Plenary Panel
Metaverse Services: The Way of Services Towards the Future

Monday July 3, 10:50 - 12:00
Regency Ballroom A/B

With the emergence of new generation of digital technologies, e.g., artificial intelligence, block chain, cloud computing, big data, edge computing, 5G/6G, VR/AR/MR, and the Internet of Things, an exciting era of metaverse is coming. Interacted and linked with the physical world, metaverse offers a platform of a new social ecosystem, dealing with digital twins and empowering virtual-reality symbiosis. In metaverse, social activities and business processes perform based on the sequences of workflow or service processes. Bridging both the virtual space and the real world, such metaverse services are more complicated and present many new challenges and research questions. This panel assembles leading experts from academia and industry to discuss the new challenges, issues, and opportunities of metaverse services and their applications.

Panel Chairs

Professor Xiaofei Xu has been a professor on computer science of Harbin Institute of Technology (HIT) since 1993, and served as the Vice President of HIT, the President of HIT, Weihai Campus from 2015 to 2022. He received his PhD in Computer Science from HIT in 1988. Prof Xu is the fellow and board member of China Computer Federation (CCF), Vice Director of the Steering Committee of Higher Education on Software Engineering of China, Director of the Executive Committee of the Union of MOOC Associations in China, and the leader of the expert group of University-Industry Co-education Program by China Ministry of Education. He was the Chairman of the Technical Committee on Service Computing of CCF during 2016-2019. His research interests include service computing and service engineering, enterprise computing and enterprise interoperability, software engineering, databases and data mining, smart service applications. He has published more than 300 research papers and seven academic books. He has supervised 36 PhD and more than 100 Master students. In 2019, he received the IEEE TCSVC Outstanding Leadership Award. In 2022, he received the CCF Outstanding Contribution Award, the CCF TCSC Life-Time Academic Contribution Award on Service Computing.

Michael Sheng is a professor and Head of School of Computing at Macquarie University, Australia. Before moving to Macquarie University, he spent 10 years at School of Computer Science, the University of Adelaide, serving in a number of senior leadership roles including acting Head and Deputy Head of School of Computer Science. From 1999 to 2001, he also worked at University of New South Wales as a visiting research fellow. Prior to that, he spent 6 years as a senior software engineer in industries. Michael Sheng’s research interests include the Internet of Things (IoT), services computing, big data analytics, machine learning, and Web technologies. He is ranked by Microsoft Academic as one of the Most Impactful Authors in Services Computing (Top 5 All Time) and in Web of Things (Top 20 All Time). Michael Sheng is the recipient of AMiner Most Influential Scholar in IoT (2018), ARC (Australian Research Council) Future Fellowship (2014), Chris Wallace Award for Outstanding Research Contribution (2012), and Microsoft Research Fellowship (2003). He is the Vice Chair of the Executive Committee of the IEEE Technical Community on Services Computing (IEEE TCSVC), the Associate Director of Macquarie University Smart Green Cities Research Center, and a member of the ACS (Australian Computer Society) Technical Advisory Board on IoT.

Panelists

Boualem Benatallah is a full professor of computing at Dublin City University (DCU, Ireland) since Jan 2022. Professor Benatallah has had over 21 years as a research leader and academic (senior lecturer, associate professor, professor and then scientia professor), at UNSW Sydney (Australia). His main research interests are developing fundamental concepts and techniques in Web service composition, services engineering, crowdsourcing services, data curation, cognitive services, and business processes management. He has published more than 300 refereed papers including more than 90 journal papers. Most of his papers appeared in very selective and reputable conferences and journals. Boualem has been General and PC chair of a number of international conferences. He has been guest editor of several special issues for reputable international journals. He is a member of the steering committee of BPM and ICSOC conferences. He is member of the editorial board of numerous international journals including ACM Transactions on Web and IEEE Transactions on Services Computing. He held visiting professor positions at several prestigious research institutes and universities. He was a member of the team (comprising multiple university, government, and industry partners) that constructed the successful bid for the Smart Services CRC (Cooperative Research Centre). He was research leader of the data curation foundry research stream at the Data to Decisions CRC. He is Fellow of the IEEE. He is a member of Executive Committee of IEEE Computer Society's Technical Committee on Business Informatics and Systems.

