Archive
Enterprise Collective: Connecting People via Content
Enterprise Collective: Connecting People via Content
Source: HP Labs
We describe an application for rapidly and optimally responding to enterprise opportunities and challenges, by leveraging the tacit knowledge in an enterprise, via identifying the right subject matter expert(s). Enterprise Collective is a web application that automatically discovers experts and their expertise via semantic analysis of their work products (e.g., e- mails, patents, papers, reports, presentations, and blogs). The key feature of Enterprise Collective is being “passive”; where the employees do not fill out or maintain forms or profiles. The application provides an interactive user interface that hides the underlying complexity. Enterprise Collective can benefit any business user, without extensive training or any analytical background. The application leverages the Expert-Expertise, Expert-Documents, and Expertise-Documents relationships, and subsequently permits navigation within this knowledge space. Enterprise Collective uses technologies for semantic analysis of work products and relevance computation using graph flow. A semi-automatic taxonomy generator is used to extract expertise from documents. The “authority” of each expert in relation to an expertise is computed via the nature of the work product and frequency of references. To demonstrate the benefit of Enterprise Collective in large organization, we describe a case study.
A Live Comparison of Methods for Personalized Article Recommendation at Forbes.com
A Live Comparison of Methods for Personalized Article Recommendation at Forbes.com
Source: HP Labs
We present the results of a multi-phase study to optimize strategies for generating personalized article recommendations at the Forbes.com web site. In the first phase we compared the performance of a variety of recommendation methods on historical data. In the second phase we deployed a live system at Forbes.com for five months on a sample of 82,000 users, each randomly assigned to one of 20 methods. We analyze the live results both in terms of click- through rate (CTR) and user session lengths. The method with the best CTR was a hybrid of collaborative-filtering and a content-based method that leverages Wikipedia-based concept features, post- processed by a novel Bayesian remapping technique that we introduce. It both statistically significantly beat decayed popularity and increased CTR by 37%.
How to Track Your Data: Rule-Based Data Provenance Tracing Algorithms
How to Track Your Data: Rule-Based Data Provenance Tracing Algorithms
Source: HP Labs
As cloud computing and virtualization technologies become mainstream, the need to be able to track data has grown in importance. Having the ability to track data from its creation to its current state or its end state will enable the full transparency and accountability in cloud computing environments. In this paper, we showcase a novel technique for tracking end-to-end data provenance, a meta-data describing the derivation history of data. This breakthrough is crucial as it enhances trust and security for complex computer systems and communication networks. By analyzing and utilizing provenance, it is possible to detect various data leakage threats and alert data administrators and owners; thereby addressing the increasing needs of trust and security for customers’ data. We also present our rule-based data provenance tracing algorithms, which trace data provenance to detect actual operations that have been performed on files, especially those under the threat of leaking customers’ data. We implemented the cloud data provenance algorithms into an existing software with a rule correlation engine, show the performance of the algorithms in detecting various data leakage threats, and discuss technically its capabilities and limitations.
Tracking of Data Leaving the Cloud
Tracking of Data Leaving the Cloud
Source: HP Labs
Data leakages out of cloud computing environments are fundamental cloud security concerns for both the end- users and the cloud service providers. A literature survey of the existing technologies revealed the inadequacies of current technologies and the need for a new methodology. This position paper discusses the requirements and proposes a novel auditing methodology that enables tracking of data transferred out of Clouds. Initial results from our prototypes are reported. This research is aligned to our vision that by providing transparency, accountability and audit trails for all data events within and out of the Cloud, trust and confidence can be instilled into the industry as users will get to know what exactly is going on with their data in and out of the Cloud.
Privacy Management in Global Organisations
Privacy Management in Global Organisations
Source: HP Labs
In this paper it is considered how meeting privacy requirements can be challenging for global organisations, particularly where future Internet service provision models are involved. Approaches will be explained that can be used to help address these issues, with a focus on some of the innovative solutions that the author has been involved in developing in HP Labs that are currently being used, rolled out or are the subjects of further research.
Privacy, Security and Trust in Cloud Computing
Privacy, Security and Trust in Cloud Computing
Source: HP Labs
Cloud computing refers to the underlying infrastructure for an emerging model of service provision that has the advantage of reducing cost by sharing computing and storage resources, combined with an on-demand provisioning mechanism relying on a pay- per-use business model. These new features have a direct impact on information technology (IT) budgeting but also affect traditional security, trust and privacy mechanisms. The advantages of cloud computing – its ability to scale rapidly, store data remotely, and share services in a dynamic environment – can become disadvantages in maintaining a level of assurance sufficient to sustain confidence in potential customers. Some core traditional mechanisms for addressing privacy (such as model contracts) are no longer flexible or dynamic enough, so new approaches need to be developed to fit this new paradigm. In this chapter we assess how security, trust and privacy issues occur in the context of cloud computing and discuss ways in which they may be addressed.
