No Arabic abstract
The increasing relevance of areas such as real-time and embedded systems, pervasive computing, hybrid systems control, and biological and social systems modeling is bringing a growing attention to the temporal aspects of computing, not only in the computer science domain, but also in more traditional fields of engineering. This article surveys various approaches to the formal modeling and analysis of the temporal features of computer-based systems, with a level of detail that is suitable also for non-specialists. In doing so, it provides a unifying framework, rather than just a comprehensive list of formalisms. The paper first lays out some key dimensions along which the various formalisms can be evaluated and compared. Then, a significant sample of formalisms for time modeling in computing are presented and discussed according to these dimensions. The adopted perspective is, to some extent, historical, going from traditional models and formalisms to more modern ones.
Visualization recommendation (VisRec) systems provide users with suggestions for potentially interesting and useful next steps during exploratory data analysis. These recommendations are typically organized into categories based on their analytical actions, i.e., operations employed to transition from the current exploration state to a recommended visualization. However, despite the emergence of a plethora of VisRec systems in recent work, the utility of the categories employed by these systems in analytical workflows has not been systematically investigated. Our paper explores the efficacy of recommendation categories by formalizing a taxonomy of common categories and developing a system, Frontier, that implements these categories. Using Frontier, we evaluate workflow strategies adopted by users and how categories influence those strategies. Participants found recommendations that add attributes to enhance the current visualization and recommendations that filter to sub-populations to be comparatively most useful during data exploration. Our findings pave the way for next-generation VisRec systems that are adaptive and personalized via carefully chosen, effective recommendation categories.
Quantum computing is an emerging paradigm with the potential to offer significant computational advantage over conventional classical computing by exploiting quantum-mechanical principles such as entanglement and superposition. It is anticipated that this computational advantage of quantum computing will help to solve many complex and computationally intractable problems in several areas such as drug design, data science, clean energy, finance, industrial chemical development, secure communications, and quantum chemistry. In recent years, tremendous progress in both quantum hardware development and quantum software/algorithm have brought quantum computing much closer to reality. Indeed, the demonstration of quantum supremacy marks a significant milestone in the Noisy Intermediate Scale Quantum (NISQ) era - the next logical step being the quantum advantage whereby quantum computers solve a real-world problem much more efficiently than classical computing. As the quantum devices are expected to steadily scale up in the next few years, quantum decoherence and qubit interconnectivity are two of the major challenges to achieve quantum advantage in the NISQ era. Quantum computing is a highly topical and fast-moving field of research with significant ongoing progress in all facets. This article presents a comprehensive review of quantum computing literature, and taxonomy of quantum computing. Further, the proposed taxonomy is used to map various related studies to identify the research gaps. A detailed overview of quantum software tools and technologies, post-quantum cryptography and quantum computer hardware development to document the current state-of-the-art in the respective areas. We finish the article by highlighting various open challenges and promising future directions for research.
Our experience of the world is multimodal - we see objects, hear sounds, feel texture, smell odors, and taste flavors. Modality refers to the way in which something happens or is experienced and a research problem is characterized as multimodal when it includes multiple such modalities. In order for Artificial Intelligence to make progress in understanding the world around us, it needs to be able to interpret such multimodal signals together. Multimodal machine learning aims to build models that can process and relate information from multiple modalities. It is a vibrant multi-disciplinary field of increasing importance and with extraordinary potential. Instead of focusing on specific multimodal applications, this paper surveys the recent advances in multimodal machine learning itself and presents them in a common taxonomy. We go beyond the typical early and late fusion categorization and identify broader challenges that are faced by multimodal machine learning, namely: representation, translation, alignment, fusion, and co-learning. This new taxonomy will enable researchers to better understand the state of the field and identify directions for future research.
An agent that can understand natural-language instruction and carry out corresponding actions in the visual world is one of the long-term challenges of Artificial Intelligent (AI). Due to multifarious instructions from humans, it requires the agent can link natural language to vision and action in unstructured, previously unseen environments. If the instruction given by human is a navigation task, this challenge is called Visual-and-Language Navigation (VLN). It is a booming multi-disciplinary field of increasing importance and with extraordinary practicality. Instead of focusing on the details of specific methods, this paper provides a comprehensive survey on VLN tasks and makes a classification carefully according the different characteristics of language instructions in these tasks. According to when the instructions are given, the tasks can be divided into single-turn and multi-turn. For single-turn tasks, we further divided them into goal-orientation and route-orientation based on whether the instructions contain a route. For multi-turn tasks, we divided them into imperative task and interactive task based on whether the agent responses to the instructions. This taxonomy enable researchers to better grasp the key point of a specific task and identify directions for future research.
Serverless computing has emerged as an attractive deployment option for cloud applications in recent times. The unique features of this computing model include, rapid auto-scaling, strong isolation, fine-grained billing options and access to a massive service ecosystem which autonomously handles resource management decisions. This model is increasingly being explored for deployments in geographically distributed edge and fog computing networks as well, due to these characteristics. Effective management of computing resources has always gained a lot of attention among researchers. The need to automate the entire process of resource provisioning, allocation, scheduling, monitoring and scaling, has resulted in the need for specialized focus on resource management under the serverless model. In this article, we identify the major aspects covering the broader concept of resource management in serverless environments and propose a taxonomy of elements which influence these aspects, encompassing characteristics of system design, workload attributes and stakeholder expectations. We take a holistic view on serverless environments deployed across edge, fog and cloud computing networks. We also analyse existing works discussing aspects of serverless resource management using this taxonomy. This article further identifies gaps in literature and highlights future research directions for improving capabilities of this computing model.