Risk-Averse Matchings over Uncertain Graph Databases

A large number of applications such as querying sensor networks, and analyzing protein-protein interaction (PPI) networks, rely on mining uncertain graph and hypergraph databases. In this work we study the following problem: given an uncertain, weighted (hyper)graph, how can we efficiently find a (hyper)matching with high expected reward, and low risk? This problem naturally arises in the context of several important applications, such as online dating, kidney exchanges, and team formation. We introduce a novel formulation for finding matchings with maximum expected reward and bounded risk under a general model of uncertain weighted (hyper)graphs that we introduce in this work. Our model generalizes probabilistic models used in prior work, and captures both continuous and discrete probability distributions, thus allowing to handle privacy related applications that inject appropriately distributed noise to (hyper)edge weights. Given that our optimization problem is NP-hard, we turn our attention to designing efficient approximation algorithms. For the case of uncertain weighted graphs, we provide a $\frac{1}{3}$-approximation algorithm, and a $\frac{1}{5}$-approximation algorithm with near optimal run time. For the case of uncertain weighted hypergraphs, we provide a $\Omega(\frac{1}{k})$-approximation algorithm, where $k$ is the rank of the hypergraph (i.e., any hyperedge includes at most $k$ nodes), that runs in almost (modulo log factors) linear time. We complement our theoretical results by testing our approximation algorithms on a wide variety of synthetic experiments, where we observe in a controlled setting interesting findings on the trade-off between reward, and risk. We also provide an application of our formulation for providing recommendations of teams that are likely to collaborate, and have high impact.Comment: 25 page

Nanoinformatics: developing new computing applications for nanomedicine

Nanoinformatics has recently emerged to address the need of computing applications at the nano level. In this regard, the authors have participated in various initiatives to identify its concepts, foundations and challenges. While nanomaterials open up the possibility for developing new devices in many industrial and scientific areas, they also offer breakthrough perspectives for the prevention, diagnosis and treatment of diseases. In this paper, we analyze the different aspects of nanoinformatics and suggest five research topics to help catalyze new research and development in the area, particularly focused on nanomedicine. We also encompass the use of informatics to further the biological and clinical applications of basic research in nanoscience and nanotechnology, and the related concept of an extended ?nanotype? to coalesce information related to nanoparticles. We suggest how nanoinformatics could accelerate developments in nanomedicine, similarly to what happened with the Human Genome and other -omics projects, on issues like exchanging modeling and simulation methods and tools, linking toxicity information to clinical and personal databases or developing new approaches for scientific ontologies, among many others

Reviewing the integration of patient data: how systems are evolving in practice to meet patient needs

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>The integration of Information Systems (IS) is essential to support shared care and to provide consistent care to individuals – patient-centred care. This paper identifies, appraises and summarises studies examining different approaches to integrate patient data from heterogeneous IS.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>The literature was systematically reviewed between 1995–2005 to identify articles mentioning patient records, computers and data integration or sharing.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>Of 3124 articles, 84 were included describing 56 distinct projects. Most of the projects were on a regional scale. Integration was most commonly accomplished by messaging with pre-defined templates and middleware solutions. HL7 was the most widely used messaging standard. Direct database access and web services were the most common communication methods. The user interface for most systems was a Web browser. Regarding the type of medical data shared, 77% of projects integrated diagnosis and problems, 67% medical images and 65% lab results. More recently significantly more IS are extending to primary care and integrating referral letters.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>It is clear that Information Systems are evolving to meet people's needs by implementing regional networks, allowing patient access and integration of ever more items of patient data. Many distinct technological solutions coexist to integrate patient data, using differing standards and data architectures which may difficult further interoperability.</p

Amnesic online synopses for moving objects

We present a hierarchical tree structure for online maintenance of time-decaying synopses over streaming data. We exemplify such an amnesic behavior over streams of locations taken from numerous moving objects in order to obtain reliable trajectory approximations as well as affordable estimates regarding distinct count spatiotemporal queries

Sampling trajectory streams with spatiotemporal criteria

Monitoring movement of high-dimensional points is essential for environmental databases, geospatial applications, and biodiversity informatics as it reveals crucial information about data evolution, provenance detection, pattern matching etc. Despite recent research interest on processing continuous queries in the context of spatiotemporal data streams, the main focus is on managing the current location of numerous moving objects. In this paper, we turn our attention onto a historical perspective of movement and examine trajectories generated by streaming positional updates. The key challenge is how to maintain a concise, yet quite reliable summary of each object&#039;s movement, avoiding any superfluous details and saving in processing complexity and communication cost. We propose two single-pass approximation techniques based on sampling that take advantage of the spatial locality and temporal timeliness inherent in trajectory streams. As a means of reducing substantially the scale of the dataseis, we utilize heuristic prediction to distinguish which locations to preserve in the compressed trajectories. A comprehensive experimental study verifies the stability and robustness of the proposed techniques and demonstrates that intelligent compression schemes are able to act as effective load shedding operators achieving remarkable results

Online amnesic summarization of streaming locations

Massive data streams of positional updates become increasingly difficult to manage under limited memory resources, especially in terms of providing near real-time response to multiple continuous queries. In this paper, we consider online maintenance for spatiotemporal summaries of streaming positions in an aging-aware fashion, by gradually evicting older observations in favor of greater precision for the most recent portions of movement. Although several amnesic functions have been proposed for approximation of time series, we opt for a simple, yet quite efficient scheme that achieves contiguity along all retained stream pieces. To this end, we adapt an amnesic tree structure that effectively meets the requirements of time-decaying approximation while taking advantage of the succession inherent in positional updates. We further exemplify the significance of this scheme in two important cases: the first one refers to trajectory compression of individual objects; the other offers estimated aggregates of moving object locations across time. Both techniques are validated with comprehensive experiments, confirming their suitability in maintaining online concise synopses for moving objects