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The Computer Science Colloquium Series is a forum for invited speakers, faculty, and graduate students to share research ideas. Everyone is invited to attend and participate. An up-to-date listing of the speakers and abstracts of their talks will be posted here. Please e-mail the colloquium committee if you are interested in speaking or know of someone who would be a good addition to our program. Thank you.
Colloquia are generally held every Thursday at 3:40 p.m. except during academic holidays. See below for specific times and topics. Refreshments will be served after every colloquium in the conference room, 225 Atanasoff Hall.
You can also have a look at our Spring 2001 colloquium series page.
Listing of Talks
Several speakers have agreed to present but have not yet been scheduled. Potential dates for these talks are listed as "to be announced" in the table below. All other dates are open. Please contact one of us listed below if you are interested in speaking or know of a potential contributor to our series.
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Abstracts
1. MultiJavaCurtis Clifton
In this talk I will give an overview of the motivation,syntax, and semantics of MultiJava, an extension to the Java Programming Language.MultiJava adds open classes and symmetric multiple dispatch to Java, obviating the need for the Visitor pattern and providing a simple solution to the binary methods problem.
This work is joint with Gary Leavens of Iowa state University and Craig Chambers and Todd Millstein of the University of Washington.
2. Complexity of Problems in AlgebraCilfford Bergman
The field of computational complexity provides tools for measuring the inherent difficulty of solving mathematical problems. Over the years, algebraists have discovered many algorithms for particular problems in their field, thereby demonstrating the decidability of the problem, but until recently, little work has been done on the complexity of these problems. In this talk, I will survey some new results obtained by myself (in collarboration with Giora Slutzki) and others on the complexity of problems that arise naturally in algebra.
3. Sciences and Cultures of the Artificial:Methodological Constraints on Reproducing NatureMassimo Negrotti
The technology of the artificial may be defined as the effort to replicate or mimic natural objects or processes by means of current conventional technology and materials. Artificial intelligence is an example of such an endeavor. This talk will report on the results of a theoretical study of the logic characterizing any attempt to design something artificial. Sciences of the artificial focus on discipline-specific problems of reproducing natural objects or processes. We will be concerned with the sciences of the artificial in their own right. We will attempt to characterize the assumptions, methodologies, constraints, questions, and problems that are shared by the sciences of the artificial regardless of the specifics of each domain. The result is an outline of a general theory of the artificial.
4. Terminators and Scouts and Robots that Go Bump in the NightRichard Voyles
The face of war, as seen by the United States Military, is changing drastically. Superpower conflicts and nuclear arms races in the international arena no longer dominate the military's attention. Instead, the threats of greatest concern are terrorism and urban warfare. These are low-level engagements in unknown or hostile areas where civilians are still going about their daily lives. Opposing forces are small, agile and generally indistiguishable from innocent bystanders. As a result, everyone is a threat, yet everyone must be treated as an innocent civilian.
To minimize the risk of casualties to both civilians and our own troops, the DoD (Department of Defense) has turned to robotics. Robots can be used to keep civilians and soldiers apart and to keep soldiers out of the line of fire. At the Center for Distributed Robotics, we have been developing miniature mobile robots to do just that. The Scout is a cylindrical robot, smaller than a can of pop, designed for remote reconnaissance and surveillance. It can be tossed or fired into an area of interest, before soldiers enter, to gather information on what awaits through a variety of sensors. Once inside, it rolls and hops to find a hiding place or seek information.
The TerminatorBot is a limbed mobile robot that locomotes by dragging itself with its two arms. The arms provide manipulation ability and can access areas that rolling and hopping can't reach. The drawbacks are greater complexity and greater power consumption than the Scout. We are attempting to leverage these heterogeneous capabilities in a large distributed system of up to 45 robots for collective military tasks, civilian SWAT team operations, and civilian search-and-rescue.
The bulk of the talk will be on the individual robots and their capabilities with additional discussion of the ongoing research to make the components operate as a distributed whole.
