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Influence maximization (IM) is the problem of finding a seed vertex set that maximizes the expected number of vertices influenced under a given diffusion model. Due to the NP-Hardness of finding an optimal seed set, approximation algorithms are frequently used for IM. In this work, we describe a fast, error-adaptive approach that leverages Count-Distinct sketches and hash-based fused sampling. To estimate the number of influenced vertices throughout a diffusion, we use per-vertex Flajolet-Martin sketches where each sketch corresponds to a sampled subgraph. To efficiently simulate the diffusions, the reach-set cardinalities of a single vertex are stored in memory in a consecutive fashion. This allows the proposed algorithm to estimate the number of influenced vertices in a single step for simulations at once. For a faster IM kernel, we rebuild the sketches in parallel only after observing estimation errors above a given threshold. Our experimental results show that the proposed algorithm yields high-quality seed sets while being up to 119x faster than a state-of-the-art approximation algorithm. In addition, it is up to 62x faster than a sketch-based approach while producing seed sets with 3%-12% better influence scores, Comment: 12 pages. Sent to IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering as a regular paper

There is a plethora of data structures, algorithms, and frameworks dealing with major data-stream problems like estimating the frequency of items, answering set membership, association and multiplicity queries, and several other statistics that can be extracted from voluminous data streams. In this survey, we are focusing on exploring randomized data structures called Bloom Filters. This data structure answers whether an item exists or not in a data stream with a false positive probability fpp. In this survey, many variants of the Bloom filter will be covered by showing the strengths of each structure and its drawbacks i.e. some Bloom filters deal with insertion and deletions and others don't, some variants use the memory efficiently but increase the fpp where others pay the trade-off in the reversed way. Furthermore, in each Bloom filter structure, the false positive probability will be highlighted alongside the most important technical details showing the improvement it is presenting, while the main aim of this work is to provide an overall comparison between the variants of the Bloom filter structure according to the application domain that it fits in.

We propose HAMSI (Hessian Approximated Multiple Subsets Iteration), which is a provably convergent, second order incremental algorithm for solving large-scale partially separable optimization problems. The algorithm is based on a local quadratic approximation, and hence, allows incorporating curvature information to speed-up the convergence. HAMSI is inherently parallel and it scales nicely with the number of processors. Combined with techniques for effectively utilizing modern parallel computer architectures, we illustrate that the proposed method converges more rapidly than a parallel stochastic gradient descent when both methods are used to solve large-scale matrix factorization problems. This performance gain comes only at the expense of using memory that scales linearly with the total size of the optimization variables. We conclude that HAMSI may be considered as a viable alternative in many large scale problems, where first order methods based on variants of stochastic gradient descent are applicable., Comment: The software is available at https://github.com/spartensor/hamsi-mf

In parallel computing, a valid graph coloring yields a lock-free processing of the colored tasks, data points, etc., without expensive synchronization mechanisms. However, coloring is not free and the overhead can be significant. In particular, for the bipartite-graph partial coloring (BGPC) and distance-2 graph coloring (D2GC) problems, which have various use-cases within the scientific computing and numerical optimization domains, the coloring overhead can be in the order of minutes with a single thread for many real-life graphs. In this work, we propose parallel algorithms for bipartite-graph partial coloring on shared-memory architectures. Compared to the existing shared-memory BGPC algorithms, the proposed ones employ greedier and more optimistic techniques that yield a better parallel coloring performance. In particular, on 16 cores, the proposed algorithms perform more than 4x faster than their counterparts in the ColPack library which is, to the best of our knowledge, the only publicly-available coloring library for multicore architectures. In addition to BGPC, the proposed techniques are employed to devise parallel distance-2 graph coloring algorithms and similar performance improvements have been observed. Finally, we propose two costless balancing heuristics for BGPC that can reduce the skewness and imbalance on the cardinality of color sets (almost) for free. The heuristics can also be used for the D2GC problem and in general, they will probably yield a better color-based parallelization performance especially on many-core architectures., Comment: 11 pages

A recent work of Harn and Fuyou presents the first multilevel (disjunctive) threshold secret sharing scheme based on the Chinese Remainder Theorem. In this work, we first show that the proposed method is not secure and also fails to work with a certain natural setting of the threshold values on compartments. We then propose a secure scheme that works for all threshold settings. In this scheme, we employ a refined version of Asmuth-Bloom secret sharing with a special and generic Asmuth-Bloom sequence called the {\it anchor sequence}. Based on this idea, we also propose the first multilevel conjunctive threshold secret sharing scheme based on the Chinese Remainder Theorem. Lastly, we discuss how the proposed schemes can be used for multilevel threshold function sharing by employing it in a threshold RSA cryptosystem as an example.

