Prof. Felix Wu

Ubiquitous Computing Leveraging Online Social Informatics

This talk is concerning human relationship, interactions, and value between the information content and the structural properties of online social networks. And, how will this affect the paradigm of Ubiquitous Computing. We view the online social network as a vehicle for propagating information (or innovations) of various kinds in supporting human/relationship-centric computation. Depending on the available structural topology (or the structure of overlapping communities), some information might get propagated much faster/wider, while other information might never be practically accessible by most of the population. Thus, it is valuable to develop a computational model to analyze and leverage the information content’s value according to the integration of social and information networks. Furthermore, the "value" of social informatics can be used, as an alternative, to determine the outcome of ubiquitous computing. The possible applications following this principle include discovery of community interests and inter-dependency analysis between information content and human relationship. We will discuss how contents might possibly affect the structural properties of online social networks under different models of social capital.

Biography of Felix Wu:

Prof. S. Felix Wu has been doing “experimental” system research, i.e., building prototype systems to justify and validate novel architectural concepts. Since 1995, he and his students/postdocs have built many experimental systems in the areas of fault tolerant network, IPSec/VPN security policy, attack source tracing, wireless network security, intrusion detection and response, visual information analytics, and, more recently, future Internet design. An article titled "Networking: Four ways to reinvent the Internet" published in Nature 463 (February 3rd, 2010, by Katharine Gammon) provided a brief but very nice cover about his primary thought on a Social-network-based future Internet architecture (much more comprehensible than if he were to write it, actually). During the past couple years, he has been pretending (and hoping) to know a little bit more about humanity science so he can claim that he is working on multidisciplinary research. And, he strongly believes that thoroughly considering the factor of human relationships is necessary for any IT innovation. Therefore, his primary research objective, before he retires, is to help and contribute to the information technology advancement that would truly help our human society. As an initial step, he recently released the SINCERE (Social Interactive Networking and Conversation Entropy Ranking Engine, sponsored by NSF) search engine under http://www.sincere.se, which is trying to help our Internet society to discover "interesting/unusual" discussions. Felix received his BS from Tunghai University, Taiwan, in 1985, both MS and PhD from Columbia University in 1989 and 1995, all in Computer Science. He has about 110+ academic publications, which means that he should probably focus much more on the depth and quality. He is currently a Professor with the Computer Science department at UC Davis.

Dr. Santi Caballé

Intelligent software systems in support for enhancing and improving the on-line collaborative learning experience

Collaborative learning systems often lack the challenging resources and tools required to fully support collaborations, making the experience unattractive to end-users and discouraging progression. Whilst the learner might expect to control the collaborative experience, often it is the collaborative experience that controls and limits the learner. As a result, collaborative learning resources can lack authentic interactivity, user empowerment and balanced levels of challenge, thus having a negative effect in learner motivation and engagement. In order to overcome these deficiencies, in this talk I will propose a range of advance intelligent systems that virtualize the live collaborative sessions and produce interactive and attractive resources to be experienced and played by learners during the collaboration. Learners can observe how avatars discuss and collaborate, how discussion threads grow, and how knowledge is constructed, refined and consolidated. Furthermore, learners can interact with these systems in order to modify some parameters observing the consequences and assessing their understanding. The research reported in this talk was undertaken within the European Framework 7 project ALICE (Adaptive Learning via Intuitive/Interactive, Collaborative and Emotional Systems).

Biography of Santi Caballé:

Dr. Santi Caballé has a PhD, master’s degree and bachelor’s degree in computer science from the Open University of Catalonia (Spain). He is an associate professor and a researcher in the Department of Computer Science of the Open University of Catalonia, where he coordinates several online courses in the areas of software engineering and information systems. He is also the Academic Director of the Postgraduate Program at this university in the area of Software Engineering. His research focuses on the fields of e-learning and computer-supported collaborative learning, software engineering, and distributed and grid technologies. Dr. Caballé has leaded and participated in over 20 research projects, including leading EU-FP7 and US-NSF multi-million funded projects, and has been involved in the organization of several international conferences and workshops. He has published over 120 peer-reviewed research contributions, including 10 books and 30 journal papers, and has also served as an editor for a number of books and journals.

Prof. S.S. Iyengar

NEXT GENERATION SENSOR NETWORKS: SENSOR DATA COLLECTION CURRENT ART AND FUTURE PERSPECTIVE

In the developing world, mobile phone penetration is often more than 50 %. New automobiles are often connected to global networks. This has changed the type and scale of sensor networking applications that are feasible. This article discusses a sampling of current research prototypes. Example applications are given for science, government, industry, and consumer electronics applications. This sampling shows how distributed sensing is changing the way we live; it also points to changes that can be anticipated in the near future.

