Energy-aware performance analysis methodologies for HPC architectures—An exploratory study

Performance analysis is a crucial step in HPC architectures including clouds. Traditional performance analysis methodologies that were proposed, implemented, and enacted are functional with the objective of identifying bottlenecks or issues related to memory, programming languages, hardware, and virtualization aspects. However, the need for energy efficient architectures in highly scalable computing environments, such as, Grid or Cloud, has widened the research thrust on developing performance analysis methodologies that analyze the energy inefficiency of HPC applications or their associated hardware. This paper surveys the performance analysis methodologies that investigates into the available energy monitoring and energy awareness mechanisms for HPC architectures. In addition, the paper validates the existing tools in terms of overhead, portability, and user-friendly parameters by conducting experiments at HPCCLoud Research Laboratory at our premise. This research work will promote HPC application developers to select an apt monitoring mechanism and HPC tool developers to augment required energy monitoring mechanisms which fit well with their basic monitoring infrastructures.     

Is SA shared or distributed in team work? An exploratory study in an intelligence analysis task

This study compared two theoretical approaches to Situation Awareness (SA): the psychological school of thought and the systems ergonomics school of thought, by assessing measurement of team SA within these frameworks. Two teams were assigned and organised into either a traditional Hierarchy or a Peer-to-Peer organisational structure in a single case study design. Measures derived from the psychological and systems ergonomics perspectives were applied to assess their sensitivity for assessing team SA. No statistically significant differences were found between the two teams when measures originating in the psychological tradition were considered: differences were found, however, for measures originating in the systems ergonomics tradition. Literature concerned with team SA reveals a lack of consensus with regards to explaining the nature of the phenomenon as well as its measurement. This paper argues for a debate in the field to clarify what constitutes appropriate measurement techniques for team SA and suggests that these are taken from the systems ergonomics tradition, as suggested by the present studies findings.

Relevance to industry

Teams are a major feature of most industrial applications of work, and maintaining good situation awareness is important to successful performance. A method for examining the situation awareness of teams is proposed and compared with the individual models. Analysing the team as a functional unit of situation awareness is presented for future work.     

An object‐oriented approach for analysing and characterizing urban landscape at the parcel level

This paper presents an object‐oriented approach for analysing and characterizing the urban landscape structure at the parcel level using high‐resolution digital aerial imagery and LIght Detection and Ranging (LIDAR) data. Additional spatial datasets including property parcel boundaries and building footprints were used to both facilitate object segmentation and obtain greater classification accuracy. The study area is the Gwynns Falls watershed, which includes portions of Baltimore City and Baltimore County, MD. A three‐level hierarchical network of image objects was generated, and objects were classified. At the two lower levels, objects were classified into five classes, building, pavement, bare soil, fine textured vegetation and coarse textured vegetation, respectively. The object‐oriented classification approach proved to be effective for urban land cover classification. The overall accuracy of the classification was 92.3%, and the overall Kappa statistic was 0.899. Land cover proportions as well as vegetation characteristics were then summarized by property parcel. This exercise resulted in a knowledge base of rules for urban land cover classification, which could potentially be applied to other urban areas.     

Is the addition of an assisted driving Hamiltonian always useful for adiabatic evolution?

It has been known that when an assisted driving item is added to the main system Hamiltonian, the efficiency of the resultant adiabatic evolution can be significantly improved. In some special cases, it can be seen that only through adding an assisted driving Hamiltonian can the resulting adiabatic evolution be made not to fail. Thus the additional driving Hamiltonian plays an important role in adiabatic computing. In this paper, we show that if the driving Hamiltonian is chosen inappropriately, the adiabatic computation may still fail. More importantly, we find that the adiabatic computation can only succeed if the assisted driving Hamiltonian has a relatively fixed form. This may help us understand why in the related literature all of the driving Hamiltonians used share the same form.     

Idea generation and open innovation in SMEs: When does market‐based collaboration pay off most?

Small‐ and medium‐sized enterprises (SMEs) largely depend on proficient idea generation activities to improve their front‐end innovation performance, yet the liabilities of newness and smallness often hamper SMEs' ability to benefit from systematic idea generation. To compensate for these liabilities, many SMEs adopt an open innovation approach by collaborating with market‐based partners such as customers and suppliers. This study investigates the relationship between SMEs' systematic idea generation and front‐end performance and investigates the moderating role of market‐based partnership for SMEs. Drawing on a survey of 146 Swedish manufacturing SMEs, this study provides two key contributions. First, the systematic idea generation and front‐end performance relationship in SMEs is non‐linear. Accordingly, higher levels of front‐end performance are achieved when idea generation activities are highly systematic. Second, the returns from higher levels of systematic idea generation are positively moderated by market‐based partnerships. Thus, external cooperation with customers and suppliers pays off most toward front‐end performance when SMEs have highly systematic idea generation processes. These results indicate a contingency perspective on the role of external partnerships. They also have implications for research into the front‐end of innovation and open innovation in the context of SMEs.     

