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Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Events for March
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CS Colloquium
Tue, Mar 01, 2011 @ 03:30 PM - 05:00 PM
Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Guy Rothblum, Princeton University
Talk Title: Differential Privacy: Recent Developements and Future Challenges
Abstract: Consider a database of sensitive information about a set of participants. Statistical analysis of the data may yield valuable results, but it also poses serious threats to the participants' privacy. A successful research program has, in the last few years, attempted to address these conflicting concerns, formulating the rigorous privacy guarantee of differential privacy [Dwork McSherry Nissim and Smith '06] and showing that in some cases data analyses can provide accurate answers while protecting participants' privacy.
After reviewing some of this past work, I will introduce two new general-purpose tools for privacy-preserving data analysis:
1. A new "boosting" framework for improving the accuracy guarantees of weak differentially private algorithms.
2. Robust privacy guarantees for differentially private algorithms under composition.
Using these tools we will show that, computational complexity aside, differential privacy permits surprisingly rich and accurate data analyses. I will then highlight some of the intriguing challenges that remain open for future work in this field. No prior knowledge will be assumed.
Biography: Guy Rothblum is a postdoctoral research fellow at Princeton University, supported by a Computing Innovation Fellowship. He completed his Ph.D. in computer science at MIT, and his M.Sc. in computer Science and Applied Mathematics at the Weizmann Institute of Science. His research interests are in theoretical computer science and computer security, especially privacy-preserving data analysis, cryptography and complexity theory.
Host: Prof. Ming-Deh Huang
Location: Seaver Science Library (SSL) - 150
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Kanak Agrawal
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CS Colloquium
Thu, Mar 03, 2011 @ 03:30 PM - 05:00 PM
Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Haryadi Gunawi, UC Berkeley
Talk Title: Towards Reliable Storage Systems
Abstract: Three trends will dominate the storage systems of tomorrow: increasingly massive amounts of data, the incredible growth of software complexity, and the increasing use of cheap and less reliable hardware. These trends present us with a huge challenge: How can we promise users that storage systems work robustly in spite of their massive software complexity and the broad range of hardware failures that can arise? Addressing this question is not straightforward as current approaches scatter recovery code in thousands of lines of intricate, low-level C code. As a result, reliability problems are often found in current storage systems.
In this talk, I will present how we build a new generation of more robust and reliable storage systems via simpler designs and powerful testing frameworks. Specifically, I will first present new online and offline reliability frameworks (I/O Shepherding and SQCK) that advocate a higher-level strategy where the logic of reliability policies can be described clearly and concisely. I will then describe my most recent work in advancing the current state-of-the-art of cloud testing via FATE and DESTINI, a failure testing service and a framework for declarative recovery specifications. Finally, I will close this talk with my future plans in the area of cloud storage systems.
Biography: Haryadi Gunawi is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the University of California, Berkeley. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin, Madison in 2009. His current research focuses on operating systems and large-scale storage systems. Beyond that, his research experience also spans cross-disciplinary areas such as software engineering, distributed systems, networking, and databases. He has won numerous awards including the 2010 NSF Computing Innovation Fellowship, a co-winner of the 2009 departmental best thesis award, an Honorable Mention for the 2009 ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award, and an NSF CISE Award under the Data-intensive Computing program.
Host: Prof. Ramesh Govindan
Location: Seaver Science Library (SSL) - 150
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Kanak Agrawal
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GTHB Seminar
Tue, Mar 08, 2011 @ 12:00 PM - 01:30 PM
Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Shachar Kariv , University of California, Berkeley
Talk Title: Who is (More) Rational?
