Für eine stabile und sichere Stromversorgung müssen sich Einspeisung und Verbrauch im elektrischen Stromnetz, das heute noch über keine nennenswerten Speicherkapazitäten verfügt, stets im Gleichgewicht befinden. Die zunehmende Einspeisung durch regenerative Energiequellen ist aber nur schwer zu prognostizieren und in der Regel nicht planbar. Um den Ausgleich zwischen Verbrauch und fehlender Erzeugung aus Erneuerbaren herzustellen, muss daher vermehrt auf die am Netz vorhandenen konventionellen Kraftwerke zurückgegriffen werden, da nur sie in ihrer Einspeiseleistung beeinflussbar sind und damit netzstabilisierend eingesetzt werden können.

Parallel dazu müssen regionale Energieüberschüsse entgegen der üblichen Flussrichtung vom Erzeuger in Regionen mit einem Defizit an Erneuerbaren gebracht werden. Auf dem Weg dorthin müssen die Netze ausreichend dimensioniert sein. Auch hierbei spielen konventionelle Kraftwerke eine wichtige Rolle, um die Frequenz im Verbundnetz auch bei Versorgung durch dezentrale Energieerzeuger in jeder Sekunde aufrechtzuerhalten. Um dieser wachsenden Unsicherheit im Betrieb elektrischer, regenerativ geprägter Versorgungsnetze zu begegnen, wird versucht, einen Teil der elektrischen Geräte und Anlagen auf Kundenseite zu flexibilisieren und zur Unterstützung bei der Einhaltung des Gleichgewichtes zwischen Verbrauch und Erzeugung zu beeinflussen, um bspw. bevorzugt dann Strom zu konsumieren, wenn z.B. der Wind gerade heftiger weht.

Derartige intelligente Stromnetze, sog. „Smart Grids“, die das Flexibilisierungspotenzial dezentraler Verbraucher und Erzeuger für einen Ausgleich des Versorgungsgleichgewichts nutzen, müssen jedoch die Belastbarkeitsgrenzen der Netzinfrastruktur jederzeit mit berücksichtigen. Mit zunehmender Anzahl steuerbarer Anlagen, die zu diesem Zweck geregelt werden sollen, erhöht sich die Komplexität der zugrunde liegenden und bislang zentral organisierten Koordinationsaufgabe überproportional. Aus diesem Grund verfolgen zukünftige Smart Grid Konzepte dezentrale Lösungsansätze, die das komplexe Ausgleichsproblem in kleinere und damit leichter beherrschbarere Teilprobleme zerlegen. Derartige Ansätze sind maßgeblich informations- und kommunikationstechnisch geprägt. Stromnetz und Anlagen müssen intelligenter werden und sich kontinuierlich über ihre Bedürfnisse abstimmen, um der geänderten Versorgungsaufgabe gerecht zu werden und den Netzausbaubedarf zu verringern.

Abstract:

ICT infrastructures and enterprise systems are today in a process of deep change, motivated by the transformation that are taking place in two key dimensions. One is the technology dimension, with the advent of Cloud Computing, Service Oriented Architectures (SOA) and SaaS (Software as a Service), Internet of Things and Smart Objects, Semantic Web and Linked Data, and finally the advent of Social Media in the enterprise world, just to name a few among the most relevant ones. Another is the socio-economic dimension, where the slowdown of western economies requires a change in the development models and business paradigms; in particular, enterprises are under pressure to achieve, at the same time, more efficiency and continuous innovation. Therefore, enterprise systems need to refocus, progressively shifting from the management of today resources and value production activities to the invention of future opportunities and new forms of value production. This is, in essence, the current scenario that next generation enterprise systems need to cope with. And the challenges require a new approach to the knowledge assets that is often referred to as the ‘oil of the third millennium’. Therefore, enterprise systems need to deeply change, in the way they are conceived and engineered, achieving a tight integration with semantic technologies and social media.

