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SUNMONTUEWEDTHUFRISAT
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Events for December
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CS Colloquium and CAIS Seminar: Andy Plumptre - Improving the effectiveness of law enforcement in African Parks
Thu, Dec 01, 2016 @ 02:00 PM - 02:50 PM
Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Andy Plumptre, Tropical Conservation Scientist
Talk Title: Improving the effectiveness of law enforcement in African Parks
Series: Center for AI in Society (CAIS) Seminar Series
Abstract: This lecture satisfies requirements for CSCI 591: Computer Science Research Colloquium.
Investment in law enforcement in protected areas in Africa typically form more than 50% of the budget and often nearer 85-90%. Yet there has been very little research looking at ways that ranger patrolling could be improved and made more efficient and effective. This presentation will present work that has been undertaken in Uganda to improve law enforcement and discuss areas of research that are still needed to better understand how to improve enforcement.
Biography: Andy Plumptre, PhD is a tropical conservation scientist who has been working for the past 25 years in the Albertine Rift Region of Africa, one of the most biodiverse parts of the continent. His work has focused on many different issues related to the conservation of this region including developing new methods for surveying primates in forests, improving ranger patrolling in protected areas, conservation planning for the Albertine Rift, building national capacity to undertake monitoring and research, supporting transboundary conservation, and establishing new protected areas.
Host: Center for AI in Society, USC
Location: Mark Taper Hall Of Humanities (THH) - 301
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Assistant to CS chair
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CS Colloquium: Michael Ernst (University of Washington) - Analyzing the entire program: applying natural language processing to software engineering
Thu, Dec 01, 2016 @ 04:00 PM - 05:00 PM
Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Michael Ernst, University of Washington
Talk Title: Analyzing the entire program: applying natural language processing to software engineering
Series: CS Colloquium
Abstract: This lecture satisfies requirements for CSCI 591: Computer Science Research Colloquium. Part of Yahoo! Labs Machine Learning Seminar Series.
A powerful, but limited, way to view software is as source code alone.
Mathematical techniques, such as abstract interpretation and model checking, can indicate whether the program satisfies a formal specification. But, where does the formal specification come from?
A program consists of much more than a sequence of instructions.
Developers make use of test cases, documentation, variable names, program structure, the version control repository, and more. I argue that it is time to take the blinders off of software analysis tools: tools should use all these artifacts to deduce more powerful and useful information about the program.
Researchers are beginning to make progress towards this vision. In this talk, I will discuss four initial results that find bugs and generate code, by making use of variable names, error messages, procedure documentation, and user questions.
Biography: Michael D. Ernst is a Professor in the Computer Science & Engineering department at the University of Washington.
Ernst's research aims to make software more reliable, more secure, and easier (and more fun!) to produce. His primary technical interests are in software engineering, programming languages, type theory, security, program analysis, bug prediction, testing, and verification. Ernst's research combines strong theoretical foundations with realistic experimentation, with an eye to changing the way that software developers work.
Ernst is an ACM Fellow (2014) and received the inaugural John Backus Award (2009) and the NSF CAREER Award (2002). His research has received an ACM SIGSOFT Impact Paper Award (2013), 8 ACM Distinguished Paper Awards (FSE 2014, ISSTA 2014, ESEC/FSE 2011, ISSTA 2009, ESEC/FSE 2007, ICSE 2007, ICSE 2004, ESEC/FSE 2003), an ECOOP 2011 Best Paper Award, honorable mention in the 2000 ACM doctoral dissertation competition, and other honors. In 2013, Microsoft Academic Search ranked Ernst #2 in the world, in software engineering research contributions over the past 10 years.
Dr. Ernst was previously a tenured professor at MIT, and before that a researcher at Microsoft Research.
More information is available at his homepage: http://homes.cs.washington.edu/~mernst/.
Host: Chao Wang
Location: Henry Salvatori Computer Science Center (SAL) - 101
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Assistant to CS chair
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CS Colloquium and CAIS Seminar: Andy Plumptre - How much to protect and where? Conservation planning in Africa's biodiversity hotspot
Fri, Dec 02, 2016 @ 11:00 AM - 11:50 AM
Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Andy Plumptre, Tropical Conservation Scientist
Talk Title: How much to protect and where? Conservation planning in Africa's biodiversity hotspot
Series: Center for AI in Society (CAIS) Seminar Series
Abstract: This lecture satisfies requirements for CSCI 591: Computer Science Research Colloquium.
The Albertine Rift is the richest region for vertebrate conservation in Africa. Protected areas have been established here in the past but mainly for large mammal species. This presentation will look at where needs to be conserved in the region to maximize the conservation impacts in terms of species protected whilst at the same time avoiding future mining developments in the region and the impacts of future climate change. Using conservation planning science to demonstrate the uniqueness of sites then led to the creation of new protected areas.
Biography: Andy Plumptre, PhD is a tropical conservation scientist who has been working for the past 25 years in the Albertine Rift Region of Africa, one of the most biodiverse parts of the continent. His work has focused on many different issues related to the conservation of this region including developing new methods for surveying primates in forests, improving ranger patrolling in protected areas, conservation planning for the Albertine Rift, building national capacity to undertake monitoring and research, supporting transboundary conservation, and establishing new protected areas.
