ICCCN 2017 Panels (3 panels)
Panel I: Age of the Internet of Things:
A confluence of technological advances marks the advent of a new era. World data volume is growing at an unprecedented pace, much of it from embedded devices. Smart cities are expected to grow, fed by millions of data points from multitudes of human and physical sources. Cyber-attacks grow more nefarious, bringing down physical systems. Social networks are becoming ubiquitous, offering information on physical things. The separation between cyber, physical, and social systems is blurring. Collectively, these developments lead to the emergence of a new field, where the networking and physical realms meet. It is the field of the Internet of Things (IoT). What challenges and opportunities are brought about by the emergence of the age of IoT? How much of it real? What is the intellectual core behind IoT technologies, if there is one? Importantly, how does this all impact networking and Internet research? This panel brings world experts to discuss.
Krishna Kant, Temple University
Lixia Zhang, UCLA
Rick Schlichting, ATT
Dr. Sajal Das is the Chair of Computer Science and Daniel St. Clair Endowed Chair at Missouri University of Science and Technology. During 2008-2011, he served the NSF as a Program Director in the Division of Computer Networks and Systems. Prior to 2013 he was a University Distinguished Scholar Professor of Computer Science and Engineering and founding director of the Center for Research in Wireless Mobility and Networking (CReWMaN) at the University of Texas at Arlington. Dr. Das’ current research interests include theory and practice of wireless sensor networks,mobile and pervasive computing, cyber-physical systems, smart environments including smart healthcare and smart grid, big data analytics, IoT, distributed and cloud computing, security, biological and social networks, and applied graph theory and game theory. He has directed numerous funded projects and published extensively with more than 650 research articles in high quality journals and refereed conference proceedings. He holds 5 US patents, co-authored 52 book chapters and four books titled Smart Environments: Technology, Protocols, and Applications (2005), Handbook on Securing Cyber-Physical Critical Infrastructure: Foundations and Challenges (2012), Mobile Agents in Distributed Computing and Networking (2012), and Principles of Cyber-Physical Systems: An Interdisciplinary Approach (2017). He is one of the most prolific authors in computer science according to DBLP. His h-index is 75 with more than 24,500 citations according to Google Scholar. Dr. Das is a recipient of 10 Best Paper Awards at prestigious conferences and numerous awards for research, teaching and mentoring including the IEEE Computer Society’s Technical Achievement Award for pioneering contributions to sensor networks and mobile computing. He serves as the founding Editor-in-Chief of Elsevier’s Pervasive and Mobile Computing journal (since 2005), and as an Associate Editor of several journals including IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing and ACM Transactions on Sensor Networks. A (co-) founder of IEEE PerCom, IEEE WoWMoM, and IEEE SMARTCOMP conferences, he has served on numerous IEEE and ACM conference committees as General Chair, Technical Program Chair, or Program Committee member. Dr. Das is an IEEE Fellow.
Krishna Kant is a professor in the Computer and Information Science Department at Temple University in Philadelphia, PA where he directs the center for research in energy and configuration management. Earlier he was a research professor in the Center for Secure Information Systems (CSIS) at George Mason University. From 2008-2013 he served as a program director at the National Science Foundation (NSF) where he managed the computer systems research (CSR) program and was instrumental in the development and running of NSF-wide sustainability initiative called SEES (science, engineering and education for sustainability). His current areas of research include sustainability and energy efficiency in data centers, performance of storage systems, robustness and security of data center configurations, smart grid security, and application of computing technologies to larger sustainability problems. Prior to NSF, he served at Intel Corporation for 11 years working on a variety of data center architecture and technology issues. From 1991 to 1997, he held the consultant position at Ericsson (formerly Bellcore) and worked on many broadband and narrowband telecommunications technologies. Prior to 1991, he was an Associate Professor of Computer Science at the Pennsylvania State University with research contributions in performance modeling and distributed systems. From 1981-1984 he was an assistant professor in the EECS department of Northwestern University. He received his Ph.D. degree in Mathematical Sciences from University of Texas at Dallas in 1981. He carries a combined 35 years of experience in academia, industry, and government. He has published in a wide variety of areas in computer science, authored a graduate textbook on performance modeling of computer systems, and coedited two books on cyberphysical infrastructure and cloud computing security. He is a Fellow of the IEEE.
