Event Guide
September 29th, 2007
AM
9:00 – 9:30 Welcome & Registration (Great Hall)
9:30 – 10:00 Opening Ceremony (DC 1350)
10:00 – 11:00 Erik Demaine (DC 1350)
11:00 – 11:15 Break (Great Hall)
11:15 – 12:15 Heath Windcliff (DC 1350)
12:15 - 1:45 LUNCH (DC 1301/Fishbowl)
PM
1:45 – 2:45 Janice Glasgow (DC 1350)
2:45 – 3:00 Break (Great Hall)
3:00 – 4:00 Hugh Williams (DC 1350)
4:00 – 5:00 Panel: David Cheriton, Faith Ellen, Ian Goldberg, and Craig Kaplan (DC 1350)
5:00 – 6:00 Reception (DC 1301)
Speaker: Erik D. Demaine MIT
Origami, Linkages, and Polyhedra: Folding with Algorithms
Abstract: What forms of origami can be designed automatically by algorithms? What shapes can result by folding a piece of paper flat and making one complete straight cut? What polyhedra can be cut along their surface and unfolded into a flat piece of paper without overlap? When can a linkage of rigid bars be untangled or folded into a desired configuration?
Folding and unfolding is a branch of discrete and computational geometry that addresses these and many other intriguing questions. I will give a taste of the many results that have been proved in the past few years, as well as the several exciting open problems that remain open. Many folding problems have applications in areas including manufacturing, robotics, graphics, and protein folding.
Biography: Erik Demaine is Associate Professor and Esther and Harold E. Edgerton Professor in computer science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Demaine's research interests range throughout algorithms, from data structures for improving web searches to the geometry of understanding how proteins fold to the computational difficulty of playing games. He received a MacArthur Fellowship (2003) as a "computational geometer tackling and solving difficult problems related to folding and bending--moving readily between the theoretical and the playful, with a keen eye to revealing the former in the latter". He recently published a book about folding together with Joseph O'Rourke, called Geometric Folding Algorithms: Linkages, Origami, Polyhedra, (Cambridge University Press, 2007). He has also coedited "Tribute to a Mathemagician" (A K Peters, 2003), in honor of the influential mathemagician Martin Gardner.
Speaker: Heath Windcliff
Algorithmic Trading
Abstract: The field of finance has had a long history of applying cutting edge mathematical and computational tools. In this talk we will discuss the recent explosion in algorithmic trading where decisions are based on economic models of supply, demand, risk and reward. We will illustrate how skills learned by students of Scientific Computation, Optimization, Software Design, Applied Mathematics, Data Warehousing and Statistics can be applied directly to complex and interesting problems in trading and risk management.
Biography: Heath Windcliff came from British Columbia to Waterloo as an undergraduate with a strong interest in accoustics. He had previously observed that several prominent authors of texts in this area hailed from Waterloo. He completed his undergraduate degree in Applied Mathematics in 1998. When it became time to undertake graduate studies, he came under the spell of computational finance, in particular a set of interesting risk management problems related to pension plan design and management. Heath obtained his Masters degree in Applied Mathematics in 2000 and then his PhD in Computer Science in 2003 here at Waterloo, in both cases under the supervision of Peter Forsyth. At present Heath manages a team responsible for the research and development of algorithmic trading strategies at Morgan Stanley.
Speaker: Janice Glasgow
Molecular Imagery
Abstract: This talk will present a knowledge representation scheme for computational imagery based on research in cognitive psychology and cognitive neuroscience. As well, it overviews two applications of the scheme in the bioinformatics domain of protein structure determination.
Biography: Janice Glasgow is a Professor in the School of Computing at Queen's University and holds the Queen's Research Chair in Biomedical Computing. Dr. Glasgow sits on the Editorial Board for several of the top journals in artificial intelligence, cognitive science and bioinformatics and is a past President of Canadian Society for Computational Intelligence. She is one of the founding board members of the International Society for Computational Biology.
Speaker: Hugh Williams
What Keeps our Secrets Safe?
Abstract: Control over who knows what about us, for what purposes,
and to whom it is disclosed, is of profound concern to anyone making use of
electronic communication devices. In the e-world, personal information is in
a very real sense the person. Thus, it is essential that we have confidence
in the capacity of the information collector to secure our personal
information. This can only be achieved through the very technology that
threatens our privacy. One important ingredient in these privacy-enhancing
technologies is cryptography.
