We are delighted to organize the next iteration of the International Workshop on Cloud, IoT and Fog Systems (and Security) – CIFS 2021 which will be colocated with UCC 2021 conferences to be held in hybrid online mode and in Leicester, UK.
Continuum computing is seen as next evolutionary step after cloud computing, profoundly shaping the way software applications are built and delivered based around modern microservice architectures and serverless technologies. Complex software applications are decomposed, in part automatically, to yield the best possible runtime characteristics. The community around continuum computing is growing, and a growing body of knowledge is correspondingly published.
Following our previous work on structured literature datasets, we would like to point out the interim release of the new dataset on continuum computing. The dataset has been curated by Julie Ann George.
Modern software applications need to accomodate many technical and business demands. Over the past decade, the dominant industry trend has been to decompose applications into smaller microservices and to deploy them as composition atop various cloud platforms and devices. More recently, more suitable abstractions were proposed to build and describe such software. Software becomes adaptive, liquid and osmotic within a continuum of computing resources, ranging from high-end data centres (e.g. HPC) and multiple clouds over fog/edge/middlebox systems to sensors and end user devices including machines and mobile phones.
At Zurich University of Applied Sciences, we are currently building a test track to link applied teaching with research and innovation. Such a facility allows for covering a whole range of topics: programming, autonomous driving, robotics, cloud, serverless, continuums, sensing, open data, data science, and various computing paradigms. We expect a video to be available around November that explains the facility and especially the teaching element. In this research blog post, we already report on interesting observations around the uplink between sensors and FaaS. We expect these insights to bring benefits to companies building IoT-cloud integrations.
In the context of our «Smart Cities and Regions Services Enablement» efforts, space (and to some extent time) are important dimensions. First, the digital transformation has an inherent spatial component. While the research application field is pragmatically scoped to cities and regions, indeed it spans a wider spectrum from households, quarters, districts to countries and even supranational entities. The recent wave of «surface digitalisation» has primarily affected mobile citizens (pandemic apps) and workers (video conferencing in home offices) around the world. This increased the surface over the previous one that for most citizens encompassed e-banking, e-ticketing and e-tax declarations, with various degrees of voluntariness.
The University of St. Gallen, through its Latin-American-Swiss Center (CLS-HSG), is the Leading House for the Latin American region, granting incentives and developing joint research cooperation projects with numerous Latin American countries. One of the grant recipients is the Service Prototyping Lab at Zurich University of Applied Sciences, bringing programmability to fog-cloud continuum computing with its parters from UNICAMP in Brazil. In this blog post, a recent research slam featuring this and other chosen projects is summarised.