Invited Speakers

ICCCN 2009 will feature a number of distinguished keynote and invited speakers.

Keynote Speakers

Distinguished Invited Speakers

Andrea Goldsmith

Title: The next wave in wireless technology: challenges and solutions

Abstract: The demand for wireless communications has enjoyed exponential growth worldwide for decades, and looks to continue unabated into the foreseeable future.  To meet these demands, the next generation of high-performance wireless networks must support a significant increase in data rates, better coverage, greater spectral efficiency, and higher reliability. In addition, applications such as sensor networks, smart structures, and bioengineering need extreme energy efficiency as well as new wireless networking paradigms. Overcoming these technical challenges will require significant breakthroughs in wireless component and system design, as well as cross-layer optimization between applications and their underlying networks.  This talk will describe these design challenges along with recent innovations in wireless technology that may provide the solutions.   

Bio: Andrea Goldsmith is a professor of Electrical Engineering at Stanford University, and was previously an assistant professor of Electrical Engineering at Caltech. She is also co-founder of Quantenna Communications, Inc., and has previously held industry positions at Maxim Technologies, Memorylink Corporation, and AT&T Bell Laboratories. Dr. Goldsmith is a Fellow of the IEEE and of Stanford, and she has received several awards for her research, including co-recipient of the 2005 IEEE Communications Society and Information Theory Society joint paper award and winner of the National Academy of Engineering Gilbreth Lecture Award. She currently serves as Associate Editor for the IEEE Transactions on Information Theory and as Editor for the Journal on Foundations and Trends in Communications and Information Theory and in Networks. She was previously an editor for the IEEE Transactions on Communications and for the IEEE Wireless Communications Magazine. Dr. Goldsmith is active in committees and conference organization for the IEEE Information Theory and Communications Societies and has served on the Board of Governors for both societies, is president of the IEEE Information Theory Society, the founding chair of its student society, as well as a Distinguished Lecturer for the IEEE Communications Society. At Stanford she received the university postdoc mentoring award and will serve as faculty senate chair in 2009/2010. Dr. Goldsmith has authored the book "Wireless Communications'' and co-authored the book "MIMO Wireless Communications,'' both published by Cambridge University Press. Her research includes work on wireless communication and information theory, MIMO systems and multihop networks, cross-layer wireless system design, and wireless communications for distributed control.  She received the B.S., M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering from U.C. Berkeley.  

Jim Kurose

Title: Cyber-physical systems: linking sensing, networking, computation, and people

Bio: Jim Kurose received a B.A. degree in physics from Wesleyan University and his Ph.D. degree in computer science from Columbia University. He is currently Interim Dean of the College of Natural Science and Mathematics and Distinguished University Professor (and past chairman) in the Department of  Computer Science at the University of Massachusetts. He is also co-director of the Networking Research Laboratory and Associate Director of the NSF Engineering Research Center for Collaborative Adaptive Sensing of the Atmosphere (CASA).   Professor Kurose has been a Visiting Scientist at IBM Research, INRIA, Institute EURECOM, the University of Paris, LIP6, and Thomson Research Labs. His research interests include network protocols and architecture, network measurement, sensor networks, multimedia communication, and modeling and performance evaluation. Dr. Kurose has served as Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Transactions on Communications and was the founding Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking. He has been active in the program committees for IEEE Infocom, ACM SIGCOMM, and ACM SIGMETRICS conferences for a number of years, and has served as Technical Program Co-Chair for these conferences. He has won several conference best paper awards and received the ACM Sigcomm Test of Time Award. He is the recipient of the Outstanding Teacher Award from the National Technological University (8 times), the Outstanding Teacher Award from the College of Natural Science and Mathematics at the University of Massachusetts, the Outstanding Teaching Award of the Northeast Association of Graduate Schools, and the IEEE Taylor Booth Education Medal. He was one of the founders of the Commonwealth Information Technology Initiative (CITI), and is also interested in system and pedagogical aspects of instructional technology. He has been the recipient of a GE Fellowship, IBM Faculty Development Award, and a Lilly Teaching Fellowship. He is a Fellow of the IEEE and the ACM. With Keith Ross, he is the co-author of the textbook, Computer Networking, a top down approach featuring the Internet (4th edition)  published by Addison-Wesley Longman.

