Raman Kannan

22 Maria Court

Holmdel, NJ 07733

Phone: (908)-787-0779

kannan@moncol.monmouth.edu

http://www.monmouth.edu/monmouth/academic/dna

Career Interest

Teaching and Research in Computer Support for Collaborative Work, Distributed Systems, Multimedia and applications of these technologies in Distributed Software Engineering, Health, Engineering and Banking industries.

Mission

To transition advanced technology to our community in a timely manner by engineering usable software systems and by training our students in advanced technologies.

Purpose, Justification and Synopsis

The grand challenge faced by small as well as mega-corporations today is what to make of the glut of information that is available and how to use them effectively. Most importantly in a timely manner. At the DNA Laboratory we are constantly evaluating new communication infrastructures (DCE,ONC, CORBA, WWW,etc) as they become available. We devise working prototypical services to demonstrate interoperability and develop workable integration strategies.

Currently we are working on such key enabling technologies as general purpose collaborative infrastructures, digital libraries, Shared Document Space and services on the internet. The applicability and benefit of these substrate technologies are being evaluated in information intensive application domains such as Collaborative Software Engineering. Our solutions are aimed at augmenting the existing services to both add and gather information without explicit knowledge of underlying formats, communication protocols and services.

DNA for the Digital Society

Just as there are microscopic blueprints that make up complex living organisms we are creating autonomous and atomic services which can be integrated in numerous ways to devise very large systems. We do so by integrating advanced but disparate technologies and tools using sound software engineering techniques. As an illustration in the IDAM project we are experimenting with WWW technologies and the hypermedic capabilities to facilitate intuitive software maintenance. Software lives most in the maintenance phase and yet maintenance and the problems associated with maintenance are largely ignored. How can we assist software engineers to better visualize or navigate large software repositories. How can we help software developers find/discover software artifacts available in the public domain that may be appropriate for their task. This is one of the applications we have in mind. As new capabilities are made available we plan to integrate and demonstrate that advanced technologies can indeed be put to "productive" use. In doing so our emphasis is to demonstrate the role and benefit of applying advanced design techniques and other software engineering methods and techniques.

Academic Emphasis (Rekindling innate I**3)

Most importantly we do so with singular emphasis on training and technology transition centered around Innovation, Imagination and Improvisation. Faculty and students work together on all aspects of problem solving. So that our students become agents of technology infusion and change for their prospective employers.

Experience

September 1994 - Software Engineering Department, Monmouth University. Also, affiliated with the Center for Technology Development and Transfer at Monmouth University.

Teaching

Research and Infrastructure

Motivation: Graphical User Interface construction is a time consuming, human intensive process. It is practically impossible to build custom graphical user interface for all the databases (legacy and evolving) individually.

Technical Report: Draft.

Motivation: There is a vast (and ever expanding) resource (information) in the form of documents on one hand and on the other hand there are robust technologies to navigate (Hypertext technologies and World Wide Web) if only these resources could be rendered in HTML. In IDAM we are trying to find ways to transform native documents to HTML or SGML format. The motivation is to provide support for incorporating these digital repositories into hypermedia on-demand without human intervention.

Technical Report: (Accepted for Publication)

Proposal: IEEE WETICE-96

Agenda: http://conan.wi-inf.uni-essen.de/WETICE/agenda.html

Position Paper:Joint W3C/OMG Workshop on Distributed Objects and Mobile Code

Agenda: http://www.w3.org/pub/WWW/OOP/9606_Workshop/submissions/accept

Motivation: CORBA and HTML are two strategic technologies and there is a need for identifying requirements for interoperability and solving related problems.

Motivation: This is a development and commercialization effort and purely due to my expertise in Unix environment, I undertook this challenge to setup and analyze the CAPS system.

Corporate Training and Grants

Developed the Database, Network Computing and Graphical User Interface modules. Also contributed as a team member to develop the over-all curriculum and program outline (9 courses). Three groups of students and total funding in excess of 500K. Recently, we procured additional support for incorporating heterogeneous databases in this program.

Contributed as a team member to develop the over-all curriculum and the program (3 courses). In excess of 150K.

September 1994 - Independent Consultant as an expert in multi-dimensional Data Analysis, Network Computing, Systems Design and Training.

Major Company in the Financial Industry

Designed a network of agents to receive and distribute market data across geographically distributed area using design patterns and a OO framework.

Presented work in OOPSLA 95 Workshop.

Technical Report: Draft in preparation on OO Frameworks.

Court appointed expert on multi-dimensional data analysis (Superior Court of NJ)

Technical Reports: Wrote 3 reports.

1992 - September 1994 - Assistant Vice President, Citibank, N.A. Development of applications and departmental infrastructure for enterprise computing. Designed and developed Models for automatic GUI generation. Automated Trade Confirmation using text processing utilities.

August - November 1992 - Director of Distributed Applications, Shadyside Hospital, Pittsburgh, PA 15232.

