- talks - lists.cs.princeton.edu

Colloquium Speaker: Asaf Cidon, Friday, March 3 - 12:30pm
by Nicole E. Wagenblast 25 Feb '17

25 Feb '17

Colloquium Speaker Asaf Cidon, Stanford University Friday, March 3 - 12:30pm Computer Science 105 Host: Prof. Kyle Jamieson Reliability and Performance Challenges at Cloud Scale Cloud computing is quickly becoming the backbone for critical societal applications, such as self-driving cars, tele-medicine and Internet of Things. However, the unprecedented scale of cloud infrastructure, with millions of servers spread across hundreds of data centers, introduces new fundamental challenges that were not faced by past computer systems. In my talk, I will present two examples of systems, Copysets and Cliffhanger, which leverage an analytical approach to tackle novel challenges introduced by the scale of the cloud. In Copysets, I present a novel replication framework that reduces the probability of data loss by over 10,000 times for the common scenario of simultaneous server failures. In Cliffhanger, I present a key-value cache that dynamically adapts to changing cloud application workloads, which reduces the number of misses by 35% or more. Both of these systems provide an example for my research approach, of building practical systems that tackle novel unstudied problems introduced by the scale of the cloud. Asaf Cidon is the Vice President, Content Security Services at Barracuda Networks. He currently also leads the cloud caching research project at Stanford. Asaf completed his PhD at Stanford under Mendel Rosenblum and Sachin Katti. His research on cloud and mobile systems was published in NSDI and Sigcomm, and received the Best Student Paper Award in Usenix ATC. Asaf was also the founder and CEO of Sookasa, a cloud storage security startup, which was acquired by Barracuda Networks. His research focuses on how to provide reliability and performance guarantees in large-scale cloud environments, and was adopted by several companies, including Facebook, NetApp, and Chartbeat.

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Colloquium Speaker: Irene Zhang, Thursday, March 2- 12:30pm
by Nicole E. Wagenblast 24 Feb '17

24 Feb '17

Colloquium Speaker Irene Zhang, University of Washington Thursday, March 2, 2017 - 12:30pm Computer Science 105 Host: Jennifer Rexford Towards New Systems for Mobile/Cloud Applications The proliferation of datacenters, smartphones, personal sensing and tracking devices, and home automation products is fundamentally changing the applications we interact with daily. Today's popular user applications are no longer limited to a single desktop computer but now commonly span many mobile devices and cloud servers. As a result, existing systems often do not meet the needs of modern mobile/cloud applications. In this talk, I will present three systems designed to tackle the challenges of mobile/cloud applications: Sapphire, Diamond and TAPIR. These systems represent a first step towards better end-to-end support for mobile/cloud applications in runtime management, data management, and distributed transactional storage. Together, they significantly simplify the development of new mobile/cloud applications. Irene Zhang is a fifth-year PhD student at the University of Washington. She works with Hank Levy and Arvind Krishnamurthy in the Computer Systems Lab. Her current research focuses on systems for large-scale, distributed applications, including distributed runtime systems and transactional storage systems. Before starting her PhD, Irene worked for three years at VMware in the virtual machine monitor group. Irene received her S.B. and M. Eng. in computer science from MIT, where she worked with Frans Kaashoek in the Parallel and Distributed Operating Systems Lab.

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Colloquium Speaker: Dorsa Sadigh, Tuesday, February 28- 4:30pm
by Nicole E. Wagenblast 22 Feb '17

22 Feb '17

MAE, COS, and ELE Colloquium Speaker Dorsa Sadigh , University of California, Berkeley Tuesday, February 28 - 4:30pm Computer Science 105 CS Host: Tom Funkhouser Towards a Theory of Safe and Interactive Autonomy Today’s society is rapidly advancing towards cyber-physical systems (CPS) that interact and collaborate with humans, e.g., semi-autonomous vehicles interacting with drivers and pedestrians, medical robots used in collaboration with doctors, or service robots interacting with their users in smart homes. The safety-critical nature of these systems requires us to provide provably correct guarantees about their performance in interaction with humans. The goal of my research is to enable such human-cyber-physical systems (h-CPS) to be safe and interactive. I aim to develop a formalism for design of algorithms and mathematical models that facilitate correct-by-construction control for safe and interactive autonomy. In this talk, I will first discuss interactive autonomy, where we use algorithmic human-robot interaction to be mindful of the effects of autonomous systems on humans, and further leverage these effects for better safety, efficiency, coordination, and estimation. I will then talk about safe autonomy, where we provide correctness guarantees, while taking into account the uncertainty arising from the environment. Further, I will discuss a diagnosis and repair algorithm for systematic transfer of control to the human in unrealizable settings. While the algorithms and techniques introduced can be applied to many h-CPS applications, in this talk, I will focus on the implications of my work for semi-autonomous driving. Dorsa Sadigh is a Ph.D. candidate in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences department at UC Berkeley. Her research interests lie in the intersection of control theory, formal methods, and human-robot interactions. Specifically, she works on developing a unifying framework for safe and interactive autonomy. Dorsa received her B.S. from Berkeley EECS in 2012. She was awarded the NDSEG and NSF graduate research fellowships in 2013. She was the recipient of the 2016 Leon O. Chua department award and the 2011 Arthur M. Hopkin department award for achievement in the field of nonlinear science, and she received the Google Anita Borg Scholarship in 2016.

