|Speaker and Abstract
Affiliation: McGill University
Title: Research Overviews
Abstract: The first colloquium of the year will feature short presentations from a number of faculty members in the school of computer science. This is your opportunity to get a quick overview of the research that is happening in the department. Professors will talk about their research programs and recently published work, but more importantly they will also speak about current projects and future opportunities for new students. Come hear about new research problems, and then discuss with students and faculty over snacks and drinks at the reception that follows.
Biography of Speaker:
The following professors will be presenting research overviews:
- Brigitte Pientka
- Derek Ruths
- Doina Precup
- Greg Dudek
- Jerome Waldispuhl
- Luc Devroy
- Martin Robillard
- Paul Kry
Affiliation: Efi Arazi school of Computer Science, The Interdisciplinary Center, Herzliya
Title: Smart tools for photos and 3D models manipulation
Abstract: Powerful applications such as PhotoShop for images, AutoCad and Maya for 3D models,
allow manipulating and fabricating digital objects in unimaginable ways.
However, these tools are sophisticated and often very difficult to use.
One of the challenges in graphics and design today is to create simpler
tools that allow even novice users to use computers more naturally for
photographs and 3D objects manipulations.
In this talk I will present several such efforts including sketch2photo, sketch2-3D
and the recent 3-sweep technology (all joint works with students and colleagues).
The key factor in all these works is utilizing humans specifically for semantic, high-level
tasks that are very simple for them, and are still extremely difficult for machines, while
utilizing the machine for tasks that are tedious or hard for humans.
Biography of Speaker:
Ariel Shamir is an associate professor at the Efi Arazi school of Computer Science at the Interdisciplinary Center in Herzliya Israel. He received a B.Sc. and M.Sc. degrees in math and computer science Cum Laude from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, and a Ph.D. in computer science in 2000. He spent two years as a post-doctoral fellow at the computational visualization center at the University of Texas in Austin. In 2006 he held the position of visiting scientist at Mitsubishi Electric Research Labs in Cambridge MA. He has also had affiliations with Disney Research, Lawrence Livermore national laboratory, and a number of high-tech companies in Israel (Primesense, Sensomatix, Paieon medical, and more). His research interests include geometric modeling, computer graphics, visualization, and machine learning.
Affiliation: University of Pennsylvania
Title: Assuring the Safety of On-Demand Medical Cyber-Physical Systems
Abstract: On-demand medical cyber-physical systems are assembled from individual medical devices to treat a patient in a specific clinical scenario. We discuss an approach to establish safety of such a system. We treat such a system as a virtual medial device (VMD) and propose a model-based framework to describe and assess VMDs. The framework includes a modeling language with formal semantics for modeling VMDs and their constituent devices, and a medical application platform (MAP) that provides the necessary deployment support for the VMD models.
Biography of Speaker:
Oleg Sokolsky is a Research Associate Professor with the Department of Computer and Information Science of University of Pennsylvania. He is a member of the PRECISE Center (Penn Research in Embedded Computing and Integrated Systems), and Real-Time Systems group.
He received M.Sc. and Ph.D. in Computer Science from St. Petersburg Technical University and Stony Brook University, respectively. His main research interest is the application of formal methods to design and verification of distributed real-time systems. Other interests, all related to the main one, include on-line monitoring of distributed systems and formal foundations for it, hybrid systems, automated extraction of specifications from source code, and formal methods in software engineering in general and in embedded software in particular.
Title: Algorithmic Challenges for Greening Data Centers
Abstract: Everyone has heard the statistics about how much of an energy hog IT has become: The emissions of a server are nearly that of a car! The electricity usage of data centers is growing 12 times faster than that of the US as a whole! Given the significant energy consumption of data centers, improving their energy efficiency is an important social problem.
