2003-2004 AbstractsCPSC 681 Graduate Seminar:The Turing Test Revisited: Brain vs. ComputerDr. Bruce McCormick, Professor Emeritus, CS Department, Texas A&M University
4:10 p.m., Wednesday September 17, 2003 AbstractIn 1950 Alan Turing proposed the "Imitation Game," since called the Turning Test, as an experimental probe of whether machines can think. "To date, nothing has come remotely close to passing an unrestricted Turning Test..." (French, Trends in Cognitive Science, 6:3, 2000), yet Turing's article in Mind remains one of the most influential papers ever written in Computer Science.The seminar will reexamine the Turing Test from the perspective of a half century's advances in Computational Neuroscience. We ask:
BiographyB.H. McCormick received his B.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Physics from MIT and Harvard University, respectively. He was Professor of Computer Science and Physics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. At the University of Illinois at Chicago and Texas A&M University, he headed the Information Engineering and the Computer Science departments, respectively. Currently he is Professor of Computer Science and director of the Brain Networks Laboratory at Texas A&M University.His research areas include computer graphics and visualization, brain mapping, and neural networks. His attention is currently focused on the design and implementation of the Knife-Edge Scanning Microscope and its potential to generate data for constructing anatomically correct models of mouse brain networks. CPSC 681 Faculty Contact: Dr. Bruce McCormick (mccormick@cs.tamu.edu) CPSC 681 Graduate Seminar:Simulating the Real World in Real Time: Interactive Physically-Based ModelingDr. John Keyser, Assistant Professor, CS Department, Texas A&M University
4:10 p.m., Wednesday September 24, 2003 AbstractCreating visually realistic simulations of physical systems is an important part of many applications. For several of these applications, such as training simulators and games, performing the simulations at interactive rates is especially important. We would like to have systems that can respond to user input in a physically-believable fashion, at a rate sufficient to allow a user to interact with the system as it develops.This talk will focus on both the methods used for fundamental physical simulation, as well as the approaches we take to ensure that the simulations run at interactive rates. For many physical systems, realistic simulations are possible, but only at very slow speeds. We obtain interactivity chiefly through two simplifying assumptions:
We will discuss the prior work in interactive physically-based simulation, as well as our previous and ongoing efforts related to simulation of fire and burning objects, cloud formation, plant-wind interaction, cloth simulation, and rigid-body dynamics. BiographyJohn Keyser is an assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science at Texas A&M University. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of North Carolina in 2000, and B.S. degrees in Engineering Physics, Applied Mathematics, and Computer Science from Abilene Christian University in 1994. His research interests, broadly encompassing graphics, are specifically focused on issues of modeling. Current research projects focus on robust geometric and solid modeling, geometric reconstruction and visualization of neuron data, and physically-based simulation.CPSC 681 Faculty Contact: Dr. Bruce McCormick (mccormick@cs.tamu.edu) CPSC 681 Graduate Seminar:Sustaining Denial of Service AttacksDr. Andreas Klappenecker, Assistant Professor, CS Department, Texas A&M University
4:10 p.m., Wednesday October 1, 2003 AbstractFlooding a server by numerous nonsensical messages and thereby consuming resources is an increasingly popular method of cyber terror. The problem is that such attacks are easy to orchestrate and--because few defense mechanisms are in place--often very effective. We present and analyze a simple randomized caching scheme, which is the core of a probabilistic queuing algorithm. We give evidence that this queuing algorithm provides a fair share of resources to benign users, penalizing malicious users trying to consume server resources. Our simulation results indicate that our algorithm allows a server to better sustain a denial of service attack.This is joint work with Seth Voorhies and Hyunyoung Lee from the University of Denver. BiographyAndreas Klappenecker studied Computer Science at the University of Karlsruhe in Karlsruhe, Germany. He received his masters degree in 1995 and his Ph.D. degree in 1 998. He was a Visiting Assistant Professor of Mathematics at Texas A&M University in 1999, and then worked for a short time as a Research Associate at the University of Karlsruhe. Dr. Klappenecker became an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Texas A&M in November of 2000.His research interests include the design and analysis of algorithms, in particular quantum algorithms, signal and image processing, and cryptography. His research is supported by grants from the National Science Foundation, and from a Telecommunications and Informatics Initiative of Texas A&M University. Dr. Klappenecker received highest distinction for his Ph.D. thesis. He was named Fellow-at-Large of the Santa Fe Institute in 2000. CPSC 681 Faculty Contact: Dr. Bruce McCormick (mccormick@cs.tamu.edu)
CPSC 681 Graduate Seminar:Generic Programming in C++Dr. Bjarne Stroustrup, Professor and CoE Chair in Computer Science, CS Department, Texas A&M University
