Dynamics underlying Box-office: Movie Competition on Recommender Systems

We introduce a simple model to study movie competition in the recommender systems. Movies of heterogeneous quality compete against each other through viewers' reviews and generate interesting dynamics of box-office. By assuming mean-field interactions between the competing movies, we show that run-away effect of popularity spreading is triggered by defeating the average review score, leading to hits in box-office. The average review score thus characterizes the critical movie quality necessary for transition from box-office bombs to blockbusters. The major factors affecting the critical review score are examined. By iterating the mean-field dynamical equations, we obtain qualitative agreements with simulations and real systems in the dynamical forms of box-office, revealing the significant role of competition in understanding box-office dynamics.Comment: 8 pages, 6 figure

Multicast scheduling in feedback-based two-stage switch

Proceedings of the IEEE Workshop on High Performance Switching and Routing, 2009, p. 28-33Scalability is of paramount importance in high-speed switch design. Two limiting factors are the complexity of switch fabric and the need for a sophisticated central scheduler. In this paper, we focus on designing a scalable multicast switch. Given the fact that the majority traffic on the Internet is unicast, a cost-effective solution is to adopt a unicast switch fabric for handling both unicast and multicast traffic. Unlike existing approaches, we choose to base our multicast switch design on the load-balanced two-stage switch architecture because it does not require a central scheduler, and its unicast switch fabric only needs to realize N switch configurations. Specifically, we adopt the feedback-based two-stage switch architecture [10], because it elegantly solves the notorious packet mis-sequencing problem, and yet renders an excellent throughput-delay performance. By slightly modifying the operation of the original feedback-based two-stage switch, a simple distributed multicast scheduling algorithm is proposed. Simulation results show that with packet duplication at both input ports and middle-stage ports, the proposed multicast scheduling algorithm significantly cuts down the average packet delay and delay variation among different copies of the same multicast packet. Keywords-Feedback-based two-stage switch, scalable multicast switch, load-balanced switch. © 2009 IEEE.published_or_final_versio

Minimizing internal speedup for performance guaranteed optical packet switches

Providing QoS guarantee for Internet services is very important It evokes the issue that packet switches should provide guaranteed performance (i.e. 100% throughput with bounded worst-case delay). Optical switching technology is widely considered as an excellent solution for packet switches in future networks. However, to achieve guaranteed performance in optical packet switches, an internal speedup is required due to the existence of reconfiguration overhead. How to reduce the internal speedup is the main concern for making these switches practical In this paper, we first derive the internal speedup S as a function of the number of switch configurations N S and the reconfiguration overhead δ, or S=f(N S,δ). We show that the recently proposed ADJUST algorithm is flawed. Based on the internal speedup function we derived, a new algorithm (ADAPTIVE), with time complexity of O((λ-l)N 2logN), is proposed to minimize S. © 2004 IEEE.published_or_final_versio

Scheduling optical packet switches with minimum number of configurations

In order to achieve the minimum traffic delay in a performance guaranteed optical packet switch (OPS) with reconfiguration overhead, the switch fabric has to use the minimum number of configurations (i.e. N configurations where N is the switch size) for traffic scheduling. This requires a very high speedup in the switch fabric to compensate for the loss in scheduling efficiency. The high speedup requirement makes the idea of using N configurations (to schedule the traffic) impractical under current technology. In this paper, we propose a new scheduling algorithm called α i-SCALE to lower the speedup required. Compared with the existing MIN algorithm [5], α i- SCALE succeeds in pushing the speedup bound (i.e. worst-case speedup requirement) to a much lower level. For example, when N=200, the speedup bound required to compensate the loss in scheduling efficiency is 30.75 for MIN, whereas 23.45 is sufficient for our α i-SCALE. © 2005 IEEE.published_or_final_versio

Load-balanced optical switch for high-speed router design

A hybrid electro-optic router is attractive, where packet buffering and table lookup are carried out in electrical domain and switching is done optically. In this paper, we propose a loadbalanced optical switch (LBOS) fabric for a hybrid router. LBOS comprises N linecards connected by an N-wavelength WDM fiber ring. Each linecard i is configured to receive on channel λ i. To send a packet, it can select and transmit on an idle channel based on where the packet goes. The packet remains in the optical domain all the way from an input linecard/port to an output linecard/port. Meanwhile, the loading in the ring network is perfectly balanced by spreading the packets for different destinations to use different wavelengths, and packets for the same destination to use different time slots. With the pipelined operation of the LBOS, we show that LBOS is an optical counterpart of an efficient load-balanced electronic switch, and close-to-100% throughput can be obtained. To address the ringfairness problem under the inadmissible traffic patterns, an efficient throughput-fair scheduler for LBOS is also devised. ©2010 IEEE.published_or_final_versio

On optimization of optical packet switches with reconfiguration overhead

Optical packet switching is one of the most promising technologies for carrying IP traffic over WDM optical networks. For optical packet switch (OPS) design, due to the reconfiguration overhead in the switch fabric, packet delay and speedup are two key factors to be considered. Existing scheduling algorithms, DOUBLE [4] and ADAPTIVE [5], make effective tradeoff between these two factors. In this paper, we show that the performance of both DOUBLE and ADAPTIVE, as well as their underlying OPS switch architecture, can be further optimized. Our proposed solutions are shown to effectively reduce both speedup and packet delay at the same time without incurring any extra cost. © 2005 IEEE.published_or_final_versio

Monitoring cycle design for fast link failure detection in all-optical networks

Fast link failure detection in all-optical networks (AONs) can be achieved using monitoring cycles (m-cycles). An m-cycle is a loop-back optical connection of supervisory wavelengths with a dedicated monitor. Compared to the channel-based or link-based monitoring schemes, m-cycle based schemes require much less number of monitors. In this paper, we propose an ILP (Integer Linear Program) formulation for m-cycle design to minimize the network cost. Our contributions are two-fold: 1) non-simple m-cycles are enabled; and 2) an efficient tradeoff is allowed between the monitor cost and the bandwidth cost. Numerical results show that our algorithm outperforms existing algorithms with a significant performance gain. © 2007 IEEE.published_or_final_versionIEEE Global Telecommunications Conference (GLOBECOM '07), Washington, DC, USA, 26-30 November 2007 p. 2315-231

Corporatism and the ghost of the third way

10.2202/1932-0213.1076Capitalism and Society53