• SUN Microsystems, Inc.Intelligent visualization and analysis of traffic data on the Sun platform for transportation government agencies
  $40,000 (Jan. 2008 - Dec. 2008)
  Cheng-Tien Lu and Ing-Ray Chen
• DoD
  3D Interfaces for Improved Interpretation of Hard-To-Discriminate Ballistic Objects
  $225,000 (Sept. 2006 - May 2008)
  Cheng-Tien Lu and Ing-Ray Chen
• DoD
  Advanced Interactive C2 Knowledge Mining and Visualization Systems
  $30K (April 2006 - Oct. 2006)
  Cheng-Tien Lu and Ing-Ray Chen
• National Institutes of Health (NIH): Building Web Services Infrastructure for Senior Citizens
  Web service middleware to provide services to senior citizens
  $205,000 (Jan. 2004 - Jan. 2006)
  Athman Bouguettaya, Denis Gracanin
• National Science Foundation (NSF): Digital Government
  Database Middleware for Distributed Ontologies in State and Federal Family & Social Services
  Athman Bouguettaya
• NSF Integrated Research and Education in Advanced Networking
  Integrated Research and Education in Advanced Networking (IREAN)
  $2.55M (August 2000 - July 2005)
  Scott Midkiff, Ing-Ray Chen, etc.
• NetRoster
  Efficient and Scalable Localized Search Engine
  $20K (Jan. 2005 - July 2005)
  Ing-Ray Chen and Cheng-Tien Lu
• Intel Wireless Curriculum Development
  An Integrated Laboratory Course in Wireless and Mobile Systems Design
  $290K (Aug. 2002 - Dec. 2004)
  Scott Midkiff, Ing-Ray Chen, and Luiz DaSilva
• Microsoft Research
  Wireless Ad Hoc Messenger
  $36,550 (Jan. 2002 - Dec. 2003)
  Ing-Ray Chen, Denis Gracanin, Shawn A Bohner, Scott Midkiff (EcE), Luiz DaSilva (EcE)
• Intoka
  Modeling and Evaluation of Networked Enterprise Systems
  $30,000 (Jan. 2001 - Jun. 2002)
  Ing-Ray Chen
• Hewlett-Packard (HP): Equipment Grant
  Building E-Services Using E-speak
  Athman Bouguettaya
• USENIX Scholars scholarship
  Athman Bouguettaya (Faculty), Mourad Ouzzani (Ph.D. student)
• SUN: Equipment Grant
  Design of Web-based Virtual Enterprises
  Athman Bouguettaya
• Virginia Tobacco Settlement Foundation
  Csaba Egyhazy
  

• Northern Virginia Regional Partnership
  Internet Software Development Program
  $118,800 (July 1, 2001 - May 31, 2002)
  Laura Fornash (Cont. Ed.), Denis Gracanin
  
• INTEL Corporation
  Wireless Curriculum Development: An Integrated Laboratory Course in "Wireless and Mobile Systems Design"
  $240,000
  Scott Midkiff (EcE), Ing-Ray Chen, Luiz DaSilva (EcE)
  

Intelligent visualization and analysis of traffic data on the Sun platform for transportation government agencies

3D Interfaces for Improved Interpretation of Hard-To-Discriminate Ballistic Objects

In our knowledge-based society collaboration environments are a key Knowledge Management trend. In implementing this trend, the critical step is to capture the collaboration that surrounds visual information used in decision-making. The project will develop distributed data visualization techniques to support collaborative decision-making. Specifically, it will implement a library of client-user intelligent visualization components that link together displays of information exploitation results (e.g., threats and their predicated behaviors) with a type of "look-ahead" interactive visualization of impacted assets, available sensors and weapons. In its first instantiation, the system will contribute to the development of discrimination and weapon engagement mockup of Battle Management Crew Station system. The technological novelty is in the distributed aspect of visualization and in the incorporation of a mechanism for the synergistic organization of distributed visual components to support dynamic and linked depictions (e.g., "next-step" and "what-if") in order to rapidly guide the crew to the optimal and shortest threat engagement course of action.

Advanced Interactive C2 Knowledge Mining and Visualization System

Amongst the most challenging technological tasks confronting the U.S. missile-defense program is the development of an integrated, high-performing and high-usability Command & Control Information System. The main goal of a C2 information system is to provide military operators tools that enable them to quickly and accurately filter and decipher massive amounts of battlespace data. Therefore, it is crucial that the C2 information system provide automatic mining operations and highly usable graphic interfaces to present actionable information to its military operators. This effort will propose the development of state-of-art techniques utilizing knowledge representation, advanced data mining and visualization technology for maximizing the utilization of heterogeneous data collected from distributed BMDS sensors. This project will design and integrate a general ontology for knowledge representation of objects, events and activities; an efficient and real-time interpretation technique; a novel data mining approach specially tailored for the knowledge base; and an interactive visualization for C2 operational decision makers.

