| Title | : | ∑ (( Smart, Pervasive, Cloud ) Computing) =? |
| Speaker | : | Athula Ginige (Western University of Sydney, Australia) |
| Details | : | Thu, 7 Jun, 2018 3:00 PM @ A M Turing Hall |
| Abstract: | : | In the past few years, many advances have happened in Smart Computing, Pervasive Computing and Cloud Computing. In this presentation, I will explore how we can effectively combine these advances in different areas of computing to address some of the Grand Challenges or United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) especially in areas of Food Security and Healthcare delivery. Growth in world population and the need to feed them, increasing life expectancy and the need to care for them, climate change, issues with fossil fuels among others have posed us a set of challenges often termed Grand Challenges. United Nations as a successor to its Millennium Goals have formulated 17 Sustainable Development Goals; No Poverty, Zero Hunger and Good Health and Well-Being being the first three. The advances in various aspects of computing can make a significant contribution towards finding sustainable solutions to these Grand Challenges. The question is how best to combine these advances to develop these solutions.
To understand how advances in various computing aspects can be effectively combined to solve these Grand Challenges, 7 years ago, we embarked on a research project to develop a mobile-based information system for agriculture domain. This system has now evolved into a Digital Knowledge Ecosystems for Agribusiness and at present getting deployed among a large number of farmers in India and Sri Lanka. Advances in smart and pervasive computing have enabled us to connect with millions of users through their mobile phones and use inbuilt sensors to collect location-specific data. Using this information user context can be computed. Cost-effective cloud computing options enabled us to develop a large agriculture ontology and a corresponding knowledgebase that can be queried based on computed user context. This enabled us to generate Actionable Information in response to user queries which was provided to the users through their mobile devices. This empowered users to act and user actions were captured via the visual interfaces on the mobile and aggregated to derive situational knowledge. This situational knowledge is shared among the user community based on earlier computed context to empower them to make informed decisions that can lead to increased productivity, better economic outcomes and sustainable growth. The growth of the farmer community attracted other major stakeholders in the domain such as Government Institutions, major agrochemical companies, microfinance organisations and potential buyers to be part of the Digital Knowledge Ecosystem fuelling its growth. The Digital Knowledge Ecosystem architecture that evolved is very generic and can be used to develop systems to solve many other Grand Challenges. For example, we are now developing a system to manage type 2 Diabetes by replacing crop knowledgebase with a Knowledgebase on chronic disease management. Another project we are currently working on is to develop a Digital Knowledge Ecosystem to manage child growth and related growth issues. We have also started a project to develop a Mobile-based Information System for Nutrition driven Agriculture to combat Hidden Hunger†with a group of African Universities. Speaker Bio: Athula Ginige is Professor of Information Technology at Western Sydney University (WSU), Australia and he leads the Social Computing and Knowledge Ecosystems Research Program at the School of Computing, Engineering and Mathematics. This program focuses on developing knowledge driven Social Computing solutions delivered via mobile based systems to a range of applied problems including Grand Challenges in diverse areas such as agriculture, healthcare, business and education. His current research areas include both autonomous and participatory sensor networks, knowledge aggregation and event detection, large-scale knowledge organisation based on ontologies and semantic web technologies, context modelling, designing mobile-based systems for user empowerment and Social Computing. Digital Knowledge Ecosystems integrate all these technologies and methodologies to provide innovative and sometimes disruptive solutions to real-world challenges. One such example is Digital Knowledge Ecosystem (DKES) for Agribusiness which he pioneered to address the key problems that farmers and other stakeholders face as a result of an uncoordinated market. This DKES has evolved over the last many years and is now poised to transform agriculture by linking major stakeholders and providing them with relevant context-dependent actionable information on the go to create a well-coordinated system. In 2016 he won the Australian Computer Society Digital Disrupter Gold award for developing the Digital Knowledge Ecosystem (DKES) for Agribusiness. He has over 250 Journal and Conference publications and given many keynotes at conferences. He graduated with B.Sc. first class honours from University of Moratuwa, Sri Lanka. He obtained his Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge, England. |
