Keynote

Erik Radtke, VP, Enterprise IT Transformation Advisory & Chief Architects, IBM Global Technology Services

Yike Guo, Imperial College London, UK; Shanghai University, China

Michael Sheng, Macquarie University, Australia

Rong N. Chang, Member of IBM Academy of Technology (AoT), USA

Erik Radtke is responsible for Enterprise IT Transformation Advisory in IBM Global Services. This includes leadership of a global team of Senior Technical Leaders who advise clients on the transformation of their Enterprise IT with a particular focus on digital transformation and cognitive automation. Erik also leads the Chief Architects of IBM Services globally and ensures the transformation advisory skills are scaled and executed effectively with clients around the globe.

Erik has 27 years of leadership experience in the IT industry, joined IBM in 1990 and has held various leadership positions since 1993 in IBM.

In 2001, Erik became Director Technical Support Services Delivery Europe for Software, Storage and Networking. In 2003, Erik moved to IBM Europe Headquarters, Paris as Director for Software Services in Europe. He introduced an integrated service offering framework covering all IBM hardware and software. As of February 2005, Erik became Executive for Maintenance & Technical Support in Central Region.

In February 2010, Erik assumed the responsibility of Vice President, Technical Sales in IBM Systems & Technology Europe, positioning IBM Systems, Storage and System Software for clients, business partners and integrators.

In July 2014, Erik joined IBM Global Services to become Vice President of Innovation and Technology in Europe. In the end of 2015, Erik took over the global leadership of Enterprise IT Transformation Advisory and Chief Architects.

Keynote Title

IT Service transformation with automation & AI

Keynote Abstract

Today businesses are transforming at a rapid pace to meet new demands of clients, governments and regulation. IT Services play a vital role in enabling these business transformations. The presentation is looking at how the IBM Service Platform with Watson is helping clients to transform IT Services and achieve their business transformation goals. Client examples are being looked at and how cognitive services/AI come into play.

Yike Guo is a Professor of Computing Science in the Department of Computing at Imperial College London. He is the founding Director of the Data Science Institute at Imperial College, as well as leading the Discovery Science Group in the department. Professor Guo also holds the position of CTO of the tranSMART Foundation, a global open source community using and developing data sharing and analytics technology for translational medicine.

Professor Guo received a first-class honours degree in Computing Science from Tsinghua University, China, in 1985 and received his PhD in Computational Logic from Imperial College in 1993 under the supervision of Professor John Darlington. He founded InforSense, a software company for life science and health care data analysis, and served as CEO for several years before the company's merger with IDBS, a global advanced R&D software provider, in 2009.

He has been working on technology and platforms for scientific data analysis since the mid-1990s, where his research focuses on knowledge discovery, data mining and large-scale data management. He has contributed to numerous major research projects including: the UK EPSRC platform project, Discovery Net; the Wellcome Trust-funded Biological Atlas of Insulin Resistance (BAIR); and the European Commission U-BIOPRED project. He is currently the Principal Investigator of the European Innovative Medicines Initiative (IMI) eTRIKS project, a €23M project that is building a cloud-based informatics platform, in which tranSMART is a core component for clinico-genomic medical research, and co-Investigator of Digital City Exchange, a £5.9M research programme exploring ways to digitally link utilities and services within smart cities.

Professor Guo has published over 200 articles, papers and reports. Projects he has contributed to have been internationally recognised, including winning the “Most Innovative Data Intensive Application Award” at the Supercomputing 2002 conference for Discovery Net, and the Bio-IT World "Best Practices Award" for U-BIOPRED in 2014. He is a Senior Member of the IEEE and is a Fellow of the British Computer Society.

Keynote Title

E-Science 2.0: From Building Services for Science to Science as a Service

Keynote Abstract

E-Science addresses the phenomenon of increasingly doing scientific research through distributed global collaboration. Such a globally collaborative effort is enabled by the Internet, cloud computing and big data resource. E-science has significantly changed the way science is undertaken. 15 years efforts on e-science research have resulted in many significant achievements. With the maturity of technology in cloud computing, big data management and analysis, we are in the new era of e-science where science can be provided as a service and scientific research can be done in a new way in an “invisible college” fashion. This talk will present such a service view towards e-science and its associated technology.

