Enabling smarter communities through opportunistic clouds

23 maggio 2019
23 maggio 2019

Time: 15:30
Venue: Via Sommarive 5 - Polo Ferrari 1 (Povo, TN) - Room Garda

Speaker

  • Prof. Christine Julien - University of Texas at Austin, USA

Abstract

Existing smart community applications require many diverse devices to coordinate with one another, but existing deployments by and large rely on either a backend Internet connection to support communication or provide only one-way distribution of data (e.g., via environmental beacons). However, emerging IoT platforms possess sophisticated device-to-device communication capabilities alongside the expected sensing, computation, and actuation. The ability for devices in smart communities to "chatter" directly opens broad new possibilities for those devices to leverage one anothers' capabilities, where the potential of a combined "opportunistic cloud" is much greater than the sum of its individual parts. This talk will use motivating applications from the smart communities domain to identify technical capabilities and constraints that lead us to consider the use of direct device-to-device collaboration. Drawing on my group's work in collaborative, opportunistic context-awareness, I will describe a series of interrelated research contributions that lead to a future vision of opportunistic clouds for smart communities.

About the Speaker

Christine Julien is a Professor at the University of Texas at Austin in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department. Her research is at the intersection of pervasive computing and software engineering, investigating programming abstractions, middleware, models, and tools that ease the programming burden in these complex, dynamic, and unpredictable environments. She has published more than 130 conference and journal publications in her career. Her work has been supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF), the Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR), the Department of Defense, Freescale Semiconductors, Google, and Samsung. Dr. Julien graduated with her D.Sc. in 2004 from Washington University in Saint Louis. She earned her M.S. degree in 2003 and her B.S. with majors in Computer Science and Biology in 2000 (both also from Wash. U.).

Contact: gianpietro.picco [at] unitn.it (Gian Pietro Picco)