SUNMONTUEWEDTHUFRISAT
Events for November 24, 2008
-
Stochastic Local Search for Propositional Satisfiability
Mon, Nov 24, 2008 @ 02:00 PM
Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Prof. Abdul Sattar, Griffith University, Australia
Host: Prof. Milind TambeAbstract:
The problem of finding a consistent truth assignment to all propositional variables in a formula, known as SAT problem, has been an interesting and difficult challenge. Indeed, SAT is at the heart of all computationally intractable problems. Many real world problems could be encoded as SAT problems. Thus finding an efficient solution for SAT has far reaching impact on computationally hard problems. This talk will begin with an overview of the main approaches for solving SAT problems. We will then focus on stochastic local search based methods. These methods have been shown to be highly effective for large size problems. We will present our recent results on clause weighting based local search, including an influential method that automatically learns about the structure of the problem, and efficiently exploit those structures to solve some of the difficult challenge problems in the field.Biography:
Prof Sattar is founding Director of the Institute for Integrated and Intelligent Systems (IIIS), a research centre of excellence at Griffith University established in 2003. He is a Research Leader at NICTA Queensland Laboratory since June 2005, and also held the Associate Director of Education portfolio at the Queensland Laboratory from October 2006-June 2008. He has been an academic staff member at Griffith University since February 1992 as a lecturer (1992-95), senior lecturer (1996-99), and professor (2000-present) within the School of Information and Communication Technology. Prior to his career at Griffith University, he was a lecturer in Physics in Rajasthan, India (1980-82), research scholar at Jawaharlal Nehru University, India (1982-85), the University of Waterloo, Canada (1985-87), and the University of Alberta, Canada (1987-1991).He holds a BSc (Physics, Chemistry and Mathematics) and an MSc (Physics) from the University of Rajasthan, India, an MPhil in Computer and Systems Sciences from the Jawaharlal Nehru University, India, and an MMath in Computer Science from the University of Waterloo, Canada, and a PhD in Computer Science (with specialization in Artificial Intelligence) from the University of Alberta, Canada. His current research interests include knowledge representation and reasoning, constraint satisfaction, rational agents, propositional satisfiability, temporal reasoning, temporal databases, and bioinformatics. He has supervised 17 successful completions of PhD graduates, and published over 100 technical papers in refereed conferences and journals in the field. His research team has won three major international awards in recent years (the gold medals for the SAT 2005 and SAT 2007 competitions in the random satisfiable category and an IJCAI 2007 distinguished paper award).Location: Kaprielian Hall (KAP) - 144
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: CS Colloquia
-
The Promise, the Limits, and the Beauty of Software (Distinguished Lecture)
Mon, Nov 24, 2008 @ 04:00 PM
Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Dr. Grady Booch, IBM Research
Host: Prof. Barry BoehmAbstract:
Within this generation, software has changed the way that individuals collaborate, organizations do business, economies operate, and cultures interact. Software-intensive systems can amplify human intelligence, but they cannot replace human judgment; software-intensive systems can fuse, coordinate, classify, and analyze information, but they cannot create knowledge.Although software offers seemingly limitless promise, there are some very real limits to what software can do. Not everything we want to build can be built: there exist pragmatic theoretical and technical limits that make software development hard, if not in some cases impossible.Furthermore, not everything we want to build should be built: there exist moral, economic, social, and political limits that govern human industry.Software-intensive systems are perhaps the most intellectually complex artifacts created by humans, and while the majority of individuals in the civilized world rely on software in their daily lives, few of them understand the essential complexity therein, the labour required to create such artifacts, and the beautiful and elegant chaos of their architecture.In this presentation, we will examine the promise, the limits, and the beauty of software, as well as offer some conclusions that can be drawn from the last 60 years of software and some expectations and cautions for the next generation.Biography:
http://www.handbookofsoftwarearchitecture.com/index.jsp?page=ContactLocation: Olin Hall of Engineering (OHE) - 132
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: CS Colloquia
