Social Life Networks: Addressing Fundamental Problems

Speaker: Ramesh Jain¹, Laleh Jalali²

Affiliation: University of California, Irvine¹, University of California, Irvine²

Time: Thursday 22/10/2015 from 13:00 to 14:00

Venue: Access Grid UWS. Presented from Parramatta (EB.1.32), accessible from Campbelltown (26.1.50) and Penrith (Y239).

Abstract: One of the most fundamental yet challenging problems in human society is to connect needs of people to appropriate resources efficiently, effectively, and promptly. Availability of enormous volumes of heterogeneous Cyber-Physical-Social (CPS) data streams allows design and implementation of networks to detect evolving situations with little latency. These networks are called Social Life Networks (SLNs) that connect people, things, resources, and sensors. In many cases it may be possible to predict evolving situations. This opens up new opportunities to connect emerging needs to available resources. Such systems are very useful for many important problems at local as well as regional and even global level. We present an approach towards building such network. In this process we designed EventShop to access and process heterogeneous geo-spatial data streams for situation recognition and availability of resources. Also we are building Personal EventShop to build Personicles to model individuals and identify evolving personal situations and needs. This can then be used for connecting needy people with appropriate resources. Understanding causal patterns between multiple data streams plays a key role in forming models of individuals as well as other dynamic complex objects. This approach has been implemented in the form of an interactive causal engine and tested with several simple applications. We will demonstrate our approach in the context of allergy and asthma problems. In addition to the technical approach, its implications for emerging societal applications, such as agriculture in developing countries, will be discussed.

Biography¹:

Ramesh Jain is an entrepreneur, researcher, and educator. He is a Donald Bren Professor in Information & Computer Sciences at University of California, Irvine where he is doing research in Event Web and experiential computing. Earlier he served on faculty of Georgia Tech, University of California at San Diego, The university of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Wayne State University, and Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur. He is a Fellow of ACM, IEEE, AAAI, IAPR, and SPIE. His current research interests are in processing massive number of geo-spatial heterogeneous data streams for building Smart Social System. He is the recipient of several awards including the ACM SIGMM Technical Achievement
Award 2010.

Ramesh co-founded several companies, managed them in initial stages, and then turned them over to professional management. These companies include PRAJA, Virage, and ImageWare. Currently he is involved in Krumbs. He has also been advisor to several other companies including some of the largest companies in media and search space.

Biography²:

Laleh Jalali is a PhD candidate in Computer Science at the University of California, Irvine. Her research interests include Multimodal Information Processing, Causality Reasoning and Inference, Visual Analytics, Internet of Things (IoT), and Healthcare Information Technologies.

In her dissertation, entitled "Event-driven causal modeling in multimedia data streams", she proposed an interactive causal modeling framework that builds on data-driven techniques while emphasizing and including the appropriate human knowledge in causal inference from observational data.