NIH Building Web Services Infrastructure for Senior Citizens

The healthcare needs of senior citizens are expected to surge as baby-boomers start retiring. As a result, this trend will put tremendous stress on the already stretched and cost spiraling healthcare systems. Of special interest in this project is senior citizens healthcare. Senior citizens are challenged in ways fundamentally different from the general population. Receiving services in a convenient way is not a matter of choice for them, but of necessity. Failing health accompanied with limited mobility may force senior citizens into unhealthy choices. Recent advances in Web standards and technologies offer a cost effective leverage to maintain and use large healthcare information systems. New studies suggest that senior citizens are now the fastest growing group of World Wide Web users. This pilot project, a collaborative effort between Virginia Tech and the Virginia Department for the Aging (VDA), focuses on the development of a Web service middleware infrastructure. The infrastructure will enable the seamless interoperation of the VDA's autonomous information systems based on new Web service standards. Web services are modular, XML-based software components that can be discovered, accessed, and composed using widely accepted industry standards. The proposed middleware will enable senior citizens to request and receive services using a one stop shop interface. A graphical user interface that adapts to the limited abilities of senior citizens is proposed to be designed as a Web service providing a homogeneous design framework. The protection of senior citizens privacy is paramount. Agent-based techniques congruent with Web services is proposed to enforce privacy protection. The proposed pilot project will demonstrate the feasibility of using a Web service middleware for the purpose of providing convenient, effective, and customized services to senior citizens. Web services on the Web are poised to play the same role as data has played in database management systems. Two sites, Virginia Tech and VDA, will be used for the deployment of the Web Service middleware prototype. The deliverable is the proof of concept. Three specific research issues will be investigated in this project: (1) dynamic Web service composition, and (2) privacy preservation, and (3) adaptive presentation. The prototype will be evaluated and tested by a focus group of senior citizens selected by VDA and staff members at Virginia Tech.

NSF Digital Government Grant

With the advent of the Web, the globalization of world economies, and the high expectation generated to what users and citizens should expect in terms of quality of service, any information is expected to be readily accessible from the Web. Unfortunately, when it comes to databases, solutions are not yet available to make these information sources Web-friendly. We define Web-friendliness as the ability to access and integrate data from web-accessible databases in full transparency, in the same manner Web pages are now accessed and used. In the database jargon, the technical term is called database interoperability.

The ever expanding reliance on computers has meant a greater dependence on databases to manage critical data for the everyday business. For instance, government agencies use a plethora of databases to manage and provide services and resources under their jurisdiction. The quality and cost-effectiveness of government services could tremendously be improved if techniques are available to access government and non-government databases in a seamless fashion. The WWW offers a unique opportunity for the development of Web-based database techniques to seamlessly interoperate islands of autonomous and heterogeneous databases to cater for the needs of the people.

In case of a large network of autonomous and heterogeneous databases as those potentially accessible from the Web, a meaningful organization and segmentation of databases would have to be based on simple ontologies that describe coherent slices of the information space. These distributed ontologies would filter interactions, accelerate information searches, and allow for the sharing of data in a tractable manner. We propose the use of distributed ontologies of information repositories that get established through a distributed domain ontologies. This meta-information would represent the domain of interest of the underlying information repositories. For example, collections of databases that store information about the same topic are grouped together. Individual databases join and leave the formed ontologies at their own discretion. Ontology (inter-ontology relationships) formation and maintenance, would occur via a special-purpose language.

We propose to investigate the design and implementation of distributed ontologies in the context of Web-accessible databases. Middleware support will be investigated. The overall objective is to provide a Web-based infrastructure to transparently access all potentially accessible databases where each database would be presented to the user as one homogeneous element of a much larger database, that we call the World Wide Database (WWD). We identify three major tasks in this project: Query Infrastructure for the WWD, Agent Middleware Support for the WWD, and Dynamic Inter-Ontology Relationships Support for the WWD. Database administrators and users will use one single query language to transparently manage data and meta-data. This is of great importance as a major bottleneck in managing government data has been the wide variety of interfaces users and case officers had to be exposed to, to get and provide services. Users of the proposed system will be able to discover and integrate data drawn from dissimilar databases using one single interface and remain unaware of the heterogeneity and autonomy aspects of the underlying databases. This transparent access to databases on the Web will eventually enable the use of all Web-accessible databases as one single monolithic, though flexible, database containing everything recorded.

