A Versatile Storage System for Future Networking Architecture

With the growth of social networks in recent years, user generated data such as videos, photos and blogs have become an important source of information in our life. However, user’s data are often locked in by a few giant application service providers (ASP), such as Facebook, Twitter, Tencent, etc. There are two drawbacks to this structure: 1) The ownership of user’s data belongs to ASPs. The user cannot share his or her data across different ASPs to reach a broader audience. 2) The user’s online social groups are fragmented by ASPs. That is, the members of a user’s social group, such as friends or colleagues, are scattered among different ASPs.

In this talk, we suggest a global storage system as the infrastructure of the Internet. With this approach, users would store their own data and social relations; effectively, the ownership of users’ data and users’ social relations is returned back to the users. The system would be an open structure in that it would provide a standard API to interact with ASPs. Users could publish or share their data with targeted social groups regardless which ASPs they are with. This global storage system could also support real-time data communication and integrate networking service with traditional file service.

About the Speaker

Xiaohua Jia received his BSc (1984) and MEng (1987) from University of Science and Technology of China, and DSc (1991) in Information Science from University of Tokyo. He is currently Chair Professor with the Department of Computer Science at City University of Hong Kong. His research interests include cloud computing and distributed systems, computer networks, wireless sensor networks and mobile wireless networks. Jia is an editor of IEEE Internet of Things, IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems (2006-2009), Wireless Networks, Journal of World Wide Web, Journal of Combinatorial Optimization, and more. He was the general chair of ACM MobiHoc 2008, area-chair of IEEE INFOCOM 2010 and 2015, technical program committee co-chair of IEEE GlobeCom 2010—Ad Hoc and Sensor Networking Symposium, and technical program committee vice-chair of ICDCS 2015. He is a fellow of IEEE.

Event Topic

Distinguished Lecture Series