Rui Ren

Linxiao Yang, Rui Ren, Xinyue Gu et al.

Electric load forecasting is an indispensable component of electric power system planning and management. Inaccurate load forecasting may lead to the threat of outages or a waste of energy. Accurate electric load forecasting is challenging when there is limited data or even no data, such as load forecasting in holiday, or under extreme weather conditions. As high-stakes decision-making usually follows after load forecasting, model interpretability is crucial for the adoption of forecasting models. In this paper, we propose an interactive GAM which is not only interpretable but also can incorporate specific domain knowledge in electric power industry for improved performance. This boosting-based GAM leverages piecewise linear functions and can be learned through our efficient algorithm. In both public benchmark and electricity datasets, our interactive GAM outperforms current state-of-the-art methods and demonstrates good generalization ability in the cases of extreme weather events. We launched a user-friendly web-based tool based on interactive GAM and already incorporated it into our eForecaster product, a unified AI platform for electricity forecasting.

Jianfeng Zhan, Lei Wang, Wanling Gao et al.

This paper outlines BenchCouncil's view on the challenges, rules, and vision of benchmarking modern workloads like Big Data, AI or machine learning, and Internet Services. We conclude the challenges of benchmarking modern workloads as FIDSS (Fragmented, Isolated, Dynamic, Service-based, and Stochastic), and propose the PRDAERS benchmarking rules that the benchmarks should be specified in a paper-and-pencil manner, relevant, diverse, containing different levels of abstractions, specifying the evaluation metrics and methodology, repeatable, and scaleable. We believe proposing simple but elegant abstractions that help achieve both efficiency and general-purpose is the final target of benchmarking in future, which may be not pressing. In the light of this vision, we shortly discuss BenchCouncil's related projects.

Wanling Gao, Jianfeng Zhan, Lei Wang et al.

Several fundamental changes in technology indicate domain-specific hardware and software co-design is the only path left. In this context, architecture, system, data management, and machine learning communities pay greater attention to innovative big data and AI algorithms, architecture, and systems. Unfortunately, complexity, diversity, frequently-changed workloads, and rapid evolution of big data and AI systems raise great challenges. First, the traditional benchmarking methodology that creates a new benchmark or proxy for every possible workload is not scalable, or even impossible for Big Data and AI benchmarking. Second, it is prohibitively expensive to tailor the architecture to characteristics of one or more application or even a domain of applications. We consider each big data and AI workload as a pipeline of one or more classes of units of computation performed on different initial or intermediate data inputs, each class of which we call a data motif. On the basis of our previous work that identifies eight data motifs taking up most of the run time of a wide variety of big data and AI workloads, we propose a scalable benchmarking methodology that uses the combination of one or more data motifs---to represent diversity of big data and AI workloads. Following this methodology, we present a unified big data and AI benchmark suite---BigDataBench 4.0, publicly available from~\url{http://prof.ict.ac.cn/BigDataBench}. This unified benchmark suite sheds new light on domain-specific hardware and software co-design: tailoring the system and architecture to characteristics of the unified eight data motifs other than one or more application case by case. Also, for the first time, we comprehensively characterize the CPU pipeline efficiency using the benchmarks of seven workload types in BigDataBench 4.0.

Jiechao Cheng, Rui Ren, Lei Wang et al.

The increasing popularity of server usage has brought a plenty of anomaly log events, which have threatened a vast collection of machines. Recognizing and categorizing the anomalous events thereby is a much salient work for our systems, especially the ones generate the massive amount of data and harness it for technology value creation and business development. To assist in focusing on the classification and the prediction of anomaly events, and gaining critical insights from system event records, we propose a novel log preprocessing method which is very effective to filter abundant information and retain critical characteristics. Additionally, a competitive approach for automated classification of anomalous events detected from the distributed system logs with the state-of-the-art deep (Convolutional Neural Network) architectures is proposed in this paper. We measure a series of deep CNN algorithms with varied hyper-parameter combinations by using standard evaluation metrics, the results of our study reveals the advantages and potential capabilities of the proposed deep CNN models for anomaly event classification tasks on real-world systems. The optimal classification precision of our approach is 98.14%, which surpasses the popular traditional machine learning methods.