Talk Title & Abstract

Challenges in Real-time Edge AI
Advances in neural network revolutionized modern machine intelligence, but important challenges remain when applying these solutions in IoT contexts; specifically, in cost-sensitive applications and at the point of need on lower-end embedded devices. The talk discusses challenges in offering real-time machine intelligence services at the edge to support IoT applications in resource constrained environments. The intersection of IoT applications, real-time requirements, and AI capabilities motivates several important research directions. For example, how to support efficient execution of machine learning components on low-cost edge devices while retaining inference quality and offering confidence estimates in results? How to reduce the need for expensive manual labeling of IoT application data? How to improve the responsiveness of AI components to critical real-time stimuli in their physical environment? How to prioritize and schedule the execution of intelligent data processing workflows on edge-device GPUs? How to exploit data transformations that lead to sparser representations of external physical phenomena to attain more efficient learning and inference? The talk discusses challenges in edge AI applications from a real-time computing perspective.

Biography

Tarek Abdelzaher received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Michigan in 1999. He is currently a Sohaib and Sara Abbasi Professor and Willett Faculty Scholar at the Department of Computer Science, the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign. He has authored/coauthored more than 300 refereed publications in real-time computing, distributed systems, sensor networks, and control. He serves as an Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Real-Time Systems for over 10 years, 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, among others. Abdelzaher's research interests lie broadly in understanding and influencing performance and temporal properties of networked embedded, social and software systems in the face of increasing complexity, distribution, and degree of interaction with an external physical environment. Tarek Abdelzaher is a recipient of the IEEE Outstanding Technical Achievement and Leadership Award in Real-time Systems (2012), the Xerox Award for Faculty Research (2011), as well as several best paper awards. He is a fellow of IEEE and ACM.

Talk Title & Abstract

Electrification in the Aerospace Industry
Electrification is being hailed as a pillar of the so-called Fourth Industrial Revolution. Along with digitalization, it’s touted as the harbinger of new efficiencies in supply chains and the platform for new public policy. It will radicalize the design of everything from our power grids and roadways to vehicles and urban centers. Electrification offers the opportunity for sustainable growth, reduced carbon emissions, and a new, fundamental change in the way we power the world around us. The vision of Rolls-Royce Electrical is to be a world-class provider of electrical power and propulsion systems and thus to champion electrification.
Electrification of aircraft bears the promise of more efficient, silent, and sustainable flight—reducing fuel consumption and operating costs for aircraft operators. Power density, reliability, weight, volume, and fault tolerance are of paramount importance for aerospace-intended electrical machines and drives. We tackle these challenges with proven systems integration, systems engineering expertise, and professional and experienced flight test and flight operations capability of our team. We have built our long-standing expertise with propulsion systems in the MW class for marine and industrial applications, and have become a world leader in the development of MW power for hybrid-electric aircraft in the regional aircraft class. Electrification also opens new markets like sub-megawatt propulsion for commuter aircraft and urban air mobility that enable us to grow value beyond today’s core markets and scope of supply. Ongoing developments in the field of More Electric Aircraft technology to eliminate hydraulic, pneumatic, and gearbox-driven aircraft subsystems will contribute to further reduction in fuel consumption and operational costs. Join this session to understand the direction that electrification will take in the aerospace industry.

Biography

Amit K. Gupta holds a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT)-Roorkee and a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from National University of Singapore (NUS). During 2000-12, he worked for Bechtel Corporation, Samsung Heavy Industries, Delphi Automotive Systems and Vestas Wind Systems. Since August 2012, he is leading Rolls-Royce Electrical at Rolls-Royce Singapore Pte Ltd. He is Director of the Electrical Programme at Rolls-Royce@NTU Corporate lab and Rolls-Royce Director for the Electrical Power System Integration Lab @ NTU (EPSIL@N).
He has been granted 32 patents and published more than 135 papers in international conferences and journals. He is an Adjunct Professor with ECE-NUS, EEE-NTU and EE-IIT-Roorkee. He received inaugural 2016 IEEE R10 Industry-Academia collaboration award for developing world class electrical R&D lab EPSIL@N. He is recipient of several Rolls-Royce Engineering & Technology (E&T) Awards for Engineering Excellence. He’s a recipient of Vestas Innovation excellence award 2009 for being top 5 innovators of Vestas Global Research. He is a recipient of several IEEE awards including the 2021 IEEE McMurray Award for Industry Achievements in Power Electronics and Prize paper from the IEEE Industrial Applications Society’s (IAS) - Industrial Power Converter Committee (IPCC) for 2005. He is recipient of The IET Premium Awards 2019.
He is an Associate Editor for IEEE Transitions on Power Electronics and plays an active role in organizing electrical power engineering conferences in Asia. He is Fellow of IEEE – USA, IET - UK, IES - Singapore, and a Chartered Engineer - Engineering Council (UK).

