will present

A Comprehensive Analysis of the Worm Circuitry 
that drives Egg-Laying Behavior
 

The Vampire Automated Theorem Proving (ATP) system has been very successful at proving theorems in first-order logic. Vampire has won the First-Order Form (FOF) division of the CADE ATP System Competition (CASC) for all except one of the last 15 years, and many papers highlighting Vampire's strengths have been published. This talk examines the flip side of the Vampire coin ... what kinds of problems are difficult or even impossible for the latest incarnation of Vampire. The talk will help users decide when to use Vampire, and when to use another ATP system, will help the Vampire developers direct their work, and provides the data required to build a portfolio ATP system with Vampire as a component.

This is another in the Department of Computer Science Pizza Seminar series. Refreshments will be served.

Monday 27th April 2015, 5:00pm, UB230

The increasing amount of textual data bears valuable insights in domains including business intelligence, science impact, and digital humanities. While automated text-analysis algorithms produce compelling results on summarizing and mining textual data, the end results are often too complex for average users to make decisions upon. In this talk, I will introduce my research efforts on integrating automated data-analysis algorithms with visual analytics systems that help decision makers make sense of large-scale textual data interactively.

My research promotes topical trends and event structures as essential ingredients in depicting large text collections. Events, which are characterized by changes in topics, location, people, and time, are key elements for decision makers to understand, analyze, and even respond to certain activities (e.g. social movements, marketing campaigns). I will introduce systems that integrate text-analysis algorithms with human assessment of the extracted topics and events. To scale up my approach, I will present an architecture that takes advantage of parallel processing and cloud computing methods to enable the collection and analysis of vast amount of textual data. To further incorporate existing knowledge into topic models, I will introduce new approaches that leverage keywords/tags to shape the formation of topics and events. Through integrating statistical methods, the scalable architecture, and interactive visualizations, we provide an analysis environment for uncovering hidden topics and events, and extracting actionable insights from text corpora.

Presented by the Department of Computer Science.

Wednesday 22nd April 2015, 5:00pm, UB506

The University of Miami hired a third party company to build a University of Miami UHealth Mobile application for iOS and Android. On September 2014, I joined the UHealth IT department as an intern. My original task was updating and adding new features to the iOS Application. Besides programming I was allowed to attend weekly Project Management meetings in which the different teams of the UHealth IT department provided their weekly feedback. During these meetings project managers also went over the process of launching their application. As an intern, I was able to perform my task as iOS developer, but also got to experience the management and business side of Information Technology.

This report describes the internship I spent at Next University Inc. and presents several tasks completed during this time, such as:
- Implementing a plugin named Code Editor for Moodle (The learning management system used at NextU).
- Creating a profile page for the students.
- Creating a MongoDB and populating it with Moodle's database.
- Generating a JSON file with the MongoDB's data.
- Creating a web service that could create, update and enroll users into courses.
- Replacing Moodle's default SMTP service with Mandrill (a third party tool to send emails).
- Creating a plugin that generates a certificate when a student completes a program.
- Generating several tables and graphs with SQL and Periscope.io to analyze students' data.
- Creating a plugin that stores how many active/suspended users NextU has per month.
- Fixing several issues in the process.
In order to complete these tasks I had to use several programming languages such as Java, PHP, JavaScript and SQL, as well as different markup languages like HTML, XML and CSS.

This is another in the Department of Computer Science Pizza Seminar series. Refreshments will be served on the Ungar Building Terrace at 4:30PM

Wednesday 8th April 2015, 5:00pm, UB506

Consider a polyhedral obstacle and a polyhedral robot that translates in three dimensions and rotates about an axis.  For example, a drone navigating a warehouse.  Construction of the configuration space would permit rapid planning of flight paths for the drone.  The 4D configuration space of the robot can be considered to be a 3D configuration space, which is a Minkowski sum of polyhedra, that varies with angle.  The 3D space changes combinatorial structure at critical angles.  Mayer, Fogel, and Halperin compute the critical angles and the structure changes for convex obstacle and robot (Solid Modeling 2010, CAD 2011).  We extend this work to general polyhedra.  Critical angle is characterized set of contacts between robot and obstacle vertices, edges, and facets. The angles where a case occurs are the roots of a univariate polynomial of degree at most 6.  There are 30,362 distinct special cases that result when some of the contacting pairs share vertices.  Factoring the polynomials that arise during construction would be prohibitively expensive, yet knowing the factors is a requirement for any numerical approach.  This talk gives an offline algorithm for factoring the polynomials and building lookup tables.  Using a few lookups and a fast online algorithm, the construction can determine the factors of any criticality polynomial and can identify ones that have already been solved.

Joint work with Elisha Sacks and Nabeel Butt of Purdue University

This is another in the Department of Computer Science Pizza Seminar series. Refreshments will be served on the Ungar Building Terrace at 4:30PM

Wednesday 1st April 2015, 5:00pm, UB506

The emergent processes driving social dynamics are a product of complex interactions among large numbers of individuals. In this talk, I will show several examples of complex human dynamics across various social systems, from scientific impact to social escalations. In the first part, I demonstrate a mechanistic model for the citation dynamics of individual papers, allowing us to collapse the citation histories of papers from different journals and disciplines into a single curve, indicating that all papers tend to follow the same universal temporal pattern. Next we focus on sudden uprisings occurred in social unrests, providing evidence instead of a remarkable gestational phase marked by self-organized aggregation through Social Networking Sites. Development hyper-escalates ahead of an uprising, enabling prediction of the real-world onset with substantial lead-times. Following a close parallel with the correlation clustering in quasi-particles and cyber-enabled contentious politics, we develop a theory of multi-agent adaptation agnostic of country and language.

This is another in the Department of Computer Science Pizza Seminar series. Refreshments will be served on the Ungar Building Terrace at 4:30PM

Wednesday 25th March 2015, 5:00pm, UB506

A large portion of the knowledge contained in the web is stored in unstructured natural language text. In order to acquire and formalize this heterogeneous knowledge, methods that automatically process this information are in demand. Knowledge Extraction can be defined as the process of acquiring knowledge from unstructured or structured data.  This knowledge is represented in a machine-readable format, which can enable a computer system to perform complex tasks such as inferring new facts from the data or communicate with an end user in natural language.  This talk will focus on a specific application of Knowledge Extraction from the web, namely for Music Recommendation. First, a brief overview of Knowledge Extraction systems is given. Then, a method to acquire knowledge from musical texts is presented. The extracted knowledge is represented as a graph, from which the recommendations are computed. A major advantage of this approach is that the recommendations can be conveyed to the user using natural language, thus providing an enhanced user experience. The rest of the talk will focus on measures to assess the validity of the extracted knowledge graph from a linguistic and a knowledge perspective, and will briefly explore the richness of the explanations given to the user as to why a musical item has been recommended.

This is another in the Department of Computer Science Pizza Seminar series. Refreshments will be served on the Ungar Building Terrace at 4:30PM

Monday 23rd March 2015, 5:00pm, UB506

Network analysis and graph mining play a prominent role in providing insights and studying phenomena across various domains, including social, behavioral, biological, transportation, entertainment, and financial domains. For example, online activity and interaction networks formed from electronic communication (e.g., email), social media (e.g., Twitter), and content sharing (e.g., Facebook). A key characteristic of these networks is that their complex structure is massive and continuously evolving over time, which makes it challenging and computationally intensive to analyze, query, and model these networks in their entirety. In this talk, I will discuss challenges of large-scale network analysis and show how sampling can mediate between the accuracy requirements of the network analysis task, the network characteristics, and the available resources. The talk will include a discussion of sampling, estimation, and visual network analytics and mining, showing how to use them for high-impact machine learning and big data applications in social, biological, and behavioral domains.

Presented by the Department of Computer Science.

Thursday 19th March 2015, 5:00pm, UB230

Studying complex behavior in economic, social, or other similar systems is an important scientific endeavor with potentially direct impact to society via the eventual commercialization of relevant technology. The big-data revolution offers the opportunity to easily collect and process large amounts of data recording system behavior. Yet, our fundamental understanding of real-world complex systems remains slim at best. In this talk, I will summarize research from my group that takes a modern AI, machine learning, and engineering approach to questions about systems in domains where global behavior results from complex local interactions of agents embedded in a network. Our particular interest is interactions resulting from the distributed reasoning and the deliberate decisions of a large number of agents (e.g., a social network). In our work, we seek, and provide, algorithms that scale polynomially with the number of agents and thus can deal with relatively large systems.  I will also illustrate our approach to causal strategic inference and to machine learning from strictly behavioral data in a real-world domain: the U.S. Congress. I will conclude with a summary of my broader research plan and my overall contributions, including applications to risk analysis in interdependent-security systems and, time permitting, spatio-temporal prediction from sparse measurements of cellular-data loads at base stations/cell towers, wireless localization, and graphical models for competitive networked economies

Presented by the Department of Computer Science.

Wednesday 18th March 2015, 5:00pm, UB506

Google executes over 3.5 billion searches daily, each involving 1000 computers over dozens of locations around the world. The average duration is 250 milliseconds - a double blink of the eye. It isn't just about Web pages, 300 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute. Android powers hundreds of millions of mobile devices in more than 190 countries around the world, over 25 million sites are connected to Google Analytics, and the list goes on. Join us to dig into what it means to organize the world's information to make it universally accessible and useful - and the enormous engineering challenges that brings. Whether it's searches per day or miles driven using Google Navigation, learn about how we operate at a scale the world has never seen.

This is another in the Department of Computer Science Pizza Seminar series. Refreshments will be served on the Ungar Building Terrace at 4:30PM

Tuesday 17th March 2015, 5:00pm, UB506

The world today is characterized by too much knowledge. With so much knowledge readily accessible, the question is: what can we do with it. I will describe methods to extract and model knowledge so that it can be deployed effectively as services. I will show how knowledge extraction can be used for trend analysis and for predictions from technology and from academic publications based on social network methods. In addition, I will present implementations of methods of large scale knowledge manipulation in fields such as information for video understanding, knowledge maps for learning, and emergency crisis response.

Presented by the Department of Computer Science.

Monday 16th March 2015, 5:00pm, UB506

In the last decade, the information worker at enterprises has benefited from the evolution of technology in scalable data platforms, ad-hoc data analysis as well as data visualization. While such accomplishments have advanced the state of the art of enterprise analytics, relatively little progress has been made in the critical area of information finding. We will discuss why this has been the case and outline potential opportunities and exploratory directions.

Surajit Chaudhuri is a Distinguished Scientist at Microsoft Research and leads the Data Management, Exploration and Mining group. In addition as a Deputy Managing Director of MSR Redmond Lab, he also has oversight of Distributed Systems, Networking, Security, Programming languages and Software Engineering groups. He serves on the Senior Leadership Team of the Cloud and Enterprises Division. H is current areas of interest are enterprise data analytics, data discovery, self-manageability and cloud database services. Working with his colleagues in Microsoft Research, he helped incorporate the Index Tuning Wizard (and subsequently Database Engine Tuning Advisor) and data cleaning technology into Microsoft SQL Server. Surajit is an ACM Fellow, a recipient of the ACM SIGMOD Edgar F. Codd Innovations Award, ACM SIGMOD Contributions Award, a VLDB 10 year Best Paper Award, and an IEEE Data Engineering Influential Paper Award. Surajit received his Ph.D. from Stanford University in 1992.

Presented by the Graduate School and the Department of Computer Science.

Wednesday 4th March 2015, 5:00pm, UB506

Information visualization techniques leverage the high bandwidth of our perceptual system for communicating key insights from data. Often, these insights stem from analysis questions which are not known apriori, but evolve in the course of analysts' interactions with the visualization.  However, facilitating an implicit dialogue between the analyst (e.g.  "show me the interesting patterns") and the visualization (e.g. "this combination of dimensions might be of interest to you") is inherently challenging, especially in the face of the ever-growing complexity and heterogeneity of real-world data. The overarching goal of my research has been to bridge the gap between an analyst's mental model and the visual representation of data, by studying how systematic interaction mechanisms and perceptually motivated models can benefit domain experts during data exploration. For this purpose, I have also conducted quantitative and qualitative studies with domain experts for understanding how visual design choices impact real-world data analysis and visual communication goals. Following a top-down approach, I have aimed to translate the high-level abstract data analysis questions into concrete visual tasks (e.g., detect anomaly, compare, correlate, etc.) that help domain experts gain insight into complex data. For example, the systems my colleagues and I have developed, help climate scientists gain insights from multifaceted, high-dimensional data exploration, by seamlessly switching between different levels-of-detail and analytical perspectives. While comparing climate model parameters and outputs, the systems help them understand: /when, where, and why/, models are similar or different, at different granularity of space and time, and with respect to the multidimensional parameter spaces. Adopting a complementary bottom-up approach, I have developed conceptual models that help control the effects of visual mapping parameters (e.g., position, size, color, etc.) and screen-space features (e.g., saliency, clutter, etc.) for building optimal visual representations of complex data. The models help develop metrics for quantifying information loss, visual saliency, etc., and help guide analysts towards detecting interesting patterns and anomalies. For example, while analyzing large, high-dimensional data, visual feedback from the system using the metrics, help analysts interact with various combinations of subsets of records and dimensions, where hidden patterns can be detected. By gaining this dual perspective on building visualizations, I have been able to better reflect on how to augment visualization tools with features that better exploit our visual thinking capabilities, and thereby find solutions to real-world analysis problems. I will present illustrations, demos and case studies with domain experts, such as climatologists and environmental scientists, for supporting my discussion.

Presented by the Department of Computer Science.

Monday 2nd March 2015, 5:00pm, UB506

Interactive visualization tools are being used with increasing frequency to support complex activities in a number of domains, including science, healthcare, medicine, education, and others. Visualizations are representations of data and information that sit at the visual interface of computational tools, supporting the perceptual and cognitive tasks of users as they work with the underlying data to achieve their goals.  Previous research has clearly shown that visualizations can significantly enhance the performance of all kinds of data-driven activities. Furthermore, it is well known that making visualizations interactive can increase their expressiveness and overall utility. Interactive visualizations allow for a human-information discourse that---if designed well---supports the performance of complex tasks and activities. One problem in this relatively young area is that much design is done in an ad hoc fashion---that is, visualization and interaction techniques are often designed for particular users, tasks, and contexts of use. This makes it very difficult to engage in systematic design practices, and to have a scientific foundation for research in this interdisciplinary area. In this talk I will present a number of related frameworks I have developed in recent years to address this problem, and to enable and support systematic, scientific design practices. I will discuss how this research provides a general, comprehensive foundation on which visualization tools in many different domains can be systematically designed.

Presented by the Department of Computer Science.

Friday 27th February 2015, 1:30pm, UB506

About half of humanity lives in urban environments today and that number will grow to 80% by the middle of this century. Cities are thus the loci of resource consumption, of economic activity, and of innovation; they are the cause of our looming sustainability problems but also where those problems must be solved. Data, along with visualization and analytics can help significantly in finding these solutions. This talk will discuss the challenges of visual exploration of big urban data; and showcase approaches taken in a study of New York City taxi trips. Taxis are valuable sensors and can provide unprecedented insight into many different aspects of city life. But analyzing these data presents many challenges. The data are complex, containing geographical and temporal components in addition to multiple variables associated with each trip. Consequently, it is hard to specify exploratory queries and to perform comparative analyses. This problem is largely due to the size of the data. There are almost a billion records of taxi trips collected in a 5-year period. TaxiVis, a tool that allows domain experts to visually query taxi trips at an interactive speed and performing tasks that were unattainable before, will be presented. Also key contributions in this work: the visual querying model and novel indexing scheme for spatio-temporal datasets will be discussed.

Presented by the Department of Computer Science.

Wednesday 25th February 2015, 5:00pm, UB506

Recent epidemics of behavioral issues are calling for urgent preventive measures. Lack of trained healthcare and medical personnel, however, is leading researchers to call for computing technologies to automate some of the supportive interventions that people need, and increase their access to under-served populations. We discuss our approach to develop a novel modality for the computer-delivery of behavior change interventions via personal virtual health agents (VHA). VHAs are multimodal intelligent virtual agents who empathically deliver health interventions while adapting, in real-time, their verbal and non-verbal communication messages to those of their user's to increase engagement. We discuss the evaluation of our virtual health agents, and conclude with a discussion on design decisions to build "on-demand" personal virtual health agents as health and well-being helpers.

This is another in the Department of Computer Science Pizza Seminar series. Refreshments will be served on the Ungar Building Terrace at 4:30PM

Wednesday 18th February 2015, 5:00pm, UB506

As a Computer Scientist, you will need to go beyond textbooks to the wider world of the scientific and technical literature. Much of this material is visible on the open web, but using Google it is easy to waste time with inefficient searches and miss important information. This talk will introduce you to the wealth of Computer Science reference material, scholarly journals, books and more made available by the University of Miami Libraries. Bill Jacobs, the science librarian, will cover the most effective ways to search the library's collection and how to access the full text from on and off campus. He will also show you tools to organize and share the information you find in your literature searches and easily create bibliographies. In addition, he will briefly discuss open access and authors' rights issues.

This is another in the Department of Computer Science Pizza Seminar series. Refreshments will be served on the Ungar Building Terrace at 4:30PM

Wednesday 11th February 2015, 5:00pm, UB506

Word of mouth (WOM) - product information that's passed on from one person to another - has long been regarded as one of the most valuable sources of information for consumers (Brown and Reingen 1987). Unlike traditional offline word of mouth, which typically occurs among people who know each other, online word of mouth occurs among strangers who do not know, and are unlikely to ever know, one another. While it is reasonable to assume that social concerns, such as establishing or maintaining relationships, are likely to influence people's behavior offline, it is unclear whether social concerns dictate people's online word of mouth behavior. My research draws on data from large-scale field studies (e.g., analysis of over 65,000 Yelp reviews) as well as laboratory experiments to show that social considerations permeate every step of the word of mouth process.

This is another in the Department of Computer Science Pizza Seminar series. Refreshments will be served on the Ungar Building Terrace at 4:30PM

Wednesday 4th February 2015, 5:00pm, UB506

Games are largely seen as a source of entertainment but their ability to engage people on deeper levels make them an ideal medium for activism, advocacy, education and research. Using examples from my own work and other leading practitioners in the field, I will give an overview of games that are leading the way to change the way we think about games in the world.

This is another in the Department of Computer Science Pizza Seminar series. Refreshments will be served on the Ungar Building Terrace at 4:30PM

Wednesday 28th January 2015, 5:00pm, UB506

In The Architecture Machine, Negroponte (1973) presented a vision of an evolutionary design process in which designers propose an idea to a machine and the machine also trains designers. In this mutual manner, he proposed an interrelated design process between two distinct species (human and computer) and two intelligences (the designer and the architecture machine). This seminar introduces architectural research on machine learning in design and design education that slowly but surely illustrates how his dream becomes reality.

This is another in the Department of Computer Science Pizza Seminar series. Refreshments will be served on the Ungar Building Terrace at 4:30PM

Wednesday 21st January 2015, 5:00pm, UB506

Human functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) is an experimental discipline that establishes structure-function correspondences in the brain through the interdisciplinary application of principles from physics/engineering, computer science, statistics, biology, medicine, and psychology. In the last two decades, research in fMRI has resulted in an enormous amount of data intended to spatially localize the neural regions that perform specific mental operations (e.g., perception, action, cognition, emotion and autonomic functions). I will describe the fMR imaging modality and present prior work developing novel meta-analysis methods for investigating the spatial topography of distinct brain regions, as well as various computational techniques for mining a large database of neuroimaging data to more fully understand large-scale intrinsic connectivity networks and the functional organization of the human brain. Lastly, I will present recent results demonstrating agreement between data mining results and existing cognitive models of human face perception and the cognitive control of emotional processing. Taken together, our results suggest differential recruitment of task-dependent networks to enable cognitive, perceptual, and affective processing in the context of distinct goal-directed behaviors.

This is another in the Department of Computer Science Pizza Seminar series. Refreshments will be served on the Ungar Building Terrace at 4:30PM

Wednesday 3rd December 2014, 5:00pm, UB230

Pedro A. Pena: Developing Educational Apps at Tinybop, Inc.

Marcos Corea: Documentation and Tutorial for the Unity Game Engine

Mickey Fried: Learning from and Applying the Unity Game Engine Tutorial

This is another in the Department of Computer Science Pizza Seminar series. Refreshments will be served on the Ungar Building Terrace at 4:30PM

Wednesday 19th November 2014, 5:00pm, UB230

Huge datasets in areas of chemical biology, omics, systems biology, chemistry and other areas are generated and published via many
large-scale publicly funded projects. But these data are often difficult to analyze, integrate, and re-use for discovery projects for
which they were not originally intended. Here I illustrate some of our efforts to address these challenges. We developed BioAssay Ontology
(BAO) to enable the description and modeling of chemical biology screening data in PubChem. BAO is now used on several organizations and
projects including in the BioAssay Research Database (BARD), a public chemical biology and cheminformatic resource. In the Library of
Integrated Network-based Cellular Signatures (LINCS) program, we are developing an integrated knowledge environment to enable data modeling
across large and diverse systems-level drug response signatures from many sources. In the LINCS pilot phase we have built the LIFE search
engine that uses a semantic knowledge model and other innovations for fast retrieval of results related to query terms and concepts. Formal
ontologies can also be applied to describe and model chemical functional groups and chemical reactivity. Combining systems-level disease models,
drug-target interaction predictions, and efficient computational exploration of synthetically accessible chemistry space will enable us
to identify opportunity spaces for novel poly-pharmacology drugs. We are applying this approach to prioritize novel dual kinase and
bromodomain inhibitor scaffolds for various cancers and other diseases. In one example we have recently identified novel dual EGFR BRD4
compounds entirely based on computational models.

This is another in the Department of Computer Science Pizza Seminar series. Refreshments will be served on the Ungar Building Terrace at 4:30PM

Wednesday 12th November 2014, 5:00pm, UB230

The selective hydrolysis of the extremely stable peptide or amide bond of peptides and proteins is required in a wide range of
biological, biotechnological and industrial applications such as control of the cell cycle, cell death, proteomics, protein engineering,
designing of catalytic drugs and bioethanol production. We have applied innovative theoretical techniques including molecular dynamic (MD)
simulations, quantum mechanics (QM) and quantum mechanics/molecular mechanics (QM/MM) to investigate the mechanisms of aspartyl protease
(beta-secretase) and mono- and binuclear metal center containing enzymes (insulin degrading enzyme and leucine aminopeptidase respectively) and
their synthetic analogues. In the first step, we have investigated the roles of metal ions, ligands, second coordination shell residues and the
protein environment in the catalytic functioning of enzymes. In the next step, the knowledge of the roles of metal ions and the ligand
environment in the mechanisms of existing synthetic analogues (Pd(II), Cu(II) and Co(III) metal complexes) of enzymes will be combined with the
information acquired in the first step to design more efficient synthetic analogues of peptide cleaving enzymes.

This is another in the Department of Computer Science Pizza Seminar series. Refreshments will be served on the Ungar Building Terrace at 4:30PM

Wednesday 5th November 2014, 5:00pm, UB230

We examine the 2007 stock market bubble in China. Using multiple measures of bubble intensity for each stock, we find significantly
smaller bubbles in stocks for which there is greater analyst coverage. We further show that the abating effect of analyst coverage on bubble
intensity is weaker when there is greater disagreement among analysts. This suggests that, in line with resale option theories of bubbles, one
channel through which analyst coverage may mitigate bubbles is by coordinating investors' beliefs and thus reducing its dispersion. Stock
turnover provides further evidence consistent with this particular information mechanism.

This is another in the Department of Computer Science Pizza Seminar series. Refreshments will be served on the Ungar Building Terrace at 4:30PM

Wednesday 29th October 2014, 5:00pm, UB230

We will follow the development of hidden Markov models and graphical models in machine learning and discuss how they relate to the
pedigree likelihood model in family genetics. This is a scientific conversation that has been going on for over a quarter of a century
between statisticians, computer scientists, and geneticists. The conclusion to this conversation has yet to be discovered.

This is another in the Department of Computer Science Pizza Seminar series. Refreshments will be served on the Ungar Building Terrace at 4:30PM

Wednesday 22nd October 2014, 5:00pm, UB230

Visualization has been around now for a good amount of time. IEEE Vis, the premier academic conference in this area, has been founded in 1990. The foundational book "Readings in Information Visualization" has been published in 1999. Tableau Software has been founded in 2013. I think it's time to stop for a moment and think. What is the role of visualization? What do we want to build in the future? What are the main challenges and obstacles we will be facing? I take this opportunity to reflect about these questions and the role of visualization in research and in the society at large. Drawing from Douglas Engelbart's "Augmenting Human Intellect", I argue that the main goal of Visualization is to "amplify our intelligence" and show examples of systems that achieve this goal. During the talk I will showcase research we are conducting in my lab at New York University and will discuss challenges and ways we can make visualization more useful and pervasive.

This is another in the Department of Computer Science Pizza Seminar series. Refreshments will be served on the Ungar Building Terrace at 4:30PM

Wednesday 8th October 2014, 5:00pm, UB230

Web Services are reusable software components that make use of standardized interfaces to enable loosely-coupled business-to-business and customer-to-business interactions over the Web. In such environments, service consumers depend heavily on the service interface specification to discover, invoke, and synthesize services over the Web. Data-centric Web services are services whose behavior is determined by their interactions with a repository of stored data. A major challenge in this domain is interpreting the data that must be marshaled between consumer and producer systems. While the Web Services Description Language (WSDL) is currently the de facto standard for Web services, it only specifies a service operation in terms of its syntactical inputs and outputs; it does not provide a means for specifying the underlying data model, nor does it specify how a service invocation affects the data. The lack of data specification potentially leads to erroneous use of the service by a consumer. In this work, we propose a formal contract for data-centric Web services. The goal is to formally and unambiguously specify the service behavior in terms of its underlying data model and data interactions. We address the specification of a single service, a flow of services interacting with a single data store, and also the specification of distributed transactions involving multiple Web services interacting with different autonomous data stores. We use the proposed formal contract to decrease ambiguity about a service behavior, to fully verify a composition of services, and to guarantee correctness and data integrity properties within a transactional composition of services.

This is another in the Department of Computer Science Pizza Seminar series. Refreshments will be served on the Ungar Building Terrace at 4:30PM

Wednesday 24th September 2014, 5:00pm, UB230

A shift in the power system infrastructure from a static to a more dynamically distributed environment has contributed towards the
need for the enhancements of the future cyber physical support systems. The power systems have evolved from a unidirectional to a bidirectional infrastructure with millions of nodes from the source to the destined power user. The users could be storage facilities or applications. The monitoring of this dynamic network involves ensuring that the network is in a stable state under all circumstances that could include natural disasters, attacks from terrorist activities, undetected malfunctions and poor configurations. The existing security schemes in power control systems only consider securing the power grid at single point of the infrastructure level. The current goal of this work is to develop tools that could support this infrastructure and could ensure a reinstatement in case of such disasters. This would require both securing the infrastructure at the hardware level and at the application level.

This is another in the Department of Computer Science Pizza Seminar series. Refreshments will be served on the Ungar Building Terrace at 4:30PM

Wednesday 17th September 2014, 5:00pm, UB230

We propose two real-time sound recognition approaches that are able to distinguish a predefined whistle sound on a NAO robot in various noisy environments. The approaches use one, two, and four microphone channels of a NAO robot. The first approach is based on a frequency/band-pass filter whereas the second approach is based on logistic regression. We conducted experiments in six different settings varying the noise level of both the surrounding environment and the robot itself. The results show that the robot will be able to identify the whistle reliably even in very noisy environments.

This is another in the Department of Computer Science Pizza Seminar series. Refreshments will be served on the Ungar Building Terrace at 4:30PM

Wedensday 10th September 2014, 5:00pm, UB230

As cloud computing thrives, many organizations, both large and small, are joining a public cloud to take advantage of its multiple benefits. Especially public cloud based computing, is cost efficient, i.e., a cloud user can reduce spending on technology infrastructure and have easy access to their information without up-front or long-term commitment of resources. Despite those benefits, concern over cyber security is the main reason many large organizations with sensitive information such as the Department of Defense have been reluctant to join a public cloud. This is because different public cloud users share a common platform such as the hypervisor. An attacker can compromise a virtual machine (VM) to launch an attack on the hypervisor which, if compromised, can instantly yield the compromising of all the VMs running on top of that hypervisor. This work shows that there are multiple Nash equilibria of the public cloud security game. However, the players use a Nash equilibrium profile depending on the probability that the hypervisor is compromised given a successful attack on a user and the total expense required to invest in security. Finally, there is no Nash equilibrium in which all the users in a public cloud fully invest in security.

This is another in the Department of Computer Science Pizza Seminar series. Refreshments will be served on the Ungar Building Terrace at 4:30PM

Wedensday 3rd September 2014, 5:00pm, UB230

This talk shows how computational analysis being performed within UM's new cross-disciplinary Complexity cluster is shedding new light on collective human behavior, challenging existing beliefs and revealing a number of surprises. Computational analysis through data-mining, simulation, and traditional computation, together with collaborations across departments, are playing a key role in unraveling both the complexity of the data and its meaning. As a result, the possibility emerges to predict certain types of human behavior, through a combination of machine-learning of physical cues with simple mathematical rules that can benchmark human interactions. Potential applications of the analysis are discussed, which range from nationalsecurity through to psychology and public health, and from finance through to many-body soft matter behaviors in physics and chemistry.

Ongoing collaboration with UM faculty members Prof. Stefan Wuchty (Computer Science and Complexity cluster), Prof. Chaoming Song (Physics and Complexity cluster), Prof. Daniel Messinger (Psychology), Prof. Elvira Maria Restrepo (Geography) and UM PhD students Pedro Manrique (Physics) Hong Qi (Physics) and Nicolas Velasquez (INS)

This is another in the Department of Computer Science Pizza Seminar series. Refreshments will be served on the Ungar Building Terrace at 4:30PM

Friday 25th April 2014, 3:30pm, UB411

Improved version of the Smith-Waterman algorithm (SWA) is most widely used for local alignment of a pattern (or query) sequence with a Database (DB) sequence. This dynamic-programming algorithm is computation intensive. To reduce time for computing alignment score matrix, parallel versions have been implemented on GPUs and multicore CPUs. These parallel versions have shown significant speedup when compared with their corresponding sequential versions. Our initial evaluation of an OpenMP parallelization of SWA has shown linear speedup on multicore CPUs, but a closer look at performance data from both sequential and parallel versions have revealed two undesired effects: (i) As the length of the DB sequence increases, the number of elements of the alignment score matrix /H/ computed in per unit time initially increases, then reaches a maximum, and finally decreases continuously; (ii) the length of the DB sequence where decline starts is different for different CPUs. To overcome the computation rate decline we have proposed a run-time self-tuning algorithm. It determines the length, /l/, of a DB sequence that maximize computation rate during execution time. Then, divide computation of /H/ into computation of a set of submatrices, such that the number of columns in each submatrix is about /l/. Our study also found that the number of per-core-threads that delivers the highest rate of computation differs from CPU to CPU. Our proposed algorithm determines optimal number of threads during execution time and creates optimal number of threads for highest possible computation rate. Our extensive evaluations of the proposed self-tuning algorithm on three different multicore multi-CPU shared-memory machines have shown significant performance improvement.

This is a Department of Computer Science Master's Thesis Defense.

Thursday 3rd July 2014, 12:30pm, UB411

Scientific visualization enables researchers to extract understanding from data through visual representations. Interactive visualizations are particularly powerful for exploration of data, but they must build and manipulate representations in real time; this is especially difficult for large or complex data. Advances in human-computer interfaces also provide for new ways to engage with visualizations. This defense will cover visualization systems that address challenges in visual representation, real-time rendering, and natural interaction.

The first part of the talk will discuss three projects in robotics: (1) dynamically generated visualizations of robot behaviors in a multi-agent environment; (2) exploring 3D robot configuration spaces; (3) interactively mapping human motions to humanoid robots with visual feedback. The second part of this talk will be on a system developed with doctors at the Oregon Health and Science University (OHSU) Hospital for surgical navigation of MR and CT images using a touchless, gesture-based interface. Our medical visualization software provides enhanced understanding of complex anatomical relationships and introduces novel interactions with volumetric data.

This is a Department of Computer Science PhD Thesis Defense.

Wednesday 16th April 2014, 5:00pm, UB230 (talk @ 5:00pm), Pizza in UB411 @ 4:30pm

This seminar provides a retrospective examination of GUI Ripping - reverse engineering a workflow model of the graphical user interface of a software application - born a decade ago out of recognition of the severe need for improving the then largely manual state-of-the-practice of functional GUI testing. In these last 10 years, GUI ripping has turned out to be an enabler for much research, both within our group at Maryland and other groups. Researchers have found new and unique applications of GUI ripping, ranging from measuring human performance to re-engineering legacy user interfaces. GUI ripping has also enabled large-scale experimentation involving millions of test cases, thereby helping to understand the nature of GUI faults and characteristics of test cases to detect them. It has resulted in large multi-institutional Government-sponsored research projects on test automation and benchmarking. GUI ripping tools have been ported to many platforms, including Java AWT and Swing, iOS, Android, UNO, Microsoft Windows, and web. In essence, the technology has transformed the way researchers and practitioners think about the nature of GUI testing, no longer considered a manual activity; rather, thanks largely to GUI Ripping, automation has become the primary focus of current GUI testing techniques.

