2011-2012 CSCE 681 Abstracts
Spring 2012 Abstracts
CSCE 681 Graduate Seminar:
Myths about Autonomous Machines and Robots or "Why a little more technology will not be enough, this time either"
Dr. David Woods
Professor
Department of Integrated Systems Engineering
Ohio State University
4:10 p.m., Monday, January 30, 2012
Room 124, Bright Building
Abstract
The idea that new technology can be introduced as a simple substitution of machines for people-preserving the system though improving the results-is a persistent over-simplification fallacy at the blunt end of systems. Observing the introduction of new technology and systems into an ongoing field of practice-the reverberations and adaptations that follow-reveal patterns that are quite different from the substitution myth. Observations reveal that change represents new ways of doing things; i.e., it does not preserve the old ways with the simple substitution of one medium for another (e.g., paper for computer-based) or one agent for another (autonomous platform for human actor). Adding or expanding the machine's role changes the system at work, changing roles, coordination, and vulnerabilities. Understanding and guiding the process technology change comes only with the shift to a joint systems view that emphasizes the interactions between people, technology, and work. Observing these joint systems at work reveals processes of coordination and miscoordination as multiple parties contribute to handling evolving situations and achieving goals. Automation surprises are not simply a type of coordination breakdown at the sharp end of practice. Cases of coordination breakdown reveal a deeper surprise about automation, autonomy, authority and responsibility as developers' oversimplifications about how joint systems work lead them to miss predictable effects of technology change that create new complexities (workload, attention bottlenecks), miss how people adapt to work around complexities, and miss the actual functions in coordinated activity that require support.
Biography
David Woods is Professor in the Department of Integrated Systems Engineering at the Ohio State University. Currently, he leads the university wide initiative on Complexity in Natural, Social and Engineered Systems. Dr. Woods has served on several National Academy of Science and other advisory committees including Aerospace Research Needs (2003), Engineering the Delivery of Health Care (2005), and Dependable Software (2006). He has testified to U.S. Congress on Safety at NASA and on Election Reform. He was a board member of the National Patient Safety Foundation during its startup, Associate Director of the Midwest Center for Inquiry on Patient Safety of the Veterans Health Administration, and advisor to the Columbia Accident Investigation Board. He currently serves on the Defense Science Board Task Force on Autonomy.
Dr. Woods helped pioneer the foundations and practice of Cognitive Systems Engineering since its origins in the aftermath of the Three Mile Island accident in nuclear power. He has studied data overload in control centers, critical care medicine, and intelligence analysis. He has studied team work between people and automation, including human robot interaction, through field studies in anesthesiology and aviation and cooperative work systems in space mission operations, emergency response, and military operations, and won a Laurel Award from Aviation Week an Space Technology for his work on cockpit automation. He has designed new concepts for aiding cognitive work and applied them to improve the performance of systems of people and computers. His work on safety includes accident investigations in nuclear power, medicine, and space operations. He has led the emergence of the new field of Resilience Engineering which studies how to make complex systems resilient as a new approach to human systems integration. His latest line of research and innovation integrates advances in decentralized sensing with distributed decision making. He is co-author of the book Behind Human Error (1994; 2010, second edition) and A Tale of Two Stories: Contrasting Views of Patient Safety (1998), Joint Cognitive Systems (Foundations, 2005 and Patterns, 2006), and co-editor of books on Resilience Engineering (2006; 2011).
Faculty Contact: Dr. Robin Murphy (murphy [at] cse.tamu.edu)
CSCE 681 Graduate Seminar:
A High Level Programming Environment for Accelerated Computing
Dr. Luiz DeRose
Programming Environments Director
Cray Inc.
4:10 p.m., Wednesday, February 1, 2012
Room 124, Bright Building
Abstract
One of the critical hurdles for the widespread adoption of accelerated computing in high performance computing is programming difficulty. In order to facilitate the migration to heterogeneous systems with GPUs attached to CPUs, users need a simple programming model that is portable across machine types. Moreover, to allow for users to maintain a single code base, this programming model, and the required optimization techniques, should not be significantly different for "accelerated" nodes from the approaches used on current multi-core x86 processors. In this talk I will present Cray's approach to accelerator programming, which is based on a high level programming environment with tightly coupled compilers, libraries, and tools that can interoperate and hide the complexity of the system. Ease of use is possible with compiler making it feasible for users to write applications in Fortran, C, or C++; tools to help users port and optimize for accelerators, as well as conventional multi-core CPUs; and auto-tuned scientific libraries. I will also discuss some of the challenges and open research problems that need to be addressed to build the system software for heterogeneous systems.
Biography
Dr. Luiz DeRose is a Senior Principal Engineer and the Programming Environments Director at Cray Inc, where he is responsible for the programming environment strategy for all Cray systems. Before joining Cray in 2004, he was a research staff member and the Tools Group Leader at the Advanced Computing Technology Center at IBM Research. Dr. DeRose had a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. With more than 20 years of high performance computing experience and a deep knowledge of its programming environments, he has published more than 40 peer-review articles in scientific journals, conferences, and book chapters, primarily on the topics of compilers and tools for high performance computing.
Faculty Contact: Dr. Lawrence Rauchwerger (rwerger [at] cse.tamu.edu)
CSCE 681 Graduate Seminar:
The Theory of Crowdsourcing Contests
Jason Hartline
Assistant Professor
Electrical Engineering & Computer Science
Northwestern University
4:10 p.m., Monday, February 20, 2012
Room 124, Bright Building
Abstract
Crowdsourcing contests have been popularized by the Netflix challenge and websites like TopCoder and Taskcn. What is a crowdsourcing contest? Imagine you are designing a new web service, you have it all coded up, but the site looks bad because you haven't got any graphic design skills. You could hire an artist to design your logo, or you could post the design task as a competition to crowdsourcing website Taskcn with a monetary reward of $100. Contestants on Taskcn would then compete to produce the best logo. You then select your favorite logo and award that contestant the $100 prize.
In this talk, I discuss the theory of crowdsourcing contests. First, I will show how to model crowdsourcing contests using auction theory.
Second, I will discuss how to solve for contestant strategies. I.e., suppose you were entering such a programming contest on TopCoder, how much work should you do on your entry to optimize your gains from winning less the cost of doing the work? Finally, I will discuss inefficiency from the fact that the effort of losing contestants is wasted (e.g., every contestant has to do work to design a logo, but you only value your favorite logo). I will show that this wasted effort is at most half of the total amount of effort. A consequence is that crowdsourcing is approximately as efficient a means of procurement as conventional methods (e.g., auctions or negotiations). Joint work with Shuchi Chawla and Balu Sivan.
Biography
Prof. Hartline has been a member of the EECS faculty since 2008. At Northwestern he teaches undergraduate courses on algorithms and data structures, and graduate courses on mechanism design and approximation. Before joining Northwestern he was a researcher at Microsoft Research in Silicon Valley where he worked on auction theory and its application to selling advertisements on Internet search engines. His Ph.D. is in computer science from University of Washington, Seattle.