Government welfare and social services will be used as a case study and proof of concept of the proposed techniques. Indeed, this type of government agencies typically consists of dozens of autonomous departments providing services to needy and indigent citizens. In many cases, as we learned, the process is inefficient and costly to both the agency and citizens. One of the major problems facing this agency is the use of multiple, isolated, heterogeneous, and possibly autonomous information systems that are hard to interoperate. The Virginia Tech and Purdue Univ. researchers have teamed up with state and federal agencies namely, the Indiana Family and Social Services Administration (FSSA), the Indiana Department of Workforce Development (DWD), and the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), to help them move their database management technology to a level where the HHS, FSSA, DWD, and citizens receiving services, would be served effectively and efficiently.

NSF IGERT Grant

There is a critical shortage of Ph.D. graduates in the networking area and current Ph.D. graduates often lack pragmatic technical expertise and other skills necessary to contribute effectively to the development and use of advanced networks. This unique program will allow Ph.D. students in five degree programs, computer engineering, electrical engineering, computer science, industrial and systems engineering, and business, to work with technology developers and advanced users from industry and government on cutting-edge multidisciplinary research problems. The steady-state enrollment will be at least 19 students, with five to six U.S. Ph.D. graduates per year. We will leverage existing university investments and programs to create this state-of-the-art distributed graduate education and research training program at Virginia Tech's new Alexandria Research Institute and main campus in Blacksburg. The Alexandria location, in the heart of the booming telecommunications and networking industry around metropolitan Washington, DC, provides access to industrial and government partners and a foundation in multidisciplinary and international programs. The Blacksburg location provides access to the university's traditional research strengths and advanced networking infrastructure. Teams of students, faculty, and external collaborators will undertake research targeted at realizing a vision of the future Internet as the common, ubiquitous and global communications infrastructure. The program will integrate research on broadband wireless access, mobile access to Internet resources and applications, Internet appliances, quality of service, heterogeneous network security, and management of large-scale networks. Industrial and government partners will provide guidance through an External Advisory Board, present seminars on technical and business issues, host interns, and participate in collaborative research. Existing university programs and organizations will be engaged through an Internal Advisory Board.

Microsoft Research, Wireless Ad Hoc Messenger

This project aims at the development of a system that enables users to chat with one another in a wireless ad hoc environment using Pocket PCs without the need for any pre-existing wireless LAN or WAN infrastructure. Whenever a user with a Pocket PC walks into the ad hoc environment, a "buddy" list similar to that in MSN Messenger's Instant Messaging pops > up and the user can chat online with his/her buddies in the infrastructure-less ad hoc network. The product will be based on Bluetooth/IEEE 802.11 and Microsoft's Pocket PC P2P with embedded Visual Basic and ViaXML technologies in an indoor setting that supports frequent mobility and power on-off behaviors of users.

Intoka, Modeling and Evaluation of Networked Enterprise Systems

This project involves the use of Java and XML for defining, generating, parameterizing (giving values to model parameters) and solving queueing network models (QNMs). The goal of the project is to design and implement generic software modules comprising a network analyzer that would allow a network administrator to specify the interconnection topology of network components (switches, hubs, servers, client stations, etc) and to analyze the performance of the network by means of QNMs. XML is used as the core technology to do data exchange among software modules to be developed in the project.

HP Equipment Grant

Cheap connectivity and ease of advertising of e-services on the Web created tremendous opportunities for organizations of any size to diversify their customer-base and become truly global. By e-service, we refer to a semantically well defined functionality that allows users to access and perform tasks offered by a business application. Examples of e-services include electronic catalogs, order procurement, customer relationship management, finance, accounting, human resources, supply chain and manufacturing. The availability of diverse e-services on the Web has built very high expectations for flexible and efficient sharing of services. There are signs of this phenomenon even today in many web-based applications such as electronic catalogs, digital libraries, Web-based value chain networks, Web-based healthcare systems, just to mention a few. A flexible and efficient e-service sharing is a major step into leveraging the Web to empower users worldwide. This will enable organizations to adapt their business practices to the highly volatile and dynamic nature of the Web. In particular, it will make the concept of virtual enterprise, a conglomerate of core and outsourced e-services, a reality.