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Colloquium Speaker: Wyatt Lloyd, Monday, February 27- 12:30pm
by Nicole E. Wagenblast 21 Feb '17

21 Feb '17

Colloquium Speaker Prof. Wyatt Lloyd, University of Southern California Monday, February 27- 12:30pm Computer Science 105 Low Latency and Strong Guarantees for Scalable Storage Scalable storage systems, where data is sharded across many machines, are necessary to support web services whose data is too large for a single machine to handle. An ideal system would provide the lowest latency—to make the web services built on top of it fast—and the strongest guarantees—to make programming the web service easier. Theoretical results prove that such an ideal system is impossible, but all hope is not lost! Our work has made progress on this problem from both directions: providing stronger guarantees for low latency systems and providing lower latency for systems with strong guarantees. I will cover one of these systems, Rococo, in detail. I will also touch on our recent impossibility result, the SNOW Theorem, and how it guided us in building new systems with latency-optimal read-only transactions. Wyatt Lloyd is a third-year Assistant Professor of Computer Science at the University of Southern California. His research interests include the theory, design, implementation, evaluation, and deployment of large-scale distributed systems. He received his Ph.D. from Princeton University in 2013 for the COPS and Eiger systems, which demonstrated stronger semantics were compatible with low latency for scalable geo-replicated storage. He then spent a year as a Postdoctoral Researcher at Facebook, and he continues to collaborate with its engineers on projects related to media processing, storage, and delivery.

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Colloquium Speaker: Jacob Eisenstein, Today- 12:30pm
by Nicole E. Wagenblast 16 Feb '17

16 Feb '17

Colloquium Speaker Prof. Jacob Eisenstein, Georgia Institute of Technology Thursday, February 16, 12:30pm Computer Science 105 Host: Prof. Elad Hazan Putting language in context: social networks and discourse structures for robust language technology The creation of software that can use and understand natural human language would be a transformative technological advance, enabling computational inference to be brought to bear on the vast stores of knowledge that are encoded only as text. Supervised machine learning approaches have brought this possibility into view, but existing methods rely on annotated datasets that focus overwhelmingly on a narrow set of news texts, while failing to generalize to high-impact application domains such as social media and electronic health records. Human readers and listeners successfully comprehend language under difficult circumstances by relying on various forms of contextual information -- knowing who is speaking, and what they might be trying to say. My research brings this same contextual awareness to automated language processing, using deep learning architectures that are constructed to reflect theoretical ideas from sociolinguistics and discourse semantics. I will describe three applications of this methodology: (1) incorporating sociolinguistic variation into document classification; (2) linking textual references to canonicalized entities; (3) predicting the discourse relations that hold between sentences. I will also briefly describe research that uses computational linguistic analysis to obtain new evidence on sociocultural affinity and influence. Jacob Eisenstein is an Assistant Professor in the School of Interactive Computing at Georgia Tech. He works on statistical natural language processing, focusing on computational sociolinguistics, social media analysis, discourse, and machine learning. He is a recipient of the NSF CAREER Award, a member of the Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR) Young Investigator Program, and was a SICSA Distinguished Visiting Fellow at the University of Edinburgh. His work has also been supported by the National Institutes for Health, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and Google. Jacob was a Postdoctoral researcher at Carnegie Mellon and the University of Illinois. He completed his Ph.D. at MIT in 2008, winning the George M. Sprowls dissertation award. Jacob's research has been featured in the New York Times, National Public Radio, and the BBC. Thanks to his brief appearance in If These Knishes Could Talk, Jacob has a Bacon number of 2.

