IEEE UIC/ATC Joint Panel on

Smart Planet Challenges: Impediments and Enablers
Panel Chair: Professor Sumi Helal, University of Florida, USAPanelists:
Professor Dr. Christian Becker, University of Mannheim, Germany
Professor Wanlei Zhou, Deakin University, Australia
Professor Zhiwen Yu, Northwestern Polytechnical University, China
Professor Jadwiga Indulska, University of Queensland, Australia
Abstract
Recent advances in Pervasive Computing and Intelligent Environments research give a glimpse into thefuture of our planet and reveal exciting visions of smart everything - smart cities, smart homes, smart
workplaces, smart hotels, smart schools, and much more. Driven by technological evolution offering low
power many-things and wireless almost-everything (e.g., IEEE 802.15.4 radio, wireless sensor networks,sensor platforms), we could, in only a decade, envision and prototype impressive cyber-physical systems
and ubiquitous applications. In most of these systems, the goal has been clear and convincing, and thetechnology proved to be promising and exciting. But prototyping is only a beginning, and much remains
to be innovated and done before smart cities and smart environments become common places.
This panel will discuss the exciting and promising future of smart planet in terms of the challenging
impediments and the potential enablers. Some of the challenges include:•The need to integrate research and education across disciplines. Many research disciplines must

collaborate among and within themselves, including domain experts (of the particular environment, e.g.,gerontologist for assisted living spaces), behavior scientists, engineers, computer scientists. Collaboration
within the computer science and engineering discipline is key enabler to a smart planet.
•

The need for novel cyber-physical software architectures. Systems support and middleware are

essential foundation to building any systems – a smart planet is no exception. Software engineering isurgently needed to understand and support the full lifecycle of intelligent environments and smart spaces.
New programming models are also needed for developing safe and adaptive applications and services.
New notions of trust must be formulated and supported to ensure symbiotic relationship between the users
and their smart environments.
•Broader support is needed for effective human computer interaction. Understanding the broader

requirements of human computer interaction is crucial for both individuals and the masses. Effective
persuasion is also proving to be of paramount importance to the success of the operation of such smartspaces.
•The need to integrate computational intelligence with systems research. Without machine learningand computational intelligence techniques, the potential utility and “ceiling of goals” of smart spaces
would be severely limited. Without expanding the computer system’s research to encompass proven andestablished machine learning and computational intelligence techniques, it will be difficult to increase thecapacity of appropriately trained smart space engineers.

Panelists will present their position statements and highlight what they identify as challenges andenablers to smart planet progress and advancements.

Professor Sumi Helal
Director of the Mobile & Pervasive Computing Laboratory, University ofFlorida, USA
Email: helal@cise.ufl.edu
Short Biography
Sumi Helal is a Professor at the Computer and Information Science andEngineering Department (CISE) at University of Florida (UF), and a Finland
Distinguished Professor (FiDiPro) at Aalto University, Finland. He is a pioneer and recognized leader inthe field of Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing. He is well known, worldwide, for his interdisciplinary
research on smart spaces and Health Telematics in support of Health Care, Aging, Disabilities andIndependence. He directs the Mobile and Pervasive Computing Laboratory in the CISE department at UF.
He is co-founder and director of the Gator Tech Smart House, an experimental home for applied researchin the domains of eldercare and health telematics. He led and directed the NIDRR-funded Rehabilitation
Engineering Research Center (RERC) on Successful Aging (2001-2007), and is currently leading acontinuation project on smart home based personal health and independence, funded by the National
Institutes of Health (NIH).
Dr. Helal organized over 20 IEEE and ACM conferences or workshops and is currently serving as theassociate Editor-in-Chief of IEEE Computer, the flagship magazine of the IEEE Computer Society. Dr.
Helal earned his B.E. and M.E. degrees summa cum laude in Computer Engineering and AutomaticControl from Alexandria University, Egypt, in 1982 and 1985 respectively. He earned his Ph.D. inComputer Sciences from Purdue University in 1991.
Professor Dr. Christian Becker
Chair of Information Systems II, University of Mannheim, Germany
Email: christian.becker@uni-mannheim.de
Short Biography
Christian Becker is a full professor of Information Systems at the University ofMannheim since 2006. Prior to this, he was a visiting professor for distributed
systems at the University of Duisburg-Essen in Spring Term 2006. He studied
Computer Science at the Universities of Karlsruhe and Kaiserslautern where he received the Diploma in
1996. From 1997 till 2001 he was a researcher at the distributed systems and operating systems group at
the University of Frankfurt where he received his PhD in 2001 with a thesis about “Quality of Service
Management in Distributed Object Systems”. In 2001 he joined the distributed systems group at theUniversity of Stuttgart as Post Doc. His research focused on system support for Pervasive Computing andPeer to Peer Computing. He is specifically interested in architectures for adaptive systems. In 2004 hereceived the venia legendi (Habilitation) for Computer Science (Informatik). Christian’s research interests

are Distributed Systems, Self-Organizing Systems and Context-Aware Computing.

Professor Wanlei Zhou
Head of School of Information Technology, Deakin University, Melbourne,
Australia
Email: wanlei.zhou@deakin.edu.auShort Biography
Professor Wanlei Zhou received the B.Eng and M.Eng degrees fromHarbin Institute of Technology, Harbin, China in 1982 and 1984,
respectively, and the PhD degree from The Australian National University, Canberra, Australia, in 1991.
He is currently the Chair Professor of Information Technology and the Head of the School of Information
Technology at Deakin University, Melbourne, Australia.

Professor Zhiwen Yu
Professor & Vice-Dean, School of Computer Science
Northwestern Polytechnical University, China
Email: zhiwenyu@nwpu.edu.cn
Short Biography
Dr. Zhiwen Yu is currently a professor and vice dean of the School of Computer
Science, Northwestern Polytechnical University, P. R. China. He received his B.Eng,M.Eng and Ph.D. degree of Engineering in computer science and technology in 2000, 2003 and 2005
respectively from the Northwestern Polytechnical University. He has worked as a research fellow at theAcademic Center for Computing and Media Studies, Kyoto University, Japan from Feb. 2007 to Jan. 2009, anda post-doctoral researcher at the Information Technology Center, Nagoya University, Japan in 2006-2007. He
has been a visiting researcher at the Context-Aware Systems Department, Institute for Infocomm Research(I2R), Singapore from Sep. 2004 to May 2005. He has been an Alexander von Humboldt Fellow at theMannheim University, Germany from Nov. 2009 to Oct. 2010.

Professor Jadwiga Indulska
Professor, School of Information Technology & Electrical Engineering,
University of Queensland, Australia.
Email: jaga@itee.uq.edu.auSShort Biography
Jadwiga Indulska is a Professor in the School of Information Technology andElectrical Engineering at The University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia. She received a Master
degree in Mathematics from Jagiellonian University and her PhD degree in Computer Science from AGH

University of Science and Technology, both in Krakow, Poland. Her research interests are in the areas ofcomputer networks, distributed computing and pervasive/ubiquitous computing. Over the last 10 years,
her research has addressed many problems in pervasive and autonomic computing including context
information models for context-aware applications; autonomic management of context information;
privacy of context information; software engineering of context-aware applications; balancing user
control and software autonomy; and autonomic, rapidly deployable mesh networks. She has led research
projects on interoperability of distributed applications, mobile computing, and pervasive computing at theDSTC, an Australian Government funded Collaborative Research Centre on Distributed Systems
Technology (1992- 2005). She has been a Research Leader at NICTA (Australian National Centre of
Excellence in Information and Communication Technology) since 2006.