Massoud Pedram

Title: Green Computing: Reducing the Carbon Footprint of Information Processing Systems in an Energy-Constrained World

Abstract: Digital information management is the key enabler for unprecedented rise in productivity and efficiency gains experienced by the world economies during the 21st century. Information processing systems have thus become essential to the functioning of business, service, academic, and governmental institutions. As institutions increase their offerings of digital information services, the demand for computation and storage capability also increases. Examples include online banking, e-filing of taxes, music and video downloads, online shipment tracking, real-time inventory/supply-chain management, electronic medical recording, insurance database management, surveillance and disaster recovery. It is estimated that, in some industries, the number of records that must be retained is growing at a CAGR of 50 percent or greater. This exponential increase in the digital intensity of human existence is driven by many factors, including ease of use and availability of a rich set of information technology (IT) devices and services.  Indeed, it would be difficult to imagine how significant societal transformations that better our world could occur without the productivity and innovation enabled by the IT. Unfortunately, the energy cost and carbon footprint of the IT equipment
and services has become exorbitant.  Moreover, current technological and digital service utilization trends result in a doubling of the energy cost of the IT infrastructure and its carbon footprint in less than five years.  In an energy-constrained world, this consumption trend is unsustainable and comes at increasingly unacceptable societal and environmental costs. In my talk, I will first describe what is meant by green computing and how precisely it can be quantified. Next, I will review energy-efficient computing based on multi-core processing technology, dynamic voltage and frequency scaling, and memory/storage management. I will describe techniques to improve performance per Watt per dollar of large-scale computing systems (e.g., a data center), including multi-scale dynamic power control, task placement and scheduling, resource virtualization, and application optimizations that explore the ability of key computational kernels to dynamically configure hardware for higher efficiency.

Bio: Massoud Pedram received a B.S. degree in EE from Caltech in 1986 and a Ph.D. degree in EECS from UC-Berkeley in 1991. He joined the department of Electrical Engineering at the University of Southern California in 1991 where he is currently a full professor. From 1987 to 1989, he worked at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center. Dr. Pedram has served on the technical program committee of many technical conferences, including the Design Automation Conference, and the Design and Test in Europe Conference.  He co-founded and served as the Technical Chair and General Chair of the Int’l Symposium on Low Power Electronics and Design in 1996 and 1997, respectively. He has published four books and more than 350 technical papers. His research has received a number of awards including two ICCD Best Papers, two DAC Best Papers, an IEEE T-VLSI Best Paper, and an IEEE T-CAS-II Best Paper.  He is a recipient of the NSF's Young Investigator Award (1994) and the Presidential Faculty Fellows Award (1996).  Dr. Pedram, who is a Fellow of the IEEE, currently serves as the Editor-in-Chief of the ACM Transactions on Design Automation of Electronic Systems. His current work focuses on low power electronics and energy-efficient information processing.

Xiaodong Zhang

Title: Why is P2P the most Effective Way to Deliver Internet Media Content?

Abstract: The commonly agreed Zipf-like access pattern of Web workloads is mainly based on Internet measurements when text-based content dominated the Web traffic.  However, with dramatic increase of media traffic on the Internet, the inconsistency between the access patterns of media objects and the Zipf model has been observed in a number of studies.  An insightful understanding of media access patterns is essential to guide Internet system design and management, including resource provisioning and performance optimizations.  We have studied a large variety of media workloads collected from both client and server sides in different media systems with different delivery methods.  Through extensive analysis and modeling, we find: (1) the object reference ranks of all these workloads follow the stretched exponential (SE) distribution despite their different media systems and delivery methods; (2) one parameter of this distribution well characterizes the media file sizes, the other well characterizes the aging of media accesses; (3) some biased measurements may lead to Zipf-like observations on media access patterns; and (4) the deviation of media access pattern from the Zipf model in these workloads increases along with the workload duration. We have further analyzed the effectiveness of media caching with a mathematical model.  Compared with Web caching under the Zipf model, media caching under the SE model is far less effective unless the cache size is enormously large.  This indicates that many previous studies based on a Zipf-like assumption have potentially overestimated the media caching benefit, while an effective media caching system must be able to scale its storage size to accommodate the increase of media content over a long time.  Our study provides an analytical basis for applying a P2P model rather than a client-server model to build large scale Internet media delivery systems. 