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Talk on robotics by Siddhartha Srinivasa today at 4:30 in ELE
by Thomas Funkhouser 16 Feb '17

16 Feb '17

Title: *Robotic Manipulation under clutter and uncertainty with and around people* Speaker: Siddhartha Srinivasa, Carnegie Mellon University Series: EE Departmental Seminars Location: E-Quad, B205 Date/Time: Thursday, February 16, 2017 - 4:30pm Abstract: Robots manipulate with super-human speed and dexterity on factory floors. But yet they fail even under moderate amounts of clutter or uncertainty. However, human teleoperators perform remarkable acts of manipulation with the same hardware. My research goal is to bridge the gap between what robotic manipulators can do now and what they are capable of doing. What human operators intuitively possess that robots lack are models of interaction between the manipulator and the world that go beyond pick-and-place. I will describe our work on nonprehensile physics-based manipulation that has produced simple but effective models, integrated with proprioception and perception, that has enabled robots to fearlessly push, pull, and slide objects, and reconfigure clutter that comes in the way of their primary task. But human environments are also filled with humans. Collaborative manipulation is a dance, demanding the sharing of intentions, inferences, and forces between the robot and the human. I will also describe our work on the mathematics of human-robot interaction that has produced a framework for collaboration using Bayesian inference to model the human collaborator, and trajectory optimization to generate fluent collaborative plans. Finally, I will talk about our new initiative on assistive care that focuses on marrying physics, human-robot collaboration, control theory, and rehabilitation engineering to build and deploy caregiving systems. Bio: Siddhartha Srinivasa is the Finmeccanica Associate Professor at The Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. He works on robotic manipulation, with the goal of enabling robots to perform complex manipulation tasks under uncertainty and clutter, with and around people. To this end, he founded and directs the Personal Robotics Lab, and co-directs the Manipulation Lab. He has been a PI on the Quality of Life Technologies NSF ERC, DARPA ARM-S and the CMU CHIMP team on the DARPA DRC. Sidd is also passionate about building end-to-end systems (HERB, ADA, HRP3, CHIMP, Andy, among others) that integrate perception, planning, and control in the real world. Understanding the interplay between system components has helped produce state of the art algorithms for object recognition and pose estimation (MOPED), and dense 3D modeling (CHISEL, now used by Google Project Tango). Sidd received a B.Tech in Mechanical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology Madras in 1999, an MS in 2001 and a PhD in 2005 from the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. He played badminton and tennis for IIT Madras, captained the CMU squash team, and lately runs competitively. http://ee.princeton.edu/events/robotic-manipulation-under-clutter-and-uncer…

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Colloquium Speaker: Jacob Eisenstein, Thursday, February 16- 12:30pm- reminder
by Nicole E. Wagenblast 15 Feb '17

15 Feb '17

Colloquium Speaker Prof. Jacob Eisenstein, Georgia Institute of Technology Thursday, February 16, 12:30pm Computer Science 105 Host: Prof. Elad Hazan Putting language in context: social networks and discourse structures for robust language technology The creation of software that can use and understand natural human language would be a transformative technological advance, enabling computational inference to be brought to bear on the vast stores of knowledge that are encoded only as text. Supervised machine learning approaches have brought this possibility into view, but existing methods rely on annotated datasets that focus overwhelmingly on a narrow set of news texts, while failing to generalize to high-impact application domains such as social media and electronic health records. Human readers and listeners successfully comprehend language under difficult circumstances by relying on various forms of contextual information -- knowing who is speaking, and what they might be trying to say. My research brings this same contextual awareness to automated language processing, using deep learning architectures that are constructed to reflect theoretical ideas from sociolinguistics and discourse semantics. I will describe three applications of this methodology: (1) incorporating sociolinguistic variation into document classification; (2) linking textual references to canonicalized entities; (3) predicting the discourse relations that hold between sentences. I will also briefly describe research that uses computational linguistic analysis to obtain new evidence on sociocultural affinity and influence. Jacob Eisenstein is an Assistant Professor in the School of Interactive Computing at Georgia Tech. He works on statistical natural language processing, focusing on computational sociolinguistics, social media analysis, discourse, and machine learning. He is a recipient of the NSF CAREER Award, a member of the Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR) Young Investigator Program, and was a SICSA Distinguished Visiting Fellow at the University of Edinburgh. His work has also been supported by the National Institutes for Health, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and Google. Jacob was a Postdoctoral researcher at Carnegie Mellon and the University of Illinois. He completed his Ph.D. at MIT in 2008, winning the George M. Sprowls dissertation award. Jacob's research has been featured in the New York Times, National Public Radio, and the BBC. Thanks to his brief appearance in If These Knishes Could Talk, Jacob has a Bacon number of 2.

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Colloquium Speaker: Robert Calderbank, Tues Feb 14, 4:30pm-reminder
by Nicole E. Wagenblast 13 Feb '17

13 Feb '17

Joint talk with CS , PACM , CSML Robert Calderbank, Duke University Tuesday, February 14th- 4:30pm Computer Science 105 In this talk I will explore how data science is changing the way we practice education and research. My title Data+ is that of a ten-week summer research experience offered by the Information Institute at Duke (iiD) in which undergraduates join small project teams, working alongside other teams in a communal environment. They learn how to marshal, analyze, and visualize data, as well as how to communicate with the client sponsoring the project. The 2016 program involved about 70 undergraduate students and 30 graduate student and postdoctoral mentors working on 25 projects. I will describe projects that illuminate different ways in which student centered enquiry can transform university institutions. Our ambition for research is that it impacts society. We used to think of impact as starting with an idea, then developing that idea into a prototype, then turning the prototype into a product, then marketing the product, and so on – it is a long march and the problem with long marches is that most ideas don’t make it. I will describe an example of a different model, one where society is part of the research process. It is a collaboration with Apple on child mental health led by Guillermo Sapiro.

