Distinguished Lecture Series 2008-2009
Overview:
"Data-Intensive Super Computing: Taking
Google-Style Computing Beyond Web Search" |
|
"Sense and Respond Systems" |
|
"Quantitative System Design" |
|
"Audio-Visual Human-Computer
Interaction" |
Monday, September 22nd, 2008 at
5:30pm
Auditorium, W.T. Young Library [info]
"Data-Intensive Super Computing: Taking Google-Style Computing Beyond Web
Search"
Randal E. Bryant
School of Computer Science
Carnagie Mellon University
Abstract:
Web search engines have become fixtures in our society, but few people realize that they are actually publicly accessible supercomputing systems, where a single query can unleash the power of several hundred processors operating on a data set of over 200 terabytes. With Internet search, computing has risen to entirely new levels of scale, especially in terms of the sizes of the data sets involved. Google and its competitors have created a new class of large-scale computer systems, which we label "Data-Intensive Super Computer" (DISC) systems. DISC systems differ from conventional supercomputers in their focus is on data: they acquire and maintain continually changing data sets, in addition to performing large-scale computations over the data.
With the massive amounts of data arising from such diverse sources as telescope imagery, medical records, online transaction records, and web pages, DISC systems have the potential to achieve major advances in science, health care, business, and information access. DISC opens up many important research topics in system design, resource management, programming models, parallel algorithms, and applications. By engaging the academic research community in these issues, we can more systematically and in a more open forum explore fundamental aspects of a societally important style of computing.
Biography:
Randal E. Bryant is Dean of the Carnegie Mellon University School of Computer Science. He has been on the faculty at Carnegie Mellon for 23 years, starting as an Assistant Professor and progressing to his current rank of University Professor.
Much of Dr. Bryant's research focuses on methods for formally verifying digital hardware, and more recently some forms of software. His 1986 paper on symbolic Boolean manipulation using Ordered Binary Decision Diagrams (BDDs) has the highest citation count of any publication in the Citeseer database of computer science literature. In addition, he has developed several techniques to verify circuits by symbolic simulation, with levels of abstraction ranging from transistors to very high-level representations. Most recently, he has been investigating ways that large-scale computer systems can be organized and programmed to solve data-intensive problems.
Dr. Bryant is a fellow of the IEEE and the ACM, as well as a member of the National Academy of Engineering. His awards include: the 2007 IEEE Emmanuel Piore Award, the 1997 ACM Kanellakis Theory and Practice Award (shared with Edmund M. Clarke, Ken McMillan, and Allen Emerson) for contributing to the development of symbolic model checking, and the 1989 IEEE W.R.G. Baker Prize for the best paper appearing in any IEEE publication during the preceding year.
Dr. Bryant received his B.S. in Applied Mathematics from the University of Michigan in 1973, and his PhD from MIT in 1981. He was on the faculty at Caltech from 1981 to 1984.
Host: Professor M. Truszczynski
October 17th, 2008
Room 102,
Classroom Building [info]
"Sense and Response Systems"
K. Mani Chandy
Department of Computer Science
California Institute of Technology
Abstract:
Sense & Respond (S&R) systems detect or predict significant events and respond appropriately. Examples of S&R systems include tsunami response, containment of radiation sources, financial trading and logistics systems. Systems that detect events by correlating activities in blogs, search engines, and social networks and display critical data in dashboards are also S&R systems. This talk discusses theories and applications of S&R systems. Specific applications include interdicting mobile sources of radiation, movement of mobile agents communicating by wireless to carry out specified tasks, and displaying dashboards dealing with political and business events. The theoretical bases for these applications are in game theory, Bayesian decision theory and distributed computing.
Biography:
Dr. K. Mani Chandy got his B.Tech from the Indian Institute of Technology (Madras) in 1965 and his PhD from MIT in 1969. He has worked at IBM and served as a consultant to several companies. He was a professor at the University of Texas at Austin from 1970 to 1987 and has been at Caltech since then. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and has won awards for work in performance modeling and distributed systems and for teaching.
