Monte Carlo Methods for Top-k Personalized PageRank Lists and Name Disambiguation

We study a problem of quick detection of top-k Personalized PageRank lists. This problem has a number of important applications such as finding local cuts in large graphs, estimation of similarity distance and name disambiguation. In particular, we apply our results to construct efficient algorithms for the person name disambiguation problem. We argue that when finding top-k Personalized PageRank lists two observations are important. Firstly, it is crucial that we detect fast the top-k most important neighbours of a node, while the exact order in the top-k list as well as the exact values of PageRank are by far not so crucial. Secondly, a little number of wrong elements in top-k lists do not really degrade the quality of top-k lists, but it can lead to significant computational saving. Based on these two key observations we propose Monte Carlo methods for fast detection of top-k Personalized PageRank lists. We provide performance evaluation of the proposed methods and supply stopping criteria. Then, we apply the methods to the person name disambiguation problem. The developed algorithm for the person name disambiguation problem has achieved the second place in the WePS 2010 competition

WiFly: experimenting with Wireless Sensor Networks and Virtual coordinates

Experimentation is important when designing communication protocols for Wireless Sensor Networks. Lower-layers have a major impact on upper-layer performance, and the complexity of the phenomena can not be entirely captured by analysis or simulation. In this report, we go through the complete process, from designing an energy-efficient self-organizing communication architecture (MAC, routing and application layers) to real-life experimentation roll-outs. The presented communication architecture includes a MAC protocol which avoids building and maintaining neighborhood tables, and a geographically-inspired routing protocol over virtual coordinates. The application consists of a mobile sink interrogating a wireless sensor network based on the requests issued by a disconnected base station. After the design process of this architecture, we verify it functions correctly by simulation, and we perform a temporal verification. This study is needed to calculate the maximum speed the mobile sink can take. We detail the implementation, and the results of the off-site experimentation (energy consumption at PHY layer, collision probability at MAC layer, and routing). Finally, we report on the real-world deployment where we have mounted the mobile sink node on a radio-controlled airplane

Telex: Principled System Support for Write-Sharing in Collaborative Applications

The Telex system is designed for sharing mutable data in a distributed environment, particularly for collaborative applications. Users operate on their local, persistent replica of shared documents; they can work disconnected and suffer no network latency. The Telex approach to detect and correct conflicts is application independent, based on an action-constraint graph (ACG) that summarises the concurrency semantics of applications. The ACG is stored efficiently in a multilog structure that eliminates contention and is optimised for locality. Telex supports multiple applications and multi-document updates. The Telex system clearly separates system logic (which includes replication, views, undo, security, consistency, conflicts, and commitment) from application logic. An example application is a shared calendar for managing multi-user meetings; the system detects meeting conflicts and resolves them consistently