- Research in Trust Management in Global Computing Systems
This work took place primarily as part of the EU IST FET Project SECURE
(Secure Collaboration among Ubiquitous Roaming Entities). The project investigated the design of dynamic and self-configuring
security mechanisms that are appropriate for global computing based on the human notion of trust. I was a co-investigator in SECURE leading the scientific work at
the University of Strathclyde. Our main focus was the development of a model for trust-based collaboration. Our model is presented in
the paper titled "Trust Lifecycle Management in a Global Computing Environment".
Within the same area of work was also our participation to iTrust the EU Thematic Network on Trust Management
in Dynamic Open Systems. I was the scientific person in charge of the University of Strathclyde participation,
as part of which in September 2002 we organised the
First iTrust Workshop.
In addition to the SECURE project, work in this area was also supported by a grant from The Nuffield Foundation under
their Undergraduate Research Scheme that adapted the GridSim simulator to support experimentation with trust-based
resource allocation schemes. I was the principal investigator and academic supervisor of the research student.
This work was also supported by an International Travel Grant from the Royal Academy of Engineering that supported my attendance of the
4th International Conference on Trust Management to present the paper
Gathering Experience in Trust-Based Interactions.
- Research in Software Components for Context-aware Applications
This work involved the development of the Strathclyde Context Infrastructure (SCI)
for the collection and management of contextual information, and the development of
techniques for the identification of situations to support contextual adaptation.
- Research in Component Software and Business-to-Business E-Commerce
This work aimed to provide the technology infrastructure and management tools to enable
dynamic business-to-business E-Commerce. It included an investigation of the impact of
the Virtual Enterprise model for business organisations. It also included an
investigation of how techniques from open distributed systems, and service trading in particular,
can be used in the construction of a component oriented development framework in order to
provide the necessary flexibility and dynamism required by Enterprise Systems. This part of the
work is the topic of My Ph.D. thesis, which introduces A Component Type Model for Semantically
Enhanced Component Trading.
The work started in November 1997 at the Distributed
Systems Group in the School of Computer Science and Statistics of
the University of Dublin, Trinity College under the Virtues Project.
- Research in Digital Libraries
This work involved the study of Performance Monitoring, Load Balancing and
Dynamic Adaptation of Timeouts in Digital Library Systems. It included the
implementation of a performance monitor for digital library systems. A demo
of the performance monitor was presented in the 1st European
Conference on Research and Advanced Technology for Digital Libraries, Pisa,
Italy, in September 1997. It also included the implementation of a load
balancing prototype based on DIENST (the digital library system of the Networked
Computer Science Technical Report Library, developed at Cornell University) and
a performance study of the DIENST system. Finally, it included the implementation
of a framework for pricing and charging in digital libraries. The design of the
framework is presented in the article Economic Framework for Pricing and Charging
in Digital Libraries, J. Sairamesh, C. Nikolaou, D. Ferguson, Y. Yemini, D-Lib
Magazine, February 1996. A demo of the system was presented at the "NCSTRL Workshop"
of 5th International World Wide Web Conference, Paris, France, May 1996.
My M.Sc. thesis Performance Monitoring in Digital Library Systems, supervisor
Prof. C. Nikolaou and supervising researcher Dr. S. Kapidakis was part of this work.
This work was done from October 1995 until September 1997, while I was working as
a research assistant at the PLEIADES - Parallel & Distributed Systems Group at the Computer Science
Institute of the Foundation for Research and Technology
Hellas (FORTH).
- Research in Performance Tools for Distributed Systems and Information Economies
This work involved the design and implementation of a simulator of microeconomic models for
resource allocation and load balancing in distributed transaction processing systems. The
simulator was built as an extension to the TPsim simulator for distributed database
systems and On-Line Transaction Processing (OLTP) systems. The work was part of my B.Sc. thesis
Extensions on the distributed transaction processing systems simulator TPsim for the
simulation of microeconomic models for resource allocation and load balancing supervised by
Dr. S. Kapidakis.
This work was done from July 1994 until September 1995, while I was working as a research
student at the PLEIADES - Parallel & Distributed Systems Group of the Computer Science Institute of
the Foundation for Research and Technology Hellas (FORTH),
and was funded by the LYDIA project.