Danny L. Yeh

iQueue: a pervasive data composition framework

There will soon be a huge number of data sources accessible to applications across the Internet. These include Web services, personal devices such as cellular phones and cars, and sensors measuring physical phenomena. New classes of data-composition applications can exploit this data. However, the data is diverse, voluminous, and often rapidly changing. The sources of data can be mobile, distributed, and failure-prone. Without system support, applications that use this kind of data are difficult to write. The iQueue data composition framework provides system support for data composition, thereby making the task of writing applications easier.

Intelligent pervasive middleware for context-based and localized telematics services

Telematics is arguably the next-wave in mobile computing: with most cars already equipped with multiple embedded computing platforms, we shall witness the development of a variety of mobile services and applications with significant commercial potential. Telematics will only become a commercial reality when the underlying architecture is able to address significant concerns related to the security and privacy of telematics data, and is able to provide context information from and to a large number of mobile data sources in a scalable and device-independent manner. A telematics platform should utilize existing Internet components and technologies but cannot rely exclusively on these, especially since mobile commerce applications in the telematics environment impose specific requirements on the relationships between various services and data providers. In this paper we describe how we are developing an open standards telematics platform based on the ts-PWLAN wireless service environment and the Telematics Resource Manager middleware. Our design employs existing web service interfaces coupled with novel technology for connecting to these through a wireless gateway. Our middleware acts as a common substrate for building and deploying a wide range of telematics applications. We describe how several of these applications are currently being built on our infrastructure.

A programming framework for mobilizing enterprise applications

Mobile applications often need to synchronize their data with backend servers. Synchronization semantics have typically been set at the level of backend datastores. This is a major hindrance for enterprise applications that cannot assume a uniform storage model. In this paper, we present the SodaSync framework that provides a generic synchronization model for mobile enterprise applications that use heterogeneous backend stores. SodaSync exploits a unifying higher-level data model of service data objects (SDO) and introduces a persistence and synchronization framework for the model. It allows application programmers to express data and consistency requirements in terms of the SDO model and thereby emancipates them from the replication nuances of various backend stores. We present the major features of SodaSync, its architecture, and the status of our implementation.

Outline wizard: presentation composition and search

Presentation material is a commonly-performed task. Yet current tools provide inadequate support - search tools are unable to return individual slides, and the linear model employed by presentation creation tools lacks structure and context. We propose a novel method for presentation creation, implemented in a tool called Outline Wizard, which enables outline-based composition and search. An Outline Wizard user enters a hierarchically-structured outline of a presentation; using that structure, the tool extracts user requests to formulate contextual queries, matches them against presentations within a repository, taking into account both content and structures of the presentations, and presents the user with sets of slides that are appropriate for each outline topic. At the heart of Outline Wizard is an outline-based search technique, which conducts content search within the context derived from the hierarchical structures of both user requests and presentations. We present a heuristic outline-extraction technique, which is used to reverse engineer the structures of presentations, thereby making the structures available for our search engine. Evaluations show that the outline extraction technique and outline-based search both perform well, and that users report a satisfying experience when using Outline Wizard to compose presentations from libraries of existing material.

Managed portal appliance: an experiment in extending the reach of Web applications

In the typical Web application, a client renders markup and the application or service is implemented as a set of tiered functions in the network. However, clients can contain resources useful for an application and network connections cannot always be assumed. In this paper, we consider extending the reach of a Web application to include: 1) access to and use of local client resources, and 2) operation while disconnected from the network. We, however, try to preserve desirable programming model and management characteristics of Web applications. We propose a system architecture and discuss an initial implementation using a portal as an example Web application.

IBM system G Social Media Solution: Analyze multimedia content, people, and network dynamics in context

We present IBM System G Social Media Solution, which includes a suite of applications designed for in-context monitoring, exploration, and analysis of social multimedia content as well as related people and network dynamics. Each individual application focuses on a unique aspect of social media data analysis in relevant context; collectively, they provide a comprehensive set of tools for exploring and analyzing real-time and historical social media data at large scale. The solution is empowered by a unified data management platform, based on a property graph model, to efficiently handle a large variety of social media applications.