Talk Title & Abstract

Pushing Intelligence to the Edge of Internet of Things: A new Paradigm enabling Next-Generation Smart Systems of Systems
Internet of Things will not be only a new worldwide network interconnecting trillions of (smart) devices but, most importantly, a platform (system of systems) where to develop a new wave of (cyber-physical) services for humans and machines. In this context, in order to build IoT systems, the so-called IoT-Edge-Cloud continuum paradigm is having tremendous focus from the research community as well as from the industry. This paradigm can therefore be an enabler to push intelligence from the core of the network to its edge: from centralized data mining to embedded machine learning in tiny IoT devices to federated machine learning involving networks of edge devices. Moreover, methodologies are emerging to support analysis, design, implementation and evaluation of solutions involving mining and machine learning at the IoT edge. In this talk, we will focus on IoT from both the architectural and machine learning at the edge perspectives. Finally, some use cases will be discussed related to mobile edge computing, ambient assisting living environments, and intelligent transportation systems.

Biography

Giancarlo Fortino (IEEE Fellow 2022) is Full Professor of Computer Engineering at the Dept of Informatics, Modeling, Electronics, and Systems of the University of Calabria (Unical), Italy. He received a PhD in Computer Engineering from Unical in 2000. He is also distinguished professor at Wuhan University of Technology and Huazhong Agricultural University (China), high-end expert at HUST (China), senior research fellow at the Italian ICAR-CNR Institute, CAS PIFI visiting scientist at SIAT – Shenzhen, and Distinguished Lecturer for IEEE Sensors Council. He is the chair of the PhD School in ICT, the director of the Postgraduate Master course in INTER-IoT, and the director of the SPEME lab at Unical as well as co-chair of Joint labs on IoT established between Unical and WUT, SMU and HZAU Chinese universities, respectively. He is Web of Science Highly Cited Researcher 2020 and 2021. Currently he has 19 highly cited papers in WoS, and h-index=62 with 14500+ citations in Google Scholar. His research interests include wearable computing systems, e-Health, AI and Internet of Things, and agent-based computing. Fortino is currently the scientific responsible of the Digital Health group of the Italian CINI National Laboratory at Unical. He is author of 550+ papers in int’l journals, conferences and books. He is (founding) series editor of IEEE Press Book Series on Human-Machine Systems and EiC of Springer Internet of Things series and AE of premier int'l journals such as IEEE TAFFC-CS, IEEE THMS, IEEE IoTJ, IEEE SJ, IEEE JBHI, IEEE SMCM, IEEE OJEMB, IEEE OJCS, Information Fusion, JNCA, EAAI, etc. He organized as chair many int’l workshops and conferences (100+), was involved in a huge number of int’l conferences/workshops (500+) as IPC member, is/was guest-editor of many special issues (70+). He is cofounder and CEO of SenSysCal S.r.l., a Unical spinoff focused on innovative IoT systems. Fortino is currently member of the IEEE SMCS BoG and of the IEEE Press BoG, and chair of the IEEE SMCS Italian Chapter.

