Workshop on Furture Trends and Technology By Bebo White

ACM SEECS chapter has always aimed to get the students familiarize with the present as well as future technological vogues. Keeping that perspective in mind ACM SEECS Chapter invited Mr. Bebo White to SEECS for a workshop on “Future Trends in Technology” on 18-19 March at SEECS NUST H-12 Islamabad.

INTRODUCTION OF BEBO WHITE:

Bebo White is a Departmental Associate (Emeritus) at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, operated by Stanford University. Professor White is the author of eight books and over one hundred journal/proceedings articles. His current research interests are Web Science, Social Media in Education, and Cloud Computing.

WORKSHOP-DAY 1:

Mr. White came to SEECS on 18^th March 2015 and as he arrived the activities of the event were started. The arrival of the participants took place at 10 am in SEECS seminar Hall and soon after that there was a welcome address by the Principal of SEECS, Dr. Arshad Ali. After Dr. Arshad’s welcome note finally Mr. White took over the stage and began his workshop with the 1^st topic i.e. “Cloud and Mobile Computing”. Mobile Cloud Computing (MCC) is the combination of cloud computing, mobile computing and wireless networks to bring rich computational resources to mobile users, network operators, as well as cloud computing providers. The ultimate goal of MCC is to enable execution of rich mobile applications

A short break was there after the 1^st session. The workshop resumed at 11:40 am and Mr. White continued with the topic of “Web Science and its impact on the future Web”. He explained the study of web and its impact on future technological vogues in detail. This was followed by the interactive session with the speaker in which the participants cleared their queries.  Soon after that there was lunch break for the guest and the participants and the session resumed at 2:30 pm. Mr. White continued amazing people with his next topic which was “Preparing for the Web of Things”. He explained that what should be our line of action if we want to cope with the changing world in terms of technology and expressed his views about changing of Web and measures needed to cope with it.

 This was the last topic of the workshop and after the lecture Mr. White allowed the participants to have a healthy discussion among them related to the topic. Besides this participants got to know each other as well and conversations went on for a while until Mr. White amazed every one with his selfie stick. He requested everyone to join him and the 1^st selfie with Mr. Bebo White was taken. Having a selfie stick clearly showed that Mr. Bebo White is such a jolly person full of enthusiasm.   

DAY 2 OF WORKSHOP:

Day 2 of the workshop began with the arrival of participants at 10 am. As the participants and the guest arrived the president of ACM SEECS Chapter Mr. Aadil Jalil Chaudhary gave a welcome address. After warm welcome the workshop began in full swing. Mr. White took over the stage and introduced the 1^st topic of Day 2 i.e. “Linked Open Data - A Step towards A Semantic Web”. In computing, linked data describes a method of publishing structured data so that it can be interlinked and become more useful through semantic queries. It builds upon standard Web technologies such as HTTP, but rather than using them to serve web pages for human readers, it extends them to share information in a way that can be read automatically by computers. This enables data from different sources to be connected and queried.

After the 1^st session a short break was taken and the session resumed at 11:40 am again. Now Mr. White introduced an interesting topic “Cyber-currency/Bitcoin” which attracted the attention of the speakers as this topic was related to the currency and money. Bitcoin is an online payment system invented by Satoshi Nakamoto, who published his invention in 2008, and released it as open-source software in 2009. The system is peer-to-peer; users can transact directly without needing an intermediary. Transactions are verified by network nodes and recorded in a public distributed ledger called the block chain.

 This was followed by the interactive session with the speaker and participants cleared the queries. After that on request of under graduate students Mr. White was invited to the SEECS lobby and fun/chit chat session took place and an interesting fact was revealed that Mr. White is a good singer and is a part of Jug Band who play music with a jug. Mr. White sang songs and delighted the audience with his awesome voice. Audience took a lot of pictures with him, asked questions and also sang folk songs depicting Pakistani culture to him (though he needed translation to understand those).

 He also told that his favorite Pakistani dish was chopped mutton and peas. After this fun session Bebo White took a lunch break and at 2:30 pm the workshop began again and the last topic of the workshop was “How Online Social Media Can Be Used to Build Rich Learning Environments”.

After this session there were closing remarks by the Pro-Rector. Mr. White distributed certificates among the participants and a shield was presented to Mr. White as a memoir. After that group pictures with Mr. Bebo White were taken and again the selfie stick was an object of focus for everyone. As the selfie stick was famous all over SEECS so at the end of day 2 Mr. White gifted that selfie stick to the ACM SEECS Chapter council as a gratitude for his warm welcome and enthusiasm of the participants.    

Report By 

Umer Ahmed Mehtab

(Vice Chair ACM SEECS Editorial Board)