Keynote 2
Title: Social Sensing Challenges for a Smarter PlanetSpeaker: Tarek Abdelzaher, UIUC
Abstract: The vision of smarter cities that better conserve their resources and better streamline their services relies in part on the increased availability of data about the real time state of such resources and services, and the increased ability to perform large-scale data analytics. A central architectural component is therefore an infrastructure for data collection and information distillation that relies not only on fixed sensors but more importantly on people (and their mobile devices) as data sources. This talk motivates such an infrastructure by example applications, then discusses the research challenges brought forth by the need to collect reliable data in real time from large groups of individuals who may be unknown, unreliable, or not motivated to collect and share their data. Mathematical formulation of the underlying problems are presented together with analytic solutions. Initial evaluation results are shown from experimental prototypes deployed in controlled settings.
Bio: Tarek Abdelzaher received his B.Sc. and M.Sc. degrees in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Ain Shams University, Cairo, Egypt, in 1990 and 1994 respectively. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Michigan in 1999 on Quality of Service Adaptation in Real-Time Systems. He has been an Assistant Professor at the University of Virginia, where he founded the Software Predictability Group until 2005. He is currently a Professor and Willett Faculty Scholar at the Department of Computer Science, the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign. He has authored/coauthored more than 150 refereed publications in real-time computing, distributed systems, sensor networks, and control. He is Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Real-Time Systems, and has served as Associate Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing, IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems, IEEE Embedded Systems Letters, the ACM Transaction on Sensor Networks, and the Ad Hoc Networks Journal. He was Program Chair of RTAS 2004, RTSS 2006, IPSN 2010, ICDCS 2010 and ICAC 2011, as well as General Chair of RTAS 2005, IPSN 2007, RTSS 2007, DCoSS 2008, and Sensys 2008. Abdelzaher's research interests lie broadly in understanding and controlling performance and temporal properties of networked embedded and software systems in the face of increasing complexity, distribution, data dependencies, and degree of embedding in an external physical environment. Tarek Abdelzaher is a member of IEEE and ACM.