Zhong Chen is Professor and Director of Metaverse Technology Institute in School of Computer Science at Peking University. Dr Chen graduated and earned his PhD degree from Computer Science and Technology Department of Peking University in 1989, and then joined the faculty of computer science in Peking University. He became full professor in 1995. He was a visiting professor of UCLA from 2001 to 2002. He has been assumed the founding dean position of the School of Software and Microelectronics, Peking University from 2002 to 2010, Chairman of CS Department from 2011-2015. Prof Chen is the fellow and managing director of China Computer Federation (CCF), Vice Director of the Steering Committee of Higher Education on Computer Science and Technology of China, Vice-Chair of China Software Industry Association and Vice-Chair of China Open Source Software Promotion Union (COPU), Director of FinTech and Algorithms Expert Committee of China Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (CSIAM). His research interests include Domain-specific Software Engineering (especially in Banking and Financing, e-Commerce, Digital Government etc.) enterprise digital transformation, smart service applications, Blockchain and Web3 etc. He has published more than 200 research papers and five academic books. He has supervised 35 PhD and more than 100 Master students. He received the 1st Prize National Higher Education Teaching Achievements Award in 2005 and Excellent Teacher Awards for Computer Science and Technology by China Teacher Development Foundation in 2019.

Robert Gazda is a Senior Director in InterDigital's Wireless Networking Lab. Bob is an accomplished engineering professional and technologist with over 20 years of industry experience in wireless telecommunications, networking, and embedded systems. Currently at InterDigital, Bob is leading research and innovation focused on 5G and 6G Distributed and Converged Computing and Communications Architectures. Bob holds a Master, Software Engineering (MSE) degree from Carnegie Mellon University, a MS in Computer Engineering degree from Villanova University, and a BS in Electrical Engineering from Drexel University. His research interests include wireless communications and networking, mobility management, edge & distributed computing, and real-time systems.

Abdulmotaleb El Saddik served as a Distinguished University Professor at the University of Ottawa before joining MBZUAI. He is an internationally-recognized scholar who has made strong contributions to the knowledge and understanding of intelligent multimedia computing, communications and applications. His research focus is on the establishment of digital twins to facilitate the well-being of citizens using AI, IoT, SN, AR/VR, haptics and 5G to allow people to interact in real-time with one another as well as with their smart digital representations in the metaverse. He is the Editor-in-Chief of the ACM Transactions on Multimedia Computing, Communications and Applications (ACM TOMM), and Guest Editor for several Transactions and Journals. He has co-authored 10 books and more than 600 publications and chaired more than 50 conferences and workshops and has supervised more than 150 researchers. He has received research grants and contracts totalling more than $20M. He is the author of the book Haptics Technologies: Bringing Touch to Multimedia. Dr El Saddik is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, Fellow of IEEE, Fellow of the Canadian Academy of Engineering and Fellow of the Engineering Institute of Canada. He is an ACM Distinguished Scientist and has received several awards, including the Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel Award from the German Humboldt Foundation, the IEEE Instrumentation and Measurement Society Technical Achievement Award. He also received IEEE Canada C.C. Gotlieb (Computer) Medal and A.G.L. McNaughton Gold Medal for important contributions to the field of computer engineering and science and the IEEE TCSC Achievement Award for Excellence in Scalable Computing.

Munindar P. Singh is an Alumni Distinguished Graduate Professor in the Department of Computer Science at North Carolina State University. Munindar's research interests include artificial intelligence and multiagent systems with applications in service-oriented computing, cybersecurity, privacy, and social computing. He is a codirector of the DoD-sponsored Science of Security Lablet at NCSU, one of six nationwide. Munindar was the editor-in-chief of the ACM Transactions on Internet Technology from 2012 to 2018 and the editor-in-chief of IEEE Internet Computing from 1999 to 2002. His current editorial service includes IEEE Internet Computing, Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research, Journal of Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems, IEEE Transactions on Services Computing, and ACM Transactions on Intelligent Systems and Technology. Munindar served on the founding board of directors of IFAAMAS, the International Foundation for Autonomous Agents and MultiAgent Systems. He also served on the founding steering committee for the IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing and on the editorial board of the Journal of Web Semantics. Munindar was a general cochair for the 2005 International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multi Agent Systems, the 2016 International Conference on Service-Oriented Computing, and the 2022 IEEE Services Computing Conference. Munindar is a Fellow of AAAI (Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence), AAAS (American Association for the Advancement of Science), ACM (Association for Computing Machinery), and IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers), and was elected a foreign member of Academia Europaea (honoris causa). He has won the ACM/SIGAI Autonomous Agents Research Award, the IEEE TCSVC Research Innovation Award, and the IFAAMAS Influential Paper Award. He won NC State University's Outstanding Graduate Faculty Mentor Award as well as the Outstanding Research Achievement Award (twice). He was selected as an Alumni Distinguished Graduate Professor and elected to NCSU's Research Leadership Academy. Munindar's research has been recognized with awards and sponsorship by (alphabetically) Army Research Lab, Army Research Office, Cisco Systems, Consortium for Ocean Leadership, DARPA, Department of Defense, Ericsson, Facebook, IBM, Intel, National Science Foundation, and Xerox.