Keynote: CLOUDs: A Large Virtualisation of Small Things (Slides)

Prof Keith Jeffery

Independent Consultant
Ex-Director IT at STFC Rutherford Appleton Laboratory
United Kingdom

Abstract:
CLOUD computing is - according to the Gartner Hype Cycle - some years away for general acceptance and utilisation. The CLOUDs Expert Group of the European Commission has been working over several years analysing the evolving market and technologies and planning a roadmap with appropriate research topics. However, European large industry wishes to make small incremental steps whereas the academics - and SMEs - wish to make bold steps to 'leapfrog' the competition. A list of key research and development topics has been produced. The virtualisation offered by CLOUD computing provides a large opportunity - and a commensurate challenge- for the IoT. Virtualisation implies that the end-user neither knows nor cares how their computing (including data gathering from detectors, data management, analysis, modelling, visualisation) is done provided that the service levels and quality are maintained. The appearance to the end-user is of limitless, scalable, green computing. The IoT is characterised by limited capacities, compromises, hands-on programming and management and sometimes hostile environments. CLOUDs and the IoT are united by some key challenges: energy management and green computing, reliability and sustainability, autonomicity (including intelligent interaction of software components), performance (especially over networks), management of data (new kinds, new styles of management, distributed / fragmented) and trust, security, privacy. The solution to these challenges appears to lie in new systems development methods, new programming languages and techniques, new ways of managing data distribution (including streaming) especially in a networked environment and new ways of engaging the end-user through multilingual, multi-modal intelligent interfaces. Meeting these challenges and taking advantage of utilising CLOUDs and IoT together is a key part of the future of Europe.

Biography:
Keith Jeffery - now an independent consultant - was Director IT at STFC Rutherford Appleton Laboratory with 360,000 users, 1100 servers and 140 staff. Keith holds 3 honorary visiting professorships, is a Fellow of the Geological Society of London and the British Computer Society, is a Chartered Engineer and Chartered IT Professional, a member of the Academy of Computing and an Honorary Fellow of the Irish Computer Society. Keith has been President of ERCIM (2004-2013) and of euroCRIS (2002-2012), and serves on international expert groups, conference boards and assessment panels. He has advised government and been delegated to represent UK on international panels. He chaired the EC Expert Groups on GRIDs and on CLOUD Computing. His research passion (since the 1960s) is metadata and its use for virtualisation.

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Keynote: Internet of Things, People, and Processes (Slides)

Prof Schahram Dustdar

Distributed Systems Group (DSG)
Information Systems Institute
Vienna University of Technology
Austria

Abstract:
In this talk I will address one of the most relevant challenges for a decade to come: How to integrate the Internet of Things with people and processes, considering modern Cloud Computing and Elasticity principles. Elasticity is seen as one of the main characteristics of Cloud Computing today. Is elasticity simply scalability on steroids? In this talk I will discuss the main principles of elasticity, present a fresh look at this problem, and examine how to integrate people, software services, and things into one composite system, which can be modeled, programmed, and deployed on a large scale in an elastic way.

Biography:
Schahram Dustdar is Full Professor of Computer Science (Informatics) with a focus on Internet Technologies heading the Distributed Systems Group. He is a member of the Academia Europaea: The Academy of Europe, Informatics Section (since 2013), recipient of the ACM Distinguished Scientist award (2009), and the IBM Faculty Award (2012). He is an Associate Editor of IEEE Transactions on Services Computing, ACM Transactions on the Web, and ACM Transactions on Internet Technology and on the editorial board of IEEE Internet Computing. He is the Editor-in-Chief of Computing (an SCI-ranked journal of Springer). More information at http://dsg.tuwien.ac.at/staff/sd.

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Keynote: Easy Programming the Cloud with PyCOMPSs (Slides)

Dr. Rosa M. Badia

Barcelona Supercomputing Center
Barcelona, Spain

Abstract:
StarSs is a family of task-based programming models which is based on the idea of writing sequential code which is executed in parallel at runtime taking into account the data dependences between tasks. COMPSs is an instance of StarSs, which intends to simplify the execution of Java applications in distributed infrastructures, including clusters and Clouds. For that purpose, COMPSs provides both a straightforward Java-based programming model and a componentised runtime that is able to interact with a wide variety of distributed computing middleware (e.g. gLite, Globus) and Cloud APIs (e.g. OpenStack, OpenNebula, Amazon EC2). The tasks in a COMPSs application can be a regular method or a invokation to a web service, feature that makes it very interesting for IoT if real time as well as support to sensing is added.
The talk will focus in the recent extensions to COMPSs: PyCOMPSs, a binding for the Python language which will enable a larger number of scientific applications in fields such as lifesciences and in the integration of COMPSs with new Big Data resource management methodologies developed at BSC, such as the Wasabi self-containent objects library and Cassandra data management policies. These activities are performed under the flagship project Human Brain Project and the Spanish BSC Severo Ochoa project.

