'Computing is undergoing at least five generational changes at the same time'

We are thrilled to welcome Dr. Haitham J. Taha (University of Technology, Baghdad, Iraq) as a keynote speaker at ICFITT 2017, 1st EAI International Conference on Future Internet Technologies and Trends, which will take place between August 31 – September 2, 2017, in Surat, India. Topics of our conversation include expanding sensor count, relationship between academia and industry, and 5G.
Could you summarize the scope of your current work and what you are coming to share with everyone at ICFITT 2017?
My prime field of interest is communications engineering, especially in the wireless mobile systems; my research activity has concentrated primarily on current and new technologies around the world.

Keynote 2
Dr. Haitham J. Taha (University of Technology, Baghdad)

My current research activities concentrate solely on attempts to integrate more than modern technology in communications. It is aimed at optimization and the advantages and characteristics of these techniques in order to yield good signal-to-noise ratio with smallest possible loss in the communication system.
What do you see as the biggest future challenges for internet technologies?
Through the next years, it is expected that more than a trillion sensors will be connected to the internet. The data or even the devices will be incorporated into existing organizational processes to provide information on the location, status, activity, and functionality of those systems, as well as information related to the people who own and operate them.
But how will this affect our personal privacy, data security and our personal relationships?
We have several challenges: Security, Enterprises, Privacy, Data, Storage Management, Server Technologies and Data Center Network.
The problem lies in the nature of the IoT itself. It will connect remote devices and systems and provide a data stream between the devices and decentralized management systems. The amount and type of information differs from other sets of big data that derived from social media.
What would you say are the main trends in this area currently?
There’s a rapidly expanding gap between what the technology world is working on and what the enterprise can deliver. Many feel that emphasis on technology is wrong right now, and they’re certainly right, if it’s not integrated with top priority business objectives. However, these days it is technological improvements and new digital markets that are often considered the key to an organization’s future.
There are at least five major “generational scale” changes in the computing landscape occurring at about the same time: Delivery platforms are shifting (mobility, cloud, social), communication and collaboration channels are being reinvented (web, mobile, social), the consumer world of technology is motivating innovation, and data is opening up and exploding out of the proliferating apps, devices, and sensors that organizations are deploying or are connecting to.
5G is one of the hottest topics when talking about wireless connectivity, so on that note – many say that 5G will be a mixture of technologies, only a couple of which are ultra-densification, millimeter wave communications, and dynamic spectrum access. Of course, there is a lot of research being done in this field, but which technologies, in your opinion, will be those that end up dominating 5G?
Until now, many technical challenges remain in the design of robust and fast wireless systems that supply the performance necessary to support emerging applications. This is due to the fact that wireless channels are frequency selective, power-limited, and susceptible to noise and interference. Demand for high data rate and growing applications obtainable by a wireless device calls for an operative method. Due to limit on the available bandwidth, there is need for exploiting the available bandwidth in a way such that maximum advantage is obtained.
To make the future of communication a reality will necessitate extensive collaboration between academia and industry, which can ultimately benefit everyone.
5G – There is so much publicity on this. People claim that spectral efficiency would increase the current spectral efficiency 1000 times by using the mixture of this technology, but that is again not per user, but over an area/cell.
Although research in 4G is still going on, that doesn’t mean that we are not taking care of the next generation; adamant research in 5G technology is still going on. There is profound desire to accomplish this by developing a unified 5G design that is scalable and adaptable across an extreme variation of usage together with the support of all spectrum types.

ICFITT 2017 is still accepting papers! Find out more.