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The Fifth International Conference on Bioenvironment, Biodiversity and Renewable Energies

BIONATURE 2014

April 20 - 24, 2014 - Chamonix, France


Tutorials

T1. High Performance Computing in Biomedical Informatics
Prof. Dr. Hesham H. Ali, University of Nebraska at Omaha, USA

T2. Automatic Generation of Web Interfaces from Discourse Models and Their Evaluation
Prof. Dr. Hermann Kaindl, Vienna University of Technology, ICT, Austria

T3. Control Plane Scalability in Software Defined Networking
Prof. Dr. Eugen Borcoci, University "Politehnica” Bucharest, Romania

Special Tutorial. Graph Databases Hands-on with Neo4j 2.0
Dr. Jim Webber, Chief Scientist,  Neo Technology, USA

 

DETAILS

T1. High Performance Computing in Biomedical Informatics
Prof. Dr. Hesham H. Ali, University of Nebraska at Omaha, USA

The last few years have witnessed significant developments in various aspects of Biomedical Informatics, including Bioinformatics, Medical Informatics, Public Health Informatics, and Biomedical Imaging. The explosion of medical and biological data requires an associated increase in the scale and sophistication of the automated systems and intelligent tools to enable the researchers to take full advantage of the available databases. The availability of vast amount of biological data continues to represent unlimited opportunities as well as great challenges in biomedical research. Developing innovative data mining techniques and clever parallel computational methods to implement them will surely play an important role in efficiently extracting useful knowledge from the raw data currently available. The proper integration of carefully selected/developed algorithms along with efficient utilization of high performance computing systems form the key ingredients in the process of reaching new discoveries from biological data. This tutorial focuses on addressing several key issues related to the effective utilization of High Performance Computing (HPC) in biomedical informatics research, in particular, how to efficiently utilize high performance systems in the analysis of massive biological data. A major key issue in that regard is how to develop innovative network models that allow researchers to integrate different types of biological data and extract useful knowledge out of all available datasets. Another major issue is how to design energy-aware parallel computational models for executing computationally-intensive biomedical applications on HPC systems. The integration between biomedical informatics and HPC will undoubtedly be a major driver in the next generation of biomedical research.

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T2. Automatic Generation of Web Interfaces from Discourse Models and Their Evaluation
Prof. Dr. Hermann Kaindl, Vienna University of Technology, ICT, Austria

Every Web application needs a user interface, today even several ones tailored for different devices (PCs, Tablet PCs, smartphones). Developing a user interface is difficult and takes its time, since it normally requires design and implementation. This is also expensive, and even more so for several user interfaces for different devices.

This tutorial shows how human-computer interaction can be based on discourse modeling, even without employing speech or natural language. Our discourse models are derived from results of Human Communication theories, Cognitive Science and Sociology. Such discourse models can specify an interaction design.

This tutorial also explains and demonstrates how such a communicative interaction design can be used for automatic generation of Web GUIs and linking them to the application logic and the domain of discourse (much like at a recent tool demo at EICS’13). In particular, it sketches  and shows how the generated Web-pages are tailored for a specified screen size, e.g., of a current smartphone, through optimization techniques. This is based on novel use of model-transformation rules according to the model-driven architecture. In addition, interfaces based on Web services can be generated automatically from such models.

Based on all that, this tutorial presents how GUI Web pages resulting from this novel approach have been evaluated in thorough user studies with 60 participants, comparing two different tailoring strategies. We collected quantitative data through measuring the task completion time and error rate, as well as qualitative data through subjective questionnaires. Finally, this tutorial  presents and analyzes the collected data, and draws a high-level conclusion on the preferred tailoring strategy.

Prerequisite knowledge
The assumed attendee background is primarily some interest in designing interactions and user interfaces, especially for Web applications. There are no prerequisites such as knowledge about any of the results of Human Communication theories, Cognitive Science, Sociology or HCI in general.