1988 - August 1992 - Research Associate, DARPA's Initiative in Concurrent Engineering(DICE) Program, Concurrent Engineering Research Center(CERC), West Virginia University, Morgantown, WV 26506. Research in Enabling Technologies for Concurrent Engineering including Distributed Computing, Information Sharing and Integration Framework.

Task Leader and Principal Technical Investigator for Communications Manager 1988-92. Proposed, and designed the Communications Manager (CM) for the DICE Architecture as part of the kernel services. Served as a member of the DICE architecture team.

Research Advisor: Graduated 4 Graduate students.

Communication, Training and Teaching: Responsibilities included briefing CERC Industry partners on DICE/CERC CE Initiative, CE Architectural Services and organizing introductory course, lecture series on CM, and Distributed Computing Infrastructure.

The Communications Manager (CM) is one of the major components in the DICE Architecture for a software environment for concurrent engineering (CE). CM serves as a distributed computing infrastructure in heterogeneous networked environments. The purpose of CM is to provide network transparency, simplified application program interface for network transparent inter-process communication, application management, and distributed job management. Communications Manager maintains a directory of the DICE environment resources, such as machines, design specialists, design software tools. Applications and engineers alike can send messages and respond to messages in a network transparent fashion. Distributed Job management allows users to create, execute and maintain a network of inter-related tasks and using the dependencies between tasks, CM, maximizes the number of tasks executed at any given time. CM is implemented in C, using TCP/IP in Unix environments. As a member of the development team implemented the CM subcomponents: a BSD Socket library and the Application Management System in C using TCP/IP and UNIX.

1987-1988 - Graduate Research, in Distributed AI at West Virginia University.

DAIS, Distributed Artificial Intelligence Programming Shell: Is an environment for distributed AI programming. DAIS consists of a portable unit and a machine dependent unit. The machine dependent unit facilitates communication between machines(MDCL). The portable unit consists of a frame based knowledge representation tool, a rule based programming tool, an Intelligent Message Management module, a network server and remote processor. The intelligent message processor employs rules to send, receive and process messages. The server module allows any number of DAIS applications to exchange chunks of knowledge. The remote processor allows DAIS applications to operate on remote DAIS knowledge bases. MDCL, is based on TCP/IP in the internet domain and a departmental communication tool for IBM/PC domain.

Proposed, designed the DAIS System and implemented the entire portable layer. Defined and implemented the interfaces between MDCL and the DAIS portable layer for both Internet and IBM(PC) environments. DAIS is implemented in C and is portable between UNIX and DOS/TURBOC environments.

1982-1988 - Graduate Research and Teaching Assistant at West Virginia University. Graduate Class Projects included the design and implementation of compiler, expert system shell, graphical editor and relational database management system using C/Ada/Lisp in UNIX/VMS/Macintosh Environments.

Education

M.S., Computer Science, (4.0/4.0), West Virginia University, Morgantown, WV, USA -1988.

A Programming Environment to apply Artificial Intelligence in Computer Networking.

Ph. D., Physics, West Virginia University, Morgantown, WV, USA - 1987.

Percolation effects and Magnetic Properties of Randomly Diluted Antiferromagnetic system CoO:MgO

M. Sc., Physics, University of Roorkee, Roorkee, UP, India - 1982.

B. Sc., Physics, University of Madras, Madras, India - 1980.

Refereed Conference Publications

R. Kannan, "Disha: A Direction toward Software Engineering on the Net", TR-MU-SE-DNA-97-001, Accepted for publication in Webnet 97 Conference, Association for the Advancement of Computing in Education, Toronoto, Canada, November 1-5, 1997.

Agenda: http://curry.edschool.Virginia.EDU/aace/conf/webnet/Webf-k.txt

Paper: http://www.monmouth.edu/monmouth/academic/dna/webnet97.htm

R. Kannan, "TIGER: Table Independent GUI Environment for Relational Objects", TR-MU-SE-DNA-95-001, Software Engineering Department, Monmouth University, West Long Branch, NJ 07764. CSI-96, Proceedings of the 31st Annual Convention of the Computer Society of India, 30th October - 3 rd November, 1996, Bangalore, India, Pages 179-186.

Paper: http://www.monmouth.edu/monmouth/academic/dna/tigadbj4.htm

Raman Kannan, IDAM: An Actice Digital Archive Management, Accepted for the Joint W3C and OMG Workshop on Distributed Objects and Mobile Code, June 24-26, Boston, USA.

Agenda: http://www.w3.org/pub/WWW/OOP/9606_Workshop/submissions/accept

Position Paper: http://www.monmouth.edu/monmouth/academic/dna/w3cf.htm

Raman Kannan, "Semantic Web for Colloborative Software Engineering", Accepted for presentation at the IEEE WETICE-96 on Collaborative Infrastructures, June 19-21, Stanford, USA.

