Ali Sabbir

Black Box: An emergency rescue dispatch system for road vehicles for instant notification of road accidents and post crash analysis

Our research has been targeted towards building an integrated system for emergency rescue services in the event of a road accident. The project focuses on building an infrastructure which vehicle safety authorities can implement to enhance the reporting of vehicle crashes, provide post-crash analysis using motion sensors, record of the event in images and reduce the time it takes for emergency rescue to arrive at the crash location. We have achieved this using existing cellular network infrastructure already in place and also using GPS to pinpoint the exact location of the crash and send that data to an emergency rescue authority (such as Hospital, Fire Department, Police) using GSM text service. Our target was to build a low cost device that everyone can afford and use in their vehicles.

Adapting distributed voting algorithms for secure real-time embedded systems

Information assurance in real-time application settings requires dealing with extreme failure behaviors at the infrastructure level such as data corruptions by malicious processes and message timeliness violations in the network. Functional replication is employed to deal with such failures, with voting among the replica nodes to move correct pieces of data through the application-level subsystems. The goal is to develop a voting machinery that dynamically adjusts its internal mechanisms to deal with various types of failures. We present the design issues, with considerations of protocol correctness and performance engineering. A goal is to reduce the message overhead - and hence the power drain on wireless connected processes. The protocol is highly adaptive to deal with various types of failures occurring at the infrastructure level, in meeting the goal.

Performance engineering of replica voting protocols for high assurance data collection systems

Real-time data collection in a distributed embedded system requires dealing with failures such as data corruptions by malicious devices and arbitrary message delays in the network. Replication of data collection devices is employed to deal with such failures, with voting among the replica devices to move a correct data to the end-user. Here, the data being voted upon can be large-sized and/or take long time to be compiled (such as images in a terrain surveillance system and transaction histories in an intrusion detection system). The goal of our paper is to engineer the voting protocols to achieve good performance while meeting the reliability requirements of data delivery in a high assurance setting. The performance metrics are the data transfer efficiency (DTE) and the time-to-complete a data delivery (TTC). DTE captures the network bandwidth wasted and/or the energy drain in wireless-connected devices; whereas, TTC depicts the degradation in user-level QoS due to delayed and/or missed data deliveries. So, improving both DTE and TTC is a goal of our performance engineering exercise. Our protocol-level optimizations focus on reducing: i) the movement of user-level data between voters, ii) the number of voting actions/messages generated, and iii) the latency caused by the voting itself. The paper describes these optimizations, along with the experimental results from a prototype voting system.

Bridging Digital Divide: ‘Village wireless LAN’, a low cost network infrastructure solution for digital communication, information dissemination & education in rural Bangladesh

Our research targets the lack of ICT infrastructure in rural areas of Bangladesh. The research has the project to build a solar powered, low cost, fully fledged computer server from off-the-shelf components which will act as a network infrastructure for data collection, sharing and network distribution in rural areas of Bangladesh, even where electricity consistency is an issue. It is designed to create a Wi-Fi (2.4GHz) based network around the deployed area effectively creating a High Speed Local Area Network and provide ICT based services such as File Sharing, Instant Messaging, E-Education, Form Submission and a platform for any other on demand web & database services that are required by the community. The research is dedicated to bridging the Digital Divide. The objectives includes (i) building a low cost server using off-the-shelf, low cost hardware and open source software (ii) Provide a high speed data communications network effectively creating a Local Area Network (iii) Run the entire system on an incredibly low power requirement of 3.5 Watts. (iv) Provide a service layer for web services which supports Ajax, php5, MySQL (v) Deploy open source web services for data exchange and communication (vi) provide a system that has low & quick maintenance capabilities, (vii) and finally allow optional cellular (3G) data connectivity to allow the people to have shared internet access.

