Applications Development for the Computational Grid
Professor David Abramson, Monash University, Australia
[abstract] [about the speaker]
Strongly Connected Dominating Sets in Wireless Sensor Networks with Unidirectional Links
Professor Ding-Zhu Du, University of Minnesota, USA
[abstract] [about the speaker]
Supercomputers and Clusters and Grids, Oh My!
Professor Jack Dongarra, University of Tennessee and Oak Ridge National Laboratory, USA
[abstract] [about the speaker]
Mobile Web and Mobile Location-based Services
Professor Ling Liu, Georgia Institute of Technology, USA
[abstract] [about the speaker]
The Case of the Duplicate Documents: Measurement, Search, and Science
Professor Justin Zobel, RMIT, Australia
[abstract] [about the speaker]
Applications Development for the Computational Grid
Professor David Abramson, Monash University, Australia
[Abstract] The Computational Grid has promised a great deal in support of innovative applications, particularly in science and engineering. However, developing
applications for this highly distributed, and often faulty, infrastructure can be demanding. Often it can take as long to set up an computational experiment as it does to execute it. Clearly we need to be more efficient if the Grid is to deliver useful results to applications scientists and engineers. This talk will discuss a raft of upper middleware services and tools aimed at solving the software engineering challenges in building real applications, and illustrate an approach using some real applications. It also includes a discussion of the tools and techniques developed at Monash University.
[About Speaker] Professor Abramson has been involved in computer architecture and high performance computing research since 1979. Previous to joining Monash University in 1997, he has held appointments at Griffith University, CSIRO, and RMIT. At CSIRO he was the program leader of the Division of Information Technology High Performance Computing Program, and was also an adjunct Associate Professor at RMIT in Melbourne. He was also a program manager in the Co-operative Research Centre for Intelligent Decisions Systems and the Co-operative Research Centre for Enterprise Distributed Systems. Abramson is currently a professor of Computer Science in the Faculty of Information Technology at Monash University, Australia. He has chaired a number of international conferences, and has published over 120 papers and technical documents. He has given seminars and received awards around Australia and internationally and has received over $3.6 million in research grants. He also has a keen interest in R&D commercialization and is involved with Axceleon Inc, who produce an industry strength version of Nimrod, and Guardsoft, a company focused on commercialising the Guard relative debugger. Abramson's current interests are in high performance computer systems design and software engineering tools for programming parallel, distributed supercomputers and stained glass windows.
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The Case of the Duplicate Documents: Measurement, Search, and Science
Professor Justin Zobel, RMIT, Australia
[Abstract] Many of the documents in large text collections are duplicates and versions, and there are obvious benefits to identifying them. In recent research, we developed new methods for finding and handling such duplicates; however, as there was no directly comparable prior work, we had no measure of whether we had succeeded or failed. Worse, the concept of "duplicate" not only proved difficult to define, but on reflection was not logically defensible. Our investigation highlighted a paradox of computer science research: objective measurement of outcomes involves a subjective choice of preferred measure; and attempts to define measures can easily founder in circular reasoning. Also, some measures are simple abstractions that are intended to quantify complex real-world phenomena, so success by a measure may not be meaningful outside the context of the research. These are not merely academic concerns, but are significant problems in the design of research projects. In this talk, the case of the duplicate documents is used to explore whether and when it is reasonable to claim that research is successful. We use these observations to argue that our duplicate discovery methods are of significant practical value.
[About Speaker] Professor Justin Zobel received his BSc(Hons) and PhD from the University of Melbourne, where he worked for several years as a lecturer in the Department of Computer Science. Since 1990 he has been based in the School of Computer Science and Information Technology at RMIT University, where he now leads the Search Engine group. He is an Editor-in-Chief of the International Journal of Information Retrieval, an associate editor of ACM Transactions on Information Systems and of Information Processing & Management, and Treasurer of ACM SIGIR. He is the author of several textbooks, including the research methods text "Writing for Computer Science", and approximately 150 academic papers. In the research community, he is best known for his role in the development of algorithms for efficient text retrieval, which underpin applications such as web search engines. His expertise also includes fundamental data structures and algorithms, plagiarism detection, string algorithms, compression, and research methods.
