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CS Spotlight

Dr. Anne Ngu

Dr. Anne Ngu received an $80,000 contract from Pacific Northwest National Laboratory located in Richland, Washington. An initial $30,000 was awarded in 2008.

Her research is focused on building context-aware software, and in particular, using this software to improve scientific workflows. She is currently implementing a Java program with the ability to gather contextual information to provide dynamic and intelligent responses to an otherwise static and monolithic sequence of operations.

For example, a scientist may wish to perform a data transfer operation from system A to system B. A context-aware application might gather information such as network connectivity speeds between the two systems, the availability of data transfer protocols (such as scp, sftp, srmLite, and bbcp), the size of the data file to be transferred, et cetera, to choose a transfer protocol that is optimal for the given scenario at that point of time.

In this manner, the data transfer operation is performed efficiently without the scientist delving into any extraordinary, tech-centric, time-consuming activities such as learning the correct syntax to use for transferring a file under a specific operating system. The goal here is to let the scientist concentrate on research by optimizing work productivity via adaptive software.

Other uses of Ngu′s context-aware programs include sharing log-in credentials across multiple systems without the use of stored cookies. Such a feature would save the time it takes to re-authenticate without compromising security by storing a persistent and re-usable credential.

Ngu is seeking a research assistant. Email her at hn12@txstate.edu for further information.