Benyun Shi

Concurrent Negotiation and Coordination for Grid Resource Coallocation

Bolstering resource coallocation is essential for realizing the Grid vision, because computationally intensive applications often require multiple computing resources from different administrative domains. Given that resource providers and consumers may have different requirements, successfully obtaining commitments through concurrent negotiations with multiple resource providers to simultaneously access several resources is a very challenging task for consumers. The impetus of this paper is that it is one of the earliest works that consider a concurrent negotiation mechanism for Grid resource coallocation. The concurrent negotiation mechanism is designed for 1) managing (de)commitment of contracts through one-to-many negotiations and 2) coordination of multiple concurrent one-to-many negotiations between a consumer and multiple resource providers. The novel contributions of this paper are devising 1) a utility-oriented coordination (UOC) strategy, 2) three classes of commitment management strategies (CMSs) for concurrent negotiation, and 3) the negotiation protocols of consumers and providers. Implementing these ideas in a testbed, three series of experiments were carried out in a variety of settings to compare the following: 1) the CMSs in this paper with the work of others in a single one-to-many negotiation environment for one resource where decommitment is allowed for both provider and consumer agents; 2) the performance of the three classes of CMSs in different resource market types; and 3) the UOC strategy with the work of others [e.g., the patient coordination strategy (PCS )] for coordinating multiple concurrent negotiations. Empirical results show the following: 1) the UOC strategy achieved higher utility, faster negotiation speed, and higher success rates than PCS for different resource market types; and 2) the CMS in this paper achieved higher final utility than the CMS in other works. Additionally, the properties of the three classes of CMSs in different kinds of resource markets are also verified.

A PTAS for Semiconductor Burn-in Scheduling

In this paper a polynomial time approximation scheme, PTAS for short, is presented for the problem of scheduling jobs in a batch processing system. Each job has a pre-defined release date, which indicates when the job is available, and a pre-defined burn-in time, which is the least time needed for processing the job. At one time, at most B jobs can be processed together, where B is a pre-given number. No preemption is permitted.

Inferring the potential risks of H7N9 infection by spatiotemporally characterizing bird migration and poultry distribution in eastern China

BackgroundIn view of the rapid geographic spread and the increasing number of confirmed cases of novel influenza A(H7N9) virus infections in eastern China, we developed a diffusion model to spatiotemporally characterize the impacts of bird migration and poultry distribution on the geographic spread of H7N9 infection.MethodsThree types of infection risks were estimated for 12 weeks, from February 4 to April 28, 2013, including (i) the risk caused by bird migration, (ii) the risk caused by poultry distribution, and (iii) the integrated risk caused by both bird migration and poultry distribution. To achieve this, we first developed a method for estimating the likelihood of bird migration based on available environmental and meteorological data. Then, we adopted a computational mobility model to estimate poultry distribution based on annual poultry production and consumption of each province/municipality. Finally, the spatiotemporal risk maps were created based on the integrated impacts of both bird migration and poultry distribution.ResultsIn the study of risk estimation caused by bird migration, the likelihood matrix was estimated based on the 7-day temperature, from February 4 to April 28, 2013. It was found the estimated migrant birds mainly appear in the southeastern provinces of Zhejiang, Shanghai and Jiangsu during Weeks 1 to 4, and Week 6, followed by appearing in central eastern provinces of Shandong, Hebei, Beijing, and Tianjin during Weeks 7 to 9, and finally in northeastern provinces of Liaoning, Jilin, and Heilongjiang during Weeks 10 to 12.In the study of risk caused by poultry distribution, poultry distribution matrix was created to show the probability of poultry distribution. In spite of the fact that the majority of the initial infections were reported in Shanghai and Jiangsu, the relative risk of H7N9 infection estimated based on the poultry distribution model predicted that Jiangsu may have a slightly higher likelihood of H7N9 infection than those in Zhejiang and Shanghai, if we only take the probability of poultry distribution into consideration.In the study of integrated risk caused by both bird migration and poultry distribution, the higher risk in southeastern provinces occurred during the first 8 weeks, and that in central eastern provinces appeared during Weeks 8 to 12, and that in northeastern provinces since Week 12. Therefore, it is necessary to regulate the poultry markets as long as the poultry-to-poultry transmission is not so well understood.ConclusionWith reference to the reported infection cases, the demonstrated risk mapping results will provide guidance in active surveillance and control of human H7N9 infections by taking intensive intervention in poultry markets.

Adaptive Commitment Management Strategy Profiles for Concurrent Negotiations

Since computationally intensive applications may often require more resources than a single computing machine can provide in one administrative domain, bolstering resource co-allocation is essential for realizing the Grid vision. Given that resource providers and consumers may have different requirements and performance goals, successfully obtaining commitments through concurrent negotiations with multiple resource providers to simultaneously access several resources is a very challenging task for consumers. The contribution of this work is devising a concurrent negotiation mechanism that (i) coordinates multiple one-to-many concurrent negotiations between a consumer and multiple resource providers, and (ii) manages (de-)commitments (intermediate) contracts between consumers and providers. Even though the mechanism in this work allows agents to decommit intermediate contracts by paying a penalty, it is shown that the decommitment mechanism is non-manipulable. In this paper, (i) three classes of commitment strategies for concurrent negotiation and (ii) a fuzzy decision making approach for deriving adaptive commitment management strategy profiles of a consumer are presented. Two series of experiments were carried out in a variety of settings. The first set of empirical results provide guidelines for adopting the appropriate class of commitment strategies for a given resource market. In the second set of experiments, consumer agents negotiated in n markets to acquire n resources where the market type for each resource is unknown to consumers (market types are defined by different supply and demand patterns of resources). Favorable results in the second set of experiments show that commitment management strategy profiles for a consumer derived using the fuzzy decision making approach achieved the highest expected utilities among all classes of commitment management strategy profiles.

