|
|
|
Most initiatives happened in the Emerging Technologies space during the past year. Much of ET's mission is to investigate new information technologies to determine how and if further investigation and/or prototyping is warranted. The projects noted below reflect some of ET's investigations and initiatives for 2002 - 2003.
cLog is a Web application designed to support the creation of a Weblog. Features include integration with Penn State's Access Account for authentication, posting of basic HTML with a log entry, nested comment support allowing for discussion after each log entry and fine-grained access control to these functions. SlashET is an implementation of cLog which is used by Emerging Technologies to facilitate communications among group members about project initiatives.
ASET, in collaboration with staff from Administrative Information Services (AIS) has spent several months researching solutions for managing credentials in a Web environment. Credential management, also known as "Web Single-Signon," provides a means by which users can authenticate once to a Web application, receive a digital credential and use this credential to "automatically" login to other Web-based applications offered at Penn State. The primary technology being tested is Cosign, an open-source project from the University of Michigan. The ITS test pilot includes ITS applications such as the Portal, WebMail, WebAssign and eLion. Cosign is unique in that provides a login server, which authenticates the user against a central access account database (Kerberos), then sends this information back to the Web application and converts it to permit authentication and access to services that use Penn State's method for authentication, the Distributed Computing Environment (DCE).
Return to projects/initiaitves listing
ET staff are supporting Penn State researchers in the departments of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and Engineering in the College of Engineering, with a multi-institutional, multi-year, multi-million dollar, NSF-funded effort to investigate direct and indirect denial of service (DoS) attacks on network infrastructure. This is a companion grant to one that will build an inter-institutional testbed network. ET contributions are mainly in defining representative network topologies and collecting real baseline traffic data from Penn State's IP network.
Return to projects/initiaitves listing
ET has built a dedicated test network and computing infrastructure. Multiple Integrated Backbone (IB) interfaces on various routers allow test traffic to traverse the IB. This is particularly useful in areas of investigation such as Voice over IP (VoIP) and Quality of Service (QoS). Flexible network components (e.g., routers and switches) allow rapid prototyping of a broad range of network-related issues. A variety of general-purpose servers and network-attached storage devices extends the testing capabilities to applications and middleware. The dedicated test environment allows any level of testing without risking interference with operational components while still allowing access to test services from the outside.
Return to projects/initiaitves listing
ET interviewed other ITS groups to define "emerging technologies" and develop a list of technologies (emerging or otherwise) that are of interest to ITS. This effort resulted in the ET Web site which summarizes the results and identifies specific initiatives currently being undertaken/considered by ET.
Return to projects/initiaitves listing
This committee, comprised of an Emerging Technologies staff member and members of Teaching and Learning with Technology (TLT), combines the Classroom Technologies Committee and the Learning Technologies Committee into a single group. The committee is charged with determining ways in which TLT can better provide Penn State with future services in learning technologies. Faculty members from several colleges also serve on this committee.
Staff members from Emerging Technologies actively test and evaluate all releases of the Macintosh OSX operating system. Evaluation findings result in seminar, publications and presentation offerings as well as participation in the Apple University Executive Forum.
Return to projects/initiaitves listing
Mobile platforms encompass all portable computing devices, such as laptop computers, tablet computers, personal digital assistants (PDAs, including BlackBerry, iPAQ, Palm, etc.) and wireless phones.
Emerging Technologies is leading an initiative to explore the ways in which these devices can be utilized to best serve the students, faculty, staff and administration at the University. Successful deployment of mobile platforms will result in members of the University community maximizing their use of University and worldwide computing services on the mobile platforms of their choice. Currently, many people carry a laptop for e-mail access, a PDA to track their calendar, tasks and address book and a wireless phone for phone service. Ideally, a person should be able to carry only one of those devices without sacrificing any of the services. Moreover, a person should be able to alternate between wireless protocols (cell phone service, 802.11b or Bluetooth) depending on his or her circumstance at any given time. Initial investigation has focused on PDA devices with integrated wireless phones that allow internet access. Future investigations could focus on wireless phones with internet capability that have been programmed with PDA functions; or on laptop computers using wireless phone PC cards. Although the result would appear to be the same in all three cases, the key difference between the three is form factor.