Abstract: Revealed preference theory offers a criterion for decision-making quality: if decisions are high quality then there exists a utility function that the choices maximize. They conduct a large-scale field experiment that enables them to test subjects' choices for consistency with utility maximization and to combine the experimental data with a wide range of individual socio-demographic and economic information for the subjects. There is considerable heterogeneity in subjects' consistency scores: high-income and high-education subjects display greater levels of consistency than low-income and low-education subjects, men are more consistent than women, and young subjects are more consistent than older subjects. They also find that consistency with utility maximization is strongly related to wealth: a standard deviation increase in the consistency score is associated with 15-19 percent more wealth. This result conditions on current income, education, family structure, and is little changed when we add controls for past income, risk tolerance and the results of a standard personality test used by psychologists. [Authors: Syngjoo Choi (Universisty College London), Wieland Muller (Tilburg University) and Dan Silverman (University of Michigan)
Biography: Shachar Kariv was educated at Tel Aviv University and New York University, where he received his Ph.D. in economics in 2003, the same year he joined the Department of Economics at the University of California, Berkeley. He is a Professor and the Faculty Director of UC Berkeley Experimental Social Science Laboratory (Xlab), a laboratory for conducting experiment-based investigations of issues of interest to social sciences. He was a visiting member of the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Studies at Princeton (2005-6), a visiting professor at the European University Institute (2008), and a visiting fellow at Nuffield College of the University of Oxford (2009).
He is the recipient of the UC Berkeley Division of Social Sciences Distinguished Teaching Award (2008) and the Graduate Economics Association Outstanding Advising Award (2006). He was also awarded NYU College of Arts and Science Outstanding Teaching Award (Golden Dozen) in recognition of excellence in teaching and contributions to undergraduate education (2002) and NYU Dean's Outstanding Teaching Award in the Social Sciences (2001).
For his Ph.D. dissertation at NYU, he received the Outstanding Dissertation Award in the Social Sciences (2003). He also received a National Science Foundation grant for studying decisions under uncertainty in theory and experiments (2006-8). Recently, he was awarded a Sloan Research Fellowship for Economics (2009-10).
His fields of interest include game theory, decision theory, and experimental and behavioral economics. His research interests include social learning, social networks, social and moral preferences, and risk preferences. His research has been published in a variety of academic journals including, The American Economic Review, Games and Economic Behavior, Journal of Economic Theory, and Economic Theory.
(http://gthb.usc.edu/Seminars/)
*Lunch is included
Host: Prof. Yu-Han Chang
Location: Seeley Wintersmith Mudd Memorial Hall (of Philosophy) (MHP) - 101
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Kanak Agrawal
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CS Colloquium
Thu, Mar 10, 2011 @ 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Dr. Makoto Yokoo, Kyushu University
Talk Title: Cooperative Game Theory: A New Frontier for Agent Researchers
Abstract: Cooperative game theory deals with how (selfish) agents can create a coalition and divide the gain of the coalition among them, when agents can negotiate before taking their actions. This research topic has 60-year tradition (started by von Neumann), and various solution concepts (e.g. core, Shapley value) that describe how to determine the value division have been developed. Furthermore, the growth of Internet and e-commerce has expanded its application area (e.g. dynamic, agile formations of virtual organizations). In this talk, I give a brief overview of traditional results on cooperative game theory, and describe new challenging topics for agent/AI/CS researchers, such as coalitional structure generation and concise representation schemes.
Biography: Makoto Yokoo received the B.E. and M.E. degrees in electrical engineering, in 1984 and 1986, respectively, form the University of Tokyo, Japan, and the Ph.D. degree in information and communication engineering in 1995, from the University of Tokyo, Japan. From 1986 to 2004, he was a research scientist of Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corporation (NTT). He is currently a Professor of Information Science and Electrical Engineering, Kyushu University. His esearch interests include multi-agent systems, constraint satisfaction, and mechanism design among self-interested agents. He served as a general co-chair of International joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems in 2007 (AAMAS-2007), and as a program co-chair of AAMAS-2003. He is on the board of directors of International Foundation for Autonomous Agent and Multiagent Systems (IFAAMAS). He received the ACM SIGART Autonomous Agents Research Award in 2004, and the IFAAMAS influential paper award in 2010.
Host: Prof. Milind Tambe
Location: Grace Ford Salvatori Hall Of Letters, Arts & Sciences (GFS) - 101
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Kanak Agrawal
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CS Colloquium
Thu, Mar 10, 2011 @ 03:30 PM - 05:00 PM
Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Shaddin Dughmi, Stanford University
Talk Title: Randomization and Computation in Strategic Settings
Abstract: In resource allocation problems, a centralized agency allocates resources to
recipients: an Internet Service Provider allocates bandwidth to consumers; the Federal Communications Commission auctions radio spectra to telecommunications companies; and a content distribution company designs an overlay network to satisfy its customers' routing needs. Often, the agency's goal is to find an allocation that maximizes the social good. This goal is complicated by the fact that the recipients are self-interested, and their actions influence the allocation.
