A user-friendly tuning system is needed to specify, control, and adapt the temporal behavior and other quality parameters of audio/visual multimedia. The goal of this project is to explore the tuning service with its visualization techniques for quality of service (QoS); specification of bidirectional translation between different views of QoS with emphasis on translations for compressed media and reverse translation from the system to the user; signaling between the tuning service, the application, and the network in case of adaptive behavior; application-driven negotiation protocols to incorporate heterogeneous configurations of multimedia devices and different loads at the end-points; and distributed timing control.

As the presence of video support in multimedia distributed applications increases, the question of real-time video encryption arises, as does adaptivity of encryption algorithms if real-time is traded for partial security. The magnitude of the video information with respect to spatial and temporal characteristics provides new problems for encryption algorithms. Video information is of large size, compression provides several layers of dependencies, and video frame processing requires temporal bounds up to 33 ms. Our research concentrates on real-time video encryption algorithms to encrypt video frames within the temporal boundaries of video frame processing and trade-offs between encryption algorithms and real-time with respect to various security levels.

New transducer technologies now make it possible to sonically and visually immerse a user in data. From a sensory perspective, the computer need not be simply the medium of interaction between user and data; instead, users can interact directly with the data. We are exploring techniques that immerse users in a virtual world based on dynamic data that describe the behavior of massively parallel computer systems and the World Wide Web (WWW). Through a head-mounted display, three-dimensional sound cues, and direct data manipulation, the user can explore, viscerally experience, and modify the dynamic behavior of a high-performance parallel system or a WWW server.