Haris Gačanin

Date:
Time:
Place:

Thu, Mar 21^th 2019
12am
EI 2, Gusshausstr. 25, 2nd floor, Roomnumber CF0235

Biography:

Haris Gačanin received his Dipl.-Ing. degree in Electrical engineering from University of Sarajevo in 2000. In 2005 and 2008, respectively, he received MSc and PhD from Tohoku University in Japan. He worked at Tohoku University until 2010 as Assistant Professor and joined Alcatel-Lucent (now Nokia) in 2010, where he established research on data-driven analysis of communication systems at physical and media access layers. Currently, he is department head at Bell Labs and adjunct teaching professor at KU Leuven. His professional interests relate to research confluence between artificial intelligence and physical-layer communications to establish autonomous wireless systems. He has 200+ scientific publications (journals, conferences and patens) and invited/tutorial talks. He is senior member of IEEE and IEICE and recipient of IEICE Communication Systems Best Paper Award (joint 2014, 2015, 2017), The 2013 Alcatel-Lucent Award of Excellence, the 2012 KDDI Foundation Research Award, the 2009 KDDI Foundation Research Grant Award, the 2008 JSPS Postdoctoral Fellowships for Foreign Researchers, the 2005 Active Research Award in Radio Communications, 2005 Vehicular Technology Conference (VTC 2005-Fall) Student Paper Award from IEEE VTS Japan Chapter and the 2004 Institute of IEICE Society Young Researcher Award. He was awarded by Japanese Government (MEXT) Research Scholarship in 2002.

Summary:

We are now several years into explosion of machine learning (ML) in wireless networks, used to enrich decision-making by finding structures in data - knowledge discovery - as means to describe the user behavior and network performance. With new designs of wireless networks, complexity and dynamicity rises, network resources are scattered, and diversity of network elements increases. Consider these examples with interesting challenges: 1) massive number of Internet-of-Things devices, sensors and actuators give rise to the problem of dynamic network planning; 2) broadband wireless leads to problems with real-time radio resource management; 3) ultra-reliable communications require support of real-time adjustments on latency and reliability in the orders of 99,99999%. For such designs artificial intelligence (AI) is expected to support high adaptability with respect to wireless environment and its services (e.g. virtual reality). This talk discusses a paradigm shift from contemporary data-driven wireless with ML toward autonomous wireless with knowledge management by AI. We explore motivation, opportunities and methodology to adopt training-free AI methods for self-organization of wireless systems. We point out specific properties of wireless environment and classify future directions on training-free vs training-based systems. We start from popular data-driven ML techniques and briefly elaborate their benefits and shortcomings for wireless application mentioned above. The focus is on reinforcement learning as a major (training-free) representative of AI. We briefly discuss learning principles of intelligent agent with problem of random exploration for wireless-specific environment. We discuss principles of self-organization by synthesizing reasoning and learning with knowledge management. Finally, we end with a case study using wireless AI prototype for self-deployment and self-optimization. The talk provokes new coming challenges and unveil interesting future directions across multi-disciplinary research areas.

Marcello Bersani

Date:
Time:
Place:

Tue, Feb 5^th 2019
11-12am
Library, Argentinierstrasse 8 / E194-02, 3rd floor

Abstract:

Model checking is the standard technique for checking whether a system satisfies a certain property and temporal logics are the most adopted languages to express specifications over the time. Temporal logics per se are useful: they can capture a descriptive model of systems when an operational model (based on automata) is not available but also they can benefit from specific techniques that allow verification even when standard automata-based approaches might fail. This talk focuses on the extension of the well-known Linear Temporal Logic (LTL), called Constraint LTL over-clocks, and shows how this logic helped in the verification of some non-functional properties of adaptive and big-data applications, the latter ones based on the popular Apache Spark and Storm frameworks.

Salil Kanhere

Date:
Time:
Place:

Mon, Apr 17^th 2018
11-12am
Library, Argentinierstrasse 8 / E194-02, 3rd floor

Abstract:

In recent years, BlockChain (BC) has attracted tremendous attention due to its salient features including auditability, immutability, security, and privacy. BC has the potential to overcome the scalability, security and privacy challenges of Internet of Things (IoT). However, BC is computationally expensive, has limited scalability and incurs significant bandwidth overheads and delays which are not suited for most IoT applications. In this talk, we propose a Lightweight Scalable BC (LSB) that is optimized for IoT requirements while also providing end-to-end privacy and security. Our BC instantiation achieves decentralization by forming an overlay network where high resource devices jointly manage the BC. The overlay is organized as distinct clusters to reduce overheads and the cluster heads are responsible for managing the public BC. We propose a Distributed Time-based Consensus algorithm (DTC) which reduces the mining processing overhead and delay. A distributed trust approach is employed by the cluster heads to progressively reduce the processing overhead for verifying new blocks. LSB incorporates a Distributed Throughput Management (DTM) algorithm which ensures that the BC throughput does not significantly deviate from the cumulative transaction load in the network. We explore our approach in a smart home setting as a representative example for broader IoT applications. Qualitative arguments demonstrate that our approach is resilient to several security attacks. Extensive simulations show that packet overhead and delay are decreased and BC scalability is increased compared to relevant baselines.

