A. Panel for CSC 2011

• Title: Cloud and Service Computing: an Industry Perspective
• Chair: Dr. Henry Chan, Hong Kong Polytechnic University
• Date: 13 December 2011 (Tue)
• Time: 11:00am - 12:30pm
• Venue: Jockey Club Auditorium, Hong Kong Polytechnic University
  
  

Prof. Lixin Gao, University of Massachusetts
Dr. T S Lo, ASTRI
Mr. Emil Chan, iProA
Mr. Stephen Ho, CAHK
Mr. Andy Cheung, Microsoft Hong Kong
Mr. Garrick Ng, Cisco

C. Panel Theme

Nowadays, Cloud is not a debate of a future technology, but it simply exists. It is initiated based on years of vision, research and development. The Cloud now penetrates into our daily life and it provides resource from computation and hardware, to software and services.

During this rage on Cloud, the industry has gained huge amount of experiences even in a short period of time. They face technical problems that make them headache every morning; new and outrageous customer requirements that can hardly be conceived in advance; hesitation on long term future directions and emerging business competitions every now and then.

Do we get everything right? Are there any technical difficulties that the research community should get involved, both for the daily headaches and in the long term perspect? In this panel we primarily invite industry practitioners to discuss their joy and pain in their experiences of Cloud. We also invite a few academic researchers to discuss share their findings in the past.

All are welcome to join our panel discussion.

Title: Distributed Framework for Iterative Computations on Massive Datasets
Prof. Lixin Gao
University of Massachusetts

Abstract: Iterative algorithms are pervasive in many applications such as search engine algorithms, machine learning, and recommendation systems. These applications typically involve a dataset of massive scale. Fast iterative computations of the massive datasets are essential for these applications. This is particular important for on-line query such as keyword based search query. In this talk, we present an overview of MapReduce framework, and propose two frameworks, iMapReduce and pMapReduce, that enable fast iterative computations. By providing the support of iterative computations and prioritized execution, we can ensure faster convergence of the iterative process. Both iMapReduce and pMapReduce preserve the MapReduce distributed computing framework and is particularly efficient for online queries such as top-k queries. We implement iMapReduce and pMapReduce based on Apache Hadoop and evaluate its performance. Our evaluation results show that pMapReduce can reduce the computation time by two orders of magnitude comparing to that achieved with MapReduce. At the end of the talk, I will provide an overview of on-going projects in my research group.

Biography: Lixin Gao is a professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. She received her Ph.D. degree in computer science from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst in 1996. Her research interests include social networks, and Internet routing, network virtualization and cloud computing. Between May 1999 and January 2000, she was a visiting researcher at AT&T Research Labs and DIMACS. She was an Alfred P. Sloan Fellow between 2003-2005 and received an NSF CAREER Award in 1999. She won the best paper award from IEEE INFOCOM 2010 and her paper in ACM Cloud Computing 2011 was honored with ¡°Paper of Distinction¡±. She received the Chancellor¡¯s Award for Outstanding Accomplishment in Research and Creative Activity in 2010, and is a fellow of IEEE.