October 2008 - talks - lists.cs.princeton.edu

T Capra preFPO - time change
by Melissa Lawson 31 Oct '08

31 Oct '08

Tony's pre FPO, schedule for 1PM, will now begin at 1:30 PM. It will still be held ion room 401.

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C Huttenhower FPO
by Melissa Lawson 31 Oct '08

31 Oct '08

Curtis Huttenhower will present his FPO on Thursday November 6 at 10 AM in Lewis Thomas Labs 117 (note location). The members of his committee are: Olga Troyanskaya, advisor; Kai Li and Mona Singh, readers; Hilary Coller and David Botstein, nonreaders. A copy of his thesis, "Analysis of Large Genomic Data Collections", is on display in Room 310. Everyone is invited to attend his talk.

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F Cole preFPO
by Melissa Lawson 29 Oct '08

29 Oct '08

Forrester Cole will present his preFPO on Wednesday November 5 at 10AM in Room 402. The members of his committee are: Adam Finkelstein, advisor; Tom Funkhouser and Doug DeCarlo (Rutgers), readers; Szymon Rusinkiewicz and David Blei, nonreaders. Everyone is invited to attend his talk. His abstract follows below. -------------------------- Line Drawings from 3D Models Line drawing is an economical illustration style that is useful both for quick sketches and detailed drawings. This flexibility stems from the fact that human readers can comprehend even extremely sparse line drawings, if the lines are carefully constructed. A skilled artist can exploit this ability by adding or eliding lines almost at will. Since the visual effect of a drawing changes based on its detail and style, the artist can exercise broad editorial control by including no more and no less than the appropriate amount of detail. The potential for such control and the options for artistic stylization have made line drawings interesting as a method for rendering 3D models. This thesis explores several of the major issues involved in creating line drawings from 3D models, including where on the surface to place lines, when to include or omit lines, how to stylize lines and determine their visibility, and how to do all of the above at interactive frame rates for complex models. Throughout, effort is made to ground the methods in the techniques of human artists, and to describe how the challenges in creating animated line drawings relate to well-understood artistic principles. Applications areas for these techniques include architecture and design, computer animation and games, and information visualization.

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T Capra preFPO
by Melissa Lawson 29 Oct '08

29 Oct '08

Tony Capra will present his preFPO on Monday November 3 at 1PM in Room 401 (note room). The members of his committee are: Mona Singh, advisor; Tom Funkhouser and Olga Troyanskaya, readers; Fred Hughson (MOL) and Chris Floudas (CHE), nonreaders. Everyone is invited to attend his talk. His abstract follows below. --- Predicting functionally important residues in proteins from evolutionary conservation and 3D structure All residues in a protein are not equally important. Some are essential to maintain the proper structure and function of the protein, while others tolerate replacement by different amino acids. Identifying the functionally important sites in a protein is an important step towards characterizing its molecular function and has direct applications to drug design and protein engineering. In this talk, I will describe three projects that substantially improve our understanding of and ability to predict functionally important sites. First, I will present an information theoretic algorithm for predicting functionally important sites using evolutionary conservation. It acheives state-of-the-art performance and is several orders of magnitude faster than other competitive approaches. I will then describe a bioinformatics pipeline we developed to create the first large dataset of specificity determining positions (SDP). This dataset allows us to characterize properties of SDP and demonstrate that existing SDP prediction methods do not perform as well as a simple approach we developed. Last, I will introduce a method that combines our new conservation-based measure with 3D models of protein structures to signficantly improve the identification of ligand-binding sites.

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Talk today 4:00pm - COS 402
by Ginny Hogan 24 Oct '08

