Past Projects

Past Systems Group Projects

Accelerating Real-time Financial Market Data Processing - ECC Project

AEOLUS - Algorithmic Principles for Building Efficient Overlay Computers.

ASAP - QoS in multi-hop wireless networks

 - More info here

Describing Streams

The purpose of this project is to investigate the possibilities and the usefulness of approaches to describe the format of the data stream, both in terms of structural (e.g., event sequence) as well as dynamic (e.g., rates) aspects. The information derived from these descriptions should be used to enable optimisations in a declarative stream processor. These optimisations are targeted to reduce response times, memory overhead and processing cost.

Project members: Peter Fischer, Kyumars Sheikh Esmaili, Donald Kossmann

Global Distributed Dictionary - ECC Project

 - More info here

iMeMex

iMeMex is a first implementation of a Personal DataSpace Management System (PDSMS). It allows users to handle all their data available from different graph-based data formats such as email, files&folders, RSS, and databases. Moreover, iMeMex allows users to define information-integration semantics in a pay-as-you-go fashion.

Project members: Lukas Blunschi

Project page: http://www.imemex.org

JOpera

JOpera is a rich composition environment for many kinds of services (including Web services). It supports the visual design and autonomic enactment of complex distributed business protocols and conversations. More info here

MAND

One key difference between Mobile Ad Hoc Networks (MANETs) and other network types is that MANETs lack central infrastructure components necessary to build common directory-based services such as SLP, SIP, DNS, etc. This poses complicated challenges to protocol design and software architecture for such networks. MAND (Mobile Ad hoc Network Directory) is an infrastructure for the distribution, storage, and lookup of key/value pairs (tuples) in ad hoc networks. The key insight in MAND is to piggyback tuples and requests on the messages that routing protocols exchange to build and maintain routes in the ad hoc network. Using MAND we have build AdSocial, a social networking application running in ad hoc networks of Nokia N810 handheld devices.

Project members: Oriana Riva, Gustavo Alonso

Managing Assurance, Security and Trust for Services  (MASTER)

MASTER (http://www.master-fp7.eu/) is a collaborative project funded under the EU 7th Research Framework Programme. It aims to provide methodologies and infrastructures which facilitate monitoring,enforcement, and auditing of security compliance, especially where highly dynamic service oriented architectures are used to support business process enactment in single, multi-domain, and iterated contexts. ETH's role in MASTER is investigate the use of event processing systems for monitoring purposes, in particular the aspects of expressiveness, dependability and lifecycle management

See Project Page

Project Members: Tahmineh Sanamrad

Former Project members: Peter Fischer,  Kyumars Sheikh Esmaili

Modularization of Database Engines

The architecture of current Data Management Systems is mostly monolithic, highly intertwined, and has not really changed since the relational model was first proposed and implemented. Advances in hardware and computing platforms are making it almost impossible to continue operating large data management systems with such an architecture. Exploiting multi-core or cluster based systems requires to increase parallelism and have a far more loosely couple architecture. In this project we explore alternative architectures for database systems, architectures that are better suited to the new hardware platforms. Currently we are focusing our efforts on exploiting modular software design as the basis for a component based database engine that can be dynamically adapted and configured. To see the impact of modularization on current
database engines and processors we are working on refactoring an existing open source database engine, port the modules to R-OSGi, and evaluating the performance and functionality of the resulting system.

Project members: Ionut Subasu, Jan S. Rellermeyer, Gustavo Alonso

MOVIES

With the exponential growth of moving objects data to the Gigabyte range, it has become critical to develop effective techniques for indexing, updating, and querying these massive data sets. To meet the high update rate as well as low query response time requirements of moving object applications, this project takes a novel approach in moving object indexing. The resulting technique MOVIES aims to be the first to support at the same time high query rates and high update rates.

Project members: Lukas Blunschi

R-OSGI

R-OSGI is a transparent extension to the OSGi standard to implement seamless interaction with remote services. In contrast to other protocols and systems, R-OSGi preserves the semantics of OSGi services and deals with the implications on the module layer. Since R-OSGi is itself an OSGi bundle, it can be added to any OSGi application and turn it into a distributed system. R-OSGi is protocol and transport independent and facilitates spontaneous interaction with devices through service discovery and the AlfredO extension.(Old Web Page)

Project members: Michael Duller, Gustavo Alonso

SwissQM

SwissQM is a stack-based virtual machine for wireless sensor networks and a gateway component. The gateway provides a declarative interface to the sensor network. Submitted queries are compiled into short bytecode sequences that are executed by the sensor nodes. SwissQM not only eases the use of sensor networks for field researchers but is also intended as flexible research platform. SwissQM is freely available for download (under GPL license).

Project members: Michael Duller, Jan Rellermeyer, Gustavo Alonso

Project page: http://www.swissqm.inf.ethz.ch

Unity: Code in the Schema

In the last decade, XML has become very popular, as it provides a practical way to format semi-structured information. Since then, two programming worlds have prospered in two separate directions: on the one side, object-oriented languages (C++, Java, C#...) and on the other side, languages that handle information available in the XML format: type definition (DTD, XML Schema) and querying (Quilt, XQuery). This leads to a fundamental impedance mismatch between objects and XML content.
We are extending XQuery so as to give it object-oriented features seamlessly, which increases its modularity and scalability potential. This new language, Unity, can be seen as a progeny of Java, of XQuery and of XML Schema at the same time: it is object-oriented and manages XML natively. The fundamental idea behind Unity is to have code in the schema. We built a cross-compiler from Unity to XQuery.

Project members: Peter Fischer, Ghislain Fourny, Donald Kossmann

Web Service Facility in XQuery

XQuery is a powerful language for processing XML. In the context of the Web, XML data is often provided through Web services. Several XQuery implementations already support access to such services (for both WSDL and REST). We are trying to propose an extension to XQuery 1.0 that allows interoperability with WSDL services in a simple and transparent way. The main challenge in this project is mapping different type schemas.

Project members: Donald Kossmann

Former Project members: Peter Fischer, Kyumars Sheykh Esmaili

XTream

The XTream project extends and generalizes the concept of data streams to a broader range of applications that encompass a wide variety of data sources and devices and that have significantly different requirements than traditional applications on data streams. As part of the project, we are building a lightweight and extensible platform for highly distributed data stream processing.

Project members: Michael Duller, Gustavo Alonso, Donald Kossmann, Timothy Roscoe, Nesime Tatbul