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Home > Scientific Workshop - Abstracts
Ubiquitous computing reaches out: computing, context, communities Pertti Huuskonen Principal Scientist, Nokia Research Center, Tampere, Finland The talk explores issues that arise from mashups of ubicomp, context awareness and the social and semantic webs. Ubiquitous computing today enjoys a wealth of available technologies for sensing, processing, connecting and interacting. A key concern for deploying the systems in the real world is building models - computer representations of the surrounding world, the applications, the users, and their data. Ubicomp systems have often been limited to prototypes due the difficulty of obtaining models of realistic scope. This has been particularly true in the area of context awareness. The goal of understanding contextual information of the real world is still largely unreachable. Marc Parlange Professor and Dean of the School of Architecture, Civil and Environmental Engineering, EPFL The long standing challenge that faces all hydrologists and atmospheric scientists is the spatial and temporal complexity of the land surface and the desire to have high resolution measurements of surface fluxes and various state variables. Two recent advances in sensor technology are discussed and their application in the field for improved understanding of hydrologic phenomena is presented: 1. A new generation high resolution scanning raman lidar to measure temperature and humidity simultaneously at 1 m resolution to a 500 m range along with field observations; 2. A multihop wireless sensor system (sensorscope) for hydrologic applications including over rugged alpine terrain. The combination of these sensors to probe the environment is allowing smaller research teams to make rapid advances in understanding the water cycle across the landscape in regions previously not monitored at high resolution.' Sustainable energy - without the hot air David McKay Professor in the Department of Physics, University of Cambridge How easily can we (the `developed' world) get off our fossil fuel habit? Could a European country live on its own renewables? Assuming no economic constraints, assuming we cover the country with windmills and the coast with wave-machines, every roof with solar panels and every field with energy crops, could we get enough power from renewables to continue with our current consumption? See www.withouthotair.com for more details. Algorithms for Web Search Monika Henzinger Professor at the School of Communication and Computer Sciences, EPFL It is estimated that currently about 20% of the world population uses the web. A large majority of these users perform searches at web search engines to find information on the web. Thus, web search is surpassed only by email in the number of users. In this talk we present the different components of web search engines and explain what algorithmic challenges they face. In particular, we discuss algorithms for ranking search results and finding near-duplicate web pages. Industrial Perspective on Theories of Communication Olav Tirkkonen Principal member of Research Staff, Nokia Research Center and Professor, Helsinki University of Technology In modern wireless communication systems, the efficiency of single radio links is approaching the Shannon limit. Multiuser- and network-level operation principles, however, are far from what is considered theoretically optimal. In this talk, theories of communication are discussed in perspective of the next generation of communication systems. The way from observations of fundamental limits and design of optimal methods to constructing working systems is investigated, as well as the characteristics of the feedback channel in the inverse direction. Reasons for close fits as well as wide gaps between theory and practice are analyzed. Experimenting with tailor-made double-sided markets Peter L. Bossaerts Professor in the College of Management of Technology, EPFL Double-sided markets (where both buyers and sellers can initiate trade at any moment in time) should be familiar from a financial context. In experimental economics, however, double-sided markets have been used since the 1960s to study to what extent they can solve a variety of different resource allocation and even information aggregation problems. Some of the advances have made it into applications in the industry. Perhaps the most prominent of these is prediction markets. The talk will discuss how to deploy double-sided markets aimed at solving specific allocation and information problems. Three examples will illustrate the ideas: (i) optimal use of space and time resources, (ii) extraction of information, (iii) solving NP hard problems. Distribution of data on unreliable networks Amin Shokrollahi Professor at the Schools of Basic Sciences and Communication and Computer Sciences, EPFL The explosion of the Internet has led to an ever-growing demand for accessing large amounts of data anytime, from anywhere. While in the early days users were content with long waiting times and mediocre quality, modern users, and especially those paying for their service, demand stringent guarantees on the quality. This makes the problem of timely and reliable delivery of data on packet based networks a central one, with important economic ramifications. This talk will review this problem, and present a solution that is becoming fast the standard in data delivery. At its core the solution is based on a probabilistic technique. We will hint at some of the underlying mathematics involved in the analysis and design of this process, and discuss some of the economic, technical, and business ramifications of the proposed solution. |
