Prof. Schahram Dustdar
IEEE Fellow
TU Wien, Austria

Schahram Dustdar is Full Professor of Computer Science heading the Research Division of Distributed Systems at the TU Wien, Austria. He has an H-index of 78 with some 36,000 citations. He holds several honorary positions: University of California (USC) Los Angeles; Monash University in Melbourne, Shanghai University, Macquarie University in Sydney, University Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona, Spain. From Dec 2016 until Jan 2017, he was a Visiting Professor at the University of Sevilla, Spain and from January until June 2017 he was a Visiting Professor at UC Berkeley, USA.

From 1999 - 2007 he worked as the co-founder and chief scientist of Caramba Labs Software AG in Vienna (acquired by Engineering NetWorld AG), a venture capital co-funded software company focused on software for collaborative processes in teams. Caramba Labs was nominated for several (international and national) awards: World Technology Award in the category of Software (2001); Top-Startup companies in Austria (Cap Gemini Ernst & Young) (2002); MERCUR Innovation award of the Austrian Chamber of Commerce (2002).

He is founding co-Editor-in-Chief of ACM Transactions on Internet of Things (ACM TIoT) as well as Editor-in-Chief of Computing (Springer). He is an Associate Editor of IEEE Transactions on Services Computing, IEEE Transactions on Cloud Computing, ACM Computing Surveys, ACM Transactions on the Web, and ACM Transactions on Internet Technology, as well as on the editorial board of IEEE Internet Computing and IEEE Computer. Dustdar is recipient of multiple awards: IEEE TCSVC Outstanding Leadership Award (2018), IEEE TCSC Award for Excellence in Scalable Computing (2019), ACM Distinguished Scientist (2009), ACM Distinguished Speaker (2021), IBM Faculty Award (2012). He is an elected member of the Academia Europaea: The Academy of Europe, where he is chairman of the Informatics Section, as well as an IEEE Fellow (2016) and an Asia-Pacific Artificial Intelligence Association (AAIA) Fellow (2021).

Speech Title: Compute Continuum – Engineering the New Fabric of IoT, Edge, and Cloud
Abstract: As humans, things, software and AI continue to become the entangled fabric of distributed systems, systems engineers and researchers are facing novel challenges. In this talk, we analyze the role of IoT, Edge, Cloud, and Human-based Computing as well as AI in the co-evolution of distributed systems for the new decade. We identify challenges and discuss a roadmap that these new distributed systems have to address. We take a closer look at how a cyber-physical fabric will be complemented by AI operationalization to enable seamless end-to-end distributed systems.




Prof. Irwin King
IEEE Fellow
The Chinese University of Hong Kong, China

Dr. Irwin King's research interests include machine learning, social computing, AI, web intelligence, data mining, and multimedia information processing. In these research areas, he has over 300 technical publications in journals and conferences. He is an Associate Editor of the Journal of Neural Networks (NN) and ACM Transactions on Knowledge Discovery from Data (ACM TKDD). He is President of the International Neural Network Society (INNS), an IEEE Fellow, and an ACM Distinguished Member. He has served as the General Co-chair of The WebConf 2020, ICONIP 2020, WSDM 2011, RecSys 2013, ACML 2015, and in various capacities in a number of top conferences such as WWW, NIPS, ICML, IJCAI, AAAI, etc. He has won the ACM CIKM2019 Test of Time Award and also the ACM SIGIR 2020 Test of Time Award for work done in Social Computing. In early 2010 while on leave with AT&T Labs Research, San Francisco, he taught classes as a Visiting Professor at UC Berkeley. He received his B.Sc. degree in Engineering and Applied Science from California Institute of Technology, Pasadena and his M.Sc. and Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from the University of Southern California, Los Angeles.

Speech Title: Graph Neural Networks from Theory to Applications
Abstrct: Graph Neural Network (GNN) is a neural network that can process graph structured data such as social networks, citation networks, polygon mesh, molecular structures, etc. In addition to non-Euclidean data, GNN can also handle Euclidean data such as sentences, images, and videos. In this talk, we present some recent advances in the development of GNN including graph embedding, convolution-based methods, attention networks, etc. with some interesting applications for social network analysis, node classification, link prediction, recommendation, etc.




Prof. Sergei Gorlatch
University of Muenster, Germany

Sergei Gorlatch is Full Professor of Computer Science at the University of Muenster (Germany) since 2003. Earlier he was Associate Professor at the Technical University of Berlin, Assistant Professor at the University of Passau, and Humboldt Research Fellow at the Technical University of Munich, all in Germany. Prof. Gorlatch has more than 200 peer-reviewed publications in renowned international books, journals and conferences. He was principal investigator in several international research and development projects in the field of software for parallel, distributed, Grid and Cloud systems and networking, funded by the European Community and by German national bodies.

Speech Title: Modern Applications Based on Mobile Cloud and Software-Defined Networks
Abstract: In this talk we consider an emerging class of challenging software applications called Real-Time Online Interactive Applications (ROIA). ROIA are networked applications connecting a potentially very high number of users who interact with the application and with each other in real time, i.e., a response to a user’s action happens virtually immediately. Typical representatives of ROIA are multiplayer online computer games, advanced simulation-based e-learning and serious gaming. All these applications are characterized by high performance and QoS requirements, such as: short response times to user inputs (about 0.1-1.5 s); frequent state updates (up to 100 Hz); large and frequently changing numbers of users in a single application instance (up to tens of thousands simultaneous users). This talk will address two challenging aspects of software for future Internet-based ROIA applications: a) using Mobile Cloud Computing for allowing high application performance when a ROIA application is accessed from multiple mobile devices, and b) managing dynamic QoS requirements of ROIA applications by employing the emerging technology of Software-Defined Networking (SDN).