Bio

Salil Kanhere received his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees, both in Electrical Engineering from Drexel University, Philadelphia. He is currently an Associate Professor in the School of Computer Science and Engineering at UNSW Sydney, Australia. He is also a conjoint researcher at Data61 CSIRO, Faculty Associate at Institute of Infocomm Research Singapore and on the advisory board of two technology start-ups. His current research interests include Internet of Things, pervasive computing, blockchain, crowdsourcing, data analytics, privacy and security. He has published over 180 peer-reviewed articles and delivered over 20 tutorials and keynote talks on these research topics. His research has been featured on ABC News, Forbes, Wired, ZDNET, MIT Technology Review, IEEE Spectrum and other media outlets. Salil regularly serves on the organizing committee of a number of IEEE and ACM international conferences. He is on the Editorial Board of Elsevier's Pervasive and Mobile Computing and Computer Communications. Salil is a Senior Member of both the IEEE and the ACM. He was a recipient of the Alexander von Humboldt Research Fellowship.

Veljko Milutinovic

Date:
Time:
Place:

Wed, Jan 29^th 2018
11am
Library, Argentinierstrasse 8 / E184-1, 3rd floor

Abstract:

This presentation analyses the essence of DataFlow SuperComputing, defines its advantages and sheds light on the related programming model. DataFlow computers, compared to ControlFlow computers, offer speedups of 20 to 200 (even 2000 for some applications), power reductions of about 20, and size reductions of also about 20. However, the programming paradigm is different, and has to be mastered. The talk explains the paradigm, using Maxeler as an example, and sheds light on the ongoing research, which, in the case of the speaker, was higlhy influenced by four different Nobel Laureates: (a) from Richard Feynman it was learned that future computing paradigms will be successful only if the ammount of communications is minimized; (b) from Ilya Prigogine it was learned that the entropy of a computing system would be minimized if spatial and temporal data get decoupled; (c) from Daniel Kahneman it was learned that the system software should offer options realted to approximate computing; and (d) from Andre Geim it was learned that the system software should be able to trade between latency and precision.

Bio

Prof. Veljko Milutinovic (1951) received his PhD from the University of Belgrade, spent about a decade on various faculty positions in the USA (mostly at Purdue University), and was a co-designer of the DARPAs first GaAs RISC microprocessor. Later, for almost 3 decades, he taught and conducted research at the University of Belgrade, in EE, BA, MATH, and PHYS/CHEM. Now he serves as the Chairman of the Board for the Maxeler operation in Belgrade, Serbia. His research is mostly in datamining algorithms and dataflow computing, with the emphasis on mapping of data analytics algorithms onto fast energy efficient architectures. For 7 of his books, forewords were written by 7 different Nobel Laureates with whom he cooperated on his past industry sponsored projects. He has over 40 IEEE journal papers, over 40 papers in other SCI journals (4 in ACM journals), over 400 Thomson-Reuters citations, and about 4000 Google Scholar citations. Short courses on the subject he delivered so far in a number of universities worldwide: MIT, Harvard, Boston, NEU, Columbia, NYU, Princeton, Temple, Purdue, IU, UIUC, Michigan, EPFL, ETH, Karlsruhe, Heidelberg, University of Vienna, Vienna Politechnical University, Napoli, Salerno, Siena, Pisa, etc. Also at the World Bank in Washington DC, BNL, IBM TJ Watson, Yahoo NY, ABB Zurich, Oracle Zurich, etc.

We are happy to announce that the Distributed Systems Group offers two full-time PhD positions in the European Training Network for Fog Computing for Robotics and Industrial Automation (FORA). For more details and instructions on how to apply see http://www.fora-etn.eu/projects/phd-project-6/" and http://www.fora-etn.eu/projects/phd-project-10/ , respectively.

Prof. Moustafa Youssef

ACM Distinguished Scientist
Founder and Director, The Wireless Research Center
Egypt-Japan University of Science and Technology
Alexandria
Egypt

Date:
Time:
Place:

Tue, May 2^th 2017
3pm -5pm
Seminarraum Zemanek, Favoritenstrasse 9-11

Abstract:

Traditional Geographic Information Systems (GIS) focus on capturing and analyzing outdoor geographical data. However, there is no corresponding effort for indoor data and indoor GISs remain an open territory for exploration and innovation. In this talk, we show how to automatically construct semantic-rich indoor floorplans tagged with information such as points of interests and the business names or categories. Specifically, we present different crowdsourcing-based systems that leverage the standard cell phone sensors and publicly available information to achieve this goal. Experimental evaluation of these systems in four malls and a large number of transit stations in Egypt and Japan shows that they can achieve a high semantic labeling accuracy in the presence of highly noisy data. We end the talk by presenting directions for future work and open research challenges.