Atif M. Memon is an Associate Professor at the Department of Computer Science, University of Maryland, where he founded and heads the Event Driven Software Lab (EDSL). Researchers at the EDSL study issues of design, development, quality assurance, and maintenance of such software applications. He designed and developed the model-based GUI testing software GUITAR, which operates on Android, iPhone, Java Swing, .NET, Java SWT, UNO, MS Windows, and web systems, and leverages a resource cloud for test automation. He has published over 100 research articles on the topic of event driven systems, software testing, and software engineering. He is the founder of the International Workshop on TESTing Techniques & Experimentation Benchmarks for Event-Driven Software (TESTBEDS). He also helped develop the workshop on Experimental Evaluation of Software and Systems in Computer Science (EVALUATE).

This is another in the Departmental Pizza Seminar series.

Wednesday 16th April 2014, 3:30pm, UB411

The TPTP (Thousands of Problems for Theorem Provers) World is a well-established infrastructure for Automated Theorem Proving (ATP). In the context of the TPTP World, The TPTP Process Instruction (TPI) language makes possible the easy manipulation of logical formulae and provides better control over the use of ATP systems. A shell interpreter has been developed for the language. It is used as a standalone program to execute one TPI command at a time. This thesis presents work done building and testing the interpreter, demonstrates the use of the TPI language and the interpreter in theorem proving, discusses generic control of ATP systems, and shows how such control is achieved through an extension to the TPI language.

This is a Department of Computer Science Master's Thesis Defense.

Wednesday 16th April 2014, 10am, UB411

There is a trade-off between expressivity of a logic, and the power and reliability of the available Automated Theorem Provers (ATPs) for those logics. Less expressive logics typically have powerful ATPs, but it is easier to express a problem in a more expressive logic. To solve a problem written in a given logic, an ATP for that logic can be used, or the problem can be translated to a less expressive form where a more powerful ATP can be used. If the problem is translated to a less expressive form, then again the same two possibilities are available, until no further translation is possible. In this research, an experiment has been designed and carried out to compare all these possibilities. No translator was available to translate from Conjunctive Normal Form (CNF) to Description Logic (DL). A translation procedure for translating CNF to DL, and its implementation as Saffron are also presented.

This is a Department of Computer Science Master's Thesis Defense.

Monday 14th April 2014, 10am, UB411

There are several areas of research in the field of motion learning for robots. RoboCanes, a research group belonging to the Department of Computer Science at University of Miami, uses the process of recording a human motion and optimizing the same to get stable motions for a simulated robot in the framework for the agent code. The major downside of this approach is that this optimization process may take hours to return a good set of parameters which leads to the need of a fast parallelizing approach. In this thesis, we present a parallel approach that extends the existing framework to generate stable motions for simulated humanoid robots using a motion capture framework and then optimizing the motions efficiently in a distributed and parallel environment. The approach is based on a client server network of systems where the server system controls the optimization process and distributes the particles (candidate solutions of an optimization process) to multiple client systems, which are responsible for running simulations individually, using the parameters sent by the server and then evaluating the error and returning it to the server. The experiments are conducted on three different experimental setups with four motion files and three optimization algorithms. The performance of this technique is measured with varying number of clients, each of which show considerable speedup as compared to the serial process. We have conducted more than 7000 experiments and the results show that the approach is promising and we have an average speed up increase of about 0.626 with every node we add.

This is a Department of Computer Science Master's Thesis Defense.

Thursday 3rd April 2014, 3:15pm, UB411

Although frequently viewed as bureaucratic and inefficient practices, some software engineering processes, in particular unit testing, may prove to be not only useful but indispensable even for small projects. Many software-related startups often do not know which software engineering processes and tools are most effective or even those that are absolutely required. In addition, they usually have significant time constraints and have limited resources. As a result, it is very common for startup businesses to overlook and omit the use of many vital processes and/or tools, without realizing that such omissions could negatively impact their project, financially, at present and many years into the future. This thesis surveys and evaluates relevant business processes for software engineering in small enterprises including requirements engineering, infrastructure selection, and testing alternatives. Consequently, this work provides a decision support methodology when selecting software processes that will ultimately result in robust, reliable, scalable, and maintainable software. This work uses focused experimentation to demonstrate how to effectively leverage unit testing techniques for small projects where resources are limited. This thesis is the first step towards a repeatable process for selecting an appropriate set of processes and tools to be used for new, small-scale software projects. The results of this model are evaluated using a focused software development experiment where an existing software product (that did not initially consider formal software engineering techniques) is redeveloped to incorporate unit testing paradigms. The outcomes of this experiment include the evaluation and comparison of software quality and level of effort of the existing product as it related to the resulting product. This presentation is presented in two parts (1) a survey of the state-of-the-art criteria for selecting software engineering processes/tools and (2) the results of the experiment where recommended techniques for unit testing are re-developed within an application that was originally developed without formal software engineering techniques.

This is a Department of Computer Science Master's Thesis Defense.

Tuesday 1st April 2014, 3:30pm, UB411

Data compression is a challenging process with important practical applications. Specialized techniques for lossy and lossless data compression have been the subject of numerous investigations during last several decades. These general data compression algorithms were used also for compression of images with considerable success. How- ever, with recent developments of new lossy and lossless data compression algorithms designed specifically for images, researchers have begun to achieve impressive gains in image compression efficiency. Lossy image compression tolerates compromising quality and information loss at the expense of compression gain. Lossless compression, in contrast, preserves image integrity fully, which is an important consideration in certain critical applications such as medical image processing. In this thesis we present a new technique for lossless compression of images based on the pseudo-distance technique proposed by Kuroki et al. We improve their algorithm by using a dynamic pseudo-distance matrix, context-models, and utilizing block-sorting transformations before the entropy coder. While their algorithm out-performed GIF by 16%, our algorithm achieves gains of 54% over GIF and 6% over PNG. We also present a parallelized implementation of our algorithm, which results in substantial gains in compression time while providing the desired compression efficiency. We demonstrate the efficiency of our compression algorithm on standard test image sets, including non-dithered and dithered color palette, and microarray images.

This is a Department of Computer Science Master's Thesis Defense.

Wednesday 26th March 2014, 5:00pm, UB230 (talk @ 5:00pm), Pizza in UB411 @ 4:30pm

In today's connected world a Computer Science degree can launch you into places and roles you never expected. Many people pick their degree with little experience or knowledge about the many different roles and opportunities that exist once they complete their college studies. With technology becoming the foundation for all functions, Computer Science becomes the key that opens the door to opportunity. During his 20+ year career in Technology, Al Monserrat has leveraged his UM Computer Science degree to lead transformational work across industries ranging from high-tech to consumer products; organizations ranging from $5 million to $50+ billion; and across the globe. Join as we journey through a variety of topics of your choice in a casual discussion.

Al Monserrat BS '89 is responsible for the global sales, services, and partner organizations at Citrix. Collectively, his team delivers Citrix's market-leading cloud and networking solutions to support the mobile workstyle objectives of over 230,000 customers worldwide. Monserrat has carved out a reputation as a charismatic leader who works hand-in-hand with his team, partners and solution providers to develop sales strategies that have made Citrix an industry leader.

This is another in the Departmental Pizza Seminar series.

Tuesday 25th March 2014, 12:30pm, UB411

This dissertation introduces several relevant problems on music recommendation. To make a high-qualified recommender, we evaluate feature importance for favorite song detection from two perspectives. The experiment results expose that collaborative filtering signal is the most important feature among the analyzed features. A classifier combination method is proposed to leverage several classifiers trained by different data sources to predict music genre. The complemented genre labels are used in a recommendation system for individual users on local device. The recommender takes freshness, time pattern, genre, publish year, and favor into account to make recommendations. The recommender outperforms the baseline on mostly favorite songs. We propose an adapted recommendation method to response user feedbacks and find out local optimizations to improve the recommendation quality. Furthermore, a probability-based method is proposed to make recommendations for implicit user groups by integrating individual opinions on candidate songs.

This is a Department of Computer Science PhD Thesis Defense.

Wednesday 19th March 2014, 5:00pm, UB230 (talk @ 5:00pm), Pizza in UB411 @ 4:30pm

The presentation will give an introduction to Test-driven development (TDD). This process hopes to accomplish higher quality code by having the developer write a failing test, then write enough code to make the test pass, and finally refactors the new code to acceptable standards. Kent Beck, who is credited with having developed or 'rediscovered' the technique, stated in 2003 that TDD encourages simple designs and inspires confidence. We will also be talking about agile development and career paths in the CS field. Ultimate Software ranked #20 in FORTUNE's Top 100 Best Companies to Work for in America in 2014. Our enterprise cloud-based software solution offers some wonderful challenges to Software Engineers and Software Test Engineers with skillsets that students at UM possess. We are located in Weston, just West of Fort Lauderdale, and are looking for students majoring in Computer Science, CIS, Software Engineering, IT and IS!

To give you an idea of how truly impressive our work environment is... on the enterprise Development Team, we've given 78 offers to interns to join us full-time over the last 7 years, and 76 of those offers have been accepted. That near 100% acceptance rate is even more impressive because many of our interns have previously interned with companies such as Amazon, Microsoft, Lockheed Martin, Intel, Accenture, and IBM's Extreme Blue internship program. Once people experience working in this environment, they always stay if given the chance. Please bring a hard copy of your resume to give it to the Ultimate Software reps to be considered for an internship or post grad position with us.

This is another in the Departmental Pizza Seminar series.

Wednesday 5th March 2014, 5:00pm, UB230 (talk @ 5:00pm), Pizza in UB411 @ 4:30pm

Functionality of an RNA molecule depends on its secondary structure. It is also increasingly recognized that a DNA molecule can assume alternative structures of potential functional importance. How mutations in these structures affect their function? In this talk I will approach this question from two perspectives. First, I will describe an algorithm, called remuRNA, that allows to measure changes in RNA secondary in response to single nucleotide variation on RNA sequence. Comparing the impact of common SNPs naturally occurring in populations with the impact of random point mutations, we found that structural changes introduced by commonSNPs are smaller than those introduced by random point mutations. Interestingly, mutations in the regions susceptible to formation of alternative DNA structures are common and don't appear to be selected against. We propose an explanation why this might be the case.

This is another in the Departmental Pizza Seminar series.

Wednesday 26th February 2014, 5:00pm, UB230 (talk @ 5:00pm), Pizza in UB411 @ 4:30pm

Up to 20% of cancers worldwide are thought to be associated with microbial pathogens, including bacteria and viruses. The widely used methods of viral infection detection are usually limited to a few a priori suspected viruses in one cancer type. To our knowledge, there have not been many broad screening approaches to address this problem more comprehensively. In this study, we performed a comprehensive screening for viruses in nine common cancers using a multistep computational approach. Tumor transcriptome and genome sequencing data were available from The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA). Nine hundred fifty eight primary tumors in nine common cancers with poor prognosis were screened against a non-redundant database of virus sequences. DNA sequences from normal matched tissue specimens were used as controls to test whether each virus is associated with tumors. We identified human papilloma virus type 18 (HPV-18) and four human herpes viruses (HHV) types 4, 5, 6B, and 8, also known as EBV, CMV, roseola virus, and KSHV, in colon, rectal, and stomach adenocarcinomas. In total, 59% of screened gastrointestinal adenocarcinomas (GIA) were positive for at least one virus: 26% forEBV, 21% for CMV, 7% for HHV-6B, and 20% for HPV-18. Over 20% of tumors were co-infected with multiple viruses. Two viruses (EBV and CMV) were statistically significantly associated with colorectal cancers when compared to the matched healthy tissues from the same individuals (p = 0.02 and 0.03, respectively). HPV-18 was not detected in DNA, and thus, no association testing was possible. Nevertheless, HPV-18 expression patterns suggest viral integration in the host genome, consistent with the potentially oncogenic nature of HPV-18 in colorectal adenocarcinomas. The estimated counts of viral copies were below one per cell for all identified viruses and approached the detection limit. Our comprehensive screening for viruses in multiple cancer types using next-generation sequencing data clearly demonstrates the presence of viral sequences in GIA. EBV, CMV, and HPV-18 are potentially causal for GIA, although their oncogenic role is yet to be established.

This is another in the Departmental Pizza Seminar series.

Wednesday 19th February 2014, 5:00pm, UB230 (talk @ 5:00pm), Pizza in UB411 @ 4:30pm

As a Computer Scientist, you will need to go beyond textbooks to the wider world of the scientific and technical literature. Much of this material is visible on the open web, but using Google it is easy to waste time with inefficient searches and miss important information. This talk will introduce you to the wealth of Computer Science reference material, scholarly journals, books and more made available by the University of Miami Libraries. Bill Jacobs, the science librarian, will cover the most effective ways to search the library's collection and how to access the full text from on and off campus. He will also show you tools to organize and share the information you find in your literature searches and easily create bibliographies.

This is another in the Departmental Pizza Seminar series.

Thursday 13th February 2014, 5:00pm, UB230

Neural processing, perception, and cognition, are dramatically influenced by the context of events in space and time. I focus on spatial context in vision as a paradigmatic example. Perceptually, spatial context can induce intriguing illusions and salience phenomena, and plays a critical role in object grouping, segmentation, and recognition. Deficits have been implicated in neurological disorders and aging. However, the principles underlying contextual effects in vision are not well understood. An appealing hypothesis suggests that neurons represent inputs in a coordinate system that is matched to the statistical structure of images in the natural environment. I describe a computational framework that is based on a well-found account of natural image statistics, and how we have used this approach to make sense of some spatial context phenomena in neuroscience and perception. I particularly highlight recent work in which we have made progress on a challenging question, namely understanding how cortical neurons process complex natural images. Studies have rarely considered natural images, focusing instead on simpler visual stimuli such as bars and gratings. In experimental collaboration, we found that contextual modulation in primary visual cortical neurons was recruited for some images but absent for others. This variability was not well explained by standard models, but could be predicted assuming that the neurons engaged in Bayesian inference about the structure of visual inputs. Surround modulation was flexible, only being recruited when the image was inferred to contain dependencies, and muted otherwise. Our results reveal a gating of a basic, widespread cortical computation, by optimal inference about the statistics of natural input. I also discuss the broader applicability of this framework to hierarchical neural processing, deep learning of image structure in computer science, and other forms of contextual influences.

Presented by the Department of Computer Science.

Friday 7th February 2014, 5:00pm, UB230 (talk @ 5:00pm), Pizza in UB411 @ 4:30pm

Visual problem-solving tasks offer important insights into how people represent and reason about space. For example, in the Visual Oddity Task participants select the image that lacks a key spatial feature. It is critical that we understand these tasks, so we can train students to be better spatial thinkers and improve achievement in science and engineering. I use computational models as tools for studying these tasks. Each model is an autonomous agent which constructs representations from 2D drawings and reasons over them to solve a problem. The models are developed based on the current understanding of human spatial reasoning. By manipulating the models' parameters and comparing their performance to humans, one can evaluate psychological theories and derive new hypotheses. In addition, the models can be integrated into future intelligent tutoring systems to improve spatial ability.

Presented by the Department of Computer Science.

Wednesday 5th February 2014, 5:00pm, UB230 (talk @ 5:00pm), Pizza in UB411 @ 4:30pm

To date, the vast majority of research into telerobotics has focused on enabling normal people to operate a robot safely and efficiently in extreme work environments such as deep oceans, space, battlefield, etc. This project focuses on the opposite end of the telerobotics spectrum; how to allow special people (those with physical disabilities) to operate a robot safely and comfortably in normal, routine work environments such as police stations, fire departments, hospitals, construction sites, business offices, etc. We believe that the importance of this research is to develop general purpose telepresence robots that are affordable, reliable, sociable public appearance, and human-centered interface for disabled teleoperators to intuitively grasp and use. In FIU Discovery Lab, we have been developing a low cost telepresence humanoid robot, known as TeleBot that would enable a disabled veteran or police officer to perform law enforcement duties. The project team members studied the design of two military-grade robots that were borrowed from Florida Institute of Human Machine Cognition (IHMC) at Pensacola, FL. Subsequently, the team has developed the first TeleBot prototype with video, audio and sensory capabilities so that a disabled teleoperator can intuitively control the TeleBot. I will introduce architectural and algorithm designs of this project for the realization of real-time telepresence operations with optimum bandwidth utilization, human-centered intuitive control interface and ergonomic movements as well as motivation and development process of this project.

Dr. Jong-Hoon Kim is the Director of FIU Discovery Lab and a Visiting Assistant Professor in the School of Computing and Information Sciences, Florida International University. He received a B.S. from Seoul National University of Science and Technology, Seoul, South Korea in 2005. He received his masters and Ph.D. in the Department of Computer Science, Louisiana State University at Baton Rouge in 2008 and in 2011 respectively. His research interests are in Mobile Robots, Telerobotics, Embedded Systems, HCI, Sensor Networks, and Intelligent Systems. Currently, his research is focusing on Tele-Presence Robot (TeleBot), and Intelligent System for Home Automation (ISHA).

This is another in the Departmental Pizza Seminar series.

Previous Colloquia

Previous Colloquia Announcements

Wednesday 4th December 2013, 3:00pm, UB411 (pizza @ 4:30pm), UB230 (talks @ 3:00pm and 5pm)

This is another in the Departmental Pizza Seminar series.

Wednesday 20th November 2013, 5:00pm, UB411 (pizza @ 4:30pm), UB230 (talk @ 5:00pm)

Scientific discovery today is undertaken for the most part by teams working together in a cross-disciplinary setting.Further afield and wider interactions are being encouraged by funding agencies and university administration, but academics and students who are expected to work in these disparate teams are often ill equipped to cope with the dynamics of setting up cross-disciplinary teams and of making them successful. Often in the biomedical sciences, teams include molecular biologists or biochemists working together with computer scientists or engineers -- disciplines that have different languages and different cultures. Traditional boundary lines between these disciplines are becoming blurred, and there are several new disciplines that have emerged along that continuum, such as bioinformatics. This talk will introduce the topic of Team Science, discuss the ways in which collaborating across disciplines is in fact a crossing of cultures, and give examples of the joys and woes of being team members and leaders of cross-disciplinary collaborative projects.

This is another in the Departmental Pizza Seminar series.

Wednesday 13th November 2013, 5:00pm, UB411 (pizza @ 4:30pm), UB230 (talk @ 5:00pm)

Computer Science and Entrepreneurship have long had a close relationship. The advantages of software based businesses over traditional ones can empower an individual to accomplish huge goals with minimal starting resources. Why pursue this path now? There has never been a better time to get started: the time and costs of building a new business or startup are falling dramatically. In recent years, new methodologies such as the Lean Startup movement have developed risk-reducing practices for developing businesses and products through a process now called 'validated learning'. Community building events like Startup Weekend are happening globally and bringing experienced based education to people interested in entrepreneurship, but unsure of how to take the first step. Through these kind of events and more, people of different backgrounds are networking together to forge great ideas into products and services that could change your world. Even with this however, the world still needs more entrepreneurs if the promises of a better future are to someday be held true. Stay hungry, stay foolish!

This is another in the Departmental Pizza Seminar series.

Wednesday 6th November 2013, 5:00pm, UB411 (pizza @ 4:30pm), UB230 (talk @ 5:00pm)

Robotics in Education has been one of the most talked about topics of technology in education for several years. Mataric, a professor of USC and the director of Center for Robotics and Embedded Systems and Robotics Research Lab, stated that "robotics has been a growing field with the potential to significantly impact the nature of engineering and science education at all levels, from K-12 to graduate school." The talk introduces the Robotics in Education in K-12 classroom, and how using the educational robotics as a learning tool helps to enhance students learning experience of subject content knowledge, especially in STEM fields. In addition, it talks about how educational robotics can enhance the learning of 21st century skills, design thinking, and engineering thinking skills, which are some of the most important skills that 21st century students need to be successful innovators.

Amy Eguchi is an Associate Professor of Education at Bloomfield College in New Jersey. She holds her M.A. in Child Development from Pacific Oaks College, Ed.M. in Education from Harvard Graduate School of Education, and Ph.D. in Education from the University of Cambridge and has an extensive teaching experience in educational robotics both with students and teachers in K-12 setting. She also teaches educational robotics to undergraduates. She runs a competitive robotics after school team at The School at Columbia University. Dr. Eguchi has been involved in RoboCupJunior, an educational robotics competition, since 2000, as the technical committee and organizing committee members, as well as the co-chair and general chair, in international, national, and local levels. In addition, she is the vice president of RoboCup Federation representing RoboCupJunior, and a member of the RoboCup Federation Board of Trustees. Dr. Eguchi has been involved in several international collaboration educational robotics projects including the CoSpace educational robotics projects with the Advanced Robotics and Intelligent Control Centre (ARICC) at Singapore Polytechnic, Singapore and RoboCupJunior initiative in Bangladesh. She also provides consultations to various educational robotics initiatives from around the world.

This is another in the Departmental Pizza Seminar series.

Wednesday 30th October 2013, 5:00pm, UB411 (pizza @ 4:30pm), UB230 (talk @ 5:00pm)

The National Institute of Health (NIH) Library of Integrated Network-based Cellular Signatures (LINCS) program is generating extensive multidimensional datasets including biochemical-, genome-wide transcriptional-, and phenotypic cellular response signatures to a variety of small molecule and genetic perturbations with the goal to create a sustainable, widely applicable, and readily accessible systems biology knowledge resource. Integration and analysis of diverse LINCS datasets could be better accommodated by using semantic web technologies. We introduce the knowledge model developed and implemented for the LINCS data, how we implemented a complex systems biology model using OWL DL, and how it might help life scientists better analyze the datasets by using the reasoning capabilities. We further discuss how the analysis could be improved by integrating additional data, such as biological pathways by using semantic web technologies. The discussion will continue on to show how we can utilize the experiments that measure cellular pathway information by using different time points and how this information can be used for better analysis by using temporal reasoning.

This is another in the Departmental Pizza Seminar series.

Wednesday 23rd October 2013, 5:00pm, UB411 (pizza @ 4:30pm), UB230 (talk @ 5:00pm)

This talk introduces several relevant problems on music recommendation. To make a high-qualified recommender, we evaluate feature importance for favorite song detection from two perspectives. The experiment results expose that collaborative filtering signal is the most important feature among the selected features. A classifier combination method is proposed to leverage several classifiers trained by different data sources to predict music genre. The complemented genre labels are used in a recommendation system for individual users on local device. The recommender takes freshness, time pattern, genre, publish year, and favor into account to make recommendations. The recommender outperforms the baseline on mostly favorite songs. Furthermore, a probability-based method is proposed to make recommendations for implicit user groups by integrating individual opinions on candidate songs. At the end, a possible adapted recommendation method is introduced to response user feedback and find out local optimizations to improve the recommendation quality.

This is another in the Departmental Pizza Seminar series.

Wednesday 9th October 2013, 5:00pm, UB411 (pizza @ 4:30pm), UB230 (talk @ 5:00pm)

Scientists tend to collect lots of data, and the problem arises: how does one interpret all of this information? This talk will cover scientific visualization projects in the domains of robotics and medicine. These research efforts leverage the modern graphics rendering pipeline and accessible sensors (Microsoft Kinect and Leap Motion) to provide interactive experiences that enable scientists and doctors to extract insight from their data. The first part of this talk will focus on recent work: visualizing robot behaviors in multi-agent environments, modeling robot configuration spaces, and mapping human motions to humanoid robots. The main part of this talk covers a collaboration with doctors at the Oregon Health & Science University Hospital; we are working on an interactive gesture-controlled visualization system for intraoperatively viewing and manipulating data in a sterile environment.

This is another in the Departmental Pizza Seminar series.

Wednesday 2nd October 2013, 5:00pm, UB411 (pizza @ 4:30pm), UB230 (talk @ 5:00pm)

Motion learning is an interesting topic for research. The current approach used for motion learning in the RoboCanes framework uses the process of recording a human motion and optimizing the same to get a stable motion for a simulated robot. But the major downside of this approach is that this optimization process takes hours to return a good set of parameters. One possible solution is to parallelize the optimization process. This talk is about an extension of the existing framework to generate stable motions for simulated humanoid robots using motion capture framework and then optimizing them efficiently in a distributed/parallel environment. This approach uses a master slave network of systems where the master system controls the optimization process and distributes the particles (candidate solutions of an optimization process) to multiple client systems which are responsible for running simulations individually, using the parameters sent by the server and then evaluating the error and returning it to the server. The main objective is to enable faster iterations and thus reduce the time for finding the best value for the set of parameters used in the fitting function for all the joints of the motion.

This is another in the Departmental Pizza Seminar series.

Wednesday 25th September 2013, 5:00pm, UB411 (pizza @ 4:30pm), UB230 (talk @ 5:00pm)

Fueled by a wealth of data supplied by a wide range of high-throughput tools and technologies, the study of complex systems is currently reshaping a number of research fields from social science to computer science and biology. This data-rich reality calls for new approaches and techniques to harvest the hidden information and devise new models to explain the underlying principles of various complex systems. While from a functional standpoint different systems may appear to be distinct from one another, there is an increasing realization that they often share similar structural and dynamic properties. Such similarities offer new perspectives and unique opportunities for physicists to apply their methodologies on a much broader set of phenomena. In this talk, I will first present a macroscopic study of large-scale network structures observed in diverse datasets, and next focus on understanding social activities such as communication and traveling pattern at the each individual level. In the end, I will show a series of relationships that link the quantities characterizing social networks and human dynamics, and demonstrate their generality across a wide range of systems, from mobile calls to tweets.

This is another in the Departmental Pizza Seminar series.

Wednesday 11th September 2013, 5:00pm, UB411 (pizza @ 4:30pm), UB230 (talk @ 5:00pm)

Almost everyone has to give a public presentation at some time. Graduate students have to defend their theses, research students have to present their results, and many jobs require presentations. It is common to have little or no experience when you give your first presentation, and you may even be a little nervous! This talk is aimed at (graduate, research, and other) students. It describes how to present a successful talk, in a simple standard format. This talk does not try to teach general speaking skills, nor impose any personally preferred techniques. It covers the structure of a talk, the use of visual aids, speaking technique, and how to cope with questions.

This is another in the Departmental Pizza Seminar series.

Wednesday 4th September 2013, 5:00pm, Room 411 (pizza @ 4:30pm), 230 (talk @ 5:00pm)

Today's web is more complex than ever before. Variations in devices, platforms, and channels makes delivering content correctly a tedious job. For large, fast-paced companies, keeping your web presence up-to-date with the latest content can be challenging. Integration with legacy systems and data storage is a must but adds multiple layers of complexity. Magnolia CMS makes complex websites simple to manage, while its flexible software architecture makes it possible to implement custom functionality.

During this presentation Magnolia will provide an overview of its Content Management System (CMS) technology. The presenters will discuss why a CMS is needed to manage today's enterprise websites. The presentation will touch on the core technologies used by the system, a high level overview of how content storage is handled, and the modular nature of the Magnolia CMS product. Attendees should walk away from this presentation with a better understanding of how an Enterprise-level Java system is built.

This is another in the Departmental Pizza Seminar series.

Wednesday 14th April 2013, 5:00pm, Room 411 (pizza @ 4:30pm), 311 (talk @ 5:00pm)

This is another in the Departmental Pizza Seminar series.

Wednesday 10th April 2013, 5:00pm, Room 411 (pizza @ 4:30pm), 311 (talk @ 5:00pm)

Controlling an autonomous, humanoid robot in a real time, dynamic, and adversarial environment is a complex task that includes several areas of computer science. I will start with an overview of controlling a robot and present some general concepts. RoboCanes, UM's robotic soccer team, participated during the last few years in the RoboCup, an international robotic soccer competition fostering research in both robotics and AI. RoboCup uses soccer as a standard problem that provides many opportunities to develop general methods for controlling robots in demanding environments.

An essential ability of a robot is to act in its environment by generating motions. This can be a challenging problem on a robot with > 20 degrees of freedom. The current solutions in the RoboCanes agent include optimization methods that work well in a simulated environment. However, a stable bipedal walk for a physical robot requires additional approaches. One common approach is to generate trajectories of the zero moment point and the center of mass under constraints given by a simplified physical model such as an inverted pendulum. A lot of research has been done in this area in the recent years. However, despite good results in theory and simulations, in the end most implementations on physical robots still need a lot of manual tuning and are not very robust with respect to changes in the environment. Possible reasons for that and ideas for improvement will be discussed.

Andreas Seekircher is a PhD student at the University of Miami. He holds an MSc in Computer Science from the University of Bremen, Germany. His research is focused on robotics and artificial intelligence, specifically controlling autonomous robots.

This is another in the Departmental Pizza Seminar series.

Thursday 25th April 2013, 3:30pm, Room 311

This is another in the Departmental Pizza Seminar series.

Wednesday 3rd April 2013, 5:00pm, Room 411 (pizza @ 4:30pm), 311 (talk @ 5:00pm)

I will discuss how equation-free methods can be used to describe the dynamics and quantify stability of an Agent Based Model where automated trading agents interact in a Continuous Double Auction. Agents are heterogeneous in their decision making and in the timescales at which they receive, process and respond to market information. The stability of asset price and proxy indicators of order book dynamics is compared for different timescale variations. Such dynamics have not as yet been analytically quantified although recent work strongly suggests that timescales are an important component. Modern day financial markets are composed of trading agents interacting on a multitude of timescales. Depending on the market, up to 70% of trading may be due to automated algorithmic trading. These agents make and execute decisions on millisecond time scales, whilst human traders are restricted by their reaction times---in the order of 1000 milliseconds. Statistical evidence (/Johnson et al. 2012/) and experimental evidence /(Cartlidge & Cliff, 2012 and 2013, Cartlidge, De Luca, Cliff & Szostek, Forthcoming) /suggests that there exists, in effect, 'Parallel markets' that collectively determine//the order book dynamics of an asset. Automated-automated interactions on//microsecond timescales, human-human interactions occur at a timescale of//seconds, and depending on the time-scale difference between automated and//human agents; a varying quantity of automated-human interactions.//Experimental evidence (/Cartlidge, De Luca, Szostek, & Cliff, (2012)) /also shows//timescales impacts mechanisms that determine order book dynamics: specifically//the efficiency of convergence of trader shouts to the 'fundamental' market price.

Charlotte Szostek is a PhD candidate at the Bristol Centre for Complexity Sciences in the UK. Her research interests are in Non--Linear Dynamics and the use of Equation-Free methods to perform stability analysis, specifically on ABMs. The application areas of her research are financial markets and automated trading. For the past six months Charlotte has been investigating the feasibility of ABMs to inform risk more accurately for hedge funds as agents in the financial system and to understand systemic risk due to their behavior. For this time she has been based at a Risk Services Provider in New York. Charlotte's publications to date have been 'experimental economics' in computer science journals - observing interactions between human traders and automated algorithms. She has contributed to the UK governments Foresight report on the 'Future The Future of Computer Trading in Financial Markets, Driver Reviews.

This is another in the Departmental Pizza Seminar series.

Wednesday 27th March 2013, 3:30pm, Room 411

Handwriting recognition works quite well today and optical character recognition (OCR) for scanned documents is believed to be nearly error free. In this talk, the recognition of text from screenshot images will be presented which comes with very strong challenges. The biggest challenge is the very low resolution of rendered characters which typically have a height of just a few pixels. The talk will start with a brief introduction to typography and rendering technologies related to the creation of screen-rendered text, followed by a motivation for the need for text recognition from screenshot images and the presentation of selected aspects of a recognition system that was implemented at the University of M?nster, Germany. The implemented system was tested on publicly available databases holding thousands of screenshot images of single characters and words. To the author's knowledge, the system is currently the best performing system on screen-rendered text including state-of-the-art text recognition programs.

Dr. Steffen Wachenfeld received his PhD in Computer Science from the University of M?nster, Germany. He was conducting research and teaching at the Department of Computer Science for six years. Besides his PhD he holds a Masters Degree in Computer Science and a Masters Degree in Information Systems. His fields of expertise comprise social media, mobile computing, image analysis, pattern recognition, artificial intelligence, networking, mobile computing, and databases. After graduating, Steffen worked for two years in Philadelphia, USA, as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Pennsylvania in the field of Biomedical Image Analysis. Besides his academic career, Steffen ran an IT-related business for over 10 years and was co-founder of Capino GmbH, a company developing language learning software. Also he spent two years at The Boston Consulting Group, one of the world's leading Consulting Companies.

This is another in the Departmental Pizza Seminar series.

1st March 2013, 3:30pm, Room 411

This talk introduces a dynamic pseudo-distance technique with a context-modeling for compression of color-mapped images. Graphic Interchange Format (GIF) and Portable Network Graphics (PNG) are two of the well-known and frequently used techniques for the compression of color-mapped images. There are several techniques that achieve better compression results than GIF and PNG; however, most of these techniques need two passes on the image data, while others do not run in linear time. The pseudo-distance technique runs in linear time and requires only one pass. In this talk, we show that with a modified pseudo-distance technique and context-modeling, further compression gains are possible over both GIF and PNG.