5. A Computational Laboratory for Evolutionary Trade NetworksLeigh Tesfatsion
This study presents, motivates, and illustrates the use of a computational laboratory for the investigation of evolutionary trade network formation among strategically interacting buyers, sellers, and dealers.The computational laboratory,referred to as the Trade Network Game Laboratory (TNG Lab), is targetted for the Microsoft Windows desktop.The TNG Lab is both modular and extensible and has a clear, easily operated graphical user interface. It permits visualization of the formation and evolution of trade netwroks by means of real-time animations. Data tables and charts reporting descriptive performance statistics are also provided in real time.The capabilities of the TNG Lab are demonstrated by means of labor market experiments. 6. Graduate Research Poster PresentationVarious Graduate Students
What do graduate students do with all that time they spend not sleeping? They work on their research, of course! This will be an opportunity to glimpse the enormous breadth and depth of research being conducted in our department and by our affliated faculty. Over 15 different areas of research will be presented throughout the first and second floors of Atanasoff Hall, ranging from AI and Robotics to Programming Languages and Computational Complexity.
Graduate students and faculty will be available to answer your questions and describe their work.
This should be a fun, informal, and informative time. Undergraduates are especially welcome! Don't miss it!
Guy Helmer
Colored Petri Nets (CPNs) are used as a design specification for an intrusion detection system (IDS). Software Fault Tree (SFT) models of intrusions are augmented with nodes that describe trust, temporal, and contextual relationships. Hierarchical CPNs are created from the SFTs to detect events that match intrusions. Agents are developed from the CPN design that detect, classify, and correlate data obtained from systems and networks. I will discuss (1) the use of temporality to divide stages of intrusions, (2) augmentation of Software Fault Trees with trust, temporal, and contextual nodes to model intrusions, and (3) algorithmic construction of CPN design from SFTs and agent implementation from CPN design. 8. Searching a Polygonal Region from the BoundaryIchiro Suzuki
Polygon search is the problem of finding unpredictable mobile intruders in a polygonal region using one or more mobile searchers with various levels of vision, where both the searcher and intruders are allowed to move freely within the region. In this paper we consider a variant of this problem, termed boundary search, in which a single searcher has to find the intruders from the boundary of the region. Our main result is that the searcher having one flashlight whose vision is limited to a single ray is just as capable as the searcher having a light bulb that gives 360 degree vision, that is, any polygon that can be searched by the latter from the boundary can also be searched by the former from the boundary. To our knowledge, the equivalence of these searchers, one having a very limited vision and another having the maximum vision, has never been established for any interesting subclass of the polygon search problem. The proof of the equivalence uses another new result, termed Monotonic Extension Theorem, together with a simple topological argument on a 2-dimensional map called p-map that represents the searcher's state during search. A similar topological argument is used also to partially settle a long-standing conjecture on the equivalence of the abilities of two searchers, one having two flashlights and another having full 360 degree vision, for the general, non-boundary polygon search problem.
9. The Privacy Practices of Web-Browser ExtensionsDavid Martin
Computer users are spending more time with their Web browsers, due to both improved browser technology and industry efforts to provide first-class support through Web interfaces. Users are therefore motivated to customizeand otherwise improve their Web browser experiences through third-party browser extensions; at the same time, these desired extensions are able to monitor and report on users' behavior within their primary Internet interface. In this talk we discuss the privacy practices of some common Internet Explorer extensions. We find examples of both very good and very bad practices and recommend strategies for respecting privacy in this sensitive area.
This research is a project of the University of Denver Privacy Center. Collaborating with the Privacy Foundation, the Privacy Center addresses electronic privacy topics from technical, legal, business, andsocial perspectives. Joint work with Richard M. Smith, Michael Brittain,Ivan Fetch, and Hailin Wu.
