Keynote Speakers
Guang-Zhong Yang
Faculty of Engineering, Department of Computing
Imperial College London, UK
Title:"From Wearable Sensors to Wearable Robots" (Sept 29)
Abstract: With demographic changes associated with the aging population and increasing number of people living along, the requirement and practical provision of future healthcare delivery are changing rapidly. Shorter hospital stay and better community care are set to be the future trend of healthcare. The provision of “ubiquitous” and “pervasive” monitoring of physical, physiological, and biochemical parameters in any environment and without activity restriction and behaviour modification is the primary motivation of research in wearable sensors such as Body Sensor Networks (BSN). These technologies are already starting to enter into routine clinical practice. In parallel to these developments, wearable robots, actuated prostheses and exoskeletons have made significant inroads in recent years for functional rehabilitation, restoration of natural mobility and enhancing musculoskeletal strength and endurance. Assistive robots also play a key role in managing the ageing population for general activities of daily living and remote presence for linking to specialist centres. The purpose of this talk is to address the future convergence of wearable sensing and robots, highlighting novel actuation schemes based on smart materials and sensing technologies, as well as the latest developments and practical examples how these may help to reshape the future of healthcare.
Bio: Professor Guang-Zhong Yang (FREng, FIEEE, FIET, FAIMBE, FIAMBE) is director and co-founder of the Hamlyn Centre for Robotic Surgery, Deputy Chairman of the Institute of Global Health Innovation, Imperial College London, UK. Professor Yang also holds a number of key academic positions at Imperial – he is Director and Founder of the Royal Society/Wolfson Medical Image Computing Laboratory, co-founder of the Wolfson Surgical Technology Laboratory, Chairman of the Centre for Pervasive Sensing. He is a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering, fellow of IEEE, IET, AIMBE, IAMBE, MICCAI and a recipient of the Royal Society Research Merit Award and listed in The Times Eureka ‘Top 100’ in British Science. Professor Yang’s main research interests are in medical imaging, sensing and robotics. In imaging, he is credited for a number of novel MR phase contrast velocity imaging and computational modelling techniques that have transformed in vivo blood flow quantification and visualization. These include the development of locally focused imaging combined with real-time navigator echoes for resolving respiratory motion for high-resolution coronary-angiography, as well as MR dynamic flow pressure mapping for which he received the ISMRM I. I Rabi Award. He pioneered the concept of perceptual docking for robotic control, which represents a paradigm shift of learning and knowledge acquisition of motor and perceptual/cognitive behaviour for robotics, as well as the field of Body Sensor Network (BSN) for providing personalized wireless monitoring platforms that are pervasive, intelligent, and context-aware. He has published over 300 peer-reviewed publications, edited over 10 books/conference proceedings, numerous research/best paper awards, and a large research grant portfolio from the UK/EU funding bodies, research charities, and industrial sources.
Mischa Dohler
Department of Informatics,
King's College London, UK
Title:"50 Billion M2M Devices in 5G?" (Sept 30)
Abstract: A hyper-connected cyber-physical world, by some touted as the 4th Industrial Revolution with unprecedented economic and social opportunities, will heavily rely on the machine-to-machine (M2M) paradigm. Previous designs, which made us believe that low power radios or provisioning of horizontal platforms are driving factors, failed. This keynote thus revisits the lessons we learned and how we apply them to invoke architectural and protocol changes to emerging 5G design efforts so that machine type communications (MTC) become a solid constituent of the future IoT connectivity landscape, including body area networks. The talk is based on first-hand experience gained from ETSI M2M, IETF ROLL and other standardization efforts; as well as the successful creation of the pioneering M2M company Worldsensing.
