Computer Science Seminar Series
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The Computer Science Seminar Lecture Series is a collection of weekly lectures about topics at the forefront of contemporary computer science research, given by speakers knowledgeable in their field of study. These speakers come from a variety of different technical and geographic backgrounds, with many of them traveling from other universities across the globe to come here and share their knowledge.
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Browsing Computer Science Seminar Series by Subject "Computer Science Lecture Series"
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- Code as a Metaphor for Computational Thinking (CS Seminar Lecture Series)Astrachan, Owen (2012-02-24)From an educational standpoint Computer Science has embraced the phrase 'Computational Thinking' as part of defining what our students should do. The National Academies and the National Research Council call for standards based on Computational Thinking. The National Science Foundation has required that Computational Thinking be addressed in many grants and programs. What is Computational Thinking? It may be that we cannot define it precisely, but just as Supreme Court Justice Potter Steward said of pornography we "know it when we see it". In this talk I will use code as a metaphor for explaining efforts to make sure that computational thinking is infusing education in K-12, colleges, and universities. I will talk about the code of software and the code of law-and-protocols and how they can be viewed and used together in courses, programs, and projects both at local and national levels. I will explain using concrete examples and stories why this metaphor can be empowering both to us and to our students. BIO: Owen Astrachan is the Director of Undergraduate Studies in Computer Science and Professor of the Practice at Duke where he has taught for more than twenty years. He taught mathematics and computer science in high school for seven years and earned an AB in mathematics from Dartmouth and MAT, MS, and PhD degrees from Duke. Professor Astrachan builds curricula and approaches to teaching computer science. This includes an NSF-sponsored, apprentice-learning approach between Duke, Appalachian State, and North Carolina Central and an NSF CAREER Award to incorporate Design Patterns in courses. He was involved early in AP Computer Science: as teacher, as member of the development committee, and as the Chief Reader. He is the PI on the CS Principles project to create a broader, more accessible AP course in computer science. In 1995 he received Duke's Robert B. Cox Distingished Teaching in Science Award, in 1998 he received the Outstanding Instructor Award while on sabbatical at the University of British Columbia, in 2002 he received Duke's Richard K. Lublin award for "ability to engender genuine intellectual excitement, ability to engender curiosity, knowledge of field and ability to communicate that knowledge", and in 2007 he was an inaugural recipient of the NSF/CISE Distinguished Education Fellow award. The Computer Science Seminar Lecture Series is a collection of weekly lectures about topics at the forefront of contemporary computer science research, given by speakers knowledgeable in their field of study. These speakers come from a variety of different technical and geographic backgrounds, with many of them traveling from other universities across the globe to come here and share their knowledge. These weekly lectures were recorded with an HD video camera, edited with Apple Final Cut Pro X, and outputted in such a way that the resulting .mp4 video files were economical to store and stream utilizing the university's limited bandwidth and disk space resources.
- Computational Challenges in Space Research (CS Seminar Lecture Series)Baker, Joseph B. H. (2012-04-20)The Center for Space Science and Engineering Research (Space@VT) in the College of Engineering is a relatively new center having been initiated in summer 2007. At the present time Space@VT comprises twelve Faculty in the ECE and AOE departments and approximately 30 graduate students and postdoctoral associates. Space@VT research and education activities are focused on developing improved scientific understanding of the near-Earth space environment and expanding its technological exploitation for societal needs. In this presentation I will provide an overview of Space@VT research activities with a particular emphasis on those aspects that touch on computational issues. The intent is to expand the conversation with CS faculty beyond the ad-hoc collaborations that are currently ongoing and, hopefully, generate new collaborations. Some of the themes that will be covered in the presentation include: (1) data mining the archive of space physics datasets for enhanced scientific productivity, (2) the necessity for development of new compression algorithms for data downlinks and attitude control on small university-built satellites (i.e. CubeSats), and (3) high performance numerical simulations of the near-Earth space plasma environment. Bio: Joseph Baker is an Assistant Professor in the Bradley Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Virginia Tech, and a member of the Center for Space Science and Engineering Research (Space@VT). Dr. Baker's current research uses data from the Super Dual Auroral Radar Network (SuperDARN) in conjunction with other ground- and space-based datasets to investigate electromagnetic coupling in the near-Earth space environment between the solar wind, the magnetosphere, and the ionosphere (or "space weather"). Prior to joining Virginia Tech in 2008, Dr. Baker was a Senior Staff Scientist at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory. He received his Ph.D. in Atmospheric and Space Sciences from the University of Michigan in 2001, and his B.Sc. in Physics from the University of New England (Australia) in 1994. In 2011, Dr. Baker was named the Steven O. Lane Junior Faculty Fellow by the Virginia Tech Board of Visitors and an Outstanding New Assistant Professor in the College of Engineering. Dr. Baker is a member of the American Geophysical Union (AGU) and serves on its Education Award Committee. He is also a 2012 NSF CAREER award recipient. The Computer Science Seminar Lecture Series is a collection of weekly lectures about topics at the forefront of contemporary computer science research, given by speakers knowledgeable in their field of study. These speakers come from a variety of different technical and geographic backgrounds, with many of them traveling from other universities across the globe to come here and share their knowledge. These weekly lectures were recorded with an HD video camera, edited with Apple Final Cut Pro X, and outputted in such a way that the resulting .mp4 video files were economical to store and stream utilizing the university's limited bandwidth and disk space resources.