Teaching science for the workplace? An analysis of Canadian science curriculum documents

Abstract

This article reports on the analysis of 108 science curriculum documents from the 13 Canadian provinces and territories exploring the explicit links that the science curriculum makes with the world of work. The document analysis was undertaken to examine the extent to which the contemporary Canadian provincial and territorial science curriculum documents represent objectives and goals that relate to science in the workplace. Because Canadian curriculum documents are reviewed periodically, the research was timed so that it captured the moment at which a significant number of these policy documents had been revised and released: December 2004. The article begins with a review of the nature of the knowledge or New Economy. Then previous document analysis research on science curriculum policy is discussed. The present study's findings suggest that curriculum policy makers are generally inattentive to the world of work and, in particular, to the demands of the New Economy. Implications of the research include the need to review the purposes of science education in Canada. Questions we might ask include, ‘To what extent might school science attempt to bridge the worlds of school and work?’ and ‘How might the bridge be built to this large part of life after school?’     

No innovation for the elderly? The influence of cognitive distance in corporate innovation

Knowledge of customer needs are crucial for successful corporate innovations. Demographic ageing leads to a higher share of older adults (65+ generation). Consumer‐facing companies are urged to target this special or distant target group, which is mostly underrepresented in innovation teams. Various scientific domains have adopted the concept of psychological or cognitive distance, which is theoretically grounded in Construal Level Theory (CLT). Applied to an innovation context, CLT suggests that it is difficult to form detailed user representations of distant target groups and thus to acquire critical need knowledge. User involvement encompasses approaches designed to increase customer centricity and therefore helps with obtaining a better understanding of customer needs. This paper attempts to (i) explore experimentally the cognitive distance between individual developers and the target group and its role in successful ideation, and (ii) test how cognitive distance effects are moderated by the application of user‐involvement measures. The results show that cognitive distance, in particular social distance, has adverse effects; user‐involvement activities affect ideation quality positively when developers are socially close to the target group. Our findings reveal conditions for the applicability of CLT in innovation management. Implications for management practice include team composition and the application of user involvement when targeting distant target groups.     

Do bugs foreshadow vulnerabilities? An in-depth study of the chromium project

As developers face an ever-increasing pressure to engineer secure software, researchers are building an understanding of security-sensitive bugs (i.e. vulnerabilities). Research into mining software repositories has greatly increased our understanding of software quality via empirical study of bugs. Conceptually, however, vulnerabilities differ from bugs: they represent an abuse of functionality as opposed to insufficient functionality commonly associated with traditional, non-security bugs. We performed an in-depth analysis of the Chromium project to empirically examine the relationship between bugs and vulnerabilities. We mined 374,686 bugs and 703 post-release vulnerabilities over five Chromium releases that span six years of development. We used logistic regression analysis, ranking analysis, bug type classifications, developer experience, and vulnerability severity metrics to examine the overarching question: are bugs and vulnerabilities in the same files? While we found statistically significant correlations between pre-release bugs and post-release vulnerabilities, we found the association to be weak. Number of features, source lines of code, and pre-release security bugs are, in general, more closely associated with post-release vulnerabilities than any of our non-security bug categories. In further analysis, we examined sub-types of bugs, such as stability-related bugs, and the associations did not improve. Even the files with the most severe vulnerabilities (by measure of CVSS or bounty payouts) did not show strong correlations with number of bugs. These results indicate that bugs and vulnerabilities are empirically dissimilar groups, motivating the need for security engineering research to target vulnerabilities specifically.     

What makes the difference? An empirical comparison of fusion strategies for multimodal language analysis

Multimodal video sentiment analysis is a rapidly growing area. It combines verbal (i.e., linguistic) and non-verbal modalities (i.e., visual, acoustic) to predict the sentiment of utterances. A recent trend has been geared towards different modality fusion models utilizing various attention, memory and recurrent components. However, there lacks a systematic investigation on how these different components contribute to solving the problem as well as their limitations. This paper aims to fill the gap, marking the following key innovations. We present the first large-scale and comprehensive empirical comparison of eleven state-of-the-art (SOTA) modality fusion approaches in two video sentiment analysis tasks, with three SOTA benchmark corpora. An in-depth analysis of the results shows that the attention mechanisms are the most effective for modelling crossmodal interactions, yet they are computationally expensive. Second, additional levels of crossmodal interaction decrease performance. Third, positive sentiment utterances are the most challenging cases for all approaches. Finally, integrating context and utilizing the linguistic modality as a pivot for non-verbal modalities improve performance. We expect that the findings would provide helpful insights and guidance to the development of more effective modality fusion models.     

