Analytical evaluation of the performance of contact-based messaging applications

Communications in mobile opportunistic networks, instead of using the Internet infrastructure, take place upon the establishment of ephemeral contacts among mobile nodes using direct communication. In this paper, we analytically model the performance of mobile opportunistic networks for contact-based messaging applications in city squares or gathering points, a key challenging topic that is required for the effective design of novel services. We take into account several social aspects such as: the density of people, the dynamic of people arriving and leaving a place, the size of the messages and the duration of the contacts. We base our models on Population Processes, an approach commonly used to represent the dynamics of biological populations. We study their stable equilibrium points and obtain analytical expressions for their resolution. The evaluations performed show that these models can reproduce the dynamics of message diffusion applications. We demonstrate that when the density of people increases, the effectiveness of the diffusion is improved. Regarding the arrival and departure of people, their impact is more relevant when the density of people is low. Finally, we prove that for large message sizes the effectiveness of the epidemic diffusion is reduced, and novel diffusion protocols should be considered. © 2016 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.This work was partially supported by Ministerio de Economia y Competitividad, Spain (Grants TEC2014-52690-R & MTM2013-47093-P & SEV-2013-0323), Generalitat Valenciana, Spain (Grants AICO/2015/108 & ACOMP/2015/005) and by the Basque Government through the BERC 2014-2017 program.Hernández Orallo, E.; Murillo Arcila, M.; Tavares De Araujo Cesariny Calafate, CM.; Cano Escribá, JC.; Conejero Casares, JA.; Manzoni, P. (2016). Analytical evaluation of the performance of contact-based messaging applications. Computer Networks. 111:45-54. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.comnet.2016.07.006S455411

On the nature and impact of self-similarity in real-time systems

In real-time systems with highly variable task execution times simplistic task models are insufficient to accurately model and to analyze the system. Variability can be tackled using distributions rather than a single value, but the proper charac- terization depends on the degree of variability. Self-similarity is one of the deep- est kinds of variability. It characterizes the fact that a workload is not only highly variable, but it is also bursty on many time-scales. This paper identifies in which situations this source of indeterminism can appear in a real-time system: the com- bination of variability in task inter-arrival times and execution times. Although self- similarity is not a claim for all systems with variable execution times, it is not unusual in some applications with real-time requirements, like video processing, networking and gaming. The paper shows how to properly model and to analyze self-similar task sets and how improper modeling can mask deadline misses. The paper derives an analyti- cal expression for the dependence of the deadline miss ratio on the degree of self- similarity and proofs its negative impact on real-time systems performance through system¿s modeling and simulation. This study about the nature and impact of self- similarity on soft real-time systems can help to reduce its effects, to choose the proper scheduling policies, and to avoid its causes at system design time.This work was developed under a grant from the European Union (FRESCOR-FP6/2005/IST/5-03402).Enrique Hernández-Orallo; Vila Carbó, JA. (2012). On the nature and impact of self-similarity in real-time systems. Real-Time Systems. 48(3):294-319. doi:10.1007/s11241-012-9146-0S294319483Abdelzaher TF, Sharma V, Lu C (2004) A utilization bound for aperiodic tasks and priority driven scheduling. IEEE Trans Comput 53(3):334–350Abeni L, Buttazzo G (1999) QoS guarantee using probabilistic deadlines. 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Predicting self‐declared movie watching behavior using Facebook data and information‐fusion sensitivity analysis

The main purpose of this paper is to evaluate the feasibility of predicting whether yes or no a Facebook user has self-reported to have watched a given movie genre. Therefore, we apply a data analytical framework that (1) builds and evaluates several predictive models explaining self-declared movie watching behavior, and (2) provides insight into the importance of the predictors and their relationship with self-reported movie watching behavior. For the first outcome, we benchmark several algorithms (logistic regression, random forest, adaptive boosting, rotation forest, and naive Bayes) and evaluate their performance using the area under the receiver operating characteristic curve. For the second outcome, we evaluate variable importance and build partial dependence plots using information-fusion sensitivity analysis for different movie genres. To gather the data, we developed a custom native Facebook app. We resampled our dataset to make it representative of the general Facebook population with respect to age and gender. The results indicate that adaptive boosting outperforms all other algorithms. Time- and frequency-based variables related to media (movies, videos, and music) consumption constitute the list of top variables. To the best of our knowledge, this study is the first to fit predictive models of self-reported movie watching behavior and provide insights into the relationships that govern these models. Our models can be used as a decision tool for movie producers to target potential movie-watchers and market their movies more efficiently

Dialectical language model evaluation: An initial appraisal of the commonsense spatial reasoning abilities of LLMs

Language models have become very popular recently and many claims have been made about their abilities, including for commonsense reasoning. Given the increasingly better results of current language models on previous static benchmarks for commonsense reasoning, we explore an alternative dialectical evaluation. The goal of this kind of evaluation is not to obtain an aggregate performance value but to find failures and map the boundaries of the system. Dialoguing with the system gives the opportunity to check for consistency and get more reassurance of these boundaries beyond anecdotal evidence. In this paper we conduct some qualitative investigations of this kind of evaluation for the particular case of spatial reasoning (which is a fundamental aspect of commonsense reasoning). We conclude with some suggestions for future work both to improve the capabilities of language models and to systematise this kind of dialectical evaluation