- Dynamic Optimizations of Irregular Applications on Many-core Architectures (CS Seminar Lecture Series)Parton, Eric; Zehr, David; Wellington, Jake; Zhang, Zheng (2012-03-02)Enhancing the match between software executions and hardware features is key to computing efficiency in terms of both performance and energy consumption. The match is constantly complicated by emerging architecture features in computing systems and has become a continuously evolving problem. In this talk, I will present some recent findings in the implications of three prominent features of modern systems: the heterogeneity, the rapid growth of processor-level parallelism and the increasingly complex interplay among computing units. In particular, I will focus on how to streamline computations containing dynamic irregularities for General Purpose Graphic Processing Units (GPGPUs), a broadly adopted many-core architecture. The talk will begin with the theoretical foundations of GPGPU program-level transformation techniques, and further describe a runtime optimization system, named G-Streamline, as a unified software solution to irregularities in both memory references and control flows. The system enables on-the-fly elimination of irregularities through adaptive CPU-GPU pipelining and kernel splitting schemes. Working in a holistic fashion, it maximizes whole-program performance by resolving conflicts among optimizations. In the end, I will briefly describe my other work which includes a study of the influence of shared cache on multicore and a new paradigm, named shared-cache-aware optimizations, for parallel software locality enhancement. Bio: Zheng (Eddy) Zhang is a PhD candidate at the Computer Science Department of the College of William & Mary. She received her M.S. in Computer Science at William & Mary with a Computational Operations Research (COR) specialization. Her research generally lies in the area of compilers and programming systems, with a focus on revealing and exploiting the implications of emerging hardware features on the development, compilation, and execution of software. She is the lead author of a paper that won the Best Paper Award at PPoPP'10, and a recipient of a Google Anita Borg Memorial Scholarship. The Computer Science Seminar Lecture Series is a collection of weekly lectures about topics at the forefront of contemporary computer science research, given by speakers knowledgeable in their field of study. These speakers come from a variety of different technical and geographic backgrounds, with many of them traveling from other universities across the globe to come here and share their knowledge. These weekly lectures were recorded with an HD video camera, edited with Apple Final Cut Pro X, and outputted in such a way that the resulting .mp4 video files were economical to store and stream utilizing the university's limited bandwidth and disk space resources.
- Dynamical Processes on Large Networks (CS Seminar Lecture Series)Prakash, B. Aditya (2012-03-23)How do contagions spread in population networks? Which group should we market to, for maximizing product penetration? Will a given YouTube video go viral? Who are the best people to vaccinate? What happens when two products compete? Any insights on these problems, involving dynamical processes on networks, promise great scientific as well as commercial value. In this talk, we present a multi-pronged attack on such research questions, which includes: (a) Theoretical results on the tipping-point behavior of fundamental models; (b) Scalable Algorithms for changing the behavior of these processes, like for immunization, marketing etc.; and (c) Empirical Studies on tera-bytes of data for developing more realistic information-diffusion models. The problems we focus on are central in surprisingly diverse areas: from cyber-security, epidemiology and public health, viral marketing to spreading of hashtags on Twitter and propagation of memes on blogs. B. Aditya Prakash (http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~badityap) is a Ph.D. student in the Computer Science Department at Carnegie Mellon University. He got his B.Tech (in CS) from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) - Bombay. He has published 14 refereed papers in major venues and holds two U.S. patents. His interests include Data Mining, Applied Machine Learning and Databases, with emphasis on large real-world networks and time-series. Some of the inter-disciplinary questions he investigates deal with identifying the precise role of networks in diffusion of contagion (like viruses, products, ideas). The mission of his research is to enable us to understand and eventually influence such processes for our benefit. The Computer Science Seminar Lecture Series is a collection of weekly lectures about topics at the forefront of contemporary computer science research, given by speakers knowledgeable in their field of study. These speakers come from a variety of different technical and geographic backgrounds, with many of them traveling from other universities across the globe to come here and share their knowledge. These weekly lectures were recorded with an HD video camera, edited with Apple Final Cut Pro X, and outputted in such a way that the resulting .mp4 video files were economical to store and stream utilizing the university's limited bandwidth and disk space resources.