T@gz : Intuitive and Effortless Categorization and Sharing of Email Conversations
T@gz : Intuitive and Effortless Categorization and Sharing of Email Conversations
Source: HP Labs
In this paper, we describe T@g, a system designed for effortless and instantaneous sharing of enterprise knowledge through routine email communications and powerful harvesting of such enterprise information using text analytics techniques. T@gz is a system that enables dynamic, non-intrusive and effortless sharing of information within an enterprise and automatically harvests knowledge from such daily interactions. It also allows enterprise knowledge workers to easily subscribe to new information. It enables self organization of information in conversations while it carefully avoids requiring users to substantially change their usual work-flow of exchanging emails. Incorporating this system in an enterprise improves productivity by: a)discovery of connections between employees with converging interests and expertise, similar to social networks naturally leading to formation of interest groups b)avoiding the problem of information lost in mountains of emails c)creating expert profiles by mapping areas of expertise or interests to organizational map Harvested information includes folksonomy appropriate to an organization, tagged and organized conversations and expertise map.
+ Full Paper (PDF)
Software Versioning in the Cloud – Towards Source Code Management
Software Versioning in the Cloud – Towards Source Code Management
Source: HP Labs
With the introduction of cloud computing and Web 2.0, many applications are moving to the cloud environment. Version control systems have also taken a first step towards this direction. Nevertheless, existing systems are either client-server oriented or completely distributed, and they don’t match exactly the nature of the cloud. In this paper we propose a new cloud version control system focusing on the requirements imposed by cloud computing, that we identified as: concurrent editing, history rewrite, accountability, scalability, security, and fault tolerance. Our plan is to tackle these issues in a systematic way, and we present in this paper an overview of the solutions organized in three separate layers: access API, logical structure, and physical storage.
+ Full Paper (PDF)
Enabling Data Sharing in the Cloud
Web interactions usually require the exchange of personal and confidential information for a variety of purposes, including enabling business transactions and the provisioning of services. A key issue affecting these interactions is the lack of trust and control on how data is going to be used and processed by the entities that receive this data. In the traditional world, this issue is addressed by using contractual agreements that are signed by the involved parties. This could be done electronically as well but there is currently a major gap between the definition of legal contracts, regulating the sharing of data and the software infrastructure required to support and enforce them. How to ensure that legal contracts can be actually enforced by the underlying IT infrastructure? How to ensure that a potentially enforceable version of the contract corresponds to the legal version of the contract? This article describes our work to address this gap through the usage of electronic Data Sharing Agreements (e-DSA). e-DSAs can be formally defined and analysed to identify inconsistencies and contradictory policies/constraints; they can then be deployed within the IT infrastructure and enforced. We specifically ITEM REPORT show how this can be achieved in a cloud scenario, where e-DSAs are enforced via policy enforcement capabilities developed in the UK EnCoRe [6] collaborative project.
+ Full Paper (PDF)
How To Track Your Data: The Case for Cloud Computing Provenance
How To Track Your Data: The Case for Cloud Computing Provenance
Source: HP Labs
Provenance, a meta-data describing the derivation history of data, is crucial for the uptake of cloud computing to enhance reliability, credibility, accountability, transparency, and confidentiality of digital objects in a cloud. In this paper, we survey current mechanisms that support provenance for cloud computing, we classify provenance according to its granularities encapsulating the various sets of provenance data for different use cases, and we summarize the challenges and requirements for collecting provenance in a cloud, based on which we show the gap between current approaches to requirements. Additionally, we propose our approach, DataPROVE, that aims to effectively and efficiently satisfy those challenges and requirements in cloud provenance, and to provide a provenance supplemented cloud for better integrity and safety of customers’ data.
+ Full Paper (PDF)
Are you sure? Yes. Oops!
Are you sure? Yes. Oops!
Source: HP Labs
Confirmation dialog boxes are common. So common, in fact, that we have trained ourselves to click through them without thinking. Most of the time, that’s not a problem, but in rare cases it can lead to the loss of work. In this report, we’ll come up with a plausible explanation of why that happens and propose an approach that we believe will make such errors rarer.
+ Full Paper (PDF)
Multimedia Analysis and Composition Cloud Service
Multimedia Analysis and Composition Cloud Service
Source: HP Labs
Multimedia computation such as analysis and composition is increasingly moving from desktop to cloud. This trend is enabling multimedia cloud services that can be accessed through a browser, as well as mobile applications and social network applications. In this paper, we discuss the architecture of a multimedia analysis and composition cloud service. We show examples of using this architecture to provide browser-based multimedia applications, mobile applications, and social network applications, while comparing the advantages of each access method.
+ Full Paper (PDF)
Rural Healthcare on lowend phones
Rural Healthcare on lowend phones
Source: HP Labs
One of the major challenges in developing countries like India is to make healthcare services accessible to rural areas. There are many Government funded projects which setup rural health centers with connectivity to a central hub of expert doctors. For effective functioning of these projects, providing anytime anywhere access to important health-related information for the health workers is crucial. However, network connectivity and adoption of computing devices are still very low in these countries. While there is huge growth in the adoption of mobile phones, more than 80% of the phones are not Internet-enabled. Therefore there is a great need for anytime anywhere access to health-related services on simple low-end phones.
+ Full Paper (PDF)
