Throwback To 2019

At EURA NOVA, we believe technology is a catalyst for change. To embrace it, we strive to stay at the edge of knowledge. Investing in research allows us to continuously become more proficient, to maintain our know-how at the cutting edge of IT, to share its benefits with our customers, and to incubate the products of tomorrow. As we look back on the year 2019, we are both proud and happy of the work achieved!

 

Published papers:

We are happy to say that our R&D department has published five peer-reviewed scientific papers last year.

 

  • LEAD: A Formal Specification For Event Processing

 

In June, our R&D engineer Anas presented his work on complex event processing at the 13Th ACM international Conference on distributed and event-based systems, which was taking place in Germany.

Anas Al Bassit, Skhiri Sabri, LEAD: A Formal Specification For Event Processing, in 13Th ACM international Conference on distributed and event-based systems 2019

 

  • Coherence Regularization for Neural Topic Models

 

In July, our R&D engineer Kate presented her paper on neural topic models at the 16th International Symposium on Neural Networks taking place in Moscow.

Katsiaryna Krasnashchok, Aymen Cherif, Coherence Regularization for Neural Topic Models. in 16th International Symposium on Neural Networks 2019 (ISNN 2019)

 

  • STRASS: A Light and Effective Method for Extractive Summarization

 

In August, our PhD student Léo was in Italy to present his paper at the 2019 ACL Student Research Workshop.

Léo Bouscarrat, Antoine Bonnefoy, Thomas Peel, Cécile Pereira, STRASS: A Light and Effective Method for Extractive Summarization Based on Sentence Embeddings, in 2019 ACL Student Research Workshop, Florence, Italy.

 

  • GraphOpt: Framework for Automatic Parameters Tuning of Graph Processing Frameworks

 

In December, the paper written by our former intern and now full-time colleague Muaz was presented in Los Angeles at the third IEEE International Workshop on Benchmarking, Performance Tuning and Optimization for Big Data Applications.

Muaz Twaty, Amine Ghrab, Skhiri Sabri: GraphOpt: a Framework for Automatic Parameters Tuning of Graph Processing Frameworks. 2019 IEEE International Conference on Big Data (Big Data) Workshops, Los Angeles, CA, USA.

 

  • A Performance Prediction Model for Spark Applications

 

In June 2020, our paper written as part of the ECCO research project we have been leading at EURA NOVA will be presented at the Big Data congress 2020 taking place in Hawaii.

Florian Demesmaeker, Amine Ghrab, Usama Javaid, Ahmed Amir Kanoun, A Performance Prediction Model for Spark Applications, in the proceedings of Big Data congress 2020.

 

IEEE Big Data Workshop

Last December, Eura Nova’s research centre held the fourth workshop on real-time and stream analytics in big data at the 2019 IEEE Conference on Big Data in Los Angeles. The workshop brought together leading players including Confluent, Apache Pulsar, the University of Virginia and Télécom Paris Tech as well as 8 renowned speakers from 6 different countries. We received more than 30 applications and we are proud to have hosted such interesting presentations of papers in stream mining, IoT, and industry 4.0. Special thanks to our keynote guests, Matteo Merli (Apache Pulsar) and John Roesler (Confluent), and all the attendees and speakers!

 

JERICHO, research driving innovations

The mission of the JERICHO research track is to make the latest technologies available to our client, to offer them a competitive edge to play along megacorporations.  After two years of intense work, seven published papers, presentations in international conferences spanning Russia, the United States, Germany, Australia, or Belgium, our Jericho project has come to an end.

And the adventure continues! We are really excited to continue our work on innovative solutions for the next data challenges with our new research track ASGARD.

Our R&D director Sabri Skhiri says: “The costs of data solutions and the lack of data scientists will increase in the next 3 to 5 years and solutions to reduce them will benefit from a large market. In this sense, ASGARD is precisely in the strategy of Eura Nova. ASGARD aims to reduce these costs by automating the most expensive tasks. As the world becomes increasingly digital and reinvents itself, innovation and research are essential in the market.”

 

Academic collaboration

This year, we welcomed nine interns across our three offices. A big kudo to our intern Muaz who successfully finished his master thesis in collaboration with EURA NOVA! The goal of his thesis was to optimise the configuration of distributed graph frameworks. He now joined EURA NOVA to work as a full-time employee.

