SUNMONTUEWEDTHUFRISAT
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Events for May
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CS COlloq: Prof. Lin Zhong
Thu, May 06, 2010 @ 11:00 AM - 12:30 PM
Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Talk Title: From users to energy-efficient mobile InternetSpeaker: Prof. Lin ZhongHost: Prof. Ramesh GovindanAbstract:Recent years have seen an explosive growth of Internet-ready mobile devices such as smartphones, netbooks, and e-Book readers. Not only has the growth challenged the network capacity, but also Internet access is among the most power-hungry usage on mobile devices.In this talk, we examine the fundamental inefficiency in the design of mobile wireless systems and its impact on both network capacity and device efficiency. In particular, we show the conventional assumption of omni directional transmission from mobile devices is a bottleneck and focus on our recent results in realizing directional transmission for them. We first analyze how mobile devices rotate during real wireless usage and how rotation impacts the quality of directional
transmission. Leveraging these findings, we provide two realizations of directional transmission based on directional antennas and energy-efficient beamsteering that are intended for immediate and long-term deployments, respectively. Using both experimental measurement and simulation, we show that directional transmission offers improved capacity-efficiency tradeoffs for mobile wireless access.Throughout this talk, we emphasize a user-centered approach toward energy-efficient mobile system design to reveal design problems, discover new opportunities, and evaluate solutions.Bio: Lin Zhong received his B.S. and M.S. from Tsinghua University in 1998 and 2000, respectively. He received his Ph.D. from Princeton University in September, 2005. He worked with NEC Labs, America, for the summer of 2003 and with Microsoft Research for the summers of 2004 and 2005. Since September, 2005, he has been with the Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering, Rice University, as an assistant professor. He received the AT&T Asian-Pacific Leadership Award in 2001
and the Harold W. Dodds Princeton University Honorific Fellowship for 2004-2005. He and his students received the best paper awards from ACM MobileHCI 2007 and IEEE PerCom 2009.
A paper he co-authored was identified as one of the 30 most
influential papers in the first 10 years of Design, Automation & Test in Europe conferences by the conference. His research interests include mobile & embedded system design, human-computer interaction, and nanoelectronics. His research has been funded by National Science Foundation, Motorola Labs, Microsoft Research, Nokia, and Texas Instruments.
Location: Seaver Science Library (SSL) - 150
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: CS Front Desk
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CS Colloq: Dr. Pradeep Varakantham
Fri, May 07, 2010 @ 12:00 PM - 01:30 PM
Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Talk Title: Risk sensitive planning and scheduling in uncertain environmentsSpeaker: Dr. Pradeep VarakanthamHost: Prof. Milind TambeAbstract: In risk sensitive reasoning, the key goal is to maximize expected utility of a user as opposed to maximizing an expected value. Such reasoning is imperative in domains like financial planning, rescue scenarios and project scheduling problems, where users are involved and there is uncertainty associated with decisions. In this talk, I will motivate, present algorithms and show experimental results for risk sensitive reasoning in two different settings:
(a) Planning in partially observable domains with non-deterministic outcomes to actions: In this research, we consider different risk attitudes of users, which are modeled as non-linear utility functions (mapping from current wealth to the utility) and provide efficient mechanisms to compute policies that account for such risk attitudes;and
(b) Scheduling in resource constrained project scheduling problems with durational uncertainty: Here, we develop a fitness function that is based on a risk parameter set by users to guide search for robust schedules.Bio:Dr. Pradeep Varakantham is an assistant professor at Singapore Management University. Previously, he was a post doctoral fellow with Steve Smith in the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. He received his PhD in Computer Science from University of Southern California under the guidance of Milind Tambe. His research interests include reasoning with uncertainty, multi agent systems, reinforcement/inverse learning and distributed constraint reasoning. He is co-author on a paper that was nominated for Jay Modi best student paper award at AAMAS 2009. He was the Outstanding Research Assistant in the Computer Science Department at University of Southern California for the year 2005. He has papers in some of the top Artificial Intelligence conferences including IJCAI, AAAI, AAMAS, and ICAPS.
Location: Grace Ford Salvatori Hall Of Letters, Arts & Sciences (GFS) - 118
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: CS Front Desk
