IT Track
Prof. Giuseppe F. Italiano
Title of the Talk : Security and Privacy in Large Language and Foundation Models: A Survey on GenAI Attacks
Prof. G. Narahari Sastry
Title of the Talk : “Machine learning and AI Applications in Drug Discovery and Healthcare”
Prof. Jean-Marie Gorce
Title of the Talk: Learning networks: how to combine protocols, distributed algorithms and machine learning ?
DC Track
Prof. Michel Raynal
Title of the Talk : The Linearizability Hierarchy: An Example-based Introduction.
Dr. Debasish Das
Title of the Talk : Designing High-Performance Distributed Systems In Cloud
Prof. Rajkumar Buyya
Title of the Talk : Neoteric Frontiers in Cloud and Quantum Computing
Keynote Speaker
DC Track
Prof. Michel Raynal
Professor at IRISA, University of Rennes, France
Title of the Talk : The Linearizability Hierarchy: An Example-based Introduction.
This talk is neither a survey nor a research paper in the classical sense, but an example-based introduction to the linearizability hierarchy. Its aim is to explain it in an “as simple as possible” way. While linearizability is a consistency condition that addresses objects defined by a sequential specification, set-linearizability and interval-linearizability are consistency conditions that have been introduced to take into account objects defined by a concurrent specification. So, they naturally extend linearizability (and its fundamental composability property) from sequential to concurrent objects specification. The aim of the talk is not to present the theoretical foundations of set-linearizability and interval-linearizability, but to explain concurrency patterns allowed by concurrent specifications, and show how these consistency conditions report on them. This is done in a very simple way with the help of three objects that define a family of snapshot objects. In addition to the fact that it constitutes a pedagogical introduction to the topic, this talk has also a concurrency-related historical flavor.
Keywords:
Asynchrony · Concurrent object · Concurrent specification · Contention point · Contention interval · Crash failure · Interval linearizability · Linearizability hierarchy · Object specification · Modular programming · Read/write register · Set-linearizability · Read/write -based communcation, Simultaneity · Snapshot object · Time ubiquity
Michel Raynal is an Emeritus Professor of Informatics, IRISA, University of Rennes, France. He is an established authority in the domain of concurrent and distributed algorithms and systems. Author of numerous papers on this topic, Michel Raynal is a senior member of Institut Universitaire de France, and a member of Academia Europaea. He was the recipient of the 2015 Innovation in Distributed Computing Award (also known as SIROCCO Prize), recipient of the 2018 IEEE Outstanding Technical Achievement in Distributed Computing Award, and recipient of an Outstanding Career Award from the French chapter of ACM Sigops. He is also a Distinguished Chair Professor of Distributed Algorithms at the Polytechnic University (PolyU) of Hong Kong.
Michel Raynal chaired the program committees of the major conferences on distributed computing. He was the recipient of several “Best Paper” awards of major conferences (including ICDCS 1999, 2000 and 2001, SSS 2009 and 2011, Europar 2010, DISC 2010, PODC 2014). He has also written 13 books on fault-tolerant concurrent (shared memory and message-passing) distributed systems, among which the following trilogy published by Springer: Concurrent Programming: Algorithms: Principles and Foundations (515 pages, 2013), Distributed Algorithms for Message-passing Systems (510 pages, 2013), and Fault-Tolerant Message-Passing Distributed Systems: An Algorithmic Approach Springer (459 pages, 2018). His last book titled “Concurrent Crash-prone Shared Memory Systems: a Few Theoretical Notions” (115 pages) has been published in 2022. Michel Raynal is also the Series Editor of the Synthesis Lectures on Distributed Computing Theory published by Morgan & Claypool.
Dr. Debasish Das
Amazon, India
Title of the Talk : Designing High-Performance Distributed Systems In Cloud
Building high performance distributed systems is complex and needs the application of rigour and time tested practices. In this lecture, we shall discuss the common pitfalls of building such systems, more so in the cloud, which can’t be overcome by applying anecdotes, hearsay and just the work experience. In the first part of the discussion we would focus on the principles and design patterns involved in building a large-scale high performance system and in the second part we would bring in the complexity of building it in the cloud (using commodity hardware) where failure of the individual components or network partition is a common occurrence. In this discussion, we won’t focus on a specific application, but we will explain the concepts using 1) a simple web application which depends on a datastore and needs synchronous response 2) an asynchronous (off-line) data processing job. We shall discuss the theoretical issues of Scalability, Data Consistency and Robustness in the first part and focus on the problems created by the Faulty Hardware and Network Latency in the next. We would also discuss the Security issues in the cloud. We shall introduce the CAP theorem, Split Brain problem, Distributed Caching, Leader Election and Consensus algorithms, Gossip protocol and Clock Synchronisation. The goal of this talk is to shift the failure discussions to the left, while the architecture of the system is defined rather than doing it as an afterthought while the system starts failing in the production environment.
