Omer F. Rana is Professor of Performance Engineering at Cardiff University, with research interests in high performance distributed computing, data analysis/mining and multi-agent systems. He leads the Complex Systems Research Group. He was formerly the deputy director of the Welsh eScience Centre and had the opportunity to interact with a number of computational scientists across Cardiff  University and the UK. He serves on the steering committee of Cardiff
University's multi-disciplinary "Data Innovation" and "Energy Systems" Research Institutes. Rana has contributed to specification and standardisation activities via the Open Grid Forum and worked as a software developer with London-based Marshall Bio-Technology Limited prior to joining  Cardiff University, where he developed specialist software to support biotech instrumentation. He also contributed to public understanding of science, via the Wellcome Trust funded "Science Line", in collaboration with BBC and Channel 4. Rana holds a PhD in "Neural Computing and Parallel Architectures" from Imperial College (London Univ.), an MSc in Microelectronics (Univ. of Southampton) and a BEng in Information Systems Eng. from Imperial College (London Univ.).
He serves on the editorial boards (as Associate Editor) of IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems, (formerly) IEEE Transactions on Cloud Computing, IEEE Cloud Computing magazine and ACM Transactions on Internet Technology. He is a founding-member and associate editor of ACM Transactions on Autonomous & Adaptive Systems.

Title: Vertical Workflows: Service Enactment & Orchestration Across Edge and Cloud Resources for Smart Engineering

Abstract:
There is increasing realisation that edge devices, which are closer to a user, can play an important part in supporting latency and privacy sensitive applications. Such devices have also continued to increase in capability over recent years, ranging in complexity from embedded resources (e.g. Raspberry Pi, Arduino boards) placed alongside data capture devices to more complex "micro data centres". Using such resources, a user is able to carry out task execution and data storage in proximity to their location, often making use of computing resources that can have varying ownership and access rights. Increasing performance requirements for stream processing applications (for instance), which incur delays between the client and the cloud have led to newer models of computation, which requires an application workflow to be split across data centre and edge resource capabilities. With recent emergence of edge/fog computing it has become possible to migrate services to micro data centres and to address the performance limitations of traditional (centralised) cloud based applications. Such migration can be represented as a cost function that involves incentives for micro-data centres to host services with associated quality of services and experience. Using various scenarios, this talk outlines how cloud hosted services can be combined with edge services to support latency-sensitive applications. An optimisation approach is then used to describe how service enactment can be split across edge and cloud-based computational/data resources.