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Events for March 13, 2014
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CS Colloquium: Thomas Karagiannis (Microsoft Research Cambridge UK) - Predictable Data Centers
Thu, Mar 13, 2014 @ 11:00 AM - 12:30 PM
Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Thomas Karagiannis, Microsoft Research Cambridge UK
Talk Title: Predictable Data Centers
Series: CS Colloquium
Abstract: In the talk, I will provide an overview of the Predictable Data Centers project at MSR Cambridge. The project tackles the issue of unpredictable application performance in data centers. A key contributor to such unpredictability is shared resources like network and storage, where the bandwidth across the cloud network and to the cloud storage service can vary significantly. To address this, PDC aims at designing an architecture that offers performance Service Level Agreements (SLAs) across shared resources by providing tenants with the abstraction of a dedicated virtual data center.
Host: CS Systems Group
Location: Henry Salvatori Computer Science Center (SAL) - 322
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Assistant to CS chair
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CS Colloquium: Harsha V. Madhyastha (University of California Riverside) - Enabling the Software as a Service Revolution
Thu, Mar 13, 2014 @ 01:30 PM - 03:00 PM
Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Harsha V. Madhyastha, University of California Riverside
Talk Title: Enabling the Software as a Service Revolution
Series: CS Colloquium
Abstract: We are currently in the midst of a revolution with regards to how applications are delivered to users. Instead of simply shipping binaries that users install on their devices, application providers are increasingly shifting to the model of offering software services. Google Docs, Instagram, Dropbox, and Words with Friends are popular examples of this paradigm shift. In all of these cases, the use of software services enables application providers to offload application functionality from resource-constrained client devices such as smartphones and tablets, offer a seamless user experience across multiple devices, and enable content sharing.
However, the software as a service application model requires application providers to incur additional costs associated with hosting and managing service deployments. Software services also implicitly threaten user privacy and are constrained by the Internet in terms of the performance and availability perceived by users. In this talk, I will describe the existing best practices to address these challenges, highlight the problems associated with these best practices, and present an overview of three systems that we have developed to address these problems: SPANStore, WhyHigh, and LASTor. I will also discuss some of my ongoing projects and future plans for research in this space.
Biography: Harsha V. Madhyastha is an Assistant Professor in the Computer Science and Engineering department at University of California Riverside. His research interests broadly span the areas of distributed systems, networking, and security and privacy. Many of the systems developed as part of his research have been widely used and have had significant impact. For example, WhyHigh has reduced latencies to Google by an order of magnitude for millions of users, the MyPageKeeper system for detecting social malware is in use by over 20,000 Facebook users, and Internet topology and performance data from the iPlane system has been used in research projects at over 100 institutions. His work has also resulted in award papers at the USENIX NSDI and ACM SIGCOMM IMC conferences. His research is supported by the Army Research Laboratory (ARL), the Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA), Amazon, VMware, a Google Research award, a NetApp Faculty Fellowship, and an NSF CAREER award.
Host: Ethan Katz-Bassett
Location: Henry Salvatori Computer Science Center (SAL) - 332
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Assistant to CS chair
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CS Distinguished Lecture: Leslie Kaelbling (CSAIL MIT) - Making Robots Behave
Thu, Mar 13, 2014 @ 04:00 PM - 05:30 PM
Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: CS Distinguished Lecture: Leslie Kaelbling, CSAIL MIT
Talk Title: Making Robots Behave
Series: CS Distinguished Lectures
Abstract: The fields of AI and robotics have made great improvements in many individual subfields, including in motion planning, symbolic planning, probabilistic reasoning, perception, and learning. Our goal is to develop an integrated approach to solving very large problems that are hopelessly intractable to solve optimally. We make a number of approximations during planning, including serializing subtasks, factoring distributions, and determinizing stochastic dynamics, but regain robustness and effectiveness through a continuous state-estimation and replanning process. This approach is demonstrated in three robotic domains, each of which integrates perception, estimation, planning, and manipulation.
Biography: Leslie Pack Kaelbling is the Panasonic Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She has made research contributions to decision-making under uncertainty, learning, and sensing with applications to robotics, with a particular focus on reinforcement learning and planning in partially observable domains.
She holds an A.B in Philosphy and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Stanford University, and has had research positions at SRI International and Teleos Research and a faculty position at Brown University. She is the recipient of the US National Science Foundation Presidential Faculty Fellowship, the IJCAI Computers and Thought Award, and several teaching prizes and has been elected a fellow of the AAAI. She was the founder and editor-in-chief of the Journal of Machine Learning Research.
Host: Nora Ayanian and Hao Li
Location: Henry Salvatori Computer Science Center (SAL) - 101
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Assistant to CS chair