Talk Title & Abstract

Edge Intelligence for B5G/6G and IoT
Driven by the visions of the Internet of Things and 5G communications, recent years have seen a paradigm shift in mobile computing, from the centralized cloud computing toward the concept of computing at the edge. This concept pushes the mobile computing, network control and storage to the network edges, in order to enable computation-intensive and latency-critical applications at the resource-limited mobile devices. In the edge computing platform, mobility of end devices (e.g., vehicles and mobile phones), variety of user applications, and heterogeneous wireless network technologies incur critical challenges to network management and resource allocation. With the recent advance in artificial intelligence (AI), many AI tools, like machine learning, are not only the key enablers of emerging applications but also utilized to solve the problems mentioned above. The promised gains of computing at the edge and AI have motivated extensive efforts in both academia and industry on developing the technologies. This talk will focus on the orchestration between AI and computing at the edge. It considers AI as the application of the edge and a technique to solve the issues of network management and resource allocation of the edge. We will discuss current advancement in network management and resource allocation utilizing AI techniques. After that, we will discuss how the edge can provide AI service to realize emerging IoT applications. Finally, this talk will elaborate further on open research challenges.

Biography

Ai-Chun Pang received the B.S., M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science and Information Engineering from National Chiao Tung University, Taiwan, in 1996, 1998 and 2002, respectively. She joined the Department of Computer Science and Information Engineering, National Taiwan University (NTU), Taiwan, in 2002, and is now a Professor and Associate Dean of the College of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, NTU. She is also the co-founder of OmniEyes Inc. (a startup company focusing on edge-AI technology for mobile video platform). Her research interests include wireless and mobile networking, edge computing, and IoT. Dr. Pang is currently the editor of IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing, IEEE Transaction on Vehicular Technology, IEEE Transactions on Network and Service Management, IEEE Transactions on Emerging Topics in Computing, and ACM Transactions on Cyber-Physical Systems. She co-authored the book “Wireless and Mobile All-IP Networks” published by John Wiley. She is an IEEE Vehicular Technology Society (VTS) Distinguished Lecturer in 2018-22, and received VTS Women’s Distinguished Career Award in 2020. She is a Fellow of the IEEE.

Talk Title & Abstract

Reliable Sensing with Unreliable Sensors: Reimaging the Possibilities and Redefining the Limits
Electronic devices, be it a computer or a communication laser, or a clinical sensor, used to have it easy: Located in temperature/humidity-controlled rooms, monitored by expert technicians, plugged into unlimited power sources, they demonstrated impressive performance and high accuracy. No longer. Today, an implantable sensor for smart agriculture may be left buried in the dirt for a year or more with a limited energy budget, without calibration or any temperature control. A wearable sweat sensor, an insulin pump, or a brain implant needs to function regardless of the variation in body temperature, biofouling of cannula sites, or degradation of the membrane. In this talk, I will discuss our initial efforts to develop a collection of physical and statistical techniques to create the theoretical foundation of self-calibrating, ultra-high signal-to-noise ratio, electrochemical sensors that provides reliable sensing with unreliable sensors without access to the ground truth. Our approach involves rethinking sensors as a communication channel with time as an active variable and borrowing techniques from social media to ferret out fake news.

Biography

Professor Alam holds the Jai N. Gupta professorship at Purdue University, where his research focuses on the physics and technology of semiconductor devices. From 1995 to 2003, he was with Bell Laboratories, Murray Hill, NJ, as a Member of Technical Staff in the Silicon ULSI Research Department. Since joining Purdue in 2004, Dr. Alam has published over 300 papers and he is among the top-20 contributors on diverse topics involving transistors, reliability, biosensors, and solar cells. He is a fellow of IEEE, APS, and AAAS. His awards include the 2006 IEEE Kiyo Tomiyasu Medal for contributions to device technology, 2015 SRC Technical Excellence Award for fundamental contributions to reliability physics, and 2018 IEEE EDS Award for educating, inspiring and mentoring students and electron device professionals around the world. More than 450,000 students worldwide have learned some aspect of semiconductor devices from his web-enabled courses.

