The Cyber-Physical Integrated Society (CPIS) is being formed with the fusion of cyber-space and the real-world. In this paper, we will discuss Data-Driven Decision-Making (DDDM) support systems to solve social problems in the CPIS. First, we introduce a Web of Resources (WoR) that uses Web booking log data for destination data management. Next, we introduce an Internet of Persons (IoP) system to visualize individual and group flows of people by analyzing collected Wi-Fi usage log data. Specifically, we present examples of how WoR and IoP visualize flows of groups of people that can be shared across different industries, including telecommunications carriers and railway operators, and policy decision support for local, short-term events. Finally, the importance of data-driven training of human resources to support DDDM in the future CPIS is discussed.

Today, trust plays a central role in services in distributed environments. Conventionally deployed trust has been based on static framework in which a server responds to a service request under statically determined policies. However, in accordance with evolution of distributed environments empowered with IoT and federated access mechanisms, dynamic behavior must be analyzed and taken into service provision, which conventional trust cannot properly handle. In this paper, we propose an extension of PDP (Policy Decision Point) in which assertions together with service requests are evaluated. Furthermore, the evaluation may be dynamically configured in dynamically evolving trust environment. We propose an elastic trust model in view of dynamic trust environment. This enables intuitionistic modeling of typical concrete elastic distributed services.

Upcoming mood prediction plays an important role in different topics such as bipolar depression disorder in psychology and quality-of-life and recommendations on health-related quality of life research. The mood in this study is defined as the general emotional state of a user. In contrast to emotions which is more specific and varying within a day, the mood is described as having either a positive or negative valence[1]. We propose an autonomous system that predicts the upcoming user mood based on their online activities over cyber, social and physical spaces without using extra-devices and sensors. Recently, many researchers have relied on online social networks (OSNs) to detect user mood. However, all the existing works focused on inferring the current mood and only few works have focused on predicting the upcoming mood. For this reason, we define a new goal of predicting the upcoming mood. We, first, collected ground truth data during two months from 383 subjects. Then, we studied the correlation between extracted features and user's mood. Finally, we used these features to train two predictive systems: generalized and personalized. The results suggest a statistically significant correlation between tomorrow's mood and today's activities on OSNs, which can be used to develop a decent predictive system with an average accuracy of 70% and a recall of 75% for the correlated users. This performance was increased to an average accuracy of 79% and a recall of 80% for active users who have more than 30 days of history data. Moreover, we showed that, for non-active users, referring to a generalized system can be a solution to compensate the lack of data at the early stage of the system, but when enough data for each user is available, a personalized system is used to individually predict the upcoming mood.

With the acceptance of social sharing, public bike sharing services have become popular worldwide. One of the most important tasks in operating a bike sharing system is managing the bike supply at each station to avoid either running out of bicycles or docks to park them. This requires the system operator to redistribute bicycles from overcrowded stations to under-supplied ones. Trip demand prediction plays a crucial role in improving redistribution strategies. Predicting trip demand is a highly challenging problem because it is influenced by multiple levels of factors, both environmental and individual, e.g., weather and user characteristics. Although several existing studies successfully address either of them in isolation, no framework exists that can consider all factors simultaneously. This paper starts by analyzing trip data from real-world bike-sharing systems. The analysis reveals the interplay of the multiple levels of the factors. Based on the analysis results, we develop a novel form of the point process; it jointly incorporates multiple levels of factors to predict trip demand, i.e., predicting the pick-up and drop-off levels in the future and when over-demand is likely to occur. Our extensive experiments on real-world bike sharing systems demonstrate the superiority of our trip demand prediction method over five existing methods.

System logs are useful to understand the status of and detect faults in large scale networks. However, due to their diversity and volume of these logs, log analysis requires much time and effort. In this paper, we propose a log event anomaly detection method for large-scale networks without pre-processing and feature extraction. The key idea is to embed a large amount of diverse data into hidden states by using latent variables. We evaluate our method with 12 months of system logs obtained from a nation-wide academic network in Japan. Through comparisons with Kleinberg's univariate burst detection and a traditional multivariate analysis (i.e., PCA), we demonstrate that our proposed method achieves 14.5% higher recall and 3% higher precision than PCA. A case study shows detected anomalies are effective information for troubleshooting of network system faults.