This talk presents an overview on the challenges involved in the design and deployment of sensors and for modeling of information topological structure.

Biography of S.S. Iyengar:

Professor S.S. Iyengar is the Director and Ryder Professor of the School of Computing and Information Science at Florida International University. He was a visiting Homi Bhabha Distinguished Professor at IGCAR, Kalpakkam and former Satish Dhawan Professor at IISc. His publications include 6 textbooks, 5 edited books and over 500 research papers. His research interests include high-performance algorithms, sensor fusion, and intelligent systems.

He is a Fellow of IEEE, Fellow of ACM, Fellow of AAAS and Fellow of SDPS. He is a recipient of IEEE awards, best paper awards, Distinguished Alumnus award of the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, and member of European Academy of Sciences. He has served as the editor of several IEEE journals and is the founding editor-in-chief of the International Journal of Distributed Sensor Networks. In 2012 received two major awards- Dr. Ram Iyengar Lifetime Achievement Award Conferred by ISAM (International Society of Agile Manufacturing ) IIT-Banares Hindu University for his lifelong contribution to the fields of Engineering and Computer Science, December 17, 2012. Dr. Ram Iyengar received Best Computer Science Faculty of 2012 on December 30th, 2012, Pondicherry at the conference on ASDF Conference on Global Awards.

His research has been funded by NSF, DARPA, Multi-University Research Initiative (MURI Program), ONR, DOE/ORNL, NRL, NASA, US Army Research Office (URO) and various state agencies and companies. He has served on US National Science Foundation and National Institute of Health Panels to review proposals in various aspects of computational science and he is on the board of reviewers for various Computer Science and Engineering programs.

Dr. Iyengar had 45 doctoral students under his supervision and the legacy of these students can be seen in prestigious Laboratories (JPL, ORNL, LANL, NRL) and universities round the world. He has been the program Chairman of various international conferences. He received over half a million dollars in 2012-2013 funding from DARPA, NSF and other graduate level funding agencies.

Prof. Stephen S. Yau

Situation Awareness in Applications of Services and Cloud Computing

Applications of services and cloud computing often require situation awareness for better QoS, including usability, adaptability and security, due to the dynamic environment and changes of users’ requirements. During the past decade, rapid advances of mobile and embedded device technologies as well as services and cloud computing have made “computing anytime, anywhere” and more reachable than ever. Users now can access computing resources over the Internet from various mobile and stationary computing devices with the support of services and cloud computing infrastructures. Substantial research has been done to develop techniques to incorporating situation awareness in various applications of services and cloud computing, including service discovery, composition, and execution, system monitoring and adaptation, authentication and access control as well as context discovery, acquisition and dissemination, situation analysis and recognition.

In this keynote, challenges, current state of the art and future research directions on situation awareness in applications of services and cloud computing will be discussed.

Biography of Stephen S. Yau:

Stephen S, Yau is the director of Information Assurance Center and Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at Arizona State University (ASU), Tempe, Arizona. He served as the chair of the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at ASU in 1994-2001. Previously, he was on the faculties of Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois, and University of Florida, Gainesville.

He served as the president of the Computer Society of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) and was on the IEEE Board of Directors, and the Board of Directors of Computing Research Association. He served as the editor-in-chief of IEEE COMPUTER magazine. He organized many major conferences, including the 1989 World Computer Congress sponsored by the International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP), and the IEEE Annual International Computer Software and Applications Conference (COMPSAC) sponsored by IEEE Computer Society. He was a general co-chair of the 2012 IEEE World Congress on Services, including CLOUD 2012, Web Services 2012, Services Computing 2012, Mobile Services 2012, and Services Economics 2012, held in Honolulu, Hawaii.

His current research includes service-based systems, cloud computing, cyber security, software engineering, mobile ad hoc networks and ubiquitous computing. He has received many awards and recognitions, including the Tsutomu Kanai Award and Richard E. Merwin Award of the IEEE Computer Society, the IEEE Centennial Award and Third Millennium Medal, and the Outstanding Contributions Award of the Chinese Computer Federation. He is a Life Fellow of the IEEE and a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He received the B.S. degree from National Taiwan University, Taipei, and M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Illinois, Urbana, all in electrical engineering.