Lixia Zhang is a Professor in the Computer Science Department of UCLA. She received her Ph.D in computer science from MIT and was a member of the research staff at Xerox PARC before joining UCLA. She is a fellow of ACM and IEEE, the recipient of IEEE Internet Award, and the holder of UCLA Postel Chair in Computer Science. Since 2010 she has been leading the effort on the design and development of the NDN architecture.
Rick Schlichting is currently a Distinguished Inventive Scientist in the Cloud Architecture, Research, and Strategy organization at AT&T Labs in New York, NY. He received the B.A. degree in mathematics and history from the College of William and Mary, and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in computer science from Cornell University. He was on the faculty at the University of Arizona from 1982-2000, and spent sabbaticals in Japan in 1990 at Tokyo Institute of Technology and in 1996-97 at Hitachi Central Research Lab. Schlichting is an ACM Fellow and an IEEE Fellow, has served on the editorial boards of a number of IEEE magazines and journals, and has been on the technical program committees for over 70 conferences and workshops. He was the chair of IFIP Working Group 10.4 on Dependable Computing and Fault-Tolerance from 2006-12, and has also been active in the IEEE Computer Society Technical Committee on Dependable Computing and Fault Tolerance, serving as Chair of that organization from 1998-99. His research interests include highly dependable computing, distributed systems, and networks, while his current work at AT&T focuses on the use of cloud technologies for building network infrastructure.
Panel II: Cloud Scale Big Data Analytics:
In a world of increasing connectivity, new opportunities arise from the exploitation of a new type of network; indeed, not the network of physical links connecting computing machines, but rather the network of semantic links and relationships connecting data objects. The opportunity to logically connect and reason about all data of the world opens unprecedented potential for extracting information and delivering knowledge. Moreover, the exploding computational capacity of data centers and cloud engines makes it possible to process such data at a scale not previously imagined. We call it, the age of big data analytics. How does the advent of big data analytics change the network application landscape? How does it enable both new intellectual pursuits and new nefarious exploits? How is networking research impacted and what does it all mean for the future challenges in networking? This panel discusses the exciting implications.
Pei Zhang, CMU
Vanish Talwar, Facebook
Indranil Gupta, UIUC
Jeff Kephart, IBM
Christopher Stewart is an Associate Professor in the Computer Science and Engineering Department and Faculty-In-Residence in the Translational Data Analytics Institute (TDAI) at The Ohio State University. He leads the ReRout Lab where high-impact research produces novel systems and diverse expertise that broadens computer science, i.e., research that reaches out. Dr. Stewart’s research has led to fundamental intellectual contributions on the design of cloud computing systems, sustainable computing systems and STEM education. Common themes across his work are rigorous but usable mathematical models and end-to-end validation of the models using prototypes implemented within widely used systems software components. Dr. Stewart’s recent research focuses on 1) supporting interactive Internet services in the era of dark silicon (i.e., post Dennard Scaling) and 2) systems support for autonomous systems and IoT. Dr. Stewart is a recipient of the prestigious NSF Career Award. He has co-authored award papers at MASCOTS, ISSST and INFOCOM. He was the founding Chief Editor of the Sustainable Computing Register, the regular publication of the IEEE STC on Sustainable Computing. Dr. Stewart earned a PhD from the University of Rochester under the supervision of Kai Shen. He also graduated from Morehouse College.
Pei Zhang is an associate research professor in the ECE departments at Carnegie Mellon University. He received his bachelor’s degree with honors from California Institute of Technology in 2002, and his Ph.D. degree in Electrical Engineering from Princeton University in 2008. While at Princeton University, he developed the ZebraNet system, which is used to track zebras in Kenya. It was the first deployed, wireless, ad- hoc, mobile sensor network. His recent work includes SensorFly (focus on groups of autonomous miniature-helicopter based sensor nodes) and MARS (Muscle Activity Recognition). Beyond research publications, his work has been featured in popular media including CNN, Science Channel, Discovery Channel, CBS News, CNET, Popular Science, BBC Focus, etc. He is also a co-founder of the startup Vibradotech. In addition, he has won several awards including the NSF CAREER, Google faculty awards, Edith and Martin B. Stein Solar Energy Innovation Award, and a member of the Department of Defense Computer Science Studies Panel.
Vanish Talwar is currently a software engineer at Facebook. Prior to this, he was a Technical Director at PernixData (acquired by Nutanix) developing system monitoring and analytics solutions for storage appliances. Before his stint at the startup, he was a principal researcher at Hewlett-Packard Labs researching systems software and manageability stacks for next generation data centers. Vanish received his B.Tech degree in Computer Science & Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, BHU, Varanasi, and his MS and PhD in Computer Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign.
