Grid services for earthquake science
We describe an information system architecture for the ACES (Asia–Pacific Cooperation for Earthquake Simulation) community. It addresses several key features of the field—simulations at multiple scales that need to be coupled together; real-time and archival observational data, which needs to be analyzed for patterns and linked to the simulations; a variety of important algorithms including partial differential equation solvers, particle dynamics, signal processing and data analysis; a natural three-dimensional space (plus time) setting for both visualization and observations; the linkage of field to real-time events both as an aid to crisis management and to scientific discovery. We also address the need to support education and research for a field whose computational sophistication is rapidly increasing and spans a broad range. The information system assumes that all significant data is defined by an XML layer which could be virtual, but whose existence ensures that all data is object-based and can be accessed and searched in this form. The various capabilities needed by ACES are defined as grid services, which are conformant with emerging standards and implemented with different levels of fidelity and performance appropriate to the application. Grid Services can be composed in a hierarchical fashion to address complex problems. The real-time needs of the field are addressed by high-performance implementation of data transfer and simulation services. Further, the environment is linked to real-time collaboration to support interactions between scientists in geographically distant locations.

title: Wireless reliable messaging protocol for Web services (WS-WRM)
abstract: By employing Web services technology, the grid system is evolving to be more manageable service infrastructure, including lifetime management, discovery of characteristics, and notifications. Reliable messaging is one of the key issues addressed for quality of services in Web services. In this paper, we propose a reliable message scheme designed for mobile environments in the context of a Web services architecture; Web services-Wireless Reliable Messaging (WS-WRM). We also consider the federation issues with emerging specifications proposed by leading Web services standard groups. We eventually intend to extend the reliability to mobile end-nodes in a more efficient way. In this paper, we address the design issues and describe the detailed scheme of messaging architecture.

title: A Web Service Approach to Universal Accessibility in Collaboration Services
abstract: The enormous growth in wireless communications and miniaturized handheld devices in the last few years, have given rise to a vast range of new services, for heterogeneous user environments. In this paper, we investigate the nature of designing distributed services that accommodate pervasive devices. We introduce Universal Accessible Web service architecture, CAROUSEL Web service. We present our collaborative Web services model linked with an event brokering service, NaradaBrokering. We discuss how a rich synchronous and asynchronous collaboration environment can support virtual communications while being built on top of a Web service infrastructure, based on industry standard portal technologies such as XML, Apache’s Jetspeed, and WSDL. The linkage of the event brokering system with a Web service based architecture is one of the critical design issues in message-based collaborative application. We also describe the approach to universal access mechanisms in our collaborative Web service model. Also included is a discussion of the prototype collaborative SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) browser that we developed as a Web service.

title: Integration of Hand- Held Devices into Collaborative Environments
abstract: We describe a collaborative environment Garnet designed around a universal event model using the publish-subscribe paradigm. We study the integration of personal digital assistants (PDA) into synchronous collaborative sessions. Our architecture uses a PDA adaptor that maps system events into a form suitable for the PDA and uses an optimized protocol that respects bandwidth limitations.

title: Adapting Content for Mobile Devices in Heterogeneous Collaboration Environments
abstract: The portability of new miniaturized devices, together with their ability to connect conveniently to networks in different places, makes mobile computing possible. Recent advances that have led to increasing bandwidths, for wireless communications, enable mobile users to utilize a vast range of sophisticated services such as real-time collaborative services. Garnet Collaborative system is a universal accessible collaborative environment supporting synchronous communication and universal accessibility from a wide range of devices. Garnet Message System Micro Edition (GMSME) is developed to integrate heterogeneous mobile devices into the Garnet collaborative system. Garnet integrates desktop in traditional LAN environments, wireless LAN based mobile devices, and pervasive 3G communication technology seamlessly. In this paper, we describe the process of adapting content in GMSME. GMSME provides application-aware transcoding, to tune the shared resources, for different collaborative models. Also, it optimizes shared resources for each heterogeneous client environments.

title: 3D Medical Volume Reconstruction Using Web Services
abstract: We address the problem of 3D medical volume reconstruction using Web services. The use of proposed Web services is motivated by the fact that the problem of 3D medical volume reconstruction requires significant computer resources and human expertise in medical and computer science areas. Web services were implemented as an additional layer to a dataflow framework called data to knowledge. In the collaboration between UIC and NCSA, pre-processed input images at NCSA were made accessible to medical collaborators for registration. Every time medical collaborators inspected images and selected corresponding features for registration, the Web server at NCSA was contacted and the registration processing query was executed using the image to knowledge library of registration methods. Co-registered frames were returned for verification by medical collaborators in a new window. This paper presents 3D volume reconstruction problem requirements, architecture of the developed prototype system and the tradeoffs of our system design.

title: Cooperative peer groups in NICE
abstract: A distributed scheme for trust inference in peer-to-peer networks is presented. Our work is in context of the NICE system, which is a platform for implementing cooperative applications over the Internet. We describe a technique for efficiently storing user reputation information in a completely decentralized manner, and show how this information can be used to efficiently identify noncooperative users in NICE. We present a simulation based study of our algorithms, in which we show our scheme scales to thousands of users using modest amounts of storage, processing, and bandwidth at any individual node. Lastly, we show that our scheme is robust and can form cooperative groups in systems where the vast majority of users are malicious.

title: Distributed and scalable XML document processing architecture for E-commerce systems
abstract: XML has became a very important emerging standard for E-commerce because of its flexibility and universality. Many software designers are actively developing new systems to handle information in XML formats. We propose a generic architecture for processing XML. We have designed an XML processing system using the latest technologies, such as XML, XSLT (XML Stylesheet Language Transformation), HTTP and Java servlets. Our design is very generic, flexible, scalable, extensible, and also suitable for distributed network environments. A main application of the architecture and the system is to support data exchange in E-commerce systems.

title: UAMAC: Unidirectional-Link Aware MAC Protocol for Heterogeneous Ad Hoc Networks
abstract: In heterogeneous ad hoc networks, high-power nodes could potentially interfere with any on-going transmissions of low-power nodes. In this paper, we propose a unidirectional-link aware MAC protocol (UAMAC) which prevents such an interference problem by reserving the wireless channel of unidirectional high-power node selectively over one-hop. Our preliminary performance results show that the UAMAC works well in these heterogeneous environments with unidirectional links.

title: Transitive Mesh Space of a Progressive Mesh
abstract: The paper investigates the set of all selectively refined meshes that can be obtained from a progressive mesh. We call the set the transitive mesh space of a progressive mesh and present a theoretical analysis of the space. We define selective edge collapse and vertex split transformations, which we use to traverse all selectively refined meshes in the transitive mesh space. We propose a complete selective refinement scheme for a progressive mesh based on the transformations and compare the scheme with previous selective refinement schemes in both theoretical and experimental ways. In our comparison, we show that the complete scheme always generates selectively refined meshes with smaller numbers of vertices and faces than previous schemes for a given refinement criterion. The concept of dual pieces of the vertices in the vertex hierarchy plays a central role in the analysis of the transitive mesh space and the design of selective edge collapse and vertex split transformations.