Distinguished Lecture Series in Computer Science 2004-2005Department of Computer Science, Iowa State University
|
|
Download Distinguished Lecture Series Poster
Abstracts
Recent Developments in Learning Theory
Stephen Smale
We will give an exposition of topics as the geometry of data sets and some estimates for on-line learning.
Number Theory: Partitions and the Legacy of Dyson and Ramanujan
Prof. Ken Ono
At first glance the stuff of partitions seems like child's play:
4 = 3+1 = 2+2 = 2+1+1 =1+1+1+1.
Therefore, there are 5 partitions of the number 4. But (as happens in
Number Theory) the seemingly simple business of counting the ways to break a
number into parts leads quickly to some difficult and beautiful problems.
Partitions play important roles in such diverse areas of mathematics and
Combinatorics, Lie Theory, Representation Theory, Mathematical Physics, and
the theory of Special Functions, but we shall concentrate here on their role in
Number Theory. We shall give an account of the impact of Leonhard Euler,
Freeman Dyson and Srinivasa Ramanujan on the subject, and describe some of
the recent advances in the subject.
Software Engineering Optimization - Managing in the Future Economy
Ram Chillarege
The world of software is undergoing a metamorphosis.
We all sense that, in our own personal ways. The industry believes that we are moving into a new era of blended products and services, blurring the once distinct markets of products versus services. At the same time some software segments are threatened by highly competitive free offerings. On the employment front, the displacement of labor into a global workforce makes us wonder if the skills that were fountains of technical creativity, yesterday, are now but a commodity. And Moore's law does not seem to let up.
So, what now? What are the primary forces at play, and where are the technical challenges? Are there frontiers in software engineering that take us to another plane? And why is it significant to the overall IT industry and our future economy?
Download the Flyer
Performance Modeling of Extreme-Scale Systems and Applications Adolfy Hoisie In this talk we will describe novel methodologies for performance analysis, modeling and prediction applicable to extreme-scale parallel architectures and applications. We will present ongoing and planned future performance projects in PAL at Los Alamos National Laboratory, based on the new methods that can be applied to next generation parallel systems -- 100 T-Ops and beyond.
In addition to the methodology for performance modeling, a variety of applications of modeling will be presented, including architectural design, workload characterization, code optimization and system diagnostics.
We will conclude by summarizing a number of factors that in our view will significantly impact the development and performance of future generation parallel systems.
Download the Flyer
Internet Worms, and Cascading Failures, and Epidemics Donald Towsley Many network phenomena are well modeled as spreads of epidemics throughout the network. Prominent examples include the propagation of worms (e.g., Slammer) and viruses, and, more generally, faults. In this talk, we apply epidemic spreading models to these phenomena paying particular attention to the following two questions. + What makes an epidemic virulent? + How does network topology affect the virulence of an epidemic? In the context of a worm, virulence relates to the time required for it to spread. And in the context of the propagation of faults (cascading failures), virulence relates to the time until faults die out. We illustrate how simple fluid and Markov epidemic spreading models can shed light to the above questions for both worms and the propagation of faults.
Taming the Infinite: Verification of Infinite-State Systems Amir Pnueli Computers are helping us manage and control more extended areas of our life. The main obstacle to trusting to them more sensitive tasks is not speed or reliability of the hardware but rather the question of trustworthiness of the software -- the programs that drive and control such safety-critical applications.
In this talk we will survey advances in the most promising approach to absolute reliability of software -- formal verification. At a first glance this problem seems hopeless since even simple systems possess infinitely many states and even higher infinity of possible behaviors, and formal verification calls for exhaustive exploration of this infinite state space.
We will start by describing the effective methods developed for the handling of finite-state systems, which proved most useful for verification of hardware designs. Then, we will consider various methods, relying on different notions of abstraction, by which an infinite-state system can be reduced to a finite-state one and thus yield to effective analysis.
This general approach will be illustrated by several success stories, including the case of verification of device drivers at Microsoft, and successful analysis of the avionic software of the Airbus plane.
Professor Smale received his PhD from the University of Michigan in 1957, and within four years became a full Professor at Columbia University. He became Professor at the University of California, Berkeley in 1964 and Professor Emeritus in 1994. Professor Smale became a Distinguished University Professor at the City University of Hong Kong in 1995. He is also a on the faculty of Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago. He has made significant contributions in the fields of dynamic systems, geometry, econometrics, operational research, topology, and theoretical computer science. These contributions have resulted in a number of academic awards and achievements including his holding of the Alfred Sloan Research Fellowship from 1960-62. In 1966 he won a Fields Medal - an international medal awarded once every four years for outstanding discoveries in mathematics. Other awards he received include the 1965 Veblen Prize for Geometry, awarded every five years by the American Mathematical Society; in 1988 the Chauvenet Prize by the Mathematical Association of America; and in 1989 the Von Neumann Award by the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics. Professor Smale is a member of both the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is recognized internationally in many fields of Mathematics, and has been invited as a Visiting Professor to College de France, Paris (Spring 1962), University of Paris, Orsay (1972-73), Yale University (Fall 1974), and Columbia University (Fall 1987).
Professor Ono obtained his Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of California at Los Angeles in 1993. Ken Ono is now a Professor of Mathematics at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. In a ceremony at the White House in April 2000, Ono was awarded the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE) - the highest honor bestowed by the US government on scientists and engineers beginning their independent careers. In addition, he has mentored several top three finishers in the Westinghouse Science Talent Search and the Intel Science Talent Search and has received the NSF Early Career Award, Alfred Sloan Foundation Research Fellowship and the Lucille Packard Foundation Research Fellowship. Professor Ken Ono is an extremely productive mathematician (89 publications in journals and proceedings, 4 edited books and proceedings). His research touches many areas of number theory including theory of partitions, elliptic curves, modular forms, combinatorics.
