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Events for March 31, 2016
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CS Colloquium: Baris Kasikci (EPFL) - Stamping Out Concurrency Bugs
Thu, Mar 31, 2016 @ 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Baris Kasikci, EPFL
Talk Title: Stamping Out Concurrency Bugs
Series: CS Colloquium
Abstract: This lecture satisfies requirements for CSCI 591: Computer Science Research Colloquium
The shift to multi-core architectures in the past ten years pushed developers to write concurrent software to leverage hardware parallelism. The transition to multi-core hardware happened at a more rapid pace than the evolution of associated programming techniques and tools, which made it difficult to write concurrent programs that are both efficient and correct. Failures due to concurrency bugs are often hard to reproduce and fix, and can cause significant losses.
In this talk, I will first give an overview of the techniques we developed for the detection, root cause diagnosis, and classification of concurrency bugs. Then, I will discuss how the techniques we developed have been adopted at Microsoft and Intel. I will then discuss in detail Gist, a technique for the root cause diagnosis of failures. Gist uses hybrid static-dynamic program analysis and gathers information from real user executions to isolate root causes of failures. Gist is highly accurate and efficient, even for failures that rarely occur in production. Finally, I will close by describing future work I plan to do toward solving the challenges posed to software systems by emerging technology trends.
Biography: Baris Kasikci completed his Ph.D. in the Dependable Systems Laboratory (DSLAB) at EPFL, advised by George Candea. His research is centered around developing techniques, tools, and environments that help developers build more reliable and secure software. He is interested in finding solutions that allow programmers to better reason about their code, and that efficiently detect bugs, classify them, and diagnose their root cause. He especially focuses on bugs that manifest in production, because they are hard and time-consuming. He is also interested in efficient runtime instrumentation, hardware and runtime support for enhancing system security, and program analysis under various memory models.
Baris is one of the four recipients of the VMware 2014-2015 Graduate Fellowship. During his Ph.D., he interned at Microsoft Research, VMware, and Intel. Before starting his Ph.D., he worked as a software engineer for four years, mainly developing real-time embedded systems software. Before joining EPFL, he was working for Siemens Corporate Technology. More details can be found at http://www.bariskasikci.org/.
Host: CS Department
Location: Olin Hall of Engineering (OHE) - 136
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Assistant to CS chair
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CS Colloquium: Konrad Kording (Northwestern University) - Neural Cryptography
Thu, Mar 31, 2016 @ 03:00 PM - 04:00 PM
Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Konrad Kording, Northwestern University
Talk Title: Neural Cryptography
Series: CS Colloquium
Abstract: Neuroscience is slowly transitioning into a data rich discipline and large data sets allow new approaches. Brain decoders use neural recordings to infer what someone is thinking, viewing, or their intended movement. The problem has always been phrased as a supervised learning problem. Here we introduce a new method for brain decoding that does not require supervised data, i.e. the knowledge of the intended movement while the neural activity is recorded. Our approach is inspired by code breaking techniques used in cryptography where it is asked which mapping from from encrypted to decrypted text leads to text that most resembles the known structure of language. Analogously, we find a transformation of neural data (decoder) that aligns the distribution of the decoder output with the distribution of the user's intended movement. On a standard primate center-out reaching task, we demonstrate that we can obtain similar performance with that of a decoder with access to supervised data. However, current datasets are still too small to ask many relevant questions about neural computation and I am collaborating with neuroengineers to change that.
Host: CS Department
More Info: https://bluejeans.com/942986114
Location: Ronald Tutor Hall of Engineering (RTH) - 526
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Assistant to CS chair
Event Link: https://bluejeans.com/942986114
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CS Colloquium: Cynthia Sung (MIT CSAIL) - Computational Tools for Robot Design: A Composition Approach
Thu, Mar 31, 2016 @ 04:00 PM - 05:00 PM
Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Cynthia Sung, MIT CSAIL
Talk Title: Computational Tools for Robot Design: A Composition Approach
Series: CS Colloquium
Abstract: This lecture satisfies requirements for CSCI 591: Computer Science Research Colloquium
As robots become more prevalent in society, they must develop an ability to deal with more diverse situations. This ability entails customizability of not only software intelligence, but also of hardware. However, designing a functional robot remains challenging and often involves many iterations of design and testing even for skilled designers. My goal is to create computational tools for making functional machines, allowing future designers to quickly improvise new hardware.
In this talk, I will discuss one possible approach to automated design using composition. I will describe our origami-inspired print-and-fold process that allows entire robots to be fabricated within a few hours, and I will demonstrate how foldable modules can be composed together to create foldable mechanisms and robots. The modules are represented parametrically, enabling a small set of modules to describe a wide range of geometries and also allowing geometries to be optimized in a straightforward manner. I will also introduce a tool that we have developed that combines this composition approach with simulations to help human designers of all skill levels to design and fabricate custom functional robots.
Biography: Cynthia Sung is a Ph.D. candidate in the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). She received a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from Rice University in 2011 and an M.S. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from MIT in 2013. Her research interests include computational design, folding theory, and rapid fabrication, and her current work focuses on algorithms for synthesis and analysis of engineering designs.
Host: CS Department
More Info: https://bluejeans.com/727861390
Location: Henry Salvatori Computer Science Center (SAL) - 101
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Assistant to CS chair
Event Link: https://bluejeans.com/727861390