Bio:

Michele Missikoff, Doctor in Physics (University of Rome „La Sapienza“), worked until 1980 in industrial research labs of two Italian companies, leader in electronic equipment and software development, respectively. Then he started his research carrier, becoming Director of Research in 2001, at the National Research Council, Institute of Analysis of Systems and Informatics, where he coordinated the Database group until 1985, then the Knowledge Engineering group and, in 1999, he founded the LEKS, Lab for Enterprise Knowledge and Systems, that he currently leads as CNR Research Fellow.
He has been the proposer, coordinator and/or active participant in more than 30 national, European and international projects. Has being particular active in various groups, committees, and task forces, promoted by the European Commission, DG Information Society and Media. Currently, he is the coordinator of the FInES (Future Internet Enterprise Systems) Research Roadmap Task Force, launched by the EC FInES Cluster (Unit D4).
He has promoted, organised, and chaired various international conferences and workshops, among which CAiSE, CoopIS, ODBASE, EDBT (co-founder), VLDB (Industrial Co-chair). He has been editor of VLDB Journal, Journal of Applied Intelligence. He has a long teaching experience at University of Roma „La Sapienza“ and LUISS, with courses on Artificial Intelligence, Databases, Information Systems, Knowledge Management. He published more than 150 technical and scientific papers, many on international journals and conference proceedings, with the main focus on application of semantic technologies to e-Business and e-Government. His main research interests are: enterprise ontologies, methods for knowledge representation, ontology engineering, similarity reasoning, business process ontologies, methods and tools for business innovation; and applications in the area of e-tourism, e-government, e-business, and mobile social media.

True immersion into a distant environment and efficient distributed collaboration require the ability to physically interact with remote objects and to literally get in touch with other people. Touching and manipulating objects remotely becomes possible if we augment traditional audiovisual communications by the haptic modality. Haptic communications is a relatively young field of research that has the potential to substantially improve human–human and human–machine interaction.

In this talk, we address perceptual coding of haptic information and the transmission of haptic data streams over resource-constrained and potentially lossy networks. In this context, we also briefly discuss the need for objective quality metrics for haptic communication. Throughout the talk, we stress the fact that haptic communications is not meant as a replacement of traditional audiovisual communications but rather as an additional dimension for telepresence that will allow us to advance in our quest for truly immersive communication.

Brief Biography:

Eckehard Steinbach (IEEE M’96, SM’08) studied Electrical Engineering at the University of Karlsruhe (Germany), the University of Essex (Great Britain), and ESIEE in Paris. From 1994 until 2000 he was a member of the research staff of the Image Communication Group at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg (Germany), where he received the Engineering Doctorate in 1999. From February 2000 to December 2001 he was a Postdoctoral Fellow with the Information Systems Laboratory of Stanford University. In February 2002 he joined the Department of Electrical Engineering and Information Technology of Munich University of Technology (Germany), where he is currently a Full Professor for Media Technology. His current research interests are in the area of audio-visual-haptic information processing and communication as well as networked and interactive multimedia systems.

Abstract:

Fastest is a tool that assist software engineers in generating test cases from Z specifications. It provides tool support for a method of model-based testing know as the Test Template Framework. The tool reads a Z specification written in LaTeX markup and waits for commands from the user. Users can apply testing tactics to partition the input space of Z operations thus creating testing trees. Later they can prune these trees to eliminate unsatisfiable test specifications. In a third step, a satisfiability algorithm can be run to find a test case for each leaf in a testing tree. Finally, it is possible to refine these test cases into programs to test the implementation of the Z specification. In this talk I will show how Fastest works on some toy examples and our current research efforts.

Bio:

Maximiliano Cristiá is professor of Software Engineering at Universidad Nacional de Rosario (Argentina) and head of the Software Engineering Group at CIFASIS (International Franco-Argentine Center for Information Sciences and Systems). His research interests include formal methods, particularly model-based testing, software architecture and tool development for the Software Engineer.

Abstract:  

Mobile Visual Search (MVS) is a fascinating research field with many open challenges and opportunities which have the potential to impact the way we organize, annotate, and retrieve visual data (images and videos) using mobile devices. This talk is structured in four parts:
(i) MVS — opportunities: where I present recent and relevant numbers of the mobile computing market, particularly in the field of photography apps, social networks, and mobile search.

