We are proud to announce that the DAIS 2014 keynote will be delivered by Maarten van Steen, Full Professor and Chair of the Department of Computer Science, VU University Amsterdam.
A PERSPECTIVE ON THE FUTURE OF COMPUTER SCIENCES (through a technical example)
Abstract:
Computer sciences have always, and continue, to move swiftly. On the one hand, we have seen many subjects come and go. On the other, many of these subjects are becoming the core of new sciences, most recently those emerging from big-data discussions. Where does this place the computer scientist? As a natural reaction, people tend to build a fence around what they believe is "real" computer science, and what is considered to be an application of computer science.
In this talk, I will argue that drawing such a line is not only pointless, it is even dangerous. Computer sciences are more than ever in the core of new sciences, and that's where the computer scientists should be as well. Building a fence will place the computer scientist out of the core, potentially leading to isolation.
I will illustrate this point by means of a project on crowd management. It will be a technical talk, one by a die-hard systems researcher who can only make the project a success if understanding how his science can contribute to the bigger picture and what that means for collaborating with scientists from other disciplines.
From federated conferences to federated sciences?
Speaker:
MAARTEN VAN STEEN is professor of large-scale distributed systems at VU University Amsterdam and currently chair of its Department of Computer Science. Since several years, a large part his research is concentrated on understanding very large networked systems of small, wireless devices such as massive sensor networks. Next to such extreme distributed systems, his interests also reach out to complex-network science and understanding the behavior that emerges from very large networked systems. He is (co-)author of three text books, including "Distributed Systems, Principles and Paradigms" (with Andrew Tanenbaum) and "Graph Theory and Complex Networks, An Introduction."