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Thorpe, Christina
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Thorpe, Christina
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Thorpe, Christina
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Now showing 1 - 8 of 8
- PublicationCOCOA: A Synthetic Data Generator for Testing Anonymization Techniques(Springer, 2016-09-16)
; ; ; Conducting extensive testing of anonymization techniques is critical to assess their robustness and identify the scenarios where they are most suitable. However, the access to real microdata is highly restricted and the one that is publicly-available is usually anonymized or aggregated; hence, reducing its value for testing purposes. In this paper, we present a framework (COCOA) for the generation of realistic synthetic microdata that allows to define multi-attribute relationships in order to preserve the functional dependencies of the data. We prove how COCOA is useful to strengthen the testing of anonymization techniques by broadening the number and diversity of the test scenarios. Results also show how COCOA is practical to generate large datasets.853Scopus© Citations 8 - PublicationEnhancing the Utility of Anonymized Data by Improving the Quality of Generalization Hierarchies(Transactions on Data Privacy, 2017-04)
; ; ; ; The dissemination of textual personal information has become an important driver of innovation. However, due to the possible content of sensitive information, this data must be anonymized. A commonly-used technique to anonymize data is generalization. Nevertheless, its effectiveness can be hampered by the Value Generalization Hierarchies (VGHs) used as poorly-specified VGHs can decrease the usefulness of the resulting data. To tackle this problem, in our previous work we presented the Generalization Semantic Loss (GSL), a metric that captures the quality of categorical VGHs in terms of semantic consistency and taxonomic organization. We validated the accuracy of GSL using an intrinsic evaluation with respect to a gold standard ontology. In this paper, we extend our previous work by conducting an extrinsic evaluation of GSL with respect to the performance that VGHs have in anonymization (using data utility metrics). We show how GSL can be used to perform an a priori assessment of the VGHs¿ effectiveness for anonymization. In this manner, data publishers can quantitatively compare the quality of various VGHs and identify (before anonymization) those that better retain the semantics of the original data. Consequently, the utility of the anonymized datasets can be improved without sacrificing the privacy goal. Our results demonstrate the accuracy of GSL, as the quality of VGHs measured with GSL strongly correlates with the utility of the anonymized data. Results also show the benefits that an a priori VGH assessment strategy brings to the anonymization process in terms of time-savings and a reduction in the dependency on expert knowledge. Finally, GSL also proved to be lightweight in terms of computational resources.279 - PublicationAutomatic Construction of Generalization Hierarchies for Publishing Anonymized DataConcept hierarchies are widely used in multiple fields to carry out data analysis. In data privacy, they are known as Value Generalization Hierarchies (VGHs), and are used by generalization algorithms to dictate the data anonymization. Thus, their proper specification is critical to obtain anonymized data of good quality. The creation and evaluation of VGHs require expert knowledge and a significant amount of manual effort, making these tasks highly error-prone and timeconsuming. In this paper we present AIKA, a knowledge-based framework to automatically construct and evaluate VGHs for the anonymization of categorical data. AIKA integrates ontologies to objectively create and evaluate VGHs. It also implements a multi-dimensional reward function to tailor the VGH evaluation to different use cases. Our experiments show that AIKA improved the creation of VGHs by generating VGHs of good quality in less time than when manually done. Results also showed how the reward function properly captures the desired VGH properties.
