KEYNOTES

Prof.
Erol Gelenbe
Prof.
Gerardo Rubino
Prof.
Tarik Taleb
Gelenbe_s Rubino1 TARIK

Title: Distributed pervasive emergency management

About the speaker

Gelenbe_sProf. Erol Gelenbe, a native of Turkey, graduate of the Middle East Technical University (Ankara), Erol is known for inventing G-Networks, the Random Neural Network, and the FLEXSIM approach to manufacturing simulation, and has 13,000 citations and h = 61. For his work and contributions, he was elected Fellow of IEEE and ACM, Member of the Royal Academy of Belgium, the Science Academies of Hungary, Poland and Turkey, the French National Academy of Technologies, and of Academia Europaea. He was recognised by ACM SIGMETRICS (2008) as the most influential researcher and technical leader in the field of system performance evaluation. Personnally struck in his family by the 1999 earthquake in Izmit (Turkey), where 30,000 lives were lost, Erol works on emergency management since the 2000’s, and he and his team developed DBES (the Distributed Building Evacuation Simulator). He has also designed distributed algorithms aimed at evacuating the maximum number of people safely and remaining in good health, during a natural or technological emergency. He has received Honoris Causa doctorates from Belgium, Italy and France, and was awarded Chevalier de la Legion d’Honneur (France) and Commendatore al Merito della Reppublica (Italy). His publications have appeared in JACM, CACM, Physical Review, and many IEEE and ACM Transactions.

Abstract

Each year, several times a year unfortunately, most recently in Nepal in the Middle East and in the Mediterranean, we see that natural, man made, and technological catastrophes, and conflict, result in too many victims. It is very hard to predict or prevent natural or technological disasters, but it is possible through technology and organisation to detect, locate and evacuate victims in a timely manner to save them. Each time, the challenges are to locate and track the victims, to find them, and to be able to coordinate the dynamic and fast scheduling of emergency teams and first responders. This presentation and paper will focus on the information technology and engineering methods that are needed to locate victims and manage and dispatch the emergency teams. Numerous examples from realistic simulations of emergency situations will be presented. Our purpose is to stimulate interest and research in this area.

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Title: Risk and loss prediction and analysis: probabilistic approaches

About the speaker

Rubino_sGerardo Rubino is a senior researcher at INRIA (the French National Institute for Research in Computer Science and Control) where he is the leader of the DIONYSOS group, working on the analysis and design of networking technologies. He is Board Member of the Media & Networks Cluster, Brittany, France, and INRIA’s representative at the SISCom Brittany Research Cluster. Among past responsibilities, he has been Scientific Delegate for the Rennes unit of INRIA for 5 years, responsible of research in networking at the Telecom Bretagne engineering school for 5 years, Associate Editor of the Operations Research international journal “Naval Research Logistics” for 9 years, former member of the Steering Board of the European Network of Excellence EuroFGI and responsible of the relationships between the network and European industry, during several years. He has also been the head of the International Partnership Office at INRIA Rennes for 5 years. He is a member of the IFIP WG 7.3. He served at the Steering Committee of QEST (www.qest.org) for several years. He is interested in quantitative analysis of complex systems using probabilistic models, in networking and in other engineering areas. He presently works on performance and dependability analysis, and on perceptual quality assessment of audio and video applications and services built on top of the Internet. In particular, he is the author of the PSQA technology for automatic perceptual quality real-time evaluation (Pseudo-Subjective Quality Assessment). He also works on rare event analysis, he is a member of the Steering Committee of RESIM, the only workshop dedicated to the topic, and co-author of the book entitled “Rare Event Simulation Using Monte Carlo Methods” (Wiley, 2009). He is the author of more than 200 scientific works in applied mathematics and computer science.

Abstract

One of the main tasks when dealing with critical systems (systems where specific classes of failures can deal to human losses, or to huge financial losses) is the ability to quantify the associated risks, which is the door that, when opened, leads to paths towards understanding what can happen and why, and towards capturing the relationships existing between the different parts of the system, with respect to those risks. This is also the necessary preliminary work allowing to evaluate the relative importance of different factors with respect to the analyzed risks, an important component of any disaster management system. Identifying the dominant ones is important to know which parts of the system we must reinforce. The talk will describe through examples the different tools available for these tasks, and how they are used depending on the objectives to reach. We will also discuss the main related open research problems. In parallel to these catastrophes directly involving man’s action (we could call them engineering risks), we must face natural risks, which involve also human activities but whose ultimate cause is external to them. Here, the related problems and tools are different, and it is interesting to contrast them with the previously mentioned ones. We will also try to overview this second area and its main open issues.

