A Web-Based Teacher Assisting Agent System
In the conventional teaching, teaching assistances (TAs) play importance roles in supporting a teacher’s teaching activities. This paper presents a Web-based teacher assisting agent system in which a set of automated programs, so called agents in this context, is developed. It is described that how the agents are generated, where they reside, and how they work independently or collaborate with each other to assist a teacher. It is emphasized that a later developed working agent can be easily incorporated into the system under the developed system framework. It is addressed that both agent persistency and mobility in the system can be achieved by the proposed mechanisms.

title: A P2P Ubiquitous System for Testing Network Programs
abstract: This paper presents design and implementation of a peer-to-peer (P2P) ubiquitous system for assisting a programmer to efficiently test network programs in their development process by using multiple computers simultaneously. This system is implemented using the TOMSCOP (Technology Of Multi-user Synchronous COllaboration Platform). It is a synchronous P2P collaboration platform built atop the JXTA technology. JXTA is a set of protocols for developing P2P shared applications, and enables peers to find each other, form groups and exchange messages across firewalls and NATs. This system has the following three main features. Firstly, it enables the program source files being shared among peers. Secondly, a user is able to simultaneously compile, execute and stop network programs of all peers in a same group by simple operations on the system GUI. Lastly, due to using Java and JXTA technology, the system can run on any platform.

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: 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: Peer Collaboration Modes and Private Room Services in TOMSCOP
abstract: 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: A Dangerous Location Aware System for Assisting Kids Safety Care
abstract: This system focuses on a location-aware computing application and environment which provide preemptive information on dangerous locations in the kid's surroundings; i.e., the system alerts a kid on the move of the possible dangers whenever he/she is near accident prone areas. Using satellite-based GPS position sensing, this system can gradually learn and remember about the different locations that a kid routinely visits and/or passes by in his daily life, based on space-oriented contexts. The full set of system functionalities, including the map display, requires a graphical user interface. This location based services (LBSs) can compute the serious situations and alert kids to avoid dangerous situations. Our research can simulate the virtual environment as hyperspaces for kids safety care

title: Designing a Context-Aware System to Detect Dangerous Situations in School Routes for Kids Outdoor Safety Care
abstract: Ubiquitous computing is targeted at services and applications of computer and communication technologies in the real world. This research, as a part of UbicKids Project, is focused on designing a context-aware system that dynamically detects the possible dangerous situations in the routes where kids go to and return from schools, and provides prompt advices to kids who may encounter some dangerous situations. Based on analyses of typical dangerous situations in school routes, the paper then shows the system architecture and discusses about danger-related context information processing including context description, representation and presentation. Security and privacy issues and possible solutions are also explained. A preliminary system prototype has been implemented and some GUIs are explained. Related work is discussed with comparisons to other research work.