Plenary Panel: From EDGE to CLOUD

Title:	From EDGE to CLOUD
Date/Time:	Thursday July 11, 15:45 - 17:00 Location: Aula Magna Ballroom, Universita' degli Studi di Milano
Summary:	Edge computing is gaining momentum as part of the new distributed computing/systems paradigm to address the challenges and opportunities in areas such as IoT, 5G and AI/ML. The hype is reaching its crescendo with many major industry players announcing their EDGE strategies/offerings/products, the launch of Linux Foundation Edge initiative and excitements in academia. At the same time, the CLOUD continues to serve as a focal point for much existing and planned network functionality moving forward. This panel of industry and academic leaders will discuss the opportunities and challenges at the intersection of EDGE and CLOUD systems, including: What are the research and industrialization problems to be solved? What do you view as the most important issue that need to be solved (such as programming, security, privacy, durability, or trust) in the EDGE/CLOUD environment? What are some key use-cases from industry and academic perspectives?
Chair:	Nimish Radia Nimish Radia, Ph.D., is an experienced executive in the IT, mobile, telecom, and finance industry with a strong combination of technology expertise and business acumen. He has proven leadership in transforming technology into multi-million dollar profitable vertical and horizontal solutions spanning Web Scale Service and Architecture, Service Delivery Platforms (SDPs) for next generation communication and collaboration services, Identity and Context-Aware Services, Mobile Computing, Targeted Advertising, Big Data and Cloud computing. Dr. Radia is currently North America Head of Global Artificial Intelligence (AI Accelerator (GAIA). He is leading Ericcson's R&D and innovation efforts in Silicon Valley for next generation 5G and AI-driven Products, Services and Software for telecommunication and other industry verticals. He is also responsible for Global Ecosystem Strategy and Execution for GAIA. Before this role, he was responsible for 5G for Industries - an ecosystem centric approach to crate 5G based value for Media, IIoT and other industries and leading various groups within Ericsson Research including AI and Service Computing. Before joining Ericcson, he was Advanced Technology Executive at Sun for US Communications, Media and Entertainment Sales. In this role, he led cross company virtual R&D team accountable for creating revenue-generating solutions using Open Source Software Stack (LAMP, OpenID/Liberty, Open Social, etc.) for mobile broadband providers ecosystem. Prior to Sun, Nimish was senior member of IBM Research and Advanced Software Technology Group driving R&D projects with customers globally. Nimish has been recognized several times for his technology and sales achievements. He holds 8 patents and 15+ invention disclosures and industry publications.
Chair:	Geoffrey Charles Fox Fox received a Ph.D. in Theoretical Physics from Cambridge University where he was Senior Wrangler. He is now a distinguished professor of Engineering, Computing, and Physics at Indiana University where he is director of the Digital Science Center. He previously held positions at Caltech, Syracuse University, and Florida State University after being a postdoc at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, and Peterhouse College Cambridge. He has supervised the Ph.D. of 73 students and published around 1300 papers (over 500 with at least ten citations) in physics and computing with an hindex of 77 and over 35000 citations. He is a Fellow of APS (Physics) and ACM (Computing) and works on the interdisciplinary interface between computing and applications. Current work is in Biology, Pathology, Sensor Clouds and Ice-sheet Science, Image processing, Deep Learning and Particle Physics. His architecture work is built around High-performance computing enhanced Software Defined Big Data Systems on Clouds and Clusters. The analytics focuses on scalable parallel machine learning. He is an expert on streaming data and robot-cloud interactions. He is involved in several projects to enhance the capabilities of Minority Serving Institutions. He has experience in online education and its use in MOOCs for areas like Data and Computational Science.
Panelist:	Fatemeh Jalali Dr. Fatemeh Jalali joined IBM Research Australia as a research scientist after finishing her PhD at The University of Melbourne in 2015. Her main research interests include IoT, Edge computing, machine learning and energy consumption, in which she has authored several research papers and patents. Dr. Jalali is a strong advocate of diversity, equality and wellbeing within the workplace and is actively involved in encouraging and inspiring young people, especially women, in the engineering and ICT through collaborations with non-profit professional organizations. Both her technical activities and STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) promotion activities are recognized by various professional organizations. Fatemeh was awarded as one of Australia's Most Innovative Engineers in 2018 by Engineer Australia, and was also selected as one of the 200 Most Qualified Young Researchers by Heidelberg Laureate Forum 2017.
