Dr. Tadashi Dohi

Dr. Carlos Ramos

Dr. Gerald Schaefer

The health care industry is data-rich by far. Every encounter with the system results in an electronic footprint. The promises of connectivity – electronic and personal health records, patient-centered health care, clinical warehousing, home monitoring, distance medicine, health care public clouds, community of practice social networking, ubiquitous computing and more – mean exponential increases in data and, in tandem, exponential opportunities for breaches of privacy and security of personal health information. Moreover, the security and privacy issue is becoming more complex with the quest for greater efficiency in health systems and the encouragement of governments and health care institutions to bring together two fields of practice that have largely developed in parallel in industrialized countries: public health and health care. On top of all of that, patients want convenient and realtime access and control to their data. This environment drives governments and health care institutions to promote customer-centric strategies while simultaneously improving internal efficiencies and information sharing. However, the ad hoc implementation of technology will not resolve these pressures. Technology decisions must be based on a sound understanding of the business issues that drive customer needs. The current environment requires a new model—one in which health care leaders effectively fuse business and technology decisions. This invited speech provides a primer on risks associated with privacy and security in health care and guidance about industry preparedness as well as to shed light on the challenges an solutions to the security and the privacy issues. In particular, the issue of identity management (IdM) is centeral to every solution. Identity management (IDM) has been around since the first mainframe, but with one machine and one user, it wasn't much of an issue. As business computing evolved to the client/server architecture, many users would access a handful of applications. That made federated identity management (across all the apps) a little more complex -- but passwords still did the job. Today, in a virtualized cloud environment where users located anywhere might access dozens of healthcare applications that involves patient health records (such as CCRs by Google Health and CCDs by Microsoft) on numerous devices; federated identity management has become the Holy Grail.

The pervasiveness of Internet connectivity has brought a significant change to our works and lives. Cloud computing is the new paradigm shift coming out of this new era. With cloud computing, many possible trends in information and telecommunication technology are emerging. In this talk, we explain and discuss these new trends and phenomena.

Ruay-Shiung Chang received his B.S.E.E. degree from National Taiwan University in 1980 and his Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from National Tsing Hua University in 1988. He is now a professor in the Department of Computer Science and Information Engineering, National Dong Hwa University. His research interests include Internet, wireless networks, RFID and grid computing. He has published more than 70 peer-reviewed journal papers and numerous international conference papers. He is an editor for International Journal of Internet Protocol Technology, Journal of Internet Technology, and Journal of Convergence Information Technology. Dr. Chang is a member of ACM, a senior member of IEEE, and a founding member of Taiwan Institute of Information and Computing Machinery. Dr. Chang also served on the advisory council for the Public Interest Registry (www.pir.org) from 2004/5 to 2007/4.

Design and analysis of algorithms depend on progress and development of computer architecture, and also depend on change of way of thinking. From the fast algorithms to parallel algorithms, from genetic algorithms to machine learning, from evolution computing to soft computing, design method and evaluation standard of algorithms are appearing various directions. What is the algorithm? Does it exist an identical algorithm model to explain all algorithm architectures? Does it exist an identical evaluation standard to evaluate the computational complexity of different algorithm architecture? In this speech, we would discuss architecture and characteristic of every kind of algorithm to provide some materials for finding this identical algorithm model.

Professor Lei Li was born in Yancheng, Jiangsu, China on May 1, 1961. He received his Doctor Degree of Science from Xian Jiaotong University, China in 1989, and Doctor Degree of Engineering from Tohoku University, Japan in 1994 separately. He studied at Hirosaki University, Japan as a Post Doctoral and Research Assistant from April, 1989 to March 1992.

From April 1992 up to present, he has been on the Faculty of Computer Science and Engineering [1992-1997: Associate Professor, Aomori University, Japan, 1997-2001: Associate Professor, Yamaguchi University, Japan, 1999-2000: Visiting Professor, State University of New York at Stony Brook, 2002-present, Professor, Hosei University, Japan]. His research interest includes the Fast Algorithms, Parallel Algorithms, Genetic Algorithms, Neural Networks, Machine Learning Algorithms etc.

Several recent studies have reported that most outages in technical computer-based systems are due to software faults. Traditional methods in software engineering are fault avoidance/removal based on extensive testing/debugging, and fault tolerance based on design/data diversity. Sinceboth of them are very expensive and unrealistic in common cases, the key challenge then is how to provide highly dependable software with relatively cheaper cost.
We introduce several environmental diversity techniques of software systems, and overview the typical examples involving checkpoint restart and software rejuvenation. Based on the author's own research results during a past decade, we discuss stochastic models to derive several checkpoint restart and software rejuvenation policies analytically in terms of the optimality under cost criteria. The present research trend and the open problems in future are also discussed.