What is the role of IT in innovation? A bibliometric analysis of research development in IT innovation

With the wide diffusion of information technology (IT) in our daily life and work, it is clear that product innovation and service innovation have more and more connection with IT, and IT has become an important tool or component in innovation. The purpose of this paper is to provide insights into future studies pertaining to this area by investigating the research development of IT innovation using bibliometric analysis. The status of IT innovation study is analysed through citation analysis with the help of CiteSpace. Influential references, hot topics, top-tier journals and important institutes are all detected, and the intellectual structure of recent studies is also mapped in this study, and we find that research on IT innovation is mainly from two directions, innovation study group and information systems study group. Finally, we follow the logic of Nambisan [2013. “Information Technology and Product/Service Innovation: A Brief Assessment and Some Suggestions for Future Research.” Journal of the Association for Information Systems 14 (4): 215–226] to explore the relationship between IT and innovation through reviewing papers in the top journals in this field. We find that most studies treat IT as an enabler of innovation. Although some recent studies try to pay attention to the role of IT as a trigger for innovation and give some rationale for the IT–innovation relationship, further studies are still required to uncover the trigger effect mechanism.     

Gatekeepers’ innovative use of IT: An absorptive capacity model at the unit level

This paper examines the potential role of gatekeepers’ innovative use of information technology (IT) in organizational units and its ability antecedents. Using absorptive capacity theory as our theoretical lens, we theorize a model of innovative use of IT at the unit level. The proposed model was empirically validated using a survey of 204 unit gatekeepers. This paper develops a preliminary model of innovative use of IT that can inform and guide future research, specifically focusing on the key role of gatekeepers and the abilities needed by users in this role that can help in using IT in an innovative manner.     

What reveals about depression level? The role of multimodal features at the level of interview questions

Early depression detection can enable timely intervention. Automatic depression detection has relied on features extracted from individual-level data, which may be too coarse to support effective detection. Existing detection models have largely overlooked interview questions commonly used in clinical depression assessment. This research proposes a two-layered multi-modal model for depression detection, which not only extracts features from responses at a level of individual interview questions, but also identifies semantic categories of those questions. The evaluation results demonstrate that the proposed model outperforms the state-of-the-art methods for depression detection. The research findings have broad and cross-disciplinary implications.     

Is that my hand? An egocentric dataset for hand disambiguation

With the recent development of wearable cameras, the interest for research on the egocentric perspective is increasing. This opens the possibility to work on a specific object detection problem of hand detection and hand disambiguation. However, recent progress in egocentric hand disambiguation and even hand detection, especially using deep learning, has been limited by the lack of a large dataset, with suitable variations in subject, activity, and scene. In this paper, we propose a dataset that simulates daily activities, with variable illumination and people from different cultures and ethnicity to address daily life conditions. We increase the dataset size from previous works to allow robust solutions like deep neural networks that need a substantial amount of data for training. Our dataset consists of 50,000 annotated images with 10 different subjects doing 5 different daily activities (biking, eating, kitchen, office and running) in over 40 different scenes with variable illumination and changing backgrounds, and we compare with previous similar datasets.Hands in an egocentric view are challenging to detect due to a number of factors, such as shape variations, inconsistent illumination, motion blur, and occlusion. To improve hand detection and disambiguation, context information can be included to aid in the detection. In particular, we propose three neural network architectures that jointly learn the hand and context information, and we provide baseline results with current object/hand detection approaches.     

Is the time ripe for kidney tissue proteomics?

In this viewpoint article, the importance of renal tissue proteomics in health and disease is explored. The analysis of the urinary proteome and the potential clinical application of these findings are progressing. However, additional benefit would be gained from a detailed parallel exploration of the proteome of the renal parenchyma, both in models and clinical samples. With this aim, we will briefly summarize the existing literature, compare the findings and propose future tasks. Special emphasis is placed on the importance of studying specific cellular compartments and cell types within the kidney. Recent technical advances are also discussed. It is anticipated that the combination of such technologies, especially proteomic analysis of material extracted by laser capture microdissection from paraffin embedded tissue or direct mass spectrometrical tissue imaging, will revolutionize the field.     

