| Brahim Bansaou | Michael Brown | Gary Chan |
| Dik Lee | Bo Li | Qiong Luo |
| Lionel Ni | Long Quan | Qiang Yang |
This project develops a map servers to deliver map and context-sensitive information to the user over a wireless network. It encompasses several research and developmental issues:
This project takes a proxy approach in adapting web contents for PDA browsing. The user enters a URL and the proxy fetches it from the web, analyzes its structure, and present a navigation structure for the user to explore the page.
Traditional closed-circuit video surveillance systems are based on cabling and hence is not pervasive and low-cost. With users being increasingly mobile, we develop a surveillance system named COPS which allows users to monitor a place not only over the Internet, but also over the Wireless LAN and cellular networks using their cellular phones or PDAs. Furthermore, users would be automatically alarmed if suspicious activities are detected by the computer. Video storage, indexing, and retrieval will also be offered for later playback and searching. In this system, users can conveniently, collaboratively, and securely monitor a place at any time, from anywhere.
We develop a large-scale live interactive distance-learning project termed "cyberclassroom" where students anywhere can attend lectures using wired and wireless medium with their PCs, PDAs, or phones. Instructors may poll students and students may raise questions at any time in the system. The students may also record lectures for later playback if they want.
Multicast is a fundamental and important mechanism to deliver scalable multimedia services. Unfortunately the Internet nowadays still cannot support global multicast. In this part of the project, we develop efficient networking techniques to enable global multicast. The technique, termed application-levle multicast (ALM), which takes advantage of local multicast-capability of IP networks while overcoming the limitation in multicast routers. Our scheme connects the multicast-capable "islands" together by means of overlay links and hence is termed "Island Multicast," which is able to support potentially hundreds to thousands of users concurrently.
Data services are increasingly delivered over wireless medium. Currently, we are developing techniques to integrate Wireless LAN (WLAN) infrastructure mode, ad hoc mode, and GPRS. Users would be automatically connected to either one of these modes to maximize their performance in terms of speed, cost, etc. By localizing user traffic, the overall system throughput can be substantially increased.
A key insight in this research is that pervasive computing applications require integrated data acquisition, communication and actions across heterogeneous devices. For example, when a motion sensor detects someone entering a restricted area at an unexpected time, the surveillance application will control a camera to capture the intruder's image and to alert the human guard via the phone. Therefore, we propose an action-oriented pervasive query processing software framework to extract real-time data from a network of heterogeneous devices. Furthermore, this framework will enable an application to communicate and to take actions across the devices.
We propose to study three research issues in action-oriented pervasive query processing: (1) a declarative interface for applications to specify their queries and actions, (2) a uniform data acquisition and transmission layer across devices, and (3) distributed execution techniques for queries involving actions. Our framework will enable a wide range of useful applications over a network of heterogeneous devices.