Guruduth Banavar

Smarter Cities and Their Innovation Challenges

The transformation to smarter cities will require innovation in planning, management, and operations. Several ongoing projects around the world illustrate the opportunities and challenges of this transformation. Cities must get smarter to address an array of emerging urbanization challenges, and as the projects highlighted in this article show, several distinct paths are available. The number of cities worldwide pursuing smarter transformation is growing rapidly. However, these efforts face many political, socioeconomic, and technical hurdles. Changing the status quo is always difficult for city administrators, and smarter city initiatives often require extensive coordination, sponsorship, and support across multiple functional silos. The need to visibly demonstrate a continuous return on investment also presents a challenge. The technical obstacles will center on achieving system interoperability, ensuring security and privacy, accommodating a proliferation of sensors and devices, and adopting a new closed-loop human-computer interaction paradigm.

Challenges: an application model for pervasive computing

The way mobile computing devices and applications are developed, deployed and used today does not meet the expectations of the user community and falls far short of the potential for pervasive computing. This paper challenges the mobile computing community by questioning the roles of devices, applications, and a users environment. A vision of pervasive computing is described, along with attributes of a new application model that supports this vision, and a set of challenges that must be met in order to bring the vision to reality.

Exploiting IP multicast in content-based publish-subscribe systems

Publish-subscribe systems are evolving toward using content-based subscription rather than subject-based subscription. A key problem in implementing such systems is that a straightforward mapping from matching sets to multicast groups produces a number of groups that rapidly grows beyond practical limits. This paper proposes a set of alternative algorithms for solving this problem, by: (1) using a smaller set of overbroad multicast groups, judiciously chosen to minimize imprecision; (2) issuing multiple multicasts to appropriately chosen clusters; or (3) sending an event over multiple hops each involving a multicast to a set of neighbors. We evaluate these algorithms on a simulated wide-area network. We find that (1) a simple flooding algorithm is viable over an extensive range of conditions; and (2) under conditions of high selectivity and high regionalism of subscriptions, the other approaches mentioned above perform significantly better; however, the specific algorithm to use depends upon the economics of deployment.

Software infrastructure and design challenges for ubiquitous computing applications

Striving to integrate computing into everyday activities in a seamless manner.

A Case for Message Oriented Middleware

With the emergence of the internet, independent applications are starting to be integrated with each other. This has created a need for technology for glueing together applications both within and across organizations, without having to re-engineer individual components. We propose an approach for developing this glue technology based on message flows and discuss the open research problems in realizing this approach.

Concurrency control and view notification algorithms for collaborative replicated objects

This paper describes algorithms for implementing a high-level programming model for synchronous distributed groupware applications. In this model, several application data objects may be atomically updated, and these objects automatically maintain consistency with their replicas using an optimistic algorithm. Changes to these objects may be optimistically or pessimistically observed by view objects by taking consistent snapshots. The algorithms for both update propagation and view notification are based upon optimistic guess propagation principles adapted for fast commit by using primary copy replication techniques. The main contribution of the paper is the synthesis of these two algorithmic techniques-guess propagation and primary copy replication-for implementing a framework that is easy to program to and is well suited for the needs of groupware applications.

Rapidly building synchronous collaborative applications by direct manipulation

Msting GUI btider technology supports btiding user interfaces for interactive applications via direct manip ulation. However, it is notoriously ~ctit to btid the underlying data sharing and application logic for rmdti-user synchronous co~aborative applications. This paper describes a co~ection of very high-levd software components, bfit using the JavaBeans component standard, that enables domain experts and application dsigners to rapi~y bfid entire co~aborative apphcatiorts via Visual progr arnming drag-and~op, customization and wiring. Our component suite supports conference setup, awareness, data sharing, media streaming, acc~s synchronization, and tempordy coordinated media and event streams. TVe ~nstrate that the task of btiding non-trivia mdti-user applications using this approach is si@-tly s“np~ed.

A Formal Model of Service Delivery

We define a service delivery system as a set of interacting entities that are involved in the delivery of one or more business services. A service operating system manages the processes and resources within a service delivery system. This paper presents our on-going work on developing a formal model for these concepts, with the goal of clearly and precisely describing the delivery behavior of service systems. The model lays the groundwork for reasoning about the scenarios that occur in service delivery.

An authoring technology for multidevice Web applications

The rapid proliferation of mobile computing devices has increased the complexity and cost of cross-platform application development. Multidevice authoring technology (MDAT) lets developers build a generic application common to multiple devices and customize it for specific devices. We developed MDAT an end-to-end development methodology and toolset, to reduce the complexity of creating interactive, form-based Web applications that execute on heterogeneous devices. Web application refers to conventional, servlet-based Web applications as well as portlet applications. A portlet is a Web application component that a Web portal server aggregates with other portlets.

An Application Framework For Module Composition Tools

This paper shows that class inheritance, viewed as a mechanism for composing self-referential namespaces, is a broadly applicable concept. We show that several kinds of software artifacts can be modeled as self-referential namespaces, and software tools based on a model of composition of namespaces can effectively manage these artifacts. We describe four such tools: an interpreter for compositionally modular Scheme, a compositional linker for object files, a compositional interface definition language, and a compositional document processing tool. We show that these tools benefit significantly from incorporating inheritance-based reuse. Furthermore, the implementation of these tools share much in common since they are based on the same underlying model. We describe a reusable OO framework for efficiently constructing such tools. Three of the above tools were built by directly reusing the application framework, and the fourth evolved in parallel with it. We provide reuse statistics and experiences with the development of our framework and its completions.