Agenda: http://conan.wi-inf.uni-essen.de/WETICE/agenda.html

Proposal: http://www.monmouth.edu/monmouth/academic/dna/weti96ff.htm

Raman Kannan, "Managing Continuos Feed with Subscriber/Publisher Pattern", Workshop on Concurrent Distributed Patterns, OOPSLA-95, Austin, Texas.

Workshop: http://www.cs.wustl.edu/~schmidt/OOPSLA-95/html/papers

Paper: http://www.monmouth.edu/monmouth/academic/dna/subs96.htm

R. Kannan, et. al., "Software Environment for Network Computing", Workshop on "Heterogeneous Network-Based Concurrent Computing", SCRI/Florida State University, October 16-18, 1991, also appeared in the newsletter for the IEEE Technical Committee on Operating Systems and Application Environments, Vol. 6, No. 1, 1992. Also available as a technical report (CERC-TR-RN-91-007) from CERC, WVU, Morgantown, WV 26505.

R. Kannan, C.L.Chen, Michael Packer and Hawa Singh, "Directory Service for Group Work", in CSCW 92 Tools & Technologies Workshop, Toronto, Canada. Also available as a technical report (CERC-TR-RN-91-004) from CERC, WVU, Morgantown, WV 26505.

Vangati R. Narender and R. Kannan, "Dynamic RPC for Extensibility", in IEEE International Phoenix Conference on Computers and Communications-92, April 1 -3, 1992, Phoenix, Arizona.

V. Jagannathan, K. J. Cleetus, R. Kannan, J. Toth, and V. Saks, "Application Message Interface", in IEEE International Phoenix Conference on Computers and Communications-92, April 1 -3, 1992, Phoenix, Arizona.

R. Kannan, K. J. Cleetus and Y. V. Reddy, "The Local Concurrency Manager in Distributed Computing", Proceedings of the Second National Symposium on Concurrent Engineering, Feb. 7-9, 1990, 219-240, CERC, WVU, Morgantown, WV 26505.

Journal Publications

R. Kannan and W.H. Dodrill, "DAIS: Distributed Artificial Intelligence Programming Shell", IEEE EXPERT, Vol. 5, No.6, Dec. 1990,34-42.

V. Jagannathan, K. J. Cleetus, R. Kannan, A.S. Matsumoto, and J. W. Lewis, "Computer Support for Concurrent Engineering", CE Issues, Technology, and Practice, Auerbach Publishers, Sept/Oct.1991.

R. Kannan and M.S. Seehra, Phys. Rev. B 35, 6847(1987).

R. Kannan, A.S. Pavlovic and M.S. Seehra, J. Phys.C 19, L747(1986).

List of other publications (invited articles/position papers)

Raman Kannan, "Undergraduate Education in Software Engineering: Who, What, When and How?", Forum for Advancing Software Engineering, Volume 7, Number 02, September 15, 1997.

Raman Kannan, "Curriculum on Demand", Information Technology Education '97, Rochester Institute of Technology, Rochestor, NY June 9-11, 1997.

Raman Kannan, Anticipating and Leveraging the Future: Surfing the Sigmoid Curve, Invited Paper, CSI-96, Proceedings of the 31st Annual Convention of the Computer Society of India, 30th October - 3 rd November, 1996, Bangalore, India, Pages:385-391.

Paper: http://www.monmouth.edu/monmouth/academic/dna/sigmod.htm

Raman Kannan, Preparation: A Critical Component of Software Engineering, Invited Article, IEEE Technical Committee on Software Engineering, Fall, 1996, Pages: EN-6 - EN-8.

Paper: http://www.monmouth.edu/monmouth/academic/dna/se-edu.htm

Raman Kannan, "Anatomical Artifacts", Not Refereed, IEEE Computer Forum on the Next 50 Years and New York Academy of Sciences Forum on the Next 50 Years.

Short Note: http://notes.computer.org:80/next50/2166.html

Technical Reports

R. Kannan, "Scalable Architecture for Reliable, High Volume Data Feed Handlers", TR-MU-SE-DNA-97- 002, Software Engineering Department, Monmouth University, West Long Branch, NJ 07764.

R. Kannan, "Customizable Devices for Concurrency and Communication", TR-MU-SE-DNA-97-003.

R. Kannan, "Capturing User Interface Traits using MetaData", TR-MU-SE-DNA-95-003

R. Kannan, "Application Partitioning with Patterns", TR-MU-SE-DNA-95-002.

R. Kannan, Vangati R. Narender and Michael Packer, "Communication Mechanisms for Heterogeneous Networks: RPC vs. Message Passing", CERC-TR-RN-91-003, CERC, 1991.

R. Kannan and Michael Packer, "Inter-Tool Data File Exchange: Issues and Approach", CERC-TR-RN-91-005, CERC, 1991.

R. Kannan, "Engineering Information System: A comparison", CERC, 1991.

R. Kannan, "Requirements for Distributed Computing Support for CE", CERC 1990.

Professional Associations

ACM, SIGART (Artificial Intelligence), SIGOIS (Office Information Systems), IEEE, IEEE Computer Society.