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Events for March 25, 2010
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Engineering Protein Fitness Using Cellular Quality Control Mechanisms
Thu, Mar 25, 2010
Mork Family Department of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Distinguished Lecture SeriesPresentsMatthew DeLisaUniversity of CornellAbstract:TBA
Location: John Stauffer Science Lecture Hall (SLH) - 100
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Petra Pearce Sapir
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Architectural Inference and the Pursuit of Efficiency
Thu, Mar 25, 2010 @ 09:45 AM - 11:00 AM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Benjamin Lee,
Stanford UniversityAbstract:
Energy efficiency is a defining challenge in modern computing. Limits in technology scaling pose challenges in power density while limits in software parallelism raise questions about future multi-core integration. Without process and parallelism to drive efficiency, we must rely on specialization and design coordination across the hardware/software interface. However, specialization is prohibitively expensive, incurring high non-recurring engineering costs that arise from an intractable number of degrees of freedom. I present the case for architectural inference to provide tractability for complex design questions in computer architecture. Inference enables comprehensive solutions to long-standing and previously intractable design priorities in heterogeneous specialization, application/architecture co-design, and architecture/circuit co-design. I also describe strategies for leveraging efficient components in cloud computing systems. In particular, I discuss experiences from deploying the Microsoft Bing search engine on mobile processors for energy efficiency. I also note the price of efficiency, which is exacted from application robustness and flexibility, and the implications for future system design. Biography:
Benjamin Lee is an NSF Computing Innovation Fellow in Electrical Engineering and a member of the VLSI Research Group at Stanford University. His research focuses on scalable technologies, power-efficient architectures, and high-performance applications. He is also interested in economics and policy for sustainable IT infrastructure. Dr. Lee has co-authored more than twenty papers in these areas, earning six nominations/awards such as the Harvard nomination for the ACM doctoral dissertation award, an IEEE Micro Top Pick, and a Communications of the ACM highlight. He has held visiting positions at Microsoft Research, Intel Labs, and Lawrence Livermore National Lab. Dr. Lee received his B.S. from the University of California at Berkeley and his S.M., Ph.D. from Harvard University.
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - -248
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Estela Lopez
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Summer 2010 Transfer Workshop
Thu, Mar 25, 2010 @ 12:30 PM
Viterbi School of Engineering Student Affairs
Workshops & Infosessions
Considering taking classes this summer at a local community college? Attend this workshop to learn which classes to take and how to get credit for those classes.
Location: Ronald Tutor Hall of Engineering (RTH) - 211
Audiences: Undergrad
Contact: Viterbi Admissions & Student Affairs
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Photonics Seminar (Student Talk)
Thu, Mar 25, 2010 @ 01:00 PM - 02:00 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Large tuning of birefringence in two strip silicon waveguidesvia optomechanical motion Jing Ma An optomechanical method is presented to tune phase birefringence in parallel silicon strip waveguides. We first calculate the deformation of suspended, parallel strip waveguides due to optical forces. We optimize the frequency and polarization of the pump light to obtain a 9nm deformation for an optical power of 20mW. Widely tunable phase birefringence can be achieved by varying the pump power, with maximum values of 0.026. The giant phase birefringence allows linear to circular polarization conversion within 30µm for a pump power of 67mW. In-Plane Thermally Tuned Silicon-on-Insulator Wavelength Selective ReflectorLawrence StewartThe transparency of silicon at communications wavelengths makes it an ideal choice for low loss optical devices; however, silicon suffers from few and comparatively weak tuning methods. Free carrier injection or depletion are widely used and are suitable for high speed modulators, but these devices are ultimately limited by free carrier induced absorption effects. While a much slower process, thermal tuning allows for large refractive index changes with minimal changes in optical absorption. A thermally tunable silicon-on-insulator wavelength selective reflector is proposed for an application as a mirror in an integrated tunable laser. Simulations and recent experimental results of thermally tuned microring devices will be presented.