Talk Title & Abstract

Securing Cyber-Physical and IoT Systems in Smart Living Environments
Our daily lives are becoming increasingly dependent on a variety of smart cyber-physical infrastructures, such as smart cities and buildings, smart energy grid, smart transportation, smart healthcare, and so on. Alongside, smartphones and sensor enabled Internet of Things (IoT) devices are empowering humans with fine-grained information and opinion collection through crowdsensing about events of interest, resulting in actionable inferences and decisions. This synergy has led to what is called cyber-physical-social (CPS) convergence with human in the loop, the goal of which is to improve the “quality” of life. However, CPS and IoT systems are extremely vulnerable to failures and security threats. This talk will highlight unique research challenges in securing such systems, followed by novel defense mechanisms. Our proposed frameworks and solutions are based on a rich set of theoretical and practical design principles, such as secure data fusion, uncertainty reasoning, information theory, prospect theory, reputation scoring, and belief and trust models. Two case studies will be considered: (1) Security forensics and lightweight statistical anomaly detection in smart grid CPS to defend against organized and persistent adversaries that can launch data falsification attacks on smart meters using stealthy strategies. The novelty of our approach lies in a newly defined information-theoretic metric to quantify robustness and security, thus minimizing attacker’s impact on customers and utilities with low false alarm rates;(2) Secure and trustworthy decision making in mobile crowd sensing based smart transportation to detect false/spam contributions due to users’ selfish and malicious behaviors. Based on cumulative prospect theory and reputation/trust model, our approach prevents revenue loss owing to undue incentives and improves operational reliability and decision accuracy. The talk will be concluded with directions for future research.

Biography

Sajal K. Das is an IEEE Fellow, and a professor of Computer Science and Daniel St. Clair Endowed Chair at Missouri University of Science and Technology, USA where he was Computer Science Department Chair during 2013-2017. He served the National Science Foundation as a Program Director in the Computer Networks and Systems division during 2008-2011. His transdisciplinary research interests include wireless and sensor networks, mobile and pervasive computing, cyber-physical systems and IoT, UAVs, mobile crowdsensing, smart environments (e.g., smart city, smart grid, smart transportation, smart agriculture, and smart health), distributed and cloud computing, cyber security, biological and social networks, and applied graph theory and game theory. He has made fundamental contributions to these areas and published extensively with 350+ research articles in high quality journals and 475+ papers in refereed conference proceedings. A holder of 5 US patents, Dr. Das has directed more than $20 funded research projects; and coauthored 4 books – Smart Environments: Technology, Protocols, and Applications (John Wiley, 2005), Handbook on Securing Cyber-Physical Critical Infrastructure: Foundations and Challenges (Morgan Kauffman, 2012), Mobile Agents in Distributed Computing and Networking (Wiley, 2012), and Principles of Cyber-Physical Systems: An Interdisciplinary Approach (Cambridge University Press, 2020). His h-index is 94 with more than 36,100 citations according to Google Scholar. He is a recipient of 11 Best Paper Awards at prestigious conferences including ACM MobiCom and IEEE PerCom, and numerous awards for teaching, mentoring and research including the IEEE Computer Society’s Technical Achievement Award for pioneering contributions to sensor networks, and University of Missouri System President’s Award for Sustained Career Excellence. Dr. Das serves as the founding Editor-in-Chief of Elsevier’s Pervasive and Mobile Computing Journal, and as Associate Editor of several journals including the IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing, IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing, and ACM Transactions on Sensor Networks. He has graduated 11 postdocs, 48 Ph.D. students, 31 MS theses, and numerous undergraduate research students.

Talk Title & Abstract

Challenges and opportunities of Solar PV integrations to national grid
Many countries are extensively integrating solar PV generations into their distribution and transmission grids to meet their renewable energy targets and also to reduce carbon emissions. At the University of Queensland, our research team has been involved in a number of solar PV integration projects, which include both small scale rooftop PV installations in distribution networks and large scale solar farms in transmission networks. This keynote speech will present some key outcomes and solutions from our research projects in PV integrations and energy managements.

