Tutorial Program

Tutorial fees include:
  • Admission to the tutorials you select
  • Printed and bound tutorial material
  • Tutorial luncheon (only for people who attend both morning and afternoon sessions)

Morning Tutorials

T1: Mobile Middleware for Future Telecommunications.
Motivation, Future Services and Architectures Based on enago-Mobile

Thomas Magedanz and Lars Hagen,
IKV Technologies AG, Germany

Today's users want to use services worldwide on different terminals independent of any underlying networks. Here the user mobility is a major market driving aspect. In future new services have to be network and device independent. Also new intelligent terminals allow the user to let services run locally and not anymore necessarily within the network. This opens the market for services on demand, whereas these services can be distributed and executed asynchronously. But today existing networks and service provisioning platforms do not support the new requirements on such services. Due to the convergence of fixed networks, mobile networks and the Internet a new type of a platform is required - the mobile middleware platform, e.g. enago.

Such mobile middleware platforms fulfill these new user requirements, support programmable networks and types of programmable terminals for the future networks. In this environment mobile agents are the ideal vehicles for deploying personalized services to any place in a terminal and network independent manner.

This tutorial provides a comprehensive view on enago-Mobile that enables the delegates to understand the technology behind enago-Mobile and how it can be used to realize software projects within their companies and for potential customers right after the course.

The tutorial is structured into four parts:

1. Future Services and Architectures

The tutorial is started with an overview of the basic concepts of agent based telecommunication and motivate their usage, including:

  • Which services exist and what are the architectural requirements?
    • Motivate the usage of mobile agents for their realization
  • Which agent-based architectures are known and what impact do they
    have on telecommunication research?
  • What are mobile applications?
    • What is the understanding of agents?
    • Where and how can they be used?
    • Which standards are reflected and triggering their evolution?
  • What is enago-Mobile?  What is its history?

2. Case study for an agent platform: enago-Mobile

This part of the tutorial will describe and explain the enago-Mobile architecture and components:

  • What components enago Mobile consists of?
  • What is an agency? What is a region? How do they interact?
  • How to control and manage agent lifecycle, agent migration and agent communication?
  • How can enago-Mobile be adopted and extended to customer needs?

3. enago-Mobile in telecommunication networks

The third part of the tutorial examines how the enago-Mobile can be used in telecommunication networks to realize telecommunication services:

  • Introduce actual agent based telecommunication network research activities
    • Agents in programmable networks
  • How can enago-Mobile be applied in telecommunication networks?
  • Agent usage for realizing Mobile portals
    • enago-Mobile a piece of an generic platform
  • Enago-Mobile on small devices (PDA). The enago-Mobile micro edition.

4. Examining enago-Mobile service examples

The last part of the tutorial will investigate in examination and demonstration services examples to consolidate the understanding the mobile agent usage:

  • Introducing agent based telecommunication related service examples (e.g. iBroker, Smart Messaging, Content on demand, Mobile map)
  • Demonstrating the opportunities by the way of enago-Mobile
  • Detailed explanation how a service is to implement and how it can be done using enago-Mobile

About the Speakers (T1)

Thomas Magedanz (PhD) is Chief Technical Officer of the IKV Technologies AG, where he is leading the development of advanced telecommunications middleware products and 3G mobile application platforms. In addition, he acts as private professor at the computer sciences department at the Technical University Berlin, with focus on advanced telecommunication systems. Before he worked as technical director of the IKV++ GmbH, a start up company originating from GMD FOKUS with focus on advanced middleware technologies. He is a member of the IEEE, editorial board member of several journals, and the author of more than 100 technical papers/articles related to IN standards and IN evolution. He is working on IN evolution since more than ten years and thus he is an internationally recognized expert in this area. He is the author of the first international book on IN standards, published in 1996, and is an regularly invited tutorial speaker at major international IN events and conferences as he is famous for his comprehensive investigations and “easy to digest” style of presentations. He also provides on-demand on-site seminars as well as consultancy on IN related topics for different operators and vendors.

