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Full-Text Articles in Engineering

Online Piece-Wise Linear Approximation Of Numerical Streams With Precision Guarantees, Hazem Elmeleegy, Ahmed Elmagarmid, Emmanuel Cecchet, Walid G. Aref, Willy Zwaenepoel Aug 2009

Online Piece-Wise Linear Approximation Of Numerical Streams With Precision Guarantees, Hazem Elmeleegy, Ahmed Elmagarmid, Emmanuel Cecchet, Walid G. Aref, Willy Zwaenepoel

Cyber Center Publications

Continuous “always-on” monitoring is beneficial for a number of applications, but potentially imposes a high load in terms of communication, storage and power consumption when a large number of variables need to be monitored. We introduce two new filtering techniques, swing filters and slide filters, that represent within a prescribed precision a time-varying numerical signal by a piecewise linear function, consisting of connected line segments for swing filters and (mostly) disconnected line segments for slide filters. We demonstrate the effectiveness of swing and slide filters in terms of their compression power by applying them to a reallife data set plus …


Diversity And Strain Specificity Of Plant Cell Wall Degrading Enzymes Revealed By The Draft Genome Of Ruminococcus Flavefaciens Fd-1, Margret E. Berg Miller, Dionysios A. Antonopoulos, Mark Brand, Albert Bari, Alvaro Hernandez, Jyothi Thimmapuram, Bryan A. White, Marco Rincon, Harry J. Flint, Bernard Henrissat, Pedro M. Coutinho Aug 2009

Diversity And Strain Specificity Of Plant Cell Wall Degrading Enzymes Revealed By The Draft Genome Of Ruminococcus Flavefaciens Fd-1, Margret E. Berg Miller, Dionysios A. Antonopoulos, Mark Brand, Albert Bari, Alvaro Hernandez, Jyothi Thimmapuram, Bryan A. White, Marco Rincon, Harry J. Flint, Bernard Henrissat, Pedro M. Coutinho

Cyber Center Publications

Ruminococcus flavefaciens is a predominant cellulolytic rumen bacterium, which forms a multi-enzyme cellulosome complex that could play an integral role in the ability of this bacterium to degrade plant cell wall polysaccharides. Identifying the major enzyme types involved in plant cell wall degradation is essential for gaining a better understanding of the cellulolytic capabilities of this organism as well as highlighting potential enzymes for application in improvement of livestock nutrition and for conversion of cellulosic biomass to liquid fuels.


Generalization Of Acid Properties, Brahim Medjahed, Mourad Ouzzani, Ahmed Elmagarmid Jan 2009

Generalization Of Acid Properties, Brahim Medjahed, Mourad Ouzzani, Ahmed Elmagarmid

Cyber Center Publications

ACID (Atomicity, Consistency, Isolation, and Durability) is a set of properties that guarantee the reliability of database transactions [2]. ACID properties were initially developed with traditional, business-oriented applications (e.g., banking) in mind. Hence, they do not fully support the functional and performance requirements of advanced database applications such as computer-aided design, computer-aided manufacturing, office automation, network management, multidatabases, and mobile databases. For instance, transactions in computer-aided design applications are generally of long duration and preserving the traditional ACID properties in such transactions would require locking resources for long periods of time. This has lead to the generalization of ACID properties …


Beyond K-Anonymity: A Decision Theoretic Framework For Assessing Privacy Risk, Guy Lebanon, Monica Scannapieco, Mohamed Fouad, Elisa Bertino Jan 2009

Beyond K-Anonymity: A Decision Theoretic Framework For Assessing Privacy Risk, Guy Lebanon, Monica Scannapieco, Mohamed Fouad, Elisa Bertino

Cyber Center Publications

An important issue any organization or individual has to face when managing data containing sensitive information, is the risk that can be incurred when releasing such data. Even though data may be sanitized before being released, it is still possible for an adversary to reconstruct the original data using additional information thus resulting in privacy violations. To date, however, a systematic approach to quantify such risks is not available. In this paper we develop a framework, based on statistical decision theory, that assesses the relationship between the disclosed data and the resulting privacy risk. We model the problem of deciding …


Query Mesh: Multiroute, Rimma Nehme, Karen Works, Elke Rundensteiner, Elisa Bertino Jan 2009

Query Mesh: Multiroute, Rimma Nehme, Karen Works, Elke Rundensteiner, Elisa Bertino

Cyber Center Publications

We propose to demonstrate a practical alternative approach to the current state-of-the-art query processing techniques, called the “Query Mesh” (or QM, for short). The main idea of QM is to compute multiple routes (i.e., query plans)1, each designed for a particular subset of data with distinct statistical properties. Based on the execution routes and the data characteristics, a classifier model is induced and is used to partition new data tuples to assign the best routes for their processing. We propose to demonstrate the QM framework in the streaming context using our demo application, called the “Ubi-City”. We will illustrate the …