- Machine Learning in the Bandit Setting: Algorithms, Evaluation, and Case Studies (CS Seminar Lecture Series)Li, Lihong (2012-02-10)Much of machine-learning research is about discovering patterns---building intelligent agents that learn to predict future accurately from historical data. While this paradigm has been extremely successful in numerous applications, complex real-world problems such as content recommendation on the Internet often require the agents to learn to act optimally through autonomous interaction with the world they live in, a problem known as reinforcement learning. Using a news recommendation module on Yahoo!'s front page as a running example, the majority of the talk focuses on the special case of contextual bandits that have gained substantial interests recently due to their broad applications. We will highlight a fundamental challenge known as the exploration/exploitation tradeoff, present a few newly developed algorithms with strong theoretical guarantees, and demonstrate their empirical effectiveness for personalizing content recommendation at Yahoo!. At the end of the talk, we will also summarize (briefly) our earlier work on provably data-efficient algorithms for more general reinforcement-learning problems modeled as Markov decision processes. Bio: Lihong Li is a Research Scientist in the Machine Learning group at Yahoo! Research. He obtained a PhD degree in Computer Science from Rutgers University, advised by Michael Littman. Before that, he obtained a MSc degree from the University of Alberta, advised by Vadim Bulitko and Russell Greiner, and BE from the Tsinghua University. In the summers of 2006-2008, he enjoyed interning at Google, Yahoo! Research, and AT&T Shannon Labs, respectively. His main research interests are in machine learning with interaction, including reinforcement learning, multi-armed bandits, online learning, active learning, and their numerous applications on the Internet. He is the winner of an ICML'08 Best Student Paper Award, a WSDM'11 Best Paper Award, and an AISTATS'11 Notable Paper Award. The Computer Science Seminar Lecture Series is a collection of weekly lectures about topics at the forefront of contemporary computer science research, given by speakers knowledgeable in their field of study. These speakers come from a variety of different technical and geographic backgrounds, with many of them traveling from other universities across the globe to come here and share their knowledge. These weekly lectures were recorded with an HD video camera, edited with Apple Final Cut Pro X, and outputted in such a way that the resulting .mp4 video files were economical to store and stream utilizing the university's limited bandwidth and disk space resources.
- Pratical Resource Assignment in Dynamic Wireless Networks (CS Seminar Lecture Series)MacKenzie, Allen B. (2012-01-27)Efforts to create modern wireless networks have occasionally suffered from approaches that seeks to replace static resource allocation schemes with fully dynamic schemes, failing to adequately compensate for the benefits associated with stable, predictable resource allocation, such as reduced communication overhead and computational complexity. In this talk, I describe ongoing research on channel assignment in multihop, multitransceiver wireless networks that demonstrates that many of the advantages of dynamic assignment are available via a hybrid approach that builds a static network topology and then enhances it dynamically in response to network traffic. Then, I will briefly describe future work that seeks to apply a broadly similar approach to spectrum assignment. In the first portion of the talk, I describe a proposed channel assignment scheme for cognitive radio networks that balances the need for topology adaptation to maximize flow rate and the need for a stable baseline topology to support network connectivity. We focus on networks in which nodes are equipped with multiple radios or transceivers, each of which can be assigned to a channel. First, we assign channels independently of traffic, to achieve basic network connectivity and support light loads such as control traffic, and, second, we dynamically assign channels to the remaining transceivers in response to traffic demand. We formulate the problem as a two-stage mixed integer linear program (MILP) and show that with this two-stage approach we can achieve performance comparable to a fully dynamic channel assignment scheme while preserving a static, connected topology. I describe ongoing work to implement this strategy via distributed channel assignment algorithms. In the second portion of the talk, I will describe a similar problem faced in the realm of spectrum assignment. Classical, static approaches to spectrum allocation are extremely inefficient, but provide a stable environment for wireless systems. Dynamic spectrum access (DSA) has been a popular research topic in the last five years, but deployment of DSA systems has been slowed by difficult technical challenges at multiple layers of the protocol stack and delayed adoption by spectrum regulators. I will briefly describe future research which will investigate hybrid approaches with the potential to offer both stability and improved efficiency. Bio: Allen B. MacKenzie received his bachelor's degree in Electrical Engineering and Mathematics from Vanderbilt University in 1999. In 2003 he earned his Ph.D. in electrical engineering at Cornell University and joined the faculty of the Bradley Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Virginia