Dedicated Short Range Communication (DSRC) is currently standardized as a leading technology for the implementation of Vehicular Networks. Non-safety application in DSRC is emerging beyond the initial safety application. However, it suffers from a typical issue of low data delivery ratio in urban environments, where static and moving obstacles block or attenuate the radio propagation, as well as other technical issues such as temporal-spatial restriction, capital cost for infrastructure deployments and limited radio coverage range. On the other hand, Content-Centric Networking (CCN) advocates ubiquitous in-network caching to enhance content distribution. The major characteristics of CCN are compatible with the requirements of vehicular networks so that CCN could be available by vehicular networks. In this paper, we propose a CCN-based vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communication scheme on the top of DSRC standard for content dissemination, while demonstrate its feasibility by analyzing the frame format of Beacon and WAVE service advertisement (WSA) messages of DSRC specifications. The simulation-based validations derived from our software platform with OMNeT++, Veins and SUMO in realistic traffic environments are supplied to evaluate the proposed scheme. We expect our research could provide references for future more substantial revision of DSRC standardization for CCN-based V2V communication.

Epidemic cyber incidents are caused by malicious websites using exploit kits. The exploit kit facilitate attackers to perform the drive-by download (DBD) attack. However, it is reported that malicious websites using an exploit kit have similarity in their website structure (WS)-trees. Hence, malicious website identification techniques leveraging WS-trees have been studied, where the WS-trees can be estimated from HTTP traffic data. Nevertheless, the defensive component of the exploit kit prevents us from capturing the WS-tree perfectly. This paper shows, hence, a new WS-tree construction procedure by using the fact that a DBD attack happens in a certain duration. This paper proposes, moreover, a new malicious website identification technique by clustering the WS-tree of the exploit kits. Experiment results assuming the D3M dataset verify that the proposed technique identifies exploit kits with a reasonable accuracy even when HTTP traffic from the malicious sites are partially lost.

This letter presents the safety confirmation system based on Near Field Communication (NFC) and Ultra High Frequency (UHF) band Radio Frequency IDentification (RFID) tags. Because these RFID tags can operate without the need for internal batteries, the proposed safety confirmation system is effective during large-scale disasters that cause loss of electricity and communication infrastructures. Sharing safety confirmation data between the NFC and UHF band RFID tags was studied to confirm the feasibility of the data sharing. The prototype of the proposed system was fabricated, confirming the feasibility of the proposed safety confirmation system.

In the context of Cyber-Physical System (CPS), analyzing the real world data accumulated in cyberspace would improve the efficiency and productivity of various social systems. Towards establishing data-driven society, it is desired to share data safely and smoothly among multiple services. In this paper, we propose a scheme that services authenticate users using information registered on a blockchain. We show that the proposed scheme has resistance to tampering and a spoofing attack.

System administrators and security officials of an organization need to deal with vulnerable IT assets, especially those with severe vulnerabilities, to minimize the risk of these vulnerabilities being exploited. The Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS) can be used as a means to calculate the severity score of vulnerabilities, but it currently requires human operators to choose input values. A word-level Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) has been proposed to estimate the input parameters of CVSS and derive the severity score of vulnerability notes, but its accuracy needs to be improved further. In this paper, we propose a character-level CNN for estimating the severity scores. Experiments show that the proposed scheme outperforms conventional one in terms of accuracy and how errors occur.

Along with the proliferation of IoT (Internet of Things) devices, cyberattacks towards them are on the rise. In this paper, aiming at efficient precaution and mitigation of emerging IoT cyberthreats, we present a multimodal study on applying machine learning methods to characterize malicious programs which target multiple IoT platforms. Experiments show that opcode sequences obtained from static analysis and API sequences obtained by dynamic analysis provide sufficient discriminant information such that IoT malware can be classified with near optimal accuracy. Automated and accelerated identification and mitigation of new IoT cyberthreats can be enabled based on the findings reported in this study.

