Keynote Speeches

"Wireless PKI for Securing M-Commerce over The Internet"

Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Director, Internet and Cluster Computing Laboratory University of Southern California

"Online Scheduler with Partial Value - an application to Network Transmission"

Professor and the Chair of the Department of Computer Science, the University of Hong kong

Computer Network is the key technical backbone for distributed and internet computing. Assume a server is sending an image to a client and the client can control the transmission process by specifying a sequence of sampled positions (through a mouse), which corresponds to requests for higher resolution at these positions. As the bandwidth is limited, each request can only be served partially, a tradeoff between "Quality-of-Service" with response time.

In this talk, we shall formulate this problem into a special type of single-machine scheduling problem, where partially served requests can still provide useful contribution (the traditional scheduling problems only count the contribution of completely served requests) and will be counted towards the overall performance of the scheduler.

As the requests are not known beforehand, this can be classified as an on-line scheduling problem. Several 2-competitive on-line schedulers for this problem will be surveyed. A c-competitive on-line scheduler is one whose performance is at least half of that of the optimal off-line scheduler. Some new schedulers will be discussed in this talk, which include a c-competitive scheduler with c=e/(e-1) (which is about 1.58), which applies parallel processing in the schedule of a single machine. New and old lower bounds on the competitive ratio of the on-line scheduler for this problem will also be shown in this talk.

"Parallel Web Mining on PC Cluster"

Professor and the Director of the Center for Conceptual Processing of Multimedia Information, Institute of Industrial Science, University of Tokyo