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@unb.ca
www.cs.unb.ca/profs/bhavsar
www.cs.unb.ca/acrl
Outline
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Past Research Work
Current Research Work
Future Research Work
Conclusion
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
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)
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Supervision/Co-supervision
50 master's theses; 4 doctoral theses
5 post-doctoral fellows/research associates
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
ACORN
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Information diffusion and search in networks
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All pieces of information - Agents
- documents; images, etc.
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Applications
B2B and B2C e-Commerce solutions
Virtual community creation and support systems
Personalized directed information handling
ACORN: Relation to Other Work
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Search Engines
e.g. Alta Vista, Excite, Yahoo, InfoSeek, and Lycos
If the user has to search, it’s because the information diffusion is
 not fast enough
 not accurate enough

Recommender Systems
– Firefly (Maes), Fab (Balabanovic)
– Content-based or Collaborative
– ACORN’s agents: a mixture of both
Matchmakers
– Yenta (Foner)
– Very close to the ACORN spirit; lacks the flexibility of ACORN
ACORN: Relation to Other Work (cont.)
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Web Page Watchers and Push Technologies
– Tierra, Marimba, Channels
– ACORN is a means of pushing new data, reducing the need to watch
for changes
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Filtering Systems
– The filtering in ACORN is implicit in what is recommended by humans
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‘Knowbots’
– Softbots (Washington, Etzioni, Weld), Nobots (Stanford, Shoham)
– mobile agents for internet search
– ACORN provides diffusion also
tom@ucsd.edu
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ucsd.edu
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Clients
wibble@cs.stir.ac.uk
graham@cs.stir.ac.uk
anne@cs.stir.ac.uk
joan@unb.ca
bhavsar@unb.ca
Café
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At set intervals, agents present are compared, and
relevant information exchanged
– Keyphrase-based Information Sharing
– A unique method of automating community based information
sharing
Café
Cosine Measure method: Similarity of Article 3
(Category 1)
1
Ca tego ry
Ca tego ry
Ca tego ry
Ca tego ry
Ca tego ry
similarity
0.8
1:
2:
3:
4:
5:
ar ticl es
ar ticl es
ar ticl es
ar ticl es
ar ticl es
1
12
23
33
43
–
-
0.6
0.4
0.2
0
1
6
11
16
21
26
articles
(a)
31
36
41
46
11
22
32
42
49
Performance Evaluation of ACORN
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Test-bed: Several Autonomous Servers, each
serving autonomous virtual users
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Virtual User - capable of creating agents
- picks up a topic from a client core’s interest
- migrates to other servers
- potential destinations
Performance Evaluation of ACORN
120
Time (Seconds)
100
80
60
40
20
0
0
0
20
40
60
Number of Agents
80
Mingle Tim e with cosine
Total Exection Time with cosine
Mingle Tim e for without cosine
Total Exection Time without cosine
100
Future Research Work
Multi-Agent Systems: B2B-B2C Extensions
User-driven personalization
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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
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
Professional Activities
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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, HPCS’2002, 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.
Conclusion
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Broad research background
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Collaborations
- IIT, NRC, Ottawa
- UNB, Univ. of IL, USC, C-DAC India, and other institutions
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Professional Involvement
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e-Business related interests
- e.g. user profiling, multi-agent systems, Learning and eLearning, multi-lingual web, high performance web servers, …