Panelist:	Judy Qiu Prof. Judy Qiu is an associate professor of Intelligent Systems Engineering at Indiana University, where she leads the Intel Parallel Computing Center. She has conducted research in areas in big data analytics at the intersection of Cloudbg, Edge and HPC technologies. This includes a focus on programming models that support machine learning and graph computation, ranging from storage to analysis. Her research has been funded by NSF CAREER, NIH, Microsoft, Google, Intel, NEC and Indiana University. She is recently chair of the STREAM-ML workshop for the IEEE BigData 2019 and BDEC2 2018 workshop, following the leadership of several workshops, doctoral symposia and summer schools in big data, AI and HPC areas. She is on the editorial board of the International Journal of Cloud Computing.
Panelist:	Umakishore Ramachandran Prof. Umakishore Ramachandran received his Ph. D. in Computer Science from the University of Wisconsin, Madison in 1986, and has been on the faculty of Georgia Tech since then. For two years (July 2003 to August 2005) he served as the Chair of the Core Computing Division within the College of Computing. Currently, he is leading a project that deals with large-scale situation awareness using distributed camera networks and multi-modal sensing with applications to surveillance, connected vehicles, and transportation. He led the definition of the curriculum and the implementation for an online MS program in Computer Science (OMSCS) using MOOC technology for the College of Computing, which is currently providing an opportunity for students to pursue a low-cost graduate education in computer science internationally. He is the recipient of an NSF PYI Award in 1990, the Georgia Tech doctoral thesis advisor award in 1993, the College of Computing Outstanding Senior Research Faculty award in 1996, the College of Computing Dean's Award in 2003 and 2014, the College of Computing William ``Gus'' Baird Teaching Award in 2004, the ``Peter A. Freeman Faculty Award" from the College of Computing in 2009 and in 2013, the Outstanding Faculty Mentor Award from the College of Computing in 2014, and became an IEEE Fellow in 2014.
Panelist:	Azimeh Sefidcon Dr. Azimeh Sefidcon is cloud systems and platforms research director at Ericsson with a keen interest in technologies that impact societies and human lives for better. She holds a PhD degree in Electrical and computer engineering from Concordia University, Montreal Canada in the area of mobility and networks, a master degree in engineering in Intelligent networks and a master degree in engineering on computer hardware. She has more than 25 years of experience in research and development. Currently she puts her mind and effort to envisioning and pioneering the future technologies in the area of computing among other things. It is her adamant belief that we should never be satisfied with what we already know.
Panelist:	Massimo Villari Prof. Massimo Villari is Full Professor in Computer Science at University of Messina (Italy). He is actively working as IT Security and Distributed Systems Analyst in Cloud Computing, virtualization and Storage and one of the creator of Osmotic Computing Paradigm. For the EU Projects “RESERVOIR” he leaded the IT security activities of the whole project. For the EU Project “VISION-CLOUD”and H2020-BEACON, he covered the role of architectural designer for UniME. He was Scientific ICT Responsible in the EU Project frontierCities, the Accelerator of FIWARE on Smart Cities – Smart Mobility. He is strongly involved in EU Future Internet initiatives, specifically Cloud Computing and Security in Distributed Systems. He is co-author of more of 190 scientific publications and patents in Cloud Computing (Cloud Federation), Distributed Systems, Wireless Network, Network Security, Cloud Security and Cloud and IoTs, and recently in Osmotic Computing. He was General Chair of ESOCC 2015 and IEEE-ISCC 2016. Since 2011 he is a Fellow of IARIA, recognized as a Cloud Computing Expert, and since 2011 he is also involved in the activities of the FIArch, the EU Working Group on Future Internet Architecture. In 2014 was recognized by an independent assessment (IEEE Cloud Computing Transaction, Issue April 2014) as one of World-Wide active scientific researchers, top 27 classification, in Cloud Computing Area. He is General Chair of IEEE-ICFEC 2019 and Workshop Co-Chair in IEEE-CIC 2018. He will be General Chair of IEEE CCGRID in 2021 in Messina(Sicily). Currently he is the Head of Computer Science School and Rector delegate on ICT for whole University of Messina.