Return to projects/initiaitves listing
A project team was created during September 2002 to investigate the feasibility of using PKI lite in the Penn State environment for Web authentication and for signing and encrypting e-mail. Investigation will be continue in the following areas: short term vs. long term certificates; Certificate Policy statements; and implementation issues such as key distribution, escrowing and revocation.
Return to projects/initiaitves listing
Shibboleth is being used at Penn State to provide access to course material at anothe institution. The Department of Physics, of the Eberly College of Science, and ITS entered into a pilot with North Carolina State University (NCSU) in August 2002. Students in physics courses 001, 213 and 214 were able to enahnce their learning experience by accessing course materials, which reside at NCSU, through WebAssign. WebAssign is an interactive Web-based application for homework assignments, quizzes, and tests. Prior to Shibboleth, Department of Physics faculty members were manually managing user accounts required to access WebAssign. The initial pilot included approximately twenty-five students from a single physics class. After the pilot ran for several weeks, it was decided to continue the pilot into the fall 2002 semester. Shibboleth is now being used by approximately 1800 students in all physics classes with over 60,000 logins during the spring 2003 semester alone. The pilot has been deemed a success. ITS plans to offer Shibboleth as a production service for fall 2003.
Shibboleth allows students to login to their course materials via their Penn State Access Account userid and password. Shibboleth also uses federated adminstration to provide access to sensitive data. Federated administration is a way of making authentication, authorization, attributes, etc. useful to other domains that are willing to trust the information in a light-weight, distributed fashion.
Emerging Technologies evaluated four popular commercial speech recognition products for use with personal computers. The evaluation revealed that the products do not allow users to easily control computers with voice alone. While one product, "Naturally Speaking, " could be helpful to those who do not have full use of their hands, overall findings showed that for those who simply want to make computing more user-friendly, voice control is more difficult and time-consuming than using a mouse and keyboard. Investigation will continue in this area as speech recognition and text-to-speech have applicability in areas such as accessibility, versatile content access and unified messaging.
Return to projects/initiaitves listing
Staff members in Emerging Technologies supported Telecommunications and Networking Services (TNS) in testing Voice over IP (VoIP) systems using the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP). As an Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) standard, SIP is expected to provide interoperability and capabilities in the future that are not currently available.
Return to projects/initiaitves listing
A Windows Domain Working Group (WDWG) was formed in October 2002 to create a strategy for an ITS-supported Windows Domain architecture. The objective for the Windows Domain Working Group was to define a strategy to provide an ITS Windows Domain Architecture to support ITS services (services that serve Penn State) that are dependent upon a Windows environment. Three work products emerged from this group:
Return to projects/initiaitves listing
Return to projects/initiaitves listing
Emerging Technologies staff led testing of point-to-point wireless in the 38GHz band built primarily with equipment from a corporate contribution (and de-installed and retrieved from Jamaica, NY, by staff) and surplus equipment from TNS. The effort began with a test link between the USBII and Wagner Buildings to demonstrate feasibility and performance in inclement weather. The test was then extended in a joint effort with TNS and Administrative Information Services (AIS) to provide prototype IB connectivity to AIS staff in Ruth Building. This fixed-duration test uses a two-link rf connection between Computer and Ruth Buildings and will test aspects of offering such connectivity as an ITS service. When available, standards-based (e.g., IEEE 802.16) technology will be tested. In a separate wireless initiative, ET staff are working with Consulting and Support Services (CSS) and cellular service providers to define a mixed wireless LAN and cellular infrastructure that shares components to reduce total cost while increasing coverage in both media.
For information about wireless initiatives within ET, please visit the ET Initiatives page.
Return to projects/initiaitves listing
Text Only Version | Site-Index | Privacy and Legal Statements | Copyright | © 2005 The Pennsylvania State University
This site maintained by Academic Services and Emerging Technologies, a unit of Information Technology Services.
Comments and suggestions may be directed to asetcomm@psu.edu.
Last revised: Thursday, July 1, 2004.