Abstract
The talk will describe experiments and opportunities for personal and organizational considerate services to improve people and organizations effectiveness. We will describe several considerate services that can improve human system communication. We will focus on SmartFeedback a system that creates provocative user experience services to support a smart and efficient building and its inhabitants. NASA’s Leed’s platinum Sustainability base was designed to be one of the most efficient office buildings in the world, We focused on the need for people to be part of the way the building achievies its design goals. We created Sweetfeedback a locally deployable USB connected gumball/token dispenser, to help individuals at their desks feel part of the energy efficient community. The client system recognizes and rewards a person for closing windows, turning off monitors, reporting or solving temperature, sound and lighting problems. The smartfeedback server allows people to monitors peoples contributions to the building, methods of transporation with an Android application, gives feedback to help people compete for energy efficiency, and encourages other forms of community support behavior. We are working towards social feedback services that will improve human performance.

Biography
Dr Ted Selker is Associate director of mobility research at Carnegie Mellon Silicon Valley where he has been developing the campus’s research community and also the considerate computing group. He is well known as a creator and tester of new scenarios for working with computing systems. Ted spent ten years as an associate Professor at the MIT Media Laboratory where he created the Context Aware Computing group, co-directed the Caltech/MIT Voting Technology Project, and directed a CI/IDI: kitchen of the future/ product design of the future project. His work is noted for creating demonstrations of a more considerate world in which intentions are recognized and respected in complex domains, such as kitchens, cars, on phones and in email. Ted’s work takes the form of prototyping concept products supported by cognitive science research.

His successes at targeted product creation and enhancement earned him the role of IBM Fellow and director of User Systems Ergonomics Research. He has also served as a consulting professor at Stanford University, taught at Hampshire, University of Massachusetts at Amherst and Brown Universities and worked at Xerox PARC and Atari Research Labs.

Ted's innovation has been responsible for profitable and award winning products ranging from notebook computers to operating systems. For example, his design of the TrackPoint in-keyboard pointing device is used in many notebook computers; his visualizations have made impacts ranging from improving the performance of the PowerPC to usability OS/2 ThinkPad setup to Google maps, his adaptive help system has been the basis of products as well. Ted’s work has resulted in numerous awards, patents, and papers and has often been featured in the press. Ted was co-recipient of the Computer Science Policy Leader Award for Scientific American 50 in 2004, the American Association for People with Disabilities Thomas Paine Award for his work on voting technology in 2006 and the Telluride Tech fest award in 2008.

Abstract
Elasticity is seen as one of the main characteristics of Cloud Computing today. Social computing, as one of the most prominent applications deployed on Cloud infrastructures, as well as Service and Software Engineering would gain significantly from better understanding the main principles of elasticity. In this talk I will discuss the main principles of elasticity, present a fresh look at this problem, and examine how to integrate people in the form of human-based computing and software services into one composite system, which can be modeled, programmed, and instantiated on a large scale in an elastic way.

Biography
Schahram Dustdar is Full Professor of Computer Science (Informatics) with a focus on Internet Technologies, heading the Distributed Systems Group. From 2004-2010 he was Honorary Professor of Information Systems at the Department of Computing Science at the University of Groningen (RuG), The Netherlands. From 1999 - 2007 he worked as the co-founder and chief scientist of Caramba Labs Software AG in Vienna (acquired by Engineering NetWorld AG), a venture capital co-funded software company focused on software for collaborative processes in teams. Caramba Labs was nominated for several (international and national) awards. Since 2011 he is also director of the Pacific Controls Cloud Computing Research Lab at the TU Vienna.

He received the ACM Distinguished Scientist award in 2009 and receeived the IBM Faculty Award in 2012. He is Editor in Chief of Computing (SCI-ranked Springer journal), an Associate Editor of IEEE Transactions on Services Computing, and an Editorial Board member of IEEE Internet Computing.

Abstract
Taiwan is located in a tectonically active zone. Three quarters of the island comprises hilly and mountainous areas, with small drainage basins, fractured rock formations, and steep stream gradients. Taiwan also has a tropical/sub-tropical climate, with heavy rainfall in the summer typhoon season. The combination of steep slope gradients, fragmented surface materials, and abundant water naturally leads to landslides and debris flows, causing casualties and heavy economic losses to the affected areas. This paper presents the conceptual framework of an early warning system for rainfall-induced shallow landslides on a regional scale and technical issues associated with the implementation of the system. The system consists of two main parts: a processing chain, and a validation component. To predict areas where landslides are likely to occur, the processing chain uses the inputs of (1) radar rainfall data showing the spatiotemporal pattern of precipitation; and (2) geomorphic, geologic, land cover, and soil data of the region. Synchronization tools are required to ensure that data from different sources and resolutions can be combined and processed in near real-time. Data analysis is typically based on statistical models or physically based models. The result of the process chain is a landslide susceptibility map, delineating areas with different probabilities for landslide occurrence. The accuracy of the map must be validated. Mapping landslides from high-resolution satellite images (e.g., FORMOSAT II images) and comparing the mapped landslides with predicted landslides is a common validation method. A variety of semi-automatic techniques have been developed for mapping landslides from satellite images, including visual analysis, the maximum likelihood classifier, the normalized differential vegetation index, multiple change detection, and object-based image analysis. There are other data sources for validation. For example, the Debris Flow Monitoring System maintained by Taiwan’s Soil and Water Conservation Bureau can provide timely data for the occurrence of debris flows. And, as witnessed in recent disasters such as the Great East Japan Earthquake and Tsunami, volunteered geographic information (VGI) through social media is also valuable for validating landslide prediction. Similar to the process chain, a major challenge facing the validation phase is how to derive useful information for emergency management from various data sources. A landslide early warning system is therefore an information system that requires the use of data and techniques from different fields including meteorology, hydrology, geomorphology, remote sensing, and geospatial information science.

Biography
Kang-tsung (Karl) Chang received his B.S. in geography from National Taiwan University (NTU) and M.A. and Ph.D., also in geography, from Clark University. He had a 34-year teaching career in the United States, before returning to Taiwan to teach at NTU in 2005. Currently, he is a chair professor at Kainan University and an adjunct professor of geography at NTU. His research interests include geographic information system (GIS) and its applications, natural hazards, and spatial analysis. He is author of numerous journal articles on GIS, landslide modeling and landslide mapping, and Introduction to Geographic Information Systems (6th edition) published by McGraw-Hill.