Keynotes
Keynote 1
Speaker: Sara Alouf (INRIA Sophia Antipolis, France)
Title: TBA
Abstract: TBD
Biography: Sara Alouf is an Associate Researcher at Inria and vice-head of the Network Engineering and Operations group. Prior to joining Inria in March 2004, Sara held a post-doctoral position at Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam, within the Optimization of Business Processes group. She received her Habilitation in 2017 from the Université Côte d’Azur, my Ph.D. and M.Sc. from the Université Nice Sophia Antipolis in 2002 and 1999, respectively. Sara holds an Electrical and Electronics Engineering Degree from the Lebanese University, obtained in 1998. While at Inria, she have been involved in the common labs between Inria and Alcatel-Lucent (now Nokia) and between Inria and Alstom Transport. Sara has co-authored three patents. She was in the board of directors of ACM Sigmetrics (July 2019 - June 2023) and serves/served in the technical program committees of ACM Sigmetrics and MobiHoc, Performance, IEEE Infocom and Globecom, ITC, Valuetools, and WIOPT. She was the general co-chair and treasurer of the ACM Sigmetrics/IFIP Performance 2016 conference and general co-chair of ITC 36. Sara is a member of the ACM and ACM Sigmetrics and serve as Associated Editor for IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking and Elsevier Computer Communications. Her research interests include stochastic modeling and performance evaluation of communication networks.
Keynote 2
Speaker: Giuliano Casale (Imperial College London, UK)
Title: Stacks, Lists and Permanents: An Ordered Walk through New Product Forms
Abstract: Product-form solutions underpin tractable performance analysis, leveraging normalizing constant algorithms and mean value analysis to avoid enumerating huge state spaces. Classic BCMP/Kelly queueing networks build much of this tractability upon position insensitivity, namely their stationary distribution formulas remain invariant to the order of jobs at each station, depending only on counts. Order-independent and pass-and-swap queues allow more flexibility in characterizing job mixes, but still do not encompass full positional dependence.
This talk discusses product-form solutions that are sensitive to the positions of the moving units at each resource, focusing on both jobs in queues and items in caches. We review in particular recent developments on three families of models: cyclic multiclass last-come first-serve (LCFS) networks, where the state tracks the order of jobs in each LCFS stack; list-based caches, where the state tracks the position of each item across lists; and stochastic models bridging caches and queueing networks. We also reason about the matrix permanent as a mathematical tool to support position-aware product-form analysis, expressing probability computations as sums over orderings.
Biography: Giuliano Casale joined the Department of Computing at Imperial College London in 2010, where he is currently a Reader. His research focuses on quality-of-service engineering and cloud computing, areas in which he has published more than 200 refereed papers. He has helped organize and lead several conferences in performance and reliability engineering, including serving as program co-chair for ACM SIGMETRICS/Performance and IEEE/IFIP DSN. His collaborative research has been recognized with best paper awards at ACM SIGMETRICS, IEEE/IFIP DSN, and IEEE INFOCOM. From 2019 to 2023, he served as chair of ACM SIGMETRICS, followed by a term as Editor-in-Chief of Elsevier Performance Evaluation from 2023 to 2026. He currently serves on the editorial boards of ACM TOMPECS and ACM TAAS.