Maroun Touma

Collaborative customer services using synchronous Web browser sharing

For complicated transactions and inexptienced users, se~-smite may not be *cimL b addition, for marketing and sales, there maybe no substitute fm a good salesperson. Thus, there is tiue in combining ~chronous am to products and services OVHthe Web with Wchronous, human assistance v’hen needd h ord~ to pr~ vide better service to customas, increase d=, and ~erentiate their Webbased services tiom the repetition, a numbs of businesses are starting to fiTlore means of integrating Eve customs service into their Web sites.

Experiences Deploying a Transparent Split TCP Middlebox and the Implications for NFV

This paper summarizes our experiences deploying a transparent Split TCP middlebox for WiFi networks in Enterprise customer environments. Since Split TCP is nearly two decades old, we believed this would be a straightforward application of well-known technology. Reality, however, would teach us otherwise. While we began our deployment in our own office with 3,000 users, we encountered several challenges in deploying this technology at customer sites. Each customer had different network architectures, security policies, and non-negotiable requirements. In particular, modifying the network architecture was frequently impossible. Deployment challenges tended to fall into two related but distinct categories. First, making the box transparent to both clients and servers required extending the notion of transparency from beyond just layer 3 and layer 4 to include layer 2. Second, the interaction of our middlebox with other middleboxes resulted in unexpected behaviors. Our deployments supported up to 15,000 simultaneous users and lasted up to 2 years. We offer up our experiences so that others need not repeat them. We discuss some implications of our experiences on deploying network functionality in virtual environments, or Network Function Virtualization (NFV). If NFV is to be successful in real environments, these challenges will need to be overcome.

Talking to customers on the Web: a comparison of three voice alternatives

This paper describes an empirical study that compared three alternatives for voice communication in conjunction with Web page collaboration for customer service. Two of the technologies used a single phone line for both voice and data transmission. These technologies were intemet telephony and Simultaneous< Voice and Data (SVD), a protocol which allows the voice to be routed over the public telephone network, rather hart the inteme~ The study found that SVD was superior to intemet telephony in terms of a number of behavioral and subjective measures of con\7ersational interaction. The study also found that task time using intemet telephony was 45% greater than with SVD, mtilng the former a costly rdtemative in terms of human time.

Dealer collaboration: transforming the value chain through integration and relationships

The retail and aftermarket in most value chains is highly segmented and can include dealers, distributors, resellers, independent repair shops, parts suppliers, specialized accessory retail stores and content providers. In the automotive industry, the aftermarket value chain is quite large and fragmented. OEMs need to transform the way they do business in order to obtain a share of this aftermarket revenue and provide better quality of service for handling critical product failures. Crucial failure symptom information is lost between the end consumers of products and the manufacturers due to lack of proper collaboration with dealerships and intermediaries offering independent service. Currently, this results in increased warranty costs for manufacturers and customer defection. In this paper, we present an IBM software solution for automotive dealer collaboration, which enhances the OEM-Dealer relationship through contextual collaboration, information integration and transparent process management. The solution is based on open standards such as Web services, J2EE, J2ME, Struts and others.

Framework for behavioral analytics in anomaly identification

Behavioral Analytics (BA) relies on digital breadcrumbs to build user profiles and create clusters of entities that exhibit a large degree of similarity. The prevailing assumption is that an entity will assimilate the group behavior of the cluster it belongs to. Our understanding of BA and its application in different domains continues to evolve and is a direct result of the growing interest in Machine Learning research. When trying to detect security threats, we use BA techniques to identify anomalies, defined in this paper as deviation from the group behavior. Early research papers in this field reveal a high number of false positives where a security alert is triggered based on deviation from the cluster learned behavior but still within the norm of what the system defines as an acceptable behavior. Further, domain specific security policies tend to be narrow and inadequately represent what an entity can do. Hence, they: a) limit the amount of useful data during the learning phase; and, b) lead to violation of policy during the execution phase. In this paper, we propose a framework for future research on the role of policies and behavior security in a coalition setting with emphasis on anomaly detection and individuals deviation from group activities.

Network Science collaborative experimentation methods and tools to accelerate network science innovation within the ITA and NS-CTA

Network Science research within the ITA and NS-CTA explores the challenges and emerging directions for networked armed forces. This paper presents the justification, methodology and supporting tools built by the alliance to promote deeper collaboration among its members in order to accelerate the pace of research and further connect basic research with Army relevance. Our approach leverages virtualization, dynamic network provisioning and high-fidelity network simulation techniques for modeling, reproducing and extending complex distributed multi-genre network experimentation with research capabilities that can be readily enlisted by the consortium researchers.

Policy Supersession in a Coalition ISR Network

Policy super session provides a framework for maintaining coherence in a partitioned network. This is most relevant for mission critical policy-based networks where the on-going operations of the system require a greater level of flexibility and resilience in dealing with network communication failure.

ContactPoint: helping large organizations collaborate

In this paper we present what we have learned while working with a large distributed marketing organization in order to design and develop ContactPoint, a personalized content delivery system and collaborative tool. It can be very difficult for members of large organizations to stay informed about what is happening in different parts of the organization. ContactPoint allows members of the organization to subscribe to one or more information sources, receive information alerts on their desktop, easily identify subject matter specialists, and collaborate with those specialists.

User experience of CLIVE/mbanx solution

The video illustrates how a customer logged in from home over a single phone line to a Web-based Internet banking self-service can invoke human assistance on demand using a customer care technology called CLIVE [1]. Once connected, the customer and the customer service representative (CSR) can speak with each other, interact with the contents of a shared Web page, and maintain awareness of each other’s location on the Web page.