Debasish has been working in the industry from the pre internet times and lucky enough to watch the paradigm shift from client-server-based computing to internet and cloud-based systems. Along this journey he has witnessed to rise of virtual machines and container-based computing, the switch over from ACID based DBMS to the NO-SQL ones and also the programming paradigm shift from Java to Clojure and C++ to GoLang. Initially, he worked with companies in the financial domain, such as, Aetna Financial Services and FICO and later on moved to work with Yahoo, Amazon and Google. Couple of areas which excites Debasish are, building and maintaining, high tps, high volume systems for the internet traffic and cloud security. The human aspect of software development, aka, coding styles/standard, readability and maintainability of code is an area of perpetual interest for him. He is currently trying to understand the impact of AI on the software development life cycle and how it would influence the way we design/develop/maintain very large distributed systems.
He received a BE in Electronics Engg. from Jadavpur University, an M.Tech. in Computer Science, and a PhD in Computer Science from Indian Statistical Institute, Kolkata.
Director, Cloud Computing and Distributed Systems (CLOUDS) Lab, The University of Melbourne, Australia, CEO, Manjrasoft Pvt Ltd, Melbourne, Australia
Title of the Talk : Neoteric Frontiers in Cloud and Quantum Computing
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.
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=169 g-index=373, and 154,200+ citations). He graduated 60 PhD students who are working in world-leading research universities and high-tech companies such as Microsoft, Google, and IBM. He has been recognised as IEEE Fellow, a “Web of Science Highly Cited Researcher” for seven times since 2016, the “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, Fog, Quantum 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
IT Track
Prof. Giuseppe F. Italiano
Deputy Rector in Artificial Intelligence and Professor of Computer Science at LUISS University, Rome, Italy
Title of the Talk : Security and Privacy in Large Language and Foundation Models: A Survey on GenAI Attacks
As Large Language Models and Foundation Models continue to evolve and integrate into various aspects of our society, understanding their capabilities, limitations, and potential vulnerabilities becomes of the utmost importance. In this paper, we aim at exploring the security and privacy landscape surrounding those models in a systematic way.
Giuseppe F. Italiano is Deputy Rector in Artificial Intelligence and Professor of Computer Science at Luiss University. He has been Visiting Professor in several international universities, including Columbia University (NY, USA), Université Paris-Sud (Francia), Max–Planck–Institut fur Informatik, Saarbrücken (Germania), Hong Kong University of Science & Technology. He was also Visiting Scientist at AT&T Research Labs (NJ, USA) and Microsoft Research (CA, USA). Most of his research is centered around the design of algorithms. In 2016 he was nominated Fellow of the European Association for Theoretical Computer Science for “Fundamental contributions to the design and analysis of algorithms for solving theoretical and applied problems in graphs and massive data sets, and for his role in establishing the field of algorithm engineering”. He has published over 300 papers, most of which are in top journals and conferences in theoretical computer science/algorithms and several textbooks on algorithms. He has been consulting with big international companies and co-founded several tech startups.
Prof. G. Narahari Sastry
Professor, Department of Biotechnology, Indian Institute of Technology Hyderabad
Title of the Talk : “Machine learning and AI Applications in Drug Discovery and Healthcare”
Technological revolution being witnessed today largely owes to the emergence of Artificial Intelligence, and particularly machine learning, which impacted both basic and applied sciences. The ability to ask scientific questions and probing the new technological space was greatly enhanced due to the new roads made by intelligent technologies. In this talk I would like to focus on two areas, drug discovery and health care, and how these emerging technologies have metamorphosed the research practices in these fields. The impact of the AI driven technologies in hit and lead identification, lead optimization, animal and clinical trails will be analyzed with some illustrative case studies. Examples will be given where the top-niche human skills are being slowly replaced by machine learning and chatbots. Drug discovery and healthcare appear to be two different areas, but AI and ML techniques are able to bring some unusual correlations between these areas. Some of the fundamental questions on aging, metabolic disorders, degenerative diseases and geriatric care will be addressed. Importantly, how these questions can be effectively addressed by using AI and ML approaches will be explained.
