We explore the effect of dimensionality on the nearest neighbor problem. We show that under a broad set of conditions (much broader than independent and identically distributed dimensions), as dimensionality increases, the distance to the nearest data point approaches the distance to the farthest data point. To provide a practical perspective, we present empirical results on both real and synthetic data sets that demonstrate that this effect can occur for as few as 10-15 dimensions. These results should not be interpreted to mean that high-dimensional indexing is never meaningful; we illustrate this point by identifying some high-dimensional workloads for which this effect does not occur. However, our results do emphasize that the methodology used almost universally in the database literature to evaluate high-dimensional indexing techniques is flawed, and should be modified. In particular, most such techniques proposed in the literature are not evaluated versus simple linear scan, and are evaluated over workloads for which nearest neighbor is not meaningful. Often, even the reported experiments, when analyzed carefully, show that linear scan would outperform the techniques being proposed on the workloads studied in high (10-15) dimensionality!.

When is nearest neighbor meaningful

ing WS1S Systems to Verify Parameterized Networks . . . . . . . . . . . . 188 Kai Baukus, Saddek Bensalem, Yassine Lakhnech and Karsten Stahl FMona: A Tool for Expressing Validation Techniques over Infinite State Systems . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 204 J.-P. Bodeveix and M. Filali Transitive Closures of Regular Relations for Verifying Infinite-State Systems . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 220 Bengt Jonsson and Marcus Nilsson Diagnostic and Test Generation Using Static Analysis to Improve Automatic Test Generation . . . . . . . . . . . . . 235 Marius Bozga, Jean-Claude Fernandez and Lucian Ghirvu Efficient Diagnostic Generation for Boolean Equation Systems . . . . . . . . . . . . 251 Radu Mateescu Efficient Model-Checking Compositional State Space Generation with Partial Order Reductions for Asynchronous Communicating Systems . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 266 Jean-Pierre Krimm and Laurent Mounier Checking for CFFD-Preorder with Tester Processes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 283 Juhana Helovuo and Antti Valmari Fair Bisimulation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 299 Thomas A. Henzinger and Sriram K. Rajamani Integrating Low Level Symmetries into Reachability Analysis . . . . . . . . . . . . . 315 Karsten Schmidt Model-Checking Tools Model Checking Support for the ASM High-Level Language . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 331 Giuseppe Del Castillo and Kirsten Winter Table of

Tools and Algorithms for the Construction and Analysis of Systems. Proc. TACAS 2009

This survey covers hard real-time scheduling algorithms and schedulability analysis techniques for homogeneous multiprocessor systems. It reviews the key results in this field from its origins in the late 1960s to the latest research published in late 2009. The survey outlines fundamental results about multiprocessor real-time scheduling that hold independent of the scheduling algorithms employed. It provides a taxonomy of the different scheduling methods, and considers the various performance metrics that can be used for comparison purposes. A detailed review is provided covering partitioned, global, and hybrid scheduling algorithms, approaches to resource sharing, and the latest results from empirical investigations. The survey identifies open issues, key research challenges, and likely productive research directions.

/pdf/a-survey-of-hard-real-time-scheduling-for-multiprocessor-313o35g6ho.pdf

A survey of hard real-time scheduling for multiprocessor systems

Life expectancy in most countries has been increasing continually over the several few decades thanks to significant improvements in medicine, public health, as well as personal and environmental hygiene. However, increased life expectancy combined with falling birth rates are expected to engender a large aging demographic in the near future that would impose significant burdens on the socio-economic structure of these countries. Therefore, it is essential to develop cost-effective, easy-to-use systems for the sake of elderly healthcare and well-being. Remote health monitoring, based on non-invasive and wearable sensors, actuators and modern communication and information technologies offers an efficient and cost-effective solution that allows the elderly to continue to live in their comfortable home environment instead of expensive healthcare facilities. These systems will also allow healthcare personnel to monitor important physiological signs of their patients in real time, assess health conditions and provide feedback from distant facilities. In this paper, we have presented and compared several low-cost and non-invasive health and activity monitoring systems that were reported in recent years. A survey on textile-based sensors that can potentially be used in wearable systems is also presented. Finally, compatibility of several communication technologies as well as future perspectives and research challenges in remote monitoring systems will be discussed.

Wearable Sensors for Remote Health Monitoring.

Internet of Things (IoT) technology has attracted much attention in recent years for its potential to alleviate the strain on healthcare systems caused by an aging population and a rise in chronic illness. Standardization is a key issue limiting progress in this area, and thus this paper proposes a standard model for application in future IoT healthcare systems. This survey paper then presents the state-of-the-art research relating to each area of the model, evaluating their strengths, weaknesses, and overall suitability for a wearable IoT healthcare system. Challenges that healthcare IoT faces including security, privacy, wearability, and low-power operation are presented, and recommendations are made for future research directions.

