CRA-W Distinguished Lecture Series
University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC)

Computing in Cirrus Clouds: The Challenge of Intermittent Connectivity

Ellen Zegura
Professor and Chair School of Computer Science
College of Computing, Georgia Tech

Computer Science and Information Systems Joint Colloquium
1:00 – 2:00 PM, Monday, April 16, 2012
ITE 325B

Mobile devices are increasingly relied on for services that go beyond simple connectivity and require more complex processing. Improved connectivity options for mobile devices have enabled applications that transcend an individual device's capabilities by making use of remote processing and storage.

The primary approach in wide use today to enable such remote processing makes use of cloud computing resources to offload the "heavy lifting" that may be required in some mobile applications to specially designated servers or server clusters. In reality, a mobile device often encounters, albeit intermittently, many entities capable of lending computational resources. We call these alternative settings "cirrus clouds". In this talk I will discuss the unique challenges posed by intermittent connectivity and describe some early progress on managing such a setting.

This is a joint work with Mostafa Ammar, Mayur Naik and Cong Shi.

SHORT BIO: Professor Ellen W. Zegura received the BS degree in Computer Science, the BS degree in Electrical Engineering, the MS degree in Computer Science and the DSc degree in Computer Science from Washington University, St. Louis. Since 1993, she has been on the faculty in the College of Computing at Georgia Tech. She currently serves as Professor and Chair of Computer Science. She received an NSF CAREER Award in 1995, a Washington University distinguished Alumni Award in 2008, and was selected as an IEEE Fellow in 2010. She was elected to the CRA Board of Directors in 2011.

Professor Zegura has conducted research and taught in computer networking for over 20 years. Her research interests include the Internet, with a focus on its topological structure and services, as well as mobile wireless networking. In network topology, she is the co-creator of the GT-ITM suite of Internet topology modeling tools, which remains in use 15 years after its original release. In mobile wireless networking, she and her colleagues invented the concept of message ferries to facilitate communications in environments where network connectivity is unreliable and/or sparse. Almost four years ago, she helped create the Computing for Good initiative in the College of Computing, a project-based teaching and research activity that focuses on the use of computing to solve pressing societal problems.

Host: Professor Marie desJardins