Honours projects 2008

Projects supervised by Michael Fry

Customisation and Context Awareness
This project is related to the major Multi-Channel Content Delivery research project of the Smart Services Cooperative Research Centre (CRC). The CRC is due to commence operation in the first quarter of 2008 and the student will be expected to work closely with the research project team. The project will explore customisation of on-line content, such as web content, using user context information. Context information can include the users geo-location (eg from GPS and/or other location sensors), the state of the channel between the content server and the user (eg latency, bandwidth), the type of user device (eg PC, PDA, mobile phone etc), and any other information that can be sensed or inferred (eg the user is currently driving a car). The project will entail developing an understanding of the state of the art in gathering and inferring context information and user tracking, including current and emerging devices and technologies. It will consider frameworks and platforms for tracking and managing context information, such as those that fall loosely under the banners of the ‘Internet of Things’ or ‘Real World Web’. It will explore options for how content should be re-purposed and/or transcoded for the different devices, contexts and user experiences. The project will entail a review of literature from relevant journals and conferences, of material available from device manufacturers and network providers, and from relevant standards groups. It will then entail, as the major part of the project, experimental development and evaluation of technologies for deriving and managing context and customisation. This will require solid technical programming skills and understanding of networked systems.

Content Delivery in the Mobile Internet
This project is related to the major Multi-Channel Content Delivery research project of the Smart Services Cooperative Research Centre (CRC). The CRC is due to commence operation in the first quarter of 2008 and the student will be expected to work closely with the research project team. It will address and explore emerging technologies for the automated re-purposing of content with a special emphasis on (but not necessarily exclusively limited to) web content for mobile devices. How to best store and deliver standard web pages to mobile phones is a good example of the problems to be addressed. Furthermore, service providers do not wish to store multiple versions of content to suit different modes of delivery. So, more generally, the project will focus on technology-independent approaches for managing a single source of content, and then adaptively delivering this content to optimally suit heterogeneous user devices and networks. It will explore in detail the work emerging from the Mobile Web Initiative of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and other relevant groups such as the Open Mobile Alliance. It will then entail, as the major part of the project, some experimentation and evaluation of content re-purposing approaches. It may also entail experimentation with new mobile platforms such as Android, recently released by Google. This will require solid technical programming skills and understanding of networked systems.

Network Challenge Detection
It is widely agreed that the Internet needs to become more resilient to various forms of challenge including malicious attacks such as spam or denial of service, those arising from normal behaviour such as flash crowds, or just plain faults and unintentional mis-configurations. As a first step we need to develop models of how the network should operate under normal conditions, when free from challenges and attacks. Then, via a defined (and measurable) set of metrics, determine when the network moves from a normal state to a challenged state. At this stage alarms can be raised and remediation strategies put into place. This project will explore current research on challenge detection and from there develop some new techniques for a chosen set of challenges. These may then be validated via a range of strategies including analysis and simulation. This will require a good knowledge of networking and solid technical and/or analytic skills. The project is linked to the supervisor’s participation in a major European collaborative project that will commence in 2008, funded by the European Union’s Future Internet Research and Experimentation (FIRE) program, which will provide wider context and enrichment for the project.