Computer Science Colloquium

Current Internet systems are based on a client/server model that makes servers be hot spots, but under-utilizes rich resources on client sides. Peer-oriented computing has been emerging into an attractive paradigm in distributed and Internet systems, challenging the traditional client/server model. However, a peer-oriented distributed system is likely to have weak resource coordinations, and to easily loose security and privacy among peers.

In this talk, I will present a reliable and fast peer-oriented Web document sharing service that attempts to fully utilize the information and resources on client sides and alleviate servers' burdens. In this peer-oriented service, clients can quickly share documents among themselves with the help of a limited power in the proxy. I will address four related technical issues: (1) evaluation of the performance potential, (2) algorithms designs of self-organized data flows, (3) enforcement of integrity and mutual anonymity among peer clients, and (4) implementation of this service using existing Internet infrastructure. Experimental performance to show the effectiveness of this peer-oriented Web document sharing service will also be presented.

Li Xiao is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Computer Science, College of William and Mary. She was awarded a Usenix Research Fellowship in 2001. Her research interests are in the areas of parallel/distributed and Internet computing and systems, system resource management, and design and implementations of experimental algorithms.