Infosphere: Smart Delivery of Fresh Information

27.09.2002

Foredragsholdere
Calton Pu

Abstact:
In the pervasive/ubiquitous computing environment of the near future, we will have many computers per person and many sensors linking these computers to the real world. These computers and sensors will generate a large amount of information that need gathering, transmitting, storing, filtering, followed by timely notification and delivery to users.

We believe that the missing link in the construction of Infosphere is the software to manage information flow from the information producers to consumers. We propose the Infopipe abstraction to link information producers to consumers. In addition to their basic function of transporting information, Infopipes manage and manipulate the concrete delivery properties of the information flowing through them, such as freshness. Infopipe creation and composition involve the specification of these properties and system resource management mechanisms to maintain them. The property specifications are translated automatically by the system into an actual implementation with the desired behavior. When information flows through an Infopipe, concrete delivery properties and requirements such as freshness, performance, and security are updated en route and maintained each step of the way. The three components of Infopipe, the property management, the feedback-based resource management, and the smart information delivery, can be combined to form an Infosphere that brings the right information to the right user at the right time.



Biography:
Calton Pu was born in Taiwan, but grew up in Brazil. He received his PhD from University of Washington in 1986 and served on the faculty of Columbia University and Oregon Graduate Institute. Currently, he is holding the position of Professor and John P. Imlay, Jr. Chair in Software at the College of Computing, Georgia Institute of Technology. He is leading the Infosphere project, part of the DARPA Information Technology Expedition program. Infosphere is a joint project between Georgia Tech and OGI, plus a number of other collaborators. Infosphere builds on his previous and ongoing research interests. First, he has been working on next-generation operating system kernels to achieve high performance, adaptiveness, security, and modularity, using program specialization, software feedback, and domain-specific languages. This area has included projects such as Synthetix, Immunix, Microlanguages, and Microfeedback, applied to distributed multimedia and system survivability. Second, he has been working on new data and transaction management by extending database technology. This area has included projects such as Epsilon Serializability, Reflective Transaction Framework, and Continual Queries over the Internet. His collaborations include applications of these techniques in scientific research on macromolecular structure data, weather data, and environmental data, as well as in industrial settings. He has published more than 30 journal papers and book chapters, 100 conference and refereed workshop papers, and served on more than 40 program committees, including the co-PC chair of SRDS'95, co-general chair of ICDE'97, co-PC chair of ICDE'99, general chair of CIKM'01, co-PC chair of COOPIS’02, and co-PC chair of SRDS’03. He is currently an associate editor of DAPD and IJODL. His research is currently funded by NSF, DARPA, Intel, and other sources.



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