Database Systems Laboratory

Sabhash Bhalla Associate Professor	Wanming Chu Assistant Lecturer	Yutaka Watanobe Assistant Lecturer	Mark Sifer Visiting Researcher

Information systems in transportation, health-care and public utility services depend on large scale data management systems. Research activity in Database Systems is focused on broadening their range of applicability. It is also focused on improving the performance of domain specific applications. Large applications for Services use database systems as a basic part for web data resources. This year the laboratory plans to publish the proceedings of 6th workshop on ”Databases in Networked Information System (DNIS)” with international participation. The delivered lecture and manuscripts will be utilized to develop the state-of-the-art lectures on current research problems. These created a focused view on new research problems. many current aspects of web related research activity were discussed at the workshop. In addition to complexity in features such as multiple attributed data, many new types of raw data are emerging that need to be captured by DBMSs for information extraction. Many research efforts are being made to make suitable Object-Relational architectures for spatial databases. Most of the advances in techniques concentrate on capturing more meaning within data. A number of researchers are actively developing improved data management strategies using Business Intelligence and data. This provides a challenging area for study. The domains of activity include : developing new user interfaces and query languages for skilled and semi-skilled users in health-care; extracting structure and meaning from unstructured and semi-structured data; developing infrastructures for computing facilities as a service (cloud services) for cloud computing; supporting mobile computing applications, and designing new data models and asynchronous computation models for transaction and services. The Database Systems Laboratory has research activity concentrating on data modeling as well as transaction processing activity. Data Modeling for Spatial Objects Information Processing Systems of future will be a combination of integrated components. There will be components for intelligent problem solving, or decision making, components for specialized data processing and components for shared information management. The applications will utilize a shared base of information. Some examples are - business automation, industrial automation, computer-aided design and manufacture, and cartography. Work-flow and Web Services Traditional approaches to transaction management introduce elements of unpredictable delays during transaction processing. Thus, making these not suitable for adoption in new application environments. The techniques for time-critical transactions are applicable to Mobile databases and multimedia databases. Digital Library Studies The goal of this research is to study the feasibility to endow a computational system with the ability to process information. As an experimental platform the laboratory is building a web retrieval system that enables users to retrieve multimedia information carrying a given subjective (Kansei) content. Such system will prove useful in various areas of information technology such as online shopping, advertising industry, entertainment, design, wearable computers. The modeling issues are reformulated from the complementary points of view: a multimedia data mining approach to address the mapping between impression (or Kansei) words and multimedia impressions, An approach that involves the user in the modeling process. Query Language with reference to user skills Prototype systems to access dynamic contents through web based information systems are in progress. These emulate mobile e-commerce activity in banking and Geographic Information Systems, for test and studies. The test protypes have been evolved based on research on query-by-ojbect and spatial Query-by-example techniques.

Refereed Journal Papers

[bhalla-01:2008]	Subhash Bhalla and Masaki Hasegawa. Performance Considerations of Embedded Computations in Distributed Databases. Journal of Embedded Computing, (4), (to appear) 2009.
	In many applications using database systems, the conventional method of transaction processing can not be used. This is on account of lack of integration and existance of centralized solutions. Such situations exist within heterogeneous systems, mobile database transactions and time-critical applications requiring admission on priority for a select group of transactions. For example, in conventional methods, the deadlock detection is based on use of delay to cause and watch deadlocks. It generates many difficulties, such as, (a) high overheads of periodic checking (b) Non-deterministic nature of the delays, and (c) difficulties to scaleup the centralized solutions. The existing proposal lacks in local processing for distributed transactions. The proposed technique uses normal message communication among peers. The proposal leads to enhanced role for resource sites. The proposal introduces asynchronous operations in transaction processing. As a result the detection processes do not wait for occurrences of time-outs delays. In most cases the technique eliminates the possibility of occurrence of waiting delays.
[bhalla-02:2008]	Takanori Kuroiwa and Subhash Bhalla. Book Recommendation System for Utilization of Library Services. International Journal of Computational Science and Engineering, 3(4), (to appear) 2010.
	There are a number of approaches for making a recommendation system. Most such approaches are used for recommending books for purchase. In addition, there is a need for systems, for utilization of existing books from a library or from, one’s own bookshelf. The proposed book recommendation system utilizes available techniques from book recommendation systems. It aims at providing support for search and utilization of existing books. Such a support is an essential to maximize advantage from available book resources. By retrieving web reviews of books using existing web services, an infrastructure has been created for need based book recommendation system. The proposed book recommender focuses on meeting an individuals needs, rather than calculating similarity or preferences automatically.
[yutaka-01:2008]	Yutaka Watanobe, Nikolay Mirenkov, and Rentaro Yoshioka. Algorithm library based on algorithmic cyberFilms. Knowledge-Based Systems, 22:195–208, 2009.
	A library of algorithms developed as algorithmic cyberFilms is presented. Algorithmic cyberFilms are a new type of software components for presentation, specification/ programming, and automatic code generation of computational algorithms. The algorithmic cyberFilm format is implemented as a set of multimedia frames (and scenes), and each component is represented by frames of algorithmic skeletons representing dynamical features of an algorithm, by frames of integrated view providing static features of the algorithm in a compact format, and by corresponding template codes supporting the program generation. We developed a library which is a collection of basic and advanced algorithms taught at universities, including computation on grids, trees, and graphs. In this paper, we present basic constructs of visual languages which are used for representing cyberFilms as well as for demonstrating the library components. We also provide a general overview of the library and its features. In addition, we discuss results of experiments which were conducted to verify the usability of the library components and their usefulness in education.

