Quality of Service Aware Data Stream Processing for Highly Dynamic and Scalable Applications

Huge amounts of georeferenced data streams are arriving daily to data stream management systems that are deployed for serving highly scalable and dynamic applications. There are innumerable ways at which those loads can be exploited to gain deep insights in various domains. Decision makers require an interactive visualization of such data in the form of maps and dashboards for decision making and strategic planning. Data streams normally exhibit fluctuation and oscillation in arrival rates and skewness. Those are the two predominant factors that greatly impact the overall quality of service. This requires data stream management systems to be attuned to those factors in addition to the spatial shape of the data that may exaggerate the negative impact of those factors. Current systems do not natively support services with quality guarantees for dynamic scenarios, leaving the handling of those logistics to the user which is challenging and cumbersome. Three workloads are predominant for any data stream, batch processing, scalable storage and stream processing. In this thesis, we have designed a quality of service aware system, SpatialDSMS, that constitutes several subsystems that are covering those loads and any mixed load that results from intermixing them. Most importantly, we natively have incorporated quality of service optimizations for processing avalanches of geo-referenced data streams in highly dynamic application scenarios. This has been achieved transparently on top of the codebases of emerging de facto standard best-in-class representatives, thus relieving the overburdened shoulders of the users in the presentation layer from having to reason about those services. Instead, users express their queries with quality goals and our system optimizers compiles that down into query plans with an embedded quality guarantee and leaves logistic handling to the underlying layers. We have developed standard compliant prototypes for all the subsystems that constitutes SpatialDSMS

Hardware-Aware Algorithm Designs for Efficient Parallel and Distributed Processing

The introduction and widespread adoption of the Internet of Things, together with emerging new industrial applications, bring new requirements in data processing. Specifically, the need for timely processing of data that arrives at high rates creates a challenge for the traditional cloud computing paradigm, where data collected at various sources is sent to the cloud for processing. As an approach to this challenge, processing algorithms and infrastructure are distributed from the cloud to multiple tiers of computing, closer to the sources of data. This creates a wide range of devices for algorithms to be deployed on and software designs to adapt to.In this thesis, we investigate how hardware-aware algorithm designs on a variety of platforms lead to algorithm implementations that efficiently utilize the underlying resources. We design, implement and evaluate new techniques for representative applications that involve the whole spectrum of devices, from resource-constrained sensors in the field, to highly parallel servers. At each tier of processing capability, we identify key architectural features that are relevant for applications and propose designs that make use of these features to achieve high-rate, timely and energy-efficient processing.In the first part of the thesis, we focus on high-end servers and utilize two main approaches to achieve high throughput processing: vectorization and thread parallelism. We employ vectorization for the case of pattern matching algorithms used in security applications. We show that re-thinking the design of algorithms to better utilize the resources available in the platforms they are deployed on, such as vector processing units, can bring significant speedups in processing throughout. We then show how thread-aware data distribution and proper inter-thread synchronization allow scalability, especially for the problem of high-rate network traffic monitoring. We design a parallelization scheme for sketch-based algorithms that summarize traffic information, which allows them to handle incoming data at high rates and be able to answer queries on that data efficiently, without overheads.In the second part of the thesis, we target the intermediate tier of computing devices and focus on the typical examples of hardware that is found there. We show how single-board computers with embedded accelerators can be used to handle the computationally heavy part of applications and showcase it specifically for pattern matching for security-related processing. We further identify key hardware features that affect the performance of pattern matching algorithms on such devices, present a co-evaluation framework to compare algorithms, and design a new algorithm that efficiently utilizes the hardware features.In the last part of the thesis, we shift the focus to the low-power, resource-constrained tier of processing devices. We target wireless sensor networks and study distributed data processing algorithms where the processing happens on the same devices that generate the data. Specifically, we focus on a continuous monitoring algorithm (geometric monitoring) that aims to minimize communication between nodes. By deploying that algorithm in action, under realistic environments, we demonstrate that the interplay between the network protocol and the application plays an important role in this layer of devices. Based on that observation, we co-design a continuous monitoring application with a modern network stack and augment it further with an in-network aggregation technique. In this way, we show that awareness of the underlying network stack is important to realize the full potential of the continuous monitoring algorithm.The techniques and solutions presented in this thesis contribute to better utilization of hardware characteristics, across a wide spectrum of platforms. We employ these techniques on problems that are representative examples of current and upcoming applications and contribute with an outlook of emerging possibilities that can build on the results of the thesis

