Adnan Masood's Weblog! عدنان مسعود

At PDC08 keynote, Ray Ozzie, Chief Software Architect at Microsoft has just announced the CTP launch of Windows Azure - The Cloud Computing Platform. In his words, its the 'World of parallel computing and world of horizontal scale" and Azure is the answer to cloud computing needs for the service age. It's a hosted 'app-engine' style cloud services housed in the microsoft data centers, first in the US and then internationally. However, its offers WAY beyond what an "app-engine" can do.



Windows Azure, dubbed as "the operating system for the cloud" allows, Windows Azure manages the complexity of data center management and cloud hosting and allows you to focus on the app development. The key features/points as are follows.

• Automated Service Management
• Scalable Hosting
• Manage Services, not just servers
• Service Model and Code
• High Availability
  
• Rich Developer Experience (test it from ur local machine using Visual Studio)

Windows Azure Hello World app can be seen here. hellocloud.cloudapp.net.

Ray demonstrated adding new nodes to the cloud via the management console. In his words, "it's (adding nodes) is so easy, even a CEO can do it". It's going to be an open platform offer REST Command line interfaces and management instrumentation via Windows Azure Development Fabric. The Operating System for the Cloud leverages Oslo based modeling which "fundamentally modifies the way we code today". A strong statement, let's see how it unfolds over time.

I am blogging this at a time when there are only 256 entries if you Google "Windows Azure" which is going to change very very fast. I'll keep posting as we at PDC gets early access to Azure CTP and get to host and play with this exciting new platform.

Azure Service Platform
http://www.microsoft.com/azure/default.mspx

Windows Azure
http://www.azure.com/

Photos of the presentation are here.
http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=68816&l=ce60f&id=565127783

This is my tentative schedule for the PDC'08. Listing of all the sessions I want to attend however this requires human cloning and hence I might be watching streaming of the sessions I am unable to attend due to these scheduling conflicts. PDC08 Schedule for Adnan Masood Monday, October 27 8:30 AM - 10:30 AM   8:30 AM - 11:00 AM Keynote Hall A     11:00 AM - 12:15 PM A Lap around Cloud Services Part 1 Petree Hall CD   Live Labs Web Sandbox: Securing Mash-ups, Site Extensibility, and Gadgets 408B     12:45 PM - 1:30 PM Microsoft Visual C# IDE: Tips and Tricks 403AB     1:45 PM - 3:00 PM ASP.NET 4.0 Roadmap 153   The Future of C# Petree Hall CD     3:30 PM - 4:45 PM ASP.NET MVC: A New Framework for Building Web Applications 153     5:15 PM - 6:30 PM Developing and Deploying Your First Cloud Service Petree Hall CD   Framework Design Guidelines 403AB   Agile Development with Microsoft Visual Studio 502A   Microsoft .NET Framework: Overview and Applications for Babies 411     Tuesday, October 28 8:30 AM - 10:30 AM   8:30 AM - 11:00 AM Keynote Hall A     11:00 AM - 12:00 PM Keynote Hall A     11:00 AM - 12:30 PM   12:45 PM - 1:30 PM Live Services: What I Learned Building My First Mesh Application 501B   WCF: Zen of Performance and Scale 515B   Coding4Fun: Windows Presentation Foundation Animation, YouTube, iTunes, Twitter, and Nintendo's Wiimote 403AB     1:45 PM - 3:00 PM SQL Server 2008: Business Intelligence and Data Visualization 515A   How to Develop Supercomputer Applications 408A     3:30 PM - 4:45 PM   5:15 PM - 6:30 PM Architecting Services for the Cloud Petree Hall CD   ASP.NET and JQuery 403AB     Wednesday, October 29 8:30 AM - 10:00 AM   8:30 AM - 11:00 AM Keynote Hall A     10:30 AM - 11:45 AM Service Bus Services: Connectivity, Messaging, Events, and Discovery 406A   Parallel Programming for Managed Developers with the Next Version of Microsoft Visual Studio Petree Hall CD     12:00 PM - 12:45 PM Showcase: Cloud Computing Platform Enables Next Generation Conferencing Solutions 408A   Improving Code Quality with Code Analysis 409A     1:15 PM - 2:30 PM Modeling Data for Efficient Access at Scale 403AB   Improving .NET Application Performance and Scalability 153     3:00 PM - 4:15 PM A Day in the Life of a Cloud Service Developer Petree Hall CD   Developing with Microsoft .NET and ASP.NET for Server Core 515A   The Future of C# [REPEAT] 502A     4:45 PM - 6:00 PM Mono and .NET 515B   Architecture without Big Design Up Front 403AB   A Lap around "Oslo" [REPEAT] 502A     Thursday, October 30 8:30 AM - 10:00 AM Services Symposium: Expanding Applications to the Cloud 515B     8:30 AM - 9:45 AM SQL Server Data Services : Under the Hood 404A   Live Services: FeedSync and Mesh Synchronization Services 153   PowerShell: Creating Manageable Web Services 406A   Microsoft Visual Studio Team System Team Foundation Server: How We Use It at Microsoft 151   Research: Contract Checking and Automated Test Generation with Pex 403AB     10:15 AM - 11:30 AM Under the Hood: Inside the Cloud Computing Hosting Environment 151   ASP.NET: Cache Extensibility 403AB     10:15 AM - 11:45 AM Services Symposium: Enterprise Grade Cloud Applications 515B     12:00 PM - 1:15 PM Cloud Computing: Programming in the Cloud Petree Hall CD     12:00 PM - 1:30 PM   1:45 PM - 3:00 PM An Introduction to Microsoft F# 502A