(ii) Basic concepts: where I explain the basic MVS pipeline and discuss the three main MVS scenarios and associated challenges.

(iii) Advanced technical details: where I explain technical aspects of feature extraction, indexing, descriptor matching, and geometric verification, discuss the state of the art in these fields, and comment on open problems and research opportunities.

(iv) Examples and applications: where I show recent and significant examples of academic research (e.g., Stanford Product Search System) and commercial apps (e.g., Google Goggles, oMoby, kooaba) in this field.

Dr. Oge Marques is an Associate Professor and Associate Chairman in the Department of Computer and Electrical Engineering & Computer Science at Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton, Florida. He is currently a guest professor with ITEC at Klagenfurt University. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Engineering from Florida Atlantic University in 2001, his Masters in Electronics Engineering from Philips International Institute / Eindhoven University of Technology (Eindhoven, NL) in 1989 and his Bachelor’s Degree in Electrical Engineering from UTFPR (Curitiba, Brazil), where he also taught for more than 10 years before moving to the USA. He has been teaching undergraduate and graduate students for more than 20 years. His research experience has been mostly in the fields of image processing and computer vision. He is the (co-) author of four books in these topics, including the recently released textbook „Practical Image and Video Processing Using MATLAB“ (Wiley-IEEE Press, 2011). He is a Senior Member of both the IEEE and the ACM.

This talk will present SPLAY, an integrated system that facilitates the design, deployment and testing of large-scale distributed applications. Unlike existing systems, SPLAY covers all aspects of the development and evaluation chain. It allows developers to express algorithms in a concise, simple language that highly resembles pseudo-code found in research papers. The execution environment has low overheads and footprint, and provides a comprehensive set of libraries for common distributed systems operations. SPLAY is freely available from http://www.splay-project.org/.

CV: Pascal Felber received his M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology. From 1998 to 2002, he has worked at Oracle Corporation and Bell-Labs (Lucent Technologies) in the USA. From 2002 to 2004, he has been an Assistant Professor at Institut EURECOM in France. Since October 2004, he is a Professor of Computer Science at the University of Neuchâtel, Switzerland, working in the field of dependable and distributed systems. He has published over 80 research papers in various journals and conferences.

With the growing amount of images, videos, and music, the task to support users in exploring multimedia databases is of ever-increasing importance. That is why numerous content-based browsing approaches have been developed. They support users in searching and browsing for multimedia objects in an interactive and playful way. In terms of query performance, however, these browsing approaches are frequently limited to small-to-moderate size databases. The question of how to efficiently browse large-scale multimedia databases yet remains to be answered.

In this talk, I will provide an overview of efficient query processing techniques applicable to content-based browsing systems. To this end, I will first introduce the domain of adaptive distance-based similarity measures and show how to model image similarity in a flexible way. I will then present recent developments for efficient exploration query processing by means of similarity-based visualizations and metric indexing. Finally, I will show how to browse millions of multimedia objects in a few seconds.

Abstract: 
Recent large scale disasters have awaken governments at home and abroad to their needs for preparedness to support public safety and performance of cyber-systems assisting first responders (FR). First responders of various agencies are often on the frontline to assist in managing these events to protect lives and property. The effectiveness of their mission is highly dependent on capability of mobile wireless systems available at incident scenes, especially how their mobile infrastructure and devices can assist in real-time FR connectivity and location tracking, and protect against threads and vulnerabilities in an integrated manner. 
The talk presents challenges to achieve such integration when taking into account resource limitations in mobile systems, mission-orientation of first responders, and possible threats and safety problems at incident scenes. We will amplify these challenges on two examples: (a) reliable relay placement for FR communication in high-rises, and (b) alert mechanisms if threats are detected. In case of the reliable relay placement, we will examine placement of relays to communicate reliably with base stations via polymorphic networks. In case of alert mechanisms we will discuss solutions such as Mobi-Herald and examine it against resource limitations and possible threats.
We will conclude the talk with a short overview of other research projects that are going on in the Mobile Networking and Operating System (MONET) group at the University of Illinois.

