Public Lecture Narasimhan 2013

Professor V. Lakshmi Narasimhan is going to give a public guest lecture on cloud security on Tuesday 24th of September at 1400-1530 in room I-202. This is the first in a series of cyber security themed guest lectures planned for this fall and affiliated with the European Cyber Security Month initiative.

The talk is sponsored by the IT Academy.

You can read the full abstract and the speaker bio below.

Hope to see you there,

Rain Ottis

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Research Issues and Challenges in Cloud Computing

With a Critical Perspective on Security Aspects

Prof. V L Narasimhan

Senior Vice-President, Srikar & Associates International

Email: srikar1008@gmail.com

Cloud computing is currently the ‘in buzz word’ in computing. But what is cloud computing? Cloud computing radically changes the way computer applications and services are constructed, delivered, and managed. Cloud computing provides a new potential for corporate, enterprise and academic computing to consolidate their data and services over the WWW so that (approved) anyone-anywhere-anytime access is possible. Cloud computing shares the same original vision of grid computing articulated in the 1990s by several researchers, however, there are significant differences also.

Large data centers permit resource sharing across various applications, which leads to possible economies of scale at the hardware and software levels, whereby they can be hosted over a common platform that is available to everyone. Software services that can obtain seemingly infinite scalability and services level is now possible. Incremental growth to meet customers’ varying demands is also possible. Several types of costing models, rapid provisioning and availability lead to more efficient resource utilization and reduced cost for utilization. Therefore, NEW TECHNIQUES for managing shared data in the cloud, fault-tolerance mechanisms, service composition, scheduling, metering and billing, protecting privacy, communication, and, more generally, sharing resources among applications under the control of diverse organizations, ARE NOW REQUIRED.

In this talk, I will detail what is Cloud Computing, challenges and opportunities in cloud computing, underlying technical issues in cloud computing and the dark side of cloud computing. In particular, I will detail several security data, information and knowledge related security issues that need to be tackled when working with cloud. Specifically, issues such as, mechanism for storage and/or usage of data, encryption/decryption mechanisms, custodial policies, legal protections, and many other areas would be dealt with. Some underlying security issues on the use of cloud over a smart grid environment will also be introduced. The deployment of artificial intelligent agents to manage such diverse security issues would also be considered in this talk.

And, iff time permits, I will also provide cloud computing applications to several areas which include, but not limited to, information management, intelligence and value-adding thru’ information extraction, process flow & workflow analysis, organiogram generation, economic analysis, medical & pharmaceutical intelligence, just-in-time management of health, manufacturing, environment. I will also give some examples of cloud computing to web intelligence (social network and mobile network). However the multi-million dollar questions include, “Are you safe? Is your privacy Protected? Ethical & Legal Issues?” I will conclude the talk with some grand challenges that is inherent in Cloud Computing.

Keywords: Cloud computing, Research issues and challenges in cloud computing, Lessons from distributed systems, peer computing and grid computing, Security issues in cloud computing, Approaches to solutions.

Biography of the Speaker

Dr. Lakshmi narasimhan has Bachelor’s degrees in Physics (BSc) and Electronics Engineering (BEng) from the University of Madras and the Indian Institute of Science respectively. He obtained his Master’s degree from the Anna University of Technology and his PhD from the University of Queensland, Australia. He worked as a Postdoctoral fellow, lecturer and then as a senior lecturer at the University of Queensland. Later, he moved to the Defense Science and Technology Organization (DSTO) as a Principal Research Scientist. Narasimhan also worked as a full professor at the University of North Texas, USA and held a Chair in Software Engineering at the University of Newcastle, Australia. He was also a full professor at the Computer Science Department at East Carolina University, USA. Presently he serves as the Senior Vice-President at Srikar & Associates International and SEED Inc. His current research interests are in: Software Engineering (testing, visualization, instrumentation, product line engineering & CBSE, Cloud computing), Information Engineering (business informatics, medical informatics, mobile systems, information management, information extraction & information fusion, medical gaming technologies) and Computer Architecture (embedded system, reconfigurable computing & performance analysis). Narasimhan is a Senior Member of the IEEE, ACM, Fellow of ACS, IEAust and IEE (UK). He is a Technical Member (representing USA) on the Expert Panels of ISO (International Standards Organization), American National Standards Institute (ANSI) and MIMOSA (Machinery Information Management Open Standards Organization, USA). Lakshmi has over 350 publications to his credit and has won over $8 million in research funding. Lakshmi is also deeply associated with the ABET and other accrediting bodies (e.g., NBA of India) that are involved in improving the quality of education around the world. Lakshmi is also an ACM Distinguished Speaker and an IEEE Distinguished Visitor.