Title: Vehicular Cloud Offloading: From Driver Assistance to Safety Critical Applications

Abstract

Vehicles increasingly rely on IT technology for tasks such enhancing driver experience and offering driver assistance, and for supporting safety-critical applications.  Today, most vehicular applications run entirely on the vehicle, requiring a substantial on-vehicle IT infrastructure, impacting the complexity, cost, and maintenance of the vehicle.  Cloud offloading is an attractive alternative that can reduce cost by levering the inexpensive, elastic resource pool provided by clouds.  Unfortunately, this approach is not practical for many sensor-driven applications.  Video and lidar have high bandwidth requirements, resulting in high network latencies and costs.  In this presentation, I will talk about our experience with offloading a variety of sensor-driven applications to the cloud, starting with driver-assist applications with loose latency bounds such as gesture recognition, to latency-sensitive applications such as SLAM.  I will present two offloading architectures, targeting applications with different requirements for long term state maintenance.  I will also discuss the implications for the design of vehicular networks.

Title: Wireless Communication, Sensing, and Security from Millimeter Wave to Terahertz

Abstract 

This talk will describe new capabilities and challenges for communication, sensing, and security for next-generation wireless networks. I will begin by describing emerging transmitter and receiver architectures that can realize high-frequency communication and sensing. I will discuss the key elements needed to realize links that are robust to client and environmental mobility.  Moreover, I will describe how new sensing  capabilities can go beyond merely “higher resolution due to smaller wavelength” with emerging devices. Lastly, I will address physical layer security and resilience to eavesdroppers and will show how we can likewise go beyond  “better security due to narrower beams” and realize new security features.

 

Title: Smart Cities – A Perspective on Research and Innovation

Abstract

The desired functionalities of smart cities go beyond what current technology can offer.  The talk explores fundamental challenges and opportunities and discusses research directions to make resilient smart cities a reality. The talk will also highlight the importance of transdisciplinary research methodologies that transcends discipline-specific boundaries to create new conceptual, theoretical and practical frameworks for holistic socially aware, economically feasible smart cities. 

Bio

Dr. Znati currently serves as Dean of CIT at UAEU. Prior to holding this position, he was Professor and Chair of the Department of Computer Science at the University of Pittsburgh. He also served as the Director of the Computer and Network Systems Division and led the Information Technology Research Initiative at NSF. Dr. Znati's current research interests are in building reliable networked systems and designing fault-tolerant computational models for energy-aware resiliency in extreme-scale systems. Dr. Znati has served as the General Chair of several main conferences, including GlobeCom 2010, INFOCOM 2005, and SECON 2004.  He served or currently serves as a member of Editorial Boards of a number of networking, distributed system and security journals and transactions. He also served as a Member of the Science Foundation Ireland Board, Co-Chaired the Network and Information Research and Development, Large Scale Networking and Internet2 Research Advisory Council, for Developing Strategies for Excellence in Internet2 in Support of Research.