I wrote/scavenge this while Amanda Laucher's F# talk yesterday. It's a beauty, this terse F# syntactically & semantically. Having worked with scheme, experimenting with F# comes naturally however James Iry during a 1-1 discussions begs to differ that they are QUITE different. I have yet to independently verify the merit of this claim.

open System.IO
open System.Net            
            
let GetUrl(url:string) =

    let req = WebRequest.Create(url)

    // Get the response, synchronously
    let rsp = req.GetResponse()

    // Grab the response stream and a reader. Clean up when we're done
    use stream = rsp.GetResponseStream()
    use reader = new StreamReader(stream)

    // Synchronous read-to-end, returning the result
    reader.ReadToEnd()

let result = GetUrl("http://www.google.com")
printfn "%s" result

A comparison of Google AppEngine, Amazon EC2 and Sun Project Caroline. Thanks to Rashid Kamran for pointing me to it.

via Scott Hanselman

For those who use Windows Communication Foundation extensively know that unlike SOAP based services, there is a lack of REST services contractual support in WCF. In lieu of this need, I have started this project, WADL on CodePlex, to build a tool which generates code for RESTFul Web services and RESTFul Web service clients from WADL contract files.

With YABE and everything else going on, I think I would need some significant help from open source volunteers and contributing developers looking forward to work in the area of REST interoperability. Interested? email me or contact via codeplex.

The intent of this project is to for .wadl, do exactly what WSDL does for SOAP based services. Further details about WADL file format are as follows.

A .wadl file is an XML document written in an XML grammar called Web Application Description Language (WADL). This file defines how an REST based Web service behaves and instructs clients as to how to interact with the service. When you use Wadl.exe to create a proxy class, a single source file is created in the programming language that you specify. In the process of generating the source code for the proxy class, the tool determines the best type to use for objects specified in the service description.

wadl: Web Application Description Language (WADL) - Specification ...
Web Application Description Language (WADL) https://wadl.dev.java.net/wadl20061109.pdf



The WADL specification (PDF) and WADL schema describe the features of the language in detail but a few points are worth highlighting: [1]

• Generative URIs are handled by including support for parameterization of URI components.
• The base set of HTTP methods (GET, POST, PUT, DELETE, HEAD) are specifically supported by the WADL schema but the method enumeration is open to use with other methods such as those specified by WebDAV.
• Representation parameters are hints to processors that point out interesting parts of a resource representation. As such they may be used or ignored as desired. I think they'll be useful for RPC-like interactions but less so for more document oriented work.
• Sibling representation elements represent alternative representations of the same resource. This means you can describe a resource that is offered in alternate formats, e.g. XML or HTML.
• The design center is XML/HTTP but this doesn't preclude use with alternate representation formats: the representation/@mediaType attribute provides the necessary hook.

Reference
[1] http://weblogs.java.net/blog/mhadley/archive/2005/05/introducing_wad.html

(Update: I finally got around to upload the conference posters in original higher resolution. This wasn't my usual cannon so sorry for the little grainy result but it should be kinda readable.)

KDD 2008 was a great learning experience, providing opportunities for life-long learning, career development, and professional networking. It helps very much in getting to know the data mining community, the current trends in knowledge discovery & machine learning areas and that all these prolific authors and researchers are actually humans, not robots like previously thought.

Social Networking was the dominating theme of the conference and research areas specified, no doubt about that. They key sessions were as follows.

• Trevor Hastie of Stanford University on “Regularization Paths and Coordinate Descent
• Thore Graepel of Microsoft Research on “Large Scale Data Analysis and Modeling in Online Services and Advertising”
• Michael Schwarz of Yahoo! Research on “Internet Advertising and Optimal Auction Design”
• Jitendra Malik of the University of California Berkeley on “The Future of Image Search"

One of my personal favorites was Foster Provost and Jennifer Neville's tutorial session on predictive modeling in social networks. Also, I got a chance to meet and talk to the the following luminaries of the genre.

