Title: From Content-Centric Internet to Tactile Internet: Some Thoughts on Future IoT Architecture Design

Time: 11:00am 

Venue: Room 308, Chow Yei Ching Building, The University of Hong Kong

Speaker(s): Prof Zhi-Li Zhang

Remark(s): 

Professor Zhi-Li Zhang
University of Minnesota

Date:
April 8, 2019
Monday
11:00 am

Venue:
CPD-LG.18
Central Podium
Centennial Campus
The University of Hong Kong

Abstract:

Recent years have witnessed the proliferation of various mobile and sensor devices, from mobile phones to smart home devices. These mobile and sensor technologies – together with a whole gamut of emerging applications they enable --usher a new era of Internet of Things (IoT) services that will revolutionize the way how we live E and interactwith each other and the physical world. For example, various kinds of (physical or virtual) sensors in the physical and/or cyber worlds have not only allowed us to collect a whole gamut of (spatial-temporal) data, but also afforded us the opportunity to apply advanced data analytics, machine learning algorithms to extract actionable knowledge (or AI),make intelligent decisions in response to events, take actions and effect changes in the physical world, e.g., via remotely controlling and issuing commands to smart (mobile or embedded) devices (i.e., actuators) -- namely, the so-called "Tactile" Internet.Emerging IoT applications and services are putting a strain on today's network architecture, which has primarily served as a giant information repository and distribution platform. The challenges posed by emerging IoT applications and services call for re-thinking and re-architecting of existing networking, compute and storage infrastructures. In this talk, we will put forth some initial thoughts on the challenges and architectural design issues for future IoT networks. Leveraging and building upon the CONIA – content (provider)-oriented, namespace-independent network architecture --that we have advocated and have been developing for multimedia content delivery, we advance a new IoTarchitecture -- referred to as IoTa -- that represents a paradigm shift from content delivery to remotely accessing, controlling or steering real or virtual objects (such as sensors or actuators) in perceived real-time by human operators or machines. The proposed IoTa architecture is application-driven and software-defined}. While it borrowsideas from software-defined networking (SDN) and network function virtualization (NFV), it constitutes a refactoring of the conventional "control-data plane separation" by incorporating and integrating information (including content, control and command) delivery, compute and storage functions in a unifying (network architecture) framework.

About the Speaker:

Professor Zhang is McKnight Distinguished University Professor and Qwest Chair Professor at Department of Computer Science & Engineering, University of Minnesota. He received his B.S. degree in Computer Science from Nanjing University, China, and his M.S. and Ph.D.‘ degrees in Computer Science from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Dr. Zhang’s research interests lie broadly in computer communication and networks, Internet technology,multimedia and emerging applications. His past research was centered on the analysis, design and development of scalable Internet QoS solutions to support performance-demanding multimedia applications. His current research focuses on building highly scalable, resilient and secure Internet and cyber-physical systems & infrastructures and developing mechanisms to enhance Internet service availability, reliability and security, and on developing next generation, service-oriented, manageable Internet architectures to provide better support for creation, deployment, operations and management of value-added smart services and underlying networks, including mobile, cloud and content delivery services and networks. Dr. Zhang has published more than 150 journal, conference andworkshop papers. Dr. Zhang has received several honors for his research, and he is co-recipient of a number of Best Paper Awards. He is a Fellow of IEEE.

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Title: HKU Big Data Workshop

Time: 08:00am 

Venue: CPD-LG09, Central Podium Centennial Campus, The University of Hong Kong

Speaker(s): Various

Remark(s): 

The Big Data and Artificial Intelligence Workshop (BDAI) will be held in the University of Hong Kong on 6^th April, 2019. BDAI hosts international speakers from the areas of Big Data and AI, which are important areas in knowledge and world economy. The main goal of BDAI is to provide a platform to exchange research insights and implementation areas. We hope to offer researchers, professors, and students to share their experiences and participate in open discussions. 