G. Narahari Sastry is currently working as a Professor in the Department of Biotechnology, IIT Hyderabad. Prior to joining IITH in 2024, Prof. Sastry was the Director of CSIR-North East Institute of Science and Technology (NEIST), Jorhat, Assam from February 2019. Prof. Sastry trained as a chemist, has strongly engaged in conducting interdisciplinary areas spanning chemistry, biology, modeling and informatics. Currently, most of his group consist of people with training in biology and computer science, working towards developing software. Prof. Sastry’s current focus is on employing the artificial intelligence and machine learning approaches, along with mathematical modeling to address fundamental problems in science and technology. He is primarily focusing on how the modern science, especially the concepts related to Industry4.0 and 5.0 can be exploited for the self-reliance (Aatmanirbhar Bharat) for the national. As an academician, Prof. Sastry has been effective in elegantly employing computational and theoretical methods to solve problems in chemistry, biology and allied areas. These efforts are embedded not only to provide a robust platform for carrying out research in CADD but also to inculcate the culture of developing software packages. His research work was published in more than 330 research papers and reviews, which received over 13,726 citations, with an h-index of 56. Under his guidance 30 people were awarded Ph.D., 20 Post-doctoral fellows, 250 students have done internship or short-term projects. After taking over the leadership at CSIR-NEIST, he has established centers of excellence in (Minister of chemical and fertilizers) Petroleum research, (CSIR) Infectious diseases, (DBT) Advanced Computation and Data Sciences Division (ACDSD), (DBT) Bionest, (NMPB)RCFC, and (DONOR ministry) STINER which are aimed to trigger research and development activities for the benefit of North East population. In his career, he has delivered more than 490 lectures in international and national conferences/workshops/seminars.
Prof. Sastry was awarded with Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize in Chemical Sciences (2011) (one of the highest prizes for science and engineering in India), National Bioscience award, DBT (2009), (one of the highest for Life sciences in India), Swarnajayanti Fellowship (2005) (DST), B.M. Birla award (2001), Dr. B.C. Deb Memorial award (2009), CRSI Bronze Medal (2011), CRSI Silver Medal (2024) and Alexander von Humboldt Fellowship. He is also Sir J. C. Bose National Fellow. He was a visiting professor at IMS, Japan; LMU, Munich, Germany; Jackson State University, USA, and Kyushu University, Japan. He is a Fellow of INSA (FNA), National Academy of Sciences (FNASc), Fellow of the Indian Academy of Sciences (FASc), Fellow of Royal Society of Chemistry (FRSC), Fellow of Association of Biotechnology and Pharmacy, Telangana State Academy of Sciences (Founder Fellow), Andhra Pradesh Academy of Sciences (FAPAS) and also Fellow of Biotech Research Society, India (BRSI). Earlier Professor Sastry, has made fundamental contributions in the areas of: a) computational and theoretical chemistry; b) theoretical organic chemistry and reaction mechanism; c) software and data base development for drug discovery (Molecular Property Diagnostic Suite), d) non-covalent interactions, e) cooperativity of non-covalent interactions, f) computer-aided drug design.
Head of Telecommunications department, INSA-Lyon, Inria.
Title of the Talk: Learning networks: how to combine protocols, distributed algorithms and machine learning ?
While machine learning has revolutionized the digital world, both in its applications and in its foundations, the deep interactions between network protocol design and decentralized algorithms are still under-explored. In this presentation, we study the problem from two complementary angles: the use of machine learning for networks, and the optimization of networks for learning. We will discuss some recent results related to distributed and federated learning, as well as the use of machine learning algorithms to control and optimize wireless networks.
Jean-Marie Gorce (Senior Member, IEEE) is a Professor with INSA de Lyon. He received the M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering from the Institut National des Sciences Appliquées (INSA), Lyon, France, in 1993 and 1998, respectively. He was a Co-Founder of the Centre for Innovation, Telecommunications and Integration of Services (CITI Lab), in 2001. He was a Visiting Scholar with Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, USA, from 2013 to 2014. He has been the deputy director for Science at INRIA Grenoble Rhône-Alpes from 2017 to 2021, and director for science at Inria Lyon from 2021 to 2024.
He leads the research group Maracas, associated to INSA and Inria. His research focuses on multi-user communicating systems, with approaches combining information theory, coding, distributed algorithms, signal processing and machine learning, and has been supported by several French and European sponsored projects. He is currently involved in the European project INSTINCT on joint communication and sensing for 6G, and he leads the Inria-Nokia Challenge LearnNet working at the interesection of learning and networking. He has co-published more than 200 conference and journal articles in major venues.