- talks - lists.cs.princeton.edu

Michael Uhlar and Sathya Gunasekar from Facebook, Friday, May 3
by Emily C. Lawrence 29 Apr '19

29 Apr '19

Michael Uhlar and Sathya Gunasekar from Facebook Friday, May 3 at 12:30pm Computer Science - Room 104 (large auditorium) [ https://www.cs.princeton.edu/events/25851 | https://www.cs.princeton.edu/events/25851 ] CacheLib - Unifying & Abstracting HW for caching @ Facebook In order to operate with high efficiency, Facebook’s infrastructure relies on caching in many different backend services. These services place very different demands on their caches, e.g., in terms of working set sizes, access patterns, and throughput requirements. Historically, each service used a different cache implementation, leading to inefficiency, duplicated code and effort. CacheLib is an embedded caching engine, which addresses this requirement with a unified API for building a cache implementation across many HW mediums. CacheLib transparently combines volatile and non-volatile storage in a single caching abstraction. To meet the varied demands, CacheLib successfully provides a flexible, high-performance solution for many different services at Facebook. In this talk, we describe CacheLib’s design, challenges, and several lessons learned.

1 0

Bill Buxton Seminar, Monday April 29, 4:30pm. Friend Convocation Room
by Margaret Martonosi 26 Apr '19

26 Apr '19

Hello all- Dr. Bill Buxton, Principal Researcher at Microsoft, will be on campus Monday April 29. He’s giving a seminar at 4:30pm in the Friend Convocation room and we really hope lots of you will be there. Please forward to students as well, particularly those interested in Graphics, HCI, and Design. thanks, mrm > Buxton-Microsoft Collection On the Importance of History Shaping the Future > Monday, April 29th 4:30pm > Friend Center, Convocation Room > Speaker: Bill Buxton, Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research > Free and open to the public. Registration required. > > https://www.tfaforms.com/4734441 > > History, backed up by current data, tells us that what we perceive as rapid technological change is generally due to a large number of technologies evolving slowly. > > Over the past 45 years I have accumulated a collection of gadgets that captures the history of technological growth. For you, the value may just be nostalgia. However, my hope is this. In this age where the things which we produce create such a strong cultural impact, can we really afford not to take advantage of the learnings of the past hidden in plain sight? > > BIO > A Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research, Bill has had a 40- year involvement in research, practice and commentary around design, innovation and human aspects of technology. Following a 20-year career as a professional musician, he morphed into a researcher and interaction designer, at the University of Toronto, Xerox PARC, Alias Research and SGI Inc. He has been awarded four honourary doctorates, is co-recipient of an Academy Award for Scientific and Technical Achievement, received an ACM/SIGCHI Lifetime Achievement Award, and is a Fellow of the ACM. Bill has published, lectured and consulted widely, and is an Adjunct Professor at the University of Toronto, and a Distinguished Professor of Industrial Design at the Technical University Eindhoven. Other than his family, mountains and rivers are his first love. For more information, see billbuxton.com Margaret Martonosi H. T. Adams '35 Professor of Computer Science. Director, Keller Center for Innovation in Engineering Education Princeton University ■ mrm(a)princeton.edu ■ http://www.princeton.edu/~mrm

1 0

Nora Willett will present her FPO "Tools for Live 2D Animation" on Tuesday, 5/7/2019 at 2pm in CS 402
by Nicki Mahler 24 Apr '19

