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Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Events for January
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CS Colloquium: Vishal Misra (Columbia University) - The Network Neutrality Debate: An Engineering Perspective
Tue, Jan 13, 2015 @ 04:00 PM - 05:15 PM
Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Vishal Misra , Columbia University
Talk Title: The Network Neutrality Debate: An Engineering Perspective
Series: CS Colloquium
Abstract: The issue of Network Neutrality has ignited considerable public debate recently. While the term and much of the discussion originated in the legal community, we started looking at it from an engineering and networking perspective a few years ago. We employed the lens of cooperative game theory and a careful modeling of the Internet including the topology, peering relationships and protocols used on the Internet. Our primary conclusion is that Network Neutrality as an issue is secondary to that of the real problem, that of lack of market competition amongst broadband providers. We present some of our results including our prediction back in 2008 of a rise in paid peering (this year Netflix signed paid peering arrangements with all 4 of the top broadband providers in the US), the inadequacies of strict Network Neutrality regulation when competition exists and our proposal of a Public Option ISP that solves the problems of a "non neutral network" without needing any regulatory support. We also discuss some open issues regarding Network Neutrality in the wireless context.
This Lecture will be available to stream HERE. (please right-click to load in a separate tab for optimal performance).
Biography: Vishal Misra is an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Columbia University. His research emphasis is on mathematical modeling of networking systems, bridging the gap between practice and analysis. He served as the Vice-Chair of the Computer Science Department at Columbia University from 2009 to 2011, and in 2011 he spun out Infinio, a company in the area of datacenter storage. The company is based in Kendall Square and employs more than 50 people. He is also credited with inventing live-microblogging at Cricinfo, a company he co-founded while a graduate student at UMass Amherst, predating Twitter by 10 years. Cricinfo was later acquired by ESPN and is still the worldâs most popular sports portal.
Host: CS Networked Systems Laboratory
Location: Henry Salvatori Computer Science Center (SAL) - 101
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Assistant to CS chair
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CS Colloquium: Michael Reiter (UNC) - Side Channels in Multi Tenant Environments
Tue, Jan 20, 2015 @ 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Michael Reiter, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Talk Title: Side Channels in Multi Tenant Environments
Series: CS Colloquium
Abstract: With the growth of cloud computing, the security provided by public clouds to their tenants is increasingly being scrutinized, in part because these clouds arrange for mutually distrustful tenants to simultaneously execute tasks on the same hardware. In this talk we explore a long-suspected but, to date, largely hypothetical attack vector in public clouds, namely 'side-channel attacks' in which one tenant might learn sensitive information about another tenant simply by running on the same hardware with it, but without violating the logical access control enforced by the cloud's isolation software (hypervisor or operating system). Specifically, we demonstrate the practicality of damaging cross-tenant side channel attacks on modern hypervisors and operating systems, including some that we have demonstrated on commercial public clouds. We will then describe various approaches we have developed to defend against side-channel attacks in cloud environments, both inexpensive defenses against our specific attacks and more holistic but expensive protections.
Biography: Michael Reiter is the Lawrence M. Slifkin Distinguished Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC). He received the B.S. degree in mathematical sciences from UNC in 1989, and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science from Cornell University in 1991 and 1993, respectively. He joined AT&T Bell Labs in 1993 and became a founding member of AT&T Labs - Research when NCR and Lucent Technologies (including Bell Labs) were split away from AT&T in 1996. He then returned to Bell Labs in 1998 as Director of Secure Systems Research. In 2001, he joined Carnegie Mellon University as a Professor of Electrical & Computer Engineering and Computer Science, where he was also the founding Technical Director of CyLab. He joined the faculty at UNC in 2007.
Dr. Reiter's research interests include all areas of computer and communications security and distributed computing. He regularly publishes and serves on conference organizing committees in these fields. He served as program chair for the the flagship computer security conferences of the IEEE, the ACM, and the Internet Society, and of the flagship dependability conference of the IEEE; as Editor-in-Chief of ACM Transactions on Information and System Security; and on the editorial boards of IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing, the International Journal of Information Security, and Communications of the ACM. He also served on the Emerging Technology and Research Advisory Committee for the United States Department of Commerce for four years.
Dr. Reiter was named an ACM Fellow in 2008 and an IEEE Fellow in 2014.
Host: Teamcore
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 248
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Assistant to CS chair
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CS Colloquium: Dr. Chris Paredis (NSF) - A Theoretical Framework for Systems Engineering and Design - Asking "Why?" rather than just "How?"
Tue, Jan 27, 2015 @ 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Dr. Chris Paredis, National Science Foundation
Talk Title: A Theoretical Framework for Systems Engineering and Design - Asking "Why?" rather than just "How"?
Series: CS Colloquium
Abstract: An important component of the Engineering and Systems Design (ESD) and Systems Science (SYS) programs at the National Science Foundation is the development of a theoretical foundation for systems engineering and design. In this presentation, I will motivate the need for a theoretical framework and explain what it is. As an example, a model for systems engineering and design will be introduced in which the artifact development process is modeled as a search process. Unlike many models in the literature, this model provides an explanation for (rather than just a description of) current practices. Related to the need for a theoretical framework is the need for rigorous research methodology. I will therefore present some thoughts on the desired characteristics of a rigorous research methodology for systems engineering and design. The presentation will end with some logistical details about the NSF programs and an opportunity for Q&A. The overall goal is to increase the success of principal investigators when submitting proposals to the ESD or SYS programs.