This is a Department of Computer Science Colloquium.

Wednesday 20th February 2013, 5:00pm, Room 411 (pizza @ 4:30pm), 311 (talk @ 5:00pm)

In humanoid robot soccer, the color coded environment is predominantly perceived through a camera sensor. Therefore, a reliable and efficient object recognition system is crucial. Over the years, a standard approach evolved that uses a static color classification as the first processing step. Besides its efficiency, this approach lacks robustness against unforeseen changes in illumination. In this talk, I will present an object recognition system for the RoboCup Standard Platform League that does not use static color classification as the first processing step. Instead, objects are found based on color similarities to increase robustness. The proposed system is still sufficiently efficient to allow for real time operation despite the limited processing power of the robot. It is shown that the detection rate is comparable under static lighting conditions and substantially better under changing lighting conditions.

This is another in the Departmental Pizza Seminar series.

Wednesday 13th February 2013, 5:00pm, Room 411 (pizza @ 4:30pm), 311 (talk @ 5:00pm)

We are exposed to enormous amounts of information, yet our processing capacity is limited. How we attend to and perceive incoming information (e.g., snack food options) has a profound influence on our choices (e.g., chosen snack item). In particular, choices are affected by exogenous factors such as visual saliency, which affects where we look and thus which alternatives we consider, and endogenous factors such as expected reward, which also affects our eye-movements and choices. A biologically plausible model of early visual attention from computational neuroscience is used to analyze the physical characteristics of objects in a visual scene in order to determine which items are most likely to attract viewers' attention. At the same time, a series of eye-tracking experiments examine where attention is deployed during real decision-making process. Finally, a computational model (i.e., a drift-diffusion type of model) is introduced, which describes (and aims to predict) how visual and reward information determine economic choices.

This is another in the Departmental Pizza Seminar series.

Wednesday 6th February 2013, 5:00pm, Room 411 (pizza @ 4:30pm), 311 (talk @ 5:00pm)

With the advancement of computational infrastructure and the success of the statistical machine learning methods, there exists a substantial problem of interpreting the content. For an autonomous agent: what is knowledge? Is it learnable? What constituents keep the knowledge correct? And: where does an agent get the ground truth from to verify knowledge? High-level languages or methods such as description logic (SROIQ(D)) or Bayesian networks are the most prevalent technologies to represent knowledge with substantial expressivity and moderate computational cost. These representations allow an agent to infer and reason about static knowledge. There remains the question whether an agent can dynamically predict knowledge, learn knowledge from sensorimotor interactions and generalize for unseen circumstances. In this talk we look at a mechanistic solution for these questions using description logic representation and reasoning subsystem to synchronize high-level human knowledge (essentially public) with the low-level sensorimotor knowledge (essentially private).

This is another in the Departmental Pizza Seminar series.

Monday 28th January 2013, 11:00am, Executive Conference Room, Newman Alumni Center

The abundance of many disparate biological data sources necessitates the development of computational methods that allow skillful data integration. Specifically, such approaches provide the opportunities to identify complex relationships between biological entities that can shed a light on key players in diseases. Giving an overview of applications of novel approaches I will present (i) a current flow algorithm that allows the determination of causal paths through molecular interaction networks from genomic perturbations to disease genes in brain cancers. (ii) Furthermore, I will introduce a graph-based approach that was applied to determine epistatic interactions between genes in the human malaria parasite. (iii) Finally, I will present a simple computational approach to predict microRNAs that potentially play a role in different cancers.

This is a College of Arts & Sciences and Department of Computer Science colloquium.

Wednesday 28th February 2013, 5:00pm, Room 411 (pizza @ 4:30pm), 311 (talk @ 5:00pm)

There is a lot of buzz in the networking industry these days about Software Defined Networking or SDN.Cisco recently announced a strategy around SDN and network programmability called the Open Network Environment or ONE.One of the key pillars of ONE is a rich device-level application programming interface (API) called onePK or ONE Platform Kit. This talk will focus on what onePK provides in terms of APIs cand capabilities.Attendees will have a chance to think in new terms about how networks can be provisioned, managed, and controlled.Some use case demonstrations will be shown to help reinforce the material.

This is another in the Departmental Pizza Seminar series.

Wednesday 23rd January 2013, 3:30pm, McArthur Engineering Annex, Room 202

Accurate computer recognition of handwritten mathematics offers to provide a versatile interface for mathematical computing systems, such as Maple, document creation and collaboration. Mathematical handwriting, however, provides a number of challenges beyond what is required for the recognition of handwritten natural languages. New methods of character recognition are important for accurate handwritten mathematics input.

We present a geometric theory that we have found useful for recognizing mathematical symbols. Characters are represented as parametric curves approximated by certain truncated orthogonal series. This maps symbols to a low-dimensional vector space of series coefficients in which the Euclidean distance is closely related to the variational integral between two curves. This can be used to find similar symbols very efficiently. We describe some properties of mathematical handwriting data sets when mapped into this space and compare classification methods and their confidence measures. The beauty of this theory is that a single, coherent view provides several related geometric techniques that give a high recognition rate and that do not rely on peculiarities of the symbol set.

This is another in the Departmental Pizza Seminar series.

Thursday 17th January 2013, 3:30pm, Executive Conference Room, Newman Alumni Center

Probabilistic models are common in biology. Many of the successful models have been readily tractable, leaving calculations on models with a combinatorial-sized state space as an open problem. This talk examines two kinds of models with combinatorial state spaces: continuous-time and discrete-time Markov chains. These models are applied to two problems: RNA folding pathways and family genetics. While the applications are disparate topics in biology, they are related via their models, the statistical quantities of interest, and in some cases the computational techniques used to calculate those quantities.

This is a Department of Computer Science colloquium.

Wednesday 14th November 2012, 5:00pm, Ungar Building, Room 411 (pizza), 311 (talk)

Look at any good medical science research article in any high impact journal. Count the number of authors and look at the range of departments and institutions they come from. Chances are that somewhere in the authors list are one or more bioinformatics experts without whom the project could not have been completed. Research in today's world is about teams of people from an increasing number of disciplines, and in the medical sciences these teams include clinicians, biochemists, molecular biologists, bioinformaticians, statisticians, and software engineers. This talk will highlight the rise of team science, the launch of the Science of Team Science field, and their main findings about how scientific teams work (or don't!). Examples will be presented of successful team science projects that include bioinformatics, such as the Human Genome Project and from the drug discovery world.

This is another in the Departmental Pizza Seminar series.

Wednesday 7th November 2012, 5:00pm, Ungar Building, Room 411 (pizza), 311 (talk)

Consider a 2D scene with a static obstacle, such as a top-down view of an apartment, and a mobile robot capable of 2D translation and 1D rotation. The robot can move with three degrees of freedom, but it cannot collide with the obstacle. The space of all valid arrangements of the robot is called its configuration space; it consists of all (X,Y,?) such that the robot is not overlapping with the obstacle. This talk will illustrate how the configuration space of such a scene can be visualized by constructing and rendering a 3D polygonal mesh that exists at the configuration space boundaries. The mesh is built "airtight" and without fixed sampling along ? in order to attain a compact and accurate representation of the smooth surface of the configuration space. The triangles of the mesh can be used to generate a path for the robot from an initial configuration to a goal configuration without collision.

This is another in the Departmental Pizza Seminar series.

Monday 14th January 2013, 11:00am, CAS Wesley Gallery

Information is delivered to cortical pyramidal neurons via thousands of synaptic inputs, activated at different dendritic locations with varying degrees of temporal synchrony and in different sequences. Using electrophysiological recordings combined with two-photon glutamate uncaging, calcium imaging and compartmental modeling, we tested how different regions along single cortical dendrites integrate excitatory inputs, and whether they are sensitive to the sequence of synaptic activation. We found that dendrites of cortical neurons have a gradient of non-linear synaptic integration, whereby proximal inputs sum linearly and require precise temporal coincidence for effective summation, whereas distal inputs are amplified with high gain and integrated over broader time windows. The mechanism involves dendritic impedance gradients and non-linear synaptic NMDA receptor activation, and also confers high sensitivity to the temporal input sequence, allowing dendrites to efficiently discriminate different sequences of synaptic activation. Pyramidal cell dendrites can thus exhibit multiple computational strategies, and act processing compartments for detection of synaptic sequences, implementing a fundamental cortical computation.

Tiago Branco received his M.D. from Lisbon University in 2002. He then joined the Wellcome Trust Four-Year Ph.D. Programme in Neuroscience at University College London (UCL), where in the group of Dr. Yukiko Goda he focussed on neurotransmitter release properties of individual synapses. After receiving his Ph.D. in 2007 he moved to Prof. Michael Hausser's laboratory in UCL, where he applied electrophysiological, optical and modelling techniques to investigate how dendritic integration contributes to single neuron computations. In 2012 he started his own group as a Sir Henry Dale Fellow at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology, where he combines physiological and molecular methods to investigate the how the mouse brain implements the computations that underlie innate behaviours.

This is a Departmentof Computer Science colloquium.

Wednesday 31st October 2012, 5:00pm, Ungar Building, Room 411 (pizza), 311 (talk)

Our goal in this study was to identify gene-environment interactions that are critical in the development of astrocytic tumors. We also aim to identify genes and/or pathways that may further the understanding of the differences between low and high grade astrocytic tumors. Several steps were involved in our analysis, including: 1) identification of a significant set of over-and under-expressed genes through meta-analysis of several astrocytoma microarray studies; 2) enrichment analysis of the set of significant genes; 3) network analysis of the set of significant genes; and 4) investigation and validation of the network analysis. Through meta-analysis of 12 sub-studies which compared normal tissue to astrocytomas, we were able to identify a list of 554 genes which were differentially expressed in the majority of these studies. Many of the genes identified in this study have in fact been implicated in the development of astrocytoma, including EGFR, HIF-1α, c-Myc, WNT5A, and IDH3A. We then performed reverse engineering of our gene list using Bayesian network analysis. Networks of genes were produced for astrocytoma. This study was able to identify a set of key genes significantly disregulated during the development of astrocytoma. Our results suggest that alterations in the expression of eight to ten key genes may be required for the development of astrocytoma.

This is another in the Departmental Pizza Seminar series.

Monday 22nd October 2012, 11:00am, CAS Wesley Gallery

Collections of networks are at the core of modern society, spanning technological, biological and social systems. Over the past decade, a science of networks has been emerging and providing insights into the structure and function of many diverse types of systems, such as protein-interactions in a cell, collaboration networks of scientists, and the World Wide Web. Random graphs provide a framework for modeling network phenomena, especially phase transitions, such as the sudden emergence of large-scale connectivity. This talk will give an overview and present a variant of the classic Erdos-Renyi model of network formation, showing that we can alter the location and also the nature of the phase transition, making for an explosive onset of connectivity. We also develop random graph models of interacting networks, motivated by the fact that individual networks are increasingly interdependent (e.g., the Internet and the power grid, globalization of financial markets). We show that interactions between different types of networks can actually lower critical thresholds and provide stabilizing effects with respect to cascades.

Raissa D'Souza is an Associate Professor of Computer Science and of Mechanical Engineering at the University of California, Davis, as well as an External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute. Her research focuses on mathematical models of self-organization, phase transitions, and the structure and function of networked systems. Raissa received a PhD in Statistical Physics from MIT in 1999, then was a postdoctoral fellow, first in Fundamental Mathematics and Theoretical Physics at Bell Laboratories, and then in the Theory Group at Microsoft Research. Her influential, interdisciplinary work on network theory has appeared in journals such as Science, PNAS, and Physical Review Letters, and her research has been funded by the NSF, the National Academy of Sciences of the USA, DOD, ARL and AFOSR. Raissa has been selected a Kavli Fellow of the National Academy of Sciences four times and is a member of the Science Steering Committee of the Santa Fe Institute. She has served on the program committees for numerous conferences, and currently serves on the editorial board of several international mathematics and physics journals. When not pursuing research ideas, she can typically be found outside, either scaling rocks or sailing.

This is a College or Arts and Sciences, and Department of Computer Science, Colloquium.

Wednesday 17th October 2012, 5:00pm, Ungar Building, Room 311/411

There are different forms of logic with different levels of expressivity. Scientists have developed Automated Theorem Provers (ATPs) to reason about these different forms of logic. An ATP is a tool that automatically checks if a statement (conjecture) is logical consequence of a set of statements (axioms). Very expressive logics have less powerful ATPs, and conversely less expressive logics have more powerful ATPs. A problem, which is a set of statements in a natural language, is first stated in a logical form. The logical form is either given to a suitable ATP, or can be translated to a less expressive logic with more powerful ATPs. The question is which approach gives the best trade-off between expressivity and ATP performance.

This is another in the Departmental Pizza Seminar series.

Wednesday 10th October 2012, 5:00pm, Ungar Building, Room 311/411

We present a complete path planning algorithm for a plane robot with three degrees of freedom and a static obstacle. The part boundaries consist of n linear and circular edges. The algorithm constructs and searches a combinatorial representation of the robot free space. Its computational complexity is O((n⁴ + c₃ )log n) with c₃ O(n⁶ ) the number of configurations with three simultaneous contacts between robot and obstacle edges. The algorithm is implemented robustly using our adaptive-precision controlled perturbation library. The program is fast and memory efficient, is provably accurate, and handles degenerate input.

Joint work with Elisha Sacks of Purdue University and Steven Trac of Epic Systems Corporation.

This is another in the Departmental Pizza Seminar series.

Wednesday 12th September 2012, 5:00pm, Ungar Building, Room 506

Almost everyone has to give a public presentation at some time. Graduate students have to defend their theses, research students have to present their results, and many jobs require presentations. It is common to have little or no experience when you give your first presentation, and you may even be a little nervous! This talk is aimed at (graduate, research, and other) students. It describes how to present a successful talk, in a simple standard format. This talk does not try to teach general speaking skills, nor impose any personally preferred techniques. It covers the structure of a talk, the use of visual aids, speaking technique, and how to cope with questions.

This is another in the Departmental Pizza Seminar series.

Wednesday 5th September 2012, 5:00pm, Ungar Building, Room 506

Next-generation wireless systems are characterized by three key features: heterogeneity, in terms of technologies and services; size, in terms of number of users, nodes, and services; and dynamics, in terms of rapidly varying environments and uncertainty. The design and analysis of such complex systems must handle a myriad of co-existing devices that can interact, self-organize, meet stringent QoS requirements, and adapt to their environment. In this respect, game theory is expected to play a critical role toward deploying intelligent, distributed, and self-organizing communication systems in which network devices can make independent and rational strategic decisions. This talk provides a comprehensive introduction to game theory in its two branches, non-cooperative and cooperative games, as it applies to the design of future heterogeneous wireless networks. For each type of games, we present the fundamental components, introduce the key properties, mathematical techniques, solution concepts, and describe the challenges and methods for applying these games in two emerging fields: (i) the design and analysis of heterogeneous small cell and cognitive wireless networks and (ii) the development of physical layer wireless security solutions. We conclude the talk with insights on future work and some related areas.

Walid Saad received his B.E. from the Lebanese University in 2004, his M.E. in Computer and Communications Engineering from the American University of Beirut in 2007, and his PhD degree from the University of Oslo in 2010. From August 2008 until July 2009 he was a visiting scholar in the Coordinated Science Laboratory at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign. From January 2011 until July 2011, he was a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the Electrical Engineering Department at Princeton University. Currently, he is an Assistant Professor at the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at the University of Miami. His research interests span the areas of game theory, wireless networks, small cell networks, cognitive radio, and security. He has published over 60 publications in major technical journals and conferences in these areas, including a book on game theory in wireless and communication networks, published by Cambridge University Press in October 2011. He has recently received three best paper awards at the 7^th International Symposium on Modeling and Optimization in Mobile, Ad Hoc and Wireless Networks (WiOpt), in June 2009, at the 5^th International Conference on Internet Monitoring and Protection (ICIMP) in May 2010, and at the IEEE Wireless Communications and Networking Conference (WCNC) in 2012.

This is another in the Departmental Pizza Seminar series.

Thursday 9th August 2012, 11:30am, Ungar Building, Room 402

Our digital society relies on commerce, work, food provisioning, transportation, energy, information and data networks, and many others, that interact to make the system "work as a whole". For the first time in human history, all of these networks have a common mediator other than money, and a representation system: the information and data networks. Thus we can envision to model and understand these complex networks as an observable formal system. This talk will present an approach to such "NetONets" based on stochastic networks that leads to closed form mathematical solutions, and we will illustrate it through specific results for stochastic networks that simultaneously model commerce, transportation, ICT and energy consumption.

This is a Department of Computer Science Colloquium. Refreshments will be served at 11:00am

Monday 11th June 2012, 11:30am, Ungar Building, Room 426

The widespread adoption of social plugins, such as Facebook's Like and Google's +1 buttons, has raised concerns about their implications to user privacy, as they enable social networking services to track a growing part of their members' browsing activity. Existing mitigations in the form of browser extensions can prevent social plugins from tracking user visits, but inevitably disable any kind of content personalization, ruining the user experience. In this work we describe a novel design for privacy-preserving social plugins that decouples the retrieval of user-specific content from the loading of a social plugin. In contrast to existing solutions, this design preserves the functionality of existing social plugins by delivering the same personalized content, while it protects user privacy by avoiding the transmission of user-identifying information We have implemented our design in SafeButton, an add-on for Firefox that fully supports seven out of the nine social plugins currently provided by Facebook, including the Like button, and partially due to API restrictions the other two. As privacy-preserving social plugins maintain the functionality of existing social plugins, we envisage that they could be adopted by social networking services themselves for the benefit of their members. To that end, we also present a pure JavaScript design that can be offered transparently as a service without the need to install any browser add-ons.

Prof. Evangelos Markatos received his diploma in Computer Engineering from the University of Patras in 1988, and the M.S and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science from the University of Rochester, NY in 1990 and 1993 respectively. Since 1992, he collaborates with the Institute of Computer Science of the Foundation for Research and Technology - Hellas (ICS-FORTH) where he is currently the founder and head of the Distributed Computing Systems Laboratory. He conducts research in several areas including distributed and parallel systems, the World-Wide Web, Internet Systems and Technologies, as well as Computer and Communication Systems Security. He has been the project manager of the LOBSTER and NoAH projects, both funded in part by the European Union and focusing on developing novel approaches to network monitoring and network security. He is currently the project manager of the i-code and SysSec projects. Since 1992, he has also been affiliated with the Computer Science Department of the University of Crete, where he is currently a full Professor.

This is a Department of Computer Science Colloquium. Refreshments will be served at 11:00am

Wednesday 25th April 2012 5:00pm, Ungar 411

Monday 23rd April 2012 5:00pm, Ungar 411

This is another in the Department of Computer Science Pizza Seminar Series

Wednesday 18th April 2012, 5:00pm, Ungar Building, Room 411

We discuss the design and implementation of the prototype of an avatar-based health system aimed at providing people access to an effective behavior change intervention which can help them to find and cultivate intrinsic motivation to change unhealthy lifestyles. An empathic Embodied Conversational Agent (ECA) delivers the intervention. The health dialog is informed by a computational model of Motivational Interviewing, a novel effective face-to-face patient-centered counseling style which respects an individual's pace toward behavior change. Although conducted on a small sample size, results of a user study to assess users' acceptance of the virtual counselor indicate that the system prototype is well accepted by 75% of users.

This is another in the Departmental Pizza Seminar series.

Thursday, April 12th, 2012, 5:00 PM, Ungar Building, Room 311

This thesis presents a new approach to recommending suitable tracks from a collection of songs to the user. The goal of the system is to recommend songs that are favored by the user, are fresh to the user's ear, and fit the user's listening pattern. The "Forgetting Curve" is used to assess the freshness of a song and evaluate "favoredness" using the user log. I analyze users' listening pattern to estimate the level of interest of the user in the next song. Also, user behavior is treated on the song being played as feedback to adjust the recommendation strategy for the next one. High-level features of music, like songs genre, also play an important role in music recommendation. Hence, this thesis proposes a method to classify songs in the Million Song Dataset according to song genre. Since songs have several data types, several sub-classifiers are trained by different types of data. These sub-classifiers are combined using both classifier authority and classification confidence for a particular instance. In the experiments, the combined classifier surpasses all of these sub-classifiers and the SVM classifier using concatenated vectors from all data types. Finally, I develop an application to evaluate our approach in the real world. The user logs of trial volunteers show good performance of the proposed method.

This is a Department of Computer Science Masters Defense.

Wednesday 28th March 2012, 5:00pm, Ungar Building, Room 411

The severity and number of intrusions and attacks against smartphone devices as well as computer systems and networks are rapidly increasing. Preserving the availability and integrity of these computing assets in the face of fast-spreading intrusions requires advances not only in detection algorithms, but also in automated response techniques. Additionally, the rapid size and complexity growth of software systems signify the quest for systems that detect their own compromises and failures and automatically repair themselves. In particular, the ultimate goal of the intrusion response system design is to adaptively react against malicious attacks in real-time, given offline knowledge about the target system configuration, and online alerts and measurements from system-level sensors. In this presentation, we propose a new approach to automated response called the Response and Recovery Engine (RRE). Our engine employs a game-theoretic response strategy against adversaries modeled as opponents in a two-player Stackelberg stochastic game. RRE applies attack-response trees to analyze undesired security events and their countermeasures using Boolean logic to combine lower-level attack consequences. In addition, RRE accounts for uncertainties in intrusion detection alert notifications. RRE then chooses optimal response actions by solving a partially observable competitive Markov decision process that is automatically derived from attack-response trees.

This is another in the Departmental Pizza Seminar series.

Thursday 22nd March 2012, 5:00pm, Ungar Building, Room 402

I do believe in and am excited by interdisciplinary research. But, I believe that there are many issues about such research that are misunderstood. The dictionary defines it as: "involving two or more academic, scientific, or artistic disciplines". That is true, but there is much more to it than just having two areas interact. In this talk I would like to explain my background and my past research that was interdisciplinary. I would like to highlight some of, in my opinion, the major issues that arise whenever we try to do this type of work. I will also discuss the type of teaching that is needed to make this type of research successful. Finally, I will use my crystal ball and try and predict some future interdisciplinary research directions. Predictions, especially of the future as pointed out by Niels Bohr, are always difficult and I hope that you will find my comments interesting.

Dr. Richard Lipton is Stoney Chair of Computer Science at Georgia Institute of Technology. At Georgia Institute of Technology he served as Associate Dean for College of Computing from 2003 to 2008. Prior to joining Georgia Institute of Technology he was a Professor of Computer Science (now Emeritus) and a Professor of Electrical Engineering Computer Science at Princeton University, an Associate Professor of Computer Science at University of California at Berkeley, and an Associate Professor of Computer Science at Yale University. He has been a Consulting Chief Scientist of Telcordia Technologies since 1996 and has held a visiting faculty position at IBM T. J. Watson Research Center and of Xerox Parc. Dr. Lipton has made fundamental contributions to and written numerous papers in a broad range of areas in computing, including: cryptography, quantum computing, biological computation, complexity theory, network algorithms, and programming languages. Dr. Lipton received a B.S. from Case Western Reserve University in 1968 and his Ph.D. from Carnegie-Mellon University in 1973. Dr. Lipton is a Fellow of Association for Computing Machinery, a Guggenheim Fellow, and a Member of National Academy of Engineering.

Wednesday 4th April 2012, 5:00pm, Ungar Building, Room 411

Executives need data - constantly. They need it live, they need it analyzed, and they need it on demand. They're turning to teams of analysts to help run their business and those analysts are turning to programmers to get their tools out there 24/7. We'll take a look at technologies helping us do this, required skillsets, and how an always-on business requires always-on data.

This is another in the Departmental Pizza Seminar series.

Wednesday 22nd February 2012, 5:00pm, Ungar Building, Room 411

Psychosocial treatments and assessments are effective for a range of psychological problems. One particular area of concern is youth suicide. This paper reports on the SAMHT intelligent tutoring system, which provides youth suicide risk assessment training. SAMHT's interactive avatar interface is based on an intelligent backend, and provides a believable interaction that is effective for training mental health professionals.

This is another in the Departmental Pizza Seminar series.

Wednesday 7th March 2012, 5:00pm, Ungar Building, Room 411

This is another in the Departmental Pizza Seminar series.

Wednesday 15th February 2012, 5:00pm, Ungar Building, Room 411

The study of behavioral and neurophysiological mechanisms involved in rat spatial cognition provides a basis for the development of computational models and robotic experimentation of goal-oriented task behaviors. These models and robotics architectures offer neurobiologists and neuroethologists alternative platforms to study, analyze and evaluate new hypotheses on spatial cognition. In this talk we discuss a comparative analysis of spatial cognition in rats and robots by contrasting similar goal-oriented tasks in a cyclical maze, where studies in rat spatial cognition are used to develop computational system-level models of hippocampus integrating kinesthetic and visual information to produce a cognitive map of the environment that drives robot experimentation. During training, Hebbian learning and reinforcement learning, in the form of Actor-Critic architecture, enables a robot to learn the optimal route to a goal from a designated fixed location in the maze. During testing, robot exploits maximum expectations of reward stored within a previously acquired cognitive map to reach the goal from different starting positions. Current and future directions of this research are discussed.

This is another in the Departmental Pizza Seminar series.

Monday 13th February 2012, 5:00pm, Ungar Building, Room 402

I will describe recent and ongoing research to develop intelligent software assistants that help people solve problems. Key elements of such systems include: natural, intuitive interfaces, including natural language understanding; user-centered decision support methods that support human problem-solving; and techniques to make such systems adaptable and extensible. The goal of the research is to understand the principles of such systems and how they can be applied to solve specific problems. I will demonstrate several prototypes and applications that we have developed over the years.

Dr. George M. Ferguson is a research scientist in the Department of Computer Scientist at the University of Rochester. He received a B.Sc. degree in Math and Computer Science from McGill University in 1987, M.S. degrees in Computer Science from University of Alberta and from University of Rochester in 1989 and 1991, respectively, and Ph.D. in Computer Science from University of Rochester in 1995. He has served as chair, as organizer, or as a program committee member for many conferences, including Program Chair for AAAI-2004. He has proposed, received, and managed multi-million dollar research projects from NIH, DARPA, ONR, and NSF. Dr. Ferguson conducts research to bring software to the next level and to make a real difference in people's lives.

This is another in the Departmental Pizza Seminar series.

Wednesday 1st February 2012, 5:00pm, Ungar Building, Room 411

This talk with be an introduction to the world of health information technology. From fast retrieval and storage of patient data to government regulations and patient safety issues, the challenges never stop. I will start by explaining what is Epic, and how the HIT world is structured. Then I will describe some of the problems and challenges that we face in the health care industry. After tackling such issues, I will touch on some of the cool things we plan to do in the future.

This is another in the Departmental Pizza Seminar series.

Wednesday 30th November 2011, 5:00 PM, Ungar Building, Room 402

XAPT Corporation was the winner of the Microsoft Dynamics ERP Global Partner of the Year 2011 Award

This is a CSMS Project Industrial Liaison Seminar. Refreshments will be served.

Wednesday 30th November 2011 4:00pm, Ungar 411

At a time when the cheapest AAA video game takes roughly two years, 20 million dollars, and 70 people to make, what sort of challenges face an independent development team with limited time, money, and man power, let alone in a rapidly growing market that demands increasingly higher quality products? In this presentation, the intimidating expectations, pie eyed goals, and crushing realities facing those trying to stand toe to toe with the video game industry behemoths will be highlighted while showcasing a student team's progress in their yearlong effort to develop a video game for the Xbox 360.

MicroRNAs and siRNAs ate small regulatory RNAs that play a vital role in diverse biological processes. Their ultimate function is to facilitate the reduction of the product of a target messenger RNA. Recent advances in genome synthesis technology allow for manipulation of existing genes and the creation of novel genomic sequences to specification, with a great number of applications. Incorporation of miRNA sites in mRNA sequences allows for enhanced expression control and facilitates dynamic regulatory network interactions. We explore the possibility of embedding miRNA binding sites in the coding region of a protein.

This is Department of Computer Science Seminar

Wednesday 2nd November 2011, 5:00pm, Ungar Building, Room 402

Multirobot systems are an important research topic in wide area coverage applications such as hazardous waste clean-up, bomb detection, surveillance, and search and rescue missions. They can work in parallel and complete tasks faster than a single robot. Communications can support cooperation to speed up execution, reduce duplication, and prevent interference. Communication among team members is achieved explicitly or implicitly. In explicit communication, messages are intentionally transmitted and received from robot to robot. In implicit communication, robots observe the environment and other robot actions. Although many systems use explicit communications, in exploration of large, open areas (e.g. stadiums and parks), persistent intra-team digital communication is not guaranteed. Therefore, alternative approaches that do not rely upon message passing throughout exploration are needed.

Novel contributions of overcoming communication limitations in wide area coverage include: (1) insight on how information shared between robots that are close has more influence on immediate action selection than information shared between robots that are farther apart. Spatial and temporal locality can be instrumental in determining relevance in subsequent action selection; (2) an approach in which observation leverages spatial and temporal locality to infer state rather than rely on digital messaging; and (3) an approach in which robots use spatial rendezvous to exchange information instead of continuously passing messages. Robots explore an environment in sectors, or designated areas, and periodically meet to communicate map information of what they explored. Simulations and physical experiments were conducted and results suggest both approaches can serve as alternatives to cooperation based on continuous point-to-point communications.

Wednesday 26th October 2011, 5:00pm, Ungar Building, Room 411

This talk presents an overview of ontology, including how formal ontology compares to less formal approaches and how the Suggested Upper Merged Ontology (SUMO) (www.ontologyportal.org) compares to other formal ontologies. Classes of ontology-based applications are introduced. Issues of the capabilities and tradeoffs in first order logic inference are explored. The SUMO is also described in detail, along with its mappings to the WordNet lexicon.

Adam Pease is a senior researcher at Rearden Commerce in Foster City, Ca. He has led research in ontology, linguistics, and formal inference, including development of the Suggested Upper Merged Ontology (SUMO), the Controlled English to Logic Translation (CELT) system, and the Sigma knowledge engineering environment. Sharing research under open licenses, in order to achieve the widest possible dissemination and technology transfer, has been a core element of his research program and his products have been downloaded by thousands of people around the world. He is the author of the new book "Ontology: A Practical Guide".

This is another in the Departmental Pizza Seminar series.

Friday 21st October 2011, 10:00am, Ungar Building, Room 311

In this talk I will present my research on real-time 3D graphics and virtual characters. In the first part, I will summarize the motivation behind my work and my contributions to skinning, deformable collision detection, and pre-computation based rendering. In the second part, I will talk in detail about animating cloth and clothing, starting with a playback-only baking technique and subsequently moving to a more general upsampling method, which adds fine-scale details to coarse mesh simulations. Interesting technical nuggets needed to make these approaches work efficiently include: an approximate version of principal component analysis, harmonic regularization (an extension of the classical Tikhonov approach) and our take on "tracking," i.e., how to constrain fine-scale physics to follow a given coarse-scale animation. In the final part, I will conclude with some ideas for future work, revolving mostly around the question of how to make digital content creation more intuitive.

Wednesday 19th October 2011, 5:00pm, Ungar Building, Room 411

All traditional approaches to adding identity and access management functionality to applications present the same issues: they require the developers to take matters into their own hands, demand specialized security knowledge or heavily rely on the features of the underlying infrastructure. This situation has led to a proliferation of APIs and techniques, forcing developers to continually re-learn how to perform the same task with different APIs or in other words constantly "reinventing the wheel". Claims-based identity is an approach that changes the way we think about authentication and authorization, adding a logical representation of identity transactions and identify the roles that every entity plays. By adding that further level of indirection, claims-based identity created the basis for decoupling the programming model and the details of the deploy-time systems. Consequently, taking the claims-based identity approach we can achieve high-level yet accurate descriptions, irrespective of their implementation details.

Note: This will be an excellent venue to learn about a local software company that hires interns and full time software engineers. Undergraduate Computer Science students are especially encouraged to attend.

This is another in the Departmental Pizza Seminar series.

Wednesday 12th October 2011, 5:00pm, Ungar Building, Room 402

The area of Artificial Intelligence is diverse and at a crossroads. Much of the past research in the area has focused either on high-level reasoning from abstract, ungrounded representations or on interpreting raw sensor data towards building grounded representations. However, neither of these foci taken alone is sufficient for deploying practical, real-world AI systems. My research focuses on knowledge representation and reasoning in two application areas: (1) Agents in Dynamic and Real-Time Environments and the (2) Semantic Web. I will address both areas:

(1): In recent years, much work has been done on creating complete autonomous agents: those that sense their environment, engage in high-level cognitive decision-making, and then execute their actions in the environment. We will explore the problem of enabling autonomous agents in finding the right position on the field or in tracking the ball within a soccer game while dealing with time constrains, adverse opponents, and dynamic environments. This research has implications for a variety of autonomous agents and robotics, such as robots that assists humans on an every day basis.

(2): The focus of my research in the Semantic Web area is the development of methods in order to solve the semantic heterogeneity problem (e.g., catalogue integration). I concentrate and evaluate on emerging ontology-based approaches in order to find and integrate information sources for the construction of ontologies. These techniques are used to solve problems that can be described with terminological logics. I will demonstrate an example from our NIH funded research project "BioAssay Ontologies" (in collaboration with the Miller School of Medicine).