DESSERT: An Efficient Algorithm for Vector Set Search with Vector Set Queries

We study the problem of $\textit{vector set search}$ with $\textit{vector set queries}$. This task is analogous to traditional near-neighbor search, with the exception that both the query and each element in the collection are $\textit{sets}$ of vectors. We identify this problem as a core subroutine for semantic search applications and find that existing solutions are unacceptably slow. Towards this end, we present a new approximate search algorithm, DESSERT (${\bf D}$ESSERT ${\bf E}$ffeciently ${\bf S}$earches ${\bf S}$ets of ${\bf E}$mbeddings via ${\bf R}$etrieval ${\bf T}$ables). DESSERT is a general tool with strong theoretical guarantees and excellent empirical performance. When we integrate DESSERT into ColBERT, a state-of-the-art semantic search model, we find a 2-5x speedup on the MS MARCO and LoTTE retrieval benchmarks with minimal loss in recall, underscoring the effectiveness and practical applicability of our proposal.Comment: Code available, https://github.com/ThirdAIResearch/Desser

Special Topics in Information Technology

This open access book presents thirteen outstanding doctoral dissertations in Information Technology from the Department of Electronics, Information and Bioengineering, Politecnico di Milano, Italy. Information Technology has always been highly interdisciplinary, as many aspects have to be considered in IT systems. The doctoral studies program in IT at Politecnico di Milano emphasizes this interdisciplinary nature, which is becoming more and more important in recent technological advances, in collaborative projects, and in the education of young researchers. Accordingly, the focus of advanced research is on pursuing a rigorous approach to specific research topics starting from a broad background in various areas of Information Technology, especially Computer Science and Engineering, Electronics, Systems and Control, and Telecommunications. Each year, more than 50 PhDs graduate from the program. This book gathers the outcomes of the thirteen best theses defended in 2020-21 and selected for the IT PhD Award. Each of the authors provides a chapter summarizing his/her findings, including an introduction, description of methods, main achievements and future work on the topic. Hence, the book provides a cutting-edge overview of the latest research trends in Information Technology at Politecnico di Milano, presented in an easy-to-read format that will also appeal to non-specialists