Economists cope with self-interested behavior by designing mechanisms that align individual incentives with the social good. This requires finding an optimal solution to the -- often intractable -- resource allocation problem.
Computer scientists cope with intractability by designing approximation algorithms. Until recently, it appeared difficult to unify these techniques and design incentive-compatible computationally-efficient mechanisms for computing approximately optimal allocations. Impossibility results regarding deterministic mechanisms suggest that this difficulty is fundamental.
My work harnesses the power of randomization to reconcile economic and computational requirements in settings where deterministic mechanisms provably can not. My colleagues and I (1) developed general techniques for the design of randomized mechanisms, (2) applied these techniques to solve some of the paradigmatic problems in this area, and (3) developed a black box reduction that, for a large class of problems, generically converts an approximation algorithm to an incentive compatible mechanism without degrading its approximation guarantee.
Biography: Shaddin Dughmi is a PhD student in the computer science theory group at Stanford University, advised by Professor Tim Roughgarden. His main research interests are in algorithms, game theory, and combinatorial optimization. Shaddin graduated from Cornell University in 2004 with a B.S. in computer science and a minor in applied mathematics. From 2004 to 2006, he was an Information Security Engineer at the MITRE Corporation, where he worked on cryptographic protocol analysis. He enrolled in the Stanford computer science PhD program in the Fall of 2006, with an expected graduation date of June 2011.
Host: Prof. David Kempe
Location: Seaver Science Library (SSL) - 150
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Kanak Agrawal
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AI SEMINAR
Thu, Mar 10, 2011 @ 04:00 PM - 06:00 PM
Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science, Information Sciences Institute, USC Viterbi School of Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Chris Welty, Research staff member, IBM Watson Research Center
Talk Title: Inside the mind of Watson
Abstract: Watson is a computer system capable of answering rich natural language questions and estimating its confidence in those answers at a level of the best humans at the task. Â On Feb 14-16, in an historic event, Watson triumphed over the best Jeopardy! players of all time. Â In this talk Chris Welty will discuss how Watson works and dive into some of its answers (right and wrong).
Biography: Chris Welty is a Research Scientist at the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center in New York. Previously, he taught Computer Science at Vassar College, taught at and received his Ph.D. from Rensselaer Polytechnice Institute, and accumulated over 14 years of teaching experience before moving to industrial research. Chris' principal area of research is Knowledge Representation, specifically ontologies and the semantic web, and he spends most of his time applying this technology to Natural Language Question Answering as a member of the DeepQA/Watson team and, in the past, Software Engineering. Dr. Welty is a co-chair of the W3C Rules Interchange Format Working Group (RIF), serves on the steering committee of the Formal Ontology in Information Systems Conferences, is president of KR.ORG, on the editorial boards of AI Magazine, The Journal of Applied Ontology, and The Journal of Web Semantics, and was an editor in the W3C Web Ontology Working Group. While on sabbatical in 2000, he co-developed the OntoClean methodology with Nicola Guarino. Chris Welty's work on ontologies and ontology methodology has appeared in CACM, and numerous other publications. see:
http://domino.research.ibm.com/comm/research_people.nsf/pages/welty.index.html
Host: Ed Hovy ISI
Location: Grace Ford Salvatori Hall Of Letters, Arts & Sciences (GFS) - 106
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Eric Mankin
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AI seminar
Fri, Mar 11, 2011 @ 10:30 AM - 12:00 PM
Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science, Information Sciences Institute, Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, USC Viterbi School of Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Chris Welty, Research staff member, IBM Watson Research Center
Talk Title: Inside the mind of Watson
Abstract: Watson is a computer system capable of answering rich natural language questions and estimating its confidence in those answers at a level of the best humans at the task. On Feb 14-16, in an historic event, Watson triumphed over the best Jeopardy! players of all time. In this talk Chris Welty will discuss how Watson works and dive into some of its answers (right and wrong).