Host: Center for AI in Society, USC
Location: Seeley G. Mudd Building (SGM) - 101
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Assistant to CS chair
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CS Colloquium: Ariel Felner (Ben-Gurion University) - Search for Optimal Solutions: the Heart of Heuristic Search is Still Beating
Fri, Dec 02, 2016 @ 12:00 PM - 01:00 PM
Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Ariel Felner, Ben-Gurion University
Talk Title: Search for Optimal Solutions: the Heart of Heuristic Search is Still Beating
Series: CS Colloquium
Abstract: The field of heuristic search has spawned large number of subfields such as finding good heuristics, abstracting state-spaces, finding solutions of different qualities or that meet different requirements or constraints. However, a major research direction within the field of heuristic search is that of finding optimal solutions.
While the A* algorithm was proved to be optimally effective there exists a large number of algorithms and research directions that enhance the A* family of algorithms and improve their performance. In this talk I'll cover a number of such recent algorithms. These algorithms assume a fixed heuristic function but exploit various algorithmic directions to improve upon A* in many ways along the following lines: better memory usage, improved generations of nodes, interleaving depth-first searches into A*, enhanced calculations of the heuristic and recent developments of optimal bidirectional search.
Biography: Ariel Felner received his Ph.D in 2002 from Bar-Ilan University, Israel, and is now an associate professor at Ben-Gurion University, Israel. He is the chair of the Israeli Association for Artificial intelligence (IAAI) and a council member of SoCS. He is interested in all aspects of heuristic search and has performed research in various areas within the field of heuristic search. He pays specific attention to pedagogical and historical aspects of teaching concepts in this field.
Host: Sven Koenig
Location: Hedco Neurosciences Building (HNB) - 15
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Assistant to CS chair
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CS Colloquium: Martin Rinard (MIT) - Automatically Patching Errors in Software Systems
Tue, Dec 06, 2016 @ 04:00 PM - 05:00 PM
Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Martin Rinard , MIT
Talk Title: Automatically Patching Errors in Software Systems
Series: CS Colloquium
Abstract: This lecture satisfies requirements for CSCI 591: Computer Science Research Colloquium.
Patching defects is a central activity in essentially all software development activities. Current practice relies almost exclusively on human developers to manually locate and patch each defect.
I will present two techniques for automatically patching software defects. Both leverage the enormous amount of software and software revision histories produced by open-source software development efforts.
The first technique locates and transfers correct code from a donor application into a recipient application to eliminate defects in the recipient. The second technique generates and searches a space of potential patches, using a model of correct code learned from previous successful patches to guide the search. The experimental results highlight the potential of these two techniques to automate the elimination of many defects.
Biography: Martin Rinard is a Professor in the Department of EECS at MIT and a member of the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL). His research interests include programming languages, computer security, program analysis, program verification, software engineering, and distributed and parallel computing.
Prominent results include automatic techniques that enable applications to survive otherwise fatal errors and security attacks, and techniques that trade off accuracy of end-to-end results in return for increased performance and resilience.
He holds a PhD in Computer Science from Stanford University. He is an ACM Fellow, and has received many awards including the Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship and numerous Distinguished and Best Paper awards from top venues of his field.
Homepgae: http://people.csail.mit.edu/rinard/
Host: Chao Wang
Location: Henry Salvatori Computer Science Center (SAL) - 101
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Assistant to CS chair
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Distinguished Stanford Lecturer: Big Data and Human Behavior
Wed, Dec 07, 2016 @ 12:00 PM - 02:00 PM
Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Justin Grimmer, Associate Professor of Political Science and Computer Science, Stanford University
Talk Title: Exploratory and Confirmatory Causal Inference for High Dimensional Interventions
Host: USC Dornsife College
Location: Cammilleri Hall, Brain and Creativity Institute (BCI)
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: USC Computer Science
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CS Colloquium: Zhenhui (Jessie) Li (Penn State) - Toward Semantic Understanding of Spatial Trajectories
Tue, Dec 13, 2016 @ 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Zhenhui (Jessie) Li , Penn State
Talk Title: Toward Semantic Understanding of Spatial Trajectories
Series: Yahoo! Labs Machine Learning Seminar Series
Abstract: How could we harness the increasingly available big data to understand our dynamic ecosystem? For example, why people or animals move in the space in certain ways and how do their movements respond to surrounding environments? Why are crimes more frequent in certain regions and can we explain it using heterogeneous urban data? Is shale gas development contaminating our environment and how to mine the correlations between environment and all potential factors?
Our research aims to develop data mining techniques for geospatial data collected from different sources to semantically understand trajectories, urban dynamics, and environment, by closely collaborating with domain experts. In this talk, I will focus on data mining techniques to understand spatial trajectories. I will first discuss why existing methods often make trivial discoveries when contexts are not considered. I will then present our recent results in semantic understanding of trajectories with rich spatial-temporal contexts. I will also show that using cross-domain big data is critical to understand crimes and environment. Throughout the talk, I would like to share my experiences in exciting interdisciplinary collaborations.
Part of Yahoo! Labs Machine Learning Seminar Series
Biography: Dr. Zhenhui (Jessie) Li is Assistant Professor of Information Sciences and Technology at the Pennsylvania State University. Prior to joining Penn State, she received her PhD degree in Computer Science from University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in 2012, where she was a member of data mining research group. Her research has been focused on mining heterogeneous and large-scale geospatial data with applications in ecology, environment, social science, urban computing, and transportation. She is a passionate interdisciplinary researcher and closely collaborates with social scientists, animal scientists, criminologists, and geoscientists. To learn more, please visit her homepage: https://faculty.ist.psu.edu/jessieli
Host: Yan Liu
Location: Hedco Neurosciences Building (HNB) - 100
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Assistant to CS chair