4:10 p.m., Wednesday October 15, 2003 AbstractGeneric and generative programming are fashionable. C# and Java are growing generic extensions, there are meta-programming dialects of Haskell and ML, and most novel C++ techniques rely on templates. The reason is simple: these techniques lead to code that is both type safe and more efficient than alternatives. Here, I trace the C++ usage from the earliest days through current libraries, to plausible future language extensions. Providing statically type safe containers that equal C arrays in performance and outperforming qsort() with simpler code is important, but it is just the beginning.BiographyBjarne Stroustrup designed and implemented C++. Over the last decade, C++ has become the most widely used language supporting object-oriented programming by making abstraction techniques affordable and manageable for mainstream projects. Using C++ as his tool, Stroustrup has pioneered the use of object- oriented and generic programming techniques in application areas where efficiency is a premium; examples include general systems programming, switching, simulation, graphics, user-interfaces, embedded systems, and scientific computation. The influence of C++ and the ideas it popularized are clearly visible far beyond the C++ community. Languages including C, C#, Java, and Fortran99 provide features pioneered for mainstream use by C++, as do systems such as COM and CORBA.His book "The C++ Programming Language" (Addison-Wesley, first edition 1985, second edition 1991, third edition 1997, "special" edition 2000) is the most widely read book of its kind and has been translated into at least 18 languages. A later book, "The Design and Evolution of C++" (Addison-Wesley, 1994) broke new ground in the description of the way a programming language was shaped by ideas, ideals, problems, and practical constraints. In addition to his five books, Stroustrup has published more than a hundred academic and more popular papers. He takes an active role in the creation of the ANSI/ISO standard for C++ and continues to work on the maintenance and revision of that standard. Bjarne Stroustrup is the College of Engineering Chair in Computer Science Professor at Texas A&M University. He retains a link with AT&T Labs - Research as a member of the Information and Systems Software Research Lab. He is an AT&T Bell Laboratories Fellow and an AT&T Fellow. He is actively involved in the ANSI/ISO standardization of C++. Recipient of the 1993 ACM Grace Murray Hopper award. ACM fellow. CPSC 681 Faculty Contact: Dr. Bruce McCormick (mccormick@cs.tamu.edu)
CPSC 681 Graduate Seminar:Autonomous Semantics in Natural and Artificial AgentsDr. Yoonsuck Choe, Assistant Professor, CS Department, Texas A&M University
4:10 p.m., Wednesday October 22, 2003 AbstractHow can we build artificial agents that can autonomously explore and understand their environments? An immediate requirement for such an agent is to understand what its own sensory state means, i.e., to learn the semantics of its internal sensory state. In principle, we as designers can provide the agents with the required semantics, but this turns out to be a challenging engineering problem. To overcome this challenge, we need to first look at natural agents and see how they acquire meaning of their own sensory states -- their neural firing patterns. We can learn a lot about what certain neural spikes mean by carefully controlling the input stimulus and observing how the neurons fire. However, neurons embedded in the brain do not have direct access to the outside stimuli, so such a stimulus-to-spike association may not be possible.How then does the brain solve this problem? We propose that motor action is necessary to overcome this conundrum. Further, we provide a simple yet powerful criterion: sensory-invariance, for learning the meaning of sensory states. The basic idea is that a particular action sequence, which maintains invariance of a certain sensory state, reflects important properties of the environmental stimulus that triggered the sensory state. Our experiments with a simplified sensorimotor agent shows that sensory-invariance can indeed serve as a powerful objective for semantics learning. The results from the experiments will be discussed in relation to other relevant work, and several unresolved issues will be considered. In a broader context, semantics is an important issue in information technology (IT) in general, thus the implications of our approach on IT will be briefly touched upon. This is a joint work with S. Kumar Bhamidipati. BiographyYoonsuck Choe is an assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science at Texas A&M University. He received his B.S. degree in Computer Science from Yonsei University (Korea) in 1993, and his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Sciences from the University of Texas at Austin in 1995 and 2001. His current research areas include computational modeling of the brain, computational and biological vision, thalamocortical basis of analogy and cortical integration, and autonomous semantics in sensorimotor agents.CPSC 681 Faculty Contact: Dr. Bruce McCormick (mccormick@cs.tamu.edu)
CPSC 681 Graduate Seminar:Hyper-Hitchcock -- Authoring Interactive Videos and Generating Interactive SummariesDr. Frank Shipman, Associate Professor, CS Department, Texas A&M University
4:10 p.m., Wednesday October 29, 2003 AbstractTo simplify the process of editing interactive video, we developed the concept of "detail-on-demand" video as a subset of general hypervideo. Detail-on-demand video keeps the authoring and viewing interfaces relatively simple while supporting a wide range of interactive video applications. Our editor, Hyper-Hitchcock, provides a direct-manipulation environment in which authors can combine video clips and place hyperlinks between them. To summarize a video, Hyper-Hitchcock can also automatically generate a hypervideo composed of multiple video summary levels and navigational links between these summaries and the original video. Viewers may interactively select the amount of detail they see, access more detailed summaries, and navigate to the source video through the summary.BiographyFrank Shipman is an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Center for the Study of Digital Libraries at Texas A&M University. He has been pursuing research in the areas of hypermedia, computer-supported cooperative work, and intelligent user interfaces since 1987. Dr. Shipman's doctoral work at the University of Colorado and subsequent work at Xerox PARC and Texas A&M has investigated combining informal and formal representations in interfaces and methods for supporting incremental formalization. Dr. Shipman's research has led to commercial systems like ForeFront Group's Virtual Notebook System and Eastgate System's Web Squirrel and Tinderbox. He manages on-going research projects in the areas of spatial hypertext, information visualization, requirements gathering, video editing, and computers and education.CPSC 681 Faculty Contact: Dr. Bruce McCormick (mccormick@cs.tamu.edu)