Bio: Mischa Dohler is full Professor in Wireless Communications at King's College London, Head of the Centre for Telecommunications Research, co-founder and member of the Board of Directors of the smart city pioneer Worldsensing, Fellow and Distinguished Lecturer of the IEEE, and Editor-in-Chief of the Transactions on Emerging Telecommunications Technologies. He is a frequent keynote, panel and tutorial speaker. He has contributed to numerous wireless broadband and IoT/M2M standards, holds a dozen patents, chaired numerous conferences, and published more than 170 refereed transactions, conference papers and books. He has a citation h-index of 35. He acts as policy, technology and entrepreneurship adviser, examples being Richard Branson's Carbon War Room, the House of Lords UK, the EPSRC ICT Strategy Advisory Team, the European Commission, the ISO Smart City working group, and various start-ups. He is also an entrepreneur, angel investor, passionate pianist and fluent in 6 languages. He has talked at TEDx. He had coverage by national and international TV & radio; and his contributions have featured on BBC News and the Wall Street Journal.
Giancarlo Fortino
Raffaele Gravina
University of Calabria, Italy
Title:"From Embedded Computing Frameworks for Body Sensor Networks to Cloud-assisted Body Sensor Networks" (Oct 1)
Abstract: Body Sensor Networks (BSNs) are a powerful technology for supporting many human-centered real-world systems. They are currently having a significantly increasing research interest thanks to their potential to enable continuous and real-time human monitoring at low cost by guaranteeing ease of deployment, fault tolerance, and non-invasive operations. Most of the current BSN systems have been developed in the health-care domain. However, wearable systems have great capabilities for diversified application domains, which are gaining more and more attention in the last years: e-Social, e-Sport and e-Fitness, e-Entertainment and interactive computer games, and e-Factory. In this talk, we first overview the state-of-the-art of the embedded computing frameworks for BSNs (e.g. CodeBlue, RehabSPOT, Titan, SPINE), classifying them according to a well-defined reference framework. Then, we focus on the SPINE (Signal Processing In-Node Environment) project (https://spine.deis.unical.it) that provides methodologies and frameworks for the effective and efficient development of collaborative BSN systems. Finally, we delineate the research challenges of integrating BSNs with cloud computing infrastructures and, specifically, focus on our BodyCloud, a SaaS approach for Community BSNs.
Bios: Professor Giancarlo Fortino is currently Associate Professor of Computer Engineering (since 2006) at the Dept. of Informatics, Modeling, Electronics and Systems (DIMES) of the University of Calabria (Unical), Rende (CS), Italy. He has a Ph. D. degree and Laurea (MSc+BSc) degree in Computer Engineering from Unical. He holds the Italian Scientific National Habilitation for Full Professorship and is Guest Professor at the Wuhan University of Technology, China. He has been also Visiting Researcher and Professor at the International Computer Science Institute (Berkeley, USA) and at the Queensland University of Technology (Australia), respectively. His main research interests include agent-based computing, wireless sensor networks, pervasive and cloud computing, multimedia networks and Internet of Things technology. He authored over 200 publications in journals, conferences and books. He chaired more the 40 Int'l conferences/workshops as co-chair, organized more than 15 special issues in well-known Int'l Journals, and participated in the TPC of over 250 conferences. He is the founding editor of the Springer Book Series on "Internet of Things: Technology, Communications and Computing”, and currently serves in the editorial board of IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing, Journal of Networks and Computer Applications, Engineering Applications of Artificial Intelligence, Information Fusion. He is co-founder and CEO of SenSysCal S.r.l., a spin-off of Unical, developing innovative sensor-based systems for e-health and domotics. He is IEEE Senior member. His webpage is at https://wwwinfo.deis.unical.it/fortino.
Raffaele Gravina received the PhD degree in computer engineering from the University of Calabria, Italy, in 2012. He is the main designer of the SPINE Framework and responsible for the open-source contributions. He has been a visiting researcher at the Telecom Italia WSN Lab at Berkeley, California between 2007 and 2010. He is involved in several research projects on WSNs, including AD-PERSONAS, MAPS and the REWSN Cluster of CONET FP7. He is co-founder of SenSysCal S.r.l. and Talent Garden Cosenza S.r.l. He is author of more than 30 papers in international journals, conferences and books. He is currently serving as PostDoctoral Research Fellow in Computer Engineering at the University of Calabria, Italy. His research interests are currently focused on high-level programming methods for Wireless Body Sensor Networks. His webpage is at https://plasma.deis.unical.it/rg/index.html.
