Fall 2018 Colloquia

  • Dec. 10 2018
    • Speaker: Hessam Babaee, Ph.D.
    • Affiliation:
    • Location: Innovation Center, Room 2277
    • Time: 13:00--14:00
    • Title: A Reduced Description of Transient Stochastic Thermo-Fluid Systems
    • Abstract:Highly convective thermo-fluid systems have a difficult phenomenon to predict: transient instabilities. While these instabilities have finite lifetimes, they can play a crucial role either by altering the system dynamics through the activation of other instabilities or by creating sudden nonlinear energy transfers that lead to extreme responses. However, their essentially transient character makes their description a particularly challenging task. We develop a minimization framework that focuses on the optimal approximation of the system dynamics in the neighbourhood of the system state. This minimization formulation results in differential equations that evolve a time-dependent basis so that it optimally approximates the most unstable directions. Several thermo-fluid demonstration cases will be presented that shows the performance of the presented method.
    • Bio: Dr. Hessam Babaee is an expert in the area of hydrodynamic instability, uncertainty quantification, reduced-order modeling and high performance computing. He is currently a tenure-stream Assistant Professor in Swanson School of Engineering at University of Pittsburgh and a Research Scientist in Mechanical Engineering Department at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Prior to joining University of Pittsburgh, he was a Postdoctoral Associate at MIT. He received his PhD in Mechanical Engineering and a Masters degree in Applied Mathematics from Louisiana State University both awarded in 2013.
  • Dec. 7 2018
    • Speaker: Yi Wang, Ph.D.
    • Affiliation: Department of Mechanical Engineering, University of South Carolina
    • Location: Innovation Center, Room 2277
    • Time: 13:00--14:00
    • Title: A Flow Feature Detection Framework for Massive Computational Data Analytics
    • Abstract: In this seminar a framework based on the incremental proper orthogonal decomposition (iPOD) and the data mining method to perform integrated analysis on large-scale computational data will be presented for targeted data visualization, discovery, and learning. Four key components will be introduced, including (1) iPOD based on the mean value and the subspace updating method to incrementally reduce data dimensions, decouple the time-averaged and time-varying flow structures, and extract coherent structures and modes in massive Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) data; (2) data mining to classify the flow regions of similar dynamic characteristics and identify the candidate and global ROIs (GROIs) for focused analysis; (3) feature detection to capture flow features of interest and determine ultimate ROIs (UROIs); and (4) selective storage and targeted visualization of data in UROIs. Case studies on vortex and shock wave detection that are of significant interest to aerospace and defense applications will be presented to demonstrate the framework. Computational performance of the framework in terms of data volume, reduction ratio, resource usage, and storage requirements will also be discussed. Our quantitative results clearly show that iPOD is able to process large datasets that overwhelm the traditional batch POD leading to 4-16X data reduction in the temporal domain through spectral projection. By data mining 50% to 70% of the spatial domain with high probability of flow feature occurrence is identified as candidate GROIs for efficient, confined feature detection. Key features in the UROI consisting of only 2% to 30% of the original data are successfully captured by our feature detection algorithms, and can be selectively stored and visualized for targeted discovery and learning. In contrast to batch-POD, iPOD reduces physical memory usage by more than 10X and processing time by up to 75% and is far more appropriate for large data analytics.
    • Bio: Yi Wang obtained his B.S. and M.S. in Machinery and Energy Engineering from Shanghai Jiao Tong University, P.R.China in 1998 and 2000, respectively; and his Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from the Carnegie Mellon University in 2005. Currently he is an associate professor of mechanical engineering and is the principal investigator (PI) of the Integrated Multiphysics & Systems Engineering Laboratory (iMSEL) at the University of South Carolina. He has served as a PI or a Co-PI on multiple DoD-, MDA-, NASA-, and NIH-funded projects to develop advanced methodologies and techniques in computational and data-enabled science and engineering (CDS&E), including reduced order modeling, data reduction, large-scale and/or real-time data analytics, hierarchical system-level simulation, and system engineering. The applications of these technologies span spacecraft and missile thermal analysis, aeroservoelasticity and aerothermoservoelasticity, massive computational data management, real-time flight load data processing, integrated multi-scale fluidics systems (design, fabrication, and experimentation) for environmental monitoring, biodefense, and regenerative medicine. He has coauthored 4 book chapters, and 80 journal and conference publications. He is also the co-inventor of 5 patents.
  • Sep. 21 2018
    • Speaker: Laurent L. Njilla
    • Affiliation: U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL)
    • Location: Innovation Center, Room 2277
    • Time: 11:00 -- 12:00
    • Title: Blockchain Technology and Cyber Threat Information Sharing
    • Abstract: Cybersecurity is becoming one of the challenging problems in the connected world because of heterogeneity of networked systems and scale and complexity of cyberspace. Cyber-attacks are not only increasing in terms of numbers but also getting more sophisticated. Cyber-defense for prevention, detection and response to cyber-attacks is an on-going challenge that needs efforts to protect critical infrastructures and private information. Complexity and scale of cyberspace and heterogeneity of networked systems make cybersecurity even more challenging. Almost all organizations are vulnerable to (similar or same) cyber-attacks where information sharing could help prevent future cyber-attacks.
      This talk presents and evaluates an information sharing framework for cybersecurity with the goal of protecting confidential information and networked infrastructures from future cyber-attacks. The proposed framework leverages the blockchain concept where multiple organizations/agencies participate for information sharing (without violating their privacy) to secure and monitor their cyberspaces. This blockchain based framework is to constantly collect high resolution cyber-attack information across organizational boundaries of which the organizations have no specific knowledge or control over any other organizations' data or damage caused by cyber-attacks.