Bio: Xiaodong Zhang is the Robert M. Critchfield Professor in Engineering, and Chairman of the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the Ohio State University. His research interests cover a wide spectrum in the areas of high performance, distributed and networking systems. Several technical innovations and research results from his team have been widely adopted in commercial products and open source systems to advance several core system technologies, such as in Sun MicroSystems processors, in Linux Kernels, the NetBSD operating system, and in MySQL database systems. Recently, their open source software TopBT (a topology-aware BitTorrent client) has been frequently used by many P2P users, which eliminates unnecessary network traffic and keeps a high downloading speed. Dr. Zhang is the associate Editor-in-Chief of IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems, and is also serving on the Editorial Boards of IEEE Transactions on Computers, IEEE Micro, and Journal of Parallel and Distributed Computing. He has chaired several major technical conferences in the fields, including ICPP’07, WWW’08, and ICDCS’09. Xiaodong Zhang received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from University of Colorado at Boulder, and B.S. in electrical engineering from Beijing University of Technology. He is a Fellow of the IEEE.

Nirwan Ansari

Title: It Congestion Or Denial of Service?

Bio: Nirwan Ansari received the B.S.E.E. (summa cum laude, gpa=4.0/4.0) from the New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT), Newark, in 1982, the M.S.E.E. degree from University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, in 1983, and the Ph.D. degree from Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN, in 1988. He joined NJIT’s Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering as Assistant Professor in 1988, and has been Full Professor since 1997. He has also assumed various administrative positions at NJIT. He authored Computational Intelligence for Optimization (Springer, 1997, translated into Chinese in 2000) with E.S.H. Hou, and edited Neural Networks in Telecommunications (Springer, 1994) with B. Yuhas. His current research focuses on various aspects of broadband networks and multimedia communications. He has also contributed over 300 technical papers, over one third of which in refereed journals/magazines. He is a Senior Technical Editor of the IEEE Communications Magazine, and also serves on the Advisory Board and Editorial Board of five other journals. He has been serving the IEEE in various capacities such as Chair of IEEE North Jersey COMSOC Chapter, Chair of IEEE North Jersey Section, Member of IEEE Region 1 Board of Governors, Cluster Chair of IEEE COMSOC Networking TC Cluster, Chair of IEEE COMSOC Technical Committee on Ad Hoc and Sensor Networks, and Chair/TPC Chair of several conferences/symposia. Some of his recent awards and recognitions include an IEEE Fellow (Communications Society), IEEE Leadership Award (2007, from Central Jersey/Princeton Section), the NJIT Excellence in Teaching in Outstanding Professional Development (2008), IEEE MGA Leadership Award (2008), the NCE Excellence in Teaching Award (2009), and designation as an IEEE Communications Society Distinguished Lecturer

Yuguang "Michael" Fang

Title: Securing Wireless Ad Hoc Networks: An ID-Based Cryptographic Approach

Abstract: Huge interest and demand on information superhighway (the future high-speed Internet access) have pressed various telecommunications research fronts and resulted in various kinds of wired or wireless network clouds of various administrative domains to enable the universal information access via inexpensive resource-constrained devices. Thus, the future trend will lead to a new form of Internet consisting of wired and wireless segments where resource-constrained devices such as palm pilots and sensors may become integral parts of the Internet rather than access-only platforms. Moreover, various kinds of applications over such heterogeneous networks may demand control actions to be taken over such networks in order to fulfill certain networking missions (such as sensing and actuation). One of the key design problems is the information assurance in such heterogeneous networks, particularly over wireless networks with resource-constrained devices. In this presentation, a novel approach to addressing the security issue is given. It will be demonstrated that the ID-based cryptography can be applied to effectively address various network security problems in the resource-constrained wireless networks. Recent research progress and future research challenges will be reported.