Now that the Web has made services readily accessible, the challenge is to automatically compose services to provide more complex ones. However, there has been little success with effective sharing of these services. Indeed, the development of integrated e-services is still ad-hoc, time-consuming and requires enormous effort of low-level programming. This task is obviously tedious and hardly scalable because the service space is large, distributed, heterogeneous, volatile, and highly dynamic. This problem is aggravated by the added degree of dynamism, unpredictability, and distribution of the Web. Existing techniques such as EDI, component-based E-commerce systems (e.g., integrated electronic catalogs and cross-organizational workflows) are usually appropriate to integrate small number of e-services with static relationships. However, they are ineffective in large and highly dynamic environments. For example, the cost of setting up a new business relationship is usually very high. Database research has undeniably made large strides towards sharing data on the Web. There is a need for database researchers to think "out of the box" to address the e-services challenges. E-service support differs from structured data support in at least two ways. First, an e-service usually provides a pre-defined interface to access and perform tasks offered by applications (e.g., Java programs, CORBA servers) including those implemented on top of databases (e.g., CGI scripts). In contrast, a database provides an SQL-like language to access and query data. Second, an e-service usually requires a sequence of operations and multiple interactions to fulfill a task. Interactions with databases in contrast involve more primitive operations (i.e., send query/get results).

HP's e-speak has been developed to address some of the fundamental issues facing the deployment of e-services. Its open architecture and strong backing from HP provides a strong impetus for it to be tomorrow's standard for e-services deployment over the Web. Much work needs to be done to mature the e-speak. The main goal of this project is to enhance the fundamental understanding of how to efficiently and effectively share and create Web-accessible e-services. This involves providing high-level modeling constructs to describe services, to search for services and to (dynamically) compose new services from available services. This project will build on top of HP's e-speak open systems. The PIs drawing from their respective universities' strong teaching and research experience, will each be developing a graduate level course on web-based middleware. We expect that each course will draw a large number of students (40 or more graduate students). The students will first learn the fundamental features of the e-speak architecture. Semester long students projects will be used to allow students to develop needed expertise with e-speak on the one hand, and complement it with language and composition protocols, on the other hand. A course is concurrently being developed at Virginia Tech that centers around the use of e-speak in the classroom. We require the use of 1 graduate assistant for the development of the course developed at Virginia Tech. We expect to finalize the course development including all on-line materials in one year. We expect that by project's end, we will have a complete set of documents on-line for other universities to use for their own course development.

USENIX Scholars scholarship

Summary:

Mr. Ouzzani's contribution centers around the definition, design, and implementation of query optimization techniques in Web accessible database environments. He is proposing a stratified view of Quality of Service (QoS) for databases, including system based query optimization. In the proposed approach, Web accessible databases are organized in communities based on the information that they store. Each community is defined by an ontology. The potential of this work has far-reaching implications for Web-based emerging applications, i.e., it could pave the way for building advanced Web-based applications like Virtual Enterprises (VE) and the integration of Web-based Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and Customer Relationship Management (CRM).

SUN Equipment Grant

We propose to investigate a Web/Internet-centric architecture, which supports the creation, administration, and evolution of Web-based Virtual Enterprises (VEs). The concept of VE is slowly taking root in business circles as an alternative to traditional enterprises. What is lacking is a model that is congruent with the Web and its users. Materializing VEs is a major step into leveraging the Web to empower users worldwide. In a nutshell, a VE is a conglomeration of Web-based software components working in tandem to achieve the business goals of the enterprise. Our proposal centers on using databases (for efficient storage), workflows (for regulating VEs' interactions), brokers (managers of information expertise), and Web techniques (information discovery, retrieval and disseminate) to freely outsource commercially available Web-based software components to create and manage VEs. We will explore an architecture that will facilitate business-to-business and business-to-customer interactions in a seamless fashion. The approach will heavily rely on Web/Internet Databases to provide the information-base for conducting business on the Internet.

Virginia Tobacco Settlement Foundation

Working closely with the University of Virginia in the Phase I objectives of the Virginia Tobacco Initiative for Biologic Discovery and Digital Education.

Northern Virginia Regional Partnership

This grant provides a training program that will enable participant to acquire advanced Internet software development skills. The training is structured to match the needs of the rapidly changing information technology industry. Distance and on-line learning capabilities and expertise will be used in combination with the more traditional classroom/laboratory settings to introduce participants to web-based learning and prepare them for life-long learning. The training activities will be used for the evaluation of learning methodologies and as a basis for research in information technology education.

Intel Corporation

This project will develop a new multidisciplinary, upper-division undergraduate/first-year graduate laboratory course "Wireless and Mobile Systems Design" for computer science, computer engineering, and electrical engineering students. The course will take a system perspective, with students characterizing the wireless physical and multiple access control layers (e.g., assessing IEEE 802.11b, IEEE 802.11a, and Bluetooth performance under various conditions), extending protocols at the network and transport layer (e.g., enhancing TCP to improve performance over wireless links), and developing mobile applications using middleware software such as Intel's PCA Microsoft's .NET CF and Sun's J2ME (e.g., realizing a simple mobile messenger system). Deliverables are a new course and teaching lab, including lecture material, case studies, and laboratory projects, and dissemination of course material to the academic community.