Spring 2018 Colloquia

  • Mar. 30 2018
    • Speaker: Rahmatollah Beheshti
    • Affiliation: Johns Hopkins University
    • Location: Innovation Center, Room 2277
    • Time: 10:15 - 11:15 AM
    • Title: Complex Models to Understand Complex Health Behaviors
    • Abstract: Most of the health conditions are directly or indirectly resulted from humans’ decisions. These decisions are affected by a wide range of personal and environmental factors. While understanding health decision-making processes can lead to significant breakthroughs in both treatment and prevention of different diseases, due to their complex nature, our knowledge about many of these processes is very limited. Computational and data-driven techniques are increasingly considered as powerful options to fuse various types of data (such as biological and behavioral data) to understand these complexities. In this talk, Dr. Beheshti will present several projects from the areas of smoking and obesity research in which he has used complex systems and AI methods to study health behaviors. Specifically, he will talk about one of his recent projects studying the role of price in food decision-making.
    • Bio: Dr. Rahmatollah Beheshti is a fourth-year postdoctoral fellow at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, with a joint appointment in the Department of Applied Math & Statistics at Johns Hopkins. He has a PhD in Computer Science and a Master in Artificial Intelligence and has been working in the area of Computational Epidemiology and Health Data Analytics for the past eight years. He has close to 20 first author full articles in these areas. Specifically, he has worked extensively on two major public health epidemics: smoking and obesity and has focused on very different aspects of these two, including the social, economic, environmental, and lately biological factors that affect those epidemics.
  • Mar. 26 2018
    • Speaker: Guorong Wu
    • Affiliation: University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
    • Location: Innovation Center, Room 2277
    • Time: 10:15 - 11:15 AM
    • Title: Computational Brain Connectome: From Reverse Engineering the Brain to Understand Brain Connectivity
    • Abstract: Neuroimaging research has developed rapidly in last decade, with various applications of brain mapping technologies that provide mechanisms for discovering neuropsychiatric disorders in vivo. The human brain is something of an enigma. Much is known about its physical structure, but how it manages to marshal its myriad components into a powerhouse capable of performing so many different tasks remains a mystery. In this talk, I will demonstrate that it is more important to understand how the brain regions are connected rather than study each brain region individually. I will introduce my recent research on human brain connectome, with the focus on revealing high-order brain connectome and functional dynamics using learning-based approaches, and the successful applications in identifying neuro-disorder subjects such as Autism and Alzheimer’s disease.
    • Bio: Dr. Guorong Wu is an Assistant Professor in Department of Radiology at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. His primary research interests are medical image analysis, big data mining, scientific data visualization, and computer-assisted diagnosis. He has been working on medical image analysis since he started my Ph.D. study in 2003. In 2007, he received the Ph.D. degree in computer science and engineering from Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai, China. He has developed many image processing methods for brain magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), diffusion tensor imaging, breast dynamic contrast-enhanced MRI (DCE-MRI), and computed tomography (CT) images. These cutting-edge computational methods have been successfully applied to the early diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease, infant brain development study, and image-guided lung cancer radiotherapy. Meanwhile, Dr. Wu lead a multi-discipline research team in UNC which aims to translate the cutting-edge intelligent techniques to the imaging-based biomedical applications, for the sake of boosting translational medicine. Dr. Wu has released more than ten image analysis software packages to the medical imaging community, which count to totally more than 15,000 downloads since 2009. Dr. Wu is the recipient of NIH Career Development Award (K01) and PI of NIH Exploratory/Developmental Research Grant Award (R21). He also serves as the Co-PI and Co-Investigator in other NSF and NIH grants.
  • Mar. 23 2018
    • Speaker: Kamal Al Nasr
    • Affiliation: Tennessee State University
    • Location: Innovation Center, Room 2277
    • Time: 10:15 - 11:15 AM
    • Title: Protein Structure Determination as a Computational Problem
    • Abstract: The development process of new drugs can cost on average $4 billion. Therefore, it is strategic to apply robust computational approaches to cover a broader chemical space like computer-aided drug design while reducing the number of compounds that must be synthesized and tested in vitro to keep costs low. Protein structural information is a crucial input for computer-aided drug design. Conventional determination techniques such as X-ray crystallography are time consuming and fail with proteins that are hard to crystallize. Likewise, traditional computational techniques are unsuccessful with many types of proteins such as membrane and macromolecular proteins that make up more than the half of contemporary drug targets. In contrast, Cryo-Electron Microscopy (cryo-EM) is a biophysics technique that generates volumetric images to determine structures of macromolecular complexes and assembles. However, it is challenging to determine the atomic structures from images generated at sub-nanometer resolution using cryo-EM. In addition, the volume of prospective sub-nanometer EM images to be analyzed has rapidly grown. Therefore, powerful computational methods such as de novo modeling are thus needed to make use of the available cryo-EM data. In this presentation, I will present some challenging problems and computational approaches to use the non-atomic images of cryo-EM to model protein structures. Novel algorithms, image processing techniques, and data analysis will be presented to overcome the hinder of resolution problem of cryo-EM.
    • Bio: Dr. Kamal Al Nasr is an assistant professor of Computer Science at Tennessee State University since August 2013. He received his Bachelor's and Master's degree in Computer Science from Yarmouk University, Jordan in 2003 and 2005, respectively. Dr. Al Nasr received another Master's degree in Computer Science from New Mexico State University, Las Cruces, NM in 2011. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Old Dominion University, Norfolk, VA in 2012. During his Ph.D. study, he was awarded College of Science's university fellowship on July 2010. He Joined the Department of Systems and Computer Science at Howard University, Washington, D.C. as a postdoctoral research scientist in 2012. His research interest is centered on developing efficient computational methods for protein structure prediction in de novo modeling. Specifically, he focuses on using Electron Cryo-Microscopy (cryo-EM), high performance computing, data analytics, and graph theory to design algorithms, which efficiently predict the 3-dimensional structure of proteins. During his structural bioinformatics research, Dr. Al Nasr has written several peer-reviewed papers in national and international journals and proceedings. Further, Dr. Al Nasr has two active grants from national agencies (i.e., NSF and NIH) to support his research.
  • Mar. 21 2018
    • Speaker: Qiang Zeng
    • Affiliation: Temple University
    • Location: Innovation Center, Room 2277
    • Time: 10:15 - 11:15 AM
    • Title: Cross-Area Approaches to Innovative Security Solutions
    • Abstract: By applying out-of-the-box thinking and cross-area approaches, novel solutions can be innovated to solve challenging problems. In this talk, I will share my experiences in applying cross-area approaches, and present creative designs to solve two difficult security problems. Problem 1: Decentralized Android Application Repackaging Detection. An unethical developer can download a mobile application, make arbitrary modifications (e.g., inserting malicious code and replacing the advertisement library), repackage the app, and then distribute it; the attack is called application repackaging. Such attacks have posed severe threats, causing $14 billion monetary loss annually and propagating over 80% of mobile malware. Existing countermeasures are mostly centralized and imprecise. We consider building the repackaging detection capability into apps, such that user devices are made use of to detect repackaging in a decentralized fashion. In order to protect repackaging detection code from attacks, we propose a creative use of logic bombs, which are commonly used in malware. The use of hacking techniques for benign purposes has delivered an innovative and effective defense technique.
      Problem 2: Precise Binary Code Semantics Extraction. Binary code analysis allows one to analyze a piece of binary code without accessing the corresponding source code. It is widely used for vulnerability discovery, dissecting malware, user-side crash analysis, etc. Today, binary code analysis becomes more important than ever. With the booming development of the Internet-of-Things industry, a sheer number of firmware images of IoT devices can be downloaded from the Internet. It raises challenges for researchers, third-party companies, and government agents to analyze these images at scale, without access to the source code, for identifying malicious programs, detecting software plagiarism, and finding vulnerabilities. I will introduce a brand new binary code analysis technique that learns from Natural Language Processing, an area remote from code analysis, to extract useful semantic information from binary code.
    • Bio: Dr. Qiang Zeng is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer & Information Sciences at Temple University. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science and Engineering from the Pennsylvania State University, and his B.E. and M.E. degrees in Computer Science and Engineering from Beihang University, China. He has rich industry experiences and ever worked in the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, the NEC Lab America, Symantec and Yahoo. Dr. Zeng's main research interest is Systems and Software Security. He currently works on IoT Security, Mobile Security, and deep learning for solving security problems. He has published papers in PLDI, NDSS, MobiSys, CGO, DSN and TKDE.
  • Mar. 19 2018
    • Speaker: Sayed Ahmad Salehi
    • Affiliation: Utah Valley University
    • Location: Innovation Center, Room 2277
    • Time: 10:15 - 11:15 AM
    • Title: Signal processing and other forms of computation with biomolecular (DNA) reactions
    • Abstract: With the recent advances in the field of synthetic biology, molecular computing has emerged as a non-conventional computing technology and a broad range of computational processes has been considered for molecular implementation. In contrast to electronic systems where signals are represented by time-varying voltage values, in molecular computing systems signals are represented by time-varying concentrations of molecular types. The field aims for the design of custom, embedded biological "controllers" - DNA molecules that are engineered to perform useful tasks in situ, such as cancer detection and smart drug therapy. The past few decades have seen remarkable progress in the design of integrated electronic circuits for digital signal processing and other forms of computation. Nowadays, in terms of circuit complexity, the pace of progress in biotechnology is similar to, even faster than, integrated circuits; it's like a golden age of molecular circuit design. This seminar presents how the knowledge and expertise in circuit design can be applied and extended to the domain of molecular computing. The talk has two main parts. First, some frameworks are explained for the development of molecular systems computing signal processing operations such as frequency filters. Second, a new molecular encoding, called fractional coding, is introduced to map digital stochastic computing circuits into molecular circuits. Based on this approach, molecular computation of complex mathematical functions and a single-layer neural network (perceptron) is described.
    • Bio: Dr. Sayed Ahmad Salehi received his MSc. and Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering (with minor in Computer Science) from the University of Minnesota in 2015 and 2017, respectively. Dr. Salehi is currently an assistant professor in the Computer Science and Engineering Department at Utah Valley University. His research interests include low-power VLSI architectures for signal processing, embedded systems, stochastic computing, and molecular (DNA) computing. He is the recipient of the University of Minnesota Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship in 2016 and the finalist for the best paper award in DSP2015 conference.
  • Mar. 16 2018
    • Speaker: Heewook Lee
    • Affiliation: Carnegie Mellon University
    • Location: Innovation Center, Room 2277
    • Time: 10:15 - 11:15 AM
    • Title: Graph-centric approaches for understanding the mutational landscape of life
    • Abstract: Genetic diversity is necessary for survival and adaptability of all forms of life. The importance of genetic diversity is observed universally in humans to bacteria. Therefore, it is a central challenge to improve our ability to identify and characterize the extent of genetic variants in order to understand the mutational landscape of life. In this talk, I will focus on two important instances of genetic diversity found in (1) human genomes (particularly the human leukocyte antigens—HLA) and (2) bacterial genomes (rearrangement of insertion sequence [IS] elements). I will first show that specific graph data structures can naturally encode high levels of genetic variation, and I will describe our novel, efficient graph-based computational approaches to identify genetic variants for both HLA and bacterial rearrangements. Each of these methods is specifically tailored to its own problem, making it possible to achieve the state-of-the-art performance. For example, our method is the first to be able to reconstruct full-length HLA sequences from short-read sequence data, making it possible to discover novel alleles in individuals. For IS element rearrangement, I used our new approach to provide the first estimate of genome-wide rate of IS-induced rearrangements including recombination. I will also show the spatial patterns and the biases that we find by analyzing E. coli mutation accumulation data spanning over 2.2 million generations. These graph-centric ideas in our computational approaches provide a foundation for analyzing genetically heterogeneous populations of genes and genomes, and provide directions for ways to investigate other instances of genetic diversity found in life.
    • Bio: Dr. Heewook Lee is currently a Lane Fellow at Computational Biology Department at the School of Computer Science in Carnegie Mellon University, where he works on developing novel assembly algorithms for reconstructing highly diverse immune related genes, including human leukocyte antigens. He received a B.S. in computer science from Columbia University, and obtained M.S. and Ph.D in computer science from Indiana University. Prior to his graduate studies, he also worked as a bioinformatics scientist at a sequencing center/genomics company where he was in charge of the computational unit responsible for carrying out various microbial genome projects and Korean Human Genome project.
  • Mar. 14 2018
    • Speaker: Soteris Demetriou
    • Affiliation: University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
    • Location: Innovation Center, Room 2277
    • Time: 10:15 - 11:15 AM
    • Title: Security and Privacy Challenges in User-Facing, Complex, Interconnected Environments
    • Abstract: In contrast with traditional ubiquitous computing, mobile devices are now user-facing, more complex and interconnected. Thus they introduce new attack surfaces which can result in severe private information leakage. Due to the rapid adoption of smart devices, there is an urgent need to address emerging security and privacy challenges to help realize the vision of a secure, smarter and personalized world.
      In this talk, I will focus on the smartphone and its role in smart environments. First I will show how the smartphone's complex architecture allows third-party applications and advertising networks to perform inference attacks and compromise user confidentiality. Further, I will demonstrate how combining techniques from both systems and data sciences can help us build tools to detect such leakage. Second, I will show how a weak mobile application adversary can exploit vulnerabilities hidden in the interplay between smartphones and smart devices. I will then describe how we can leverage both strong mandatory access control and flexible user-driven access control to design practical and robust systems to mitigate such threats. I will conclude, by discussing how in the future I want to enable a trustworthy Internet of Things, focusing not only on strengthening smartphones, but also emerging intelligent platforms and environments (e.g. automobiles, smart buildings/cities), and new user interaction modalities in IoT (acoustic signals).
    • Bio: Soteris Demetriou is a Ph.D. Candidate in Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His research interests lie at the intersection of mobile systems and, security and privacy, with a current focus on smartphones and IoT environments. He discovered side-channels in the virtual process filesystem (procfs) of the Linux kernel that can be exploited by malicious applications running on Android devices; he built Pluto, an open-source tool for detection of sensitive user information collected by mobile apps; he designed security enhancements for the Android OS which enable mandatory and discretionary access control for external devices. His work incited security additions in the popular Android operating system, has received a distinguished paper award at NDSS, and is recognized by awards bestowed by Samsung Research America and Hewlett-Packard Enterprise. Soteris is a recipient of the Fulbright Scholarship, and in 2017 was selected by the Heidelberg Laureate Forum as one of the 200 most promising young researchers in the fields of Mathematics and Computer Science.
  • Mar. 12 2018
    • Speaker: Antonios Argyriou
    • Affiliation: University of Thessaly, Greece
    • Location: Innovation Center, Room 2277
    • Time: 10:15 - 11:15 AM
    • Title:The Role of Applications in Wireless Communication System Design and Optimization
    • Abstract: The next generation of cellular wireless communication systems (WCS) aspire to become a paradigm shift and not just an incremental version of existing systems. These systems will come along with several technical and conceptual advances resulting in an ecosystem that aims to deliver orders of magnitude higher performance (throughput, delay, energy). These systems will essentially serve as conduits among service/content providers and users, and are expected to support a significantly enlarged and diversified bouquet of applications. In this talk we will first introduce the audience to the fundamental concepts of WCS that brought us to this day. Subsequently, we will identify the application trends that drive specific design choices of future WCS. Then, we will present a new idea for designing and optimizing future WCS that puts the specific application at the focus of our choices. The discussion will be based on two key application categories namely wireless monitoring, and video delivery. In the last part of this talk we will discuss how this paradigm, that elevates the role of the applications, opens up new directions for understanding, operating, and designing future WCS.
    • Bio: Dr. Antonios Argyriou received the Diploma in electrical and computer engineering from Democritus University of Thrace, Greece, in 2001, and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in electrical and computer engineering as a Fulbright scholar from the Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, USA, in 2003 and 2005, respectively. Currently, he is an Assistant Professor at the department of electrical and computer engineering, University of Thessaly, Greece. From 2007 until 2010 he was a Senior Research Scientist at Philips Research, Eindhoven, The Netherlands where he led the research efforts on wireless body area networks. From 2004 until 2005, he was a Senior Engineer at Soft.Networks, Atlanta, GA. Dr. Argyriou currently serves in the editorial board of the Journal of Communications. He has also served as guest editor for the IEEE Transactions on Multimedia Special Issue on Quality-Driven Cross-Layer Design, and he was also a lead guest editor for the Journal of Communications, Special Issue on Network Coding and Applications. Dr. Argyriou serves in the TPC of several international conferences and workshops in the area of wireless communications, networking, and signal processing. His current research interests are in the areas of wireless communications, cross-layer wireless system design (with applications in video delivery, sensing, vehicular systems), statistical signal processing theory and applications, optimization, and machine learning. He is a Senior Member of IEEE.
  • Mar. 09 2018
    • Speaker: An Wang
    • Affiliation:George Mason University
    • Location: Innovation Center, Room 2277
    • Time: 10:15 - 11:15 AM
    • Title:Elastic and Adaptive SDN-based Defenses in Cloud with Programmable Measurement
    • Abstract: The past decade has witnessed a dramatic change in the way organizations and enterprises manage their cloud and data center systems. The main drive of such transition is the Network Virtualization techniques, which have been promoted to a new level by the Software-Defined Networking (SDN) paradigm. Along with the programmability and flexibility offered by SDN, there are fundamental challenges in defending against the prevalent large-scale network attacks, such as DDoS attacks, against the SDN-based cloud systems. This talk presents efficient and flexible solutions to address such challenges in both reactive and proactive modes of SDN. In this talk, I will first discuss the vulnerabilities in the architecture of SDN, which results in risk of congestions on the control path under the reactive mode. For the solution, I will show how the control path capacity could be elastically scaled up by taking advantages of the software switches’ abundant processing powers to handle control messages. Then, for the proactive mode, I will discuss how traffic measurement and monitoring mechanisms are necessary yet incompetent with the existing SDN solutions. To fix this issue, I will present the design and implementation of a separate monitoring plane in SDN that enables flexible and fine-grained data collections for security purposes.
    • Bio:An Wang is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Computer Science at George Mason University. She received BS in Department of Computer Science and Technologies from Jilin University in 2012. Her research interests lie in the areas of security for networked systems and network virtualization, mainly focusing on Software-Defined Networking (SDN) and cloud systems, and large-scale network attacks.
  • Mar. 07 2018
    • Speaker: Anuj Karpatne
    • Affiliation: University of Minnesota
    • Location: Innovation Center, Room 2277
    • Time: 10:15 - 11:15 AM
    • Title:Theory-guided Data Science: A New Paradigm for Scientific Discovery from Data
    • Abstract: This talk will introduce theory-guided data science, a novel paradigm of scientific discovery that leverages the unique ability of data science methods to automatically extract patterns and models from data, but without ignoring the treasure of knowledge accumulated in scientific theories. Theory-guided data science aims to fully capitalize the power of machine learning and data mining methods in scientific disciplines by deeply coupling them with models based on scientific theories. This talk will describe several ways in which scientific knowledge can be combined with data science methods in various scientific disciplines such as hydrology, climate science, aerospace, and chemistry. To demonstrate the value in combining physics with data science, the talk will also introduce a novel framework for combining deep learning methods with physics-based models, termed as physics-guided neural networks, and present some preliminary results of this framework for an application in lake temperature modeling. The talk will conclude with a discussion of future prospects in exploiting latest advances in deep learning for building the next generation of scientific models for dynamical systems, where theory-based and data science methods are used at an equal footing.
    • Bio: Anuj Karpatne is a PostDoctoral Associate at the University of Minnesota, where he develops data mining methods for solving scientific and socially relevant problems in Prof. Vipin Kumar's research group. He has published more than 25 peer-reviewed articles at top-tier conferences and journals (e.g., KDD, ICDM, SDM, TKDE, and ACM Computing Surveys), given multiple invited talks, and served on panels at leading venues (e.g., SDM and SSDBM). His research has resulted in a system to monitor the dynamics of surface water bodies on a global scale, which was featured in an NSF news story. He is also a co-author of the second edition of the textbook, "Introduction to Data Mining." Anuj received his Ph.D. in September 2017 from the University of Minnesota under the guidance of Prof. Kumar. Before joining the University of Minnesota, Anuj received his bachelor's and master's degrees from the Indian Institute of Technology Delhi.
  • Mar. 05 2018
    • Speaker: Justin Zhan
    • Affiliation: University of Nevada, Las Vegas
    • Location: Innovation Center, Room 2277
    • Time: 10:15 - 11:15 AM
    • Title: BIG DATA BRIDGE
    • Abstract: Data has become the central driving force to new discoveries in science, informed governance, insight into society, and economic growth in the 21st century. Abundant data is a direct result of innovations including the Internet, faster computer processors, cheap storage, the proliferation of sensors, etc, and has the potential to increase business productivity and enable scientific discovery. However, while data is abundant and everywhere, people do not have a fundamental understanding of data. Traditional approaches to decision making under uncertainty are not adequate to deal with massive amounts of data, especially when such data is dynamically changing or becomes available over time. These challenges require novel techniques in data analytics, data-driven optimization, systems modeling and data mining. In this seminar, a number of recent funded data analytics projects will be presented to address various data analytics, mining, modeling and optimization challenges. In particular, the DataBridge, which is a novel data analytics system, will be illustrated.
    • Bio: Dr. Justin Zhan is a professor at the Department of Computer Science, College of Engineering, Department of Radiology, School of Medicine, as well as Nevada Institute of Personalized Medicine. His research interests include Big Data, Information Assurance, Social Computing, Biomedical Computing and Health Informatics. He has been a steering chair of International Conference on Social Computing (SocialCom), and International Conference on Privacy, Security, Risk and Trust (PASSAT). He has been the editor-in-chief of International Journal of Privacy, Security and Integrity and International Journal of Social Computing and Cyber-Physical Systems. He has served as a conference general chair, a program chair, a publicity chair, a workshop chair, or a program committee member for over one-hundred and fifty international conferences and an editor-in-chief, an editor, an associate editor, a guest editor, an editorial advisory board member, or an editorial board member for about thirty journals. He has published more than two hundred articles in peer-reviewed journals and conferences and delivered thirty keynote speeches and invited talks. His research has been extensively funded by National Science Foundation, Department of Defense and National Institute of Health.
  • Mar. 02 2018
    • Speaker: Sanjib Sur
    • Affiliation: University of Wisconsin- Madison
    • Location: Innovation Center, Room 2277
    • Time: 10:15 - 11:15 AM
    • Title: Bringing Millimeter-Wave Wireless to the Masses
    • Abstract: Many of the emerging IoT applications --- such as wireless virtual and augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, tactile internet --- demand multiple gigabits per second wireless throughput with sub-millisecond latency guarantees. Today’s wireless infrastructure --- such as LTE or Wi-Fi --- will unlikely handle such demand. Abundant opportunity, however, exists at millimeter-wave wireless, but with two key-barriers --- directional link alignment and link blockage --- that prevent the mass deployment of millimeter-wave in today’s network. In the first part of the talk, I will present my approach to addressing these two challenges by designing solutions that span across the wireless link, protocol, and system stack. Mass deployment of millimeter-wave devices also brings opportunity to enable new IoT applications, including designing new user-device interactions and ad-hoc imaging of objects hidden from the line-of-sight. In the second part of the talk, I will briefly go through my design to address the challenges of such ad-hoc applications. Finally, I will conclude this talk with a glimpse of my future works that are shaped by the emerging mass proliferation of cheap and ubiquitous wireless systems at millimeter-wave, sub-terahertz, and terahertz.
    • Bio:Sanjib Sur is a Ph.D. candidate in the Electrical and Computer Engineering department at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His research interests are in millimeter-wave networks, wireless and mobile systems, and IoT connectivity and sensing systems. His research works have appeared on multiple flagship conferences for wireless and mobile systems. Sanjib has been recently nominated for the Wisconsin Distinguished Graduate Fellowship for an outstanding graduate research work. He received a Bachelor’s degree with the highest distinction in Computer Science and Engineering from the Indian Institute of Engineering Science and Technology, where he was awarded the President of India Gold Medal for outstanding academic achievement.
  • Feb. 28 2018
    • Speaker: Zsolt Kira
    • Affiliation:Georgia Institute of Technology
    • Location: Innovation Center, Room 2277
    • Time: 10:15 - 11:15 AM
    • Title:Towards Continual and Fine-Grained Learning for Robot Perception
    • Abstract: A large number of robot perception tasks have been revolutionized by machine learning and deep neural networks in particular. However, current learning methods are limited in several ways that hinder their large-scale use for critical robotics applications: They are often focused on individual sensor modalities, do not attempt to understand semantic information in a fine-grained temporal manner, and are beholden to strong assumptions about the data (e.g. that the data distribution is the same when deployed in the real world as when trained). In this talk, I will describe work on novel deep learning architectures for moving beyond current methods to develop a richer multi-modal and fine-grained scene understanding from raw sensor data. I will also discuss methods we have developed that can use transfer learning to deal with changes in the environment or the existence of entirely new, unknown categories in the data (e.g. unknown object types). I will focus especially on this latter work, where we use neural networks to learn how to compare objects and transfer such learning to new domains using one of the first deep-learning based clustering algorithms, which we developed. I will show examples of real-world robotic systems using these methods, and conclude by discussing future directions in this area, towards making robots able to continually learn and adapt to new situations as they arise.
    • Bio:Dr. Zsolt Kira received his B.S. in ECE at the University of Miami in 2002 and M.S. and Ph.D. in Computer Science from the Georgia Institute of Technology in 2010. He is currently a Senior Research Scientist and Branch Chief of the Machine Learning and Analytics group at the Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI). He is also an Adjunct at the School of Interactive Computing and Associate Director of Georgia Tech’s Machine Learning Center (ML@GT). He conducts research in the areas of machine learning for sensor processing and robot perception, with emphasis on feature learning for multi-modal object detection, video analysis, scene characterization, and transfer learning. He has over 25 publications in these areas, several best paper/student paper and other awards, and has been invited to speak at related workshops in both academia and government venues.
  • Feb. 26 2018
    • Speaker: Pooyan Jamshidi
    • Affiliation: Carnegie Mellon University
    • Location: Innovation Center, Room 2277
    • Time: 10:15 - 11:15 AM
    • Title:Transfer Learning for Performance Analysis of Highly-Configurable Software Systems
    • Abstract: A wide range of modern software-intensive systems (e.g., autonomous systems, big data analytics, robotics, deep neural architectures) are built configurable. These systems offer a rich space for adaptation to different domains and tasks. Developers and users often need to reason about the performance of such systems, making tradeoffs to change specific quality attributes or detecting performance anomalies. For instance, developers of image recognition mobile apps are not only interested in learning which deep neural architectures are accurate enough to classify their images correctly, but also which architectures consume the least power on the mobile devices on which they are deployed. Recent research has focused on models built from performance measurements obtained by instrumenting the system. However, the fundamental problem is that the learning techniques for building a reliable performance model do not scale well, simply because the configuration space is exponentially large that is impossible to exhaustively explore. For example, it will take over 60 years to explore the whole configuration space of a system with 25 binary options.
      In this talk, I will start motivating the configuration space explosion problem based on my previous experience with large-scale big data systems in industry. I will then present my transfer learning solution to tackle the scalability challenge: instead of taking the measurements from the real system, we learn the performance model using samples from cheap sources, such as simulators that approximate the performance of the real system, with a fair fidelity and at a low cost. Results show that despite the high cost of measurement on the real system, learning performance models can become surprisingly cheap as long as certain properties are reused across environments. In the second half of the talk, I will present empirical evidence, which lays a foundation for a theory explaining why and when transfer learning works by showing the similarities of performance behavior across environments. I will present observations of environmental changes‘ impacts (such as changes to hardware, workload, and software versions) for a selected set of configurable systems from different domains to identify the key elements that can be exploited for transfer learning. These observations demonstrate a promising path for building efficient, reliable, and dependable software systems. Finally, I will share my research vision for the next five years and outline my immediate plans to further explore the opportunities of transfer learning.
    • Bio:Pooyan Jamshidi is a postdoctoral researcher at Carnegie Mellon University, where he works on transfer learning for building performance models to enable dynamic adaptation of mobile robotics software as a part of BRASS, a DARPA sponsored project. Prior to his current position, he was a research associate at Imperial College London, where he worked on Bayesian optimization for automated performance tuning of big data systems. He holds a Ph.D. from Dublin City University, where he worked on self-learning Fuzzy control for auto-scaling in the cloud. He has spent 7 years in industry as a developer and a software architect. His research interests are at the intersection of software engineering, systems, and machine learning, and his focus lies predominantly in the areas of highly-configurable and self-adaptive systems (more details: https://pooyanjamshidi.github.io/research/).
  • Feb. 19 2018
    • Speaker: Nirupam Roy
    • Affiliation: University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign (UIUC)
    • Location:Innovation Center, Room 2277
    • Time: 10:15 - 11:15 AM
    • Title:Internet of Acoustic Things (IoAT): Challenges, Opportunities, and Threats
    • Abstract: The recent proliferation of acoustic devices, ranging from voice assistants to wearable health monitors, is leading to a sensing ecosystem around us -- referred to as the Internet of Acoustic Things or IoAT. My research focuses on developing hardware-software building blocks that enable new capabilities for this emerging future. In this talk, I will sample some of my projects. For instance, (1) I will demonstrate carefully designed sounds that are completely inaudible to humans but recordable by all microphones. (2) I will discuss our work with physical vibrations from mobile devices, and how they conduct through finger bones to enable new modalities of short range, human-centric communication. (3) Finally, I will draw attention to various acoustic leakages and threats that arrive with sensor-rich environments. I will conclude this talk with a glimpse of my ongoing and future projects targeting a stronger convergence of sensing, computing, and communications in tomorrow’s IoT, cyber-physical systems, and healthcare technologies.
    • Bio: Nirupam Roy is a Ph.D. candidate in Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). His research interests are in mobile sensing, wireless networking, and embedded systems with applications to IoT, cyber-physical-systems, and security. Roy is the recipient of the Valkenburg graduate research award, the Lalit Bahl fellowship, and the outstanding thesis awards from both his Bachelor's and Master's institutes. His recent research on "Making Microphones Hear Inaudible Sounds" received the MobiSys'17 best paper award and was selected for the ACM SIGMOBILE research highlights of the year in 2017.

