New Keynote: The Limits of Cloud Computing and the Emergence of Edge Computing
In 2024, the cloud computing market was estimated to be over $600 billion in value. The cloud lies at the heart of virtually all of the recent advances in machine learning (ML) and ML-based artificial intelligence (AI). Large Language Models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT have captured the popular imagination. Cloud computing was crucial to the work that won the Nobel Prize in Physics, and the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2024. For the foreseeable future, cloud computing will continue to be a dominant paradigm.
What accounts for this stunning success of cloud computing? What could possibly threaten its dominance? In this talk, we will explore how the constraints of latency, bandwidth scalability, privacy, data sovereignty, and disconnection-tolerance pose fundamental limits to what cloud computing can deliver in real-world settings, especially adversarial settings. Cloudlet-based edge computing aims to “bring the cloud closer” to relieve these pain points. The successful real-time AI systems of the future will seamlessly fuse the strengths of cloud computing and edge computing. What are some of the transformative cyber-human and cyber-physical systems that will emerge? What challenges will edge computing face, both in adversarial and non-adversarial settings? What is the role of application-specific hardware accelerators in real-time AI?
From the 2025 IEEE World Congress on SERVICES (SERVICES 2025).