Arkady Zaslavsky – Current and recent research projects
May, 2003

Areas:


MOBILE AGENTS

Monash University academics and students working with me in this area include Seng Wai Loke, Shonali Krishnaswamy, Maria Indrawan, David Squire, Glenn Jayaputera, Oshadi Alahakoon, Amir Padovitz, John Page, Lito Cruz, Martin Pirotta, Dennis Pratistha.

 
ARC Linkage Project (LP0211384, 2002-2004, 2 APA(I) PhD scholars, Project leader)
e-Hermes: Context-rich mobile agent technology to support information needs of financial institutions

How do we achieve flexibility and efficiency of financial services in electronic commerce environment using mobile software agents? To address this question the project will extend a system architecture based on mobile agents, which retrieve, pre-process and deliver relevant information to potentially mobile users. Two major components – information processor and agent mission processor - will be researched and developed by two PhD scholars to be supported by this application. The project results could be commercialised by the industry partner. The project is innovative in that it considers the emerging agent paradigm as an integrated distributed system in the e-commerce environment. More

Project PhD scholars are Glenn Jayaputera and Oshadi Alahakoon

   
 
Hewlett-Packard(HP) PhD Endowment (2003-2005, 1 PhD scholar(TBA), Project leader) —
ContextExplorers: mobile agents for run-time context discovery, validation and verification
Mobile software agents represent one of strategic areas of pervasive computing that promise solutions to some real world problems and enable “anytime, anywhere, with any device” access to digital information and services. This project will investigate and develop methods and tools that will generate mobile software agents and inject them into the network. These agents will be capable of discovering and sensing the current context in which a target pervasive computing system is running, validating and verifying the context attributes like location via direct and indirect techniques and then communicating the discovered and verified context back to the target application. More
   
 
ADIS: Adaptive Distributed Information Services – collaborative project with Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU, Trondheim) & KTH (Stockholm, Sweden), funded by Norwegian Government - Prof Mihhail Matskin (Project leader); my role - associate researcher

The main objective of the project is development of models, methods and a platform for adaptive intelligent distributed mobile information services support. More

I visited NTNU between 28 August and 1 September, 2002, gave a seminar. We continue collaboration within ADIS project even after Prof M.Matskin moved from NTNU to KTH.

   
 
PhD project - John Page (commenced in September, 2002) -
Security issues in mobile agent communities

With rapid growth of distributed applications, mobile agents are playing more and more prominent role. Vulnerabilities of mobile agent based distributed systems include threats from hosting servers, from other agents & processes, and the necessity to involve a third party for establishing trust relationship between a visiting mobile agent and a host computer. Lack of mechanisms to establish trust relationship between members of mobile agent communities as well as ways to guard the entire communities against attacks and threats impede widespread adoption of agent technology. This project aims at researching and developing ways of adaptive security for roaming mobile agents and dynamic agent communities. We believe that rather than protecting software agents against malicious servers we should be able to detect at run-time whether an agent has been compromised and act accordingly. More

   
 
PhD project - Lito Cruz (commenced in August, 2002) -
Reasoning about agent mobility and coordination

This project investigates impact of mobility on agent coordination and use of ontologies for multi-agent systems.

More

   
 
PhD project - Martin Pirotta (commenced in 1998, PT) -
Billing for resource utilisation by mobile agents

This project studies how to bill for resources making up a massively distributed system in which mobile agents dwell and roam while consuming resources and performing e-commerce operations on behalf of their users.

More

   
 
Tracking moving objects with mobile agents using discoverable resources

Given abundance of computational resources in the surrounding environment mobile agents are capable of tracking moving objects using discoverable resources like microphones, as an example of a listening device. Proof-of-concept project has been carried out by Daniel Hägglund (danhag-7@student.luth.se) from Luleå University of Technology who did his Masters under my supervision and help from Kåre Synnes, Luleå University of Technology in 2002. More


 

 

 

 

Mobile agents for sound recognition and tracking

Mobile agents/intelligent assistants in the mobile phone

 

Using Elvin (publish-subscribe) for mobile agent communication

Agents in e-commerce

2. Distributed data mining and e-commerce

ARC Discovery – Dr Shonali Krishnaswamy –ARC fellow, “Efficient Prediction of Application Metrics for E-Services”, 2003-2005

Scalable distributed data mining with mobile agents – PhD, about to commence

3. Pervasive & mobile computing

Formalisation of and manipulation with context – PhD project, just started

CoolCampus – pervasive services and applications

Decision support for mobile users – joint with SIMS, ARC discovery applied – Masters

Location-awareness and adaptive security – Masters project, just finished

PANDA – FP6

TPPDS - Trusted contextualised pervasive personalised devices and services – next year, FP6

Context algebra and formal foundations of context

4. Wireless networks & services

Wireless LAN topology visualisation & management – ongoing project, Masters

Ad hoc wireless network protocols and support for hot-spot areas – PhD in LTU, Sweden

Wireless LAN positioning and client tracking

Locating unauthorised sources of wireless LAN transmission – Masters project

5. M3 DSTC

Mobility in enterprise applications

6. Misc

Document overlap detection – fast engine for plagiarism detection – PhD completed

Schema mapping with MOF – PhD project about to finish (Andy Bond & Kathy Ewald)