Engineering of replica voting protocols for energy-efficiency in data delivery

This paper describes the engineering of replica voting protocols for energy-efficiency in data delivery. The protocols employ 2-phase voting among replica processes to move a correct data from the external environment to the end-user(s) in a secure real-time application setting. The replicas may be wireless computation nodes deployed in a power-constrained environment. The cross-layer optimization techniques is employed to reduce the amount of network message exchanges and device processing cycles expended for data delivery to the user. This optimization can in turn reduce the battery energy consumption of wireless devices that participate in the voting protocol. Cross-layer design of a replica-based voting protocol is considered for deployment over IEEE- 802.11 networks. Furthermore, though the paper focused on replica voting as the application, the optimization techniques are useful in other application domains

Concurrency control frameworks for interactive sharing of data spaces in real-time distributed collaborations

The multimedia information exchanges in distributed collaborative applications may be modeled, from communication system perspective, as the flow of media messages between user entities, to provide access to shared window objects on workstations. An example of shared window is a design document interactively reviewed by a team of engineers over a discussion session. A key requirement is that all users should see the same local copy of a shared window object at any given point in time (WYSIWIS), even though these users may reside in different workstations interconnected over a network. In this paper, we study the temporal ordering of real-time persistent messages as the basis for achieving WYSIWIS. The approach requires specifying the synchronization constraints on accessing shared window objects in the form of state-transition relations and timeliness needs when processing messages for object state updates. Non-conflicting actions can be processed in any sequence by user entities, thereby increasing overall system-level performance and user-level efficacy. The paper describes the salient features of our concurrency control model, and then identifies the basic protocol elements to realize the model. Applications are also described to demonstrate the viability of our approach.

Adaptive Voting Algorithms for Reliable Dissemintation of Data in Sensor Networks

A real-time data collection system in sensor network settings requires dealing with failures in the network and in the external environment: such as data corruptions by malicious devices and message timeliness violations in the network. Functional replication is employed to deal with such failures, with voting among the replica devices to move a correct data to the end-user. The goal of our paper is to develop a voting system that dynamically adapts its internal mechanisms to deal with various types of failures. The paper presents the design issues, with considerations of protocol correctness and performance. A goal is to reduce the message overhead - and hence the power drain on wireless connected sensor devices.

Devising a strategy for playing Bangla Hangman (Jhulonto Manob) based on character frequency distribution

In this paper we created an optimal playing strategy for the Bengali (Bangla) Hangman word game which we named Jhulonto Manob. We demonstrated three possible strategies to play Jhulonto Manob. The first strategy tries the most frequent character in the dictionary first and correspondingly moves down the list whereas the second strategy proposed guesses most frequent character in the dictionary of words of length n, where n is the length of the hidden word. But, the optimal strategy states that when a character is guessed incorrectly we should take that information into account and recalculate the frequency distribution on a filtered dictionary where words are of length n and those words does not contain the character(s) which resulted in an incorrect guess. This filtration radically decreases the search space and therefore increases the chance of winning. In the process, interesting statistical data in Bangla words are also revealed.

Grid/cloud-based e-Governance of higher education institutes and perception thereof: Bangladesh perspective

The strategic objective of e-Governance is to support and simplify governance for Government, People and Businesses. With immergence of technology and growing demand of the society, if appropriately applied, Higher Education Institutes (HEIs) can also leverage the benefit of e-Governance by collaborative resource sharing and service-usage through grid and cloud computing. The underlying goals for adopting e-Governance practices are to ensure improved quality in disseminating education and administration; establish dynamic and need-based communication with various internal, external and peer entities; and conforming to regulations. Grid and cloud can be two candidate frameworks for HEIs governance, which will potentially lower the cost of governance solutions and provide better services. In this paper, the authors propose grid and cloud based e-Governance frameworks for Bangladeshi HEIs. Also a survey is conducted to find perception of various stakeholders about grid and cloud based e-Governance.

Managing shared contexts in distributed multi-player game systems

In this paper, we consider the impact of a weaker model of eventual consistency on distributed multi-player games. This model is suitable for networks in which hosts can leave and join at anytime, e.g., in an intermittently connected environment. Such a consistency model is provided by the Secure Infrastructure for Networked Systems (SINS) [24], a reliable middleware framework. SINS allows agents to communicate asynchronously through a distributed transactional key-value store using anonymous publish-subscribe. It uses Lamports Paxos protocol [17] to replicate state. We consider a multi-player maze game as example to illustrate our consistency model and the impact of network losses/delays therein. The framework based on SINS presented herein provides a vehicle for studying the effect of human elements participating in collaborative simulation of a physical world as in war games.