Bio

Moustafa Youssef is the Founder and Director of the Wireless Research Center at Egypt-Japan University of Science and Technology (E-JUST). His research interests include mobile computing, location determination technologies, pervasive computing, mobile wireless networks, and network security. He is an associate editor for the ACM TSAS, a previous area editor of the ACM MC2R and served on the organizing and technical committees of numerous prestigious conferences. Prof. Youssef is the recipient of the 2003 University of Maryland Invention of the Year award, the 2010 TWAS-AAS-Microsoft Award for Young Scientists, the 2012 Egyptian State Award, the 2013 and 2014 COMESA Innovation Awards, the 2013 ACM SIGSpatial GIS Conference Best Paper Award, among many others. He is also an ACM Distinguished Speaker and an ACM Distinguished Scientist.

Javid Taheri

Date:
Time:
Place:

Wed, Sep 7^th 2016
3pm
Library, Argentinierstrasse 8 / E184-1, 3rd floor

Abstract:

Cloud Data Centres (CDCs) are filled with servers to perform the ever increasing web/remote services through manageable cloud service paradigms. To date, most research endeavours aim to optimize performance in each of these layers independent of other layers. Knowing that single-layer solutions still have the potential to profoundly increase productivity of CDCs, I argue that only holistic solutions could be game-changers in this arena. To this end, although holistic approaches require much more complex frameworks and solutions, I believe that our current technological advancements and experience in optimizing processes in each of these layers can allow us to proceed toward this challenging yet extremely valuable direction. In this talk, I will discuss three major topics in CDCs (optimization techniques in SaaS, optimization techniques in IaaS, and SDN as an enabler to better utilize network resources) and demonstrate our work in each of these layers. I will then lay out a roadmap to achieve holistic approaches in which individual solutions could be augmented to not only tie-down layers but also further enhance efficiency and productivity of CDCs.

Bio

Javid Taheri received his Bachelor and Masters of Electrical Engineering from Sharif University of Technology, Tehran, Iran, in 1998 and 2000, respectively. He received his Ph.D. in the field of Mobile Computing from the School of Information Technologies at the University of Sydney, Australia. Since 2006, he has been actively working in several fields, including: networking, optimization, parallel/distributed computing, and cloud computing. Because of his contribution to the vibrant area of Cloud Computing, he was selected among 200 top young researchers in Mathematics and Computer Science by the Heidelberg Forum in 2013. He also holds several cloud/networking related industrial certification from VMware (VCP-DCV, VCP-DT, and VCP-Cloud), Cisco (CCNA), Microsoft, etc. He is currently working as an Associate Professor at Department of Computer Science in Karlstad University, Sweden. His major areas of interest are (1) Profiling, Modelling and Optimization techniques for private and public cloud infrastructures, (2) Profiling, Modelling and Optimization techniques for Software Defined Networks, and (3) Network-aware Scheduling Algorithms for Cloud and Green computing.

Date:
Place:

September 5^th-7^th 2016
Gußhausstraße 27-29

TU Wien will host the 5th European Conference on Service-oriented and Cloud Computing The Distributed Systems Group at TU Wien is very happy to announce that we will host ESOCC 2016 (www.esocc2016.eu) from September 5th-7th, 2016. ESOCC is the premier European forum for researchers in the field of service-oriented computing and cloud computing. Therefore, it is a great honor that we have been chosen to organize the conference. Also, Prof. Schahram Dustdar serves as General Chair.

Chayan Sarkar

Delft University of Technology

Date:
Time:
Place:

Thursday, Feb 18^th 2016
11:00
Library, Argentinierstrasse 8 / E184-1, 3rd floor

Abstract:

A wireless sensor network (WSN) is a distributed system composed of many battery-operated embedded devices. WSNs are deployed to monitor a specific target area and collect data autonomously. Philosophy of Internet of Things is to monitor and control any device, any time, from anywhere, which looks like next version of WSN. Thus the question is, are IoT and WSN synonymous? I will elaborate on this in the first part of my talk along with an intuitive architecture. Next, I tackled many questions: (i) How to make existing network operation more energy-efficient? (ii) How to gather more data from limited infrastructure? (iii) How to gather information from the data collected from different sources? I have used spatio-temporal correlation based estimation model to make network more energy-efficient. I have introduced the concept of virtual sensing to provide data for many applications without dense infrastructure. I have created a generic architecture for IoT that can combine data from multiple sources. It enables easy decision making and task execution based on the sensed data. In the last part, I want to share my current work on low latency and time bound data delivery. I conclude with some open questions and future interesting avenues for research, some of which superficially explored already.