 

Talks & seminars

This year, the research team had the pleasure to be invited at several international conferences:

  • In February, our research director Sabri Skhiri gave a seminar on modern Stateful Stream Processing at EPT. Our R&D engineer Syrine Ferjaoui also went to Morocco to give a workshop about data architecture at the Annual International Conference on Arab Women In Computing.
  • In March, Sabri was at the World AI Show in Dubaï to talk about successfully deploying AI projects in production. He was also invited to Barcelona Tech to give a Big Data Architecture & Design  seminar.
  • In June, our data privacy officer Nazanin Gifani gave a masterclass on Fairness and Transparency in AI at the DI Summit in Brussels.
  • In September, our R&D project manager Shivom Aggarwal talked at the Arab Future Cities Summit 2019 about deploying AI at industrial scale for smart cities.
  • In October, our software engineer Christophe Philemotte was in San Francisco to talk at the Kafka Summit about crossing the streams thanks to Kafka and Flink.
  • In November, Sabri was invited as a keynote speaker at the 17th International Conference on Service-Oriented Computing to share his experience about the convergence between micro-service, stateful stream processing and function as a service.

 

Summer schools & conferences

This year, Euranovians attended more than 15 prestigious international conferences and summits across the world to remain up to date and grow our network. We investigated the state of the art in streaming, data science, DevOps, computer vision or cloud engineering at conferences such as Flink Forward, Spark AI Summit, Kubecon, IEEE Big Data, DataWorks Summit, Kafka Summit, NeurIPS, RedHat, Elixir LDN or CVPR.

Euranovians brought back what they learned for the rest of the team and the big data community. Find our public summaries, identified trends and review of conferences here:

 

Fourth Workshop on Real-Time and Stream Analytics in Big Data: key takeaways

Last December, Eura Nova’s research center held the fourth workshop on real-time and stream analytics in big data at the 2019 IEEE Conference on Big Data in Los Angeles. The workshop brought together leading players including Confluent, Apache Pulsar, the University of Virginia and Télécom Paris Tech as well as 8 renowned speakers from 6 different countries. We received more than 30 applications and we are proud to have hosted such interesting presentations of papers in stream mining, IoT, and industry 4.0.

The workshop was a real success with many interesting questions and comments. If you could not attend, our R&D engineer Syrine Ferjaoui brought back important elements from the presentations for you.

 

First keynote speaker:

First of all, the workshop started with the keynote of Matteo Merli, PMC member at Apache Pulsar. His talk “Messaging and Streaming” explained how Pulsar can be a unified infrastructure that supports messaging and streaming.

Matteo introduced messaging as events that are being created and streaming as analysing events that just happened. These are two different processing concepts but they need a single infrastructure. He then explained the architecture view of Pulsar, which has separate layers between the brokers and the bookies (BookKeeper instances that handle persistent storage of messages). This means that brokers and bookies can be added independently, traffic can be shifted very quickly across brokers, and new bookies will ramp up on traffic quickly. This segmented distribution makes the architecture of Pulsar more flexible and dynamic.

Pulsar has other interesting features such as durability, low latency, high throughput, high availability, unified messaging model, high scalability, native computing, … The roadmap includes working on Pulsar storage API to allow direct access to data stored in Pulsar and to retrieve and process data more efficiently. They are also working on higher-level messaging features.”

 

Second keynote speaker:

The second keynote was given by John Roesler, a Kafka committer at Confluent. He talked about Kafka Streams and the evolution of streaming paradigms.

To design software, we, developers, used to separate the application logic from the database. To scale the database capacity, we then started to use a search index to do ETL jobs and query the database in a fast and optimal way. However, this created bugs in the software, added data consistency issues, and created more complexity in the system. Later, we started to use HDFS for a more flexible design. While enabling replication and distributed storage, this solution added more latency and supported batch processing only. It did not meet the needs of real-time processing use cases.

At this point, streaming helped a lot. The next step was to add a streaming platform that reads from sources, does some computation, and sinks the result somewhere else. The KafkaStreams design is a set of multiple lambda stateful functions, which makes it a good fit for a microservices architecture.  With Kafka Streams’ new updates, the app logic is linked to a relational database with ACID guarantees.

