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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 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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Abstracts
1. Logical Reasoning Under Uncertainty with the Theory of Hints and Probabilistic Argumentation SystemsPaul-Andre Monney
The Theory of Hints and Probabilistic Argumentation Systems represent a new framework for reasoning under uncertainty. This framework is based on the Dempster-Shafer theory of evidence. It will be shown that the mathematical concept of hint can nicely represent both the uncertainty and the imprecision that is often attached to the available information. The support function that is derived from a hint measures the weight of the arguments speaking in favour of a hypothesis, whereas the plausibility function indicates the degree of compatibility between the hypothesis and the information. Support and plausibility functions are more general than probability measures in the sense that they can be non-additive. It is interesting to note that Jakob Bernoulli already introduced the idea of support functions in his book called Ars Conjectandi, which was published in 1713. Using the concept of hints and the inference principle provided by Dempster's rule's of combination, classical logical reasoning and probability theory work together to produce a sound method for evaluating the credibility of some hypotheses of interest. The corresponding reasoning systems are called Probabilistic Argumentation Systems (PAS). Their main features will be presented and a computer implementation of PAS called ABEL will be used to discuss an illustrative example.
2. sHype Hypervisor Security Architecture - A Layered Approach for the Xen Open-Source Hypervisor(Joint Lecture with Electrical & Computer Engineering)
Reiner Sailer
sHype is a hypervisor security architecture developed by IBM Research for different virtual machine monitors. It is available as an integral part of the Xen open-source hypervisor. sHype originally builds on the advantages of the emerging and broadly available hardware support for virtualization by providing simple system-independent and robust security policies. It controls virtual resources across multiple platforms. Our main objective is to provide a secure foundation for server platforms, providing functions such as strong isolation, mediated sharing between virtual machines, attestation and integrity guarantees for the hypervisor and its virtual machines, resource control, and secure services. In this talk, I will focus on the sHype access control framework and its implementation into the Xen hypervisor: first on the Xen access control policies and second on the layering of operating system security policies on top sHype. This talk will conclude with a comparison of sHype to other currently available virtual machine monitor security solutions and potential research issues. 3. Phoenix: A Framework for Software Analysis and OptimizationsJohn Lefor
Phoenix is the next generation code generator and analysis framework currently under development at Microsoft Corporation. In this talk I will describe the overall goals and architecture of Phoenix and provide some insight for how to use Phoenix in software research and instruction. Phoenix is integrated with the latest version of Microsoft's Visual Studio 2005 and I will demonstrate how to get started using Phoenix with Visual Studio. 4. Ramanujan's Lost Notebook(Joint Lecture with Department of Mathematics)
Bruce Berndt
Srinivasa Ramanujan, generally regarded as the greatest mathematician inIndian history, was born in 1887 and died in 1920 at the age of 32. Most of his work was recorded without proofs in notebooks. In the spring of 1976, while searching through papers of the late G. N. Watson at Trinity College, Cambridge, George Andrews found a sheaf of 138 pages of Ramanujan's work. In view of the fame of Ramanujan's "ordinary" notebooks, Andrews naturally called this collection of sheets Ramanujan's "lost notebook." This work, comprising about 650 results with no proofs, arises from the last year of Ramanujan's life and represents some of his deepest work. After a brief history of Ramanujan's life and notebooks, the history and origin of the lostnotebook will be given. The remainder of the lecture will be devoted to asurvey of some of the most interesting entries in the lost notebook. Theseinclude claims in q-series, theta functions, continued fractions, integrals,partitions, and other infinite series. 5. Annual Poster Day Poster Session - The Computer Science department poster session is on! Scheduled for 3:30- 5:00pm on Thursday, March 23rd on the second floor of Atanasoff, this event will showcase all the research being done in our department in a social, show-and-tell atmosphere. We very much hope that you and/or your research group will participate by creating a poster displaying your research over the last year and coming to the poster session to discuss your ideas with other graduate students and the faculty. There will also be food supplied by the department. Keep an eye on your e-mail for further details on how to make a poster and get a space for posting from Chad Brewbaker (crb002@iastate.edu), your representative to the equipment committee and organizer for this event.For detailed information, please visit Poster Day website.
6. Distinguished Lecture:Random graphs and Internet graphs
(Joint Lecture with Department of Mathematics)
Fan Chung Graham
We will discuss some recent developments on random graphs with given expected degree distributions. Such random graphs can be used to model various very large graphs arising in Internet and telecommunications. In turn, these "massive graphs" shed insights and lead to new directions for random graph theory. For example, it can be shown that the sizes of connected components depend primarily on the average degree and the second-order average degree under certain mild conditions. Furthermore, the spectra of the adjacency matrices of some random power law graphs obey the power law while the spectra of the Laplacian follow the semi-circle law. We will mention a number of related results and problems that are suggested by various applications of massive graphs. 7. Robert Stewart Distinguished Lecture:Software Upgrades in Distributed Systems
Barbara Liskov
Upgrading the software of long-lived, highly-available distributed systems is difficult. It is not possible to upgrade all the nodes in a system at once, since some nodes may be unavailable and halting the system for an upgrade is unacceptable. Instead, upgrades must happen gradually, and there may be long periods of time when different nodes run different software versions and need to communicate using incompatible protocols. This talk describes an infrastructure that make it possible to upgrade distributed systems automatically while limiting service disruption. It also describes a methodology for upgrades, including a new way to specify upgrades.