Faculty Contact: Dr. Evdokia Nikolova (nikolova [at] cse.tamu.edu)
CSCE 681 Graduate Seminar:
Robotic Planning with Limited Sensing
Jason O'Kane
Assistant Professor
Department of Computer Science and Engineering
University of South Carolina
4:10 p.m., Wednesday, February 22, 2012
Room 124, Bright Building
Abstract
The usefulness of a mobile robot is limited by its ability to sense and interact with its environment. However, because information from sensors is limited and sometimes unreliable, robots are often confronted with substantial and difficult-to-resolve uncertainty about the state of the world. This talk will present two lines of research that make progress toward autonomy in spite of such uncertainty. First, I will describe new methods for localization and navigation that allow mobile robots with limited sensing capabilities and noisy actuators to move through their environments in provably reliable ways. Second, I will discuss target tracking applications in which a robot or team of robots seeks to locate and follow moving targets, under several different sensing and motion constraints. The overall theme is that many important tasks in robotics require surprisingly little sensing.
Biography
Jason O'Kane is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of South Carolina. He earned Ph.D. (2007) and M.S. (2005) degrees from the University of Illinois and the B.S. (2001) degree from Taylor University, all in Computer Science. He received an NSF CAREER award in 2010, and is a member of the DARPA Computer Science Study Panel. His research spans algorithmic robotics, planning under uncertainty, and computational geometry.
Faculty Contact: Dr. Dylan Shell (dshell [at] cse.tamu.edu)
CSCE 681 Graduate Seminar:
Geometric and Statistical Techniques for Predicting Structural Influences on Binding Specificity
Brian Y. Chen
Assistant Professor
Department of Computer Science and Engineering
Lehigh University
4:10 p.m., Monday, March 5, 2012
Room 124, Bright Building
Abstract
Engineering or reverse engineering the molecular machinery that controls
specificity in protein-ligand binding is a crucial but difficult challenge
in many fields. Understanding these mechanisms can explain, for example,
why resistance occurs against certain drugs and not others, but building
such an understanding depends frequently on the painstaking visual
examination of protein structures. To assist and accelerate these
efforts, this talk presents algorithms for automatically identifying
structural influences on specificity. Our approach leverages techniques
from computational solid geometry to facilitate a comparative analysis of
molecular surfaces inside ligand binding cavities. Using parametric
modeling techniques, we can model similarities and differences in these
surfaces to discover statistically significant similarities and variations
that point to structural influences on specificity. In our results, we
will demonstrate that our methods accurately predict experimentally
established influences on specificity.
Biography
Brian Y. Chen is an assistant professor at the Department of Computer
Science and Engineering in the P. C. Rossin College of Engineering and
Applied Sciences at Lehigh University. Before joining the Lehigh faculty,
Dr. Chen was a postdoctoral research scientist working with Barry Honig at
the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, the Center for Computational Biology
and Bioinformatics, and the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular
Biophysics at Columbia University. He completed his doctoral and master's
degrees with Lydia Kavraki at Rice University, in computer science, and
his bachelor's degrees from Rutgers University in mathematics and computer
science.
Faculty Contact: Dr. Scott Schaefer (schaefer [at] cse.tamu.edu)
CSCE 681 Graduate Seminar:
Minimally Invasive Mechanism Design: Distributed Covering with Carefully Chosen Advice
Georgios Piliouras
Postdoc Research Associate
Electrical and Computer Engineering
Georgia Institute of Technology
4:10 p.m., Wednesday, March 7, 2012
Room 124, Bright Building
Abstract
A fundamental concern in distributed systems is aligning individual incentives with social welfare to avoid socially inefficient outcomes arising from agents acting autonomously. The role of a system designer is to provide simple mechanisms that achieve socially desirable outcomes. Centrally broadcasting non-binding advice is one natural and widely-applicable mechanism. The main challenge in such a broadcasting mechanism is to design a provably effective advice vector.
In this paper, we address this challenge by focusing on a broad family of vertex cover and set cover games. These games are challenging from a mechanism design standpoint because they exhibit highly inefficient equilibria and furthermore finding a solution with minimum social cost is computationally intractable. We prove that in the case of vertex cover games, an arbitrary broadcasted advice of low social cost suffices to lead numerous self-interested dynamics to outcomes which are almost optimal (within a constant factor) in polynomial time. These results hold even if the advice affects only temporally a small fraction of the agents. In the case of set cover games, we provide results utilizing additional structure of the advice vector. Specifically, we show that a carefully chosen advice can guide self-interested dynamics to outcomes which are $O( log n )$-optimal. This is joint work with Maria-Florina Balcan, Sara Krehbiel and Jinwoo Shin.
Biography
Georgios Piliouras received his B.S. in electrical engineering & computer science in 2004 from the National Technical University of Athens and his M.Sc. in mathematical logic and computer science in 2005 from the University of Athens. In 2010, he received his PhD from Cornell University in computer science under the guidance of Prof. Eva Tardos. He is currently a postdoc associate at the Georgia Institute of Technology.
His research focus is algorithmic game theory, which lies at the intersection of algorithm design and game theory and whose objective is to design algorithms suitable for strategic environments. In his work, he has applied these principles to a number of different areas including distributed routing, micro-economic theory, control of prototype neuromorphic microchips, spiking neural networks as well as linguistics. He is a recipient of Cornell's Olin Fellowship.
Faculty Contact: Dr. Evdokia Nikolova (nikolova [at] cse.tamu.edu)
CSCE 681 Graduate/IAMCS Seminar:
A Bayesian Framework for the Solution of High-Dimensional Stochastic PDEs
Nicholas J. Zabaras
Professor
Materials Process Design and Control Laboratory
Sibley School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering
Cornell University
4:10 p.m., Monday, March 19, 2012
Room 124, Bright Building
Abstract
Computer codes that model physical phenomena or engineering processes depend on a number of uncertain input parameters. In this presentation, we discuss the development of an efficient, Bayesian Uncertainty Quantification (UQ) framework using a novel treed Gaussian process model. The tree is adaptively constructed using information conveyed by the observed data about the length scales of the underlying process. On each leaf of the tree, we utilize Bayesian Experimental Design techniques in order to learn a multi-output Gaussian process. While traditional UQ methods (e.g. sparse grids) build a surrogate of the computer code, our framework results in a probability distribution over the possible surrogates, effectively quantifying the epistemic uncertainty introduced by the finite number of simulations (e.g. error-bars for the statistics of interest). Furthermore, the scheme explicitly models correlations between discrete outputs of the code as well as in space and time. We numerically demonstrate the effectiveness of the suggested framework in identifying discontinuities, local features and unimportant dimensions in the solution of stochastic differential equations.
Biography
After completing doctoral work in Theoretical and Applied Mechanics, Professor Zabaras joined the faculty of the Mechanical Engineering Department at the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN. He became a Cornell faculty member in 1991. Zabaras is a Fellow of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, and member of the American Physical Society, the American Academy of Mechanics, the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics and the Minerals, Metals & Materials Society. He received a Presidential Young Investigator Award from the National Science Foundation in 1991.
Faculty Contact: Dr. Nancy Amato (amato [at] cse.tamu.edu)
CSCE 681 Graduate Seminar:
Multi-Application User Interest Modeling
Frank Shipman
Associate Director
Center for the Study of Digital Libraries
Professor
Department of Computer Science and Engineering
Texas A&M University
4:10 p.m., Wednesday, March 28, 2012
Room 124, Bright Building
Abstract
User interest modeling attempts to represent user interests in a form that can be used to improve system support when users are searching for, selecting from, and browsing documents or other resources. Work on recognizing user interests based on their prior activities, such as their browsing behavior, is a common approach to implicit user interest modeling. The work presented expands on this approach by aggregating activity across multiple end-user applications. This talk presents the evolution of the Interest Profile Manager, a local application that collects activity data and acts as a service to those applications seeking to better support information access.
