Distinguished Lecture Series | SCS

Hosted by the David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science

Date: Thursday, June 17, 2010, 4:30 p.m., DC1302
Speaker: Stuart Feldman ,Vice President Engineering, Google
Title: Computing at the Extremes
Abstract: Computing at the limits of technology calls for numerous engineering decisions and tradeoffs. General purpose solutions do not work at the extremes. Traditional HPC has been analyzed for decades, resulting in specialized architectures. Systems for life critical systems, for large enterprises, for tiny devices, and other arenas have special requirements that push the state of the art. Different methods and approaches are needed for architecture, software engineering and system operation. This talk will discuss a variety of these regimes, but will focus on some of the essential tradeoffs for the newer area of data intensive computing with enormous amount of information.
Biography: Stu is responsible for engineering activities at Google's offices in the eastern part of the Americas, with projects affecting most of the company's focus areas. He also has executive responsibility for several important Google products. He did his academic work in astrophysics and mathematics and earned his AB at Princeton and his PhD at MIT. He is Past President of ACM (Association for Computing Machinery) and received the 2003 ACM Software System Award. He is a Fellow of the IEEE, a Fellow of the ACM, a Fellow of the AAAS, a member of the Board of Directors of the AACSB (Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business, International). He serves on a number of government advisory committees. He has taught course at Harvard, Princeton, Berkeley, and Yale. After graduating, Stu was a computer science researcher at Bell Labs and later a research manager at Bellcore. He was the creator of Make as well as the architect for a large new line of software products at Bellcore. At IBM he held various positions, including Vice President for Computer Science in IBM Research, where he drove the long-term and exploratory worldwide science strategy in computer science and related fields; Vice President for Internet Technology, with responsibility for IBM strategies, standards, and policies relating to the future of the Internet, and managed a department that created experimental Internet-based applications; and Director of IBM's Institute for Advanced Commerce, which was dedicated to creating intellectual leadership in e-commerce.

Date: Thursday, October 14, 2010 , 4:30 p.m., DC1302
Speaker: Madhu Sudan, MIT
Title: Towards Universal Semantic Communication
Abstract: Is it possible for two intelligent players to communicate meaningfully with each other, without any prior common background? What does it even mean for the two players to understand each other? We claim that this question, in addition to being of philosophical/linguistic interest, goes to the essence of modern communication/computation. Modern communicating devices are extremely diverse, constantly evolving, and misunderstandings (mismatches in protocols) between communicating devices are a major source of errors. We believe that questions like this need to be answered to set the foundations for a robust theory of (meaningful) communication. In this talk, I will describe our approach towards this problem. We argue that in order to solve such problems, we must first articulate why intelligent players (and/or powerful computers) communicate. This leads us to a formal theory of "goals" of communication. We then show that when progress towards the goal is "verifiable'' then players can detect misunderstandings. Under a complexity-theoretic lens, we show roughly that verifiability is really the essence of resolving misunderstandings: Verifiable goals are more powerful than goals that can be achieved without communication (so communication is good), but very restricted compared to "unverifiable'' goals (so there is need for moderation). Most of the talk will focus on the definitions of various concepts such as "goals'', "(mis)understanding'' and resort to theorems based on computational complexity to support these definitions. Based on joint works with Oded Goldreich (Weizmann) and Brendan Juba (MIT)
Biography: Madhu Sudan recently joined Microsoft Research at their New England Research Center as a Principal Researcher. He is currently on leave from MIT where he was the Fujitsu Professor of EECS. Madhu Sudan got his Bachelors degree from IIT Delhi in 1987 and his Ph.D. from UC Berkeley in 1992. From 1992-1997 he was a Research Staff Member at IBM's Thomas J. Watson Research Center. He joined MIT in 1997 where among other roles he was an Associate Director of MIT's CSAIL from 2007-2009. Madhu Sudan's research lies in the fields of computational complexity theory, algorithms and reliable communication. He is best known for his works on probabilistic checking of proofs, and on the design of list-decoding algorithms for error-correcting codes. His current research interests include semantic communication and property testing. In 2002, Madhu Sudan was awarded the Nevanlinna Prize, for outstanding contributions to the mathematics of computer science, at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Beijing.

