Keynote Talks

I- “Research challenges in cloud computing and big data tools“.

Seif haridi KTH, Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden

II- “Communication without Repudiation: The Unanswered Question“.

Mohamed G. Gouda University of Texas at Austin, USA

Details :

I- Research challenges in cloud computing and big data tools

Biography of Seif Haridi:
Seif haridi is a professor of computer systems at KTH, the Royal Institute of Technology  in Sweden. He is also Chief Scientist at SICS, Swedish Institute of Computer Science. During 2011-2013 he served as the action-line leader of cloud computer at EIT ICTLABS, European Institute of Innovation and technology. His research interest are in the area of large scalable distributed systems.

Abstract:
I will focus in this talk on what is next in the area of cloud computing and data-intensive computational frame works. In particular as cloud computing in data centers becomes today’s technology, research efforts are shifting into the challenges in multi data-centers cloud environments, especially in distributed data management.  Also for big data applications the tools are changing from simple Map Reduce frameworks into full fledged computational systems for processing and querying large data sets that makes it much easier for application developers to create value out of data. We will present the current state of research in these areas and outline the related research challenges.

II- Communication without Repudiation: The Unanswered Question

Biography of Mohamed G. Gouda:
Mohamed G. Gouday was born in Egypt. His first B. Sc. was in Engineering and his second was in Mathematics; both are from Cairo University. Later, he obtained M. A. in Mathematics from York University and Masters and Ph. D. in Computer Science from the University of Waterloo. He worked for the Honeywell Corporate Technology Center in Minneapolis 1977-1980. In 1980, he joined the University of Texas at Austin where he currently holds the Mike A. Myers Centennial Professorship in Computer Sciences. From 2009 to 2012, Prof. Gouda has served as the Lead Program Director of the Computer System Research (CSR) program in the National Science Foundation (NSF).

His research areas are distributed and concurrent computing and network protocols. In these areas, he has been working on abstraction, formality, correctness, nondeterminism, atomicity, reliability, security, convergence, and stabilization. He has published over twenty book chapters, over eighty journal papers, and over one hundred conference and workshop papers. Prof. Gouda is the author of the textbook « Elements of Network Protocol Design », published by John-Wiley & Sons in 1998. This is the first and only textbook where network protocols are presented in an abstract and formal setting. He also coauthored two monographs that were published by Springer in 2005 and 2006.

He supervised Twenty Five Ph. D. students. Five of his students are now Full Professors at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs, the University of California at Santa Barbara, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Ohio-State University, and the University of Iowa. Another four of his former students are Associate Professors, and three of his students are still Assistant Professors.

He was the program committee chairman of ACM SIGCOMM in 1989. He was the program committee chairman of IEEE ICNP in 1993, 1998, 2005, and 2008. He was the program committee chairman of IEEE ICDCS in 1999. He was the general chairman of SSS in 2006.

Prof. Gouda is the 1993 winner of the Kuwait Prize in Basic Sciences. He was the recipient of two IBM Faculty Partnership Awards and became a Fellow of the IBM Center for Advanced Studies in Austin in 2002. He won the 2001 IEEE Communication Society William R. Bennet Best Paper Award. In 2004, his paper « Diverse Firewall Design », coauthored with Alex X. Liu and published in the International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks, won the William C. Carter Award. In 2005, he won a teaching excellence award from the College of Natural Sciences at the University of Texas at Austin.

Abstract:
A non-repudiation protocol is to be executed by two parties, say S and R, in order to (1) enable S to send some text to R, then receive some non-repudiated evidence that R has indeed received the text, and (2) enable R to receive both the sent text from S and some non-repudiated evidence that this text was indeed sent from S to R. Since 1995, tens of non-repudiation protocols have been proposed, but every one of these protocols seems to suffer from one or more well-known problems. For example, most protocols assume the existence of a third party that is trusted by both S and R. This observation reminds us that the following core question has never been answered. Can there be a non-repudiation protocol that does not suffer from any of these problems?