Biography: Biography: Chris Welty is a Research Scientist at the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center in New York. Previously, he taught Computer Science at Vassar College, taught at and received his Ph.D. from Rensselaer Polytechnice Institute, and accumulated over 14 years of teaching experience before moving to industrial research. Chris' principal area of research is Knowledge Representation, specifically ontologies and the semantic web, and he spends most of his time applying this technology to Natural Language Question Answering as a member of the DeepQA/Watson team and, in the past, Software Engineering. Dr. Welty is a co-chair of the W3C Rules Interchange Format Working Group (RIF), serves on the steering committee of the Formal Ontology in Information Systems Conferences, is president of KR.ORG, on the editorial boards of AI Magazine, The Journal of Applied Ontology, and The Journal of Web Semantics, and was an editor in the W3C Web Ontology Working Group. While on sabbatical in 2000, he co-developed the OntoClean methodology with Nicola Guarino. Chris Welty's work on ontologies and ontology methodology has appeared in CACM, and numerous other publications. see:
http://domino.research.ibm.com/comm/research_people.nsf/pages/welty.index.html
Host: Gully Burns, 1SI
Location: ISI 11th floor conference room
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Eric Mankin
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CS Colloquium
Mon, Mar 21, 2011 @ 02:00 PM - 03:30 PM
Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Roger Dingledine, Project Leader - the Tor Project
Talk Title: Tor and the Censorship Arms Race: Lessons Learned
Abstract: Tor is a free-software anonymizing network that helps people around the world use the Internet in safety. Tor's 2200 volunteer relays carry traffic for several hundred thousand users including ordinary citizens who want protection from identity theft and prying corporations, corporations who want to look at a competitor's website in private, and soldiers and aid workers in the Middle East who need to contact their home servers without fear of physical harm.
Tor was originally designed as a civil liberties tool for people in the West. But if governments or others can block connections *to* the Tor network, who cares that it provides great anonymity? A few years ago we started adapting Tor to be more robust in situations where authorities or operators actively attempt to impede its use. We streamlined its network communications to look more like ordinary SSL, and we introduced "bridge relays" that are harder for an attacker to find and block than Tor's public relays.
Through the Iranian elections in June 2009, the periodic blockings in China, the demonstrations in Tunisia and Egypt, and whatever's coming next, we're learning a lot about how circumvention tools work in reality for activists in tough situations. This talk will assume some familiarity with Tor already, and jump quickly into the technical and social problems we're encountering, what technical approaches we've tried so far (and how they went), and what approaches I think we're going to need to try next.
Biography: Roger Dingledine is project leader for The Tor Project, a US non-profit working on anonymity research and development for such diverse organizations as Voice of America, the U.S. Navy, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation. In addition to all the hats he wears for Tor, Roger organizes academic conferences on anonymity, speaks at a wide variety of industry and hacker conferences, and also does tutorials on anonymity for national and foreign law enforcement.
Host: Terry Benzel and John Wroclawski - USC/ISI
Location: Mark Taper Hall Of Humanities (THH) - 210
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Kanak Agrawal
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GTHB Seminar
Tue, Mar 22, 2011 @ 12:00 PM - 01:30 PM
Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Prof. Eric Friedman, Cornell University
Talk Title: Bargaining Theory in the Cloud
Abstract: The axiomatic theory of bargaining solutions was initiated by John Nash with his seminal paper in 1950 and has a long and mostly mathematical history. Surprisingly, it arises naturally in a variety of allocation problems arising in cloud computing. For example, the second most famous bargaining solution, the Kalai-Smorodinsky solution, is the outcome of a simple water filling algorithm used in the Mesos Platform and has many strong properties in that setting, including incentive compatibility and fairness. In this talk, he will explore these connections for a variety of cloud computing problems and show how axiomatic bargaining theory can be used to analyze allocation problems in the cloud and conversely how cloud computing sheds new light on axiomatic bargaining theory.
This talk is based on joint work with Ali Ghodsi, Scott Shenker and Ion Stoica.
Biography: Eric Friedman is Associate Professor of Operations Research and Information Engineering at Cornell University and a Senior Research Scientist at the International Computer Science Institute at Berkeley (ICSI). His research interests include applications of game theory and complex network theory to computer science and cognitive neuroscience.