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Mobile Web and Mobile Location-based Services
Professor Ling Liu, Georgia Institute of Technology, USA
[Abstract] The Web today, powered by Web server, application server technology, and Web services, is the lingua franca of the bulk of contents out on the Internet. As computing and communications options become ubiquitous, this Internet access capability is being embedded in billions of wireless devices such as PDAs, cellular phones, and computers embedded in vehicles. The Mobile Web is extending the Web through mobile information access, with the promise of greater information access opportunity, richer and device-spanning Web experiences, due to continuous availability and location awareness. In addition, advances in positioning technologies, mobile hardware, and the growing popularity and availability of mobile communications have made many devices location-aware. Location-based information management has become an important problem in mobile computing systems. Furthermore, the computational capabilities in mobile devices continue to rise, making mobile devices increasingly accessible. However, much research efforts to date have been devoted to location management in centralized location monitoring systems. Very few have studied the distributed approach to real-time location management. We argue that for mobile applications that need to manage a large and growing number of mobile objects, the centralized approaches do not scale well in terms of server load and network bandwidth, and are vulnerable to single point of failure. In this keynote, I will describe a distributed location service architecture, and discuss some important opportunities and challenges of mobile location based services (LBSs) in future computing environments. I will first review the research and development of LBSs in the past decade, focusing on system scalability, robustness, and performance measurements. Then I will discuss some important challenges for wide deployment of distributed location-based services in mission-critical applications and future computing environments. Not surprisingly, the mobile web and the location-aware computing will drive the merger of wireless and wired Internet world, creating a much larger industry than today's predominantly wired Internet industry.
[About Speaker] Ling Liu is currently an associate professor at the College of Computing of Georgia Tech and a director of the Distributed Data Intensive Systems (DiSL) laboratory, working on various research issues and technical challenges of large scale distributed data intensive systems, ranging from decentralized overlay networks, exemplified by peer to peer computing and grid computing, to mobile computing systems and location based services, sensor network systems, and enterprise computing technology. She has published over 150 international journal and conference articles. She and her students have produced a number of open source software systems, among which the most popular ones are WebCQ and XWRAPElite. She is a recipient of best paper award from IEEE ICDCS 2003, and a best paper award from International Conference on World Wide Web (WWW 2004), a recipient of IBM Faculty Partnership Award (2003), and a recipient of ACM service award (2001, 2004) and IEEE service award (2004). Dr. Ling Liu is on the editorial board of several top ranked International journals, including IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Engineering (TKDE) and International Journal of Very Large Databases (VLDBJ). She has chaired multiple international conferences on various themes of data intensive distributed systems, including IEEE International Conference on Data Engineering (General chair of ICDE 2007, PC co-chair of ICDE 2006, vice PC Chair of ICDE04), a vice PC chair of IEEE International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems (ICDCS 2006), a PC chair of IEEE Int. Conf. on Collaborative Computing (2005), IEEE Int. Conf. on Web Services (ICWS 2004). Most of Dr. Liu’s current research projects are sponsored by NSF, DARPA, Department of Energy, IBM, and HP.
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Strongly Connected Dominating Sets in Wireless Sensor Networks with Unidirectional Links
Professor Ding-Zhu Du, University of Minnesota, USA
[Abstract] A Connected Dominating Set (CDS) can serve as a virtual backbone for a wireless sensor network since there is no ¯xed infrastruc- ture or centralized management in wireless sensor networks. With the help of CDS, routing is easier and can adapt quickly to network topology changes. The CDS problem has been studied extensively in undirected graphs, especially in unit disk graphs, in which each sensor node has the same transmission range. However, in practice, the transmission ranges of all nodes are not necessarily to be equal. In this paper, we model a network as a disk graph where unidirectional links are considered and introduce the Strongly Connected Dominating Set (SCDS) problem in disk graphs. We propose two constant approximation algorithms for the SCDS problem and compare their performances through the theoretical analysis.