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Title: Towards 5G: Carrier-Grade Programmable Virtual Mobile Networks

About the speaker

TARIKDr. Tarik Taleb is an IEEE Communications Society (ComSoc) Distinguished Lecturer and a senior member of IEEE. He is currently a Professor at the School of Electrical Engineering, Aalto University, Finland. Prior to his current academic position, he was working as Senior Researcher and 3GPP Standards Expert at NEC Europe Ltd, Heidelberg, Germany. He was then leading the NEC Europe Labs Team working on R&D projects on carrier cloud platforms, an important vision of 5G systems. He was also serving as technical leader of the main work package, Mobile Core Network Cloud, in EU FP7 Mobile Cloud Networking project, coordinating among 9 partners including NEC, France Telecom, British Telecom, Telecom Italia, and Portugal Telecom. Before joining NEC and till Mar. 2009, he worked as assistant professor at the Graduate School of Information Sciences, Tohoku University, Japan, in a lab fully funded by KDDI, the second largest network operator in Japan. From Oct. 2005 till Mar. 2006, he worked as research fellow at the Intelligent Cosmos Research Institute, Sendai, Japan. He received his B. E degree in Information Engineering with distinction, M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees in Information Sciences from GSIS, Tohoku Univ., in 2001, 2003, and 2005, respectively. Prof. Taleb’s research interests lie in the field of architectural enhancements to mobile core networks (particularly 3GPP’s), mobile cloud networking, network function virtualization, software defined networking, mobile multimedia streaming, inter-vehicular communications, and social media networking. Prof. Taleb has been also directly engaged in the development and standardization of the Evolved Packet System as a member of 3GPP’s System Architecture working group. Prof. Taleb is a member of the IEEE Communications Society Standardization Program Development Board. As an attempt to bridge the gap between academia and industry, Prof. Taleb founded the “IEEE Workshop on Telecommunications Standards: from Research to Standards”, a successful event that got awarded “best workshop award” by IEEE Communication Society (ComSoC). Based on the success of this workshop, Prof. Taleb has also founded and has been the steering committee chair of the IEEE Conf. on Standards for Communications and Networking. Prof. Taleb is the general chair of the 2019 edition of the IEEE Wireless Communications and Networking Conference (WCNC’19) to be held in Marrakech, Morocco. He is/was on the editorial board of the IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications, IEEE Wireless Communications Magazine, IEEE Transactions on Vehicular Technology, IEEE Communications Surveys & Tutorials, and a number of Wiley journals. He is serving as chair of the Wireless Communications Technical Committee, the largest in IEEE ComSoC. He also served as Vice Chair of the Satellite and Space Communications Technical Committee of IEEE ComSoc (2006 – 2010). He has been on the technical program committee of different IEEE conferences, including Globecom, ICC, and WCNC, and chaired some of their symposia. Prof. Taleb is the recipient of the 2009 IEEE ComSoc Asia-Pacific Best Young Researcher award (Jun. 2009), the 2008 TELECOM System Technology Award from the Telecommunications Advancement Foundation (Mar. 2008), the 2007 Funai Foundation Science Promotion Award (Apr. 2007), the 2006 IEEE Computer Society Japan Chapter Young Author Award (Dec. 2006), the Niwa Yasujirou Memorial Award (Feb. 2005), and the Young Researcher’s Encouragement Award from the Japan chapter of the IEEE Vehicular Technology Society (VTS) (Oct. 2003). Some of Prof. Taleb’s research work have been also awarded best paper awards at prestigious conferences.

Abstract

The telecom industry keeps reinventing itself. Soon, the world will be experiencing the 5th generation mobile networks (5G), also referred to as beyond 2020 mobile communication systems. Major obstacles to overcome in 5G systems are principally the highly centralized architecture of mobile networks along with the static provisioning and configuration of network nodes built on dedicated hardware components. This has resulted in lack of elasticity and flexibility in deployment of mobile networks; rendering their run-time management costly, cumbersome and time-consuming. Software Defined Networking, Network Function Virtualization, and Cloud Computing, along with the principles of the latter in terms of service elasticity, on-demand features, and pay-per-use, could be important enablers for various mobile network enhancements, to specifically virtualize and decentralize mobile networks using general-purpose COTS (commercial of the shelf) hardware. For this purpose, different requirements have to be met and numerous associated challenges have to be subsequently tackled. This talk will touch upon the recent trends the mobile telecommunications market is experiencing and discuss the challenges these trends are representing to mobile network operators. To cope with these trends, the talk will then showcase the feasibility of on-demand creation of cloud-based elastic mobile networks, along with their lifecycle management. The talk will introduce a set of technologies and key architectural elements to realize such vision, turning end-to-end mobile networking into software engineering.

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