Keynote Speakers at ICCCN 2023
July 24, 2023, MondayKeynote Talk:
AI-EDGE: Designing future XG networks and distributed intelligence
Dr. Ness B. Shroff
Abstract: Networking and AI are two of the most transformative information technologies. These technologies have helped improve the quality of the human condition, contributed to national economic competitiveness, national security, and national defense. The AI-EDGE Institute is aimed at leveraging the synergies between both networking and AI to design the next generation of edge network. A new distributed intelligence plane will be developed to ensure that these networks are self-healing, adaptive, and self-optimized. The future of AI is distributed AI and these intelligent and adaptive networks will in turn unleash the power of collaboration to solve long-standing distributed AI challenges, making AI more efficient, interactive, and privacy preserving. The Institute plans to develop the key underlying technologies for distributed and networked intelligence to enable a host of future transformative applications such as intelligent transportation, remote healthcare, distributed robotics, and smart aerospace. Going beyond research, the Institute recognizes that it is a national priority to educate students, professionals, and practitioners in AI and networks, and substantially grow and diversify the workforce. The Institute will develop novel, efficient, and modular ways of creating and delivering education content and curricula at scale, and to spearhead a program that helps build a large diverse workforce in AI and networks spanning primary and secondary education to university students and faculty. In this talk, the speaker gave an overview of the key components of the Institute, identifying a set of interesting research directions. Further, the speaker will also describe through a case study involving caching, why the edge is so different from the core of the network, and how Machine Learning (ML) tools and techniques can be developed to improve performance.
Biography: Ness B. Shroff holds the Ohio Eminent Scholar Chaired Professorship of Networking and Communications at Ohio State University. He received his Ph.D. degree from Columbia University, NY in 1994. Dr. Shroff’s research focuses on fundamental problems in machine learning, network optimization, stochastic control, and algorithmic design. His work contributes to the design, control, performance, pricing, and security of complex systems such as communication networks, computing, storage and cloud based systems, social networks, and recommendation systems. Dr. Shroff is a Fellow of the IEEE, and a National Science Foundation CAREER awardee. Dr. Shroff is on the list of highly cited researchers from Thomson Reuters ISI (previously ISI web of Science) in 2014 and 2015, and in Thomson Reuters Book on The World's Most Influential Scientific Minds in 2014. He received the IEEE INFOCOM achievement award for seminal contributions to scheduling and resource allocation in wireless networks, in 2014.
July 25, 2023, Tuesday
Keynote Talk:
Title: Complexities of as-a-Service Edge-to-Cloud Platform
Dr. Puneet Sharma
Abstract: Consumers want a unified view of their applications, data, and services everywhere with on-premises data-centers, colocation, or public cloud offerings. In this talk, I will share learnings from our research with building cloud-managed on-premise infrastructure and managing hybrid/multi-cloud deployments. We will discuss the challenges in scaling as-a-Service edge-to-cloud platform, particularly heterogeneity, connectivity, data management, and application diversity across private-public network boundaries.
Biography: Puneet Sharma is Director of Networking and Distributed Systems Lab at Hewlett Packard Labs where he leads research on Edge2Cloud Infrastructure for Multi-Cloud, Resource Orchestration, 5G, AI , Security and IoT. Prior to joining HP Labs, he received a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Southern California. Puneet has contributed to various Internet standardization efforts such as co-authoring UPnP’s QoS Working Group’s QoSv3 standard and the IETF RFCs on the multicast routing protocol PIM. He has published over 100 research articles. His work on Mobile Collaborative Communities was featured in the New Scientist Magazine. He has been granted 70+ US patents. He is a Fellow of IEEE and Distinguished Member of ACM. He was listed twice in (for years 2021 and 2020) AI 2000 Most Influential Scholars list for last decade (2009-2020).
July 26, 2023, Wednesday
Keynote Talk:
Title: Compromise/Malware Detection vs. Avoidance for Low-End Embedded/Smart/IoT Devices
Dr. Gene Tsudik
Abstract: Guaranteeing runtime integrity of embedded system software is an open problem. Trade-offs between security and other priorities (e.g., cost and/or performance) are inherent, and resolving them is both challenging and important. Proliferation of runtime attacks that introduce malicious code (e.g., by injection) into embedded devices motivates research into mitigation techniques. One popular approach is Remote Attestation (RA), whereby a trusted entity (verifier) periodically checks the current software state of an untrusted remote device (prover). RA yields a timely authenticated snapshot of prover's state that verifier uses to decide whether an attack/compromise occurred.
One major issue is that RA represents pure overhead and can consume non-negligible time and other resources on prover, which is problematic for a real-time or safety-critical device. Consequently. there is a need to minimize RA time complexity. To address this problem, we show how to construct a low-overhead RA technique that consumes very little bandwidth and minimal amount of cryptographic overhead. Another issue is that current RA approaches require verifier to explicitly initiate RA, based on some unclear criteria. Thus,, verifier only learns about prover's compromise late, upon the next RA instance. While sufficient for compromise detection, some applications would benefit from a more proactive, prevention-based approach. To this end, we construct an inexpensive hardware/software co-design enforcing: (i) runtime software immutability, thus precluding any illegal software modification, and (ii) authenticated updates as the sole means of modifying software. In it, a successful RA instance serves as a proof of successful update, and continuous subsequent software integrity is implicit, due to the runtime immutability guarantee. This obviates the need for RA between software updates and yields unobtrusive integrity assurance.
Biography: Gene Tsudik is a Distinguished Professor of Computer Science at the University of California, Irvine (UCI). He obtained his PhD in Computer Science from USC in 1991. Before coming to UCI in 2000, he was at the IBM Zurich Research Laboratory (1991-1996) and USC/ISI (1996-2000). His research interests include numerous topics in security, privacy and applied cryptography. Gene Tsudik is a Fulbright Scholar, Fulbright Specialist (thrice), a fellow of ACM, IEEE, AAAS, IFIP and a foreign member of Academia Europaea. He was the recipient of the 2017 ACM SIGSAC Outstanding Contribution Award, and the 2020 IFIP Jean-Claude Laprie Award. His magnum opus is the first ever rhyming crypto-poem published as a refereed paper. Gene Tsudik is unfriendly to machine learning, blockchains and differential privacy.