Peer Collaboration Modes and Private Room Services in TOMSCOP
This paper presents the implementation of peer group management services in a pure P2P groupware framework called TOMSCOP (technology of multiuser synchronous collaboration platform). To support a variety of computer-based collaborative activities and styles, a user in a group can be assigned a role or identity such as a discusser peer, a chair peer, a presenter peer, a player peer, or an observer peer-Based on the above identities and their control service, we developed three collaboration modes, i.e., discussion mode, presentation mode and rotation mode, for smoothly manipulating shared applications in their different usages. Moreover we designed and implemented the public and private room services for users to create suitable collaboration rooms that match theirs privacy requirements. These modes and services not only provide more functions to TOMSCOP users, but also support software developers for easily and flexibly making P2P shared applications with different purposes

title: Implementation of a Pure P2p Collaboration Multiplatform and its Applications
abstract: Peer-to-Peer (P2P) computing offers many attractive features, such as collaboration, self-organization, load balancing, availability, fault tolerance and anonymity. However, it also faces many seri...

title: A Multiplatform P2P System: its implementation and applications
abstract: Peer-to-peer (P2P) computing offers many attractive features, such as collaboration, self-organization, load balancing, availability, fault tolerance and anonymity. However, it also faces many serious challenges. In our previous work, we implemented a synchronous P2P collaboration platform called TOMSCOP. Based on the elementary peer group services offered by the JXTA general framework, TOMSCOP provides the extra four types of services: synchronous message transportation, peer room administration, peer communication support and application space management. By using the four services, different kinds of shared applications for various specific purposes can be relatively easily developed and associated collaborative cyber spaces or communities can be quickly built across the JXTA virtual network overlaid on top of the existing physical networks. However, the TOMSCOP was implemented only in Windows XP OS. In this paper, we extend our previous work and present the implementation of a Multi-Platform P2P System (MPPS). The proposed system operates very smoothly in UNIX Solaris 9 OS, LINUX Suse 9.1 OS, Mac OSX, and Windows XP. In the future study, we would like to evaluate the implemented P2P platform and compare its performance with other P2P systems.

title: The specification and implementation of a virtual university software system
abstract: Distance learning is one of the interesting research topics of distributed computing. This paper discusses a joint research project between the University of Aizu in Japan and Tamkang University in Taiwan. A software system supporting virtual university operations is proposed. The software architecture is designed based on three criteria of virtual university operations: administration, awareness and assessment. Specifications of each tools in the system are proposed, with some implementation details and solutions being discussed. We also point out some interesting research directions in the realization of a virtual university.

title: A general purpose virtual collaboration room
abstract: The general purpose virtual collaboration room (VCR) is an Internet based desktop groupware system that enables a group of remote individuals to flexibly and naturally conduct their collaborative teaching/learning/working without constraints on collaboration types, working styles, group scales, and system platforms. To cope with the complexity, a room metaphor, i.e., emulating a physical room and objects in it, is used as a framework of the system. System implementation becomes no more complex than the case of using one object by identifying associated objects in communication messages between a room server and clients. The VCR provides rich and effective support of awareness of the user, object, space, and their mutual relations. With the use of Java applets for system implementations, users can enter and use a VCR from any standard Java enabled Web browser.

title: A principled approach for formative Web learning assessment and adaptive tutoring
abstract: Web based distance learning is a trend of instruction delivery. One of the most difficult challenges of such a learning mechanism is the assessment of students' learning criteria. It is hard to judge the behavior of a student since the instructor is separated spatially and temporally from the students. However, it is possible to rely on some Web based tools to keep track of a student's course attendance, as well as the navigation behavior of that student. In addition, the navigation behavior of an individual can be compared to those of others. Analysis can be conducted, and an interactive tutorial can be generated to assist the student with a poor score. The paper proposes such a mechanism, as well as its supporting system run on Windows browsers.

title: Towards a Natural Internet-Based Collaborative Environment with Support of Object Physical and Social Characteristics
abstract: Objects in this article refer to sharable applications, such as a whiteboard and a video player, used by multi-users who are in different sites and have computers connected to networks. The objects are important elements in our Internet-based desktop collaborative system, called virtual collaboration room (VCR). We argue that a natural collaborative environment should be developed in a framework of using both a room metaphor and an object metaphor, i.e., emulating the fundamental characteristics of real rooms and real objects, respectively. This article gives the first systematic specifications of object physical and social characteristics, and discusses how to exploit and implement the object characteristics in VCR. A preliminary prototype of platform independent real-time audio/video communications among multiple users is also described. It can be used together with VCR.

title: Energy-Efficient Localized Topology Control Algorithms in IEEE 802.15.4-Based Sensor Networks
abstract: Sensor networks have emerged as a promising technology with various applications, where power efficiency is one of the critical requirements. The recent IEEE 802.15.4 standard offers a promising platform for wireless sensor networks. Since each node can act as a coordinator or a device in the IEEE 802.15.4 standard, 802.15.4-based sensor networks have various possible network topologies. To reduce power consumption, in this paper, we try to construct network topologies with a small number of coordinators while still maintaining network connectivity. By reducing the number of coordinators, the average duty cycle is reduced and the battery life is prolonged. Three topology control algorithms are proposed in this paper. Self-pruning (SP) is the simplest one with O(1) running time and provides the shortest path to the sink node. Ordinal pruning (OP) can significantly improve SP in terms of power saving with O(n) running time. Layered pruning (LP) is a trade off between the first two pruning algorithms with O(radicn) running time and has a slightly higher power consumption than OP. Furthermore, all three algorithms are independent of the physical radio propagation characteristics. Extensive simulations have been performed to verify the effectiveness of the proposed topology control schemes

title: Towards global routing with RLC crosstalk constraints
abstract: Conventional global routing minimizes total wire length and congestion. Experiments using large industrial benchmark circuits show that up to 24% of nets in such routing solutions may have RLC crosstalk violations at 3GHz clock. We develop an extremely efficient length-scaled Keff (LSK) model that has a high fidelity for long-range RLC crosstalk. We formulate an extended global routing problem (denoted as GSINO) to consider simultaneous shield insertion and net ordering with RLC crosstalk constraints, then propose an effective three-phase GSINO algorithm. The GSINO algorithm completely eliminates the RLC crosstalk violations, and has small area and wire length overhead compared to conventional routing.

title: Design and implementation of a P2P shared Web browser using JXTA
abstract: The most shared applications use the client/server model in which, however a server is usually very complex and heavy since all of group managements are done by the server and sometimes becomes a communication bottleneck as all of date exchange among group members are mediated via it. To solve the above problems, our shared browser adopted a pure peer-to-peer (P2P) architecture without using any server A group member or a device called a peer dynamically finds other peers via distributed searching, and directly exchange data with other peers. It supports not only sharing a Web document in a peer group but also synchronously viewing the document and manipulating the browser with further support of some group users' awareness information like a user's moving a cursor, entering a new URL and clicking a hyperlink. It is implemented using JXTA protocols and Java programming language. To make the system applicable over the Internet across firewalls and NATs, the HTTP protocol can be used to transfer data via a pipe, a communication mechanism in JXTA.

title: Simplex Memory Neural Networks
abstract: The biological neural network-simplex memory neural network-is proposed to describe the mechanisms of pattern memory in the brain. A mathematical model of the simplex memory neural network is constructed to memorize any binary pattern with content-addressable memory function. Under Hebbian learning rule, the new network has some important functions in accord with the learning and memory behaviors of the brain.