24 Oct '08

Manish Vachharajani, University of Colorado - Boulder Title: Visualizing Potential Parallelism in Sequential Programs Abstract: This talk will presents ParaMeter, an interactive program analysis and visualization system for large traces. Using ParaMeter, a software developer can locate and analyze regions of code that may yield to parallelization efforts and to possibly extract performance from multicore hardware. The key contributions in the paper are (1) a method to use interactive visualization of traces to find and exploit parallelism, (2) interactive-speed visualization of large-scale trace dependencies, (3) interactive-speed visualization of code interactions, and (4) a BDD variable ordering for BDD-compressed traces that results in fast visualization, fast analysis, and good compression. ParaMeter's effectiveness is demonstrated by finding and exploiting parallelism in 175.vpr. Measurements of ParaMeter's visualization algorithms show that they are up to seventy-five thousand times faster than prior approaches. Bio: Manish Vachharajani is currently an Assistant Professor at the University of Colorado at Boulder. His research is focused on programming and design of advanced multicore systems ranging from general purpose homogeneous multicores to special purpose compute platforms such as GPUs. Current results from his group range from record-breaking network-processing performance on commodity multicore hardware to substantial speedups of industrial strength numerical weather prediction codes. Manish earned his Ph.D. from Princeton University in 2004.

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S Comandur FPO - time change
by Melissa Lawson 22 Oct '08

22 Oct '08

Seshadhri Comandur's FPO, Friday October 24, will now begin at 1:30 PM instead of 2PM as originally announced. Still in Room 402.

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J Podolak FPO
by Melissa Lawson 20 Oct '08

20 Oct '08

Joshua Podolak will present his FPO on Monday October 27 at 2PM in Room 402. The members of his committee are: Szymon Rusinkiewicz, advisor; Tom Funkhouser and Adam Finkelstein, readers; David Dobkin and Bernard Chazelle, nonreaders. A copy of his thesis, "The Symmetry Transform and Its Applications", is on display in Room 410. Everyone is invited to attend his talk.

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N Vachharajani FPO
by Melissa Lawson 20 Oct '08

20 Oct '08

Neil Vachharajani will present his FPO on Monday October 27 at 9AM in Room 402. The members of his committee are: David August, advisor; Sharad Malik and Scott Mahlke (U Michigan), readers; Andrew Appel and Li-Shiuan Peh, nonreaders. A copy of his thesis, "Intelligent Speculation for Pipelined Multithreading", is on display in Room 310. Everyone is invited to attend his talk.

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Mark Pauly Talk Tomorrow
by Thomas Funkhouser 19 Oct '08

19 Oct '08

Mark Pauly will be giving the PIXL talk tomorrow at noon in CS 402. ################### Title: Symmetry Detection and Structure Discovery for Digital 3D Geometry Abstract: With recent advances in 3D acquisition technology we witness a tremendous growth in the size and complexity of digital 3D models at all scales. We are now capable of digitizing entire cities, reconstruct the intricate 3D structures of human organs, or build accurate spatial representations of complex molecules. One of the key challenges in processing such data is finding and extracting geometric content relevant for a specific application. In this talk I will introduce a computational framework for symmetry detection and structure discovery in digital 3D geometry. The approach is fully automatic and assumes no prior knowledge on the location, size, or shape of the symmetric elements. Based on a statistical analysis of pairwise similarity transformations, our method successfully discovers complex regular structures amidst clutter, noise, and missing geometry. This enables applications in model repair, automated data classification, shape retrieval, reverse engineering, or compression. I will also discuss how symmetry detection and geometric optimization methods can be combined to yield an effective tool for shape design that allows enhancing or de-emphasising symmetries. Bio: Mark Pauly is an assistant professor at the CS department of ETH Zurich. >From August 2003 to March 2005 he was a postdoctoral scholar at Stanford University, where he also held a position as visiting assistant professor during the summer of 2005. He received his Ph.D. degree (with distinction) in 2003 from ETH Zurich and his M.S. degree (with honors) in 1999 from TU Kaiserslautern. His research interests include computer graphics and animation, geometry processing, shape modeling and analysis, and computational geometry. He was recipient of a full-time scholarship of the German National Merit Foundation, received the ETH medal for outstanding dissertation, and was awarded the Eurographics Young Researcher Award in 2006.

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S Comandur FPO
by Melissa Lawson 17 Oct '08

17 Oct '08

Seshadhri Comandur will present his FPO on Friday October 24 at 2PM in Room 402. The members of his committee are: Bernard Chazelle, advisor; Sanjeev Arora and Moses Charikar, readers; Boaz Barak and Ken Steiglitz, nonreaders. A copy of his thesis, "Sublinear Distributed Reconstruction", is on display in Room 310. Everyone is invited to attend his talk.

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