We propose a method for preventing smartphone theft when the owner dozes off. The owner of the smartphone wears a wristwatch type device that has an acceleration sensor and a vibration mode. This device detects when the owner dozes off. When the acceleration sensor in the smartphone detects an accident while dozing, the device vibrates. We implemented this function and tested its usefulness.

In order to operate an ambulance efficiently, we developed a Smart Ambulance Approach Alarm System using smartphone, by notifying the approach of an ambulance to other vehicles on public roads. The position information of ambulances has not been opened in view of development costs and privacy protection. Therefore, our study opens the position information inexpensively by loading commodity smartphones, not special devices, into ambulances. The position information is made to be open as minimum necessary information by our developed cloud server application, considering dynamic state of other vehicles on public roads and privacy of ambulance service users. We tested the functional efficiency of this system by the demonstration experiment on public roads.

Deterioration of software quality developed by multiple organizations has become a serious problem. To predict software degradation after an organizational change, this paper investigates the influence of quality deterioration on software metrics by analyzing three software projects. To detect factors indicating a low evolvability, we focus on the relationships between the change in software metric values and refactoring tendencies. Refactoring after an organization change impacts the quality.

Combinatorial optimization problems with a large solution space are difficult to solve just using von Neumann computers. Ising machines or annealing machines have been developed to tackle these problems as a promising Non-von Neumann computer. In order to use these annealing machines, every combinatorial optimization problem is mapped onto the physical Ising model, which consists of spins, interactions between them, and their external magnetic fields. Then the annealing machines operate so as to search the ground state of the physical Ising model, which corresponds to the optimal solution of the original combinatorial optimization problem. A combinatorial optimization problem can be firstly described by an ideal fully-connected Ising model but it is very hard to embed it onto the physical Ising model topology of a particular annealing machine, which causes one of the largest issues in annealing machines. In this paper, we propose a fully-connected Ising model embedding method targeting for CMOS annealing machine. The key idea is that the proposed method replicates every logical spin in a fully-connected Ising model and embeds each logical spin onto the physical spins with the same chain length. Experimental results through an actual combinatorial problem show that the proposed method obtains spin embeddings superior to the conventional de facto standard method, in terms of the embedding time and the probability of obtaining a feasible solution.

This paper considers Peer-to-Peer (P2P) video streaming systems, in which a given video stream is divided into b stripes and those stripes are delivered to n peers through b spanning trees under the constraint such that each peer including the source can forward at most b stripes. The delivery of a stripe to n peers is said to be a k-hop delivery if all peers receive the stripe through a path of length at most k. Let B_k=∑_i=0^k-1bⁱ. It is known that under the above constraint, k-hop delivery of b stripes to n peers is possible only if n≤B_k. This paper proves that (k+1)-hop delivery of b stripes to n peers is possible for any n≤B_k; namely, we can realize the delivery of stripes with a guaranteed latency while it is slightly larger than the minimum latency. In addition, we derive a necessary and sufficient condition on n to enable a k-hop delivery of b stripes for B_k-b+2≤n≤B_k-1; namely for n's close to B_k.

In previous studies, we determined that workloads often contain many input-output (IO) concentrations. Such concentrations are aggregations of IO accesses. They appear in narrow regions of a storage volume and continue for durations of up to about an hour. These narrow regions occupy a small percentage of the logical unit number capacity, include most IO accesses, and appear at unpredictable logical block addresses. We investigated these workloads by focusing on page-level regularity and found that they often include few regularities. This means that simple caching may not reduce the response time for these workloads sufficiently because the cache migration algorithm uses page-level regularity. We previously developed an on-the-fly automated storage tiering (OTF-AST) system consisting of an SSD and an HDD. The migration algorithm identifies IO concentrations with moderately long durations and migrates them from the HDD to the SSD. This means that there is little or no reduction in the response time when the workload includes few such concentrations. We have now developed a hybrid storage system consisting of a cache drive with an SSD and HDD and a multi-tier SSD that uses OTF-AST, called “OTF-AST with caching.” The OTF-AST scheme handles the IO accesses that produce moderately long duration IO concentrations while the caching scheme handles the remaining IO accesses. Experiments showed that the average response time for our system was 45% that of Facebook FlashCache on a Microsoft Research Cambridge workload.

