My Active research projects, research problems, and future directions covers areas of Mobile and Wireless Computing Mobile Database System Research, Data dissemination on wireless channels, Web Security, Sensor Technology, Bio informatics and some others...

In mobile and wireless computing area my research activities are related to information management aspects. In simple terms the research problem can be stated as “How to manage information processing in a secured manner on a mobile platform where connectivity is achieved through wireless network”. This research area requires new ways of processing queries and managing transactions, building new transaction model that has mobile related properties in addition to ACID properties, new ways of caching data on a mobile processor, efficient ways of identifying location of mobile processors, and many more. The human-computer interaction also takes a new form in this area. We have developed a new mobile transaction model called “Mobilaction”, where we have incorporated a location property, which takes care of location in the management of mobile transactions. There are still a large number of problems to be solved in this area. At present I am looking into how to enhance relational data model to include LDD so that location queries can be efficiently processed.

System recovery, concurrency control and transaction management are quite complex. I am studying the log management and checkpointing issues. Mobility and low reliability of mobile storage units log management is difficult. The question is how and where to store log so that its availability is high for recovery. Similarly how to serialize concurrent transactions in the presence of disconnected operation is also an open problem. Since mobile databases are highly distributed and could be heterogeneous, a new transaction commitment approaches are required. We have developed a transaction commitment protocol called TCOT (Transaction Commit on Timeout), which uses timeout parameter to commit distributed execution of transactions. We are further investigation this algorithm.

The availability and advances in the management of RF channels allow us to develop a global information dissemination system, which can be used from anywhere in the world. Like satellite radio a user can tune the system to access required information such as weather information, entertainment information, stock quotes, and so on. The system can be fine tuned by creating finer information granularity, which will cater for individual needs. Thus, a user can get traffic information for a particular highway in a particular city. This research is funded by NSF and project name is DAYS (Data in Your Space). There are a large number of problems, which are related to networking, RF channel management, data caching, and so on.

Web has become an important component of any organization, where all types of information are stored. It requires necessary security mechanisms for protecting its unauthorized use. It is difficult because its access is universal. We are developing schemes to provide necessary security to a web site through controlled access mechanisms.

Sensors are very useful in disseminating and capturing information at any geographical location (small, tiny or big). There are many situations in which we require to create a sensor network for integrating information originating from multiple sources. My research relates to data capture, data validation, data integration, etc., originating from sensor networks. This research also includes investigation into stream data management.

We are developing an intelligent database management system, which we refer to as “BioMind”. BioMind is a complete database system, which helps to identify protein when its functional or structural or both properties are submitted to the database.

In addition to the above areas I also work in the area of Medical Informatics, workflow, ad hoc (dynamic)networking, data warehousing, data mining, and real time systems.