Prof. Schahram Dustdar (IEEE Fellow/AAIA Fellow)
TU Wien, Austria
Bio: Schahram Dustdar is a Full Professor of Computer
Science at TU Wien, where he leads the Distributed Systems
Group, and he is also affiliated as an ICREA research
professor at Universitat Pompeu Fabra (UPF) in Barcelona.
(https://dustdar.prof) He is widely known for pushing the
frontier of elastic, dependable cloud-to-edge systems and
the Computing Continuum, turning cutting-edge research into
practical foundations for modern distributed intelligence.
An IEEE Fellow, ACM Distinguished Scientist/Speaker, and
member of Academia Europaea, he’s a sought-after keynote
speaker recognized for shaping how large-scale systems
adapt, scale, and stay resilient in the real world.
Keynote Title: Active Inference for Distributed
Intelligence in the Computing Continuum
Abstract: Modern distributed systems must operate under
uncertainty, across environments, infrastructures, and
applications that vary widely. Within the Computing
Continuum (IoT–Edge–Fog–Cloud), applying
neuroscience-inspired principles and mechanisms may help us
build more flexible solutions that can generalize across
diverse settings. Intriguing hypotheses in neuroscience
propose that many brain functions in humans and animals
arise from a small number of powerful principles. If these
hypotheses hold, they could offer deep insight into how
humans and animals cope with unpredictable events—and even
support imagination. In this talk, we explore how Active
Inference, alongside established design principles for
modern distributed systems—such as elasticity, predictive
equilibrium, and antifragility—can enable Distributed
Intelligence across the Computing Continuum.
Prof. Ling Liu (IEEE Fellow)
Georgia Institute of Technology, USA
Bio: Ling Liu is a Professor in the School of
Computer Science at Georgia Institute of Technology. She
directs the research programs in the Distributed Data
Intensive Systems Lab (DiSL), examining various aspects of
Internet-scale big data powered artificial intelligence (AI)
systems, algorithms and analytics, including performance,
scalability, reliability, privacy and trust. Prof. Liu is an
elected IEEE Fellow, a recipient of IEEE Computer Society
Technical Achievement Award (2012), and a recipient of the
best paper award from numerous top venues, including IEEE
ICDCS, WWW, ACM/IEEE CCGrid, IEEE Cloud, IEEE ICWS. In
addition to serving as program chairs of top venues, such as
WWW, VLDB, ICDCS, ICDE, IEEE Cloud Computing, and associate
editors or guest editors of over a dozen journals, Prof. Liu
served as the editor in chief of several ACM or IEEE
journals, including IEEE Transactions on Service Computing
(2013-2016), ACM Transactions on Internet Computing (since
2019). Currently, Professor Liu is serving as the Editor in
Chief of IEEE Transactions on Big Data (since Jan 2025).
Prof. Liu is a frequent keynote speaker in top-tier venues
in Big Data, AI and ML systems and applications, Cloud
Computing, Privacy, Security and Trust. Her current research
is primarily supported by USA National Science Foundation
under CISE programs, CISCO and IBM.