Biography

Tapan Saha was born and brought up in Bangladesh. He studied in BUET, IIT Delhi and the University of Queensland (UQ) where he received his PhD in 1994. He has been with the University of Queensland since 1996, where he has been a Professor of Electrical Engineering since 2005. He has previously worked with BUET for three and half years and with James Cook University in Australia for two and half years. Currently he is the Discipline Leader of Power, Energy & Control Engineering at UQ, Founding Director of Australasian Transformer Innovation Centre & Leader of UQ Solar and UQ industry 4.0 Energy TestLab. He is a Fellow of IEEE and a Fellow of the Institution of Engineers Australia. He is an IEEE Power & Energy Society Distinguished Lecturer. Prof. Saha has successfully supervised 50 PhD students as the principal supervisor. He has received extensive funding from Australian competitive agencies, state and federal governments and electricity industry. He has published more than 600 papers in IEEE, IET & Elsevier Journals and peer reviewed conferences.

Talk Title & Abstract

Clone detection and Benchmarking in Big Code
Copying a code fragment and then reusing it by pasting and adapting (e.g., adding/modifying/deleting statements) is a common practice in software development, resulted in a significant amount of duplicated code in software systems. On the other hand, duplicated code poses a number of threats to the maintenance of software systems such as clones are the #1 “bad smell” in Fowler’s refactoring list. Software clones are thus considered to be one of the major contributors to the high software maintenance cost, which could be up to 80% of the total software development cost. The era of Big Data has introduced new applications for clone detection. For example, clone detection has been used to find similar mobile applications, to intelligently tag code snippets, to identify code examples, and so on from large inter-project repositories. The dual role of clones in software development and maintenance, along with these many emerging new applications of clone detection, has led to a great many clone detection tools and analysis frameworks. In this talk, I will outline our experience in developing clone detection tools from large-scale inter-projects code repositories using even a desktop machine with standard hardware configurations. I will then also talk about how do we evaluate such large-scale clone detection tools using our BigCloneBench, a clone benchmark of more than eight million manually validated clone pairs in 25 thousand Java projects.

Biography

Chanchal K. Roy is Co-Director of Software Research Lab and Professor of Software Engineering/Computer Science at the University of Saskatchewan, Canada. He is the lead and Program Director of an NSERC CREATE graduate program on Software Analytics Research and a co-lead of the Data Management and Repository group of an NSERC Canada First Research Excellence Fund (CFREF) on Food security. As the co-author of the widely used NiCad code clone detection system, he has published more than 180 refereed publications, with many of them in premier software engineering conferences and journals that have been cited more than 8,000 times. Dr. Roy works in the broad area of software engineering, with particular emphasis on software clone detection and management, software evolution and maintenance, recommender systems in software engineering, automated software debugging, and big data analytics in software engineering. His contributions to the software maintenance community, and particularly to the software clones community, have been highly influential, winning Most Influential Paper (a.k.a. Test of Time awards) awards at SANER 2018, ICPC 2018 and SANER 2021. He has been recognized with the New Scientist Research Award of the College of Arts and Science of the University of Saskatchewan and the University wide New Researcher Award. He is one of three Canadian computer scientists honoured with a prestigious award for young researchers, a 2018 Outstanding Young Computer Science Researcher Award by CS-Can/Info-Can, a national, non-profit society dedicated to representing all aspects of computer science and the interests of the discipline across Canada. Dr. Roy was a vision keynote speaker at WCRE/CSMR 2014 on software clones, and a keynote speaker at both IWSC 2018 and IEEE R10HTC 2018. He serves widely on the program committees of major software engineering conferences such as ICSE, ASE, ICSME, SANER, MSR, ICPC and SCAM, and has been regular reviewers of the major journals in Software Engineering. He served (has been serving) as chairs and/or program committee members in most of the conferences of his area including General Chair for ICPC 2014, SCAM 2019, IWSC 2015 and Program Co-chairs for ICPC 2018, IWSC 2012 and ISEC 2022. He has attracted over $4M in external funding since joining the USask, including an NSERC Discovery Accelerator Supplement Grant, NSERC CREATE grant and leading major roles in two CFREF grants in Food Security and Water Security. Dr. Roy’s recent work on a new way of searching Stack Overflow was featured in Stack Overflow blogs which then subsequently was featured in most of the major tech news websites and blogs such as ACM Tech news, TechRepublic, Hacker News, SD Times, and reddit.