• Professor Foster Provost, editor-in-Chief of the journal Machine Learning
•  Ron Kohavi (GM for Microsoft's Experimentation Platform,)
• Gregory Piatetsky-Shapiro (Chair ACM SIGKDD)

And to see the following

• Christos Faloutsos
• Usama Fayyad
• Trevor Hastie
• Raghu Ramakrishnan (author of cow book)

However, I missed the chance of meeting Dr. Jaiwei Han. He had to leave early.

It was a well organized event with breaks. There are a few suggestions I have for improvement.

1. Provide a voting mechanism to allow people to choose their sessions of liking in advance; allocate the size of room according to the interest. This might not be perfect but will provide a good estimation. This is because some of the rooms were completely packed when people were sitting on the floor in the alleyway and some of them were half empty.

2. Full disclosure and reproducibility is important in academia and research. Some of the data used in the papers and presentations was unavailable for verification of the claims due to the proprietary nature of it, especially some of the vendor specific presentations (Yahoo, Microsoft and Orkut etc). There are very effective anonymization and privacy preserving techniques to allow the sharing.

3. Slides of the presentations should be made available to the attendees.

and next time, J'aime la vie en Paris!

Anomaly Pattern Detection in Categorical Datasets

Outlier Detection in High Dimensional Data

Day 3 started with Invited Talk of Dr. Michael Schwarz from Yahoo! Research on “Internet Advertising and Optimal Auction Design” who discussed Generalized English Auctions  and Internet advertising, generalized second price options. (Details can be read on Akshay Java’s Social Media research blog here). It was an interesting talk pertaining to how almost every transaction follows the modern auction model and what approaches can be used to maximize the throughput and ROI.
Later during regular sessions, I attended the Discovery and Detection research session which was focused on outlier analysis. It comprised of the following presentations.
25-minute presentations

• Automatic Identification of Quasi-Experimental Designs for Discovering Causal Knowledge. D. D. Jensen, A. S. Fast, B. J. Taylor, M. E. Maier.
• Discrimination-aware Data Mining. D. Pedreschi, S. Ruggieri, F. Turini.

15-minute presentations

• Local Peculiarity Factor and Its Application in Outlier Detection. J. Yang, N. Zhong, Y. Yao, J. Wang.
• Angle-Based Outlier Detection in High-dimensional Data. H. Kriegel, M. Schubert, A. Zimek.
• Anomaly Pattern Detection in Categorical Datasets. K. Das, J. Schneider, D. B. Neill.

Lunch was sponsored by Yahoo! and it was pretty cool décor with their gadgets, puzzles and YahooDokus.  Later in the afternoon I attended
25-minute presentations

• Factorization Meets the Neighborhood: a Multifaceted Collaborative Filtering Model. Y. Koren.
• Combinational Collaborative Filtering for Personalized Community Recommendation. W. Chen, D. Zhang, E. Y. Chang.

And then

• (R) Scaling Up Text Classification for Large File Systems. G. Forman, S. Rajaram.
• (I) Data Mining Using High Performance Data Clouds: Experimental Studies Using Sector and Sphere. R. Grossman, Y. Gu Short.

I later got a chance to talk to Dr. Grossman about the cloud computing initiative that he is very passionate about. He discussed in his presentation how Sector is approximately twice as fast as Hadoop and how Sector has been used to distribute the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) via the web site sdss.ncdm.uic.edu.
The day concluded with Poster reception where I get to talk to several authors and presenters including Wen-Yen Chen, Pooja Mittal, Yabo-Arber Xu, Kaustav Das of Anomaly Pattern Detection in Categorical Datasets and one of the authors of Information Extraction from Wikipedia, not sure who.

Day 4

The last day of conference started with Jitendra Malik’s invited talk on “The Future of Image Search”.  (Greg Linden’s Blog Post about the talk). It was a great talk where Jitendra discussed the evolution of vision, image search, shortcomings of tagging and textual taxonomies and pushed for "category recognition" for objects in images.
Later there were the following excellent sessions.

• Context-Aware Query Suggestion by Mining Click-Through and Session Data. H. Cao, D. Jiang, J. Pei, Q. He, Z. Liao, E. Chen, H. Li. (Best Application Paper Award Winner)
• Scalable and Near Real-Time Burst Detection from eCommerce Queries. N. Parikh, N. Sundaresan.
• Using Predictive Analysis to Improve Invoice-to-Cash Collection. S. Zeng, P. Melville, C. A. Lang, I. Boier-Martin, C. Murphy.
• TagMark: Reliable Estimations of RFID Tags for Business Processes. L. W. F. Chaves, E. Buchmann, K. Böhm.

The conference concluded with closing remarks from the general chair, Ying Li.