Projects
Maryland Information and Network Dynamics Laboratory
Maryland Information and Network Dynamics Laboratory
MIND Lab News
Come visit us at Maryland Day on Saturday, April 25th! For more information, visit our information page.
›› Integration Technologies
MyeVyu is a new application that is being developed by the MIND Lab of the University of Maryland Institute for Advanced Computer Studies (UMIACS) in collaboration with OIT, the Department of Public Safety, the Department of Transportation, and the Department of Facilities. The hope for this system is that it will not only make the University of Maryland campus safer, but that it will improve the overall quality of life on campus.
For more information, please visit our dedicated MyeVyu page.
›› Location Determination Technologies
Our research focuses on identifying the noisy characteristics of the wireless channel and developing techniques to overcome them to obtain accurate positioning. It is advantageous to run the location determination algorithm on the client devices to achieve privacy and decentralized implementation. Since these devices are usually energy constrained, it is important to reduce the computation requirements for location determination algorithms. We have developed location-clustering techniques based on the signal strength received from the access points to reduce the computational requirements of the location determination algorithm and allow the system to scale to large areas.
PinPoint is a distributed algorithm that enables a set of n nodes to determine the RF propagation delays between every pair of nodes, from which the inter-node distances and hence the spatial topology can be readily determined. PinPoint does not require any calibration of the area of interest and thus is rapidly deployable. Unlike existing time-of-arrival techniques, PinPoint does not require an infrastructure of accurate clocks (e.g., GPS) nor does it incur the o(n^2) message exchanges of .echoing. techniques. PinPoint can work with nodes having inexpensive crystal oscillator clocks, and incurs a constant number of message exchanges per node to determine the location of n nodes. Each node.s clock is assumed to run reliably but asynchronously with respect to the other nodes, i.e., they can run at slightly different rates because of hardware (oscillator) inaccuracies. PinPoint provides a mathematical way to compensate for these clock differences in order to arrive at a very precise timestamp recovery that in turn leads to a precise distance determination. Moreover, each node is able to determine the clock characteristics of other nodes in its neighborhood allowing network synchronization. Evaluation of the prototype in typical indoor and outdoor environments shows that PinPoint gives an average accuracy of four to six feet, in different environments, allowing PinPoint to support accurate rapidly deployable localization scenarios.
Nuzzer focuses on exploiting the variability of signals sent in wireless networks due to the presence of objects, such as people. The ongoing goal is to determine whether or not we can determine the location of a particular person or persons. This technology currently uses fixed wireless transmitters and receivers at fixed locations that measure the signal strength of a particular area. Disturbances in the signal potentially indicate the presence of a foreign object in the area in question.
›› Time Synchronization Strategies
Cyclone Time Technology enables heterogeneous systems that include clocks of various inherent precision, resolution and stability to synchronize. Cyclone offers several advantages over the current master-slave based techniques by avoiding a single point of failure and achieving accuracy that does not depend on the actual local clock drift rates. Further, the use of only local information makes the scheme highly scalable.
›› Context-Aware Systems
The Rover technology uses the Information Dynamics paradigm developed at the MIND Lab to provide a context-aware integration platform that is platform independent. The Rover infrastructure focuses on two major tasks: to expose as much contextual information as possible and to create services which need to communicate with each other and external sources, such as the Internet. We provide an easy to use application programming interface (API) that allows developers to create Rover-enabled applications with communication and messaging in mind.
Context-aware security, in which context is utilized to allow security mechanisms to adjust based on the current situation, is essential to enabling effective security in dynamic and mobile computing environments. Our research focuses on studying how, and the extent to which, utilizing context enhances security, with a focus on access control.