Fall2017 Colloquia

  • November 29 (Wednesday), 10:00-11:00am, Storey Innovation Center, Room 2277, Qiang Zeng. Temple University. "Instant and Bug-Free Patch Generation for Fixing Heap Vulnerabilities" Abstract (MS-Word docx format). Abstract (text).

Spring2017 Colloquia

Fall2016 Colloquia

  • October 21 (Friday), 1420-1510 (2:20-3:10pm), Swearingen 2A31, Ralph Smith. North Carolina State University. "Active Subspace and Surrogate Model Techniques for Complex Physical and Biological Models" Abstract (MS-Word docx format). Abstract (text).
  • September 13 (Tuesday), 1745-1845 (5:45-6:45pm), Swearingen 2A31, Stephen Shaw. "Why Does Every Tech Company Care about Patents? (Or, Why Does My Manager Keep Bugging Me about Patents?)" Abstract (MS-Word docx format). Abstract (text).
  • September 9 (Friday), 1420-1510 (2:20-3:10pm), Swearingen 2A14, Zhu Wang , University of South Carolina. "Proper Orthogonal Decomposition Reduced-Order Modeling of Complex Fluid Flows" Abstract (MS-Word docx format). Abstract (text).
  • September 2 (Friday), 1420-1510 (2:20-3:10pm), Swearingen 2A31, Charles A. Kamhoua , Air Force Research Laboratory. "Application of Game Theory to High Assurance Cloud Computing" Abstract (MS-Word docx format). Abstract (text).
  • August 19 (Friday), 1420-1510 (2:20-3:10pm), Swearingen 2A14, Joseph E. Johnson , University of South Carolina. "A Proposed Numerical Data Standard Supporting Automated Network Cluster Analytics" Abstract (MS-Word docx format). Abstract (text).

Spring 2016 Colloquia

Fall 2015 Colloquia

  • November 24(Tuesday), 1450-1600 (2:50-4:00pm), Swearingen 1C01, Tom Bradicich, VP Hewlett-Packard "Big Analog Data - the Often Overlooked Big Data" Abstract (PDF format).
  • (CANCELLED!) November 20(Friday), 1420-1510 (2:20-3:10pm), Swearingen 2A31, Adrian Sandu, Department of Computer Science, Virginia Tech. "Computational Tools for Data Assimilation" Abstract (MS-Word docx format). Abstract (text).
  • October 30 (Friday), 1420-1510 (2:20-3:10pm), Swearingen 2A31, Brian Williams, Los Alamos National Laboratory. "Computational Enhancements to Bayesian Design of Experiments Using Gaussian Processes" Abstract (MS-Word docx format). Abstract (text).
  • October 16 (Friday), time, place and title to be announced, Dylan Shell, Computer Science and Engineering, Texas A&M University.
  • October 2 (Friday) 1400-1600 (2:00-4:00pm), "4rd Gamecock Computing Research Symposium", on the first floor of Swearingen. Featuring 1) State of the CSE Department, 2) Brief Overviews of Faculty Research , 3) Research Poster Presentations by Graduate Students
  • September 29 (Tuesday), 1900-2000 (7:00-8:00pm), Amoco Hall, Swearingen Chris King, IDV, Inc., the creators of SpeedTree. " USC Engineering Grads Making a Dent In Films and Video Games" Abstract (MS-Word docx format). Abstract (text).
  • September 04 (Friday), 1420-1510 (2:20-3:10pm), Swearingen 2A18, Xiaoyan (Iris) Lin, Department of Statistics, University of South Carolina. "A Semiparametric Probit Model for Case 2 Interval-censored Failure Time Data" Abstract (MS-Word docx format). Abstract (text).

