Pricing average price advertising options when underlying spot market prices are discontinuous

Advertising options have been recently studied as a special type of guaranteed contracts in online advertising, which are an alternative sales mechanism to real-time auctions. An advertising option is a contract which gives its buyer a right but not obligation to enter into transactions to purchase page views or link clicks at one or multiple pre-specified prices in a specific future period. Different from typical guaranteed contracts, the option buyer pays a lower upfront fee but can have greater flexibility and more control of advertising. Many studies on advertising options so far have been restricted to the situations where the option payoff is determined by the underlying spot market price at a specific time point and the price evolution over time is assumed to be continuous. The former leads to a biased calculation of option payoff and the latter is invalid empirically for many online advertising slots. This paper addresses these two limitations by proposing a new advertising option pricing framework. First, the option payoff is calculated based on an average price over a specific future period. Therefore, the option becomes path-dependent. The average price is measured by the power mean, which contains several existing option payoff functions as its special cases. Second, jump-diffusion stochastic models are used to describe the movement of the underlying spot market price, which incorporate several important statistical properties including jumps and spikes, non-normality, and absence of autocorrelations. A general option pricing algorithm is obtained based on Monte Carlo simulation. In addition, an explicit pricing formula is derived for the case when the option payoff is based on the geometric mean. This pricing formula is also a generalized version of several other option pricing models discussed in related studies.Comment: IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering, 201

Securing Real-Time Internet-of-Things

Modern embedded and cyber-physical systems are ubiquitous. A large number of critical cyber-physical systems have real-time requirements (e.g., avionics, automobiles, power grids, manufacturing systems, industrial control systems, etc.). Recent developments and new functionality requires real-time embedded devices to be connected to the Internet. This gives rise to the real-time Internet-of-things (RT-IoT) that promises a better user experience through stronger connectivity and efficient use of next-generation embedded devices. However RT- IoT are also increasingly becoming targets for cyber-attacks which is exacerbated by this increased connectivity. This paper gives an introduction to RT-IoT systems, an outlook of current approaches and possible research challenges towards secure RT- IoT frameworks

Automatic inspection of analog and digital meters in a robot vision system

A critical limitation of most of the robots utilized in industrial environments arises due to their inability to utilize sensory feedback. This forces robot operation into totally preprogrammed or teleoperation modes. In order to endow the new generation of robots with higher levels of autonomy techniques for sensing of their work environments and for accurate and efficient analysis of the sensory data must be developed. In this paper detailed development of vision system modules for inspecting various types of meters, both analog and digital, encountered in a robotic inspection and manipulation tasks are described. These modules are tested using industrial robots having multisensory input capability

Radio Frequency Interference Mitigation

Radio astronomy observational facilities are under constant upgradation and development to achieve better capabilities including increasing the time and frequency resolutions of the recorded data, and increasing the receiving and recording bandwidth. As only a limited spectrum resource has been allocated to radio astronomy by the International Telecommunication Union, this results in the radio observational instrumentation being inevitably exposed to undesirable radio frequency interference (RFI) signals which originate mainly from terrestrial human activity and are becoming stronger with time. RFIs degrade the quality of astronomical data and even lead to data loss. The impact of RFIs on scientific outcome is becoming progressively difficult to manage. In this article, we motivate the requirement for RFI mitigation, and review the RFI characteristics, mitigation techniques and strategies. Mitigation strategies adopted at some representative observatories, telescopes and arrays are also introduced. We also discuss and present advantages and shortcomings of the four classes of RFI mitigation strategies, applicable at the connected causal stages: preventive, pre-detection, pre-correlation and post-correlation. The proper identification and flagging of RFI is key to the reduction of data loss and improvement in data quality, and is also the ultimate goal of developing RFI mitigation techniques. This can be achieved through a strategy involving a combination of the discussed techniques in stages. Recent advances in high speed digital signal processing and high performance computing allow for performing RFI excision of large data volumes generated from large telescopes or arrays in both real time and offline modes, aiding the proposed strategy.Comment: 26 pages, 10 figures, Chinese version accepted for publication in Acta Astronomica Sinica; English version to appear in Chinese Astronomy and Astrophysic

Instant restore after a media failure

Media failures usually leave database systems unavailable for several hours until recovery is complete, especially in applications with large devices and high transaction volume. Previous work introduced a technique called single-pass restore, which increases restore bandwidth and thus substantially decreases time to repair. Instant restore goes further as it permits read/write access to any data on a device undergoing restore--even data not yet restored--by restoring individual data segments on demand. Thus, the restore process is guided primarily by the needs of applications, and the observed mean time to repair is effectively reduced from several hours to a few seconds. This paper presents an implementation and evaluation of instant restore. The technique is incrementally implemented on a system starting with the traditional ARIES design for logging and recovery. Experiments show that the transaction latency perceived after a media failure can be cut down to less than a second and that the overhead imposed by the technique on normal processing is minimal. The net effect is that a few "nines" of availability are added to the system using simple and low-overhead software techniques