Host: Professor M. Singhal
January 15th, 2009 at
5:30
Auditorium at Young Library[info]
"Quantitative System Design"
Mary K. Vernon
Department of Computer Science
University of Wisconsin
Abstract:
This talk will provide a 20-year perspective on the use of analytic models to design of a wide range of commercially important architectures and systems with complex behavior. These systems include resources with highly bursty and/or correlated packet arrivals, communication protocols with complex routing and blocking of messages, resources that are configured for a very high probability (e.g., 0.9999) of providing immediate service to each arriving client, and complex large-scale Grid/Internet applications. The examples illustrate some guiding principles for model development, and show that the models can be relatively easy to develop. More importantly, the models can be highly accurate -- often more accurate than simulation, and sometimes more accurate than the system implementation! The examples also illustrate that the models can provide unique insight into system design as well as significant new system functionality. In other words, analytic models are a key tool for competitive systems engineering. Time permitting, the talk will include some important observations about workload models, and some ways to avoid key pitfalls in simulation.
Biography:
Mary K. Vernon received a B.Sc degree with Departmental Honors in Chemistry and the Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from the University of California at Los Angeles. In 1983 she joined the Computer Science Department at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she is currently Professor of Computer Science and Industrial Engineering and Chair of the Computer Sciences Department. Her research interests include performance analysis techniques for evaluating high performance computer/communication system design tradeoffs, Internet transport protocols, optimized CMP hardware/software co-design, and storage system design. She has co-authored over 80 technical papers including seven award papers - most recently one of three "Fast Track to ToN" papers at Infocom 2004, and the Best Paper Award at the 2005 USENIX Security Symposium. Prof. Vernon has served on the editorial board of the IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems, the 1999 NSF Blue Ribbon Panel for High Performance Computing, the NSF CISE Advisory Board, the CRA Board of Directors, the Board of Directors of the NCSA, and as Chair of the ACM SIGMETRICS. She received the NSF Presidential Young Investigator Award in 1985, the ACM Fellow award in 1996, the UW-Madison Vilas Associate Award in 2000 and the UW-Madison Kellett Mid-career Award in 2006. She is a member of the IFIP WG 7.3 on Information Processing System Modeling, Measurement and Evaluation.
Host: Professor K. Calvert
March 13th, 2009 at 5:30
Auditorium at Young Library[info]
"Audio-Visual Human-computer Interaction"
Thomas S. Huang
Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology
University of Illinois
Abstract:
We first give an overview of the Human-Computer Intelligent Interaction major research theme of the Beckman Institute. Then a number of research projects will be described, including: Emotion recognition, shrug detection, hand tracking and gesture recognition, and audio-visual emotive avatars. The algorithms developed under these research projects have a wide spectrum of applications, esp. in ECRM (Electronic Consumer Relation Management) including the measurement of audience reaction to displays and the delivery of text messages by emotive avatars.
Biography:
Thomas S. Huang received his B.Sc Degree in Electrical Engineering from National Taiwan University, Taipei, Taiwan, China; and his M.S. and Sc.D. Degrees in Electrical Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts. He was on the Faculty of the Department of Electrical Engineering at MIT from 1963 to 1973; and on the Faculty of the School of Electrical Engineering and Director of its Laboratory for Information and Signal Processing at Purdue University from 1973 to 1980. In 1980, he joined the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he is now William L. Everitt Distinguished Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, and Research Professor at the Coordinated Science Laboratory, and Head of the Image Formation and Processing Group at the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology and Co-Chair of the Institute's major research theme Human Computer Intelligent Interaction.
Dr. Huang's professional interests lie in the broad area of information technology, especially the transmission and processing of multidimensional signals. He has published 20 books, and over 500 papers in Network Theory, Digital Filtering, Image Processing, and Computer Vision. He is a Member of the National Academy of Engineering; a Foreign Member of the Chinese Academies of Engineering and Sciences; and a Fellow of the International Association of Pattern Recognition, IEEE, and the Optical Society of American; and has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, an A.V. Humboldt Foundation Senior U.S. Scientist Award, and a Fellowship from the Japan Association for the Promotion of Science. He received the IEEE Signal Processing Society's Technical Achievement Award in 1987, and the Society Award in 1991. He was awarded the IEEE Third Millennium Medal in 2000. Also in 2000, he received the Honda Lifetime Achievement Award for "contributions to motion analysis". In 2001, he received the IEEE Jack S. Kilby Medal. In 2002, he received the King-Sun Fu Prize, International Association of Pattern Recognition; and the Pan Wen-Yuan Outstanding Research Award. In 2005, he received the Okawa Prize. In 2006, he was named by IS&T and SPIE as the Electronic Imaging Scientist of the year. He is a Founding Editor of the International Journal Computer Vision, Graphics, and Image Processing; and Editor of the Springer Series in Information Sciences, published by Springer Verlag.
Host: Professor R. Yang