Software

Leveraging implicit demographic information for face recognition using a multi-expert system

This paper describes a novel biometric architecture to implement unsupervised face recognition across varying demographics. The present proposal deals with ethnicity, gender and age, but the same strategy can be crafted for any mix of soft/hard biometrics, sensors, and/or methods. Our aim is not to explicitly distinguish demographic features of a subject (e.g., male vs. female). We rather aim at implicitly exploiting such information to improve the accuracy of subject identification. The role demographics plays in authentication has been reported by many recent studies.

FATCHA: biometrics lends tools for CAPTCHAs

This paper presents a novel strategy to implement a CAPTCHA (Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart). The aim of these tests is to easily and reliably distinguish between real human users and (malicious) bots. The approach underlying FATCHA is to exploit real time capture of human actions instead of human ability to recognize visual or auditory items. The latter approach explicitly requires proposing a challenge difficult for an automatic responder but easy for a human.

The distortion of locality sensitive hashing

Given a pairwise similarity notion between objects, locality sensitive hashing (LSH) aims to construct a hash function family over the universe of objects such that the probability two objects hash to the same value is their similarity. LSH is a powerful algorithmic tool for large-scale applications and much work has been done to understand LSHable similarities, i.e., similarities that admit an LSH. In this paper we focus on similarities that are provably non-LSHable and propose a notion of distortion to capture the approximation of such a similarity by a similarity that is LSHable.

Counting graphlets: space vs time

Counting graphlets is a well-studied problem in graph mining and social network analysis. Recently, several papers explored very simple and natural approaches based on Monte Carlo sampling of Markov Chains (MC), and reported encouraging results. We show, perhaps surprisingly, that this approach is outperformed by a carefully engineered version of color coding (CC) [1], a sophisticated algorithmic technique that we extend to the case of graphlet sampling and for which we prove strong statistical guarantees.

Measuring Docker performance: what a mess!!!

Today, a new technology is going to change the way platforms for the internet of services are designed and managed. This technology is called container (e.g. Docker and LXC). The internet of service industry is adopting the container technology both for internal usage and as commercial offering. The use of container as base technology for largescale systems opens many challenges in the area of resource management at run-Time, for example: Autoscaling, optimal deployment and monitoring.

Energy-aware auto-scaling algorithms for Cassandra virtual data centers

Apache Cassandra is an highly scalable and available NoSql datastore, largely used by enterprises of each size and for application areas that range from entertainment to big data analytics. Managed Cassandra service providers are emerging to hide the complexity of the installation, fine tuning and operation of Cassandra virtual data centers (VDCs). This paper address the problem of energy efficient auto-scaling of Cassandra VDC in managed Cassandra data centers. We propose three energy-aware autoscaling algorithms: Opt, LocalOpt and LocalOpt-H.

Autonomous mobile sensor placement in complex environments

In this article, we address the problem of autonomously deploying mobile sensors in an unknown complex environment. In such a scenario, mobile sensors may encounter obstacles or environmental sources of noise, so that movement and sensing capabilities can be significantly altered and become anisotropic. Any reduction of device capabilities cannot be known prior to their actual deployment, nor can it be predicted.We propose a new algorithm for autonomous sensor movements and positioning, called DOMINO (DeplOyment of MobIle Networks with Obstacles).

Controlling cascading failures in interdependent networks under incomplete knowledge

Vulnerability due to inter-connectivity of multiple networks has been observed in many complex networks. Previous works mainly focused on robust network design and on recovery strategies after sporadic or massive failures in the case of complete knowledge of failure location. We focus on cascading failures involving the power grid and its communication network with consequent imprecision in damage assessment. We tackle the problem of mitigating the ongoing cascading failure and providing a recovery strategy.

Design of low-voltage high-speed CML D-latches in nanometer CMOS technologies

This paper presents the design of a novel low-voltage high-speed D-latch circuit suitable for nanometer CMOS technologies. The proposed topology is compared against the low-voltage triple-tail D-latch and its advantages are demonstrated both by simulations, under different performance/power consumption tradeoffs with a 40-nm CMOS technology, and theoretically, thanks to a simple model of the propagation delay derived for both low-voltage topologies.

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