Gander

Gander is a distributed search engine for mobile networked environments characterized by high volumes of short-lived data. We refer to these emerging types of environments as Personalized Networked Spaces (PNetS).

PNetS are comprised of digital devices, both mobile and embedded in the environment (e.g., smart phones, sensors, RFID tags), connected by a dynamic network topology. As in the Internet, large volumes of data motivate the need for expressive search mechanisms that efficiently identify and provide access to information relevant to users' needs. However, the volatile and heterogeneous nature of PNetS' network and data preclude traditional information retrieval techniques.

This project aims to address the novel research and software engineering challenges that arise from the new requirements in this emerging search space.

This project is funded, in part, by the National Science Foundation under grant CNS-0844850 and a Google Research Award. Any opinions, findings and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation (NSF).

Project Participants: Jonas Michel (Ph.D. student), Dr. Christine Julien (MPC director), Dr. Jamie Payton (collaborator at Temple University), Dr. Gruia-Catalin Roman (collaborator at The University of New Mexico)

Press

  1. Searching the Here and Now, UT School of Engineering, February 28, 2013
  2. How Google Plans to Find the UnGoogleable, MIT Technology Review, November 27, 2012

Publications:

  1. Jonas Michel, Christine Julien. "From Human Mobility to Data Mobility: Leveraging Spatiotemporal History in Device-to-Device Information Diffusion" Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Mobile Data Management. 2016.
  2. Jonas Michel, Christine Julien, Jamie Payton. "Gander: Mobile, Pervasive Search of the Here and Now in the Here and Now" IEEE Internet Of Things Journal. 2014.
  3. Jonas Michel, Christine Julien. "A Cloudlet-Based Proximal Discovery Service for Machine-to-Machine Applications" Proceedings of the International Conference on Mobile Computing, Applications and Services (MobiCASE). 2013.
  4. Jonas Michel, Christine Julien, Jamie Payton, Gruia-Catalin Roman. "myGander: A Mobile Interface and Distributed Search Engine for Pervasive Computing" Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Pervasive Computing and Communications (Demonstrations Track). 2012.
  5. Jonas Michel. "Mobilizing Search of the Here and Now" Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Pervasive Computing and Communications (Ph.D. Forum). 2012.
  6. Jonas Michel, Christine Julien, Jamie Payton, Gruia-Catalin Roman. "A Spatiotemporal Model for Ephemeral Data in Pervasive Computing Networks" Proceedings of the 1st International IEEE Workshop on Hot Topics in Pervasive Computing (PerHot). 2012.
  7. Jonas Michel, Christine Julien, Jamie Payton, Gruia-Catalin Roman. "The Gander Search Engine for Personalized Networked Spaces" Technical Report. 2012.
  8. Jonas Michel, Christine Julien, Jamie Payton, Gruia-Catalin Roman. "Gander: Personalizing Search of the Here and Now" Proceedings of the 8th International ICST Conference on Mobile and Ubiquitous Systems (MobiQuitous). 2011