Spring 2015 Colloquia

  • April 17 (Friday), 1530-1630 (3:30-4:30pm), Swearingen 1C01 (Amoco Hall), John Hodgson, Blizzard Entertainment. "Games? Serious Games?" Abstract (MS-Word docx format). Abstract (text).
  • April 10 (Friday), 1450-1605 (2:50-4:05pm), Swearingen 2A05, Alberto Quattrini Li, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Minnesota. "On the Study, Design, and Evaluation of Exploration Strategies for Autonomous Mobile Robots." Abstract (MS-Word docx format). Abstract (text).
  • February 13 (Friday), 0930-1100, Swearingen1A03 (Faculty Lounge), Gregory Gay, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Minnesota. "Steering Model-Based Test Oracles to Admit Real Program Behaviors." Abstract (MS-Word docx format). Abstract (text).
  • February 6 (Friday), 0930-1100, Swearingen1A03 (Faculty Lounge), Mai Zheng, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, The Ohio State University. "Torturing Storage Systems for Fun and Profit." Abstract (MS-Word docx format). Abstract (text).
  • January 30 (Friday), 0930-1100, Swearingen1A03 (Faculty Lounge), Daniel Wong, Department of Electrical Engineering, University of Southern California. "Energy Proportional Datacenters." Abstract (MS-Word docx format). Abstract (text).
  • January 23 (Friday), 0930-1100, Swearingen1A03 (Faculty Lounge), Yingjie Lao, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Minnesota. "Design of Secure and Anti-Counterfeit Integrated Circuits." Abstract (MS-Word docx format). Abstract (text).

Fall 2014 Colloquia

  • November 21 (Friday), 1530-1630 (3:30-4:30pm), Swearingen1A03 (Faculty Lounge), Tian He, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Minnesota. "Research Challenges in Low-Duty-Cycle Networks." Abstract (MS-Word docx format). Abstract (text).
  • November 14 (Friday), 1530-1630 (3:30pm-4:30pm), Swearingen1C01 (Amoco Hall), Chase Gray, DroneDeploy. "Controlling Drones across the World with Javascript." Abstract (MS-Word docx format). Abstract (text).
  • September 24 (Wednesday), 1400-1500 (2pm-3pm), Swearingen1A03 (Faculty Lounge), Dipti Patra, Electrical Engineering Department, National Institute of Technology Rourkela. "Super-Resolution Image Reconstruction." Abstract (MS-Word docx format). Abstract (text).

Spring 2014 Colloquia

  • March 28 (Friday), 1430-1520 (2:30pm-3:20pm), Swearingen 2A15, Mingfu Shao, Laboratory of Computational Biology and Bioinformatics. "On the Edit Distance between Genomes with Duplicate Genes." Abstract (MS-Word docx format). Abstract (text).
  • March 17 (Monday), 1345-1445 (1:45pm-2:45pm), Swearingen 1A03 (Faculty Lounge), Kirk Cameron, Department of Computer Science, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University. "Pushing Water up Mountains: Energy Oddities and Green High Performance Computing." Abstract (MS-Word docx format). Abstract (text).
  • Colloquium Canceled due to Inclement Weather February 11 (Tuesday), 1700-1800 (5pm-6pm), Swearingen 1A03 (Faculty Lounge), Nancy Amato, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Texas A&M University. "Sampling-Based Motion Planning: From Intelligent CaD to Crowd Simulation to Protein Folding." Abstract (MS-Word docx format). Abstract (text).

Fall 2013 Colloquia

Spring 2013 Colloquia

  • April 25, 2013 (Thursday), 1400-1500 (2pm-3pm), Swearingen 1A03 (Faculty Lounge), Subrahmanyam Bulusu, Department of Earth and Ocean Sciences, University of South Carolina. "Measuring Salinity from Space." Abstract (MS-Word format). Abstract (text).
  • April 11, 2013 (Thursday) 1400-1500 (2pm-3pm), Swearingen 1A03 (Faculty Lounge), Lantao Liu Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Texas A&M University. "Coordinating Multi-robot Systems: New Developments in Task Allocation." Abstract (MS-Word format). Abstract (text).
  • April 4, 2013 (Thursday) 1330-1430 (1:30pm-2:30pm), Swearingen 3D05, Jingjin Yu Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. "Combinatorial Structures and Filter Design in Information Spaces." Abstract (MS-Word format). Abstract (text).
  • March 28, 2013 (Thursday) 1400-1530 (2:00pm-3:30pm), Swearingen 1A03 (Faculty Lounge), Ioannis Rekleitis School of Computer Science, McGill University. "Algorithmic Robotics: Enabling Autonomy in Challenging Environments." Abstract (pdf format). Abstract (text).
  • March 20, 2013 (Wednesday) 1430-1530 (2:30pm-3:30pm), Swearingen 2A31, Jenay Beer School of Psychology. Georgia Institute of Technology. "Aging in Place: The Potential for Robots as Assistive Technology." Abstract (MS-Word format). Abstract (text).
  • March 7, 2013 (Thursday) 1430-1530 (2:30pm-3:30pm), Swearingen 1A03 (Faculty Lounge), Cory Henson Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Wright State University. "A Semantics-based Approach to Machine Perception." Abstract (MS-Word format). Abstract (text).

Fall 2012 Colloquia

  • October 9, 2012 (Tuesday) 1430-1530 (2:30pm-3:30pm), Swearingen 3A75, GQ Zhang Department of Computer Science, Case Western Reserve University. "Ontology-driven Data Integration in Biomedicine."

Department of Computer Science and Engineering: Spring 2012 Colloquia

Department of Computer Science and Engineering: Fall 2011 Colloquia

  • March 28, 2012 (Friday) 1500-1600 (3pm-4pm), Swearingen 1A03 (Faculty Lounge), Dong Xu Department of Computer Science, University of Missouri. "Prediction of Protein Structures and Modifications" Abstract (MS-Word format). Abstract (text).
  • February 10, 2012 (Friday) 1430-1530 (2:30pm-3:30pm), Swearingen 1A03 (Faculty Lounge), John W. Sheppard Department of Computer Science, Montana State University. "Prognostics and Health Management: Models, Maintenance, and Maturation" Abstract (MS-Word format). Abstract (text).
  • February 3, 2012 (Friday) 1430-1530 (2:30pm-3:30pm), Swearingen 1A03 (Faculty Lounge), Matt E. Thatcher Department of Computer Information Systems, University of Louisville. "A Model of Optimal Software Patent Policy" Abstract (MS-Word format). Abstract (text).
  • January 11, 2012 (Wednesday) 1430-1530 (2:30pm-3:30pm), Swearingen 1A03 (Faculty Lounge), Matthias Klusch German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI). "Intelligent Service Coordination in the Future Internet" Abstract (MS-Word format). Abstract (text).
  • December 2, 2011 (Friday) 1430-1530 (2:30pm-3:30pm), Swearingen 1A03 (Faculty Lounge), Marouane Kessentini Qatar University. "Search-Based Transformation by Example" Abstract (MS-Word format). Abstract (text).
  • November 18, 2011 (Friday) 11:00-noon, Swearingen 1C01 (Amoco Hall), Juan E Vargas Microsoft Technology and Policy Group. "Innovation and Cloud Computing" Abstract (MS-Word format). Abstract (text).
  • November 18, 2011 (Friday) 1430-1530 (2:30pm-3:30pm), Swearingen 2A27, Ron Alterovits University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. "Computing Motions for Healthcare Robots" Abstract (MS-Word format). Abstract (text).
  • November 4, 2011 (Friday) 11-noon, Swearingen 1C01 (Amoco Hall), Rodney Naramore Federal Bureau of Investigations. "The FBI Cyber Crime Program." Abstract (MS-Word format). Abstract (text).
  • November 4, 2011 (Friday) 1430-1530, 300 Main B213, Gabriel Terejanu Institute for Computational Engineering and Sciences, The University of Texas at Austin. "Integrated Methodology for Building Confidence in the Predictive Capability of Computational Models." Abstract (MS-Word format). Abstract (text).
  • October 27, 2011 (Thursday) 1515-1615, Swearingen 1C02 (Amoco Hall), Stan Birchfield Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Clemson University. "Monocular Vision Modules for Mobile Robotics Applications." Abstract (MS-Word format). Abstract (text).
  • October 7, 2011 (Thursday) 1100-1215, Swearingen 1C02 (Amoco Hall), Dennis A. Roberson Department of Computer Science, Illinois Institute of Technology. "Social Networking Driven Trends in Wireless Broadband Networks." Abstract (MS-Word format). Abstract (text).
  • October 7, 2011 (Thursday) 1430-1530, Swearingen 2A27, Dennis A. Roberson Department of Computer Science, Illinois Institute of Technology. "IIT’s Spectrum Observatory: Lessons Learned from Four Years of Monitoring the Spectrum Occupancy in the City of Chicago." Abstract (MS-Word format). Abstract (text).

Department of Computer Science and Engineering: Summer 2011 Colloquia

  • May 25, 2011 (Wednesday) 1500-1600, Swearingen 1A03 (Faculty Lounge), Max Alekseyev Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of South Carolina. "Computational Challenges and Advances in Genome Assembly from Short Reads." Abstract (MS-Word format). Abstract (text).

Department of Computer Science and Engineering: Past Spring 2011 Colloquia

  • April 22, 2011 (Friday) 11-12 (noon), Swearingen 3D05 (Staff Lounge). Raheem Beyah, Department of Computer Science, Georgia State University. "A Passive Approach to Wireless Device Fingerprinting." Abstract (pdf format). Abstract (MS-Word format). Abstract (text).
  • April 13, 2011 (Wednesday) 1600-1700, Swearingen 1A03 (Faculty Lounge) Christopher King and Michael J. Sechrest, Interactive Data Visualization, Inc. "One Great Developer is Worth a Thousand Good Ones: Tips for Starting Down the Right Path." Abstract (MS-Word format). Abstract (text).
  • April 8, 2011 (Friday) 1430-1530, Swearingen 2A31. Jianjun Hu, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of South Carolina. "Machine Learning and Data Mining in Protein Bioinformatics." Abstract (MS-Word format). Abstract (text).
  • April 1, 2011 (Friday) 1430-1530, Sloan 112 1A03. Lindsey Hudson, Linguistic Program, University of South Carolina. "Wordify! Morphology Meets Ludology." Abstract (MS-Word format). Abstract (text).
  • April 1, 2011 (Friday) 13-14, Swearingen 1A03 (Faculty Lounge) Nicole Dean, Deputy Director, National Cyber Security Divisionversity. "A Passive Approach to Wireless Device Fingerprinting." Abstract (MS-Word format). Abstract (text).
  • March 25, 2011 (Friday) 1430-1530, Swearingen 2A31. Song Wang, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of South Carolina. "Shape Matching and Classification: Algorithms and Performance Evaluation." Abstract (MS-Word format). Abstract (text).
  • March 4, 2011 (Friday) 1430-1530, Swearingen 2A31. Yan Tong, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of South Carolina. "Semi-Supervised Face Alignment for an Image Ensemble." Abstract (MS-Word format). Abstract (text). (Rescheduled from February 4, 2011).
  • February 25, 2011 (Friday) 1430-1530, Swearingen 1A03 (Faculty Lounge). Wolfgang Gentzsch, DEISA-2 (Distributed European Infrastructure for Supercomputing Applications) Consortium. "Building Sustainable e-Infrastructure for Research and Education." Abstract (MS-Word format). Abstract (text). Presentation (pptx, more than 5MB).
  • February 17, 2011 (Friday) 1430-1530, Swearingen 2A31. Curtis Merriweather, Emergent, Inc. "Cyber Security Concerns in the Global Marketplace." Presentation (ppt).
  • February 11, 2011 (Friday) 1430-1530, Swearingen 2A31. Jijun Tang, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of South Carolina. "Combinatorial and Statistical Approaches in Gene Rearrangement Analysis." Abstract (MS-Word format). Abstract (text).
  • February 4, 2011 (Friday) 1430-1530, Swearingen 2A31. Yan Tong, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of South Carolina. "Semi-Supervised Face Alignment for an Image Ensemble." Abstract (MS-Word format). Abstract (text). (Canceled; rescheduled to March 4, 2011).
  • January 28, 2011 (Friday) 1430-1530, Swearingen 2A31. Kuldar Taveter, Department of Informatics, Tallinn University of Technology. "Agent-Oriented Modeling for Social Grocery Shopping and Other Societal Information Systems." Abstract (MS-Word format). Abstract (text). Slides (pdf)

Department of Computer Science and Engineering: Fall 2010 Colloquia

  • December 1, 2010 (Monday) 1400-1530, Swearingen 1A03 (Faculty Lounge). Damjan Miklic, School of Electrical Engineering and Computing, University of Zagreb. "A Grid-Based Approach to Formation Control." Abstract (MS-Word format). Abstract (text).
  • October 11, 2010 (Monday) 1400-1530, Swearingen 1A03 (Faculty Lounge). Amy Apon, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Arkansas. "High Performance Cluster Modeling and Development." Abstract (MS-Word format). Abstract (text).
  • September 14, 2010 (Tuesday) 1530-1630, 300 Main Room B201. Yan Tong, Visualization and Computer Vision Lab, GE Global Research Center. "Affective Computing from Human Faces." Abstract (MS-Word format). Abstract (text).

