Keynote Lectures

Abstract
The consumer has a choice to shop on-line from home via a browser or mobile app or go alternatively in person to a store and accomplish a shopping goal. The latter is usually without the need of any on-line device. The two approaches are not integrated into one system. The consumer always seeks value for money to satisfy his need, also to be inspired and to have a great uplifting shopping experience. The store requires increasing profits while trying to excel in satisfying any customer requirement. The future customer will always be connected. The customer will enjoy a shopping experience, receiving personalized services leading to building loyalty and trust with the shop. This vision of the future is based on the interplay of a set of technologies which will combine the interaction of mobile data with store items in real time. This merging not only must it work well, but also be well optimized. The talk will cover the marriage of the local store together with the store electronic presence (e-shop) into one whole, smoothly operating system, from both the administrator of the system point of view and the customer. We envisage developments in physical shopping where sensors intelligently will interact, using a number of devices and techniques to assist this process, such as mobile phones or other devices using audio directions. A real time customer servicing system will be coupled to the e-shop system of the company business. The use of web Analytics and user profiling is crucial to e-shopping in identifying customer profiles and to offer vital statistics to the management for the state of the business as well as traffic, speed, throughput diagrams and faults of the e-shop in need of improvement. The talk will describe an architecture we envisage for this holistic system of managing both e-shop as well as physical shop offering good prospects for profitable management for a 24/7 service. The system requirements for real time or near real time Analytics also for the physical shopping mode, sets new requirements for the sensory interpretation and data fetching/pushing into devices. A real time customer servicing application must immediately provide offers and discounted articles in conjunction with the location of the customer in the store. Since the lifetime of the customer needs is short, the system must identify the customer profile, guess the customer need, process the need and push for an inspiring solution to this need to the customer device, before the customer has walked passed this product range, ideally. The talk will describe the status of our architecture for integrated shopping, our research on Web Analytics, Intelligent sensing and other complementary technologies and applications required for shopping experiences of the future.

Abstract
Clouds have been very popular, and their performance becomes more important due to the increase of users and applications. Currently, many enterprises are adopting Clouds to achieve high performance for their applications at low costs.

Because of the nature of these systems, there are important issues that must be addressed, such as: resource allocation, efficient scheduling, energy conservation, reliability, security and trust, cost, availability, quality. Effective management of cloud resources is crucial to use effectively the power of these systems and achieve high system performance. Furthermore, software structures that best exploit clouds capabilities while providing applications compatibility should be examined.

Cloud computing is a concept that has emerged from grid computing; it provides users the ability to acquire computational resources on demand from its virtually infinite pool on a pay-as-you-go basis.
The cloud computing paradigm can offer various types of services, such as computational resources for HPC applications, web services, social networking, etc. Resource allocation and scheduling is a difficult task in clouds where there are many alternative heterogeneous computers. If cloud computing is going to be used for HPC, appropriate methods must be considered for allocating resources to user requests efficiently, VM scalability, as well as effectively scheduling the tasks. The scheduling algorithms must seek a way to maintain a good response time to leasing cost ratio. Furthermore, adequate data security and availability are critical issues that have to be considered along with energy-efficient solutions that are required to minimize the impact of cloud computing on the environment.

Abstract
In the context of network systems I will discuss the limits of reconfigurable systems. To this end, I will draw on examples from architectural trends, the silicon roadmap in a post Moore's law era, along with recent directions in future networking. I will then set out to map the current and future edges of reconfigurable systems in networking. In this talk I will discuss the state and future of SDN, showing how reconfiguration is an essential function of all networks. The role of reconfiguration has evolved from a prototyping technology to incorporate control technologies, and beyond this to hybrid host systems, adaptive interface design and use in the control of future network-transmission systems. As network reconfiguration must, by necessity, match the needs of both user and implementer, the emergence of SDN has, for reconfigurable systems, led to a new class of domain specific languages, a renewed interest in functional languages, and an ever-wider user base. I conclude with a discussion of current systems and ideas as future predictors for technologies beyond 100Gb/s. In particular I will talk to the opportunities enabled by tighter photonic integration. This is alongside a forecast of how technologies, limitations, and usage will impacts the future of networking reconfiguration.

Abstract
Over the last few years we have seen a rapid growth in the Web of Data where now statistics indicate that there are around 100 billion semantic statements available on the Web. Governments, especially the US and UK Governments, are producing hundreds of thousands of public datasets in machine readable form on the Web using Web standards such as RDF(S) and SPARQL. Major Web and Media players such as Google, Facebook, Yahoo!, Microsoft and the BBC are now using this technology. In this talk I will describe work that we have been carrying out in the area which we term "Linked Services" which seeks to connect the spheres of Linked Data and Web services to form a new global computing platform. I will illustrate the talk with a number of applications we have been involved.