Title: Cloud Computing and Big Data: What it means for future scientific research 
Speaker: Dr. Feng Zhao 
         Assistant Managing Director 
         Microsoft Research Asia

Date: 18 May 2012 
Time: 10am – 11am 
Venue: Room 513 William M. W. Mong Engineering Building, CUHK

Abstract: 
The tidal wave of massive, real-time data generated by sensors and people has profoundly altered the way we formulate, conduct and publish scientific research.  Big data is really about leveraging the data assets, cloud computing infrastructure, and deep analysis tools to gain unprecedented insights about the physical world and social structures. This talk will look at the macro trends in the technology space, from computing, storage, networking all the way to the data centers, examine a few case studies, and describe our current research efforts in building scalable and robust platforms for processing and visualizing the big data.

About the speaker: 
Feng Zhao is an Assistant Managing Director at Microsoft Research Asia, responsible for the hardware, mobile and sensing, software analytics, systems, and networking research areas. He is also an adjunct Professor at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Shanghai Jiaotong University, and University of Washington. Prior to joining MSR-Asia in 2009, he was a Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research Redmond (2004-2009), and founded the Networked Embedded Computing Group. His research has focused on wireless sensor networks, energy-efficient computing, and mobile systems. He has authored or co-authored over 100 technical papers and books, including a book, Wireless Sensor Networks: An information processing approach, by Morgan Kaufmann. 
Feng was the founding Editor-In-Chief of ACM Transactions on Sensor Networks (2003-2010), and founded the ACM/IEEE IPSN conference. Feng served on ACM SIGBED Executive Committee (2004-2010), as TPC Co-Chair for ACM Sensys’05, and on the Steering Committee for CPSWeek (2007-). In 2008, he worked with USENIX and ACM to help start a new workshop series, HotPower, focusing on the emerging topic of sustainable computing. 
Feng received his BS from Shanghai Jiaotong University (1984), and MS and PhD in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from MIT (1988 and 1992, respectively). He taught at Ohio State University as an Assistant and then tenured Associate Professor in Computer Science 1992-1999, and at Stanford University as a Consulting Professor of Computer Science 1999-2006. He was a Principal Scientist at Xerox PARC 1997-2004. 
An IEEE Fellow and ACM Distinguished Engineer, Feng received a Sloan Research Fellowship (1994) and NSF and ONR Young Investigator Awards (1994, 1997). 

Inquiries: Alice Lau kylau@se.cuhk.edu.hk