Dr. Michael Sheng is a full Professor and Head of Department of Computing at Macquarie University. Before moving to Macquarie, Michael spent 10 years at School of Computer Science, the University of Adelaide (UoA). Michael holds a PhD degree in computer science from the University of New South Wales (UNSW) and did his post-doc as a research scientist at CSIRO ICT Centre. From 1999 to 2001, Sheng also worked at UNSW as a visiting research fellow. Prior to that, he spent 6 years as a senior software engineer in industries.

Prof. Sheng has more than 320 publications as edited books and proceedings, refereed book chapters, and refereed technical papers in journals and conferences including ACM Computing Surveys, ACM TOIT, ACM TOMM, ACM TKDD, VLDB Journal, Computer (Oxford), IEEE TPDS, TKDE, DAPD, IEEE TSC, WWWJ, IEEE Computer, IEEE Internet Computing, Communications of the ACM, VLDB, ICDE, ICDM, CIKM, EDBT, WWW, ICSE, ICSOC, ICWS, and CAiSE.

Dr. Michael Sheng is the recipient of the ARC Future Fellowship (2014), Chris Wallace Award for Outstanding Research Contribution (2012), and Microsoft Research Fellowship (2003). He is a member of the IEEE and the ACM.

Keynote Title

The Internet of Things (IoT) Services: Experiences and Challenges

Keynote Abstract

The Internet of Things (IoT) is widely regarded as an important technology to change the world in the coming decade. Indeed, IoT will play a critical role to improve productivity, operational effectiveness, decision making, and to identify new business service models for social and economic opportunities. While IoT-based digital strategies and innovations provide industries across the spectrum with exciting capabilities to create a competitive edge and build more value into their services, there are still significant gaps in making IoT services a reality, specially on effectively managing large volume of IoT devices and information generated from them. In this talk, I will overview my more than 10-year research activities on IoT services, and also discuss some future research directions.

Dr. Rong N. Chang is a member of IBM Academy of Technology at the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center. He is leading an in-market research effort in creating DevOps and IoT cloud based intelligent financial services. He received his Ph.D. degree in computer science & engineering from the University of Michigan in USA in 1990. Before joining IBM in 1993, he was with Bellcore researching on B-ISDN based personal ubiquitous application services. He has received six IBM Outstanding Technical Achievement Awards, held 30+ patents, and published 50+ refereed technical papers in the areas of distributed services computing. He is chair of IEEE Technical Committee on Services Computing and associate editor-in-chief of the IEEE Transactions on Services Computing. He is steering committee member of ACM/IEEE Symposium of Edge Computing, CCF International Conference on Service Science, IEEE World Congress on Services, and IEEE Cloud Computing for Emerging Markets. He is general chair of 2018 IEEE International Congress on Internet of Things and 2018 US chair of the Sino-American Technology and Engineering Conference (sponsored in part by the Chinese State Council of PRC). He has an ITIL Foundation certificate in IT Services Management and one Micro MBA certificate.

Keynote Title

IoT Cloud Based Intelligent Financial Services: A DevOps Perspective

Keynote Abstract

Financial services industry comprises of banking, financial markets, and insurance market segments. Total expenditures of global financial-services were about $455B in 2015 and would rise to $475B by 2020. This presentation will first elucidate the importance of creating an IoT-cloud enabled API economy for the financial services industry. It will then illuminate some key non-functional requirements (e.g., EU General Data Protection Regulation) for the new generation of API services. From the viewpoint of DevOps, some relevant key architecture design decisions will be illustrated (e.g., API invocation authentication and authorization). The presentation concludes with several open issues in using the DevOps approach to designing, building, and managing intelligent financial services continuously in an agile manner.