Bio

I am a final year PhD student at the faculty of Electrical Engineering, Computer Science and Mathematics at the Delft University of Technology in Netherlands. I completed my bachelor's and master's study in computer science and engineering at the Jadavpur University in Kolkata in 2009 and at the Indian Institute of Technology in Mumbai (IIT Bombay) in 2011, respectively. During my master's, I visited the telecommunication networks group at TU Berlin for 9 months under the DAAD scholarship. Since January, 2012, I am working at the embedded software group at TU Delft for my PhD. I am guided by Dr. R. Venkatesha Prasad and Prof. Koen Langendoen. I was involved in a EU F7 project called iCore, where I collaborated with various industrial and academic partners.

Artem Polyvyanyy

Queensland University of Technology

Date:
Time:
Place:

Thursday, Dec 17^th 2015
11:00
Library, Argentinierstrasse 8 / E184-1, 3rd floor

Abstract:

Process Querying: Expressiveness, feasibility, and language. Process models capture the behavior of systems in an unambiguous way by describing (often infinite) collections of process instances, where a process instance is an arrangement of activities and/or events in relation to each other according to an order in which they can be executed by a system. Process Querying studies applications of theoretical computer science fundamentals, e.g., results in distributed and parallel computing, model checking, and formal methods, to problems in process modelling and analysis, in particular management of collection of process models. Process Querying addresses the problem of automatically managing (collections of) process models based on process instances that these models describe. A user interacts with a collection of process models via process querying intents. A process querying intent is a formally specified request to manage a collection of process models for a particular purpose. Process Querying research initiative spans a range of topics from theoretical studies of algorithms and the limits of computability of process querying techniques to the practical issues of implementing process querying technologies in software. In this talk, Dr Artem Polyvyanyy will propose a research agenda on process querying as well as will report on his recent research activities that fit the proposed agenda. Specifically, this presentation will focus on works that aim at improving the expressive power of process querying techniques, feasibility of process querying, and the design of a formal language for specifying process querying intents, called process query language (PQL).

Bio

Dr. Artem Polyvyanyy is a Lecturer at the Business Process Management Discipline, Information Systems School, Science and Engineering Faculty, of the Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, Australia. He has a strong background in Computer Science, Software Engineering, and Business Process Management from the National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy, Kyiv, Ukraine, and the Hasso Plattner Institute, Potsdam, Germany. In March 2012, he received a Ph.D. degree (Dr. rer. nat.) in the scientific discipline of Practical Computer Science from the University of Potsdam, Germany. Artem's industry experience includes internships at Wincor-Nixdorf GmbH in Hamburg, Germany, and SAP Labs in Palo Alto, CA, USA. His research and teaching interests include Distributed and Parallel Systems, Automata Theory, Formal Methods, Information Systems, Software Engineering, and Workflow Management. He has published more than 40 scientific works on these topics in academic book chapters, journal articles, and conference papers. More recently, he has conducted research on the fundamentals of process analysis, the foundations of behavior abstraction in concurrent systems, and querying of process model repositories.

Demetris Zeinalipour

University of Cyprus

Date:
Time:
Place:

Tuesday, Sept 30^th 2014
11:00
Library, Argentinierstrasse 8 / E184-1, 3rd floor

Abstract:

The explosive number of smartphones with ever growing computing and sensing capabilities have brought a paradigm shift to many traditional domains of the computing field. Smartphone users nowadays gain access to unprecedented possibilities, knowledge and power due to a diverse landscape of applications. Developers on the other hand are challenged with a fragmented mobile landscape that is extremely dynamic to changes in both hardware and software. Re-programming smartphones and instrumenting them for application testing and data gathering at scale is currently a tedious and time-consuming process that poses significant logistical challenges.

In this talk, we present the abstractions comprising SmartLab, a Mobile Infrastructure as a Service cloud we have developed and deployed at the University of Cyprus. In SmartLab, an intuitive web-based interface supplies a variety of complex mobile management utilities that provide fine-grained and low-level control over real smartphones, e.g., usage of networking, storage and sensors as well as automated mockup executions. We present our research experiences from using SmartLab in different research settings as well as our envisioned future scenarios for urban-scale deployment, federation issues and security studies. My talk will be succeeded by a summary of related mobile data management research efforts, namely Anyplace, which is our in-house indoor localization and navigation service; and Rayzit, which is our award-winning location-based crowd messaging service.

