Seminars, Workshops and Conferences
November 14, 2003:
Water Resources in the 21st Century under Climate Change Scenarios seminar will be held 1:00 p.m. at the Milton Bender Auditorium.
Introduction
Water resources around the world are under high stress due to escalating rate of increase of demand, especially in Asian region due to its high rate of economic development and population and growth. Climate change has aggravated this problem with its large impact in water resources characteristics. For adequate planning and management of water resources in the 21st century, it has become necessary to study availability of water resources both temporal and spatial domains incorporating the possibility influence of climate and socio-economic changes.
Associate Professor Dr. Taikan of the University of Tokyo is an internationally renowned leading researcher in Japan, who has been conducting research on the above issues including Land-atmosphere interaction and its modeling, Inter-annual variation of global climate and the Asian Monsoon, Global water resources analysis, Virtual water, Isotope analysis, etc. Dr. Oki and his team have been actively involved in various international projects including GEWEX, GLASS, GSWP, IAHS PUB, etc. He has been selected as one of the Future Water Leaders by the IWRA, the Stockholm International Water Institute, and the Third World Centre for Water Management as potential water leaders of the future. He and his team have received the prestigious Tison Award of IAHS this year.
In this seminar, Dr. Oki and two of his colleagues, Assistant Prof. Dr. Shinjiro Kanae and Research Fellow Dr. Kei Yoshimura, who are involved in the research of climate change and isotope analysis, will present about their on-going research and findings.
All interested persons are cordially invited. All the students of WEM Field of Study should attend. For further details, please contact Prof. Ashim Das Gupta at tel. 02-524-5556 or Dr. Dushmanta Dutta at tel. 02-524-5794.
November 20, 2003: 'The Long and Winding Road To Industrial Strength Semantic Web Services' seminar by Dr. Michael Brodie, Chief Scientist, Verizon Information Technology, USA. The seminar will be held at 10:00-11:00 a.m. in Room CS-209, Computer Science Building.
Abstract
Web Services appear to be the basis for the Next Generation of computing in which rigid, non-interoperable, monolithic, legacy applications bound within organizational boundaries are replaced by E-Services - flexible services that can be discovered and invoked anywhere on the World Wide Web and composed, as required, to achieve higher level goals. Web Services are proposed to address software integration - the largest cost component in Information Technology. But Web Services are plumbing - inexpensive remote invocation.
The E-Services vision requires Semantic Web Services to enable discovery, composition, and integration. But this is techie talk. Neither Web Services nor Semantic Web Services are or should be goals. What really matters is a grander vision flexible, cost effective E-services that substantially overcome the integration challenge on an industrial scale. As with previous attempts at similar goals, such as the heroic journey to relational databases and the less than heroic treks to distributed object computing, economics, business aspects, and technical pragmatics such as scalability and performance dominate mere plumbing. This talk investigates the pragmatic challenges on the long and winding road to realizing the vision of truly interoperable applications based on cost effective, flexible integration through the land of Semantic Web Services. What will it take for Web Services to avoid Silver Bullet status in the annals of computing?
'...it's less about improving the technology that we have, it's
more about using that technology to solve business problems, the problems
we have in everyday life.'
-- A Survey of the IT Industry, The Economist, May 10, 2003
Biography
Dr. Michael L. Brodie is Chief Scientist, Verizon Information Technology. Dr. Brodie works on large-scale strategic Information Technology (IT) challenges for Verizon Communications Corporations senior executives. His primary interest is in the optimal use of IT, with an emphasis on emerging and advanced technologies and practices, to enable
organizational and business objectives, including organizational change. In addition to Computer Science he has investigated the relationships between
economics, business, and technology. His long-term industrial research focus is on advanced computational models and architectures and the large-scale information systems that they support. He is concerned with the Big Picture, business and technical contexts, core technologies, and
integrationwithin in a large scale, operational telecommunications environment.
Dr. Brodie has an active interest in advances in eBusiness, cooperative information systems, interoperability, information systems, databases, infrastructure and application architectures, legacy systems migration, business processes, experimental or domain-driven computer science, and the effective evaluation and deployment of advance IT solutions. Dr. Brodie has authored over 150 books, chapters, journal
articles, and conference papers. He has presented keynote talks, invited lectures, and short courses on many topics in over thirty countries. He is
a member of the Board of six research foundations including the VLDB (Very Large Databases) Endowment (1992 - present), is on the editorial board of several research journals.
December 1-19, 2003: The Electric Power System Management (EPSM), Energy Field of Study of Asian Institute of Technology will organize a medium training workshop on Power System Operation, Automation and Deregulation at AIT Conference Center. The training workshop is organized into three modules, namely, Power System Operation (Dec. 1-4), Power System Automation (Dec. 8-9, Dec. 11-12), and Power System Deregulation (Dec. 15-19).
Attendees may be registered for one or more modules of this training
workshop.
January 14-16, 2004:: International Conference on 'Electric Supply Industry in Transition: Issues and Prospect for Asia' will be held at the AIT Conference Center.
The conference is co-organized by the Power Systems Engineering Research Center (PSERC, comprising of more than a dozen leading universities in the USA, including U.C. Berkeley), University of Technology, Sydney, Australia, and Asian Institute of Technology. The conference is coordinated by Professor Surapong Chirarattananon, SERD, AIT
The conference focus will be on 'Electricity Supply Industry in Transition': pertinent issues and prospects for Asia. The topic is timely as most of the utilities around the world, including developing nations, are changing the way they do businesses in electricity supply. A variety of people, power utilities, private power producers and academic institution, are expected to benefit from this conference.
For further information please email: olivier@ait.ac.th