Web Services Composition Challenges 2008 Web Services Challenges'08 Deadline: March 31, 2008, Co-located with CEC08 and EEE08, Washington, DC USA, July 21-24, 2008.
NSERC Discovery Grant
My proposal of "Building Self-Manageable Web Service Processes" has won NSERC Discovery Grant . This project runs from 2007 to 2012. I need more students to work on this topic.
Merit Award
My master's student Yong Liang has won 2006-2007 Graduate Student Merit Award in UNB.
Currently, I am working on the following two topics:
1) Web service modeling and computing
I am using formal models, such as automata, process algebra and Petri net, to model Web service
networks, and investigating computing algorithms for Web service monitoring, diagnosis and
reconfiguration.
2) Monotonicity analysis in model abstraction and data mining
This is a problem I identified when I study qualitative model abstraction. Qualitative model is a kind
of symbolic model used for model-based reasoning, or more generally, automatic reasoning. I study how
to build the qualitative model from numerical data. The concept of scale-based monotonicity is
developed in 2004. Now I am investigating the potentials of using it for feature points detection,
knowledge representation and data mining. I am especially interested in bridging symbolic and numerical methods.
I also work on collaboration projects with some partners on Web services and data mining.
Teaching: CS6905 Advanced Technology on E-business: Service Computing: Foundations, Design and Implementation
This course will be offered again in Jan, 2008.
Service computing has become a strategic area of scientific study. Service computing covers the science and technology that underlie business services and IT services. This course introduces new technologies in service computing from information systems point of view. This course focuses on the techniques to support application integration, data integration and business process integration, more specially, includes XML, Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) and Web services, and business process integration and performance management.
Prerequisites: knowledge about web server, Java, database management.
I am recruiting two post-docs in the direction of Web service process adaption to start in Sept. 2008 (confirmed funding). I am also looking for talented ph.d. students (confimed funding) on Web service research. All the positions are in Concordia University in Montreal.
My Students
Xianrong Zhen (Ph.D. student (UNB), 9/2007-)
Han Liang (Master's student (UNB), 2004-2007), currently in the Ph.D. program of University of Alberta.
Yong Liang (Master's student (UNB), 2004-2007), currently work as a software engineer in Montreal.
Xinge Du (Master's student (UNB), 2004-2006), currently work as a software engineer in Swiftradius.
Matthias Klein (exchange Master's student (UNB), 2004-2006), currently work in Germany.
Coming Publications
Daniel Lemire, Martin Brooks and Yuhong Yan, "An Optimal Linear Time Algorithm for Quasi-Monotonic Segmentation", International Journal on Computer Mathematics, Feb. 2008.
Yuhong Yan and Han Liang, "Lazy Learner on Decision Tree for Ranking" , the International Journal on Tools with AI (IJTAI), Vol. 17 No. 1, Feb. 2008, p139-158.
Yuhong Yan, Philippe Dague, Yannick Pencole, and Marie-Odile Cordier, "A Model-based Approach for Diagnosing Faults in Web Service Processes", International Journal on Web Service Research, October, 2008.
Yuhong Yan, "Description Language and Formal Methods for Web Service Process Modeling", accepted as a book chapter in "Business Process Management: Concepts, Technologies and Applications", Volume: Advances in Management Information Systems, Publisher: M.E Sharpe Inc.
Suresh Jeyaverasingam and Yuhong Yan, "Mash up Home Library Systems" , a finalist paper in 2008 IEEE Services Computing Contest.
Yuhong Yan, "When Service Computing Meets Software Engineering" , 2008 IEEE Education Methodology Summit on Services Computing, July 8, 2008.
Xianrong Zheng and Yuhong Yan, "An Efficient Web Service Composition Algorithm Based on Planning Graph", plan for ICWS08.
Yuhong Yan, Juergen Bode, and Bill McIver, "Between Service Science and Service Oriented Software Systems", plan for ICWS08.
