Haneen Mohammed

Fine-grained lineage tracks the relationships between input and output of a query, and is particularly useful in analytical applications such as query debugging, view maintenance, query explanations, and data cleaning. Prior approaches rewrite SQL queries to also track lineage, but can slow query execution in analytical engines that are designed to process complex query patterns on large datasets. Moreover, they mainly capture lineage at the logical level. SmokedDuck extends DuckDB to support fast lineage capture and querying by tracking lineage at the instruction level by leveraging the duality between lineage and data movement. In this demonstration, we show how a user can leverage operator-level lineage to understand and debug a query execution through SQLStepper: an application built on top of SmokedDuck. Users upload data and execute queries using an in-browser command line, then explore query-level and operator-level lineage visually to track down bugs.

With the rapid increase in raw volume data sizes, such as terabyte-sized microscopy volumes, the corresponding segmentation label volumes have become extremely large as well. We focus on integer label data, whose efficient representation in memory, as well as fast random data access, pose an even greater challenge than the raw image data. Often, it is crucial to be able to rapidly identify which segments are located where, whether for empty space skipping for fast rendering, or for spatial proximity queries. We refer to this process as culling. In order to enable efficient culling of millions of labeled segments, we present a novel hybrid approach that combines deterministic and probabilistic representations of label data in a data-adaptive hierarchical data structure that we call the label list tree. In each node, we adaptively encode label data using either a probabilistic constant-time access representation for fast conservative culling, or a deterministic logarithmic-time access representation for exact queries. We choose the best data structures for representing the labels of each spatial region while building the label list tree. At run time, we further employ a novel query-adaptive culling strategy. While filtering a query down the tree, we prune it successively, and in each node adaptively select the representation that is best suited for evaluating the pruned query, depending on its size. We show an analysis of the efficiency of our approach with several large data sets from connectomics, including a brain scan with more than 13 million labeled segments, and compare our method to conventional culling approaches. Our approach achieves significant reductions in storage size as well as faster query times.

This paper presents Abstractocyte, a system for the visual analysis of astrocytes and their relation to neurons, in nanoscale volumes of brain tissue. Astrocytes are glial cells, i.e., non-neuronal cells that support neurons and the nervous system. The study of astrocytes has immense potential for understanding brain function. However, their complex and widely-branching structure requires high-resolution electron microscopy imaging and makes visualization and analysis challenging. Furthermore, the structure and function of astrocytes is very different from neurons, and therefore requires the development of new visualization and analysis tools. With Abstractocyte, biologists can explore the morphology of astrocytes using various visual abstraction levels, while simultaneously analyzing neighboring neurons and their connectivity. We define a novel, conceptual 2D abstraction space for jointly visualizing astrocytes and neurons. Neuroscientists can choose a specific joint visualization as a point in this space. Interactively moving this point allows them to smoothly transition between different abstraction levels in an intuitive manner. In contrast to simply switching between different visualizations, this preserves the visual context and correlations throughout the transition. Users can smoothly navigate from concrete, highly-detailed 3D views to simplified and abstracted 2D views. In addition to investigating astrocytes, neurons, and their relationships, we enable the interactive analysis of the distribution of glycogen, which is of high importance to neuroscientists. We describe the design of Abstractocyte, and present three case studies in which neuroscientists have successfully used our system to assess astrocytic coverage of synapses, glycogen distribution in relation to synapses, and astrocytic-mitochondria coverage.

The controller is a critical piece of the SDN architecture, where it is considered as the mastermind of SDN networks. Thus, its failure will cause a significant portion of the network to fail. Overload is one of the common causes of failure since the controller is frequently invoked by new flows. Even through SDN controllers are often replicated, the significant recovery time can be an overkill for the availability of the entire network. In order to overcome the problem of the overloaded controller failure in SDN, this paper proposes a novel controller offload solution for failure mitigation based on a prediction module that anticipates the presence of a harmful long-term load. In fact, the long-standing load would eventually overwhelm the controller leading to a possible failure. To predict whether the load in the controller is short-term or long-term load, we used three different classification algorithms: Support Vector Machine, k-Nearest Neighbors, and Naive Bayes. Our evaluation results demonstrate that Support Vector Machine algorithm is applicable for detecting the type of load with an accuracy of 97.93% in a real-time scenario. Besides, our scheme succeeded to offload the controller by switching between the reactive and proactive mode in response to the prediction module output.