Big Data: Technologies, Algorithms and Applications:

In this age, big data applications are increasingly becoming the main focus of attention because of the enormous increment of data generation and storage that has taken place in the last years, in science, business, ... This situation becomes a challenge when huge amounts of data are processed to extract knowledge because the data mining techniques are not adapted to the new space and time requirements. We must consider the new paradigms to develop scalable algorithms. In this tutorial we will introduce briefly the technologiesthat haveemerged stronglyin recent years (Hadoop ecosystem, Spark, Flink, …)and the libraries such as MLlib, … We will pay attention to the bridge from big data to smart data using data preprocessing techniques for big data. The process to create an algorithm under the MapReduce paradigm will be discussed, presenting some case of study and applications.

Salvador García received the M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science from the University of Granada, Granada, Spain, in 2004 and 2008, respectively. He is currently an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence, University of Granada, Granada, Spain. He has published more than 60 papers in international journals. He is a member of the editorial board of “Information Fusion” (Elsevier) and “AI Communications” (IOS Press), and he is co-Editor in Chief of the international journal “Progress in Artificial Intelligence” (Springer). He is a co-author of the book entitled “Data Preprocessing in Data Mining” published by Springer. His research interests include data science, data preprocessing, Big Data, evolutionary learning, statistical inference, metaheuristics and biometrics. He belongs to the list of the Highly Cited Researchers in the area of Computer Sciences (2014-2015): http://highlycited.com/ (Thomson Reuters). His h-index is 33 in Scholar Google, receiving more than 8,000 citations.

Sergio Ramírez-Gallego received the M.Sc. degree in Computer Science in 2012 from the University of Jaén, Spain. He is currently a Ph.D. student at the Department of Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence, University of Granada, Spain. He has published in the areas of data preprocessing, online learning and big data. He is an active developer that has contributed to GitHub with several solutions for large-scale learning on Apache Spark. This software has been extensively used by companies and experts. He has also spread the word of Spark across many conferences and courses.

Mobile and Ubiquitous Personal Identification using Contactless Finger Knuckle Biometrics:

A range of biometrics modalities have high privacy concerns, lower accuracy, concerns from hygienic and/or infrared radiations, and stigma associated with their usage in the criminal investigation which results in low user-acceptance. Such concerns can be addressed by incorporating finger knuckle images which is relatively new biometrics. This tutorial will discuss on the usage of finger knuckle biometrics for e-business, law-enforcement and forensic applications. In particular, the technical solutions for automatically recovering/matching major and minor knuckle modalities will be discussed. We will also discuss on knuckle minutiae recovery/matching, smartphone applications, and stability of knuckle patterns due to physiological growth/ageing. A range of publicly available contactless databases and open research problems in this area will also be discussed during this tutorial.

Prof. Ajay Kumar received the Ph.D. degree from the University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, in 2001. He was an Assistant Professor with the Department of Electrical Engineering, IIT Delhi, Delhi, India, from 2005 to 2007. He is currently working an Assistant Professor with the Department of Computing, Hong Kong Polytechnic University. His current research interests are on biometrics with an emphasis on hand biometrics, vascular biometrics, iris, and multimodal biometrics. He holds five U.S. patents, and has authored extensively on biometrics and computer vision-based industrial inspection. He is an area editor for the Pattern Recognition Letters Journal and serves on the IEEE Biometrics Council as the Vice President (Publications). He was on the Editorial Board of the IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics & Security from 2010 to 2013, and served on the program committees of several international conferences and workshops in the field of his research interest. He was the Program Chair of the Third International Conference on Ethics and Policy of Biometrics and International Data Sharing in 2010, the Program Co-Chair of IJCB 2011 (Washington DC), ICB 2013 (Madrid), CVPR Biometrics Workshop in 2013-2015 and has served as General Co-Chair for IJCB 2014 (Tampa) and ISBA 2015 (Hong Kong).