Date: Tuesday, November 9, 2010, 4:30 p.m., DC1302
Speaker: Susan Landau, Harvard University
Title: Surveillance or Security? The Risks Posed by New Wiretapping Technologies
Abstract: The United States has moved large portions of business and commerce, including the control of critical infrastructure, online. This reliance on information systems leaves the U.S. highly exposed and vulnerable to cyberattack. Yet despite this, U.S. law enforcement and national security policy remain firmly focused on building wiretapping systems whin communications infrastructure. These surveillance paradigms do not easily fit the new technologies. By embedding eavesdropping mechanisms into communication technology itself, we are building tools that could easily be turned against us. Indeed, such attacks have already occurred. In a world that has Al-Qaeda, nation-state economic espionage, and Hurricane Katrina, how do we get communications security right?
Biography: Susan Landau is a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study for the 2010-2011 academic year. Her book, "Surveillance or Security? The Risks Posed by New Wiretapping Technologies," will be published by MIT Press in March 2011. From 1999-2010 Landau was a Distinguished Engineer at Sun Microsystems; there she concentrated on the interplay between security and public policy. Landau has briefed government officials in both Washington and Europe on such disparate issues as security risks in surveillance mechanisms, digital rights management, and cryptographic export control, and she has written numerous articles and op-eds on these issues. Most recently she testified for the House Science Committee on Cybersecurity Activities at NIST's Information Technology Laboratory. She and Whitfield Diffie wrote "Privacy on the Line: The Politics of Wiretapping and Encryption." Landau is a member of the Commission on Cyber Security for the 44th Presidency, established by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, and serves on the Computer Science and Telecommunications Board of the National Research Council and on the advisory committee for the National Science Foundation's Directorate for Computer and Information Science Engineering. Before joining Sun, Landau was a faculty member at the University of Massachusetts and Wesleyan University. Landau is the recipient of the 2008 Women of Vision Social Impact Award, a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and an ACM Distinguished Engineer.

Date: Thursday, February 10, 2011, 4:30 p.m., DC1302
Speaker: Gilles Brassard, University of Montreal
Title: Quantum Magic in Secret Communication
Abstract: Quantum Cryptography is the first near-term practical application of the emerging field of quantum information processing. It allows two parties who share only a short prior secret to exchange messages with provably perfect confidentiality under the nose of an eavesdropper whose computational power is unlimited and whose technology is restricted only by the accepted laws of physics. In this talk, we shall tell the tale of the origin of Quantum Cryptography from the birth of the first idea by Wiesner in 1970 to the invention of Quantum Key Distribution in 1983, to the first prototypes and ensuing commercial ventures, to exciting prospects for the future. No prior knowledge in quantum mechanics or cryptography will be expected.
Biography: Professor of computer science since 1979 and Canada Research Chair at the Université de Montréal, Gilles Brassard laid the foundations of quantum cryptography at a time when only a handful of people worldwide were interested in quantum information processing. Among his many other achievements are the invention of privacy amplification, quantum teleportation, quantum entanglement distillation and amplitude amplification. Editor-in-Chief for Journal of Cryptology from 1991 until 1997, he is the author of three books that have been translated into eight languages. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada (Academy of Science), of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research and of the International Association for Cryptologic Research. Among his many awards, we note the E.W.R. Steacie Memorial Fellowship, the Killam Research Fellowship, the Prix Marie-Victorin, the Rank Prize in Opto-Electronics and the NSERC Gerhard Herzberg Canada Gold Medal for Science and Engineering. He was awarded a honorary doctorate by the ETH in Zürich.