CPSC 681 Graduate Seminar:On the Evidence-Based Resource Management in Distributed Computing SystemsDr. Steve Liu, Associate Professor, CS Department, Texas A&M University
4:10 p.m., Wednesday, November 5, 2003 AbstractInternet, since its inception about four decades ago (http://www.isoc.org/internet/history/brief.shtml) has become the center of every major technology and business sector. The global connectivity of Internet allows a legitimate user to access numerous useful resources, yet it also brings an under-protected system closer to hackers than ever.While the fear of IP address starvation still lingers, GRID computing is clustering more networks into virtual communities; network intrusions and information frauds are growing at alarming rates. Cyber trust is one of the four priority areas of the CISE division of NSF. The homeland security department is charged to be responsible for US Cyber Security. FBI, US secret services, and other federal agencies are reaching out to the state and local levels because of the real concerns for identity theft and other Internet misuses. The importance of secure and trustworthy Internet communities cannot be overstated. Security concerns stem from imperfection of the specification and implementation of cryptographic and operational protocols. For instance, many of the email viruses are due to inadequate authentication. UDP flooding that can easily overwhelm any network is due to lack of access control. Firewalls, intrusion detection systems, anti-virus patches are routinely employed to close obvious security holes, many other security problems need to be addressed from the fundamental properties of the system; but clearly, they are nothing but "door locks" that keep low level strangers from the computer assets. Most high level offenders that caused tangible damages (monetary loss, customer list, credit card numbers) were done by hackers with insightful knowledge of the target systems. The situation will become only worse with more complex software systems deployed, and with more powerful desktops sitting on the cable-modem/DSL/university campuses ready to become zombies of innovative attack schemes. There is no quick fix to the Internet security problems. A holistic solution for trustworthy computing requires complete and provable protocol and cryptographic specifications (including theories), correct implementation of specifications in hardware and software, and disciplined operational procedures. The list goes on and on. A fully secure system may become too costly or too cumbersome to be useful. Yet an insecure system may face the dreadful consequence of total mission failure or business loss for critical applications. In this talk, we will only consider the notion of "undeniable evidences" that have been developed for e-cash applications. While e-cash may have a long way to go due to political, legal, and user confidence concerns, we found that e-coin algorithms, cryptographic evidences, and their interaction procedures can be effectively used as the foundation of the notion of trustworthiness of distributed computing. After all, without evidence, the notion of trustworthiness can change with subjective interpretation. On the basis of a public key infrastructure (PKI), one could create a distributed resource system that will guarantee the authenticity of anonymous users. It also allows a group to create an anonymous trust third party (TTP), so that important system management functions can be enforced via the anonymous TTP. BiographyDr. Steve Liu received his PhD from the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at the University of Michigan in 1989. He has been working on various research problems in the general areas of real-time distributed systems. His current research topics include evidence-based resource management in distributed systems (evidence formalization, auditing, secure mobile code/architecture) and image analysis (retinal image detection for diabetic retinopathy, cholesterol distribution modeling).CPSC 681 Faculty Contact: Dr. Bruce McCormick (mccormick@cs.tamu.edu)
CPSC 681 Graduate Seminar:Knowledge Interaction Design for Creative Knowledge WorkDr. Kumiyo Nakakoji, Professor, and Dr. Yasuhiro Yamamoto, Research Associate, KID (Knowledge Interaction Design) Laboratory at RCAST (Research Center for Advanced Science and Technology), University of Tokyo
4:10 p.m., Monday, November 10, 2003 AbstractWe will present our approach for the development of application systems for creative knowledge work, particularly for early stages of information design tasks. Being a cognitive tool serving as a means of externalization, an application system affects how the user is engaged in the creative process through its visual interaction design. Knowledge interaction design is a framework where a set of application systems for different information design domains are developed based on an interaction model, which is based on a certain model of thought processes.Our ART (Amplifying Representational Talkback) project has developed two sets of application systems using the knowledge interaction design framework: one includes systems for linear information design, such as writing, movie-editing, and video-analysis; the other includes systems for network information design, such as file-system navigation and hypertext authoring. Our experience shows that the resulting systems encourage users to follow a certain cognitive path through graceful user experience. BiographyKumiyo Nakakoji is a Professor at the KID (Knowledge Interaction Design) laboratory at Research Center for Advanced Science and Technology, University of Tokyo, Japan. She received her BS from Osaka University (1986), and MS (1990) and PhD (1993) in Computer Science from University of Colorado at Boulder. Her current research interests include computer support for collective creativity and knowledge interaction design.Yasuhiro Yamamoto, who received BS from Kyoto University in 1996 and received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Nara Institute of Science and Technology in 2001, has been interested in information philosophy and visual interaction design. He has been serving as the primary interaction designer for the ART project described in the presentation. He is a member of the KID laboratory, and currently a Research Fellow at the TBI project, RCAST, University of Tokyo. CPSC 681 Faculty Contact: Dr. Bruce McCormick (mccormick@cs.tamu.edu)