Biography
Frank Shipman is a Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering and Associate Director of the Center for the Study of Digital Libraries at Texas A&M University. He has been pursuing research in the areas of hypermedia, digital libraries, computers and education, computer-supported cooperative work, and intelligent user interfaces since 1987. Dr. Shipman's work at the University of Colorado, Xerox PARC and Texas A&M has investigated combining informal and formal representations in interfaces and methods for supporting incremental formalization. He manages on-going research projects in the areas of integrating policy and technology design in social media, recommender systems, information visualization, multimedia and accessibility, and computers and education.
Faculty Contact: Dr. Nancy Amato (amato [at] cse.tamu.edu)
CSCE 681 Graduate Seminar:
Programmability and Correctness on Large-Scale Systems
Dr. Bronis de Supinski
Exascale Computing Technologies (ExaCT) Project Leader
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL)
Adjunct Associate Professor, Department of Computer Science and Engineering
Texas A&M University
4:10 p.m., Monday, April 2, 2012
Room 124, Bright Building
Abstract
Writing correct programs for large-scale systems is becoming increasingly challenging. The size of the systems is growing dramatically - the Sequoia system that is currently being fielded at LLNL will have over 1.5 million cores and 6 million hardware threads. Further, the node types are becoming increasingly diverse. Not only are the compute nodes becoming significant parallel systems in their own right (a Sequoia node has 16 cores and 64 hardware threads available for
application use) but they are often heterogeneous, with a large percentage of the floating point capability frequently provided through accelerators such as GPUs. Significant debate currently surrounds how best to program these complex systems. Importantly, practical solutions that can be used on existing systems still permit coding errors, which become more difficult to isolate in large, complex systems. In this talk, I will summarize the overall strategy of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory to program large-scale systems and to ensure the correctness of those programs. I will also detail some recent advances that contribute to that strategy.
Biography
Bronis R. de Supinski is the principal investigator and leader of the Exascale Computing Technlogies (ExaCT) project and the co-leader of the Advanced Simulation and Computing (ASC) program's Application Development Environment and Performance Team (ADEPT) at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL). He is also an Adjunct Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at Texas A&M University.
His research interests include high performance computer architectures, performance modeling and analysis, message passing implementations and tools, large-scale debugging, memory performance improvement, cache coherence and distributed shared memory, consistency semantics and programming models. Bronis earned his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Virginia in 1998 and he joined LLNL's Center for Applied Scientific Compuiting (CASC) in July 1998. Currently, his projects include scalable debugging methods, investigations into mechanisms and tools to improve memory performance, applications of data mining techniques to tools for large-scale systems, resiliency techniques, a variety of optimization techniques and tools for MPI and several issues with OpenMP, including its memory model and tool support. He pursues the last set of topics as the Chair of the OpenMP Language Committee. Throughout his career, Bronis has won several awards, including the prestigious Gordon Bell Prize in 2005 and 2006. He is a member of the ACM and the IEEE Computer Society.
Faculty Contact: Dr. Nancy Amato (amato [at] cse.tamu.edu)
CSCE 681 Graduate Seminar:
Dueling Algorithms
Dr. Nicole Immorlica
Assistant Professor
The Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
Northwestern University
4:10 p.m., Wednesday, April 18, 2012
Room 124, Bright Building
Abstract
We revisit classic algorithmic search and optimization problems from
the perspective of competition. Rather than a single optimizer
minimizing expected cost, we consider a zero-sum game in which an
optimization problem is presented to two players, whose only goal is
to outperform the opponent. Such games are typically exponentially
large zero-sum games, but they often have a rich combinatorial
structure. We provide general techniques by which such structure can
be leveraged to find minmax-optimal and approximate minmax-optimal
strategies. We give examples of ranking, hiring, compression, and
binary search duels, among others. We give bounds on how often one can
beat the classic optimization algorithms in such duels.
Joint work with Adam Tauman Kalai, Brendan Lucier, Ankur Moitra,
Andrew Postlewaite, and Moshe Tennenholtz.
Biography
Nicole Immorlica is an assistant professor in EECS at Northwestern University. She received her PhD from MIT in 2005 and continued on to do postdocs at Microsoft Research and Centruum voor Wiskunde en Informatica (CWI) before starting her tenure-track job. She is the recipient of various fellowships and awards including the NSF CAREER Award, the Sloan Fellowship and the Microsoft New Faculty Fellowship. Her research interests lie in the field of algorithmic game theory, specifically social networks and mechanism design.
Faculty Contact: Dr. Evdokia Nikolova (nikolova [at] cse.tamu.edu)
CSCE 681 Graduate Seminar:
C++11 Style - A Touch of Class
Dr. Bjarne Stroustrup
Distinguished Professor and holder of the College of Engineering Chair in Computer Science
The Department of Computer Science and Engineering
Texas A&M University
4:10 p.m., Monday, April 23, 2012
Room 124, Bright Building
Abstract
We know how to write bad code: Litter our programs with casts, macros, pointers, naked new and deletes, and complicated control structures. Alternatively (or in addition), obscure every design decision in a mess of deeply nested abstractions using the latest object-oriented programming and generic programming tricks. For good measure, complicate our algorithms with interesting special cases. Such code is incomprehensible, unmaintainable, usually inefficient, and not uncommon.
But how do we write good code? What principles, techniques, and idioms can we exploit to make it easier to produce quality code? I will make an argument for type-rich interfaces, compact data structures, integrated resource management and error handling, and highly-structured algorithmic code. I will illustrate my ideas and motivate my guidelines with a few idiomatic code examples.
I will use C++11 freely. Examples include auto, general constant expressions, uniform initialization, type aliases, type safe threading, and user-defined literals. C++ features are only just starting to appear in production compilers, so some of my suggestions have the nature of conjecture. However, developing a "modern style" is essential if we don't want to maintain newly-written 1970s and 1980s style code in 2020.
This presentation reflects my thoughts on what "Modern C++" should mean in the 2010s: a language for programming based on light-weight abstraction with a direct and efficient mapping to hardware, suitable for infrastructure code.
Biography
Bjarne Stroustrup is the designer and original implementer of C++ and the author of several books (incl. "Programming — Principles and Practice using C++" and "The C++ Programming Language) and many popular and academic publications. His research interests include distributed systems, design, programming techniques, software development tools, and programming languages. He is actively involved in the ISO standardization of C++. Dr. Stroustrup is a Distinguished Professor at Texas A&M University and the holder of the College of Engineering Chair in Computer Science. He retains a link with AT&T Labs-Research as an AT&T Fellow. He is a member of the US National Academy of Engineering, and IEEE Fellow and an ACM fellow. Born in Aarhus Denmark 1950. Cand.Scient. (Mathematics and Computer Science), 1975, University of Aarhus Denmark. Ph.D. (Computer Science) 1979, Cambridge University, England. www.research.att.com/~bs.
