Keynote Speakers

Abstract

Computer systems are increasingly shifting away from the traditional desktop computing. Driven by technological advances we see people using a manifold of small devices like mobile phones or handheld computers. Devices become mobile; location-awareness is provided by satellite navigation; the integration with digital infrastructures open up new areas of applications leading to a shift towards digital forms of work and increasingly of social applications. An intermixing use in both work life and private life, and in public and in private situations is recognized.

In the coming phase a large part of computer systems will become invisible being embedded into our houses, offices and public space. They may even be worn at our bodies and embedded in our clothes. All these developments lead to a different notion of human-computer relationship. The direct personal devotion to the device will not exist any more. Various input and output channels will enable users to benefit from a digital and device infrastructure which is in their surrounding - leading to interaction with the ambience and to Ambient Media Systems. Seamless applications of explicit and implicit interaction as well as mixtures of reactive and proactive behaviour arise.

In the talk we will characterize Ambient Media and Systems from different viewpoints and work out several chasms whose bridging lead to research challenges. Physicality and virtuality are melting, the notion of space needs a revised understanding, multi-modal interaction and new interaction paradigms are approaching, privacy and acceptability need to be addressed. All these challenges require interdisciplinary approaches.

Biography

Michael Weber received his Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Kaiserslautern, Germany. He worked in the avionics industry on parallel applications and in-flight telephone systems and at the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI) as a senior scientist on AV-conferencing and application sharing systems.

In 1994 he was appointed professor for distributed systems at the University of Ulm in southern Germany where he continued his research on multimedia systems and on collaboration infrastructures now based on software agents. Since 2000 he is director of the Institute of Media Informatics where the university research on human computer interaction, multimedia, computer graphics and interaction design is concentrated. His research interests span the areas of mobile and ubiquitous computing, and human-computer interaction.

Dr. Weber has led various projects funded by the state of Baden-Wurttemberg, the German Ministry for Education and Research (BMBF), the European Commission and by industrial partners in application areas like e-learning systems, support systems for online studies, car-to-car communication and intelligent environments. He has authored and co-authored over 100 peer reviewed contributions, edited three books and has written a textbook.

Abstract

The future eSociety approaches quickly with every progress in building the technological artifacts supporting it. Wireless networks and nano-devices already blend the virtual and physical world in creative ways that easily go beyond the imaginable. Networked embedded control systems build daily more and more veins in the nervous system of our world animating industrial, artistic, learning, scientific and other 'opportunistic ecosystems' of single devices / departments / enterprises integrated into a larger and more complex emerging infrastructure that we refer to as Cyber-Physical Ecosystem (CPE).

The talk will sheds light on how to unleash the power of the emerging eNetwork middleware embedded into the complex ecosystem's fabric in order to craft desired functionalities targeting various applications among which: blackout-free electricity generation and distribution, optimization of energy consumption, disaster response through deployment of holistic security ecosystems, pandemic mitigation, networked transportation and manufacturing, environmental monitoring and sustainability assessment.

Using the latest knowledge of complexity science a methodological framework for evolving large scale CPE from the 'bottom-up' will be introduced. We will unravel the ‘eNetwork DNA’ and put it to work similar to how DNA molds the fundamental cells in natural systems such that they can evolve to accommodate gradual or abrupt change in the environment or internal operating conditions. The ‘eNetwork cells’ will be adaptively crafted through dynamic protocols enabling service composition into novel architectural components.

Biography

Professor Mihaela Ulieru holds the Canada Research Chair in Adaptive Information Infrastructures for the e-Society since 2005 when she also established (with Canada Foundation for Innovation funding) and leads the Adaptive Risk Management Laboratory (ARM Lab) researching Complex Networks as Control paradigm for Complex Systems to develop Evolvable Architectures for Resilient eNetworked Applications and Holistic Security Ecosystems. She was recently appointed on Canada's Science, Technology and Innovation Council by the Minister of Industry, to advise the Government and provide foresight on innovation issues related to ICT impact on Canada's economic development and social well-being against international standards of excellence.

Prof. Ulieru has a PhD in Diagnostics and Controls of Dynamical Systems, from Darmstadt University of Technology in Germany and was on Faculty at Brunel University in London, UK and at the University of Calgary in Canada where she held the Junior Nortel Chair in Intelligent Manufacturing and founded the Emergent Information Systems Lab. As member of the governing board (AdCom) of the IEEE Industrial Electronics Society, Prof. Ulieru founded the international Industrial Informatics research community and its two major forums: the IEEE Industrial Informatics Conferences and the IEEE-IES Industrial Agents Technical Committee. She is a highly thought expert in distributed intelligent systems, topic on which she is a frequent keynote and tutorial speaker as well as distinguished visiting professor internationally. Currently she holds appointments on several international S&T advisory boards and review panels, among which: the Science and Engineering Research Council of Singapore, the Scientific Council of the EU Network of Excellence in Intelligent Manufacturing, Australia's Digital Ecosystems and Business Intelligence Institute Advisory Board, the Natural Science and Engineering Research Council of Canada's Advisory Panel on International Strategy and as expert on the US NSF Cyber-Systems and the EU FP7 Review Panels.