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26.09.2019 - Performance Measurements of Interledger Connectors
Speaker: Prof. Dr. Radu State
Host: Prof. Dr. Burkhard Stiller
This talk will present some of the research work done within the RIPPLE-UBRI research grant awarded by Ripple to the University of Luxembourg. We will address in this topic the performance measurement of Interledger connectors, used to connect multiple ledgers. The talk will introduce the Interledger protocol architecture, highlight the several layers used for payments across multiple ledgers, and address the monitoring of performance and security of a connector using system tracing tools.
Prof. Dr. Radu State, Senior Scientist at SnT/University of Luxembourg, is the Head of the research group SEDAN (Service and Data Management). He is a graduate from both the French and the North-American research and education systems from which he obtained in 1998 the Master of Science Degree at the Johns Hopkins University (USA) followed in 2001 by a PhD degree at INRIA (France). He holds a Habilitation à diriger des recherches since 2009 from the University of Lorraine, France.
Before joining SnT Radu was Professor of Computer Science in Nancy at the University of Lorraine and a senior researcher (Chargé de recherche première classe) with INRIA (Institut de Recherche en Informatique), France. Starting with 2016 he founded the research group SEDAN at SnT/University of Luxembourg.
Radu’s main research interests are in the areas of Blockchain, Big Data Systems, and Network Security on which he supervised and co-supervised successfully in the past 13 PhD students. Radu is currently supervising 12 PhD students and 10 Research Associates working on several industry-driven projects with local companies.
10.10.2019 - SAP HANA - The Evolution of an In-Memory DBMS from Pure OLAP Processing Toward Mixed Workloads
Speaker: Dr. Norman May
Host: Prof. Dr. Michael Böhlen
The journey of SAP HANA started as an in-memory appliance for complex, analytical applications. The success of the system quickly motivated SAP to broaden the scope from the OLAP workloads the system was initially architected for to also handle transactional workloads, in particular to support its Business Suite flagship product. In this paper, we highlight some of the core design changes to evolve an in-memory column store system towards handling OLTP workloads. We also discuss the challenges of running mixed workloads with low-latency OLTP queries and complex analytical queries in the context of the same database management system and give an outlook on the future database interaction patterns of modern business applications we see emerging currently.
Dr. Norman May did his doctoral thesis on algebraic optimization and evaluation of XML queries at the University of Mannheim, Germany. After joining SAP, he worked as researcher and technical coordinator of the TEXO/Theseus research project; this research focused on service discovery, service composition, and service engineering. In 2010 he joined the SAP HANA database development team where he now works as a database architect with a focus on query processing and effective resource management. He supervises the research of several students in the SAP HANA campus and actively contributes to the database research community.
24.10.2019 - Internet of Thing Security with Provably Unclonable Functions
Speaker: Prof. Dr. Denis Trcek
Host: Prof. Dr. Burkhard Stiller
The emerging internet is become increasingly populated by Internet of Things (IoT) devices. These devices often lack computing and energy resources, so providing security in such environments is a real challenge. To tackle this situation such solutions are needed that are lightweight. Further, it is desired that security solutions are tied to some inherent properties of IoT devices, especially when it comes to authentication. In this case unique identification by using provably unclonable functions (PUFs) provides a promising approach. But what are the main issues that need addressing before PUFs can be deployed in operational environments, and which are the available options for their treatment?
The emerging internet is become increasingly populated by Internet of Things (IoT) devices. These devices often lack computing and energy resources, so providing security in such environments is a real challenge. To tackle this situation such solutions are needed that are lightweight. Further, it is desired that security solutions are tied to some inherent properties of IoT devices, especially when it comes to authentication. In this case unique identification by using provably unclonable functions (PUFs) provides a promising approach. But what are the main issues that need addressing before PUFs can be deployed in operational environments, and which are the available options for their treatment?
Prof. Dr. Denis Trček is a full professor at Faculty of computer and information sciences, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia, where he heads Laboratory of e-Media. He has been involved in the field of computer networks and IS security and privacy for more than twenty years. He has taken part in various international as well as national research and application projects in government, banking, and insurance sectors.
His research interests include e-Business, IS security, privacy, formal methods, trust management, and human factor modelling. His bibliography includes over one hundred titles, including two monographs published by renowned publisher Springer Nature. D. Trček serves (or has served) as a member of many international bodies, including NATO ICS Panel, ENISA MB (secondary member), and IFIP WG 11.2. In 2014 he was awarded a prestigious Fulbright scholarship to conduct research at Stanford University as a visiting professor.
31.10.2019 - AI, Swarming and the Evolution of Military Strategy
Speaker: Dr. Jean-Marc Rickli
Host: Prof. Dr. Davide Scaramuzza
Military strategy has relied on four mechanisms to use military force: denial, punishment, risk and decapitation. With the advent of artificial intelligence and autonomous weapons systems, it will be possible to use military force in swarms. Swarming might be disruptive as it might provide an offensive advantage that will not only revolution the battlefield but also strategic stability. This presentation will review the impact of AI in the military and discuss its consequences.
Dr. Jean-Marc Rickli is the head of global risk and resilience at the Geneva Centre for Security Policy (GCSP) in Geneva, Switzerland. He is a senior advisor for the AI (Artificial Intelligence) Initiative at the Future Society at Harvard Kennedy School. His book that was published by Georgetown University Press in June 2019 and co-written with Dr. Andreas Krieg is entitled "Surrogate Warfare: The Transformation of War in the Twenty-first Century".