Natural killer or T-lymphocyte cells: Which is the best immune therapeutic agent for cancer? An optimal control approach

Therapeutic vaccines are being developed as a promising new approach to treatment for cancer patients. There are still many unanswered questions about which kind of therapeutic vaccines are the best for the cancer treatments? In this paper we consider a mathematical model, in the form of a system of ordinary differential equations (ODE), this system is an example from a class of mathematical models for immunotherapy of the tumor that were derived from a biologically validated model by Lisette G. de Pillis. The problem how to schedule a variable amount of which vaccines to achieve a maximum reduction in the primary cancer volume is consider as an optimal control problem and it is shown that optimal control is quadratic with 0 denoting a trajectory corresponding to no treatment and 1 a trajectory with treatment at maximum dose along that all therapeutics are being exhausted. The ODE system dynamics characterized by locating equilibrium points and stability properties are determined by using appropriate Lyapunov functions. Especially we attend a parametric sensitivity analysis, which indicates the dependency of the optimal solution with respect to disturbances in model parameters.     

An open book on Facebook? Examining the interdependence of adolescents’ privacy regulation strategies

Users of social network sites (SNSs) use three main strategies that help to manage the privacy of their profile information: (1) limiting the level of data revealed, (2) using privacy settings to exert control over data and (3) audience/friendship management by being restrictive about whom to accept as a ‘friend’. Extant research does not show whether these strategies operate as independent mechanisms or whether they are interdependent and work as a system. Given what offline privacy theorist Irwin Altman (1977 Altman, Irwin. 1977. “Privacy Regulation: Culturally Universal or Culturally Specific?” Journal of Social Issues 33 (3): 66–84. doi: 10.1111/j.1540-4560.1977.tb01883.x[Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]) designates as the multi-mechanic nature of privacy protection, we test a model in which we expect to find that the three discerned strategies are related to one another. Structural equation modelling analysis performed on the subsample (n?=?1564) of our study’s data – collected among 1743 adolescents by means of a paper-and-pencil survey – demonstrates that, in line with Altman’s vision of privacy protection, the three discerned strategies effectively operate as an interdependent system. In congruence with the hypotheses derived from extant research, we found that adolescents’ level of disclosure influences adolescents’ involvement in the two other discerned strategies: Adolescents with high levels of personal information disclosure share an increased tendency to have many friends on SNSs and a lower level of using privacy settings.     

Empowering the users? A critical textual analysis of the role of users in open source software development

This paper outlines a critical, textual approach for the analysis of the relationship between different actors in information technology (IT) production, and further concretizes the approach in the analysis of the role of users in the open source software (OSS) development literature. Central concepts of the approach are outlined. The role of users is conceptualized as reader involvement aiming to contribute to the configuration of the reader (to how users and the parameters for their work practices are defined in OSS texts). Afterwards, OSS literature addressing reader involvement is critically reviewed. In OSS context, the OSS writers as readers configure the reader and other readers are assumed to be capable of and interested in commenting the texts. A lack of OSS research on non-technical reader involvement is identified. Furthermore, not only are the OSS readers configured, but so are OSS writers. In OSS context while writers may be empowered, this clearly does not apply to the non-technical OSS readers. Implication for research and practice are discussed.

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An assessment of the Padé-Laplace method for transient electric birefringence decay analysis

We implemented and tested the Padé-Laplace method for analyzing a sum of exponential decays, and applied it to transient electric birefringence decay measurements on DNA samples. The Padé-Laplace method involves integrating the decay data to calculate the Taylor expansion of the Laplace transform. The Padé approximant of the Laplace transform can be calculated from the Taylor series, and is then used to determine the number and value of the time constants in the decay. False solutions with complex and positive (diverging) exponentials were obtained from data but these false solutions were easily discarded. We found the method to be remarkably robust to random noise, but very sensitive to baseline errors. The same data sets were analyzed using the well-established deconvolution program CONTIN. The Padé-Laplace method could resolve time constants better than CONTIN from noisy data, but CONTIN compensated for baseline errors much more effectively. The time for executing either analysis on a microcomputer was almost the same.     

Environmental support hypothesis in designing multimedia training for older adults: Is less always more?

This study explores younger and older adults learning of MS Publisher functionalities from a multimedia tutorial. Twenty younger and twenty three older adults assigned to a redundant (experimental) or non-redundant (control) condition were taught how to create a greeting card, while the results of their learning were assessed with immediate and delayed performance measures. While younger learners benefited from a non-redundant condition, older learners exhibited an opposite trend. Redundant condition was beneficial for their performance efficiency on a set of a transfer tasks, and their troubleshooting performance during the delayed session. From a cognitive load perspective, using a redundant text along with an audio narration overloads learner’s working memory by placing more strain on the visual pathway and not providing any additional cognitive advantage. From an environmental support standpoint and decreased processing resources view of cognitive aging, providing additional representational support helps reducing the task demands for older adults and results in better learning. The results have cognitive and practical implications for the design of multimedia learning environments for older adults.