ICIN 2024 Keynotes

Title: Network and service management across the compute continuum

Abstract: Fueled by impressive advances in containerization, orchestration, and network softwarization, the Compute Continuum emerged recently as a compelling concept and paradigm that aims to manage network and computation resources across the Cloud-edge spectrum in a homogeneous and holistic fashion. However, despite the promising progresses, there is still some work to do in order to reify the Compute Continuum vision.

This keynote will introduce the Compute Continuum, illustrate the main opportunities and challenges that it opens up, and discuss some of the most promising research avenues and approaches. More specifically, we will focus on the resource allocation perspective, highlighting how digital twins,
computational intelligence, and reinforcement learning can be applied to implement dynamic and proactive service fabric management solutions for the Cloud Continuum.

Finally, we will analyze some high-stakes use cases including Industry 5.0 and natural disaster rescue and recovery – where the resource continuity assumption underlying the Compute Continuum paradigm gets stretched to the point of breaking down – and analyze how researchers are attempting to address the corresponding issues.

Bio: Mauro Tortonesi is the head of the Big Data and Compute Continuum research laboratory at the University of Ferrara, Italy. He received the Ph.D. degree in computer engineering from the University of Ferrara, in 2006. He was a Visiting Scientist with the Florida Institute for Human & Machine Cognition (IHMC), Pensacola, FL, USA, from 2004 to 2005 and with the United States Army Research Laboratory, Adelphi, MD, USA, in 2015. He participates / has participated with several roles in a wide number of research projects in the distributed systems area, with particular reference to Compute Continuum, IoT and Big Data solutions in industrial and military environments. He has co-authored over 100 publications and has 4 international patents.

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Title: AI Continuum for Smart, Secure and Sustainable Network

Abstract: In this keynote we will define and discuss the AI Continuum pillars towards Smart, Secure and Sustainable Networks with examples from mobile networks including RAN, ORAN and CORE. 

Three pillars of AI Continuum for Smarter networks will be discussed and exemplified on real use cases: 

• Network data-centric representation: We will examine state of the art and current design patterns on Graph Modeling enriched with Graph Analytics and GNN- Graph Neural Networks for Topology discovery, RCA and proactive events analysis:

• Observability, Troubleshooting recommendation:  We will present examples of network use cases and examine state of the art LLMs for those operations as well as which LLM AI architectures are the best fit. MoE, Mixture of Expert design pattern, will particularly be discussed. 
• Closed loop and actuations: For thisone of the most targeted level of automation, we will examine LLM, Agents and Reinforcement Learning to discuss mature/ready to use architecture patterns and where we need more researches and innovations.  

Those pillars of AI Continuum are key to achieve the “real” Data-Driven for Networks, going beyond the costly/siloed and network segment centric Data and AI pipelines.

Bio: Imen Grida Ben Yahia received her PhD degree in Telecommunication Networks from Telecom SudParis, Institut Polytechnique de Paris, in 2008. She is currently, Principal AI/ML Specialist Architect for Telco in Amazon Web Services (https://aws.amazon.com). She is tech. leading and building Telco solutions with AI/ML based on AWS services with key telco players to accelerate the move towards Smarter, Greener and Cloudified Networks. Previously, Imen was a Researcher and Technical leader in Orange Innovation, in charge of building, from research to delivery, data and AI/ML pipelines for network operations; Founder of Predictive Network Maintenance use cases in Orange. She co-authored several research papers on AI for Networks (6G, 5G, Software Networks, Cloud Native Net). Imen participated to several conferences as organizer, member of several Technical Program Committee and Public speaker.

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Title: NFV-COIN: Leveraging In-Network Computing with Network Function Virtualization

Abstract: In this keynote we will examine a phenomenon that is resignifying communication networks as we know them. Instead of acting just as a data transport medium, multiple technologies have made it possible to leverage networks to run and provide user-level services. This paradigm has been alternately called Computing In the Network (COIN) and In-Network Computing (INC). INC has been mostly used in the context of programmable hardware, which provides support for the implementation of services on the data-layer level. Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) is another alternative technology to deploy novel types of services within the network. NFV allows the implementation in software of middleboxes traditionally available as specialized hardware. Network services can be implemented as SFCs (Service Function Chains) based on virtualization technologies that run on commodity hardware. Although most virtualized functions have classic middlebox functionalities (e.g. firewalls or intrusion detectors) arbitrary COIN services can be implemented using NFV technologies, which we call NFV-COIN. An NFV-COIN architecture has been proposed that is compliant with the NFV-MANO reference model. We present case studies of NFV-COIN services for distributed abstractions that are notoriously relevant and hard to implement and maintain, including consensus, reliable and ordered broadcast, and failure detectors.

Bio: Elias P. Duarte Jr. is a Full Professor at Federal University of Parana, Curitiba, Brazil, where he is the leader of the Computer Networks, Distributed Systems & Security Lab (LaRSiS). He has been twice (2005 and 2009) Visiting Associate Professor at Tohoku University (Japan) and Visiting Scholar at the University of California at Irvine (1997). His research interests include Computer Networks and Distributed Systems, their Dependability, Management, and Algorithms. He has published nearly 300 peer-reviewed papers and has supervised more than 130 students both on the graduate and undergraduate levels.  Prof. Duarte is currently Associate Editor of the Computing (Springer) journal and IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing, and has served as chair of more than 25 conferences and workshops in his fields of interest, including chairing the TCPs of SRDS’18, ICDCS’21, and GLOBECOM’24. 

He received a Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from Tokyo Institute of Technology, Japan, 1997, M.Sc.  degree in Telecommunications from the Polytechnical University of Madrid, Spain, 1991, and both BSc and MSc degrees in Computer Science from Federal University of Minas Gerais, Brazil, 1987 and 1991, respectively. He chaired the Special Interest Group on Fault Tolerant Computing of the Brazilian Computing Society (2005-2007); the Graduate Program in Computer Science of UFPR (2006-2008); and the Brazilian National Laboratory on Computer Networks (2012-2016). He is a member of the Brazilian Computing Society and a Senior Member of the IEEE.