Finally, John Roesler considers that “software is a fractal”, a never-ending pattern: a software architecture is complex and even when we zoom into a single component, it is still complex. But for the Kafka Streams’ design, when we zoom out, it looks like a set of services interacting and connected to each other and this simplifies the aforementioned designs.

John concluded by mentioning open problems that can be dealt with in stream processing, including semantics, observability, operability, and maintainability.

 

Workshop Invited Speakers:

After the keynotes, 8 selected papers were presented, covering mainly these 6 topics: (1) Stream Processing for IoT, (2) Serverless and HPC (High Performance Computing), (3) Collaborative Streaming, (4) Stream Mining, (5) Image Mining and (6) Real-time Machine Learning. Some papers are not yet available, as they will be published in the proceeding of the IEEE Big Data Conference. In the meantime, do not hesitate to contact our R&D department at research@euranova.eu to discuss how you can leverage stream processing in your projects.

Sören and Wilhelm are engineers in the Software Engineering Group from Kiel University. They propose a stream processing architecture which allows for aggregating sensors in hierarchical groups, supports multiple hierarchies in parallel, provides reconfiguration at runtime, and preserves the scalability and reliability qualities of streaming.

Andre Luckow, head of Blockchain and Emerging Technologies at BMW Group, and Shantenu Jha, associate professor at Rutgers University, presented StreamInsight, which provides insight into the performance of streaming applications and infrastructure, their selection, configuration, and scaling behaviour.

The paper is written by Tobias Grubenmann, researcher at The University of Hong Kong, in collaboration with Daniele Dell’Aglio and Abraham Bernstein, researchers at the University of Zurich. They present the Collaborative Stream Processing (CSP), a model where the costs, which are set exogenously by providers, are shared between multiple consumers, the collaborators. For this, they identify the important requirements for CSP to establish trust between the collaborators and propose a CSP algorithm adhering to these requirements.

  • Kennard-Stone Balance Algorithm for Time-series Big Data Stream Mining (Tengyue Li, Simon Fong, and Raymond Wong)

Tengyue Li and Simon Fong (researcher and associate professor at the University of Macau, China) and Raymond Wong (associate professor at UNSW Sydney) worked on the Kennard-Stone Balance algorithm used as a new data conversion method. Training a prediction model effectively using big data streams poses certain challenges in machine learning. In this paper, the authors apply the Kennard-Stone algorithm on time-series to extract a meaningful representation of big data streams, which improves the performance of a machine learning model.

 

  • Assessing the Effects of TV Ad Events on Digital Search: On the Selection of Outcome Measures (Shawndra Hill, Anthony Colas, H. Andrew Schwartz, and Gordon Burtch)

Shawndra Hill (Microsoft), Anthony Colas (University of Florida), H. Andrew Schwartz (State University of New York at Stony Brook) and Gordon Burtch (University of Minnesota) explained their work on the interactions between TV content and online behaviours such as response to digital advertising. They developed AdMiner, a tool that can track online activity around a brand and provide actionable insights into ad campaigns.

 

Austin Harris, Jose Stovall, and Mina Sartipi (researchers and CUIP director at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga) have helped to create Chattanooga’s smart corridor, used to test new technologies and generate data-driven outcomes. In their talk, they presented the corridor, used as a test bed for research in smart city developments in a real-world environment. The wireless communication infrastructure and network of sensors in combination with data analytics provide a means of monitoring and controlling city resources and infrastructure in real time.

 

Sebastian Trinks and Carsten Felde (TU Bergakademie Freiberg) presented how image mining can help avoiding errors and low quality of printed prototypes in real time. This can result in saving resources and increasing efficiency when developing new products.

 

This year, IEEE Big Data held the Real-time Machine Learning Competition on Data Streams. As the competition is focused on streaming, its online platform required a specific infrastructure that meets data stream mining requirements. Dihia Boulegane is a Ph.D. student at Télécom ParisTech working in collaboration with Orange Labs on machine learning for IoT networks monitoring. She was in charge of implementing the streaming engine of the dedicated platform of the competition. Dihia explained its components, the technologies used, and the challenges met to build the platform. At the end, the platform was able to provide multiple streams to multiple users, to receive multiple streams, to process them and to provide the leader board and live results.