Talk Title & Abstract

Silica composite microcapsules for functional finishing of textiles：encapsulation and release properties
Silica composite microcapsules with different structures containing hollow, core-shell, yolk-shell, porous, tree-ring type or other special shapes, can be prepared by using hyperbranched silica precursors (PEOS) and their modifications (PEG-PEOS or C16H33-PEOS) as stabilizers of oil-in-water, water-in-oil or double emulsions. Functional liquids including fragrance, mosquito repellent or bacteria inhibition can also be synchronously encapsulated by silica shells formed by proceeding of hydrolysis and condensation. Without any additional surfactants, by adjusting the degree of modified groups, the monodispersed particles with different sizes can be easily obtained. To repair the deficiency for weak obstructions of thin shells, the assisting free-radical polymerization of adapted monomers inside significantly enhanced the encapsulation efficiency of liquids and achieved their controllable release, which satisfied requirement of basic high-temperature processing, such as polymer blending and textile finishing. The nanostructured organic-inorganic hybrid sol-gel coatings were successfully integrated onto the surface of polyester fibers by combination of twin polymerization and PEOS chemistry with superhydrophobic performance.

Biography

Zhi Chen received a bachelor’s degree from chemistry department of Xiamen University, a master’s degree from Fudan University, and his Ph.D. degree from RWTH-Aachen university, Germany, major in macromolecular chemistry and physics. He is currently a full-time teacher in College of Materials Science and Engineering, Wuhan Textile University. His current research interests include organosilicon materials, supramolecular self-assembly, functional microcapsules, colloids and interfaces, free-radical polymerization etc. During his postdoc period in DWI - Leibniz Institute for Interactive Materials, Aachen, Germany, he participated in BMWi/AiF projects (IGF 19959 BG, 19892 N and 19620 N) and EU project (EMR 60). His partial results were published on ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces, Macromolecules, Langmuir, Journal of Colloid and Interface Science, etc.

Talk Title & Abstract

Functionalisation of fibre-reinforced plastic composites
Fiber-reinforced plastics (FRP) are increasingly being used in moving components due to their high specific stiffnesses and strengths in addition to the ability for specifically tailored properties. Current developments display a trend towards kinematic systems, which are employed in mechanical engineering, especially in textile machinery, as well as in logistics, automation technology and automotive engineering, where their low mass makes FRP a particularly suitable material. With the increasing application of kinematic systems, there is also a growing demand for simple, weight-saving and cost-effective solutions for special kinematics that can generate requirement-specific movements and forces based on energy- and material-efficient actuator principles, taking into account the lightweight design concept. In this presentation, alternative approaches in terms of innovative textile-based adaptive FRP with structurally integrated shape memory alloys are designed, implemented, tested and evaluated in comparison with conventional technical solutions. They include the development of novel approaches and technological solutions both for the reproducible setting of a suitable boundary layer between the shape memory alloy in wire form and the surrounding fiber composite material and for the fully automatic integration of the textile-processable actuator into the textile reinforcement structure.

Biography

Dr.-Ing. Moniruddoza Ashir is working as a postdoctoral fellow, research associate and tutor for DAAD fellows at the Institute of Textile Machinery and High Performance Material Technology, Technical University of Dresden, Germany. He graduated from the College of Textile Technology (now Bangladesh University of Textiles) securing the first class third position. Later, he worked as the Production Officer (full time) in a textile factory and lecturer (part time) at a private university in Bangladesh. Dr. Ashir obtained the prestigious DAAD scholarship in 2011. In December 2013, he completed his M. Sc. Degree in Textile and Ready-made Clothing Technology. He received his doctorate in Mechanical Engineering in October 2020. Dr. Ashir is the author of 27 peer-reviewed journal papers as the first author. He presented his research findings in different international conferences in Australia, Austria, Belgium, China, Greece, Germany, Italy, Portugal, Slovenia, Turkey and UK. Three of his patent applications have already been published. His field of research is the technical textiles especially functionalization of fiber reinforced plastics by means of shape memory alloys for the fabrication of adaptive structures.