1. Talk 1: Managing Data (and Services) in Pervasive Environments (Jan 12, 2006)
2. Talk 2: A Gentle Introduction to the Semantic Web (aka the Researcher's Web 2.0) (Jan 14, 2006)

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Managing Data (and Services) in Pervasive Environments
                                                                                
          Anupam Joshi
          Department of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering
          University of Maryland Baltimore County
          http://www.cs.umbc.edu/~joshi/
	  (Jan 12, 2006)
                                                                                
Technological advances in semiconductors as well as wireless
networking are leading us towards the vision of Pervasive
Computing. We envision that in the (near) future, devices all around a
person, either embedded as a part of smart spaces, or being carried by
other people in the vicinity, will provide an array of services and
information that she might want to use. All of these devices will
spontaneously discover each other and connect via short range ad-hoc
networks such as those engendered by Bluetooth/UWB. This is very different
from infrastructure based mobile environments, where mobile devices
are viewed simply as consumers of services/information and the
data comes from servers on the wired side. Several interesting questions
arise in terms of how traditional notions of database systems need to
adapt to this context. In this talk
we will present our efforts to create a system that provides
personalized and secure access to services/information in pervasive
environments. We will describe the vision, the design of our system,
and preliminary implementations that work on a combination of
laptop/palmtop devices connected by 802.11 and Bluetooth networks.
                                                                                
                                                                                
                                                                                
                                                                                
                                                                                
                                                                                
A Gentle Introduction to the Semantic Web
(aka the Researcher's Web 2.0)
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          Anupam Joshi
          Department of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering
          University of Maryland Baltimore County
          http://www.cs.umbc.edu/~joshi/
                                                                                
The "Semantic Web" has been riding up the hype curve for the past couple
of years.
In this talk, we will seek to demystify this hype by introducing you to
the basic ideas
and technologies behind the semantic web (ontologies, RDF/S, OWL).
In information systems, ontologies are explicit formal specifications of
a domain's
concepts, objects, and relations. Ontologies provide both a model of
information to be
represented and a vocabulary to use in describing it. The semantic web
languages RDF and
OWL have been developed and standardized by the W3C to allow data and
knowledge to be
shared and reused across application, enterprise, and community boundaries.
We will also show how the semantic web technologies are being used to
build distributed
systems, especially distributed information systems.