Research Outline:

Peer-to-Peer (P2P) systems attract much research concern today as a new architecture for distributed computing and the Internet. P2P systems can be described informally as a system in which a large number of sites co-operate and coordinate to perform specific tasks. The sites in P2P systems are called peers, due to their similarity in capability and function within the system. Typically, peers can be any PCs connected to the Internet or an intranet. The peers are organised as an overlay network having its own protocols and routing mechanisms, which we refer to as P2P network. P2P systems are dynamic in nature. The peers can join and leave the network continuously, but the overall system performance does not degrade too much.

P2P systems cover broad applications including data sharing, distributed computing, communication and collaboration as well as platform services. Our focus is on P2P data sharing systems. The motivation of P2P data sharing system is the rapid growth of the amounts of digital information in the World Wide Web. A P2P data sharing system is for sharing huge amount of data in the P2P network, where each peer contributes its own data and storage capacity as well as benefits from the resources shared by other peers. Many systems and prototypes have been built for data sharing in P2P networks and some of them have become very popular web services.

As an attempt to provide efficient retrieval based on contents in P2P text sharing systems, my student fellows and I proposed a super-peer based hierarchical summary indexing, which is to appear as a full paper in IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering. Our current research aims to provide richer functionality to P2P data sharing systems such as supporting structured data sharing and integration.

Research Experience:

My research experience with SMA has been enriching and challenging. With the first year of course study and industrial attachment, I accumulated the basic knowledge in computer science and developed hands-on skills as well. Moreover, the close interaction with the professors from NUS, NTU and MIT gave me great opportunities to see for myself the state-of-the-art research they engaged in, thus enlarging my experience in the research of computer science, in addition to helping me discover my research interests.

I also had a great experience doing research in database area at SMA. My advisors at NUS and MIT are both experienced researchers and I am learning a lot from them. Since our database team is a big group, I have numerous opportunities to discuss and exchange ideas with many students and fellows. I also participated in research seminars held by the CS programme of SMA and obtained much knowledge and insights from them.