Faculty Contact: Dr. Nancy Amato (amato [at] cse.tamu.edu)
CSCE 681 Graduate Seminar:
Building a Better Mouse Brain Atlas
Dr. Joe Warren
Chair & Professor
The Department of Computer Science
Rice University
4:10 p.m., Wednesday, April 25, 2012
Room 124, Bright Building
Abstract
The "omics"-era of biology has led to the gathering of vast amounts of data in the quest to understand the structure and function of biological systems. Much of the data being produced (such as gene sequence information and microarray data) is discrete in its nature and lacks a spatial sense. Existing database techniques have proven to be very effective at organizing this data for subsequent analysis. However, newer techniques such as in-situ hybridization have allowed the generation of 2D image data that captures the level of expression of a specific gene over a large anatomical region. As high-throughput versions of these methods are deployed, large numbers of 2D images (usually generated from sectioned 3D structures) must be assembled and stored in some type of geometric database that facilitates comparison and analysis of the expression data.
In this talk, we will discuss one partially elegant method for organizing this expression data into a geometric database: subdivision meshes.
These meshes serves as a geometric atlas that is easily deformed onto 2D images allowing for meaningful spatial comparison of the expression data attached to the image. The first part of the talk will review earlier work by the author on building a 2D version of a database for gene expression patterns over the mouse brain (geneatlas.org) and compare the functionality of this database to a more well-known competitor, the Allen Brain Atlas. The second part of the talk will focus on the challenges of building a 3D version of such an atlas and describe advances by the speaker and his collaborators to meet these challenges.
Biography
Professor Warren attended Rice University and received an undergraduate degree in Computer Science in 1983. He then attend graduate school at Cornell University and received his PhD in Computer Science in 1986. After graduation, he returned to Rice University where he has been a Professor of Computer Science ever since. Professor Warren has served as Chair of the Department of Computer Science since 2008.
Professor Warren's research interests include geometric modeling and design, computational geometry, computer graphics and educational technology. His current research focuses on discrete multi-resolution methods for modeling smooth shape and their applications to interesting applied problems. Together with Henrik Weimer, Dr. Warren is the author of the book Subdivision Methods for Geometric Design.
Faculty Contact: Dr. Scott Schaefer (schaefer [at] cse.tamu.edu)
CSCE 681 Graduate Seminar:
The Price of Churn in Dynamic Distributed Systems
Dr. Silvia Bonomi
Assistant Professor
Sapienza University of Rome
4:10 p.m., Monday, April 30, 2012
Room 124, Bright Building
Abstract
Providing deterministic guarantees for distributed computing abstractions built on top of distributed systems prone to continuous arrival and departure of processes (i.e., churn) is a hard challenge.
This talk will address the price of mastering the unpredictability injected by churn inside a distributed system by showing how churn impacts on different application properties (i.e. connectivity, consistency, validity etc...), especially when it is combined with other unpredictable elements such as, asynchrony, failures etc...
Specifically, the talk will consider two different problems, such as one-shot query answering and shared memory emulation, and will highlight different challenges in solving them in presence of churn.
Biography
Silvia Bonomi is a Fix Term Assistant Professor at the University of Rome "La Sapienza".
She got her PhD in Computer Science from the same University in 2010 and she is doing research on various computer-science fields including dynamic distributed systems and event-based systems.
In these research fields, she published several papers in peer reviewed scientific forums.
She is also a member of the MIDLAB research group and of the Research Center for Cyber Intelligence and Information Security (CIS).
In these contexts, she is currently involved in an EU-funded project dealing with energy saving in private and public buildings (GreenerBuildings project) and she worked on dependable distributed systems (ReSIST network of excellence) and on the definition of new semantic tools for e-Government (SemanticGov).
Faculty Contact: Dr. Jennifer Welch (welch [at] cse.tamu.edu)
Fall 2011 Abstracts
CSCE 681 Graduate Seminar (only required for new graduate students):
Graduate Orientation I: Overview of Department Resources & Contacts, Honor Code, and Student Organizations
MANDATORY FOR NEW GRAD STUDENTS (but not other CSCE 681 students)
4:10-6:00 p.m., Monday August 29, 2011
Room 124, Bright Building
Abstract
This meeting will concentrate on the essentials the students will need to settle in. It will include an introduction to departmental administration (staff who's who, payroll, mailboxes, phones), the computing resources (computer use/accounts, printer quotas, lab access/tours), the academic advising staff and resources, the TAMU honor system, TAMU Libraries, Graduate Teaching Academy, Student Engineers' Council and relevant student organizations (CSGSA, AWICS, TACS (TAMU ACM and IEEE student chapter), UPE and TAGD).
MANDATORY FOR NEW GRAD STUDENTS (but not other CSCE 681 students)
CSCE 681 Graduate Seminar (required for all new graduate students and all CSCE 681 students):
Graduate Orientation II: Presentation, Poster Session, & PIZZA!
MANDATORY FOR NEW GRAD STUDENTS and counts towards requirement for CSCE 681 STUDENTS.
4:10-6:00 p.m., Wednesday August 31, 2011
Room 124, Bright Building
Abstract
- 4:10-5:10 p.m. - Presentation: tba
- 5:10-6:00 p.m. - Pizza & Current Student Poster Session - new students can meet current grads and learn about ongoing research projects.
MANDATORY FOR NEW GRAD STUDENTS and CSCE 681 STUDENTS
CSCE 681 Graduate Seminar:
Risk-averse Combinatorial Optimization
Dr. Evdokia Nikolova
Assistant Professor
Department of Computer Science and Engineering
Texas A&M University
4:10 p.m., Monday, September 5, 2011
Room 124, Bright Building
Abstract
Optimization has played a key role in making the task of decision making from art to science in the past century. An important challenge that still remains is our ability to incorporate the uncertainty in our knowledge and risk-aversion in our objective. A simple but insightful example of this is encapsulated in the decision question: given a number of route choices, which shall I choose? Interestingly, this simple question (easily solvable in a deterministic setting) becomes highly non-trivial when we incorporate the uncertainty of delays and the individual's risk-aversion. This primarily stems from the combinatorial nature of the problem coupled with the non-convexity of the objective.
In this talk I explain how to solve this reliable route planning problem, and mention how its solution has been adapted in the MIT CarTel system for routing, which incorporates real traffic information (cartel.csail.mit.edu). I then show how the solution extends to a general framework of risk-averse combinatorial optimization, for which I present exact and approximation algorithms. These general-purpose algorithms can also cope with combinatorial problems that are NP-hard, whose deterministic versions we only know how to approximate. At the end, I touch upon how the risk-averse framework provides a foundation for studying equilibria in stochastic network games.
Biography
Evdokia Nikolova is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at Texas A&M University. Previously she was a postdoctoral associate in the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at MIT. She graduated with a BA in Applied Mathematics with Economics from Harvard University, MS in Mathematics from Cambridge University, U.K. and Ph.D. in Computer Science from MIT. She is interested in algorithms arising in stochastic optimization, networks and economics with applications to complex systems.
Faculty Contact: Dr. Nancy Amato (amato [at] cse.tamu.edu)
CSCE 681 Graduate Seminar:
Cyberphysical Systems: Foundations and Challenges
Dr. P. R. Kumar
Professor and College of Engineering Chair in Computer Engineering
Texax A&M University
4:10 p.m., Monday, September 19, 2011
Room 124, Bright Building
Abstract
We provide an account of some foundational research topics in this area. These include function computation in wireless networks, temporal guarantees in wireless networks, clock synchronization in wireless networks, correctness by design, and conclude with an account of experiments in our lab.
