Bio. Rama Akkiraju is an IBM Fellow, IBM Master Inventor and IBM Academy Member. Presently, Rama is the CTO of AI Operations, which aims to optimize the IT Operations management processes with AI-infusion. Prior to this role, Rama led the AI mission of enabling natural, personalized and compassionate conversations between computers and humans both as the director of research and development in IBM's Watson division and as the Chief Architect. She and her team developed and delivered several user-modeling centric AI Services such as Personality Insights, Tone Analyzer, Emotion Analysis, and Sentiment Analysis services to the IBM Watson platform. Before this, Rama led various projects and Research teams at IBM Watson Research Center and IBM Almaden Research Center in the areas of AI, analytics, business process optimization and delivered award-winning and innovative analytical assets to IBM’s Global Business Services (GBS), and Global Technology Services (GTS) organizations saving millions of dollars in costs. Rama has been named by Forbes magazine as one of the ‘Top 20 Women in AI Research’ in May 2017, has been featured in ‘A-Team in AI’ by Fortune magazine in July 2018, In addition, Rama has been named ‘Top 10 pioneering women in AI and Machine Learning’ by Enterprise Management 360 in April 2019. Rama is also the recipient of the University of California, Berkeley’s Athena award for Technical and Executive Leadership for 2020.
Abstract. The vision of self-aware, self-healing, and self-managing Information Technology (IT) systems has remained elusive till recently. Recent advancements in Cloud computing, Natural Language Processing (NLP), Machine Learning (ML), and Artificial Intelligence (AI) in general, i. are all making it possible to realize this vision now. AI can optimize IT operations management processes by increasing application availability, predicting and detecting problems early, reducing the time it takes to resolve problems, proactively avoiding problems, and optimizing the resources and cost of running business applications on hybrid Clouds. In this talk, I will discuss the opportunity for AI to optimize IT Operations Management. I will describe how semi-structured application and infrastructure logs can be analyzed to predict anomalies early, how entities can be extracted and linked from logs, alerts and events to reduce alert noise for IT operations admins, how NLP can be put to use on unstructured content in prior incident tickets to extract next-best-action recommendations to resolve problems, and how deployment change request descriptions can be analyzed in combination with past incident root cause information to predict risks of deployment changes to prevent issues from happening in the first place.
Galina Pildush, Palo Alto Net: IoT Vulnerabilities … To be or not to be…
Bio. Dr. Galina D. Pildush has been active in computer networking and cyber security industry for more than twenty years. She holds PhD in Organization and Management, specializing in IT, MSc and BSc, both in Computer Science. Over ten years ago, Galina’s passion had expanded into Mobile Network Operator (MNO) infrastructure protection, cloud security, and virtualization. Throughout the years, Galina held various engineering roles, product management & architecture, and strategy & planning with various high-tech companies. Galina is being an active industry standards contributor (3GPP, IETF, ETSI), an author of computer networking books and articles, a blogger, and a frequent speaker/panelist at various security conferences, evangelizing MNOs infrastructure security and services. At Palo Alto Networks, Galina’s current role is World Wide Consulting Engineering, focusing on MNO infrastructures’ security and services.
Abstract. New technologies, or even old ones, create new opportunities for cybercriminals. The attackers don’t have to be sophisticated to make an impact. Just think of Mirai. Is it completely eradicated or is it still mingling out there in the wild, perhaps in another form factor? Can legacy security approaches keep up with the new technologies, the speeds and feeds offered by 5G, soon to be 6G, protecting humans, things, data, and preventing loss of lives? This presentation covers the latest findings “in the wild”, explaining the attackers’ kill chain, the versatility of threat vectors, especially in the Service Provider space, threats’ impact on our daily lives, ranging from consumers to enterprises and service providers. It will identify the ever-increasing threat vectors from IoTs and smart hand-held devices, security risks, security requirements, and the security mechanisms that would result in preventative Zero Trust security posture. It will go into details on how preventative security can be architected holistically. With increased threat vectors come responsibilities. As cyberthreat impact on our daily lives cannot be looked at in isolation, we must transform the challenges into opportunities. Which opportunities are those? Is it enough just to be diligent in avoiding opening fishing emails, for example, or is there more to it?
Kostas Kontogiannis, Western University: Extracting Microservice Dependencies
Bio. Kostas is a Professor and Western Research Chair in Software Engineering for Cyber-Physical Systems at the Department of Computer Science at Western University. Kostas received a B.Sc. degree in Mathematics from the University of Patras, Greece, a M.Sc. degree in Computer Science from Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium, and a Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from McGill University, Canada. Prior to joining Western, Kostas served as a tenured Associate Professor at the Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering, University of Waterloo, Canada, and Professor at the Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering at the National Technical University of Athens.