Host: Prof. Yu-Han Chang
More Info: http://gthb.usc.edu/Seminars/Location: Seeley Wintersmith Mudd Memorial Hall (of Philosophy) (MHP) - 101
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Kanak Agrawal
Event Link: http://gthb.usc.edu/Seminars/
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Annual George Bekey Keynote Lecture 2011
Tue, Mar 22, 2011 @ 04:00 PM - 06:00 PM
Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Prof. Michael I. Jordan, University of California, Berkeley
Talk Title: Completely Random Measures for Bayesian Nonparametrics
Abstract: Computer Science has historically been strong on data structures and weak on inference from data, whereas Statistics has historically been weak on data structures and strong on inference from data. One way to draw on the strengths of both disciplines is to pursue the study of "inferential methods for data structures", i.e., methods that update probability distributions on recursively-defined objects such as trees, graphs, grammars and function calls. This is accommodated in the world of "Bayesian non parametrics", where prior and posterior distributions are allowed to be general stochastic processes. Both statistical and computational considerations lead one to certain classes of stochastic processes, and these tend to have interesting connections to combinatorics. I will focus on Bayesian non parametric modeling based on completely random measures, giving examples of how recursions based on these measures lead to useful models in several applied problem domains, including protein structural modeling, natural language processing, computational vision, and statistical genetics.
Biography: Michael I. Jordan is the Pehong Chen Distinguished Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and the Department of Statistics at the University of California, Berkeley. His research in recent years has focused on Bayesian nonparametric analysis, probabilistic graphical models, spectral methods, kernel machines and applications to problems in signal processing, statistical genetics, computational biology, information retrieval and natural language processing. Prof. Jordan was named to the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) in 2010 and the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) in 2010. He is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the IMS, the ACM, and the IEEE.
Refreshments will be served at the Gerontology (GER) courtyard at 4 pm. Talk begins in GER Auditorium at 4:30pm.
Host: Prof. Fei Sha
Location: Ethel Percy Andrus Gerontology Center (GER) - Auditorium
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Kanak Agrawal
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USC Water Institute Seminar
Fri, Mar 25, 2011 @ 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Chris Scholin, President/Chief Executive Officer, Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute
Talk Title: Fostering Science-Engineering Partnerships as a Means to Develop âNext Generationâ Ocean Observatories
Abstract: David Packard founded the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI) in 1987 as an alternative to the traditional academic oceanographic research institution. He challenged us to develop and apply new methods, instruments, and analytical systems to address fundamental problems in ocean science and to identify new directions where innovative technologies will accelerate marine research. To achieve this vision, Packard created MBARI as an organization that is fundamentally based on a peer relationship between scientists and engineers, and one that enables ready access to the sea. In that light, over the past year, MBARI has cast a new strategic plan that will guide it for the coming decade. Emphasized are four major research themes â Exploration and Discovery, Ocean Visualization, Ecosystem Dynamics, and Ocean Biogeochemistry. Each theme focuses on different aspects of documenting the current state of the ocean and life within it against the backdrop of global change. In this presentation, I will provide a broad overview of MBARI and will highlight a number of ongoing projects that exemplify science-engineering partnerships stemming from our current research priorities.
Biography: Christopher Scholin is President/Chief Executive Officer of the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute. Chris received a Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology-Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution Joint Program in Biological Oceanography in 1993, a M.A. in Molecular Biology and Immunology from Duke University in 1986, and a B.A. with highest honors in Biology from the University of California at Santa Barbara in 1984. His research interests are centered on detection of water borne microorganisms including bacterioplankton, invertebrates, harmful algae and associated toxins using molecular probes and the Environmental Sample Processor. He currently serves on an External Advisory Committee for the University of Miamiâs Oceans and Human Health Center, the Management Committee of the Center for Ocean Solutions, and the Board of Trustees of the Monterey Bay Aquarium and the Alliance for Coastal Technologies.
