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Events for April 24, 2014
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CS RASC Seminar: Steven M. LaValle (Oculus VR) - Virtual Reality, Really!
Thu, Apr 24, 2014 @ 11:00 AM - 12:30 PM
Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Steven M. LaValle, Oculus VR
Talk Title: Virtual Reality, Really!
Series: RASC Seminar Series
Abstract: It has been an exciting adventure as we race to bring the consumer version of the Oculus Rift VR headset into widespread use for games, cinema, therapy, virtual travel, and beyond. Palmer Luckey's 2012 prototype demonstrated that smartphone-based advances in display and sensing technology enable a lightweight, high field-of-view VR experience that is affordable by the masses. This has stimulated widespread interest across many industries, research labs, and potential end users of this technology. This talk will highlight some of the ongoing technical challenges, including game development, user interfaces, perceptual psychology, and accurate head tracking. Although VR has been researched for decades, many new challenges arise because of the ever changing technology and the rising demand for new kinds of VR content.
Biography: Steven M. LaValle is Principal Scientist at Oculus VR, Inc. He is a roboticist and a Professor of Computer Science at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. He is best known for his introduction of rapidly exploring random tree (RRT) algorithms, and his book on Planning Algorithms, one of the most highly cited texts in the field. In 2012, he was one of seven faculty named as a University Scholar at UIUC for 2012-2014.
Host: Nora Ayanian
Location: Kaprielian Hall (KAP) - 156
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Assistant to CS chair
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CS Colloquium: Ariel Feldman (University of Pennsylvania) - Designing Systems for Skeptics
Thu, Apr 24, 2014 @ 04:00 PM - 05:30 PM
Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Ariel Feldman, University of Pennsylvania
Talk Title: Designing Systems for Skeptics
Series: CS Colloquium
Abstract:
In modern distributed systems, users are increasingly being asked to rely on third parties who do not necessarily have their best interests in mind. For example, cloud hosted services offer a myriad of benefits, but they require users to trust the service provider with the confidentiality and integrity of their data and the correctness of the computations performed on it. The recent history of accidental and malicious data disclosures, misuse of users’ data, surreptitious censorship, and warrantless surveillance has shown that this trust is often misplaced. Moreover, non-technical mechanisms, such as laws and market incentives, have proved to be insufficient to mitigate these threats.
In this talk, I will present two implemented systems that enable their users to benefit from cloud deployment, but that are designed “for skeptics:” they provide users with guarantees that hold even if the service provider cannot be trusted. The first system, SPORC, makes it possible to build low-latency collaborative Web applications such as shared text editors, group calendars, and instant messaging applications with an untrusted provider. The provider only sees encrypted data and cannot deviate from correct execution without detection. And if the provider does misbehave, SPORC gives users a means to recover. Pantry, the second system, enables a user to outsource a general purpose computation to a potentially faulty provider and yet verify that the computation was performed correctly. Unlike prior efforts, Pantry allows verifiable computations to operate on remotely-stored data that the user does not possess, opening the way to a wide variety of uses such as MapReduce jobs and database queries.
Biography: Ari Feldman is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Pennsylvania whose research focuses on building systems that provide confidentiality, integrity, and correctness by design rather than solely through non-technical means, drawing on techniques from distributed systems, applied cryptography, and theory. He received his Ph.D. in computer science from Princeton University in 2012 under the supervision of Edward W. Felten and received an A.B. in computer science and in ethics and political philosophy from Brown University.
Host: Minlan Yu
Location: Henry Salvatori Computer Science Center (SAL) - 101
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Assistant to CS chair
