Jacob Slonim

Requirements gathering with alzheimer's patients and caregivers

Technology may be able to play a role in improving the quality of life for Alzheimers patients and their caregivers. We are evaluating the feasibility of an information appliance with the goal of alleviating repetitive questioning behaviour, a contributing factor to caregiver stress. Interviews were conducted with persons with Alzheimers disease and their caregivers to determine the nature of the repetitive questioning behaviour, the information needs of patients, and the interaction abilities of both the patients and the caregivers. We report results of these interviews and discuss the challenges of requirements gathering with persons with Alzheimers disease and the feasibility of introducing an information appliance to this population.

Globalizing business, education, culture through the Internet

T HE WORLD BECAME A SMALLER PLACE IN THE 20TH CENTURY. TRANSportation technology caused physical distances to shrink by several orders of magnitude, and telecommunications technology made terrestrial distances insignificant. The transformation of the world into a global village caused revolutionary changes in the physical and social infrastructure, rivaling those of the industrial revolution. Even the types of jobs people did changed or disappeared, replaced by new jobs that had never existed before. Other results included great changes in societys economic infrastructure. Computer technology further supports globalization by radically changing the economics of communication , so geographic proximity is even less a requirement for effective collaboration and business interaction. Moreover, globalization of computer technology makes possible new forms of technical and social organization that influence the efficiency of business enterprises as well as the quality of life of ordinary citizens. However, our ability to influence the evolution of globalization depends on our understanding of the technology of globalization and its social implications. Globalization occurs at both the national and international levels. Infrastructure is initially developed

A distributed system architecture for a distributed application environment

Advances in communications technology, development of powerful desktop workstations, and increased user demands for sophisticated applications are rapidly changing computing from a traditional centralized model to a distributed one. The tools and services for supporting the design, development, deployment, and management of applications in such an environment must change as well. This paper is concerned with the architecture and framework of services required to support distributed applications through this evolution to new environments. In particular, the paper outlines our rationale for a peer-to-peer view of distributed systems, presents motivation for our research directions, describes an architecture, and reports on some preliminary experiences with a prototype system.

The CORDS multidatabase project

In virtually every organization, data are stored in a variety of ways and managed by different database and file systems. Applications requiring data from multiple sources must recognize and deal with the specifics of each data source and must also perform any necessary data integration. The objective of a multidatabase system is to provide application developers and end users with an integrated view of and a uniform interface to all the required data. The view and the interface should be independent of where the data are stored and how the data are managed. CORDS is a research project focused on distributed applications. As part of this project, we are designing and prototyping a multidatabase system. This paper provides an overview of the system architecture and describes the approaches taken in the following areas: management of catalog information, schema integration, global query optimization, (distributed) transaction management, and interactions with component data sources. The prototype system gives application developers a view of a single relational database system. Currently supported component data sources include several relational database systems, a hierarchical database system, and a network database system.

Crossroads for Canadian CS enrollment

What should be done to reverse falling CS enrollment in the Canadian education system?

An architecture in support of universal access to electronic commerce

Abstract In order to increase accessibility to electronic commerce applications, an overall reduction in the complexity of interactions with computerized systems is required. This paper describes an architecture that uses personalization information to customize interactions with end-users in a way that reduces interaction complexity. The storage and manipulation of personal information under the control of the end-user for the dynamic customization of interactions requires a paradigm shift from the client–server model of computing to the more general peer-to-peer model. In this paper, the existing three-tier architecture is extended with a new, human-centric layer that is configurable by domain experts who are not necessarily computer science or computer engineering professionals, allowing for a ‘technology pull’ approach to the configuration of systems. The human-centric layer will support a process-oriented peer-to-peer interaction paradigm and will use existing middleware services for access to network services and legacy systems. This paper focuses on the conceptual model and the functional framework of this new human-centric layer.

Owner-controlled information

Information about individuals is currently maintained in many thousands of databases, with much of that information, such as name and address, replicated across multiple databases. However, this proliferation of personal information raises issues of privacy for the individual, as well as maintenance issues in terms of the accuracy of the information. Ideally, each individual would own, maintain and control his personal information, allowing access to those who needed at the time it was needed. Organizations would contact the individual directly to obtain information, therefore being assured of using current and correct information.While research has been performed on users owning and controlling access to their personal information in an electronic commerce environment, we argue that this concept should be extended to all user information including, for example, medical and financial information. The end goal is not for users to simply maintain copies of this information, but to be the source of this information.This paper presents the concept of users owning their personal information and introduces some of the issues involved in users being able to control access to this information. The security requirements, including authentication, access control and audit, as well as user interfaces and trust, for this new paradigm are given particular emphasis.

NDX-100: An Electronic Filing Machine for the Office of the Future

This distributed microprocessor-based filing system will not only replace those familiar grey cabinets—it will be part of the advanced communications system of the office of the future.

Considerations for determining the degrees of centralization or decentralization in the computing environment

Abstract The advent of distributed data base systems has introduced a bewildering assortment of terms, measurements, and descriptions for managers and users. The complexity which a distributed system introduces in hardware, software, and data allocation provides the major source of misunderstanding and confusion that is reflected in current jargon. This paper proposes a method of definition and measurement which alleviates the terminology and measurement problem. The methodology provides a standardized view of distributed systems and promotes an objective, quantified approach to the classification and selection of such a system.

Concurrency control of large unstructured data

Current research projects and database product extensions reflect the importance of unconventional database applications (for example, document processing and computer aided design). Unconventional applications differ from the conventional ones (for example, airline reservation) in the nature of transactions and data. The transactions may be complex, long and involve human interaction. The data includes small, structured objects as well as large, unstructured objects. The unstructured objects are stored in and managed by unstructured database management systems (UDS). UDS employs coarse-granularity locking which limit the concurrency and reduce the throughput of transactions. This paper deals with this problem of coarse-granularity locking at UDS. It proposes and investigates the logical concurrency control (LCC) concept as a solution. In LCC, a software module sits on top of the UDS and offers a higher-level service. This module employs application-domain-specific fine-granularity locking to achieve high concurrency.