Previous works have studied the throughput allocation of the heterogeneous storage system consisting of SSD and HDD in the dynamic setting where users are not all present in the system simultaneously, but those researches make multiple servers as one large resource pool, and cannot cope with the multi-server environment. We design a dynamic throughput allocation mechanism named DAM, which can handle the throughput allocation of multiple heterogeneous servers in the dynamic setting, and can provide a number of desirable properties. The experimental results show that DAM can make one dynamic throughput allocation of multiple servers for making sure users' local allocations in each server, and can provide one efficient and fair throughput allocation in the whole system.

Emerging solid state drives (SSDs) based on a next-generation memory technology have been recently released in market. In this work, we call them low-latency SSDs because the device latency of them is an order of magnitude lower than that of conventional NAND flash SSDs. Although low-latency SSDs can drastically reduce an I/O latency perceived by an application, the overhead of OS processing included in the I/O latency has become noticeable because of the very low device latency. Since the OS processing is executed on a CPU core, its operating frequency should be maximized for reducing the OS overhead. However, a higher core frequency causes the higher CPU power consumption during I/O accesses to low-latency SSDs. Therefore, we propose the device utilization-aware DVFS (DU-DVFS) technique that periodically monitors the utilization of a target block device and applies dynamic voltage and frequency scaling (DVFS) to CPU cores executing I/O-intensive processes only when the block device is fully utilized. In this case, DU-DVFS can reduce the CPU power consumption without hurting performance because the delay of OS processing incurred by decreasing the core frequency can be hidden. Our evaluation with 28 I/O-intensive workloads on a real server containing an Intel® Optane™ SSD demonstrates that DU-DVFS reduces the CPU power consumption by 41.4% on average (up to 53.8%) with a negligible performance degradation, compared to a standard DVFS governor on Linux. Moreover, the evaluation with multiprogrammed workloads composed of I/O-intensive and non-I/O-intensive programs shows that DU-DVFS is also effective for them because it can apply DVFS only to CPU cores executing I/O-intensive processes.

Traceability links between software artifacts can assist in several software development tasks. There are some automatic traceability recovery methods that help with managing the massive number of software artifacts and their relationships, but they do not work well for software artifacts whose descriptions are different in terms of language or abstraction level. To overcome these weakness, we propose the Connecting Links Method (CLM), which recovers transitive traceability links between two artifacts by intermediating a third artifact. In order to apply CLM for general use without limitation in terms of software artifact type, we have designed a standardized method to calculate the relation score of transitive traceability links using the scores of direct traceability links between three artifacts. Furthermore, we propose an improvement of CLM by considering software version. We evaluated CLM by applying it to three software products and found that it is more effective for software artifacts whose language type or vocabulary are different compared to previous methods using textual similarity.

Mining software artifacts is a useful way to understand the source code of software projects. Topic modeling in particular has been widely used to discover meaningful information from software artifacts. However, software artifacts are unstructured and contain a mix of textual types within the natural text. These software artifact characteristics worsen the performance of topic modeling. Among several natural language pre-processing tasks, removing stop words to reduce meaningless and uninteresting terms is an efficient way to improve the quality of topic models. Although many approaches are used to generate effective stop words, the lists are outdated or too general to apply to mining software artifacts. In addition, the performance of the topic model is sensitive to the datasets used in the training for each approach. To resolve these problems, we propose an automatic stop word generation approach for topic models of software artifacts. By measuring topic coherence among words in the topic using Pointwise Mutual Information (PMI), we added words with a low PMI score to our stop words list for every topic modeling loop. Through our experiment, we proved that our stop words list results in a higher performance of the topic model than lists from other approaches.

