Is IoT Ready for the Real World? A Systems Research Perspective
Gian Pietro Picco, University of Trento, Italy
The Past, Present and Future of Business Process Management
Jan Mendling, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Germany
The CLOUD: Trigger for a Socio-Economic Revolution
Tobias Hoellwarth, EuroCloud Europe, Austria
Storing Critical Data in the Cloud: Challenges and Solutions
Miguel P. Correia, Universidade de Lisboa, Portugal
Is IoT Ready for the Real World? A Systems Research Perspective
Gian Pietro Picco
University of Trento
Italy
Brief Bio
Gian Pietro Picco is a professor in the Department of Information Engineering and Computer Science (DISI) at the University of Trento, Italy. His research spans the fields of software engineering, middleware, and networking, and is currently oriented towards wireless sensor networks, Internet of Things and Cyber-Physical systems, mobile computing, and large-scale distributed systems. The research performed in his group combines theoretical study and in-field validation in real-world applications, and has led to several awards, including a "Most Influential Paper" at ICSE'07 (for a paper published a decade earlier) and Best Paper Awards at IPSN (2009, 2011, 2015), PerCom (2012), and EWSN (2018). He is an associate editor for ACM Trans. on Sensor Networks (TOSN), and has served in the same role for IEEE Trans. on Software Engineering (TSE) and the J. of Pervasive and Mobile Computing. He is also the co-Editor-in-Chief of the newly-created ACM Transactions on the Internet of Things (TIOT).
Abstract
The Internet of Things (IoT) is a compelling vision attracting considerable interest from both industry and academia. However, it is also one where it is often hard to separate the hype from what is concretely in reach of today's technology. In this talk, I take my own decade-long research on a key enabler of the IoT vision, wireless sensor networks (WSNs), as the opportunity to reflect on the present and future of research on IoT. My perspective is eminently system-driven, and revolves about a real-world application we deployed in-field and for which our recent research reports an 80x improvement in energy consumption w.r.t. the initial baseline. These improvements are representative of what has been achieved by WSN research, and may be illustrative of what we can expect in the near future from IoT at large. On the other hand, I also argue that the root of these achievements lies in a few key factors whose presence is not immediately evident in today's IoT research. These factors, along with a few challenges and current trends discussed in the talk, are going to determine whether and how the IoT vision will ultimately materialize.
The Past, Present and Future of Business Process Management
Jan Mendling
Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin
Germany
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Brief Bio
Jan Mendling is the Einstein-Professor of Process Science with the Department of Computer Science at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Germany. His research interests include various topics in the area of business process management and information systems. He has published more than 450 research papers and articles, among others in Management Information Systems Quarterly, ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology, IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, Journal of the Association of Information Systems and Decision Support Systems. He is a department editor for Business and Information Systems Engineering, member of the board of the Austrian Society for Process Management , one of the founders of the Berlin BPM Community of Practice , organizer of several academic events on process management, and a member of the IEEE Task Force on Process Mining. He is co-author of the textbooks Fundamentals of Business Process Management, Second Edition, and Wirtschaftsinformatik, 12th Edition, , which are extensively used in information systems education.
Abstract
Business process management has its roots in workflow modeling and office automation in the 1970s. Since then, it has been closely intertwined with various trends and developments in the area of information system engineering. This talk reflects upon this co-evolution and comments on emerging trends of both fields including blockchain and robotic process automation.
The CLOUD: Trigger for a Socio-Economic Revolution
Tobias Hoellwarth
EuroCloud Europe
Austria
Brief Bio
Dr. Höllwarth has worked as a corporate consultant specialized in IT projects for over
20 years. In addition to his work at the Vienna University of Economics and Business he
also founded the companies Höllwarth Consulting, ICT Advisory Network and Sourcing
International. Dr. Tobias Höllwarth was a founding member of EuroCloud Austria
where he is today a member of the Board and is the director for the international
StarAudit program and president of EuroCloud Europe. He acts as an expert for
questions pertaining to certification at the Austrian Standards Institute and is leader of
the Austrian delegation that participates in negotiations with the International
Organization for Standardization (ISO) where cloud computing is concerned.
Abstract
When Michelangelo painted the fresco depicting the creation of Adam in the Sistine Chapel, he illustrated how the divine spark jumped from God to the first human being. God created Adam, and in doing so changed the world. The Cloud is likewise such a spark. It is one of the four SMAC elements, part of the “nexus of forces”—but most importantly, it is the visible tool of the industrial revolution that we are lucky enough to be experiencing right now. This presentation will point out the similarities between the Cloud and previous socio-economic revolutions that changed human existence, and explain the positive as well as the disastrous economic consequences that have become visible already. It will delineate the differences between the Cloud, the Internet of Things, Industry 4.0 and other well-known buzz words. Dr. Tobias Höllwarth, president of EuroCloud Europe, will also focus on the current situation of the European society, which is not yet well prepared for this massive change—as can also be seen in the results of many recent political elections. He will explain in what ways the digital transformation of our world causes political radicalization, raising unemployment and with it the frustration and disorientation of more and more individuals. One of the lessons of this presentation will be several examples of how we can participate actively in this fast-changing game and support cloud service customers as well as providers.
Storing Critical Data in the Cloud: Challenges and Solutions
Miguel P. Correia
Universidade de Lisboa
Portugal
Brief Bio
Miguel Correia is an Associate Professor at Instituto Superior Técnico (IST) of Universidade de Lisboa (ULisboa). He is a Senior Researcher at INESC-ID and currently the Scientific Coordinator of the Distributed Systems Group (GSD). He is a non-executive member of the Board of Associação DNS.PT, the registry for domain pt. He has been involved in several international and national research projects related to cybersecurity, including the SafeCloud, PCAS, TCLOUDS, ReSIST, CRUTIAL, and MAFTIA European projects. He has more than 150 publications and is Senior Member of the IEEE. His research is focused on (cyber)security and dependability (aka fault tolerance), typically in distributed systems, in the context of different applications (blockchain, cloud, mobile).
Abstract
Cloud storage services may fail in several ways, from temporary outages to data corruption, due to accidental faults or intentional actions. This talk starts by presenting a set of challenges that exist when storing critical data in the cloud, such as health and financial data. Then, it introduces a set of solutions to these problems: storing data in several clouds, Byzantine fault tolerance, encryption, secret sharing, and homomorphic digital signatures. These solutions are not presented in a void, but in the context of a set of services we have been developing for a few years: a cloud-of-clouds storage service called DepSky, the SCFS cloud-backed file system, and the SafeAudit storage integrity verification service.