Master Thesis Submitted!!

Today, the 30th of March 2011, one day before my deadline, I submitted my Master Thesis! Below is the abstract of my thesis. I'm looking forward to my defense by the end of this month/beginning of next month! Please feel free to email me with any questions or comments about my topic at marleine AT gmail DOT com.

Modeling Distributed Applications in a Smarter Home Infrastructure
Abstract  

Nowadays, witnessing the widespread availability of broadband communications and the increase in the number of web-enabled home devices, opportunities for new innovations arise. A new category of products and business models for the “Smarter Home” is made possible. Applications that are distributed but yet interconnected can offer more effective services for the consumer. For instance, interacting applications between several homes can offer a saving in energy consumption or in the oil refilling expenses by optimizing the usage and refilling dates. To enable this new kind of applications, this thesis discusses appropriate models and designs for their system infrastructure. The architecture along with the application model discussed in this thesis, enable developers to easily create services and applications that can be reused. A “Smarter Home” application store will be shown where customers can purchase more services for their intelligent homes. Moreover, the implementation of a dependency service that only allows the installation of applications having their dependencies satisfied by services in the system is thoroughly explained. A sample application is developed and described to present the feasibility of the architecture and the models designed.

My Master Thesis Proposal

I am currently working on my Master Thesis at IBM Deutschland R&D GmbH, Software Group, in collaboration with Universität Stuttgart, Institute of Parallel and Distributed Systems (IPVS). As I have been asked multiple times about my topic, I thought of writing this short post with a link to my Master Thesis Proposal page at the university.

Master Thesis title:
Modeling Distributed Applications in a Smarter Home Infrastructure

End of Internship

Today was my last internship day at IBM Deutschland R&D GmbH - IBM Software Group.

I have been doing this internship for 9 months, 6 of which were considered as a mandatory internship and 3 as a voluntary one. During the whole period, I have been working in the same department which was about industry solutions.

The internship was just great! I really got to learn lots of new stuff and gain more skills. IBM, being an international company, gave me the chance of meeting great people and making very nice friends from several countries. I am really satisfied from the outcome of this internship and it was a pleasure for me to work with these outstanding mentors and department/team colleagues. Thank you for the amazing internship you made me have!!

Seminar Report and Presentation

So today I had to present my Seminar presentation which consisted of explaining and presenting the report I previously wrote during the semester. The report was a resume of a collection of many papers about Mobile Ad Hoc Networks for Video Multicast. The seminar was titled as Advanced Topics in Distributed Systems: Modern Group Communication Mechanisms, supervised by Dr. Boris Koldehofe, under the Institute of Parallel and Distributed Systems, Universitaet Stuttgart. So this seminar first began by selecting a topic, which in my case was: MANETs: Multicast Routing in Mobile Ad-hoc networks. Then lots of papers had to be read and relevant information had to be written in a 10 page report. Afterwards, a 45 mins presentation had to be presented, explaining to an audience what your topic and report was about, then followed by a 15 mins discussion with questions and answers. It was the first time for me to present such a long presentation.. and it took plenty of time to organize it to fill the time I was given.. but I would like to say that it went good in a certain way!

If we go more into details about the presentation, well, it first began by an introduction about MANETS (Mobile Ad Hoc Networks). The definition of MANETs was given, some applications were stated, along with some problems and constraints. Then the reason why multicast is important in MANETs was said. After this introduction, a section was made about multicast overview. In this overview, the definition, some applications, requirements or constraints and problems about video multicast were stated. Then a comparison about multicast tree and mesh approaches was discussed where their definitions, advantages and disadvantages and an example protocol using each one of them were given. Afterwards, the On-Demand Multicast Routing Protocol (ODMRP) and the Multicast Ad Hoc On-Demand Distance Vector (MAODV) routing protocols were explained in details, giving examples, pros and cons for each one of them. Finally a new routing protocol: Multiple Tree Multicast Ad Hoc On Demand Distance Vector (MT-MAODV) was presented with an example to clarify it and some evaluations.

I think I learned a lot from this seminar and maybe my work can help someone so feel free to check it out! :)

N.B. The presentation was done using MS PowerPoint because some effects were not well displayed using OO Impress, so I would advice to open the ppt file with MS PowerPoint.. Sorry for any inconvenience..

ATDS - Seminar Report

ATDS - Seminar Presentation

New Beginning, New Goal!

New Beginning, new goal! That's what is running through my head when I think about my admission in INFOTECH, Universität Stuttgart, Germany. Studying this Master program after having finished my Bachelor Thesis also in the same university, makes me familiar with the ambiance of the life here. So I really hope that I can do something good with this opportunity I am living now.

Also what made me back to post on my blog.. well today while going back home after some Christmas Gifts shopping trip, I met a colleague also studying the same Master program. Talking together, I discovered that he knew some info about me due to the fact that he checked my blog! I was really surprised! I thought that having left Cairo and the people I knew there, no one would be checking my blog anymore, but well, actually people were checking it! So knowing this fact, I decided to go back to my room and directly post a new post! Good encouragement!