Social networks often demonstrate hierarchical community structure with communities embedded in other ones. Most existing hierarchical community detection methods need one or more tunable parameters to control the resolution levels, and the obtained dendrograms, a tree describing the hierarchical community structure, are extremely complex to understand and analyze. In the paper, we propose a parameter-free hierarchical community detection method based on micro-community and minimum spanning tree. The proposed method first identifies micro-communities based on link strength between adjacent vertices, and then, it constructs minimum spanning tree by successively linking these micro-communities one by one. The hierarchical community structure of social networks can be intuitively revealed from the merging order of these micro-communities. Experimental results on synthetic and real-world networks show that our proposed method exhibits good accuracy and efficiency performance and outperforms other state-of-the-art methods. In addition, our proposed method does not require any pre-defined parameters, and the output dendrogram is simple and meaningful for understanding and analyzing the hierarchical community structure of social networks.

In this paper, we propose a new routing protocol for named data networking applied to ad hoc networks. We suppose a type of ad hoc networks that advertise versatile information in public spaces such as shopping mall and museum. In this kind of networks, information providers prepare fixed nodes, and users are equipped with mobile terminals. So, we adopt a hybrid approach where a proactive routing is used in the producer side network and a reactive routing is used in the consumer side network. Another feature of the proposed protocol is that only the name prefix advertisement is focused on in the proactive routing. The result of performance evaluation focusing on the communication overhead shows that our proposal has a moderate overhead both for routing control messages and Interest packets compared with some of conventional NDN based ad hoc routing mechanisms proposed so far.

This paper proposes an anomaly prediction method based on k-means clustering that assumes embedded devices with memory constraints. With this method, by checking control system behavior in detail using k-means clustering, it is possible to predict anomalies. However, continuing clustering is difficult because data accumulate in memory similar to existing k-means clustering method, which is problematic for embedded devices with low memory capacity. Therefore, we also propose k-means clustering to continue clustering for infinite stream data. The proposed k-means clustering method is based on online k-means clustering of sequential processing. The proposed k-means clustering method only stores data required for anomaly prediction and releases other data from memory. Due to these characteristics, the proposed k-means clustering realizes that anomaly prediction is performed by reducing memory consumption. Experiments were performed with actual data of control system for anomaly prediction. Experimental results show that the proposed anomaly prediction method can predict anomaly, and the proposed k-means clustering can predict anomalies similar to standard k-means clustering while reducing memory consumption. Moreover, the proposed k-means clustering demonstrates better results of anomaly prediction than existing online k-means clustering.

Various systems that share remote co-worker's awareness information have been proposed for realizing efficient collaborative work among distributed offices. In this study, we implemented an interruptibility sharing system in a university laboratory and assessed the observation behavior for the displayed information. Observation behavior for each target member was detected using an eye tracker to discuss the usage and effect of the system in a quantitative manner, along with the considerations of workers' job positions and relationships. The results suggested that participants observed interruptibility information approximately once an hour while at their desks. Observations were frequent during break-times rather than when the participants wanted to communicate with others. The most frequently observed targets were the participants themselves. The participants gazed the laboratory members not only in a close work relationship but also in a weak relationship. Results suggested that sharing of interruptibility information assists worker's self-reflection and contributes to the establishment of horizontal connection in an organization including members in weak work relationship.