Andreas Reinhardt

The University of New South Wales, Australia

Date:
Time:
Place:

Wednesday, Jul 23^rd 2014
13:00
Library, Argentinierstrasse 8 / E184-1, 3rd floor

Abstract:

More and more smart energy measurement devices (e.g., smart meters and smart plugs) are being deployed in households and office buildings worldwide to collect fine-grained power consumption data. A wide range of novel energy-based services can be realized based on these data, e.g., emitting recommendations how to save energy or providing means to increase comfort. In this talk, I will outline selected user-centric services based on energy monitoring which are enabled by the availability of high-resolution power consumption data. I will also shed light on how power consumption data can reveal the nature of operating appliances and their mode of operation at high accuracy. A briefly discussion of the resulting threats to user privacy and insights gained from a lightweight local solution to mitigate these threats by eliminating characteristic consumption patterns from the data will conclude my presentation.

Bio

Dr Andreas Reinhardt has joined UNSW as a Vice-Chancellor's Postdoctoral Research Fellow within the School of Computer Science and Engineering in March 2013. He holds a doctoral degree in Electrical Engineering and Information Technology from Technische Universität Darmstadt, Germany, where he graduated in 2011 on the topic of designing sensor networks for smart spaces. His current research interests lie in the area of ubiquitous computing for a smarter use of energy, with a special focus on making wireless sensor and actuator networks viable for their integration into smart energy management systems.

Nico Herzberg

Hasso-Plattner-Institute, Germany

Date:
Time:
Place:

Thursday, Mar 20^th 2014
10:30
Library, Argentinierstrasse 8 / E184-1, 3rd floor

Abstract: Process Intelligence describes methods and technologies to monitor, analyze and control business processes based on process execution data, so-called. The topic is well explored in automated process execution environments that are controlled by process engines, but needs to be discovered for manual executing process environments, such as in healthcare.

In this talk, Nico will present the underlying framework for process intelligence in non-automated process execution environments, some applications that base on it and open research questions.

Prof. Emanuele Della Valle

Politecnico di Milano

Date:
Time:
Place:

Monday, Mar 3^rd 2014
12:00
Library, Argentinierstrasse 8 / E184-1, 3rd floor

Abstract: Reasoning on rapidly chancing information requires: a) semantic models for representing both data streams and continuous querying/reasoning tasks, and b) reasoning algorithms optimised for continuous reactive query-answering. This talk presents applications cases from which Stream Reasoning requirements were elicited, it briefly covers the findings of 5 year of research, it presents an optimised algorithm for Incremental Reasoning on RDF Streams (IMaRS), and offers an outlook on future research opportunities.

Dr. Srikumar Venugopal

University of New South Wales (Sydney)

Date:
Time:
Place:

Friday, Dec 13^th 2013
11:00
Library, Argentinierstrasse 8 / E184-1, 3rd floor

Abstract: The defining feature of cloud computing is elasticity, or the ability to add and remove resources at will. Elasticity has created interesting opportunites for research into resource provisioning, fault tolerance, scalability and the like. However, most of the current research into elasticity has focussed on linear scaling of application logic where management of state information is delegated to a persistence layer. There has been less emphasis on the impact of elasticity on the persistence layer and how application state can be effectively managed during elastic operations.

This talk will present some of the recent work in my group in UNSW on elastic scaling, both for application layer and for the persistence layer. I will end the talk with some thoughts on how we can unify elasticity across the application stack.

Am 11. Oktober kann im Rahmen des CCC – Catalysts Coding Contest in Wien wieder um die Wette "gecodet" werde. Im Wiener Rathaus geht es um ein Preisgeld von insgesamt 5.245 €. Eine Anmeldung ist noch möglich.

Ziel des Programmierwettbewerbs ist es, die gestellten Aufgaben so schnell wie möglich zu lösen. Teilnahmeberechtigt sind alle interessierten EntwicklerInnen (egal ob StudentIn, SchülerIn oder PraktikerInnen). Antreten kann man alleine oder in Teams bis zu maximal drei Personen.

Die Teilnahme am Wettbewerb ist anonym – nur die besten 30 werden namentlich in einer sogenannten Hall of Fame genannt.

Alle Infos zur Anmeldung sowie zum Wettbewerb gibt es auf www.catalysts.cc/contest/

Dr. Ingo Weber

Senior researcher at [NICTA], Adjunct Lecturer at University of New South Wales

Date:
Time:
Place:

Friday, Sept 13^th 2013
10:00
Library, Argentinierstrasse 8 / E184-1, 3rd floor

Abstract:

With an estimated market volume of US$ 130 billion and double-figure growth rates, cloud computing is on the path to change many aspects of our digital lives. We consider the question of potential benefits and open challenges when bringing BPM into the cloud, such as (i) how can BPM benefit from the cloud, (ii) what should BPM in the cloud look like, and (iii) what can BPM bring to cloud computing practices? In this talk I will present three works around those questions, namely (a.) end-user-friendly process modelling in the cloud, (b.) process-aware auto-scaling of cloud resources, and (c.) process mining for error diagnostics in cloud management processes -- with an emphasis on (c.). The talk will close with a presentation of a number of open challenges

The Distributed Systems group at the Vienna University of Technology has an open, fulltime funded position either for a PhD student (3 years) or a post-doc (2 years). The expected candidate will work on the topic "Programming Hybrid Compute Units in the Cloud" in the context of the FP7 FET SmartSociety under the supervision of Schahram Dustdar and Hong-Linh Truong. The main goal of this position is to research and develop techniques and models for programming human-based services, software services and things in the cloud to support hybrid and diversity-aware collective adaptive systems.

