Hard disk drive failures are one of the most common causes of service downtime in data centers. Predictive maintenance techniques have been adopted to extend the Remaining Useful Life (RUL) of these drives, and minimize service shortage and data loss. Several approaches based on machine and deep learning techniques have been proposed to address these issues, mostly exploiting models based on Self-Monitoring analysis and Reporting Technology (SMART) attributes. While these models have proven to be reliable, their performance is affected by the lack of information about the proximity of disk failure in time. Moreover, many of these techniques are sensitive to the highly unbalanced nature of existing data-sets, in terms of good to failed hard disk ratio. In this article, we propose a LSTM (Long Short Term Memory)-based model combining SMART attributes and temporal analysis for estimating a hard drive health status according to its time to failure. Our approach outperforms state-of-the-art methods when evaluated on two data-sets, one containing hourly samples from 23395 disks and the other reporting daily samples from 29878‬ disks. Experimental results showed that our approach is well suited to data-sets with different sampling periods, being able to predict hard drive health status up to 45 days before failure.

In this paper, we propose a novel structure-based partitioning algorithm able to break a large ontology into different modules related to specific topics for the domain of interest. In particular, we leverage the topological properties of the ontology graph and exploit several techniques derived from Network Analysis to produce an effective partitioning without considering any information about semantics of ontology relationships. An automated partitioning tool has been developed and several preliminary experiments have been conducted to validate the effectiveness of our approach with respect to other techniques.

Thomas Graf, Aniello De Santo. Proceedings of the 16th Meeting on the Mathematics of Language. 2019.

Commentary: Developmental Constraints on Learning Artificial Grammars with Fixed, Flexible, and Free Word Order