[About Speaker] Ding-Zhu Du received his M.S. degree in 1982 from Institute of Applied Mathematics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, and his Ph.D. degree in 1985 from the University of California at Santa Barbara. He worked at Mathematical Sciences Research Institute, Berkeley in 1985-86, at MIT in 1986-87, and at Princeton University in 1990-91. He was an associate-professor/professor at Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Minnesota in 1991-2005, a professor at City University of Hong Kong in 1998-1999, and a research professor at Institute of Applied Mathematics, Chinese Academy of Sciences in 1987-2002. Currently, he is a professor at Department of Computer Science, University of Texas at Dallas, a program director for Theory of Computing in National Science Foundation, USA, and also a professor at Xi'an Jiaotong University. His research interests include combinatorial optimization, communication networks, and theory of computation. He has published more than 160 journal papers and 40 books. He is the editor-in-chief of Journal of Combinatorial Optimization and book series on Network Theory and Applications. He is also in editorial boards of more than 15 journals. He is well-known for proving the Gilbert-Pollak conjecture on the Steiner ratio, the Derman-Leiberman-Ross conjecture on optimal consecutive 2-out-of-$n$ systems in reliability, and the global convergence of Rosen gradient projection method in nonlinear programming. In 1998, he received received CSTS Prize from INFORMS (a merge of American Operations Research Society and Institute of Management Science) for research excellence in the interface between Operations Research and Computer Science. In 1996, he received the 2nd Class National Natural Science Prize in China. In 1993, he received the 1st Class Natural Science Prize from Chinese Academy of Sciences. In 1992, the proof of Gilbet-Pollak conjecture was selected by 1992 Year Book of Encyclopaedia, Britannica, as the first one among six outstanding achievements in mathematics in 1991.
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Supercomputers and Clusters and Grids, Oh My!
Professor Jack Dongarra, University of Tennessee and Oak Ridge National Laboratory, USA
[Abstract] In this talk we will look at the changes that have taken place in the area of High Performance Computing over the last 10 years, and will look toward future trends. We will advocate the "Grid" to support large-scale applications. This envisaged Grid must provide transparent access to the complex combination of tools necessary for solution of applications problems - computational, networking, and storage - that can be provided through aggregation of distributed resources.
[About Speaker] Jack Dongarra received a Bachelor of Science in Mathematics from Chicago State University in 1972 and a Master of Science in Computer Science from the Illinois Institute of Technology in 1973. He received his Ph.D. in Applied Mathematics from the University of New Mexico in 1980. He worked at the Argonne National Laboratory until 1989, becoming a senior scientist. He now holds an appointment as University Distinguished Professor of Computer Science in the Computer Science Department at the University of Tennessee, has the position of a Distinguished Research Staff member in the Computer Science and Mathematics Division at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), and an Adjunct Professor in the Computer Science Department at Rice University. He specializes in numerical algorithms in linear algebra, parallel computing, the use of advanced-computer architectures, programming methodology, and tools for parallel computers. His research includes the development, testing and documentation of high quality mathematical software. He has contributed to the design and implementation of the following open source software packages and systems: EISPACK, LINPACK, the BLAS, LAPACK, ScaLAPACK, Netlib, PVM, MPI, NetSolve, Top500, ATLAS, and PAPI. He has published approximately 200 articles, papers, reports and technical memoranda and he is coauthor of several books. He was awarded the IEEE Sid Fernbach Award in 2004 for his contributions in the application of high performance computers using innovative approaches. He is a Fellow of the AAAS, ACM, and the IEEE and a member of the National Academy of Engineering.
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