Preface:

There was a saying that Ph.D. people are not good at programming and they only write papers without recognition of real life. Is it true ?

Of course Not! At least not for me.

Here I show some of my projects finished while I am on the way to my Ph.D. degree. Most of the projects use thousands of lines of codes and some of them are small but neat and well functional. My current Ph.D. topic project is the biggest one. It includes multiple thousands of lines already and more functions are to be implemented.


I am good at programming in multiple languages, especially in C/C++ , Java and SQL, which are what I am playing with now. I touched wide variety of computer languages and environments before, such as Bolland Delphi (which I found very convenient to develop database engine and really easy to write a friendly program interface),

MS VC++ /VB (VC is the first convenient SDK I used and VB Script are so important to develop real components and application now). And after I became a graduate student, I put most of my energy on UNIX systems and workstations. As a pleasant result I grasped more tools like Perl, Shell programming, UNIX system maintenance, and UNIX environment oriented programming skills.


http://www.cis.udel.edu/~wchen/projects.html


List of Projects by Wei Chen


Ph.D. Thesis topic.

Coordination is a key technology for agent systems. My research task attacks the problem of distributing intelligence to individual software module, called intelligent agent, so that mutual objective of multiple agents can be achieved efficiently with better quality with potentially low cost and less time in dynamically changing environment. It encompasses various technologies, such as Human Computer Interaction, Graphic User Interface, Mobile Computing, Distributed Systems and Computing, Task Modeling and Scheduling, Software Programming, XML, etc.

DECAF (Distributed, Environment-Centered Agent Framework) is the system that I am working on. Java is the computer language that I am using.

Reference : My advisor, Prof. Decker's homepage about Coordination;

http://www.cis.udel.edu/~decker

http://www.cis.udel.edu/~decaf


AGeneTology(University of Delaware Bioinformatics Ontology Project)

We set up our Ontology Protocol of Bioinformatics at UD. And a big project is finished using agent technology with the presence of Wrappers, Reasoners, Web page Gene resources ( Gene Bank, Fly Base, Mouse Base, Saccharomyces Genome Database (SGD), etc. ). Reasoner gets user's input/command from GUI(Graphic User Interface), and distributes sub-tasks to multiple Wrappers; By querying multiple web resources, Wrappers gather expected information, integrate them, and submit the analyzed knowledge back to the Reasoner; Finally, Reasoner sends the integrated information back in a manner that understandable to the users. The communication is implemented with XML format language with certain structure, which we call it AGeneTology.


I contribute this project by two way. First, I wrote Wrapper Agent, by starting more than a dozen of Java threads concurrently, to query different Internet resources, analyze the integrated result, and send back the formatted knowledge back. Second, a set of API, which is used to extract XML content information, is developed by Wei Chen. XML becomes more and more popular right now, and we decided that XML as the communication format in the project. I used XML information extraction skill in order that agents understand each other, which W3C's effort of XPath approach shares the same idea as mine ( XPath release in www.W3C.org as reference).

Reference : Link from my home page list the DECAF API and XML Parser APIs.

http://www.cis.udel.edu/~wchen



Oracle system monitoring, SQL development, and JDBC

The entire server side program is demonstrated with the MovieClub project, which is small but fully functional. The underlying Database Engine is MySQL; JDBC is the connection between database and front side user interface; Servlet is used as main program, receiving user request and querying underlying database; Formatted, user-friendly list of query result is sent back to client web browser. Add, Delete and Modification operations are allowed.

Reference: http://128.4.131.29:8080/servlet/try.html

http://128.4.131.29:8080/servlet/memberIn.html
The demonstration of this system is unopn request, since the underlying database that is not running all the time.


Secure data transmission with SNMP PDU wrapped within UDP packet, starting from the very original ANS.1 file composition to high level programming with interactive user control interface; Internet SNMPv2 network management agent construction, designing the MIB(Management Information Base) from scratch and enrich actual network management tools (such as traceroute, etc.) with user defined functions.

Http://earth.cis.udel.edu:8080/courses/cisc853/


PROXY Server

Provide an standard and secure interface between DECAF system and general webpage browsers(IE, Netscape, Mosaic), so that the computing capability can be used by Internet users. The PROXY implementation facilitates the popularity of DECAF system.

Reference : http://www.cis.udel.edu/~wchen/research/proxy/SampleApplet.html
This demo page will run upon request, since it requires local execution of DECAF system that is not running all the time.


Internet is the biggest resource of information. But the amount of information from Internet is so huge and it is so complicated and mixed that in some sense it is not useful to your potentially expected tasks. Information Gathering technologies are becoming increasingly important. Information Retrieval are implemented. Applications are these, like, stock value query, university student management, financial portfolio, etc.

Reference : http://www.cis.udel.edu/~decaf/Demo.tar


CORBA Discrete-Event Simulation Facility;


Thread/Process Creation, Synchronization and locks to block reader/writer;

Process access, control and creation;

Process Scheduling and Memory Management.


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