Listed in alphabetical order

Prof. Robert H. Deng, School of Information Systems, Singapore Management University, Singapore

Mr. Mikko Hyppönen, Chief Research Officer, F-Secure

Mr. Gabriel Waller, Head of Security Technologies, Nokia Networks

Dr. Yi Pan, Georgia State University, Atlanta, Georgia, USA

Prof. Witold Pedrycz, IEEE fellow, EiC of Information Sciences Canada Research Chair

Prof. Vincenzo Piuri, IEEE fellow, IEEE Vice President on Technical Activities, EiC of IEEE Systems Journal

ABSTRACT: To mitigate users’ privacy concerns about their data in the cloud, a common solution is to store data in encrypted form so that it will remain private even if servers are un-trusted or compromised. The encrypted data, however, must be amenable to sharing and access control. In this talk, we will first present vulnerabilities in some of the cloud based storage services and propose a new security model for access control of encrypted data in the cloud. We will then provide an overview of the solutions in the literature. In particular, we will describe some of the techniques for making sharing of encrypted data in the cloud scalable, efficient and privacy-preserving.

BIO: Robert H. Deng has been a Professor at the School of Information Systems, Singapore Management University since 2004. Prior to this, he was Principal Scientist and Manager of Infocomm Security Department, Institute for Infocomm Research, Singapore. His research interests include data security and privacy, multimedia security, network and system security. He was Associate Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security from 2009 to 2012. He is currently Associate Editor of IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing, and member of Editorial Board of the Journal of Computer Science and Technology (the Chinese Academy of Sciences) and the International Journal of Information Security (Springer), respectively. He is the chair of the Steering Committee of the ACM Symposium on Information, Computer and Communications Security (ASIACCS). He received the University Outstanding Researcher Award from the National University of Singapore in 1999 and the Lee Kuan Yew Fellow for Research Excellence from the Singapore Management University in 2006. He was named Community Service Star and Showcased Senior Information Security Professional by (ISC)^2 under its Asia-Pacific Information Security Leadership Achievements program in 2010.

ABSTRACT: There is an accelerating arms race going on in the online world. We have all extended our lives from the real world to the online world. However, our data data and our privacy is being threatened by attackers in the online world. We have to fight online criminals and online hacktivists. And - a bit surprisingly - we nowadays also have to fight online attacks that are originating from governments themselves. How did we end up to this situation? Where are we going next? And what should we do?

BIO: Mikko Hyppönen is the Chief Research Officer of F-Secure in Finland. He has been working with computer security for over 20 years and has fought the biggest malware outbreaks in the net. He has written on his research for the New York Times, Wired and Scientific America. Mr. Hypponen was selected among the 50 most important people on the web in by the PC World magazine, and the Foreign Policy magazine included him on the list of "Top 100 Global Thinkers".

ABSTRACT: The 5G mobile network infrastructure beyond 2020 is expected to provide the universal communication environment that will be capable of connecting everything including people, sensors, vehicles, smart meters, and many other things far beyond our current experience of connectivity. The varied applications will set high requirements to the communication services, not just in traffic capacity, data speed, and energy consumption but increasingly also in network reliability which includes aspects of service availability and quality, security, and privacy. The presentation will assess these requirements and introduce some key solutions.

BIO: In Nokia since 2000 (IT Project Manager, security projects). In Networks since 2004, SW security with PKI and SW asset protection. Some research achievements: The mechanism for giving the BTS a digital identity used for enrolment, authentication and secure communication was prototyped in my team. Also the Mobile Guard was first prototyped in Security Technologies, and showed on the MWC in 2012.Previously: a) ERP consultancy (JD Edwards), b) Entrepreneur: SW tailored development, c) M.Sc (Economics) Computing, from Hanken school of Economics.

