GRAM - a P2P system of group revision assistance management
This paper focuses on general design and prototype implementation of a peer-to-peer (P2P) and a proactive mechanism based version management system called GRAM (group revision assistance management). It provides four special features in comparison with other version management systems: higher system reliability and robustness, effective revision collision prevention using proactive agents, context-aware environment for team software revision, a unified XML format for configuration and history files as well as system and agent exchange messages. Every peer holds a shared space synchronized with other peers' ones, and a workspace for a user's ordinary editing. GRAM is implemented using the JXTA technology that consists of the virtual JXTA network and basic peer group services. The system GUI and basic functions in the current prototype are also presented to show its basic usages. By using GRAM, version management of various software development projects can be comfortably conducted.

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 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: 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: 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 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: A Web-Based Teacher Assisting Agent System
abstract: 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 user-friendly platform for developing and accessing grid services
abstract: This article presents an enhanced platform that provides a friendly environment of developing grid services and accessing grid services over Globus Toolkit 3 (GT3). This platform includes a class of functions for processing parameters input from a developer via GUI, a class of functions for generating files required for defining a grid service specified, and a class of functions for creating client program and facilitating accesses of the deployed services. As a result, the development and access of grid services requires less special expert knowledge of a developer at the server side and users at the client side, the efficiency of developing and accessing grid services can be improved. This paper describes our design ideas, necessary functions, and implementations. The comparisons with other related toolkits are given and the extended version of the platform on top of the web service environment rather than GT3.

title: A P2P groupware system with decentralized topology for supporting synchronous collaborations
abstract: Network based groupware systems are for supporting collaborations among a group of people who are engaged in a common task or goal using computers connected by a variety of networks including the Internet. A synchronous groupware system supports group members' collaborative activities at the same time. Due to the almost all of current synchronous collaborative systems have been implemented either using a centralized topology or a hybrid topology, the research presented in this paper has been devoted to investigation, design and implementation of a peer-to-peer (P2P) groupware system, called DSC, using a decentralized topology. As it does not use any server at all, peers in a group need to coordinately manage their group by themselves, and each peer has to fully handle the correct message passing by itself. The DSC system is implemented using the JXTA technology and platform that enable peers to find each other, form groups and exchange messages across firewalls and NATs. It currently offers three shared objects of Web browser, file viewer and drawing pad as well as a text chat tool. The synchronous controls of a shared space, the objects, telepointer and so on are also provided. Its evaluations with a practical test environment are given in detail.

title: The capacity of time-delay recurrent neural network for storing spatio-temporal sequences
abstract: We investigate the capacity of a type of discrete-time recurrent neural network, called time-delay recurrent neural network, for storing spatio-temporal sequences. By introducing the order of a spatio-temporal sequence, the match law between a time-delay recurrent neural network and a spatio-temporal sequence has been established. It has been proved that the full order time-delay recurrent neural network of l-step feedback is able to learn and memorize (or store) any bipolar (or binary) spatio-temporal sequence of the order k if k≤l, and that the asymptotic memory capacity of the first-order time-delay recurrent neural network of one-step feedback is not less than C1(n)=n+1, where n is the number of processing neurons in the network. Moreover, we substantiate the theoretical results by simulation experiments.

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.