Biography
P. R. Kumar obtained his B. Tech. degree in Electrical Engineering (Electronics) from I.I.T. Madras in 1973, and the M.S. and D.Sc. degrees in Systems Science and Mathematics from Washington University, St. Louis, in 1975 and 1977, respectively. From 1977-84 he was a faculty member in the Department of Mathematics at the University of Maryland Baltimore County. From 1985-2011 he was a faculty member in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and the Coordinated Science Laboratory at the University of Illinois. Currently he is at Texas A&M University, where he holds the College of Engineering Chair in Computer Engineering.
Kumar has worked on problems in game theory, adaptive control, stochastic systems, simulated annealing, neural networks, machine learning, queueing networks, manufacturing systems, scheduling, wafer fabrication plants and information theory. His current research interests are in wireless networks, sensor networks, and networked embedded control systems.
His research is currently focused on wireless networks, sensor networks, cyberphysical systems, and the convergence of control, communication and computation.
Kumar is a member of the National Academy of Engineering of the USA, as well as the Academy of Sciences of the Developing World. He was awarded an honorary doctorate by the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (Eidgenossische Technische Hochschule) in Zurich. He received the IEEE Field Award for Control Systems, the Donald P. Eckman Award of the American Automatic Control Council, and the Fred W. Ellersick Prize of the IEEE Communications Society. He is a Fellow of IEEE. He is a Guest Chair Professor and Leader of the Guest Chair Professor Group on Wireless Communication and Networking at Tsinghua University, Beijing, China. He is also an Honorary Professor at IIT Hyderabad. He was awarded the Daniel C. Drucker Eminent Faculty Award from the College of Engineering at the University of Illinois, and the Alumni Achievement Award from Washington University in St. Louis.
Faculty Contact: Dr. Jennifer Welch (welch [at] cse.tamu.edu)
CSCE 681 Graduate Seminar:
Reverse Engineering of Data Structures from Binary
Dr. Zhiqiang Lin
Assistant Professor
Department of Computer Science
University of Texas at Dallas
4:10 p.m., Monday, September 26, 2011
Room 124, Bright Building
Abstract
The syntactic and semantic definitions of a program's data structures are valuable to many security and forensics applications, such as memory image mining, software vulnerability discovery, protocol reverse engineering, and virtual machine introspection. In this talk, I will present a systematic framework to reverse engineer data structure definitions as well as data structure instances without a program's source code. In the first part of the talk, I will present REWARDS, a main component of the framework that automatically reveals the syntactic and semantic definitions of data structures from a program's binary. I will then demonstrate the unique benefits of REWARDS to binary software vulnerability discovery and botnet investigation. In the second part of the talk, I will present SigGraph, another key component of my framework that automatically generates non-isomorphic, context-free data structure signatures, for reverse engineering data structure instances from memory images. In particular, I instantiate SigGraph for generating signatures of OS kernel objects without requiring global kernel memory mapping information. I will demonstrate the application of SigGraph to kernel memory forensics and kernel rootkit detection.
Biography
Zhiqiang Lin is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science in the University of Texas at Dallas. He received his PhD in Computer Science from Purdue University in 2011. His research efforts primarily focus on Systems and Software Security, with an emphasis on the development of program analysis and reverse engineering techniques, and their applications to OS kernel integrity enforcement, software vulnerability discovery, malicious code analysis, and computer forensics.
Faculty Contact: Dr. Guofei Gu (guofei [at] cse.tamu.edu)
CSCE 681 Graduate Seminar:
Bioinformatics and Malaria Research: Building Cost Efficient but Effective Antimalaria Drugs
Dr. Ezekiel Femi Adebiyi
Head & Professor
Computer & Information Sciences
Covenant University
Ota, Ogun State, Nigeria
4:10 p.m., Monday, October 3, 2011
Room 124, Bright Building
Abstract
Reports have shown that the resistance of the malaria parasite to existing drugs is increasing. Therefore, there is a huge and urgent need to discover and validate new drug or vaccine targets to enable the development of new treatments for malaria. Presently, every year 300 million to 500 million people suffer from this disease (90% of them in sub-Saharan Africa). About 1.5 million to 3 million people die of malaria every year (85% of these occur in Africa). One child dies of malaria somewhere in Africa every 20 sec., and there is one malarial death every
12 sec somewhere in the world.
In this talk, I will describe our efforts at Covenant University, Ota, Nigeria, with collaborators from Universities of Hedelberg and Marburg, Germany at building cost efficient but effective antimalarial drugs. Briefly, using novel techniques from bioinformatics, we have computationally mined four (4) drug target sites on the malaria parasite for which the biological mode of actions of associated bioactive compounds will be entirely known. This discovery provides for the first time antimalarial drug target sites upon which a viable structural design pipeline is being built. And also provides a viable platform to optimize the fitting of "indigenous" medicinal plants bioactive compounds via a rational drugs design approach.
Biography
Ezekiel Femi Adebiyi obtained the Ph.D degree in 2002 in Computer Science - Algorithms and Bioinformatics from the University of Tubingen, Germany on a German Academic Exchange Programme (DAAD) Scholarship. He had his basic and research training in Mathematics at the University of Ilorin with the B.Sc (Second Class Upper) and the M.Sc degrees. Starting as a Graduate Assistant at the University of Ilorin in 1992, Ezekiel Adebiyi rose rapidly to become a Professor at Covenant University in June 2010. In between this working track, he served as Research Fellow in several institutes in the US and also in Europe. He has also worked in World-Class organizations and therefore has a rich blend of academic and professional experience.
He is the President, Nigeria Society of Bioinformatics and Computational Biology, formerly Vice-President and presently Secretary, African Society of Bioinformatics and Computational Biology. Prof. Ezekiel Adebiyi is the leader of the bioinformatics group and the Head of Department (Computer and Information Sciences) at Covenant University, Nigeria. He is industrious, with a passion to turning his theories to products. His main research interests are in computational complexity and computational molecular biology, with emphases on the bioinformatics of malaria research.
Faculty Contact: Dr. Nancy Amato (amato [at] cse.tamu.edu)
CSCE 681 Graduate Seminar:
Ultra-Low Power Asynchronous Digital Circuits
Dr. Scott C. Smith
Director of the Asynchronous Digital Design Lab and Interim Associate Department Head
University of Arkansas, Department of Electrical Engineering
4:10 p.m., Wednesday, October 5, 2011
Room 124, Bright Building
Abstract
The International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors (ITRS) predicts that asynchronous (clockless) circuits will account for approximately 50% of the multi-billion dollar semiconductor industry by 2024. ITRS has identified leakage power consumption as one of the top three overall challenges for the last 5 years, and has identified it as a clear long term threat and a focus topic for design technology in the next 15 years. Among the many techniques proposed to control or minimize leakage power in deep submicron technology, Multi-Threshold CMOS (MTCMOS), which reduces leakage power by disconnecting the power supply from the circuit during idle (or sleep) mode while maintaining high performance in active mode, is very promising. This talk will provide an introduction to asynchronous logic, NULL Convention Logic (NCL), and Multi-Threshold CMOS (MTCMOS), and then detail how the MTCMOS technique is combined with NCL to yield a fast ultra-low power asynchronous circuit design methodology, called Multi-Threshold NULL Convention Logic (MTNCL), which vastly outperforms traditional NCL in all aspects (i.e., area, speed, energy, and leakage power), and significantly outperforms the MTCMOS synchronous architecture in terms of area, energy, and leakage power, although the MTCMOS synchronous design can operate faster.