ABSTRACT: Cloud computing has emerged rapidly as a growing paradigm of on-demand access to computing, data and software utilities using a usage-based billing model. Many massive data applications including database applications and web searching should be the ideal applications on cloud platforms. However, many legacy scientific computing codes are written in traditional parallel programming languages such as MPI and OpenMP and cannot be executed on these cloud platforms. With the current cloud programming models, complicated scientific computing algorithms cannot be implemented easily and executed efficiently on many cloud platforms. In this talk, I will give a review of different massively parallel computing platforms and compare various computing domains and programming models on these platforms. In particular, I will point out the shortcomings and limitations of current cloud computing programming models for typical scientific computing algorithms, and propose possible solutions. Current cloud models such as MapReduce or Spark and their variants have succeeded in data-parallel applications such as database operations and web searching; however, they are still not effective for applications with a lot of data dependency such as scientific computing applications. We propose several approaches to solving this problem through extension of current programming models, automatic translation from sequential codes to cloud codes, simple API and framework built on current cloud models and traditional models such as MPI, detection of data and task parallelism, and their efficient scheduling. Some preliminary theoretical and experimental results will also be reported in this talk.

BIO: Dr. Yi Pan is a Distinguished University Professor of the Department of Computer Science and an Interim Associate Dean of Arts and Sciences and an Interim Chair of Biology at Georgia State University, USA. Dr. Pan received his B.Eng. and M.Eng. degrees in computer engineering from Tsinghua University, China, in 1982 and 1984, respectively, and his Ph.D. degree in computer science from the University of Pittsburgh, USA, in 1991. His profile has been featured as a distinguished alumnus in both Tsinghua Alumni Newsletter and University of Pittsburgh CS Alumni Newsletter. Dr. Pan's research interests include parallel and cloud computing, wireless networks, and bioinformatics. Dr. Pan has published more than 170 journal papers with over 50 papers published in various IEEE journals. In addition, he has published over 170 papers in refereed conferences. He has also co-authored/co-edited 40 books. His work has been cited more than 4000 times. Dr. Pan has served as an editor-in-chief or editorial board member for 15 journals including 7 IEEE Transactions. He is the recipient of many awards including IEEE Transactions Best Paper Award, IBM Faculty Award, JSPS Senior Invitation Fellowship, IEEE BIBE Outstanding Achievement Award, NSF Research Opportunity Award, and AFOSR Summer Faculty Research Fellowship. He has organized many international conferences and delivered over 40 keynote speeches at various international conferences around the world.

ABSTRACT: Understanding complex systems or phenomena, realizing knowledge acquisition in the presence of huge volumes of data (big data), carrying out reasoning mechanisms, communicating findings and making sound decisions are commonly carried at some conveniently established level of abstraction. We build some pieces of knowledge, which are typically conveyed not in the form of numbers but arise as more abstract entities – information granules. Quite commonly they are articulated in natural language, say low inflation, significant fluctuations of exchange rate, strong influence observed in social networks, etc. To make those implicit abstract entities operational, they need to be formalized in an explicit manner offered within the realm of Granular Computing.

We discuss the fundamental concept and research agenda of Granular Computing, its essential formalisms used to represent information granules (sets, intervals, fuzzy sets, rough sets, shadowed sets, probabilities, etc.), emphasize their role in the formation of explicitly expressed knowledge tidbits, and discuss ways of acquiring of information granules on a basis of available experimental evidence. Given the broad spectrum of formal settings of information granules, we elaborate on underlying principles, which hold regardless of the diversity of formal approaches and subsequently lead to a unified and cohesive processing platform, namely (i) the principle of justifiable granularity, (ii) an optimal allocation of information granularity, and (iii) emergence of hierarchies of layers of information granules engaging higher order and higher type constructs.

In the sequel, an origin, motivation, and selected representative examples arising in granular rule-based system modeling, especially in the context of distributed data, are discussed. We highlight key motivating factors behind the emergence of type-2 and order-2 information granules and reveal apparent linkages between type-n information granules and hierarchical and distributed processing architectures.

The role of information granules is elaborated on with regard to general problems of system modeling, data quality, associative recall and imputation mechanisms where we demonstrate that to reflect the nature of processing, the ensuing results are inherently information granules rather than plain numeric entities.