Inferring Plasmodium vivax Transmission Networks from Tempo-Spatial Surveillance Data

Background The transmission networks of Plasmodium vivax characterize how the parasite transmits from one location to another, which are informative and insightful for public health policy makers to accurately predict the patterns of its geographical spread. However, such networks are not apparent from surveillance data because P. vivax transmission can be affected by many factors, such as the biological characteristics of mosquitoes and the mobility of human beings. Here, we pay special attention to the problem of how to infer the underlying transmission networks of P. vivax based on available tempo-spatial patterns of reported cases. Methodology We first define a spatial transmission model, which involves representing both the heterogeneous transmission potential of P. vivax at individual locations and the mobility of infected populations among different locations. Based on the proposed transmission model, we further introduce a recurrent neural network model to infer the transmission networks from surveillance data. Specifically, in this model, we take into account multiple real-world factors, including the length of P. vivax incubation period, the impact of malaria control at different locations, and the total number of imported cases. Principal Findings We implement our proposed models by focusing on the P. vivax transmission among 62 towns in Yunnan province, Peoples Republic China, which have been experiencing high malaria transmission in the past years. By conducting scenario analysis with respect to different numbers of imported cases, we can (i) infer the underlying P. vivax transmission networks, (ii) estimate the number of imported cases for each individual town, and (iii) quantify the roles of individual towns in the geographical spread of P. vivax. Conclusion The demonstrated models have presented a general means for inferring the underlying transmission networks from surveillance data. The inferred networks will offer new insights into how to improve the predictability of P. vivax transmission.

Adaptive bargaining agents that negotiate optimally and rapidly

Whereas many extant works only adopt utility as the performance measure for evaluating negotiation agents, this work formulates strategies that optimize combined negotiation outcomes in terms of utilities, success rates, and negotiation speed. In some applications (e.g., grid resource management), negotiation agents should be designed such that they are more likely to acquire resources more rapidly and with more certainty (in addition to optimizing utility). For negotiations with complete information, mathematical proofs show that the negotiation strategy set in this work optimizes the utilities of agents while guaranteeing that agreements are reached. A novel algorithm BLGAN is devised to guide agents in negotiations with incomplete information. BLGAN adopts 1) a Bayesian learning (BL) approach for estimating the reserve price of an agents opponent, and 2) a multi-objective genetic algorithm (GA) for generating a proposal at each negotiation (N) round. In bilateral negotiations with incomplete information, empirical results show that when both agents adopt BLGAN to learn each others reserve price, they are both guaranteed to reach agreements, and complete negotiations with much fewer negotiation rounds. When only one agent adopts BLGAN, the agent was highly successful in reaching agreements, achieved average utilities that were much closer to optimal, and used fewer negotiation rounds than the agent that did not adopt BLGAN.

Research priorities in modeling the transmission risks of H7N9 bird flu

The epidemic of H7N9 bird flu in eastern China in early 2013 has caused much attention from researchers as well as public health workers. The issue on modeling the transmission risks is very interesting topic. In this article, this issue is debated and discussed in order to promote further researches on prediction and prevention of avian influenza viruses supported by better interdisciplinary datasets from the surveillance and response system.

Approximate colored range and point enclosure queries

In this paper, we formulate two classes of problems, the colored range query problems and the colored point enclosure query problems to model multi-dimensional range and point enclosure queries in the presence of categorical information. Many of these problems are difficult to solve using traditional data structural techniques. Based on a new framework of combining sketching techniques and traditional data structures, we obtain two sets of results in solving the problems approximately and efficiently. In addition, the framework can be employed to attack other related problems by finding the appropriate summary structures.

A Regression-based Coordination for Concurrent Negotiation

Given that resource providers and consumers may have different requirements and performance goals, concurrent negotiation is considered in this work to successfully obtain commitments with multiple resource providers for consumers in grid. This work devises a concurrent negotiation mechanism for grid consumers to acquire multiple resources in which both consumers and providers can renege on contracts. The novel contribution of this work is devising a concurrent mechanism that coordinates multiple one-to-many concurrent negotiations using a regression-based coordination strategy. Empirical results show that the regression-based coordination strategy is stable for different number of required resources and outperformed existing coordination strategies in terms of utility in different kinds of resource market.

Approximate colored range queries

In this paper, we formulate a class of colored range query problems to model the multi-dimensional range queries in the presence of categorical information. By applying appropriate sketching techniques on our framework, we obtained efficient data structures that provide approximate solutions to these problems. In addition, the framework can be employed to attack other related problems by finding the appropriate summary structures.