24 Apr '19

Nora Willett will present her FPO "Tools for Live 2D Animation" on Tuesday, 5/7/2019 at 2pm in CS 402. The members of her committee are as follows: Adam Finkelstein (adviser), Readers: Thomas Funkhouser and Wilmot Li (Adobe Research); Examiners: Szymon Rusinkiewicz, Marshini Chetty, and Adam Finkelstein. A copy of her thesis is available upon request. Everyone is invited to attend her talk. The talk abstract follows below: Live animation of 2D characters is an emerging form of storytelling that has begun to appear on streaming platforms and broadcast TV. Unlike traditional animation, human performers control characters in real time so that they can respond and improvise to live events. Current live animation systems provide a range of animation controls, such as camera input to drive head movements, audio for lip sync, and keyboard shortcuts to trigger discrete pose changes via artwork swaps. However, managing all of these controls during a live performance is challenging. This dissertation presents four tools to assist performers in creating compelling live 2D animation. To create more compelling characters, we propose three tools to control artwork layers’ swaps and deformations. First, we introduce an interactive system that addresses the problem of triggering artwork swaps in live settings. Next, another system transfers poses from an input video to a character, automatically driving new animation through pose data. We also describe a framework that augments the primary motion of a character by adding secondary motion - subtle movement of parts like hair, foliage or cloth that complements and emphasizes the primary motion. To add more details to scene backgrounds, we show a mixed initiative interface which, from a few user-drawn scribbles, extracts repetitive texture elements in an image, and supports animating them.

1 0

Seyed Sobhan Mir Yoosefi will present his General Exam on Thursday, May 2nd, 2019 at 10:45am in CS 401
by Nicki Mahler 24 Apr '19

24 Apr '19

Seyed Sobhan Mir Yoosefi will present his General Exam on May 2nd, 2019 at 10:45am in CS 401. The members of his committee are as follows: Yoram Singer (adviser), Robert Schapire, and Matt Weinberg Everyone is invited to attend his talk, and those faculty wishing to remain for the oral exam following are welcome to do so. His abstract and reading list follow below. Title: Reinforcement Learning with General Constraints Abstract: In some applications of RL, it's not easy to achieve the goal in mind only by designing a scalar reward function. In those tasks, it might be more appropriate to think of both constraints and reward. These constraints might help you to meet some safety criteria, shape the behavior of the agent, or encourage exploration and diversity. The previous works done on this topic are mostly limited to a specific type of constraints and they aim to achieve only one of the above. We introduce a new formulation of the problem which handles the general form of constraints; we are given an MDP in which instead of getting a scalar reward for our actions, we receive a vector measurement. Now the goal is to find a policy for which the expected vector measurement lies in a given convex target set. Given access to a planning oracle (scalar with no constraint), We show that we are able to give an algorithm which solves this general problem. Now we can aim for more than one of the goals the previous algorithm were dealing with. For example, we can meet the safety constraints and at the same time encourage exploration and diversity. Reading List: [ https://docs.google.com/document/d/1gyK7CSo3Fh99ABH8O6yNYtPY2U_DHW5wUcQ-iXT… | https://docs.google.com/document/d/1gyK7CSo3Fh99ABH8O6yNYtPY2U_DHW5wUcQ-iXT… ] Text Books: * Sutton, Richard S., and Andrew G. Barto. Reinforcement learning: An introduction . MIT press, 2018. * Chapters: 2-10,13 * Shalev-Shwartz, Shai, and Shai Ben-David. Understanding machine learning: From theory to algorithms . Cambridge university press, 2014. * Chapters: 2-6, 9, 10, 12, 14 Papers: * Syed, Umar, and Robert E. Schapire. "A game-theoretic approach to apprenticeship learning." Advances in neural information processing systems . 2008. * Blackwell, David. "An analog of the minimax theorem for vector payoffs." Pacific Journal of Mathematics 6.1 (1956): 1-8. * Abernethy, Jacob, Peter L. Bartlett, and Elad Hazan. "Blackwell approachability and no-regret learning are equivalent." Proceedings of the 24th Annual Conference on Learning Theory . 2011. * Hazan, E., Kakade, S. M., Singh, K., & Van Soest, A. (2018). Provably efficient maximum entropy exploration. arXiv preprint arXiv:1812.02690 . * Le, Hoang M., Cameron Voloshin, and Yisong Yue. "Batch Policy Learning under Constraints." arXiv preprint arXiv:1903.08738 (2019). * C. Tessler, D. J. Mankowitz, and S. Mannor. Reward constrained policy optimization. arXiv preprint arXiv:1805.11074 , 2018. * Agrawal, Shipra, and Nikhil R. Devanur. "Bandits with concave rewards and convex knapsacks." Proceedings of the fifteenth ACM conference on Economics and computation . ACM, 2014. * Mannor, Shie, and John N. Tsitsiklis. "Online learning with constraints." International Conference on Computational Learning Theory . Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg, 2006. * Abernethy, Jacob D., and Jun-Kun Wang. "On frank-wolfe and equilibrium computation." Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems . 2017.