A Hierarchical Approach To Model Web Query Interfaces For Web Source Integration, Thomas Kabisch, Eduard Dragut, Clement Yu, Ulf Leser Jan 2009

A Hierarchical Approach To Model Web Query Interfaces For Web Source Integration, Thomas Kabisch, Eduard Dragut, Clement Yu, Ulf Leser

Cyber Center Publications

Much data in the Web is hidden behind Web query interfaces. In most cases the only means to "surface" the content of a Web database is by formulating complex queries on such interfaces. Applications such as Deep Web crawling and Web database integration require an automatic usage of these interfaces. Therefore, an important problem to be addressed is the automatic extraction of query interfaces into an appropriate model. We hypothesize the existence of a set of domain-independent "commonsense design rules" that guides the creation of Web query interfaces. These rules transform query interfaces into schema trees. In this paper we …


Private Queries And Trajectory Anonymization: A Dual Perspective On Location Privacy, Gabriel Ghinita Jan 2009

Private Queries And Trajectory Anonymization: A Dual Perspective On Location Privacy, Gabriel Ghinita

Cyber Center Publications

The emergence of mobile devices with Internet connectivity (e.g., Wi-Fi) and global positioning capabilities (e.g., GPS) have triggered the widespread development of location-based applications. For instance, users are able to ask queries about points of interest in their proximity. Furthermore, users can act as mobile sensors to monitor traffic flow, or levels of air pollution. However, such applications require users to disclose their locations, which raises serious privacy concerns. With knowledge of user locations, a malicious attacker can infer sensitive information, such as alternative lifestyles or political affiliations. Preserving location privacy is an essential requirement towards the successful deployment of …


The Plant Ionome Coming Into Focus, Lorraine Williams, David Salt Jan 2009

The Plant Ionome Coming Into Focus, Lorraine Williams, David Salt

Cyber Center Publications

92 elements have been identified on earth and 17 of these are known to be essential to all plants. The essential elements required in relatively large amounts (>0.1% of dry mass) are called macronutrients and include C, H, O, N, S, P, Ca, K, Mg. Those required in much smaller amounts (<0.01% of dry mass) are referred to as micronutrients or trace elements and include Ni, Mo, Cu, Zn, Mn, B, Fe, and Cl. Plant growth and development depends on a balanced supply of these essential elements and thus the plant has a range of homeostatic mechanisms operating to ensure that this is maintained. Beneficial elements which promote growth and may be essential to some taxa, include Na, Co, Al, Se and Si. Elements such as the heavy metal Cd and the metalloid As have no demonstrated biological function in plants, but are nevertheless taken up and cause severe toxicity in most plant species. The concept for this special issue is the plant ionome, a word coined to encompass all these elements and allow focussed discussion and investigations on the mechanisms that co-ordinately regulate these elements in response to genetic and environmental factors reviewed in Salt et al., 2008).


Foreword For The Special Issue Of Selected Papers From The 1st Acm Sigspatial Workshop On Security And Privacy In Gis And Lbs, Elisa Bertino, Maria Luisa Damiani Jan 2009

Foreword For The Special Issue Of Selected Papers From The 1st Acm Sigspatial Workshop On Security And Privacy In Gis And Lbs, Elisa Bertino, Maria Luisa Damiani

Cyber Center Publications

The first Workshop on Security and Privacy in GIS and LBS (SPRINGL 2008) was organized on November 4, 2008 at Irvine (CA) in conjunction with the SIGSPATIAL International Conference on Advances in Geographic Information Systems (ACM GIS 2008). The goal of the SPRINGL workshop series is to provide a forum for researchers working in the area of geospatial data security and privacy. Both security and privacy are critical for geospatial applications because of the dramatic increase and dissemination of geospatial data in several application contexts including homeland security, environmental crises, and natural and industrial disasters. Furthermore, geospatial infrastructures are being …


Location Privacy In Moving-Object Environments, Dan Lin, Elisa Bertino, Reynold Cheng, Sunil Prabhakar Jan 2009

Location Privacy In Moving-Object Environments, Dan Lin, Elisa Bertino, Reynold Cheng, Sunil Prabhakar

Cyber Center Publications

The expanding use of location-based services has profound implications on the privacy of personal information. If no adequate protection is adopted, information about movements of specific individuals could be disclosed to unauthorized subjects or organizations, thus resulting in privacy breaches. In this paper, we propose a framework for preserving location privacy in moving-object environments. Our approach is based on the idea of sending to the service provider suitably modified location information. Such modifications, that include transformations like scaling, are performed by agents interposed between users and service providers. Agents execute data transformation and the service provider directly processes the transformed …