Abstract:High-fidelity modeling, simulation, and analysis, enabled by supercomputing, are becoming increasingly important to NASA's mission to pioneer the future in space exploration, scientific discovery, and aeronautics research. While scientific and engineering advancements used to rely primarily on theoretical studies and physical experiments, today computational science is an equal partner in such achievements. In addition, computational modeling and simulation serves as a predictive tool that is not otherwise available. As a result, the use of high performance computing is now integral to the space agency's work in all mission areas. Anchored by the Pleiades and Electra supercomputers with a combined peak of over 12 petaflops, the High End Computing Capability (HECC) Project at NASA Ames Research Center provides a fully integrated production environment to satisfy NASA's diverse modeling, simulation, and analysis needs. However, the success of many NASA missions depends on solving complex computing challenges, some of which are NP-hard and intractable on traditional supercomputers. Quantum computing promises an unprecedented ability to solve intractable problems by harnessing quantum mechanical effects such as tunneling, superposition, and entanglement. The Quantum Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (QuAIL) at Ames hosts the D-Wave 2000Q system, the world's largest quantum annealer with 2038 qubits, and is NASA's primary facility for conducting research and development in quantum information sciences. The overall goal with this spectrum of advanced computing capabilities is to provide a consolidated bleeding−edge environment for all of NASA's computational and analysis requirements.

Bio: Dr. Rupak Biswas is currently the Director of Exploration Technology at NASA Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, Calif., and has held this Senior Executive Service (SES) position since January 2016. In this role, he in charge of planning, directing, and coordinating the technology development and operational activities of the organization that comprises of advanced supercomputing, human systems integration, intelligent systems, and entry systems technology. The directorate consists of approximately 700 employees with an annual budget of $160 million, and includes two of NASA's critical and consolidated infrastructures: arc jet testing facility and supercomputing facility. He is also the Manager of the NASA-wide High End Computing Capability Project that provides a full range of advanced computational resources and services to numerous programs across the agency. In addition, he leads the emerging quantum computing effort for NASA.

Dr. Rupak Biswas received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Rensselaer in 1991, and has been at NASA ever since. During this time, he has received several NASA awards, including the Exceptional Achievement Medal and the Outstanding Leadership Medal. He is an internationally recognized expert in high performance computing and has published more than 150 technical papers, received many Best Paper awards, edited several journal special issues, and given numerous lectures around the world.

Abstract:This talk discusses four rapidly growing trends on their impact on people. The trends are: (1) Big Data, AI, signal processing, and other areas have applications that are increasingly commoditized. Open source, free libraries have excellent software in many domains. Companies are offering powerful Big Data and AI applications in the cloud. The key problem of combining these applications is being partially solved within each vendor's ecosystem. (2) At the same time, hardware in the form of sensors, onboard computers such as the Raspberry Pi, and computers leased in the cloud are getting ever cheaper. (3) Streams of data on the web from Twitter, RSS feeds, video cams are increasingly available. (4) The web enables people to find experts, anywhere in the world, who do short-term IT projects. These trends enable non-experts to build ever more powerful applications that monitor multiple massive streams of data at ever-lower cost to identify and detect critical patterns. Hobbyists, school children, startups, and established companies will build more of such applications, and this has a profound impact on society. This talk attempts at predicting where these trends will lead in ten years and their impact on society.

Bio: Dr. K. Mani Chandy is the Simon Ramo Professor, Emeritus at the California Institute of Technology. He got his Bachelors in Electrical Engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras, in 1965; MS in Electrical Engineering at the Polytechnic Institute of New York in 1966; and a PhD in Operations Research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1969. He taught at the University of Texas at Austin, from 1969 to 1987, and at the California Institute of Technology from 1987 to 2014. He served as chairman of the Computer Science department at U.T. and as Executive Officer at Caltech. He has written books on performance modeling, concurrent programming, and event processing. He has written several papers on queuing networks, computer and communications performance modeling, distributed simulation, the development and verification of concurrent programs, compositional programming notations for parallel programs, and the detection of critical events from streams of data.

