Software-defined infrastructures

April 12 11:30-12:30 WWH 335. Software-defined infrastructures (Cloud, Edge, and IoT) have opened new opportunities to enhance flexibility and reduce computer network management burdens. This talk covers some of my research group’s investigations on the design, prototyping, and performance analysis of software-defined service management architectures built to achieve programmability of edge computing mechanisms for several applications: from natural disaster response to telemedicine, from cyber-physical systems for precision agriculture to cyber-human systems. I will discuss a few network management problems solved sometimes with human intelligence and sometimes with artificial intelligence. I will then discuss a few provocative ways to “orchestrate” networked infrastructures using unconventional signals.

Bio:Flavio Esposito is an Associate Professor in Computer Science at Saint Louis University (SLU) and a Fellow of the Research Institute. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science at Boston University and his M.S. in Telecommunication Engineering from the University of Florence, Italy. His research interests include Cyber-Physical Systems, edge computing, AI/ML for networks, networks for AI/ML, and (wireless) network management. Before joining SLU, Flavio was a senior software engineer at a high-frequency trading company, Exegy, building network protocols and firmware for FPGA. Flavio was also a visiting research scientist at Bell Laboratories, NJ, at BBN Technologies (the company that built ARPANET), Cambridge, MA, and was a visiting researcher at Eurecom, France, and at the Center for Wireless Communications, Oulu, Finland. Flavio has received several research and service awards, including six best paper awards in IEEE or ACM conferences, the Comcast Innovation Award twice, and the Outstanding Graduate Mentoring Faculty Award from the School of Science and Engineering at SLU. Currently, Flavio is managing 3 NSF awards as lead PI, among which a CPS medium, and is the CEO of Spaghetti Code Labs LLC, a profitable startup cofounded with one of his PhD students on network security educational apps. One of these apps, WeeNet, has today over 5.7M downloads.