Good morning everybody, welcome to our seminar today.

It's my pleasure to welcome here today Professor Charam Dusta.

He is full professor of computer science and head of the distributed systems group at TU

Vienna.

From 2004 to 2007 he was honorary professor of information system at the department of

computer science at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands.

He is an associate editor of IEEE transaction on service computing, ACM transactions on

the web and ACM transactions on internet technology and on the editorial board of IEEE internet

computing and IEEE computer.

He is also an editor in chief of computing, Springer.

Professor Dusta is a recipient of the ACM Distinguished Scientist Award in 2009, the

IBM Faculty Award 2012, a member of the Academia Europae and received the IEEE Fellow Award

this year.

We are glad to have you here today and give us some information and the ideas of elastic

computing.

We met at a meeting of the Academia Europae in Darmstadt this year and I think there were

many similarities although different assumptions here with our research on invasive computing.

That's right.

So please Professor Dusta.

Thank you very much for your kind introduction and the invitation.

Thanks everybody for being here.

In this talk, approximately one hour I guess, I will talk about what we have done in the

last couple of years, five, six years or so on a topic which we call elastic computing,

which somehow we believe is an interesting area and as mentioned before, somehow related

to what you guys are doing here.

Not overlapping but somehow related.

So what we observed in the last decades is basically that the systems that we are building

are having three entities and these three entities are people, software services and

things increasingly and that these three entities are essentially the building blocks of how

information systems are increasingly being built.

Now this observation sounds very trivial but in fact it is not if you zoom into more details

because it brings forth a number of novel problems which somehow lead us to believe

that we require novel paradigms on how to develop systems.

We have all kinds of let's say application areas like smart homes, e-health networks,

smart city type of applications, transportation networks, energy networks, etc. which all

have to different degrees these three building blocks in there.

The question now which led us to this area of elasticity is essentially a class of systems

that we are building which require certain number of problems to be solved in a different

way.

So we have the area of smart things basically looking into areas like smart cities where

we have lots of sensors emitting data.

We have cloud computing paradigms where we have data centers offering their compute power,

data storage power, etc. and we have humans who have to work in different areas as decision

makers making sense out of data, delegating work to machines, sometimes even machines

are delegating work to humans.

And if you look at such a scenario where you have number of people, number of things, and

number of services being weaved together, you come up with a number of problems which

are extremely strange in a sense.

A couple of strange things are that the people are suddenly not outside the system only interacting

with the system but they are actually functional entities also doing something like in crowdsourcing,