Keynote Presentation

Bio:

Prof. Nick Antonopoulos is currently the Head of School of Computing and Assistant Dean (Research) of the Faculty of Business, Computing & Law at the University of Derby. Prior to joining the University of Derby in March 2009 he was a
Senior Lecturer (US Associate Professor) and Director of the MSc Degrees at the Department of Computing, University of Surrey, UK. He holds a BSc in Physics (1st class) from the University of Athens in 1993, an MSc in Information Technology
from Aston University in 1994, and a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Surrey in 2000. Prior to joining the academia he has worked as a networks consultant and was the co-founder and director of a company developing
Web-based management information systems. He has over 11 years of academic experience during which he has designed
and has been managing advanced Masters Programmes in computer science at the University of Surrey. He has published
over 80 articles in fully refereed journals and international conferences. He has received a number of best paper awards in conferences and graduated 6 PhD students. He has published two recent books on P2P and Cloud Computing by IGI Global
and Springer respectively. He is the organiser and co-chair of the international conference on advances in P2P systems
(AP2PS 2010). He is a Fellow of the British Computer Society and the UK Higher Education Academy. His research
interests include emerging technologies such as large scale distributed systems and peer-to-peer networks, software
agent architectures and security.
 

Abstract:

Peer-to-Peer networks first emerged in the late 90’s as specialised systems & protocols to support distributed file sharing. Since then, the scientific community has gradually changed the way P2P networks are perceived; from file sharing
applications to a general-purpose methodology that can be applied to design large scale resource discovery and sharing applications. The term resource is quite generic and encapsulates not just files but applications, services and computational resources such as storage and processing cycles.

This talk is split into two parts: Firstly, it will provide a tutorial overview of peer-to-peer network architectures and
techniques. The emphasis will be on understanding the key operational and topological similarities and differences between different P2P systems in order to assess the suitability of the P2P method in developing real world business systems.

Secondly, the talk will focus on the applicability of the P2P in facilitating cooperation between distributed systems in terms
of resource sharing on demand. This is a particularly important topic nowadays with the advent of clouds and Grids that tend to be provided by different third parties and are operated as standalone computing environments. In this part, the talk will
aim to describe a generic P2P approach towards interconnecting independent networks for the purpose of sharing computational resources on demand. This approach is derived from a series of recently completed research projects and
can provide the basis of a general purpose methodology for using P2P to interconnect and support the cooperation between networks. The method includes a semantic element in that it allows for participant networks and nodes to use keywords to specify the activities they are willing to participate in and thus ensure that they do not execute computational tasks that
do not conform to their semantic restrictions.