Briefly put, cryptography is the study and development of
techniques for rendering information unintelligible to all but intended
recipients of that information. If a sender and receiver of a message wish
to communicate over an insecure channel (mobile phone, internet) and want to
ensure that no other unauthorized party can read their transmission, they
will make use of a particular cryptosystem. A conventional cryptosystem can
be thought of as a large collection of transformations (ciphers), any one of
which will render the original message (plaintext) to unintelligible
ciphertext, but in order for the receiver to read the message, he must know
which particular transformation was used by the sender. The information that
identifies the transformation used by the sender is called the key. It is
important to point out that if an eavesdropper acquires some message and its
encrypted equivalent, he should not be able to extract the key from this
information. Nor should the system be vulnerable to an adaptive attack; such
attacks make use of information previously acquired to obtain new
information from the sender and so on until the system is broken. This is
what makes cryptography fascinating. How can we protect our communications
against these kinds of attacks? Remember also that a good cryptosystem must
resist an attack even from the inventor of the system.
In this talk, which is intended for a non-specialist
audience, I will describe from a historical perspective several features of
modern encryption techniques.
Biography: Dr. Hugh C. Williams obtained his PhD in 1969 from the
then Department of Applied Analysis and Computer Science at the University
of Waterloo. In 1970 he joined the newly established Department of Computer
Science at the University of Manitoba, where he was promoted to the rank of
Full Professor in 1979. He moved to the University of Calgary in 2001 where
he became iCORE (Alberta Informatics Circle of Research Excellence) Chair
for Algorithmic Number Theory and Cryptography (ICANTC) and Professor in the
Department of Mathematics and Statistics.
Dr. Williams is internationally recognized as an expert
in computational number theory and its application to cryptography; in
particular, he is a world authority on computing in number fields. Much of
his research is specifically aimed at the development, improvement and
implementation of mathematically based cryptosystems. He was one of the
first to use modern mathematical techniques for securing and authenticating
communication; indeed, he developed a variant of an idea of Michael Rabin
which is now a very widely mentioned cryptosystem. This system, generally
referred to as the Rabin-Williams Scheme, is recognized in the ISO/IEC 9796,
ANSI X9.31 and IEEE P1363 standards for public-key cryptography and digital
signatures. For many years he has also been involved in the design and
construction of machines that will perform the numerical sieving operation
very rapidly, a capability of great importance in primality testing and
secure verification of digital signatures such as the Rabin-Williams
signatures arising from the public-key cryptosystem of the same name. A new
sieve, constructed by Dr. Williams and graduate student Kjell Wooding, has
permitted them to determine 12 new pseudosquares. Most recently he has
written several papers on secure key exchange systems that make use of the
properties of quadratic fields or function fields.
Dr. Williams has published 140 refereed journal papers,
27 refereed conference papers and 21 books (or chapters therein). From
1983-85, he held a national Killam Research Fellowship, one of the most
prestigious honours in Canadian research. He has been an associate editor
since 1978 for Mathematics of Computation, arguably the premier journal on
computational mathematics, is also a member of the editorial board of
Utilitas Mathematica, and is an Editor-in-Chief and co-founder of
Contributions to Discrete Mathematics. He has served on the program
committees of many conferences and workshops, chairing several of them. He
was also honoured in 2003 with two special conferences in celebration of his
60th birthday, one in Banff and the other in Warsaw, Poland. In 2004 he was
appointed Professor Emeritus at the University of Manitoba, a great honour
at that University.
Dr. Williams is the founder and Director of the
University of Calgary's Centre for Information Security and Cryptography
(CISaC), and leads CISaC's participation in the newly formed Calgary
Laboratory for Information Assurance and Security (CLIAS). Under his
leadership, ICANTC and CISaC have established key academic, industrial and
institutional collaborations, driven the development of the largest most
comprehensive education program in cryptography in Canada, and created
important opportunities to apply theory in mathematics and cryptography to
the development of novel cryptosystems, algorithms and benchmarking/analysis
capabilities. His experience as Associate Dean of Research Development
(Faculty of Science, University of Manitoba) is translating into the
development of a broad integrated vision of research, training and
development for ICANTC. He also sits on the Board of Directors of the Number
Theory Foundation, the Pacific Institute for the Mathematical Sciences, and
the Canadian Mathematical Society.
Dr. Williams has also served on the Natural Science and
Engineering Research Council(NSERC) Grant Selection Committees for both
Computing and Information Science (1972-75) and Pure and Applied Mathematics
(1991-94), and chaired the latter from 1993-94. He has also been a member of
the Steacie Awards Selection Committee and was the NSERC Appeal Advisor for
Pure and Applied Mathematics for three years.
In addition to graduating 8 graduate students and
supervising six PDFs in the past six years, Dr. Williams is actively
involved in speaking and outreach engagements. He has delivered a number of
distinguished lectures including, for example, as an Invited Keynote Speaker
at the 2004 Workshop on Cryptographic Algorithms and their Uses (Gold Coast,
Australia), and at the Sixth International Mathematica Symposium, Banff, AB,
August, 2004.