Biography:
Dr. Rosa M. Badia holds a PhD on Computer Science (1994) from the Technical University of Catalonia (UPC). She is a Scientific Researcher from the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Cientificas (CSIC) and team leader of the Grid Computing and Cluster research group at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC). She was involved in teaching and research activities at the UPC from 1989 to 2008, where she was an Associated Professor since year 1997. From 1999 to 2005 she was involved in research and development activities at the European Center of Parallelism of Barcelona (CEPBA). Her current research interest are programming models for complex platforms (from multicore, GPUs to Grid/Cloud). The group lead by Dr. Badia has been developing StarSs programming model for more than 10 years, with a high success in adoption by application developers. Currently the group focuses its efforts in two instances of StarSs: OmpSs for heterogenoeus platforms and COMPSs for distributed computing (i.e. Cloud). Dr Badia has published more than 120 papers in international conferences and journals in the topics of her research. She has participated in several European projects, for example BEinGRID, Brein, CoreGRID, OGF-Europe, SIENA, TEXT and VENUS-C, and currently she is participating in the project Severo Ochoa (at Spanish level), TERAFLUX, ASCETIC, The Human Brain Project, EU-Brazil CloudConnect, and TransPlant and is a member of HiPEAC2 NoE.

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Keynote: Cognitive Cars and Smart Roads - Applications, Challenges and Solutions

Prof. A. Boukerche, FEiC, FCAE, FAAAS

Canada Research Chair Tier-1
DIVA Strategic Research Network
University of Ottawa
Canada

Abstract:
Future generations of Vehicular Networks and Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) will play an important role in providing transport services more effectively and more securely. The next stage in ITS development will be greatly influenced by the integration of distributed systems and architectures, as well as by open and common standards and service-oriented architectures.
This talk will consist in an overview about the major research projects related to the design of cognitive cars and smart roads applications, which we are currently investigating at the DIVA Strategic Research Network and PARADISE Research Laboratory, University of Ottawa. Next we shall focus on the main challenges, design issues and discuss some results obtained recently. Finally, if time permits, we will talk about LIVE testbed, a convergence of distributed simulation, wireless multimedia and vehicular sensor technologies we are developing at DIVA and PARADISE Research Laboratory for an urban vehicular grid. This testbed will facilitate and enable us to evaluate and design new protocols and applications for future generations of wireless vehicular and sensor network technologies.

Biography:
Azzedine Boukerche is a Full Professor and holds a Canada Research Chair Tier-1 position at the University of Ottawa. He is the Scientific Director of NSERC-DIVA Strategic Research Network and Director of PARADISE Research Laboratory at Ottawa U. Prior to this, he held a faculty position at the University of North Texas, USA. He worked as a Senior Scientist at the Simulation Sciences Division, Metron Corporation located in San Diego. He spent a year at the JPL/NASA-California Institute of Technology where he contributed to a project centered about the specification and verification of the software used to control interplanetary spacecraft operated by JPL/NASA Laboratory.
Dr. Boukerche is a Fellow of the Engineering Institute of Canada, a Fellow of the Canadian Academy of Engineering, a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the recipient of the Ontario Distinguished Researcher Award, the Premier of Ontario Research Excellence Award, the G. S. Glinski Award for Excellence in Research, The IEEE Computer Society Golden Core Award, The IEEE CS- Meritorious Award, the University of Ottawa Award for Excellence in Research. Dr. A. Boukerche serves as an Associate Editor for several IEEE Transactions and ACM journals, as well as a Steering Committee Chair for several IEEE and ACM international conferences.
His current research interests include vehicular networks, sensor networks, mobile ad hoc networks, mobile and pervasive computing, wireless multimedia, performance evaluation and modeling of large-scale distributed systems, distributed computing, and large-scale distributed interactive simulation. Dr. Boukerche has published several research papers in these areas and he is the recipient of several best research paper awards for his work on vehicular and sensor networking and mobile computing. He is the Editor of three books on mobile computing, wireless ad hoc and sensor networks.

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Keynote: Mobile Cloud

Prof Fun Hu

Future Ubiquitous Networks Research Group
School of Engineering and Informatics
University of Bradford
UK

Abstract:
Mobile Cloud Networks (MCN) integrate cloud computing and mobile networks technologies to enable resource-constraint mobile devices utilize varied cloud-based resources. It is expected that MCN will play an important role in the next generation mobile communication networks and cloud computing development in the decade to come. In parallel, C-RAN (Centralised /Cooperative/ Cloud/ Clean RAN) is seen as a key part in the development of 5G mobile communications networks. This talk will present an overview on MCN and C-RAN developments, their architectural and network infrastructure principles, as well as the research challenges that need to be addressed. Finally, the talk will cover some of our work in relation to call admission control in C-RAN that we have carried out so far.

Biography:
Fun Hu has been Professor of Wireless Communications Engineering since 2005 and was awarded the Yorkshire Forward Chair in Wireless Communications in 2007 by the then regional development agency. She has over 20 years of experience in mobile, wireless and satellite communications through participations and contributions to various EU, ESA and UK research council funded projects. She was one of the two UK national delegates to various EU COST (Co-Operation in Science and Technology) Actions including COST 279, COST253 and COST 256. She was an executive member in the IEE Electronics and Communications Divisions Professional Network Group on Satellite Systems and Applications between 2000 and 2002 and a member of the Technical Advisory Board in the same group between 2002 and 2008. Her research interests encompass aeronautical communications, mobile/wireless/satellite networking, protocol design, security, QoS and mobility management, radio resource management, wireless sensor networks, RFID, Middleware, the Internet of Thing and Embedded Systems.