Guest Speakers

1. Amit Sheth
   Kno.e.sis Center
   Computer Science & Engineering
   Wright State University
   amit.sheth@wright.edu
   
   Computing for Human Experience: Semantics empowered Cyber-Physical, Social and Ubiquitous Computing beyond the Web
   
   Traditionally, we had to artificially simplify the complexity and richness of the real world to constrained computer models and languages for more efficient computation. Today, devices, sensors, human-in-the-loop participation and social interactions enable something more than a "human instructs machine" paradigm. Web as a system for information sharing is being replaced by pervasive computing with mobile, social, sensor and devices dominated interactions. Correspondingly, computing is moving from targeted tasks focused on improving efficiency and productivity to a vastly richer context that support events and situational awareness, and enrich human experiences encompassing recognition of rich sets of relationships, events and situational awareness with spatio-temporal-thematic elements, and socio-cultural-behavioral facets. Such progress positions us for what I call an emerging era of "computing for human experience" (CHE). Four of the key enablers of CHE are: (a) bridging the physical/digital (cyber) divide, (b) elevating levels of abstractions and utilizing vast background knowledge to enable integration of machine and human perception, (c) convert raw data and observations, ranging from sensors to social media, into understanding of events and situations that are meaningful to humans, and (d) doing all of the above at massive scale covering the Web and pervasive computing supported humanity. Semantic Web (conceptual models/ontologies and background knowledge, annotations, and reasoning) techniques and technologies play a central role in important tasks such as building context, integrating online and offline interactions, and help e nhance human experience in their natural environment.
   In this talk I will discuss early enablers of CHE including semantics-empowered social networking and sensor Web, and computation of higher level abstractions from raw and phenomenological data. An article in IEEE Internet Computing provides background information: http://bit.ly/HumanExperience
   
   Bio: Amit Sheth is an educator, research and entrepreneur. He is the LexisNexis Ohio Eminent Scholar at the Wright State University, Dayton OH. He directs Kno.e.sis - the Ohio Center of Excellence in Knowledge-enabled Computing (http://knoesis.org, http://www.cs.wright.edu/announcement/worldclass) which works on topics in Semantic, Social, Sensor and Services computing over Web and in social-cyber-physical systems. Prof. Sheth is an IEEE fellow and is one of the highly cited authors in Computer Science (h-index = 71), World Wide Web and databases. He is EIC of highly ranked Intl. Journal of Semantic Web &Information Systems (http://ijswis.org), is joint-EIC of Distributed & Parallel Databases, is series co-editor of two Springer book series, and serves on several editorial boards. By licensing his funded university research, he has also founded and managed two successful companies. Several commercial products and many operationally deployed applications have resulted from his R&D.
   
   
2. Ling Liu
   Distributed Data Intensive Systems Lab
   College of Computing
   Georgia Institute of Technology
   lingliu@cc.gatech.edu
   
   Big Data Analytics in the Cloud: Opportunities and Challenges
   
   Cloud computing is characterized by ubiquitous network access, location independent resource pooling, rapid elasticity and provisioning, pay-per-use pricing and autonomic control of large-scale operations. The exciting impact of cloud computing comes from enabling new service consumption and delivery models that support business model innovations and big data analytics. In the context of big data, significant advances have been made over the past two decades in the development of algorithms and techniques to provide data management and data mining solutions with high availability, reliability and consistency. The growing number of Internet scale enterprises that provide services and cater to millions of users has been unprecedented. In this talk, we analyze the design choices that enable big data analytic systems to achieve orders of magnitude higher levels of scalability compared to traditional databases. We highlight some design principles for managing big data in the Cloud, which augment existing databases with new features such as scalability, elasticity and autonomy while preserving data privacy and confidentiality. We conclude the talk with a selection of business intelligence applications that exhibit both opportunities and challenges of big data analytics in the Cloud.
   
   Bio: Ling Liu is a full Professor in the School of Computer Science at Georgia Institute of Technology. She directs the research programs in Distributed Data Intensive Systems Lab (DiSL), examining various aspects of large scale data intensive systems with the focus on performance, availability, security, privacy, and energy efficiency. Prof. Liu and her students have released a number of open source software tools, including WebCQ, XWRAP, PeerCrawl, GTMobiSim. Prof. Liu has published over 300 International journal and conference articles in the areas of databases, distributed systems, and Internet Computing. Prof. Liu has served as general chair and PC chairs of several IEEE and ACM conferences in data engineering and distributed computing fields and served on editorial board of over a dozen international journals. Currently Prof. Liu is on the editorial board of Distributed and Parallel Databases (Springer), Journal of Parallel and Distributed Computing (JPDC), IEEE Transactions on Service Computing (TSC), and ACM Transactions on Web (TWEB). Dr. Liu's current research is primarily sponsored by NSF, IBM, and Intel.
   
   
3. Gunter Ollmann
   Damballa Inc.
   gollmann@damballa.com
   
   
   Whoever knows the network best, owns it!
   
   When discussing "targeted attacks" or "advanced persistent threats" we tend to focus heavily upon the penetration of the target - discussing the exploitation technique, dissecting the malicious payload, and performing an autopsy of the known victims. We concentrate upon those areas because they're relatively easy to understand and conduct automated analysis upon; they're the low hanging fruit of the breach landscape. The problem is that these well studied aspects of the threat are just the most visible components of a well thought out campaign run by professional intrusion specialists. This talk will look at the anatomy of a modern network security breach. What happens after malware penetrates the first round of defenses? How do professionals navigate the network, select and target internal resources, and siphon off their ill-gotten gains? More importantly though, how are the human operators behind the threat managing to subvert existing commercial protection solutions, and what are opportunities ahead for the good-guys to research and innovate new protection and detection technologies to combat them?
   
   Bio: Gunter Ollmann serves as VP of Research at Damballa Inc. and is a known veteran in the security space. Prior to joining Damballa, Ollmann held several strategic positions at IBM Internet Security Systems (IBM ISS) with the most recent being the Chief Security Strategist. In this role he was responsible for predicting the evolution of future threats and helping guide IBM's overall security research and protection strategy, as well as being the key IBM spokesperson on evolving threats and mitigation techniques. He also held the role of Director of X-Force as well as the former head of X-Force security assessment services for EMEA while at ISS (which was acquired by IBM in 2006). Prior to joining ISS, Ollmann was the professional services director of Next Generation Security Software (NGS), a vulnerability research and attack-based consulting firm. Ollmann has been a contributor to multiple leading international IT and security focused magazines and journals, and has authored, developed and delivered a number of highly technical courses on Web application security.