The sparse unmixing of hyperspectral data has attracted much attention in recent years because it does not need to estimate the number of endmembers nor consider the lack of pure pixels in a given hyperspectral scene. However, the high mutual coherence of spectral libraries strongly affects the practicality of sparse unmixing. The collaborative sparse unmixing via variable splitting and augmented Lagrangian (CLSUnSAL) algorithm is a classic sparse unmixing algorithm that performs better than other sparse unmixing methods. In this paper, we propose a CLSUnSAL-based hyperspectral unmixing method based on dictionary pruning and reweighted sparse regression. First, the algorithm identifies a subset of the original library elements using a dictionary pruning strategy. Second, we present a weighted sparse regression algorithm based on CLSUnSAL to further enhance the sparsity of endmember spectra in a given library. Third, we apply the weighted sparse regression algorithm on the pruned spectral library. The effectiveness of the proposed algorithm is demonstrated on both simulated and real hyperspectral datasets. For simulated data cubes (DC1, DC2 and DC3), the number of the pruned spectral library elements is reduced by at least 94% and the runtime of the proposed algorithm is less than 10% of that of CLSUnSAL. For simulated DC4 and DC5, the runtime of the proposed algorithm is less than 15% of that of CLSUnSAL. For the real hyperspectral datasets, the pruned spectral library successfully reduces the original dictionary size by 76% and the runtime of the proposed algorithm is 11.21% of that of CLSUnSAL. These experimental results show that our proposed algorithm not only substantially improves the accuracy of unmixing solutions but is also much faster than some other state-of-the-art sparse unmixing algorithms.

The consistent alignment of point clouds obtained from multiple scanning positions is a crucial step for many 3D modeling systems. This is especially true for environment modeling. In order to observe the full scene, a common approach is to rotate the scanning device around a rotation axis using a turntable. The final alignment of each frame data can be computed from the position and orientation of the rotation axis. However, in practice, the precise mounting of scanning devices is impossible. It is hard to locate the vertical support of the turntable and rotation axis on a common line, particularly for lower cost consumer hardware. Therefore the calibration of the rotation axis of the turntable is an important step for the 3D reconstruction. In this paper we propose a novel calibration method for the rotation axis of the turntable. With the proposed rotation axis calibration method, multiple 3D profiles of the target scene can be aligned precisely. In the experiments, three different evaluation approaches are used to evaluate the calibration accuracy of the rotation axis. The experimental results show that the proposed rotation axis calibration method can achieve a high accuracy.

Biomedical event extraction is an important and challenging task in Information Extraction, which plays a key role for medicine research and disease prevention. Most of the existing event detection methods are based on shallow machine learning methods which mainly rely on domain knowledge and elaborately designed features. Another challenge is that some crucial information as well as the interactions among words or arguments may be ignored since most works treat words and sentences equally. Therefore, we employ a Bidirectional Long Short Term Memory (BLSTM) neural network for event extraction, which can skip handcrafted complex feature extraction. Furthermore, we propose a multi-level attention mechanism, including word level attention which determines the importance of words in a sentence, and the sentence level attention which determines the importance of relevant arguments. Finally, we train dependency word embeddings and add sentence vectors to enrich semantic information. The experimental results show that our model achieves an F-score of 59.61% on the commonly used dataset (MLEE) of biomedical event extraction, which outperforms other state-of-the-art methods.

Image quality depends on the randomness of the k-space signal under-sampling in compressed sensing MRI (CS-MRI), especially for two-dimensional image acquisition. We investigate the feasibility of non-random signal under-sampling CS-MRI to stabilize the quality of reconstructed images and avoid arbitrariness in sampling point selection. Regular signal under-sampling for the phase-encoding direction is adopted, in which sampling points are chosen at equal intervals for the phase-encoding direction while varying the sampling density. Curvelet transform was adopted to remove the aliasing artifacts due to regular signal under-sampling. To increase the incoherence between the measurement matrix and the sparsifying transform function, the scale of the curvelet transform was varied in each iterative image reconstruction step. We evaluated the obtained images by the peak-signal-to-noise ratio and root mean squared error in localized 3×3 pixel regions. Simulation studies and experiments showed that the signal-to-noise ratio and the structural similarity index of reconstructed images were comparable to standard random under-sampling CS. This study demonstrated the feasibility of non-random under-sampling based CS by using the multi-scale curvelet transform as a sparsifying transform function. The technique may help to stabilize the obtained image quality in CS-MRI.

Existing fault localization based on neural networks utilize the information of whether a statement is executed or not executed to identify suspicious statements potentially responsible for a failure. However, the information just shows the binary execution states of a statement, and cannot show how important a statement is in executions. Consequently, it may degrade fault localization effectiveness. To address this issue, this paper proposes TFIDF-FL by using term frequency-inverse document frequency to identify a high or low degree of the influence of a statement in an execution. Our empirical results on 8 real-world programs show that TFIDF-FL significantly improves fault localization effectiveness.