CPSC 681 Graduate Seminar:
Electrical Engineering Distinguished
Speaker Seminar presented as CPSC 681 From Wireless and Sensor Networks to Convergence: Protocols and ArchitectureDr. P. R. Kumar, Professor, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, and Research Professor, Coordinated Science Lab; University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
4:10 p.m., Friday, November 14, 2003 AbstractThis talk deals with protocols and software architecture.We begin with the protocol needs of ad hoc wireless networks, which require several asynchronous distributed algorithms that can adapt to the location and number of nodes in the network, and to the traffic demands. We present three such protocols for problems arising especially in wireless networks -- power control (COMPOW), media access (SEEDEX), and routing (STARA). We highlight not only the algorithms but also the role of architecture in software implementation of protocols. Next we address the issue of where we are headed in the next phase of the information technology revolution. We begin with the historical context, and then turn to convergence of control with communication and computation. We highlight the importance of architecture and abstractions. Joint work with S. Graham, G. Baliga, K. Huang, V. Kawadia, S. Narayanaswamy, R. Rozovsky, P. Gupta, V. Borkar BiographyP. R. Kumar is the Franklin W. Woeltge Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, and a Research Professor in the Coordinated Science Laboratory, at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. He was the recipient of the Donald P. Eckman Award of the American Automatic Control Council. He is a Fellow of the IEEE. Dr. Kumar received his B.Tech in Electrical Engineering (Light Current) from I.I.T. Madras in 1973, and the D.Sc. in Systems Science and Mathematics from Washington University, St. Louis in 1977.He has presented plenary lectures at conferences including the IEEE Conference on Decision and Control, the SIAM Annual Meetings, the SIAM Conference on Optimization, WiOpt'03: Modeling and Optimization in Mobile, Ad Hoc and Wireless Networks, the German Open Conference on Probability and Statistics, and the Mediterranean Conference on Control and Automation. His current research interests are in wireless networks, sensor networks, information technology convergence, wafer fabrication plants, and machine learning. CPSC 681 Faculty Contact: Dr. Bruce McCormick (mccormick@cs.tamu.edu)
CPSC 681 Graduate Seminar:Fault Tolerant Routing in Energy-Efficient Cluster InterconnectsDr. Eun Jung Kim, Assistant Professor, CS Department, Texas A&M University
4:10 p.m., Monday, November 24, 2003 AbstractWith clusters increasingly taking on various applications that require QoS guarantees, it is important to make them and the underlying infrastructure dependable to ensure their commercial success. Therefore, fault-tolerance in clusters to accommodate link and node failures is an important step towards this goal. In addition, optimizing energy consumption in these architectures has recently emerged as a major concern since server power usage is becoming a significant fraction of the total ownership cost.In this talk, first I will introduce the InfiniBand Architecture (IBA) framework that may emerge as the de facto standard for designing future system area networks (SANs) for clusters. Then I will present an APM (Automatic Path Migration)-based framework for IBA-style cluster interconnects and introduce a fault tolerant routing scheme for the mixed traffic. Along with the fault tolerant routing scheme, two energy optimization schemes (Dynamic Voltage Scaling and Dynamic Link Shutdown) will be re-investigated to study the energy dissipation pattern in the presence of faults. Simulation results of a 40-node irregular network indicate that our fault-tolerant routing scheme can accommodate link or node failures without severe performance degradation. In addition, the energy optimization schemes reduce significant amount of energy regardless of the presence of link or node failures. BiographyEun Jung Kim is an Assistant Professor in the Computer Science Department at Texas A&M University. Her research interests include Computer Architecture, Power Efficient Systems, Parallel/Distributed Systems, Computer Networks, Cluster Computing, QoS Support in Cluster Networks and Internet, Performance Evaluation, and Fault-Tolerant Computing. More information about her research is available at http://www.cs.tamu.edu/faculty/ejkim.CPSC 681 Faculty Contact: Dr. Bruce McCormick (mccormick@cs.tamu.edu)
CPSC 681 Graduate Seminar:EFG: A Component-based Approach to Groupware EngineeringDr. Du Li, Assistant Professor, CS Department, Texas A&M University