Efficient Processing of Ranking Queries in Novel Applications

Ranking queries, which return only a subset of results matching a user query, have been studied extensively in the past decade due to their importance in a wide range of applications. In this thesis, we study ranking queries in novel environments and settings where they have not been considered so far. With the advancements in sensor technologies, these small devices are today present in all corners of human life. Millions of them are deployed in various places and are sending data on a continuous basis. These sensors which before mainly monitored environmental phenomena or production chains, have now found their way into our daily lives as well; health monitoring being a plausible example of how much we rely on continuous observation of measurements. As the Web technology evolves and facilitates data stream transmissions, sensors do not remain the sole producers of data in form of streams. The Web 2.0 has escalated the production of user-generated content which appear in form of annotated posts in a Weblog (blog), pictures and videos, or small textual snippets reflecting the current activity or status of users and can be regarded as natural items of a temporal stream. A major part of this thesis is devoted to developing novel methods which assist in keeping track of this ever increasing flow of information with continuous monitoring of ranking queries over them, particularly when traditional approaches fail to meet the newly raised requirements. We consider the ranking problem when the information flow is not synchronized among its sources. This is a recurring situation, since sensors are run by different organizations, measure moving entities, or are simply represented by users which are inherently not synchronizable. Our methods are in particular designed for handling unsynchronized streams, calculating an object's score based on both its currently observed contribution to the registered queries as well as the contribution it might have in future. While this uncertainty in score calculation causes linear growth in the space necessary for providing exact results, we are able to define criteria which allows for evicting unpromising objects as early as possible. We also leverage statistical properties that reflect the correlation between multiple streams to predict the future to provide better bounds for the best possible contribution of an object, consequently limiting the necessary storage dramatically. To achieve this, we make use of small statistical synopses that are periodically refreshed during runtime. Furthermore, we consider user generated queries in the context of Web 2.0 applications which aim at filtering data streams in forms of textual documents, based on personal interests. In this case, the dimensionality of the data, the large cardinality of the subscribed queries, as well as the desire for consuming recent information, raise new challenges. We develop new approaches which efficiently filter the information and provide real-time updates to the user subscribed queries. Our methods rely on a novel ordering of user queries in traditional inverted lists which allows the system to effectively prune those queries for which a new piece of information is of no interest. Finally, we investigate high quality search in user generated content in Web 2.0 applications in form of images or videos. These resources are inherently dispersed all over the globe, therefore can be best managed in a purely distributed peer-to-peer network which eliminates single points of failure. Search in such a huge repository of high dimensional data involves evaluating ranking queries in form of nearest neighbor queries. Therefore, we study ranking queries in high dimensional spaces, where the index of the objects is maintained in a purely distributed fashion. Our solution meets the two major requirements of a viable solution in distributing the index and evaluating ranking queries: the underlying peer-to-peer network remains load balanced, and efficient query evaluation is feasible as similar objects are assigned to nearby peers

Fundamentals

Volume 1 establishes the foundations of this new field. It goes through all the steps from data collection, their summary and clustering, to different aspects of resource-aware learning, i.e., hardware, memory, energy, and communication awareness. Machine learning methods are inspected with respect to resource requirements and how to enhance scalability on diverse computing architectures ranging from embedded systems to large computing clusters

Special Topics in Information Technology

This open access book presents thirteen outstanding doctoral dissertations in Information Technology from the Department of Electronics, Information and Bioengineering, Politecnico di Milano, Italy. Information Technology has always been highly interdisciplinary, as many aspects have to be considered in IT systems. The doctoral studies program in IT at Politecnico di Milano emphasizes this interdisciplinary nature, which is becoming more and more important in recent technological advances, in collaborative projects, and in the education of young researchers. Accordingly, the focus of advanced research is on pursuing a rigorous approach to specific research topics starting from a broad background in various areas of Information Technology, especially Computer Science and Engineering, Electronics, Systems and Control, and Telecommunications. Each year, more than 50 PhDs graduate from the program. This book gathers the outcomes of the thirteen best theses defended in 2020-21 and selected for the IT PhD Award. Each of the authors provides a chapter summarizing his/her findings, including an introduction, description of methods, main achievements and future work on the topic. Hence, the book provides a cutting-edge overview of the latest research trends in Information Technology at Politecnico di Milano, presented in an easy-to-read format that will also appeal to non-specialists

Fundamentals

Volume 1 establishes the foundations of this new field. It goes through all the steps from data collection, their summary and clustering, to different aspects of resource-aware learning, i.e., hardware, memory, energy, and communication awareness. Machine learning methods are inspected with respect to resource requirements and how to enhance scalability on diverse computing architectures ranging from embedded systems to large computing clusters

Emerging research directions in computer science : contributions from the young informatics faculty in Karlsruhe

In order to build better human-friendly human-computer interfaces, such interfaces need to be enabled with capabilities to perceive the user, his location, identity, activities and in particular his interaction with others and the machine. Only with these perception capabilities can smart systems ( for example human-friendly robots or smart environments) become posssible. In my research I\u27m thus focusing on the development of novel techniques for the visual perception of humans and their activities, in order to facilitate perceptive multimodal interfaces, humanoid robots and smart environments. My work includes research on person tracking, person identication, recognition of pointing gestures, estimation of head orientation and focus of attention, as well as audio-visual scene and activity analysis. Application areas are humanfriendly humanoid robots, smart environments, content-based image and video analysis, as well as safety- and security-related applications. This article gives a brief overview of my ongoing research activities in these areas