As the demand of data reliability becomes more and more larger, most of today's storage systems adopt erasure codes to assure the data could be reconstructed when suffering from physical device failures. In order to fast recover the lost data from a single failure, recovery optimization methods have attracted a lot of attention in recent years. However, most of the existing optimization methods focus on homogeneous devices, ignoring the fact that the storage devices are usually heterogeneous. In this paper, we propose a new recovery optimization method named HSR (Heterogeneous Storage Recovery) method, which uses both loads and speed rate among physical devices as the optimization target, in order to further improve the recovery performance for heterogeneous devices. The experiment results show that, compared to existing popular recovery optimization methods, HSR method gains much higher recovery speed over heterogeneous storage devices.

As the superstructure of knowledge graph, ontology has been widely applied in knowledge engineering. However, it becomes increasingly difficult to be practiced and comprehended due to the growing data size and complexity of schemas. Hence, ontology summarization surfaced to enhance the comprehension and application of ontology. Existing summarization methods mainly focus on ontology's topology without taking semantic information into consideration, while human understand information based on semantics. Thus, we proposed a novel algorithm to integrate semantic information and topological information, which enables ontology to be more understandable. In our work, semantic and topological information are represented by concept vectors, a set of high-dimensional vectors. Distances between concept vectors represent concepts' similarity and we selected important concepts following these two criteria: 1) the distances from important concepts to normal concepts should be as short as possible, which indicates that important concepts could summarize normal concepts well; 2) the distances from an important concept to the others should be as long as possible which ensures that important concepts are not similar to each other. K-means++ is adopted to select important concepts. Lastly, we performed extensive evaluations to compare our algorithm with existing ones. The evaluations prove that our approach performs better than the others in most of the cases.

Network function virtualization (NFV) achieves the flexibility of network service provisioning by using virtualization technology. However, NFV is exposed to a serious security threat known as cross-VM cache timing attacks. In this letter, we look into real security impacts on network virtualization. Specifically, we present two kinds of practical cache timing attacks on virtualized firewalls and routers. We also propose some countermeasures to mitigate such attacks on virtualized network functions.

Recently, Network Function Virtualization (NFV) has drawn attentions of many network researchers with great deal of flexibilities, and various network service chains can be used in an SDN/NFV environment. With the flexibility of virtual middlebox placement, how to place virtual middleboxes in order to optimize the performance of service chains becomes essential. Some past studies focused on placement problem of consolidated middleboxes which combine multiple functions into a virtual middlebox. However, when a virtual middlebox providing only a single function is considered, the placement problem becomes much more complex. In this paper, we propose a new heuristic method, the gradual switch clustering based virtual middlebox placement method, in order to improve the performance of service chains, with the constraints of end-to-end delay, bandwidth, and operation cost of deploying a virtual middlebox on a switch. The proposed method gradually finds candidate places for each type of virtual middlebox along with the sequential order of service chains, by clustering candidate switches which satisfy the constraints. Finally, among candidate places for each type of virtual middlebox, the best places are selected in order to minimize the end-to-end delays of service chains. The evaluation results, which are obtained through Mininet based extensive emulations, show that the proposed method outperforms than other methods, and specifically it achieves around 25% less end-to-end delay than other methods.

Forecasting commodity futures price is a challenging task. We present an algorithm to predict the trend of commodity futures price based on a type of structuring data and back propagation neural network. The random volatility of futures can be filtered out in the structuring data. Moreover, it is not restricted by the type of futures contract. Experiments show the algorithm can achieve 80% accuracy in predicting price trends.

It is not easy for a student to present a question or comment to the lecturer and other students in large classes. This paper introduces a new audience presentation system (APS), which creates slide presentations of students' mobile responses in the classroom. Experimental surveys demonstrate the utility of this APS for classroom interactivity.