Biography
Scott C. Smith received B.S. degrees in Electrical Engineering and Computer Engineering and the M.S. degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Missouri - Columbia in 1996 and 1998, respectively, and the Ph.D. degree in Computer Engineering from the University of Central Florida, Orlando, in 2001. He started as an Assistant Professor at the University of Missouri - Rolla (now called Missouri University of Science & Technology) in August 2001, was promoted to Associate Professor in March 2007 (effective September 2007), and is currently an Associate Professor at University of Arkansas, Fayetteville. He has authored more than 50 refereed publications, 3 issued U.S. patents and 3 pending, and a book on "Designing Asynchronous Circuits using NULL Convention Logic (NCL)," all of which can be viewed from his website: http://comp.uark.edu/~smithsco/. Additionally, Dr. Smith has procured over $3.25M in funding from a variety of government agencies and private industry, and is a co-owner of two IC design companies located in Fayetteville, AR. His research interests include computer architecture, asynchronous logic design, CAD tool development, embedded system design, VLSI, FPGAs, trustable hardware, self-reconfigurable logic, and wireless sensor networks. Dr. Smith is a Senior Member of IEEE, and a Member of Sigma Xi, Eta Kappa Nu, Tau Beta Pi, and ASEE.
Faculty Contact: Dr. Tracy Hammond (hammond [at] cse.tamu.edu)
CSCE 681 Graduate Seminar:
Parallel Graph-based Techniques for Clustering Large-scale Metagenomics Datasets
Dr. Ananth Kalyanaraman
Assistant Professor
School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
Washington State University
4:10 p.m., Monday, October 10, 2011
Room 124, Bright Building
Abstract
Biological data, both naturally derived and synthetically generated, generally suit graph representations well. Among other uses, graph-based representations can be used to reveal networks within data that are tied together by shared characteristics such as homology or function. Consequently, clustering formulations are prevalent in a number of biological applications, including that of determining protein-protein interactions and discovering protein families from metagenomics data. Performing these operations at a large-scale, however, still remains technically challenging.
In this talk, I will report on the on-going development of new parallel approaches for identifying protein clusters from large-scale metagenomics ORF/protein data. More specifically, I will present distributed memory machine algorithms, using MPI and Hadoop MapReduce, that take as input a set of amino acid sequences and output a set of clusters wherein the the members of every cluster are homologous to most other members in the same cluster. Such homologous clusters often constitute the core of functionally related families. Preliminary tests on an arbitrary collection of 2 million ORF/protein sequences obtained from an ocean metagenomics survey project reveal that our new approach is able to drastically reduce the time to solution, scale to thousands of processors, and improve sensitivity by recruiting more sequences. Time permitting, I will also discuss how our approach ideas can be extended to other use-cases such as identifying groups of protein sequences that share a set of domains, or building mass spectral libraries.
Biography
Ananth Kalyanaraman is an Assistant Professor at the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science in Washington State University. He is also an affiliate faculty in the WSU Molecular Plant Sciences graduate program and in the Center for Integrated Biotechnology at WSU. He received his Bachelors from India in 1998, and his MS and PhD from Iowa State University in 2002 and 2006, respectively. His research interests are in high performance computational biology. The primary focus of his work has been on developing algorithms that use high-performance computing for data-intensive problems originating from the areas of computational genomics and metagenomics. Ananth is a recipient of a 2011 DOE Early Career Award, and two best paper awards, one at IPDPS and another at CSB. He was the program chair for the IEEE HiCOMB 2011 workshop and regularly serves on a number of program committees and proposal panels. His research is currently funded by NSF, DOE and USDA. Ananth is a member of ACM, IEEE, IEEE-Computer Society, ISCB and LSS.
Faculty Contact: Dr. Tiffani Williams (tlw [at] cse.tamu.edu)
CSCE 681 Graduate Seminar:
Supervising Robots across Time Delay during Recent NASA Field Tests
Dr. Robert R. Burridge
Senior Scientist
Robotics and Artificial Intelligence
TRACLabs Inc.
Houston, Texas
4:10 p.m., Monday, October 17, 2011
Room 124, Bright Building
Abstract
The Predictive Interactive Graphical Interface (PIGI) is a suite of tools developed at NASA's Johnson Space Center (JSC) for supervising robots across expected Earth-moon time delays (5-10 second round trip), and extended for use with Earth-NEO delays (up to 100 seconds round trip). These tools improve interaction between a human supervisor and a remote robot by mitigating the effects of the time delay. Using a combination of robot behavior prediction and task queuing, PIGI enables the supervisor to reduce robot idle time, which leads to more efficient completion of the tasks. Over the past few years, PIGI has been used to remotely command five different NASA robots during field tests in Arizona, California, Texas, and Washington, all from a single location at JSC in Houston. In this talk, PIGI will be presented, several NASA robots will be introduced, and highlights from recent field tests will be discussed.
Biography
Dr. Burridge received his Ph.D. in CS/Intelligent Systems at the University of Michigan in 1996, and immediately headed south! In Houston, he has been involved with TRACLabs since it was formed in 1997, working on various robotics projects for NASA's Johnson Space Center. These have included Robonaut, EVA Robotic Assistant (ERA), the Peer-to-Peer project, Centaur, Chariot (now SEV), and Centaur-2. His research has focused on supervised autonomy and ways to enable a human operator to better interact with a robot and keep it productive. He is a founding member of the development group for RAPID, which is a NASA multi-center project to standardize robot commanding and telemetry for semi-autonomous robots, particularly in the presence of time delay. Since 2007, he has won several SBIR and STTR small business grants from NASA, DARPA, and the Army. These grants have focused on manipulators, manipulation, and the control architecture to support it.
Faculty Contact: Dr. Robin Murphy (murphy [at] cse.tamu.edu)
CSCE 681 Graduate Seminar:
Distributed Algorithms for Robot Recovery, Angular Coordinate Systems, and Low-Cost Robots: An Overview of the Rice Multi-Robot Systems Lab
Dr. James McLurkin
Assistant Professor
Department of Computer Science
Rice University
4:10 p.m., Wednesday, October 26, 2011
Room 124, Bright Building
Abstract
In this talk we present results from three different projects: 1. A distributed recovery algorithm to extract a multi-robot system from complex environments. The goal is to maintain network connectivity while allowing efficient recovery. Our approach uses a maximal-leaf spanning tree as a communication and navigation backbone, and routes robots along this tree to the goal. Simulation and experimental results demonstrate the efficacy of this approach. 2. Angular coordinate systems can provide robots with useful network geometry from very low-cost hardware. We introduce "scale-free coordinates" as a coordinate system of intermediate power and design complexity. We show that it can estimate low-quality network geometry, but can still be used to build a useful motion controller with interesting limitations. 3. We introduce the "r-one" robot, a low-cost design suitable for research, education, and outreach. We provides tales of joy and disaster from using 90 of these platforms for our research, a freshman engineering systems course, and graduate robotics lab.