Bio: Dr. Fang received a Ph.D. degree in Systems Engineering from Case Western Reserve University in January 1994 and a Ph.D degree in Electrical Engineering from Boston University in May 1997. He was an assistant professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at New Jersey Institute of Technology from July 1998 to May 2000. He then joined the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at University of Florida in May 2000 as an assistant professor, got an early promotion to an associate professor with tenure in August 2003 and to a full professor in August 2005. He holds a University of Florida Research Foundation (UFRF) Professorship from 2006 to 2009, a Changjiang Scholar Chair Professorship with Xidian University, Xi'an, China, from 2008 to 2011, and a Guest Chair Professorship with Tsinghua University, China, from 2009 to 2012. He has published over 250 papers in refereed professional journals and conferences. Dr. Fang received the National Science Foundation Faculty Early Career Award in 2001 and the Office of Naval Research Young Investigator Award in 2002, and is the recipient of the Best Paper Award in IEEE International Conference on Network Protocols (ICNP) in 2006 and the recipient of the IEEE TCGN Best Paper Award in the IEEE High-Speed Networks Symposium, IEEE Globecom in 2002. Dr. Fang is also active in professional activities. He is a Fellow of IEEE and a member of ACM. He is currently serving as the Editor-in-Chief for IEEE Wireless Communications and serves/served on several editorial boards of technical journals including IEEE Transactions on Communications, IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications, IEEE Wireless Communications Magazine and ACM Wireless Networks. He was an editor for IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing and currently serves on its Steering Committee. He has been actively participating in professional conference organizations such as serving as the Steering Committee Co-Chair for QShine, the Technical Program Vice-Chair for IEEE INFOCOM'2005, Technical Program Symposium Co-Chair for IEEE Globecom'2004, and a member of Technical Program Committee for IEEE INFOCOM (1998, 2000, 2003-2010).

Krishna Kant

Title: Emerging Challenges in Distributed Virtualized Data Centers

Bio: Dr. Krishna Kant has been with Intel Corp since 1997 where he has worked in a variety of research areas including traffic characterization, security/robustness in the Internet, data center networking, server performance modeling, and power/thermal control of computer systems.  He
is currently on rotation with the National Science Foundation. From 1991 to 1997, he was with Telcordia Technologies (formerly Bellcore) and worked on a variety of Signaling System No 7 and Operations support system issues. Prior to this, he was an Associate Professor of Computer
Science at Penn State University, University Park, PA. He is the author of a graduate text book “Introduction to Computer System Performance Modeling”, McGraw Hill 1992. He received his Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from University of Texas at Dallas in 1981.

Larry Peterson

Title: Towards the Big "C" Cloud

Bio: Larry Peterson is the Robert E. Kahn Professor of Computer Science at Princeton University. He is Director of the Princeton-hosted PlanetLab Consortium and recently chaired the planning group that helped launch the GENI/NetSE Initiative. He is also a co-author of the best selling networking textbook "Computer Networks: A Systems Approach."  His research focuses on the design and implementation of networked systems. Professor Peterson has served as Editor-in-Chief of the ACM Transactions on Computer Systems, on the Editorial Board for the IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking and the IEEE Journal on Select Areas in Communication, and as program chair for SOSP, NSDI, and HotNets. Peterson is a Fellow of the ACM. He received his Ph.D. degree from Purdue University in 1985.

George C. Polyzos

Title: μ-Operators, User-Provided, Community, and Cognitive Networks in Open Spectrum Access

Abstract: Low cost wireless network access equipment operating in unlicensed bands has revolutionized local area communications and has permitted, perhaps for the first time in history, to the general public to provide communications services and run User Provided Networks. Coupled with the ease of deployment of these wireless technologies, it has made such networks ubiquitous in densely populated urban areas, introducing the potential for Open Spectrum Access and new business models. The issue is not anymore coverage, but interference. The mushrooming of such networks, which was seen as bliss in the early years, it is now becoming a curse. Their unplanned deployments and very dynamic topologies demand highly autonomic operation for survival.
Access Points (APs), and transmitters in general, belonging to a heterogeneous crowd of Wireless Internet Service Providers, non-profit organizations, municipalities and residential users, among others, contend for spectrum. In addition, they compete with other technologies such as Bluetooth, WiMax ran in unlicensed bands, and others. The lack of coordination among them, coupled with the scarcity of spectrum and the density of these deployments usually cause severe interference conditions, which necessitate advanced interference mitigation strategies.
These APs belong in general to different entities who play the role of μ-Οperators. With high AP power, they cover a wide area in the neighborhood and have the potential to provide high utility to their owners, either in the form of (possibly virtual) payments, or just because of the pride in providing extended coverage. However, this leads to increased interference to other μ-Οperators and can be considered antisocial behavior. Decreasing transmitter power can lead to increased utility if other transmitters (μ-Οperators) cooperate. In the past we have proposed and investigated distributed techniques for “opening up” wireless access and providing incentives for cooperation among μ-Οperators based on Peer-to-Peer techniques.
Cognitive radio techniques come to the rescue. Feedback from user devices and out-of band communication can be utilized to generate dynamic coverage and interference maps. Roaming user devices can measure and report spectrum use. For Wi-Fi systems, technology for reporting spectrum sensing results has been standardized (IEEE 802.11k) and will soon be widely available. Specialized sensors, strategically positioned, can also be assigned to this task, but client mobility is invaluable. Dealing with random user devices as sources for information, however, raises incentives and security concerns. Trusted devices cannot always be assumed; devices polluting system information with invalid reports may lead to suboptimal configuration and spectrum access decisions, which can in turn cause more interference.
We are studying the robustness and security of the reporting process. We consider various attacker strategies and devise mechanisms for effectively tackling them. Our simpler mechanisms for securing the process of interference reporting and increasing its robustness in the presence of adversaries are based on applying simple majority rules; for colluding attackers, our strategy changes. Since this scenario involves relationships between users and service providers, it is reasonable to assume a level of trust among them. Reports submitted by users affiliated with a network are valued more, while reports by “foreign” users are discounted, considering each user’s trust value.

