Meeting Agenda

Wednesday, April 23^rd, 1997

Location:

DC 1304

Time:

13:30

Chair:

Ashraf Michail

1. Adoption of the Agenda - additions or deletions

2. Coffee Hour

Coffee hour this week:

Matthew Davidchuk

Coffee hour next week:

Volunteers?

3. Next meeting

Date:

April 30^th, 1997

Location:

DC 1304

Time:

13:30

Chair:

Matthew Davidchuk

Technical presentation:

Ashraf Michail

4. Forthcoming

Chairs:

1. Dan Milgram (5/7)
2. Liddy Olds (5/14)
3. Mark Riddell (5/21)

Tech Presenters:

1. Marryat Ma (5/7)
2. Dan Milgram (5/14)
3. Liddy Olds (5/21)

5. Technical Presentation

Presenter:

Michael D. McCool

Title:

Implementing Interactive Services on the WWW

Abstract:

A brief introduction to the implementation of CGI
(common gateway interface) WWW services will be given, via a live
example based on Perl.   This example shows how to process forms,
how to manage a simple database, and how to store state between
transactions on the client.

6.General Discussion Items

7. Action List

• Alias Brown Bag Seminar Series
• Ivan Sutherland Visit
• CGL Photo

8. Director's Meeting

9. Seminars

• Master's Essay Presentation - Supporting Adaptive Collaborative Applications in a Wireless Environment

Tara Whalen, graduate student, Dept. Comp. Sci., Univ. Waterloo
Wednesday, April 23
2:30-3:30
DC 1304

Software that supports collaboration (groupware) is rapidly gaining popularity, and many people wish to work together while using mobile computers. Mobile collaboration is made difficult by the characteristics of a wireless channel. The quality of a wireless connection can vary widely and is often of poor quality, characterized by low bandwidth and frequent disconnections.

Experiments with Calliope, a multi-user shared editor, indicate a number of application-level changes that allow more effective use of a wireless channel. Chief among these changes is the addition of adaptability, which allows the editor both to take full advantage of favorable network conditions and to handle difficult conditions as they occur. These experiments also indicate which network conditions are most relevant to groupware, information that will be used in a wireless network monitoring system that supports several types of adaptive applications.


• Getting the Web Ready For Wearable Wireless Internet Devices

Mike Lazaridis, Pres. of Research in Motion
April 23, 1997
3:30 p.m.
DC1302

The Internet/Intranet phenomena has demonstrated that people desire to interact with organized real-time information as much, if not more, than with people. The information content on the Internet continues to grow, becoming more organized, and more attractively bundled and packaged for all market segments. The successful introduction of low bandwidth HDML and other compact and efficient "Hand-held Device Mark-up Languages" will, with the help of proxy servers, give efficient Internet access to even the smallest devices. As the Internet, and the number of people who use and depend on it continues to grow, the need for any-time, any-where access to this information will become essential. The need to interact with this vast information and commerce base, receive and initiate email, and interact with others requires a wireless always-on, always-connected interactive wearable wireless technology. Mr. Lazaridis will describe the future of wearable wireless Internet devices, the possibilities and limitations of wireless data technologies, and some potential Internet services.


• Master's Essay Presentation - The use of CORBA objects to create Viewpoints on Legacy Systems

Tim Francis, graduate student, Dept. Comp. Sci., Univ. Waterloo
April 24, 1997
10:00-11:00 a.m.
DC 1331

Legacy systems pose an enormous problem to the deployment of object oriented technology in companies. There are literally trillions of lines of existing application code, rendering a complete or immediate migration to new technology impossible. Any replacement code must continue to interoperate with existing applications, while correctly implementing all the business rules and constraints that were provided by the code it is replacing. The presentation will propose viewpoints, in which multiple views can provide different perspectives on the same data, as a mechanism to introduce object technology into this environment. The use of CORBA distributed objects to implement these viewpoints will then analysed in some detail.


• Master's Essay Presentation - GROWING SOFTWARE: An Economic Analysis

E. de Oliveira, graduate student, Dept. Comp. Sci., Univ. Waterloo
April 24, 1997
11:00-12:00 p.m.
DC 1331

This presentation intends to summarize the micro- economic model introduced by Hal R. Varian and expand it under the Software Development point of view, inserting the economic paradigms inside the Software Development cycle. Then, I introduce a reuse model that tries to verify Varian's theory that software developers tend to crowd their packages with an excess of features to attract new users.

The reuse model I propose demonstrates that Varian's conclusions are partially true, but the software vendor hits a concrete barrier after inserting a given number of features into a program where the cost per feature does not go down, no matter how many extra features are added to the program.

This indicates that, despite the economic incentives presented by Varian that the software vendor tends to over-feature a given software product, there is a hard limit where there is no value add to the software vendor to keep investing in easy-to-use enhancements in order to attract new users.


• Master's Thesis Presentation - An Authoring Tool for Customizable Documents<

Kim Parsons, graduate student, Dept. Comp. Sci., Univ. Waterloo
April 29, 1997
10:00-11:30 a.m.
DC 1304

In my thesis, I describe the design and implementation of an authoring tool for customizable documents. The authoring tool was written as part of the HealthDoc project at the University of Waterloo, a project which aims to generate health-education materials that are tailored to the medical condition and personal situation of an individual patient. The authoring tool described in this thesis would be used by a medical writer to create documents that can be customized for individual readers.

The HealthDoc authoring tool will be used to specify variations of a single document and the discourse structure of the document. The author enters ordinary English text and indicates the conditions under which each piece of text is relevant for a particular type of patient. The author also includes in the document supplemental linguistic information that is used by the rest of the HealthDoc system to perform linguistic ``repair'' of the document, to ensure that the final document is coherent and rhetorically effective. The linguistic information currently used by HealthDoc is rhetorical relations and coreference. The authoring tool provides facilities to indicate rhetorical relations between pieces of text and to indicate groups of words and phrases that are coreferential.


• Master's Thesis Presentation - An Evaluation of a State-Based Model of Feature Interactions

Pansy Au, graduate student, Dept. Comp. Sci., Univ. Waterloo
April 30, 1997
10:30-11:30 a.m.
DC 1304

Many telephony features have been introduced in the past two decades. Feature designers increasingly experience problems in their attempts to add new features to the existing system without disrupting the other features and services in the system. A feature interaction occurs when the behaviour of a feature is affected by the existence of another feature in the system. Due to the complexity of the system, manual inspection to identify and resolve these interactions is clearly infeasible. Therefore, automated techniques must be used in the feature development process.

A formal notation based on state transition machine is used to specify individual feature behaviour and reachability analysis is performed to automatically compose feature specifications to form different call configurations and to detect feature interactions among those features. This state-based approach is evaluated with respect to a benchmark of feature interactions published by Bellcore. Due to the diverse nature and causes of interactions and the complexity of telephony, no single approach will be able to detect all possible classes of interactions. Our approach is able to specify 15 of the 19 features in the benchmark and is able to detect 11 of the 23 interactions discussed in the benchmark, with the possibility of detecting four more in the near future.

10. Lab Cleanup (until 14:30 or 5 minutes)