PhD Thesis Proposal Defence


"Web Proxy Mining and Its Applications"

By

Mr. Wenwu Lou


Abstract

The wide-spread use of large caching proxy servers as critical Internet
infrastructure components has resulted great research attention in
processing and analyzing traffic data on these proxy servers for improving
system performance. A proxy acts as an intermediate server for retrieving
Web resources on behalf of a group of Web clients. Consequently traffic
data on a proxy contain footprints of Web accesses by many Web users to
many Web servers. This multi-user/multi-server characteristic of proxy
traffic data allows the tracking and analysis of collective user behaviors
across on the Web and has the potential of revealing relationships among
users, Web servers, and Web pages. In addition, proxy traffic data bring
content and hyperlink information over a wide and focused range of Web
recourses, along with usage information on the same set of Web resources.
This gives arise to new research opportunities in integrated processing of
hyperlinks and usage data on a proxy server.

A lot of important research issues come into play if sophisticate types of
analysis are to be carried out on proxy traffic data. These include
effective data preparation techniques, consistent modelling and analysis
of hyperlink information and usage data, and efficient deployment of novel
applications on a proxy server. In this proposal, we explore some of these
important issues and outline our initial investigations. We first propose
a heuristic divide-and-conquer approach for episode identification in a
proxy log; then in the language of graph we propose two types of
consistent models for both hyperlinks and usage data; and finally we
describe two proxy-based intelligent information services enabled by Web
proxy mining. We also summarize a number of research directions worth
further investigation.


Date:				Tuesday, 20 May 2003

Time:				2:00p.m.-4:00p.m.

Venue:				Room 3402
				Lifts 17-18

Committee Members:		Prof. Hongjun Lu (Supervisor)
				Prof. Dik-Lun Lee (Chairman)
				Dr. Qiong Luo
				Dr. Qiang Yang


**** ALL are Welcome ****