Data Provenance and Management in Radio Astronomy: A Stream Computing Approach

New approaches for data provenance and data management (DPDM) are required for mega science projects like the Square Kilometer Array, characterized by extremely large data volume and intense data rates, therefore demanding innovative and highly efficient computational paradigms. In this context, we explore a stream-computing approach with the emphasis on the use of accelerators. In particular, we make use of a new generation of high performance stream-based parallelization middleware known as InfoSphere Streams. Its viability for managing and ensuring interoperability and integrity of signal processing data pipelines is demonstrated in radio astronomy. IBM InfoSphere Streams embraces the stream-computing paradigm. It is a shift from conventional data mining techniques (involving analysis of existing data from databases) towards real-time analytic processing. We discuss using InfoSphere Streams for effective DPDM in radio astronomy and propose a way in which InfoSphere Streams can be utilized for large antennae arrays. We present a case-study: the InfoSphere Streams implementation of an autocorrelating spectrometer, and using this example we discuss the advantages of the stream-computing approach and the utilization of hardware accelerators

A Primal-Dual Algorithm for Link Dependent Origin Destination Matrix Estimation

Origin-Destination Matrix (ODM) estimation is a classical problem in transport engineering aiming to recover flows from every Origin to every Destination from measured traffic counts and a priori model information. In addition to traffic counts, the present contribution takes advantage of probe trajectories, whose capture is made possible by new measurement technologies. It extends the concept of ODM to that of Link dependent ODM (LODM), keeping the information about the flow distribution on links and containing inherently the ODM assignment. Further, an original formulation of LODM estimation, from traffic counts and probe trajectories is presented as an optimisation problem, where the functional to be minimized consists of five convex functions, each modelling a constraint or property of the transport problem: consistency with traffic counts, consistency with sampled probe trajectories, consistency with traffic conservation (Kirchhoff's law), similarity of flows having close origins and destinations, positivity of traffic flows. A primal-dual algorithm is devised to minimize the designed functional, as the corresponding objective functions are not necessarily differentiable. A case study, on a simulated network and traffic, validates the feasibility of the procedure and details its benefits for the estimation of an LODM matching real-network constraints and observations

Bibliography and summary of methods related to the error analysis of hybrid computers technical note no. 4

Bibliography and summary of methods used in error analysis of hybrid computer

Performance bounds for expander-based compressed sensing in Poisson noise

This paper provides performance bounds for compressed sensing in the presence of Poisson noise using expander graphs. The Poisson noise model is appropriate for a variety of applications, including low-light imaging and digital streaming, where the signal-independent and/or bounded noise models used in the compressed sensing literature are no longer applicable. In this paper, we develop a novel sensing paradigm based on expander graphs and propose a MAP algorithm for recovering sparse or compressible signals from Poisson observations. The geometry of the expander graphs and the positivity of the corresponding sensing matrices play a crucial role in establishing the bounds on the signal reconstruction error of the proposed algorithm. We support our results with experimental demonstrations of reconstructing average packet arrival rates and instantaneous packet counts at a router in a communication network, where the arrivals of packets in each flow follow a Poisson process.Comment: revised version; accepted to IEEE Transactions on Signal Processin

Graph Spectral Image Processing

Recent advent of graph signal processing (GSP) has spurred intensive studies of signals that live naturally on irregular data kernels described by graphs (e.g., social networks, wireless sensor networks). Though a digital image contains pixels that reside on a regularly sampled 2D grid, if one can design an appropriate underlying graph connecting pixels with weights that reflect the image structure, then one can interpret the image (or image patch) as a signal on a graph, and apply GSP tools for processing and analysis of the signal in graph spectral domain. In this article, we overview recent graph spectral techniques in GSP specifically for image / video processing. The topics covered include image compression, image restoration, image filtering and image segmentation