1
 

• My Research and e-Business
• Virendrakumar C. Bhavsar
• Professor and
• Director, Advanced Computational Research
  Laboratory
• Faculty of Computer Science
• University of New Brunswick Fredericton, NB
• bhavsar_at_unb.ca
• www.cs.unb.ca/profs/bhavsar
• www.cs.unb.ca/acrl

2
Outline

• Past Research Work
• Current Research Work
• Future Research Work
• Conclusion

3
Past Research Work

• ? Parallel/Distributed Processing
• - Parallel Computer Architecture
• Design and Analysis of Parallel Algorithms
• Real-time and Fault-Tolerant Systems
• ? Artificial Neural Networks
• ? Learning Machines and Evolutionary
• Computation
• ? Computer Graphics
• Visualization

4
Past Research Work (cont.)

• ? Multimedia for Education Intelligent Tutoring
  Systems
• Multi-Lingual Systems and Transliteration
• Web Portal for an NB company
• Clustifier and Extractor (IIT, NRC, Ottawa)
• Intelligent User Profile Generator
• ? Multi-Agent Systems
• with Dr. Marsh (IIT, NRC, Ottawa)
• ? Supervision/Co-supervision
• 50 master's theses 4 doctoral theses
• 5 post-doctoral fellows/research associates

5
Current Research Work (cont.)

• ? Parallel/Distributed Processing
• - C3-Grid development
• - Design and analysis of parallel/distributed
• applications
• Multi-Agent Systems
• - Specification and verification of multi-agent
  systems
• with Dr. Mironov, Russia
• Information Sharing in Multi-agent Systems
• with Dr. Ghorbani, UNB

6
ACORN

• Information diffusion and search in networks
• All pieces of information - Agents
• - documents images, etc.
• Applications
• B2B and B2C e-Commerce solutions
• Virtual community creation and support
  systems
• Personalized directed information handling

7
ACORN Relation to Other Work

• Search Engines
• e.g. Alta Vista, Excite, Yahoo, InfoSeek, and
  Lycos
• If the user has to search, its because the
  information diffusion is
• not fast enough
• not accurate enough
• Recommender Systems
• Firefly (Maes), Fab (Balabanovic)
• Content-based or Collaborative
• ACORNs agents a mixture of both
• Matchmakers
• Yenta (Foner)
• Very close to the ACORN spirit lacks the
  flexibility of ACORN

8
ACORN Relation to Other Work (cont.)

• Web Page Watchers and Push Technologies
• Tierra, Marimba, Channels
• ACORN is a means of pushing new data, reducing
  the need to watch for changes
• Filtering Systems
• The filtering in ACORN is implicit in what is
  recommended by humans
• Knowbots
• Softbots (Washington, Etzioni, Weld), Nobots
  (Stanford, Shoham)
• mobile agents for internet search
• ACORN provides diffusion also

9
tom_at_ucsd.edu
ucsd.edu
ymasrour_at_ai.it.nrc.ca
ai.it.nrc.ca
S e r v e r
bob_at_ai.it.nrc.ca
dick_at_ucsd.edu
steve_at_ai.it.nrc.ca
anwhere.else
foo_at_anywhere.else
cs.stir.ac.uk
meto.gov.uk
joan_at_unb.ca
Clients
bhavsar_at_unb.ca
wibble_at_cs.stir.ac.uk
graham_at_cs.stir.ac.uk
anne_at_cs.stir.ac.uk
10
Café

• At set intervals, agents present are compared,
  and relevant information exchanged
• Keyphrase-based Information Sharing
• A unique method of automating community based
  information sharing

11
CaféCosine Measure method Similarity of
Article 3 (Category 1)

12
Performance Evaluation of ACORN

• Test-bed Several Autonomous Servers, each
  serving autonomous virtual users
• Virtual User - capable of creating agents
• - picks up a topic from a client cores
  interest
• - migrates to other servers
• - potential destinations

13
Performance Evaluation of ACORN
14
Future Research Work

• Multi-Agent Systems B2B-B2C Extensions
• User-driven personalization
• Personalized and personalizable automatic
  delivery and search for information
• Directed advertisements based on user profiles
  and preferences
• agent learning
• Data mining over large distributed networks and
  databases
• Automated and manually-driven user profile
  generation and update

15
Future Research Work (cont.)

• Multi-Agent Systems for Distributed Databases-
  continuous updating of large and distributed
  databases on intranets and the Internet
• Multi-Agent Systems
• - Very naturally satisfy many requirements in
  such an environment
• - Provide a very flexible and open
  architecture
• - Scalability analysis with multiprocessor
  servers

16
Professional Activities

• Professional Involvement
• - Chair, IEEE NB Section
• - The C3.ca Association, Inc.(the Canadian
  Consortium for High
• Performance Computing)
• Member, Executive Committee and BoD
• Organized many workshops and conferences
• - Program-Co-Chair, HPCS2002, June 17-19,
  2002,
• Moncton, NB
• - Technical Committee Member, 3rd Workshop on
  Parallel
• Distributed Science and Engineering
  Computing with
• Applications, Fort Lauderdale, FL, April
  15-19, 2002.
• - Program Committee Member, Grid Canada,
  Toronto,
• February, 2002.

17
Conclusion

• Broad research background
• Collaborations
• - IIT, NRC, Ottawa
• - UNB, Univ. of IL, USC, C-DAC India, and other
  institutions
• Professional Involvement
• e-Business related interests
• - e.g. user profiling, multi-agent systems,
  Learning and e-Learning, multi-lingual web, high
  performance web servers,