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Section: New Results
Large-scale and user-centric distributed systems
FreeRec: An anonymous and distributed personalization architecture
Participants : Antoine Boutet, Davide Frey, Arnaud Jégou, Anne-Marie Kermarrec, Heverson Borba Ribeiro.
FreeRec is an anonymous decentralized peer-to-peer architecture designed to bring personalization while protecting the privacy of its users [17] , [30] , [44] . FreeRec’s decentralized approach makes it independent of any entity wishing to collect personal data about users. At the same time, its onion-routing-like gossip-based overlay protocols effectively hide the association between users and their interest profiles without affecting the quality of personalization. The core of FreeRec consists of three layers of overlay protocols: the bottom layer, rps, consists of a standard random peer sampling protocol ensuring connectivity; the middle layer, PRPS, introduces anonymity by hiding users behind anonymous proxy chains, providing mutual anonymity; finally, the top clustering layer identifies for each anonymous user, a set of anonymous nearest neighbors. We demonstrate the effectiveness of FreeRec by building a decentralized and anonymous content dissemination system. Our evaluation by simulation, our PlanetLab experiments, and our probabilistic analysis show that FreeRec effectively decouples users from their profiles without hampering the quality of personalized content delivery.
HyRec: A hybrid recommender system
Participants : Antoine Boutet, Davide Frey, Anne-Marie Kermarrec.
The ever-growing amount of data available on the Internet calls for personalization. Yet, the most effective personalization schemes, such as those based on collaborative filtering (CF), are notoriously resource greedy. HyRec is an online cost-effective scalable system for CF personalization. HyRec relies on a hybrid architecture, offloading CPU-intensive recommendation tasks to front-end client browsers, while retaining storage and orchestration tasks within back-end servers. HyRec has been fully implemented and extensively evaluated on several workloads from MovieLens and Digg. We convey the ability of HyRec to significantly reduce the operation costs of the content provider by up to 70% and drastically improve the scalability by up to 500%, with respect to a centralized (or cloud-based recommender approach), while preserving the quality of the personalization. We also show that HyRec is virtually transparent to the users and induces only 3% of the bandwidth consumption of a P2P solution.
Social market
Participants : Davide Frey, Arnaud Jégou, Anne-Marie Kermarrec, Michel Raynal, Julien Stainer.
The ability to identify people that share one's own interests is one of the most interesting promises of the Web 2.0 driving user-centric applications such as recommendation systems or collaborative marketplaces. To be truly useful, however, information about other users also needs to be associated with some notion of trust. Consider a user wishing to sell a concert ticket. Not only must she find someone who is interested in the concert, but she must also make sure she can trust this person to pay for it. Social Market (SM) solves this problem by allowing users to identify and build connections to other users that can provide interesting goods or information and that are also reachable through a trusted path on an explicit social network like Facebook. This year, we extended the contributions presented in 2011, by introducing two novel distributed protocols that combine interest-based connections between users with explicit links obtained from social networks ala Facebook. Both protocols build trusted multi-hop paths between users in an explicit social network supporting the creation of semantic overlays backed up by social trust. The first protocol, TAPS2, extends our previous work on TAPS (Trust-Aware Peer Sampling), by improving the ability to locate trusted nodes. Yet, it remains vulnerable to attackers wishing to learn about trust values between arbitrary pairs of users. The second protocol, PTAPS (Private TAPS), improves TAPS2 with provable privacy guarantees by preventing users from revealing their friendship links to users that are more than two hops away in the social network. In addition to proving this privacy property, we evaluate the performance of our protocols through event-based simulations, showing significant improvements over the state of the art. In addition to our previous publication on this topic, our recent work led to a paper that appeared in TCS [20] .
Privacy-preserving P2P collaborative filtering
Participants : Davide Frey, Anne-Marie Kermarrec, Antoine Rault, François Taïani.
The huge amount of information available at any time in our connected society calls for a mechanism to filter it efficiently. Recommendation systems provide such a mechanism by personalizing the information displayed for each user. However, the collection of personal information by recommendation systems threatens the privacy of users. We address the two needs for recommendation and privacy through a peer-to-peer user-based collaborative filtering system. Recommendation is done ala GOSSPLE by building an overlay network which connects users with similar interests via clustering and random peer sampling. This overlay network is then used to make recommendations based on what similar users liked. Users' privacy is protected in two ways. Users are protected from a Big Brother adversary by the peer-to-peer design of the system in which profiles are stored only by their owners. Users are protected from other malicious users who would try to learn the content of their profiles by our landmark-based cosine similarity measure. It indirectly computes the similarity of two users by comparing their respective similarities with a set of randomly generated profiles, called landmarks. Thus, users can compute their similarity without revealing their profile, contrarily to the regular cosine similarity when used in a peer-to-peer system.
Gossip protocols for renaming and sorting
Participants : George Giakkoupis, Anne-Marie Kermarrec.