The selected candidate will be employed as full time at the Vienna University of Technology. The position opens at 1.10.2013.

Potential candidates should possess

• A master degree (or equivalent) in computer science
• Excellent programming skills in Java
• Very good knowledge in Cloud Computing, Web Services and SOA
• Good knowledge in workflow-based, adaptive and elastic systems
• Good knowledge in programming language designs
• Good knowledge in human computation, socially-enhanced service-oriented computing, and IoT
• Very good scientific communication and writing skills
• Strong publications in top conferences (for postdocs)
• Strong experience in developing software prototypes
• Strong international teamwork experience
• Proficiency in English communication and writing

Prospective candidates should contact and send his/her applications, including academic records, samples of master/PhD thesis and scientific papers, a CV and relevant certificates, a statement on software prototype development experience, and a motivation letter, to:

Schahram Dustdar | Hong-Linh Truong
Distributed Systems Group
Email: {dustdar, truong} @dsg.tuwien.ac.at

Applications from female candidates are highly encouraged. The deadline for applying this position is 30.08.2013. The accepted candidate will be decided in September 2013. Starting date can be negotiated but it is expected that a Phd student can start from 1 Oct, 2013 while a postdoc will start 1 Jan, 2014.

In the context of the interdisciplinary Doctoral College "Urban Energy and Mobility Systems" at the Vienna University of Technology - a joint program with the Wiener Stadtwerke Holding AG, we have an open funded PhD student position for the topic "Complex distributed Process Management for Energy and Mobility System Analytics". The expected student will be jointly supervised by Professors at the Distributed Systems Group (Schahram Dustdar and Hong-Linh Truong) and the Department of Spatial Planning (Andreas Voigt and Claudia Czerkauer-Yamu) at The Vienna University of Technology and by industrial partners at the Wiener Stadtwerke Holding AG. The expected student will also join the research program with other nine candidates in other research topics.

The selected candidate will be employed as PhD research assistant student at the Vienna University of Technology for 25 hours/week. The position opens at 1.10.2013 and is funded for 3 years.

Potential candidates should possess

• A master degree (or equivalent) in computer science
• Strong programming skills in Java, C++, Python and BPEL
• Good knowledge in Cloud Computing and SOA
• Good knowledge in Workflows, Data management and Data analytics
• Good knowledge in smart cities
• Very good scientific communication and writing skills
• Strong teamwork experience
• Proficiency in English communication and writing

Prospective candidates should contact and send his/her applications, including academic records, CV and relevant certificates and a motivation letter, to:

Vienna University of Technology
Research center for energy and Environment
Karlsplatz 13/E006, 1040 Wien, Austria
Email: energiewelten@tuwien.ac.at

Application deadline is: 30.06.2013. The accepted candidate will be decided in August 2013. Details about the doctoral college and its research topics can be found at Urban Energy and Mobility Systems.

The call for applications of the Vienna PhD School of Informatics for the academic year 2013/2014 is open. The deadline for applications is May 26, 2013.

Detailed information about the PhD School can be found at http://www.informatik.tuwien.ac.at/phdschool/.

The curriculum of the PhD School covers the main research areas of the Faculty of Informatics and constitutes a structured program of supervised study and research. The duration of the PhD School is three years.

Prof. Aditya Ghose

University of Wollongong

Date:
Time:
Place:

Tuesday, April 11^st 2013
11:00
Library, Argentinierstrasse 8 / E184-1, 3rd floor

Abstract:

The problem of strategic alignment is regarded as one of the grand challenges in management. In this talk, I will argue that an algorithmic approach to the analysis of the alignment of services with organizational strategy is possible, and will demonstrate it via the ServAlign tool. I will argue that the use of such a tool is an important basis for enterprise rationalization via strategic dashboards. I will also argue that a novel take on big data enables the acquisition of strategic know-how.

