Prof. Hao Zhang, Michigan State University, USA
Fellow of American Statistical Association, Elected Member of the International Statistical Institute

Biography: Hao Zhang is Professor and Chair at the Department of Statistics and Probability at Michigan State University. He is Fellow of American Statistical Association and an Elected Member of the International Statistical Institute. He has served editorial boards of Journal of the American Statistical Association, Statistica Sinica, Environmetrics, and Statistics & Probability Letters. His research interests are primarily in spatial and spatio-temporal statistics. His work includes both theoretical investigation into asymptotic properties of machine learning methods for spatial data and development of algorithms for the analysis of big spatial data. He collaborates with researchers in ecology, environmental sciences, climatology, and natural resources.

 

Prof. Farid Meziane, University of Derby, UK
Head of the Data Science Research Centre

Biography: Farid Meziane is a professor of Data Science, Head of the Data Science Research Centre, and the University's lead for the Data Science academic research theme. He obtained a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Salford, UK on his work on producing formal specification from Natural Language requirements. The work was considered at that time as pioneering in the area and paved the way for a large interest in automating the production of software specifications from informal requirements.
He has authored over 200 scientific papers and participated in many national and international research projects. He is the co-chair of the international conference on application of Natural Language to information systems; co-chair of the international conference on Information Science and Systems. He is serving in the programme committee of over ten international conferences. He is an associate editor for the data and knowledge engineering (Elsevier) journal and the managing editor of the International Journal of Information Technology and Web Engineering (IDEA publishing). He was awarded the Highly Commended Award from the Literati Club, 2001 for his paper on Intelligent Systems in Manufacturing: Current Development and Future Prospects. His research expertise includes Natural Language processing, semantic computing, data mining and big data and knowledge Engineering.

Webpage: https://www.derby.ac.uk/staff/farid-meziane/

 

Prof. Domenico Talia, University of Calabria, Italy

Speech Title: Distributed Machine Learning: Bridging Cloud and Edge Systems

Abstract: Edge-cloud solutions are being used to collect and analyze large amounts of data generated by IoT devices in various application domains, such as urban mobility, smart cities, healthcare, and augmented reality. We must be able to combine techniques and algorithms of data analysis and machine learning with the scalable architectures of Cloud systems and Edge technologies. This approach can reduce latency and network congestion associated with traditional cloud-based machine learning techniques by processing data locally on edge devices before sending it to the cloud for further analysis. This keynote discusses distributed machine learning and proposes a reference architecture to adapt distributed machine learning algorithms at the edge-cloud continuum. Real applications are presented, and the main open research issues are discussed.

Biography: Domenico Talia is a full professor of computer engineering at the University of Calabria, Italy and an Honorary professor at Noida University, India. He is a co-founder of the start-up DtoK Lab. His research interests include Big Data analysis, high-performance computing, parallel and distributed data mining algorithms, Cloud computing, distributed machine learning, social data analysis, peer-to-peer systems, and parallel programming models and languages. Domenico Talia has published 10 books and more than 400 papers in archival journals such as Communications of the ACM, IEEE TPDS, IEEE Computer, IEEE TKDE, IEEE TSE, IEEE TSMC-A, IEEE TSMC-B, IEEE Micro, ACM Computing Surveys, FGCS, Parallel Computing, IEEE Internet Computing, and highly reputed conference proceedings. He is a member of the editorial boards of IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems, IEEE Computer, ACM Computing Surveys, the Future Generation Computer Systems journal, the International Journal of Web and Grid Services, the Journal of Cloud Computing-Advances, Systems and Applications, the Scalable Computing Practice and Experience journal, the International Journal of Next-Generation Computing. He was guest editor of special issues of IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, Parallel Computing, IEEE Transactions on Big Data, and Future Generation Computer Systems, and served as a program chair or program committee member of several international conferences. Talia is a senior member of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and IEEE Computer Society and has been a reviewer for several research agencies and public administrations.