Prof. Fatos Xhafa

BigData eLearning Analytics: The Cornerstone for New Generation of Learning Management Systems and Online Collaboration

BigData Analytics has emerged as a disruptive technology in many fields of businesses engineering and knowledge management. Among them, BigData eLearning Analytics play an important role in Virtual Campuses and eLearning platforms. Initially, BigData eLearning Analytics served as a basis for monitoring and decision making in traditional Learning Management Systems (LMS). However, BigData eLearning Analytics is playing a crucial role in the design of new LMS systems by enabling not only learning analytics but also the A3 paradigm (Anywhere, Anytime, Awareness), emotion-aware learning, trustworthy e-assessment and other trends to maximize learner’s motivation, experiences and outcome.

In this talk we will address and discuss current and new trends and challenges arising in BigData eLearning Analytics as a cornerstone for new generation of Learning Management Systems and Online Collaboration. The talk we will focus on massive data processing and mining techniques for BigData eLearning under efficiency and scalability requirements. We will analyse and discuss techniques related to software patterns for massive data processing, and identify various issues arising in mining large data sets. We will exemplify the discussion by real life examples, large learning data sets and case studies from a real Virtual Campus.

Biography of Fatos Xhafa

Fatos Xhafa received his PhD in Computer Science in 1998 from the Department of Computer Science of the Technical University of Catalonia (UPC), Barcelona, Spain. Currently, he holds a permanent position of Professor Titular (Hab. Full Professor) at UPC, Barcelona Tech. He was a Visiting Professor at Birkbeck College, University of London (UK) during academic year 2009-2010 and Research Associate at Drexel University, Philadelphia (USA) during academic term 2004/2005. Prof. Xhafa has widely published in peer reviewed international journals, conferences/workshops, book chapters and edited books and proceedings in the field. He is awarded teaching and research merits by Spanish Ministry of Science and Education, by IEEE conference and best paper awards. Prof. Xhafa has an extensive editorial and reviewing service. He is editor in Chief of International Journal of Grid and Utility Computing and International Journal of Space-based and Situated Computing from Inderscience and member of EB of several International Journals and Guest Editors of Special Issues. He is Editor in Chief of the Elsevier Book Series "Intelligent Data-Centric Systems" and of Springer Book Series "Lecture Notes in Data Engineering and Communication Technologies". He is actively participating in the organization of several international conferences and workshops. He is a member of IEEE Communications Society, IEEE Systems, Man & Cybernetics Society and Emerging Technical Subcomm of Internet of Things.

His research interests include parallel and distributed algorithms, massive data processing and collective intelligence, optimization, networking, P2P and Cloud computing, security and trustworthy computing, machine learning and data mining, among others.

Dr. Francesco Palmieri

Introducing Energy-Awareness in Communication Infrastructures: A novel Approach to Sustainable Networking

Despite the significant degree of technological maturity reached by modern telecommunications infrastructures, new critical issues are emerging as side effects associated to their energy consump- tion, environmental impact and related costs, now accounting for an important part of the networks' operational expenditures. For this reason, the power consumption of telecommunication networks has recently attracted the attention of both researchers and field experts in order to contain the associated energy bills and reduce their ecological impact. Many of the proposed countermeasures, introducing energy effciency in network equipment, focus exclusively on the reduction of the power consumption, without adequately considering more traditional network engineering objectives such as balancing resource utilization, routing policy, or resilience schemes. As a consequence, network control plane strategies passed from one extreme to the other, from being totally energy-unaware to exclusively energy-efficient at the expenses of load-balancing, with obvious impacts on the power consumption in the former case and on the blocking rate in the latter one. Correctly handling this problem implies introducing the concept of energy awareness within the overall routing and trafic engineering framework, by also relying on the possibility of using alternate energy sources and more the trafic according to the different billing policies. This also means solving a very com- plex multi-objective optimisation approach aiming at containing the network's energy consumption and ecological impact while balancing the overall load and maintaining an acceptable connection demand satisfaction rate. The optimal solutions to such an optimisation problem, can be found only in unaffordable times by using integer linear programming, so that other near-optimal solution based on novel heuristic methods and engineering practices are needed.

Hence, the main goal of this keynote is presenting the current challenges and research trends related to the introduction of energy-awareness in communication infrastructures by exploring the emerging models necessary to formally characterize the energy consumption within networks and the new energy-aware protocols, architectures, techniques and paradigms that, by considering power usage as a new constraint, are capable to optimize the use of energy and reduce the ecological footprint in order to achieve more sustainable large scale communication infrastructures that will be a basis for growth and prosperity.

Biography of Francesco Palmieri

Francesco Palmieri is an Associate Professor at the University of Salerno, Italy. He is habilitated as a full professor in both Computer Science and Computer Engineering. He received from the same university two Italian \Laurea" degrees and a PhD in computer science. His major research interests concern high performance computing/networking protocols and architectures, routing algorithms and network security. Previously he has been an assistant professor at the Second University of Naples, and the Director of the telecommunication and networking division of the Federico II University, in Naples, Italy. At the start of his career, he also worked for several international companies on networking-related projects. He has been closely involved with the development of the Internet in Italy as a senior member of the Technical-Scientific Advisory Committee and of the CSIRT of the Italian NREN GARR. He was a visiting scholar in several universities in Europe and Asia. He has published a large number of papers in leading technical journals, books and conferences and currently serves as the editor-in-chief of an international journal (i.e., Journal of High Speed networks) and is part of the editorial board or associate editor of several other well reputed ones (i.e., IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing, Information Sciences, Future generation Computer Systems, Applied Soft Computing, Soft Computing).