Speaker bio:

Professor Aditya Ghose is Director of the Decision Systems Lab at the School of Computer Science and Software Engineering at the University of Wollongong. He holds PhD and MSc degrees in Computing Science from the University of Alberta, Canada (he also spent parts of his PhD candidature at the Beckman Institute, University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign and the University of Tokyo) and a Bachelor of Engineering degree in Computer Science and Engineering from Jadavpur University, Kolkata, India. Professor Ghose is a Research Leader in the Australian Cooperative Research Centre for Smart Services, Co-Director of the Centre for Oncology Informatics at the Illawarra Health and Medical Research Institute, Co-Leader of the University of Wollongong Carbon-Centric Computing Initiative and Co-Convenor of the Australian Computer Society NSW SIG on Green ICT. He is Vice-President of CORE, Australia's apex body for computing academics. He is also President of the Service Science Society of Australia.

Dr. Mikhail Panshenskov

St. Petersburg State University, Russia

Date:
Time:
Place:

Thursday, January 31^st 2013
11:00
Library, Argentinierstrasse 8 / E184-1, 3rd floor

This talk has been cancelled

Abstract:

In the presence of limited resources constant computing power growth requires effective utilization of computing resources. The problem of effective scheduling becomes highly relevant. Numerous heuristics (like min-min, xsufferage, genetic algorithms etc.) provide relatively good solution for a NP-hard problem of scheduling. Although most of the published heuristics have two issues. First of all, many of such algorithms do not consider inter-processor communication which becomes highly important in modern computing. Secondly, many scheduling heuristics do not guarantee the quality of scheduling whatsoever. Based on models of C.Leiserson and V.Vl. Voevodin the author builds a new mathematical model of scheduling in distributed systems with active data transfers. The author considers different types of independent tasks and different types of distributed systems and for all the scenarios presents worst case estimates of quality of scheduling as a function of task and distributed environment parameters. These estimates demonstrate the influence of communication and sizes of independent tasks on the quality of scheduling. For instance, the Author shows how the connection latency plays important role in the scheduling. Also the author has deployed a distributed system on small cluster of 20 nodes and demonstrated applications of the method to estimate the quality of scheduling. The methods can be applied to calculate the quality of scheduling for different present cases including 1)scheduling of independent tasks in MapReduce and 2)scheduling in the presence of horizontal scaling (like in elastic cloud EC2).

Paul Grefen & Remco Dijkman

Eindhoven University of Technology

Date:
Time:
Place:

Thursday, January 17^th 2013
11:00
Library, Argentinierstrasse 8 / E184-1, 3rd floor

Abstract:

In this presentation, we address the topic of support for real-time control in complex, multi-modal logistics chains. We elaborate control models and show how these can be mapped to information system infrastructures. The presentation consists of two parts. In the first part, Paul Grefen presents the development of an information-based control model for supply chains. He shows how this control model can be mapped to shared IT infrastructure, such as service clouds. In the second part of the presentation, Remco Dijkman presents the GET Service European project, which aims at a practical implementation of a specific version of the control model around an integrated service bus. In this project, aggregation of large volumes of diverse real-time, transport-related information is used to provide input for both static and dynamic planning of complex logistics processes. The ultimate goal is to support on-the-fly, drag-and-drop reconfiguration of logistics processes using the parallel availability of multiple transport modalities (i.e., using synchro-modality).

at the 10^th International Conference on Service-Oriented Computing, Shanghai 2012

Former DSG member Martin Pinzger accepted the Full Professor position of Software Engineering at the University of Klagenfurt, Austria

Prof. Schahram Dustdar receives the IBM Faculty Award 2012.
TU Wien News Page (german)

Artikel in der "Presse" vom 22.08.2012

Seite 24, Seite 25, Seite 26

Die TU Wien forscht für Städte der Zukunft und entwickelt Ideen und Lösungsansätze.
Smart City Forschung @ TUU Wien.

Artikel im Kurier vom 13.6.2012

Doctoral College "Adaptive Distributed Systems"

more Information

Alessio Gambi

Univ. of Lugano, Switzerland, [Homepage]

Date:
Time:
Place:

Thursday, January 12^th 2012
14:00
Library, Argentinierstrasse 8 / E184-1, 3rd floor

Abstract:

In the context of Cloud computing, Service Providers (SP) can access resources "on-demand" and dynamically scale their elastic applications; in this way, SPs can reduce the need of system over-sizing and provide guarantees about applications QoS. To properly achieve this, SPs must decide on when, what and how to scale their systems.

Dynamic changes in operating conditions, and the complexity of the relations between system behaviors and system configurations may reduce the effectiveness of statically defined solutions. Model based self-adaptive controllers seem to be more promising solutions as they were originally proposed to deal with complex systems, emerging behaviors, and dynamic environments, and because they can autonomously learn from past experience and adapt to the actual operating conditions.

In this talk, I discuss the design of self-adaptive controllers based on a particular black-box surrogate model, named Kriging model. Kriging models are the mathematical tools that controllers use to capture the relations between the QoS of the virtualized systems, the incoming workload and the system configuration, and to support their planning activities; the models are maintained up-to-date by the controllers during the runtime activities.

