Emerging Trends and Challenges to Intelligent Collaborative Systems
 at Global Scale

Chair: Fatos Xhafa, Technical University of Catalonia, Spain

In this discussion panel we will be addressing emerging trends and challenges to collaborative systems at global scale.

Panel Focus

We are currently witnessing the emerging of many new distributed computing paradigms: Web 2.0, Social Networks, Cyber-physical systems, Human-centric/Social computing, Grids, Clouds, and Crowds, which are having a great impact on collaborative systems:

• These paradigms are generating a huge potential for collaboration at global-level (among human teams, organizations, cities, governments, and nations…)
• There is an unprecedented potential to make collaboration more efficient and seamless due to the ever growing integration of physical and cyber-world
• “Collective intelligence” and “wisdom of crowds” are emerging as new forms of collaboration among people and teams to achieve economic and social goals
• Various networking paradigms (wireless networks, ad hoc networks, mobile networks…) are enabling the collaboration in new scenarios such as disaster management, knowledge cities, etc.
• There is a growing dependence on collaborative computing platforms due to the need to secure and make available huge amounts of data and information used/generated by the collaboration in long periods of time.

The panel will focus on answering key questions about Collective intelligence, Wireless and Mobile Computing, the shift from “competition paradigm” to “collaboration paradigm” and “collaborative organizing”, centralization of collaboration in few main global sites,  Collaboration and security issues about intelligent collaborative systems.

Fatos Xhafa holds a PhD in Computer Science from the Department of Languages and Informatics Systems (LSI) of the Technical University of Catalonia (UPC), Barcelona, Spain. He was a Visiting Professor at the Department of Computer Science and Information Systems, Birkbeck, University of London (UK) during academic year 2009-2010. He holds a permanent position of Professor Titular at the Department of LSI, UPC (Spain). His research interests include parallel and distributed algorithms, combinatorial optimization, approximation and meta-heuristics, networking and distributed computing, Grid and P2P computing. Dr. Xhafa has widely published in peer reviewed international journals, conferences/workshops, book chapters and edited books and proceedings in the field. Dr. Xhafa has an extensive editorial and reviewing service. He is Editor in Chief of two international peer-reviewed journals: the International Journal of Space-based and Situated Computing, Inderscience (http://www.inderscience.com/browse/index.php?journalCODE=ijssc) and the International Journal of Grid and Utility Computing, Inderscience  (http://www.inderscience.com/browse/index.php?journalCODE=ijguc). He is an associate/member of Editorial Board of several international peer-reviewed scientific journals. He has also guest co-edited several special issues of international journals. Dr. Xhafa is actively participating in the organization of several international conferences. He is General Chair of 2nd Int’l Conf. on Intelligent Networking and Collaborative Systems (INCoS-2010), 24-26 Nov. 2010, Greece; General Co-Chair of AINA-2011, the IEEE 25th Int’l Conference on Advanced Information Networking and Application, Singapore, March 22-25, 2011, General Co-Chair of CISIS-2011, the Fifth International Conference on Complex, Intelligent, and Software Intensive Systems, June 30th-July 2nd, 2011 Korean Bible University (KBU), Seoul, Korea.

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Please note that due to unexpected circumstances Prof. Janusz Kacprzyk was not able to join us in Thessaloniki. So, the initially programmed panel discussion had to be rescheduled.