SUNMONTUEWEDTHUFRISAT
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Events for March
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CS Colloquium
Tue, Mar 03, 2009 @ 04:00 PM
Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Collection, Cataloging, Preservation, Access and Education using Video testimonies of Holocaust and other genocide survivors at the USC Shoah Foundation Institute
Speaker: Sam Gustman, USC Shoah Foundation
Host: Prof. Ellis HorowitzAbstract:
The USC Shoah Foundation Institute was originally a non-profit founded by Steven Spielberg in 1994 called the Shoah Foundation. In 2006, the archives and staff became a part of USC. The technology for collecting, cataloging, indexing, digitally preserving, accessing and educating at the Institute will be discussed. This includes methodology for making over 100,000 hours of video available online and the infrastructure necessary to preserve the testimonies.Biography:
Sam Gustman has been Chief Technology Officer of the Shoah Foundation since 1994 and was responsible for overseeing the 2006 move of the Foundation's archives to USC. As CTO of the USC Shoah Foundation Institute, Gustman ensures the archive's accessibility for academic and research communities at USC and around the world. He is responsible for the operation, preservation, and cataloging of the Institute's 105,000 hours of video testimony, the 8 petabyte digital video preservation effort, and 135-terabyte digital library effort, one of the largest public video databases in the world. His office offers technical support for universities and organizations that subscribe to the Institute's Visual History Archive. Gustman has sixteen years of leadership experience in information technology, and is the inventor of 11 patents on digital library technology for the USC Shoah Foundation Institute. He has also been the primary investigator on National Science Foundation research projects with a cumulative funding total of more than $8 million. Gustman has a bachelor of science in engineering, with a focus in computer engineering, from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.Location: Seaver Science Library (SSL) - 150
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: CS Colloquia
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Organic Computing - a Generic Approach to Controlled Self-organization in Adaptive Systems
Wed, Mar 04, 2009 @ 03:30 PM
Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Prof. Hartmut Schmeck, University of Karlsruhe
Host: Prof. Neno MedvidovicAbstract:
Organic Computing is a recent paradigm for the design and management of complex technical systems, addressing the need for adaptive, self-organizing systems which are capable of dealing with changing requirements and unanticipated situations in a robust and trustworthy way and which allow an external "observer" or "user" to interfere and influence the system whenever it does not show acceptable behavior by itself. Research in this area is supported by a priority program of the German Research Foundation ( www.organic-computing.de/SPP ). The talk will present the generic observer/controller architecture of Organic Computing and describe our research on organic traffic control and on smart energy systems. Furthermore, the talk will highlight the close connection to COMMputation, a newly formed focus area of research at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, emphasizing the inherent combination of communication and computation in a broad range of complex application systems.Biography:
Hartmut Schmeck is a Full Professor of Applied Informatics at the University of Karlsruhe within the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology - KIT (Gernany). He is (co-)author of more than 110 publications on advanced algorithms and architectures, in particular on bio-inspired methods in optimization and algorithms for reconfigurable architectures. His current major research interest is on self-organization and adaptivity in complex technical systems. He is the principal investigator of research projects on information and communication technologies in energy and traffic systems. He has been program and conference chair for several international workshops and conferences, is a key member of the "Organic Computing Initiative" and coordinator of the DFG priority program SPP 1183 on "Organic Computing". At the KIT, he is the Scientific Spokesperson of the newly formed KIT-Focus Area "COMMputation" addressing the inherent combination of communication and computation that is a characteristic feature of smart application systems.Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: CS Colloquia
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A Survey of Some Recent Research at the Border of Game Theory and Theoretical Computer Science
Thu, Mar 05, 2009 @ 04:00 PM
Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
CS Distinguished Lecture
Speaker: Prof. Anna Karlin, University of Washington
Host: Prof. David KempeAbstract:
The design of protocols for resource allocation and electronic commerce among parties with diverse and selfish interests has spawned a great deal of recent research at the boundary between economics, game theory and computer science.In the process, completely new areas of research have emerged such as computational economics. We need to understand the complexity of computing various equilibria. New notions such as the "price of anarchy" arise in an attempt to quantify the efficiency lost due to selfish behavior in natural games. Finally, there is "mechanism design", a fascinating subfield of game theory and microeconomics, focusing on "incentive engineering". A mechanism is an algorithm or protocol that is explicitly designed so that rational participants, motivated solely by their self-interest, will end up achieving the designer's goals.In this talk, we survey some of the research and open problems in these areas. (No background in game theory will be assumed.)Biography:
Anna Karlin is a Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Washington. She received her Ph.D. from Stanford University and then spent 5 years as a researcher at (what was then) Digital Equipment Corporation's Systems Research Center before coming to the University of Washington. Her professional activities have included serving on the National Research Council's Computer Science and Telecommunications Board, the editorial board for SIAM Journal on Computing, the committee to award the ACM Paris Kanellakis Theory and Practice Award (including chairing that committee in 2006), and serving as Program Chair for the 1997 IEEE Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science. She has given a number of Distinguished Lectures at major universities including among others MIT, Brown, Penn and Duke.Her research is primarily in theoretical computer science: the design and analysis of algorithms, particularly probabilistic and online algorithms. Much of her work is also at the interface between theory and other areas, such as economics and game theory, data mining, operating systems, networks, and distributed systems.Outside of work, her main claim to fame is having formerly been part of "an obscure and very bad rock band of furry Palo Alto geeks" (according to the Rolling Stones) called Severe Tire Damage (or STD for short). STD was the first band to broadcast live over the Internet (back in 1993).Location: Seaver Science Library (SSL) - 150
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: CS Colloquia
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A Framework of Test-to-Test Transformations to Improve Fault Detection Efficacy
Tue, Mar 10, 2009 @ 04:00 PM
Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Prof. Sebastian Elbaum, University of Nebraska
Host: Prof. Neno MedvidovicAbstract:
Testing is the most common practice to assess and improve software quality. Testing is also expensive, often consuming more than fifty percent of software development costs. To reduce such costs, companies must focus their testing efforts on specific and limited types of tests. This tactic, however, sacrifices timely fault detection. To address this problem we have developed an approach to transform existing tests into new tests with complementary fault detection power and applicability. In this talk I will discuss two of such test-to-test transformations: 1) a carving transformation that partitions system tests into unit tests for developers to use earlier in the life cycle, and 2) an aggregating transformation that stitches unit tests to form integration tests that exercise untested behavior. I will conclude by presenting a vision for a framework of test representations and transformations that will enable researchers and practitioners to treat tests as data that can be easily manipulated, abstracted, and composed to create new tests with unique capabilities.Biography:
Sebastian Elbaum is an Associate Professor at the Computer Science and Engineering Department at the University of Nebraska - Lincoln. His research aims to improve software dependability through testing, monitoring, and analysis. He is the recipient of an NSF Career Award, an IBM Innovation Award, two ACM SigSoft Distinguished Paper Awards, and an UNL Award for Excellence in Graduate Education. He served as Program Chair for the 2007 International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis, and as Program Co-Chair for the 2008 Empirical Software Engineering Symposium. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Idaho, and a Systems Engineering degree from Universidad Catolica de Cordoba, Argentina.Location: Seaver Science Library (SSL) - 150
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: CS Colloquia
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Measurement, Modeling and Rendering for Realistic Computer Graphics
Wed, Mar 11, 2009 @ 10:30 AM - 11:30 AM
Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Dr. Abhijeet Ghosh, ICT, USC
Host: Prof. Shahram GhandeharizadehAbstract:
Throughout its history, the field of computer graphics has been striving towards increased realism. Photo-realistic image synthesis has traditionally involved the development of algorithms for the simulation of physically accurate light transport in a scene. However, the quality of rendering produced by these algorithms is limited by the quality of the input scene descriptions such as materials and illumination models. With the advances within the field of digital photography over the last decade, there has been significant interest in acquiring material and illumination models from photographs. This acquisition method has led to the development of image-based modeling and rendering techniques for realistic computer graphics.In this talk, I will present a set of new techniques for efficient acquisition and modeling of reflectance properties of real world materials and human faces, as well as new algorithms for high quality rendering with acquired data. In particular, I will describe a novel high speed approach for the acquisition of bidirectional reflectance distribution functions (BRDFs) of materials by projecting basis illumination, and a technique for practical modeling and rapid measurement of layered facial reflectance using a few controlled lighting conditions. Here, I will discuss some approaches for separation of individual reflectance components and fitting measured data to appropriate reflectance and scattering models. I will also touch upon rendering techniques for such measured data. In particular, I will present some Monte Carlo strategies for efficient sampling of static as well as dynamic environmental illumination, as well techniques for efficient rendering of layered subsurface scattering.Location: Henry Salvatori Computer Science Center (SAL) - 222