4:10 p.m., Monday, December 1, 2003 AbstractGroupware applications facilitate a geographically distributed group of people to interact over a computer network. Popular groupware products include Lotus Notes, Microsoft NetMeeting, and instant messengers. A groupware framework provides reusable collaboration services to facilitate the development of a range of groupware applications. Both the framework and applications must be highly customizable and evolvable to address the diverse and changing requirements of end users during actual use.This talk presents a component-based framework (called EFG) for developing evolvable groupware. The framework provides collaboration services that can be dynamically attached to application components that are only required to follow an industrial standard component model (JavaBean). This makes it possible to leverage the ever-growing base of third-party, collaboration-unaware COTS components into groupware applications without modifying source code. The talk also overviews general groupware engineering concepts through an example groupware application that conceptually adds groupware features to a distributed file system. BiographyDr. Du Li is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Center for the Studies of Digital Libraries at Texas A&M University. He received his PhD degree from the University of California, Los Angeles, in 2000. His research interests include computer-supported cooperative work, distributed systems, and programming languages.CPSC 681 Faculty Contact: Dr. Bruce McCormick (mccormick@cs.tamu.edu)
CPSC 681 Graduate Seminar:Charting the Networks of the Whole Mouse Brain: A Progress ReportDr. Bruce McCormick, Professor, CS Department, Texas A&M University
4:10 p.m., Wednesday February 4, 2004 AbstractRecent developments in knife-edge scanning microscopy and reconstruction of brain microstructure--its neurons and their connectivity into brain networks--from the volume datasets generated by this three-dimensional microscopy, will be described.The neuronal connectivity of human and other mammalian brains is as yet largely uncharted. Anatomically correct network models of the brain do not exist at present for the mammalian brain of any species. Indeed, today the observed small-animal brain cannot be modeled as a detailed network: There is simply not enough available three-dimensional neuroanatomical data of mammalian brain microstructure and its neurons and connectivity. Whole-brain imaging and reconstruction at the neuronal level of detail differs from earlier reconstruction approaches in several important ways. First, to image brain microstructure at the neuronal level requires massive data volumes: uncompressed data of 26 terabytes for one mouse brain. Second, high data-acquisition rates are essential: higher than100 megavoxels/second to scan a mouse brain within approximately 100 hours. Third, innovative tissue preparation techniques are required for en bloc staining with, for example, Nissl, Golgi-Cox, and transgenically induced protein stains such as GFP. Fourth, 3D parallel image-processing algorithms are critical to reconstruct 3D brain microstructure of observed brains geometrically, and to visualize the observed and reconstructed neurons with their connectivities and networks. Lastly, rather large computational resources must be available to support the endeavor. All these aspects of whole small-animal brain imaging and reconstruction will be described in the context of on-going and planned research in the Brain Networks Laboratory, Department of Computer Science, TAMU. BiographyB.H. McCormick received his B.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Physics from MIT and Harvard University, respectively. He was Professor of Computer Science and Physics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. At the University of Illinois at Chicago and Texas A&M University, he headed the Information Engineering and the Computer Science departments, respectively. Currently he is Professor of Computer Science and director of the Brain Networks Laboratory at Texas A&M.His research areas include computer graphics and visualization, brain mapping, and neural networks. His attention is currently focused on the design and implementation of the Knife-Edge Scanning Microscope and its potential to generate data for constructing anatomically correct models of mouse brain networks. CPSC 681 Faculty Contact: Dr. Bruce McCormick (mccormick@cs.tamu.edu) CPSC 681 Graduate Seminar:New Results on Computational Lower Bounds*Dr. Jianer Chen, Professor, CS Department, Texas A&M University
4:10 p.m., Wednesday February 11, 2004 AbstractWe develop new techniques for deriving very strong computational lower bounds for a class of well-known NP-hard problems. This class includes Weighted Satisfiability, Dominating Set, Hitting Set, Set Cover, Clique, and Independent Set. For example, although a trivial enumeration can easily test in time O(n^k) if a given graph of n vertices has a clique of size k, we prove that unless an unlikely collapse occurs in parameterized complexity theory, the problem is not solvable in time f(k)n^{o(k)} for any function f, even if we restrict the parameter values to be bounded by an arbitrarily small function of n. Under the same assumption, we prove that even if we restrict the parameter values k to be of the order of u(n) for any reasonable function u(n), no algorithm of running time n^{o(k)} can test if a graph of n vertices has a clique of size k. Similar strong lower bounds on the computational complexity are also derived for other NP-hard problems in the above class. Our techniques can be further extended to derive computational lower bounds on polynomial time approximation schemes for NP-hard optimization problems.* This is a joint work with X. Huang, I. Kanj, and G. Xia. BiographyJianer Chen got his Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, New York University, 1987, and his Ph.D. degree in Mathematics from Columbia University, 1990. Currently he is a professor in Computer Science at Texas A&M University. His research interests include algorithms and complexity, computer networks, and computer graphics.CPSC 681 Faculty Contact: Dr. Bruce McCormick (mccormick@cs.tamu.edu) CPSC 681 Graduate Seminar:Ensuring Consistency in Group EditorsDr. Du Li, Assistant Professor, CS Department, Texas A&M University