Department of Computer Science and Engineering: Spring 2010 Colloquia

  • April 9, 2010 (Friday) 1430-1520, 300 Main, Room B102. Chin-Tser Huang, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of South Carolina. "Authentication and Privacy in WiMAX Networks." Abstract: Previous wireless networking technologies operated under a limited range, such as the popular WiFi, or at a limited speed, such as cellular networks. The IEEE 802.16 standard, more commonly known as WiMAX, is poised to overcome these restrictions and bring broadband access to much more households with its ability to transmit to a range of up to 30 miles at speeds as high as 75 Mbps. This represents a highly efficient solution as it allows an entire geographical area, such as a metropolitan city or rural town, to be effectively covered by a few base stations without individually laying high-speed cable to each building. Moreover, WiMAX supports two other significant functionalities in mobility and multicasting, which make it even more powerful and convenient to use. However, as the interest in and adoption of WiMAX rapidly increase, its security also becomes a growing concern, especially on the issues of authentication and privacy. In this talk, we will consider the authentication and privacy in WiMAX networks with three major components. First, we address the need of sufficient and efficient authentication and privacy for WiMAX networks by presenting several attack scenarios and discussing major schemes that provide authentication and privacy in wired networks. Second, we overview the security sublayer in the IEEE 802.16 standard, in particular its Privacy and Key Management protocols (PKM, and PKMv2 in the latest IEEE 802.16e), and reveal their vulnerabilities in face of several types of attacks. Third, we propose solutions to fix the aforementioned vulnerabilities of PKM and PKMv2, and present novel protocols aimed at providing authentication and privacy for multicasting and roaming situations in WiMAX networks. Evaluation results show that these new protocols perform more efficiently than the current standard.
  • April 2, 2010 (Friday) 1430-1520, 300 Main, Room B102. Jason Bakos, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of South Carolina. "Heterogeneous Computing: New Directions for Efficient and Scalable High-Performance Computing." Abstract: Until recently, Moore’s Law, coupled with advancements in computer architecture, has allowed the performance achieved with legacy software to continue to improve. However, current-generation microprocessors can no longer sustain growth in their per-thread performance, and in response there has been a fundamental shift towards scaling up the number of individual processor cores per CPU. However, each of these individual processor cores are still designed with the premise of extracting as much performance as possible from code that is oblivious to the underlying micro architecture, requiring a large portion of their real estate to be allocated to control logic and cache as opposed to computational units. Heterogeneous computing, which is the technique of combining special-purpose processors with general-purpose processors within the same computer system, offers the potential to boost the performance hundreds or thousands of times more efficiently than by simply scaling up the number of general-purpose processors. However, making this technique accessible to application programmers will require a new generation of specialized development tools and design methodologies that don’t yet exist. In this talk, I will present an overview of our work in heterogeneous computing, as well as provide a peek into what the future may hold for this field.
  • March 29, 2010 (Monday) 1600-1700, Swearingen 1A03 (Faculty Lounge). Norman McEntire, Servin Corporation. "The iPhone for Software Developers: A Live Coding Session!" (UPE Keynote Address. Abstract (MS-Word format). Abstract (text).
  • March 26, 2010 (Friday) 1430-1520, 300 Main, Room B102. John Rogers, School of Computer Science, DePaul University. "Constructive Logic." Abstract (MS-Word format). Abstract (text).
  • March 19, 2010 (Friday) 1430-1520, 300 Main, Room B102. Srihari Nelakuditi, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of South Carolina. "Breaking Away from Collision Avoidance: Towards Collision Detection in Wireless Networks." Abstract: Wireless networks are founded on the principles of collision avoidance. This talk presents an attempt to detect and abort collisions in wireless networks. Briefly, the receiver uses physical layer information to detect a collision, and immediately notifies the transmitter to abort the transmission. The collision notification consists of a unique signature, sent on the same frequency channel as the data. The transmitter uses a second listener antenna to discern this notification through signature correlation. The transmitter aborts, freeing the channel for other productive transmissions. A prototype testbed of 10 USRP/GNURadios demonstrates the feasibility and effectiveness of our approach. Bio: Srihari Nelakuditi received his Ph.D. from University of Minnesota, Minneapolis in Computer Science. He is currently an Associate Professor at University of South Carolina, Columbia. Srihari Nelakuditi is a recipient of the NSF CAREER Award in 2005. His current research focus is on making wired and wireless networks more resilient to failures/disruptions and more efficient in utilizing network resources.
  • February 19, 2010 (Friday) 1430-1520, 300 Main, Room B102. Jose Vidal, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of South Carolina. "Multiagent Systems." Abstract: In this talk, Dr. Vidal will present some of his current research projects in collaborative knowledge systems, supply chains, and agent-based traffic models.
  • February 12, 2010 (Friday) 1430-1520, 300 Main, Room B102. Derk A. Edwards, ManTech International Corporation. "What does not Work in Information Security." Biosketch: Derek Edwards has been a Computer Forensics Intrusion Analyst with ManTech International for the past eight years, where he has served as an incident handler at the U.S. Departments of Justice and State. At State, he contributed to the team that won the 2004 Frank B. Rowlett Trophy for Organizational Achievement, presented by the National Security Agency.
  • February 5, 2010 (Friday) 1430-1520, 300 Main, Room B102. John Rose, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of South Carolina. "De Novo Peptide Sequencing: Informatics and Pattern Recognition Applied to Protemics." Abstract: Tandem mass spectrometry(MS/MS) is the engine driving high-throughput protein identification. The samples from which the data are derived may contain complex mixtures of thousands of proteins. Moreover, in environmental samples proteins may derive from multiple species. These protein mixtures (with or without prior separation) are treated with proteolytic enzymes, cutting the proteins into smaller peptides of size manageable by current MS/MS technology. The peptides are then analyzed generating MS/MS spectra. The task of determining the identity of the peptide from its spectrum is currently the weak point in the process. Current approaches to de novo sequencing are able to compute candidate peptides efficiently. The problem lies in the limitations of current scoring functions. In this presentation we introduce the concept of proteome signature. By examining proteins and compiling proteome signatures (amino acid usage) it is possible to characterize likely combinations of amino acids and better distinguish between candidate peptides. Our results strongly support the hypothesis that a scoring function that considers amino acid usage patterns is better able to distinguish between candidate peptides. This in turn leads to higher accuracy in peptide prediction.
  • January 29, 2010 (Friday) 1430-1520, 300 Main, Room B102. Song Wang, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of South Carolina. "Shape Matching and Classification: Algorithms and Performance Evaluation." Abstract: In this talk, I will go over some recent advances on 2D shape matching and classification, which have important applications in computer vision, image processing, and pattern recognition. With these new advances made by different research groups, we can more robustly quantify shape similarity under various Noise, occlusions and nonrigid shape deformation. At the end, I will particularly introduce two new perceptually motivated strategies we recently developed for further improving shape matching and classification. I will also briefly introduce the MPEG7 shape benchmark and the associated bull-eye testing that are widely used for evaluating and comparing the performance of the different shape matching and classification algorithms.
  • January 22, 2010 (Friday) 1430-1520, 300 Main, Room B102. Stephen A. Fenner, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of South Carolina. "Entanglement, Teleportation, and Quantum Channels." Abstract: About a year ago, Matthew Hastings discovered superadditive quantum channels, resolving a long-standing open question in quantum information theory. Such channels can transmit more information when used in tandem than the combined amount of information that each channel can send individually. The key to superadditivity is that inputs to the channels are quantum states which are entangled, i.e., correlated in a uniquely quantum way. Quantum entanglement is a valuable resource for quantum information processing. I will introduce the notion of quantum entanglement and give some examples of its use in quantum information and computation, particularly, quantum teleporation. If time permits, I will also discuss how quantum channels can be superadditive.

Department of Computer Science and Engineering: Fall 2009 Colloquia

  • November 20, 2009 (Friday) 1430-1530, Lecture Hall 2A31 in Swearingen. Seven-Minute Madness, Part II. Presentation by departmental faculty, with topics to be determined. 1. Song Wang 2. Csilla Farkas 3. Jason Bakos 4. Jianjun Hu 5. John Bowles 6. Marco Valtorta 7. Chin-Tser Huang 8. Jijun Tang 9. Homayoun Valafar 10. Michael Huhns
  • November 13, 2009 (Friday) 1430-1530, Lecture Hall 2A31 in Swearingen. Seven-Minute Madness, Part I. Presentation by departmental faculty: 1. Srihari Nelakuditi, "Research on Emerging Networks" 2. Steve Fenner, "Quantum Computing and Information" 3. Duncan Buell, "Digital Gaming for the Humanities" 4. Jose Vidal, "Multiagent Systems" 5. John Rose, "Applications of Information and Pattern Recognition in Biological Systems" 6. Wenyuan Xu, "Wireless networking and Security" 7. Manton Matthews, "Natural Language and Parallel Processing"
  • November 6, 2009 (Friday), 1530-1630, Sloan 112. Julia Hirschberg, Department of Computer Science, Columbia University. "Detecting Deception from Speech: Humans vs. Machines." Co-sponsored by the USC Linguistics Program, the Center for Digital Humanities, and the Department of Computer Science and Engineering. Flyer (pdf format).
  • November 5, 2009 (Thursday), 1530-1630, BA 584. Julia Hirschberg, Department of Computer Science, Columbia University. "Modeling Turn-Taking Behavior in Spoken Dialogue Systems." Co-sponsored by the USC Linguistics Program, the Center for Digital Humanities, and the Department of Computer Science and Engineering. Speaker biography: I am a professor in the Department of Computer Science at Columbia University, currently on sabbatical at KTH in Stockholm. I received my PhD in Computer Science from the University of Pennsylvania, after previously doing a PhD in sixteenth-century Mexican social history at the University of Michigan and teaching history at Smith. I worked at Bell Laboratories and AT&T Laboratories -- Research from 1985-2003 as a Member of Technical Staff and a Department Head, creating the Human-Computer Interface Research Department there. I served as editor-in-chief of Computational Linguistics from 1993-2003 and was an editor-in-chief of Speech Communication from 2003-2006 and am now on the Editorial Board. I was on the Executive Board of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) from 1993-2003, have been on the Permanent Council of International Conference on Spoken Language Processing (ICSLP) since 1996, and served on the board of the International Speech Communication Association (ISCA) from 1999-2007 (as President 2005-2007). I am on the board of the CRA-W and have been active in working for diversity at AT&T and at Columbia. I have been a fellow of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence since 1994 and an ISCA Fellow since 2008. I received a Columbia Engineering School Alumni Association (CESAA) Distinguished Faculty Teaching Award in 2009.
  • November 3, 2009 (Tuesday) 1100-1200, Swearingen 2A18. Karim Mahrous, Sandia National Laboratories. "Sandia's Research Efforts in Serious Games and Multiagent Simulation." Biography of the speaker: Karim Mahrous graduated from the University of California, Davis (UCD) in 2000 with degrees in Computer Science and Mathematics. He received his Masters in 2004 and Ph.D. in 2006 from the Department of Computer Science at UCD. While a graduate student he was a member of the Visualization and Graphics Research Group in the Institute for Data Analysis and Visualization (IDAV). His major area of research is vector field topology with an emphasis on identification of topological structures. Dr. Mahrous worked for Electronic Arts (EA) at the Maxis and EARS studio in Redwood City, CA. While there he established several relationships between EA and IDAV including fellowships, research projects and the graduate level computer science course "Rendering Topics in Interactive Entertainment" which he co-taught. His credits include work on "Godfather: The Game", "The Simpson Game", and "Simcity 4 Rush Hour - Simcity 4 Deluxe" Dr. Mahrous currently works for Sandia National Laboratories, California. While there he spends time working with universities by advising student thesis projects and establishing curricula that create students prepared for the interactive entertainment industry. His website is http://karimmahrous.org.
  • October 30, 2009 (Friday) 1430-1530 (2:30pm-3:30pm) Swearingen 2A31. Romit Roy Choudhury, Departments Electrical and Computer Engineering and of Computer Science, Duke University. "Designing a Virtual Information Telescope Using Mobile Phones and Social Participation." Abstract (MS-Word format). Abstract (text).
  • October 23, 2009 (Friday) 1430-1530, Swearingen 2A31. Stephen Fenner, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of South Carolina. "Entaglement and Quantum Channels." Abstract: In late Fall 2008, superadditive quantum channels were discovered, resolving a long-standing open question in quantum information theory. Such channels can transmit more information when used in tandem than the combined amount of information that each channel can send individually. The key to superadditivity is that inputs to the channels are quantum states which are entangled, i.e., correlated in a uniquely quantum way. Quantum entanglement is a valuable resource for quantum information processing. I will introduce the notion of quantum entanglement and give some examples of its use in quantum information and computation. If time permits, I will also discuss how quantum channels can be superadditive.
  • October 16, 2009 (Friday) 1430-1530, Swearingen 2A31. Song Wang, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of South Carolina. "3D Open-Surface Shape Correspondence for Statistical Shape Modeling: Identifying Topologically Consistent Landmarks." Abstract: Shape correspondence, which aims at accurately identifying corresponding landmarks from a given population of shape instances, is a very challenging step in constructing a statistical shape model such as the Point Distribution Model. The state-of-the-art methods such as MDL and SPHARM are primarily focused on closed-surface shape correspondence. In this talk, I am going to introduce a novel method aimed at identifying accurately corresponding landmarks on 3D open-surfaces with a closed boundary. In particular, we enforce explicit topology consistency on the identified landmarks to ensure that they form a simple, consistent triangle mesh to more accurately model the correspondence of the underlying continuous shape instances. The proposed method also ensures the correspondence of the boundary of the open surfaces. I am going to report the performance of the proposed method in constructing a statistical shape model of the human diaphragm from 26 shape instances.
  • October 2, 2009 (Friday) 1430-1530, Swearingen 2A31. Jason O'Kane, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of South Carolina. "Navigation and Tracking with Simple Mobile Robots." Abstract: As robots interact with the physical world, their usefulness depends on how effectively they can sense and move through their environments. Unfortunately, sensors provide only limited (and sometimes incorrect) information. Therefore, for robots to be useful, they must act effectively in spite of uncertainty about the world. This reality motivates a careful study of the information requirements of the problems we intend to solve. In this talk, Dr. O'Kane will present several lines of recent research that make progress toward this goal. First, he will present a navigation problem in which a robot with very simple sensing capabilities moves through its environment, using certain features along the way to counteract the effects of uncertainty in its motions. Second, he will discuss new techniques for tracking unpredictable targets that allow a robot to effectively collaborate with an ambient sensor network. Finally, Dr. O'Kane will speculate about several future research directions.
  • September 24, 2009 (Thursday) 10-11am, Swearingen 1A03 (Faculty Lounge). Leon Sterling, Department of Computer Science and Software Engineering, University of Melbourne. "The Art of Agent-Oriented Modeling." Abstract (MS-Word format). Abstract (text).
  • September 18, 2009 (Friday) 1430-1530, Swearingen 2A31. Jijun Tang, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of South Carolina. "Phylogenetic Reconstruction from Gene Rearrangement Events." Abstract: Rearrangement of genes under reversal, transposition, and other operations are known to be an important evolutionary mechanism and have attracted great interests from evolutionary biologists and comparative genomicists. In this talk, I will discuss the details of our branch-and-bound methods that provide accurate solution to the multichromosomal phylogeny problems, along with experimental results on both simulated and biological datasets. I will also discuss new statistical approaches to assess the quality of phylogenies obtained from rearrangement data.
  • September 11, 2009 (Friday) 1430-1530 (2:30-3:30pm), Swearingen 2A31. Jeffrey Mark Siskind, School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Purdue University. "Automatic Differentiation of Functional Programs or Lambda, the Ultimate Calculus." Abstract (MS-Word format). Abstract (text).
  • CSCE 791 Seminar series, Fall 2009. CSCE 791 is a seminar class for graduate students but is open to all CSE students and the public at large. Seminars are held on Fridays, 2:30 to 3:30pm in Swearingen 2A31.