Host: Prof. Gaurav Sukhatme
Location: Hedco Neurosciences Building (HNB) - Auditorium
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Kanak Agrawal
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CS Seminar
Thu, Mar 31, 2011 @ 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Dr. Sven Dickinson, Department of Computer Science, University of Toronto
Talk Title: The Role of Intermediate Shape Priors in Perceptual Grouping and Image Abstraction
Abstract: Perceptual grouping played a prominent role in support of early object recognition systems, which typically took an input image and a database of shape models and identified which of the models was visible in the image. When the database was large, local features were not sufficiently distinctive to prune down the space of models to a manageable number that could be verified. However, when causally related shape features were grouped, using intermediate-level shape priors, e.g., cotermination, symmetry, and compactness, they formed effective shape indices and allowed databases to grow in size. In recent years, the recognition (categorization) community has focused on the object detection problem, in which the input image is searched for a specific target object. Since indexing is not required to select the target model, perceptual grouping is not required to construct a discriminative shape index; the existence of a much stronger object-level shape prior precludes the need for a weaker intermediate-level shape prior. As a result, perceptual grouping activity at our major conferences has diminished. However, there are clear signs that the recognition community is moving from appearance back to shape, and from detection back to unexpected object recognition. Shape-based perceptual grouping will play a critical role in facilitating this transition. But while causally related features must be grouped, they also need to be abstracted before they can be matched to categorical models. In this talk, I will describe our recent progress on the use of intermediate shape priors in segmenting, grouping, and abstracting shape features. Specifically, I will describe the use of symmetry and non-accidental attachment to detect and group symmetric parts, the use of closure to separate figure from background, and the use of a vocabulary of simple shape models to group and abstract image contours.
Biography: Sven Dickinson received the B.A.Sc. degree in Systems Design Engineering from the University of Waterloo, in 1983, and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science from the University of Maryland, in 1988 and 1991, respectively. He is currently Professor and Chair of the Department of Computer Science at the University of Toronto, where he has also served as Acting Chair (2008-2009), Vice Chair (2003-2006), and Associate Professor (2000-2007). From 1995-2000, he was an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Rutgers University, where he also held a joint appointment in the Rutgers Center for Cognitive Science (RuCCS) and membership in the Center for Discrete Mathematics and Theoretical Computer Science (DIMACS). From 1994-1995, he was a Research Assistant Professor in the Rutgers Center for Cognitive Science, and from 1991-1994, a Research Associate at the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, University of Toronto. He has held affiliations with the MIT Media Laboratory (Visiting Scientist, 1992-1994), the University of Toronto (Visiting Assistant Professor, 1994-1997), and the Computer Vision Laboratory of the Center for Automation Research at the University of Maryland (Assistant Research Scientist, 1993-1994, Visiting Assistant Professor, 1994-1997). Prior to his academic career, he worked in the computer vision industry, designing image processing systems for Grinnell Systems Inc., San Jose, CA, 1983-1984, and optical character recognition systems for DEST, Inc., Milpitas, CA, 1984-1985.
Host: Prof. Gerard Medioni
Location: Seaver Science Library (SSL) - 150
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Kanak Agrawal
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CS Colloquium
Thu, Mar 31, 2011 @ 03:30 PM - 05:00 PM
Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Dr. Zhichun Li, NEC Research Labs
Talk Title: Towards Scalable User-Agnostic Attack Defense
Abstract: Security has become one of the major concerns for todayâs Internet. End users, however, are slow in adopting new security technologies. Many users cannot do good security management by themselves. On the other hand, IT managers desire efficient and scalable protection mechanisms.
Towards solving these issues, in this talk, I would like to introduce two of my efforts I did at Northwestern University. First, I will present the design of NetShield, a new vulnerability signature based NIDS/NIPS, which achieves high throughput comparable to that of the state-of-the-art regular expression based systems while offering much better accuracy. In particular, I propose a candidate selection algorithm which efficiently matches thousands of vulnerability signatures simultaneously, and design a parsing transition state machine that achieves fast protocol parsing.
Second, I will talk about WebShield, a secure web proxy design that protects clients from web-based exploits by processing potentially malicious JavaScript in a sandboxed environment (shadow browser) on a middlebox. With shadow browsers, WebShield also aims to deploy client-based defenses against various classes of web attacks without client modifications.
Biography: Zhichun Li currently is a research staff member at NEC Research Labs. Before joining NEC, he received his Ph.D. on Dec 2009 from Northwestern University, and continued working in the same university as a research associate for half a year. He earned both M.S. and B.S. degrees from Tsinghua University in China. His research interests span the areas of security, networking and distributed systems with an emphasis on network security, web security, smartphone security, cloud security, social network security, network measurement and distributed system diagnosis. He has conducted research at Microsoft Research Redmond and International Computer Science Institute (ICSI) of UC Berkeley.
Host: Prof. William Halfond
Location: Seaver Science Library (SSL) - 150
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Kanak Agrawal