1 0

Linguang Zhang will present his FPO, "Learning and Deploying Local Features" on Monday, 5/6/2019 at 1pm in CS 402.
by Nicki Mahler 23 Apr '19

23 Apr '19

Linguang Zhang will present his FPO, "Learning and Deploying Local Features" on Monday, 5/6/2019 at 1pm in CS 402. The members of his committee are as follows: Szymon Rusinkiewicz (adviser); Readers: Thomas Funkhouser and Olga Russakovsky; Nonreaders: Adam Finkelstein and Jia Deng. A copy of his thesis is available upon request. Everyone is invited to attend his talk. The talk abstract follows below: Many computer vision applications including image matching, image-based reconstruction and localization rely on extracting and matching robust local features. A typical local feature pipeline first detects repeatable keypoints in the image (i.e., keypoint detector), and then computes a short vector to uniquely describe each keypoint (i.e., feature descriptor). Both the keypoint detector and the feature descriptor are conventionally hand-crafted based on what is intuitive to the designer. For example, corners or blobs are popular choices of keypoints, and the image gradient is a useful clue for descriptors. However, it is often dicult to define these principles to accommodate various applications. In this thesis, we study data-driven approaches which can more easily tailor the local feature pipeline for target applications. We start with a mobile robotics application that leverages local features extracted from ground texture images to achieve high-precision global localization. The second part of the thesis addresses the problem that existing keypoint detectors that are optimized for natural images su↵er from sub-optimal performance on texture images. We therefore learn a keypoint detector specifically for each type of texture using a deep neural network. Our detector automatically learns to identify keypoints that are distinctive in the target texture rather than relying on a set of pre-defined rules. Finally, we focus on a non-parametric approach for learning feature descriptors. Many well-performing local feature descriptors are trained using a triplet loss that includes a tunable margin, which limits its ability to generalize to other types of data and problems. We propose to replace the hard margin with a soft margin that self-tunes as learning progresses. To summarize, we first demonstrate through a novel visual-based localization system where a customized local feature pipeline is critical. Then, we tackle both the keypoint detector and the feature descriptor with generalizable data-driven approaches.

1 0

Microsoft's Bill Buxton speaking Monday, April 29
by Emily Lawrence 23 Apr '19

23 Apr '19

Bill Buxton, Principal Research at Microsoft, will be talking about creativity, innovation and design, especially design research and technology. Monday, April 29th at 4:30pm in the Friend Center Convocation Room. Open to the public. RSVP: https://www.tfaforms.com/4734441 BIO A Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research, Bill has had a 40- year involvement in research, practice and commentary around design, innovation and human aspects of technology. Following a 20-year career as a professional musician, he morphed into a researcher and interaction designer, at the University of Toronto, Xerox PARC, Alias Research and SGI Inc. He has been awarded four honourary doctorates, is co-recipient of an Academy Award for Scientific and Technical Achievement, received an ACM/SIGCHI Lifetime Achievement Award, and is a Fellow of the ACM. Bill has published, lectured and consulted widely, and is an Adjunct Professor at the University of Toronto, and a Distinguished Professor of Industrial Design at the Technical University Eindhoven. Other than his family, mountains and rivers are his first love. For more information, see billbuxton.com TALK TITLE & ABSTRACT The Buxton-Microsoft Collection: On the Importance of the History of the Past in Shaping the History of the Future History, backed up by current data, tells us that what we perceive as rapid technological change is generally due to a large number of technologies evolving slowly. For example, the recent history of information and telecommunications technologies says that it takes about 20-30 years for a technology, once identified, to reach maturity (defined, for example, as becoming a $1B industry). That says, for example, that anything which is going to become a $1B industry in the next 5 years most likely already has a 15 year history - a history which is generally below the radar, is nevertheless discoverable by those who know how and where to look. Over the past 45 years I have accumulated a collection of gadgets that captures the history of technological growth. For you, the value may just be nostalgia. However, my hope is this. In this age where the things which we produce create such a strong cultural impact, can we really afford not to take advantage of the learnings of the past hidden in plain sight? Beth Ellen Jarvie Communication Coordinator Keller Center School of Engineering and Applied Science Princeton University ACE 25 Engineering Quadrangle Princeton, NJ 08544 609-258-1643

