Abstract. Cloud computing is receiving increasingly attention as it provides infinite resource capacity and "pay-as-you-go" resource usage pattern to hosted applications. To maintain its SLA targets, resource provisioning of service-oriented applications in the cloud requires reliable performance from the cloud resources. In this paper, we study performance behavior of small instances in Amazon EC2. We demonstrate that the performance of virtual instances is relatively stable over time with fluctuations of mean response time within at most 8% of the long-term average. Moreover, we also show that different supposedly identical instances often have very different performance, up to a ratio 4 from each other. We consider this as an important issue that must be addressed, but also as an opportunity as it allows one to assign each instance with a task that matches its own performance profile.

Facial Expression Recognition (FER) can be widely applied to various research areas, such as mental diseases diagnosis and human social/physiological interaction detection. With the emerging advanced technologies in hardware and sensors, FER systems have been developed to support real-world application scenes, instead of laboratory environments. Although the laboratory-controlled FER systems achieve very high accuracy, around 97%, the technical transferring from the laboratory to real-world applications faces a great barrier of very low accuracy, approximately 50%. In this survey, we comprehensively discuss three significant challenges in the unconstrained real-world environments, such as illumination variation, head pose, and subject-dependence, which may not be resolved by only analysing images/videos in the FER system. We focus on those sensors that may provide extra information and help the FER systems to detect emotion in both static images and video sequences. We introduce three categories of sensors that may help improve the accuracy and reliability of an expression recognition system by tackling the challenges mentioned above in pure image/video processing. The first group is detailed-face sensors, which detect a small dynamic change of a face component, such as eye-trackers, which may help differentiate the background noise and the feature of faces. The second is non-visual sensors, such as audio, depth, and EEG sensors, which provide extra information in addition to visual dimension and improve the recognition reliability for example in illumination variation and position shift situation. The last is target-focused sensors, such as infrared thermal sensors, which can facilitate the FER systems to filter useless visual contents and may help resist illumination variation. Also, we discuss the methods of fusing different inputs obtained from multimodal sensors in an emotion system. We comparatively review the most prominent multimodal emotional expression recognition approaches and point out their advantages and limitations. We briefly introduce the benchmark data sets related to FER systems for each category of sensors and extend our survey to the open challenges and issues. Meanwhile, we design a framework of an expression recognition system, which uses multimodal sensor data (provided by the three categories of sensors) to provide complete information about emotions to assist the pure face image/video analysis. We theoretically analyse the feasibility and achievability of our new expression recognition system, especially for the use in the wild environment, and point out the future directions to design an efficient, emotional expression recognition system.

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Attribute independence has been taken as a major assumption in the limited research that has been conducted on similarity analysis for categorical data, especially unsupervised learning. However, in real-world data sources, attributes are more or less associated with each other in terms of certain coupling relationships. Accordingly, recent works on attribute dependency aggregation have introduced the co-occurrence of attribute values to explore attribute coupling, but they only present a local picture in analyzing categorical data similarity. This is inadequate for deep analysis, and the computational complexity grows exponentially when the data scale increases. This paper proposes an efficient data-driven similarity learning approach that generates a coupled attribute similarity measure for nominal objects with attribute couplings to capture a global picture of attribute similarity. It involves the frequency-based intra-coupled similarity within an attribute and the inter-coupled similarity upon value co-occurrences between attributes, as well as their integration on the object level. In particular, four measures are designed for the inter-coupled similarity to calculate the similarity between two categorical values by considering their relationships with other attributes in terms of power set, universal set, joint set, and intersection set. The theoretical analysis reveals the equivalent accuracy and superior efficiency of the measure based on the intersection set, particularly for large-scale data sets. Intensive experiments of data structure and clustering algorithms incorporating the coupled dissimilarity metric achieve a significant performance improvement on state-of-the-art measures and algorithms on 13 UCI data sets, which is confirmed by the statistical analysis. The experiment results show that the proposed coupled attribute similarity is generic, and can effectively and efficiently capture the intrinsic and global interactions within and between attributes for especially large-scale categorical data sets. In addition, two new coupled categorical clustering algorithms, i.e., CROCK and CLIMBO are proposed, and they both outperform the original ones in terms of clustering quality on UCI data sets and bibliographic data.

Digitalization of content is both a blessing and a curse. While it allows for efficient transmission and consumption, the ease of copying and sharing digital content has resulted in rampant piracy. Digital Rights Management (DRM) has emerged as a multidisciplinary measure to protect the copyright of content owners and to facilitate the consumption of digital content. In this paper, we survey the technological aspects of DRM. We present a discussion of DRM definitions, formulate a general DRM model and specify its various DRM components. We also evaluated emerging trends such as the use of P2P in DRM and DRM for personal access control, some noteworthy issues such as content reuse and granularity, as well as citing some future directions such as frequent content key upgrades.

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NoSQL Cloud data services provide scalability and high availability properties for web applications but at the same time they sacrifice data consistency. However, many applications cannot afford any data inconsistency. CloudTPS is a scalable transaction manager to allow cloud database services to execute the ACID transactions of web applications, even in the presence of server failures and network partitions. We implement this approach on top of the two main families of scalable data layers: Bigtable and SimpleDB. Performance evaluation on top of HBase (an open-source version of Bigtable) in our local cluster and Amazon SimpleDB in the Amazon cloud shows that our system scales linearly at least up to 40 nodes in our local cluster and 80 nodes in the Amazon cloud.

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