Koolau Ballrooms

Hale Koa Hotel

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Windward Mall Center Court

Practical Instruction on Ufer Grounds : vTools Events (ieee.org)

James Mercier, P.E.

Concrete encased electrodes for grounding electrical power systems, also called Ufer grounds, are highly effective grounding systems when installed correctly. James will explain what constitutes a Ufer ground and how one can be easily constructed in accordance with IEEE Standard 142-2007 (the Green Book) and the National Electrical Code (NEC). He will also explain what common errors and myths surround Ufer grounds as well as an error in the IEEE Green Book, and errors interpreting the NEC. James will also explain how Ufer grounds are essential to effective lightning protection systems. James’ background as an experienced construction electrician and a BS Civil Engineer make him uniquely qualified to explain civil/structural concepts and practices and how they are relevant to his fellow Electrical Engineers.

eSports: Managing Competition With Network Latency Challenges : vTools Events (ieee.org)

Dr. Sky Kauweloa, Esports, University of Hawaii

For the global esports industry, the notion of a "fair and even playing field" in competitive video game play between teams located at vast distances from each other has been central to the immense growth and popularity of esports globally. However, in order to institute an environment where players feel that no other location holds a distinct advantage over other locations when it comes to the speed (measured in milliseconds) that data is transferred between geographic sites ("ping"), professional esports players often seek conditions in which they can exploit, save, or counter any perceived imbalances at which some players may have faster ping than others.  

In this presentation, Dr. Kauweloa will be exploring the controversies of ping (the network transmission of data measured as latency) through the experiences of the University of Hawai’i at Manoa (UHM) esports program. The UH Esports program is home to 8 highly competitive collegiate esports varsity teams, all of whom play out of the university’s iLab. In order to be at peak performance, the players constantly seek ways of improving their network connections to game servers. Because of the geographic location of Hawai’i, however, there are limitations to what can be done to fully address, or significantly eliminate, the issue of latency for competitive players.

The popularity and visibility of the UH Esports program provide an interesting insight into the broader discussion of latency. Of course, the complexities around the speed at which data is moved between locations are not just a problem for highly competitive “gamers,” but touch on issues far broader: the execution of services with real-time internet applications, mobile user experiences, and perceptions within augmented reality spaces. The goal of the presentation is to invigorate discussion among technologists, engineers, and interested individuals who are interested in understanding this particular technology problem for Hawai’i. 

Privacy algorithms: Research Practice and Transfer to Industry : vTools Events (ieee.org)

Dr. Olivera Kotevska, Oak Ridge National Laboratories

Today we face an explosion of systems from health monitoring to national security infrastructure that generate and collect vast data daily. Increasingly, these systems use machine learning methods for intelligent decisions, prone to cyber-security attacks. So, we ask how data privacy should be protected in a world where data is gathered and shared with increasing speed and ingenuity. This presentation will describe several privacy techniques for streaming data protection, frameworks for machine learning, and privacy attacks. We will share results using real-world datasets and ORNL testbed and describe best practices. The talk concludes with a brief discussion of present open challenges in privacy-preserving algorithms and how the research findings can be transferred to industry.

Facilitating Security and Trust among Multiple Parties through Blockchain Techniques : vTools Events (ieee.org)

Dr. Yuhong Liu, Santa Clara University

In this talk, Dr. Yuhong Liu will discuss some key characteristics of blockchain and a few promising applications of blockchain that can facilitate security and trust among multiple parties. Some examples include applying blockchain to secure software updates for resource-constrained IoT networks; designing a secure and efficient multi-signature scheme to facilitate multi-party approval process on Fabric, an enterprise blockchain platform; and facilitating fair trading of digital-goods via a blockchain based proxy re-encryption scheme.

With the prosperity of edge computing, massive users and devices at the edge of the computer networks are more actively involved in the networks, pushing the information collection, computation, storage, and communications more towards end users. In these more decentralized systems, how to enable efficient and trustworthy interactions among different parties becomes an essential issue. 

Blockchain has been considered as a promising approach to facilitate the establishment of decentralized trustworthy computing systems with non-repudiated information records. With the emergence of Bitcoin, blockchain has attracted wide attention as a secure and decentralized platform to enable peer-to-peer exchanges of digital currency. However, Bitcoin can only support simple scripts, which limit its major applications to only decentralized finance. Ethereum is the most well-known permissionless blockchain platform that generalizes the system as a state machine and enables smart contracts, a piece of code that can support complex logic and be self-executed when certain conditions are met. Such generalization enables blockchain to potentially serve as a computing infrastructure to facilitate secure and decentralized interactions among any parties without making high trust assumptions about them.