Wednesday 5th October 2011, 5:00pm, Ungar Building, Room 411

Different Automated Theorem Proving (ATP) systems solve different parts of different problems in different ways. Given a set of proofs produced by ATP systems based on adequately common principles, it is possible to create new proofs by combining proof components extracted from the proofs in the set. It is not generally easy to say that one of the original or new proofs is better or worse than another, but ways to show that two proofs are different are available. This talk describes a process of proof combination to form new proofs that are different from the original set of proofs.

This is another in the Departmental Pizza Seminar series.

Friday 16th September 2011, 3:00pm, Ungar Building, Room 411

Modern life science and drug discovery research generates very large amounts of so called -omics data, including data about properties and functions of genes, proteins, and more complex biological entity modules. Large amounts of data are also generated of perturbations of biological model systems for example by chemicals. All with the goal to better understand the mechanisms of human disease and how dysregulated systems can be put back into normal function. However, despite the exponential increase of available data, new knowledge does not appear to be generated at the same pace, as can be seen for example at the relatively constant rate of new approved drugs over the last 50 years.

The enormous complexity of biological systems and mechanisms of disease call for novel approaches combining various experimental and computational strategies and require interdisciplinary cross training and collaboration. The University of Miami with the medical school and the College of Arts and Sciences provides an ideal environment to achieve just that.

For about 18 months, via the Center for Computational Science, the research groups of Dr Visser and Dr Schürer have been collaborating to develop novel approaches to enable researchers to better utilize existing high-throughput datasets. This collaboration has been so successful that we are now planning to expand it further while providing opportunities for students who are interested to develop the cross-disciplinary expertise required to address the most pressing issues related to human health.

In this seminar we will briefly introduce several current research projects covering different aspects of drug discovery. A unifying aspect is the goal of enabling scientists to better utilize large and complex available datasets and the development and application of semantic web technologies to achieve this goal.

We will introduce 1) the BioAssay Ontlogy (BAO) project (http://bioassayontology.org/), which is focused on categorizing and analyzing biological screening data; 2) "Phylostructeomics" - proteome-wide analysis of binding sites and ligand protein binding interactions targeted toward poly-pharmacology; and 3) the SMARTNames project focused on functional chemistry space, chemical reactivity and synthetic chemistry. More information and publications can be found at http://biomed.miami.edu/sschurer and http://www.ccs.miami.edu/chemoinformatics-team.html.

This is another in the Departmental Pizza Seminar series.

Wednesday 7th September 2011, 5:00pm, Ungar Building, Room 411

Psycholinguistic research shows wide evidence of the online, incremental nature of language understanding. Artificial systems that interpret language, however, have generally been designed based on essentially offline architectures. This talk is divided into two parts. First, we present a corpus of task-oriented interactive dialogue that is used to develop conversational agent systems. Second, we use information theory to analyze to what extend speakers follow optimal strategies in distributing information during language production.

This is another in the Departmental Pizza Seminar series.

Friday, July 15th 2011, 3:00pm, Ungar Room 402

In the field of Music Data Mining, Mood and Topic information has been considered as a high level metadata. The extraction of mood and topic information is difficult but is regarded as very valuable. The immense growth of Web 2.0 resulted in Social Tags being a direct interaction with users (humans) and their feedback through tags can help in classification and retrieval of music. One of the major shortcomings of the approaches that have been employed so far is the improper filtering of social tags. This thesis delves into the topic of information extraction from songs' tags and lyrics. The main focus is on removing all erroneous and unwanted tags with help of other features. The hierarchical clustering method is applied to create clusters of tags. The clusters are based on semantic information any given pair of tags share. The lyrics features are utilized by employing CLOPE clustering method to form lyrics clusters, and Naive Bayes method to computer probability values that aid in classification process. The outputs from classification are finally used to estimate the accuracy of a tag belonging to the song. The results obtained from the experiments all point towards the success of the method proposed and can be utilized by other research projects in the similar field.

This is a Department of Computer Science Masters Defence.

Friday, May 6th, 2011, 2:00 PM, Ungar Building, Room 402

Emerging technologies facilitate an environment where web-based software or web services have well-defined, open interfaces and are discoverable across the Internet. Service-oriented computing is an emerging approach to software engineering that suggests that new specialized business processes can be created, on-demand, simply by integrating the services provided by others. However, in the real world, software developers tend to create applications that do not conform to consistent developmental practices even if they do use universal interface representations (e.g. the eXtensible Markup Language). Our research utilizes semantic approaches, enhanced syntactical methods, and contextual information to automate the integration of software services that are developed randomly from a wide array of diverse sources. This talk discusses our foundational lines of research and subsequent contributions in the areas of service discovery, composition, and evaluation. The talk will conclude with future work that leverages service-oriented paradigms in areas such as visual analytics, smart grid, and the "Internet of things".

This is a Department of Computer Science Colloquium.

Wednesday 20th April 2011, 5:00pm, Ungar Building, Room 411

Regular expressions are mostly known as pattern matching expressions in scripting languages (Perl, sed, awk, etc.). They are also theoretically studied as being part of Automata Theory. A regular expression denotes a language (set of words) and two regular expressions are equivalent when they denote the same language. The equivalence problem is decidable and furthermore, any equivalence can be proved axiomatically. Various such axiomatisations have flourished during the last fifty years, we will survey the most important ones. Every axiomatisation comes together with a proof of completeness of the following form: if two regular expressions are equivalent then there exists a proof within the axiomatic system. In principle, when this completeness proof is constructive one can extract from it an algorithm that produces a certificate of the equivalence. We have filled the gap developing a program (written in OCaml) that computes certificates. For this purpose we have designed a domain specific proof system with a language of commands for composing a certificate checkable within this system. During the talk I will make a demonstration of the program.

This is a joint work with Bodhayan Roy at TIFR.

This is another in the Departmental Pizza Seminar series.

Wednesday, April 13th, 2011, 5:00 PM, Ungar Building, Room 411

Accurate earthquake prediction is a difficult, unsolved problem that is central to the ambitions of many geoscientists. Understanding why earthquakes occur requires a profound understanding of many interrelated processes; the Earth functions as a massive, complex system. Scientific visualization can be applied to such problems to improve understanding and reveal relationships between data. There are several challenges inherent to visualizing seismic data: working with large, high-resolution 3D and 4D data sets in a myriad of formats, integrating and rendering multiple models in the same space, and the need for real-time interactivity and intuitive interfaces. This work describes a product of the collaboration between computer science and geophysics. TerraVis is a real-time system that incorporates advanced visualization techniques for seismic data. The software can process and efficiently render digital elevation models, earthquake catalogs, fault slip distributions, moment tensor solutions, and scalar fields in the same space. In addition, the software takes advantage of stereoscopic viewing and head tracking for immersion and improved depth perception. During reconstruction efforts after the devastating 2010 earthquake in Haiti, TerraVis was demonstrated as a tool for assessing the risk of future earthquakes.

This is a Department of Computer Science Masters Defense.

Tuesday 12th April 2011, 5:00 PM, Ungar Building, Room 402

James shares how he went from making pennies as a local Miami web developer to building the largest video game hosting company in the world in less than 8 years.

James is the CEO of Hypernia, and specializes in hosting the world's top media and entertainment businesses. He is responsible for connecting over 50 million people together each and every day through social networks, online games, websites and online communications. His goal is to keep technology affordable and flexible for everyone to promote social progress. In 2008, he worked with Michael Moore in distributing "Slacker Uprising" online, breaking all worldwide download records for a feature film.

This is a CSMS Project Industrial Liaison Seminar. Refreshments will be served.

Monday, April 4th, 2011, 5:00 PM, Ungar Building, Room 345

The RoboCup Soccer Simulation 3D teams RoboCanes, of the University of Miami, and Bold Hearts, of the University of Hertfordshire, have joined forces under a grant of the RoboCup federation to enhance and develop the infrastructure for one of the largest robotics and AI competitions in the world. Firstly, we made the simulation system used in the simulated humanoid robotic soccer competitions ready to enable competitions on a larger scale and more dynamic than the years before. Secondly, we have designed and developed a framework to perform massive parallel learning and optimisation in the complex scenario of robotic soccer. Despite this collaboration, the teams are still competitors, currently competing for the first prize in the German Open competitions. In this seminar we will give an overview and demos of both our collaborative and competitive work.

This is a Department of Computer Science Colloquium. Refreshments will be served.

Friday, April 1st, 2011, 5:00 PM, Ungar Building, Room 402

The Internet is at once an immense engineering artifact, a pervasive social force, and a fascinating object of study. Unfortunately many natural questions about the Internet resist precise answers, for a variety of reasons. In this talk I'll start by discussing why measuring the Internet's infrastructure, traffic, and applications is interesting and important, and why it is often so difficult. I'll then touch on methods that are often used to overcome the Internet's resistance to being measured -- in particular, statistical inference. As a detailed example I'll describe a current project in traffic measurement. We are asking the question: using traffic measurements taken at one location in the Internet, can we estimate how much traffic is flowing in a different part of the Internet? I'll show evidence that such estimation is indeed possible, and suggest how this technique may be used to answer both scientific and commercial questions.

Mark Crovella is Professor of Computer Science at Boston University. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Rochester in 1994. His research interests are in performance evaluation, focusing on parallel and networked computer systems. In the networking arena, he has worked on characterizing the Internet and the World Wide Web. He has explored the presence and implications of self-similarity and heavy-tailed distributions in network traffic and Web workloads. He has also investigated the implications of Web workloads for the design of scalable and cost-effective Web servers. In addition he has made numerous contributions to Internet measurement and modeling; and he has examined the impact of network properties on the design of protocols and the construction of statistical models. Professor Crovella is co-author of "Internet Measurement: Infrastructure, Traffic, and Applications" (Wiley Press, 2006) and is the author of over one hundred papers, with over 13,000 citations (Google Scholar, 2010). Between 2007 and 2009 he was Chair of ACM SIGCOMM. In 2010 he received the SIGMETRICS Test of Time Award for "Self-Similarity in World Wide Web Traffic: Evidence and Possible Causes". Professor Crovella is a Fellow of the ACM.

This is a Department of Computer Science Colloquium. Refreshments will be served.

Wednesday 23rd March 2011, 5:00pm, Ungar Building, Room 411

Every agent needs information about the current state and the environment to act successfully. Often retrieving information from sensor measurements is considered as a passive process, that is done while the agent tries to reach a goal. However in many scenarios the actions of an agent have an influence on the perceptions. So it is possible to consider the information gain in the selection of actions, such that the error in the estimated state is decreased. Strategies for active sensing or active localization can lead to a large improvement of the overall performance.

The RoboCup is a robotics competition where autonomous robots play soccer. A soccer robot in this environment can not perform well without information about the own position and the location of the ball. Smaller errors in the state estimation lead to a more accurate behavior. A simple head movement that scans the environment in a fixed pattern already works, but it has to be tuned manually and is not flexible.

It will be shown how the estimation of a robot's world model can be improved by actively sensing the environment through considering the current world state estimate through minimizing the entropy of an underlying particle distribution. Being originally computationally expensive, this approach was optimized to become executable in real-time on a robot with limited resources. This approach was used on a humanoid robot, performing self-localization and ball tracking on a RoboCup soccer field.

Andreas Seekircher is a PhD student at the University of Miami. He holds a M.Sc. in Computer Science from the University of Bremen, Germany. The paper "Entropy-based Active Vision for a Humanoid Soccer Robot" won the best paper award on the RoboCup Symposium 2010. His research is focused on robotics and artificial intelligence, specifically controlling autonomous robots.

This is another in the Departmental Pizza Seminar series.

Wednesday 9th March 2011, 5:00pm, Ungar Building, Room 411

Acquiring and processing information is important for agents, both natural as artificial. Being able to use more information can give the agent an advantage over others. However, information can be very costly for many organisms, from blow flies to humans, it is known that information related processes can take up over 20% of the full energy consumption. So, we can assume that an agent tries to maximize its informational capability, but only up to the minimal requirements for being able to act successfully. We can study the effect of this assumption, and of informational bounds in general, on behavior, using tools from the well-established field of Information Theory. I will discuss some of the aspects and behavioral properties arising from this methodology, such as Empowerment, which measures the amount of observable control of an agent on the environment and leads to intrinsically motivated behavior, and Relevant Information, which is the minimum amount of information needed to achieve a certain level of performance on a task. Specifically, I will focus on hierarchical behavior structures, which are popular in ethology and machine learning, although deep understanding of why they are attractive, why they work, and whether they are necessary, is missing. Starting from the argument that behaviour generation is constrained by a range of limits on information acquisition and processing, I show how such limits spontaneously give rise to abstraction and structuring of tasks and behaviour generation, and thereby suggest that hierarchical structuring is a natural way of coping with informational constraints.

This is another in the Departmental Pizza Seminar series.

Wednesday 2nd March 2011, 5:00pm, Ungar Building, Room 411

Monolithic programs are now being gradually replaced with software that is made up of a number of components, originating from various sources. Every software component is associated not only with functional, but also with non-functional aspects. A reflective middleware framework has been built to capture characteristics that a software component should have and how other components depend on those characteristics to keep the whole system working as required. The main idea is to monitor (introspection) the applications, in order to change or tune (intercession) the software components with the specific goal of making the whole system workable. To find new components, two stochastic search algorithms were developed and added to the middleware. Software component selection is done using both the most relevant characteristics that the component should have so they can be integrated to the other existing components and swarm intelligence techniques; specifically pheromone value.

This is another in the Departmental Pizza Seminar series.

Wednesday 23rd February 2011, 5:00 PM, Ungar Building, Room 506

Computer Science dominates every aspect of robotic and human exploration of the planets. Prior to launch, mission design and planning merge planetary body models with predicted launch vehicle, orbit, spacecraft and science payload instrument models to optimize the probability of success, define mission phases and science observation sequences, and minimize risks by having sufficient weight, power, data transmission, etc. resource margins to handle the "unknown" unknowns. During flight operations, these same models and algorithms are updated to reflect the knowledge learned of the planetary bodies, instrument flight performances and anomalies encountered to continually re-plan the remainder of the mission. Finally the scientific data analyses is performed to glean every tidbit of information that will help us determine the origins, evolutions and current states of the planetary bodies in our solar system and what lies ahead for humans. Examples will be given on observation planning, instrument modeling, image restoration, diverse data set registration and map projection, data visualization and flight operations. At the heart of all of these are models, data and algorithms optimized to run on computers, with parallel computers becoming more prevalent, having print, plot and interactive voice and terminal displays (i.e., computer science) to learn the secrets hidden in the planetary bodies.

This is a CSMS Project Industrial Liaison Seminar. Refreshments will be served.

Thursday 17th February 2011, 5:00 PM, Ungar Building, Room 402

Several methods in data and shape analysis can be regarded as transformations between metric spaces and in general, as maps from k-tuples of metric spaces into a metric space. Examples are hierarchical clustering methods, the higher order constructions of computational persistent topology, and several computational techniques that operate within the context of data/shape matching under invariances. Metric geometry, and in particular different variants of the Gromov-Hausdorff distance provide a point of view which is applicable in different scenarios. The underlying idea is to regard datasets as metric spaces, or metric measure spaces (a.k.a. mm-spaces, which are metric spaces enriched with probability measures), and then, crucially, at the same time regard the collection of all datasets as a metric space in itself. Variations of this point of view give rise to different taxonomies that include several methods, both preexisting and novel, for extracting information from datasets and shapes. I will show an ongoing application of one of these new methods to functional classification of chemical compounds by shape properties. Imposing metric structures on the collection of all datasets could be regarded as a "soft" construction. The classification of certain algorithms, or the axiomatic characterization of them, can be achieved by imposing more "rigid" directed-graph structures on the collection of all finite metric spaces. I will describe some results along these lines in the context of clustering schemes.

This is a Department of Computer Science Colloquium. Refreshments will be served in UB345 at 4:30pm.

Monday 14th February 2011, 5:00 PM, Ungar Building, Room 311

Visualization tools are essential for deriving meaning from the avalanche of data we are generating today. To facilitate an understanding of the complex relationships embedded in this data, visualization research leverages the power of the human perceptual and cognitive systems, encoding meaning through images and enabling exploration through human-computer interactions. In my research I design visualization systems that support exploratory, complex data analysis tasks by biologists who are analyzing large amounts of heterogeneous data. These systems allow users to validate their computational models, to understand their underlying data in detail, and to develop new hypotheses and insights. My research process includes five distinct stages, from targeting a specific group of domain experts and their scientific goals through validating the efficacy of the visualization system. In this talk I'll describe a user-centered, methodological approach to designing and developing visualization tools and present several successful visualization projects in the areas of genomics and systems biology. I will also discuss the long term implications of this work and the field of visualization as a whole.

This is a Department of Computer Science Colloquium. Refreshments will be served in UB345 at 4:30pm.

Wednesday 9th February 2011, 5:00pm, Ungar Building, Room 411

Although there is a large amount of information available in formats suitable for machine reasoning (such as relational databases), the vast majority of human-made information is only available as natural language text. In this talk, I will present a hybrid, deep natural language processing approach to Information Extraction and discuss its application in two domains. First, I will describe a system which extracts geospatial information mentioned in text. Using a combination of the text mention as well as a geographic information system (GIS) database, the system grounds this information in geospatial entities and latitude and longitude coordinates and can track an entity's location over time, based only on the text description. I will also describe our recent preliminary work on using this same deep NLP framework for extracting medical history information from clinical texts.

Nate Blaylock received a Ph.D. in Computer Science at the University of Rochester in 2005 where his dissertation dealt with natural language understanding and plan recognition for dialog systems. Prior to joining IHMC in 2007, Nate was a Research Scientist at Cycorp, where his research focused on using predictive event models to apply plan recognition to level 2/3 fusion problems. Prior to that, Nate spent two years in a postdoctoral position at Saarland University in Saarbrucken, Germany, where he helped build the bilingual German/English SAMMIE in-car dialog system, using the theory of collaborative problem solving from his thesis to understand and reason with natural language in dialog. At IHMC, Nate continues to do research on dialog systems, plan and intent recognition, and natural language understanding, including information extraction in the medical and geospatial domains.

This is another in the Departmental Pizza Seminar series.

Thursday 3rd February 2011, 5:00 PM, Ungar Building, Room 402

The Internet is at once an immense engineering artifact, a pervasive social force, and a fascinating object of study. Unfortunately many natural questions about the Internet resist precise answers, for a variety of reasons. In this talk I'll start by discussing why measuring the Internet's infrastructure, traffic, and applications is interesting and important, and why it is often so difficult. I'll then touch on methods that are often used to overcome the Internet's resistance to being measured - in particular, statistical inference. As a detailed example I'll describe a current project in traffic measurement. We are asking the question: using traffic measurements taken at one location in the Internet, can we estimate how much traffic is flowing in a different part of the Internet? I'll show evidence that such estimation is indeed possible, and suggest how this technique may be used to answer both scientific and commercial questions.

Speaker Bio: Mark Crovella is Professor of Computer Science at Boston University. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Rochester in 1994. His research interests are in performance evaluation, focusing on parallel and networked computer systems. In the networking arena, he has worked on characterizing the Internet and the World Wide Web. He has explored the presence and implications of self-similarity and heavy-tailed distributions in network traffic and Web workloads. He has also investigated the implications of Web workloads for the design of scalable and cost-effective Web servers. In addition he has made numerous contributions to Internet measurement and modeling; and he has examined the impact of network properties on the design of protocols and the construction of statistical models.

Professor Crovella is co-author of "Internet Measurement: Infrastructure, Traffic, and Applications" (Wiley Press, 2006) and is the author of over one hundred papers, with over 13,000 citations (Google Scholar, 2010). Between 2007 and 2009 he was Chair of ACM SIGCOMM. In 2010 he received the SIGMETRICS Test of Time Award for "Self-Similarity in World Wide Web Traffic: Evidence and Possible Causes". Professor Crovella is a Fellow of the ACM.

This is a Department of Computer Science Colloquium. Refreshments will be served.

Wednesday 8th December 2010, 5:00 PM, Ungar Building, Room 402

Developing software to bring a complex mobile robot system to life and have it exhibit intelligent behavior in an autonomous, robust, and safe manner is a very, very difficult, complex, time-consuming, and error-prone endeavor. In this talk I analyze the reasons and origins of this complexity and present some ideas for handling it. One topic of particular relevance is architecture, and its manifold interpretations of it. I survey the approach we take in the project BRICS to structure architectural issues. Finally, I present a software development process model we recently developed in order to organize software development in robotics such that it meets professional standards.

Gerhard K. Kraetzschmar is a professor for autonomous systems at Bonn-Rhein-Sieg University, Germany. He obtained a M.Sc. (Diploma) and a Ph.D. (Dr.-Ing.) in Computer Science, both from University of Erlangen. His research interests include a wide range of fields in robotics, artificial intelligence, artificial life, and neuroinformatics, with special focus on software development for robotics, multirobot teams, robot learning, middleware for robotics, and educational robotics. He is a member of AAAI, ACM, IAS, IEEE, and GI, and Vice President RoboCupJunior of the RoboCup Federation.

This is a joint Department of Computer Science and Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering Colloquium. Refreshments will be served.

Wednesday 1st December 2010 4:30pm, Ungar 411

Adam Schwartz - Facial Motion Capture for Games

Pablo Bolivar Morales - Estimation of Repeats from Sparce Next Generation Sequencing

Andres Acevedo Ulloque - Android Game Development: The Runner
This project explores development for mobile platforms and the trend that follows it. We will talk about the use a game engine (AndEngine) during the development of a game for the Android platform. Additionally, we will discuss from the design concept to the implementation, the difficulties and challenges faced during the process of developing an Android game. Demo of Android game - Runner.

This is another in the Departmental Pizza Seminar series.

Monday 29th November 2010 4:30pm, Ungar 411

Joel Botner - Input Abstraction: Beyond the QWERTY Keyboard

Gracia Bonilla - CoSeChar: Genomic Coding Sequence Characterization Tools

Cameron Carpenter - SporkleAI: Automatic Interfacing and Problem Solving on Sporkle.com

Oscar Sanchez - Upgrading and Restructuring the "Save Dade" Website and Services

This is another in the Departmental Pizza Seminar series.

Monday 22nd November 2010, 5:00 PM, Ungar Building, Room 506

The Deep Water Horizon well blowout on April 20th 2010 discharged between 40,000 - 1.2 million tons of crude oil into the Gulf of Mexico. In order to understand the fate and impact of the discharged oil, particularly on the environmentally sensitive Florida Keys region, we have implemented a multi-component application which consists of many individual tasks that utilize a distributed set of computational and data management resources. The application includes two 3D ocean circulation models of the Gulf and South Florida and a multi-phase oil spill model. Information from ocean models is integrated with a multi-phase oil model that tracks the fate of approximately 10 million oil particles. These individual components execute as large parallel applications on a 640 core IBM Power 5 cluster and a 5040 core Linux cluster, both operated by the Center for Computational Science, University of Miami. The work flow between the models is handled by a custom distributed software framework built using the Open Project for Networked Data Access Protocol (OPeNDAP). In this talk, we present sample results and discuss computational challenges in deploying such many task distributed work flows on large clusters and heterogeneous architectures.

This is a CSMS Project Industrial Liaison Seminar. Refreshments will be served.

Wednesday 10th November 2010, 5:00pm, Ungar Building, Room 411

GPU computing is the use of a GPU (graphics processing unit) to perform general purpose scientific and engineering computations. The GPU has evolved over the years to have teraflops of floating point performance. New massively parallel architectures enable the use of hundreds of processor cores for general computations, while their modest price and accessible programming interfaces allow the general users to take advantage of these developments. In this seminar we will examine the modern GPU architecture and design philosophy, exposing some of the benefits and limitations of the platform. We will introduce algorithmic techniques for this specialized architecture and demonstrate how to create programs using the CUDA programming model.

This is another in the Departmental Pizza Seminar series.

Wednesday 3rd November 2010, 5:00pm, Ungar Building, Room 411

Modular audio programming environments such as SuperCollider or Max/MSP are used for a wide variety of tasks, such as algorithmic music composition, live sound and art installations, and acoustics research. They allow users to quickly develop specialized tools in an environment tailored for working with audio. While they are enormously powerful, using them for sound design is sometimes difficult because of the lack an intuitive interface for exploring the parameters of the synthesis graphs built in them. Synthetic is a program that wraps around SuperCollider and provides this interface. It aims to be a new breed of software that is a cross between a wave editor and a modular audio environment.

This is another in the Departmental Pizza Seminar series.

Wednesday 27th October 2010, 5:00pm, Ungar Building, Room 411

While both volunteer computing and social networks have proved successful, the merging of these two models is a new field: Social Volunteer Computing. A Social Volunteer Computing system utilizes the relationships within a social network to determine how computational resources flow towards tasks that need to be completed, and the results of these computations are added back into the social network as content. Such a system will provide scientists and artists a new facility to obtain computational resources and disseminate their work. RenderWeb, a prototype Social Volunteer Computing system, is introduced that allows animations created in Blender to be distributed and rendered within Facebook.

This is a Department of Computer Science PhD Proposal Defense

Wednesday 29th September 2010, 5:00pm, Ungar Building, Room 411

The traditional rendering technique of real-time computer graphics involves the use of geometric primitives, such as triangles, to construct surface representations of objects. This technique works well in many situations, especially when drawing objects that are solid and have easily recognizable surfaces. However, there are many visual phenomena that are nebulous, contain partial transparency, or are too complex to effectively visualize with polygonal meshes. Examples found in nature include smoke, fire, cloudes, and crepuscular rays ("god rays"). Scientists and engineers also require methods for interpreting volumetric data: pressure measurements in an area surrounding a fault, air turbulence, the behavior of fluids, or medical data with several layers and materials. With the recent evolution of programmable graphics hardware, volumetric data and related phenomena can be rendered with interactive framerates. This presentation will provide a high-level overview of the programmable graphics pipeline and how it enables powerful new approaches to visualizing volume data. The seminar will focus on 3D texture-based GPU volume rendering and demonstrate a few applications within scientific visualization.

This is another in the Departmental Pizza Seminar series.

Wednesday 28th April 2010 4:30pm, Ungar 411

Adam Schwartz - Motion Capture-based Facial Animation for Games. Facial animations are an important element in modern video games. Prof. Visser's soccer simulator lacks this. Facial motion capture can be used to this end, but requires a good amount of processing before it can be used in a game. It must be properly mapped, and the mappings must be translated properly into animation. While implementing this with predefined blendshapes may appear to be the simpler task, this is not the case if the animations are intended to be used with a very large number of characters. As such, a method using a bone structure, while perhaps less visually appealing, is a far more practical solution.

Michael Schick - The Language of the Future. Have you ever wanted to ask Google a math problem, or the name of the Nobel Peace Prize winner from 1919, and get back the answer not just a link to a "relevant" website? Automated Theorem Proving provides us this possibility! In my talk I will be discussing the advantages of Automated Theorem Proving, specifically the advantages of certain languages, and how my research is helping to improve the field.

Matthew Ferens - Working in the Unreal Engine. The concept of video games has become an integral part in any Computer Science discussion as it incorporates many aspects of the field into a multi-billion dollar industry. Video game engines, powerful platforms on which games are built, were once extremely restricted and proprietary, but many have recently been released for public consumption. The Unreal Development Kit is perhaps the best known and most powerful as it allows for creation of everything from simple levels to complete games by anyone with the will to learn. The purpose of this project was to work with the engine and gain experience that can apply to both scholarly and real-world work. The project focused on simple level design, scripting, and connecting it all together into a final product.

Benjamin Drolet - Reducing Spam on Online Forms. Have you ever managed a web page with form validation? Have you received annoying SPAM from people blasting your forms? Have you ever had to fill out an annoying form online? My talk will discuss a new way that I developed to reduce SPAM through forms. I will talk about the advantages and disadvantages of form validation and how my program is helping improve the process.

This is another in the Departmental Pizza Seminar series.

Wednesday 21st April 2010, 5:00pm, Ungar Building, Room 402

Do you often misplace your keys? Forget someone's name a second after you've heard it? Wish you could memorize facts for a test quicker? If the answer to any of those is yes, then you are probably in the same boat as everyone else! But it doesn't have to be that way. I will be giving a seminar on how to improve your memory drastically. Remembering names, numbers, words, can be easy and fun. I have been able to train my brain to memorize a 200 digit number in less than 5 minutes, the order of a shuffled deck of cards in just under a minute, and the names of everyone I meet. In this talk I will be discussing the techniques I have trained my memory to use in order to accomplish these amazing feats. The best part: anyone can learn them!

See Nelson on TV.

This is another in the Departmental Pizza Seminar series.

Wednesday 14th April 2010, 5:00pm, Ungar Building, Room 411

Geospatial data integration with semantic web technology is one of the hot topics in the knowledge and data engineering field. What makes the integration of geospatial data task more complicated than others is the variety of the geospatial data models, formats, semantics and relations. Moreover, in order to employ the web as a medium for data and information integration, comprehensive datasets and vocabularies are required as they enable the disambiguation and alignment of other data and information. All these factors are considered challenges in the design and implementation of a semantic web based GIS system. TerraFly, a public service of Florida International University sponsored by NSF (MII, MRI et al.) and by NASA, USGS, and IBM is our candidate on which we apply the semantic web techniques for the purpose of integrating data from various knowledge bases, and enriching its search service with more accurate and meaningful query results.

This is another in the Departmental Pizza Seminar series.

Tuesday 6th April 2010, 5:00 PM, Ungar Building, Room 402

In response to Hurricane Andrew, South Florida Building Code was revised to include debris impact protection of products covering exterior openings of the building. The new standards also implemented ASCE-7-88 which increased the wind pressure on building envelopes. The new testing standards with enhanced pressures, required development of advanced testing and analysis facilities. The task required the merger of several engineering and scientific disciplines. We will examine how an interdisciplinary approach to problem solving was used to address these challenges.

This is a CSMS Project Industrial Liaison Seminar. Refreshments will be served.

Wednesday 31st March 2010, 5:00pm, Ungar Building, Room 345

The recent earthquake in Haiti has motivated scientists and engineers to assess the risk of future earthquakes that could affect the rebuilding of Port-au-Prince. As part of a collaborative effort with geophysicists in the Rosentiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science, we have developed prototype software for visualizing seismic data. Our software takes advantage of stereoscopic 3D rendering for immersion and improved perception of depth. This talk will describe the relevance of the data being visualized as well as the details of the software's implementation. The fundamentals of stereo vision and differences between the various stereo technologies will also be covered. This seminar will involve an interactive demonstration of the stereoscopic 3D vision.

This is another in the Departmental Pizza Seminar series.

Wednesday March 10th 2010 5:00pm, Ungar 411

Images contain large amount of data and are used in many applications. Not only compressed image data save space, but also in certain applications such as the World-Wide-Web (WWW), they save time since the amount of data to be transmitted is smaller than the original image. Codebook approaches have been used in lossy image compression. For example, vector quantization employs codebook. For lossless compression of images, more than a decade ago, a codebook approach based on spanning trees was proposed. In this talk we address suitability of permutation codes for still images.

This is another in the Departmental Pizza Seminar series.

Wednesday February 24th 2010 5:00pm, Ungar 411

Search Engines are our number one source for finding answers to questions in the 21st century, but unfortunately they do not provide us with immediate answers. The answers still need to be extracted by the user from the results returned by the search engine. This talk addresses this problem and discusses how we are getting closer to being able to reason about world knowledge by using theorem provers and how they provide us with the exact answers we are looking for. Currently, the theorem provers used to provide this service lack a user-friendly means of submitting a query. This talk will also discuss how, by using controlled natural language, one can submit queries with ease and in a natural way rather than a complex and esoteric way.

This is another in the Departmental Pizza Seminar series.

Wednesday February 3rd 2010 5:00pm, Ungar 411

While both volunteer computing and social networks have already proved to be successful, the merging of these two models is a new field. We call this new field Social Volunteer Computing. A Social Volunteer Computing system utilizes the relationships within a social network to determine how computational resources flow towards tasks that need to be completed. We call this Socially-Driven Computation. The result of this computation, which we call Socially-Computed Content, is added back into the social network. This presentation will also introduce RenderWeb, a prototype Social Volunteer Computing system that allows Blender animations to be quickly rendered by friends within Facebook.

This is another in the Departmental Pizza Seminar series.

Wednesday, January 27th, 2010 5:00 PM, Ungar Building, Room 402

Over 40 years ago, Michael Goldberg started a Miami software company called FDP, employing many UM mathematics and computer science students over the years and eventually becoming the leading provider of software for the insurance and pension industries. After selling FDP, Michael started another company 5 years ago called Flamingo Software, specializing in web-based systems for insurance and financial services companies. Find out what a career in software development can be like and what it takes to run a successful software company.

This is a CSMS Project Industrial Liaison Seminar. Refreshments will be served.