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 248
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Jing Ma
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CS Colloq: Bryan Parno
Thu, Mar 25, 2010 @ 03:30 PM - 05:00 PM
Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Talk Title: Secure Code Execution on General-Purpose Computers
Speaker: Bryan Parno
Host: Prof. Ramesh GovindanAbstract:
As businesses and individuals entrust more and more sensitive tasks (e.g., paying bills, shopping online, or accessing medical records) to computers, it becomes increasingly important to ensure this trust is warranted. However, users are understandably reluctant to abandon the low cost, high performance, and flexibility of today's general-purpose computers. Thus, one of the fundamental questions I consider is: How can secure code execution coexist with the untrustworthy mountain of buggy yet feature-rich software that is common on modern computers?
For example, how can we keep a user's keystrokes private if the operating system, the most privileged software on the computer, cannot be trusted to be free of vulnerabilities? This is made all the more difficult by the need to preserve the system's existing functionality and performance.In this talk, I will present two techniques I have developed to address the need for features and security. With the Flicker architecture, I showed that that these conflicting needs can both be satisfied by constructing an on-demand secure execution environment, using a combination of software techniques and recent commodity CPU enhancements. This provides a solid foundation for constructing secure systems that must coexist with standard software; the developer of a security-sensitive code module need only trust her own code, plus as few as 250 lines of Flicker code, for the secrecy and integrity of her code's execution.Flicker assumes that a small portion of the computer's hardware can be trusted, but an increasing number of computing tasks are outsourced to the "cloud", where the user has no such guarantees. To formalize this setting, I introduced the notion of verifiable computing and designed a protocol to provably and efficiently provide computational integrity for work done by an untrusted party. The protocol also provides provable secrecy for the inputs and outputs of the computation. In addition, my protocol provides asymptotically optimal performance (amortized over multiple inputs). This result shows that we can outsource arbitrary computations to untrusted workers, preserve the secrecy of the data, and efficiently verify that the computations were done correctly.Bio:
Bryan Parno is a PhD candidate in Electrical and Computer Engineering
(ECE) at Carnegie Mellon University. He earned his Masters in ECE at Carnegie Mellon University, and his Bachelors in Computer Science at Harvard University. His current work focuses on the foundations of trust on modern computers. His research interests include computer security, systems, networks, and applied cryptography. In his spare time, he enjoys photography and volunteering as an Emergency Medical technician.
Location: Seaver Science Library (SSL) - 150
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: CS Front Desk
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Low Power Compact Servers
Thu, Mar 25, 2010 @ 04:00 PM - 06:00 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Distinguished Lecturer SeriesDr. Trevor Mudge,
University of MichiganABSTRACT
Trevor Mudge received a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Illinois.
Since then he has been at the University of Michigan. He was named the Bredt Professor of Engineering after a ten year term as Director of the Advanced Computer Architecture Laboratory -- a group of a dozen faculty and 80 graduate students. He is author of numerous papers on computer architecture, programming languages, VLSI design, and computer vision. He has also chaired 42 theses in these areas. He is a Fellow of the IEEE, a member of the ACM, the IET, and the British Computer Society.BIOGRAPHY
With power and cooling becoming an increasingly costly part of the operating cost of a server, the old trend of striving for higher performance with little regard for power is over. Emerging semiconductor process technologies, multicore architectures, and new interconnect technology provide an avenue for future servers to become low power, compact, and possibly mobile. In our talk we examine three techniques for achieving low power: 1) Near threshold operation; 2) 3D die stacking; and 3) replacing DRAM with Flash memory.Lecture 4:00PM
Reception to follow at 5:00PM in SAL LobbyLocation: Henry Salvatori Computer Science Center (SAL) - 101
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Estela Lopez
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Networking Your Way to a Job
Thu, Mar 25, 2010 @ 04:00 PM - 05:00 PM
Viterbi School of Engineering Career Connections
Workshops & Infosessions
What is networking? Attend this workshop and learn how to build relationships and connections that can teach you more about your field. Discover USC networking resources that can help build your private network!
Location: Ronald Tutor Hall of Engineering (RTH) - 211
Audiences: All Viterbi Students
Contact: RTH 218 Viterbi Career Services
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United States Air Force
Thu, Mar 25, 2010 @ 05:30 PM - 06:30 PM
Viterbi School of Engineering Career Connections
Workshops & Infosessions
Join representatives of this company as they share general company information and available opportunities.
Location: Grace Ford Salvatori (GFS) 106
Audiences: All Viterbi Students
Contact: RTH 218 Viterbi Career Services