Visit Prof. Ken Ono's homepage here. Ram brings a new order of insight into measuring and managing software engineering. Prior to starting his consulting
practice, he was with IBM for 14 years where he founded and headed the IBM Center for Software Engineering.
He then served as Executive Vice President of Software and Technology for Opus360, New York. In
June 2004 Ram received the IEEE technical achievement award for the invention of Orthogonal Defect Classification
(ODC). The methodology brings value through fast measurement, sophisticated analysis and targeted
feedback. ODC is widely adopted across IBM and is rapidly gaining acceptance among several high maturity
organizations. In 1995 Ram led the IBM Academy study on Software Testing culminating in forming IBM's
company wide Test initiative. Led by a corporate director, this continues today to be credited for far reaching
impact touching tens of thousands of engineers. Ram is IEEE Fellow, and author of ~50 peer reviewed technical
articles. He serves on the steering committees of Dependability and Software Reliability, and the board of
the University of Illinois Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. He founded and chaired the CTO
council for NYSIA in 2001. He received a BSc degree from the University of Mysore, BE and ME from the
Indian Institute of Science, and PhD from the University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign in Electrical and Computer
and Engineering.
Visit Ram Chillarege's homepage here. Adolfy Hoisie is a Staff Scientist, the Leader of the Parallel Architectures and Performance Lab (PAL), and the Leader of the Modeling, Algorithms and Informatics Group in the Computer and Computational Sciences Division at LANL. From 1987 until he joined LANL in 1997, he was a researcher at Cornell University. Dr. Hoisie's area of research is performance analysis and modeling of systems and applications. He has published extensively, lectured at numerous conferences and other important events in his area worldwide. He was the winner of the Gordon Bell Award in 1996, and co-author to the recently published SIAM monograph on performance optimization.
Visit Adolfy Hoisie's homepage here. Donald Towsley
Towsley holds a B.A. in Physics (1971) and a Ph.D. in Computer Science (1975) from University of Texas. From 1976 to 1985 he was a member of the faculty of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. He is currently a Distinguished Professor at the University of Massachusetts in the Department of Computer Science. He has held visiting positions at IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, Yorktown Heights, NY; Laboratoire MASI, Paris, France; INRIA, Sophia-Antipolis, France; AT&T Labs - Research, Florham Park, NJ; and Microsoft Research Lab, Cambridge, UK. His research interests include networks and performance evaluation. He currently serves on the Editorial board of Journal of the ACM and IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications and has previously served on numerous other editorial boards. He was a Program Co-chair of the joint ACM SIGMETRICS and PERFORMANCE '92 conference and the PERFORMANCE 2002 conference. He is a member of ACM and ORSA, Chair of IFIP Working Group 7.3, and cofounder and director of the Computer Performance Foundation. He has received the 1998 IEEE Communications Society William Bennett Best Paper Award and numerous best conference/workshop paper awards. Last, he has been elected Fellow of both the ACM and IEEE.
Visit Donald Towsley's homepage here. Amir Pnueli
Amir Pnueli received his Ph.D. degree in Applied Mathematics at the Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot, Israel where, since 1981, he has been a Professor of Computer Science, and since 1998 head of the "Minerva Center for Verification of Reactive Systems." Since 1999 he is a professor of Computer Science at NYU. Prof. Pnueli is the 1996 recipient of the ACM Turing award "For his seminal work introducing temporal logic into computing science and for outstanding contributions to program and system verification." He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, the Israeli Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the 2000 recipient of the Israel prize in the category of exact sciences. He received honorary doctorates from the Universities of Uppsala, Joseph Fourier (Grenoble, France), and University of Oldenburg, Germany.
Prof. Pnueli is mainly known for the introduction of temporal logic into Computer Science and his work on the application of temporal logic to the specification and verification of reactive systems. Together with David Harel, Pnueli worked on the semantics and implementation of Statecharts, a visual language for the specification, modeling, and prototyping of reactive systems, applied to avionics, transport, and electronic hardware systems. His current research interests involve synthesis of reactive modules, automatic verification of multi-process systems, and specification methods that combine transition systems with temporal logic.
Visit Amir Pnueli's homepage here. Thank you for visiting this page. Please send your suggestions and comments
to one of us in the Computer Science colloquium committee.
Biographies
Miller Distinguished Lecture
The Miller Lecture Series is made possible by the generosity of
F. Wendell Miller, who left his entire estate jointly to Iowa State
University and the University of Iowa. Mr. Miller, who died in 1995
at age 97, was born in Altoona, Illinois, grew up in Rockwell City,
graduated from Grinnell College and Harvard Law School and practiced
law in Des Moines and Chicago before returning to Rockwell City to
manage his family's farm holdings and to practice law. His will
helped to establish the F. Wendell Miller Trust, the annual earnings
on which, in part, helped to support this activity.
Robert Stewart Distinguished Lecture
The Robert Stewart Distinguished Lecture in Computer Science is made possible
by the generous contribution of Dr. Long Nguyen, who got his doctorate from
the Computer Science Department at Iowa State University in 1975. It is in
honor of his mentor, Dr. Robert Stewart, Professor Emeritus and the first
Department Chair of Computer Science at Iowa State University.
Contacts