Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Filesystems: Addressing The Last-Mile “Problem” In Services-Oriented/Cloud Computing, George K. Thiruvathukal, Joseph P. Kaylor, Konstantin Läufer

Computer Science: Faculty Publications and Other Works

We have designed and implemented RestFS, a software framework that provides a uniform, configurable connector layer for mapping remote web-based resources to local filesystem-based resources, recognizing the similarity between these two types of resources. Such mappings enable programmatic access to a resource, as well as composition of two or more resources, through the local operating system’s standard filesystem application programming interface (API), script-able file-based command-line utilities, and interprocess communication (IPC) mechanisms. The framework supports automatic and manual authentication.

As part of this talk, we demonstrate a new filesystem that interfaces to the SketchFab.com service to support 3D model visualization. For …

My Materials Supporting The Exploring Computer Science Curriculum, Ronald I. Greenberg

Computer Science: Faculty Publications and Other Works

Ready-made handouts and other resources supporting the Exploring Computer Science (introductory high school) curriculum are provided for Units 1 through 3. These materials were based on version 4 of the ECS curriculum but should remain relevant in later versions as well.

Accelerating Learning With Distance Education And Open Courseware, George K. Thiruvathukal

Computer Science: Faculty Publications and Other Works

What will happen if academia disrupts traditional teaching methods by providing students with online and free academic materials?

Simplifying Domain Modeling And Memory Management In User-Mode Filesystems With The Nofs Framework, Joseph P. Kaylor, Konstantin Läufer, George K. Thiruvathukal

Computer Science: Faculty Publications and Other Works

Transparent access to remote data sets and data arising from web services is a non-trivial challenge to application developers. This early stage work addresses this challenge with NOFS, an object-oriented framework for creating filesystems to support domain specific functionality. While an early stage work, we present a solution to solve the access problem. Our solution greatly simplifies the task of filesystems development by providing the glue code needed between a domain model and the filesystem contract. We demonstrate support for domain models that are larger than physical memory and demonstrate how the concerns of caching can be removed from user-mode …

An Object-Oriented Framework For Userland Filesystem Development, George K. Thiruvathukal, Joseph P. Kaylor, Konstantin Läufer

Computer Science: Faculty Publications and Other Works

Userland filesystems (also known as virtual/installable filesystems) represent a promising direction for interfacing the traditional filesystem concept to specific domain instances (e.g. finance, bioinformatics, astronomy, photo sharing services, etc.) One might initially be inclined to think of filesystems as “old school” or “so 1980s” but their use remains an established practice in computational science and in many business domains, owing to the stability of filesystems interfaces and the continued perception of having great overall performance. While the promise of building one’s own userland filesystems is great, the approach has seen little adoption, owing to the complexity of working with low-level …

Method And Apparatus For Enabling Digital Rights Management In File Transfers, William L. Olson, Vida Ilderem, Frederick L. Kitson, Morris A. Moore, Paul Moroney, Petr Peterka, Theodore Rzeszewski, Robert H. Yacobellis

Computer Science: Faculty Publications and Other Works

Embodiments of the invention generally provide a method and apparatus for enabling digital rights management in file transfers. One embodiment of a method for transferring digital content from a first user to a second user, includes transferring ownership of an instance of the digital content to the second user, where the instance of the digital content resides on a first device belonging to the first user. Copies of the digital content are then deleted from one or more additional devices belonging to the first user (including at least one offline device).

Digging Into Data, George K. Thiruvathukal

Computer Science: Faculty Publications and Other Works

Computational projects such as Wordle can simplify our lives by extracting data and presenting it in a new, visually compelling way.

Open Source Classroom Polling (Interactive Response) Facility, Ronald I. Greenberg

Computer Science: Faculty Publications and Other Works

The contents of the UNIX directory resulting from unzipping the .zip file provide a demonstration of a simple polling facililty that instructors can use in class any time that students have access to a web browser. This is a good way to have students work problems and see to what extent they are converging towards correct answers.

Unlike other polling facilities, this one is completely free without any restrictions on number of simultaneous users, etc. It also allows a feature most polling facilities do not in that it may be used for completely free-form answers, and the instructor can still …