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The Internet Futures group has a range of ongoing project activities each year involving ANU students, mainly from the Faculty of Engineering and IT (FEIT) and in particular fourth year students from the Department of Computer Science (DCS).
These projects range from short, single-semester eScience activities, to full year Honours research and Software Engineering projects.
2004
9 Software Engineering students (+X 3rd-year students),
2 Software Engineering Research Project students,
1 Honours student,
1 eScience student
AccessGrid-to-H323 gateway, Phase 2 [SE]
Sudha Retnam Bala,
Vivek Ramesh,
(+3? 3rd year students)
The AccessGrid toolkit uses a different set of protocols to H.323 to establish and manage audio/video connections between all its participants. Given the potential growth of the AccessGrid, and the massive installed base of H.323 devices, alongside H.320 and IP/PSTN telephony, an efficient gateway is needed to link the two worlds. It needs to run in real-time, and effectively bridge the very different interfaces between the single-stream, bandwidth-limited H.323 world and the multi-stream, multicast-based AccessGrid. This project builds on the 2003 project (below) enhancing the foundation toolkit to increase flexibility and performance, and to look at integration with some of the other relevant projects here (e.g. cluster video transcoding, and bandwidth constrained application gateways).
The project is described in more detail on the Silver323 web page.
AccessGrid MacOSX port and Video capture [SE]
Nathan ter Bogt,
Peter Tomlins
(+5 3rd year students)
The video and audio capture tools in the AccessGrid toolkit are many years old, with limited development and few new codecs. Newer display tools such as our VP program will provide a more flexible display user interface. Tools like these can benefit from additional metadata sent by the capture application, as well as take advantage of new video compression algorithms. With the support of the Apple University Development Fund (AUDF) this project will undertake a port of the various packages to the MacOSX platform, and the development of a new video capture application which will provide newer codecs, additional metadata, and take advantage of the MacG5 performance and interfaces (such as ieee1394/firewire).
AccessGrid Recording Tool and Hardware Management Tool [SE]
Neil Hathaway,
Edward Hun
(+4? 3rd year students)
The environment of the AccessGrid system is very different to normal videoconferencing systems. There are an unbounded number of video and audio streams, 30-50 not being uncommon. Further there are complex application data streams such as shared powerpoint/presentation materials, shared whiteboards, etc. The rooms can also hold additional hardware tools such as electronic whiteboards, steerable cameras, online instruments, etc. This project will develop a set of recording and post-production tools, to be able to record AccessGrid sessions in completeness, and post-produce them into other formats that could be delivered e.g. on DVD or as a single stream. It will also provide remote control capabilities for the hardware in the AccessGrid rooms.
Avaya IP telephone gateway and monitoring system [SE]
Timothy O'Brien,
Marielle Nyasio,
David Clarke,
(+4? 3rd year students)
The ANU moved to an IP-based telephony system in 2002/2003, which meant a dramatically more flexible telephone infrastructure. Through the ANU's agreement with Avaya it was decided to work on collaborative research and development on this infrastructure. This project follows from one in 2003 (below), which looked at the issues created by the separate voice and data VLANs employed at the ANU. While it keeps the telephone and data network traffic separate, it breaks the ability for software-phones on desktop computers, notebooks and PDAs to make calls to the ANU phones and beyond. It is also proving difficult to monitor, analyse and report on the almost 4000 IP phones, additional analogue gateway-connected phones, and associated hardware. This project will look at new ways of providing the softphone gateway in a secure fashion, as well as a monitoring and reporting infrastructure.
The project is described in more detail on the Avaya-projects web page.
Cluster multi-stream video decoding [SE-RP]
Justin Bedo
Projects such as the AccessGrid and H.323 multi-site conferencing units (MCUs) require realtime decoding and encoding of multiple video streams, with possible stream-merging and other processing in the pipeline. This project will look at various ways the transcoding processing can be distributed across a cluster, which techniques optimise performance and latency, and how this can be integrated as a remote-infrastructure with other systems.
Real-time on-demand bandwidth-constrained video transcoding [SE-RP]
Rahul Rai
While large amounts of bandwidth are available to researchers at many institutions, it is not ubiquitous. Remote sites, and homes, don't generally have many megabits/second of bandwidth. This project will build on the rcbridge multicast/unicast gateway to also offer transcoded video (possibly building on the cluster project above) to pre-determined bandwidths and somehow defined priorities, creating an audio/video stream to fit into any specified bandwidth.
