Business intelligence | EPFL Graph Search

Business intelligence (BI) comprises the strategies and technologies used by enterprises for the data analysis and management of business information. Common functions of business intelligence technologies include reporting, online analytical processing, analytics, dashboard development, data mining, process mining, complex event processing, business performance management, benchmarking, text mining, predictive analytics, and prescriptive analytics. BI tools can handle large amounts of structured and sometimes unstructured data to help identify, develop, and otherwise create new strategic business opportunities. They aim to allow for the easy interpretation of these big data. Identifying new opportunities and implementing an effective strategy based on insights can provide businesses with a competitive market advantage and long-term stability, and help them take strategic decisions. Business intelligence can be used by enterprises to support a wide range of business decisions rangin

Squall

Aleksandar Vitorovic

Squall is a scalable online query engine that runs complex analytics in a cluster using skew-resilient, adaptive operators. Online processing implies that results are incrementally built as the input arrives, and it is ubiquitous for many applications such as algorithmic trading, clickstream analysis and business intelligence (e.g., in order to reach a potential customer during the active session). This thesis presents the overview of Squall, including some novel join operators, as well as lessons learned over the five years of working on this system. Existing open-source online systems (e.g. Twitter Storm, Spark Streaming) provide only hash-joins, which are limited to equi-joins and prone to skew. In contrast, Squall puts together state-of-the-art skew-resilient partitioning schemes (including some of our own), local query operators, and techniques for scalable online query processing. Such a system allows us to leverage the effect of various design choices on the performance, to seamlessly build efficient novel operators, and to discover and address new skew types (e.g. dependence on tuple arrival order) that can arise only in online systems. Existing partitioning schemes for joins work well only for a narrow set of data distribution properties, that is, specific proportion of join output and input sizes for 2-way joins, or similar data distribution among all the relations for multi-way joins. In contrast, Squall covers the entire spectrum of different data distributions by providing two novel skew-resilient partitioning schemes: (a) a scheme for 2-way non-equi joins partitions the data using a multi-stage load-balancing algorithm that contains a join-specialized computational geometry algorithm, and (b) a scheme for multi-way joins which constructs composite partitioning, consisting of different partitioning schemes according to the skew degree in different relation attributes. Compared to state-of-the art, our schemes achieve up to 15X speedup and are up to 5X more efficient in terms of resource consumption.

EPFL2016

Recognition and Understanding of Meetings Overview of the European AMI and AMIDA Projects

Hervé Bourlard, Steve Renals

The AMI and AMIDA projects are concerned with the recognition and interpretation of multiparty (face-to-face and remote) meetings. Within these projects we have developed the following: (1) an infrastructure for recording meetings using multiple microphones and cameras; (2) a one hundred hour, manually annotated meeting corpus; (3) a number of techniques for indexing, and summarizing of meeting videos using automatic speech recognition and computer vision, and (4) a extensible framework for browsing, and searching of meeting videos. We give an overview of the various techniques developed in AMI (mainly involving face-to-face meetings), their integration into our meeting browser framework, and future plans for AMIDA (Augmented Multiparty Interaction with Distant Access), the follow-up project to AMI. Technical and business information related to these two projects can be found at www.amiproject.org, respectively on the Scientific and Business portals.

IDIAP2008

Squall

Aleksandar Vitorovic

EPFL2016