Lars Hagen received his M.S. in computer sciences from the Technical University of Berlin, Germany, in 1996. In 1997 he started working at the GMD Research Center for Open Communication Systems. In this environment he was involved in several international TINA auxiliary projects. Since spring 1998, he has been with IKV Technology AG where he is active in the development of advanced telecommunications middleware products and 3G mobile application platforms. He is also working and managing ACTS and IST projects at IKV and published several papers related to mobile agents and 3rd generation mobile systems. In addition, he acts as guest lector at the computer sciences department at the Technical University Berlin, with focus on mobile telecommunication systems and IN.

T2: Global Computation and the Ambient Calculus

Luca Cardelli, Microsoft Research, UK

The last decades have seen the emergence of the "sea of objects"; paradigm for structuring complex distributed systems on workstations and local area networks. In this approach, applications and system services are composed of and communicate among themselves through reliable and transparently accessible object interfaces, leading to the synchronous interaction of hundred or thousands of unstructured objects.

This approach has lead to major progress in software composability and reliability. Unfortunately, it is based on a number of assumptions that do not hold on wide-area networks. There, access to resources is intrinsically asynchronous and unreliable (because of failure, congestion, disconnected operation, etc.) and not transparent (because of variations in latency and bandwidth, hardware and software mobility, and the presence of firewalls). Coping with these characteristics requires to a new model of computation, where mobility can play an important role.

We discuss the challenges of computation on wide-area networks, and introduce a formalism, the Ambient Calculus, that matches some fundamental characteristics of wide-area networks and systems. Our approach (developed together with Andrew Gordon) reflects the intuition that to function satisfactorily on a wide-area network, the "sea of objects"; must be partitioned and made hierarchical, internally mobile, and secure.

About the Speaker (T2)

Luca Cardelli was born in Montecatini Terme, Italy, studied at the University of Pisa (until 1979), and has a Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Edinburgh (1982). He worked at Bell Labs, Murray Hill, from 1982 to 1985, and at Digital Equipment Corporation, Systems Research Center in Palo Alto, from 1985 to 1997, before assuming his current position at Microsoft Research Ltd, in Cambridge UK.

His main interests are in the theory of programming languages, for applications to language design, semantics, and implementation. He wrote the first compiler for ML (the most popular typed functional language) and one of the earliest direct-manipulation user-interface editors. He was a member of the Modula-3 design committee, and has designed a few experimental languages, of which the latest is Obliq: a distributed higher-order language. His more protracted research activity has been in establishing the semantic and type-theoretic foundations of object-oriented languages, resulting in the recent book "A Theory of Objects" with Martin Abadi. Currently, he is focusing on the foundations of global and mobile computation.

He is the author of over 50 international publications, has served on over 30 international program committees, and was the program chair of POPL'98. He is an associate editor of the Journal of Functional Programming, of Theory and Practice of Object Systems, and of Science of Computer Programming. He is a member of ACM, EATCS, IFIP WG 2.8, and (formerly) IFIP WG 2.2.

Afternoon Tutorials

T3: Mobile Agents for Application Integration

Fred Igo, Mitsubishi Electric Research Labs, USA
Masataka Kawaguchi, Mitsubishi Electric, Japan

Application integration is a thorny and complex distributed computing problem.  Mobile Agents are a good solution for distributed computing problems and XML helps to make documents application independent. Concordia-xml, a product developed by Mitsubishi Electric, expands the Concordia™ mobile gent platform using development tools, XML and runtime support to provide a framework for rapid development and deployment of application integration solutions using Mobile Agents and XML.

This tutorial will cover the advantages of Mobile Agents, XML and Concordia-xml for developing application integration solutions, present case studies of actual solutions using Concordia & XML, and review the actual methodology and tools for the development of such solutions.

The outline of this tutorial is structured as follows:

1. Why Mobile Agents & XML for Application Integration?

This part of the tutorial will discuss advantages of mobile agents over traditional application integration solutions, such as messaging and centralized hub-spoke architectures. We will also show how design tools with a graphical drag-and-drop style allow for rapid agent application design and development.  We will also discuss how XML provides seamless interchange of information between different systems and formats.

2. Case Study of Application Integration Solutions

This part of the tutorial will discuss some of the solutions that Mitsubishi Electric has developed in a number of different domains to address the application integration issue.  We will present application scenarios and actual deployed systems using both Concordia-xml and MELBA.  MELBA is a unique software product, also developed by Mitsubishi Electric, which uses mobile agent technology to link up various computer systems within a company or between a company and its business partners. Using Concordia mobile agents and XML, MELBA offers an easy to implement, secure and robust alternative to complex and costly systems integration work.