1 0

Yixin Sun will present her Pre FPO, "Enhancing Anonymity Systems under Network and User Dynamics" on April 24, 2019 at 3pm in CS 402
by Nicki Mahler 22 Apr '19

22 Apr '19

Yixin Sun will present her Pre FPO, "Enhancing Anonymity Systems under Network and User Dynamics" on April 24, 2019 at 3pm in CS 402. The members of her committee are as follows: Prateek Mittal (reader), Nick Feamster (reader), Mung Chiang (advisor), Jennifer Rexford (non-reader), Ed Felten (non-reader) Everyone is invited to attend her talk. The talk title and abstract follow below. Title: Enhancing Anonymity Systems under Network and User Dynamics Abstract: Privacy on the Internet is eroding rapidly. Anonymity systems have been designed to protect the identity and privacy of users from untrusted destinations and third parties on the Internet. However, many anonymity systems assume that important system components, such as the network infrastructure and client location, are static. In practice, these components are highly dynamic and exhibit changes over time. In this dissertation, I exploit network and user dynamics to uncover new attacks in anonymity systems, and consequently build defenses to protect user anonymity from such new attacks. First, we present Raptor attacks, that can be launched by Autonomous Systems (ASes) to compromise user anonymity in the Tor network. AS-level adversaries can exploit the asymmetric nature of Internet routing and launch active routing attacks to observe user traffic and deanonymize users via traffic correlation analysis. We successfully demonstrate the attacks in the wild with 95% accuracy rate. Second, we design the Counter-Raptor defense to safeguard Tor against active routing attacks via a new Tor guard relay selection algorithm that incorporates the resilience of relays into consideration. We show that the algorithm successfully improves the security for Tor clients by up to 36% on average (up to 166% for certain clients). Finally, we present Tempest attack that exploits client mobility to compromise anonymity. Using experimental analysis on real-world datasets, we demonstrate that mobility degrades user privacy across a wide range of anonymity systems, including deployed systems such as Tor; path-selection protocols for Tor such as DeNASA and Counter-RAPTOR; and network-layer anonymity protocols for Internet routing such as HORNET.

1 1

Fwd: Rigetti QC Programming workshop: Friday April 19 at 1pm in CS Small Auditorium
by Margaret Martonosi 19 Apr '19

19 Apr '19

QC Programming workshop starting *now* in CS Small Auditorium! Join us! -mrm Margaret Martonosi H. T. Adams '35 Professor of Computer Science. Director, Keller Center for Innovation in Engineering Education Princeton University ■ mrm(a)princeton.edu ■ http://www.princeton.edu/~mrm > Begin forwarded message: > > From: Margaret Martonosi <mrm(a)Princeton.EDU> > Subject: Rigetti QC Programming workshop: Friday April 19 at 1pm in CS Small Auditorium > Date: April 12, 2019 at 7:55:20 AM EDT > To: quantum-list(a)Princeton.EDU > Reply-To: Margaret Martonosi <mrm(a)Princeton.EDU> > > HI All- > > Rigetti will be here next week to give a QC Programming tutorial. CS Small auditorium at 1-3pm on Friday April 19. Be there! (More details below.) > > Margaret Martonosi > H. T. Adams '35 Professor of Computer Science. > Director, Keller Center for Innovation in Engineering Education > Princeton University ■ mrm(a)princeton.edu ■ http://www.princeton.edu/~mrm > > >> Begin forwarded message: >> >> From: Amy Brown <amy(a)rigetti.com> >> Subject: Re: Quantum Computing Workshop at Princeton >> >> >> LEARN HOW TO PROGRAM A QUANTUM COMPUTER >> Learn about quantum computers and how to program them using Rigetti's pyQuil quantum programming language, explained by Amy Brown, a Rigetti Quantum Solutions Engineer. A working knowledge of complex numbers, matrix arithmetic, and programming in Python is all that is required. The workshop will be held on Friday, April 19 at 1pm in CS Small Auditorium. Follow the instructions at this link to get set up with pyQuil, the Forest SDK, and the notebooks that will be used in the workshop: https://github.com/amyfbrown/pyQuil-workshop-notebooks/blob/master/README.md >> >> Looking forward to it, >> Amy >> >> >> Amy Brown, B.S. Physics >> Quantum Solutions Engineer >> amy(a)rigetti.com >> +1 (914) 924-4317 > > > Margaret Martonosi > H. T. Adams '35 Professor of Computer Science. > Director, Keller Center for Innovation in Engineering Education > Princeton University ■ mrm(a)princeton.edu ■ http://www.princeton.edu/~mrm