10. Creating Correct Subclasses without seeing Superclass Codeor
How to Document Extensible Java Superclasses
Clyde Ruby
A major problem for object-oriented frameworks and class libraries is how to provide enough information about an extensible superclass so that programmers can safely create new subclasses without studying superclass code. The goal of my work is to determine what information is needed so library providers do not have to reveal the code of library superclasses. A closely related goal is to develop a set of library design guidelines that will simplify reasoning about subclasses that inherit from frameworks and class libraries. In this talk I will present several examples that show the kinds of unexpected problems that can arise when creating subclasses, and the information needed to reason about how to avoid such problems.
Speaker Biographies
Curtis CliftonCurtis Clifton received his B.S. in Electrical Engineering from Iowa State University in 1992. He is currently a graduate student in the Dept. of Computer Science at ISU. His interests are in programming language design and specification.
Visit Curtis Clifton's hompage here.
Cilfford BergmanDr. Cliff Bergman received his PhD from the University of California, Berkeley in 1981. He joined the faculty of Iowa State in 1982. Dr. Bergman's research has concentrated on universal algebra, logic and lattice theory. In the last few years he has collaborated extensively with Giora Slutzki on the computational complexity of problems in algebra.
Dr. Bergman is a member of the Iowa State Information Systems Security Lab and teaches a course each Spring on cryptography. His future research plans include algebraic and complexity problems in cryptography.
Visit Cilfford Bergman's hompage here.
Massimo NegrottiDr.Massimo Negrotti is Professor of Methodology of human sciences at the University of Urbino and,Director of IMES-LCA(Istituto Metodologico Economico Statistico - Lab for the culture of the Artificial). Professor Negrotti has investigated the relationship between artificial intelligence models and human cultures, from theoretical and empirical perspectives since 1985. More recently, his work has focused on the theme of the artificial as a key concept for understanding a wide range of human behaviour.Professor Negrotti has published extensively on this topic. Among his publications are "Understanding the Artificial", an edited collection published by Springer-Verlog, in 1991; "The Theory of the Artificial", published by Intellect Books, in 1999; "Designing the Artificial" to be published by the MIT press. A special issue of the AI & Society journal on the culture of the artificial guest edited by Professor Negrotti is currently in press.Professor Negrotti has also lectured extensively on this topic around the world.
Richard VoylesDr. Voyles received the B.S. in Electrical Engineering from Purdue University in 1983, the M.S. in Manufacturing Systems Engineering from the Department of Mechanical Engineering at Stanford University in 1989, and the Ph.D. in Robotics from the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University in 1997. He is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Minnesota.
Dr. Voyles's industrial experience includes three years with IBM, where he was a manufacturing/test engineer working on automation projects, and one and one-half years with Intergrated Systems, Inc., where he was a research scientist working on contracted applications of real-time software. Dr. Voyles founded Trident Robotics and Research, Inc. and co-founded Vigilant Technologies, Inc., both of which develop real-time control hardware.
Dr. Voyles' research interests are in the areas of robotics and artificial intelligence. Specifically, he is interested in the coordination of teams of robotic agents for common goals where resource constraints play an important role. He is also interested in programming robots by human demonstration, robot-to-robot skill transfer, and skill-based approaches to robot programming. Dr. Voyles also has expertise in sensors and sensor calibration, particularly haptic and force sensors.
Visit Richard Voyles's hompage here.
Leigh TesfatsionLeigh Tesfatsion received the Ph.D. degree in economics, with a minor in mathematics, from the university of Minnesota in 1975. She joined the Department of Economics at the University of Southern California in 1975, where she subsequently was promoted to associate and full professor.In 1990 she accepted a position as professor of economics at Iowa State University, with a courtesy appointment as a professor of mathematics.
Her recent research has focussed on agent-based computational economics(ACE), the computational study of economics modelled as evolving systems of autonomous interacting agents.In particular, she has developed an ACE framework for studying the formation and evolution of trade networks under alternative market structures. This framework is currently being applied to the study of market power, hysteresis, and excess earnings heterogeneity in labor markets and to the study of restructuring in electricity markets.
