CAREER: Similarity-based representation of large-scale image collections

Principal Investigator: Svetlana Lazebnik
Funding Agency: National Science Foundation
Agency Number: IIS-0845629

Abstract
The researchers will develop an infrastructure that supports (a) automatic generation of the functionality and architecture of a collaborative application, (b) reuse of existing programs, and (c) easy substitution of infrastructure-provided components with custom ones. This research is important for two related reasons. First, it would give application programmers a path for incrementally developing a collaborative application, enabling them to quickly discover tools that do not lend themselves to collaborative access and gradually fine-tune the functionality and architecture of those that do. Second, it would allow developers of complete collaborative applications and infrastructures to become builders of individual components, sharing complex designs and implementations. Such sharing is important since a large number of research issues in diverse areas such as distributed systems, databases, user-interfaces, and real-time communication must be addressed by a collaboration system, and it is difficult for a single team to implement all state-of-the-art solutions in a collaborative system. While the general idea of component-based software is rapidly gaining acceptance in industry and academia, there are no other projects researching how it may be applied to the domain of collaboration.

The researchers will investigate several novel concepts for supporting these goals including a fine-grained decomposition of a collaborative application, use of general patterns instead of specific interfaces to describe the interaction protocols of components, generic parameterized implementations of these components, a multi-phase notification scheme to reduce the dependence among these components, a generic parameterized mapping of a logical architecture to a physical architecture, abstractions for automating the task of connecting components together, and collaboration support that is partitioned in the various layers of an application. They will use existing collaboration systems to guide their design and evaluation efforts. In particular, they will re-implement existing designs of collaboration systems using their infrastructure and existing single-user software. They will evaluate how well their infrastructure supports (a) reuse by determining how many changes are required to existing software to make it work with infrastructure components, (b) composition by determining the extent to which components are shared among the re-implemented collaborative systems, and (c) automation by determining how much effort was required to implement these systems.