Rukman Senanayake

The OWL-S editor – a development tool for semantic web services

The power of Web Service (WS) technology lies in the fact that it establishes a common, vendor-neutral platform for integrating distributed computing applications, in intranets as well as the Internet at large. Semantic Web Services (SWSs) promise to provide solutions to the challenges associated with automated discovery, dynamic composition, enactment, and other tasks associated with managing and using service-based systems. One of the barriers to a wider adoption of SWS technology is the lack of tools for creating SWS specifications. OWL-S is one of the major SWS description languages. This paper presents an OWL-S Editor, whose objective is to allow easy, intuitive OWL-S service development and to provide a variety of special-purpose capabilities to facilitate SWS design. The editor is implemented as a plugin to the OWL ontology editor, and is being developed as open-source software.

Policy-Based Cognitive Radios

We present a new language for expressing policies that allow opportunistic spectrum access while not causing interference. CoRaL has expressive constructs for numerical constraints, supports efficient reasoning, and will be verifiable. The language is extensible so that unanticipated policy types can be encoded. We also describe a policy reasoner that reasons about CoRaL policies, and show how this reasoner can be used with various cognitive radios (in this case, an XG radio) to guarantee policy-specified behaviors while allowing spectrum sharing.

A Policy Engine for Spectrum Sharing

We argue for a policy-based approach to increase spectrum availability. To this extend, we briefly summarize a new language for expressing policies that allow opportunistic spectrum access. A Policy Reasoner that reasons about these policies can be used with cognitive radios to guarantee policy- specified behaviors while allowing spectrum sharing. We present our policy reasoner design and we evaluated the reasoner in a demonstration. We describe the policies used in that demonstration and the results of the evaluation.

CoRaL--Policy Language and Reasoning Techniques for Spectrum Policies

We present the cognitive radio (policy) language (CoRaL), a new language for expressing policies that govern the behavior of cognitive radios that opportunistically share spectrum. A Policy Reasoner validates radio transmissions to ensure that they are compliant with the spectrum policies. The Policy Reasoner also discovers spectrum sharing opportunities by deriving what requirements must be fulfilled for transmissions to be valid, i.e., in compliance with policies. A novel mix of reasoning techniques is required to implement such a reasoner.

Towards More Effective Cyber Operator Interfaces Through Semantic Modeling of User Context

Cyber operators frequently need to quickly process large amounts of data that are generated by various network monitoring systems or applications, and they need to rapidly make complex decisions. We posit that dynamically tailoring the user experience to the cyber operator’s context would significantly improve the effectiveness and efficiency of their ability to respond and take action. Tailoring can take the form of filtering to present the information most relevant to the situation, or automating tasks that are most beneficial in the current context. SRI’s bright ( www.sri.com/bright) approach records the action and gaze details of cyber operator interactions across several cyber security applications. Analysis of the collected data will provide insight into the current interests of cyber operators, and form the basis for future methods and mechanisms for adapting the user experience.

bRIGHT – Workstations of the Future and Leveraging Contextual Models

Experimenting with futuristic computer workstation design and specifically tailored application models can yield useful insights and result in exciting ways to increase efficiency, effectiveness, and satisfaction for computer users. Designing and building a computer workstation that can track a user’s gaze; sense proximity to the touch surface; and support multi-touch, face recognition etc meant overcoming some unique technological challenges. Coupled with extensions to commonly used applications to report user interactions in a meaningful way, the workstation will allow the development of a rich contextual user model that is accurate enough to enable benefits, such as contextual filtering, task automation, contextual auto-fill, and improved understanding of team collaborations. SRI’s bRIGHT workstation was designed and built to explore these research avenues and investigate how such a context model can be built, identify the key implications in designing an application model that best serves these goals, and discover other related factors. This paper conjectures future research that would support the development of a collaborative context model that could leverage similar benefits for groups of users.