 

Special thanks to our keynote guests, Matteo Merli and John Roesler, and all the attendees and speakers! We are looking forward to an even more successful workshop in the coming edition of the IEEE Big Data Conference. Stay tuned for paper submission dates!

 

A Performance Prediction Model for Spark Applications

Apache Spark is a popular open-source distributed-processing framework that enables efficient processing of massive amounts of data. It has a large number of parameters that need to be tuned to get the best performance. However, tuning these parameters manually is a complex and time-consuming task. Therefore, a robust performance model to predict applications execution time could greatly help in accelerating the deployment and optimization of big data applications relying on Spark. In this paper, we ran extensive experiments on a selected set of Spark applications that cover the most common workloads to generate a representative dataset of execution time. In addition, we extracted application and data features to build a machine learning-based performance model to predict Spark applications execution time. The experiments show that boosting algorithms achieved better results compared to other algorithms.

Florian Demesmaeker, Amine Ghrab, Usama Javaid, Ahmed Amir Kanoun, A Performance Prediction Model for Spark Applications, in the proceedings of Big Data congress 2020.

Click here to access the paper in its preprint form.

IEEE Big Data 2019 – A Summary

At the beginning of the month, our R&D director Sabri Skhiri and our R&D engineer Syrine Ferjaoui travelled to Los Angeles to attend IEEE Big Data Conference. It is one of the most influential academic gatherings in distributed machine learning. This year, it featured 879 authors, shortlisted from 2009 applicants. They came from 28 countries and presented 210 papers. Back in Belgium, Sabri and Syrine give you their opinion on the event itself and the important elements from the keynotes, the tutorials, the workshops and the interesting papers.

 

The Big Trends

Sabri says: “The main trends were deep learning, NLP, privacy-preserving approaches, GAN, graph mining and stream mining. In my view, the level of the papers was quite good. Authors are becoming ever more skilled in data science, maths and algorithms. This goes to show that to be a good data scientist, you need an extensive set of advanced skills. Interestingly, there was almost nothing about distributed computing! This is a big move compared to the previous editions. The only presentations that had something to do with distributed systems were about optimisation strategies, an area similar to what our ECCO team researches. The Big Data Conference focuses on data science; it does not really look into its scalability.  Distributed computing topics tend to be dealt with at conferences like DEBS, VLDB, USENIX, SIGMOD, etc. As a result, this conference is an amazing place to see hundreds of data science use cases with, most of the time, an interesting contribution.”

 

The Keynotes

 

The keynotes were focused on data science as well. We even heard the term “Big Data Science”.

Keynote 1: Responsible Data Science by Lise Getoor – Professor at UC Santa Cruz

Syrine says: “The first keynote was my favourite. Lise started by comparing machine learning to a black box. The goal was to unpack the box and invite people to use data science and to use it wisely. To autonomise ethical decision-making, we should move away from maximising AI systems autonomy and move toward human-centric systems. To do this, we should make sure that human-centric systems have three qualities: (1) be knowledge-based, (2) be data-driven, and (3) support human values. Achieving responsible data science requires both machine-learning and ethics.”

 

Keynote 2: DataCommons “Google for Data” by Ramanathan Guha – Google

Guha presented DataCommons, a project started by Google to combine data from different open sources. Syrine explains: “Google’s DataCommons project allows users to pretend that the Web is one website, enabling developers to pretend all this data is in one database. The long-term vision of Google is to aggregate all data from publicly available sources (Medicare, Wikidata, sequence data, Landsat, CDC, Census…) into a single Open Knowledge Graph. The goal is to ​reduce or eliminate the ​​data download-clean-store​ process. Instead, users can access and use already cleaned data in the cloud. ​Data can be public or private (internet & intranet). This will avoid repeated data wrangling  and ease the burden of data storage, indexing, etc.”

