Date : 23 Apr 2012
Time : 2:30 pm - 3:30 pm
Venue : Room PQ703, 7/Floor, PQ core, Mong Man Wai Building
The Hong Kong Polytechnic University

Abstract:

In this talk, I will give an overview of my research activities in the area of social computing and mobile cloud computing. In the first part, I will illustrate how we can exploit social network properties to engineer more reliable, secure, efficient and scalable computer systems. Many computer networks have dual properties. They are physical networks and at the same time human networks. It is tremendously important to integrate social networking features to computer systems design. I will start by introducing several human mobility and social contact experiments with diversified scenarios and their impact on the research community. Next, I will demonstrate how understanding social network can help us scaling up microblogging services, improving forwarding efficiency in opportunistic mobile networks, designing spam protection systems, offloading mobile data from cellular networks, etc.

In the second part, I will introduce the SkyRider mobile cloud computing project with a focus on the ThinkAir computation offloading platform. Smartphones have exploded in popularity in recent years, becoming ever more sophisticated and capable. As a result, developers worldwide are building increasingly complex applications that require ever increasing amounts of computational power and energy. ThinkAir is a framework that makes it simple for developers to migrate their smartphone applications to the cloud. It exploits the concept of smartphone virtualization in the cloud and provides method-level computation offloading. Advancing on previous work, it focuses on the elasticity and scalability of the cloud and enhances the power of mobile cloud computing by parallelizing method execution using multiple virtual machine (VM) images. I will show with examples that ThinkAir can significantly improve the computation performance and energy consumption of mobile devices (i.e. 10x or 100x times).

The Speaker:

Dr. Pan HUI is a senior research scientist and principal investigator in Telekom Innovation Laboratories (T-labs) Germany, and an adjunct Professor of social computing and networking in Aalto University (Helsinki University of Technology) Finland. He received his PhD from Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge. During his PhD, he was also an affiliated researcher with Intel Research Cambridge. His Mphil and bachelor degrees were both from University of Hong Kong. His current research interests include social networking and computing, cloud computing and Internet services, mobile and pervasive systems, planet-scale sensing and smarter cities, and the application of complex network science in communication systems design. Dr. Hui has published more than 80 international papers and book chapters, and has accumulated around 3,000 citations. He has founded and chaired several IEEE/ACM conferences/workshops, and served on the technical program committee of numerous international conferences and workshops including IEEE Infocom, SECON, MASS and Globecom. He also has 8 granted and pending European patents. More information about his profile and his research work can be found at http://www.deutsche-telekom-laboratoriesde/~panhui/

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*** ALL ARE WELCOME ***

Contact: Prof. George Baciu
Email: csgeorge@comp.polyu.edu.hk
Tel : 2766-7295 or 2766-7272