Sparse Transfer Learning for Interactive Video Search Reranking

Visual reranking is effective to improve the performance of the text-based video search. However, existing reranking algorithms can only achieve limited improvement because of the well-known semantic gap between low level visual features and high level semantic concepts. In this paper, we adopt interactive video search reranking to bridge the semantic gap by introducing user's labeling effort. We propose a novel dimension reduction tool, termed sparse transfer learning (STL), to effectively and efficiently encode user's labeling information. STL is particularly designed for interactive video search reranking. Technically, it a) considers the pair-wise discriminative information to maximally separate labeled query relevant samples from labeled query irrelevant ones, b) achieves a sparse representation for the subspace to encodes user's intention by applying the elastic net penalty, and c) propagates user's labeling information from labeled samples to unlabeled samples by using the data distribution knowledge. We conducted extensive experiments on the TRECVID 2005, 2006 and 2007 benchmark datasets and compared STL with popular dimension reduction algorithms. We report superior performance by using the proposed STL based interactive video search reranking.Comment: 17 page

Weaving Rules into [email protected] for Embedded Smart Systems

Smart systems are characterised by their ability to analyse measured data in live and to react to changes according to expert rules. Therefore, such systems exploit appropriate data models together with actions, triggered by domain-related conditions. The challenge at hand is that smart systems usually need to process thousands of updates to detect which rules need to be triggered, often even on restricted hardware like a Raspberry Pi. Despite various approaches have been investigated to efficiently check conditions on data models, they either assume to fit into main memory or rely on high latency persistence storage systems that severely damage the reactivity of smart systems. To tackle this challenge, we propose a novel composition process, which weaves executable rules into a data model with lazy loading abilities. We quantitatively show, on a smart building case study, that our approach can handle, at low latency, big sets of rules on top of large-scale data models on restricted hardware.Comment: pre-print version, published in the proceedings of MOMO-17 Worksho

Energy Demand Shifting in Residential Households: The Interdependence between Social Practices and Technology Design

Emerging energy technologies, such as smart meters and solar photovoltaic systems (solar PV), are changing our relationship to energy. There is increasing evidence that households with solar PV on their roof tend naturally to shift their energy consumption in time to match their local generation, but what do people actually do to achieve this and how ICT can support them to optimize their consumption? In this paper we present a year-long user study to understand social practices around laundry routines and local energy generation. We highlight four challenges for the next generation of home energy management systems

Understanding and Supporting Emerging Domestic Energy Practices

The current transformation of the domestic energy landscape, including local generation, new consumption and storage, requires rethinking our research approach. This paper reports experiences from two case studies with their implications for future HCI research in the home

Resource accounting and reservation in Java Virtual Machine

The Java platform The Java programming language was designed to developed small application for embedded devices, but it was a long time ago. Today, Java application are running in many platforms ranging from smartphones to enterprise servers. Modern pervasive middleware is typically implemented using Java because of its safety, flexibility, and mature development environment. However, the Java virtual machine specification has not had a major revised since 1999 Several researches had addressed these important issues. As result of these efforts some Java specification requests (JSR) have emerged. We consider there are seven JSRs relate to monitoring and to resource accounting and reservation: three for the Java Management eXtension API (JSRs 3, 160, 255), two for Metric Instrumentation (JSRs 138, 174) and two for resource-consumption management (JSRs 121, 284). The Java Management extension API only addresses monitoring and management: it does not define specific resource accounting or reservation strategies. JSRs 138 and 174 define monitors for the Java Virtual Machine. They are coarse grained, monitoring the number of running threads, the memory used, the number of garbage collections and so on. They monitor the entire virtual machine, not specific component so, they are useless to most middleware. Based on the Multitasking Virtual Machin

Misconfiguration Discovery with Principal Component Analysis for Cloud-Native Services

