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Better Finding: Combine Semantic and Associative Context with Indaleko
Last month I presented my thesis proposal to my PhD committee. My proposal doesn’t mean that I am done, rather it means that I have more clearly identified what I intend to make the focus of my final research.
It has certainly taken longer to get to this point than I had anticipated. Part of the challenge is that there is quite a lot of work that has been done previously around search and semantic context. Very recent work by Daniela Vianna relates to the use of “personal digital traces” to augment search. It was Dr. Vianna’s work that provided a solid theoretical basis for my own proposed work.
Our computer systems collect quite an array of information, not only about us but also about the environment in which we work.
In 1945 Vannevar Bush described the challenges to humans of finding things in a codified system of records. His observations continue to be insightful more than 75 years later:
Our ineptitude in getting at the record is largely caused by the artificiality of systems of indexing. When data of any sort are placed in storage, they are filed alphabetically or numerically, and information is found (when it is) by tracing it down from subclass to subclass. It can be in only one place, unless duplicates are used; one has to have rules as to which path will locate it, and the rules are cumbersome. Having found one item, moreover, one has to emerge from the system and re-enter on a new path.
The human mind does not work that way. It operates by association. With one item in its grasp, it snaps instantly to the next that is suggested by the association of thoughts, in accordance with some intricate web of trails carried by the cells of the brain. It has other characteristics, of course; trails that are not frequently followed are prone to fade, items are not fully permanent, memory is transitory. Yet the speed of action, the intricacy of trails, the detail of mental pictures, is awe-inspiring beyond all else in nature.
I find myself returning to Bush’s observations. Those observations have led me to ask if it is possible for us to build systems that get us closer to this ideal?
My thesis is that collecting, storing, and disseminating information about the environment in which digital objects are being used provides us with new context that enables better finding.
So, my proposal is about how to collect, store, and disseminate this type of external contextual information. I envision combining this with existing data sources and indexing mechanisms to allow capturing activity context in which digital objects are used by humans. A systems level service that can do this will then enable a broad range of applications to exploit this information to reconstruct context that is helpful to human users. Over my next several blog posts I will describe some ideas that I have with what I envision being possible with this new service.
The title of my proposal is: Indaleko: Using System Activity Context to Improve Finding. One of the key ideas from this is the idea that we can collect information the computer might not find particularly relevant but the human user will. This could be something as simple as the ambient noise in the user’s background (“what music are you listening to?” or “Is your dog barking in the background”) or environmental events (“it is raining”) or even personal events (“my heart rate was elevated” or “I just bought a new yoga mat”). Humans associate things together – not in the same way, nor the same specific elements – using a variety of contextual mechanisms. My objective is to enable capturing data that we can then use to replicate this “associative thinking” that helps humans.
Ultimately, such a system will help human users find connections between objects. My focus is on storage because that is my background: in essence, I am interested in how the computer can extend human memory without losing the amazing flexibility of that memory to connect seemingly unrelated “things” together.
In my next several posts I will explore potential uses for Indaleko.
Where has the time gone?
It’s been more than a year since I last posted; it’s not that I haven’t been busy, but rather that I’ve been trying to do too many things and have been (more slowly than I’d like) cutting back on some of my activities.
Still, I miss using this as a (one way) discussion about my own work. In the past year I’ve managed to publish one new (short) paper, though the amount of work that I put into it was substantial (it was just published in Computer Architecture Letters). This short article (letter) journal normally provides at most one revise and resubmit opportunity, but they gave me two such opportunities, then accepted the paper, albeit begrudgingly over the objections of Reviewer # 2 (who agreed to accept it, but didn’t change their comments).
Despite the lack of clear publications to demonstrate forward progress, I’ve been working on a couple of projects to push them along. Both were presented, in some form, at Eurosys as posters.
Since I got back from a three month stint at Microsoft Research (in the UK) I’ve been working on one of those, evolving the idea of kernel bypasses and really analyzing why we keep doing these things; this time through the lens of building user mode file systems. I really should write more about it, since that’s on the drawing board for submission this fall.
The second idea is one that stemmed from my attendance at SOSP 2019. There were three papers that spoke directly to file systems:
- File Systems Unfit as Distributed Storage Backends
- Performance and Protection in the ZoFS User-space NVM File System
- SplitFS: Reducing Software Overhead in File Systems for Persistent Memory
Each of these had important insights into the crossover between file systems and persistent memory. One of the struggles I had with that short paper was explaining to people “why file systems are necessary for using persistent memory”. I was still able to capture some of what I’d learned, but a fair bit of it was sacrificed to adding background information.
One key observation was around the size of memory pages and their impact on performance; it convinced me that we’d benefit from using ever larger page sizes for PMEM. Some of this is because persistent memory is, well, persistent and thus we don’t need to “load the contents from storage”. Instead, it is storage. So, we’re off testing out some ideas in this area to see if we can contribute some additional insight.
The other area – the one that I have been ignoring too long – is the thesis of this PhD work in the first place. Part of the challenge is to reduce the problem down to something that is tractable and can be finished in a reasonable amount of time.
One of the questions (and the one I wanted to explore when I started writing this) is a rather famous article from 1945 entitled As We May Think. Vannevar Bush described something quite understandable, yet we have not achieve this, though we have been trying – one could argue that hypertext stems from these ideas, but I would argue that hypertext links are a pale imitation of the rich assistive model Bush lays out when he describes the Memex.
Thus, to the question, which I will reserve for another day: why have we not achieved this yet? What prevents us from having this, or something better, and how can I move us towards this goal?
I suspect, but am not certain, that one culprit may be the fact we decided to stick with an existing and well-understood model of organization:
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