A policy system shifts the focus from configuring individual devices to managing a network in aggregate, and controlling device behavior through network policies. The system developed within this project is implemented by centralizing control functions into a single software application. At the center of such a policy system is the policy rule. Policy rules may be general and abstract or specific and concrete. In either case, policy rules represent a pairing of conditions and actions that are intended to be device and vendor independent. The composition of policy rules, along with some of the characteristics of devices that are being controlled by policy rules are also modeled. Other characteristics of devices, used to capture the semantics and relationships between different objects being managed, define how the conditions and actions represented in a Policy rule are interpreted and what effect they have on the functions of the device. This project also defines a context for the schema and semantic definitions.

Transmission networks are beginning to support large volumes of data flows, thereby making congestion in network paths an unavoidable phenomenon requiring remedy by both sources and receivers. This project studied the software-level encoding and network techniques for supporting adaptive video transmissions in distributed multimedia application settings in order to adjust the sending frame rate of video sources to adapt to congestion levels in the network. Underlying this analysis is the layering of video transmissions so that the network and/or end-system elements can send or discard selective layers depending on bandwidth availability in the network. Practical applications for multi-layer video encoder development include all digital imaging industries. Beyond digital imaging, Panasonic Research has expressed interest in this study.

(Funded by NSF-PFI) Socialight is Kamida’s platform for location-based messaging. Currently, this platform delivers messages to users based on their locations, their social connections, and the affinity (interest area) groups that they have actively joined. To enhance the utility and attractiveness of Socialight to private users and commercial customers, CISDD is partnering with the company to develop an analog of “trusted vendor” in social networks. By means of a rating scheme, the contacts of a Socialight user will be ranked on several dimensions, enabling targeted delivery of messages from a given location.

The goal of this project was to construct a communication framework that would help developing mission-critical systems involving wireless networks. The suggested network protocol provides a transparent protection against message loss and/or duplication during temporal connection failures over a wireless carrier.

This project aims to organize the content of a Web site based on an analysis of the semantic structure of the site's contents. Specifically, this project will extend classification beyond localized search-based ad hoc tree structures because conventional tree representation may not capture the ways in which users search for information. Thus, information might not be found by traversing a path from the root of the classification tree. This approach will lead to improvements over simple keyword matching search capabilities for a particular site. Furthermore, the semantic structure will provide Web site designers with the means to discover similar and/or redundant information, which in turn will assist them in reconfiguring a site to achieve improved presentation and search performance.