BIO: Witold Pedrycz is a Professor and Canada Research Chair (CRC) in Computational Intelligence in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada. He is also with the Systems Research Institute of the Polish Academy of Sciences, Warsaw, Poland. He also holds an appointment of special professorship in the School of Computer Science, University of Nottingham, UK. In 2009 Dr. Pedrycz was elected a foreign member of the Polish Academy of Sciences. In 2012 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. Witold Pedrycz has been a member of numerous program committees of IEEE conferences in the area of fuzzy sets and neurocomputing. In 2007 he received a prestigious Norbert Wiener award from the IEEE Systems, Man, and Cybernetics Council. He is a recipient of the IEEE Canada Computer Engineering Medal 2008. In 2009 he has received a Cajastur Prize for Soft Computing from the European Centre for Soft Computing for “pioneering and multifaceted contributions to Granular Computing”. In 2013 has was awarded a Killam Prize. In the same year he received a Fuzzy Pioneer Award 2013 from the IEEE Computational Intelligence Society.

His main research directions involve Computational Intelligence, fuzzy modeling and Granular Computing, knowledge discovery and data mining, fuzzy control, pattern recognition, knowledge-based neural networks, relational computing, and Software Engineering. He has published numerous papers in this area. He is also an author of 15 research monographs covering various aspects of Computational Intelligence, data mining, and Software Engineering.

Dr. Pedrycz is intensively involved in editorial activities. He is an Editor-in-Chief of Information Sciences and Editor-in-Chief of WIREs Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery (Wiley). He currently serves as an Associate Editor of IEEE Transactions on Fuzzy Systems and is a member of a number of editorial boards of other international journals.

ABSTRACT: Automation of border control gates, as well as easy identification in a variety of daily-life applications (ranging, e.g., from home banking to e-commerce and e-government), requires a high degree of confidence in the identification. Modern solutions are based on biometric technologies to ensure standard quality in operation, by mimicking the usual activities performed by humans in identifying individuals. Biometric technologies allow in fact for efficiently analyzing human traits (e.g., face, fingerprint, iris, palm) for identity management.

This talk will analyze the opportunities offered by biometric technologies and their use for identity verification and recognition in automated border control systems and also in many other critical applications. The characteristics of these technologies as well as their implications on the overall system will be considered. Attention will be also given to a comprehensive system design methodology to take into account all application requirements, including the need for privacy protection.

BIO: Vincenzo PIURI has received his Ph.D. in computer engineering at Politecnico di Milano, Italy (1989). He has been Associate Professor at Politecnico di Milano, Italy and Visiting Professor at the University of Texas at Austin and at George Mason University, USA. He is Full Professor in computer engineering (since 2000) and has been Director of the Department of Information Technology at the Università degli Studi di Milano, Italy.

His main research interests are: biometrics, signal and image processing, machine learning, pattern analysis and recognition, theory and industrial applications of neural networks, intelligent measurement systems, industrial applications, fault tolerance, digital processing architectures, embedded systems, and arithmetic architectures. Original results have been published in more than 350 papers in international journals, proceedings of international conferences, books, and book chapters.

He is Fellow of the IEEE, Distinguished Scientist of ACM, and Senior Member of INNS. He is Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Systems Journal (2013-15), and has been Associate Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and the IEEE Transactions on Instrumentation and Measurement. He is IEEE Vice President-elect for Technical Activities (2015), and has been IEEE Director and IEEE Delegate for Division X, President of the IEEE Computational Intelligence Society, Vice President for Publications of the IEEE Instrumentation and Measurement Society and the IEEE Systems Council, Vice President for Membership of the IEEE Computational Intelligence Society, and Vice President for Education of the IEEE Biometrics Council.

He received the IEEE Instrumentation and Measurement Society Technical Award (2002) for the contributions to the advancement of theory and practice of computational intelligence in measurement systems and industrial applications, the IEEE Instrumentation and Measurement Society Distinguished Service Award (2008), and the IEEE Computational Intelligence Society Meritorious Service Award (2009). He is Honorary Professor at the Obuda University, Budapest, Hungary (since 2014), and Guest Professor (equivalent to Honorary Professor) at Guangdong University of Petrochemical Technology, China (since 2014).