Data grid content ingestion and workflows [Hons]
Amit Parashar
The concept of data grids links federated repositories, high-performance data transfer protocols, distributed authentication and authorisation mechanisms, amongst many others. Building a data grid on top of an existing repository is being examined by many projects. This project however will look at creating new repositories from existing federated data sets from multiple organisations, and building new data grids on-demand on complex mixed-media bases. Given the background of the student, working for the National Oceans Office, the project is focussing on oceanographic data.
Visual cues and audio localisation in the AccessGrid [eSci]
Stephanie Miller
The large display of the AccessGrid provides plenty of space to show all of the incoming video and application streams. The standard user-interface though does not identify which video sources are sending audio. This places a cognitive load on the users and the node-operators, as they try to identify who is talking. This project will develop a system to be integrated into the VP tool, to provide (i) visual highlights of sites sending audio, and (ii) localisation of audio across the display, i.e. that the sound from a site appears to come from the region of the display where the video from that site is being displayed. Just making use of the standard stereo speakers will make a noticeable difference, and additional speakers allow higher-resolution audio positioning.
2003/2004 Vacation Scholars
2 vacation scholars
Datagrids on MacOSX in support of Gravitational Wave Physics
Tom Kobialka
This project built a datagrid testbed using Globus Toolkit 3.02, ported Globus 3.02 to Mac OS 10.3. This was then used in collaboration with physicists in ACIGA and LIGO to install and configure a Lightweight Data Replicator instance at the ANU and connect to the LSC datagrid. The project also explored prototype applicatons including binX & SRB and built a testbed using Apple's Xgrid on Apple Xserve.
More details are at http://anusf.anu.edu.au/~tsk900/
2003
5 Software Engineering students,
2 Honours students.
Secure gateways for Avaya IP telephones [SE]
Steven Farlie, Sumbul Mohammed
The ANU moved to an IP-based telephony system in 2002/2003, which meant a dramatically more flexible telephone infrastructure. Through the ANU's agreement with Avaya it was decided to work on collaborative research and development on this infrastructure. This project looked at the issues created by the separate voice and data VLANs employed at the ANU. While it keeps the telephone and data network traffic separate, it breaks the ability for (i) software-phones on desktop computers, notebooks and PDAs to make calls to the ANU phones, and (ii) the IP phones to access web-based content, such as directories and messaging systems.
The project is described in more detail on the Avaya-projects web page.
AccessGrid-to-H323 gateway - Phase 1 [SE]
David Jordan, Monish Grover, Terence Tan
The AccessGrid toolkit uses a different set of protocols to H.323 to establish and manage audio/video connections between all its participants. Given the potential growth of the AccessGrid, and the massive installed base of H.323 devices, alongside H.320 and IP/PSTN telephony, an efficient gateway is needed to link the two worlds. It needs to run in real-time, and effectively bridge the very different interfaces between the single-stream, bandwidth-limited H.323 world and the multi-stream, multicast-based AccessGrid. This project developed a foundation toolkit and demonstrator to act as a user-manageable gateway.
The project is described in more detail on the Silver323 web page.
Bio-Mirror Data Grid system [Hons]
Damon Searle
Many data sets in e-Research are being published across many locations globally. To improve efficiency of access, e.g. where bandwidth is insufficient, or costs are high, some of these data sets are being aggregated and mirrored across multiple sites. One of these projects is the Bio-Mirror. Unfortunately, the data sets are not stored in an optimal fashion, and so minor changes to the source data cause large amounts of downloads for sites downstream. This project looked at content-specific update protocols to more efficiently transfer the data, to replace the more generic, and inefficient, tools like ftp and rsync.
Damon's thesis is available for download
Large-scale tiled video capture [Hons]
Chun-Yip Wu
Standard video cameras can generate images up to PAL/NTSC resolution. To generate larger-scale video images, e.g. for panoramas, or for higher-resolution, requires extremely expensive cameras. This project looked at using multiple normal resolution cameras to create an equivalent high-resolution video signal in real-time, for much lower cost.
Chun's thesis is available for download
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