Dr. Chandy received the A. A. Michelson Award from the Computer Measurement Group in 1985 for his work on computer performance modeling. He became a Fellow of the IEEE in 1990. He was inducted into the United States National Academy of Engineering in 1995 for “contributions to computer performance modeling, parallel discrete-event simulation, and systematic development of concurrent programs”. He received the IEEE Koji Kobayashi Award in 1996 for “fundamental contributions to the theory and practice of computer and communications performance modeling”. His paper on distributed global snapshots, with Leslie Lamport, was placed in the ACM Operating Systems “Hall of Fame” in 2013 and was awarded the ACM Edsger W. Dijkstra prize in 2014. He received the IEEE Harry H. Goode Award in 2017 with Jayadev Misra for their work on concurrent systems. He got a distinguished alumnus award from IIT-Madras.

Abstract: The talk will discuss the social effects of power inequality and glass ceiling in a society with two populations (e.g., men and women). We will introduce a model based on a bi-populated social network, define measures for power inequality and glass ceiling, and analyze the conditions for their occurrence in terms of three societal parameters, the relative size of the two populations, the level of homophily, and the extent of the "leaky pipeline" phenomenon.

Bio: Dr. David Peleg received the B.A. degree in 1980 from the Technion, Israel, the M.Sc. degree in 1982 from Bar-Ilan University, Israel, and the Ph.D. degree in 1985 from the Weizmann Institute, Israel, all in computer science. He then spent a post-doctoral period at IBM Almaden and at Stanford University. In 1988 he joined the Department of Computer Science and Applied Mathematics at The Weizmann Institute of Science, where he is the incumbent of the Norman D. Cohen Professorial Chair of Computer Sciences. He chaired the Weizmann Institute's Council of Professors in 2007-2008, and serves as Dean of the Faculty of Mathematics and Computer Science since 2010. His research interests include distributed network algorithms, fault-tolerant computing, communication network theory, approximation algorithms and graph theory, and he is the author of a book titled "Distributed Computing: A Locality-Sensitive Approach," as well as numerous papers in these areas. He received the ACM Edsger W. Dijkstra Prize in Distributed Computing in 2008 and the SIROCCO Prize for Innovation In Distributed Computing in 2011, and was inducted as Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) in 2017.

Abstract: The emerging Internet of Things (IoT) has several salient characteristics that differentiate it from existing wireless networking architectures. These include the deployment of very large numbers of (possibly) low-complexity terminals; the need for low-latency, short-packet communications (e.g., to support automation); light or no infrastructure; and primary applications of data gathering, inference and control. These characteristics have motivated the development of new fundamentals that can provide insights into the limits of communication in this regime. This talk will address two issues in this context, namely security and low-latency, through the respective lenses of physical layer security and finite-blocklength information theory. Basic principles of these areas will be discussed, along with recent results and several open problems.

Bio: Dr. H. Vincent Poor is the Michael Henry Strater University Professor at Princeton University. He received his Ph.D. in EECS from Princeton in 1977, and from then until joining the Princeton faculty in 1990, he was on the faculty of the University of Illinois. During 2006 − 2016, he served as Dean of Princeton's School of Engineering and Applied Science. He has also held visiting positions at several other universities, including most recently at Berkeley and Cambridge. Dr. Poor's research interests are in signal processing and information theory, and their applications in wireless networks, energy systems and related fields. He is a member of the U.S. National Academy of Engineering and the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, and is a foreign member of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the Royal Society, and other national and international academies. Recent recognition of his work includes the 2017 IEEE Alexander Graham Bell Medal, and a D.Sc. honoris causa from Syracuse University, also in 2017.

