Prof. Calton Pu
Georgia Institute of Technology

Monday December 17, 2012
2:30 pm - 5317 Sennott Square
(Hosted by Dr. Panos Chrysanthis)

Big Data, IoT, and Clouds: Research Opportunities in Disaster Management

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. We will describe some of these challenges in the three phases of disaster management: preparedness beforehand, emergency response, and recovery afterwards. With concrete scenarios, e.g., using Twitter for effective information exchange during emergencies, we will discuss the 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. Such integration requirements render some traditional approaches (e.g., analyzing and dividing the big problem into individual publishable units) potentially ineffective. We will discuss concrete and technological research challenges in using Big Data for disaster management as well as meta-level research methodological challenges in integrating research results, which has been considered "not research" in the past.

BIOGRAPHY OF SPEAKER

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 SRDS'95, ICDE'99, COOPIS'02, SRDS'03, DOA'07, DEBS'09, ICWS'10, CollaborateCom'11, ICAC'13, and co-general chair of ICDE'97, CIKM'01, ICDE'06, DEPSA'07, CEAS'07, SCC'08, CollaborateCom'08, World Service Congress'11, and CollaborateCom'12.