4:10 p.m., Wednesday February 25, 2004 AbstractRealtime group editors allow a distributed group of people to edit a shared document at the same time over a computer network. Operational Transformation (OT) is the standard method for consistency maintenance in state-of-the-art group editors. It is potentially able to achieve consistency while maintaining high local responsiveness and free interaction. However, previous OT algorithms have often been found not able to really guarantee consistency.There are scenarios in which some are able to achieve convergence, but no published work to our knowledge is able to maintain the correct effect relation between concurrent operations. We analyze the root of this problem and propose a novel state difference based transformation algorithm to solve it. Our approach fixes important algorithm flaws that have been there for 15 years. BiographyDr. Du Li received his PhD degree from UCLA and joined the faculty of Texas A&M in 2000. His research interests include CSCW, Distributed Systems, Intelligent User Interfaces, and Programming Languages, with a focus on collaboration modeling and infrastructure.CPSC 681 Faculty Contact: Dr. Bruce McCormick (mccormick@cs.tamu.edu) CPSC 681 Graduate Seminar:Modeling of Discontinuous Congestion Control Protocols and Their DesignDr. Steve Liu and Mr. Yong Xiong, Associate Professor and Ph.D. Candidate, CS Department, Texas A&M University
4:10 p.m., Monday March 1, 2004 AbstractIncrease and decrease (I-D) traffic adjustment rule is widely employed in many congestion control protocols. The I-D traffic controller is very easy to implement, but precise characterization of its behavior is very difficult, because of its discontinuous behavior. In this talk we will present a modeling and design methodology for I-D congestion controllers to guarantee asymptotic stability and eliminate traffic oscillation, based on the sliding mode control (SMC) theory. Our scheme addresses the discontinuous operations of I-D controller that have been largely ignored in the literature, and shows that discontinuity plays a crucial role in optimization of the I-D based congestion control algorithms.We show that the design of I-D congestion control systems must consider its relative degree and zero dynamics to guarantee their asymptotic stability. Analytical and experimental results show that the relative degree of the rate-based, Additive-Increase-Multiplicative-Decrease (AIMD) congestion-control algorithms is two, while that of the window-based schemes is one. That is, for optimal control performance (rapid convergence and minimal oscillation), rate-based AIMD algorithms should use both the queue length error and its first order time derivative to construct the switching function of an active queue management scheme. On the other hand, for window-based AIMD algorithms one should only use the queue length error in the switching function. Misconfiguration of the relative degree in the switching function leads to poor performance results, and adjustment of other design parameters have only marginal effects on the system performance. Based on the observations of the system dynamics of the I-D controllers, we derive a new queuing model for window-based congestion control systems that overcame the deficiency of a widely used traffic model that has significant discrepancy with the ns-2 simulation results. BiographyDr. Steve Liu received his PhD from the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at the University of Michigan in 1989. He has been working on various research problems in the general areas of real-time distributed systems. His current research topics include evidence-based resource management in distributed systems (evidence formalization, auditing, secure mobile code/architecture) and image analysis (retinal image detection for diabetic retinopathy, cholesterol distribution modeling).Yong Xiong currently is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Computer Science at Texas A&M University. His advisor is Dr. Steve Liu. Mr. Xiong's current research interest includes network modeling, congestion control, ubiquitous computing and security. CPSC 681 Faculty Contact: Dr. Bruce McCormick (mccormick@cs.tamu.edu) CPSC 681 Graduate Seminar:Programming, Language and LibrariesDr. Bjarne Stroustrup, Professor and holder of the College of Engineering Chair in Computer Science, Texas A&M University
4:10 p.m., Monday March 8, 2004 AbstractWe say we write our code in a programming language. For real code, that's only partially true. We write our programs in an "extended language" characterized by a set of libraries supporting our general application domains and key abstractions (e.g., graphics, linear algebra, and distribution). This talk explores the relationships between a few language features (primarily, classes and templates), programming styles (most prominently, generic programming), and library design in C++. All examples will be very simple to illustrate fundamental programming and performance issuesBiographyBjarne Stroustrup designed and implemented C++. Over the last decade, C++ has become the most widely used language supporting object-oriented programming by making abstraction techniques affordable and manageable for mainstream projects. Using C++ as his tool, Stroustrup has pioneered the use of object- oriented and generic programming techniques in application areas where efficiency is a premium; examples include general systems programming, switching, simulation, graphics, user-interfaces, embedded systems, and scientific computation. The influence of C++ and the ideas it popularized are clearly visible far beyond the C++ community. Languages including C, C#, Java, and Fortran99 provide features pioneered for mainstream use by C++, as do systems such as COM and CORBA.His book The C++ Programming Language (Addison-Wesley, first edition 1985, second edition 1991, third edition 1997, "special" edition 2000) is the most widely read book of its kind and has been translated into at least 18 languages. A later book, The Design and Evolution of C++ (Addison-Wesley, 1994) broke new ground in the description of the way a programming language was shaped by ideas, ideals, problems, and practical constraints. In addition to his five books, Stroustrup has published more than a hundred academic and more popular papers. He takes an active role in the creation of the ANSI/ISO standard for C++ and continues to work on the maintenance and revision of that standard. Bjarne Stroustrup is a professor and the holder of the College of Engineering Chair in Computer Science at Texas A&M University. He retains a link with AT&T Labs - Research as a member of the Information and Systems Software Research Lab. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering. An AT&T Bell Laboratories Fellow and an AT&T Fellow. Recipient of the 1993 ACM Grace Murray Hopper award. ACM fellow. CPSC 681 Faculty Contact: Dr. Bruce McCormick (mccormick@cs.tamu.edu) CPSC 681 Graduate Seminar:Grids: Analyzing the Performance of ApplicationsDr. Valerie E. Taylor, Department Head and Stewart & Stevenson Professor, Texas A&M University
