I'm currently participating in the research and development of Project RADAR and Project Aura.

RADAR

RADAR (Reflective Agents with Distributed Adaptive Reasoning) is a large research project funded by DARPA's Cognitive Computing Initiative. Its goal is to develop software-based cognitive personal assistants that can help people improve productivity in their workplace. I'm working on the high-level architecture of RADAR under Prof. David Garlan's guidance. The most significant challenge facing us is how to enable a variety of heterogeneous agents to coordinate seamlessly and effectively to accomplish sophisticated tasks. At present I'm experimenting on a prototype of a key component in the architecture: the Task Manager, which is intended to manage high-level tasks and coordinate communications among agents in a personal space.

This is the architecture diagram of my Task Manager prototype. Click on it to view a larger version of the diagram.

Aura

Aura is a ubiquitous computing framework allowing computational tasks moving from one environment to another with minimum user distraction. One of the core elements in an Aura system is the notion of a "supplier". Each supplier is an application wrapper with an abstract description of the services the application provides. I designed and developed a generic framework for developing Aura suppliers on Windows platform. This framework allows miscellaneous Windows applications to be easily plugged into an Aura system. Major design challenges were to create a flexible, asynchronous communication mechanism, parallelism, portability, and system extensibility. At present I'm doing research on context-awareness.

This is the architecture diagram of Generic AuraSupplier Framework. Click on it to view a larger version of the diagram. Check my practice presentation (103 KB) for more information.

WQVBuddy

WQVBuddy is a one-year MSE studio project sponsored by SEI (Software Engineering Institute). Its goal was to develop a software that enables users to manage and transfer images from Casio Watch Cameras to a wide range of Palm OS compatible handheld PDAs over infrared. I participated in the design of the system and developed the core IrCOMM (Infrared Communication Protocol) module, IrTran-P (Infrared Transfer Picture Protocol) module, and JPEG de/compression module. The most significant challenges were to support system portability and provide high performance. Our team, the Charlatans,  successfully overcome those challenges and delivered a high-quality product ahead of schedule.

[My Cool Trophy]	This is the Casio WQV-10 Wrist Camera Watch I won in the project competition. ^_^
[My Wonderful Mentors]	Clifford Huff and Grace Lewis @ SEI
[My Talented "Clients"]	Daniel Plakosh and Scott Hissam @ SEI
[The Charlatan's Web Site]	http://dogbert.mse.cs.cmu.edu/charlatans/
[My Presentations]	Fall 2002 End of Semester Presentation (415 KB)
	Summer 2003 End of Semester Presentation (319 KB)

UniCommerce

UniCommerce is a team project for the "Dependable Distributed Middleware Systems" course (taught by Prof. Priya Narasimhan). The project requires the design, implementation, empirical evaluation and end-to-end analysis of a real-time fault-tolerant high-performance distributed middleware application. Our team developed a three-tier, fault-tolerant, real-time, and 24*7 e-commerce application, geared towards college students buying and selling goods, supporting warm passive replication, automatic fail recovery and load balancing.

This is the architecture diagram of our real-time fault-tolerant UniCommerce system. Click on it to view a larger version of the diagram. Check my final presentation (364 KB) for more information.