3. How to develop an Application Integration Solution?

The third part of this tutorial will discuss how Concordia-xml tools can be used to develop a unique application integration solution.  We will show how to design XML documents for carrying enterprise information and define how that information relates to data fields in multiple disparate enterprise data repositories.  We will also present a methodology for designing reports and forms for presentation and submission of information via the designed XML document.  Finally, we will show how to design business rules for application specific logic and processing flow for the agents and documents within the Concordia-xml framework.

About the Speakers (T3)

Frederick J. Igo, Jr. is a Senior Principal Technical Staff member of Cambridge Systems Laboratory at Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories in Cambridge Massachusetts.  During more than fifteen years at Mitsubishi Electric he has had interest in various system software research and development, including distributed computing, distributed OLTP and multi-dimensional database technology.  The results of which have led to twice winning Mitsubishi Electric's President's Award.  He has spent the last few years focusing on mobile agent research and development with Mitsubishi Electric's Concordia mobile agent platform.  

Masataka Kawaguchi is Manager of Cellular Phone Application at Mitsubishi Electric IT R&D Center in Ofuna, Japan. His interests include next generation middleware software and its application in the wireless communication domain.  Prior to his current position, he spent 4.5 years at the Mitsubishi Electric Research Labs in the U.S., participating in the development of the Concordia mobile agent framework.  He is currently working on the development of cell phone applications utilizing agent technology.

T4: Resource Control for Mobile Agents

Niranjan Suri, University of West Florida, USA

Resource control is an important requirement for mobile agent systems. This tutorial will explore the requirements for resource control, different models for resource control APIs, and different approaches to implement resource control in the Java environment. A survey of existing resource control approaches will also be included.

About the Speaker (T4)

Niranjan Suri is a Research Scientist at the Institute for Human and Machine Cognition (IHMC) at the University of West Florida. His recent research has led to the development of the NOMADS mobile agent system for Java-based agents with secure execution and anytime and forced mobility. He has developed and implemented a Java-compatible Virtual Machine with key extensions to support mobile state and resource control within the Java environment. His research interests include virtual machines, distributed computing, autonomous intelligent agents, network security, distributed, persistent objects, and Internet-based collaboration tools.

Keynotes

Mobile Code Research: Looking Back and Peering Ahead

F. B. Schneider, Cornell University, USA

Fred B.Schneider is a professor at Cornell's Computer Science Department and director of the AFRL/Cornell Information Assurance Institute. He has an M.S. and Ph.D. from SUNY Stony Brook and a B.S. from Cornell. Dr. Schneider is author of the graduate text "On Concurrent Programming" and co-author (with David Gries) of the undergraduate text "A Logical Approach to Discrete Math." He is a fellow of AAAS and ACM and is Professor at Large at the University of Tromsø (Norway), where he is a member of the TACOMA project. In addition to chairing the National Research Council's study committee on information systems trustworthiness and editing "Trust in Cyberspace," Dr. Schneider is co-managing editor of Springer-Verlag's "Texts and Monographs in Computer Science," and serves on a number of journal editorial boards. He holds patents in the area of fault-tolerant system design.

Mobile Agents and the Unsexy (but Lucrative) Reality -- Integrating and Extending the Enterprise

A. Ricciardi, Valaran Corporation, USA

Aleta Ricciardi has a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Cornell University. She is Exec VP and Founder of Valaran since June, 2000. Most recently, Dr. Ricciardi was an assistant professor at the University of Texas at Austin. While on sabbatical leave (1998- 2000) she was a research scientist at Bell Laboratories, where she started the Distributed Systems Research Department. She has conducted research in distributed computing and middleware, fault tolerance, automated protocol derivation for distributed applications, and security for distributed systems. She is a member of the Jini Technical Oversight Committee, the ACM, the IEEE, and the PODC Steering Committee. In 1998, Dr. Ricciardi was the national recipient of the C. Holmes Macdonald Outstanding Young Faculty Award, given by Eta Kappa Nu, the electrical engineering honor society.