Event-notification and Messaging Architectures for Real-time Science Coordination (slides - PDF)

Presenter: Elias Sinderson, Graduate Student, UCSC and NASA Ames Summer Intern (2002)

Abstract: Coordination among large groups of researchers and mission personnel entails many of the same challenges that other large groups face. These difficulties include communications overhead, coordinating schedules, data assimilation, and maintaining an overall situational awareness of the effort. One of the requirements of any application intended to support real-time scientific coordination is that the end users be notified of any changes or developments that may impact their work. Event notification and messaging architectures designed to address this functionality will be presented, along with their relative strengths and weaknesses. The Mars Exploration Rover Collaborative Information Portal will be used as a practical example of a system which has been designed to overcome the difficulties of real-time scientific coordination among large groups within an operational mission setting.

Bio: Elias Sinderson is a doctoral student in the Department of Computer Science at the University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC) and works at NASA Ames on the Mars Exploration Rover Collaborative Information Portal (MER-CIP) project. He received his B.S. from the Evergreen State College in Olympia, WA, where his studies focused on both Computer and Cognitive Science. His research interests center on the use of event notification and messaging architectures to build loosely-coupled distributed systems, and the development of protocol standards which support collaborative application environments. Prior industry experience on large projects has given him an intimate appreciation of the difficulties faced within such environments and piqued his interest in software engineering methodology. In addition to pursuing a number of extra-curricular activities, Elias is also a member of the ACM.