In [33] we devise efficient gossip-based protocols for some fundamental distributed tasks. The protocols assume an -node network supporting point-to-point communication, and in every round, each node exchanges information of size bits with (at most) one other node. We first consider the renaming problem, that is, to assign distinct IDs from a small ID space to all nodes of the network. We propose a renaming protocol that divides the ID space among nodes using a natural push or pull approach, achieving logarithmic round complexity with ID space , for any fixed . A variant of this protocol solves the tight renaming problem, where each node obtains a unique ID in , in rounds. Next we study the following sorting problem. Nodes have consecutive IDs 1 up to , and they receive numerical values as inputs. They then have to exchange those inputs so that in the end the input of rank is located at the node with ID . Jelasity and Kermarrec (2006) suggested a simple and natural protocol, where nodes exchange values with peers chosen uniformly at random, but it is not hard to see that this protocol requires rounds. We prove that the same protocol works in rounds if peers are chosen according to a non-uniform power law distribution.
This work has been done in collaboration with Philipp Woelfel.
Adaptive streaming
Participants : Ali Gouta, Anne-Marie Kermarrec.
HTTP Adaptive Streaming (HAS) is gradually being adopted by Over The Top (OTT) content providers. In HAS, a wide range of video bitrates of the same video content are made available over the internet so that clients' players pick the video bitrate that best fit their bandwidth. Yet, this affects the performance of some major components of the video delivery chain, namely CDNs or transparent caches since several versions of the same content compete to be cached. We investigated the benefits of a Cache Friendly HAS system (CF-DASH), which aims to improve the caching efficiency in mobile networks and to sustain the quality of experience of mobile clients. We presented a set of observations we made on large number of clients requesting HAS contents [34] , [35] . Then, we evaluated CF-dash based on trace-driven simulations and testbed experiments. Our validation results are promising. Simulations on real HAS traffic show that we achieve a significant gain in hit-ratio that ranges from 15% up to 50%.
Work was done in collaboration with Yannick Le Louedec, Zied Aouini and Diallo Mamadou.
DynaSoRe: Efficient in-memory store for social applications
Participant : Arnaud Jégou.
Social network applications are inherently interactive, creating a requirement for processing user requests fast. To enable fast responses to user requests, social network applications typically rely on large banks of cache servers to hold and serve most of their content from the cache. The objective of this work is to build a memory cache system for social network applications that optimizes data locality while placing user views across the system. We call this system DynaSoRe (Dynamic Social stoRe). DynaSoRe storage servers monitor access traffic and bring data frequently accessed together closer in the system to reduce the processing load across cache servers and network devices. Our simulation results considering realistic data center topologies show that DynaSoRe is able to adapt to traffic changes, increase data locality, and balance the load across the system. The traffic handled by the top tier of the network connecting servers drops by 94% compared to a static assignment of views to cache servers while requiring only 30% additional memory capacity compared to the whole volume of cached data.
This work was conducted in collaboration with Xiao Bai, Flavio Junqueira, and Vincent Leroy. The product of this collaboration led to the publication of a paper at the Middleware 2013 conference [26] .
Adaptive metrics on distributed recommendation systems
Participants : Anne-Marie Kermarrec, François Taïani, Juan Manuel Tirado Martin.
Current distributed recommendation systems are metric based. This means that recommendation quality depends on a single user comparison function. This is a simple solution that cannot cover the particularities of each system. Classically computing intensive data-mining methods have been used in the field of recommendation. However, they are not proper in distributed scenarios due to the lack of a global vision and the existing restrictions in terms of computing power. In this project, we study how to provide and model ad-hoc similarity metrics that can be automatically adapted to a different number of scenarios. We study our solution from two different points of view: recommendation and performance. In the first, we evaluate the capacity of data mining technics to give users relevant recommendations. Second, by exploring the performance of different approaches in order to obtain relevant recommendations we plan to study the trade-off between relevant recommendations and computational cost.
Cliff-Edge Consensus: Agreeing on the precipice
Participants : Michel Raynal, François Taïani.
In this project, we worked on a new form of consensus that allows nodes to agree locally on the extent of crashed regions in networks of arbitrary size. One key property of our algorithm is that it shows local complexity, i.e. its cost is independent of the size of the complete system, and only depends on the shape and extent of the crashed region to be agreed upon. In [40] , we motivate the need for such an algorithm, formally define this new consensus problem, propose a fault-tolerant solution, and prove its correctness.
This work was done in collaboration with Geoff Coulson and Barry Porter.
Clustered network coding
Participants : Fabien André, Anne-Marie Kermarrec, Konstantinos Kloudas, Alexandre Van Kempen.
Modern storage systems now typically combine plain replication and erasure codes to reliably store large amount of data in datacenters. Plain replication allows a fast access to popular data, while erasure codes, e.g. Reed-Solomon codes, provide a storage-efficient alternative for archiving less popular data. Although erasure codes are now increasingly employed in real systems, they experience high overhead during maintenance, i.e. upon failures, typically requiring files to be decoded before being encoded again to repair the encoded blocks stored at the faulty node.
In this work, we propose a novel erasure code system, tailored for networked archival systems. The efficiency of our approach relies on a combination of the use of random codes coupled with a clever yet simple clustered placement strategy. Our repair protocol leverages network coding techniques to reduce by 50% the amount of data transferred during maintenance, as several cluster files are repaired simultaneously. We demonstrate both through an analysis and extensive experimental study conducted on a public testbed that our approach dramatically decreases both the bandwidth overhead during the maintenance process and the time to repair data lost upon failure.
This has been done in collaboration with Erwan le Merrer, Nicolas, Le Scouarnec and Gilles Straub.