Keynote #1

M. Brian Blake

Vice Provost for Academic Affairs and Dean of the Graduate School at the University of Miami

Title

Web-Scale Workflow and Analytics

Abstract

This talk will discuss the state of the art in service-oriented computing and how  
it has manifested itself into web-scale, system workflows for various cyber-physical  
domains.  After a background into the state-of-the-art in software-as-a-service  
systems, I will highlight three specific projects conducted in my research lab -  
approaches for spanning scientific workflows across cloud environments, approaches  
for energy-efficient service-oriented systems across geographically distributed  
networks, and infrastructures that leverage mixed human and web service systems to  
conduct big data analytics. 

Bio

M. Brian Blake is Vice Provost for Academic Affairs and Dean of the Graduate School at the University of Miami. Dr. Blake has appointments in the Department of Computer Science, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, and the Department of Human Genetics. Dr. Blake has published over 155 journal articles, books/book chapters, and refereed conference/workshop papers in the areas of internet computing, web-based software engineering and distributed data management. His research lab has been awarded over $9 million in sponsored research from federal and industry sponsors. Dr. Blake has served on 4 National Academies’ studies or committees and on the National Science Foundation’s Advisory Committee for the CISE Directorate. In 2015, he will be Editor-in-Chief for IEEE Internet Computing, is currently Associate Editor of IEEE Transactions on Service Computing, and Editor-in-Chief of a Springer book series entitled Web-Scale Workflow and Analytics. He has served as general/program chair/co-chair for 6 of the top research conferences in his specialty. He is an ACM Distinguished Scientist and Senior Member of the IEEE. Prior to the joining the University of Miami, Dr. Blake was Associate Dean of Engineering at the University of Notre Dame, and Department Chair of Computer Science at Georgetown University. Dr. Blake received a Bachelor of Electrical Engineering from Georgia Institute of Technology, a Master of Science in Electrical Engineering from Mercer University, and PhD in Information and Software Engineering from George Mason University. More information about Dr. Blake can be found at https://www.cs.miami.edu/~blake

Keynote #2

Prof. X. Sean Wang

Professor and Dean, School of Compute Science, Fudan University, Shanghai, China

Title

A Decision Guidance Query Language Involving Collaborative Agents

Abstract

An increasing number of situations need collaborative agents to work in a fashion for a global goal, and computer programs need to help users in making decisions to move such complex processes towards desirable outcomes. This guidance is usually provided in the presence of large amounts of dynamically collected data and learned uncertainty models. Often, the technical tools needed include descriptions that represent the behavior of the processes and decision optimization to provide control values in order to maximizing or minimizing an objective. In this talk, we will describe a framework that represents data and domain knowledge in a unified fashion and that allows innovative thinking and algorithms in solving prediction and decision questions, while fully taking advantage of the existing computation methods from the various paradigms.

Bio

X. Sean Wang is Professor and Dean at the School of Compute Science, Fudan University, Shanghai, China. He received his PhD degree in Computer Science from the University of Southern California, Los Angeles, California, USA, in 1992. Before joining Fudan University in 2011, he was the Dorothean Chair Professor in Computer Science at the University of Vermont, Burlington, Vermont, USA, and between 2009-2011, he served as a Program Director at the National Science Foundation, USA, in the Division of Information and Intelligent Systems. He has published widely in the general area of databases and information security, and was a recipient of the US National Science Foundation Research Initiation and CAREER awards. His research interests include database systems, information security, data mining, and sensor data processing. In the research community, he served as the general chair of ICDE 2011 held in Washington DC, and in other roles at international conferences and journals, including PC co-chair of MDM 2013, WISE 2012, PC member of past SIGMOD, CIKM, ICDE and many other conferences, current associate editor of Geoinformatica and WWW journal, and past associate editor of TKDE and KAIS.

Keynote #3

Dr. Bhavani Thuraisingham

Louis A. Beecherl, Jr. I, Distinguished Professor, Department of Computer Science Executive Director of the Cyber Security Research Institute Erik Jonsson School of Engineering and Computer Science, The University of Texas at Dallas

Title
Cloud Based Assured Information Sharing

Bio

Dr. Bhavani Thuraisingham is the Louis A. Beecherl, Jr. Distinguished Professor of Computer Science and the Executive Director of the Cyber Security Research and Education Institute at The University of Texas at Dallas (UTD). She is an elected Fellow of IEEE, the AAAS, the British Computer Society, and the SPDS (Society for Design and Process Science). She received several prestigious award including IEEE Computer Society's 1997 Technical Achievement Award for “outstanding and innovative contributions to secure data management”, the 2010 ACM SIGSAC (Association for Computing Machinery, Special Interest Group on Security, Audit and Control) Outstanding Contributions Award for “seminal research contributions and leadership in data and applications security for over 25 years” and the SDPS Transformative Achievement Medal for her contributions to interdisciplinary research. She has unique experience working in the commercial industry, research laboratory, US government and academia and her 34 year career includes research and development, technology transfer, product development, program management, and consulting for the federal government at Honeywell, MITRE, NSF and UTD. Her work has resulted in 100+ journal articles, 200+ conference papers, 100+ keynote/featured addresses, eight US patents (three pending) and fifteen books (two pending). She received the prestigious earned higher doctorate degree (Doctor of Engineering) from the University of Bristol, England for her published research work in secure data management since her PhD.