1 0

Ge Wang gives Evnin Lecture tonight 7pm in Friend 101
by Adam Finkelstein 18 Apr '19

18 Apr '19

Ge Wang, Princeton COS PhD and one of the founding members of the Princeton Laptop Orchestra, is giving the Evnin Lecture tonight 7pm in Friend 101: https://www.princeton.edu/events/2019/evnin-lecture-artful-design-technolog…

1 0

EE Seminar Series: NOW in B205-Vivienne Sze, MIT
by Emily Lawrence 18 Apr '19

18 Apr '19

EE SEMINAR SERIES Speaker: Vivienne Sze, MIT Title: Efficient Computing for AI and Robotics Day: Thursday, April 18, 2019 Time: 4:30pm Room: B205 Engineering Quadrangle Host: Prof. Verma and Prof. Wentzlaff Abstract: Computing near the sensor is preferred over the cloud due to privacy and/or latency concerns for a wide range of applications including robotics/drones, self-driving cars, smart Internet of Things, and portable/wearable electronics. However, at the sensor there are often stringent constraints on energy consumption and cost in addition to the throughput and accuracy requirements of the application. In this talk, we will describe how joint algorithm and hardware design can be used to reduce energy consumption while delivering real-time and robust performance for applications including deep learning, computer vision, autonomous navigation/exploration and video/image processing. We will show how energy-efficient techniques that exploit correlation and sparsity to reduce compute, data movement and storage costs can be applied to various tasks including image classification, depth estimation, super-resolution, localization and mapping. Bio: Vivienne Sze is an Associate Professor at MIT in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department. Her research interests include energy-aware signal processing algorithms, and low-power circuit and system design for portable multimedia applications, including computer vision, deep learning, autonomous navigation, and video process/coding. Prior to joining MIT, she was a Member of Technical Staff in the R&D Center at TI, where she designed low-power algorithms and architectures for video coding. She also represented TI in the JCT-VC committee of ITU-T and ISO/IEC standards body during the development of High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC), which received a Primetime Engineering Emmy Award. She is a co-editor of the book entitled "High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC): Algorithms and Architectures" (Springer, 2014). Prof. Sze received the B.A.Sc. degree from the University of Toronto in 2004, and the S.M. and Ph.D. degree from MIT in 2006 and 2010, respectively. In 2011, she received the Jin-Au Kong Outstanding Doctoral Thesis Prize in Electrical Engineering at MIT. She is a recipient of the 2018 Facebook Faculty Award, the 2017 Qualcomm Faculty Award, the 2016 Google Faculty Research Award, the 2016 AFOSR Young Investigator Research Program (YIP) Award, the 2016 3M Non-Tenured Faculty Award, the 2014 DARPA Young Faculty Award, the 2007 DAC/ISSCC Student Design Contest Award, and a co-recipient of the 2017 CICC Outstanding Invited Paper Award, the 2016 IEEE Micro Top Picks Award and the 2008 A-SSCC Outstanding Design Award. This seminar is supported with funds from the Korhammer Lecture Series

1 0