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: CS Colloquia
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An Introduction to NetApp
Tue, Mar 24, 2009 @ 03:30 PM - 04:30 PM
Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Steven Kleiman, Network Appliance
Host: Prof. Shahram GhandeharizadehAbstract:
NetApp is a $3B company you may not a have heard of, yet it stores the data of many of the world's largest companies. NetApp has a different approach to data storage. This talk will discuss some of these innovative approaches, and why data storage is such an interesting problem.Biography:
Steve Kleiman is currently Senior Vice President and Chief Scientist at Network Appliance and is responsible for setting future technology directions for the company. He has been involved with the design and development of file systems, UNIX and workstation architecture since 1977; first at Bell Telephone Laboratories, where he helped develop the first x86 based UNIX product, and then at Sun Microsystems Inc. At Sun he was a Distinguished Engineer and chief architect of clustered UNIX systems. Previously, as Chief Technologist for Sun's Interactive Services Group, he designed Sun's first video server product line. He was also the lead architect for multithreading and multiprocessing in Solaris and is a member of the POSIX Pthreads committee. He was the developer of the Vnodes file system interface and was a member of the original NFS development team at Sun. He was also the project leader of the original port of SunOS to SPARC. He received an M.S. in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University in 1978 and a B.S. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from M.I.T in 1977. He is the author or co-author of 17 conference or journal papers, 40 patents, and 1 book.Location: Olin Hall of Engineering (OHE) - 122
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: CS Colloquia
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Quality Assurance Techniques for Web Applications
Tue, Mar 24, 2009 @ 04:00 PM
Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: William G. J. Halfond, Georgia Institute of Technology
Host: Prof. Nenad MedvidovicAbstract:
Over the past decade, web applications have become big business. They are used to provide a variety of services, such as banking, online shopping, and entertainment, to millions of users. Thisgrowth in web applications has driven a need for specialized quality assurance techniques that can help developers prevent security vulnerabilities and ensure that their web applications run reliably.Although there has been an extensive amount of research in the area of software quality assurance, the majority of existing techniques are not directly applicable to web applications. Part of the reason for this is that traditional abstractions used in these techniques, such as control-flow, data-flow, and interfaces, look very different in web applications. This talk provides an overview of my research in quality assurance for web applications and also discusses in more detail my working one aspect of this problem, interface definitions, and its application to test-input generation and verification of web applications.Biography:
William Halfond is a final year PhD student in the College of Computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology. He works with Professor Alessandro Orso in the area of software engineering. He is interested in quality assurance techniques for web applications and has worked on various topics including program analysis, test-input generation, testing requirements, runtime analysis, and security.
Location: Seaver Science Library (SSL) - 150
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: CS Colloquia
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Third Annual George Bekey Keynote Lecture - Tom Mitchell
Thu, Mar 26, 2009 @ 04:00 PM - 05:30 PM
Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
**Third Annual George Bekey Keynote Lecture**Title: Brains, Meaning and Corpus StatisticsSpeaker: Prof. Tom Mitchell, CMUHost: Prof. Ellis Horowitz, Prof. Craig KnoblockLight Refreshments: 3:30 PM Abstract:
How does the human brain represent meanings of words and pictures in terms of the underlying neural activity? This talk will present our research using machine learning methods together with fMRI brain imaging to study this question. One line of our research has involved training classifiers that identify which word a person is thinking about, based on their neural activity observed using fMRI. A more recent line involves developing a computational model that predicts the neural activity associated with arbitrary English words, including words for which we do not yet have brain image data. This computational model is trained using a combination of fMRI data associated with several dozen concrete nouns, together with statistics gathered from a trillion-word text corpus. Once trained, the model predicts fMRI activation for any other concrete noun appearing in the text corpus, with highly significant accuracies over the 60 nouns for which we currently have fMRI data.Biography:
Tom M. Mitchell is the E. Fredkin Professor and head of the Machine Learning Department at Carnegie Mellon University. Mitchell is a past President of the American Association of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), and a Fellow of the AAAS and of the AAAI. His general research interests lie in machine learning, artificial intelligence, and cognitive neuroscience. Mitchell believes the field of machine learning will be the fastest growing branch of computer science during the 21st century.