Wednesday, January 27th, 2010 2:30 PM, McArthur Engineering Annex, Room MEA202

The FIU School of Computing and Information Sciences, with partners FAU and UNCC, is leading an exciting international research and career development opportunity for students from FIU, FAU, UNCC, UM, and UPRM. This Partnership for International Research and Education (PIRE) is a 5-year long project funded for $2.3 million through a highly competitive program by the National Science Foundation. PIRE aims to provide international research and training experiences to its participants by leveraging the established programs, resources, and community of the Latin American Grid. After the successful execution of this program in the first two years, we decided to open this program to all disciplines of Science and Engineering. Students selected by the PIRE program will become part of a prestigious international research network focusing on using cyberinfrastructure to solve challenging societal problems while training a generation of globally-oriented IT professionals who will become leaders in industry and academia. We are looking for highly qualified undergraduate, graduate, and post-doctoral students in Science and Engineering disciplines who are interested in working on critical real-world applications that use or extend cyberinfrastructure as part of an international R&D team. The PIRE program includes collaboration-driven trips (6 weeks to full semesters in length) to top research sites in Argentina, Brazil, China, France, India, Italy, Mexico, Spain, and more countries. PIRE will also sponsor fellowships of up to $10,000 per semester and monetary awards for winners of PIRE annual poster sessions.

This is a joint presentation by the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and the Department of Computer Science.

Wednesday December 16th 2009 5:00pm, Ungar 411

Over the last forty years, remarkable progress has been made in the area of speech separation and enhancement, however accurate estimation of clean speech in real-world environments is still a challenge. We address the problem of speech estimation as statistical estimation with "missing" data in the independent component analysis (ICA) domain. Missing components are substituted by values drawn from "similar" data in a multi-faceted ICA representation of the complete data. I will present the algorithm for the inference of missing data in the case of a fixed pattern of missing data, and then I will present an application of our approach to the problem of bandwidth extension, where speech is degraded by a fixed filtering process. I will show the capability of the algorithm to reconstruct fine missing details of the original data with little artifacts: information of the source signal can indeed be modeled and used in order to recreate a natural sounding source in adverse conditions. The extension of the method to statistical spectral inference according to random patterns of missingness promises progress in the long open problem of performing speech enhancement while enhancing the intelligibility of speech.

This work has been done in collaboration with Doru-Cristian Balcan (Carnegie Mellon University) and Timo Gerkmann (Bochum University).

Biography: Justinian Rosca is Program Manager in Audio, Signal Processing and Wireless Communications at Siemens Corporate Research in Princeton, USA. He is also Affiliate Professor, Department of Electrical Engineering of University of Washington, Seattle, USA. He received the Dipl. Eng. degree in Computers and Control Engineering from Bucharest Polytechnic University in 1984, the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science from University of Rochester in 1992 and 1997 respectively. Dr. Rosca is conducting research in statistical signal processing and radio management, with an emphasis on topics involving acquisition, management and processing of data with uncertainties, such as audio processing, blind signal separation, wireless management, adaptive principles in stochastic search and optimization, and probabilistic inference in artificial intelligence.

Tuesday December 8th 2009 5:00pm, Ungar TBA

For new terminals such as Network PC and thin-client, broadband network access is becoming significant. For mobile users, wireless communication technology such as Cognitive Radio (CR) is expected to realize seamless communications. However, QoS consideration in CR has not been well investigated. This talk intorduces a QoS control framework which consists of such as optimization of resource allocation, and shows a result of "Geographical Optimal Route Selection with Cost-Constraint".

This is another in the Departmental Pizza Seminar series.

Wednesday December 2nd 2009 4:30pm, Ungar 411

Andres Acevedo - Planning of iPhone game development. This talk will be about the steps taken in the preparation and planning of iPhone game development. Additionally it will cover subjects such as hardware requirements to develop for the iPhone (and possible solutions), setting up projects using the Xcode SDK and Interface Builder, basic concepts of cocoa and cocoa touch, and the use of existent frameworks to assist game development.

Jose Hernandez - Axiom Selection for Automated Theorem Proving. Is Abraham Lincoln a mammal? Does there exist a capital which has the same latitude as Moscow that can get flooded? This talk will be on my work on a axiom selector mechanism (SInE) for Automated Theorem Provers. The axiom selector picks out the correct facts needed to solve a specific set of question. I will go over how I managed to get the Automated Theorem Provers integrated into the axiom selector; also problems that arose when I did and how I plan to solve them.

Alexandra Teyssandier - ATP with External Sources of Axioms for Dummies. The internet is a constantly expanding source of knowledge. External specifications allow ATPs to access information from web sources and databases to prove large theorems. The goal is to allow an end user to take a general knowledge, English conjecture and develop a conjecture in first order logic to answer questions such as "where is it sunny in the northern hemisphere today?" The first step is a simple scroll-list interface with searchable options that allows a user to find predicates relevant to their query. It links to external specifications from SUMO and XDB. Future plans include developing a more user-friendly, English language input.

Michael Schick - Changing the World of Theorem Proving: From Untyped to Typed. This talk will discuss logic languages, including First Order Form (FOF) and Typed First order Form (TFF). It will examine the TPTP and its uses, specifically related to Automated Theorem Proving. Additionally, it will show how to convert FOF axioms to TFF. Results generated from using TFF as compared to FOF, and the other potential advantages of TFF will be described.

Pascual Oliu - Fast Edit Distance and LCS Calculation Using Dominance Relationships. Calculating edit distances between two sequences is a fundamental problem in bioinformatics. A new algorithm computes edit distances efficiently by identifying dominance relationships in a dynamic programming matrix. This talk will discuss coding an efficient implementation of the algorithm in C and using it to solve the related LCS problem.

This is another in the Departmental Pizza Seminar series.

Tuesday November 24th 2009 5:00pm, Ungar 506

An ontology is a formal, explicit specification of a conceptualization. The process of engineering an ontology for a domain using the top-down approach is a complex task that consumes a lot of time and effort (it's the knowledge acquisition bottleneck). When the domain is a substantially large amount of texts (corpus), one way to expedite this prior process is to reverse engineer the ontology from the corpus. In this talk I am presenting my master's research proposal on an efficient and effective method to solve the reverse engineering problem using lexico-semantic analysis and probabilistic reasoning.

This is another in the Departmental Pizza Seminar series.

Wednesday November 18th 2009 5:00pm, Ungar 411

Almost everyone has to give a public presentation at some time. Graduate students have to defend their theses, research students have to present their results, and many jobs require presentations. It is common to have little or no experience when you give your first presentation, and you may even be a little nervous! This talk is aimed at (graduate, research, and other) students. It describes how to present a successful talk, in a simple standard format. This talk does not try to teach general speaking skills, nor impose any personally preferred techniques. It covers the structure of a talk, the use of visual aids, speaking technique, and how to cope with questions.

This is another in the Departmental Pizza Seminar series.

Wednesday October 28th 2009 5:00pm, Ungar 411

In the first part of this talk we defined the problem we want to solve, i.e. the need of a systematic and flexible approach to perform pattern classification of biological data coming from many sources. Since the nature of the problem dictates the nature of the solution, in this talk we will talk about the scope of the BCD, the limitations found during its implementation, and how they were resolved. The present state of the BCD and its future direction will be discussed. The bottom question is: how general can an information system be? As we will see, not much, i.e. 'very general' with a twist.

This is another in the Departmental Pizza Seminar series.

Wednesday, October 21st, 2009 5:00 PM, Ungar Building, Room 402

Subduction zones, where oceanic plates are pushed under the leading edge of continental plates along ocean trenches, produce Earth's largest earthquakes and most tsunamis. The pattern of strain release during earthquakes, where the leading edge of the continental plate jumps towards the ocean by several meters or more, is related to the slow build-up of strain accumulation during the interseismic period, which may last for hundreds of years. New GPS technology permits this slow pattern of strain accumulation to be measured. Studies of strain accumulation may give clues to the nature of future earthquakes, leading to improved understanding of the seismic process and improved forecast of seismic hazard. However, GPS data at a number of subuction zones indicates that not all accumulated strain is released during earthquakes; slow, aseismic slip events with durations of days - months are increasingly recognized as a major component in the strain release budget. In this talk I will describe a new GPS and seismic network that is being installed in northern Costa Rica by the University of Miami to monitor such events, and describe preliminary results from the first three years of operation. We have already observed one slow slip event, in May 2007. Maximum surface offsets were approximately 2 cm, occurring over a duration of several weeks, corresponding to an ~ M 6.5 earthquake if all of this strain had been released rapidly. Maximum slip was centered near the down-dip edge of the conventionally defined seismogenic zone. How these data are collected, analyzed and interpreted will be discussed, as well as implications for future earthquakes and improved understanding of the earthquake process.

This is a CSMS Project Industrial Liaison Seminar. Refreshments will be served.

Wednesday October 14th 2009 5:00pm, Ungar 411

Biodatabases are becoming increasingly accessible, increasingly big, and increasingly heterogeneous. The BCD is an (ongoing) open web information system that provides a systematic and flexible approach to perform pattern classification of biological data coming from many sources. In this talk I will describe the practical problems encountered during the design and development of the BCD and the solutions implemented related to high performance, high availability, high maintainability, high extensibility, cloud computing, database federation, web services, configuration management, and integration of third-party calculated feature vectors into the BCD data mining framework. The present state of the BCD and its future direction will be discussed. The bottom question is: how general can an information system be? As we will see, not much, i.e. "very general" with a twist.

This is another in the Departmental Pizza Seminar series.

Thursday, October 8th, 2009 5:00 PM, Ungar Building, Room 402

In this talk, I will discuss the role of mathematics and computer science at NSA and discuss hiring opportunities, including REUs (Research Experiences for Undergraduates) and programs for graduate students.

This is a CSMS Project Industrial Liaison Seminar. Refreshments will be served.

Wednesday October 7th 2009 5:00pm, Ungar 411

Autonomous agents in real-time and dynamic adversarial environments offer numerous research challenges. Perception, localization, decision- making, communication, and locomotion are good examples. The novel modern sports simulator we will discuss integrates results from ten years of research in the area of autonomous soccer playing robots (both softbots and physical robots) with RoboCup as a testbed. We will explore the problem of enabling autonomous agents in finding the right passing point or in making a complex decision within a soccer game while dealing with time constrains, hostile opponents, and dynamic environments. We propose a framework for spatio-temporal real-time analysis of dynamic scenes. The underlying hierarchical three-tier multiagent system consists of autonomous BDI agents that allows dynamic group structures (e.g., an emergent situation for a wing attack). The online game runs seamlessly in a web browser with a new and state-of-the-art 3D visualization engine. Latest developments include research results from a motion capturing lab and face generators to enhance the believability of the players and the users' visualization experience.

This is another in the Departmental Pizza Seminar series.

Wednesday September 30th 2009 5:00pm, Ungar 411

Web Services is one of the most dominant tools in the world today to implement SaaS (Software As A Service) principles. It has revolutionized the way services are mashed-up to build complex services and governing bodies. QoS (Quality of Services) such as security, reliability, etc., plays an important role in creating an ultimate service with governance. This presentation will focus on harnessing the power of Web Services using Apache Axis2 to create such a service and invoking prior service using Apache Axis2 client in a matter of minutes. In logic ...

This is another in the Departmental Pizza Seminar series.

Wednesday September 23rd 2009 5:00pm, Ungar 411

There is an enormous demand from the industry for Web Services and related technologies at present. These demands are not only from the IT field, but also from other disciplines such as finance, telecommunications, and government. Web Services is one of the most successful implementations of Service Oriented Architectures, which provides an infrastructure to build reusable software services in a heterogeneous environment. Apache Axis2 is considered to be the most successful open source Web Services middleware platform offered by the Apache Software Foundation. This presentation will focus on the basics of the Apache Axis2 architecture, concepts, and R&D opportunities available for students in the open source arena.

This is another in the Departmental Pizza Seminar series.

Wednesday September 2nd 2009 5:00pm, Ungar 411

In recent years there has been a growing demand for Automated Theorem Proving (ATP) in large theories, which often have more axioms than can be handled effectively as normal internal axioms. This work addresses the issues of accessing external sources of axioms from a first-order logic ATP system, and presents an implemented ATP system that retrieves external axioms asynchronously, on demand. The efficacy of the system is demonstrated on test problems that make use of a range of external sources of axioms, including databases and web services. In the long term this system will be able to answer very general knowledge questions, using a natural language interface.

This is another in the Departmental Pizza Seminar series.

Thursday July 30th, 2009 2:00pm, Ungar Building, Room 426

Developing logic and proving conjectures are some of the major goals in the world of Automated Theorem Proving. Various ATP systems have been designed for the purpose. However, for majority of ATP systems it becomes difficult to prove conjectures when the available axiom set is too large. This research introduces a concept of machine learning to deal with large axiom sets. The closest relevant axiom sets for a failed conjecture are formed by learning from existing solved conjectures in the same problem domain. Semantic axiom refining approaches are then applied on an already reduced axiom set for refining it to a much finer level. The failed conjecture is then tried proving from refined axiom set. The SWC problem domain was picked for testing purposes, and the tool proved successful by solving 24/124 failed conjectures. Performance was better when compared to SRASS.

This is a Department of Computer Science Masters Defense.

Wednesday, April 22th, 2009 5:00 PM, Ungar Building, Room 411

Have you ever wondered how the University of Miami is connected to the rest of the world? In the past few years the University's network has grown to include four Internet Service Providers, 46 different commercial peers, and several research and education networks, including National Lamdba Rail, Internet 2, and others. Discover what equipment is used, what it looks like, and how it is connected together. Learn about what network resources are available to the University community.

A Pizza Science Seminar. Pizza and refershments are served.

Monday, April 13th, 2009 3:00 PM, Ungar Building, Room 426

With growing trend in 'cloud computing' and increase in the data moving into the Internet, the need to store large amounts of data by service providers such as Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, etc. has increased over time. Now, more than ever, there is a need to efficiently and securely store large amounts of data. This thesis presents an implementation of a Ramp Scheme that confidentially splits a data file into a configurable number of parts or shares of equal size such that a subset of those shares can recover the data entirely. Furthermore, the implementation supports a threshold for data compromise and data checksum verification to verify that the data parts have not been tampered with. This thesis addresses two key problems faced in large-scale data storage, namely, data availability and confidentiality.

This is a Department of Computer Science Masters Defense.

Monday, April 13th, 2009 5:30 PM, Ungar Building, Room 426

Persistent and secure store for web objects is an attractive feature in today's web world and possess a good potential for exploration. Persistence of a storage mechanism refers to its ability to store an object for extremely long time periods. Resilience refers to its fault tolerance ability or its ability to retrieve the object completely even if a part of that object is lost due to any catastrophic failure like the disk failure. It is also important that this storage mechanism is able to store this object in a secure manner. In the current world usability of any storage mechanism is enhanced multiple times if it could be used from a web service. This thesis considers different techniques that provide each of these properties and proposes a storage mechanism that makes use of information dispersal techniques that is suited to store data securely with an emphasis on availability and resilience. A working prototype of this storage mechanism was developed as a part of this thesis and is made available as a library for program developers. This library provides APIs to store and retrieve data as well as a control API which can be used to query and set the configuration. The APIs to store and retrieve data also has a limited web interface which increases its usability to web developers. The performance of this prototype was measured and is presented using graphs and tables. Finally a demonstration of the applications of this prototype is also provided.

This is a Department of Computer Science Masters Defense.

Monday, April 6th, 2008 3:30 PM, Room MCA202

Tropical cyclones continue to be a serious concern for the Nation, causing significant risk to life, property, and economic vitality. While NOAA has made steady improvements in forecasting track since 1990, intensity has lagged behind, primarily because a good track forecast is essential before addressing any intensity changes. However, over the last 5 years NOAA's track forecasts improved enough for us to now focus on intensity forecast improvements. Since the devastating 2004-2005 Hurricane Seasons NOAA developed a plan to improve forecasts of hurricane intensity, structure, and track in cooperation with other government and non-government partners. This Hurricane Forecasting Improvement Project (HFIP), is a 10-year project designed to accelerate improvements in one to five day forecasts for hurricane track, intensity, and structure and to reduce forecast uncertainty, with an emphasis on rapid intensity change because of its importance to emergency management amongst others. The HFIP Plan has been widely distributed and reviewed, with an alliance of the hurricane research and forecasting communities agreeing to move forward with its implementation. The Plan's strategy is to perform research into hurricane intensity change and rapid intensification mechanisms, exploit new observing systems, expand computing capacity, build higher resolution coupled models and ensembles, improve infrastructure for transitioning research to operations (R2O) and support operations-like systems to the research community (O2R), and broaden NOAA expertise and expand interaction with the external community.

This is a Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering presentation, and a CSMS Project Industrial Liaison Seminar. See Computer Science and Mathematics for Scientists. Refreshments will be served.

Wednesday, April 1st, 2009 5:00 PM, Ungar Building, Room 402

Neal Alewine and Harvey Ruback will discuss IBM's speech technology. Also present will be the IBM LA Grid program director Juan Caraballo.

Neal Alewine is an IBM Senior Technical Staff Member, Software Group Voice and DataPower Architect. Harvey Ruback is an IBM Senior Technical Staff Member, Systems and Technology Group Advanced Voice Architect. Juan F. Caraballo is the IBM Program Director for LA Grid - Corporate University and Innovation Programs. He was previously the Software Group Program Director for Enterprise Speech Solutions.

This is a CSMS Project Industrial Liaison Seminar. See Computer Science and Mathematics for Scientists. Refreshments will be served.

Thursday, March 5, 2009 at 5:00pm, Ungar Building, Room 402

We will look at random number generation from the point-of-view of Monte Carlo computations. Thus, we will examine several serial methods of pseudorandom number generation and two different parallelization techniques. Among the techniques discussed with be "parameterization," which forms the basis for the Scalable Parallel Random Number Generators (SPRNG) library. SPRNG was developed several years ago by the author, and has become widely used within the international Monte Carlo community. SPRNG is briefly described, and the lecture ends with a short revue of quasirandom number generation. Quasirandom numbers offer many Monte Carlo applications the advantage of superior convergence rates.

Dr. Mascagni was born in Bologna, Italy. He has a Ph.D. in Mathematics from Courant Institute of Mathematics and has worked at the National Institute of Health and the Institute of Defense Analysis' Supercomputer Research Center. He is currently a professor in the department of Computer Science of Florida State University. Dr. Mascagni is on the editorial board of three journals in his field, and is on the Board of Directors of IMACS. He has been a visiting professor at the University of Padova in Italy, the University of Salzburg in Austria, and the Swiss Federal Technical Institute-Zurich in Switzerland, and is a consultant to industry and government

This is a joint presentation of The Center For Computational Science and the Department of Computer Science and co-sponsored by Rosenstiel School Of Marine And Atmospheric Science and the The Department Of Electrical And Computer Engineering

Friday, February 20th, 2009 at 4:00 pm, Ungar Building, Room 411

Joe Clarke will discuss his role in porting GNOME/GTK+ to the FreeBSD platform. As part of the discussion, the goals, structure and charter of the GNOME Project will be outlined.

Joe Clarke works at Cisco Systems, and is an expert in CiscoWorks LAN Management Solution and IOS embedded device management. His day job supports his interests in FreeBSD, including his work as Ports Manager, GNOME porter, and Tinderbox maintainer. Presented by the Department of Computer Science

Refreshments will be served.

Friday, February 20, 2009 at 11:00; Ungar Room 411

Data cleaning is a critical component of Business Intelligence software. Specifically, the data cleaning step reconciles multiple representations of the same data and thereby ensures accurate data analysis. With the advent of the web, this problem has gained even more importance. For example, data cleaning technology is also used to capture typos and differences in representation when looking up addresses in an online address search. Traditionally, data cleaning has been driven by consultants and software that is custom made for specific vertical domains. In this talk, we take a different approach and propose a programming framework for data cleaning. We will identify some of the key aspects of such a programming framework.

Surajit Chaudhuri is a Principal Researcher and a Research Area Manager at Microsoft Research, Redmond. In 1996, Surajit started the AutoAdmin project on self-tuning database systems at Microsoft Research and along with his team developed novel automated physical design tuning technology. Their research led to the development of Index Tuning Wizard (Microsoft SQL Server 7.0, SQL Server 2000) and Database Tuning Advisor (SQL Server 2005, SQL Server 2008). More recently, along with his colleagues, Surajit has worked in the area of data cleaning. Their research on data cleaning has been incorporated in Microsoft SQL Server 2005 and SQL Server 2008. Surajit is also interested in the problem of search and querying information exploiting IR as well as DBMS techniques. Surajit did his Ph.D. from Stanford University and worked at Hewlett-Packard Laboratories, Palo Alto from 1991-1995. He is an ACM Fellow. He was awarded the ACM SIGMOD Contributions award in 2004 and a 10 year VLDB Best paper Award in 2007.

Refreshments will be served. All are invited.

Thursday February 19 at 6:00 PM. Ungar 426.

Everyone is welcome. Competition, Pizza, Chun Li.
For more information contact adam _at_ mail.cs.miami.edu.

Thursday February 19 at 6:00 PM. Ungar 426.

Everyone is welcome. Competition, Pizza, Chun Li.
For more information contact adam _at_ mail.cs.miami.edu.

Wednesday, February 18th, 2009, 5:00pm, Ungar 411

Dr. Kierchhoff presents a new generation of e-Sports-games. It is a combination of characteristics of real soccer players with modern AI technology. The user adds soccer knowledge for the next game while choosing formation, tactics, and training sessions for his team. Each game is simulated and visualized in a 3D Java applet within a web browser thereafter. This results into a unique game that has convinced the German Bundesliga (DFL GmbH) among others. Dr. Kierchhoff is one of the driving forces behind the "Official Bundesliga Manager", a game that has convinced more than 105,000 users since August 2007 and is running on www.bundesliga.de.

Users can create their own team from all 530 Bundesliga players and plays with this team to win the championship against 17 other teams in a weekly rhythm (in analogy to the real Bundesliga). The game also contains options to ascend/descend into different leagues according to the quality of the team (virtual 1./2. Bundesliga). The games have the same rhythm than the reality, however, the games will be played one day earlier.

Modern technology is the basis for the game. The players are software robots and act autonomously. They decide on their own with the help of modern AI technology which action will be executed within the next few seconds. The combination of reality with weekly (daily possible) updates of player data, the definition of the user with his formation and tactics and the autonomy of the software robots is brand-new and guarantees a unique experience for users.

The Official Bundesliga Manager is a combination of high tech artificial intelligence methods, an new 3D graphics engine, and elite sports. Artificial software robots are charged with weekly updated real data from the Bundesliga players. They then play autonomously their league games in a virtual world. (www.bundesliga.de).

The talk contains a technology demonstration and will then give insight into a vibrant industry sector by analyzing more than 120.000 customers. Dr. Kierchhoff will talk about potential markets and business opportunities in this sector. The talk underlines the importance for game programming in education.

This is another in the Department of Computer Science Pizza Seminar Series.

Monday, February 16th, 2009 4:00 pm, Ungar Building, Room 411

High quality 3D rendering requires massive computing resources. In order to render animations within a reasonable amount of time, the rendering process is often distributed among a cluster of computers, typically called a rendering farm. However, most individuals and small studios do not have the resources to purchase or lease a rendering farm. In the late 1990's, Java technology brought a hope that distributed applets could be utilized as an alternative to traditional network rendering models. Yet, this hope was never realized, nor was it fully implemented. Taking into account new developments in web application technology and the Sunflow renderer, this thesis will reexamine the possibility of distributed rendering applets. This thesis will suggest that distributed Java applets can effectively render projects across a collection of heterogeneous and geographically dispersed computers over the Internet. Moreover, this paper will present a prototype web application, called RenderWeb, that uses distributed applets to quickly render projects created in popular animation programs, such as Blender, 3D Studio MAX, and Softimage

This is a Department of Computer Science Masters Defense

Thursday Jan 29 at 6:00 PM. Ungar 426.

Everyone is welcome. There will be games, pizza and zombies.

For more information contact adam _at_ mail.cs.miami.edu.

Thursday, December 4, 2008, 2:00pm, Ungar 411

QoS (Quality of Service) control in WLAN (IEEE 802.11 Wireless LAN) is becoming increasingly important. Although previous research has attempted to increase total throughput, few studies have treated individual TCP/UDP flow QoS. EDCA in IEEE 802.11e might provide prioritized QoS functions that would partially address this problem. However, in uplink flow, which is defined as data moving from a terminal toward an Access Point, EDCA has limitations. These manifest themselves both across classes and in differentiated QoS control between terminals in the same class. Furthermore, 802.11e requires modification of terminals as well as other alterations proposed by other researchers. Instead of 802.11e or other modifications of 802.11, we propose an approach to controlling QoS that requires no terminal modifications or installation of additional software/hardware. The proposed idea is MAC-frame Receiving-Opportunity Control (ROC). Performance evaluation shows that the ROC causes some performance degradation in total WLAN throughput but can achieve not only QoS priority control but also arbitrary throughput performance. In particular, the ROC (in the MAC layer) can also permit different throughputs for high priority and low priority flows, conditioned on control processes in other layers. These may include rate adaptation (in the MAC layer) and TCP congestion control (in the TCP layer).

Wednesday, December 3, 2008, 5:30pm, Ungar 411

Report on internship.

As the aging baby boomer generation approaches retirement age, health care providers are searching for ways to ease the burden of an increasingly older population. Subsequent generations are migrating away from their parents and grandparents, increasing the relevance of assisted-living facilities for elderly patients. Moreover, a rising life expectancy and dependence on a greater number of health professionals is contributing to a more expensive health care system, and depression and loneliness is now common among seniors. Researchers in the field of social robotics propose the use of robots to assist caregivers in menial tasks and to extend the independence and quality of life of aging individuals where possible.

As part of Humana's Rapid Prototyping Internship Program, we developed a system to evaluate the potential for a robotic companion's use in the home. Pleo, a robotic dinosaur manufactured by UGOBE, serves as the platform used for this prototyping. Reprogramming Pleo to perform the roles of both a health care tool and companion may provide an interface to technology that is more approachable for the elderly. We present the details and challenges in building the software used to enhance Pleo and integrate him into a system of devices that work together. The processes involved in creating new media for the robot will also be covered. In addition, we will discuss the structure and modifiability of the Pleo robot, including its limitations and advantages.

This is another in the Departmental Pizza Seminar series.

Friday, November 21st, 2008 at 12:15 pm, Ungar Building, Room 426

We present robust explicit construction of 3D configuration spaces using controlled linear perturbation. The input is two planar parts: a fixed set and a moving set, where each set is bounded by circle segments. The configuration space is the three-dimensional space of Euclidean transformation (translations plus rotations) of the moving set relative to the fixed set. The goal of constructing the 3D configuration space is to determine the boundary representation of the free space where the intersection of the moving set and fixed set is empty. To construct the configuration space, we use the controlled linear perturbation algorithm. The controlled linear perturbation algorithm assigns predicate polynomial signs that are correct for a nearly minimal input perturbation. The output of the algorithm is a consistent set of polynomial signs. This approach is algorithm-independent and overhead over traditional floating point methods is reasonable.

If the fixed and moving sets are computer representations of physical objects, then computing the configuration space greatly aids in many computational geometry problems. Our main focus of computing the configuration space is for the path planning problem. We must find if a path exists from the start to the goal, where the fixed set is the obstacle, and the moving set is the object trying to reach the goal.

This is a Department of Computer Science Ph.D. Defense

Thursday, November 13th, 2008 11:00 am, Ungar Building, Room 426

One aspect of Automated Reasoning deals with writing computer programs that can answer questions using logical reasoning. An Automated Theorem Proving (ATP) system translates a question to be answered to a first-order logic conjecture, and attempts to prove the conjecture from the set of axioms provided. If a proof is found an answer extraction method can be applied to answer the original question. If more than one proof is possible, more than one answer may need to be extracted. Most ATP systems can find only a single answer for a question. To extract multiple answers, users may have to re-invoke the ATP system with a modified question. This work describes some ways to achieve multiple-answer extraction. An answer extraction program, called the multi-answer system, has been developed to automate the process of answer extraction. It enables users to conveniently extract different answers in a variety of ways. Extracting more than one answer is useful but it is also helpful if the extracted answers can be compared to a list of user's answers. The multi-answer system uses set operations like union, intersection, subset, superset, element, and difference to perform answer comparison.

This is a Department of Computer Science Masters Defense

Wednesday, November 12th, 2008 5:00 PM, Ungar Building, Room 402

With the number of economic, environmental and foreign policy crises at the moment, have you thought about how you as an individual can directly contribute? As a technologist, have you ever thought about how you could save a life, or even better, many? If you have, think about how to promote wellness in your community (health, environment, security and happiness). With all of the crises happening around us at the moment, this is one problem on which we as individuals can have a dramatic effect, for ourselves and those around us.

Within Humana, the Innovation Center is a group of business and technology leaders who are looking at how to engage people to improve their wellness. Within the Emerging Technology Applications group we use digital media and emerging technologies such as computer games, social media, virtual worlds, social robots and the like. We run a paid Rapid Prototyping Internship Program (RPIP) that is designed to provide students with the chance to temper their skills on problems that have important and real world applications.

In 2008, three University of Miami computer science students, Justin Stoecker (BSc 2009), Richard Roesler (BSc 2009) and Adam McMahon (MSc 2009) undertook internships. Adam used Sims2 to design a game to show the health and economic benefit of using technology to assist the elderly to stay in their homes when threatened with an assisted living facility. Justin and Richard developed a prototype system for using the Pleo social robot as an alternative interface for the elderly to use technology in the home such as medication reminders, wireless scales and blood pressure cuffs. Justin also developed a memory game for the Pleo.

In the seminar, Adam, Justin and Richard will present the results of their work. The details of the upcoming RPIP'09 will also be discussed. If you are interested in applying for a paid position, please come and see the type of projects we are interested in pursuing.

This is a CSMS Project Industrial Liaison Seminar. See Computer Science and Mathematics for Scientists. Refreshments will be served.

Wednesday, November 5th, 2008, 5:00pm, Ungar 411

The presentation in this pizza seminar will be split in two consecutive parts. The first presents research in the field of knowledge representation and high-level scene interpretation for autonomous agents in dynamic physical environments. The application context will be robotic soccer. To be more precise, the RoboCup 3D soccer simulation league where the University of Bremen participated with our Virtual Werder 3D agent team from 2004-2007.

After a brief introduction to the domain, I'll argue that a quantitative world model alone is inadequate for agents interacting in a highly dynamic physical environment such as (simulated) soccer. Without further efforts targeted at a hybrid knowledge base, the agents are ill-equipped to apprehend extended motion incidences. To meet this need, I propose a knowledge processing pipeline ranging from relevance-driven compilation of a concise, basic qualitative scene description to a knowledge-based detection of complex events, actions and action sequences. The detection is thereby conceived as a spatio-temporal pattern matching problem which can be solved using logic programming. A methodology for the formalization of motion patterns and their inner composition is introduced and consequently applied in a knowledge engineering process to capture human expertise about a large set of soccer-specific motion situations. The formalization scales in a natural way from low-level events towards strategic plays. I'll also propose an efficient knowledge-based detection strategy whose bottom-up search is based on the interrelationships among modeled patterns. Seizing a full-featured prototype, a thorough statistical evaluation of analysis quality and execution performance was conducted in realistic application scenarios. Results were promising with respect to precision and recall, using - as a baseline - precise, complete sensor input at a 5Hz update frequency. Also, the analysis is robust against noisy, incomplete input as encountered in application scenarios such as the RoboCup 3D Soccer Simulation League, howing a defensible graceful quality degradation. The approach is also shown suitable for non-restricted real-time employment.

The second part of the presentation will retain the focus on autonomous agent and multi-agent systems. Yet, as it is motivated by my current occupation as a research assistant in the Collaborative Research Center entitled 'Autonomous Cooperating Logistic Processes', the application domain will change to transport logistics.

The CRC is concerned with research on new paradigms that can replace and effectively optimize traditional centralized management and control of complex supply networks in emergent, fast-moving, globalized markets. The basic idea pursued in our research group is a distribution of control and thus a transfer of autonomy from the human controller to the logistic objects themselves. These objects, which might be means of transport, freight containers or (collections of) bulk goods, are thereby modeled as intelligent software agents which pro-actively assume responsibility for transport logistic tasks such as the efficient and adaptive routing of goods from the production facilities in far east to the end user market in Germany.

I will try and sketch current tentative ideas to provide heterogeneous teams of agents which can be collectively thought of as acting as a freight forwarding company could adapt to a dynamically changing logistic environment via a collaborative multi-agent learning process. The adaption is conceived as running concurrently to the primary logistic task of the agent community. Depending on their individual circumstances/capabilities (mobile, resource-bounded agents due to live on on-board embedded systems or stationary high-performance agents, located at transshipment centers), the distinct agent types contribute to the global task of team adaption in several ways. For instance, as experience canvassers or as local learners/knowledge miners. The concept strives to bring together in a beneficial way research from multi-agent systems and multi-agent-based simulation, knowledge representation, learning and data/association rule mining.

This part of the talk is intentionally presented at an early stage of concept formation in order to draw comments and ideas from the audience.

