Modern distributed systems also deal with uncertain scenarios, where environments, infrastructures, and applications are widely diverse. In the scope of IoT-Edge-Fog-Cloud computing, leveraging these neuroscience-inspired principles and mechanisms could aid in building more flexible solutions able to generalize over different environments. A captivating set of hypotheses from the field of neuroscience suggests that human and animal brain mechanisms result from a few powerful principles. If proved to be accurate, these assumptions could open a deep understanding of the way humans and animals manage to cope with the unpredictability of events and imagination. In this talk, we will explore how Active Inference mechanisms can be utilized for Distributed Intelligence in the Computing Continuum.

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Schahram Dustdar is a Full Professor of Computer Science at the TU Wien, heading the Research Division of Distributed Systems, Austria and part-time ICREA research Professor at UPF Barcelona. He holds several honorary positions: University of California (USC) Los Angeles; Monash University in Melbourne, Shanghai University, Macquarie University in Sydney, and University Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona, Spain. From Dec 2016 until Jan 2017 he was a Visiting Professor at the University of Sevilla, Spain and from January until June 2017 he was a Visiting Professor at UC Berkeley, USA.
From 1999 – 2007, he worked as the co-founder and chief scientist of Caramba Labs Software AG in Vienna (acquired by ProjectNetWorld AG), a venture capital co-funded software company focused on software for collaborative processes in teams. He is the co-founder and chief scientist of Coovally.ai, an AI infrastructure company based in Barcelona.
He serves as Editor-in-Chief of Computing (Springer). Dustdar is the recipient of multiple awards: IEEE TCSVC Outstanding Leadership Award (2018), IEEE TCSC Award for Excellence in Scalable Computing (2019), ACM Distinguished Scientist (2009), ACM Distinguished Speaker (2021), IBM Faculty Award (2012). He is an elected member of the Academia Europaea: The Academy of Europe, as well as an IEEE Fellow(2016) and an Asia-Pacific Artificial Intelligence Association (AAIA) Fellow (2021) and was AAIA president (from 2020-2021).