Tech, where he is now an associate professor. Prof. MacKenzie's research focuses on wireless communications systems and networks. His current research interests include cognitive radio and cognitive network algorithms, architectures, and protocols and the analysis of such systems and networks using game theory. His past and current research sponsors include the National Science Foundation, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, and the National Institute of Justice. Prof. MacKenzie is an associate editor of the IEEE Transactions on Communications and the IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing. He also serves on the technical program committee of several international conferences in the areas of communications and networking, and is a regular reviewer for journals in these areas. Prof. MacKenzie is a senior member of the IEEE and a member of the ASEE and the ACM. In 2006, he received the Dean's Award for Outstanding New Assistant Professor in the College of Engineering at Virginia Tech. He is the author of more than 45 refereed conference and journal papers and the co-author of the book Game Theory for Wireless Engineers. The Computer Science Seminar Lecture Series is a collection of weekly lectures about topics at the forefront of contemporary computer science research, given by speakers knowledgeable in their field of study. These speakers come from a variety of different technical and geographic backgrounds, with many of them traveling from other universities across the globe to come here and share their knowledge. These weekly lectures were recorded with an HD video camera, edited with Apple Final Cut Pro X, and outputted in such a way that the resulting .mp4 video files were economical to store and stream utilizing the university's limited bandwidth and disk space resources.
- Runtime Systems: Taming the High Performance Computing Beast (CS Seminar Lecture Series)Ribbens, Calvin J. (2012-02-03)High performance computing (HPC) is an area of computer science and engineering that has always evolved rapidly---sometimes leading and sometimes riding succeeding waves of technical innovation. While HPC application developers and users have continued to benefit from the increasing power of these high-end resources, the increasing complexity of HPC execution environments will require more and more reliance on runtime systems. Parallelism, load-balancing, power, fault-tolerance, and hardware heterogeneity are just a few of the emerging dominant issues that require runtime solutions. In this talk I will briefly describe some of the motivations and trends in runtime systems for HPC. I will then describe two recent projects we have worked on at Virginia Tech. The first, ReSHAPE, is a runtime system that allows the number of nodes assigned to job running on a cluster to be changed at run time. Experimental results from a prototype implementation of ReSHAPE illustrate the potential of "malleable" jobs for improving overall cluster utilization and reducing turn-around time for individual jobs. The second project, Samhita, is a distributed shared memory (DSM) execution environment, which allow programs based on the widely used Pthreads library for shared memory thread parallelism to be easily ported to a distributed memory (cluster) platform. Samhita not only allows a wide range of parallel codes to be ported to a new context, but its design reduces the problem of DSM to a cache management problem, with corresponding opportunities for exploiting locality at runtime. Bio: Cal Ribbens is Associate Professor and Associate Department Head for Undergraduate Studies in the Department of Computer Science at Virginia Tech. He received a B.S. in Mathematics from Calvin College (1981) and a Ph.D. in Computer Sciences from Purdue University (1986). His research interests include parallel computation, numerical algorithms, mathematical software, and tools and environments for high performance computing. The Computer Science Seminar Lecture Series is a collection of weekly lectures about topics at the forefront of contemporary computer science research, given by speakers knowledgeable in their field of study. These speakers come from a variety of different technical and geographic backgrounds, with many of them traveling from other universities across the globe to come here and share their knowledge. These weekly lectures were recorded with an HD video camera, edited with Apple Final Cut Pro X, and outputted in such a way that the resulting .mp4 video files were economical to store and stream utilizing the university's limited bandwidth and disk space resources.
- Symantec's WINE System for Repeatable, Data-Intensive Experiments in Cyber Security (CS Seminar Lecture Series)Dumitraş, Tudor (2012-03-16)Symantec's WINE System for repeatable, data-intensive experiments in cyber security The Computer Science Seminar Lecture Series is a collection of weekly lectures about topics at the forefront of contemporary computer science research, given by speakers knowledgeable in their field of study. These speakers come from a variety of different technical and geographic backgrounds, with many of them traveling from other universities across the globe to come here and share their knowledge. These weekly lectures were recorded with an HD video camera, edited with Apple Final Cut Pro X, and outputted in such a way that the resulting .mp4 video files were economical to store and stream utilizing the university's limited bandwidth and disk space resources.
