Speaker: Calton Pu, Professor and John P. Imlay, Jr. Chair in Software, School of Computer Science, Georgia Institute of Technology

Time: 9:30-10:30 am, Dec.16, 2014

Venue: Meeting room 202, Second Floor, Office Building, Software Campus

Host: Lizhen Cui

Abstract: The ongoing convergence of evolution of devices (Internet of Things), deployment of large shared infrastructures (computing clouds), and accumulation of Big Data (sensors and social networks) has created exciting new research challenges in quality of service (e.g., real-time response time, high availability and robustness despite widespread failures), and quality of information (e.g., security, privacy, and robustness despite misinformation). These research challenges require integration and synthesis of results from several related areas, e.g., sensor networks and social networks as Big Data producers, and sophisticated models running on clouds as Big Data consumers. We have built LITMUS, a landslide detection system, to illustrate the research challenges of integrating physical sensors (earthquakes and rainfall) and social sensors (Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube). LITMUS is running live in the project website at [].

Bio: Calton Pu was born in Taiwan and grew up in Brazil.  He received his PhD from University of Washington in 1986 and served on the faculty of Columbia University and Oregon Graduate Institute.  Currently, he is holding the position of Professor and John P. Imlay, Jr. Chair in Software in the College of Computing, Georgia Institute of Technology.  He has worked on several projects in systems and database research.  His contributions to systems research include program specialization and software feedback.  His contributions to database research include extended transaction models and their implementation.  His recent research has focused on automated system management in clouds (Elba project), information quality (e.g., spam processing), and big data in Internet of Things.  He has collaborated extensively with scientists and industry researchers.  He has published more than 70 journal papers and book chapters, 200 conference and refereed workshop papers. He served on more than 120 program committees, including the co-PC chairs of ICDE99, COOPIS02, SRDS03, DOA07, DEBS09, ICWS10, CollaborateCom'11, ICAC13, and co-general chair of ICDE'97, CIKM'01, ICDE06, DEPSA07, CEAS07, SCC08, CollaborateCom08, World Service Congress11, and CollaborateCom12.