[Conference News] Enabling Survivability in Cloud-Networking Services

As cloud computing services expand across interconnected datacenters, reliability and survivability are becoming major concerns among users. Current failure-recovery strategies aren’t always effective against large failures, so survivable virtual network (VN) mapping design is of key interest.

At the 2013 International Conference on Computing, Networking and Communications (ICNC 2013), researchers from Cisco Systems, Kuwait University, and the University of New Mexico presented a paper proposing a way to compute VN mappings so that each service request can recover from a single regional failure.

“Survivable Cloud Networking Services” and other papers from ICNC 2013 are available to both IEEE Computer Society members and paid subscribers via the Computer Society Digital Library.

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[Conference News] Reducing Overhead in Named Data Manets

Named Data Networks (NDNs) use data names instead of host addresses to locate data. The NDN architecture assumes pull-based forwarding and a one-interest-one-data principle. To initiate a data transfer, a data consumer must send an Interest Packet to request the corresponding data packet. NDN’s chunk-based caching feature is beneficial in coping with the mobility and intermittent connectivity challenges in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks (Manets).

In a paper presented at the 2013 International Conference on Computing, Networking and Communications (ICNC 2013), researchers from the University of California, Los Angeles, and IBM T.J. Watson Research Center describe a study of Named Data Manet (NDM) forwarding designs. They propose the Neighborhood-Aware Interest Forwarding (NAIF) design to reduce the bandwidth usage induced by indiscriminate interest flooding, which is a problem in other NDM forwarding designs. They present results showing that NAIF reduces bandwidth usage by up to 54 percent compared to other approaches.

“Interest Propagation in Named Data Manets” and other ICNC 2013 papers are available to both IEEE Computer Society members and paid subscribers via the Computer Society Digital Library.

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[Conference News] Extracting Hidden Behavioral Patterns from Social Network Data

Massive information about human behavior is continuously generated by Web-based services, both public and private. The data include traces of not only individual activities but also collaborative work, and the social networks that can be extracted from these datasets offer a kind of knowledge that’s independent of user awareness.

In a paper presented at the 2013 International Conference on Social Intelligence and Technology (Social 2013), researchers from the Wroclaw University of Technology in Poland describe a data-driven approach to social network analysis that enables various applications of knowledge about human behavior. They illustrate selected models and analytical methods in applications to recommender systems, organizational structure analysis, and social group evolution.

“From Data to Human Behaviour” and other papers from Social 2013 are available to both IEEE Computer Society members and paid subscribers via the Computer Society Digital Library.

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[Conference News] “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly” in Face-Recognition Systems

Face recognition is an active area of computer-vision and pattern-recognition research. The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (GBU) Challenge Problem is a recent effort to build on earlier successful evaluations of face-recognition systems relative to illumination, pose, expression, and age. GBU focuses on “hard” aspects of face recognition from still frontal image pairs that aren’t acquired under studio-like controlled conditions. The image pairs are partitioned into the good (easy to match), the bad (average matching difficulty), and the ugly (difficult to match).

In a paper presented at the 2012 IEEE Workshop on the Applications of Computer Vision (WACV 2012), researchers from the University of Notre Dame investigate image and facial characteristics that can account for the observed significant differences in performance across these three partitions. Their analysis indicates that the differences reflect simple but often ignored factors such as image sharpness, hue, saturation, and extent of facial expressions.

“Predicting Good, Bad and Ugly Match Pairs” and other papers from WACV 2012 are available to both IEEE Computer Society members and paid subscribers via the Computer Society Digital Library.

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[Conference News] Artifact Cloning in Industrial Software Product Lines

Many companies develop software product lines by cloning and adapting artifacts of existing variants, but their development practices in these processes haven’t been systematically studied. This information vacuum threatens the approach’s validity and applicability and impedes process improvements.

An international group of industry and academic researchers presented a paper presented at the 2013 17th European Conference on Software Maintenance and Reengineering (CSMR 2013) that characterized the cloning culture in six industrial software product lines realized via code cloning. The paper describes the processes used, as well as their advantages and disadvantages. The authors further outline issues preventing the adoption of systematic software-reuse approaches and identify future research directions.

“An Exploratory Study of Cloning in Industrial Software Product Lines” and other papers from CSMR 2013 are available to both IEEE Computer Society members and paid subscribers via the Computer Society Digital Library.

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