Enabling a Smart World through Service Computing and Data Processing Architectures

Inaugural lecture: Professor Stephan Reiff-Marganiec

Smart cars, smart houses, smart medicine, smart cities. In recent years we have seen a great emergence of smart technology ideas, concepts and products. Looking more to the basics, they are all technologies that impact people’s everyday lives based on the interpretation of data gathered from the environment. These technologies are often introduced as the next must-have, and then we can often read in the press where they went wrong. However, they are here to stay, more will emerge and they will improve our quality of life.

This lecture reflected on the state of the art and highlighted opportunities and challenges for truly life-changing smart technologies. Professor Stephan Reiff-Marganiec considered the underlying technologies and the importance of data processing as a key enabler but placed these in the context of societal impact and demands. He specifically focused on aspects of software architecture for cloud and service computing paradigms, highlighting the key issues of these architectures that emerge when we consider the demands from the Internet of Things (IoT): a system of trillions of interconnected sensors producing ‘lots of little data’. He also considered how data processing can be distributed in various ways, and thus allow the ideas from service and cloud computing to be expanded for IoT, touching on the current hot topics of data analytics and machine learning.

Seen through the lens of a Computer Scientist, the talk considered technical aspects, but these were shown in the context of applications that everyone understands and uses. He considered how this technology improves our daily lives, but also considered the more human worries that are associated.

Inaugural Lecture Series: Professor Stephan Reiff-Marganiec

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Professor Stephan Reiff-Marganiec

Professor Stephan Reiff-Marganiec is a Professor in Computer Science and the Head of Computing at the University of Derby. His responsibility includes oversight of teaching and research in the department and the interaction of teaching, research and knowledge exchange.

Prior to joining the University of Derby, Stephan worked in a dual role at the University of Leicester, leading the Leicester Innovation Hub whilst being an Associate Professor in Informatics.

Stephan's research focuses on data management and processing architectures including service-oriented architectures, cloud computing, IoT, as well as context-sensitive/aware systems and data modelling considering an applied angle of these technologies.