ITR: Dynamic and Secure Distributed Collaborations

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The focus of this project is on the development of conceptualfoundations along with a middleware infrastructure for rapidconstruction of dynamic and secure distributed collaborations. Thisproject is investigating techniques for constructing dynamiccollaboration environments from their high-level specifications. Thesespecifications are interfaced with a middleware to build the desiredenvironment. This project is developing techniques for specifying acollaboration plan using XML and mechanisms for a mobile agent basedmiddleware for implementing such a plan. A collaboration specificationidentifies the participants in a collaboration by their roles, and alsospecifies the associated role-based security policies. It specifies theshared objects together with the coordination and workflow requirementsfor information flow among the participants. Mechanisms are beinginvestigated for participants to dynamically join or leave an environment.These include mechanisms for authentication of a participant'scredentials, assignment of roles, and discovery of resources by aparticipant. These mechanisms and services are integrated in anagent based middleware, using the Ajanta agent programming system,for constructing distributed collaborations. This middleware investigatesuse of mobile agents for building transportable user interfaces,for executing remote coordination actions, and as mobile workflowobjects. It also provides support for resource discovery, naming, eventmanagement, and security.