Date: Thursday, March 24, 2011, 4:15 p.m., Theatre of the Arts, Modern Languages Building
Speaker: Joe Marks, Vice President, Disney Research
Title: Research at The Walt Disney Company
Abstract: At The Walt Disney Company we tell stories. For us, technology and science are always a means to an end. This influences what research we do, and how we do it. If the capability we need to tell a story is for sale in the marketplace, then we can buy it. But if we need a capability that is not commercially available, then we look to our research labs to develop it. For example, some current topics of interest to us include:
* Physical simulation of cloth, hair, and fluids for animated CG movies.
* The representation of 2D geometry for hand-drawn animation.
* Interactive robots for park attractions.
* Mobile computing for guests in our parks & resorts.
* Real-time athlete tracking for sports visualization.
* Behavioral marketing.
Because we don’t need to make money from technology per se, and because we have a leading position in the media & entertainment industry, we can conduct our research more openly than many other companies. We collaborate with academe, publish our results, and work with research organizations at other companies. Jointly owned intellectual property is often acceptable to us. The idiosyncrasies of our business model thus make R&D at the Walt Disney Company somewhat different than at other companies, but no less important. We anticipate continued growth in our research capabilities as we look for more and better ways to invent and innovate around our core business of storytelling.
Biography: Joe Marks grew up in Dublin, Ireland. He earned three degrees from Harvard University. His areas of interest include computer graphics, human-computer interaction, and artificial intelligence. He has worked previously at Bolt Beranek and Newman and at Digital's Cambridge Research Laboratory. Prior to his current position as VP Research and Development, he was the Research Director at Mitsubishi Electric Research Labs in Cambridge, Massachusetts, from 2000 to 2006.

Date: Thursday, March 31, 2011, 3:30 p.m., Humanities Theatre, HH
Speaker: Jon Kleinberg, Cornell University
Title: Computational Perspectives on Social Phenomena in On-Line Networks
Abstract: With an increasing amount of social interaction taking place in the digital domain, and often in public on-line settings, we are accumulating enormous amounts of data about phenomena that were once essentially invisible to us: the collective behavior and social interactions of hundreds of millions of people, recorded at unprecedented levels of scale and resolution. Analyzing this data computationally offers new insights into the design of on-line applications, as well as a new perspective on fundamental questions in the social sciences. We discuss how this perspective can be applied to questions involving network structure and the dynamics of interaction among individuals, including analysis of data from the on-line domain as well as mathematical models that seek to abstract some of the underlying phenomena.
Biography: Jon Michael Kleinberg (born October 1971) is an American computer scientist, MacArthur Fellow, Nevanlinna Prize winner, and the Tisch University Professor of Computer Science at Cornell University.Jon Kleinberg was born in 1971 in Boston, Massachusetts. He received a B.S. in computer science from Cornell University in 1993 and a Ph.D., also in computer science, from MIT in 1996. Since 1996 he has been a professor in the Department of Computer Science at Cornell, as well as a visiting scientist at IBM's Almaden Research Center. His work has been supported by an NSF Career Award, an ONR Young Investigator Award, a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, a Packard Foundation Fellowship, a Sloan Foundation Fellowship, and grants from Google, Yahoo!, and the NSF. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Kleinberg is best known for his work on networks and particularly for his HITS algorithm, developed while he was at IBM. HITS is an algorithm for web search that builds on the eigenvector-based methods used in algorithms and served as the full scale model for PageRank by recognizing that web pages or sites should not only be considered important (as in PageRank) if they are linked to by many others, but also if they link to many others. Search engines themselves are examples of sites that are important because they link to many others. Kleinberg realized that this generalization implies two different classes of important web pages, which he called "hubs" and "authorities". The HITS algorithm is an algorithm for automatically identifying the leading hubs and authorities in a network of hyperlinked pages. Kleinberg is also known for his work on algorithmic aspects of the small world experiment. He was one of the first to realize that Stanley Milgram's famous "six degrees" letter-passing experiment implied not only that there are short paths between individuals in social networks but also that people seem to be good at finding those paths, an apparently simple observation that turns out to have profound implications for the structure of the networks in question. Kleinberg has written numerous papers and articles as well as a textbook on computer algorithms, Algorithm Design, co-authored with Éva Tardos. Among other honors, he received a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship also known as the "genius grant" in 2005 and the Nevanlinna Prize in 2006, an award that is given out once every four years along with the Fields Medal as the premier distinction in Computational Mathematics. His new book is entitled "Networks, Crowds, and Markets: Reasoning About a Highly Connected World" and will be published by Cambridge University Press in 2010.

David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science
University of Waterloo
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2010-2011 Distinguished Lecture Series

Hosted by the David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science