Anthony J. Wiley

Breaking open the set top box

In this paper we describe the work being done at HP Labs Bristol in the area of home networks and gateways. This work is based on the idea of breaking open the set top box by physically separating the access network specific functions from the application specific functions. The access network specific functions reside in an access network gateway that can be shared by many end user devices. The first section of the paper present the philosophy behind this approach. The end user devices and the access network gateways must be interconnected by a high bandwidth network which can offer a bounded delay service for delay sensitive traffic. We are advocating the use of IEEE 1394 for this network, and the next section of the paper gives a brief introduction to this technology. We then describe a prototype digital video broadcasting satellite compliant gateway that we have built. This gateway could be used, for example, by a PC for receiving a data service or by a digital TV for receiving an MPEG-2 video service. A control architecture is the presented which uses a PC application to provide a web based user interface to the system. Finally, we provide details of our work on extending the reach of IEEE 1394 and its standardization status.

Aesthetic measure of alignment and regularity

To be effective as communications or sales tools, documents that are personalized and customized for each customer must be visually appealing and aesthetically pleasing. Producing perhaps millions of unique versions of essentially the same document not only presents challenges to the printing process but also disrupts the standard quality control procedures. The quality of the alignment in each document can easily distinguish professionally looking documents from amateur designs and some computer generated layouts. A multicomponent measure of document alignment and regularity, derived directly from designer knowledge, is developed and presented in computable form. The measure includes: edge quality, page connectivity, grid regularity and alignment statistics. It is clear that these components may have different levels of importance, relevance and acceptability for various document types and classes, thus the proposed measure should always be evaluated against the requirements of the desired class of documents.

Aesthetically-driven layout engine

A novel Aesthetically-Driven Layout (ADL) engine for automatic production of highly customized, non-flow documents is proposed. In a non-flow document, where each page is composed of separable images and text blocks, aesthetic considerations may take precedence over the sequencing of the content. Such layout methods are most suitable for the construction of personalized catalogues, advertising flyers and sales and marketing material, all of which rely heavily on their aesthetics in order to successfully reach their intended audience. The non-flow algorithm described here permits the dynamic creation of page layouts around pre-existing static page content. Pages pre-populated with static content may include reserved areas which are filled at run-time. The remainder of a page, which is neither convex, nor simply-connected, is automatically filled with customer-relevant content by following the professional manual design strategy of multiple levels of layout resolution. The page designers preference, style and aesthetic rules are taken into account at every stage with the highest scoring layout being selected.

Web-intrinsic interactive documents

Modern interactive documents are complex applications that give the user the editing experience of editing a document as it will look in its final visual form. Sections of the document can be either editable, or read-only, and can dynamically conform artifacts like images to specific users. The components underlying interactive documents are dynamically bound variables and a complex rule engine for adapting the document as the user edits. Web interactive documents deliver the dynamic editing experience through the web by using a web browser for deploying the editor. Document editors built-in the web browser as a native application provide a higher quality editing experience because the editors look and feel is consistent with the web browsers innate controls and navigation. The majority of traditional interactive documents have been developed using proprietary formats which are not compatible with todays web browser implementations because they were originally intended as desk-top applications. As a consequence, traditional interactive documents are not inherently web applications. This talk will provide an overview of the technical challenges faced in developing a web-intrinsic interactive document solution that simultaneously addresses the need for simple, yet rich, user editing features combined with the scalability, and ease of deployment, demanded by enterprises today. By way of example, I will introduce, and demonstrate, a new interactive document representation and deployment model. A prerequisite for such representations is that they enable documents to account for traditional document roles and still behave as intrinsic web content for document interaction. Another is that they are also able to support conventional enterprise workflows and complex processes, e.g. approvals, audit, versioning, storage and archival.

HP relate: a customer communication system for the SMB market

Enterprise businesses rely on variable data publishing solutions to produce customer communications, such as letters, statements, and financial reports, which are tailored to individual recipients. Until now, however, such customer communications systems were out of the reach of the small and medium business (SMB) market for several reasons. In order to produce enterprise-quality documents, businesses needed employees with advanced skills in document design and automated document composition. In addition, customized documents typically require scripted business logic and complicated data integration. To achieve this level of document composition and delivery would require the SMB user to have access to IT systems and staffing that would be prohibitively expensive. HP Relate is an innovative document design system that delivers enterprise-quality documents for a next-generation customer communication system for the SMB market. HP Relate features easy-to-use document design tools that require no more than self-assisted training. Document business logic and data integration is accessible to SMB users through common office tools, such as dragging and dropping and spreadsheets. Instead of requiring software installed on the users system, HP Relate is provisioned on a cloud-based platform using a software as a service (SaaS) subscription-based model. In addition, the HP Relate platform enables SMBs to deliver documents in the format of a customers choosing, including traditional print forms, web-based deployment, and mobile devices.

Applying security to SMDS: a practical example

The need for secure data exchange within the public Switched Multimegabit Data Service (SMDS) environment is addressed by applying the IEEE 802.10 Secure Data Exchange (SDE) protocol. A result of this study has been the implementation of an efficient protection mechanism for information transfer over the public SMDS network, providing security against unauthorized disclosure, data modification, masquerading attacks, and unauthorized access to resources. A security and key management system, consisting of applications and protocols, has also been provided. This has been used for configuring security system attributes such as cryptographic keys, session keys, and security flags, and for the supervision of the SDE protocol and the maintenance of local secure management information bases.<<ETX>>