Short Bio:
Klara Nahrstedt is a full professor  at  the  University  of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign,  Computer Science Department. Her research interests are directed   toward  multimedia  systems, quality of service (QoS) management in mobile networks, QoS routing, QoS-aware resource management, Quality of Protection (QoP) in multimedia systems, and real-time security in mission-critical systems. She is the coauthor of widely used multimedia books `Multimedia: Computing, Communications and Applications‘  published by Prentice Hall, and ‘Multimedia Systems’ published by Springer Verlag. She is the recipient of the IEEE Communication Society Leonard Abraham Award for Research Achievements, Ralph and Catherine Fisher Professor, IEEE Fellow, University Scholar, Humboldt Fellow, and the Chair of SIG Multimedia. She was the general chair of ACM Multimedia 2006, general chair of ACM NOSSDAV 2007 and the general chair of IEEE Percom 2009. Klara Nahrstedt received her BA in mathematics from Humboldt University,  Berlin, in 1984, and M.Sc. degree in numerical analysis from the same university in 1985. In 1995 she received her PhD from the University of Pennsylvania in the Department of Computer and Information Science. She is the member of ACM and IEEE Fellow.

Supercomputing has drawn significant attention from the research and industry communities. The reasons are multidimensional, including the advance of computer technology, the merging of large-scale applications, and needs of national defense. However, designing high performance, high efficiency and high security supercomputers has been proven to be a hard task.

In this talk, Prof. Zhang introduces the TH-1A supercomputer, which was developed by the College of Computer Science of NUDT (National University of Defense Technology). The peak speed of TH-1A is 4700 TFLOPS, the LINPACK test result is 2566 TFLOPS, and it was ranked No. 1 on the TOP 500 list released in November 2010. The architecture which integrates GPUs and CPUs for high-performance parallel comp

uting is exploited for the first time in the world. The whole system consists of two major components: hardware system and software system. For the hardware system, the TH-1A team developed 3 large-scale integrated circuit designs, 4 kinds of nodes, 2 networks, and 15 different PCB boards. Accordingly, the operating system, the compiling system, the parallel programming environment, and the scientific virtualization system were developed for the software system. The TH-1A supercomputer has been used in many applications, including oil exploration, high-end equipment development, bio-medical research, 3D animation, cloud computing, and so on.

Abstract

For decades now the computer revolution has been driven by trends of increasing CPU speed, digital storage capability, and network connectedness, all at reduced unit costs. The current technology wave is “mobile devices” such as iOS and Android smartphones and tablets. Today’s mobile device is more capable than yesterday’s desktop computer in virtually every way. Key to the success of the current tech trend is the ability to share data intelligently and for our devices to respond sensibly to our context: where we are, what we are doing, what our current needs are, and what we are likely to want or need next. You might be surprised by what your phone “knows” about you and can do for you! In this talk we will explore ways that mobile technology and the growing “Web of Data” are changing how we conduct business, consume entertainment, and use technology to make our lives better in a wide variety of ways. We will review trends both in the mobile marketplace and in the research community, including progress so far and future work that still needs to be done.

Bio

Dr. Stephen W. Liddle is academic director of the Kevin and Debra Rollins Center for Entrepreneurship and Technology at Brigham Young University an

d professor of Information Systems at the Marriott School of Management. Dr. Liddle teaches mobile app development and information systems analysis. Liddle has been a member of BYU’s business school faculty since 1995, after receiving his PhD in Computer Science from BYU. He has been active in the conceptual modeling community for two decades, and currently serves as treasurer of the steering committee for the ER Conference. Liddle’s research interests include conceptual modeling, software engineering environments and tools, data extraction, and e-business. He is particularly interested in mobile application development and applications of conceptual modeling, such as the use of ontologies in data extraction. His work has appeared in journals such as Data and Knowledge Engineering and the Annals of Operations Research, and in respected conferences such as the ER Conference and CIKM, among others. Besides authoring or co-authoring more than 50 refereed academic papers, Liddle is editor of numerous conference and workshop proceedings, and is co-author of the book E-Business: Principles and Strategies for Accountants. Liddle is a member of several advisory boards for tech startups in Utah, and has considerable experience in software development.