Biography
James McLurkin is an Assistant Professor at Rice University in the Department of Computer Science. Current interests include using distributed computational geometry for multi-robot configuration estimation and control, and defining complexity metrics that quantify the relationships between algorithm execution time, inter-robot communication bandwidth, and robot speed. Previous positions include lead research scientist at iRobot corporation, where McLurkin was the manager of the DARPA-funded Swarm project. Results included the design and construction of 112 robots and distributed configuration control algorithms, including robust software to search indoor environments. He holds a S.B. in Electrical Engineering with a Minor in Mechanical Engineering from M.I.T., a M.S. in Electrical Engineering from University of California, Berkeley, and a S.M. and Ph.D. in Computer Science from M.I.T.
Faculty Contact: Dr. Dylan Shell (dshell [at] cse.tamu.edu)
CSCE 681 Graduate Seminar:
2ND ANNUAL TRICK-OR-RESEARCH and 681
4:10 p.m., Monday, October 31, 2011
Room 124, Bright Building
Abstract
Hosted by Aggie Women in Computer Science http://awics.cse.tamu.edu/Research/2011/index.php, Trick-or-Research will be a presentation of the research currently going on in the Computer Science and Engineering Department and an opportunity for undergraduates and new graduate students to tour the labs in the department. Join us if you are interested in research or just want to learn more about what is going on in our department. This is a two part event:
- Faculty Research Presentations: Each professor will be given 90 seconds to explain his or her research focus during the regular 681 seminar on
Monday from 4:10-5:25 p.m. in 124 HRBB.
- Lab Tours: The research labs in the department will be open for visiting from 2-4 p.m. on Tuesday November 1. This is the Trick-or-Research part!
Each lab you visit will have goodies to give out and give you a tour of what is going on in that lab. Lab passports will be provided and students who get at least 4 stamps in their passports will be eligible for a raffle for great prizes that will be held after the event.
Feel free to come and go if your schedule does not permit you to attend the entire event.
Faculty Contact: Dr. Nancy Amato (amato [at] cse.tamu.edu)
CSCE 681 Graduate Seminar:
CPS Challenges to the Trustworthiness of Systems
Dr. Aloysius K. Mok
Quincy Lee Centennial Professor in Computer Sciences
University of Texas at Austin
4:10 p.m., Monday, November 7, 2011
Room 124, Bright Building
Abstract
CPS (Cyber-Physical Systems) are computer-enabled systems that require tight conjoining of and coordination between computational and physical resources. In this talk, we shall discuss the impact of the physical elements on the trustworthiness of CPS applications. New research issues are raised in regard to the fault tolerance, security and resource virtualization of CPS. Inasmuch as the conjoining of and coordination between computational and physical elements are central to the success of CPS, we shall argue that an integrative framework is required to lay a proper foundation for the design of CPS applications.
Biography
Professor Aloysius K. Mok is the Quincy Lee Centennial Professor in Computer Sciences at University of Texas, Austin. His primary research interest is in real-time and embedded systems and the recent development in the emerging field of cyber-physical systems research. Professor Mok has made fundamental contributions to the formal specification, analysis and synthesis techniques of real-time and embedded systems and he is internationally known for his work in hard real-time scheduling algorithm design. Professor Mok has consulted widely for both the U.S. government and industries and is the holder of several patents. He is the co-founder of a company in advanced industrial wireless control.
Faculty Contact: Dr. Radu Stoleru (stoleru [at] cse.tamu.edu)
CSCE 681 Graduate Seminar:
Property-Aware Programming with Semantic C++ Concepts
Dr. Peter Gottschling
Institute of Scientific Computing
Dresden University of Technology
4:10 p.m., Wednesday, November 9, 2011
Room 124, Bright Building
Abstract
Reusability and performance are criteria aimed for by every software development. The most successful programming paradigm in this regard is generic programming. Functions are not limited to specific types but usable by any type that satisfies certain requirements — formalized by so-called concepts while static polymorphism and specialization enable optimal performance. Property-aware programming focuses specifically on semantic concepts. Expressing the semantic behavior within program sources allows for a new quality of reliability in production software by using concept-enabled compilers and novel testing tools. Semantic concepts also enable a generic manner of performance optimization. State-of-the-art techniques and new approaches will be presented in this talk.
Biography
Peter Gottschling is the Founder and Managing Director of SimuNova UG and Director for Software Research at Stillwater Supercomputing, Inc.
He also works for the Institute of Scientific Computing at Dresden University of Technology. He is the author of the Matrix Template Library version 4 (MTL4) that is emerging as one of the most advanced libraries in scientific computing combining intuitive mathematical notation with performance in the range of hand-tuned assembler libraries and the latest algorithmic discoveries. Peter Gottschling is author or co-author of the Parallel Boost Graph Library, ANGEL: a graph-based library for transformations in automatic differentiation, and ParGraph: another parallel graph library. The development of these generic libraries led to his research on semantic concepts. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Dresden University of Technology awarded Magma Cum Laude. He is member of DIN (German institute for standardization) and head of the German delegation in the international ISO committee for the standardization of C++.
Faculty Contact: Dr. Jaakko Järvi (jarvi [at] cse.tamu.edu)
CSCE 681 Graduate Seminar:
Grand Challenges in Authorization Systems
Dr. Ravi Sandhu
Executive Director and Chief Scientist
Institute for Cyber Security (ICS)
Lutcher Brown Endowed Chair in Cyber Security
Professor of Computer Science (College of Science)
University of Texas at San Antonio
4:10 p.m., Monday, November 14, 2011
Room 124, Bright Building
Abstract
This talk will give a personal perspective on major developments in authorization systems and the grand challenges to be addressed in future. Although a myriad of access control models and policy languages have been proposed only a handful (DAC, MAC, RBAC) have been successfully deployed. I will examine the reasons for this limited success, identify the shortcomings of this current set of models and the grand challenges that model and system builders must confront as we look ahead to an increasing cyber-rich and cyber-dependent world.
Biography
Ravi Sandhu is founding Executive Director of the Institute for Cyber Security at the University of Texas San Antonio, and holds an Endowed Chair. He is an ACM, IEEE and AAAS Fellow and inventor on 23 patents.
He is Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing, past founding Editor-in-Chief of ACM Transactions on Information and System Security and a past Chair of ACM SIGSAC. He founded ACM CCS, SACMAT and CODASPY, and has been a leader in numerous other security conferences. His research has focused on security models and architectures, including the seminal role-based access control model.
Faculty Contact: Dr. Guofei Gu (guofei [at] cse.tamu.edu)
Two-Part CSCE 681 Graduate Seminar:
Utilization of Remote-Controlled Machine Technology for the Accident of the Nuclear Power Plant
Dr. Hajime Asama
Professor
The University of Tokyo, Japan
4:10 p.m., Wednesday, November 16, 2011
Room 124, Bright Building
Abstract
The Great Eastern Japan Earthquake and Tsunami occurred in March 11, 2011, and the accident of Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant occurred due to the earthquake and the tsunami. There have been lots of needs of remote-controlled machine technology including robot technology (RT) for the response of the accident. In this presentation, it is introduced how these technology has been utilized in the emergent situation so far and will be expected as the middle-range and long-range measures towards decommission.
