Prof. Witold Pedrycz

University of Alberta, Canada

IEEE Life Fellow

Speech Title: New Horizons of Machine Learning: Pursuing a Unified Data - Knowledge Environment

Abstract: Over the recent years, we have been witnessing truly remarkable progress in Machine Learning (ML) with highly visible accomplishments encountered, in particular, in natural language processing and computer vision impacting numerous areas of human endeavours. Driven inherently by the technologically advanced learning and architectural developments, ML constructs are highly impactful coming with far reaching consequences; just to mention autonomous vehicles, control, health care imaging, decision-making in critical areas, among others.
Data are central and of paramount relevance to the design methodology and algorithms of ML. While they are behind successes of ML, there are also far-reaching challenges that require urgent attention especially with the growing importance of requirements of interpretability, transparency, credibility, stability, and explainability. As a new direction, data-knowledge ML concerns a prudent and orchestrated involvement of data and domain knowledge used holistically to realize learning mechanisms and support the formation of the models.
The objective of this talk is to identify the challenges and develop a unique and comprehensive setting of data-knowledge environment in the realization of the development of ML models. We review some existing directions including concepts arising under the name of physics informed ML.
We investigate the representative topologies of ML models identifying data and knowledge functional modules and interactions among them. We also elaborate on the central role of information granularity in this area.

Biography : Witold Pedrycz (IEEE Life Fellow) is Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada. He is also with the Systems Research Institute of the Polish Academy of Sciences, Warsaw, Poland. Dr. Pedrycz is a foreign member of the Polish Academy of Sciences and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. He is a recipient of several awards including Norbert Wiener award from the IEEE Systems, Man, and Cybernetics Society, IEEE Canada Computer Engineering Medal, a Cajastur Prize for Soft Computing from the European Centre for Soft Computing, a Killam Prize, a Fuzzy Pioneer Award from the IEEE Computational Intelligence Society, and 2019 Meritorious Service Award from the IEEE Systems Man and Cybernetics Society.
His main research directions involve Computational Intelligence, Granular Computing, and Machine Learning, among others.
Professor Pedrycz serves as an Editor-in-Chief of Information Sciences, Editor-in-Chief of WIREs Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery (Wiley), and Co-editor-in-Chief of Int. J. of Granular Computing (Springer) and J. of Data Information and Management (Springer).

Prof. Rajkumar Buyya

University of Melbourne, Australia

IEEE Fellow
Foreign Fellow of Academia Europaea
Redmond Barry Distinguished Professor
Director of the Cloud Computing and Distributed Systems (CLOUDS) Laboratory

