Colloquium Series (Fall 2005) Sponsored by Department of Computer Science, Iowa State University

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Distinguished Lecture Series in Computer Science 2005-2006

The Department of Computer Science is pleased to host the Distinguished Lecture Series in Computer Science 2005-2006. For further information on the distinguished lecture series please visit this link .

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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Informal requirements stated in a natural language often suffer from ambiguity, inconsistency, and incompleteness. For these reasons, the trend over the last decade has been towards alternate approaches for specifying requirements such as use cases and requirement modeling languages. However, the growing popularity of model-based development and the increasing power of formal verification tools make yet another approach possible. In this approach, informal shall statements are rewritten as formal properties over a model and shown to hold on that model. Informal shall statements can thus be viewed as a first step in capturing requirements as system properties. This presentation discusses how this is being explored at Rockwell Collins under NASA Langley's Aviation Safety & Security Program.

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This talk covers historical trends in database query languages, from the early days until today. It gives tribute to the great impact of E. F. Codd's relational data model. It describes the invention of SQL, the impact of SQL on the industry, and some lessons learned from our experience with SQL. It describes the goals and current status of XQuery, a new XML query language currently being developed by W3C, and discusses how XQuery might be expected to evolve in the future.

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This talk focuses on the design of a simulation infrastructure that facilitates the study of diseases dynamics in different spatial domains. After motivating the need for the field of computational epidemiology, this presentation will highlight differenct modeling paradigms deemed suitable to simulate the manifestation of diseases in a given population. Depending on the level of spatial resolution of the model, different computing paradigms may be applicable. Two of these computational paradigms are: Multi-Agent Systems and Stochastic Cellular Automata. Their role in the design of simulator that can facilitate disease spread and/or exposure models will be discussed in detail. Recent advances in high-performance computing facilitate the execution of complex simulation models. The availability of data from geographic information systems (GIS), new visualization techniques (i.e. virtual reality) and high-performance computing paradigms, such as cluster and grid computing will greatly contribute to the development of tools that facilitate the work of today's epidemiologists. The talk concludes with the discussion on a proposed design of a simulation environment that can take advantage of high-performance computing.

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In this talk, I will describe our research in extensible languages. This work begins with the realization that programming languages and programming tasks are rarely a perfect fit: a program can often be clarified by using a number of language features tailored to the task at hand. These "domain-specific" features typically do not exist in general purpose languages. One approach to making such high-level features available is "extensible languages". An extensible programming language allows a programmer to import into her extensible "host" programming language the unique combination of domain-specific language features that raise the level of abstraction of the language to that of the problem domain. These features may be (i) new language constructs describing high-level abstractions in a domain, (ii) semantic analyses that, for example, check that the programmer has used the new language constructs correctly, or (iii) optimizing program transformations that rewrite a program into a more efficient form. This imperfect fit between languages and tasks also exists in the realm of software specification and thus we are also interested in extensibility as it applies to modelling and specification languages. I will describe the underlying language processing mechanisms our extensible compiler framework employs to build extensible programming and specification languages (higher-order attribute grammars extended with "forwarding") and demonstrate these ideas with a prototype implementation.

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Speaker Biographies

Steven P. Miller

Steve Miller is a Senior Principal Engineer in the Advanced Technology Center of Rockwell Collins and has almost 30 years of experience in software development. He received his Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Iowa in 1991 and a B.A. in physics and mathematics from the University of Iowa.

His current research interests include model-based development, formal methods, and software testing. He is principle investigator on a project sponsored by NASA Langley and Collins to investigate advanced methods and tools for the development flight critical systems. Prior to this he has lead several research efforts at Collins, including a collaborative effort with SRI International and NASA Langley to formally verify the microcode in the AAMP5 and AAMP-FV microprocessors using the PVS verification system.

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Don Chamberlin

Don Chamberlin is best known as co-inventor of the SQL database language and as author of the book, "A Complete Guide to DB2 Universal Database."

He is currently representing IBM in the W3C working group on XML Query, and is an editor of the XQuery language specification. Don is an IBM Fellow at the Almaden Research Center. He is also an ACM Fellow and a member of the National Academy of Engineering. He holds a B.S. degree from Harvey Mudd College and a Ph.D. from Stanford University.

Visit Don Chamberlin's homepage here.

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Armin R. Mikler

Armin R. Mikler received his Diploma in Informatics from Fachhochschule Darmstadt, Germany in 1988. After spending one year as a Fulbright exchange student at Iowa State University (ISU), he joined ISU as a graduate student and received his MS and Ph.D. in Computer Science in 1990 and 1995 respectively. From 1995 to 1997, he worked as a postdoctoral research associate in the Scalable Computing Laboratory at Ames Laboratory, USDOE. In 1997, Dr. Mikler joined the faculty in Computer Science at the University of North Texas (UNT) where he holds the rank of associate professor in Computer Science with joint appointment in the Department of Biological Sciences. His research interests include: Intelligent Network Management, Distributed Coordination of Intelligent Mobile Agents, Distributed Decision Making, Multi-Agent Simulation and Stochastic Cellular Automate applied to Computational Epidemiology. Dr. Mikler has established and is the director of the Computational Epidemiology Research Laboratory (CERL), which provides the necessary computational infrastructure to conduct large scale simulations. As a member of the Institute of Applied Science at UNT, he has been conducting collaborative and interdisciplinary research in computational science, specifically in the areas of quantitative analysis of ecological processes and Biocomplexity. Dr. Mikler is an associate editor of the Telecommunication Systems Journal and a member of the ACM and the IEEE Computer Society.

Visit Armin R. Mikler's homepage here.

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Eric Van Wyk

Eric Van Wyk is an Assistant Professor in the Computer Science and Engineering department at the University of Minnesota. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Iowa in 1998 and was a post-doctoral researcher in the Computing Laboratory at Oxford University before joining the University of Minnesota in 2002. His research interests are in the area of programming languages, specifically, in declarative specifications of language syntax, semantics, and optimizations. The primary focus of his research is extensible programming and specification languages and the extensible compiler frameworks that implement such languages. He is also interested in the use of temporal logic to specify data flow analyses, how these can be used as side conditions in optimizing transformations and in proofs that the transformations are correct. Dr. Van Wyk is a 2005-2007 McKnight Land-Grant Professor and the recipient of an NSF CAREER Award.

Visit Eric Van Wyk's homepage here.

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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
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