Abstract: Cloud computing has been adopted as a popular computing model for the development, deployment and provision of complex delay-sensitive applications. It provides infrastructure, platform, and software as services to the users in a pay-as-you-go basis. However, for efficient cloud performance and consumers' satisfaction, issues related to resource allocation, application scheduling, cost, quality of service, timeliness and energy conservation need to be addressed. A challenging problem is to run complex real-time applications in the cloud. Therefore, effective scheduling techniques should be employed ensuring that the deadlines of applications will be met. Recently, due to the explosive growth of Internet of Things applications, fog computing has emerged as a novel computing paradigm beyond cloud computing to cope with large network traffic and communication delay. Most of the IoT applications are delay-sensitive and they face the problem of large latency. Therefore, they require new scheduling techniques for timeliness. Real-time applications should be assigned to resources at the fog and cloud layers, based on their communication and computational characteristics. In this talk we will present recent research covering various concepts on scheduling real-time applications in cloud and fog systems and we will provide future directions and challenges in the cloud and fog computing area.

Biographical note: Helen Karatza is a Professor Emeritus in the Department of Informatics at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece, where she teaches courses in the postgraduate and undergraduate level and carries out research. Dr. Karatza's research interests include Computer Systems Modeling and Simulation, Performance Evaluation, Fog and Cloud Computing, Energy Efficiency in Large Scale Distributed Systems, Resource Allocation and Scheduling and Real-time Distributed Systems. Dr. Karatza has authored or co-authored over 225 technical papers and book chapters including five papers that earned best paper awards at international conferences. She is senior member of IEEE, ACM and SCS, and she served as an elected member of the Board of Directors at Large of the Society for Modeling and Simulation International. She served as Chair and Keynote Speaker in International Conferences.

Dr. Karatza is the Editor-in-Chief of the Elsevier Journal "Simulation Modeling Practice and Theory" and Senior Associate Editor of the "Journal of Systems and Software" of Elsevier. She was Editor-in-Chief of "Simulation Transactions of The Society for Modeling and Simulation International" and Associate Editor of "ACM Transactions on Modeling and Computer Simulation". She served as Guest Editor of Special Issues in International Journals. More info about her activities/publications can be found in http://agent.csd.auth.gr/~karatza/