Speaker: Dr. Krithi Ramamritham
Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay
Monday, December 11, 2006
11:00 am - 12:00 pm
EBU3b 1202

ABSTRACT
Data gathered from (wireless) sensor networks and those delivered today via the web reflect rapid and unpredictable changes in the world around us. Clearly, the Quality of Service needs for such delivery are much more stringent than for static data. This talk will examine the nature of dynamics of distributed data, study the suitability of the current infrastructure for disseminating time varying information, and discuss fresh approaches to maintain the temporal coherency of dynamic data. We argue that executing user queries over dynamic data at the edge of the network, e.g., at Data Aggegators, improves scalability and reduces overhead but poses challenges in terms of delivering consistent query results in spite of data dynamics as well as failures in the infrastructure. How these challenges can be met by the judicious design of algorithms for data dissemination, caching and cooperation forms the crux of the talk.

BIO
Dr. Krithi Ramamritham is the Vijay and Sita Vashee Chair Professor at the Dept. of Computer Science and the Head of Kanwal Rekhi School of IT, IIT Bombay, Mumbai. Dr. Ramamritham received his B. Tech. in Electrical Engineering and M. Tech. in Computer Science Engineering from IIT Madras in 1976 and 1978 respectively. Ramamritham's interests span the areas of real-time systems, transaction support in advanced database applications, and real-time databases systems. He served as Program Chair and General Chair for the Real-Time Systems Symposium in 1994 and 1995 respectively. He serves on the editorial board of many journals, including the IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems and the Real-Time Systems Journal. He has also co-authored two IEEE tutorial texts on real-time systems, a text on advances in database transaction processing, and a text on scheduling in real-time systems. Dr. Ramamritham was also named Fellow of the IEEE in 1998, Fellow of the ACM in 2001 and Fellow of the Indian National Academy of Engineering in 2005.