Location: Ethel Percy Andrus Gerontology Center (GER) - entology Auditorium (GER)
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: CS Front Desk
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Modeling and Tracking Activities with Event-Coupled HMMs
Mon, Mar 30, 2009 @ 04:00 PM
Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Dr. Aram Galstyan, ISI, USC
Host: Prof. Jonathan GratchAbstract:
Plan, activity, and intent recognition (PAIR) is concerned with inferring hidden states of agents based on an observable sequence of their actions. Although PAIR has been an active area of research for more than a decade, most studies so far has been limited to systems with a single agent, or a handful of them. I will present our work on activity recognition on a larger scale, where thousands of agents interact with each other by engaging in abstract "attribute trades". Those interactions induce an evolving network, where the nodes and the edges represent the agents and their transactions, respectively. The collective dynamics of this network can be naturally modeled through a novel type of interacting hidden Markov models (HMM), which we call Event-Coupled HMMs. I will discuss our approach to scalable inference-making with EC-HMM, which involves pruning the network through semi-supervised learning, and utilizing an approximate and scalable representation of the hidden process on the reduced network. I will conclude by discussing the notion of "trackability", which can be intuitively defined as one's ability to accurately infer stochastic processes, and present some recent results in the context of binary HMMs.Biography:
Dr. Aram Galstyan received his Ph.D. in theoretical condensed matter physics from University of Utah, in 2000. He then joined USC Information Sciences Institute where he currently works as a computer scientist at the Intelligent Systems Division. Dr. Galstyan's current research focuses on learning and discovering patterns in large-scale sequential data, statistical network analysis, and semi-supervised learning with graphs. His other research interests include mathematical modeling of complex adaptive systems, emergent coordination in robotic swarms, and learning in multi-agent systems.
Location: Von Kleinsmid Center For International & Public Affairs (VKC) - 210
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: CS Colloquia
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From Game Characters to Game Companions: Practice, Anticipation, and Embodiment
Tue, Mar 31, 2009 @ 04:00 PM
Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Guy Hoffman
Host: Prof. Gerard Medioni Abstract:
Aiming to make computer game agents more engaging and longer-lasting, I propose the notion of "game companions", based on three notions: (a) viewing game play as a collaborative activity, highly coordinated with a human player; (b) modeling practice to improve the agents' skills over time; and (c) moving game characters into the physical world, in the form of personal robots. Framed within an overall methodology that optimizes for engagement instead of efficiency, this talk introduces computational models for two aspects of practice: anticipation and embodiment, and their implementation on game agents and collaborative robots. First, I present an extension to Markov Decision Processes, modeling anticipation for agents collaborating with humans. I discuss the implementation of the model on a game character, which adapts to a human collaborator through repetition. I demonstrate the effect of anticipation on repetitive teamwork by showing this agent to be more efficient and fluent, and to seem significantly more committed and contributing to the team, as rated by human players. Then, I extend this discrete state/action model to a cognitively plausible embodied framework operating on continuous sensory input and performing real-world motor activity. Based on recent neuro- psychological findings supporting an embodied view of cognition, I model practice as priming perceptual simulation and affecting Hebbian learning. Implemented on two robots, I show this framework to have significant effects on both the efficiency of a human-robot team, and on human subjects' perception of the robot's intelligence, fluency, and even gender. With our aims set on long-term engaging interaction with artificial agents, these systems' capacity to physically practice with humans may hold a key to the kind of efficient and satisfying performance that humans are accustomed to from each other. Biography:
Guy Hoffman is a postdoctoral research associate at the Georgia Institute of Technology Center for Music Technology. Prior, he was a postdoctoral associate at MIT. Hoffman holds a Ph.D. from the MIT Media Lab in the field of Human-Robot Interaction and an M.Sc. in Computer Science from Tel Aviv University. His research investigates practice, anticipation, and joint action between humans and artificial agents, with the aim of designing agents that display more fluent behavior with their human partners. Other research interests include theater and musical performance robots as well as non-anthropomorphic agent design. His robot AUR won the 2007 IEEE International Robot Design Competition; he was animation and software lead on the 2008 World Expo Digital Water Pavilion, one of TIME magazine's "Best Inventions of 2007"; his research has been covered in the international press, including the New York Times, Süddeutsche Zeitung, and Science; Hoffman has held several senior research and product development positions in the Israeli software technology industry; and his work in animation, data visualization, architecture, theater, and new media art has been internationally published and exhibited.Location: Seaver Science Library (SSL) - 150
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: CS Colloquia
