Projects

2001.2-present: Research Staff Member, IBM T. J. Watson Research Center

• 2005.11-2006.12: SOA Application Factory (Technical Lead)
  As the technical lead and project manager of the SOA Application Factory project (an IBM CEO Milestone in 2006), Dr. Zhang led the technical design and development process of IBM SOA Solution Modeling Tool, which streamlines the SOA services design process in Rational tooling platform based on IBM’s SOA method. IBM SOA Solution Modeling Tool has been deployed at Global Business Solution Center (GBSC) after two phased pilots. IBM SOA Solution Modeling Tool has been used in dozens of selected account teams and industry solution projects. In addition, he led the design of the initial version of the End-to-End Solution Process (E2E Process) for the SOA Application Factory.
  
• 2004.9-Present: Co-lead, IBM SOA Solution Stack, IBM Worldwide SOA community project
  Dr. Zhang has been leading IBM’s SOA Solution Stack 2.0 effort by contributing architectural building blocks, interaction patterns, metadata, and modeling since 2004. IBM SOA Solution Stack 2.0 has been adopted as a way to realize services in IBM SOA Method. SOA Solution Stack 2.0 has been used as a base to create IBM SOA Reference Architecture commercial offerings. A simplified version is planned to be released to open standards. Initial tooling support has been prototyped.
  
• 2004.10-2005.5: Chief Architect, Industrial Standards, IBM Software Group
  In 2004 and 2005, Dr. Zhang was appointed as the Chief Architect of Industrial Standards at IBM Software Group. In this position, he was playing technical leadership role in helping define IBM’s strategy for industrial standards and open architecture for service-oriented business solutions. He was also assigned to define the technical strategy of the Global Industrial Sector (including Global Electronics Industry, Automotive Industry, Aerospace and Defense Industry, and Chemical and Petroleum Industry) for IBM. As the strategic leader from IBM side, he helped push Web services to RosettaNet in Electronics Industry and AIAG in Automotive Industry. From technical perspective, he also created Web Services Resource Framework (WSRF) based Web Services Collaboration (WS-Collab) Specification that enables business-level collaboration standards for service to service interactions. In January 2005 and February 2005, Dr. Zhang was the only research consultant in the IBM Global Services (IGS) Store of Tomorrow project team ($8X million) to design a lightweight Enterprise Services Bus, which is the first IBM ESB in production.
  
• 2005.6-2005.10: Service-Oriented Order-to-Cash Solution (Technical Lead)
  As the technical leader, I proposed a continuous business process improvement solution for Order-to-Cash (O2C) based on Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA). It includes the O2C business process componentization assets and O2C service delivery framework, which streamlines customers’ Order-to-cash business process and increase revenue through continuous process improvement. An innovative message exchange framework based on Really Simple Syndication (Web 2.0 technology) was created to support fresh content and status synchronization. As IBM’s first service-oriented O2C solution and service initiative, the research results are playing a significant role in the $19 billion overall market for O2C solutions.
• SOA-Based Extended Business Collaboration Enablement (Technical Lead)
  Businesses are increasingly outsourcing key operations and interacting with ever extending nets of partners. Running extended Business-to-Business (B2B) operations creates the need for more advanced human interactions while advancing the automation base of B2B functions. In this project, Dr. Zhang introduced a model for on-demand business process-based collaboration, namely, Extended Business Collaboration (eBC), its major elements of modeling, and a configurable business protocol-enabling framework. He discovered some of the major research issues associated with facilitating extended business collaboration, and presented Annotated Business HyperChain technology leveraging Web services and semantic annotation model. A real customer engagement has been used to validate the novel method invented in this project.
  SOA for Extended Business Collaboration project has been highlighted as Innovation Matters of Computer Science at IBM Research since August 2005 (http://domino.research.ibm.com/comm/research.nsf/pages/r.servcomp.innovation.html). This project provides a service-oriented architecture for enabling business process integration and management in business-to-business environments through a uniform business resource description model, integration activity management, and a set of configurable and flexible message exchange patterns.
• Web Services Hub Framework and E-Sourcing Enabling Technologies (Chief Architect)
  