07.11.2019 - Building a Better Bicycle for the Mind
Speaker: Prof. James Eagan, Ph.D.
Host: Prof. Dr. Chat Wacharamanotham
Steve Jobs once described the computer as "a bicycle for the mind", a tool that amplifies people's cognitive capabilities. My work focuses on making this bicycle a better, more expressive tool for humans in a data-rich world: by understanding how people interact with and make sense of data, by making interactions more flexible and expressive, and by rethinking how we build software so users can appropriate and adapt it to their own idiosyncratic needs. In this talk, I will present an overview of my lab's work in these three areas.
Prof. James Eagan, Ph.D., is an Associate Professor (Maître de conférences) in the Design, Interaction, Visualisation & Applications (DIVA) group at Télécom Paris and the Institut Polytechnique de Paris. His research in the fields of human-computer interaction and information visualisation focuses on making the computer a more expressive tool for people to use, and is generally organized around three themes: making software more malleable, using information visualisation to help people better make sense of data, and increasing the expressiveness of the tools people use to do so. He is also co-chair of the MS Big Data program. Before joining Télécom Paris, he was a post-doctoral researcher at LRI (CNRS & Université Paris-Sud). He holds a Ph.D. and M.Sc. in Computer Science from the Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech) and a B.A. in Mathematics/Computer Science from Lawrence University.
14.11.2019 - Software Heritage: Source Code Analysis at the Scale of the World
Speaker: Prof. Dr. Stefano Zacchiroli
Host: Prof. Dr. Alberto Bacchelli
The Software Heritage project has assembled the largest existing archive of publicly available software source code and associated development history, for more than 6 billion unique source code files and 1 billion unique commits, coming from more than 90 million development projects.
In this talk we will review the project background, current status, and future directions with a focus on its research applications. In particular, we will discuss (1) using the Software Heritage archive as a research object, allowing to study software evolution, patterns, and development dynamics at an unprecedented scale; and (2) how Software Heritage is a fundamental building block for open science, and how it contributes to increasing accessibility and reproducibility of scientific source code. We will conclude the talk with a brief overview of the research challenges that need to be overcome to fulfill the Software Heritage mission.
Prof. Dr. Stefano Zacchiroli is Associate Professor of Computer Science at University Paris Diderot on leave at Inria. His research interests span formal methods, software preservation, and Free/Open Source Software engineering. He is co-founder and the current CTO of the Software Heritage project. He is an official member of the Debian Project since 2001, where he was elected to serve as Debian Project Leader for 3 terms in a row over the period 2010-2013. He is a former Board Director of the Open Source Initiative (OSI) and recipient of the 2015 O'Reilly Open Source Award.
28.11.2019 - BAS Tools for the Processing of Spoken Language
Speakers: Dr. Raphael Winkelmann & Dr. Christoph Draxler
Host: Prof. Dr. Volker Dellwo
The Bavarian Archive for Speech Signals (BAS) provides a number of web services for processing spoken language. These services are multilingual and may be used both via a graphical user interface and a standardised API.
The services cover many of the processing tasks necessary for speech: basic services such as distributed orthographic transcription, access to third-party automatic speech recognition and grapheme to phoneme conversion, and high-level services such as automatic segmentation, the creation of corpus metadata, subtitle and anonymisation services.
In this presentation we will give an overview of the services and discuss their interplay and the integration into e.g. the statistics package R.
Dr. Raphael Winkelmann obtained his PhD in phonetics and speech processing at LMU-Munich for his development of web-based tools for the statistical analysis and visualisation of speech data. He is the author of the EmuR WebApp system.
Dr. Christoph Draxler obtained his PhD in the area of logic programming languages and databases at the Department of Computer Sciences of UZH in 1991. At the Phonetics Institute in Munich he now works on web-based tools for the annotation and perception of speech.
05.12.2019 - Towards Reproducible Science: a Few Building Blocks From my Personal Experience
Speaker: Prof. Dr. Oscar Corcho
Host: Prof. Dr. Abraham Bernstein
It is well understood that achieving Reproducible Science across all scientific disciplines is an extremely ambitious goal that will be really difficult to achieve. However, there are many small steps that can be taken towards improving our way of doing, communicating, and advancing Science, by making the experiments that we describe in our scientific papers easier to reproduce.
In this talk, I will talk about some of the efforts that we have been working on in the context of our research group, focused on achieving a more Reproducible Science. First, our work on ontologies for the representation of Wetlab laboratory protocols (for plant genomics). We have been working on analyzing manually papers describing laboratory protocols, deriving a representation for them, understanding how Instruments, Reagents, Outputs, etc., have to be identified and annotated, publishing now this laboratory protocols as Linked Data. Second, the work that we are doing in the context of the STARS4ALL foundation, where we are trying to provide support to the research (and activists) community working on light pollution. We are working on making research data available as open data, as well as creating ontologies that can be used by public institutions. Finally, I will discuss on what I believe that is still needed in order to achieve the broader goal of Reproducible Science and will open a discussion on the current barriers to achieve this goal.
Prof. Dr. Oscar Corcho is full professor of Artificial Intelligence at the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, where he co-leads the Ontology Engineering Group. His main research activities are focused on Ontology Engineering, Ontology-Based Data Access and Integration, and the application of semantic technologies in Open Science. In 2016 he was conferred the award Juan López de Peñalver by the Spanish Royal Academy of Engineering, for being one of the top young scientists in the area of Engineering. He combines his research activities with technology transfer (being the co-founder of the spin-off company Localidata focused on open government data) and open data and open science activism.