More Information at BDAI

Title: Content Recommendation for Viral Social Influence

Time: 01:30pm 

Venue: Room 308, Chow Yei Ching Building, The University of Hong Kong

Speaker(s): Panagiotis Karras

Remark(s): 

Panagiotis Karras
Department of Computer Science
Aarhus University

Date:
April 4, 2019
Thursday
1:30 pm

Venue:
Rm 308
Chow Yei Ching Building
The University of Hong Kong

Abstract:
How do we select content that will become viral in a whole network after we share it with friends or followers? Significant research activity has been dedicated to the problem of strategically selecting a seed set of initial adopters so as to maximize a meme’s spread in a network. Yet this line of work assumes that the success of such a campaign depends solely on the choice of a tunable set of initiators, regardless of how users perceive the propagated meme, which is fixed. Yet inmany real-world settings, the opposite holds: a meme’s propagation depends on users’ perceptions of its tunable characteristics, while the set of initiators is fixed.We address the natural problem that arises in such circumstances: Suggest content, expressed as a limited set of attributes, for a creative promotion campaign that starts out from a given seed set of initiators, so as to maximize its expected spread over a social network. To our knowledge, no previous work addresses this problem. We find that the problem is NP-hard and inapproximable. As a tight approximation guarantee is not admissible, we design an efficient heuristic, Explore-Update, as well as a conventional Greedy solution. Our experimental evaluation demonstrates that Explore-Update selects near-optimal attribute sets with real data, achieves 30% higher spread than baselines, and runs an order of magnitude faster than Greedy.

About the Speaker:
Panagiotis Karras (Panos) is an Associate Professor in Computer Science at Aarhus University. In his research he designs robust and versatile methods for data access, mining, and representation. He earned an MEng in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the National Technical University of Athens and a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Hong Kong. Has has been awarded with a Hong Kong Young Scientist Award, a Lee Kuan Yew Postdoctoral Fellowship at the National University of Singapore, a Teaching Excellence Fellowship at Rutgers Business School, and a Best Faculty Performance Award at the Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technology. Panos' work has been published in venues such as VLDB, KDD, SIGMOD, ICDE, SIGIR, and WWW, and cited over 2000 times. He regularly serves as a PC member and referee for major conferences and journals in those areas.

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Title: Dr Man Ho

Time: 09:30am 

Venue: Room 308, Chow Yei Ching Building, The University of Hong Kong

Speaker(s): 

Remark(s): 

Dr Man Ho

AUDepartment of Computing

The Hong Kong Polytechnic University

Abstract:

Conceptualized 10 years ago as a core component of Bitcoin, blockchain has gained a vast amount of interest. Informally speaking, a blockchain is a distributed, shared, and immutable ledger that maintains a growing list of ordered records. It became extremely popular among the industries in the last few years. Many companies are exploring applications of blockchain beyond cryptocurrencies.In this talk, the speaker will introduce blockchain and highlight some of the latest development in this area. In particular, we will discuss how cryptography helps in the protection of transaction privacy in blockchain-based applications, and why it is crucial. We will also discuss attacks that may circumvent cryptographic protection mechanisms. Topics covered include ring signatures and zero-knowledge proofs and statistical attacks.Finally, we will conclude the talk with challenges related to the adoption of blockchain technologies and insights developed from our experience.

About the Speaker:

Dr. Man Ho Au received his PhD degree from the University of Wollongong in 2009. He is now an assistant professor and a director of the Monash-PolyU-CC Joint Research Lab on Blockchain and Cryptocurrency Technologies at the Department of Computing, the Hong Kong Polytechnic University. His research interests include information security and blockchain technology. He has published over 140 refereed papers in top journal and conferences, including ACM CCS, ACM SIGMOD, NDSS, IEEE TIFS, TC, TKDE, etc. His work received many international recognitions, including the 2009 PET runner-up award for outstanding research in privacy enhancing technologies and best paper awards of ACISP 2016, ISPEC 2017 and ACISP 2018. According to Google Scholar, his h-index is 34 and his work has been cited over 3600 times. He is an expert member of the China delegation of ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 27 working group 2 - Cryptography and Security Mechanisms and a committee member of the Hong Kong Blockchain Society R&D division.