Candidate Seminar by Dr. Hamzeh Khazaei (University of Toronto)

Speaker: Dr. Hamzeh Khazaei
                University of Toronto

Title: Big Data Management as a Service

Date: Wednesday, March 1st, 2017

Time: 10:30 a.m

Place: EV3.309

ABSTRACT

The combination of cloud computing and big data has given rise to many opportunities as well as challenges in various research areas such as software and data engineering. In order to harness the power of big data, cloud resources are deemed necessary for data storage and analytics. Also, many cloud systems and applications themselves generate big data that makes software analytics challenging to achieve; the data that is captured from these systems, e.g., logs and monitoring data, are big enough that prolongs time to insight for technical, managerial, and organizational improvements. Therefore, engineering data intensive software systems requires a specific set of design patterns and best practices during development, deployment and operation. Due to sheer scale of such applications and systems, they need to support self-* properties to act autonomously.

This talk addresses above challenges in the context of three big data research projects in health informatics, smart city and smart applications on virtual infrastructure domains.  First, I will discuss design patterns and algorithms for building and engineering high-performance big data platforms; second, I explain my research on design and implementation of a smart transportation system and learning algorithms to improve the safety and efficiency of Ontario roads and highways; third, I will present a programmable microservice platform that supports locality, context and heterogeneity for big data processing in geographically distributed IoT applications.

BIO

Dr. Hamzeh Khazaei is a research associate in Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at University of Toronto. Previously, he was a postdoctoral fellow in Adaptive System Research Lab at York University and a research scientist at IBM Canada Research and Development Centre, respectively. Dr. Khazaei received his PhD degree in Computer Science from University of Manitoba where he did research on performance engineering of cloud computing centers. He obtained both his Masters and Bachelor degrees in computer science from Amirkabir University of Technology, Tehran, Iran. He has six years of industry experience in software engineering, project management and big data analytics. During his postdoctoral research, he has been involved in three nationally and internationally recognized projects in big data management and cloud computing, namely, Artemis (aka IBM Data Baby for providing health informatics as a service) at IBM, ORF Research Excellence project on Connected Vehicle and Smart Transportation (CVST) and NSERC Strategic Network for Smart Applications on Virtual Infrastructure (SAVI) at York University and University of Toronto. His research on big data management and performance engineering has attracted high attention from government, media and research community through increased funding, frequent citations and a number of best paper awards and spotlight recognitions from top-tier conferences and journals.