SCF 2018 Tutorial

Tutorial 1: Blockchain: Basics, Smart Contracts, and Challenges
(06/25 Monday, 8:45-12:20 Room 1)

Abstract: Blockchain is an emerging, disruptive, and transformational technology of incredible growth and potential, and is poised to have tremendous impact and benefits across many industries including banking, financial, healthcare, manufacturing, insurance, logistics, land registry, and others. Recently, blockchain has gained significant attention among academia and the scientific research community. In this tutorial, we present an introduction to the underlying design principles, protocols, and architecture of blockhain. We also describe blockchain types, powerful features, and potential application domains. The tutorial will show how to program the blockchain with Ethereum smart contracts using Solidity language and Remix IDE. We demonstrate how blockchain using smart contracts can be the preferred answer to many pressing research problems related to IoT management, identity, data monetization, and security. The tutorial will also cover advanced topics related to block validation and construction, forking, Merkle trees, and consensus algorithms, and generating addresses and keys. Moreover, the tutorial will highlight major research challenges for blockchain, and will discuss newly emerging blockchain types as those of IOTA, Tangle, and Algorand.

About the Speakers

Khaled Salah is a full professor and has extensive background and expertise in blockchain, cloud computing, IoT, cybersecurity, computer networks, and web application development. He has over 170 publications and 2 US patents. He is an active and engaged speaker and has given a number of keynote speeches, invited talks, and tutorials on topics related to Blockchain, IoT, cloud computing, embedded systems, and Cybersecurity. Currently, he is supervising a number of research projects on “Blockchain and IoT”, and also is teaching undergraduate and graduate courses in the areas IoT, Blockchain, Cloud, and Cybersecurity. A recent news story, dated Dec. 27, 2017, was published by KU on his teaching and research activities with regards to blockchain and IoT.

Tutorial 2: IBM Cloud for Research and Developlement
(06/25 Monday, 13:30-17:10 Room 1)

Abstract: IBM's cloud offers platform as a service (PaaS), infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and includes a catalog of services that can be integrated with PaaS and IaaS to build solutions.  This multi-tiered system makes it convenient for Researchers and Developers (R&D) to tailor the platform to their research agenda – building and testing low level, new cloud services; developing models and algorithms, and developing services for external consumption.  Each of these activities requires working with different cloud capabilities, and integrating various services. Each of these activities may also require private services within the IBM Intranet, as well as tools, existing data, systems, and processes.  In addition, working in the cloud also requires the same level of security and compliance required in any IBM internal environment. The solution which we have developed over the past four years has focused on integration of these diverse platform resources, automation of security and compliance, a simplified portal to accomplish virtual machine  and ‘bare metal machine’ set up and management, usage metering, service access, data placement, and network / firewall setup and management. The techniques we have used in these cloud front end system support methods has allowed the R&D teams to focus on their primary research work, with little or no time devoted to the underlying cloud entities in the IaaS or PaaS.

About the Speakers

Lorraine M. Herger is the Director of Research Integrated Solutions and CIO of IBM Research, a worldwide organization with 12 locations; a Master Inventor, with over 50 patents, 25 publications and a Senior Technical Staff Member.  Lorraine received the 2017 CIO 100 award for innovative use of technology to drive business for IBM Research by creating a cloud environment where IBM Research can host assets for external partners. Lorraine is the chief technical architect of THINKLab, an innovative environment for immersive experiences and led the team in the design, and installation of each of IBM’s 13 THINKLabs.  Lorraine and her team currently manage the Cloud for the IBM Research Division.

Carlos Fonseca is an Executive IT Architect, Software Engineer, and a people manager.  With over 20 years of software development, and architecture experience, Carlos has provided many contributions to IBM technologies, solutions, and software products. 
Currently, Carlos manages a high-performance team of software engineers, IT specialist and architects providing innovated Information Technology solutions for IBM.  These solutions range from application development, IBM cloud application and infrastructure architecture and design, mobile design and development, wireless technology solutions, emerging client adoption solutions, VPN and secured access solutions.  Carlos provides technical leadership in many of the team’s contributions including leading several key cloud infrastructure architecture and deployment projects in IBM Research.

Mercy Bodarky is a Security focal for the Integrated Solutions Team of IBM Research. In this role, Mercy works across several disciplines including IT Security, Cloud, and Privacy, IT & business operations and collaboration. She manages several global security programs for all services to the division. Mercy is an active member of the IRI, ACM and SWE. She also serves as the webmaster for the SWE, NY City chapter. In her spare time develops outreach projects to educate students of all ages to STEM careers.