Internet of Things for Smart Healthcare: Technologies, Challenges, and Opportunities

Recently, there have been several promising techniques developed for schedulability analysis and response time analysis for multiprocessor systems based on over-approximation. This paper contains two contributions. First, to improve the analysis precision, we apply Baruah’s window analysis framework [6] to response time analysis for poradic tasks on multiprocessor systems where the deadlines of tasks are within their periods. The crucial observation is that for global fixed priority scheduling, a response time bound of each task can be efficiently estimated by fixed-point computation without enumerating all the busy window sizes as in [6] for schedulability analysis. The technique is proven to dominate theoretically state-of-the-art techniques for response time analysis for multiprocessor systems. Our experiments also show that the technique results in significant performance improvement compared with several existing techniques for multiprocessor schedulability analysis. As the second main contribution of this paper, we extend the proposed technique to task systems with arbitrary deadlines, allowing tasks to have deadlines beyond the end of their periods. This is a non-trivial extension even for single-processor systems. To our best knowledge, this is the first work of response time analysis for multiprocessor systems in this setting, which involves sophisticated techniques for the characterization and computation of response time bounds.

http://www.neu-rtes.org/publications/guan_rtss09.pdf

New Response Time Bounds for Fixed Priority Multiprocessor Scheduling

Models for real-time systems have to balance the inherently contradicting goals of expressiveness and analysis efficiency. Current task models with tractable feasibility tests have limited expressiveness, restricting their ability to model many systems accurately. In particular, they are all recurrent, preventing the modeling of structures like mode switches, local loops, etc. In this paper, we advance the state-of-the-art with a model that is free from these constraints. Our proposed task model is based on arbitrary directed graphs (digraphs) for job releases. We show that the feasibility problem on preemptive uniprocessors for our model remains tractable. This even holds in the case of task systems with arbitrary deadlines.

http://user.it.uu.se/~yi/pdf-files/rtas11.pdf

The Digraph Real-Time Task Model

An increasing trend in embedded system design is to integrate components with different levels of criticality into a shared hardware platform for better cost and power efficiency. Such mixed-criticality systems are subject to certifications at different levels of rigorousness, for validating the correctness of different subsystems on various confidence levels. The real-time scheduling of certifiable mixed-criticality systems has been recognized to be a challenging problem, where using traditional scheduling techniques may result in unacceptable resource waste. In this paper we present an algorithm called PLRS to schedule certifiable mixed-criticality sporadic tasks systems. PLRS uses fixed-job-priority scheduling, and assigns job priorities by exploring and balancing the asymmetric effects between the workload on different criticality levels. Comparing with the state-of-the-art algorithm by Li and Baruah for such systems, which we refer to as LB, PLRS is both more effective and more efficient: (i) The schedulability test of PLRS not only theoretically dominates, but also on average significantly outperforms LB's. (ii) The run-time complexity of PLRS is polynomial (quadratic in the number of tasks), which is much more efficient than the pseudo-polynomial run-time complexity of LB.

/pdf/effective-and-efficient-scheduling-of-certifiable-mixed-2r84ilod1w.pdf

Effective and Efficient Scheduling of Certifiable Mixed-Criticality Sporadic Task Systems

The major obstacle to use multicores for real-time applications is that we may not predict and provide any guarantee on real-time properties of embedded software on such platforms; the way of handling the on-chip shared resources such as L2 cache may have a significant impact on the timing predictability. In this paper, we propose to use cache space isolation techniques to avoid cache contention for hard real-time tasks running on multicores with shared caches. We present a scheduling strategy for real-time tasks with both timing and cache space constraints, which allows each task to use a fixed number of cache partitions, and makes sure that at any time a cache partition is occupied by at most one running task. In this way, the cache spaces of tasks are isolated at run-time.As technical contributions, we have developed a sufficient schedulability test for non-preemptive fixed-priority scheduling for multicores with shared L2 cache, encoded as a linear programming problem. To improve the scalability of the test, we then present our second schedulability test of quadratic complexity, which is an over approximation of the first test. To evaluate the performance and scalability of our techniques, we use randomly generated task sets. Our experiments show that the first test which employs an LP solver can easily handle task sets with thousands of tasks in minutes using a desktop computer. It is also shown that the second test is comparable with the first one in terms of precision, but scales much better due to its low complexity, and is therefore a good candidate for efficient schedulability tests in the design loop for embedded systems or as an on-line test for admission control.

http://user.it.uu.se/~yi/pdf-files/emsoft09-yi.pdf

Cache-aware scheduling and analysis for multicores

A large class of embedded systems is distinguished from general-purpose computing systems by the need to satisfy strict requirements on timing, often under constraints on available resources. Predictable system design is concerned with the challenge of building systems for which timing requirements can be guaranteed a priori. Perhaps paradoxically, this problem has become more difficult by the introduction of performance-enhancing architectural elements, such as caches, pipelines, and multithreading, which introduce a large degree of uncertainty and make guarantees harder to provide. The intention of this article is to summarize the current state of the art in research concerning how to build predictable yet performant systems. We suggest precise definitions for the concept of “predictability”, and present predictability concerns at different abstraction levels in embedded system design. First, we consider timing predictability of processor instruction sets. Thereafter, we consider how programming languages can be equipped with predictable timing semantics, covering both a language-based approach using the synchronous programming paradigm, as well as an environment that provides timing semantics for a mainstream programming language (in this case C). We present techniques for achieving timing predictability on multicores. Finally, we discuss how to handle predictability at the level of networked embedded systems where randomly occurring errors must be considered.

/pdf/building-timing-predictable-embedded-systems-3c0dor3ej5.pdf

Nan Guan

Papers

New Response Time Bounds for Fixed Priority Multiprocessor Scheduling

The Digraph Real-Time Task Model

Effective and Efficient Scheduling of Certifiable Mixed-Criticality Sporadic Task Systems

Cache-aware scheduling and analysis for multicores

Building timing predictable embedded systems