Abstract: This talk presents an overview of the new COSMOS testbed being developed jointly by Rutgers, Columbia and NYU under the National Science Foundation's recently announced Platforms for Advanced Wireless (PAWR) program. The COSMOS testbed has a particular focus on “beyond 5G” ultra-high bandwidth and low latency communication tightly integrated with edge computing, and is thus intended to provide a suitable platform for real-world evaluation of future edge-cloud enhanced mobile networks and services. Motivating applications such as augmented reality, cloud-assisted vehicular and smart intersection are identified in terms of typical functionality and bandwidth/latency requirements. The COSMOS open, programmable testbed architecture based on software-defined radios (SDR), cloud radio access networks (CRAN), software defined x-haul networks (SDN) and mobile edge cloud (MEC) is given. Key technologies in COSMOS including SDR base stations, mmWave radio, optical wavelength division switching, next-generation mobile core network and distributed edge cloud will be discussed. Plans for COSMOS deployment in uptown Manhattan along with a future roadmap for the project are given in conclusion.

Bio: Dipankar Raychaudhuri is Distinguished Professor, Electrical & Computer Engineering and Director, WINLAB (Wireless Information Network Lab) at Rutgers University. As WINLAB's Director, he is responsible for an internationally recognized industry-university research center specializing in wireless technology. He is also the principal investigator for several large U.S. National Science Foundation funded projects including the “ORBIT” wireless testbed, the “MobilityFirst” future Internet architecture, and the COSMOS city-scale platform for advanced wireless research.

Dr. Raychaudhuri has previously held corporate R&D positions including: Chief Scientist, Iospan Wireless (2000-01), AGM & Dept Head, NEC Laboratories (1993-99) and Head, Broadband Communications, Sarnoff Corp (1990-92). He obtained the B.Tech (Hons) from IIT Kharagpur in 1976 and the M.S. and Ph.D degrees from SUNY, Stony Brook in 1978, 79. He is a Fellow of the IEEE.

Abstract: The fog computing and Multiple-access Edge Computing (MEC) vision leverages the availability of powerful and low-cost middleboxes, statically deployed at suitable edges of the network and acting as local proxies for the centralized cloud backbone. This potentially enables, among other things, better scalability and better reactivity in the interaction with mobile nodes (sensors, actuators, smartphones of mobile users, etc.) via local control decisions, actuation, and coordination. This talk will focus on the state-of-the-art research activities and the adoption of fog/MEC computing solutions in the domain of the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), where strict latency and reliability requirements are present. In addition, the talk will provide an overview of some original solutions (and open research challenges) for specific domains of predictive maintenance, quality control, and settings optimization, when applied to the manufacturing production processes. The industrial domain of manufacturing production processes is central to the just started project of Competence Center for Industry 4.0, called Big Data Innovation and Research Excellence (BI-REX) and situated in Bologna, Italy, which provides an outstanding playground for the industrial application of fog/MEC solutions.

Bio: Dr. Paolo Bellavista is a full professor of distributed and mobile systems in the Department Computer Science and Engineering (DISI) at the University of Bologna (UNIBO), Italy. He is also a visiting professor at Sorbonne University, Paris. He has long experience in middleware for mobile services, edge/cloud computing for quality-aware IoT applications, and scalable IoT platforms. He has co-authored more than 200 papers (about 75 journal/magazine articles) in these fields. He currently serves as the Editor-in-Chief of the MDPI Computers Journal (2017-) and as a member of the Editorial Boards of several international journals, such as IEEE Transactions on Network and Service Management, IEEE Transactions on Services Computing, Elsevier’s Pervasive and Mobile Computing, Elsevier's Journal on Network and Computing Applications, and MDPI Sensors Journal. In addition, he is an elected Secretary of the IEEE ComSoc Internet Technical Committee, member of the Steering Committee of the NESSI EU Technology Platform, and UNIBO representative in the EIT Digital KIC National Steering Committee. Finally, he has been the UNIBO leader in several Artemis JTI, FP7, and H2020 projects related to IoT interoperability, distributed ICT infrastructures, mobile cloud, and edge computing. He is co-supervising the launch of the Competence Center for Industry 4.0 in Bologna (BI-REX, starting its activities January 2019.