A selection of related publications of the proposer
Bogdan, C., Kaindl, H., Falb, J., and Popp, R., Modeling of interaction design by end users through discourse modeling, In Proceedings of the 2008 ACM International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces (IUI’08). Maspalomas, Gran Canaria, Spain, 2008. ACM Press.
Falb, J., Kaindl, H., Horacek, H., Bogdan, C., Popp, R., and Arnautovic, E., A discourse model for interaction design based on theories of human communication. In CHI’06 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems, New York, NY, USA, 2006. ACM Press, pages 754–759.
Falb, J., Kavaldjian, S., Popp, R., Raneburger, D., Arnautovic, E., and Kaindl, H., Fully Automatic User Interface Generation from Discourse Models. In Proceedings of the 2009 ACM International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces (IUI’09), ACM. Sanibel Island, Florida, USA, 2009. ACM Press. Tool demo paper.
Falb, J., Popp, R., Röck, T., Jelinek, H., Arnautovic, E., Kaindl, H., UI Prototyping for Multiple Devices Through Specifying Interaction Design. In: Human-Computer Interaction — INTERACT 2007, Proceedings of the 11th IFIP TC 13 International Conference, Part I, LNCS 4662, Springer, 2007, pages 136–149.
Popp, R., Falb, J., Raneburger, D., and Kaindl, H., A Transformation Engine for Model-driven UI Generation. in Proceedings of the 4th ACM SIGCHI Symposium on Engineering Interactive Computing Systems (EICS´12), Copenhagen, Denmark, 2012.
Popp, R., Kaindl, H., Raneburger, D., Connecting Interaction Models and Application Logic for Model-driven Generation of Web-based Graphical User Interfaces, in Proceedings of the 20th Asia-Pacific Software Engineering Conference (APSEC’13), 2013, pages 215–222.
Popp, R., Raneburger, D., and Kaindl, H., Tool support for automated multi-device GUI generation from discourse-based communication models, in Proceedings of the 5th ACM SIGCHI Symposium on Engineering Interactive computing systems (EICS ’13). New York, NY, USA: ACM, 2013. Tool demo paper.
Raneburger, D., Alonso-Ríos, D., Popp, R., Kaindl, H. and Falb, J., A user study with GUIs tailored for smartphones. In Proceedings of the 14th IFIP TC13 Conference on Human-Computer Interaction (INTERACT ‘13), Berlin, Heidelberg, 2013. Springer-Verlag.
Raneburger, D., Popp, R., Alonso-Ríos, D., Kaindl, H. and Falb, J., A User Study with GUIs Tailored for Smartphones and Tablet PCs, in Proceedings of the 2013 IEEE International Conference on Systems, Man and Cybernetics (SMC'13), 2013, pages 3727–3732.
Raneburger, D., Popp, R., Kaindl, H., and J. Falb, Automated WIMP-UI Behavior Generation: Parallelism and Granularity of Communication Units, in Proceedings of the 2011 IEEE International Conference on Systems, Man and Cybernetics (SMC´11), 2011, pages 2816–2821.
Raneburger, D., Popp, R., Kaindl, H., Falb, J., and Ertl, D.,, Automated Generation of Device-Specific WIMP-UIs: Weaving of Structural and Behavioral Models, in Proceedings of the 2011 SIGCHI Symposium on Engineering Interactive Computing Systems (EICS´11), 2011, pages 41–46.
Raneburger, D., Popp, R., Kavaldjian, S., Kaindl, H., and Falb, J., Optimized GUI Generation for Small Screens, Model-Driven Development of Advanced User Interfaces, LNCS, Springer-Verlag, Berlin-Heidelberg (selected from MDDAUI'10 Workshop papers), 2011.

 

T3. Control Plane Scalability in Software Defined Networking
Prof. Dr. Eugen Borcoci, University "Politehnica” Bucharest, Romania

Pre-requisites: general knowledge on networking architectures, proocols and SDN technlogies are supposed to exist.

Recently proposed Software Defined Networking (SDN) architectures and technologies together with vertical (e.g. OpenFlow) protocols constitute an important emergent approach, of high interest for both research and industry communities. In SDN the control plane and data planes are decoupled, while network intelligence is more centralized, thus offering a better and more flexible control of the network resources allocation, routing, traffic engineering, quality of services, etc. At the control level  an overall image of the network can be achieved via Network Operating Systems (NOS). The data plane network forwarders become programmable via open interfaces (e.g. Openflow). Network function virtualization (NFV) techniques naturally cooperate with SDN. However, despite its attractiveness, SDN technology still has open issues, and therefore created new research challenges both from architectural and  implementation point of view. Degree of centralization versus scalability, especially in large networks context and multi-domain environment, are such  important topics.

The tutorial discusses the control plane scalability problems and presents some current solutions to solve them, in single and multi-domain networks, where the number of forwarding elements is large. Several techniques are examined, starting with straightforward solutions to increase the controller processing power and then create a balance between the tasks at controller level  and data plane level, aggregation techniques, proactive policies, etc. Multiple controller solution seems to be the way for large environments; several designs are discussed like flat and hierarchical structure multiple controllers, or  recursive design. Communication techniques and protocols inter-SDN controllers are discussed. An overall conclusion is that scalability aspects are not fundamentally unique to SDN and they can be solved by a careful design.   

 

Special Tutorial. Graph Databases Hands-on with Neo4j 2.0
Dr. Jim Webber, Chief Scientist,  Neo Technology, USA

This hands-on tutorial will show attendees how to build sophisticated models and queries using the popular open-source graph database Neo4j. Starting from a whiteboard, we'll show how the labelled property graph model is an excellent fit for connected data problems, and learn the Cypher query language for making sense of that data at runtime. In between the exercises we'll have time for side-discussions on Neo4j architecture and data and systems challenges.

 
 

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