Finally, User Provided Networks are not limited to the Access Networks. Wireless Community Networks have emerged throughout the world. Using inexpensive wireless technology, autonomous wireless backbones and internetworks have been built and are operating, offering a variety of broadband services to their members and other participants. Together with smaller or larger Wireless Services Providers, Wireless Service Aggregators and other network providers, they provide a wide range of service providers. Relationships among all these are not straightforward anymore and are becoming very dynamic. Automated Trust management is becoming a key issue for their interconnection and successful interoperation.

Bio: Prof. George C. Polyzos is leading the Mobile Multimedia Laboratory at the Athens University of Economics and Business, where he is a Professor of Computer Science. Previously, he was Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of California, San Diego, where he was co-director of the Computer Systems Laboratory, member of the Steering Committee of the UCSD Center for Wireless Communications and Senior Fellow of the San Diego Supercomputer Center. He has advised or co-advised 11 Ph.D. students. His current research interests include mobile multimedia communications, ubiquitous computing, wireless networks, Internet protocols, security and privacy, and performance analysis of computer and communications systems. Prof. Polyzos received his Dipl. in EE from the National Technical University in Athens, Greece and his M.A.Sc. in EE and Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Toronto. His group’s currently funded research includes the following FP7 projects on Future Internet Architecture: “Publish-Subscribe Internet Routing Paradigm,” “EIFFEL,” and “Anticipating the Network of the Future–From Theory to Design” (Euro-NF Network of Excellence) and a Microsoft Research award titled “ARCHANGEL,” on the Cell Phone as a Platform for Healthcare program. Prof. Polyzos is on the editorial board of Wireless Communications and Mobile Computing, has been a guest editor for a number of journal special issues, has been on the Program Committees of many conferences and workshops, as well as reviewer for NSF, the California MICRO program, the European Commission, and the Greek General Secretariat of Research and Technology and many scientific journals.

Weihua Zhuang

Title: Distributed Resource Allocation for QoS Support in Wireless Networks

Bio: Dr. Weihua Zhuang has been a professor in Electrical and Computer Engineering, at the University of Waterloo, Canada, since October 1993. Her current research focuses on resource allocation and QoS provisioning in wireless networks. She is a co-author of the textbook Wireless Communications and Networking, which has been published by Prentice Hall since 2003, and has been translated to Chinese and published by the Publishing House of Electronics Industry in China since 2004. Dr. Zhuang is a co-recipient of a Best Paper Award from IEEE ICC 2007, a Best Student Paper Award from IEEE WCNC 2007, and the Best Paper Awards from the International Conferences on Heterogeneous Networking for Quality, Reliability, Security and Robustness (QShine 2007 and 2008). She received the Outstanding Performance Award in 2005, 2006, and 2008 from the University of Waterloo for outstanding achievements in teaching, research, and service, and the Premier's Research Excellence Award in 2001 from the Ontario Government for demonstrated excellence of scientific and academic contributions.  Dr. Zhuang is the Editor-in-Chief of IEEE Transactions on Vehicular Technology, and an Editor of IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications, EURASIP Journal on Wireless Communications and Networking, and International Journal of Sensor Networks. She is a Fellow of IEEE and an IEEE Communications Society Distinguished Lecturer.