An intelligent automated assistant system engages with the user in an integrated, conversational manner using natural language dialog, and invokes external services when appropriate to obtain information or perform various actions. The system can be implemented using any of a number of different platforms, such as the web, email, smartphone, and the like, or any combination thereof. In one embodiment, the system is based on sets of interrelated domains and tasks, and employs additional functionally powered by external services with which the system can interact.

Intelligent Automated Assistant

Update anywhere-anytime-anyway transactional replication has unstable behavior as the workload scales up: a ten-fold increase in nodes and traffic gives a thousand fold increase in deadlocks or reconciliations. Master copy replication (primary copy) schemes reduce this problem. A simple analytic model demonstrates these results. A new two-tier replication algorithm is proposed that allows mobile (disconnected) applications to propose tentative update transactions that are later applied to a master copy. Commutative update transactions avoid the instability of other replication schemes.

/pdf/the-dangers-of-replication-and-a-solution-1uj92zms11.pdf

The dangers of replication and a solution

The authors examine potential relationships among categories of personal information, beliefs about direct marketing, situational characteristics, specific privacy concerns, and consumers’ direct marketing shopping habits. Furthermore, the authors offer an assessment of the trade-offs consumers are willing to make when they exchange personal information for shopping benefits. The findings indicate that public policy and self-regulatory efforts to alleviate consumer privacy concerns should provide consumers with more control over the initial gathering and subsequent dissemination of personal information. Such efforts must also consider the type of information sought, because consumer concern and willingness to provide marketers with personal data vary dramatically by information type.

Privacy Concerns and Consumer Willingness to Provide Personal Information

A computer based records management system comprises an information filter for assuring that record data units offered to the system for storage are complete and not redundant. These record data units may be electronic in nature, scanned from paper, digitally formed from audio, video or otherwise formed as digital data information media, an objective of the disclosed system being to eliminate paper or microform record keeping. If record data units comprising documents are incomplete or redundant, the data units may be queued for special handling, returned or otherwise disposed of. Record data units accepted for system entry are acknowledged and preferably tagged to enable tracking and forwarded for unit verification and certification. Verification and certification includes examination of units for compliance with preset criteria. Once a unit is found to meet the criteria, the unit is stored in permanent storage along with a disposal schedule determined for that unit. Only users meeting predetermined security levels may alter or dispose of a stored unit prior to scheduled disposal. Moreover, reasons for such alteration or destruction are required from the cleared user, and an associated data field must be completed. Consequently, the present system provides for record data unit tracking and audit trails in the event of any requirement for regulatory or legal compliance with discovery or other record unit requests. The present invention also permits reconstruction of the record units of an enterprise in the event of a catastrophic event.

Computer based records management system method

This paper proposes the use of repetitive broadcast as a way of augmenting the memory hierarchy of clients in an asymmetric communication environment. We describe a new technique called "Broadcast Disks" for structuring the broadcast in a way that provides improved performance for non-uniformly accessed data. The Broadcast Disk superimposes multiple disks spinning at different speeds on a single broadcast channel--in effect creating an arbitrarily fine-grained memory hierarchy. In addition to proposing and defining the mechanism, a main result of this work is that exploiting the potential of the broadcast structure requires a re-evaluation of basic cache management policies. We examine several "pure" cache management policies and develop and measure implementable approximations to these policies. These results and others are presented in a set of simulation studies that substantiates the basic idea and develops some of the intuitions required to design a particular broadcast program.

/pdf/broadcast-disks-data-management-for-asymmetric-communication-2ws2o1c7w5.pdf

Broadcast disks: data management for asymmetric communication environments

A database system is, by one definition [4], "a system whose overall purpose is to maintain information and to make that information available on demand." Database systems have evolved as part of a response to the desire to separate concerns. That is, the "application" should be responsible for manipulation of information and for its presentation to a user, and the "database system" should perform application-independent data management operations. A true separation, however, is difficult to achieve in practice. Often, the internal data structures and physical placement of data within the database system are optimized to achieve efficient performance for those queries known to be critical for the target application. The data schema itself may also reflect performance concerns. For particularly demanding applications, such as information filtering, database management may be completely customized to meet the needs of the application and even embedded within the application itself. The Datacycle TM architecture [2, 10] is a radical approach to database management. It attempts to achieve a full separation of concerns between the needs of many applications and the database management system supporting those needs, even for applications with unusually high demands for flexibility in access to data and for performance. In the Datacycle architecture, the contents of the entire database are broadcast cyclically over high-bandwidth communication facilities to multiple very large-scale integration (VLSI) data filters that perform complex associative search operations in parallel. The cyclic broadcasting and hardware filtering of information allow a different set of technology trade-offs affecting system architecture, functionality, and performance. The result is a unique combination of functionality and performance to support complex information management applications: • As in most database systems based on the relational model [3], the interface between the

The Datacycle architecture

The evolutionary trend toward a database-driven public communications network has motivated research into database architectures capable of executing thousands of transactions per second. In this paper we introduce the Datacycle architecture, an attempt to exploit the enormous transmission bandwidth of optical systems to permit the implementation of high throughput multiprocessor database systems. The architecture has the potential for unlimited query throughput, simplified data management, rapid execution of complex queries, and efficient concurrency control. We describe the logical operation of the architecture and discuss implementation issues in the context of a prototype system currently under construction.

The datacycle architecture for very high throughput database systems

The development of telecommunications features is difficult for many of the same reasons that software development is difficult. The need for rapid feature introduction requires separation of applications from the system, allowing multiple vendors to concurrently develop features. A key obstacle to the concurrent development of features, the feature interaction problems is examined. As a framework for studying feature interactions their effects on customers and developers are discussed, and tools and methods that exist or are emerging that reduce their impact on the development process are considered.

http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/iel3/1230/1607/00041848.pdf

The feature interaction problem in telecommunications systems

The goal of the Touring Machine project is to provide a reliable and extensible software platform that supports independently-developed distributed multimedia applications. The project includes an experimental testbed composed of a network of desktop video and audio devices controlled via user workstations. Touring Machine is more than a research testbed; it is the basis of the communications tools used daily by 100 users in two Bellcore locations 50 miles apart. It supports multimedia conferencing and information services as well as point-to-point communications. This paper describes Touring Machine, its system model and its software architecture.

/pdf/touring-machine-a-software-platform-for-distributed-15ewgikts5.pdf

Gary E. Herman

Papers

The Datacycle architecture

The datacycle architecture for very high throughput database systems

The feature interaction problem in telecommunications systems

Touring Machine: a software platform for distributed multimedia applications

The Touring Machine system