However, energy efficiency is necessary but not sufficient for sustainability, which demands reduced usage of energy from fossil fuels. In this talk, I will describe some recent work highlighting the algorithmic challenges associated with "greening" data centers. We will focus on two applications:(i) dynamic resizing within a data center; and (ii) geographical load balancing across an Internet-scale system. In both contexts I will present our new algorithms, which provide significantly improved performance guarantees when compared with the "standard" approaches using Receding Horizon Control. Additionally, if time allows, I will briefly discuss the our recent progress toward the implementation and evaluation of these algorithms in HP data centers, and the use of these algorithms within demand response markets.
Biography of Speaker:
Adam Wierman is a Professor in the Department of Computing and Mathematical Sciences at the California Institute of Technology, where he is a member of the Rigorous Systems Research Group (RSRG). His research interests center around resource allocation and scheduling decisions in computer systems and services. He received the ACM SIGMETRICS Rising Star award in 2011, and has been co-recipient of best paper awards at ACM SIGMETRICS, IEEE INFOCOM, IFIP Performance,
the IEEE Green Computing Conference, the IEEE Power and Energy Society General Meeting, and ACM GREENMETRICS. He was named a Seibel Scholar, received an Okawa Foundation grant, and received an NSF CAREER grant. Additionally, he has received multiple teaching awards, including the Associated Students of the California Institute f Technology (ASCIT) Teaching Award.
Affiliation: University of Southern California
Title: Architectural Decay in Software Systems: Symptoms, Causes, and Remedies
Abstract: Engineers frequently neglect to carefully consider the impact of their
changes to a software system. As a result, the software system's
architectural design eventually deviates from the original designers' intent
and degrades through unplanned introduction of new and/or invalidation of
existing design decisions. Architectural decay increases the cost of making
new modifications and decreases a system's reliability, until engineers are
no longer able to effectively evolve the system. At that point, the system's
actual architecture may have to be recovered from the implementation
artifacts, but this is a time-consuming and error-prone process, and leaves
critical issues unresolved: the problems caused by architectural decay will
likely be obfuscated by the system's many elements and their
interrelationships, thus risking further decay. In this talk I will focus on
pinpointing locations in a software system's architecture that reflect
architectural decay. I will discuss the reasons why that decay occurs.
Specifically, I will present an emerging catalog of commonly occurring
symptoms of decay -- architectural "smells". I will illustrate the
occurrence of smells identified in the process of recovering the
architectures of several real-world systems. Finally, I will provide a
comparative analysis of a number of automated techniques that aim to recover
a system's architectural design from the system's implementation.
Biography of Speaker:
Nenad Medvidović is a Professor and Associate Chair for Ph.D. Affairs in the
Computer Science Department at the University of Southern California.
Between 2009 and 2013 Medvidović served as Director of the USC Center for
Systems and Software Engineering (CSSE). He was the Program Co-Chair of the
2011 International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE 2011).
Medvidović received his Ph.D. in 1999 from the Department of Information and
Computer Science at UC Irvine. He is a recipient of the National Science
Foundation CAREER (2000) award, the Okawa Foundation Research Grant (2005),
the IBM Real-Time Innovation Award (2007), and the USC Mellon Mentoring
Award (2010). He is a co-author of the ICSE 1998 paper titled
"Architecture-Based Runtime Software Evolution", which was recognized as
that conference's Most Influential Paper. Medvidović's research interests
are in the area of architecture-based software development. His work focuses
on software architecture modeling and analysis; middleware facilities for
architectural implementation; domain-specific architectures; architectural
styles; and architecture-level support for software development in highly
distributed, mobile, resource constrained, and embedded computing
environments. He is a co-author of a textbook on software architectures.
Medvidović is a member of ACM, ACM SIGSOFT, IEEE, and IEEE Computer Society.
Affiliation: University of Massachusetts, Amherst & Akamai Technologies
Title: The Billion Dollar Question in Online Videos: How Video Performance Impacts Viewer Behavior?
Abstract: Online video is the killer application of the Internet. It is predicted that more than 85% of the consumer traffic on the Internet will be video-related by 2016. Yet, the future economic viability of online video rests squarely on our ability to understand how viewers interact with video content. For instance:
* If a video fails to start up quickly, would the viewer abandon?
