University of Cambridge > Computer Laboratory > Systems Resarch Group > Opera Research Group

Projects

The Opera group has been doing research in diverse fields related to distributed systems including secure publish/subscribe systems, asychronous middleware, transport monitoring, access control, policy management, trust, contract-driven applications, semantics for network programming as well as mobile agents, operating systems, storage architectures, peer-to-peer systems, multimedia systems, distributed databases etc.

Current

PAL

Personal and Social Communication Services for Health and Lifestyle Monitoring, EPSRC/TSB, July 2009 - June 2012, with Essex University, BT and Ericsson.

SmartFlow

This project investigates and addresses the shortcomings of existing middleware systems for deployment within the healthcare domain. An extendable, event-based middleware architecture, SmartFlow, will be developed that can integrate heterogeneous systems and provide a framework for dynamically managing middleware extensions.

TIME-EACM

TIME-EACM - Transport Information Monitoring Environment-Event Architecture and Context Management - is the research core of a wider project, TIME, and will use the City of Cambridge as a testbed for developing software to monitor and analyse traffic.

Past

CareGrid

The aim of CareGrid is to develop software to realise trust domains, scalable from body-area networks through to grid applications, in which decisions are based on evidence, mitigated by trust and privacy requirements.

EDSAC21 - Event-Driven, Secure Application Control for the 21st century

The goal of the EDSAC21 project is to add role-based access control to a large-scale and collaborative publish/subscribe communication system.

Access Control Policy Management

We are working on policy-driven applications. We have extended the PostgreSQL Object-Relational Database Management System with active database triggers. This functionality supports both an active security platform (where the security properties of an application are monitored and any violations are notified) and active policy management.

CEA - Cambridge Event Architecture

Our early work on the Cambridge Event Architecture (CEA) extended the then-predominant, object-oriented middleware (CORBA and Java) with a publish, register, notify paradigm.

CEA events were typed to support the programming of distributed, event-based applications.

COBRA - Content-Based Retrieval Architecture

COBRA - Content-Based Retrieval Architecture - is an attempt to build a framework to construct multimedia information retrieval systems.

Earls Colne

This project presents 500 years of searchable historical records from an Essex town. The contribution of the Computer Laboratory is described in the introduction, under Brief History of the Project .

ECCO

ECCO aims to be an event-based distributed system over peer-to-peer networks in a multi-event broker model that adapts to mobile computing environments and web services.

Hermes

Hermes is a publish/subscribe system where a network of event brokers decouples publishers and subscribers.

This is in contrast with CEA's extensions to middleware for closely coupled components. Hermes uses XML for event transport while allowing standard programming languages such as Java for typed-event programming in end systems.

We have also worked on event composition, provided as a service placed optimally above the broker network.

IMP - Interactive Multimedia Presentation

The IMP - Interactive Multimedia Presentation - project is investigating how to provide support for the process of constructing interactive applications within distributed multimedia environments.

MSSA - Multi-Service Storage Architecture

The multi-service storage architecture (MSSA) was designed to meet the needs of existing and emerging applications such as those with multimedia presentation support requirements and those which wish to use multi-file structured documents. The MSSA allows evolution from, and compatibility with, traditional applications.

Nomadic Pict

More information on the Nomadic Pict web page.

OASIS - An Open Architecture for Secure, Interworking Services

An emerging requirement is for applications and distributed services to cooperate or inter-operate. Existing mechanisms are able to hide the heterogeneity of host operating systems and abstract the issues of distribution and object location.

However, in order for systems to inter-operate securely there must also be mechanisms to hide differences in security policies, or at least to support negotiation between them.

Operating Systems

The Opera group has been working on improving general-purpose operating systems.

PEPITO - Peer-to-Peer Implementation and Theory

More information on the PEPITO web site.

SECURE

SECURE is an IST Global Computing project to create security mechanisms for the Internet, based on explicit models of trust and risk. SECURE itself is an acronym which stands for Secure Environments for Collaboration among Ubiquitous Roaming Entities (and is in no way contrived...)

The project is a distributed, collaborative one and includes a number of researchers from the Cambridge University Computer Lab. To the right you can see several members of the SECURE team captured in their natural habitat, sightseeing around Europe.