Workshop Guest Speakers

Featuring in Sensor Network and Ambient Intelligence

Ambient-Assisted Living for an Aging Society: From Passive Monitoring to Prevention and Therapy

Guest Lecture by Professor Luca Benini

Abstract

The presentation will look into hardware-software architectures and design issues for Ambient-Assisted Living systems. The focus will be on systems that not only perform basic sensor processing, storage and transmission, but also react autonomously to the incoming sensor information with bounded response time. Critical event detection and bio-feedback fall within the classes of applications targeted by these systems. We will look in details at the technical challenges and emerging trends in this area, with particular emphasis on how to guarantee safe and robust operation under tight form-factor, energy and cost constraints.The presentation will look into hardware-software architectures and design issues for Ambient-Assisted Living systems. The focus will be on systems that not only perform basic sensor processing, storage and transmission, but also react autonomously to the incoming sensor information with bounded response time. Critical event detection and bio-feedback fall within the classes of applications targeted by these systems. We will look in details at the technical challenges and emerging trends in this area, with particular emphasis on how to guarantee safe and robust operation under tight form-factor, energy and cost constraints.

Biography

Luca Benini is a Full Professor at the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (DEIS) of the University of Bologna, Italy. He also holds a visiting faculty position at the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland, and a Consulting Research Professor position at the Belgian Interuniversity MicroElectronics Centre (IMEC). He received a Ph.D. degree in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University in 1997.

Dr. Benini’s research interests are in the design of system-on-chip platforms for embedded applications, and energy-efficient smart sensors and sensor networks, including biosensors and related data mining challenges. He has published more than 400 papers in peer-reviewed international journals and conferences, four books and several book chapters. He has been the General Chair and Program Chair of the Design Automation and Test in Europe Conference. He has been a member of the technical program committee and organizing committee of several conferences, including the Design Automation Conference, International Symposium on Low Power Design, the Symposium on Hardware-Software Codesign. He is the Associate Editor of several international journals, including the IEEE Transactions on Computer Aided Design of Circuits and Systems, ACM Journal on Emerging Technologies in Computing Systems, and ACM Transactions on Embedded Computing Systems. He is a Fellow of the IEEE and member of the steering board of ARTEMISIA European Association on Advanced Research & Technology for Embedded Intelligence and Systems.

Featuring in New Zealand Workshop in High Performance Computing

Grid tools that scientists can use (and want to)

Guest Lecture by Mark Gahegan

Abstract

The famous mathematician and philosopher, Alfred North Whitehead, wrote (circa 1930): “Logic is the chosen resort of clear-headed people, severally convinced of the complete adequacy of their doctrines. It is such a pity that they cannot agree with each other.”

This talk starts with the question: ‘Where does meaning come from in the natural and social sciences?’, and proposes a meta-model approach that integrates ontology, use-cases, workflows and social networks to form a nexus of meaning. The resulting knowledge infrastructure can play an important role in sharing understanding in collaborative settings and through large organizations. Examples from work within the Geosciences Network and other cyberinfrastructures show how knowledge-level computational tools can help communicate and mediate understanding between collaborating researchers.

Biography

Mark Gahegan is Professor in the School of Geography, Geology and Environmental Science at the University of Auckland, New Zealand, where he also directs the newly-formed Centre for e-Research at Auckland (CeRA). He was, until Dec. 2007, Associate director of the GeoVISTA Center at Penn State, USA. His research interests are at the interface of the natural and computational sciences, concentrating on geoscience and geographical information science. He has published on a wide number of topics, from semantics and knowledge management, through information and knowledge visualization and machine learning, to spatial data structures and algorithms. He is on the editorial board of seven related journals. Gahegan leads the GeoVISTA Studio (exploration and discovery) and ConceptVista (concept mapping and ontology) open-source software initiatives. He is also an active member of several ongoing cyber-infrastructure initiatives involving: the geosciences, human-environment interaction, archeology, and plant pathology. He has specific interests in capturing and communicating meaning amongst collaborating scientists as they work to better understand Earth’s complex systems.

View-Oriented Parallel Programming

Guest Lecture by Zhiyi Huang

Abstract

View-Oriented Parallel Programming (VOPP) is a novel parallel programming model that uses views for communication between multiple processes. A view is a group of data objects in shared memory. VOPP requires that all shared data are partitioned into non-overlapping views. With the introduction of views, mutual exclusion and shared data access are bundled together in VOPP, which offers both convenience and high performance to parallel programming. Furthermore, VOPP can resolve the issues such as data race and deadlock in parallel programming. This talk will address the issues of VOPP such as programability, performance advantages, portability, and limitation. It will also compare with other popular programming models such as MPI, OpenMP, and Transactional Memory. Finally, performance results of VOPP will be demonstrated through two example VOPP environments: VODCA and Maotai, which are implemented for cluster computers and multi-core computers, respectively.

Biography

Dr Zhiyi Huang is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Otago, New Zealand. He received his BSc degree in 1986 and PhD degree in 1992 in Computer Science from the National University of Defense Technology (NUDT) in China. From 1992 to 1996, he worked as a Chief Technical Officer (CTO) in industry while also lecturing in the Department of Computer Science at the Beijing Institute of Technology (BIT). Then he worked at the School of Computing & Information Technology at the Griffith University in Australia as a Research Fellow from 1996 to 1998. Since 1998, he has been lecturing at the University of Otago. Dr Huang had been a visiting professor at EPFL (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne) and Tsinghua University in 2005. He is now the Technical Liaison of the Sun Microsystems Center of Excellence in OpenSPARC that is based in the University of Otago.

Dr Huang’s main interests include parallel/distributed computing, cluster computing, multi-core systems, distributed shared memory, transactional memory, high-performance computing, virtualization of computer architectures, operating systems, and computer networks.

Featuring in Programming Parallel Applications for Multi-cores

Transactional Memory is the Answer! What was the Question?

Guest Lecture by James Goodman

Abstract

It has been more than 15 years since Herlihy and Moss first proposed Transactional Memory. Despite all the research and all the promise, it has had almost no impact on real systems to date. A new technology must be clearly superior to the established technology — not just better — in order to replace it. In this talk I will examine the promises made regarding Transactional Memory and the current state of affairs. Is TM the next big advance? Will it fade away? How will the established technology respond to the challenge?

Biography

James R. Goodman received the Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley in 1980. From 1974—80 he work for the Intel Corporation, designing add-on memory systems for IBM mainframe computers. From 1980–2004 he was a member of the Computer Science and ECE departments at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he is now an emeritus professor. He is currently a professor of Computer Science at the University of Auckland where he holds the Chair of Computer Systems.

Goodman’s current research is focused on multiprocessor synchronization, including Transactional Memory. In 2000, he and Ravi Rajwar proposed the concept of Speculative Lock Elision (SLE), demonstrating that the same hardware techniques for supporting transactions could also be applied to locks. He was an early contributor to the multiprocessor snooping cache literature, publishing the first paper to describe a snooping algorithm. He and his students proposed the first queue-based locking protocol (QOLB), which led directly to MCS Locks. He has published in the areas of database systems, interconnection networks, virtual memory, memory systems design, and novel multiprocessor architectures.

He is a Fellow of the IEEE, and the co-author of an undergraduate textbook, entitled, “A Programmer’s View of Computer Architecture.”

Last modified: Monday, 02-Feb-2009 14:27:36 NZDT