Analyzing networks requires complex algorithms to extract meaningful information. Centrality metrics have shown to be correlated with the importance and loads of the nodes in network traffic. Here, we are interested in the problem of centrality-based network management. The problem has many applications such as verifying the robustness of the networks and controlling or improving the entity dissemination. It can be defined as finding a small set of topological network modifications which yield a desired closeness centrality configuration. As a fundamental building block to tackle that problem, we propose incremental algorithms which efficiently update the closeness centrality values upon changes in network topology, i.e., edge insertions and deletions. Our algorithms are proven to be efficient on many real-life networks, especially on small-world networks, which have a small diameter and a spike-shaped shortest distance distribution. In addition to closeness centrality, they can also be a great arsenal for the shortest-path-based management and analysis of the networks. We experimentally validate the efficiency of our algorithms on large networks and show that they update the closeness centrality values of the temporal DBLP-coauthorship network of 1.2 million users 460 times faster than it would take to compute them from scratch. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work which can yield practical large-scale network management based on closeness centrality values.

Intel Xeon Phi is a recently released high-performance coprocessor which features 61 cores each supporting 4 hardware threads with 512-bit wide SIMD registers achieving a peak theoretical performance of 1Tflop/s in double precision. Many scientific applications involve operations on large sparse matrices such as linear solvers, eigensolver, and graph mining algorithms. The core of most of these applications involves the multiplication of a large, sparse matrix with a dense vector (SpMV). In this paper, we investigate the performance of the Xeon Phi coprocessor for SpMV. We first provide a comprehensive introduction to this new architecture and analyze its peak performance with a number of micro benchmarks. Although the design of a Xeon Phi core is not much different than those of the cores in modern processors, its large number of cores and hyperthreading capability allow many application to saturate the available memory bandwidth, which is not the case for many cutting-edge processors. Yet, our performance studies show that it is the memory latency not the bandwidth which creates a bottleneck for SpMV on this architecture. Finally, our experiments show that Xeon Phi's sparse kernel performance is very promising and even better than that of cutting-edge general purpose processors and GPUs.

Who is more important in a network? Who controls the flow between the nodes or whose contribution is significant for connections? Centrality metrics play an important role while answering these questions. The betweenness metric is useful for network analysis and implemented in various tools. Since it is one of the most computationally expensive kernels in graph mining, several techniques have been proposed for fast computation of betweenness centrality. In this work, we propose and investigate techniques which compress a network and shatter it into pieces so that the rest of the computation can be handled independently for each piece. Although we designed and tuned the shattering process for betweenness, it can be adapted for other centrality metrics in a straightforward manner. Experimental results show that the proposed techniques can be a great arsenal to reduce the centrality computation time for various types of networks.

Literature search is arguably one of the most important phases of the academic and non-academic research. The increase in the number of published papers each year makes manual search inefficient and furthermore insufficient. Hence, automatized methods such as search engines have been of interest in the last thirty years. Unfortunately, these traditional engines use keyword-based approaches to solve the search problem, but these approaches are prone to ambiguity and synonymy. On the other hand, bibliographic search techniques based only on the citation information are not prone to these problems since they do not consider textual similarity. For many particular research areas and topics, the amount of knowledge to humankind is immense, and obtaining the desired information is as hard as looking for a needle in a haystack. Furthermore, sometimes, what we are looking for is a set of documents where each one is different than the others, but at the same time, as a whole we want them to cover all the important parts of the literature relevant to our search. This paper targets the problem of result diversification in citation-based bibliographic search. It surveys a set of techniques which aim to find a set of papers with satisfactory quality and diversity. We enhance these algorithms with a direction-awareness functionality to allow the users to reach either old, well-cited, well-known research papers or recent, less-known ones. We also propose a set of novel techniques for a better diversification of the results. All the techniques considered are compared by performing a rigorous experimentation. The results show that some of the proposed techniques are very successful in practice while performing a search in a bibliographic database., 19 pages, manuscript under review

The literature search has always been an important part of an academic research. It greatly helps to improve the quality of the research process and output, and increase the efficiency of the researchers in terms of their novel contribution to science. As the number of published papers increases every year, a manual search becomes more exhaustive even with the help of today's search engines since they are not specialized for this task. In academics, two relevant papers do not always have to share keywords, cite one another, or even be in the same field. Although a well-known paper is usually an easy pray in such a hunt, relevant papers using a different terminology, especially recent ones, are not obvious to the eye. In this work, we propose paper recommendation algorithms by using the citation information among papers. The proposed algorithms are direction aware in the sense that they can be tuned to find either recent or traditional papers. The algorithms require a set of papers as input and recommend a set of related ones. If the user wants to give negative or positive feedback on the suggested paper set, the recommendation is refined. The search process can be easily guided in that sense by relevance feedback. We show that this slight guidance helps the user to reach a desired paper in a more efficient way. We adapt our models and algorithms also for the venue and reviewer recommendation tasks. Accuracy of the models and algorithms is thoroughly evaluated by comparison with multiple baselines and algorithms from the literature in terms of several objectives specific to citation, venue, and reviewer recommendation tasks. All of these algorithms are implemented within a publicly available web-service framework (http://theadvisor.osu.edu/) which currently uses the data from DBLP and CiteSeer to construct the proposed citation graph., 10 pages, 8 figures, 3 tables