Multi-keyword multi-click advertisement option contracts for sponsored search

In sponsored search, advertisement (abbreviated ad) slots are usually sold by a search engine to an advertiser through an auction mechanism in which advertisers bid on keywords. In theory, auction mechanisms have many desirable economic properties. However, keyword auctions have a number of limitations including: the uncertainty in payment prices for advertisers; the volatility in the search engine's revenue; and the weak loyalty between advertiser and search engine. In this paper we propose a special ad option that alleviates these problems. In our proposal, an advertiser can purchase an option from a search engine in advance by paying an upfront fee, known as the option price. He then has the right, but no obligation, to purchase among the pre-specified set of keywords at the fixed cost-per-clicks (CPCs) for a specified number of clicks in a specified period of time. The proposed option is closely related to a special exotic option in finance that contains multiple underlying assets (multi-keyword) and is also multi-exercisable (multi-click). This novel structure has many benefits: advertisers can have reduced uncertainty in advertising; the search engine can improve the advertisers' loyalty as well as obtain a stable and increased expected revenue over time. Since the proposed ad option can be implemented in conjunction with the existing keyword auctions, the option price and corresponding fixed CPCs must be set such that there is no arbitrage between the two markets. Option pricing methods are discussed and our experimental results validate the development. Compared to keyword auctions, a search engine can have an increased expected revenue by selling an ad option.Comment: Chen, Bowei and Wang, Jun and Cox, Ingemar J. and Kankanhalli, Mohan S. (2015) Multi-keyword multi-click advertisement option contracts for sponsored search. ACM Transactions on Intelligent Systems and Technology, 7 (1). pp. 1-29. ISSN: 2157-690

A Semantic Collaboration Method Based on Uniform Knowledge Graph

The Semantic Internet of Things is the extension of the Internet of Things and the Semantic Web, which aims to build an interoperable collaborative system to solve the heterogeneous problems in the Internet of Things. However, the Semantic Internet of Things has the characteristics of both the Internet of Things and the Semantic Web environment, and the corresponding semantic data presents many new data features. In this study, we analyze the characteristics of semantic data and propose the concept of a uniform knowledge graph, allowing us to be applied to the environment of the Semantic Internet of Things better. Here, we design a semantic collaboration method based on a uniform knowledge graph. It can take the uniform knowledge graph as the form of knowledge organization and representation, and provide a useful data basis for semantic collaboration by constructing semantic links to complete semantic relation between different data sets, to achieve the semantic collaboration in the Semantic Internet of Things. Our experiments show that the proposed method can analyze and understand the semantics of user requirements better and provide more satisfactory outcomes

MM2RTB: bringing multimedia metrics to real-time bidding

In display advertising, users' online ad experiences are important for the advertising effectiveness. However, users have not been well accommodated in real-time bidding (RTB). This further influences their site visits and perception of the displayed banner ads. In this paper, we propose a novel computational framework which brings multimedia metrics, like the contextual relevance, the visual saliency and the ad memorability into RTB to improve the users' ad experiences as well as maintain the benefits of the publisher and the advertiser. We aim at developing a vigorous ecosystem by optimizing the trade-offs among all stakeholders. The framework considers the scenario of a webpage with multiple ad slots. Our experimental results show that the benefits of the advertiser and the user can be significantly improved if the publisher would slightly sacrifice his short-term revenue. The improved benefits will increase the advertising requests (demand) and the site visits (supply), which can further boost the publisher's revenue in the long run

A Novel Side-Channel in Real-Time Schedulers

We demonstrate the presence of a novel scheduler side-channel in preemptive, fixed-priority real-time systems (RTS); examples of such systems can be found in automotive systems, avionic systems, power plants and industrial control systems among others. This side-channel can leak important timing information such as the future arrival times of real-time tasks.This information can then be used to launch devastating attacks, two of which are demonstrated here (on real hardware platforms). Note that it is not easy to capture this timing information due to runtime variations in the schedules, the presence of multiple other tasks in the system and the typical constraints (e.g., deadlines) in the design of RTS. Our ScheduLeak algorithms demonstrate how to effectively exploit this side-channel. A complete implementation is presented on real operating systems (in Real-time Linux and FreeRTOS). Timing information leaked by ScheduLeak can significantly aid other, more advanced, attacks in better accomplishing their goals