Keynote Lectures

Cloud Computing - State-of-the-Art and Future Research Trends
Eleni Karatza, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece, Greece

Connecting Services to the Web of Data
John Domingue, Independent Researcher, United Kingdom, United Kingdom

What Do We Know and How Well Do We Know It? Current Knowledge about Software Engineering Practices
David Budgen, School of Engineering & Computing Sciences, Durham University Mountjoy, United Kingdom, United Kingdom

Cloud Computing - State-of-the-Art and Future Research Trends

Eleni Karatza
Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece

Brief Bio
Helen Karatza is a Professor Emeritus in the Department of Informatics at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece, where she teaches courses in the postgraduate and undergraduate level, and supervises doctoral and postdoctoral research. Dr. Karatza's research interests include Computer Systems Modeling and Simulation, Performance Evaluation, Grid and Cloud Computing, Energy Efficiency in Large Scale Distributed Systems, Resource Allocation and Scheduling and Real-time Distributed Systems. Dr. Karatza has authored or co-authored over 215 technical papers and book chapters including five papers that earned best paper awards at international conferences. She is senior member of IEEE, ACM and SCS, and she served as an elected member of the Board of Directors at Large of the Society for Modeling and Simulation International. She served as Chair and Keynote Speaker in International Conferences. Dr. Karatza is the Editor-in-Chief of the Elsevier Journal “Simulation Modeling Practice and Theory” and Senior Associate Editor of the “Journal of Systems and Software” of Elsevier. She was Editor-in-Chief of “Simulation Transactions of The Society for Modeling and Simulation International” and Associate Editor of “ACM Transactions on Modeling and Computer Simulation”. She served as Guest Editor of Special Issues in International Journals. More info about her activities/publications can be found in http://agent.csd.auth.gr/~karatza/

Abstract
Clouds have been very popular, and their performance becomes more important due to the increase of users and applications. Currently, many enterprises are adopting Clouds to achieve high performance for their applications at low costs.

Because of the nature of these systems, there are important issues that must be addressed, such as: resource allocation, efficient scheduling, energy conservation, reliability, security and trust, cost, availability, quality. Effective management of cloud resources is crucial to use effectively the power of these systems and achieve high system performance. Furthermore, software structures that best exploit clouds capabilities while providing applications compatibility should be examined.

Cloud computing is a concept that has emerged from grid computing; it provides users the ability to acquire computational resources on demand from its virtually infinite pool on a pay-as-you-go basis.
The cloud computing paradigm can offer various types of services, such as computational resources for HPC applications, web services, social networking, etc. Resource allocation and scheduling is a difficult task in clouds where there are many alternative heterogeneous computers. If cloud computing is going to be used for HPC, appropriate methods must be considered for allocating resources to user requests efficiently, VM scalability, as well as effectively scheduling the tasks. The scheduling algorithms must seek a way to maintain a good response time to leasing cost ratio. Furthermore, adequate data security and availability are critical issues that have to be considered along with energy-efficient solutions that are required to minimize the impact of cloud computing on the environment.

Connecting Services to the Web of Data

John Domingue
Independent Researcher, United Kingdom

Brief Bio
Prof. John Domingue is the Deputy Director of the Knowledge Media Institute at The Open University and the President of STI International, a semantics focused networking organization. He has published over 200 refereed articles in the areas of Artificial Intelligence and the Web and his current work is focused on how semantic technology can automate the management, development and use of Web services and on the relationship between Linked Data, rich media and education. Over the last decade John Domingue has served as the Scientific Director for three large European projects covering semantics, services, the Web and business process management. He current serves as Chair of the Steering Committee for the ESWC Conference Series. From 2008-2012 he served as a member of the Future Internet Assembly Steering Committee which helped coordinate the activities of over 150 EU projects with a combined budget of over 500M Euros. He is the Project Coordinator for two EU projects: FORGE which will connect Europe’s main Internet research and experimentation facilities to eLearning and Linked Data technologies and the European Data Science Academy which will increase the number of skilled data scientists within European industry. He is the founder and Director of the ESWC Summer and serves on the editorial board for the Journal of Web Semantics and the Applied Ontology Journal.

Abstract
Over the last few years we have seen a rapid growth in the Web of Data where now statistics indicate that there are around 100 billion semantic statements available on the Web. Governments, especially the US and UK Governments, are producing hundreds of thousands of public datasets in machine readable form on the Web using Web standards such as RDF(S) and SPARQL. Major Web and Media players such as Google, Facebook, Yahoo!, Microsoft and the BBC are now using this technology. In this talk I will describe work that we have been carrying out in the area which we term "Linked Services" which seeks to connect the spheres of Linked Data and Web services to form a new global computing platform. I will illustrate the talk with a number of applications we have been involved.

What Do We Know and How Well Do We Know It? Current Knowledge about Software Engineering Practices

David Budgen
School of Engineering & Computing Sciences, Durham University Mountjoy, United Kingdom
www.durham.ac.uk/david.budgen

ICSOFT-EA

Brief Bio
David Budgen is a Professor of Software Engineering in the School of Engineering & Computing Sciences at Durham University in the UK. His research interests include software design, design environments, healthcare computing and empirical software engineering. He is the author of the book Software Design (Pearson Addison Wesley, 2nd edition 2003) and has recently completed a new book Evidence-Based Software Engineering & Systematic Reviews in collaboration with Barbara Kitchenham and Pearl Brereton. He was awarded a BSc(Hons) in Physics and a PhD in Theoretical Physics from Durham University, following which he worked as a research scientist for the Admiralty and then held academic positions at Stirling University and Keele University before moving to his present post at Durham University in 2005. He is a member of the IEEE Computer Society, the ACM and the Institution of Engineering & Technology (IET).

Abstract
The various prescriptions for how software systems can be developed and maintained make wide use of a set of ‘practice models’ that have become established over the years. Many of these were originally formulated by expert practitioners, usually by codifying successful and largely individual experiences (such as plan-driven forms for software design, software design patterns, testing strategies, etc.). Demonstration of their effectiveness has likewise tended to be essentially anecdotal, making it difficult for the would-be adopter to determine how useful a particular practice might be within their own environment.
Over the past thirty years there has been a growing interest in using empirical studies to help evaluate the effectiveness of software engineering techniques. However, the reliance upon individual human skill that is usually involved in software development, and the difficulty of obtaining adequate number of participants for such studies, also means that these have rarely been able to provide any definitive guidance about how, when and where adoption of a given technique might be appropriate.
More recently, the evidence-based approach has focused upon aggregating studies of a particular phenomenon in order to obtain stronger evidence about effectiveness. My talk will review what we mean by evidence-based research practices, and discuss how far these have currently been able to provide the sort of guidance that may be able to inform practice and teaching, as well as how they need to evolve in order to achieve better quality outcomes.