Colloquia / Seminars / Industry Talks

A mobile ad-hoc network (MANET) is based on a self-organizing and rapidly deployed network of mobile devices to exchange information without using any pre-existing fixed network infrastructure. Mobile services (M-services) suit the healthcare scenarios in terms of the healthcare providers have to be highly cooperative and collaborative in an ad hoc manner. To meet the needs of highly mobile patients in healthcare institutions, mobile devices such as Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs) and tablet PCs are being used for storing entire patient histories and physicals, research data collection forms, the physician's reference desk, current care plans, and drug orders, as m-services. However, many healthcare institutions find it difficult to build such an infrastructure that can fully address privacy access control requirements, especially in light of recent changes in health privacy legislative environment. One reason is the lack of clear linkages from privacy considerations at a management-level conceptualization to the technology implementations of privacy access control mechanisms and solutions. The primary focus of this research project is the privacy access control enforcement model for healthcare applications of adapting mobile devices over MANETs in terms of emerging communication technologies. In particular, the major research challenge is that the mobile devices come together on an ad hoc basis in the sense that the devices had not been programmed a priori to work with each other. This talk will give an overview of all the related research issues in this context and discuss the future research directions.

Patrick C. K. Hung is an Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Business and Information Technology in UOIT and an Adjunct Assistant Professor at the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering in University of Waterloo. Patrick is currently collaborating with Boeing Phantom Works ( Seattle, USA ) and Bell Canada on security- and privacy-related research projects, and he has filed two US patent applications on "Mobile Network Dynamic Workflow Exception Handling System." In addition, Patrick is also cooperating on Web services composition research projects with Southeast University in China . He was a Research Scientist with Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization ( Canberra , Australia ) and a Visiting Assistant Professor at the Department of Computer Science in the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. Patrick has been serving as a panelist of the Small Business Innovation Research and Small Business Technology Transfer programs of the National Science Foundation (NSF) in the States since 2000. He is an executive committee member of the IEEE Computer Society's Technical Steering Committee for Services Computing, a steering member of EDOC “Enterprise Computing,” and an associate editor/editorial board member/guest editor in several international journals. He is the Program Co-Chair of the 9th IEEE EDOC 2005, the General Chair of the 10th IEEE EDOC 2006 and the Program Committee Vice-Chair of the 2006 IEEE SCC 2006 and 2007.