Tutorial 3: Bioinformatics Virtual Organizations Constrction Framework
(06/25 Monday, 8:45-12:20 Room 2)

Abstract: Systems Bioinformatics is a relatively new approach, which lies in the intersection of systems biology and classical bioinformatics. It focuses on integrating information across different levels using a bottom-up approach as in systems biology with a data-driven top-down approach as in bioinformatics. A key approach in Bioinformatics Systems is the construction of multiple networks representing and their integration in a layered network that exchanges information within and between layers. Given the bulk of biochemical entities that go under various names and interact on different levels, the relevance of fully annotated data Grid services in bioinformatics, especially systems biology, is enormous. Until now, ambiguities in synonyms and interactions had to be detected by human intelligence; – meaning full-fledged systems biology services won't be successfully automated without proper categorization. Since DB-Annotator draws on a common set of agreed ontologies (eg gene ontology) for the annotation of both data services and data sets or subsets, it can provide the semantic glue on all levels required.    a precondition for data exchange and manipulation within the Grid network of virtual organizations (VO). Thus raise the needs to dynamic collaboration and rapid distributed solution. Hyper Dynamic Virtual Organizations Constriction Framework (HDVOCF) is theoretical description framework to create Dynamic Virtual Organizations (DVO) at the knowledge level. DVOF has been utilized CommonKADS knowledge engineering methodology to model DVO. A new structural approach (hyper-management) for supporting the modeling of a collaborative network by utilizing CommonKADS the knowledge of the problem can be structured in three stages context level, concept level and artifact levels; DVOF has been identified three models namely 1) “New Federated Collaborative Networked Organization Model (FCNOM)”, 2) “Virtual Collaboration Knowledge Model (VCKM) and 3) “Collaboration Network Organization Grid-Cloud Convergence Architecture (CNOGCA) Based on Open Grid Services Architecture (OGSA). Each model is composed by an ontology that describes each of the entities covered by the model and where applicable a set of design patterns.

About the Speakers

Dr. Morcous Massoud Yassa received his Master degree in Computer Science from Faculty of Computers and Information, Cairo University in 2008 and his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the same faculty in 2014. He has served as an invited member of the technical program committee of several international conferences. He has been on the technical program committee of different IEEE conferences. He acts as a reviewer for the international conferences and journals. His research has been published in various international journals and conferences. He has published numerous scientific articles in an Arabic language magazine, "AlAhram". He has conducted tutorial sessions in prominent conferences such as IEEE BIBM 2014 - UK, IEEE COMPSAC 2014 - Sweden, IEEE Healcare2013 - Portugal, and IEEE "JEC-ECC 2013 – Cairo, KKIO 2015 – Poland, ICHI 2015 – USA. Dr. Morcous main research interests lie with the knowledge modeling, sharing and reuse, intelligent information retrieval, Software Engineering, Software requirements engineering, Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), Virtual Organizations, Grid & Cloud Computing and Green Computing. He is a member of Scientific Research Group in Egypt its main research interest in a particular aspect of computational intelligent, intelligent environment, network security, machine learning, bioinformatics and biomedical and related disciplines. He has served as an invited member of the technical program committee of several IEEE conferences. He acts as a reviewer for the international conferences and journals. He has published numerous scientific articles in Arabic language: magazine, AlAhram URL: http://aitmag.ahram.org.eg/OuterWriter/4063.aspx.

Tutorial 4: A Live System to Track each Product Unit in Global Trade using Blockchain
(06/25 Monday, 13:30-15:40 Boren)

Abstract: This tutorial showcases the actual adaptation of the Blockchain (BC) technology in the global trade space. An online system will demonstrate each product with a unique identification is tracked from the source manufacturer to the end user across countries, which is captured in an end-to-end global supply chain. Two examples will be given: premium American wines, and prescription drugs. We will discuss how data is structured and collected from manufacturers, logistics providers and end users, and securely saved in a data storage environment utilizing SQL and Blockchain methods.

As blockchain networks are established, identity becomes an inherent part of identifying participants within business networks and across business networks. Blockchain backed; decentralized identity is critical in online identification. A proof of concept demo will be shown to showcase how decentralized identity will be leveraged in a digital economy, providing point to point identification with more trust.

About the Speakers

Jack Duan is the founder and CEO of Gliding Eagle Inc, a system and data company specializing in global trade. He has over 12 years of Fortune 500 company experience in both high-tech (Senior IT Technologists at Sun Microsystems), and consumer marketing (Big-Data Product Manager, Marketing Strategies, Safeway). He has dual-cultural backgrounds in the US and China. He has a BS in Computer Science from Indiana University and a MBA from UC Berkeley-Haas.

Milan Patel is a Product Manager for IBM Blockchain Trusted Identity, focused on delivering blockchain backed identity services in a digital era for self-sovereign, decentralized identity.

He has been in the technology industry for 4 years, diving into the clouds directly after graduating with honors from North Carolina State University in 2013. Joining as an associate product manager, Milan held roles as a lead business analyst, competitive and market strategy, and most recently as product manager for IBM Cloud Virtual server, prior to focusing on trusted, digital identity.

Milan is passionate about spending time with family, enjoys the outdoors, mentoring high school students, and always looking for the next travel adventure.

About the Services Society

The Services Society (S2) is a non-profit professional organization that has been created to promote worldwide research and technical collaboration in services innovations among academia and industrial professionals. Its members are volunteers from industry and academia with common interests. S2 is registered in the USA as a "501(c) organization", which means that it is an American tax-exempt nonprofit organization. S2 collaborates with other professional organizations to sponsor or co-sponsor conferences and to promote an effective services curriculum in colleges and universities. The S2 initiates and promotes a "Services University" program worldwide to bridge the gap between industrial needs and university instruction. The Services Society has formed 10 Special Interest Groups (SIGs) to support technology and domain specific professional activities.

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