338Scopus© Citations 2 - PublicationIntegration of QoS Metrics, Rules and Semantic Uplift for Advanced IPTV Monitoring(Springer, 2015-07)
; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; Increasing and variable traffic demands due to triple play services pose significant Internet Protocol Television (IPTV) resource management challenges for service providers. Managing subscriber expectations via consolidated IPTV quality reporting will play a crucial role in guaranteeing return-on-investment for players in the increasingly competitive IPTV delivery ecosystem. We propose a fault diagnosis and problem isolation solution that addresses the IPTV monitoring challenge and recommends problem-specific remedial action. IPTV delivery-specific metrics are collected at various points in the delivery topology, the residential gateway and the Digital Subscriber Line Access Multiplexer through to the video Head-End. They are then pre-processed using new metric rules. A semantic uplift engine takes these raw metric logs; it then transforms them into World Wide Web Consortium’s standard Resource Description Framework for knowledge representation and annotates them with expert knowledge from the IPTV domain. This system is then integrated with a monitoring visualization framework that displays monitoring events, alarms, and recommends solutions. A suite of IPTV fault scenarios is presented and used to evaluate the feasibility of the solution. We demonstrate that professional service providers can provide timely reports on the quality of IPTV service delivery using this system.2212Scopus© Citations 6 - PublicationEnabling IPTV service assurance using OpenFlowOne difficulty facing Internet Protocol Television (IPTV) service providers is the issue of monitoring and managing their service delivery network. An in-depth monitoring regime is required, which performs measurements within different networking devices. When network conditions deteriorate to the point where they could disrupt IPTV services, Network Operators (NOs) can use the measurements as a basis to reconfigure the network with minimal delay. OpenFlow (OF) presents a potential solution to this problem as it provides vendor-neutral access to the packet forwarding interface of the different hardware device types. This work investigates how OF can leverage video packet inspection measurements taken from within the IPTV service delivery network and combine these with of statistics to make decisions regarding routing in order to assure service quality.
542Scopus© Citations 14 - PublicationHaRD: a heterogeneity-aware replica deletion for HDFSThe Hadoop distributed file system (HDFS) is responsible for storing very large data-sets reliably on clusters of commodity machines. The HDFS takes advantage of replication to serve data requested by clients with high throughput. Data replication is a trade-off between better data availability and higher disk usage. Recent studies propose different data replication management frameworks that alter the replication factor of files dynamically in response to the popularity of the data, keeping more replicas for in-demand data to enhance the overall performance of the system. When data gets less popular, these schemes reduce the replication factor, which changes the data distribution and leads to unbalanced data distribution. Such an unbalanced data distribution causes hot spots, low data locality and excessive network usage in the cluster. In this work, we first confirm that reducing the replication factor causes unbalanced data distribution when using Hadoop’s default replica deletion scheme. Then, we show that even keeping a balanced data distribution using WBRD (data-distribution-aware replica deletion scheme) that we proposed in previous work performs sub-optimally on heterogeneous clusters. In order to overcome this issue, we propose a heterogeneity-aware replica deletion scheme (HaRD). HaRD considers the nodes’ processing capabilities when deleting replicas; hence it stores more replicas on the more powerful nodes. We implemented HaRD on top of HDFS and conducted a performance evaluation on a 23-node dedicated heterogeneous cluster. Our results show that HaRD reduced execution time by up to 60%, and 17% when compared to Hadoop and WBRD, respectively.
186Scopus© Citations 6 - PublicationExperience of developing an openflow SDN prototype for managing IPTV networksIPTV is a method of delivering TV content to endusers that is growing in popularity. The implications of poor video quality may ultimately be a loss of revenue for the provider. Hence, it is vital to provide service assurance in these networks. This paper describes our experience of building an IPTV Software Defined Network testbed that can be used to develop and validate new approaches for service assurance in IPTV networks. The testbed is modular and many of the concepts detailed in this tutorial may be applied to the management of other end-to-end services.
1230Scopus© Citations 9 - PublicationImproving the Utility of Anonymized Datasets through Dynamic Evaluation of Generalization Hierarchies(IEEE, 2016-07-30)
; ; ; The dissemination of textual personal information has become a key driver for innovation and value creation. However, due to the possible content of sensitive information, this data must be anonymized, which can reduce its usefulness for secondary uses. One of the most used techniques to anonymize data is generalization. However, its effectiveness can be hampered by the Value Generalization Hierarchies (VGHs) used to dictate the anonymization of data, as poorly-specified VGHs can reduce the usefulness of the resulting data. To tackle this problem, we propose a metric for evaluating the quality of textual VGHs used in anonymization. Our evaluation approach considers the semantic properties of VGHs and exploits information from the input datasets to predict with higher accuracy (compared to existing approaches) the potential effectiveness of VGHs for anonymizing data. As a consequence, the utility of the resulting datasets is improved without sacrificing the privacy goal. We also introduce a novel rating scale to classify the quality of the VGHs into categories to facilitate the interpretation of our quality metric for practitioners.413Scopus© Citations 1