ICWS'03 Keynotes

Keynote 1: Web Services and The Evolving Information Market In The SMB Sector

Speaker: Dr. Ephraim Feig, IEEE Fellow



Date: June 24, 2003

Abstract:  Today, very sophisticated applications are becoming more accessible to more and more users, but typically they must be put together and serviced by specialists. The SMB market- comprising small to middle businesses, typically defined as those with annual revenues less than $500 million- is ideally poised to reap the rewards of this evolution. Information-based products and services that hitherto were only available to the large and wealthy can now be enjoyed by smaller organizations. But more and more they will be delivered and hosted by third party experts.

As was the case with the larger organizations before, the major cost of adopting advanced information technologies will involve integration into legacy systems. Web Services will be the glue that will enable the cost-efficient integration required by the SMB community. In this presentation, I will describe how Kintera is using Web Services to broaden its market reach by allowing its numerous partners- themselves typically small businesses- to enhance their offerings by seamlessly integrating to its back-end CRM, CMS, eMarketing and ecommerce systems.

Bio:  Dr. Ephraim Feig is CTO and CMO of Kintera, responsible for the company's overall technology and marketing strategy. Prior to Kintera, Dr. Feig spent 20 years with IBM, where his most recently held positions were Program Director of Emerging Technologies in the Research Division and Program Director of Media Platforms in the Internet Division.  In 1992, he was elected Fellow of the IEEE for his technical and theoretical contributions.  Dr. Feig has received 14 IBM Invention Achievement Awards, was awarded 32 international patents (17 in the U.S.) and has 19 more published and pending. He has published more than 100 articles in technical journals and conference proceedings in the areas of e-business, multimedia technologies, signal processing and theoretical computer science.  Dr. Feig has taught at seven institutions of higher education, including Columbia University, The City College of New York, and New York Polytechnic Institute. He received his Ph.D. in Mathematics from The Graduate Center of the City University of New York. 

Keynote 2: Web Services R&D Directions
Speakers:
Dr. Jen-Yao Chung, Program Director, IBM T.J. Watson Research Center
Dr. Liang-Jie (LJ) Zhang, Research Staff Memebr, IBM T.J. Watson Research Center

Date: June 24, 2003

Abstract:  Web services are Internet enabled re-usable application components that are described in understandable interfaces represented in WSDLs and communicated in a standard protocol defined by SOAP. We can implement Web services in different languages and deploy them in hetrogeneous application platforms as well as hetrogeneous operating systems. In fact, creating a Web service from scratch or from existing applications is a mechanical process by using the available web services tools. However, how to use Web services efficiently and effectively to build adaptive e-business solutions is a real challenging research topic. Specifically, when creating a Web services, we are facing the first challenge issue Web services interoperability, which is required to allow different Web services deployed in different systems to communicate with each other. Then the next challenging issue is how to dynamically find a candidate set of Web services from heterogeneous Web services registries for building a Web service-based solution. After that, adaptively composing the available Web services to match business requirements is another challenging research topic as well. Therefore, we categorize the Web services R&D challenging issues into five major categories, namely, Interoperability, Federated Discovery, Dynamic Composition, Monitoring and Management, and Security and Privacy. In this talk, we will present research and development directions that could be used to address these challenging issues. Research prototypes related to advanced Web services discovery and dynamic Web services flow composition will be demonstrated in this talk. We will cover Web services security and management in the context of Web Services Interoperability and semantic computing. We will conclude with our view of the Web Services future trends and direction.