NASA SBIR 2006 Solicitation

SMALL BUSINESS CONCERN (Firm Name, Mail Address, City/State/Zip, Phone)
SciberQuest, Inc.
Pacific Executive Plaza 777 South Highway 101, Suite 108
Solana Beach, CA 92075-2623
(858) 793-7063

PRINCIPAL INVESTIGATOR/PROJECT MANAGER (Name, E-mail, Mail Address, City/State/Zip, Phone)
Homa   Karimabadi
homak@sciberquest.com
Pacific Executive Plaza 777 South Highway 101, Suite 108
Solana Beach, CA  92075-2623
(858) 793-7063

TECHNICAL ABSTRACT ( Limit 2000 characters, approximately 200 words)
Our goal is to adapt the peer?to?peer technology (P2P), which has been overwhelmingly successful in popular content distribution, as the basis for development of scientific collaboratory called Scientific Peer Network (SciPerNet), pronounced Cyper?Net. In contrast to P2P networks such as Gnutella, Bit Torrent, and others, SciPerNet incorporates three design elements that are critical to application of P2P for scientific purposes (Figure 1):

? User Authentication

? Data Integrity Validation

? Reliable Searching

In order to make SciPerNet an effective tool for distributed collaboration, it will also have built-in features (Figure 2) for creation and management of communities, access to authenticated list of scientists from different professional organizations such as American Physical Society, management and sharing of files, blogs and whiteboarding. It will also provide a number of novel features such as (i) Profiler which replaces the need to create personalized websites, (ii) searching documents for query hits rather than the usual file name only, (iii) U-publish which enables "publishing" scientific papers and their supplementary materials, and EmailAttacher which works by dragging a file into an email utility but rather than attaching and sending the file, it simply creates a link to the folder where the file resides with the instructions for the user on the other end to retrieve it.

POTENTIAL NASA COMMERCIAL APPLICATIONS ( Limit 1500 characters, approximately 150 words)
We expect strong marketing opportunities for SciPerNet within the federal government, scientific organizations, and commercial sector through (i) creation of online communities, (ii) cost savings and enhanced offerings to content provides, and (iii) rapid adoption among the public of a new file sharing mechanism using EmailAttacher feature of SciPerNet. Currently, the Environmental Protection Agency, US Geological Survey, and Housing and Urban Development are among the federal groups that are deploying distributed content systems to move the US government to the next level of interdepartmental information sharing. NASA and other federal agencies would be obvious targets for the cost savings that SciPerNet would provide. NASA is a data centric organization and accessing and sharing of data among scientists remains a challenge. Virtual observatory is a promising technology for making accessible data access from various missions and instruments through a web browser. SciPerNet provides a complimentary solution to Virtual Observatories by enabling distributed collaboration and sharing of downloaded and/or processed data among scientists. This will, in turn, increase science returns from NASA missions. As such, SciPerNet can serve a two-fold purpose for NASA, as cost-savings software as well as a productivity tool for scientists working with data from NASA missions.

POTENTIAL NON-NASA COMMERCIAL APPLICATIONS ( Limit 1500 characters, approximately 150 words)
SciPerNet enables creation of online communities, provides cost effective ways for organizations to disseminate content/data, and EmailAttacher allows users to easily share photos,videos/music files through their email utility. The creation of online communities generates "traffic" among targeted audience with obvious marketing potential in delivery of ads and products. P2P also offers a major savings to content providers. One recent Bear Stearns report estimated that Napster would have had to pay nearly $7 million a month for bandwidth costs alone if it had been hosting all the songs its members were downloading at its peak. Such examples are a powerful attraction for companies looking for ways to cut costs. EmailAttacher feature of SciPerNet holds the promise of rapid adoption among the public sector. Email remains the dominant means of electronic communication but with the growth of broadband internet, there has been a desire to share large files (movies, audio files, scientific data files) over the internet. Large files cannot be sent as attachments via email, and this had led to photo-sharing websites like Kodak, EasyShare Gallery, Snapfish, and Shutterfly. However, all these websites share a common flaw: The need to upload photos to a Web server, a process which just gets lengthier and more prone to error the bigger the files get. Email Attacher overcomes the existing limitation of email and enables the user to "attach" large files.

NASA's technology taxonomy has been developed by the SBIR-STTR program to disseminate awareness of proposed and awarded R/R&D in the agency. It is a listing of over 100 technologies, sorted into broad categories, of interest to NASA.

TECHNOLOGY TAXONOMY MAPPING

Computer System Architectures Software Tools for Distributed Analysis and Simulation