Yuhong Yan, Elder Mathias, "Domain Specific Middleware vs. Service Oriented Architecture in Remote Instrument Control", an invited paper to the Journal of Nuclear Instruments and Methods in Physics Research, Elsevier.
Yuhong Yan, Yannick Penncole and Marie-Odile Cordier, "Abstract Minimal Signautres for Falut Diagnosis in Discrete Event Systems".
Yuhong Yan, "Reconfiguring Business Processes at Run Time".
A Web service process may fail to complete due to faulty Web services. As these Web services belong to different organization and their internal behaviour is unknown to external world, diagnosing the causes of the failure is difficult. But if we can, we can charge a penalty to the faulty Web services and design automatic fault recover actions.
Current software technique offers the try-catch mechanism for fault handling. The software developer associates an exception with a fault at the design time. When an exception which causes the halt of the process is caught, we deduce that the associated faults have ever occurred. This method relies on the expertise of the software developer. The assumed cause of the exception may not be true. In this case, it is a false diagnosis. Or there are more causes of the exception, that the developer is not aware of. In this case, it is an incomplete diagnosis.
Our moel-based diagnosis approach automatically diagnose the causes of the exceptions in a Web service process. An automaton model is built for a Web service process described in an xml language called BPEL (Business Process execution Language). When an exception is received at the run time, the diagnosis function can give all real causes of the exception, i.e. giving a list of all possibly faulty Web services. This work collaborates with IRISA (France) and University of Paris (France).
The novelty of this approach
1) Avoid modeling the fault behaviour, i.e. you do not need to know how the process can be faulty. What you need is a process definition that describes what the right behaviour the process should be.
2) Give complete and sound diagnosis, i.e. a complete list of faulty Web services, and the list is guaranteed to be correct, in the sense of model-based reasoning.
3) Practically it can be used as a generic fault handling mechanism. It is especially useful when you have too many alarms or exceptions to enumerate in your process description and when you cannot write a specific fault handler to each of the caught exceptions. It is the case in network communication networks.
Implementation:
The monitoring and diagnosing functions have been intersted into an open source BPEL engine. We have put our demo on YouTube. This video clip shows: (1) ActiveBPEL interface and functions; (2) Addiing a monitoring listner and monitoring the Web service statues; (3) Diagnosis function is triggered after an exception induced from ActiveBPEL interface.
(Last update Aril, 2007)
Authors: Yong Lian and Xinge Du (Master's in UNB), Abhijeet Roy (Undergraduate in UNB)
OISEE stands for Online Interactive Science and Engineering Experiment System. Online experimentation allows students from anywhere to operate remote instruments at any time. We use SOA for the architecture of the online experiment system.
We have developed a generic methodology to wrap commercial instruments using IVI and VISA standard as Web services. We have developed Web 2.0 based techniques to display the virtual instrument panel and real time signals with just a standard Web browser. You can operate the remote instruments and observe the output use a standard Web browser. The technique developed in this paper can be widely used for different real laboratories, such as microelectronics, chemical engineering, polymer crystallization, structural engineering, and signal processing.
The courseware management functions are based on open source Moodle. Currently it has the functions to manage an online course, such as content management, student management, collaborative functions etc.
(This one has been taken offline)
Author: Matthias Klein (Master's in UNB)
This e-learning site uses multimedia materials and rich links between them for music learning. Learning objects are music score, background knowledge and performances organized around pieces of music, instruments and musicians.
Instead of using existing Learning Management systems, this project uses portal platform as its architecture. The advantage of this architecture is that the e-learning system can share modules, such as user management and collaboration tools, and use information, such as database and file system, available in the enterprise portal for learning functions. The e-learning portlet can be deployed into any standard compliant portal platform (compliant to JSR-168) without any code changes.
Contact Info
My current address is:
NRC-IIT
46 Dieneen Drive, Fredericton, NB E3B 9W4, Canada
Phone: +1-(506)-444-0388
Fax: +1-(506) 444-6114
e-mail: yuhong.yan(at)nrc.gc.ca