  Summary: Web Services Hub Framework (a.k.a. Managed E-Hub) is a network-based utility. Connect once and trade anywhere. It provides a secure, reliable connection hub to the eco-system of market places (buyers, sellers, solution utilities, private exchanges, public market places). It provides the infrastructure for the integration of internal systems with business-critical third-party application and Web Service providers at low-cost and high-accuracy transactions. Further, it provides the housing infrastructure for trading services such as UPS, Payment services, BE4WS. These services may be provided by partners or IBM. It is also a platform to aggregate services based on BPOL (Business Process Outsourcing Language) to enhance service outsourcing capability: e-business on demand.

• WebSphere Business Integrator (WBI) and UPS E-Commerce Tools Integration Using Web Services (Chief Architect)
  
  Summary: In recognition of the increasing importance of globalization and the resulting need for greater, faster and more flexible communications, a framework is required to allow any company to establish itself in no time or make optimum use of their legacy applications and run efficiently with minimal cost input. This case study presents such a framework called ELPIF for e-logistics processes integration based on Web Services via incorporating (1) common alliance interface (2) adaptation layer; and (3) dynamic data binding mechanism. This framework can be adopted as a new service delivery model that uses a design pattern, business process inheritance and solution templates. The interaction between the e-logistics processes and business process manager that orchestrates e-logistics processes in an e-business solution will be described in this paper. A transportation planning in the purchase order management process of a B2B solution is used as an example to illustrate the usage of ELPIF by encapsulating United Parcel Service (UPS) on-line XML Tools as Web Services.
  
• Grid Computing Solutions (Chief Architect)
  Invited articles: Developing Grid applications, Part 1 and Part 2

• IBM WebSphere Business Integrator (WBI) and Web Services Integration Demo for IBM Dynamic E-business Announcement on May 14, 2001, XML DevCon 2001 in April, and JavaOne 2001 in June (Chief Architect)
  
  Summary: A working B2B system is presented for demonstrating the feasibility of the proposed advanced UDDI search engine (BE4WS) for dynamic e-business integration. In this system, buyer can use Web Services to create purchase order and get the details of the created purchase orders. Meanwhile, suppliers can check the purchase order information, find transportation providers, obtain quotes for service, and assign the provider to a specific purchase order. Especially, an intelligent shipping agent using BE4WS is used to find the potential transportation service providers who serve the country of dispatch of the purchase order from a private UDDI registry.

Media HyperChain Projects

2000.3-2001.2: Senior Software Engineer, IBM Software Group

• E-Commerce Solutions for Interactive Digital Television – IBM HotMedia iTV (Chief Architect)
  
  Summary: IBM Interactive TV transforms the traditional broadcast television with one-way feed of information and entertainment into the enhanced TV mode with richer, two-way television experience. This solutions consist of HotMedia® TV technology and other IBM backend services such as WebSphere Commerce Suite, Content Manager and other DB2 applications.
  HotMedia® TV is an architecture and toolset for the development of interactive TV content creation, management, distribution and related interactive offerings. Using digital video as a starting point, data can be embedded in the transport stream and synchronized with the video and audio content of the stream. Data is synchronized with specific coordinates (spatial) and specific frames (temporal) of the video. We designed and implemented HotMedia TV Studio Live to embed data into MPEG-2 transport stream in real-time and enable interactive TV audience and program rating in real-time using multi-level tracking methods, systems and program products.
  

1998.3-2000.3: Postdoctoral Research Scientist/Multimedia Architect, IBM T. J. Watson Research Center/IBM Software Group, New York, USA

• E-Commerce Solutions for Internet Media - IBM supported product: HotMedia (http://www.ibm.com/hotmedia/) (Core Architecture Team Member)
  
  Summary: HotMedia is a toolkit for creative professionals, designed to enrich e-business applications with rich media. With HotMedia you can add special effects, such as 360-degree views, multi-track animations, streaming audio and video, panning and scrolling, and zoomable multi-resolution images. Add interactions and hot links, and assemble the entire experience into one file, easily added to a web page and delivered over today's networks. HotMedia dynamically determines the minimal code and data content which is needed and downloads it progressively. This plug-in-free Java tool also includes e-commerce-enhancing features designed to attract, retain and track customer mouse clicks. We invented an advanced tracking framework for rich media and an advanced in-banner secure transaction system. The invented web content pre-fetching and real-time display technology, synchronized multimedia and streaming web content, was implemented in released HotMedia Audio authoring tool & Java player.
  
