SUNMONTUEWEDTHUFRISAT
Events for March 27, 2008
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CS Colloq: Coordinating Multiple Moving Objects: From Robots to Microdroplets
Thu, Mar 27, 2008 @ 11:00 AM - 12:30 PM
Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Title: Coordinating Multiple Moving Objects: From Robots to MicrodropletsSpeaker: Prof. Srinivas AkellaABSTRACT:
Coordinating the collision-free motions of multiple moving objects is
a challenging problem, with applications ranging from automotive
workcells to lab-on-a-chip devices. I will first describe our work on
the coordination of multiple robots with dynamics constraints, with
applications in manufacturing cells and UAV coordination. I will then
describe the coordination of microdroplets in digital microfluidic
"lab-on-a-chip" systems. A digital microfluidic system controls
individual droplets of chemicals on an array of electrodes; the
chemical analysis is performed by moving, mixing, and splitting
droplets. This promising new technology can impact applications in
biological research, point-of-care clinical testing, and biochemical
sensing by offering tremendous flexibility and parallelism through
software control. Since the simultaneous coordination of even tens of
droplets on the array is extremely difficult to program manually, we
are developing modular array layouts and network-style droplet routing
algorithms to automatically enable the flexible coordination of
hundreds of droplets. I will discuss our ongoing work in applying
these algorithms to enable versatile digital microfluidic biochips for
problems in biology.BIO:
Srinivas Akella is with the Computer Science department and Center for
Automation Technologies and Systems at Rensselaer Polytechnic
Institute, Troy, New York. He was a Beckman Fellow at the Beckman
Institute for Advanced Science and Technology, University of Illinois
at Urbana-Champaign, before joining RPI. He received his Ph.D. in
Robotics from the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon
University and his B.Tech. from the Indian Institute of Technology,
Madras. He has received the CAREER award from the National Science
Foundation, and was selected as a Rensselaer Faculty Early Research
Career Honoree. His research interests are in developing optimization
and geometric algorithms for applications in robotics, automation,
microsystems, and biotechnology.Location: Ronald Tutor Hall of Engineering (RTH) - 406
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: CS Colloquia
This event is open to all eligible individuals. USC Viterbi operates all of its activities consistent with the University's Notice of Non-Discrimination. Eligibility is not determined based on race, sex, ethnicity, sexual orientation, or any other prohibited factor.
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CS Colloq: Stabilizing Internet Routing: or, A Story of Heterogeneity
Thu, Mar 27, 2008 @ 03:30 PM - 05:00 PM
Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Title: Stabilizing Internet Routing: or, A Story of HeterogeneitySpeaker: Brighten Godfrey (UC Berkeley) Abstract:
A significant cause of the unreliability of end-to-end communications on the Internet is route instability: dynamic changes in routers' selected paths. Instability is becoming even more problematic due to the increasing prevalence of real-time applications and concerns about the scalability of the Internet routing architecture. Yet Route Flap Damping, the main mechanism for combating instability, has introduced unexpected pathologies and reduced availability. This talk describes a more principled approach to stabilizing Internet routing. First, we characterize the design space by identifying general approaches to achieve stability, and giving theoretical bounds on optimal strategies within each approach. Second, I will describe Stable Route Selection (StaRS), a new mechanism which uses flexibility in route selection to improve stability without sacrificing availability. Simulation and experimental results show that StaRS improves stability and end-to- end reliability while deviating only slightly from preferred routes, and closely approaching our theoretical lower bound. These results indicate that StaRS is a promising, easily deployable way to safely stabilize Internet routing. StaRS's stability improvements are enabled by dramatic heterogeneity in route failure patterns. I will present the case that StaRS is an instance of a much more general principle: that heterogeneity --- variation in reliability, processing speed, bandwidth, or other metrics --- should quite often be viewed as an advantage. This thesis is supported by practical and theoretical results in a variety of settings including distributed hash tables, overlay multicast, and job scheduling.Biography:
Brighten Godfrey's research concerns distributed and networked systems, including Internet routing architecture, distributed algorithms, analysis of networks, peer-to-peer systems and overlay networks. He is presently a Ph.D. candidate advised by Ion Stoica at UC Berkeley.
Location: Seaver Science Library (SSL) - 150
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: CS Colloquia
This event is open to all eligible individuals. USC Viterbi operates all of its activities consistent with the University's Notice of Non-Discrimination. Eligibility is not determined based on race, sex, ethnicity, sexual orientation, or any other prohibited factor.
