Keynote Speakers

Director of Secretariat, ECHONET Consortium

Title: ECHONET, A Home Network that Supports Our Lifestyle

Biography: Seiichiro Matsumoto was born in 1950. He graduated from Musashi Institute of Technology in 1974. He has been working as the senior engineer in the Total Solutions Division at Hitachi Ltd in developing home network and sensor network operations. He is the vice chairman of the technical committee for household appliances network in The Japan Electrical Manufacturers’ Association (JEMA). From 1998 to 2004 he was the chairman of the ECHONET Consortium Steering Committee and developed, standardized, and promoted activities for the spread of ECHONET.
In 2006, he was awarded the Net-at Home Award at the international conference for Net-at Home 2006 held in Nice, France. He became the director general of the ECHONET Consortium from 2006.

University of Florida

Title: Quality-of-Life Engineering

A Paradigm Shift for the 21st Century

Biography: Dr. Sumi Helal is a Professor at the Computer and InformationScience and Engineering Department (CISE) at the Universityof Florida. His research interests span the areas of Pervasive Computing, Mobile Computing and networking and Internet Computing. He directs the Mobile and Pervasive Computing Laboratory and leads the technology development of the NIDRR-funded Rehabilitation Engineering Research Center on Successful Aging (RERC). He is co-founder and Director of the Gator Tech Smart House, an experimental home for applied pervasive computing research in thedomain of elder care. Additionally, he is founder, President and CEO of Phoneomena, Inc., a mobile application and middleware company, and founder and President of Pervasa, Inc., a University of Florida start-up focused on platform and middlewareproducts for sensor networks.
Outside of his teaching and research, Dr. Helal is a co-founder and an editorial board member of the IEEE Pervasive Computing magazine. He is the Editor of the magazine's column on Standards, Tools and Emerging Technologies. He is also an Associate Editor of the IEEE Transaction on Mobile Computing. He has published over 200 books, book chapters, journal articles, and conference or workshop papers. He is a Senior member of the Institute of Electricaland Electronics Engineers (IEEE), and a member of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and the USENIX Association.
Born in Suez, Egypt, Dr. Helal earned his B.E. and M.E. degrees in Computer Science and Engineering from Alexandria University, Egypt, in 1982 and 1985 respectively. He earned his Ph.D. in Computer Sciencesfrom Purdue University in 1991. Before joining the University of Florida, he held academic and industrial research positions at MCC, Purdue University and the University of Texas at Arlington.