4:10 p.m., Monday March 22, 2004 AbstractCurrently, distributed systems or grid systems are becoming available through programs and projects such as the TeraGrid, the NASA Information Power Grid, the Alliance, the National Partnership for Advanced Computational Infrastructure, GriPhyN, and the European Grid Effort. Grids, in contrast to conventional parallel systems, have some unique features that pose significant research challenges. This talk will provide an overview of different projects related to grid systems and present some of our current work in the area of performance analysis for parallel and grid applications.BiographyValerie E. Taylor earned her Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1991. From 1991-2002, Dr. Taylor was a member of the faculty of Northwestern University. Dr. Taylor has since joined the faculty of Texas A&M University as Head of the Dwight Look College of Engineering's Department of Computer Science and holder of the Stewart & Stevenson Professorship II. Her research interests are in the area of high performance computing, with particular emphasis on mesh partitioning for distributed systems and performance analysis of parallel and distributed applications. She has authored or co-authored over 70 publications in these areas. Dr. Taylor has received numerous awards for distinguished leadership and research.CPSC 681 Faculty Contact: Dr. Bruce McCormick (mccormick@cs.tamu.edu) CPSC 681 Graduate Seminar:Humanities Informatics: The Texas A&M University InitiativeDr. Richard Furuta, Professor and Director of the Center for the Study of Digital Libraries and the Hypermedia Research Laboratory, Texas A&M University
4:10 p.m., Wednesday April 7, 2004 AbstractHumanities Informatics, a synthesis of the liberal arts and the computer sciences, encompasses topics of broad intellectual and practical significance. The Humanities Informatics Initiative at Texas A&M University brings together faculty from computer science, liberal arts, and the campus libraries in an equal partnership devoted to developing innovative computing tools, digital collections, and hypertextual archives of broadly significant academic and educational value to the humanities. The talk will describe the Initiative and will provide examples from some of our ongoing research work that illustrates how both computer science and liberal arts benefit when humanities informatics research focuses on questions of value to both.BiographyRichard Furuta is a faculty member at Texas A&M University where he is a Professor in the Department of Computer Science, Director of the Center for the Study of Digital Libraries, and Director of the Hypermedia Research Laboratory. Dr. Furuta received the B.A. degree from Reed College in 1974, the M.S.degree in Computer Science from the University of Oregon in 1978, and the Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from the University of Washington in 1986. Dr. Furuta's current areas of research include digital libraries, hypermedia systems and models, structured documents, and document engineering. He currently serves as an Editor-in-Chief for the Journal of Digital Libraries, as chair of the steering committee for the ACM-IEEE Joint Conference on Digital Libraries, and as a member of a number of other editorial boards and conference program committees.CPSC 681 Faculty Contact: Dr. Bruce McCormick (mccormick@cs.tamu.edu) CPSC 681 Graduate Seminar:Watch your Timing! A Biased View on Security in the Post-Encryption EraDr. Riccardo Bettati Associate Professor, Texas A&M University
4:10 p.m., Monday April 12, 2004 AbstractWith increasing amounts of internet traffic being encrypted, and its contents therefore being beyond the reach of effective cryptanalysis, or other simple attacks, attention is shifting toward attacks that take advantage of increasingly subtle covert channels. One family of such attacks, commonly known as traffic analysis, relies on observations of the temporal (and other) behavior of traffic to infer sensitive information about the applications and/or the underlying system.In this presentation, I will give an overview of the capabilities of high-resolution traffic analysis, and describe how it can be used to break encryption, to render anonymity systems ineffective, or to help discovering the configuration of protected remote systems. Countermeasures against these forms of attacks exist. I will describe a few, and illustrate some unexpected weaknesses of such systems. BiographyRiccardo Bettati received his Diploma in Informatics from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH), Zürich, Switzerland, in 1988 and his Ph.D. from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1994. From 1993 to 1995, he held a postdoctoral position at the International Computer Science Institute in Berkeley and at the University of California at Berkeley. He is currently Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Texas A&M University, where he co-leads the Real-Time Systems Group and the Highly Available Network Infrastructure Laboratory. His research interests are in real-time distributed systems, real-time communication, and support for highly resilient networks and distributed applications.CPSC 681 Faculty Contact: Dr. Bruce McCormick (mccormick@cs.tamu.edu) CPSC 681 Graduate Seminar:Mixed-Initiative Information CompositionDr. Andruid Kerne Assistant Professor, Texas A&M University
