Dr. Yin Zhang is a post-doc fellow in the Embedded and Pervasive Computing Lab of Huazhong University of Science and Technology(HUST). His research areas include data mining, data analysis and social network in the field of research. After his collaboration with CLOUDCOMP Conferences in the last two years, Dr. Zhang now shares with us some of his viewpoints about improvements reached by the 2014 edition, also making the point about new standards and benefits brought in by the innovation of cloud computing.
As TPC Chair of CLOUDCOMP 2014, what was your overall impression of the conference? What were the main issues that have emerged from the conference?
Actually, I have been involved in CLOUDCOMP 2013 as Local Chair. Compared to last year, CLOUDCOMP has shown impressive improvements: the authors are more professional in specific fields of cloud computing; the conference abstracts more attendees from various areas; the sessions keep pace with the times, and focuses on the advanced techniques.
According to the accepted papers of the conference, the following issues attract more attention:
- Applications on cloud computing: About 35% papers focus on applications development by cloud computing, and more than half of these papers mentioned Hadoop.
- Virtualization: More than 20% papers focus on virtualization on cloud, especially virtual resources reservation, allocation and migration.
- Mobile cloud: With the development of mobile networks, about 15% authors pay attention to mobile cloud.
How important is the interaction between academicians and practitioners in the area of cloud computing?
Cloud computing is an industrial practice from grid computing, parallel computing and other academic researches. The interaction between academicians and practitioners is very important because 1) practitioners can share various challenges in practice which need to be considered in academic researches, and 2) academicians can present their researches verified by experiments or simulations which need to be evaluated in practical implementation. In a word, practitioners know where we should go while academicians can help us to find the right way.
How can cloud computing change the IT landscape? What kind of new products and services can we have thanks to the penetration of cloud computing into our lives?
This question has been discussed numerous times. In my opinion, the most important change is that cloud computing will promote the innovation of business models. End-users just focus on the services without concern of networks, hardware, OS, security, data, OAM, etc., which should be the responsibility of providers.
With the promotion of cloud computing, we can enjoy various novel products and services which were unavailable before. Specifically, I think the cloud-based information sharing applications have brought us great convenience, such as Dropbox, iCloud, OneDrive, Google Docs, etc. Through these applications we can create and share our information online and access them from anywhere.
