Title and Abstract of Invited Talks

• Arzad Kherani: Power and QoS Optimization for BLE-based Accessory-Smartphone Communications

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  BLE based Accessory-Smartphone communication (WBANs/WPANs), used for health-care, infotainment and many other applications, usually operate in dynamic environment (varying number of sensors, wireless conditions, etc.). These devices are typically configured in connection-oriented hub-and-spoke model with the Master controller. With an end-objective of optimizing the capacity of BLE (Bluetooth Low Energy) centric systems, we share analytical models, experimental setup and experimental validation of these models. Using a current consumption model for commercially available BLE devices, analytical models are developed to obtain closed form expressions for performance metric like Current Consumption and Quality of Service. (QoS in BLE context will be impacted by Application Delay, Overall end-to-end Reliability, throughput, and Stability region). Key contribution of this work is that it provides a way for Smartphones to control the Duration of Usage (DoU) of the connected accessories, while achieving a graceful application performance. Models presented in the paper capture both, connection-oriented and broadcast-based BLE communications systems. These models explicitly account for the system parameters such as data generation rate, communication buffer available at the Slave device, relative offsets in anchor points provided by Master to different connections, etc. These models feed into an adaptation algorithm running in the Master device to dynamically configure BLE connection parameters.




• Archan Misra: Group Analytics: Understanding and Predicting Human Behavior in Urban Public Spaces

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  Group-based interaction (such as studying together for a class project on campus, heading towards a taxi queue at an airport or enjoying a meal together at a cafe) is an important part of the "DNA" of human behavior in urban public venues. This talk will describe a broad set of activities related to the use of mobile sensing & analytics to study the properties and behavior of physical groups in densely crowded urban public spaces (such as a university campus or airport). As a result of the successful deployment of the LiveLabs testbed on the SMU campus, as well as through partnerships with additional public venues (including an airport and a recreational resort), we have obtained the indoor location/movement traces of tens of thousands of individuals, spanning several months. In the first part of the talk, I will explore the topic of "group detection", explaining how novel features (extracted from location and smartphone) data help provide better performance over conventional proximity-based techniques. Subsequently, I shall discuss how such group detection capabilities provide a primitive for understanding human behavior at such public venues, including (a) prediction of indoor movement and residency times, (b) identification of anomalous or unusual events and (b) the semantics of group interaction.




• Dipankar Raychaudhuri: Integrating Advanced Mobility Services into the Future Internet Architecture

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  This paper discusses the design challenges associated with supporting advanced mobility services in the future Internet. The recent transition of the Internet from the fixed host-server model to one in which mobile platforms are the norm motivates a next-generation protocol architecture which provides integrated and efficient support for advanced mobility services. Key wireless access and mobility usage scenarios are identified including host mobility, multihoming, vehicular access and context addressabil- ity, and key protocol support requirements are identified in each case. The MobilityFirst (MF) architecture being developed under the National Science Foundation's future Internet Architecture (FIA) program is proposed as a possible realization that meets the identified requirements. MF protocol specifics are given for each wireless/mobile use case, along with sample evaluation results demonstrating achievable performance benefits.




• Giridhar Mandyam: Impact of HTML5 Persistent Connectivity to Power Consumption for the Mobile Web

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  With the advent of HTML5, the next generation of browser-based technologies for web developers, new connectivity paradigms have arisen that will allow web developers to move beyond HTTP-based stateless transactions. However, such new features do not transition seamlessly from the desktop to mobile browsers. Specifically, handheld devices with limited battery life can be impacted by persistent connectivity. In this work, two recent technologies (WebSockets and WebRTC) are examined with respect to power consumption. Based on this analysis, recommendations for improving battery life when using these technologies are provided.




• Zartash Afzal Uzmi: Impact of Internet Censorship: A Measurement View

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  Internet censorship artificially changes the dynamics of resource production and consumption, impacting stakeholders that include end users, service providers, and content providers. This talk will provide a measurement analysis of this impact in the context of two large-scale censorship events in Pakistan: blocking of pornographic content in 2011 and of YouTube in 2012.

  Using customer traffic collected at a midsize ISP before and after the censorship events , we: a) quantify the demand for blocked content, b) illuminate challenges encountered by the ISP in implementing the censorship policies, c) investigate changes in user behavior (e.g., with respect to circumvention) after censorship, and d) assess benefits extracted by competing content providers of blocked content.




• Ishwardutt Parulkar: Evolution of mobile networks - some directions towards 5G

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  According to the Cisco Visual Networking Index (VNI), global mobile data traffic will increase 11-fold between 2013 and 2018. The number of mobile-connected devices now is equal to the number of people on the earth and by 2018, there will be 1.4 mobile devices per capita. By 2018, over half of the devices connected to the Internet will be "smart" devices. Mobility has not only become the central axis off the internet, but it is also growing in leaps and bounds. Other technology trends such as the shift to cloud computing and business trends such as the value chain shifting from developing Internet infrastructure to providing over-the-top services will also be key in determining the next generation mobile network.

  Based on the demands of mobility and business challenges of mobile operators, some of the key considerations in building the next generation of the mobile internet are: 1) Virtualization of network functions to reduce opex for mobile operators. In the RAN, that implies decomposing the radio stack in a way that is amenable to centralizing functionality. 2) Handling scale, latency, data/signaling traffic profiles, security demanded by wireless M2M and IOT applications. 3) Integration of radio access technologies - cellular (licensed), Wifi, LTE-AA into a seamless architecture. 4) Shifting the paradigm of the network from a host connectivity based network to a information centric network where content is named. Insights into these key directions and the impact they will have on the development of 5G will be presented.




• Manish Gupta: Deriving Insights from Data: Opportunities for Societal Impact

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  We are entering an era that will usher dramatic changes in most industries via exploitation of data. With the availability of abundant computing power, proliferation of data from sensors and increasing digitization of data that used to be in non-electronic form, there are opportunities to enable transformations in the way the world is run. We present examples of problems that can be tackled in Healthcare, Education, Banking and Transportation domains, each with a potential to deliver not only business value but also positively impact the lives of millions of people. We further describe unique challenges like scale, heterogeneity and poor infrastructure in growth markets like India, which often require new approaches. Diving deeper into the healthcare industry, we present preliminary work that shows the applicability of remote sensing and data analytics to measure body vitals such as respiration and heart rate, and also to diagnose diseases such as breast cancer and atrial fibrillation (a form of cardiac arrhythmia). As more of the patients' medical history gets captured in electronic health record systems, there is a further promise of applying real-time predictive analytics to assist doctors in practicing evidence-based medicine. We present work that significantly improves upon the state of the art for a variety of problems, including prediction of serious complications such as acute hypotensive episodes for patients in an ICU, and predicting the probability of a patient requiring ICU admission. In the area of transportation, we show how capturing the mobility patterns in a city can enable significant improvements in the efficiency and consumer-friendliness of public transportation. We also describe the opportunities to improve learning outcomes through personalization and more effective navigation of content from massively parallel online courses. Finally, we present some observations on the common aspects of these solutions across various industry verticals, characterizing these as technology support to enable highly personalized services at massive scale and describe some outstanding challenges .





• Kanchi Gopinath: Cloud Security

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  After briefly reviewing attacks on cloud security through "systems" insecurities, we will discuss a clouds' "communication" insecurity, even if the packets are encrypted, using some recent ideas in workload identification.




• Sambit Sahu: Sensing City-Scale People Movement, Life Style from Telco Data and its Application to Smarter Services