Department of Computer Science and Engineering: Spring 2009 Colloquia

  • CSCE 791 Seminar series, Spring 2009. CSCE 791 is a seminar class for graduate students but is open to all CSE students and the public at large. Seminars are held on Fridays, 2:30 to 3:30pm in Swearingen 2A31.
  • April 23, 2009 (Thursday) 1600-1700 (4:00-5:00pm), Swearingen 1A20 (Video Conference Center). Grayson Randall, Insight Technologies, Inc. "Autonomous Vehicles: When Will Your Car Drive You?" Abstract (MS-Word format). Abstract (text).
  • March 27, 2009 (Friday), 1530-1630 (3:30-4:30pm), Swearingen 1A03 (Faculty Lounge). Jur van den Berg, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, "Reciprocal Velocity Obstacles for Real-Time Multiagent Navigation." Abstract (MS-Word format). Abstract (text). Canceled by the speaker.
  • February 10, 2009 (Tuesday), 1530-1700 (3:30-5pm), Swearingen 1A03 (Faculty Lounge). Jack Lutz, Iowa State University, "Computational Aspects of Nanoscale Self-Assembly." Abstract (MS-Word format). Abstract (text).

Department of Computer Science and Engineering: Fall 2008 Colloquia

  • September 12, 2008 (Friday) 3:30-4:30pm, Lecture Hall B201 in 300 Main Street. Seven-Minute Madness. Presentation by departmental faculty: Jose Vidal (Negotiation Networks), John Bowles (Software Verification and Validation), Homayoun Valafar (Computational Biology and Medicine), Jason Bakos (Reconfigurable Computing), Srihari Nelakuditi (ARENA for Research on Emerging Networks and Applications), Marco Valtorta (Graphical Probabilistic Models for Hypothesis Management), Jianjun Hu (Data Mining and Pattern Discovery in Genomics Data), Chin-Tser Huang (Practically Useful Network Security), Gang Quan (Real-Time and Embedded System Design), Jason O'Kane (Planning in Robotics), and Steve Fenner (The Limits of Computation).
  • September 5, 2008 (Friday) 3:30-4:30pm, Lecture Hall B201 in 300 Main Street. Seven-Minute Madness. Presentation by departmental faculty: Duncan Buell (Chair), Michael Huhns (Agents and the Semantic Web), Jijun Tang (Phylogenetic Reconstruction, Medical Imaging Processing and Computer Games), John Rose (Genomics and Proteomics), Csilla Farkas (Information Assurance), Caroline Eastman (Search in Multifaceted Information Spaces), Wenyuan Xu (Wireless Networking and Security), Song Wang (Research in the USC Computer Vision Lab), and Manton Matthews (Natural Language, Logic and the Web).

Department of Computer Science and Engineering: Spring 2008 Colloquia

  • May 5, 2008 (Monday) 1530-1700 (3:30-5pm), Lecture Hall B213 in 300 Main Street Building. Max Alekseyev, University of California, San Diego, "Genome Rearrangements: from Biological Problems to Combinatorial Algorithms (and back)." Abstract (MS-Word format). Abstract (text).
  • April 24, 2008 (Thursday) 1530-1700 (3:30-5pm), Swearingen 3C02 (Chemical Engineering Conference Room). Douglas W. Raiford, Wright State University, "Algorithmic Techniques Employed in the Detection and Characterization of Global Evolutionary Forces." Abstract (MS-Word format). Abstract (text).
  • April 10, 2008 (Thursday) 1530-1700, Swearingen 3C02 (Chemical Engineering Conference Room). Xuefeng Zhou, Washington University, "Study of microRNAs: A Biology Problem with Computational Challenges." Abstract (MS-Word format). Abstract (text).
  • April 2, 2008 (Wednesday) 1430-1530, Swearingen 1A03 (Faculty Lounge). Bill Gasarch, University of Maryland at College Park, "Multiparty Communication Complexity." Abstract (MS-Word format). Abstract (text).
  • March 25, 2008 (Tuesday) 1300-1400, Swearingen 1A03 (Faculty Lounge). H. Van Dyke Parunak, New Vectors, "Exploring and Exploiting 'The Several Branches'." Abstract (MS-Word format). Abstract (text). This is the keynote talk for the Upsilon Pi Epsilon initiation ceremony for new members. Upsilon Pi Epsilon is the Honor Society for the Computing Sciences. The talk is open to the public.
  • January 17, 2008 (Thursday) 1500-1600, Swearingen 1A03 (Faculty Lounge). Brian Blake, Department of Computer Science, Georgetown University, "Towards The Matrix: Intelligent Agents and Augmented Reality to Enhance Human Learning Performance." Abstract (MS-Word format). Abstract (text)
  • January 24, 2008 (Thursday) 1400-1500, Lecture Hall B103 in 300 Main Street Building. Michael W. Berry, Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, University of Tennessee, "Topic Detection and Tracking Using Nonnegative Matrix and Tensor Factorizations." Abstract (MS-Word format). Abstract (text).

Department of Computer Science and Engineering: Fall 2007 Colloquia

Department of Computer Science and Engineering: Fall 2006 Colloquia

USC Times site, with Link to Calendar of Colloquia, Lectures, Etc.

Department of Computer Science and Engineering: Past Spring 2006 Colloquia

  • September 7, 2007 (Friday) 3:30-4:30pm, Lecture Hall B201 in 300 Main Street. Seven-Minute Madness. Presentation by departmental faculty: Duncan Buell (Chair), Steve Fenner (The Limits of Computation), Csilla Farkas (Information Assurance), Jose Vidal (Automated negotiations and combinatorial auctions), Caroline Eastman (Search in Multifaceted Information Spaces), John Rose (Genomics and Proteomics), Chin-Tser Huang (Practically Useful Network Security), Jijun Tang (Phylogenetic Reconstruction, Medical Imaging Processing and Computer Games), and Gang Quan (Power aware real-time embedded system design).
  • September 11, 2007 (Tuesday) 1530-1630, Coker Life Sciences Building Room CLS 005. Bernard Moret, Laboratory for Computational Biology and Bioinformatics, École Polytecnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), A Computational View of Phylogenetic Reconstruction, Comparative Genomics, and Whole-genome Evolution at the Level of Genes." Tri-fold announcement (MS-Word format).
  • September 13, 2007 (Thursday) 1530-1630, Swearingen Building Room 3A75. John Rogers, Department of Computer Science, DePaul University, "How to Use Kolmogorov Complexity to Perform (Almost) Content-free Phylogenetics." Abstract (MS-Word format). Abstract (text).
  • September 14, 2007 (Friday) 3:30-4:30pm, Lecture Hall B201 in 300 Main Street. Seven-Minute Madness. Presentation by departmental faculty: Marco Valtorta (Graphical Probabilistic Models for Hypothesis Management), Michael Huhns (Agents and the Semantic Web), Song Wang (Research in the USC Computer Vision Lab), Wenyuan Xu (Wireless networking and security), Jason Bakos (Reconfigurable Computing), Srihari Nelakuditi (ARENA for Research on Emerging Networks and Applications), Jianjun Hu (Computational Genomics and Computational Evolution), Jason O'Kane (Robotics and Autonomous Systems), Homayoun Valafar (Computational Biology and Medicine), and Manton Matthews (Natural Language, Logic and the Web).
  • October 18, 2007 (Thursday) 1530-1730, Lecture Hall B213, 300 Main Street Building. Special event on computing for insurance applications, including: Paul Beinat, NeuronWorks International, "Advancing the Frontiers of Machine Learning: Applying Artificial Intelligence Techniques to Insurance Regression Problems." Event announcement (pdf). Paul Beinat's biographical sketch (MS-Word format)
  • August 23, 2006 (Wednesday) 1500-1600, Faculty Lounge (Swearingen 1A03). Andras Lorincz, Faculty of Informatics, Eotvos University, "Goal-Oriented Self-Organizing Distributed Systems: A Study with Internet Crawlers." Abstract (MS-Word format). Abstract (text).
  • August 25, 2006 (Friday) 1000-1100, Swearingen 2A22. Andras Lorincz, Faculty of Informatics, Eotvos University, "Accountable Surveillance for a Safe Brave New World." Abstract (MS-Word format). Abstract (text).
  • August 25, 2006 (Friday) 2:30-3:45pm, Lecture Hall B213 in 300 Main Street. Seven-Minute Madness. Presentation by departmental faculty: Michael Huhns (Multiagent Systems), Caroline Eastman (Effective Web Searching), Larry Stephens (Ontology Reconciliation for Security in Vehicular Ad-Hoc Networks), Marco Valtorta (Bayesian Networks), Srihari Nelakuditi (Computer Networks), Song Wang (Computer Vision and Medical Imaging), Tiecheng Liu (Video Analysis and Information Retrieval), Chin-Tser Huang (Secure Protocol Implementation & Development), and Homayoun Valafar (Computational Protein Folding).
  • September 8, 2006 (Friday) 2:30-3:45pm, Lecture Hall B213 in 300 Main Street. Seven-Minute Madness. Presentations by Departmental Faculty: Duncan Buell (Reconfigurable Computing), Jason Bakos (Special-Purpose Parallel Architectures), Gang Quan (Real-time and Embedded System Design), John Rose (Viruses: The Real Deal), Jijun Tang (Phylogenetic Reconstruction for Complex Genome Arrangement Events), Jose Vidal (Automated Negotiation Networks), Steve Fenner (Theoretical Computer Science), Csilla Farkas (Information Assurance on the Web), and Manton Matthews (Natural Language Processing).
  • April 19, 2006 (Thursday) 1600-1700, Amoco Hall (Swearingen 1C01). UPE Induction Lecture : James Clark, Next Up Ventures, Title TBA.
  • April 14, 2006 (Friday) 1600-1700, Amoco Hall (Swearingen 1C01). Juan Gilbert, Department of Computer Science and Software Engineering, Auburn University. "Application Quest: Computing Diversity." Abstract (MS-Word format). Abstract (text).
  • March 23, 2006 (Thursday) 1100-1200, Faculty Lounge (Swearingen 1A03). Orhan Camoglu, Department of Computer Science, University of California at Santa Barbara. "Discovering Functional Relationships among Proteins Using Computational Techniques." Abstract (MS-Word format). Abstract (text).
  • March 16, 2006 (Thursday) 1100-1200, Faculty Lounge (Swaeringen 1A03). Wenrui Gong, Department of Computer Engineering, University of California at Santa Barbara. "Synthesizing DSP Applications onto Reconfigurable Computing Systems." Abstract (MS-Word format). Abstract (text).
  • March 1, 2006 (Wednesday) 1600-1700, Amoco Hall (Swearingen 1C01). Ananth Kalyanaraman, Department of Computer Engineering, Iowa State University. "Parallel Methods in Computational Genomics." Abstract (MS-Word format). Abstract (text).
  • February 24, 2006 (Friday) 1430-1530, Amoco Hall (Swearingen 1C01). David Penry, Department of Computer Science, Princeton University. "Exploiting Structure and Parallelism to Accelerate Microarchitectural Simulation." Abstract (MS-Word format). Abstract (text).
  • February 20, 2006 (Monday) 1325-1425, Faculty Lounge (Swearingen 1A03). Lesley Shannon, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Toronto. "Leveraging Configurability in the System Design Process." Abstract (MS-Word format). Abstract (text).
  • February 17, 2006 (Friday) 1430-1530, Amoco Hall (Swearingen 1C01). Romit Roy Choudhury, Department of Computer Science, University of Illinois. "Utilizing Beanforming Antennas for Wireless Multihop Networks." Abstract (MS-Word format). Abstract (text).
  • January 13, 2006 (Friday) 1530-1630, Faculty Lounge (Swearingen 1A03). Stefan Andrei, Department of Computer Science, National University of Singapore. "Verification and Debugging of Real-Time Specifications." Abstract (MS-Word format). Abstract (text).