Tadashi Dohi received the B.Sc. (Engineering), M.Sc. (Engineering) and Ph.D. (Engineering) from Hiroshima University, Japan, in 1989, 1991 and 1995, respectively. In 1992, he joined the Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering, Hiroshima University, Japan, as an Assistant Professor. He has been working as a Full Professor in the Department of Information Engineering, Graduate School of Engineering, Hiroshima University, Japan, since 2002. In 1992 and 2000, he was a Visiting Research Scholar in University of British Columbia, Canada and Duke University, USA, respectively, on leave of absence from Hiroshima University. His research areas include software reliability engineering, dependable computing and performance evaluation. He published 380 refereed papers in the above fields. He is a Regular Member of ORSJ, JSIAM, IEICE, REAJ and IEEE (Computer Society and Reliability Society).

Dr. Dohi served as the General Chair of The IEEE 22nd International Sysmposium on Software Reliability Engineering (ISSRE 2011), Hiroshima, Japan, Nov. 29 - Dec. 2, 2011, as well as several international events such as AIWARM 2004, AIWARM 2006, AIWARM 2008, WoSAR 2008, MENS 2010, APARM 2010 and WoSAR 2010. Also, he acted as the Editorial Board Member of Asia-Pacific Journal of Operational Research, Journal of Risk and Reliability, International Journal of Reliability and Quality Performance, International Journal of Quality, Statistics, and Reliability, International Journal of Computational Science and Engineering, among others.

Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) are computing systems interacting with physical processes. CPS are typically designed as networks of interacting elements instead of as standalone devices. CPS use computations and communication deeply embedded in and interacting with physical processes to add new capabilities to physical systems. CPS must be dependable, secure, safe, efficient, and operate in real-time. They must also be scalable, cost-effective and adaptive. The integration of computational and physical processes exhibits a complex behaviour that cannot be analyzed by the computational or physical sciences alone. These systems also transcend traditional computer-controlled systems because of their scale, dependence on man-machine interaction and their rich communication infrastructure that is enabled by the Internet. CPS range from miniscule (pace makers) to large-scale (the national power-grid, blackout-free electricity generation and distribution, optimization of energy consumption).

This speech is dedicated to the integration of Intelligence in Cyber-Physical Systems. We will illustrate this with Power Systems. Power Networks’ critical physical infrastructure depends crucially on SCADA (Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition) and DCS (Digital Control Systems) for sensing, monitoring, gathering, and control of distributed physical infrastructures. Power Systems Control Centres are the place where all the information of SCADA and DCS arrive, and Control Centre Operators’ must handle the huge amount of data and information arriving from these systems, namely when we are in the presence of critical incidents. Now Cyber-Physical Intelligence is emerging as an important sub-area. The concept of Intelligent SCADA, with decentralized, flexible, and intelligent behavior, being dynamically adaptive to the context of the Power System is appearing.

Cyber-Physical Intelligence is a concept adequate to deal with Power Systems Smart Grids, Distributed Generation, mainly based on renewable sources, and Electricity Markets. We will present the project CITOPSY (Cyber-Ambient Intelligent Training of Operators in Power Systems Control Centres), in which the concept of Cyber-Physical Intelligence is being experimented.

Image databases are growing at a rapid rate and hence efficient and effective techniques to manage these vast repositories are highly sought after. Image database navigation systems provide an interesting alternative to retrieval based approaches and in my talk, I will show how image browsers developed in our group can be used for interactive exploration of large image collections based on the principle that visually similar images are located close to each other thus helping user navigation, and that large datasets are handled through a hierarchical approach.

Gerald Schaefer gained his BSc. in Computing from the University of Derby and his PhD in Computer Vision from the University of East Anglia. He worked at the Colour & Imaging Institute, University of Derby (1997-1999), in the School of Information Systems, University of East Anglia (2000-2001), in the School of Computing and Informatics at Nottingham Trent University (2001-2006), and in the School of Engineering and Applied Science at Aston University (2006-2009) before joining the Department of Computer Science at Loughborough University. 
His research interests are mainly in the areas of colour image analysis, image retrieval, physics-based vision, medical imaging, and computational intelligence. He has published extensively in these areas with a total publication count exceeding 250. He is a member of the editorial board of more than 10 international journals, reviews for over 60 journals and served on the programme committee of more than 200 conferences. He has been invited as keynote or tutorial speaker to more than 25 conferences, is the organiser of various international workshops and special sessions at conferences, and the editor of several books, conference proceedings and special journal issues. 

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