Keynote Speakers

Title

Body Sensor Networks: from Communication to Activity Classification.

Abstract

In this talk, we will present recent research results on the design and implementation of body sensor networks (BSNs). The first part of the talk will be devoted to "body networks:" on the basis of accurate experimental characterization of the the on-body propagation channels, we will discuss on its implications on network architecture design. Once deployed over the body, each node can be provided with (a lot of) "sensors," which can collect significant information on the person status. In the second part of the talk, we will focus on a specific applicaton, given by activity classification (e.g., recognizing which type of movement a person is doing) through accelerometric and gyroscopic retrived data. In particular, we will present the approach which lead the WASNLab team (http://wasnlab.tlc.unipr.it/) to win the first BSN Contest (http://bsncontest.org/). The first part of the talk is carried out in collaboration with the Wireless Communications Group of the Opera Department of the Universite Libre de Bruxelles (Belgium). .

Biography

Gianluigi Ferrari (http://www.tlc.unipr.it/ferrari) was born in Parma, Italy, in 1974. He received his "Laurea" and PhD degrees from the University of Parma, Italy, in 1998 and 2002, respectively. Since 2002, he has been with the University Parma, where he currently is an Associate Professor of Telecommunications. He was a visiting researcher at USC (Los Angeles, CA, USA, 2000-2001), CMU (Pittsburgh, PA, USA, 2002-2004), KMITL (Bangkok, Thailand, 2007), and ULB (Bruxelles, Belgium, 2010). Since 2006, he has been the Coordinator of the Wireless Ad-hoc and Sensor Networks (WASN) Lab in the Department of Information Engineering of the University of Parma.

As of today he has published more than 140 papers in leading international journals and conferences. He is coauthor of a few books, including "Detection Algorithms for Wireless Communications, with Applications to Wired and Storage Systems" (Wiley: 2004), "Ad Hoc Wireless Networks: A Communication-Theoretic Perspective" (Wiley: 2006), "LDPC Coded Modulations" (Springer: 2009), and "Sensor Networks with IEEE 802.15.4 Systems: Distributed Processing, MAC, and Connectivity" (Springer: 2011). He edited the book "Sensor Networks: where Theory Meets Practice" (Springer: 2010). His research interests include digital communication systems analysis and design, wireless ad hoc and sensor networking, adaptive digital signal processing.

Dr. Ferrari is a co-recipient of a best student paper award at IWWAN'06 and a best paper award at EMERGING'10. The WASNLab team won the first Body Sensor Network (BSN) contest, held in conjunction with BSN 2011. He acts as a frequent reviewer for many international journals and conferences. He acts also as a technical program member for many international conferences. He currently serves on the Editorial Boards of "The Open Electrical and Electronic Engineering (TOEEJ) Journal" (Bentham), the "International Journal of RF Technologies: Research and Applications" (Taylor and Francis), and the "International Journal of Future Generation Communication and Networking" (SERSC). He was a Guest Editor of the 2010 EURASIP JWCN Special Issue on "Dynamic Spectrum Access: From the Concept to the Implementation."

Title

CamCube - Rethinking the Data Center Cluster

Abstract

Since the early days of networks, a basic principle has been that endpoints treat the network as a black box. An endpoint injects a packet with a destination address and the network delivers the packet. This principle has served us well, and has enabled the Internet to scale to billions of devices using networks owned by competing companies and running applications developed by different parties. However, this approach might not be optimal for large-scale Internet data centers, such as those run by Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Facebook, in which all the components are controlled by a single entity. In the CamCube project, we have been looking at a different approach to build data centers, borrowing ideas from the fields of high performance parallel computing, distributed systems and networking. We use a direct-connect topology, similar to those used in HPC, and a novel networking stack, which supports a key-based routing functionality. By providing applications with a more fine-grained control on network resources, CamCube enables increasing performance and reducing development complexity and cluster costs. In this talk, I will provide an overview of the CamCube platform and motivate its peculiar design choices. I will also describe the design and the evaluation of a number of services that we implemented on CamCube. These include a MapReduce service that provides significant higher performance than existing solutions running on traditional clusters.

Biography

Paolo Costa currently holds a college fellowship at the Department of Computing of Imperial College London. Before joining Imperial, he spent 2.5 years in the Systems and Networking Group of the Microsoft Research Lab in Cambridge and, prior to that, he had been a Postdoctoral Researcher in the Computer Systems group at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. He holds a M. Sc. and Ph.D. degree in Computer Engineering from the Politecnico di Milano, received, respectively, in 2002 and 2006.

His research interests lie at the intersection of systems and networking with particular focus on large-scale networked systems, ranging from sensor and mobile networks to overlays and, more recently, data centers.