Andrew Kusiak is Professor and Chair of the Department of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering at the University of Iowa in Iowa City, Iowa. He is interested in applications of computational intelligence and innovation science in renewable energy, product development, manufacturing, clinical medicine, and pharmaceutical industry. Dr. Kusiak has published numerous books and technical papers in journals sponsored by professional societies, such as AAAI, ASME, IEEE, IIE, ESOR, IFIP, IFAC, INFORMS, ISPE, and SME. He speaks frequently at international meetings, conducts professional seminars, and consults for numerous corporations. Dr. Kusiak has served on editorial boards of over forty journals. He is the IIE Fellow and the Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Intelligent Manufacturing. He can be contacted at andrew-kusiak@uiowa.edu and his publications are available at http://www.icaen.uiowa.edu/%7Eankusiak/lab/islhome.html#publications

The emergence of Semantic Web Services and automated service discovery, access and composition functionality will enable higher levels of interoperability and automation across broad range of mobile services. Furthermore, advances in wireless communication, mobile computing, sensor networks, and portable devices offer unique chances to deliver novel anytime anywhere services and information, thus enabling a wide range of mobile applications. However, context-awareness and security remain the two main challenges facing the research community in this field. Overcoming these challenges requires the use of semantic web technologies to develop mobile applications that can dynamically recognize and adapt to the context in which their users operate (e.g. location, activities and tasks, surrounding environment, social context, etc.), and to reconciliate the interoperability and confidentiality requirements associated with these applications. In this talk, we describe recent progress in this field with a focus on context awareness issues in mobile services. In particular, we show the use of ontologies to model context information in a service oriented mobile environment. Applications in m-learning and mobile e-healthcare will also be presented.

Biography:

Professor Rachid Benlamri is the Chair of the Software Engineering Department at Lakehead University, Canada. He is also the Chief Operation Officer of Bitcold Technology Inc., a startup company specialized in e-Healthcare technologies (www.bitcold.com). He graduated from the Computer Science Department at the University of Manchester - UK in 1990. His research interests are in the area of Semantic Web, Context-Aware Computing, Ubiquitous Computing, Mobile Knowledge Management, and Semantic Video Analysis. His research is supported by many funding institutions such as the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC), Northern Ontario Heritage Fund Corporation (NOHFC), Academic Health Science Centers (AHSC) of Ontario, and the Ontario Partnership for Innovations and Commercialization (OPIC). He supervised over 70 students and postdoctoral fellows. He published over 60 articles in refereed journals and conferences. He was the general Chair for the 5th International Conference on Digital Information Management (ICDIM’2010). He also organized and chaired many international workshops on various topics including ubiquitous computing, context-aware computing, and mobile learning. Dr. Benlamri is an Associate Editor for the International Journal of Ubiquitous Learning, and member of the editorial board of many other journals as such the International Journal of Learning Technologies, the International Journal of Mobile Communications, the International Journal of Emerging Technologies in Web Intelligence, and the International Journal of Electronic Government. For more information about Prof. Rachid Benlamri, see http://flash.lakeheadu.ca/~rbenlamr.