CS2310 Seminars and Term Project
The seminars and term project are closely related to
the theoretical study and experimental development of
a multimedia software engineering framework for
distributed time-critical applications on the web.
The seminars are intended to study and understand
other researchers' approaches. The term project
provides an opportunity for us to mannually apply
the approach described in my classnotes (and my online book) to a real problem. The term project
will lead to mockup or prototype, but the real implementation
will be for subsequent study.
Interested students may continue with me to pursue this topic, which
will lead to papers (usually jointly written by
several students and me) and MS projects and eventually
PhD research topics and doctoral dissertation.
Seminar Suggestions
As mentioned above, the topic we are interested in is how to develop distributed
time-critical applications utilizing both inhouse web services
as well as commercially available web services.
In the industry circle you hear a lot about
SOA (service oriented architecture) these days.
I recently invited Steve Mahoney of CEI to talk about
SOA. His online lecture notes can be a good
starting point for you.
You can search the web and google on SOA to report
on the industry practice related to SOA and multimedia software engineering.
Obviously not only industry people are interested in SOA, but also
academic people who are jumping in to formalize web service
frameworks. You can study Pahl's paper,
An Ontological Framework for Web Service
Processes, and give a seminar on this paper.
Or you can follow the references mentioned in Pahl's
paper to study other related papers.
(I like Pahl's paper because I strongly suspect I can
map his abstractions into my active index model.)
Once you selected a topic, either practical or theoretical, let me know.
You can also pick a topic on your own, and run by me for
approval. If the topic is too trivial, or on some technology
that has already passed its peak, I will let you know.
Term Project
Term project will be a group effort. We will explore
the following, or related, scenarios of a real application.
An Application Scenario of Just-in-Time e-Learning
An end user John needs to repair an instrument.
The specific situation of this repair job is captured by various sensors. John places queries to
find more information about this instrument. Sensor-based query processing locates the relevant
repair manuals, which can be made available through the virtual classroom.
John knows he cannot repair the instrument by himself. Therefore John accesses the Chronobot Bid
Manager to post a repair job. The sensors monitoring this instrument will feed data continuously to
the job posting, so that the job posting actually contains a lot of detailed information not ordinarily
available on a job posting. Relational mining discovers the persons with experience in repairing this
type of instrument, and they are prompted to respond.
Another user Keith accesses the Chronobot Bid Manager web service and identifies himself as a repair
serviceman. He browses through the list of all the bids that he has placed for multiple jobs postings.
There are two messages that inform him that two of his bids were accepted. He is interested to find out more
about these jobs. Keith is able to access the readings from the sensors so that he has a clear
picture about the instrument and what he can do.
After the bidding, negotiation is carried out to bring the two sides to an agreement. Once the deal is
agreed upon, John can proceed to repair the instrument on site with the on-line help from Keith. Since the
two persons share the same information supplied continuously by the sensors, they will have a clear common
understanding of the problem, and John learn quickly from Keith to repair the instrument.
Discussion
The above scenario of JIT learning can readily be translated into similar scenarios according
to the context - a senior citizen on-site can be assisted by a nurse on-line to give himself an
injection; a physician on-site can be aided by a surgeon on-line to perform a surgical operation;
and so on. By virtue of multicast and anycast routing protocols, sensors are able to feed data continuously to
multiple nodes in the network, so that multimedia information fusion is possible to answer queries
and to process bids through the chronobot.
By tightening or loosening parametric values specifying the time constraints, the JIT
scenarios can cover a wide spectrum of situations, ranging
from distaster managment with extremely strict timing constraints
to assistive learning with more relaxed timing constraints.
Term Project
The term project follows the multimedia software engineering
methodology to create a prototype for the JIT e-learning
application scenario.
This is a team project, where each student takes
on a part of the project and leads discussion in the class.
Time Critical Applications
An example is as follows.
A time-critical input message will have a time parameter Tc.
Let the system clock be Ts.
If Ts < Tc then the index cell is not triggered.
If Tc+Tnormal > Ts > Tc then send nurse
(The output message is also a time-critical
message with time parameter Tc' that is
computed from Tc and Tnormal, i.e., Tc' = f(Tc, Tnormal).
For example, Tc' = Tc+Tnormal.)
If Tc+Talarm > Ts > Tc+Tnormal, i.e., Tc
is within an alarm threshold Talarm, then
an alarm message is sent to request the nurse(s) to respond immediately.
We will discuss how to incorporate time critical specification
into (1) scenarios, (2) IC cards, and (3) Active index.
IC Cards
First describe the JIT application scenario (stories) using visual patterns such as IC cards.
Patterns
Next expand the IC cards into formal patterns, which are relational graphs.
Specification
Then transform the IC cards into the IC structure.
Implementation
Finally based upon the IC structure
implement a prototype (or a mock-up) where some of the
components are implemented in-house and others
are existing web services.