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Colloquium Speaker: Jacob Eisenstein, Thursday, February 16- 12:30pm
by Nicole E. Wagenblast 13 Feb '17

13 Feb '17

Colloquium Speaker Prof. Jacob Eisenstein, Georgia Institute of Technology Thursday, February 16, 12:30pm Computer Science 105 Host: Prof. Elad Hazan Putting language in context: social networks and discourse structures for robust language technology The creation of software that can use and understand natural human language would be a transformative technological advance, enabling computational inference to be brought to bear on the vast stores of knowledge that are encoded only as text. Supervised machine learning approaches have brought this possibility into view, but existing methods rely on annotated datasets that focus overwhelmingly on a narrow set of news texts, while failing to generalize to high-impact application domains such as social media and electronic health records. Human readers and listeners successfully comprehend language under difficult circumstances by relying on various forms of contextual information -- knowing who is speaking, and what they might be trying to say. My research brings this same contextual awareness to automated language processing, using deep learning architectures that are constructed to reflect theoretical ideas from sociolinguistics and discourse semantics. I will describe three applications of this methodology: (1) incorporating sociolinguistic variation into document classification; (2) linking textual references to canonicalized entities; (3) predicting the discourse relations that hold between sentences. I will also briefly describe research that uses computational linguistic analysis to obtain new evidence on sociocultural affinity and influence. Jacob Eisenstein is an Assistant Professor in the School of Interactive Computing at Georgia Tech. He works on statistical natural language processing, focusing on computational sociolinguistics, social media analysis, discourse, and machine learning. He is a recipient of the NSF CAREER Award, a member of the Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR) Young Investigator Program, and was a SICSA Distinguished Visiting Fellow at the University of Edinburgh. His work has also been supported by the National Institutes for Health, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and Google. Jacob was a Postdoctoral researcher at Carnegie Mellon and the University of Illinois. He completed his Ph.D. at MIT in 2008, winning the George M. Sprowls dissertation award. Jacob's research has been featured in the New York Times, National Public Radio, and the BBC. Thanks to his brief appearance in If These Knishes Could Talk, Jacob has a Bacon number of 2.

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Cyber-Physical Systems in Aerospace Engineering
by Scott Karlin 11 Feb '17

11 Feb '17

Cyber-Physical Systems in Aerospace Engineering Eric Feron, Georgia Institute of Technology Monday, February 13, 2017, 3:30pm EQUAD Rm J223 The Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) of today are, in principle, no different from the controlled systems of yesterday. However, what justifies the new name, especially in Aerospace Engineering, is the spectacular increase in available embedded computing power allowing the systems to offer a vastly expanded range of functionalities. In addition, the safety-critical or mission-critical nature of anything that aerospace engineering builds makes it very important that the systems be verified and validated every step of the way from concept to operation. However, on the one hand, software verification and validation (V&V) alone has been reported to burn in excess of 50% of the B787's development budget. On the other hand, the proponents of novel air vehicles, such as Amazon, Google, Zee, or A^3 by Airbus group, challenge the high cost of CPS development and would like to see a "lite" V&V approved by certification agencies. This talk will concentrate on the basic principles of Aerospace CPS development, indicating the traditional way such systems are specified, built, verified, and validated. The author's specific attempts at addressing the high cost of V&V, notably credible embedded software synthesis, will be highlighted along the way, but current needs and existing challenges will be equally emphasized, regardless of who ends up meeting them. The difficult question of certifying advanced autonomy algorithms will be discussed, along with the recent solutions proposed by the engineering and policy research community. Eric Feron received the B.S. degree from École Polytechnique, Palaiseau, France, the M.S. degree from the École Normale Supérieure, Paris, France, and the Ph.D. degree from Stanford University, Stanford, CA. He is the Dutton–Ducoffe Professor of Aerospace Software Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA and a consulting Professor of Applied Mathematics at École Nationale de l’Aviation Civile, Toulouse, France. Prior to that, he was with the faculty of the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, for 12 years. His former research students are distributed throughout academia, government, and industry. He has published three books and several research papers. His research interests include using fundamental concepts of control systems, optimization, and computer science to address important problems in aerospace engineering such as agile control of unmanned aerial vehicles and multi-agent operations in air transportation systems, and aerospace cyber-physical system certification.

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