Title

:

Scalability and Control of e-Service Networks

Speaker

:

Dr. Cathy H. Xia

Date

:

February 15th, 2008 (Friday)

Time

:

11:30 a.m. - 12:30 a.m.

Venue

:

Room 513

William M.W. Mong Engineering Building

(Engineering Building Complex Phase 2)

CUHK

Recent advances in networking and information technology boost the development of new and advanced services offered over communication systems that integrate a widely heterogeneous mix of applications and computer devices. Various forms of e-service networks have emerged with increasing size and complexity in applications ranging from Web server farms to stream processing systems to supply chains. Many of the traditional performance models and control techniques are under great challenges:

• With the high degree of parallel processing, complicated processing tasks, and limited buffering space, is the traditional Jackson network sufficient to model today＊s service networks? What will be the performance impact as such networks grow larger and larger in scale?

• With the geographically dispersed network structure and highly dynamic service environment, is the traditional centralized optimization approach practical to deal with the various admission control and resource management decisions? Can we develop control mechanisms that are more robust, distributed and scalable?

• With the great demand uncertainty due to competition in today＊s e-service market, how can we make better pricing and capacity planning decisions?

In this talk, we will consider these and other fundamental questions in e-service network design and management, and look at how new research in analytical performance modeling and optimization help us derive useful and effective solutions.

Dr. Cathy H. Xia received her Ph.D. in Engineering-Economic Systems and Operations Research from Stanford University. She then joined IBM T.J. Watson Research Center as a research scientist. Dr. Xia is currently the chair of the performance modeling and analysis research community at IBM Research. She is the Associate Editor of International Journal of Information Systems in the Service Sector and the tutorial chair of ACM Sigmetrics 2008. She has served in a number of conference program committees including SIGMETRICS and Performance 2004-2008. Her research interests are in the general areas of services science, management and engineering, with particular focus on
distributed control of stream processing systems, sensor networks, Web services, pricing and outsourcing strategies, stochastic processes, queuing theory, and performance modeling and analysis of parallel and distributed systems.

Host

:

Prof. Sean X. Zhou

Tel

:

(852) 2609 8336

Email

:

zhoux@se.cuhk.edu.hk

Enquiries

:

Prof. Nan Chen or Prof. Sean X. Zhou

:

Department of Systems Engineering and Engineering Management

CUHK

Website

:

http://www.se.cuhk.edu.hk/~seg5810

Email

:

seg5810@se.cuhk.edu.hk