This is another in the Department of Computer Science Pizza Seminar series

Wednesday, October 29th 2008 5:00pm, Ungar 411

Dr. Visser presents a new generation of e-Sports-games. It is a combination of characteristics of real soccer players with modern AI technology. The user adds soccer knowledge for the next game while choosing formation, tactics, and training sessions for his team. Each game is simulated and visualized in a 3D Java applet within a web browser thereafter. This results into a unique game that has convinced the German Bundesliga (DFL GmbH) among others. Dr. Visser is one of the driving forces behind the "Official Bundesliga Manager", a game that has convinced nearly 100.000 users since August 2007 and is running on www.bundesliga.de. Users can create their own team from all 530 Bundesliga players and plays with this team to win the championship against 17 other teams in a weekly rhythm (in analogy to the real Bundesliga). The game also contains options to ascend/descend into different leagues according to the quality of the team (virtual 1./2. Bundesliga). The games have the same rhythm than the reality, however, the games will be played one day earlier.

Modern technology is the basis for the game. The players are software robots and act autonomously. They decide on their own with the help of modern AI technology which action will be executed within the next few seconds. The combination of reality with weekly (daily possible) updates of player data, the definition of the user with his formation and tactics and the autonomy of the software robots is brand-new and guarantees a unique experience for users. The Official Bundesliga Manager is a combination of high tech artificial intelligence methods, an new 3D graphics engine, and elite sports. Artificial software robots are charged with weekly updated real data from the Bundesliga players. They then play autonomously their league games in a virtual world. (www.bundesliga.de). The talk contains details about the technology, an online demonstration, and an outlook within the context of the Graphics and Games Track at UM.

Ubbo Visser is currently a Visiting Associate Professor at the Department of Computer Science since August 2008. He received his Habilitation in Computer Science (qualification for Professor) from University of Bremen in 2003, a PhD in Geoinformatics from University of Muenster in 1995, and a MSc in Geography (Landscape-ecology) from University of Muenster in 1988. His research specialization is in artificial intelligence, more specifically on knowledge representation and reasoning. He is interested in the combination of symbolic and sub-symbolic technologies in the domain areas of "Semantic Web" and "Multiagent Systems". His focus in the Semantic Web area lies in the development of methods that combine terminological logics and spatio-temporal representation and reasoning techniques. The focus in the Multiagent Systems area lies in the development of techniques for agents that act in highly dynamic and real-time environments, such as mobile robots and games.

This is another in the Department of Computer Science Pizza Seminar series

Wednesday, October 22th 2008 5:00pm, Ungar 411

Graph based semi-supervised learning (GBSSL) has attached considerable interests in machine learning, data mining and computer vision communities in recent years. In this talk, I will introduce the basic configurations in GBSSL, and a representative algorithm -- label propagation, and a multilevel scheme to make it more efficient. The applications of GBSSL in image segmentation, text classification and information retrieval will also be introduced in this talk.

Dr. Fei Wang has got his Ph.d. degree from Tsinghua University, Beijing, China in 2008. He is now a postdoctoral researcher in School of Computing & Information Sciences, Florida International University. His main research interests include machine learning, data mining, information retrieval and pattern recognition. He has published over 40 papers in the top journal & conferences of the relevant field.

This is another in the Department of Computer Science Pizza Seminar series

Wednesday, October 15th 2008 5:00pm, Ungar 402

A brief overview of Intellectual Property (IP) Law including patents, trademarks, and copyrights. What is Intellectual Property? What role does an IP attorney play? Why is an engineering or scientific degree needed to become a patent attorney? Specific focus aimed at the process of becoming a patent attorney or agent, as well as the benefits and obstacles of pursuing this career choice.

This is a CSMS Project Industrial Liaison Seminar. See Computer Science and Mathematics for Scientists. Refreshments will be served.

Monday, October 13th 2008 10:00am, Engineering Building Annex, MEA202

A human cognitive model that can robustly execute basic tasks would make a valuable contribution to three interrelated areas of endeavor, robust agent simulations, human-computer interfaces, models of human cognition. The centerpiece of the human execution of natural tasks is the fluid use of gaze to direct and select appropriate behaviors, but little is known about the control mechanisms responsible for the gaze sequences that do this. For example, a difficult problem for all models of gaze control, intrinsic to selective perceptual systems, is how to detect important stimuli without consuming excessive computational resources. We show in both real and virtual walking environments, that human gaze patterns are tightly controlled by task demands and remarkably sensitive to the probabilistic structure of the environment. One way to understanding this use of gaze is to create a model of a human that has a sufficient amount of complexity so as to be capable of generating such behaviors. Recent technological advances in graphics models that simulate extensive human capabilities can be used as platforms from which to develop synthetic models of visuo-motor behavior. Currently such models can capture only a small portion of a full behavioral repertoire, but for the behaviors that they do model, they can describe complete visuo-motor subsystems at a useful level of detail. The value in doing so is that the body's elaborate visuo-motor structures greatly simplify the specification of the abstract behaviors that guide them. The net result is that, essentially, one is faced with proposing an embodied "operating system" model for picking the right set of abstract behaviors at each instant. We outline one such model. A centerpiece of the model uses vision to aid the behavior that has the most to gain from taking environmental measurements. Preliminary tests of the model against human performance in realistic VR environments show that main features of the model show up in human behavior.

Colloquium sponsored by the University of Miami Departments of Computer Science and of Electrical and Computer Engineering and the Center for Computational Science

Wednesday, October 8th 2008 5:00pm, Ungar 411

I will talk about the problem of using shared resources for private computations. This problem has been studied in two closely related models: locally random reductions (LRRs) and private information retrieval (PIR) schemes.

In both models, there are two parties that communicate with each other. The first party consists only of a single client and the other party consists of one or more resources (which could be, for instance, oracles or servers). The client wishes to solve some problem on an input that is private to the client by interacting with the information resources. The crucial privacy requirement is that at the end of all communication each resource must not learn anything about the actual input, except possibly the length of the input. It is considered infeasible for the resources to simply send all information (or computational aids) that would be required by the client to solve the problem on any possible input of a given length.

The solution to this puzzle makes use of randomness in a crucial way. Basically, for any given input the client sends different random queries to different resources and uses the answers to these queries to solve the problem. The probability distribution of the random query(ies) sent to a single resource depends only on the length of the input. If we assume that the resources do not collude to learn the input of the client and that thus each resource gets to know only its own queries, then the resources do not learn anything about the actual problem instance. The challenge in constructing good LRRs and PIR schemes is to devise mechanisms with as low as possible communication requirement.

I will explain and motivate these models, describe known results related to these models, and present my recent results on the complexity of languages that have locally random reductions (LRRs) of certain types.

About the speaker: Dr. Rahul Tripathi is an assistant professor of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of South Florida (USF), Tampa, FL. His research interests are in algorithms and computational complexity theory. Dr. Tripathi holds a B.Tech. (2000) in Computer Science and Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur, India, and an M.S. (2003) and Ph.D. (2005) in Computer Science from the University of Rochester, NY.

This is another in the Department of Computer Science Pizza Seminar series

Wednesday, October 1st 2008 5:00pm, Ungar 411

Zac Brown, an undergraduate student in the University of Miami's Department of Computer Science recounts his experience as an intern with the world's most well known search engine and internet ad provider, Google. He will discuss his time there, the project he worked on and provide some insight into what Google is doing, where Google is going and some fun facts about Google. He may even provide confirmation to any rumors people have heard, provided his NDA permits him to do so. If you've ever wondered what it's like to work at Google, how they develop software, or even just how they make money, this is your chance to talk to a past Google employee.

This is another in the Department of Computer Science Pizza Seminar series

Thursday September 22nd 2008 5:00pm, Ungar 426

Virtual environments have the way we understand and interact with data by transforming it into "in-our-face-and-hands" information. These environments have also revolutionized the way we communicate that information to others. We are now able to gain insight in particular problem domains like never before: we can collaborate with our colleagues, locally or remotely, and we can better explain our discoveries to others through powerful virtual reality experiences. Today, the practical implementation of these capabilities is still evolving, but a growing interest and acceptance by industry is accelerating the development efforts. The non-academic communities are demanding virtual reality and virtual environments technology that is robust and stable enough to come out of research laboratories and be put to work on industrial settings. This, combined with today's limitations of traditional sources of academic funding, presents a unique opportunity for universities open to widen their academic and research models towards applied research and entrepreneurship of their faculty and students. This talk reflects Dr. Cruz's experiences and personal assessment on the current state and trends of virtual reality technology, her challenging career as a non-traditional faculty, and the opportunities to develop strong integrated academic and research programs to capitalize in this emerging field.

Dr. Carolina Cruz-Neira is a pioneer in the field of Virtual Reality (VR). She started in the early 90's being the lead designer of the CAVE Virtual Reality Environment, and the software engineer of CAVELibs, the first software API to run such complex virtual environments. Until 2005, Dr. Cruz was the Stanley Chair in Interdisciplinary Engineering and the Associate Director and co-founder of the Virtual Reality Applications Center at Iowa State University (ISU). Currently, Dr. Cruz is the Executive Director and Chief Scientist of the Louisiana Immersive Technologies Enterprise (LITE) and the William Hansen Hall Endowed Chair in Computer Engineering at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette.

Colloquium sponsored by the University of Miami Department of Computer Science and the Center for Computational Science.

Wednesday, April 23rd 2008, 5:00pm, Ungar 411

The focus of my project is to enable anyone to develop a simple to intermediate version of popular game genres without having to produce code or logic. The Easy GameCreator only requires the user to click or drag objects onto the game he/she is creating. In assisting the user to produce a game, the E.G.C. will organize the various stages and object files that the user chooses and displays them in a convenient location.

This project, programmed in JAVA using the Processing graphics library, offers a visual simulation of the movements and interactions of mosquitoes with respect to humans. The inputs include the size of the space, mosquito and human population, and mosquito lifetime. The output consists of representative markers designated as humans or mosquitoes by different size and color. How often each person is bitten will be recorded as a counted number and as a gradual change in color of the human. This simulation should give a better understanding of how mosquitoes move and interact.

Ruby On Rails is a full stack MVC (model-view-controller) web framework that is designed for rapid application development. The popular Facebook application provides an API to allow third parties to write web applications that can be integrated with the Facebook web application itself. Amazon Web Services is a technology platform provided by Amazon.com. It allows developers to deploy web applications on a "cloud" of computing resources that is easily scalable. The Google AJAX Search API lets developers use JavaScript to embed a simple, dynamic Google search box and display search results. I wrote a simple facebook wishlist application that allows the user to search and display a wishlist of products on their profile, using with the Ruby on Rails framework, Amazon Web Services and Google Search APIs.

This project is to design a software for conference registration. Original software was started as a project for Software engineering class. More universal and platform independent design is used this time around. My SQL was a software of choice. I would like to create a system with a semi-professional feel to it. Dr .U. Sarkar approved the project, though I had only minimal interaction with him; much of it will be left up to my ability and logic in finding the right way to manipulate the PHP and MySQL languages. It will be nice to implement the entire project in the web environment.

This is another in the Departmental Pizza Seminar series.

Thursday April 17th 2008 5:00pm, Ungar 506

We will look at random number generation from the point-of-view of Monte Carlo computations. Thus, we will examine several serial methods of pseudorandom number generation and two different parallelization techniques. Among the techniques discussed with be 'parameterization,' which forms the basis for the Scalable Parallel Random Number Generators (SPRNG) library. SPRNG was developed several years ago by the author, and has become widely used within the international Monte Carlo community. SPRNG is briefly described, and the lecture ends with a short revue of quasirandom number generation. Quasirandom numbers offer many Monte Carlo applications the advantage of superior convergence rates.

Dr. Mascagni was born in Bologna, Italy. He has a Ph.D. in Mathematics from Courant Institute of Mathematics and has worked at the National Institute of Health and the Institute of Defense Analysis's Supercomputer Research Center. He has currently a professor in the department of Computer Science of Florida State University. Dr. Mascagni is on the editorial board of three journals in his field, is on Board of Directors of IMACS. He has been a visiting professor at the University of Padova in Italy, the University of Salzburg in Austria, and the Swiss Federal Technical Institute-Zurich in Switzerland, and is a consultant to industry and government.

Wednesday, April 16th 2008, 5:00pm, Ungar 411

It is essential that a Theorem Prover, presented with a theorem to prove and a list of axioms to prove it with, knows which of the axioms will be most useful, and which will be of least use in its quest. The Google Prophet utilizes the power of latent semantics (the idea that any symbol has a "hidden" meaning that can be inferred by the other symbols it associates with) to rank axioms in order of most useful to least useful, with an accuracy far beyond simple string matching methods.

This is another in the Departmental Pizza Seminar series.

Wednesday, April 9th 2008, 5:00pm, Ungar 411

We will present both an experimental framework for the study of on-line optimisation algorithms for packet routing, and theoretical results on "best paths" and on travel times in random network environments. The experimental "cognitive packet network" (CPN) test-bed at Imperial College will be described, and the CPN routing algorithm will be presented together with detailed experimental results concerning its performance. We shall also show how Brownian motion can be used to predict travel delays in uncertain wired and wireless networks, and describe an application to adaptive routing in wireless sensor networks. This work is currently funded by the US/UK International Technology Alliance funded by DoD and IBM.

Prof Erol Gelenbe FIEEE, FACM, FIEE, is the Professor in the Dennis Gabor Chair at Imperial College. A graduate of the Middle East Technical University, Ankara, Turkey, he is an elected Member of Academia Europaea and of the Turkish Academy of Sciences, and has received honoris causa doctorates from the University of Rome, the University of Liege (Belgium), and Bogazici University (Turkey). His research spans both computer networks and bio-informatics. A Member of Eta Kappa Nu, he has been decorated by the President of Italy with the honours of "Grand Officer of the Order of the Star of Italian Solidarity" and of "Commander of Merit of the Republic of Italy". In France he has received the honour of Officer of the Order of Merit, and has won the Grand Prix France Telecom of the French Academy of Sciences. Prof Gelenbe is on the editorial board of the Proceedings of the Royal Society, Acta Informatica, Telecommunication Systems and several other journals; he is Editor-in-Chief of The Computer Journal (British Computer Society).

This is another in the Departmental Pizza Seminar series.

Wednesday, April 2th 2008, 5:00pm, Ungar 411

Almost everyone has to give a public presentation at some time. Graduate students have to defend their theses, research students have to present their results, and many jobs require presentations. It is common to have little or no experience when you give your first presentation, and you may even be a little nervous! This talk is aimed at (graduate, research, and other) students. It describes how to give a successful talk, in a simple standard format. This talk does not try to teach general speaking skills, nor impose any personally preferred techniques. It covers the structure of a talk, the use of visual aids, speaking technique, and how to cope with questions.

This is another in the Departmental Pizza Seminar series.

 Wednesday March 5th 2008 5:00pm, Ungar 402

Data clustering is an important task in many disciplines. A large number of studies have attempted to improve clustering by using the side information that is often encoded as pairwise constraints. However, these studies focus on designing special clustering algorithms that can effectively exploit the pairwise constraints. We present a boosting framework for data clustering, termed as BoostCluster, that is able to iteratively improve the accuracy of any given clustering algorithm by exploiting the pairwise constraints. The key challenge in designing a boosting framework for data clustering is how to influence an arbitrary clustering algorithm with the side information since clustering algorithms by definition are unsupervised. The proposed framework addresses this problem by dynamically generating new data representations at each iteration that are, on the one hand, adapted to the clustering results at previous iterations by the given algorithm, and on the other hand consistent with the given side information. Our empirical study shows that the proposed boosting framework is effective in improving the performance of a number of popular clustering algorithms (K-means, partitional SingleLink, spectral clustering), and its performance is comparable to the state-of-the-art algorithms for data clustering with side information.

Dr. Rong Jin is an assistant professor of Computer Science and Engineering at Michigan State University. He is conducting research in the areas of statistical machine learning and its application to information retrieval. He has published over eighty research articles. Dr. Jin holds a B.A. in Engineering from Tianjin University in China, an M.S. in Physics from Beijing University in China, and an M.S. and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University. He received the NSF CAREER Award in 2006.

This is another in the Departmental Pizza Seminar series.

Monday March 3rd 2008 12:00noon, Ungar 411

Many transform-based compression techniques have been investigated and devised for ECG (Electrocardiogram) signal compression. However, the Burrows-Wheeler Transformation has not been completely investigated. In this talk, we show that when compressing ECG signals, utilization of linear prediction, Burrows-Wheeler Transformation, and inversion ranks yield better compression gain in terms of weighted average bit per sample than recently proposed ECG-specific coders.

Monday March 3rd 2008 5:15pm, Ungar 402 (Refreshments at 5:00pm)

Actuaries help insurance companies in many areas, such as accounting, claims, lawsuits, investments, mergers & acquisitions, and premium calculations. Join Jonathan Jannarone, UM math graduate and Vice President of Life Actuarial at Assurant, as he explains how actuaries apply math, statistics, and computer science to their daily job. Learn about how to become an actuary, consistently picked as one of the top five occupations in the country.

This is a CSMS Project colloquium

Wednesday February 13th 2008 5:00pm, Ungar 411

As governments and the health care industry struggle with the spiraling cost of health care, proactive approaches such as preventative care, early intervention and treatment adherence procedures are necessary if we are to reign in ballooning expenditure and protect ourselves against epidemic diseases. As we face new waves of long term debilitating diseases in the developed world such as obesity, diabetes, Alzheimer's and cardio-vascular disease, our ability to identify those at risk, to intervene, educate and change behavior, and to assist the affected to maintain their treatment regiments will become vital to keeping people and our economy healthy. In this seminar, we will discuss two programs being developed ay Humana, Inc. The Visual Analytics program seeks to give analysts the ability to analyze, correlated with external data sources, and report on the massive amounts of data collected on our member population in an interactive environment. New tools, techniques and technologies are being explored to identifying patterns, trends and at-risk groups to focus resources and intervention programs. The Games for Health program promotes understanding, fitness and cognitive maintenance through the use of computer games, exploring this technology as a new communication medium.

This is another in the Departmental Pizza Seminar series.

Friday February 8th 2008 2:30pm, Ungar 402

The Internet went well beyond a technology artifact, increasingly becoming a social interaction tool. These interactions are usually complex and hard to analyze automatically, demanding the research and development of novel data mining techniques that handle the individual characteristics of each application scenario. Notice that these data mining techniques, similarly to other machine learning techniques, are intensive in terms of both computation and I/O, motivating the development of new paradigms, programming environments, and parallel algorithms that support scalable and efficient applications. In this talk we present some results that justify not only the need for developing these new techniques, as well as their parallelization.

Wagner Meira Jr. obtained his PhD from the University of Rochester in 1997 and is currently an Associate Professor at the Computer Science Department at Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais, Brazil. His research focuses on scalability and efficiency of large scale parallel and distributed systems, from massively parallel to Internet-based platforms, and on data mining algorithms, their parallelization, and application to areas such as information retrieval, bioinformatics, and e-governance.

Monday February 4th 2008 8:00pm, Cox 126

Many social interactions that are ephemeral in the physical world are recorded and accessible in the online world. The widespread use of online systems such as blogs, wikis and social networking sites provides a treasure trove of information about human behavior. This talk discusses some recent studies of large-scale online social systems, and speculates about what these studies suggest about human interactions more generally.

There will be a reception following the lecture. This colloquium is free and open to the public.

Wednesday November 28th 2007 5:00pm, Ungar 411 (Refreshments at 4:30pm)

Starting in the 1990s, a large number of young scientists left the academic life for jobs with a score of companies that wanted to merge biology with computer science to create a new branch of science - bioinformatics. Accomplishments, such as the determination of sequences of the 3 billion chemical base pairs that make up human DNA, were realized through the combined efforts of life and computer scientists.

Flesh and bones start as protein. Inside each cell is a sort of instruction book that tells the cellular machinery what type of protein to produce and, more importantly, when. That instruction book is written with a 4-letter alphabet: A, C, G, T. Reducing life to DNA reduces life to numbers. And once a problem can be stated numerically, it can be mathematically modeled, stored in computer databases and analyzed with a variety of software tools.

Today, more than even, the field of bioinformatics offers exceptional opportunities for scientists that want to contribute in understanding the natural world. Outstanding challenges, including gene regulation and function, protein synthesis, interaction and conservation, disease-susceptibility prediction based on gene sequence variation and even evolutionary conservation, just to name a few, are all areas where major advances will happen in silico as much as in vitro. And this fact is acknowledged by both academic and industrial forces, which are currently recruiting and offering a variety of well rewarded positions to qualified researchers bridging the cultural worlds of life and mathematical sciences.

This is a CSMS Project colloquium

Wednesday October 10th 2007 5:00pm, Ungar 411 (Refreshments at 4:30pm)

Modern markets require businesses to stay on the edge of technology. At the same time, C-Level executives are demanding lower IT budgets. Management is forced to downsize their in-house IT departments and outsource the day to day maintenance and configuration to Value Added Resellers (VARs) . This shift towards greater reliance on external resources has made the VAR role increasingly more demanding and complicated, as it covers virtually every aspect of a corporation's IT need. In this talk, I will describe the current landscape for IT VARs and how technology is changing the workplace. Agenda: Segmenting the market space; the IT layers of a mid-size corporation; major players in each layer, in particular Microsoft, CISCO and Citrix; VAR survival skills; Conclusion.

This is a CSMS Project colloquium

Monday October 8th 2007 5:00pm, Ungar 402

Autonomous mobile robots with the capacity to perform specific tasks such as monitoring security areas or assist in rescue scenarios have become increasingly important. Preparing one robot to have these abilities involves a variety of research questions. How does the robot know where it is? How does the robot get from A to B? What kind of action does the robot choose if an unforeseen situation arises? What is the best locomotion algorithm? Can the robot predict situations and, in general how can we measure the performance of these robots? The talk comprises a summary of a number of research projects that we have carried out at the University of Bremen. We will present problems, research approaches and solutions tackling localization, navigation, decision-making, bi-ped walking as well as situation recognition and prediction. We present how we have explored these issues on both robotic and software agents, and show examples of solutions arrived at within the context of soccer playing robots. Indeed, RoboCup has been fostering research on these problems by organizing competitions yearly, in a similar spirit that chess competitions had been used in the past decades to provide a performance measure of the Artificial Intelligence of the system. Because the soccer environment is adversarial with constant changes it demands for adequate approaches for a team of robots (rather than for one single robot). It provides a platform to evaluate how the research questions described in this talk can be explored on multi agents that communicate and cooperate. We then discuss how these results are relevant to other domains, and how they can be used and generalized in other domains such as the traffic domain or the medical domain.

Ubbo Visser is a Privat-Dozent (Assistant Professor) at the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science, University of Bremen, Germany since 1999. He received his Habilitation in Computer Science (qualification for Professor) from University of Bremen in 2003, a PhD in Geoinformatics from University of Muenster in 1995, and a MSc in Geography (Landscape-ecology) from University of Muenster in 1988. His research specialization is in artificial intelligence, more specifically on knowledge representation and reasoning. He is interested in the combination of symbolic and sub-symbolic technologies in the domain areas of "Semantic Web" and "Multiagent Systems". His focus in the Semantic Web area lies in the development of methods that combine terminological logics and spatio-temporal representation and reasoning techniques. The focus in the Multiagent Systems area lies in the development of techniques for agents that act in highly dynamic and real-time environments, such as mobile robots. Dr. Visser has published over 75 scientific articles and has received public research funding at international (Australia, European Commission), national (Germany), and regional (Bremen State) levels - including DFG (German Research Council), BMBF (Federal Ministry for Education and Research), ARC (Australian Research Council), and also from Industry. He has chaired a variety of international conferences, workshops, tutorials and symposia (e.g. RoboCup, IJCAI- and ECAI-Workshops) and he has won multiple prizes and awards for outstanding research papers and software engineering (e.g. best artificial intelligence application in Germany, awarded by the German AI society). He is the Co-Founder of three software companies that develop products based on modern AI-technologies (Conterra Ltd., ProPlant Ltd., Coach and Win Ltd.). He is a trustee of the RoboCup Federation and an Executive Member of the Media & IT Association of the state of Bremen. He is the Co- Editor of the German Journal of Artificial Intelligence and member of the editorial board of the International Journal on Semantic Web and Information Systems.

Wednesday September 26th 2007 5:00pm, MEA 202

Both the increase in civilian air traffic and the desire for improved routing and scheduling of aircraft put larger and larger demands on air traffic control (ATC). Automatic Dependent Surveillance - Broadcast (ADS-B) is a technique developed to meet the resulting demand for better information about the air situation. Civilian aircraft have a strong desire to be visible to ATC, and are willing to contribute to that end. This is already used in secondary radar, where aircraft transponders actively reply to radar requests and provide air traffic control with additional information like the aircraft identity and altitude. ADS-B delegates much more responsibility to the aircraft. The aircraft periodically determines its own position using a satellite-based navigation system, and broadcasts this information. The ADS-B ground station is a passive device that receives and decodes this signal, and forwards the information to ATC. ADS-B sensors can be cheap, compact, and only have minimal requirements on location. They can provide very detailed information about the air situation even in situations where radar coverage cannot effectively be achieved. This talk presents some of technical aspects of ADS-Band discusses how to build a reliable ATC infrastructure with ADS-B.

This colloquium is presented jointly by the Department of Computer Science and the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering.

Tuesday, May 15, 2007, 3:30pm, Ungar 402 -- Coffee at 3:00

I will describe our research in computer-aided mechanical design. Mechanical design is the task of devising an assembly of parts that performs a function reliably and economically. It is a ubiquitous activity with applications in mechanical, electrical, and biomedical engineering. Our research addresses the core design task of kinematic analysis. Kinematic analysis determines the positions and orientations at which the parts of a system touch and the ways that the touching parts interact. It is a computational bottleneck in mechanical design, especially in systems with complex part shapes, tight fits, and contact changes. We have developed a general kinematic analysis method based on configuration space computation. The method incorporates efficient algorithms for function validation, tolerancing, parameter synthesis, and redesign. I will illustrate these capabilities on industrial applications in gearshift design (with Ford Motors) and micro-mechanism design (with Sandia National Laboratory).

Joint work with Leo Joskowicz, Hebrew University.

Wednesday, April 25th 2007, 5:00pm, Ungar 411

In my presentation I will be discussing the digital scrapbook that I created for the Filipino Student Association. I will be giving some background information about the project and why I chose this project, and I will show a brief demonstration of the product. I will then discuss how I made the book using Photo Impact Pro and Macromedia Flash and give an overview of the creation process. After that, I will discuss the additions to the project and show demonstrations of their functionality. This project will be placed on the website of the Filipino Student Association so that all members can enjoy the scrapbook and the game. It will also be accessible to non-members who can learn about the club and about Filipino culture.

My project consists on creating a system for rating TPTP problems and SPC systems. The program is provided a file, containing a huge amount of data about the systems and the problems. This data contains, for example, for each system the problems it has been tested with and if the system can solve the problem or not. With this data, my program has to rate the systems and the problems. The problems are given a rating depending on the difficulty, and the systems are given a rating depending on the number of problems they solve. Once I have calculated the ratings, I gave to print it with a specific format. The issue of this project is the efficiency. Because of the large amount of data, the system has to be very efficient in order to process all the data and give the output in a reasonable time.

MiamiVideo games have been around for decades and have become a staple of entertainment across the globe. Ever wonder how they work? It all begins with the game engine. This is a crucial component of any serious game and is responsible for everything from graphical output to level management. This talk is aimed at anyone with a desire to see beyond what the player sees and learn techniques to use when building their own game engine. Topics include game state management, data organization, sprite animation, the 3D rendering pipline, character mechanics, input and sound as well as game implementation techniques. The discussion will conclude with a demo of an action adventure RPG named "Hidden in Time" developed using Jorge Jauregui's Substance Game Engine.

This is another in the Departmental Pizza Seminar series.

Wednesday, April 18th 2007, 5:00pm, Ungar 411

The wide spread use of computers and digital technology has lead way to the binding of audio and computer programming. Computer software now runs audio recording (Pro Tools), audio storage (hard drives) and audio reproduction (Ipod). Traditional computer programming teaches the fundamentals of manipulating numbers, printing out text and maybe even reading from and writing to a file. This lays the foundation for a student to perform audio programming, but how does one go to the next step? How is it possible to read and write from audio files? How are digital audio files encoded? How is it possible to synthesize audio on computer's sound card? The answer to these questions can be found by using C libraries to manipulate audio and by preparing to program complex software by learning the benefits of C++.

This is another in the Departmental Pizza Seminar series.

Wednesday, April 11th 2007, 5:00pm, Ungar 411

Almost everyone has to give a public presentation at some time. Graduate students have to defend their theses, research students have to present their results, and many jobs require presentations. It is common to have little or no experience when you give your first presentation, and you may even be a little nervous! This talk is aimed at (graduate, research, and other) students. It describes how to give a successful talk, in a simple standard format. This talk does not try to teach general speaking skills, nor impose any personally preferred techniques. It covers the structure of a talk, the use of visual aids, speaking technique, and how to cope with questions.

This is another in the Departmental Pizza Seminar series.

Wednesday, April 11th 2007, 5:00pm, Ungar 411

Wednesday, April 4th 2007, 5:00pm, Ungar 411

This talk describes the design, implementation, and testing of a system for selecting necessary axioms from a large set also containing superfluous axioms, to obtain a proof of a conjecture. The selection is determined by semantics of the axioms and conjecture, ordered heuristically by a syntactic relevance measure. The system is able to solve many problems that cannot be solved alone by the underlying conventional automated reasoning system.

This is another in the Departmental Pizza Seminar series.

Monday April 2nd 2007, 5:00pm, Ungar 402

Emergence of high-throughput experiments and resulting databases capture relationships and interactions between biomolecules. These interactions enable modeling and analysis of a cell from a systems perspective - generally using network models. In this talk, we focus on development of computational tools and statistical models for comparative analysis of molecular interaction networks. These tools target understanding of functional modularity in the cell by extracting novel information from massive amounts of interaction data, through integration of cellular organization, functional hierarchy, and evolutionary conservation.

We first discuss the problem of identifying conserved sub-networks in a collection of interaction networks belonging to diverse species. The main algorithmic challenges here stem from the NP-hard subgraph isomorphism problem that underlies frequent subgraph discovery. Three decades of research into theoretical aspects of this problem has highlighted the futility of syntactic approaches, thus motivating use of semantic information. Using a biologically motivated homolog contraction technique for relating proteins across species, we render this problem tractable. We experimentally show that the proposed method can be used as a pruning heuristic that accelerates existing techniques significantly, as well as a standalone tool that conveys significant biological insights at near-interactive rates.

With a view to understanding the conservation and divergence of modular substructures, we also develop network alignment techniques, grounded in theoretical models of network evolution. Through graph-theoretic modeling of evolutionary events in terms of matches, mismatches, and duplications, we reduce the alignment problem to a graph optimization problem and develop heuristics to solve this problem efficiently. In order to assess the statistical significance of the patterns identified by our algorithms, we probabilistically analyze the distribution of highly connected and conserved subgraphs in random graphs. Our methods and algorithms are implemented on various platforms and tested extensively on a comprehensive collection of molecular interaction data, illustrating their effectiveness in terms of providing novel biological insights as well as computational efficiency.

Mehmet Koyuturk received his B.S. (1998) and M.S. (2000) degrees in Electrical and Electronics Engineering, and Computer Engineering, respectively, from Bilkent University, Turkey. During his graduate studies at the Department of Computer Science at Purdue University, he worked on a number of problems in the areas of Computational Biology and Bioinformatics, Parallel and Distributed Computing, and Scientific Computing. His thesis focused on algorithmic and analytical aspects of comparative analysis of biological networks. His collaborations with domain experts in this area resulted in several significant publications and software tools. Since receiving his Ph.D. in August 2006, he has been a post-doctoral research associate in the same department.

This is joint work with Yohan Kim, Shankar Subramaniam (University of California, San Diego), Wojciech Szpankowski, and Ananth Grama (Purdue University) and is supported by the National Institutes of Health.

Wednesday March 21st 2007, 5:00pm, Ungar 402

Many complex systems can be represented as networks, where the nodes are the elements in a system, and the edges represent relationships between pairs of elements. Examples include social networks, protein-protein interaction networks, and the world-wide web. Much effort has been devoted to the study of topological properties that seem to be common to many networks, such as the small-world property and power-law degree distributions. Another important property that has drawn a great deal of interest recently is the so-called community structure, i.e. the existence of some natural division of a network such that nodes in each sub-network are highly associated among themselves, while having relatively fewer/weaker connections with the rest of the network. Automatically identifying such communities is fundamental for revealing the relationships between the structure and function of complex networks, with many applications in different disciplines such as sociology, biology, and computer science.

In this talk, I will discuss the conceptual and algorithmic challenges in community discovery, i.e. how to define communities, and how to identify them, and present our recent contributions in addressing these challenges. I will show several real applications of our methods in biology and other areas, and demonstrate the advantages of our methods against the existing approaches. Furthermore, I will show that the members of the same community often have very strong functional ties, which shed lights on the organizing principles of the system, and provide key insights about the functions of some previously uncharacterized members. I will conclude with an overview of my research interests and plan of future works.