8. Program Analysis Techniques for Efficient Software Model CheckingChandra Boyapati
Making software reliable is one of the most important technological challenges facing our society today. Software model checking offers a promising approach to address this problem. It is a formal verification technique that exhaustively tests a program on all possible inputs up to a given size and on all possible non-deterministic schedules, but does so cleverly by detecting similarities in the space of test cases and pruning away large numbers of redundant test cases. This talk presents techniques that significantly improve the state of art in software model checking of programs that use pointers and linked data structures. We believe our techniques can enable the checking of much larger programs and complex program properties than currently possible.Speaker Biographies
Paul-Andre Monney
Paul-Andre Monney is currently working as an Independent Consultant in Reasoning under Uncertainty. Previously, he was an Associate Professor of Statistics in the Department of Quantitative Economics at the University of Fribourg, Switzerland, and, more recently, he was for two years a Visiting Associate Professor of Statistics at Purdue University, USA. He received a Doctoral Degree in Mathematics and the Venia Legendi in Statistics from the University of Fribourg. He has done extensive research in Theoretical Computer Science and Statistics, in particular the Dempster-Shafer Theory of Evidence. Dr. Monney has numerous publications, including articles in scientific journals such as Artificial Intelligence, International Journal of Approximate Reasoning, Journal of Computational and Applied Mathematics and Zeitschrift f¨¹r Operations Research. He is co-author of A Mathematical Theory of Hints - An Approach to the Dempster-Shafer Theory of Evidence, a book presenting a new perspective on the Dempster-Shafer Theory. In 2003, he published a book entitled A Mathematical Theory of Arguments for Statistical Evidence, in which the theory of hints is applied to the field of statistics. Paul-Andr¨¦ Monney has served as a member of the program committee or as a referee for several international journals and conferences.
Reiner Sailer Reiner Sailer is a Research Staff Member at the IBM T. J. Watson Research Center since 1999 where he is working in the Secure Systems Department. He holds a Masters degree in Computer Science from the University of Karlsruhe (Germany 1994) and a Dr.-Ing. degree in Electronic Engineering from the University of Stuttgart, Germany (1999), where he worked on privacy, multi-lateral security, and security and fraud control in telecommunication networks. His major research interests today include secure hardware, access control, network and systems security, trusted computing, and secure virtualization infrastructure. John Lefor John Lefor is a Group Manager at Microsoft Research in Redmond Washington. He has been a member of the Phoenix team since the project began and is responsible for design and delivery of the Phoenix Academic Program. John has been involved in software tools at Microsoft for nearly fifteen years and has enjoyed working with compilers and code generation for most of his career Bruce Berndt Bruce Berndt is the author of five volumes on Ramanujan's Notebooks, published by Springer during the years 1985-1998. The American Mathematical Society awarded him a Steele Prize for this work in 1996. With Robert Rankin, he has published two books, Ramanujan: Letters and Commentary, and Ramanujan: Essays and Surveys, published by the American Mathematical Society. During the summer of 2005, he and George Andrews published with Springer their first (of 4?) volumes on Ramanujan's lost notebook. During the fall of 2005, Berndt served as Mahler Lecturer for the Australian Mathematical Society.Visit Bruce Berndt's homepage here.
Fan Chung Graham Fan Chung Graham received a B.S. degree in mathematics from National Taiwan University in 1970 and a Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of Pennsylvania in 1974, after which she joined the technical staff of AT&T Bell Laboratories. From 1983 to 1991, she headed the Mathematics, Information Sciences and Operations Research Division at Bellcore. In 1991 she became a Bellcore Fellow. In 1993, she was the Class of 1965 Professor of Mathematics at the the University of Pennsylvania. Since 1998, she has been a Professor of Mathematics and Professor of Computer Science and Enginering at the University of California, San Diego. She is also the Akamai Professor in Internet Mathematics.Her research interests are primarily in graph theory, combinatorics, and algorithmic design, in particular in spectral graph theory, extremal graphs, graph labeling, graph decompositions, random graphs, graph algorithms, parallel structures and various applications of graph theory in Internet computing, communication networks, software reliability, chemistry, engineering, and various areas of mathematics. She was awarded the Allendoerfer Award by Mathematical Association of America in 1990. Since 1998, she has been a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Visit Fan Chung Graham's homepage here.
Barbara LiskovProfessor Liskov is the Ford Professor of Engineering at MIT. She is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a fellow of the ACM. She received the IEEE Von Neumann medal in 2004, the lifetime achievement award from the Society of Women Engineers in 1996, and in 2003, was named one of the 50 most important women in science by Discover Magazine. Her research interests include distributed systems, replication algorithms to provide fault - tolerance, programming methodology and programming languages. Her current research projects include Byzantine - fault - tolerant storage systems, peer - to - peer computing and support for automatic deployment of software upgrades in large - scale distributed systems.
Visit Barbara Liskov's homepage here.
Chandra Boyapati Chandrasekhar Boyapati is an Assistant Professor in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department at the University of Michigan.He received his B.Tech. degree in Computer Science from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Madras, and his S.M. and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2004.Prof. Boyapati's primary research interest is software reliability, which spans the spectrum from programming languages, through program analysis, to software engineering. He is interested in all approaches for helping programmers write and maintain reliable software. He is particularly interested in developing type systems and software model checking techniques to improve software reliability.Visit Chandra Boyapati'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.
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