The goal of this research is to provide seamless access to the networked computational and information resources from mobile, wirelessly connected systems. Such systems will be an integral component of the National Information Infrastructure (NII). Some of the current obstacles in building such a ubiquitous access system on mobile platforms include their limited compute power, disks, battery life etc., as well as the limited and variable bandwidth of the wireless networks. Moreover, the next generation of radio communication hardware will engender ad-hoc networks which current proxy based mobile access models cannot handle. The approach in this research is to create agent oriented middleware which overcomes the limitations of the mobile hosts as well as wireless networks, and helps integrate them into the high performance computer and communication systems that form the backbone of the NII. The middleware transcodes (multimedia) data streams to enable weakly connected access, and integrates software component based systems to provide computational power to mobile hosts. This allows the systems to create information from available data to respond to queries, which is useful when the queries are in non-trivial domains (e.g. scientific information, electronic commerce). Moreover, the system provides disconnection management, and integrates techniques for cooperative information filtering. The system supports both proxy based and end-end data management approaches and their relative efficacy is compared. It is expected that this work will lead to the development of software systems needed to support mobile information access in complex, real world applications, and allow the NII to handle the diversity of scale presented by mobile clients connected over low bandwidth wireless (ad-hoc) networks to the high bandwidth network backbone and powerful servers. The educational component of this proposal has two aspects. One focuses on creating courses in the area of the proposed research work and training undergraduate and graduate students. The other leverages the proposed research to create adaptive electronic notebooks for science and engineering education which use (existing) courseware, digital libraries and other data repositories. It is expected that the electronic notebook software will be used by non-traditional students in continuing education programs who use low bandwidth dial-in or wireless connections. www.cs.umbc.edu/~ajoshi/career/