Bio: Jianhua Ruan is currently a PhD candidate in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at Washington University in St Louis. He received his B.S. degree (1998) in Biology from University of Science and Technology of China, and M.S. degree (2002) in Computer Science from California State University. His current research interests in computational biology and bioinformatics include (1) structural and functional properties of biological networks, (2) reverse-engineering of gene transcriptional regulatory networks, and (3) RNA structures and functions.

Monday March 19th 2007, 5:00pm, Ungar 402

The talk consists of two main parts:

Genomic sequence classification and analysis
Microorganisms dominate the biosphere, yet most have not been identified or studied. Traditional methods for culturing and characterizing microorganisms limit analysis to those that will grow under laboratory conditions, which represent less than 1% of all microorganisms. In this presentation, I will show an oligonucleotide (k-mer) classification method based on conditional probabilities, which performs substantially better than other known methods. I will demonstrate that k-mer distributions are well-preserved among related strains/species and that it is possible to identify bacterial species, even from mixed populations, via k-mer distributions, using modest amounts of sample sequence. Population analysis is persistently challenging but important to microbiologists, leading to determination of diversity and function of members of microbial communities. With our bioinformatics methods we can achieve this analysis via a homology based method for robust phylotype determination, enhancing closely related sequence associations and a methodology for achieving more accurate richness estimation, using different clustering criteria.

Genomic sequence design and synthesis
The emerging field of synthetic biology is broadly defined as the area of intersection of biology and engineering that focuses on the modification or creation of novel biological systems that do not have a counterpart in nature. We explored the problem of designing the provably shortest genomic sequence to encode a given set of genes by exploiting alternate reading frames. Here I will present an algorithm for designing the shortest DNA sequence simultaneously encoding two given amino acid sequences. We have shown that the coding sequences of naturally occurring pairs of overlapping genes approach maximum compression, as well as investigated the impact of alternate coding matrices on overlapping sequence design. Working with the group that achieved the first genome-level synthesis of a virus, we have designed, synthesized, and evaluated two new variants of poliovirus to serve as vaccines. Specifically, we seeked weakened but viable strains that may be used for preparations of a killed poliovirus vaccine. Our designs result in a virus with roughly 100-fold lower specific infectivity than the wildtype virus. Here I will present the theory behind gene design in the context of optimizing a DNA sequence for particular desired properties while simultaneously coding for a given amino acid sequence.

Wednesday, March 7th 2007, 5:00pm, Ungar 411

This overview of current graphic algorithms in the Game Industry starts with an introduction to video card capabilities highlighting the differences between software rendering, the old Fixed Function Pipeline, and the new standard, the Programmable Pipeline. Graphical approaches to game aesthetics such as Shadow mapping, Real-time lighting, Day / Night cycles, Terrain Rendering, and Cel-Shading will be demonstrated using "shader programs" on graphics hardware, utilizing the programmable pipeline that is prevalent in today's consumer desktop and video game consoles.

This is another in the Departmental Pizza Seminar series.

Wednesday February 21st 2007, 5:00pm, Ungar 402

Data mining is a new area of computer science that integrates ideas from other areas of computer science, such as algorithms, complexity theory, computer systems, databases, machine learning, and network systems. The goal of data mining is to discover interesting information in large databases. In this talk I will present some of my past and current research work in the area of data mining. I will first introduce association mining and sequence mining, both of which have been known to be quite useful in businesses. In the former the goal is to enumerate all frequent combinations of data attributes appearing in a database, in the latter the data is time- stamped and the goal is to find all frequent sequences of frequent combinations of data attributes. I will present how these data mining tasks can be used for slightly different purposes, for finding similarities among database and for predicting future events. I will then switch a gear and talk about some work on gene expression data analysis. Semi-supervised learning refers to machine learning techniques for building more accurate models creatively using unlabeled data. I will present how semi-supervised learning can be used to improve the accuracy of gene function classification. I will then speak about multi-class sample classification using gene expression data.

Wednesday September 27th 2006, 3:30pm, Ungar 402

In this talk, we give an overview of Buffalo's Center for Computational Research (CCR), one of the leading academic supercomputing sites in the world. CCR supports work in the physical sciences, engineering, life sciences, and visualization. We will also present an overview of our design and implementation of the ACDC-Grid, an extensive, multi-institutional proof-of-concept grid that is being expanded to incorporate leading academic and non-profit organizations in New York State. We will discuss our efforts in grid monitoring, predictive scheduling, grid-enabling application templates, backfill detection and optimization, data repositories and operations, dynamic and automated allocation of resources, and our dynamic firewall, to name a few. We will then present an overview of our Shake-and-Bake method of molecular structure determination and discuss critical parameters that have been optimized in our SnB instantiation of this procedure. Finally, we will discuss the functionality of the ACDC-Grid that enables a cost-effective and transparent grid-based port of SnB, including grid-enabled optimization via data repositories, data mining, and intelligent generation of jobs to be run by the daemon overseeing the parameter optimization routine.

Dr. Miller is UB Distinguished Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at SUNY-Buffalo and Senior Research Scientist at the Hauptman-Woodward Medical Research Institute. Shake-and-Bake was listed on the IEEE poster "Top 10 Algorithms of the 20th Century". The work presented in this talk was supported by NSF, NIH, DOE, NYS, the Oishei Foundation, the Wendt Foundation, NIMA, Dell, IBM, and HP. This talk represents joint work with many students, staff, and colleagues, who are listed in the talk.

Wednesday, September 20th 2006, 5:00pm, Ungar 411

You'll hear a short summary of the current state of the art in formal and computer-checked mathematics, as well as the motivation and history of formalization efforts. A lightweight overview of one of the leading formalization systems and projects - Mizar - will follow. Finally I'll talk about Mizar and its large formal knowledge base as a very interesting object for various Artificial Intelligence methods, and their potential combinations.

This is another in the Departmental Pizza Seminar series.

Wednesday, September 13th 2006, 5:00pm, Ungar 411

The equivalence of different axiomatizations of modal logics is well known and documented in the literature. e.g., S5 may be equivalently axiomatized by PC + necessitation + K (distribution) + M + 5, and by S10 + M6 + S3 + M9 + B. In order to automatically prove the equivalence of two modal systems using first-order theorem provers, we provide a series of encoding rules to represent modal logic syntax in first-order syntax, and a definitional approach to encode each proof problem into a TPTP file for mechanical deduction in a first-order theorem prover.

This is another in the Departmental Pizza Seminar series.

Monday, July 3rd 2006, 2:00pm, Ungar 506

Computer Vision is the study and application of methods that allow computers to "understand" image and video content, or content of multidimensional data. The term "understand" means that specific information is being extracted from the image or video data for a specific purpose: either for presenting it to a human operator (e. g., if cancerous cells have been detected in a microscopy image), or for controlling a process (e. g., an autonomous vehicle). Computer Vision can also be described as the complement of biological vision. In contrast to biological vision and visual perception systems though, Computer Vision enables for quantitative analysis and representation of data, and therefore it is becoming more and more essential to a wide variety of research fields.

In my talk, I will focus on different methods I have been developing in the last eight years for different applications, varying from Human-Computer and Human-Human Interaction (HCI and HHI) to 3D shape reconstruction of human organs. Specifically, the first part of my talk will be on 2D and 3D tracking of rigid, deformable and articulated objects in monocular video sequences, and how low-level features (e.g., grayscale image intensity) lead to motion and shape extraction, video segmentation, and action/event recognition. I will present the various applications of my methods, from object-based video coding to American Sign Language recognition. In the second part of my talk I will present how Computer Vision methods are applied to biomedicine. I will describe the theoretical framework of LocoWorm, a software I have developed and is currently in use for multiple tracking, locomotion features extraction and classification for aging and phenotypical analysis of C. elegans nematodes. I will also present the problem of 3D reconstruction of alveoli from lung tissue scans, and I will give the general framework of my approach. Finally, I will describe a novel method for efficient medical image segmentation, which uses local and global shape and texture information. This method can be seen as a fusion between region growing and active shape models (ASMs).

Wednesday, April 26th 2006, 5:00pm, Ungar 411

This project is about designing and implementing a complete video game. By doing this we discovered all the ins and outs of making a complete software product. The game is a 3D first person adventure in which you will have to solve several puzzles and fight versus fully armed enemies; it is developed in C++ with Open GL for the graphics.

... and ...

The main purpose of the development of the application was to create a tool that can be used in the Medical Offices as a help to billing or coding personnel. Program offers selection screens to select options needed for the transfer and possible conversion of ICD-9 codes (International Classification of Diseases, 9th Revision). Problems related to this work include: maintaining the integrity of the data structure used to manipulate code, necessity of changes required by the need for conversion. There were some programming and data management issues, that will be discussed during the presentation.

... and ...

What happens when you put three code ninjas to find a solution to world hunger? They make a game of course! HeadWARe is a 3D strategy game where squads of robots wearing nifty hats battle out for world domination. Coded from the ground up during a period of two semesters, by four able hands, HeadWARe was conceived and created to showcase the talent and work that drive the people who created it. During this presentation we will walk you through the various stages of development and discuss the logistic and design challenges encountered by the team during the execution of this project.

This is another in the Departmental Pizza Seminar series.

Wednesday, April 19th 2006, 5:00pm, Ungar 411

This aim of the project was to extend an existing software tool to visualize the results of placement, compaction, as well as configuration space algorithms that were written by Dr Victor Milenkovic. Placement and compaction algorithms are heuristics to minimize the total amount of space occupied by a set of polygons. These heuristics are run with certain restrictions placed on each polygon. For a configuration space, The configuration of an unfixed 2-D polygon relative to one or more 2-D polygons fixed on a canvas can be expressed as a triple, (x,y,θ), with (x,y) specifying the polygon's coordinates and θ specifying its rotation. The configuration space of the same polygon relative to the other polygons can be expressed as the set of all configurations, or triples, (x,y,θ), that the unfixed polygon can take. This configuration space can be decomposed into a blocked space - the set of triples (x,y,θ) in which some polygons overlap, and a free space, its complement. Professor Milenkovic implemented algorithms to calculate this decomposition, and we added an interface to an existing Java application to visualize this boundary, in 3-D (i.e., the set of (x,y,θ) ), with a 2D cross-section (i.e., only the set of (x,y) ). The interface also allows the user to control the translation and rotation of the unfixed polygon and see its current configuration as a point in the 3-D space and 2-D cross-section. Vice versa, the user can control the configuration point and immediately see the actual, updated arrangement of the polygons.

... and ...

The presentation will include the following topics:

• basic idea for the project involving web based interface.
• technology involved.
• programming technique invovled.
• limitations of the cell phone screen size.
• challenges in making decision which software product to use for the programming.

... and ...

A trading system is simply a group of specific rules, or parameters, that determine entry and exit points for a given equity. It seems that everywhere you look, you see advertisements for software promising accurate buy and sell signals and profits with every trade - all with minimal time and effort. But, what if you took the time to select some predefined financial formulas and created your very own trading system, can your trading systems offer profitable methods of trading? Well now you can check years and years of past performance of the system with my Backtesting software.

This is another in the Departmental Pizza Seminar series.

Monday, April 17th 2006, 5:00pm, Ungar 402

Recent advances in molecular biology have resulted in immense amounts of biological data (DNA sequences, protein sequences and structures, gene expression data, and protein interaction data). As a result of this growth, scalable techniques to mine and analyze this data have become paramount. These new techniques employ principles in many different areas of computer science, especially databases, data mining, machine learning and graph theory. They also impose new challenges. This talk focuses on applying database principles and computational techniques on biological data to infer functional properties of proteins. Functional and evolutionary relationships between proteins can be discovered via structure comparison. As the sizes of experimentally determined and theoretically estimated protein structure databases grow, there is a need for scalable search techniques. In this talk I will present a technique that extracts feature vectors on triplets of SSEs (Secondary Structure Elements) of proteins and uses an index structure to answer similarity queries. Currently, a wide range of information sources is available to provide evidence about the functional relationships among proteins. I will present an automated functional classification methodology that uses these information sources. Protein interaction networks provide a different view of protein functional relationships based on their interaction properties and can be used to infer intricate relations, such as pathway and complex membership. I will present analysis techniques for mining interaction networks to capture functional relationships among proteins.

Wednesday, April 12th 2006, 5:00pm, Ungar 411

This talk discusses the production of visually appealing computer-generated drawings, through the emulation of human drawing techniques and artificial evolution. Employing a population of line drawn objects from user-input, the Darwinian process of evolution produces original drawings with increasing levels of user satisfaction.

... and ...

In the logical theory of a set of axioms there are many boring logical consequences, and scattered among them there are a few interesting ones. The few interesting ones include those that are singled out as {\em theorems} by experts in the domain. This paper describes the techniques, implementation, and results of an automated system that generates logical consequences of a set of axioms, and uses filters and ranking to identify interesting theorems among the logical consequences.

This is another in the Departmental Pizza Seminar series.

Wednesday, April 5th 2006, 5:00pm, Ungar 411

An intrusion occurs as a sequence of operations that may individually affect various aspects of a computer system. Current host-based intrusion detection systems that monitor the operations within a single subsystem (e.g. file system or network) suffer from myopic views of system state. Such local views can then lead to incorrect inferences about system status. In this talk, I will present a holistic system-centric approach to intrusion detection, which monitors the global state of the host. I will present the challenges that face building such a system and present the salient features of our approach that allow overcoming these challenges.

Dr. Raju Rangaswami is an Assistant Professor in the School of Computing and Information Sciences at Florida International University. He received M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of California at Santa Barbara and his B.S. degree from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, India. He conducts research in operating systems, security, storage systems, and real-time systems. His research is supported by the National Science Foundation. More details can be found at http://www.cs.fiu.edu/~raju/

This is another in the Departmental Pizza Seminar series.

Wednesday, March 29th 2006, 5:00pm, Ungar 411

Gene networks are traditionally modeled as a deterministic dynamic system using ordinary differential equations. However, it was found recently that gene expression is best viewed as a stochastic process, since gene expression consists of a series of events that involve a small number of molecules such as DNA, RNA, and proteins. Therefore, any computational modeling and simulation of a gene network should take into account such stochasticity in gene expression. In this talk, I will first introduce stochastic modeling of gene networks from both biological and computational perspective, and then briefly describe characterization of the stochastic dynamics of gene networks or more general any coupled chemical reaction systems. I will also briefly review stochastic simulation algorithms (SSA) including the exact SSA, approximate but more efficient leaping methods, and multiscale SSAs. Finally, I will present an efficient SSA called K-leap SSA, that we developed recently, and compare its performance with that of other SSAs.

This is another in the Departmental Pizza Seminar series.

Wednesday, March 22nd 2006, 5:00pm, Ungar 411

Over the years, the advancements in science and technology have led to the increased complexity in computing systems. The systems are thus becoming increasingly more complex with growing number of heterogeneous software and hardware components, increasingly more difficult to monitor, manage and maintain. There is thus a pressing need for automatic and efficient approaches to monitor and manage complex systems. In this talk, I will first describe our research effort on mining log data for automatic system management. In particular, I will talk about two research components of the holistic effort: (a) novel text mining approaches to transform system log data in disparate formats and contents into a canonical form; (b) new temporal data mining techniques to discover relationships among event data. I will also discuss some research directions and future work on this project. If time permits, the talk will also give an overview of some other research projects that we are currently working on such as microarray data analysis, matrix factorization for text clustering, music information retrieval, adaptive workflow management.

Dr. Tao Li is currently an assistant professor in the School of Computer Science, Florida International University. He received his Ph.D. in computer science from the Department of Computer Science, University of Rochester in July 2004. His research interests are in data mining, machine learning, information retrieval, and bioinformatics. He is a recipient of NSF Career Award, IBM Faculty Award, and IBM SUR (Shared University Research) Award. More information about him can be found at http://www.cs.fiu.edu/~taoli.

This is another in the Departmental Pizza Seminar series.

Wednesday, February 22nd 2006, 5:00pm, Ungar 402

The rapidly growing body of 3D protein structures provides new opportunities to study the link between protein structure and protein function. Local structural comparison, which aims to identify arrangements of amino acids common to a family of proteins, is a way to discover structural features linking protein structures to their function. Traditional approaches to local structural comparison of proteins operate in a pair-wise fashion and have prohibitive computational cost when scaled to families of proteins. This talk describes my research on graph-based representations of protein structure and new subgraph mining algorithms to identify recurring structural patterns shared by many members of a family of proteins. A statistical measure is defined to evaluate the significance of each pattern's association with a family of proteins compared to all known protein structures.

Two collaborations with domain experts at the UNC School of Pharmacy and the UNC Medical School illustrate the use of these techniques. The first is to predict the function of several newly characterized protein structures based on the amino acid arrangements they contain. The second is to identify conserved structural features in evolutionarily related proteins. Such structures may play an important role in folding. This talk presents results from both applications and concludes with my future research plans in the areas of data mining, proteomics, and systems biology.

Mr. Huan is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Computer Science and a member of the Bioinformatics and Computational Biology Training Program at the University of North Carolina. He received his B.S. in Biochemistry from the Peking University, China in 1997 and an M.S. in Computer Science from the Oklahoma State University in 2000. He worked at Argonne National Laboratory and Nortel before he joined UNC and has current collaborations with GlaxoSmithKline. His research interests include data mining, proteomics, systems biology, and high performance computing. He was a recipient of the UNC Scholar of Tomorrow Fellowship in 2001 and the Alumni Fellowship in 2005.

Wednesday, February 15th 2006, 5:00pm, Ungar 411

Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) is a popular contactless identification technology which has been hyped as the "next generation barcode". These tiny remotely-powered computer chips have already been integrated into consumer goods, passports, public transportation tickets, and even people. Because most RFID tags lack privacy enhancing technologies or cryptography, malicious parties can use RFID technology for nefarious ends like theft, stalking, and behavioral profiling.

This presentation will discuss RFID technology, the security and privacy threats which it faces, and proposed countermeasures. I will highlight one particular new solution, the RFID Guardian, that is the focus of a collaboration between researchers at the Vrije Universiteit and the Technical University of Delft.

This is another in the Departmental Pizza Seminar series.

Wednesday, February 15th 2006, 2:30pm, Ungar 411

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are believed to be one of the emerging technologies that would change the world. WSNs can be used in a wide range of potential applications in both military and civil. Since sensor nodes are battery powered, energy efficiency is of primary concern in WSNs. To prolong a sensor network lifetime, energy efficiency must be considered in almost every aspect of sensor network design. In this talk, I will address the maximum lifetime coverage problem, which is to maximize network lifetime while a sensor network performs the coverage tasks. I will present a novel mathematical model and a Linear Programming based algorithm to approximate the solution of this problem. I will also acknowledge the relation between this problem and the domatic number problem.

In addition, toward the end of this talk, I will highlight some important results of my other work in both wireless networks and computational biology.

Wednesday, February 8th 2006, 5:00pm, Ungar 411

The drawing of information, often represented as a graph, onto a medium such as a computer screen is a fundamental yet challenging problem in computer science. The algorithms developed incorporate techniques from computational geometry, graph theory, optimization, and computer graphics.

In general, the underlying problem is to take a graph composed of vertices and edges between the vertices and place (embed) these vertices and edges on the screen in a visually appealing and informative manner. The precise definition of "appealing" and "informative" are of great debate in the graph drawing community, but certain standards are almost universally accepted. For example, graphs with multiple edge crossings are considered less appealing and more confusing than similar graphs without any crossings.

In this talk, we shall introduce the area of graph drawing, give a brief description of basic results and problems in the field, and discuss some of our own recent results particularly in the area of simultaneous graph embeddings.

This is another in the Departmental Pizza Seminar series.

Wednesday, January 18th 2006, 4:30pm, Ungar 411

Bioinformatics has become a buzz word to mean almost anything and everything to do with the interface of computers and biology. From the perspective of the discipline of Medical Genetics, there are two clear applications for this interface. One is in the database arena, linking a patient's genetic and family history information with data on the disease or syndrome that this patient presents with. The second is in understanding how a genetic problem actually translates to a disease. In other words, analysis of the gene sequence, of the protein that this gene makes, and of how this gene is switched on and off. These methods fall mostly under the title of "genomics", and have had a meteoric rise since the completion of the human genome sequence. This talk will summarize the advances made in bioinformatics for Medical Genetics, and highlight the areas where there is room for improvement.

This is another in the Departmental Pizza Seminar series.

Wednesday, December 14th 2005, 5:00pm, Ungar 402

Background: Ever since patient medical information has been put into computerized databases, there has been a plethora of security issues related to information privacy. Now, with the HIPAA act, medical facilities are being held responsible for the security of protected information. While many of the cryptographic security issues have been solved, there is still vulnerability from unauthorized users who have obtained access to an online medical record database using legitimate login information.

Abstract of Solution: To solve this problem I have designed a modification specification to database source code which requires certain "tags" to be added to queries. An unauthorized user who has gained access to the database remotely through someone else's authorized login information would receive fictitious query results when he/she sends "untagged" queries to the database. Furthermore, the sensitive information within the patient medical record would be stored in a separate table from the patient demographic information such that an unauthorized user would have to perform a table join within the query.

This is another in the Departmental Pizza Seminar series.

Thursday, December 8th 2005, 5:00pm, Ungar 402

We will explain the process of analyzing, planning, implementing and testing an Electronic Medical Record (EMR) system from a software engineering perspective. An EMR system is responsible for maintaining patient medical records as well as facilitating other office procedures (e.g. scheduling, billing). Part of the systems engineering process requires communication between team members to revise code and documentation. To streamline this process we developed a project management website that allows team members to upload their code and documentation remotely for review by the other team members.

This is another in the Departmental Pizza Seminar series.

Wednesday, November 9th 2005, 5:00pm, Ungar 506

Oceanic simulations have traditionally relied on structured-grid, finite difference methods to discretize the hydrostatic primitive equations governing large scale ocean flows. The complex coastlines of ocean basins, and the geometrically flexibility inherent in unstructured grids has spurred ocean modelers to pursue the development of finite element based models. Here we sketch the outlines of one such code: the spectral element ocean model (SEOM). The spectral element methods combine the geometrical flexibility of low-order finite element methods and spectral methods. Its advantages include high accuracy, very-low numerical dissipation, dense computational kernels at the element level and sparse neighbor-to-neighbor communication; the latter combination leads to extremely good scalability on parallel computers. In the talk the basis of the method will be presented, and sample two-dimensional simulations will be shown. The final part of the talk will revolve around the challenges of three-dimensional ocean modeling.

This is another in the Departmental Pizza Seminar series.

Wednesday, September 14th 2005, 5:00pm, Ungar 411

We present robust floating point algorithms for performing topologically invariant set operations on 2D semi-algebraic sets. A 2D semi-algebraic set is a set of cells from an arrangement of segments of algebraic curves. These algorithms transform and overlay multiple arrangements invariantly. Because the algorithms are implemented in floating point, certain topological changes are unavoidable. For instance, after a floating point Euclidean transformation, two very close but distinct points may transform into the same point. The topological changes that can result from floating point rounding are analyzed. The algorithms are invariant except for these types of changes. We discovered that the unavoidable topological changes in our robust topologically invariant algorithms occur rarely in testing. We ran tests on our topologically invariant algorithms against the original algorithms by Milenkovic and Sacks, comparing computing time and accuracy.

This is another in the Departmental Pizza Seminar series.

Friday, April 8th 2005, 2:30pm, Ungar 402

In this talk we prove new upper and lower bounds on the proper PAC learnability of decision trees, DNF formulas, and intersections of halfspaces. Several of our results were obtained by exploring a new connection between automatizability in proof complexity and learnability. After explaining this basic connection, we will prove the following new results.

1. We give new upper bounds for proper PAC learning of decision trees and DNF, based on similar known algorithms for automatizability of Resolution.
2. We show that it is not possible to PAC learn DNF by DNF in polynomial-time unless NP ⊆ BPP. We also prove the same negative result for proper PAC learning of intersections of halfspaces.
3. We show that decision trees cannot be proper PAC learned, under the assumption that SAT is not solvable by subexponential-size circuits.

This is joint work with Misha Alekhnovich, Mark Braverman, Vitaly Feldman, and Adam Klivans.

Wednesday, March 30th 2005, 5:00pm, Ungar 411

The event calculus is a powerful and highly usable formalism for reasoning about action and change. The discrete event calculus limits time to integers. This paper shows how discrete event calculus problems can be encoded in first-order logic, and solved using a first-order logic automated theorem proving system. The following techniques are discussed: reification is used to convert event and fluent atoms into first-order terms, uniqueness-of-names axioms are generated to ensure uniqueness of event and fluent terms, predicate completion is used to convert second-order circumscriptions into first-order formulae, and a limited first-order axiomatization of integer arithmetic is developed. The performance of first-order automated theorem proving is compared to that of satisfiability solving.

This is joint work with Erik Mueller of IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center.

This is another in the Departmental Pizza Seminar series.

Wednesday, March 23rd 2005, 5:00pm, Ungar 411

Using lemmas has been proved to be an effective approach for assisting ATP systems to solve hard problems. Useful lemmas can provide valuable guidance in the proof search, and help construct the proof by filling in intermediate steps. However, the formulae supplied to an ATP system as lemmas are not all necessarily useful. Unuseful lemmas act as noise, disturbing the search for the proof. It is therefore necessary to develop lemma management techniques that identify useful lemmas, and help an ATP system to use the useful lemmas to its advantage. We have designed three lemma management techniques, implemented them, and illustrated their potential with example problems. It has been shown that, with these three lemma management techniques, the problem-solving ability of an ATP system can be improved.

This is another in the Departmental Pizza Seminar series.

Wednesday, March 9th 2005, 5:00pm, Ungar 411

The Block Sorting Coder (BSC) described by Burrows and Wheeler has received considerable attention. BSC achieves a compression ratio closer to PPM, but with a faster execution speed than PPM.

An essential part of BSC schemes is the Move-to-Front (MTF) coder (recency ranking). In this talk we analyze the MTF coder and introduce a different coding (ranking) scheme, inversion coder. We prove the information theoretic relationship between interval ranks and canonical sorting permutations. Finally, we explore the relationship between inversion ranks and recency ranks and show that the inversion coding (ranking) technique introduced is superior to interval ranking and as well as recency ranking.

This is another in the Departmental Pizza Seminar series.

Wednesday, December 8th 2004, 5:00pm, Ungar 411

The standard operating system class will give you a good introduction to how operating systems work. They will likely give you overviews of some of the basic components like scheduling, IPC, memory management, etc. The knowledge that you receive will give you some direction, but little practical assistance should you choose to write your own OS. This talk is intended to provide some insight as to the specific challenges of building an OS from scratch.

This is another in the Departmental Pizza Seminar series.

Friday, October 29th 2004, 4:30pm, Ungar 402

The Halton sequence is one of the standard (along with (t,s)-sequences and lattice points) low-discrepancy sequences, and thus is widely used in quasi-Monte Carlo applications. One of its important advantages is that the Halton sequence is easy to implement due to its definition via the radical inverse function. However, the original Halton sequence suffers from correlations between radical inverse functions with different bases used for different dimensions. These correlations result in poorly distributed two-dimensional projections. A standard solution to this is to use a randomized (scrambled) version of the Halton sequence. Here, we analyze the correlations in the standard Halton sequence, and based on this analysis propose a new and simpler modified scrambling algorithm. We also provide a number theoretic criterion to choose the optimal scrambling from among a large family of random scramblings. Based on this criterion, we have found the optimal scrambling for up to 60 dimensions for the Halton sequence. This derandomized Halton sequence is then numerically tested and shown empirically to be far superior to the original sequence.

This work is joint with Ms. Hongmei, and is part of her Ph.D. dissertation.

Monday, October 18th 2004, 4:00pm, Ungar 402

The term ontological semantics refers to the apparatus of describing and manipulating meaning in natural language texts. Basic ontological-semantic analyzers take natural language texts as inputs and generate machine-tractable text meaning representations (TMRs) that form the basis of various reasoning processes. Ontological-semantic text generators take TMRs as inputs and produce natural language texts. Ontological-semantic systems centrally rely on extensive static knowledge resources:

• a language-independent ontology, the model of the world that includes models of intelligent agents;
• ontology-oriented lexicons (and onomasticons, or lexicons of proper names) for each natural language in the system; and
• a fact repository consisting of instances of ontological concepts as well as remembered text meaning representations.

Applications of ontological semantics include knowledge-based machine translation, information retrieval and extraction, text summarization, ontological support for reasoning systems, including networks of human and software agents, general knowledge management and others. In this talk I will give an overview of ontological-semantic processing and static resources and discuss its use in applications.

Wednesday, October 13th 2004, 5:00pm, Ungar 411

The development and deployment of component-based automated reasoning systems relies on an adequate infrastructure of standards and tools that allow the component systems to execute and interact in a controlled and reliable way. In the field of 1st order automated reasoning there has been limited standardization across the available component systems, resulting in adhoc combination techniques and a limited range of general purpose tools. This work presents two emerging standards in the 1st order automated reasoning community, whose adoption is leading to greater compatibility between component systems. Six general purpose tools that conform to these standards are then described. The standards and tools facilitate direct communication between components of complex systems, providing seamless integration and greater reasoning productivity.

This is another in the Departmental Pizza Seminar series.

Wednesday, April 28th 2004, 3:00pm, Ungar 402

Dimensions are numerical values assigned to certain geometric parameters. While dimensioning has been a common and basic engineering activity practiced over several centuries, a theory of dimensioning emerged only in the last decade of the 20th century. This theory is a synthesis of many ideas that range from elementary Euclidean geometry to some advanced Lie group classification of rigid motions. A prime motivator for this effort was the need to standardize the specification and exchange of product information in the computerized management of product lifecycle.

In this talk I will explain some elements of the theory of dimensioning and will point out how this also serves as a theory of parameterizing geometric models.

(This talk is based on the speaker's book "Theory of Dimensioning" published by Marcel-Dekker in October, 2003.)

About the Speaker: Vijay Srinivasan is the Program Manager for PLM Research, Standards, and Academic Programs at the IBM Corporation in New York. He is also an Adjunct Professor in the Engineering School at Columbia University, NY. He is a member of several national and international standards committees in the areas of product specification, verification, and data exchange.

Wednesday, April 21st 2004, 5:00pm, Ungar 411

Increasing competition in the development tool market has pushed vendors to combine their offerings into single products or sell them as suites. In the Web tool market, for instance, with the exception of some XML technologies, vendors are repackaging their tools into suites. eBD Software is offering alternative development methodologies to traditional Web tools such as Dreamweaver, introducing its e-Business Designer (eBD) tool in the United States.

eBD is a mix of portal and Web development environment that can generate portals, intranets and document management systems. It takes a radically different approach to Web Development. The tool follows a unique object model in which most of the features in the environment used for creating applications work like objects. Folders, pages and tables, for instance, all fall under a hierarchical structure and are treated as complete entities. Each of these structures contain a number of wizards so users can build fairly sophisticated portals with little knowledge of Web development. The wizards also come with features that enhance a site. With a few clicks, users can add calendaring, chatting and mailing links.

The talk will be a introduction to this new software solution, which will include a demo, real case studies and a discussion on this and similar technologies.

This is another in the Departmental Pizza Seminar series.

Wednesday, April 14th 2004, 5:00pm, Ungar 411

Almost everyone has to give a public presentation at some time. Graduate students have to defend their theses, research students have to present their results, and many jobs require presentations. It is common to have little or no experience when you give your first presentation, and you may even be a little nervous! This seminar is aimed at (graduate, research, and other) students. It describes how to present a successful seminar, in a simple standard format. This seminar does not try to teach general speaking skills, nor impose any personally preferred techniques. It covers the structure of a seminar, the use of visual aids, speaking technique, and how to cope with questions.

This is another in the Departmental Pizza Seminar series.

Wednesday, April 7th 2004, 5:00pm, Ungar 411

We present robust floating point algorithms for constructing arrangements of lines and semi-algebraic curves and for manipulating semi-algebraic sets. These robust algorithms construct a consistent combinatorial arrangement, and thus can handle every type of degeneracy (special cases that can give the algorithm problems). Due to floating point inaccuracies in computer arithmetic, degenerate cases arise. For example, three curves that meet at a point or two points with equal x coordinates can cause problems. An arrangement is a set of lines and curves that induces a subdivision of the plane, and it consists of vertices, edges, and cells. The construction of an arrangement is done using a plane sweep algorithm to find all the intersections. Our input is a set of continuous x-monotonic curves and lines delimited by endpoints. The sweep output is a partial vertical order on our set of segments, and these segments are obtained by splitting the input segments by their intersections. The sweep output is then converted to an arrangement (the segments are edges and their endpoints are vertices). Segments are grouped into loops by traversing through the vertices and edges, and these loops are grouped into cells using the segment order. We can now use our arrangement algorithm to rotate semi-algebraic sets and to perform set operations. The sweep runs in O((n + N + k) log n) where n is the number of curves/lines, N is the number of intersections, and k = O(n³) is the number of inconsistencies.

This is research done under the guidance of my advisor Dr. Victor Milenkovic.

This is another in the Departmental Pizza Seminar series.

