Information of Symposium

List of Speakers

(1) Pekka Abrahamsson
Senior research scientist, VTT Technical Research Centre, Finland.
Agile development of mobile information systems
Mobile phones have been closed environments until recent years. The change brought by open platform technologies such as Symbian operating system and Java-technologies has opened up a significant business opportunity for anyone to develop application software for mobile terminals. Agile approaches provide a good fit for the dynamic mobile development environment. The talk approaches the topic from both the business and the development perspectives and outlines the current status and future prospects.

Dr. Pekka Abrahamsson is a senior research scientist at VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland. He received his Ph.D. on "The role of commitment in software process improvement" from University of Oulu, Finland in 2002. His current responsibilities include managing an AGILE-ITEA project (http://www.agile-itea.org), which involves 22 organizations from 9 European countries. The project aims at utilizing agile innovations in the development of embedded systems. His research interests are currently centred on mobile information systems, applications and services development, business agility and agile software production. He has coached several agile software development projects in industry and authored 50+ scientific publications focusing on software process and quality improvement, commitment issues and agile software development. He is the principal author of the Mobile-D methodology for mobile application development.

(2) Gianpaolo Cugola
Associate Professor, Politecnico di Milano, Italy
Middleware Support for Mobile and Ubiquitous Computing
Ubiquitous and pervasive computing introduces new challenges in software development.
New abstractions are required at the middleware level to overcome the limitations imposed by traditional client/server model. Middleware tailored for such scenarios must easily support reconfiguration by promoting decoupling and by tolerating reconfigurations occurring at the underlying network level. This talk discusses advanced communication and coordination models for mobile and ubiquitous computing, which try to overcome the limitations of traditional coordination models. The relationship among these models will be analyzed and REDS, a reconfigurable middleware supporting both reactive and proactive coordination will be presented.

Prof.Gianpaolo Cugola received his Dr.Eng. degree in Electronic Engineering from Politecnico di Milano, where he spent most of his professional life. In 1998 he received the Prize for Engineering and Technology from the Dimitri N. Chorafas Foundation for his Ph.D. thesis on Software Development Environments. He is currently Associate Professor at Politecnico di Milano where he teaches several courses in the area of Computer Science. He is also Guest Professor at University of Lugano. He collaborates as Information Director with the ACM Software Engineering Interest Group (SIGSoft). He is co-author of several scientific papers published in international journals and conference proceedings. His research interests are in the area of Software Engineering and Distributed Systems. In particular, his current research focuses on middleware technology for largely distributed and highly reconfigurable distributed applications.

(3) Yoshito Tobe,
Professor, Tokyo Denki University
Sensor Networks as Social Infrastructure
Wireless sensor networks present a new paradigm for information collection and monitoring. Although they can be thought as a means for ubiquitous computing applications, they have a potential of providing fine-grained information if they are widely deployed in our society. Like other social infrastructure such as telecommunication lines, power lines, and gas pipes, they will help our daily lives. Possible applications include fine-grained weather and disaster forecasting stations. To realize such wide-area sensor networks, we need to consider the scalability of the networks. To cope with this scalability and geographical location-based management, we propose an addressing scheme to construct a hierarchy of groups called SAMON. In this presentation, I will talk about how we can realize SAMON. In addition to static deployment of wireless sensor networks, we will see a system of robot-based sensor networks. Such networks have not-well-understood features of controlled mobility and delay tolerance which were not observed in conventional wireless ad hoc networks. I will also talk about our on-going project about robotic sensor networks called WISER.

Prof. Yoshito Tobe received Bachelor of Engineering and Master of Engineering from the University of Tokyo in 1984 and 1986, respectively. He also obtained Ph.D. from Keio University in 2000. After he had been working for Toshiba Corp., he is currently a professor at Tokyo Denki University. His research areas are wireless ad hoc networks, sensor networks, and ubiquitous computing for urban lives.

(4) Yasuo Tan
Associate Professor, Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, Japan
Current Status of Home-networking Architectures and Services.
Research on home networking system is one of the most promising areas of computer systems because of its huge potential market and direct impact on daily life. Since 1970s there are many projects which approach this theme but recently, due to the evolutions on the computing and communication technology especially the wide-spread use of the Internet, home networking system becomes very realistic and attractive. In 2002, ITU-T J.190 recommendation has issued to give a standard architecture for home networking system and some consortiums in industry like DLNA and ECONET has established and are working for standard implementations for some field of home networking applications. In this talk, the current status of the home networking technologies is introduced. Latest achievements and current status of standardization and issues are discussed.

Prof. Yasuo Tan received his Ph.D in computer science from Tokyo Institute of Technology in 1993. Since then he has been working for Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (JAIST), and he is an associate professor at information network chair, school of information science of JAIST. Since 2004, he is also an associate professor at National Institute of Informatics (NII), Tokyo. His research interest includes ubiquitous computing and computer networks, especially home networking area. He is a member of IPSJ, IEICE, IEEJ, IEEE, ACM and Digital Home networking Forum.

(5) Richard Schlichting
Director, Software Systems Research, AT&T Labs-Research
A Network Service Provider's View of Ubiquitous Computing
To a network service provider, ubiquitous computing means a potentially large increase in the number of network endpoints and amount of data, as well as more widespread use of technologies such as ad hoc networking. This talk will give an overview of current research at AT&T related to ubiquitous computing, including work on information mining, management of ad hoc networks, customizable QoS for ad hoc networks, and OS specialization for small devices. It will also briefly discuss ongoing development of a testbed for emulating heterogeneous networks of the type found in large enterprises that plans to use StarBED technology as its core element.

Dr. Rick Schlichting is currently Director of Software Systems Research at AT&T Labs-Research in Florham Park, NJ. He received the B.A. degree in mathematics and history from the College of William and Mary, and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in computer science from Cornell University. He was on the faculty at the University of Arizona from 1982-2000, and spent sabbaticals in Japan in 1990 at Tokyo Institute of Technology and in 1996-97 at Hitachi Central Research Lab. Schlichting is an ACM Fellow, an IEEE Fellow, and a member of IFIP Working Group 10.4 on Dependable Computing and Fault-Tolerance. He is currently on the editorial board of IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, and has been active in the IEEE Computer Society Technical Committee on Fault-Tolerant Computing, serving as chair from 1998-99. His research interests include distributed systems, highly dependable computing, and networks.

(6) Yoichi Shinoda
Professor, Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (JAIST) ,Information Science Center
Success and Future of the StarBED Internet Simulator Project
During three years of its operation, the StarBED Internet Simulator has pro,-en itself to be an effective tool that supports research and development of network products in various aspects, especially verification of functionality and performance. As world is moving toward ubiquitous computing network faster than ever, needs for a facility like StarBED is growing; how can we trust or depend on systems that haven't been pro,-en to work correctly? This presentation first provides the current status the StarBED system including an overview of SpringOS that is an integrated suite of tools that support various simulation requirements. Then, a future direction to evolve the StarBED into general purpose verification facility that explicitly supports notion of dependability is discussed.

Prof. Yoichi Shinoda has received doctor of engineering in 1981, joined JAIST in 1991, and became a professor at Information Science Center in 2001. Although his main research interest is in overall distributed systems, his background in software engineering has influenced his work in many ways.

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