USC Times site, with Link to Calendar of Colloquia, Lectures, Etc.

Department of Computer Science and Engineering: Past Fall 2005 Colloquia

Department of Computer Science and Engineering: Past Spring 2005 Colloquia

  • November 18, 2005 (Friday) 4pm-5pm, Faculty Lounge (1A03). Subramhmanyam Bulusu, Marine Science Program, Department of Geological Sciences, University of South Carolina, "Satellite Oceanography and Ocean Models." Abstract (MS-Word format). Abstract (text).
  • April 1, 2005 (Friday) 2:30-4pm, Moore School of Business Close/Hipp Building Room BA 005. UPE Induction Lecture : Alan Cooper, "Ending the Death March." Abstract (MS-Word format). Abstract (text).
  • March 25, 2005 (Friday) 3:30pm-4:30pm, Faculty Lounge (1A03). Yang Cao, Department of Computer Science, University of California, Santa Barbara. "Multiscale Stochastic Simulation of Biochemical Systems." Abstract (MS-Word format). Abstract (text).
  • March 28, 2005 (Monday) 1pm-2pm, Faculty Lounge (1A03). Partha Pratim Pande, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of British Columbia. "Network on Chip: A New Direction in System on Chip Design." Abstract (MS-Word format). Abstract (text).
  • March 18, 2005 (Friday) 3:30pm-4:30pm, Faculty Lounge (1A03). Jason Bakos, Department of Computer Science, University of Pittsburgh. "Lightweight Hierarchical Error Control Codes for Multi-Bit Differential Channels." Abstract (MS-Word format). Abstract (text).
  • March 4, 2005 (Friday) 3:30pm-4:30pm, Faculty Lounge (1A03). Xiong Hui, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Minnesota. "Association Pattern Discovery: Algorithms and Applications in Bioinformatics." Abstract (MS-Word format). Abstract (text).
  • February 28, 2005 (Monday) 1pm-2pm, Faculty Lounge (1A03). Naren Kodali, Department of Information and Software Engineering, George Mason University. "Enforcing Semantics Aware Security in Multimedia Documents." Abstract (MS-Word format). Abstract (text).
  • February 25, 2005 (Friday) 3:30pm-4:30pm, Faculty Lounge (1A03). Fei Dai, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Florida Atlantic University. "Local Construction of Connected Dominating Sets in Wireless ad Hoc Networks." Abstract (MS-Word format). Abstract (text).
  • February 21, 2005 (Monday) 1pm-2pm, Faculty Lounge (1A03). Anurag Tiwari, Sun Microsystems. "Low Power FPGA Design Techniques for Embedded Systems." Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Computer Science, University of Cincinnati. "Low Power FPGA Design Techniques for Embedded Systems." Abstract (MS-Word format). Abstract (text).
  • February 18, 2005 (Friday) 2:30-4pm, Swearingen Amoco Hall (SWGN 1C01). Distinguished Lecture Series: Kang C. Shin, Kevin and Nancy O'Connor Professor of Computer Science, University of Michigan. "Management and Applications of Sensor Networks." Contents of Trifold Brochure (MS-Word format). Announcement (MS-Word format). Abstract (text).
  • February 7, 2005 (Monday) 1pm-2pm, Faculty Lounge (1A03). Bo Hong, Department of Electrical Engineering, University of Southern California. "Adaptive Allocation of Independent Tasks in Distributed Computing Systems." Abstract (MS-Word format). Abstract (text).
  • February 4, 2005 (Friday) 2:30-4pm, Swearingen Amoco Hall (SWGN 1C01). Distinguished Lecture Series: Jack Dongarra, University Distinguished Professor, University of Tennessee. "Supercomputers and Clusters and Grids, Oh, My!" Contents of Trifold Brochure (MS-Word format). Announcement (MS-Word format). Abstract (text).
  • January 14, 2005 (Friday) 2:30-4pm, Swearingen Amoco Hall (SWGN 1C01). Postponed: to be rescheduled. Distinguished Lecture Series: Dan Reed, Chancellor's Eminent Professor, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. "Computing Challenges: Scalability and Interdisciplinary Applications." Contents of Trifold Brochure (MS-Word format). Abstract (text).

Department of Computer Science and Engineering: Fall 2004 Colloquia

Department of Computer Science and Engineering: Summer 2004 Colloquia

Department of Computer Science and Engineering: Spring 2004 Colloquia

  • November 19, 2004 (Friday) 2:30-4pm, Swearingen Amoco Hall (SWGN 1C01). Distinguished Lecture Series: Kim Boyer, Professor and Director, Signal Analysis and Machine Perception Laboratory, Ohio State University. "Automatic Measurement of Retinal Thickness and Optic Nervehead Geometry in Optical Coherence Tomography." Contents of Trifold Brochure (MS-Word format). Abstract (text).
  • November 12, 2004 (Friday) 2:30-4pm Swearingen Amoco Hall (SWGN 1C01). Distinguished Lecture Series: Jeffrey L. Thorne, Associate Professor of Genetics and Statistics, North Carolina State University. "Combining Protein Evolution and Protein Structure." Contents of Trifold Brochure (MS-Word format). Abstract (text).
  • October 29, 2004 (Friday) 3:30-4:30pm, Amoco Hall (Swearingen 1C01). Kirk Cameron, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of South Carolina. "High-performance, Power-aware Distributed Computing." Abstract (MS-Word format). Abstract (text).
  • September 10, 2004 (Friday) 2:30-3:45pm, Swearingen Amoco Hall (SWGN 1C01). Seven-Minute Madness. Presentations by Departmental Faculty: Caroline Eastman, Michael Huhns, Chin-Tser Huang, Homayoun Valafar, Marco Valtorta, Jijun Tang, Steve Fenner, Song Wang, Jose Vidal, Manton Matthews.
  • August 27, 2004 (Friday) 2:30-3:45pm, Swearingen Amoco Hall (SWGN 1C01). Seven-Minute Madness. Presentations by Departmental Faculty: John Bowles, Srihari Nelakuditi, Kirk Cameron, Jim Davis, and Duncan Buell.
  • August 19, 2004 (Thursday) 3:30-4:30pm, Faculty Lounge (Swearingen 1A03). Carrie Gates, CERT Research Center, Carnegie Mellon University, and Faculty of Computer Science, Dalhousie University. "Network Connectivity: Solving a Mystery." Abstract (MS-Word format). Abstract (text).
  • August 20, 2004 (Friday) 3:00-4:00pm, Faculty Lounge (Swearingen 1A03). John McHugh, CERT Research Center, Carnegie Mellon University. "Pyrite or Gold: It takes more than a pick or shovel." Abstract (MS-Word format). Abstract (text). Slides used in the talk (pdf format, local copy, courtesy of Dr. McHugh). Slides used in the talk (ppt format, local copy, courtesy if Dr. McHugh).
  • August 27, 2004 (Friday) 2:30-3:45pm, Swearingen Amoco Hall (SWGN 1C01). Seven-Minute Madness. Presentations by Departmental Faculty: John Bowles, Tiecheng Liu, Csilla Farkas, Srihari Nelakuditi, Kirk Cameron, Jim Davis, Duncan Buell.
  • September 27, 2004 (Monday) 1-2:30pm Faculty Lounge (Swearingen 1A03). Victor A. Skormin, Professor of Electrical Engineering, Binghamton University. "Modeling Active Immune Response with Computer Network Considerations." Abstract (MS-Word format). Abstract (text).
  • September 28, 2004 (Tuesday) 1-2:30pm Faculty Lounge (Swearingen 1A03). Victor A. Skormin, Professor of Electrical Engineering, Binghamton University. "Detecting Malicious Software by the Presence of the Gene of Self-Replication." Abstract (MS-Word format). Abstract (text).
  • September 29, 2004 (Wednesday) 1-2:30pm Faculty Lounge (Swearingen 1A03). Victor A. Skormin, Professor of Electrical Engineering, Binghamton University. "Singular Value Decomposition as a Tool for Anomaly Detection.." Abstract (MS-Word format). Abstract (text).
  • July 9, 2004 (Friday) 10:00-11:00am, Faculty Lounge (Swearingen 1A03). Paul Segars, Department of Radiology, Johns Hopkins University. "Medical Imaging Simulation of Mice and Men." Abstract (MS-Word format). Abstract (text).
  • August 6, 2004 (Friday) 3:30-4:30pm, Faculty Lounge (Swearingen 1A03). David Lowenthal, Department of Computer Science, University of Georgia. "Client-Centered Energy Savings for TCP Downloads." Abstract (MS-Word format). Abstract (text).
  • January 23, 2004 (Friday) 3:30-4:30pm, Faculty Lounge (Swearingen 1A03). Eva Czabarka, National Center for Biotechnology Information, U.S. National Library of Medicine. "Comparing the Efficiency of Database Retrieval Methods." Abstract (MS-Word format). Abstract (text).
  • February 6, 2004 (Friday) 3:30-4:30pm, Faculty Lounge (Swearingen 1A03). Christine Julien, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Washington University. "A Software Engineering Perspective on Context-Awareness in Ad Hoc Mobile Networks." Abstract (MS-Word format). Abstract (text).
  • February 16, 2004 (Monday) 10:00-11:00am, Faculty Lounge (Swearingen 1A03). Yuhua Chen, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Washington University. "Advanced Digital Designs in Optical Burst Switching Systems." Abstract (MS-Word format). Abstract (text).
  • February 20, 2004 (Friday) 3:30-4:30pm, Faculty Lounge (Swearingen 1A03). Jennifer M.C. Vendemia and Michael J. Schillaci, Department of Psychology, University of South Carolina. "Neuroscientific Modeling of Deception with HD-ERPs and fMRI: Experimental and Computational Problems." Abstract (MS-Word format). Abstract (text). PowerPoint Presentation, by permission of Drs. Vendemia and Schillaci.
  • February 23, 2004 (Monday) 3:30-4:30pm, Faculty Lounge (Swearingen 1A03). Jijun Tang, Department of Computer Science, University of New Mexico. "Large-scale Phylogeny Reconstruction from Arbitrary Gene-order Data." Abstract (MS-Word format). Abstract (text).
  • February 27, 2004 (Friday) 3:30-4:30pm, Faculty Lounge (Swearingen 1A03). Dieter Haemmerich, Department of Surgery, University of Wisconsin at Madison. "Computer Modeling of Radiofrequency Ablation." Abstract (MS-Word format). Abstract (text).
  • March 5, 2004 (Friday) 3:30-4:30pm, Faculty Lounge (Swearingen 1A03). James A. Bednar, Department of Computer Science, University of Texas at Austin. "Computational Maps in the Visual Cortex." Abstract (MS-Word format). Abstract (text).
  • March 15, 2004 (Monday) 3:30-4:30pm, Faculty Lounge (Swearingen 1A03). Qun Li, Department of Computer Science, Dartmouth College. "Mobility and Communication in Sensor Networks." Abstract (MS-Word format). Abstract (text).
  • March 19, 2004 (Friday) 3:30-4:30pm, Faculty Lounge (Swearingen 1A03). Songqing Chen, Department of Computer Science, College of William and Mary. "Design and Implementation of the Hyper-Proxy System for High Quality Streaming Media Delivery on the Internet." Abstract (MS-Word format). Abstract (text).
  • March 22, 2004 (Monday) 3:30-4:30pm, Faculty Lounge (Swearingen 1A03). Lonnie Welch, Stuckey Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, School of Engineering and Computer Science, Ohio University. "Adaptive Resource Management for Dynamic, Distributed Real-time Systems." Abstract (MS-Word format). Abstract (text).
  • March 26, 2004 (Friday) 3:30-4:30pm, Faculty Lounge (Swearingen 1A03). Homayoun Valafar, Department of Computer Science and Department of Biochemistry, University of Georgia. "Computational Methods in Structural Genomics: High Throughput Protein Structural Determination from NMR Spectra." Abstract (MS-Word format). Abstract (text).
  • March 29, 2004 (Monday) 2:00-4:00pm, Law School Auditorium. Bret Michael, Department of Computer Science, Naval Postgraduate School, and Tom Wingfield, Potomac Institute for Policy Studies. "Domestic and International Aspects of Homeland Security Law." Abstract (MS-Word format). Abstract (text).
  • April 5, 2004 (Monday) 3:30-4:30pm, Faculty Lounge (Swearingen 1A03). Shoudan Liang, Advanced Supercomputing Group, NASA Ames Research Center. "Simple Math is Enough: Two Examples of Inferring Functional Association from Genomic Data." Abstract (MS-Word format). Abstract (text).