Speech Title: Neoteric Frontiers in Cloud, Edge, and Quantum Computing

Abstract: The twenty-first-century digital infrastructure and applications are driven by Cloud computing and Internet of Things (IoT) paradigms. The Cloud computing paradigm has been transforming computing into the 5th utility wherein "computing utilities" are commoditized and delivered to consumers like traditional utilities such as water, electricity, gas, and telephony. It offers infrastructure, platform, and software as services, which are made available to consumers as subscription-oriented services on a pay-as-you-go basis over the Internet. Its use is growing exponentially with the continued development of new classes of applications such as AI-powered models (e.g., ChatGPT) and the mining of crypto currencies such as Bitcoins. To make Clouds pervasive, Cloud application platforms need to offer (1) APIs and tools for rapid creation of scalable and elastic applications and (2) a runtime system for deployment of applications on geographically distributed Data Centre infrastructures (with Quantum computing nodes) in a seamless manner.
The Internet of Things (IoT) paradigm enables seamless integration of cyber-and-physical worlds and opening opportunities for creating new classes of realtime applications such as smart cities, smart robotics, and smart healthcare. The emerging Fog/Edge computing models support latency sensitive/real-time IoT applications with a seamless integration of network-wide resources all the way from edge to the Cloud.
This keynote presentation will cover (a) 21st century vision of computing and identifies various emerging IT paradigms that make it easy to realize the vision of computing utilities; (b) innovative architecture for creating elastic Clouds integrating edge resources and managed Clouds, (c) Aneka 6G, a 6th generation Cloud Application Platform, for rapid development of Big Data/AI applications and their deployment on private/public Clouds driven by user requirements, (d) a novel FogBus software framework with Blockchain-based data-integrity management for end-to-end IoT-Fog/Edge-Cloud integration for execution of realtime IoT applications, (e) experimental results on deploying Big Data/IoT applications in engineering, health care (e.g., COVID-19), deep learning/Artificial intelligence (AI), satellite image processing, and natural language processing (mining COVID-19 literature for new insights) on elastic Clouds, (f) QFaaS: A Serverless Function-as-a-Service Framework for Quantum Computing, and (g) new directions for emerging research in Cloud, Edge, and Quantum computing.
Biography: Dr. Rajkumar Buyya is a Redmond Barry Distinguished Professor and Director of the Cloud Computing and Distributed Systems (CLOUDS) Laboratory at the University of Melbourne, Australia. He is also serving as the founding CEO of Manjrasoft, a spin-off company of the University, commercializing its innovations in Cloud Computing. He has authored over 850 publications and seven textbooks including "Mastering Cloud Computing" published by McGraw Hill, China Machine Press, and Morgan Kaufmann for Indian, Chinese and international markets respectively. Dr. Buyya is one of the highly cited authors in computer science and software engineering worldwide (h-index=168 g-index=365, and 149,200+ citations). He has been recognised as a "Web of Science Highly Cited Researcher" for seven times since 2016, "Best of the World" twice for research fields (in Computing Systems in 2019 and Software Systems in 2021/2022/2023) as well as "Lifetime Achiever" and "Superstar of Research" in "Engineering and Computer Science" discipline twice (2019 and 2021) by the Australian Research Review.
Software technologies for Grid, Cloud, and Fog computing developed under Dr.Buyya's leadership have gained rapid acceptance and are in use at several academic institutions and commercial enterprises in 50+ countries around the world. Manjrasoft's Aneka Cloud technology developed under his leadership has received "Frost New Product Innovation Award". He served as founding Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Transactions on Cloud Computing. He is currently serving as Editor-in-Chief of Software: Practice and Experience, a long-standing journal in the field established 54+ years ago. He has presented over 750 invited talks (keynotes, tutorials, and seminars) on his vision on IT Futures, Advanced Computing technologies, and Spiritual Science at international conferences and institutions in Asia, Australia, Europe, North America, and South America. He has recently been recognized as a Fellow of the Academy of Europe. For further information on Dr.Buyya, please visit his cyberhome: www.buyya.com

Prof. Huiyu Zhou

University of Leicester, United Kingdom

Speech Title: When Parkinson’s disease meets artificial intelligence

Abstract: Parkinson’s disease (PD) is a severe condition that affects the brain. PD causes huge problems in humans such as shaking and stiffness that become worse over time. Early diagnosis and prognosis of PD results in effective and personalised treatment, reduced care costs and better quality of life. In this talk, first of all, Zhou introduces fundamental knowledge about PD and the technologies used for PD identification. This talk is divided into two streams, animal mice- and human-based PD identification. Afterwards, Zhou reports how his research group deal with immersive challenges such as single and multiple mice detection and tracking, single and multiple mice behaviour recognition, and social behaviour analysis using new video analytics technologies developed within the team. Zhou presents the machine learning techniques used to distinguish between normal and PD mice through social behaviour analysis. Zhou also shows the artificial intelligence methods developed within his team for biomarker analysis. Finally, conclusions are given to summarise the talk.
Biography：Dr. Huiyu Zhou received a Bachelor of Engineering degree in Radio Technology from Huazhong University of Science and Technology of China, and a Master of Science degree in Biomedical Engineering from University of Dundee of United Kingdom, respectively. He was awarded a Doctor of Philosophy degree in Computer Vision from Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh, United Kingdom. Dr. Zhou currently is a full Professor at School of Computing and Mathematical Sciences, University of Leicester, United Kingdom. He has published over 500 peer-reviewed papers in the field. His research work has been or is being supported by UK EPSRC, ESRC, AHRC, MRC, EU, Innovate UK, Royal Society, British Heart Foundation, Leverhulme Trust, Puffin Trust, Alzheimer’s Research UK, Invest NI and industry. Homepage: https://le.ac.uk/people/huiyu-zhou.

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