Libra: An Economy driven Job Scheduling System for Clusters

Clusters of computers have emerged as mainstream parallel and distributed platforms for high-performance, high-throughput and high-availability computing. To enable effective resource management on clusters, numerous cluster managements systems and schedulers have been designed. However, their focus has essentially been on maximizing CPU performance, but not on improving the value of utility delivered to the user and quality of services. This paper presents a new computational economy driven scheduling system called Libra, which has been designed to support allocation of resources based on the users? quality of service (QoS) requirements. It is intended to work as an add-on to the existing queuing and resource management system. The first version has been implemented as a plugin scheduler to the PBS (Portable Batch System) system. The scheduler offers market-based economy driven service for managing batch jobs on clusters by scheduling CPU time according to user utility as determined by their budget and deadline rather than system performance considerations. The Libra scheduler ensures that both these constraints are met within an O(n) run-time. The Libra scheduler has been simulated using the GridSim toolkit to carry out a detailed performance analysis. Results show that the deadline and budget based proportional resource allocation strategy improves the utility of the system and user satisfaction as compared to system-centric scheduling strategies.Comment: 13 page

Are Spoken Dialog Systems Viable for Under-served Semi-literate Populations

Abstract. Spoken dialog systems have been widely researched, and are in everyday use (e.g., Amtrak’s automated reservation system at 1-800-USA-RAIL). This research, however, has been targeted at Western users – comparatively affluent, literate, with many different options for information access, and with very different realities than those of the typical user in the developing world. Further research is needed to understand the users that comprise the other half of the world – the 2.8 billion for whom such speech interfaces may be the only realistically viable option. It is the use of dialog systems by such users that I propose to study. Specifically, the research question I wish to address is: are spoken dialog systems an effective interface choice for information access by semi-literate users in the developing world? My proposed research plan is to design, develop and test a spoken dialog system for information access in the domain of community health, tailored to the skills and needs of community health workers in the developing world, who are often semi-literate and have a dire need for access to information. The system will be evaluated relative to existin

The Case for Speech Technology for Developing Regions

Many ICT initiatives that attempt to connect end-users to each other rely on Internet-connected PCs using graphical user interfaces (GUIs). While speech-based systems over the telephone have mushroomed in the West in the past decade, their potential remains largely untapped for use in the developing world. We present reasons why speech systems may be preferable to traditional PC/GUI systems in these circumstances, along with the needs such systems can fulfill

HealthLine: Speech-based Access to Health Information by Low-literate Users

Health information access by low-literate community health workers is a pressing need of community health programs across the developing world. We present results from a needs assessment we conducted to understand the health information access practices and needs of various types of health workers in Pakistan. We also present a prototype for speech based health information access, as well as discuss our experiences from a pilot study involving its use by community health workers in a rural health center

Towards Speech Interfaces for Health Information Access by Semi-literate Users

Community health programs in many developing countries are very similar: most involve semitrained, semi-educated health workers (often female), who provide health services in their own communities in a large hierarchically managed system across the country. In Pakistan, recent evaluations of the government's flagship community health program have revealed the need for improvement in health workers ' knowledge, and recommended frequent refresher training courses. However, these have not been possible to implement primarily for reasons of cost. It is our conjecture that telephone-based adaptive speech interfaces, tailored to the specific information needs of health workers, are a viable alternative to current information access mechanisms such as handbooks and manuals. We will be designing, developing and testing such an interface (“HealthLine”) in the coming year in Pakistan. Initial results from discussions with health workers (using video prototypes) indicate that speech interfaces may potentially be much more useful for health workers than traditional media.

Sublime: A Speech- and Language-Based Information Management Environment

With ever-increasing amounts of information to be organized in people’s daily lives, current mechanisms for personal information management (PIM) leave much room for improvement. We present Sublime, a distributed, multimodal, and mobile environment for speech-based personal information management. In addition to discussing the design philosophy and evolution of the current prototype, this paper describes the functionality and architecture of the system, and indicates future research directions for the project