Department of Computer Science and Engineering: Fall 2003 Colloquia

  • September 18, 2003 (Thursday) 3:30-4:30pm, Faculty Lounge (Swearingen 1A03). Ron Sass, Electrical and Computer Engineering Department, Clemson University. "Online Architectures: Run-Time Reconfiguration and Module Specialization Research at Clemson University." Abstract (MS-Word format). Abstract (text).
  • September 23, 2003 (Tuesday) 3:30-5:00pm, Swearingen Amoco Hall (SWGN 1C01). Seven-Minute Madness. Presentations by Departmental Faculty: Duncan Buell, Steve Fenner, Tiecheng Liu, Kirk Cameron, Jim Davis, Srihari Nelakuditi, Gang Quan, Song Wang.
  • October 3, 2003 (Friday) 3:30-4:30pm, Faculty Lounge (Swearingen 1A03). Stephen Fenner, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University. of South Carolina. "Gödel for Geeks: The Incompleteness Theorem in a Nutshell." Abstract (MS-Word format). Abstract (text).
  • October 7, 2003 (Tuesday) 3:30-5:00pm, Swearingen Amoco Hall (SWGN 1C01). Seven-Minute Madness. Presentations by Departmental Faculty: John Zachary, Caroline Eastman, Csilla Farkas, John Bowles, Marco Valtorta, Juan Vargas, Larry Stevens, Michael Huhns, Manton Matthews.
  • October 17, 2003 (Thursday) 3:30-4:30pm, Faculty Lounge (Swearingen 1A03). Jianping Fan, Department of Computer Science, UNC Charlotte. "Semantic Video Classification and Indexing for Medical Education Applications." Abstract (MS-Word format). Abstract (text).
  • October 24, 2003 (Friday) 3:30-4:30pm, Faculty Lounge (Swearingen 1A03). David M. Piscitello, Core Competence, Inc. "Wireless System Security." Abstract (MS-Word format). Abstract (text).
  • October 31, 2003 (Friday) 3:30-4:30pm, Faculty Lounge (Swearingen 1A03). Salvatore Profeta, Molecular Modeling Laboratory, Department of Basic Pharmaceutical Sciences, College of Pharmacy, University of South Carolina. "Addressing Molecular Design and Related Informatics Challenges in Ag and Pharma." Abstract (MS-Word format). Abstract (text). Slides used in the talk, PowerPoint format, local copy.

Department of Computer Science and Engineering: Summer 2003 Colloquia

Department of Computer Science and Engineering: Spring 2003 Colloquia

  • February 7, 2003 (Friday) 3:30-4:30pm, Faculty Lounge (Swearingen 1A03). Yunja Choi, University of Minnesota, Department of Computer Science and Engineering. "Automated Abstraction for Model Checking Software Specifications with Interrelated Numeric Constraints." Abstract (MS-Word format). Abstract (text).
  • February 10, 2003 (Monday) 3:30-4:30pm, Faculty Lounge (Swearingen 1A03). Xiadong Zhang, National Science Foundation and College of William and Mary, Department of Computer Science. "Software and Hardware Support for Effective Locality-Aware Computing." Abstract (MS-Word format). Abstract (text).
  • February 17, 2003 (Monday) 1100-noon, Swearingen Faculty Lounge (Swearingen 1A03). Katherine Compton, Northwestern University, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. Title: "Architecture Generation of Customized Reconfigurable Hardware." Abstract (MS-Word format). Abstract (text).
  • February 25, 2003 (Tuesday) 3:30-4:30pm, Faculty Lounge (Swearingen 1A03). Yu Li, Advanced Magnetic Resonance Imaging and Spectroscopy Facility, McKnight Brain Institute, University of Florida. "High Field MR Technology Development." Abstract (MS-Word format). Abstract (text). Slides used in the talk (pps format, local copy).
  • Informal Talk: Monday, March 3, 2003, 1115am, Swearingen 1C01 (Amoco Hall). Mr. Douglas Fears, Solutions Architect, NCR and Teradata. "Why Should I be Normal? Data Warehousing Concepts." USC contact: Dr. Greg Dobbins, dobbinjg@engr.sc.edu.
  • March 3, 2003 (Monday) 3:30-4:30pm, Faculty Lounge (Swearingen 1A03). Tiecheng Liu, Department of Computer Science, Columbia University. "Summarization and Semantic Compression of Videos." Abstract (MS-Word format). Abstract (text).
  • Informal Talk: Thursday, March 6, 2pm, Swearingen 1A03 (Faculty Lounge). Terry Stowers, Academic Developer Evangelist, Microsoft. "Introduction to the Microsoft Academic Developer Initiative: Better Access to Microsoft Technical Resources." USC contact: Dr. Juan Vargas, vargasje@engr.sc.edu.
  • March 7, 2003 (Friday) 3:30-4:30pm, Faculty Lounge (Swearingen 1A03). Jun Xu, Department of Computer Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. "Defeating Security Attacks Through Runtime Mechanisms." Abstract (MS-Word format). Abstract (text).
  • April 4, 2003 (Friday) 3:30-4:30pm, Faculty Lounge (Swearingen 1A03). Haining Wang, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Michigan. "Hop-Count Filtering: An Effective Defense Against IP Spoofing." Abstract (MS-Word format). Abstract (text).
  • April 7, 2003 (Monday) 3:30-4:30pm, Faculty Lounge (Swearingen 1A03). Chin-Tser Huang, Department of Computer Sciences, University of Texas at Austin. "Hop Integrity in Computer Networks." Abstract (MS-Word format). Abstract (text).
  • April 25, 2003 (Friday) 3:30-4:30pm, Faculty Lounge (Swearingen 1A03). Nancy Glenn, Department of Statistics, University of South Carolina. "Statistical Learning Techniques for Intelligent Memory Management." Abstract (MS-Word format). Abstract (text).

Department of Computer Science and Engineering: Fall 2002 Colloquia

  • August 23, 2002 (Friday) 2:30-4:30pm, Swearingen Amoco Hall (SWGN 1C01). Ten-Minute Madness. Presentations by Ron Bonnell, Duncan Buell, Kirk Cameron, Jim Davis, Michael Huhns, Toshiro Kubota, Gang Quan, Larry Stephens, and Jose Vidal.
  • August 30, 2002 (Friday) 2:30-4:30pm, Swearingen Amoco Hall (SWGN 1C01). Ten-Minute Madness. Presentations by Duncan Clarke, Greg Dobbins, Caroline Eastman, Csilla Farkas, Stephen Fenner, Manton Matthews, Srihari Nelakuditi, John Rose, Marco Valtorta, Juan Vargas, and John Zachary.
  • September 13, 2002 (Friday) 3:30-4:30pm, Swearingen Faculty Lounge (SWGN 1A03). David A. Ramsey, The South Carolina Research Authority and University of South Carolina, Department of Computer Computer Science. "Computing Issues Brought about by Magnetic Resonance Image Processing." Abstract (MS-Word format). Abstract (text).
  • September 20, 2002 (Friday) 3:30-4:30pm, Swearingen Faculty Lounge (SWGN 1A03). Duncan A. Buell, University of South Carolina Department of Computer Computer Science. "Optimal Implementation of UPGMA and Neighbor-Joining Algorithms." Abstract (MS-Word format). Abstract (text).
  • October 4, 2002 (Friday) 3:30-4:30pm, Amoco Hall (SWGN 1C01). Duminda Wijesekera, George Mason University Department of Information and Software Engineering. "Recent Advances in Flexible Authorization Models." Abstract (MS-Word format). Abstract (text).
  • October 7, 2002 (Monday) 3:30-4:30pm, Swearingen Faculty Lounge (SWGN 1A03). Katherine Compton, Northwestern University, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. "Architecture Generation for the Totem Project." Abstract (MS-Word format). Abstract (text).
  • October 11, 2002 (Friday) 3:30-4:30pm, Amoco Hall (SWGN 1C01). Xizhou Feng, University of South Carolina Department of Computer Science and Engineering. "Parallel Bayesian Phylogenetic Inference." Abstract (MS-Word format). Abstract (text). Slides used in the talk (pdf format, local copy).
  • October 18, 2002 (Friday) 2:30-3:30pm, Amoco Hall (SWGN 1C01). Michael Filaseta, University of South Carolina Department of Mathematics. "Primality Testing in Polynomial Time." Abstract (MS-Word format). Abstract (text). Slides used in the talk (pdf format, local copy). Slides used in the talk (pdf format, author's site). This colloquium was followed by refreshments and by a departmental faculty meeting on advisement issues in Amoco Hall, led by Caroline Eastman.
  • October 25, 2002 (Friday) 3:30-4:30pm, Swearingen 2A31. John Skvoretz, University of South Carolina Department of Sociology. "Connecting the Dots: Applications of Exponential Random Graph Models to the Prediction of Tie/Arc/Edge Locations in Networks/Digraphs/Graph." Abstract (MS-Word format). Abstract (text).
  • November 8, 2002 (Friday) 3:30-4:30pm, Swearingen 2A31. Srihari Nelakuditi, University of South Carolina Department of Computer Science and Engineering. "An Introduction to the Network Simulator NS2." Abstract (MS-Word format). Abstract (text).
  • November 22, 2002 (Friday) 3:30-4:30pm, Amoco Hall (Swearingen 1C01). Toshiro Kubota, University of South Carolina Department of Computer Science and Engineering. "Robust Feature Analysis: from Algorithm to Biology." Abstract (MS-Word format). Abstract (text).

Department of Computer Science and Engineering: Spring 2002 Colloquia

  • February 8, 2002 (Friday), 3:30-4:30PM, Swearingen 2A27. Zhiling Lan, Northwestern University. "Dynamic Load Balancing for Parallel and Distributed Systems." Abstract (MS-Word format). Abstract (text).
  • February 15, 2002 (Friday), 3:30-4:30pm, Swearingen Faculty Lounge (SWGN 1A03). James Davis, University of South Carolina, Department of Computer Science and Engineering. "VLSI Systems Engineering at USC: Challenges and Opportunities." Abstract (MS-Word format). Abstract (text).
  • February 18, 2002 (Monday), 3:30-4:30pm, 300 Main B103. Ruth Cheng, Pennsylvania State University, Department of Computer Science and Engineering. "Parallel Particle Tracking Methods for Scientific Computing." Abstract (MS-Word format). Abstract (text).
  • February 22, 2002 (Friday), 3:30-4:30pm, Swearingen Faculty Lounge (SWGN 1A03). John Haskins, University of Virginia, Department of Computer Science. "Minimal Subset Evaluation: Rapid Warm-up for Simulated Hardware State." Abstract (MS-Word format). Abstract (text).
  • March 1, 2002 (Friday), 3:45-4:45pm, Swearingen Faculty Lounge (SWGN 1A03). Natalia Pakhomkina, University of South Carolina, Department of Computer Science and Engineering. "Introduction to the Teradata RDMS: Research and Development Opportunities at USC." Abstract (MS-Word format). Abstract (text). There will be a related talk to Prof. Fenner's CSCE 520 class on February 20 (Wednesday) in room 2A19 from 2:30-3:45pm. Interested persons should contact Dr. Stephen Fenner (fenner@cse.sc.edu) directly.
  • March 7, 2002 (Thursday) 3:30-4:30pm, 300 Main B110. Yongdae Kim, University of Southern California, Department of Computer Science. "Group Key agreement: Theory and Practice." Abstract (MS-Word format). Abstract (text).
  • March 8, 2002 (Friday) 4:00-5:00pm (note time change!), 300 Main B110. Kai Shen, University of California at Santa Barbara, Department of Computer Science. "Replication, Load-balancing, and QoS Support for Cluster-based Network Services." Abstract (MS-Word format). Abstract (text).
  • April 11, 2002 (Thursday) 3:00-4:00pm, 300 Main B201. Johann Gasteiger, University of Erlangen-Nuernberg, Computer-Chemie-Centrum and Institute for Organic Chemistry. "Neural Networks in Chemistry." Abstract (MS-Word format). Abstract (text).
  • April 12, 2002 (Friday) 9:00-10:00am (note morning time!), Swearingen Faculty Lounge (SWGN 1A03). Song Wang, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. "Image Segmentation by Boundary Detection: A Graph-Theoretic Approach." Abstract (MS-Word format). Abstract (text).
  • May 16, 2002 (Thursday) 10:30-11:30am, Swearingen Amoco Hall (SWGN 1C01). Regis Vincent, SRI International. Abstract (MS-Word format). Abstract (text).
  • June 3, 2002 (Monday) 1:30-2:30pm, Swearingen Faculty Lounge (SWGN 1A03). Srihari Nelakuditi, University of Minnesota, Department of Computer Science. "Localized Approach to Providing Quality of Service." Abstract (MS-Word format). Abstract (text).