Keynote Lectures

Abstract
Haptic and control communications network (Tactile Internet) is a communication platform enabling touching, monitoring, controlling and steering objects (things) remotely to support a wide range of emerging and future applications in the vertical business sectors such as: health & care, transportation, manufacturing, entrainment & events, smart grid, finance and new emerging markets.
5G wireless will comprise a multiple of interworked heterogeneous radio access networks from evolution of current radio access networks to new ones (5G vision). A Haptic and control radio access network will be an essential and important element of 5G wireless-Phase 2 and future Tactile Internet. Most of Haptic and Control Communications applications such as remote surgery require a few millisecond (ms) round trip time (RTT) delay and a very high reliability (in the order of 99.9999%). Achieving such a low RTT delay and high reliability while keeping complexity at a minimum level is a highly complex task and can be considered the main challenge for future network researchers and designers. It is well known that the delay and low reliability cause instability in the local feedback loops in both ends (haptic and control systems) of the network.
This talk will address the challenges facing the network designers to achieve the above mentioned performance indicators for end-to-end connectivity and across all network protocol stack layers from physical layer through Medium Access Control (MAC), network and transport layers to application layer.

Abstract
As defined in Wikipedia, Software Defined Networking (SDN) is about “decoupling the system that makes decisions about where traffic is sent (the control plane) from the underlying systems that forward traffic to the selected destination (the data plane)”. Such decoupling is very frequently meant to imply the physical separation between a smart (logically) centralized controller in charge of taking and enforcing decisions, and dumb network switches and devices which are completely driven by the controller in terms of forwarding rules install/update commands. We believe that this rigid, physical, separation is by no means a conceptual principle, but it is just the consequence of the inability to emerge, so far, with pragmatic device-level programming interfaces more expressive than OpenFlow, i.e., which permit to program, inside the switch itself, more complex and dynamic “flow behavior models”, rather than static forwarding rules. In the talk, we discuss technical ways to formally describe stateful per flow behavior while retaining pragmatism (and some level of compatibility with today’s OpenFlow), platform independency, and portability across different network devices and nodes. Taking stocks, we posit that the unprecedented ability to locally deploy, in each network switch, third-party programmed platform-agnostic control functions, not only questions the rigid control/data plane separation that so far has driven SDN efforts, but rather might even pave the road towards the viable return of some “active networking” ideas in the SDN arena.

Abstract
Internet of Things (IoT) is the worldwide Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) infrastructure that will support ubiquitous services among interacting beings, objects, data and applications. In IoT, everyone and everything (humans, animals, plants, wearables, appliances, vehicles, machines, etc.) will carry sensors and/or actuators that will be interconnected via networks. Various services and applications that will use the communicated information will support users and organizations.
Alongside the development of technology, user behavior, social, cultural and economic issues should be investigated. Thus, a cross-disciplinary approach should be employed to tackle uncertainties regarding the launch onto the market of profitable applications and services.
However, little attention has been given to the user behavioral and organizational issues that are necessary for the acceptance, adoption and usage of these IoT services and applications by the users and organizations. It is not clear which of these services and applications will be accepted, and what are the factors that will affect their acceptance. This keynote speech presents an introduction to IoT services and applications as well as factors that could affect their acceptance.

Abstract
In the last years the traditional ways to keep the increase of hardware performance to the rate predicted by the Moore's Law vanished. When uni-cores were the norm, hardware design was decoupled from the software stack thanks to a well defined Instruction Set Architecture (ISA). This simple interface allowed developing applications without worrying too much about the underlying hardware, while computer architects proposed techniques to aggressively exploit Instruction-Level Parallelism (ILP) in superscalar processors. Current multi-cores are designed as simple symmetric multiprocessors on a chip. While these designs are able to compensate the clock frequency stagnation, they face multiple problems in terms of power consumption, programmability, resilience or memory. The solution is to give more responsibility to the runtime system and to let it tightly collaborate with the hardware. The runtime has to drive the design of future multi-cores architectures. In this talk, we introduce an approach towards a Runtime-Aware Architecture (RAA), a massively parallel architecture designed from the runtime's perspective.

Abstract
Attribute-based access control (ABAC) appears to be a promising direction for futuristic applications. ABAC encompasses almost existing access control models,
including Identity-Based Access Control, Role-Based Access Control. In this talk, we will look at two ABAC research efforts, namely, eXtensible Access Control Markup Language (XACML) and NIST Next Generation Access Control (NGAC) and provide a detailed comparison.  We will demonstrate how these approaches satisfy the needs of some applications, including policies in the health care sector.  We will also provide pointers to the open problems and some directions for future research in ABAC.