Biography
Hajime Asama received his B. S., M. S., and Dr. Eng in Engineering from the University of Tokyo, in 1982, 1984 and 1989, respectively. He was Research Associate, Research Scientist, and Senior Research Scientist in RIKEN (The Institute of Physical and Chemical Research, Japan) from 1986 to 2002. He became a professor of RACE (Research into Artifacts, Center for Engineering), the University of Tokyo in 2002, and a professor of School of Engineering, the University of Tokyo in 2009. He received JSME (Japan Society of Mechanical Engineers) Robotics and Mechatronics Division Academic Achievement Award in 2001, RSJ (Robotics Society of Japan) Best paper Award, JSME Robotics and Mechatronics Award in 2009, etc.
He is a vice-president of Robotics Society of Japan since 2011. He was an AdCom member of IEEE Robotics and Automation Society from 2007 to 2009, an editor of Journal of International Journal of Intelligent Service Robotics, Journal of Field Robotics, Journal of Robotics and Autonomous Systems. He is a Fellow of JSME since 2004 and RSJ since 2008.
Part Two:
Response of Quince to Fukushima-Daiichi
Dr. Satoshi Tadokoro
Professor
Tohoku University
4:10 p.m., Wednesday, November 16, 2011
Room 124, Bright Building
Abstract
A severe accident of Fukushima-Daiichi Nuclear Plant was caused by tsunami of the Great Eastern Japan Earthquake beyond the scope of the assumption. Many robotic systems are being applied for its restoration. A Japanese response robot Quince entered the nuclear building on June 26, and is contributing to radiation measurement and visual inspection of 2nd to 5th floors of the nuclear reactor buildings. This talk will introduce the R&D, retrofitting and actions of Quince in Fukushima-Daiichi.
Biography
Satoshi Tadokoro received the B. E. degree in precision machinery engineering in 1982, the M. E. degree in 1984 from the University of Tokyo, and the D. E. degree in 1991. He was an associate professor of Kobe University in 1993-2005, and has been a professor of Graduate School of Information Sciences, Tohoku University since 2005. He was a project leader of MEXT DDT Project on rescue robotics in 2002-2007 having contribution of more than 100 professors nationwide. He established RoboCupRescue in 1999, TC on Rescue Engineering of SICE in 2000 (the first chair), IEEE Robotics and Automation Society (RAS) TC on Safety, Security and Rescue Robotics in 2001 (the first co-chair), and International Rescue System Institute (IRS) in 2002. He was IEEE RAS Japan Chapter Chair in 2003-2005, trustee of The RoboCup Federation in 2005-2010, Chair of JSME Robotics Mechatronics Division (RMD) in 2009, and IEEE Robotics and Automation Society AdCom member in 2008-2010. He is at present President of IRS, and IEEE RAS Vice President Elect for Technical Activities. He received IEEE Fellow in 2009, SICE Fellow in 2011, JSME Fellow in 2005, The Robot Award 2008, FDMA Commissioner Highest Award in 2008, JSME Funai Award in 2007, Best Book Author Award from AEM Society in 2006, JSME RMD Academic Achievement Award in 2005, etc. He published Rescue Robotics from Springer, RoboCupRescue from Kyoritsu Publ., etc. His research interest is in rescue robotics, virtual reality and new actuators.
Faculty Contact: Dr. Robin Murphy (murphy [at] cse.tamu.edu)
CSCE 681 Graduate Seminar:
TAMU Rescue Robots at Fukushima and Tohoku Earthquake and Tsunami
Dr. Robin Murphy
Center for Robot-Assisted Search and Rescue
Raytheon Professor of Computer Science and Engineering
Department of Computer Science
Texas A&M University
4:10 p.m., Wednesday, November 30, 2011
Room 124, Bright Building
Abstract
This talk provides an overview of all known robots used to date in the disaster and present the results from the recent joint Japanese-US deployment of rescue robotics. The Center for Robot-Assisted Search and Rescue (USA), under the direction of Prof. Robin Murphy, conducted participatory research with aerial and marine unmanned systems for remote assessment and situation awareness for critical life saving and recovery operations. CRASAR was requested within 72 hours to assist with the tsunami response recovery in the areas around Hachinohe, Minamisanriku, and Rikuzentakata by local officials working with the International Rescue System Institute (Japan). Through funding from the NSF, CRASAR deployed a five person team to Japan to directly collect data about real world uses in order to advance knowledge and understanding in artificial intelligence, cognitive science, computer vision, cyber-physical systems, and human-robot interaction as well as related areas of civil engineering and sensor networks. The joint Japan-US team used three different American remotely operated vehicles (ROVs) to open a port and search for victims tangled in the floating debris or pinned down by underwater rubble. While waiting for travel approval for the collaborative effort, Murphy independently assisted the Honeywell T-Hawk UAV team contracted by TEPCO to assess the four Fukushima Daiichi reactors. The talk identifies five areas for additional research (simulation and GIS, cyber-physical systems, computer vision and cognitive engineering, human-robot interaction, and multi-robot coordination) and offers four observations about autonomy in rescue robotics. Extensive video will be shown.
Biography
Robin Roberson Murphy is the Raytheon Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at Texas A&M and directs the Center for Robot-Assisted Search and Rescue and its Roboticists Without Borders program. She holds a B.M.E. in mechanical engineering, a M.S. and Ph.D in computer science in 1980, 1989, and 1992, respectively, from Georgia Tech. She has over 100 publications in artificial intelligence, robotics, and human-robot interaction including the textbook "Introduction to AI Robotics." She is a Fellow of the IEEE and serves on numerous governmental boards, including the Defense Science Board.
Faculty Contact: Dr. Nancy Amato (amato [at] cse.tamu.edu)
CSCE 681 Graduate Seminar:
Machine Learning and Multiagent Reasoning: from robot soccer to autonomous traffic
Dr. Peter Stone
Associate Professor
Department of Computer Science
The University of Texas at Austin
4:10 p.m., Monday, December 5, 2011
Room 124, Bright Building
Abstract
One goal of Artificial Intelligence is to enable the creation of robust, fully autonomous agents that can coexist with us in the real world. Such agents will need to be able to learn, both in order to correct and circumvent their inevitable imperfections, and to keep up with a dynamically changing world. They will also need to be able to interact with one another, whether they share common goals, they pursue independent goals, or their goals are in direct conflict. This talk will present current research directions in machine learning, multiagent reasoning, and robotics, and will advocate their unification within concrete application domains. Ideally, new theoretical results in each separate area will inform practical implementations while innovations from concrete multiagent applications will drive new theoretical pursuits, and together these synergistic research approaches will lead us towards the goal of fully autonomous agents.
Biography
Dr. Peter Stone is an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellow, Guggenheim Fellow, Fulbright Scholar, and Associate Professor in the Department of Computer
Sciences at the University of Texas at Austin. He received his Ph.D in Computer Science in 1998 from Carnegie Mellon University. From 1999 to 2002 he was a Senior Technical Staff Member in the Artificial Intelligence Principles Research Department at AT&T Labs - Research. Peter's research interests include machine learning, multiagent systems, robotics, and e-commerce. In 2003, he won a CAREER award from the National Science Foundation for his research on learning agents in dynamic, collaborative, and adversarial multiagent environments. In 2004, he was named an ONR Young Investigator for his research on machine learning on physical
robots. In 2007, he was awarded the prestigious IJCAI 2007 Computers and Thought award, given once every two years to the top AI researcher under the age of 35.
Faculty Contact: Dr. Yoonsuck Choe (choe [at] cse.tamu.edu)