Kostas is working in the areas of software and system analytics, Cyber-Physical Systems, intelligent service oriented systems, and model driven engineering. He is the author of more than a hundred influential conference papers, journals, and book chapters in these areas. His work on software maintenance, system analysis, fault localization, software transformations and service computing has received over the years wide attention and citations. Kostas is the recipient of two patents with IBM, three best paper awards, two most influential decade paper awards (WCRE/SANER, CASCON), three IBM University Partnership Awards and, a Canada Foundation for Innovation (CFI) New Opportunities Award. He is a faculty fellow at the IBM Center for Advanced Studies, IBM Toronto Laboratory, and a former visiting scientist at SEI, Carnegie Mellon University. Kontogiannis has been a member of the IEEE Distinguished Visitors Program and has served as a Steering Committee member, General Chair, Program Chair and Program Committee member, in a number of IEEE Software Engineering related conferences (ICSM, CSMR, WCRE/SANER, ICPC, WSE and, STEP).
Abstract. The use of virtualization technologies and cloud computing made possible the “on-demand” provision of resources and functionality of large software systems. Microservices architecture advocates the use of granular components (i.e. microservices) each one offering specific operations, deployed “on-demand” on virtualized containers. Examples of microservice architectures include the processing of data stemming from many IoT devices, applications related to agent-computing, and enterprise applications that are dynamically adapted to meet variable load profiles. Deployed microservices can interact with other microservices within the same container or between containers using standard inter-process communication protocols and standard service-oriented computing paradigms (REST, RPC etc.). However, in such a dynamic and complex environment, small changes in the implementation of one microservice may have significant effects (i.e. failures, policy violations) in other microservices. Consequently, this new architectural paradigm has a major effect on the way we develop such software systems and enforces new software development models. One such model is referred to a “Continuous Software Engineering” and focuses on a) making small incremental changes only; b) continuously (and if possible automatically) evaluating the quality and interactions of the system’s components when these changes are made and c) release small and release often. In this talk, we first discuss the topic of Continuous Software Engineering and in particular the issues of Continuous Integration, Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) and second, we present a technique to extract call-related and data transfer-related dependencies in microservice architectures from run-time logs, forming thus a dependency graph which constitutes a major step towards the identification of functional and non-functional requirements violations in microservice architectures.
Dimitrios Tzovaras & Dimos Ioannidis, CERT: nZEB Smart Home– Digital Innovation Hub Overview, Infrastructure & Services
Bios. Dimitrios Tzovaras is the Director of CERTH since December 2020 and was the Director of the Information Technologies Institute of CERTH. He received the Diploma in Electrical Engineering and the Ph.D. in 2D and 3D Image Compression from the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece in 1992 and 1997, respectively. His main research interests include network and visual analytics for network security, computer security, data fusion, biometric security, virtual reality, machine learning and artificial intelligence. Since 2000, Dr. Tzovaras is leading the Virtual & Augmented Reality Lab of ITI, whereas he is the main responsible for the Digital Innovation Hub, namely nZEB (http://smarthome.iti.gr) as well as leading two clusters on Industry 4.0, namely I4ByDesign (www.i4bydesign.gr) and on Zero Positive Energy Buildings (www.iszeb.gr).
Dimos Ioannidis is a Senior Researcher in CERTH. He received the Diploma in Electrical and Computer engineering, the MSc. in Advanced Communication Systems and Engineering from the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki and his PhD with title «Privacy-aware human presence and movement analysis in controlled and uncontrolled environments», from the Faculty of Engineering department of Computer Engineering & Informatics, University of Patras in 2000, 2005 and 2017 respectively. He has a strong R&D background mainly in energy efficiency, building energy performance simulation and analysis, microgrids and smart grids optimization & control, Demand Response for energy savings, computer vision, stereoscopic image processing and signal analysis, linguistics algorithms, web services, semantics, data & visual analytics, Industry 4.0 solutions, IoT platforms development and (cyber)security ecosystems including blockchain, as well as research in ethics and biometrics.
Abstract. Zero and or Positive Energy Districts and future Smart Buildings need groundbreaking ideas to come into force as well as to provide to innovators the ability to rapid prototype in novel ecosystems such as Digital Innovation Hubs and relevant Cluster initiatives. During this session, novel services supported by the nZEB Smart Home DIH of CERTH/ITI will be presented along with relevant case studies and infrastructure/services offered to the relevant stakeholders. The opportunities also for bringing the infrastructure and the relevant open data to innovators and young entrepreneurs will be part of the presentation