4:10 p.m., Monday April 19, 2004 AbstractPeople need systems that help them find information and see it in new ways. We are developing a mixed-initiative system that uses composition for browsing, collecting, and arranging information samples from web pages. The samples act as visual, semiotic, and navigational surrogates for the documents from which they are extracted. The initiatives are the system's generation of composition, and the user's direct manipulation. The system's generative actions -- collecting information samples, and composing them visually -- are conducted iteratively, based on a user model. The system presents the ongoing generation of the composition to the user in an interactive information space. In this space, the user can directly manipulate the composition through interactive design operations, which enable samples to be displaced, layered, annotated, and removed. Additionally, the user can express positive or negative interest in each sample. Expressions of interest affect the model, creating a feedback loop through the visualization.BiographyAndruid Kerne [http://www.andruid.com] is a research scientist artist focused on expressive interfaces, people collecting information, time-based media, visualization, real time distributed architectures, wearable physiological computing, and responsive environments. He is the principal investigator of CollageMachine and combinFormation, a series of expressive tools for mixed-initiative information composition. His output has been presented by the Guggenheim Museum (New York), SIGGCHI, SIGGRAPH, ACM Hypertext, New York Digital Salon (New York, Spain, London, Beijing), ISEA (Paris), Computational Semiotics in Games and New Media (COSIGN), the Milia New Talent Competition (Cannes), the Ars Electronica Center (Linz), the Boston Cyber Arts Festival, the Pan-African Theater Festival (Ghana), and the town square of the village of Anyako (Ghana). He has performed at Lincoln Center and the Barnsdall Art Park Gallery Theatre, and on the national radio of the Gambia. His work has been supported by the National Science Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, Dance Theater Workshop, the Spaulding-Potter Fund for Innovative Education, and the Texas A&M Department of Computer Science and Humanities Informatics Initiative. In Fall 2004, he will be teaching CPSC 489 Informedia (aka Structures of Interactive Information), and CPSC 689 Human Centered Systems.CPSC 681 Faculty Contact: Dr. Bruce McCormick (mccormick@cs.tamu.edu) CPSC 681 Graduate Seminar:Routing in Structured P2P Networks: Diameter-Degree TradeoffsDr. Dmitri Loguinov Assistant Professor, Texas A&M University
4:10 p.m., Monday April 26, 2004 AbstractThis talk examines graph-theoretic properties of existing peer-to-peer architectures and discusses a new infrastructure based on optimal-diameter de Bruijn graphs. Since generalized de Bruijn graphs possess very short average routing distances and high resilience to node failure, they are well suited for structured peer-to-peer networks. Using the example of Chord, CAN, and de Bruijn, we first study the routing performance, graph expansion, and clustering properties of each graph. We then examine bisection width, path overlap, and several other properties that affect routing and resilience of peer-to-peer networks. Having confirmed that de Bruijn graphs offer the best diameter and highest connectivity among the existing peer-to-peer structures, we offer a very simple incremental building process that preserves optimal properties of de Bruijn graphs under uniform user joins/departures. We call the combined peer-to-peer architecture ODRI — Optimal Diameter Routing Infrastructure.BiographyDmitri Loguinov received the B.S. degree (with honors) in computer science from Moscow State University in 1995 and the Ph.D. degree in computer science from the City University of New York in 2002. Since September 2002 he has been working as Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Texas A&M University. His research interests include Internet video streaming, congestion control, image and video coding, Internet traffic measurement and modeling, scalable overlay and peer-to-peer networks, emerging QoS architectures.CPSC 681 Faculty Contact: Dr. Bruce McCormick (mccormick@cs.tamu.edu) CPSC 681 Graduate Seminar:Pattern Recognition for Chemosensor Arrays with the KIII ModelDr. Ricardo Gutierrez-Osuna Assistant Professor, Texas A&M University
4:10 p.m., Monday May 3, 2004 AbstractThis talk presents an overview of our work at the PRISM lab on neuromorphic computation for sensor-based machine olfaction. We will start with an introduction of the most common sensing technologies in machine olfaction, describe instrumentation approaches to improve the information content of gas sensors, and review the system that motivates our research: the biological olfactory pathway. In particular, we will focus on the KIII model, a neurodynamics model of EEG activity in the olfactory bulb and cortex developed by Prof. Walter Freeman (UC Berkeley) over the past thirty years. We will provide an introduction to the model, and show how it can be used to perform contrast enhancement of raw sensor data.BiographyRicardo Gutierrez-Osuna is assistant professor in the Computer Science Department at TAMU. He received a BS degree in Electrical Engineering from the Polytechnic University of Madrid in 1992, and MS and PhD degrees in Computer Engineering from North Carolina State University in 1995 and 1998, respectively. Dr. Gutierrez-Osuna leads the Pattern Recognition and Intelligent Sensor Machines lab (PRISM), where his team performs research in biologically-plausible computational models for machine olfaction, quartz crystal microbalance sensor arrays, computational sensors for mobile robotics, audio-visual human-computer interfaces and pattern recognition for fault prediction in power distribution systems.CPSC 681 Faculty Contact: Dr. Bruce McCormick (mccormick@cs.tamu.edu) |
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