  (Best Software Award from PC Expo 2000, Five star from ZDNET Download, Five Star from ComputerCurrent, Four Star from PC Magazine).
  
• HotMedia Live WebCast (Chief Architect)
  
  Summary: It provides a synchronized and interactive web content delivery solution for live webcast. It is consist of three main components: HotMedia Live Interactive Server, HotMedia Live Encoding Station and HotMedia Live Player.
  
• HotAudio : HotMedia Audio "On the content creation side, IBM demonstrated its HotMedia technology, packaged tools that let users and partners whip up Java-based multimedia Web applications that take advantage of streaming video and audio capabilities. The toolset is centered on the HotVideo and HotAudio technologies that originated in IBM's labs."

1997.5-1998.3: Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Polytechnic Research Institute for Development and Enterprise (PRIDE), Polytechnic University, New York, USA

• E-Commerce Voice Solutions - Internet Telephony Gateway (Product Manager)
  
  Summary: The E-Commerce Voice Solutions realized the seamless connection between the broadly used Internet and the regular Public Switching Telephony Network (PSTN) so as to save large amount cost of long-distance call. It has been an industry focus within the latest years. The first prototype system based on Microsoft's NetMeeting that conformed with H.323 standard has been delivered in 1997. This system includes the Internet Telephony Gateway Server software and Internet Telephony Client software. Using this system, you can make a phone call from Internet PC to a regular POTS phone. The voice quality is pretty good. IPO2U.com has commercialized this technology.
  
• Internet Real-time Conference (Product Manager)
  
  Summary: Internet Real-time Conference based on the IOP (Internet Open Platform) architecture, standard interface and cross-platform programming language can be used as a tool for creating a virtual conference over Internet. For example, it can easily process multimedia conference preparation via Internet; and provide discussion forum, Java chat room to attendees. It has a suite of potential applications: Internet office solution, Group communication and information sharing, workshop, and interactive community media. The newer version enabled multimedia content integration with Internet Real-time Conference system and powered GISSIC’97 over the Internet. Based on this system, we proposed a High Bandwidth Distance Learning Solution for Internet 2.
  
  

• Multimedia Database : Notes based multimedia content creation, annotation, and distribution system

1996.3-1997.4: Staff Research Member of Networked Multimedia Technologies and Solutions Group, IBM China Research Lab, Beijing, P. R. China.

• E-Commerce Solutions for Hyperlinked Video Content - IBM HotVideo (Project Lead)
  
  Summary: IBM HotVideo extends the concept of hyperlinks from text and images to video, providing hyperlinks to hot spots in digital video. IBM HotVideo technology contains two components: The HotVideo Maker (Maker) and the HotVideo Player (Player). The Maker utilizes familiar point and click methods for the creation of HotVideo content. The Player allows for intrusion-free viewing of HotVideo content while alerting users to the location of hyperlinks within the frames. An indicator highlights the hot link locations in the video; the indicator is green when hot links are not present and red when hot links are present. Users can choose to either browse the hot link locations or continue to view the video as-is. This product has been released in June 1998 (See http://www.software.ibm.com/net.media/). CNN Interactive, was one of HotVideo’s initial pilot sites. USA Today reported on this invention in the cover story on April 2, 1999.
  
• SLIM: Software based Low-bit-rate Interactive Multimedia platform (Project Lead)
  
  Summary: SLIM is a self-contained component for providing real-time, interactive multimedia capability for applications conformed to H.323 standard. Its core software compression technologies were from IBM Research (H.263 and G723.1). It has low network bandwidth requirement and has the capability to provide variable bit-rates based on network resource. From July of 1996 to August of 1996, I was visiting IBM T. J. Watson Research Center to co-operate this project with Watson team.