Keynote Speakers
Sajal K. Das
(scheduled on Feb. 20)
University Distinguished Scholar Professor
Director, Center for Research in Wireless
 Mobility and Networking (CReWMaN)
Department of Computer Science and
Engineering
The University of Texas at Arlington, USA
Cyber-Physical and Networked Sensor Systems: Challenges and Opportunities
Rapid advancements in embedded systems, sensors and wireless communication technologies have led to the development
of cyber-physical systems, pervasive computing and smart environments with important applications such as smart grids,
sustainability, health care and security. Wireless sensor networks play significant role in building such systems as they can
effectively act as the human-physical interface with the digital world through sensing, communication, computing and control
or actuation. However,the inherent characteristics of wireless sensor networks, typified by resource constraints, high degree
of uncertainty, heterogeneity and distributed control pose significant challenges in ubiquitous information management. After
introducing the basic challenges, opportunities and applications, this talk will present a novel framework for multi-modal context
recognition from sensor streaming data, context-aware data fusion, and situation-aware decision making with a trade-off between
information accuracy (inference quality) and energy consumption. The underlying approach is based on dynamic Bayesian and
probabilistic models, machine learning, information theoretic reasoning, and game theory. The talk will be concluded with open
research issues and future directions.
Abdullah Mohd Zin
(scheduled on Feb. 21)
Professor
Faculty of Information Science and Technology,
Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia
Beyond Ubiquitos Computing: The HoneyBee Ensemble Computing Environment
Since the 1980s, computing environment has moved from a centralized environment into a distributed computing environment. The distributed computing environment has also moves from one phase to another.
In the 1980s, this distributed environment was provided in the form of a client-server computing, followed by the Internet computing in the 1990s.
The wide availability of mobile devices together with wireless network has changed the computing environment into mobile computing and later into pervasive or ubiquitos computing environment.
In 2008, European Union Interlink WG1 task group has proposed that the next wave of computing environment should be the ensemble computing in order to answer four major research challenges in the current computing environment.
These challenges are (i) massive number of nodes in a system, (ii) open environment, (iii) non-deterministic environment, and (iv) adaptation.
In an ensemble computing environment, computing devices can communicate and work together to complete a certain task based on peer-to-peer protocol and supporting services.
The advantages of this environment can be summarized as follows: ad hoc interaction, fluidity, transience and scalability.
There are two models of ensemble computing: a swarm of bats or a bee-hive. In this paper we will describe our proposed model of an ensemble environment known as the HoneyBee environment.
The discussion in this paper is be divided into four main issues. The first issue is about the ensemble computing in general followed by a discussion on the formal model of HoneyBee environment.
Some possible applications (two issues) within the HoneyBee environment will be described next. The fourth issue is concerning Agent Oriented Programming,
which is considered to be the most suitable software development approach for this type of computing environment.