- Towards a Materiality of Information (CS Seminar Lecture Series)Dourish, Paul (2012-03-30)In this talk, I'd like to sketch some very preliminary ideas that I'm beginning to shape into a research program for the next few years. They revolve around the materiality of digital information. In the humanities and social sciences, the last few years have seen a rise in interest in "materiality" -- an examination of the nature and consequences of the material forms of objects of social and cultural import. There are many different things that one might mean when talking of the materiality of digital information -- everything from why iPods have a different cultural cache than Zunes (the domain of material culture) to how urban landscapes are reshaped by the material constraints of high-capacity network wiring or wireless access patterns (the domain of human geography). At the moment, my particular interest is in the consequences of the fact that information -- which we generally talk about as if it were ineffable and abstract -- is something that we encounter only ever in material form, and that our information practices (the things we know how to do, as information scientists) are inextricably entwined with these material forms, both substrates (media) and representations (conventional patterns). Bio: Paul Dourish is a Professor of Informatics in the Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences at UC Irvine, with courtesy appointments in Computer Science and Anthropology. His research focuses primarily on understanding information technology as a site of social and cultural production; his work combines topics in human-computer interaction, ubiquitous computing, and science and technology studies. He has published over 100 scholarly articles, and was elected to the CHI Academy in 2008 in recognition of his contributions to Human-Computer Interaction. He is the author of two books: "Where the Action Is: The Foundations of Embodied Interaction" (MIT Press, 2001), which explores how phenomenological accounts of action can provide an alternative to traditional cognitive analysis for understanding the embodied experience of interactive and computational systems; and, with Genevieve Bell, "Divining a Digital Future: Mess and Mythology in Ubiquitous Computing" (MIT Press, 2011), which examines the social and cultural aspects of the ubiquitous computing research program. The Computer Science Seminar Lecture Series is a collection of weekly lectures about topics at the forefront of contemporary computer science research, given by speakers knowledgeable in their field of study. These speakers come from a variety of different technical and geographic backgrounds, with many of them traveling from other universities across the globe to come here and share their knowledge. These weekly lectures were recorded with an HD video camera, edited with Apple Final Cut Pro X, and outputted in such a way that the resulting .mp4 video files were economical to store and stream utilizing the university's limited bandwidth and disk space resources.
- Using a Type-centric, Multi-dimensional Event Dispatch Strategy to Simplify Android Programming (CS Seminar Lecture Series)Edwards, Stephen H. (2012-04-13)The Android Platform is a popular choice for mobile application developers because of its large user base and the open-source development tools that are available. Further, because Android applications are built using Java, many computer science educators look toward Android as a way to bring mobile application development into the classroom and get students excited about the real-world applicability of their computing skills. At the same time, however, the Android API was not developed for beginners, and it requires a number of software practices that one would only expect of more seasoned developers. This talk will present a brief overview of SOFIA, the Simple Open Framework for Inventive Android applications. SOFIA is currently being developed at Virginia Tech as a better API for writing Android applications, both for beginners and pros alike. Among the many API improvements in SOFIA, this talk will focus on one area in particular: event dispatch and event handling in client programs. The shortcomings of more conventional Java-based event dispatch designs, such as those in Swing and Android GUIs, will be discussed, including the difficulties that accompany these designs. SOFIA uses an alternative event dispatch model with a reflection-based implementation strategy to offer a cleaner, simpler solution. This approach combines the type safety of a statically typed language with the run-time flexibility of modern dynamic languages and greatly enhances the readability (and writability) of event handling code. Bio: Stephen H. Edwards is an associate professor in the Department of Computer Science at Virginia Tech. He received the BS degree in electrical engineering from the California Institute of Technology, and the MS and PhD degrees in computer and information science from the Ohio State University. His research interests include software engineering, component-based development and reuse, automated testing, formal methods in programming languages, and computer science education. He is the project lead for Web-CAT, the most widely used open-source automated grading system in the world. Web-CAT is known for allowing instructors to grade students based on how well they test their own code. The Computer Science Seminar Lecture Series is a collection of weekly lectures about topics at the forefront of contemporary computer science research, given by speakers knowledgeable in their field of study. These speakers come from a variety of different technical and geographic backgrounds, with many of them traveling from other universities across the globe to come here and share their knowledge. These weekly lectures were recorded with an HD video camera, edited with Apple Final Cut Pro X, and outputted in such a way that the resulting .mp4 video files were economical to store and stream utilizing the university's limited bandwidth and disk space resources.