Y. V. Ramana Reddy

TRINETR: An architecture for collaborative intrusion detection and knowledge-based alert evaluation

Current reactive and standalone network security products are not capable of withstanding the onslaught of diversified network threats. As a result, a new security paradigm, where integrated security devices or systems collaborate closely to achieve enhanced protection and provide multi-layer defenses is emerging. In this paper, we present the design of a collaborative architecture for multiple intrusion detection systems to work together to detect real-time network intrusions. The detection is made more efficient and effective by using collaborative intelligent agents, relevant knowledge base and combination of multiple detection sensors. The architecture is composed of three parts: Collaborative Alert Aggregation, Knowledge-based Alert Evaluation and Alert Correlation. The architecture is aimed at reducing the alert overload by correlating results from multiple sensors to generate condensed views, reducing false positives by integrating network and host system information into the evaluation process and correlating events based on logical relations to generate global and synthesized alert report. The architecture is designed as a layer above intrusion detection for post-detection alert analysis and security actions. The first two parts of the architecture have been implemented and the implementation results are presented in this paper.

An ontology based workflow centric collaboration system

This article introduces a workflow centric collaboration system based on ontology, which is context-aware and adaptive. Using ontology to represent most collaboration elements and rules of the system, we introduce an ontology repository into the framework. It gives the system the capability to represent collaboration knowledge smoothly. The system focuses on business workflow transition and business data manipulation. It can be easily extended and upgraded by modifying the ontology repository when the requirements change. Based on ontology, the system can also interact with other ontology based systems and applications.

Empowering mobile healthcare providers via a patient benefits authorization service

Moving rapidly between patient examining rooms, physicians have to examine, diagnose and decide on a course of treatment appropriate for each patient. However, if the patients health plan administrators subsequently deny coverage, the prescribed treatments would then have to be changed. There are a wide range of health insurance plans and varying cost curtailment procedures. Physicians are therefore ill-equipped to determine a course of treatment that addresses the patients needs and complies with the payers regulations. Benefits authorization applications on handheld devices using wireless communications can help mobile healthcare providers quickly determine patient medical benefit eligibility. Such facilities could improve the quality of care and physician patient communications, prevent denial of services by health plan administrators and consequential expenses to the patient. The authors originally developed a prototype desktop application as part of a secure telemedicine research project. They identify enhancements to this work to address interoperability issues and support the needs of mobile healthcare providers.

Secure collaboration technology for healthcare enterprises

Healthcare organizations have a legacy of relatively isolated vendor-proprietary departmental systems. The cost of integrating disparate healthcare systems is a significant barrier to collaborative endeavors such as telemedicine. Recent legislative measures for the protection of healthcare information place significant responsibilities on healthcare organizations to ensure that their healthcare systems and information technology practices adequately protect the privacy of healthcare information in their charge. The authors, who are developing secure telemedicine applications, identify some of these hurdles and discuss their approach to enable healthcare organizations to engage in collaborative healthcare activities.

The design of a workflow-centric, context-aware framework to support heterogeneous computing environments in collaboration

Networked based distributed collaboration has become pervasive and makes today’s enterprises much more productive than ever before. The automation of the collaborative processes can be driven and managed by workflow rules. In addition, during recent years, ubiquitous computing and universal network connectivity have imposed another imperative requirement on collaboration systems. That is, remote participants with heterogeneous and dynamic connection and process capabilities should be able to join seamlessly in the collaboration at any time. Intelligent, context-aware, and workflow-centric collaboration is an essential prerequisite to fulfill that requirement. In this paper, we describe a generic framework, dubbed as EkSarva, which is capable of embedding workflow rules and context-awareness intelligence into collaborative sessions leading to increased opportunities for process automation

Workflow-centric distributed collaboration in heterogeneous computing environments

Few contest that Computer Supported Cooperative Work has contributed to a significant improvement in productivity and effectiveness of collaboration. During recent years, pervasive computing has imposed another imperative requirement on collaboration systems. That is, remote participants with heterogeneous computing environments should be able to join seamlessly in the collaboration process and the collaboration process itself should be able to satisfy the needs of different computing environments as well be able to adapt to the changes among different environments. In order to satisfy this new requirement and embed collaboration workflow rules into automated process, we have presented a generic framework, EkSarva, which incorporates context-awareness and workflow-centric into the collaborative sessions. In essence, we believe CSCW should be a design-oriented research.

Collaboration framework for nomadic healthcare providers

Collaboration among nomadic healthcare providers presents unique challenges. This paper describes a set of requirements and an implementation approach for a collaboration architecture to meet these challenges. The collaboration framework consists of a set of services and client applications that provide authentication, messaging, scheduling, decision support and workflow.

Adaptive collaboration in an ever-changing environment

Traditional collaboration systems are typically bundled with a set of tools with pre-specified static workflow and usage patterns. They are found to be inflexible and incompetent for todays heterogeneous and ever-changing collaboration contexts and computing environments. Todays collaboration systems must be aware of the dynamic changes of collaboration contexts in a timely manner and be adaptive to these changes appropriately. In this paper, we illustrate how business logic and computing environment context awareness are provided through a set of shared ontologies with well-defined semantics in a project called as EkSarva. The awareness of collaboration contexts and its changes then enables the collaboration system to adapt to these changes and be more flexible. A dynamic workflow process is also facilitated by the context-awareness.

Eksarva: a framework for enabling agent-based collaboration

This paper describes a generic collaboration framework capable of embedding process intelligence into collaborative sessions leading to increased opportunities for process automation. We claim that currently available collaboration tools lack the flexibility to accommodate a variety of collaborative behaviors. This, we believe is due to the tight coupling that exists between the tool features and the group functionalities. We describe a generic framework that facilitates the modeling of the operations of a collaborative session as a set of workflow rules. These workflow rules are embedded into collaborative sessions and drive the enactment of the collaboration. Agents with the combination of this work flow rules and domain-specific ontology can automate processes relieving humans of mundane tasks and increasing their productivity.

Vijjana: A collaborative agent model for creating a knowledge advantage machine

In this paper we describe the Discovery Agent of Vijjana, an umbrella project for creating a person-specific knowledge repository based on classification and analysis. Vijjana provides a framework designed for building collaborative knowledge networks that are domain specific and well bounded in search categories. Using the Vijjana model, we can envision creating an intelligent agent that presents context based information that is drawn from a personalized knowledge base. We call such an agent a Knowledge Advantage Machine (KaM) as it enables a user to take advantage of the personalized knowledge base to perform the task at hand more effectively - in much the same way mechanical advantage had been helping industrial workers. In this paper we discuss only the first part, namely the discovery agent. In this part the focus is on a conceptual way to bridge the gap between the presentation layer and the data access layer which is discussed here using the Object Relational Mapping through the Hibernate framework.