International audienceCloud applications and services have significantly increased the importance of system and service configuration activities. These activities include updating(i) these services, (ii) their dependencies on third parties,(iii) their configurations, (iv) the configuration of the execution environment, (v) network configurations. The high frequency of updates results in significant configuration complexity that can lead to failures or performance drops.To mitigate these risks, service providers extensively rely on testing techniques, such as metamorphic testing, to detect these failures before moving to production. How-ever, the development and maintenance of these tests are costly, especially the oracle, which must determine whether a system’s performance remains within acceptable boundaries. This paper explores the use of a learning method called Principal Component Analysis (PCA) to learn about acceptable performance metrics on cloud-native services and identify a metamorphic relationship between the nominal service behavior and the value of these metrics. We investigate the following research question: Is it possible to combine the metamorphic testing technique with learning methods on service monitoring data to detect error-prone reconfigurations before moving to production? We remove the developers’ burden to define a specific oracle in detecting these configuration issues. For validation, we applied this proposal on a distributed media streaming application whose authentication was managed by an external identity and access management services.This application illustrates both the heterogeneity of the technologies used to build this type of service and its large configuration space. Our proposal demonstrated the ability to identify error-prone reconfigurations using P

AutoHome: an Autonomic Management Framework for Pervasive Home Applications

International audienceThis paper introduces the design of the AutoHome service oriented framework to simplify the development and runtime adaptive support of autonomic pervasive applications. To this end, we describe our novel open infrastructure for building and executing home applications. This includes the amalgamation of the two computing areas of Autonomics and Service Orientation, to produce a Component-based platform providing facilities including monitoring, touchpoints and other common autonomic services. This infrastructure uniquely blends the advantages of distributed autonomic control with global conflict management in a management hierarchy. We discuss this platform in terms of pervasive home systems and show how one would develop such a system for two examples of automated home applications: intruder detection and medical support respectively. Both applications were built within our framework and evaluated showing that the use of the framework introduces minimal overheads but provides many benefits. We then conclude by highlighting the contributions of AutoHome and a discussion about the lessons learned, limitations and future research directions

On the role of computer languages in scientific computing

International audienceScientific software are complex software systems. Their engineering involves various stakeholders using specific computer languages for defining artifacts at different abstraction levels and for different purposes. In this paper, we review the overall process leading to the development of scientific software, and discuss the role of computer languages in the definition of the different artifacts. We then provide guidelines to make informed decisions when the time comes to choose the computer languages to use when developing scientific software

Designing resource-aware distriubted system based on system level containers

International audienceResource management is critical for application domains where components share their execution environments but belong to dif-ferent stakeholders, such as smart homes or cloud systems. Yet, current middleware and application containers often hide system-level details needed for dynamic resource management. In particular, they tend to hide resource usage by offering automatic management of these resources (e.g., CPU, memory and I/O). In contrast, system-level containers, such as Linux Containers (LXC), allow fine-grain resource management. How-ever, they lack knowledge about the application's structure and its re-quirements in order to provide fine tuned resource management. In this tutorial, we will expose Squirrel: a new middleware which aims at combining the benefits from the component based software engineering to design flexible and modular application and the system level contain-ers to manage resources. Squirrel follows an approach where develop-ers specifies contracts on components and connections to describe the expected behavior of their application regarding resource consumption. These high level contracts are then used to automatically configure the system level containers which will hosts the running applications. At the end of this tutorial, applicants will be able to design applications and contracts using Squirrel and run their application inside system level containers to ensure a correct behavior of their application regarding resource consumption

Software Diversity: Challenges to handle the imposed, Opportunities to harness the chosen

National audienceDiversity emerges as a critical concern that spans all activities in software engineering (from design to verification, from deployment to runtime resilience) and appears in all sorts of domains, which rely on software intensive systems, from systems of systems to pervasive combinations of Internet of Things and Internet of Services. If these domains are apparently radically different, we envision a strong convergence of the scientific principles underpinning their construction and validation towards flexible and open yet dependable systems. In this paper, we discuss the software engineering challenges raised by these requirements for flexibility and openness, focusing on four dimensions of diversity: the diversity of functionalities required by the different customers; the diversity of languages used by the stakeholders involved in the construction of these systems; the diversity of runtime environments in which software has to run and adapt; the diversity of failures against which the system must be able to react. In particular, we want to emphasize the challenges for handling imposed diversity, as well as the opportunities to leverage chosen diversity. The main challenge is that software diversity imposes to integrate the fact that software must adapt to changes in the requirements and environment -- in all development phases and in unpredictable ways. Yet, exploiting and increasing software diversity is a great opportunity to allow the spontaneous exploration of alternative software solutions and proactively prepare for unforeseen changes. Concretely, we want to provide software engineers with the ability: to characterize an 'envelope' of possible variations; to compose 'envelopes' (to discover new macro envelopes in an opportunistic manner); to dynamically synthesize software inside a given envelop