Refereed Proceeding Papers

[bhalla-03:2008]	Subhash Bhalla. Generation of Consistent Copy of a Database within Grid Computing Environment Using a Fuzzy Dump. In Srikanth Sundarrajan, editor, Workshop on Grid and Utility Computing 2008 in collaboration with HiPC 2008. IEEE Computer Society, 2008.
	To recover from storage media failures, a database is ’restored’ from an earlier backup copy. High availability requires - backup activity to be fast, and on-line with on-going update activity. It is also necessary that active transactions view a globally consistent system state for ongoing operations. We present an asynchronous mechanism for on-the-fly backup of a copy of the database. It can be used within the grid computing environment. The technique is non-blocking. The backup procedures do not interfere with ordinary transactions. As a result the system can tolerate a disconnection of services.
[w-chu-01:2008]	Yamin Li, Shietung Peng, and Wanming Chu. An Effective Structure for Algorithmic Design and a Parallel Prefix Algorithm on Metacube. In Zhiyi Huang, Zhiwei Xu, Nathan Rountree, Laurent Lefevre, Hong Shen, John Hine, and Yi Pan, editors, Proceedings of the International Conference on Parallel and Distributed Computing, Applications and Technologies (PDCAT’08), pages 54–61, Dunedin, New Zealand, December 2008. IEEE, IEEE Computer Society Press.
	Metacube is an attractive, hypercube-like interconnection network that can connect an extremely large number of nodes with a small node degree while keeping a relatively short diamemeter. A Metacube MC(k,m) connects 22km+k nodes with only k + m links per node. Metacube can be used to build parallel computing systems of very large scale with a small number of links per node. In this paper, we propose a new presentation of Metacube for algorithmic design on Metacube. Based on the new presentation, we give an efficient algorithm for parallel prefix computation on Metacubes that runs in 2km(k + 1) + k communication steps and 2k+1m + 2k computation steps.
[yutaka-02:2008]	Rentaro Yoshioka, Yutaka Watanobe, and Nikolay Mirenkov. Incorporating Security into Software Development Process. In Hamido Fujita and Imran Zualkernan, editors, Proceedings of the seventh SoMet 08, pages 99–109. IOS Press, 2008.
	A general scheme of software development process is considered and some aspects related to integrating security into this scheme are analyzed. In particular, semantic-based, defense-in-depth techniques embedded into system/component defense shields and data acquiring/monitoring kernels are considered. The defense shields are to semantically check data of every input before a software component may process them and also to check every output before sending it to other components. The kernels are to regularly perform semantic analysis of the internal status and local data of a component/system. Based on these two ideas, real-time discovery of vulnerabilities and threats is possible even when various protective measures, such as, passwords, firewalls, intrusion detection systems, access control lists, etc. have been breached. Existing programming systems and possible new methods to realize the shields and kernels are also considered.
[yutaka-03:2008]	Paolo Bottoni, Nikolay N. Mirenkov, Yutaka Watanobe, and Rentaro Yoshioka. Composing control flow and formula rules for computing on grids. In Proceedings of 7th International Workshop on Graph Transformation and Visual Modeling Techniques, pages 1–15, European Association of Software and Technology, vol. 10, 2008.
	We define computation on grids as the composition, through pushout constructions, of control flows, carried across adjacency relations between grid cells, with formulas updating the value of some attribute. The approach is illustrated in the context of the Cyberfilm visual language.

Grants

[yutaka-04:2008]

Yutaka Watanobe. 2008. JSPS Grant-in-Aid for Young Scientists (Start-up)

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