* If a video freezes in the middle, would the viewer watch fewer minutes?
* If videos fail to load, is the viewer less likely to return to the same site?
In this talk, we outline scientific answers to these and other such questions, establishing a causal link between video performance and viewer behavior. One of the largest such studies, our work analyzes the video viewing habits of over 6.7 million viewers who in aggregate watched almost 26 million videos. To go beyond correlation and to establish causality, we develop a novel technique based on Quasi-Experimental Designs (QEDs). While QEDs are well known in the medical and social sciences, our work represents its first use in network performance research and is of independent interest.
This talk is of general interest and is accessible to a broad audience.
Biography of Speaker:
Prof. Ramesh K. Sitaraman is currently in the School of Computer Science at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. His research focuses on all aspects of Internet-scale distributed systems, including algorithms, architectures, performance, energy efficiency, user behavior, and economics. As a principal architect, he helped create the Akamai network and is an Akamai Fellow. He is best known for his pioneering role in creating the first large content delivery networks (CDNs) that currently deliver much of the world’s web content, streaming videos, and online applications.
Prof. Sitaraman is a recipient of an NSF CAREER Award and a Lilly Fellowship. He has served on numerous program committees and editorial boards of major conferences and journals. He received a B. Tech. in electrical engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras. and a Ph.D. in computer science from Princeton University.
Affiliation: McGill School of Environment
Title: Understanding Our Environment through Computational Landscape Ecology
Abstract: In recent years, the opportunities and challenges to understanding our environment have changed radically, as millions of people use technologies like Google Earth, Google Maps, and GPS-equipped smart phones to both use and make maps. These new technologies, mostly nonexistent or confined to research labs only a few years ago, are the product of years of satellite launches and image processing, algorithm development, and user-interface research. This explosion of interest in mapping technology has carried over into the field of geography itself, where advances in the availability of spatial data and the capacity to store and process them have greatly expanded our ability to understand both human-built and natural environments. As an example, Google recently released Google Earth Engine, a project to catalog and serve all of the world’s freely available satellite data for scientific use. Earth Engine uses Google's servers for its calculations, which opens up possibilities that are many orders of magnitude beyond what had been possible very recently. With the dramatic increase in availability and accessibility of spatial data through advances in remote sensing and GIS, virtual globes, and computing power, how will we gather and analyze environmental data in 5, 10, or 20 years? In this presentation I will present and explain some of the ways that algorithms and approaches (and students!) ported from computer science and electrical engineering can make considerable contributions in my field in the near future.
Biography of Speaker:
Jeffrey Cardille is an Associate Professor in McGill School of Environment and Natural Resource Sciences. He received a PhD and MSc in Environmental Monitoring from the University of Wisconsin, an MS in Industrial and Systems Engineering from Georgia Tech, and a BS in Applied Mathematics and Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon. Prior to his arrival at McGill in 2012, he was an Associate Professor in Géographie at the Université de Montréal. His research interests include Landscape ecology, land use and climate change, ecosystem and regional-scale hydrologic modeling, analysis of regional spatial land use patterns, geographic information science, and satellite remote sensing.
Affiliation: ÉTS Montréal
Title: A secure distance-bounding protocol preserving the anonymity of the participants
Abstract: Distance-bounding protocols are one of the best tools to thwart relay attacks against authentication protocols. In this talk, our objective is twofold. First, present distance-bounding protocols based on the public-key cryptography model that are secure against the typical attacks against such protocols. However, our main objective is to develop a distance-bounding protocol that protects the identity of the legitimate participants. A participant should be able to prove his location at a given time without having to reveal his identity.
Biography of Speaker:
Jean-Marc received his PhD from SOCS in 1991 and subsequently worked in both industry and academia. He is currently a Professor at the Department of Software and IT Engineering at École de technologie supérieure. His research activities focus on the security of information systems: from communication networks to enterprise networks, from embedded systems to distributed systems.