Brad B. Topol

Automatic self-healing systems in a cross-product IT environment

This paper presents the architecture and implementation of a prototype system developed to investigate fixing real-world problems with self-healing systems. Case studies performed to evaluate the efficacy of this approach are described along with the issues encountered and lessons learned.

Taxonomy of network transcoding

Universal access to the WWW is the vision in which all information, from any source, can be accessed anywhere, by any devices, in a consistent and straightforward way. However, the existing web paradigm in which the web server defines the content delivered to the Internet client device has hindered content accessibility for pervasive and ubiquitous devices. When delivering information over the Internet to pervasive and ubiquitous devices, content providers face the considerable challenge of sending and presenting content in a way that makes it usable to resource-limited devices. Transcoding is instrumental to enabling universal access to the web for pervasive and ubiquitous computing devices. In this paper, we propose a taxonomy of transcoding techniques. The main contributions of the proposed taxonomy are (1) to provide a road map of the work accomplished to date by presenting dimensions of characteristics derived from our study of transcoding models and techniques, and (2) to help identify unsolved problems that exist in the domain today. Based on the proposed taxonomy, we have analyzed several existing commercially available systems, and investigated possible future improvements on these technologies.

Distributed application service for Internet information portal

As Internet information portals become prevalent for both Internet and Intranet, most existing Internet Application Server architectures are not scalable to support the large amount of personalization, customization and content adaptation required. We propose a framework to capture the information and content dissemination process. Furthermore, we propose a methodology to map this process to a distributed application server environment. By fully exploiting the intersections of user preference at multiple content processing stages, this new framework enables high hit ratio on processing, storage, and transmission of content and thus scales well to support a large number of clients.