Tutorials

Tutorial 1: Monday - August 27, 2012

The Cloud, the Edge & Beneath: Cloud-Sensor Architectures and Optimizations

	Abdelsalam (Sumi) Helal Professor University of Florida USA
Abstract: Driven by increasing urbanization and serious economic and environmental challenges, smart city concepts and projects are emerging in an attempt to bridge the widening gap between supply and demand while reducing urbanization’s impact on the environment. In principle, the path to smart cities is obvious—embed sensors, actuators, and/or computers into objects and spaces that make up the smart city’s important elements. This “smartening” approach is not new, having driven the embedded systems industry for more than two decades. What’s new here are the massive scale and the new ecology that the smartening process requires. As smart cities proliferate, data and applications will be pressed to move to the cloud given its economies of scale and highly anticipated reductions in services costs. In fact, On World has recently reported that the strategy of moving smart home intelligence into the cloud is disrupting the Smart Home market. In this extended talk, we cover alternative architectures for Cloud-Sensor Systems and show how sensors, unlike any resource in the cloud, are difficult to connect to the cloud directly without jeopardizing the cloud scalability and their overall lifetime. We formulate both energy and sentience efficiencies and show their interplay. Sentience efficiency is a novel concept introduced by Dr. Helal and his students which incorporate the application into the optimization equation, which in turn, realizes much more savings in overall energy consumption. We show how the application of sentience efficiency first followed by energy efficiency second lead to a maximally suppressed system dynamics in cloud-sensor systems. Short Biography: Dr. Abdelsalam (Sumi) Helal is a Professor at the Computer and Information Science and Engineering Department (CISE) at the University of Florida. His research interests span the areas of Pervasive Computing, Mobile Computing and networking and Internet Computing. He directs the Mobile and Pervasive Computing Laboratory at the CISE department, and is co-founder and director of the Gator Tech Smart House, an experimental home for applied research in the domain of elder care. He led the technology development of the NIDRR-funded Rehabilitation Engineering Research Center (RERC) on Successful Aging (2001-2007), and is currently leading a new initiative on smart home based personal health and independence, funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Outside of his teaching and research activities, Dr. Helal is the co-founder and an editorial board member of the IEEE Pervasive Computing magazine. He is Editor of the magazine's column on Standards, Tools and Emerging Technologies. He has been on the editorial board of the IEEE Transaction on Mobile Computing, and currently serves as the Networking Area Chair of IEEE Computer magazine. He has published over 200 books, book chapters, journal articles, and conference or workshop papers. He is a Senior member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), and a member of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and the USENIX Association.

Abdelsalam (Sumi) Helal

Professor

USA

Abstract:

Driven by increasing urbanization and serious economic and environmental challenges, smart city concepts and projects are emerging in an attempt to bridge the widening gap between supply and demand while reducing urbanization’s impact on the environment. In principle, the path to smart cities is obvious—embed sensors, actuators, and/or computers into objects and spaces that make up the smart city’s important elements. This “smartening” approach is not new, having driven the embedded systems industry for more than two decades. What’s new here are the massive scale and the new ecology that the smartening process requires. As smart cities proliferate, data and applications will be pressed to move to the cloud given its economies of scale and highly anticipated reductions in services costs. In fact, On World has recently reported that the strategy of moving smart home intelligence into the cloud is disrupting the Smart Home market. In this extended talk, we cover alternative architectures for Cloud-Sensor Systems and show how sensors, unlike any resource in the cloud, are difficult to connect to the cloud directly without jeopardizing the cloud scalability and their overall lifetime. We formulate both energy and sentience efficiencies and show their interplay. Sentience efficiency is a novel concept introduced by Dr. Helal and his students which incorporate the application into the optimization equation, which in turn, realizes much more savings in overall energy consumption. We show how the application of sentience efficiency first followed by energy efficiency second lead to a maximally suppressed system dynamics in cloud-sensor systems.

Short Biography:
Dr. Abdelsalam (Sumi) Helal is a Professor at the Computer and Information Science and Engineering Department (CISE) at the University of Florida. His research interests span the areas of Pervasive Computing, Mobile Computing and networking and Internet Computing. He directs the Mobile and Pervasive Computing Laboratory at the CISE department, and is co-founder and director of the Gator Tech Smart House, an experimental home for applied research in the domain of elder care. He led the technology development of the NIDRR-funded Rehabilitation Engineering Research Center (RERC) on Successful Aging (2001-2007), and is currently leading a new initiative on smart home based personal health and independence, funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Outside of his teaching and research activities, Dr. Helal is the co-founder and an editorial board member of the IEEE Pervasive Computing magazine. He is Editor of the magazine's column on Standards, Tools and Emerging Technologies. He has been on the editorial board of the IEEE Transaction on Mobile Computing, and currently serves as the Networking Area Chair of IEEE Computer magazine. He has published over 200 books, book chapters, journal articles, and conference or workshop papers. He is a Senior member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), and a member of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and the USENIX Association.