Indranil Gupta (Indy) is an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He leads the Distributed Protocols Research Group (http://dprg.cs.uiuc.edu/), which works on large-scale distributed systems with a focus on datacenters and cloud computing systems. Indy received his PhD from Cornell University in 2004, and his Bachelor’s degree from Indian Institute of Technology Madras (Chennai) in 1998. He has worked at Google, Microsoft Research, and IBM Research. Indy has served as program co-chair for several leading conferences in distributed systems. Indy’s work received the NSF CAREER award in 2005, and best paper awards at several venues.
Jeff Kephart is a research scientist at IBM Research, known for his work on computer virus epidemiology and immune systems, electronic commerce agents, self-managing computing systems, and data center energy management. Presently, he serves as a principal investigator on a cognitive computing research project with Spain’s leading energy company, Repsol. Kephart’s research has been featured in the New York Times, Wired, Scientific American, Forbes, and comparable publications. He has co-authored over 150 papers (which have received over 17,000 citations), and over 35 issued US patents. Kephart has delivered keynotes on multi-agent visions and applications at several conferences and workshops, and led teams that have created commercial products in areas that include anti-virus technology and data center energy management. In 2013, he was awarded the rank of IEEE Fellow for his leadership and research in founding autonomic computing as an academic discipline. Kephart graduated from Princeton University with a BS in electrical engineering (engineering physics) and received his PhD from Stanford University in electrical engineering, with a minor in physics.
Panel III: Panel on Federal Funding for Research in Networking and Beyond:
Vipin Chaudhary (US NSF)
Richard Brown (US NSF)
Reginald Hobbs (US Army Research Lab)
A veteran of High Performance Computing (HPC), Dr. Chaudhary has been actively participating in the research, business and technology innovation frontiers of HPC for over two decades. His contributions range from heading research laboratories and holding executive management positions, to starting new technology ventures. He is currently a Program Director in the Office of Advanced CyberInfrastructure at National Science Foundation and a Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at the University at Buffalo, SUNY where he co-founded the Center for Computational and Data-Enabled Science and Engineering and the Data Intensive Computing Initiative. He was a co-founder of Scalable Informatics that provides high performance software-defined storage and compute solutions. From 2010 to 2013, Dr. Chaudhary was the Chief Executive Officer of Computational Research Laboratories (CRL) where he grew the company globally to be an HPC cloud and solutions leader before selling it to Tata Consulting Services. Prior to this, as Senior Director of Advanced Development at Cradle Technologies, Inc., he was responsible for advanced programming tools for multi-processor chips. He was also the Chief Architect at Corio Inc., in 2000, which was later bought by IBM. He received the B.Tech. (Hons.) degree in Computer Science and Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, in 1986 and a Ph.D. degree from The University of Texas at Austin in 1992.
Dr. Richard Brown III is currently a Program Director at the National Science Foundation in the Computing and Communications Foundations (CCF) division of the Directorate for Computer & Information Science & Engineering (CISE). He is currently on leave from his appointment as Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, where he has been a faculty member since 2000. He received a PhD in Electrical Engineering from Cornell University in 2000 and MS and BS degrees in Electrical Engineering from The University of Connecticut in 1996 and 1992, respectively. From 1992-1997, he was a design engineer at General Electric Electrical Distribution and Control in Plainville, Connecticut. From August 2007 to June 2008, he held an appointment as a Visiting Associate Professor at Princeton University. He is also currently serving as an Associate Editor for IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications.
Dr. Reginald L. Hobbs has over 30 years of experience in the computer industry, beginning on active duty in the United States Air Force as an information systems operator at Cheyenne Mountain. Upon leaving the military, he became a defense contractor working as a systems programmer, systems administrator, and computer facilities manager. Dr. Hobbs has a Bachelor’s degree in Electronics from Chapman University. He received a Master of Science and PhD, both in Computer Science, from the Georgia Institute of Technology. He is currently the chief of the Multilingual Computing and Analytics Branch at the Army Research Laboratory. He has research interests and experience in the areas of software engineering, network science, knowledge engineering, and cognitive science. Dr. Hobbs brought a software engineering approach to natural language processing techniques, creating user-centered software components to support research and experimentation on machine translation engines, language models, and post-editors. He is an adjunct professor on the faculties of Howard University and the University of the District of Columbia. He specializes in teaching courses in operating systems, computer architecture, software engineering, artificial intelligence, robotics, and expert systems.