Keynote Speakers

Prof Ali Mili

Ali Mili holds a PhD in computer science from the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, USA, and a Doctorate s-Sciences d’Etat from the Universite Joseph Fourier de Grenoble, France. His research interests center on software engineering, ranging from managerial to organizational to technical aspects. He has authored or co-authored ten books, twelve book chapters, and more than 200 articles in journals and conference proceedings.

Ali Mili is currently on the faculty of the New Jersey Institute of Technology; in 2005-2006, he served on the ULS panel at the SEI. Prior to joining NJIT, he served as a faculty member at WVU, at the same time as he was a Principal Scientist at the Institute for Software Research and a site director of the Software Engineering Research Center. From 1984 to 1991, A. Mili served as Maitre de Conferences then as Full Professor and Department Chair of the computer science department at the Faculty of Sciences of Tunis, Tunisia.

Abstract:

Ultra Large Scale Systems :

In 2005-2006, the software engineering institute (http://sei.cmu.edu/) convened a panel of experts to characterize software intensive systems of the future, and to identify research challenges that the design, engineering and operation of such systems pose. The most salient characteristic of such systems (called Ultra Large Scale Systems, or ULS Systems) is their size, estimated to exceed a billion lines of code. A comment by one of the panelists, that Size Changes Everything, became the rallying cry of this effort, and a rationale for the observation that such systems challenge much of the current wisdom about software, software engineering, and software intensive systems.

In this talk, we discuss characteristics of ULS systems, and explore the research challenges that they raise and the research avenues that they mandate. Also, we discuss related research initiatives such as the UK’s Large Scale Complex IT Systems, the global Verified Software Initiative, and the emerging paradigm of cloud computing.

Prof Hossam Hassanein

Hossam Hassanein is a leading authority in the areas of broadband, wireless and mobile networks architecture, protocols, control and performance evaluation. His record spans more than 400 publications in journals, conferences and book chapters, in addition to numerous keynotes and plenary talks in flagship venues. Dr. Hassanein has received several recognition and best papers awards at top international conferences. He is also the founder and director of the Telecommunications Research (TR) Lab at Queen’s University School of Computing, with extensive international academic and industrial collaborations. Dr. Hassanein has. He is a senior member of the IEEE, and is currently chair of the IEEE Communication Society Technical Committee on Ad hoc and Sensor Networks (TC AHSN). Dr. Hassanein is an IEEE Communications Society Distinguished Speaker (Distinguished Lecturer 2008-2010).

Abstract:

Towards Global IoT – Resource Reutilization :

The Internet of Things (IoT) is envisioned as a paradigm shift, with a plethora of applications, on the premise of well-established enabling technologies; prominently Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) and RFIDs. The former has evolved to improve energy efficiency and resilient operation, yet, true scalability has only been recently probed and quite sparsely advancing. Moreover, the traditional approach whereby most WSN platforms are tailored for a single-application to meet a given efficiency metric, imposes significant rigidity in re-utilizing devised platforms for new applications, and limitations on re-using previously deployed ones. In remedy, we present a novel paradigm in WSNs to efficiently utilize network resources, and extend it to a platform for multiple applications to cross utilize resources over multiple WSNs. This paradigm presents a leap in scalability, not only in a WSN, but across multiple ones, with dynamicity to accommodate for varying resources being introduced and removed; in addition to utilizing transient resources in their vicinity. To this end, we present a global architecture to efficiently adopt WSNs in IoT with changing demands and scale. Our approach is further explained and demonstrated via a detailed use case depicting the premise of IoT application.

Prof Mohamed-Slim Alouini

Dr. Alouini was born in Tunis, Tunisia. He received the Diplome d’Ingenieur from the École Nationale Supérieure des Télécommunications (TELECOM Paris Tech) and the Diplome d’Etudes Approfondies (D.E.A.) in Electronics from the Université Pierre et Marie Curie in Paris, both in 1993. He received the M.S.E.E. degree from the Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech) in 1995, and a PhD in Electrical Engineering from California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in 1998. He also received the Habilitation degree from the Université Pierre et Marie Curie in 2003.

Dr. Alouini started his academic career at the University of Minnesota in 1998. In 2005, he joined Texas A&M University at Qatar, Doha, and in 2009, he was appointed as Professor of Electrical Engineering at KAUST, Thuwal, Mekkah Province, Saudi Arabia, where he is responsible for research and teaching in the areas of Communication Theory and Applied Probability. More specifically, his research interests include design and performance analysis of diversity combining techniques, MIMO techniques, multi-hop/cooperative communications systems, cognitive radio systems, and multi-resolution, hierarchical and adaptive modulation schemes.

Dr. Alouini has published several papers on the above subjects, and he is co-author of the textbook Digital Communication over Fading Channels published by Wiley Interscience. He is a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), a member of the Thomson ISI Web of Knowledge list of Highly Cited Researchers, and a co-recipient of best paper awards in eight IEEE conferences (including ICC, GLOBECOM, VTC, and PIMRC).

Abstract

Opportunistic Splitting for User Scheduling in a Distributed Manner

The objective of this talk is to present the development of low-feedback, opportunistic schemes with fairness constraints for wireless packet scheduling. More specifically, we consider the problem of opportunistic scheduling a user in a multi-user wireless environment in a distributed manner. The opportunistic splitting algorithm is applied to find the best group of users without reporting the channel state information to the centralized scheduler. We first present a cumulative distribution function-based opportunistic splitting scheme. A score-based splitting algorithm is then presented and is shown to offer the benefits of the previously presented scheme without requiring the users to know their channel distributions. We extend the above mentioned scheduling schemes to practical systems which offer discrete data rates only.