Prabhakar, Gokul Chander Member of Technical Staff. Bell Laboratories, 600-700 Mountain Avenue, Rm 2B-302 Murray Hill, NJ 07974. 908-582-5284, (908)582-1239 (fax)

Patents Publications  PDF Biography

Personal Information

My interest can be broadly categorized towards developing and managing large scale intelligent network management tools and methods.

Current Projects

• OSS For VoIP Networks 
• The OSS for VoIP networks proposal has been voted a breakthrough proposal at Bell Labs. This is a comprehensive OSS to manage VoIP networks (contrasted with the incremental data OSS solutions currently being attempted). We are defining several project around this area including service assurance using active and passive probing, fault correlation, network traffic management, and design & planning.
  
• Network Element Configuration
  • Matisse. Automated Network Element Configuration by translating XML specifications into directly executable code with run-time support. The entire project is being developed using Java, and SAX and DOM and SAX and DOM XML parsers. An interesting part of the project is the language Mocha--subset of Java used for specifying rules, actions, and triggers for customized element configuration. The project will be delivered for further use to the NOS (Network Operations Software) part of Lucent. Matisse has become the core infrastructure tool of IEMS (the base platform for Navis suite of tools). This work is patent pending.
• Network Provisioning
  • Descartes Routing Engine. This is a high performance, light-weight routing engine for ATM, FR, and DSL networks to facilitate provisioning. This is going to be part of Lucent's Navi Provisioning Manager (NPM-D).
  • Navis OMS. This is a powerful routing engine for the optical network domain; I am involved in a project management role ensuring consistent specs, requirements, and handle project criticalities, if they arise.
• Network Auto Discovery
  • Net Inventory and Topology Discovery. . I led the development effort in 2000 (as both lead developer and primarily as development manager) for this project that has been transferred to Lucent Network Fault Management (business unit division). The tools can be used to inventory a network and also to discover the physical layer (layer 2) topology of the network. The current tool set is intended to become part of the Lucent NFM product portfolio. (To view the Net Inventory web page, you must be within Lucent firewall.). Net Inventory has been successfully Tech-transferred to NFM and released as part of Lucent product NFM (rel. 12 onwards). I am working with other interested groups in NGN and LWS for additional tech-transfer possibilities. 
  • Trishul Correlation Engine. This is a powerful correlation engine to automatically deduce provisioned circuits in ATM/FR/DSL domains. This is also being integrated as part of NPM-D.
• Middleware for WorkFlows (used in the context of Network Provisioning)
  • Bowtie. This is a highly scalable message transport to facilitate heterogenous servers (typically in a work flow environment). This scalable transport will be used as part of NPM-D to automate provisioning tasks. Bowtie provides application integration in Work Manager (NPM) and WSAM (Wireless Services Activation Manager). It is currently being ported for use with NVAM (Navis Voice Activation Manager).
• Shakti Service Quality Metric Processing Engine
  • End-to-end automated recording, monitoring and evaluation of user-defined SQM metrics. The SQM compiler automatically translates the user defined service expressions into exceutable units for the SQM evaluation engine. Lucent's press release on this can be seen here:Press release.
• ·Network Mediation
  • The code generation driver controls the code generation process itself so that code generation itself is flexible and can be tailored to meet different network mediation needs. Currently, the code generation driver provides automated network model transformation to mediation packages with runtime support transparently. By changing merely its "properties", the generated code and its behavior can be altered with no changes to the driver framework. As part of this, I also provided a vision on network mediation product infrastructure.
• IP Protocol Related Projects
  • Automated OSPF Configurator and Optimizer.. The tool finds "optimal" OSPF aggregates and their weights to advertise for each OSPF area. The algorithm/tool provides a compromise between the number of aggregates and weights to advertise thus helping for automated OSPF configuration, and for conserving routing table sizes.
  • BGP Data Analysis in the Internet.. Analyzed BGP data in the Internet in order to observe certain temporal trends and patterns. Several useful trends have been identified as part of this data analysis. We are also trying to explore in this process "what is the right level of abstraction" needed to capture the Internet Topology and connectivity.
    

Past Lucent/Bell-Labs Projects

• Automated Remote Diagnostics
• Automated Expert System Deficiency Removal The expert systems had severe knowledge-deficiency as BCS products evolved and new diagnostic techniques are developed. The diagnostic information is fed back to expert system developers as a printed copy. It takes quite sometime before that knowledge is encoded into the expert system's knowledge-base of facts. The system designed avoids the manual step by parsing and approximating the documents supplied and automatically updating the expert's fact/knowledge-base. A patent has been issued on this work on Nov 2000.