 

The Tutorials

This year, IEEE Big Data held nine tutorials. Our R&D director explains: “At this type of events, tutorials are always a good way to learn a complete state of the art in a couple of hours. I particularly appreciated the tutorial on “Taming Unstructured Big data: Automated Information Extraction for Massive Text” by the team of the famous Jiawei Han (he is a kind of pop star in data mining and the father of Graph Cube). I found out that many papers about named entity relations were published in the past two years. The idea is to be able to extract supervised, semi-supervised, and unsupervised relations between entities: for instance, discovering that “Trump” is “President of” “USA”. They also propose new approaches to integrate knowledge bases such as DBPedia or YAGO to infer new unknown relations from a corpus. This is just amazing!”

 

Syrine adds: “The tutorial on NewSQL principles, systems, and current trends was interesting as it explained why we should consider using NoSQL/NewSQL to deal with data interconnections and very high scalability. After attending this tutorial, I was motivated to order this book about Principles of Distributed Database Systems. For fans of deep learning, the tutorial “Deep Learning on Big Data with Multi-Node GPU Jobs” covers a lot about large-scale GPU-based deep-learning systems. If you missed the conference, all resources can be found on this ​link​.”

 

The Workshops

The EURA NOVA research centre organised the fourth workshop on Real-time and Stream Analytics in Big Data, at the 2019 IEEE conference on Big Data. We were really happy to welcome Matteo Merli from Apache Pulsar and John Roesler from Confluent as keynotes speakers. Thank you to them and to all the attendees and speakers! They had a great time, with captivating talks and a lot of interesting questions and comments. The summary of the event will soon be available on our website. The slides of the keynotes are available here:

 

 

Favourite Papers

A personal selection of interesting papers:

The paper tackles a really interesting problematic faced by a lot of data scientists. Introducing active learning is a cool idea and so is the way they used a mathematical trick to make their approach feasible.

Su Won Bae, from Mobilewalla, presented how they can define a complete customer acquisition model by mixing their data with their customer data (in this case, a worldwide leader in food delivery). Sabri says: “The quality of data science models highly depends on the data they can train on. I am convinced we will go in the same direction as Mobilewalla in the future to have richer models. However, mixing data must be done with care as it may raise some privacy issues;  our purpose has to have legal ground.”

The speaker presented MorphMine, a method for unsupervised morpheme segmentation.  It can generate morpheme candidates that are filtered out using entropy to select the best morphemes from a corpus. Then, these morphemes can be used to highly improve the word embedding model and the downstream machine learning tasks.

 

 

GraphOpt: Framework for Automatic Parameters Tuning of Graph Processing Frameworks

Finding the optimal configuration of a black-box system is a difficult problem that requires a lot of time and human labor. Big data processing frameworks are among the increasingly popular systems whose tuning is a complex and time consuming. The challenge of automatically finding the optimal parameters of big data frameworks attracted a lot of research in recent years. Some of the studies focused on optimizing specific frameworks such as distributed stream processing, or finding the best cloud configurations, while others proposed general services for optimizing any black-box system. In this paper, we introduce a new use case in the domain of automatic parameter tuning: optimizing the parameters of distributed graph processing frameworks. This task is notably difficult given the particular challenges of distributed graph processing that include the graph partitioning and the iterative nature of graph algorithms.

To address this challenge, we designed and implemented GraphOpt: an efficient and scalable black-box optimization framework that automatically tunes distributed graph processing frameworks. GraphOpt implements state-of-the-art optimization algorithms and introduces a new hill-climbing-based search algorithm. These algorithms are used to optimize the performance of two major graph processing frameworks: Giraph and GraphX. Extensive experiments were run on GraphOpt using multiple graph benchmarks to evaluate its performance and show that it provides up to 47.8% improvement compared to random search and an average improvement of up to 5.7%.

Muaz Twaty, Amine Ghrab, Skhiri Sabri: GraphOpt: a Framework for Automatic Parameters Tuning of Graph Processing Frameworks. 2019 IEEE International Conference on Big Data (Big Data) Workshops, Los Angeles, CA, USA.

The paper was published at the third IEEE International Workshop on Benchmarking, Performance Tuning and Optimization for Big Data Applications (BPOD 2019).

You can access it here in its preprint version.

Do not hesitate to contact our R&D department at research@euranova.eu to discuss how you can leverage graph processing in your projects.