Wednesday, March 31st 2004, 5:00pm, Ungar 411

A Video on Demand (VoD) system is expected to transmit many movies over a single channel as demanded by the end users. When several videos are transmitted simultaneously over a link the effective bandwidth required per video is usually much lower than that needed by a single video because of multiplexing gain. Fast and accurate estimation of multiplexing gain is necessary for developing call admission control (CAC) algorithms. Known models which estimate queue size and effective bandwidth of multiplexed video system cannot capture frame size variations in different segments of a video, and are not very useful particularly when the number of videos is not too large.

The multinomial model proposed in this paper is built on a Markov-modulated gamma (MMG)-based traffic model of a single video. It takes into consideration average frame size variations in different segments of a video and can predict multiplexing gain for any number of multiplexed videos. The model has been validated using MPEG traces of commercial movies.

This is another in the Departmental Pizza Seminar series.

Wednesday, March 24th 2004, 3:00pm, Ungar 426

A graphical game merges network models with traditional game theory to achieve a new compact representation better suited for large-population game theory. The model graph allows the explicit encoding of the detailed structure of strategic interactions yet has a natural and simple intuitive meaning: players are represented as nodes in the graph and the payoff of a player is only a function of the actions of the player's neighbors in the graph and those of the player itself.

In this talk, I will discuss computational and algorithmic aspects of graphical games. Algorithms for basic computations, including Nash and correlated equilibria, will be presented. Connections to related topics, such as graphical models for probabilistic modeling and inference, will be discussed. Throughout the talk, I will briefly sketch the state of the art in graphical games as well as recent work on extensions to related economic models. Time permitting, I will conclude with a discussion on open problems and future research directions.

This is joint work with Sham Kakade (Penn), Michael Kearns (Penn), John Langford (TTI-Chicago), Michael Littman (Rutgers), Nick Montfort (Penn), Robin Pemantle (Penn) and Siddharth Suri (Penn).

Wednesday, March 12th 2004, 5:00pm, Ungar 411

University Course Evaluations are presently done on paper. To move this to electronic format, there are several issues similar to those of electronic voting, in particular, anonymity for the author, authenticity of the review, correct collection, and accountability.

The speaker takes a stab at designing such a system, and hopes to have his students implement a model.

Come prepared to break my system!

This is another in the Departmental Pizza Seminar series.

Friday, March 12th 2004, 5:00pm, Ungar 426

Problems in information visualization often involve the display of a set of objects and their relationships, that can be modeled as graphs. While static graphs arise in many applications, dynamic processes give rise to graphs that evolve through time. Such dynamic processes can be found in software engineering, internet/telecommunications traffic, and social networks, among others. Typically, the underlying graph structures are large, and depending on the time-granularity, may contain from a few to a large number of timeslices. The graph representing a particular timeslice may contain fewer/more vertices/edges than the one representing the previous timeslice, or it may differ in some other graph attributes, such as node-weights, edge-weights, or labels. We describe algorithms and techniques for visualization of dynamic graph processes, using the evolution of the scientific literature as an example of such a process. In particular, we use a local copy of the ACM Digital Library of Scientific Literature dataset with over 100,000 authors and 100,000 papers.

Wednesday, March 3rd 2004, 5:00pm, Ungar 411

Current techniques for rigid body simulation run slowly on scenes with many bodies in close proximity. Each time two bodies collide or make or break a static contact, the simulator must interrupt the numerical integration of velocities and accelerations. Even for simple scenes, the number of discontinuities per frame time can rise to the millions. An efficient optimization-based animation (OBA) algorithm is presented which can simulate scenes with many convex three-dimensional bodies settling into stacks and other "crowded" arrangements. This algorithm simulates Newtonian (second order) physics and Coulomb friction, and it uses quadratic programming (QP) to calculate new positions, momenta and accelerations strictly at frame times. Contact points are synchronized at the end of each frame. The extremely small integration steps inherent to traditional simulation techniques are avoided. Non-convex bodies are simulated as unions of convex bodies. Links and joints are simulated successfully with bi-directional constraints. A hybrid of OBA and retroactive detection (RD) has been implemented as well. A review of existing work finds no other packages that can simulate similarly complex scenes in a practical amount of time.

Harald Schmidl and I presented this work at SIGGRAPH 2001. He and I developed newer work as part of his Ph.D. at UM. I have continued to work on my own, and I am now working with Kanishka Bhaduri. This talk will start with an earlier 1996 SIGGRAPH paper, continue with the SIGGRAPH 2001 paper, and continue towards the present day as time allows.

This is another in the Departmental Pizza Seminar series.

February 25th 2004, 5:00pm, Ungar 411

Failure to understand the limitations of the human being, as a link in any computer/automated system in which the person interacts, will most certainly lead to significant problems in the operation of the system that will either: (a) result in safety problems that could harm or kill, (b) cost the organization large amounts of money to correct problems, (c) lead to unhappy employees who are forced to use a system that is awkward and cumbersome. All of these outcomes are unacceptable. There exists today, a scientific, proven technique, that enable us to analyze the needs of the user/system, to study the environment within which the system is being developed, and formulate a user interface design specification which will ensure that these problems do not occur.

Peter Mitchell is an expert in Human-computer Interaction and Usability Testing. He is President Emeritus of the New York City Chapter of the Usability Professionals' Association, and a part time lecturer in the Department of Industrial Engineering. He owns the company ergo9.

This is another in the Departmental Pizza Seminar series.

Department of Computer Science Colloquium

Geoff Sutcliffe, Diego Belfiore
University of Miami

will present

A Derivation Verifier of the Semantic Kind

Automated Theorem Proving (ATP) systems are complex pieces of software, and thus may have bugs that make them unsound or incomplete. The derivations output by an ATP system may be semantically verified by trusted systems that check the required semantic properties of each inference step. Such verification may need to be augmented by structural verification that checks that inferences have been used correctly in the context of the overall derivation. This talk describes the design and implementation of the derivation verifier DVDV, which uses semantic verification and does structural checking for various situations.

Wed Feb 18, 5:00
In Ungar, Room 402
Free Pizza

Received: Sun Feb 1 0:17:18 2004

Department of Computer Science

Colloquium

Yury Puzis, Geoff Sutcliffe, Yuan Zhang and Yi Gao
University of Miami

will present

Proving hard theorems in rich theories, part II

A Rich Theory is one whose axioms (expressed in 1st order logic) contain a large number of predicates and functors, and whose theorems are often provable from a subset of the axioms. Experimental results have shown that the removal of just a few unnecessary axioms can have a significant effect on the performance of an ATP system on a problem. This work introduces a relevance measure that estimates the potential usefulness of an axiom for proving a given theorem. The measure has been used in a control algorithm that selects combinations of axioms based on their relevance, to form {\em axiom reduced} problems that are submitted to an ATP system. Evaluation shows that this system performs better than the ATP system alone. Additionally, a scheme for using the relevance measures for selecting lemmas to augment the axioms of a problem is introduced.

Monday, November 17, 5:00 PM
Either Ungar 402 or 506, as scheduling permits.
Pizza and drinks are provided by the department.

Department of Computer Science

Colloquium

Victor J. Milenkovic
University of Miami

will present

Robust Set Operations on Semi-Algebraic Sets in the Plane

At my last pizza talk, I described how to robustly construct an arrangement of algebraic curves. The ultimate purpose was CAD: computer aided design. However, constructing arrangements is still a far cry from designing stronger bridges, faster chips, or bigger SUVs. This talk will show how to define sets in the plane bounded by segments of algebraic curves and how to apply rigid transformations and how to perform set operations on them: union, intersection, symmetric difference, etc. Most of the work goes into dealing with degenerate cases: ``unexpected coincidences''. An important trick is a ``spin on the wheel of fortune'': apply a random rotation to the set before attempting the operation.

Again, this is joint work with Elish Sacks of Purdue University.

Monday, November 10, 2003, 5:00 PM
Either Ungar 402 or 506, as scheduling permits.
Pizza and drinks are provided by the department.

Department of Computer Science

Colloquium

Brian Coomes
University of Miami

will continue his presentation

Floating Point Computations

This is the third talk by Brian on this subject. Analysis of floating point error of the dot product was given in the previous talk, and error for various matrix norms.

Monday, November 3, 2003, 5:00 PM
Either Ungar 402 or 506, as scheduling permits.
Pizza and drinks are provided by the department.

Received: Fri Oct 31 10:46:59 2003

Department of Computer Science

Colloquium

Brian Coomes
University of Miami

will present

IEEE754 Floating Point Arithmetic, continue

We will show how to use the floating-point arithmetic specified in IEEE754 to produce rigorous mathematical estimates of various quantities.

See seminar, 13 October for further details.

Monday, 27 October 5:00 PM
In Ungar 402 or 506
Pizza is served at 5:00 PM
All are welcome.

Received: Fri Oct 17 18:05:50 2003

Department of Computer Science

Colloquium

Burton Rosenberg
University of Miami

will present

Secure computation with a deck of cards

A short presentation in which an ordinary deck of cards is used to compute an arbitrary boolean function by two mistrustful parties. By encoding bits and cutting the deck, neither party will learn the other party's input except for what is implied by the function output itself.

Monday, Oct 20, 5:00 PM
In Ungar, Room CC402 or 506, depending on weather.
(Weather what? whether or not it is in 402, of course).
Pizza will be served at 5:00 PM.

Received: Fri Oct 17 18:00:58 2003

Department of Computer Science

Colloquium

Brian Coomes
University of Miami

will present

IEEE754 Floating Point Arithmetic
and Rigorous Error Estimates

Before the approval of the IEEE754 standard in 1985, many computers had idiosyncratic or problematic floating-point implementations. This led to the discovery of counterintuitive, even bizarre, programmatic situations, which in turn created a general aura of distrust for floating-point arithmetic. The standard, when implemented correctly, gives cross-platform consistency and predictability to floating-point arithmetic. While the aura of distrust lingers, the general status of floating-point arithmetic has improved. We will show how to use the floating-point arithmetic specified in IEEE754 to produce rigorous mathematical estimates of various quantities. As an example, we will show how to use floating-point arithmetic to compute a rigorous upper bound for the Euclidean norm of the inverse of a square matrix approximated by a matrix of floating-point numbers.

Monday, 13 October, 5:00 PM
In Ungar, Room CC402
This the 30th in our series of Pizza seminars.
Pizza is provided.

Received: Sun Oct 12 22:03:53 2003

Department of Computer Science

Colloquium

Chip Elliott
BBN, Boston

will present

Quantum Cryptography in Practice

Abstract:
BBN, Harvard, and Boston University are building the DARPA Quantum Network, the world's first network that delivers end-to-end network security via high-speed Quantum Cryptography, and testing that Network against sophisticated eavesdropping attacks. The first network link has been up and steadily operational in our laboratory since December 2002, and will soon be built out across the metro Boston area via standard telecom (dark) fiber. In this talk, we introduce quantum cryptography, discuss its relation to modern secure networks, and describe its unusual physical layer, its specialized quantum cryptographic protocol suite (quite interesting in its own right), and our extensions to IPsec to integrate it with quantum cryptography.

Monday, October 6, 5:00 PM
Ungar Room 506
This is the 29th Pizza Seminar. Pizza is served.
Received: Mon Sep 22 19:12:56 2003

Department of Computer Science

Colloquium

Burton Rosenberg
University of Miami

will present

Towards Implementing Secure 2-Party Computation

I describe work with students Yi Gao, Yuan Zhang and Vera Arsova to implement the distributed cryptographic evaluation of functions.

We are concerned with the two party case. X and Y have values x and y and wish to collectively compute some function f(x,y). At the end of the computation X learns nothing of the value y except what can be inferred from x and the computed f(x,y). Likewise for Y. The protocol must also not release additional information even if Y cheats on the protocol.

Background the the problem will be followed by a discussion of the implementation and a demonstration.

Monday, 29 September, 5:00 PM
In Ungar, Room 402
This is the 28th Pizza Seminar. Pizza and drinks are served.
Received: Mon Sep 22 19:02:43 2003

Monday, October 6, 2003, 5:00pm, Ungar 402

BBN, Harvard, and Boston University are building the DARPA Quantum Network, the world's first network that delivers end-to-end network security via high-speed Quantum Cryptography, and testing that Network against sophisticated eavesdropping attacks. The first network link has been up and steadily operational in our laboratory since December 2002, and will soon be built out across the metro Boston area via standard telecom (dark) fiber. In this talk, we introduce quantum cryptography, discuss its relation to modern secure networks, and describe its unusual physical layer, its specialized quantum cryptographic protocol suite (quite interesting in its own right), and our extensions to IPsec to integrate it with quantum cryptography.

This is the 27rd in the Departmental Pizza Seminar series.

Monday, September 22nd 2003, 5:00pm, Ungar 402

The drawing of a graph onto a medium such as a computer screen is a fundamental yet challenging problem in computer science. The algorithms developed incorporate techniques from computational geometry, graph theory, optimization, and computer graphics.

In general, the underlying problem is to take a graph G composed of vertices (V) and edges (E) between the vertices and place (embed) these vertices and edges on the screen in a visually appealing and informative manner. The precise definition of ``appealing'' and ``informative'' are of great debate in the graph drawing community but certain standards are almost universally accepted. For example, graphs with multiple edge crossings are considered less appealing and more confusing than similar graphs without any crossings.

In this talk, we shall introduce the area of graph drawing, give a brief description of basic results and problems in the field, and discuss some of our own recent results in the area of simultaneous graph embeddings.

This is the 25rd in the Departmental Pizza Seminar series.

Monday, September 15th 2003, 5:00pm, Ungar 402

We present a robust arrangement algorithm for algebraic curves based on floating point arithmetic. The algorithm performs a line sweep, tests the consistency of each sweep update, and modifies the input to prevent inconsistent updates. The output arrangement is realizable by semi-algebraic curves that are close to the input curves. We present a new performance model for robust computational geometry in which running times and error bounds are expressed in terms of the number of input inconsistencies. An inconsistency is a combinatorial property that is derivable with a given set of numerical algorithms, but that is not realizable. The running time of the arrangement algorithm is O((n+N)\log n+k(n+N)\log n) for n curves with N intersection points and with k=O(n³) inconsistencies. The distance between the realization curves and the input is O(ε+knε) where ε is the curve intersection accuracy. The output size is always the standard O(n+N). We show experimentally that k is zero for generic inputs and is tiny even for highly degenerate inputs. Hence, the algorithm running time on real-world inputs equals that of a standard sweep and the realization error equals the curve intersection error.

Joint work with Elisha Sacks of Purdue University.

This is the 24rd in the Departmental Pizza Seminar series.

Monday, September 8th 2003, 5:00pm, Ungar 402
Tuesday, September 9th 2003, 5:00pm, Ungar 402
Wednesday, September 10th 2003, 5:00pm, Ungar 406

Joe Clarke gives two talks on FreeBSD and workshop on firewalls. The first talk will be given as part of the Computer Science Pizza Seminar series. The next two presentations will be given on the following two days.

The FreeBSD Way.
Monday, September 8th, 2003

This talk will discuss the origins and direction of FreeBSD. We will cover the political and social layouts of the project. We will discuss the philosophy of the operating system and how it is developed, as well as the underlying BSD license. We will compare to Linux and GPL where appropriate. We will also discuss FreeBSD strengths and weaknesses, and show where FreeBSD fits into both the server and desktop niches.

Getting to know and love FreeBSD
Tuesday, September 9th, 2003

This talk will cover getting started and learning to use FreeBSD. Topics will include a basic overview of installing the operating system, and where to find help to get you to "the next step." We will discuss the layout of the file system as well as how system configuration is done in the FreeBSD world. We will go into great detail about the FreeBSD ports collection, and show how to find ported software as well as install and manage ports and packages. Finally, we will look at some advanced topics like tracking -STABLE and -CURRENT branches, and how to keep your sources up-to-date.

Working with the Cisco Pix firewall
Wednesday, September 9th, 2003

This workshop is designed to familiarize students with the workings of the Cisco PIX firewall. We discuss terminology as well as configurations. We will be configuring a sample network using a PIX 501, and then demonstrating how to troubleshoot problems in the network.

Joe Marcus Clarke, Bio.

Joe Marcus Clarke holds a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science from the University of Miami. Since graduating, he has worked for Cisco Systems, Inc. in the Technical Assistance Center (TAC) supporting Cisco's network management software and technologies. He is Cisco Certified Internetwork Expert #5384 and is also a Sun Certified Java Programmer. He is a ports committer for the FreeBSD project specializing in GNOME on FreeBSD. He also sits on the Port Managers team for FreeBSD. Other Open Source projects he works on include Netatalk and the Cisco Open Source Initiative (COSI).

This is the 23rd in the Departmental Pizza Seminar series.

April 21st 2003, 5:00pm, Ungar 411

A Rich Theory is one whose axioms (expressed in 1st order logic) contain a large number of predicates and functors, and whose theorems are often provable from a subset of the axioms. Examples of rich theories are set theory, geometry, and homological algebra. The complexity and scope of rich theories contribute to the difficulty of finding proofs of theorems using Automated Theorem Proving (ATP) systems. This seminar describes techniques that have been developed to improve the performance of ATP systems on theorems in rich theories.

This is the 22nd in the Departmental Pizza Seminar series.

April 14th 2003, 5:00pm, Ungar 411

In this talk, the presenter will discuss today's and tommorrow's emerging consumer applications/services based on video and multimedia communications. The scope of this tutorial-style presentation will include application/service classes, common technology, protocol and architectures and network planning issues for supporting video and multimedia applications over Broadband wireline communication networks. Specific discussion will be based on practical issues related to key network planning parameters such as application domains, bandwidth, quality-of-service (QoS) and multicast.

This is the 21st in the Departmental Pizza Seminar series.

April 7th 2003, 5:00pm, Ungar 411

This summer Agrawal, Kayal and Saxena solved the long outstanding problem of a P-time algorithm for deciding whether a given integer is prime. In this pizza seminar I will present their proof.

This is the 20th in the Departmental Pizza Seminar series.

March 31st 2003, 5:00pm, Ungar 402

Throughout the twentieth century, composers, performers, and technologists have yearned for robust control interfaces to mediate between musician and machine. Recent developments have enabled the creation of inexpensive gestural interfaces that facilitate straightforward, meaningful, and precise mapping of gesture into sound. I will introduce the notion and importance of the "alternate controller" and discuss several of my own instruments and interfaces. Plenty of sound will be served.

This is the 19th in the Departmental Pizza Seminar series.

March 24th 2003, 5:00pm, Ungar 411

In this talk, the presenter will discuss today's and tomorrow's emerging consumer applications and services which will drive widespread deployment and acceptance of the Third Generation (3G) Mobile Wireless Communication (Cellular) Systems, blurring out the long debated gray line between myth and reality of 3G. Specific discussion will be based on key parameters of popular services/application, resulting impact/challenges on 3G system implementation, technology enablers and service migration from 2G to 3G Networks.

This is the 18th in the Departmental Pizza Seminar series.

March 17th 2003, 5:00pm, Ungar 411

A translation lattice packing of k polygons P₁, P₂, P₃,...,P_k is a (non-overlapping) packing of the k polygons which is replicated without overlap at each point of a lattice i₀v₀+i₁v₁, where v₀ and v₁ are vectors generating the lattice and i₀ and i₁ range over all integers. A densest translational lattice packing is one which minimizes the area |v₀ x v₁| of the fundamental parallelogram. An algorithm and implementation is given for densest translation lattice packing. This algorithm has useful applications in industry, particularly clothing manufacture.

This is the 17th in the Departmental Pizza Seminar series.

March 3rd 2003, 5:00pm, Ungar 411

A new physical model, Cleats on Ice (CoI), is described for calculating the acceleration of many rigid bodies with simultaneous contacts under the forces of gravity and contact friction. Under the CoI model, iterated quadratic programming (QP) suffices to calculate the accelerations. Like computationally more intensive complementarity-based techniques, CoI ensures complementarity: at each contact, a pair of bodies press on each other or accelerate away from each other but not both. However, CoI does so in an implicit rather than explicit manner that is both scalable and easy to implement. Furthermore, CoI can take advantage of powerful, well-maintained, and well-documented commercial optimization libraries. As part of a larger simulation package, CoI can practically generate realistic animations of scenes with over 200 bodies and over 500 simultaneous contacts.

Joint work with Harald Schmidl.

This is the 16th in the Departmental Pizza Seminar series.

February 24th 2003, 5:00pm, Ungar 411

The TPTP (Thousands of Problems for Theorem Provers) Problem Library is a library of test problems for Automated Theorem Proving (ATP) systems for 1st order classical logic. Since the first release of the TPTP in 1993, many researchers have used the TPTP as an appropriate and convenient basis for testing their ATP systems. The TPTP is now the de facto standard for testing and evaluating ATP systems. The TSTP Solution Library is the flip-side of the TPTP. The TSTP will maintain solutions to all the problems in the TPTP, from all currently available state-of-the-art ATP systems. The solutions output by the systems will be translated and stored in a common format, so that the TSTP can be consistently interrogated and analysed. It is expected that the TSTP will immediately contribute to the development of ATP systems, by allowing system developers to easily access and analyse other systems' solutions to TPTP problems. In a broader context the TSTP will provide a basis for understanding and comparing proof structures, will be used for certification of ATP systems, and form a framework within which users will be able to create and solve more problems using ATP tools and techniques.

This talk describes the work in progress towards the TSTP, including motivations, requirements, design decisions, and the various projects that are contributing to and using the TSTP.

This is the 15th in the Departmental Pizza Seminar series.

January 21st 2003, 4:00pm, Ungar 506

Computer simulation of real-world environments is one of the grand challenges of computer graphics. Applications for this technology include remote education, virtual heritage, specialist training, electronic commerce, and entertainment. Unfortunately, current computer graphics techniques fall far short of providing solutions for this challenge. In this presentation, I present a new approach to capturing and rendering large real-world environments, including several successful demonstrations and future research plans.

My ultimate goal is to allow an untrained operator to walk into a city or building (e.g., a museum) and wave around some device that captures a digital model, which later can be used to provide many people the realistic visual experience of "walking" through the environment interactively. My approach is to take advantage of recent technology trends and to obtain a dense and automatic sampling of a large viewpoint space with omnidirectional images. This strategy replaces the difficult computer vision problems of 3D reconstruction and surface reflectance modeling with the easier problems of motorized cart navigation, data compression, and working set management.

I also provide a research plan to capture and reconstruct large environments as well as a summary of previous approaches. This plan benefits from collaborative efforts in robotics (for building self-navigating high-resolution capture devices), computer vision (for developing image-reconstruction algorithms), and systems (for building and deploying large software systems over a network) and from developing applications to foment interactive tourism, to preserve historical sites, and to assist with simulation and training scenarios.

January 24th 2003, 4:00pm, Ungar 402

A variety of massive data sets exhibit an underlying structure that can be modeled as dynamic weighted multi-digraphs. Their sizes range from tens of gigabytes to petabytes. These include the World Wide Web, Internet Traffic and Telephone Call Detail. These data sets sheer volume brings with it a series of computational and visualization challenges due mainly to the I/O and Screen Bottlenecks.

We present external memory algorithms for connectivity and minimum spanning trees together with heuristics for quasi-clique finding. We describe how hierarchy trees help us to cope in a unified manner with both, the I/O and screen bottlenecks. This line of research has suggested the need to look for "novel" graph representations in order to provide a user or a data mining engine with informed navigation paths.

We will discuss our results with graphs having on the order of 200 million vertices and several billion edges and we will point out some mathematical problems that have surfaced along the way.

The overall goal is to extract useful information that can be brought into a user's palm top and to export these techniques to other mining domains.

Information about some of James's current visualization research projects can be obtained by accessing www.research.att.com/areas/visualization and http://www.visdays.com/.

November 18th 2002, 4:00pm, Ungar 402

The strength of magnetoencephalography (MEG) is that magnetic fields are not smeared by the skull, leading to greater potential spatial sensitivity. Unfortunately, this penetrative ability of magnetic fields also causes each sensor to receive signals from a large number of active sources and makes it difficult to shield out noise, both external (power grid) and internal (heartbeat, eyeblinks). We have made a systematic effort to improve MEG's performance through new signal processing for separation and dipole localization, both raising the effective performance of current MEG systems and relaxing constraints that have constrained MEG hardware design.

For separation, we applied SOBI to complex MEG data. This segregated non-neuronal sources from neuronal ones, and neuronal ones from each other. The separated neuronal sources seem focal, and have temporal responses consistent with their estimated locations. We can routinely isolate sources within modalities, across modalities, across tasks, and across subjects. The SNR is high enough to allow estimation of response onset times for single trials, which can be measured in visual, auditory, and somatosensory modalities with detection rates over 95%. Combined with an improved ability to localize the underlying neuronal sources, this makes possible the non-invasive study of a range of perceptual and memory functions that depend upon the timing of neuronal events occurring in specific brain regions.

With many recovered sources, dipole localization becomes a bottleneck. For both a 4D Neuroimaging Neuromag-122 and the experimental LANL SiS Mark I with superconducting magnetic mirrors, we addressed the single dipole localization problem at low SNR, achieving a reduction in localization time from 449ms to 0.5ms at an accuracy of 12mm, and to 35ms at an accuracy of 2.8mm. Our fast fully automatic noise-robust localizer is suitable for real-time applications, such as closed-loop experimental protocols and brain-computer interfaces.

Publications: http://www.cs.unm.edu/~bap/publications.html

November 11th 2002, 5:00pm, Ungar 411

In this presentation, I will cover the concepts of QoS, challenges in IP-based Multimedia networks, overall architecture, present state of design, implementation and related issues.

This is the 14th in the Departmental Pizza Seminar series.

November 8th 2002, 10:00am, Ungar 411

Recent years have witnessed significant growth and interest in wireless communication. Coupled with the advances in compter hardware and architecture, progress in wireless communication has led to significant interests in the area of Mobile Computing, a paradigm of computing anytime, anywhere. In this talk we present a synthesizing overview of several issues related to architecture, mobile host detection, need for low power and large bandwidth, etc. Challenges involved in designing such systems will also be highlighted.

November 4th 2002, 5:00pm, Ungar 411

For detailed analyses of specific chaotic systems one must often resort to numerical simulations. Unfortunately, chaotic systems amplify small errors at an exponential rate, which makes their simulations necessarily unreliable. Indeed, many published pictures of solutions of chaotic systems are unintentional forgeries. In this talk we will present several striking simulations of chaotic systems using the soon-to-be-released Phaser (www.phaser.com). We will then reveal what these bogus pictures may really depict.

This is the 13th in the Departmental Pizza Seminar series.

October 21st 2002, 5:00pm, Ungar 411

The Russian Option is a two-party contract which creates a liability for the option seller to pay the option buyer an amount equal to the maximum price attained by a security over a specific time period, discounted for the option's age. For an N+1 step time period 0, 1, 2, ..., N, the option seller's liability at time step n, 0 ≤ n ≤ N, is,

L(n) = βⁿ max_{0 ≤ t ≤ n} s_t

where s_t is the security price at time t and β is the discount factor. In this work we consider the value of this option under a standard binomial model of security prices, and give efficient algorithms for value calculation.

This work gives an O(N²) dynamic programming algorithm determining the option price at all time steps as well as the optimal execution strategy.

This is the 12th in the Departmental Pizza Seminar series.

October 7th 2002, 5:00pm, Ungar 411

After introducing some basic molecular biology, this talk will present a sampling of problems in Bioinformatics where computer scientists have been involved and have left their mark.

This is the 11th in the Departmental Pizza Seminar series.

May 28th 2002, 4:00pm, Ungar 426

A computational model is black-box if it is used without a clear understanding of how it works. A model may be black-box because its computation is hidden, or it may be black-box because its computation is hard to interpret. Examples of this latter category are semi-parametric and non-parametric models such as neural networks, nearest neighbor classifiers, and ensemble classifiers like boosting. Having greater interpretability for these models is important for advancing our understanding of how they work, but also necessary for verifying their functionality for real-world applications. In this talk I will present a new approach to analyzing the generalization strategies of these kinds of models by examining their decision region structure.

In the first half we will examine the decision region properties of feed-forward neural networks. Using the Decision Intersection Boundary Algorithm, we will look at noise in networks, good and bad generalization and learning.

In the second half we will build on the intuition gained from neural networks and introduce Decision Region Connectivity Analysis, a method that allows the computationally efficient analysis of classifiers in a model and dimensionality independent manner. I will demonstrate how DRCA can be used to understand and compare completely different types of high-dimensional classifiers (a 64-input OCR example), amongst its applications, and conclude with current research directions.

April 24th 2002, 5:00pm, Ungar 411

Video traffic is one of the major sources of broadband network traffic. Because of large bandwidth requirement of high-quality uncompressed video most video are compressed using some variants of MPEG encoding before transmission. These compression algorithms can provide very high compression ratio while maintaining good quality of decompressed video. However, MPEG-coding provides different amount of compression for different frames and results in Variable Bit Rate (VBR) data known as VBR video. Accurate traffic models of VBR video are necessary for prediction of performance of any broadband network during its design and operation. We propose a frame size model of VBR video. It generates frame sizes for full-length VBR videos while preserving both GOP-periodicity and video-segment transitions.

A two-pass algorithm for analysis of a long-duration VBR video is presented. The algorithm identifies and partitions classes of video segments. Frames in each segment class produce three data-sets one each for I-, B-, and P-type frames. Each of these data-sets is modeled with a Gamma distribution. Markov processes model video segment transitions. We have used QQ plots to show visual similarity of model-generated VBR video data-sets with original data-set. Leaky-bucket simulation study is used to show similarity of data and frame loss rates between model-generated VBR videos and original video. Our study of frame-based VBR video also reveals even a low data loss rate could affect a large fraction of I- frames causing a significant degradation of the quality of transmitted video.

This is the 10th in the Departmental Pizza Seminar series.

April 17th 2002, 5:00pm, Ungar 411

It has been shown that methods such as Correlation Dimension provide inconclusive results when determining the complexity/dynamics of transient EEG signals under the presence of multiple signal components. We propose the use of Approximate Entropy since it has proven to be robust to both signal noise and statistical outliers.

This is the 9th in the Departmental Pizza Seminar series.

April 5th 2002, 3:30pm, Ungar 426

A new paradigm for rigid body simulation is presented and analyzed. Current techniques for rigid body simulation run slowly on scenes with many bodies in close proximity. Each time two bodies collide or make or break a static contact, the simulator must interrupt the numerical integration of velocities and accelerations. Even for simple scenes, the number of discontinuities per frame time can rise to the millions. An efficient optimization-based animation (OBA) algorithm is presented which can simulate scenes with many convex three-dimensional bodies settling into stacks and other "crowded" arrangements. This algorithm simulates Newtonian (second order) physics and Coulomb friction, and it uses quadratic programming (QP) to calculate new positions, momenta, and accelerations strictly at frame times. The extremely small integration steps inherent to traditional simulation techniques are avoided.

Contact points are synchronized at the end of each frame. Resolving contacts with friction is known to be a difficult problem. Analytic force calculation can have ambiguous or non-existing solutions. Purely impulsive techniques avoid these ambiguous cases, but still require an excessive and computationally expensive number of updates in the case of many simultaneous contacts. It is shown informally that even taking into account advances in stiff integration techniques, penalty force methods cannot overcome this issue of running time in highly crowded scenes. New algorithms are presented that calculate simultaneous impulses to resolve collisions and static contacts under the Coulomb friction model. The simultaneous impulses are the solution to a QP.

In addition, the algorithms apply "bouncing at distance" and "freezing of bodies" to further speed up the simulation. These new QP algorithms are hybridized with a traditional priority queue momentum update scheme to allow sequential impulses when they are required for realism, such as in the office toy pendulum. When added to the implementation of OBA, these new algorithms increase the speed of the simulation by a factor of up to 30.

The position update has been hybridized with retroactive detection (RD) to prevent fast and thin bodies from passing through each other. Due to the modular design of the OBA simulator, the described techniques can be used as components in any existing simulator that follows a modular design of position update, finding contacts, and resolving contacts. Non-convex bodies are simulated as unions of convex bodies. Links and joints are simulated with bi-directional constraints. Analysis of the algorithm and discussion of example simulations is provided.

March 27th 2002, 5:00pm, Ungar 411

We discuss the security architecture for the Computer Science department. We review the goals and challenges of the environment, look at the technology used to respond to the challenges, and get into some detail about the proposed solution.

This is the 8th in the Departmental Pizza Seminar series.

March 22nd 2002, 4:00pm, Ungar 506

As applications manipulate an increasing amount of XML, there is growing interest in storing XML data in relational databases. Due to the mismatch between the complexity of XML's tree structure and the simplicity of flat relational tables, there are many ways to store the same XML document in an RDBMS, and a number of heuristic techniques have been proposed. These techniques typically define fixed mappings and do not take application characteristics into account. However, a fixed mapping is unlikely to work well for all possible applications.

LegoDB is a cost-based XML storage mapping engine that explores a space of possible XML-to-relational mappings and selects the best mapping for a given application. LegoDB leverages current XML and relational technologies: 1) it models the target application with an XML Schema, XML data statistics, and an XQuery workload; 2) the space of configurations is generated through XML-Schema rewritings; and 3) the best among the derived configurations is selected using cost estimates obtained through a standard relational optimizer. In this talk, I will describe the LegoDB storage engine and present experimental results that demonstrate the effectiveness of this approach.