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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 or Tuesday 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, 223 Atanasoff Hall.
In some cases, the colloquium will start at 4.10 pm and refreshments will be served earlier starting at 3.30 pm. These colloquiums are marked with an asterisk (*) below.
Next Colloquia
There are no colloquia scheduled for the next 7 days. Please check below for future colloquia.
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Distinguished Lecture Series in Computer Science 2004-2005
The Department of Computer Science is pleased to host the Distinguished Lecture Series in Computer Science 2004-2005.
Listing of Talks
Several other 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. Recent Developments in Learning Theory (Miller Distinguished Lecture)Stephen Smale
We will give an exposition of topics as the geometry of data sets and some estimates for on-line learning.
2. Higher-Order Transformation and the Distributed Data ProblemVictor Winter
The control mechanisms offered by strategic programming have been successfully used to address a variety of problems relating to confluence and termination. However, the application of strategic programming to problems of increasing complexity has raised another issue, namely how auxiliary data fits within a strategic framework. The distributed data problem characterizes the problem posed by auxiliary data. This problem arises from a discord between the semantic association of terms within a specification and the structural association of terms resulting from the term language definition.
My research is based on the premise that higher-order rewriting provides a mechanism for dealing with auxiliary data conforming to the tenets of rewriting. In a higher-order framework, the use of auxiliary data is expressed as a rule. Instantiation of such rules can be done using standard (albeit higher-order) mechanisms controlling rule application (e.g., traversal). Typically, a traversal-driven application of a higher-order rule will result in a number of instantiations. If left unstructured, these instantiations can be collectively seen as constituting a rule base whose creation takes place dynamically. However, such rule bases again encounter difficulties with respect to confluence and termination. In order to address this concern the notion of strategy construction is lifted to the higher-order as well. That is, instantiations result in rule bases that are structured to form strategies. Nevertheless, in many cases, simply lifting first-order control mechanisms to the higher-order does not permit the construction of strategies that are sufficiently refined. This difficulty is alleviated though the introduction of the transient combinator. The interplay between transients and more traditional control mechanisms enables a variety of instances of the distributed data problem to be elegantly solved in a higher-order setting. These ideas are formalized in a higher-order strategic programming language called TL.
3. Number Theory: Partitions and the Legacy of Dyson and Ramanujan (Miller Distinguished Lecture)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.
4. Protein Similarity from Isotopic Line WeavingsMichael Erdmann
Proteins provide a rich domain in which to test theories of shape similarity. Sometimes the detection of common local structure is sufficient to infer global alignment of two proteins; at other times it provides false information. Proteins with very low sequence identity may share large substructures, or perhaps just a central core. There are even examples of proteins with nearly identical primary sequence in which alpha-helices have become beta-sheets.
The thesis of this talk is: Protein similarity detection leads naturally to algorithms operating at the metric, relational, and isotopic scales. Our work introduces a definition of similarity based on atomic motions that preserve local backbone topology without incurring significant distance errors. Similarity detection then seeks rigid body motions able to overlay pairs of substructures, each related by a substructure-preserving motion, without necessarily requiring global structure preservation. This definition is general enough to span a wide range of questions: One can ask for full rearrangement of one protein into another while preserving global topology, as in drug design; or one can ask for rearrangements of sets of smaller substructures, each of which preserves local but not global topology, as in protein evolution.
5. Software Engineering Optimization - Managing in the Future Economy (Distinguished Lecture)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?
6. Enforcing Security in Conventional and Wireless NetworksNing Jiang
Computer network security is becoming increasingly critical for both conventional infrastructured networks and fast-expanding wireless environments.
In the former domain, the problem of identifying patterns from system call trails of UNIX processes to model application behaviors has been investigated intensively. Most existing approaches focus on investigating relationship between individual system calls (or system audit events). We present a new intrusion detection technique. Our scheme exploits both variable-length patterns and their relationships to detect deviations from normal application behavior. Experimental results indicate that our scheme achieves much higher detection rate than systems that only consider intra-pattern relationship while maintaining very low false alarm rate with similar space cost and time efficiency.
In the recently emerged Mobile Ad Hoc Networks (MANETs), all participating hosts are obligated to route and forward data for others to guarantee the availability of network applications and services. Most of the contemporary techniques that attempt to defeat denial of service attacks in MANETs employ reputation mechanisms for nodes to avoid and penalize malicious participants. The reputation-based strategy suffers from low scalability and is likely to be exploited by adversaries. In this talk, We introduce a novel approach that addresses these problems. With the proposed technique, no reputation information is propagated in the network and malicious nodes cannot cause false penalties to benign hosts. Misbehaving nodes are penalized and circumvented by benign nodes within their localities based on first-hand experiences. This approach significantly improves the availability of MANETs, incurs very low overhead, and is robust against various evasive behaviors.
Speaker Biographies
Stephen SmaleProfessor 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).
Victor WinterVictor Winter is an assistant professor in the Computer Science department at the University of Nebraska at Omaha. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of New Mexico in 1994. From 1995--2001 Dr. Winter worked at Sandia National Laboratories where his research efforts focused on high-assurance software development.
Visit Victor Winter's homepage here.
Prof. Ken OnoProfessor 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.
Michael ErdmannMichael Erdmann is interested in robotics and proteomics. He is a Professor of Computer Science and Robotics in the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University, and Associate Faculty of the Center for Computational Biology and Bioinformatics in the School of Medicine at the University of Pittsburgh. On the robotics side he is interested in the mechanics of manipulation and automatic planning. On the biochemical side he is interested in the geometry of proteins and in algorithms for determining protein structure from sparse NMR data. Dr. Erdmann is on the Editorial Board of the International Journal of Robotics Research. He received a Presidential Young Investigator award in the period 1991-1996. His Ph.D. (1989) and M.S. (1984) are in Computer Science from MIT, his B.S. (1982) in Mathematics from the University of Washington. In his spare time, Dr. Erdmann likes to travel, particularly to his home in the Pacific Northwest.
Visit Michael Erdmann's homepage here.
Ram ChillaregeRam 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.
Ning JiangNing Jiang is currently a Ph.D. candidate of School of Computer Science, University of Central Florida. He has published thirteen papers and journals in computer network security, data mining, and multimedia communications. He also worked as the primary researcher and project leaders in projects funded by NSF and by industrial partners such as Oracle and Imagesoft. Ning Jiang received the IEEE Orlando Reginal Outstanding Graduate Student of the Year Award in 2003.
Visit Ning Jiang's homepage here.
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Contacts
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