Biography: Dr. Chris Paredis is Program Director for the Engineering and Systems Design (ESD) and Systems Science (SYS) programs at the National Science Foundation. He is also Professor of Mechanical Engineering in the G.W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering, and in the H.M. Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering at Georgia Tech, Atlanta, USA. He is a Woodruff Faculty Fellow and Director of the Model-Based System Engineering Center. He holds graduate degrees in Mechanical Engineering from the Catholic University of Leuven (Belgium) and in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Carnegie Mellon University.
Dr. Paredis' research focuses on Model-Based Systems Engineering, combining aspects of decision theory, information technology, simulation, and systems theory to support the design of complex mechatronic systems. In these areas, he has published more than 140 refereed book chapters, journal articles and conference papers. He has made significant contributions to the development of the theory, methods and tools for decision making in design and systems engineering, and has developed several decision support tools using the SysML and Modelica languages. As Director of the Model-Based Systems Engineering Center, he leads a group of 11 faculty members towards the development of a next generation of systems engineering methods that are value-driven, model-based and human-centered.
Within the Object Management Group (OMG), he served on the SysML Revision Task Force and has led the development of the SysML-Modelica Transformation Specification. He was a founding board member of the North America Modelica Users' Group, and served on the working group responsible for the INCOSE "Systems Engineering Vision 2025." He is also a member of the Technical Advisory Board for Integrated Model-Centric Engineering Program at NASA/JPL, is past Chair of the ASME Computers and Information in Engineering division, and has served as Conference Chair for the 2013 Conference on Systems Engineering Research (CSER'13) and the 2007 Computers and Information in Engineering Conference (CIE'07).
Dr. Paredis has served as Associate Editor for the SAE Journal of Commercial Vehicles and the ASME Journal of Mechanical Design. He currently serves as co-Editor of the ASME book series, "Advances in Computers and Information in Engineering Research." He received the 2007 CETL/BP Junior Faculty Teaching Excellence Award, the 2007 SAE Ralph R. Teetor Educational Award, and the 2011 ASME CIE Excellence in Research Award.
Host: CSSE
Location: Auditorium
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Assistant to CS chair
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CS Colloquium Lecture Series: Rich Caruana (Microsoft Research) - Do Deep Nets Really Need To Be Deep?
Tue, Jan 27, 2015 @ 04:00 PM - 05:30 PM
Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Rich Caruana , Microsoft Research
Talk Title: Do Deep Nets Really Need To Be Deep?
Series: CS Colloquium
Abstract: Currently, deep neural networks are the state of the art on problems such as speech recognition and computer vision. By using a method called model compression, we show that shallow feed-forward nets can learn the complex functions previously learned by deep nets and achieve accuracies previously only achievable with deep models while using the same number of parameters as the original deep models. On the TIMIT phoneme recognition and CIFAR-10 image recognition tasks, shallow nets can be trained that perform similarly to complex, well-engineered, deeper convolutional architectures. The same model compression trick can also be used to compress impractically large deep models and ensembles of large deep models down to âmedium-sizeâ deep models that run more efficiently on servers, and down to âsmallâ models that can run on mobile devices. In machine learning and statistics we used to believe that one of the keys to preventing overfitting was to keep models simple and the number of parameters small to force generalization. We no longer believe this --- learning appears to generalize best when training models with excess capacity, but the learned functions can often be represented with far fewer parameters.
The lecture can be streamed HERE
Host: Yan Liu
Location: Henry Salvatori Computer Science Center (SAL) - 101
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Assistant to CS chair
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CS Colloquium: Prof. Martin Robillard (McGill University) - Automating Support for Evolving Software Documentation
Wed, Jan 28, 2015 @ 03:00 PM - 05:00 PM
Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Prof. Martin Robillard, McGill University
Talk Title: Automating Support for Evolving Software Documentation
Series: CS Colloquium
Abstract: Technical documentation is essential for software developers to learn and use a technology. The combined documentation for current software technologies represents a massive collection of engineering knowledge, yet the quality of this information is threatened every day by the rapid pace of change of software components and applications.
In this talk I will then present novel analysis techniques to
partially automate the maintenance of software documentation. Analyzing software documentation requires linking unstructured text with specific software elements. This task is notoriously difficult due to the inherent ambiguity of unstructured natural language. One of our techniques identifies code-like terms in documents and links these terms to specific code elements in an API. Building on this work, we developed a second technique that automatically discovers documentation patterns, i.e., coherent sets of code elements that are documented together. We use this technique to report violations of documentation patterns as the code and the documentation evolves.
The talk will conclude with a discussion of the implications of this work for software engineering and a presentation of further avenues for research on the representation and evolution of technical knowledge.
Biography: Martin Robillard is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at McGill University. His current research focuses on problems related to API usability, information discovery, and knowledge management in software engineering. He recently served as the Program Co-Chair for the 20th ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering and on the editorial board of the IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering and is currently on the editorial board of Empirical Software Engineering. He received his Ph.D. and M.Sc. in Computer Science from the University of British Columbia and a B.Eng. from Ãcole Polytechnique de Montréal.
Host: Nenad Medvidovic
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 248
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Assistant to CS chair