Abstract: This talk will survey several methodologies for distributing trust to enable attack-resistant read or write access within environments in which users expect continuity across multiple devices or devices roam in ad hoc fashion. Cryptographic token-based pre-authorization of Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) communications that involves device pairings is useful for such applications as 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray Disc format in that it allows detection of misuse of cryptographic credentials and ensures that timely remedial action may be taken. Secure facilitation of IoT and human interaction via running an “Inviter-Invitee” protocol to set up dedicated maintainable pair-wise or group-wise “communication lines” that rely upon but transcend the certification of individual users or devices has utility in enabling “pre-validation” that eases processing requirements during live validation of transactions submitted to a permissioned blockchain. Conventional public-key certificates, whether long-term or one-time usable, have drawbacks in terms of bandwidth and computational overhead which can be overcome through replacement by “implicit certificates” for which the subject public key is reconstructed rather than requiring a signature verification operation to check the validity of the included public key. The efficient combining of operations realized by implicit certificate usage can, however, lead to new attacks such as that against certificate chaining in the absence of proper countermeasures, as applicable to IEEE 1609.2 (Standard for Wireless Access in Vehicular Environments) and SCMS (Secure Credential Management System) being piloted by US Department of Transportation. Open Mobile Alliance Secure Content Exchange enables features that were not possible via OMA Digital Rights Management V2 specified Domains, such as device-based creation and management of content sharing groups and copying and moving of rights between OMA DRM devices. Corroboration of video via captured system-external environmental data and internally produced stimuli provides for securing the integrity of public safety officers' vehicle dashcams against spoofing and framing attacks. The talk will conclude with indication of related future work in cryptographic key management within a multi-tenant database/blockchain setting.

Bio: David W. Kravitz is Vice President of Crypto Systems Research at DarkMatter, and heads DarkMatter's blockchain team that is focused on providing an IoT-compatible access-controlled, auditable and privacy-preserving transaction platform. His extensive information security experience spans a wide range of application areas, including voice and data critical infrastructure, digital rights management, payments, smart grid, IoT, and high-value assets transfer. He began his career at the National Security Agency, where as Senior Technical Advisor he combined his exceptional skills in protocol and algorithm design with his evaluation capabilities to profoundly enhance the security posture of communications, as stated in the Certificate of Achievement he was awarded by the Director of NSA. He has also held senior positions at Sandia National Laboratories, CertCo/Bankers Trust Electronic Commerce, Digital Video Express, Wave Systems Corp., Motorola Labs, Certicom Research/BlackBerry, and IBM Research. He was the principal architect of the Membership Services identity management framework of the Linux Foundation's Hyperledger Fabric project, and invented DSA, the elliptic curve variant of which, ECDSA, underlies Bitcoin and Ethereum blockchains. He serves as a Technical Advisor for Atonomi-Bringing Trust and Security to IoT, and AtCash-Paperless Cash for a Digital World. He holds a Ph.D. and Masters in Electrical Engineering-Systems from University of Southern California, a Masters in Mathematical Sciences from Johns Hopkins University, and a Bachelors in Mathematics from Rutgers University.

Abstract: Massive datasets from various domains are becoming commonplace and these are increasingly being processed by clusters of off-the-shelf computers. Typically, computers in these clusters can all communicate with each other, but bandwidth for communication is severely limited and usually the cost of communication is significantly higher than cost of computation. We consider different clean and simple models that capture these constraints and describe techniques for designing “super-fast” algorithms for fundamental problems in these models. We consider classical distributed symmetry breaking problems (e.g., Maximal Independent Set) and distributed clustering problems (e.g., Metric Facility Location). We also discuss attempts to find lower bounds for problems that seem resistant to fast algorithms. A combination of information-theoretic ideas and communication complexity reductions have been used for the few lower bounds that exist in these models.

Bio: Dr. Sriram Pemmaraju is a professor in computer science at the University of Iowa, and the director of graduate studies there. His research is on theoretical aspects of distributed algorithms, especially the role of randomization in the design of these algorithms and the use of communication complexity and information-theoretic techniques to prove distributed computing lower bounds. His research is supported by the National Science Foundation and National Institutes of Health and it has received several best paper awards. He has mentored 10 PhD students so far and has received several outstanding graduate mentor nominations.