She currently serves as co-editor in charge of the Complexity-at-Large section of the journal Complexity as well as an associate editor for the Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control(starting July 2000), the journal of Public Economic Theory, the IEEE Transactions on Evolutionary Computation (IEEE-TEC), and Applied Mathematics and Computation. She has guest-edited special issues on ACE for the Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control, Computational Economics, and the IEEE-TEC. Since 1993 she has helped to organize and run a weekly interdisciplinary workshop at Iowa State University, now called the Complex Adaptive Systems Workshop. She is one of twelve Steering Commitee members responsible for organizing and running the Minor Program in Complex Adaptive Systems, newly established as an ISU graduate program in Fall 1999.
Since 1997 she has maintained an ACE website that features resources of interest to complex adaptive systems researchers in general and ACE researchers in particular. This site has been designated as a select learning resource by the Scout Report for Business and Economics(January 29, 1998). She also maintains a website on the formation of economic and social networks for an international group of researchers who are actively involved in the analytical, empirical, and experimental study of socioeconomic network formation.
Visit Leigh Tesfatsion's hompage here.
Various Graduate StudentsGraduate Advisory Commitee
The Graduate Advisory Committee, or GAC, was formed in the the spring semester of 1999 to serve as an advisory committee to the department chairperson. The committee's role has since evolved. We seek to provide a common focal point for computer science graduate student concerns. By directing graduate student concerns through a single committee we are able to focus our efforts and achieve greater impact than each student might be able to achieve individually.
Members of the committee serve as representatives to the Graduate Student Senate, the facilities committee, which coordinates department computer systems, and to the colloquium committee. Additionally, through our regular meetings with Dr. Miller, the committee provides input to the graduate committee regarding course offerings and program requirements.
Finally, the committee works to welcome new graduate students by sponsoring a mentoring program for incoming students, hosting a welcome session at the beginning of each semester, and participating in the ComS 591 orientation class
Guy HelmerGuy Helmer is a Ph.D. candidate in Computer Science at Iowa State University, researching security in operating systems and networks. Guy received his M.S. degree from ISU in 1998 and his B.S. degree from the South Dakota School of Mines and Technology in 1989. Guy served for several years as a system programmer and network engineer for Dakota State University in Madison, SD. During that time he designed and maintained local and wide area networks, administered UNIX, Network, and Windows servers, and consulted with state government agencies and other universities on networking and security issues.
Visit Guy Helmer's hompage here.
Ichiro SuzukiIchiro Suzuki received a D.E. degree in Information and Computer Sciences from Osaka University, Japan, in 1983. He has been with the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee since 1987, where currently he is Professor of Computer Science. His research interests include computational geometry, computational robotics and distributed computing.
Visit Ichiro Suzuki's hompage here.
David MartinDavid was born and reared in Ames where he attended Ames High School and ISU, earning his B.S. with a double major in Mathematics and Computer Science in 1993. While at ISU he served as an undergraduate research assistant and as a systems programmer for the CS department, AIT, and other units. He completed his Ph.D. at Boston University in 1998, changed his name to Dr. Martin, and joined the department of Mathematics and Computer Science at the University of Denver as an assistant professor.
Dr. Martin's active research interests include security, privacy, and computer networks. His current focus is the University of Denver Privacy Center, a collaborative effort between the Privacy Foundation and academic computer science, computer law, digital media studies, and business units. At the DU Privacy Center, Dr. Martin directs several graduate students in computer privacy research.
Visit David Martin's hompage here.
Clyde RubyClyde Ruby received a BA in mathematics from Pepperdine University and a MS in Computer Science from Maharishi University. He is currently a Ph.D. student in the Department of Computer Science at Iowa State University. His research interests are in object-oriented programming languages, specification languages, and documentation of frameworks and class libraries.
Visit Clyde Ruby's hompage here.
Archives
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Contacts
Thank you for visiting this page. Please send your suggestions and comments to one of us in the Computer Science colloquium committee.
- Soma Chaudhuri . chaudhur@cs.iastate.edu
- Giora Slutzki. slutzki@cs.iastate.edu
- Mayuresh Vartak. mayuresh@cs.iastate.edu
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mayuresh@cs.iastate.edu