Keynote Addresses

Abstract of the talk

The computer and information science and engineering disciplines are at the center of an ongoing societal transformation. The explosive growth of scientific and social data, wireless connectivity at broadband speeds for a countless number of mobile endpoints, and seamless access to resources in the "cloud" are transforming the way we work, learn, play, and communicate. Furthermore, the proliferation of mobile devices and new applications is leading to increasing complexity and growth of network traffic.

I will talk about how digitalization, virtualization, and mobility are reshaping our economy, society, and daily lives. I will also talk about these trends catalyze new opportunities for foundational research. I will further explore how advances in computing and communication serve as key drivers of economic competitiveness and how they will be crucial to achieving national priorities.

Short Bio

Farnam Jahanian serves as the National Science Foundation Assistant Director for the Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) Directorate. He guides CISE in its mission to uphold the nation's leadership in scientific discovery and engineering innovation through its support of fundamental research in computer and information science and engineering and of transformative advances in cyberinfrastructure.

Dr. Jahanian holds the Edward S. Davidson Collegiate Professorship in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of Michigan, where he served as Department Chair for Computer Science and Engineering from 2007 - 2011 and as Director of the Software Systems Laboratory from 1997 - 2000.

Over the last two decades at the University of Michigan, Dr. Jahanian led several large-scale research projects that studied the growth and scalability of the Internet infrastructure, which ultimately transformed how cyber threats are addressed by Internet Service Providers. His research on Internet infrastructure security formed the basis for the successful Internet security services company Arbor Networks, which he co-founded in 2001. Dr. Jahanian served as Chairman of Arbor Networks until its acquisition in 2010. His work on Internet routing stability and convergence has been highly influential within both the network research and the Internet operational communities and was recognized with an ACM SIGCOMM Test of Time Award in 2008.

Dr. Jahanian is the author of over 100 published research papers and has served on dozens of national advisory boards and panels. He has testified before Congress on a broad range of topics, including cybersecurity and Big Data. He has been an active advocate for how basic research can be uniquely central to an innovation ecosystem that drives global competitiveness and addresses national priorities. He received numerous awards for his innovative research, commitment to education, and technology commercialization activities. He was named Distinguished University Innovator at the University of Michigan (2009) and received the Governor's University Award for Commercialization Excellence (2005).

Dr. Jahanian holds a master's degree and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Texas at Austin. He is a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE), and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).

Abstract of the talk

There are now 1 billion vehicles in the world waiting to be connected to the Internet. At the same time, vehicular communication technologies have matured to a point in which massive deployment is both possible and feasible. One option for deployment is to wait for car manufacturers to embed DSRC/WAVE interfaces inside their latest models. However, since only 9% of the world's fleet is new every year, this would result in a time span of up to 20 years until 90% of the vehicles are finally connected. Another option is to rely entirely on cellular communications, such as GPRS, EDGE, 3G and LTE. This cellular only approach is impractical due to the capital expenses required for telecom operators to meet the demands of the impending tsunami of mobile data (expected to grow 1800% until 2016). Clearly, there is need for a low-cost wireless networking solution that can be placed in any vehicle and offers reliable connectivity, improved quality of experience and higher safety for drivers and passengers. This solution, we will argue, is vehicular mesh networking.

Drawing from five years of research and our experience with a large testbed of hundreds of taxis and buses, currently under deployment in Porto, Portugal, we will address how city-scale deployment can be achieved and what kind of connectivity, bandwidth, quality of service and application support can be provided as the density of Internet gateways and the density of connected vehicles grows towards widespread deployment. Some attention will also be given to relevant issues in system design such as channel modeling, mobility patterns, networking protocols and large-scale simulation with manageable complexity. Finally, we will show how a vehicular mesh network can be used as a highly dense urban scanner, producing real-time data on-the-move, which can be leveraged from the cloud to help manage future cities, protect our environment and improve our quality of life.

Short Bio

João Barros is an Associate Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Porto, Founder and CEO of Veniam'Works and Founding Director of the Institute for Telecommunications (IT) in Porto, Portugal. He was a Fulbright scholar at Cornell University and has held visiting appointments at MIT and Carnegie Mellon. He also teaches at the Porto Business School and co-founded two recent startups, Streambolico and Veniam'Works, commercializing wireless video and vehicular communication technologies, respectively. Between 2009 and 2012, Dr. Barros served as National Director of the Carnegie Mellon Portugal Program, a five-year international partnership funded by the Portuguese Foundation of Science and Technology, with a total budget of 56M Euros.

In recent years, João Barros has been Principal Investigator (PI) and Co-PI of numerous national, European and industry funded projects, co-authoring one book and more than 150 research papers in the fields of networking, information theory and security, with a special focus on smart city technologies, network coding, physical-layer security, sensor networks, and intelligent transportation systems. Dr. Barros has received several awards, including the 2010 IEEE Communications Society Young Researcher Award for the Europe, Middle East and Africa region, the 2011 IEEE ComSoC and Information Theory Society Joint Paper Award, the 2012 BES National Innovation Award, the 2013 Building Global Innovators Grand Prize (ISCTE-IUL and MIT) and a state-wide best teaching award by the Bavarian State Ministry of Sciences, Research and the Arts.

Dr. Barros is frequently invited as an expert speaker by international organizations such as the European Commission, OECD, ITU, EuroDIG and IEEE. He also worked as an independent consultant for various organizations and projects. Dr. Barros is fluent in Portuguese, German, English, French and Spanish. He received his undergraduate education in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the Universidade do Porto (UP), Portugal and Universitaet Karlsruhe, Germany, a performing arts degree in flute from the Music Conservatory of Porto, and the Ph.D. degree in Electrical Engineering and Information Technology from the Technische Universitaet Muenchen (TUM), Germany.

Abstract of the talk

Researchers in ad hoc networks are used to studying some of the prevalent technical difficulties in networking. Without a fixed infrastructure, challenges such as mobility or wireless communication must be investigated in their purest form. As a consequence one learns a great deal about the fundamentals of networking. In my talk I will present a few exciting research questions that I learned when studying ad hoc networks: I will discuss how mobility leads to distributed complexity, why clock synchronization is unexpectedly difficult, and what difference it makes to assume a more accurate wireless model. Throughout my talk I will present several open questions.

Short Bio

Roger Wattenhofer is a full professor at the Information Technology and Electrical Engineering Department, ETH Zurich, Switzerland. He received his doctorate in Computer Science in 1998 from ETH Zurich. From 1999 to 2001 he was in the USA, first at Brown University in Providence, RI, then at Microsoft Research in Redmond, WA. He then returned to ETH Zurich, originally as an assistant professor at the Computer Science Department.

Roger Wattenhofer's research interests are a variety of algorithmic and systems aspects in computer science and information technology, currently in particular wireless networks, wide area networks, mobile systems, social networks, and physical algorithms. He publishes in different communities: distributed computing (e.g., PODC, SPAA, DISC), networking (e.g., SIGCOMM, MobiCom, SenSys), or theory (e.g., STOC, FOCS, SODA, ICALP). He has served as a PC chair on more than a dozen international  conferences, including MobiHoc in 2005. More information can be found at www.disco.ethz.ch.