• Y2K remediation for CMS systems using the CMS expert. The CMS Expert is a diagnostic expert system for troubleshooting CMS products. The Y2K enhancement detects non-compliant systems and recommends the appropriate QPPCN associated with that CMS type. 

• Providing Database Schema Transparency for Expert Systems International. The tools developed make the expert systems run on the International platform where the ticketing database is radically different from the one that is domestic. The tools make the schema difference transparent and maps requests that are for domestic ticketing queries into the international version and returns results in the same way as in the domestic case. The net result is that the expert systems do not see any difference w.r.t the ticketing system under which they run. This is crucial since schema dependency of these systems would potentially stagnate their evolution. The data mapping program developed to interface with the International ticketing database is also being put to use for other purposes such as password changing etc, thus improving its overall utility and saving cost and effort for the company.

• Call Centers/CRM 
• Call Center Decision Support Tool The tool allows determination of representative agent compositions and their occupancy in a Call center over a date range. This tool is being used by Lucent CMS Life-cycle support, Sales and a variety of groups that require such information. A patent on this tool has been issues Nov'03.
• Call Center Dynamic Performance Monitoring. This work and tool allows autonomous, distributed call center performance to be monitored using metrics which are computed "on the fly" : this is done by a method that stores a meta formula for a specified metric which is instantiated into a metric determining formula at the time a call center is polled (monitored). You can read more about this monitoring offer on CRM Advisory Page. The periodic performance monitoring and call center decision support (above) are actively being utilized by Lucent's call center advisory team. A patent on this tool was issued Mar'4. Still pending in Europe.

• Infrastructure Recommendation for Diagnostic Environments This analysis provides a road-map/vision for the Denver Expert Systems in terms of the right choice of platform for their diagnosis capabilities.

Interests and Expertise

Academic Activities

• Editorial Board Memberships
  1. Intelligent Data Analysis Journal. An electronic journal by IOS Press. IDA publishes a variety of articles pertaining to intelligent systems and AI applications on data analysis. Reviewer and Editorial Board Member.
  2. Interacting with Computers. (Elsevier Science Publishers). A journal dedicated to all aspects of Computer and Human Interaction. Reviewer and Editorial Board Member (Computer Science Specialty).
  3. Applied Intelligence Journal (Kluwer Academic Publishers) International journal of AI applications (all aspects, methods, tools), and Neural nets. Reviewer and Editorial Board Member (as of Feb'99).
• Other Participation (such as Reviews)
  1. Artificial Intelligence in Engineering Design, Analysis, and Manufacturing (AIEDAM) Journal (Cambridge University Press). Reviewer.
  2. International Journal of Intelligent and Fuzzy Systems. Reviewer.
  3. International Journal of Engineering Applications of Artificial Intelligence. Reviewer.
  4. International Journal of Intelligent Systems in Accounting, Finance, and Management (John Wiley Publisher).Reviewer.
  5. Internet Computing. IEEE Publication (Magazine). Reviewer.
  6. Engineering Applications of Artificial Intelligence (Elsevier Science Publishers). Reviewer.
  
  
• Interesting Conference(s)
  • International Database Engineering and Applications Symposium (IDEAS'2001). Reviewer and Program Committee Member.
  • International Database Engineering and Applications Symposium (IDEAS'2000). Held in Montreal, Canada. Reviewer and Program Committee Member.
  • Computer Human Interaction 2000 (CHI'2000) Conference in The Hague, Netherland, April 2000. Conference Committee Member and Reviewer.
  • International Database Engineering and Applications Symposium (IDEAS'99). Held in Montreal, Canada. Reviewer and Program Committee Member.
  • Computer Human Interaction 1999 (CHI'99) Conference in Pittsburgh May 1999. Conference Committee Member and Reviewer.
  • The 12th International Conference on Industrial and Engineering Application of Artificial Intelligence and Expert Systems 1999 (IEA/AIE-99) held June 1999 in Cairo, Egypt. Reviewer and Program committee member.
  • IEEE KDEX (Knowledge and Data Exchange) Workshop held in Taiwan, November 1998. Program committee member and Reviewer.
  • IBM Center for Advanced Studies Conference (CASCON'98) held in Mississauga, Ontario, Canada. Reviewer.