Info Brochure
from Pacific Controls

 

Prof. Frank Leymann

Universität Stuttgart, Germany

Date:
Time:
Place:

Wednesday, Nov 30^th 2011
15:00
Library, Argentinierstrasse 8 / E184-1, 3rd floor

Pacific Controls and the Vienna University of Technology are developing an "internet of things". Automatic communication between electronic devices and infrastructures can save money and energy.

TU Vienna press release:
german english

 

Christian Haas

Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), Germany

Date:
Time:
Place:

Wednesday, October 5^th 2011
16:00
seminar room Argentinierstrasse

Abstract:

In order to run a platform like a Social Cloud, a certain quantity of resources is necessary to facilitate the platform itself and the services that enable the basic operation of the platform. For example, because users can share and trade resources using different (economic) protocols, the matching of demand to supply results in the calculation of one or more allocations, and requires a form of computational infrastructure to facilitate this.

Hence, this talk discusses how such infrastructure resources can be provided by the users of the Social Cloud itself, rather than from a central entity. An economic co-operative sharing model of users is formulated, where the platform itself and its functionality are provided and owned by the users. In addition, the efficiency and performance of such a model depending on incentive schemes and users' characteristics is studied.

Rui Oliveira

University do Minho, Braga, Portugal

Date:
Time:
Place:

Thursday, April 14^th 2011
14:15
EI1, Gusshausstrasse 25

Abstract:

This guest lecture is part of the master level lecture "Advanced Distributed Systems".

It may be of particular interest for PhD students working on distribution aspects, as consensus is *the* fundamental problem of distributed systems and many proofs exists under what conditions consensus can be deterministically solved - and when not (e.g., two army/coordinated attack problem, byzantine generals, muddy children/jealous amazons, etc...).

The lecture will explain the basic problem, sketch the FLP proof idea and motivate the idea of failure detectors.

Dr. Stefan Schulte

TU Darmstadt

Date:
Time:
Place:

Friday, April 1^st 2011
13:00
Library, Argentinierstrasse 8 / E184-1, 3rd floor

Abstract:

After a brief description of my research background, this talk will focus on my former work on process reliability in Service-oriented Architectures. The creation of business processes by composing loosely coupled services to (complex) workflows is one of the major application scenarios of Service-oriented Computing. As a result of the ongoing success of Web service technologies, services can be purchased from external providers. In a future "Internet of Services", functionally equivalent services which provide different cost and quality levels will be available and can be selected by a service consumer in order to execute the different steps of a workflow. Furthermore, the existence of functionally equivalent services allows replacing a service if it does not meet its guaranteed service levels. In this talk, I will present work originating from the BMBF-funded project SoKNOS (Service-Oriented ArchiteCtures Supporting Networks of Public Security) which addresses the selection of services based on user-defined constraints, the monitoring of the workflow execution, and the re-planning of service-based workflows (if necessary).

Press Release at CeBIT 2011

Jährlich wird der MiA-Award an Frauen mit Migrationshintergrund für hervorragende Leistungen und Erfolge in und für Österreich vergeben. Die diesjährige MiA für Wissenschaft & Forschung erhielt Ivona Brandic für ihre bemerkenswerten wissenschaftlichen Leistungen.

Die Universitätsassistentin stammt ursprünglich aus Bosnien-Herzegowina und kam aufgrund des Kriegsausbruches mit 15 Jahren nach Österreich.
Ivona Brandic studierte Wirtschaftsinformatik an der TU Wien sowie Universität Wien und begann ihre wissenschaftliche Karriere am Institut für Scientific Computing der Universität Wien. Seit 2007 ist sie am Arbeitsbereich Distributed Systems des Instituts für Informationssysteme tätig.

Für die MiA wird aus jeweils drei nominierten Kandidatinnen eine Preisträgerin in den folgenden Kategorien ermittelt: Wissenschaft & Forschung, Wirtschaft, Humanitäres & Gesellschaftliches Engagement, Kunst & Kultur, Sport.

Professor Dr. Jörn ALTMANN

Technology Management, Economics and Policy at the College of Engineering Seoul National University

Date:
Time:
Place:

Monday, 21 February 2011
16:00
Library, Argentinierstrasse 8 / E184-1, 3rd floor

Prospects for a Collaboration on Evaluating Adaptive SOAs

Dr. Jan Sudeikat

HAW Hamburg / VSIS group at the University of Hamburg

Date:
Time:
Place:

Tuesday, 15th February 2011
10:00
Library, Argentinierstrasse 8 / E184-1, 3rd floor

Dr. Kamal Bhattacharya

Senior Manager at IBM Research India

Date:
Time:
Place:

Monday, 31 January 2011
11:00
Library, Argentinierstrasse 8 / E184-1, 3rd floor