Contact

A.V. Williams Building
Room 4160, Desk 4
College Park, MD 20742

Office Extension -
    x52724
Academic Electronic Mail -
    almazan -at- cs.umd.edu
AIM and Y! Msg -
    Contact Me

Affiliations

MIND Lab
CSD at UMCP
UMIACS
UMD/UMCP
Personal Site

Projects Notes

I have been associated with all of the major projects listed below. While I have been involved in many more projects, these represent those which I have spent a notable amount of time on.

Unless stated otherwise, I have finished work on all of the projects.

MIND Lab Research Projects

Information Dynamics (Ongoing)

Graduate research assistant and co-principle architect. The Information Dynamics paradigm research represents the majority of what I focus on. Through this paradigm, we explore the dynamic nature of information in the use of computer systems, possibly many more uses, today. I will be creating an Information Dynamics site which explains this in much more detail at a later time.

Context-Enhanced Rover (Ongoing)

Graduate research assistant, principle architect, and principle programmer. Implemented in the Microsoft .NET 2.0 Framework, this version of Rover builds on the previous work of Rover and enhances it with contextual data. In this system, we utilize direct connections which allows connection management via universal namespaces and easy-to-build services. Unique to context-enhanced Rover is the concept of location tagging.

We have built several different services on top of this version of Rover. These include a dynamic network loader, location integration with Horus, location-aware tagging mechanisms, RSS downloading (Yahoo! Weather), news and web searches (from the Yahoo API), and a downloadable storefront application.

We are proud to announce that we have been able to successfully deploy and test Rover on a single computer, a local area network, and a campus area network. We can be particularly pleased with the extremely successful test over the Atlantic Ocean, a 'commander' watching Rover activity in College Park, Maryland, across the Atlantic Ocean in Switzerland!

Rover (Web Services Version)

Graduate research assistant, co-principle architect, and programmer. This system, now implemented in the Microsoft .NET 2.0 Framework and utilizes the Web Services Enhancements 4.0, eases the use of contextually-aware services over a variety of devices. The primary goal of this work is to provide an integration platform for services, which include location-determination software developed at the MIND Lab which includes PinPoint and Horus.

I have supervised undergraduates and graduates with projects directly related to Rover. I am also mentoring a high school student who will be working with Rover-like services.

MIND Lab Associated Projects

MobiLaps' ISP Screen-Estate (Ongoing)

MIND Lab principle software architect and MIND Lab principle programmer. At MIND Lab, we have developed this primarily using Python and Twisted. Description from the Maryland Industrial Partnerships press release regarding MobiLaps and our research group:

This project will "enhancing and extending the functionality of MobiLaps' ISP Screen-Estate product. The Screen-Estate, which unobtrusively appears in the web browser as a toolbar and does not require client-side software installation, will play a key role in transforming ISPs into providers of location-specific content, and will enable e-commerce between local users and locally-owned businesses."

AudioEye Unnamed Project

MIND Lab architect. Details to be disclosed at a later date and time.

Visual Analytics' DIG Symphony

Principle software architect and principle programmer. Designed and implemented the prototypes for use with the DIG Symphony software. By utilizing the Microsoft .NET 2.0 Framework and ADO.NET 2.0, I helped develop an image manipulation tool, a dynamic assembly loader, and a batch database operation manager.

WB HIDTA Gang Database

Co-principle software architect and principle programmaer. Using the Microsoft .NET 1.1 Framework and ASP.NET 1.1, I aided in the development of the internal database that holds entries information about gangs, members, affiliations, and other useful information about gangs.

NYU Research Projects

DisCo

Undergraduate research assistant and programmer. Aided in the development of a toolkit which provided partial solutions to security in distributed systems. This included tools that expressed access rights, secure communication, ease of component deployment, and locality-aware service discovery. This had all been developed using the Java 2 (1.4) platform.

Shower

Undergraduate research assistant and programmer. By utilizing the Microsoft .NET 1.1 Framework and ASP.NET 1.1, I aided in the investigative uses of bringing Web Services content to a portal page. We initially investigated how to dynamically choose which sources to pick from based on the location and the need of the services.

Professional Projects

New York Connect Manager (Versions 1 and 2)

Principle architect and principle programmer. MySQL and PHP based customer and activity system which aided staff with maintaining lists potential and current customers. In retrospect, this system could be redeveloped today to become more extensible using social networking technologies such as the Semantic Web.