- talks - lists.cs.princeton.edu

Talk Thomas Wahl, Fri Dec 4- 12:30pm
by Nicole E. Wagenblast 25 Nov '15

25 Nov '15

Thomas Wahl, Northeastern University Friday, December 4, 12:30 - 1:30 PM Computer Science 105 Behavioral Non-Portability in Scientific Numeric Computing The precise semantics of floating-point arithmetic programs depends on the execution platform, including the compiler and the target hardware. Platform dependencies are particularly pronounced for arithmetic-intensive scientific numeric programs and infringe on the highly desirable goal of software portability (which is in fact promised by heterogeneous computing frameworks like OpenCL): the same program run on the same inputs on different platforms can produce different results. So far so bad. Serious doubts on the portability of numeric applications arise when these differences are behavioral, i.e. when they lead to changes in the control flow of a program. In this work I will present an algorithm that takes a numeric procedure and determines an input that is likely to lead to different decisions depending merely on how the arithmetic in the procedure is compiled. Our implementation of the algorithm requires minimal intervention by the user. I will illustrate its operation on examples characteristic of scientific numeric computing, where control flow divergence actually occurs across different execution platforms. Time permitting, I will also sketch how to prove the /absence/ of inputs that may lead to control flow divergence, i.e. how to prove programs /stable/ (in one of the many senses of this word). This is ongoing work. Thomas Wahl is an Assistant Professor at Northeastern University. This is joint work with Yijia Gu, Mahsa Bayati, and Miriam Leeser at Northeastern.

1 0

IEEE SSCS Distinguished Lecture Series at Princeton - Thursday, December 3, 2015 - E-Quad B205
by Nicole E. Wagenblast 25 Nov '15

25 Nov '15

Sent on behalf of Prof. Kaushik Sengupta **Refreshments at 1 pm and a chance to talk with speakers ** cid:image002.png@01D12619.798B8680IEEE SSCS Lehigh/Princeton/Columbia Chapters Present cid:image004.jpg@01D12619.798B8680 Distinguished Lecture Colloquia, December 2015 cid:image005.png@01D12619.798B8680 Speaker: Prof . Jan Van der Spiegel University of Pennsylvania Talk Title : Bio-inspired Polarization Imagers - Making the invisible visible Date: Thursday, December 3, 2015 Time: 1:30 – 2:45 p.m. Location: Princeton University, Department of Electrical Engineering Engineering Quadrangle, Room B205 Olden Street Princeton, NJ 08544 Abstract: Biology provides us with fascinating examples of intelligent, low power, and highly efficient sensory systems. With the advances in CMOS technology, it has become feasible to build microelectronic systems that mimic some of the key features found in biology. This talk will focus on CMOS vision sensors for polarization imaging. We will review briefly the concepts of polarization and how it is used by various species in nature to enhance their vision or to aid with navigation and communication. Inspired by the biology we have explored polarization for a variety of applications to detect features that are hard to see or even invisible to the human eye. More recent results from the literature including the use of polarization imaging for disease detection will be reviewed. Motivated by the potential advantages of polarization imaging, we have developed a CMOS imager that combines the pixel array with micropolarizers and on-chip processing. Details of the design and polarizer optimization will be described. Speaker: Prof . Francesco Svelto, Università di Pavia, Italy Talk Title : On the design of circuits for frequency synthesizers at MM-waves in foto Frankultra scaled CMOS Date: Thursday, December 3, 2015 Time: 3:00 – 4:15 p.m. Location: Princeton University, Department of Electrical Engineering Engineering Quadrangle, Room B205 Olden Street Princeton, NJ 08544 Abstract: Transceivers for wireless communications at millimeter-waves are becoming pervasive in several commercial fields. Taking advantage of a cut-off frequency of hundreds of GHz, CMOS technology is rapidly expanding from Radio Frequency to Millimeter-Waves, thus enabling low-cost compact solutions. The question we raise in this talk is whether scaling is just providing advantages at mm-waves or not. We present experimental data of single devices, comparing 65nm and 32nm nodes in a wide-frequency range. In particular, switches used in VCOs for tank components tuning, MOM and AMOS capacitors, inductors. f T and f MAX increase though slower than in the past, r on *C off , a figure of merit for switches, improves correspondingly. As a consequence, wide-band circuits benefit from scaling to 32nm. As an example, a frequency divider-by-4, based on differential pairs used as dynamic latches, realized in both technology nodes and able to operate up to 108GHz, is discussed. On the contrary, passive components do not improve and eventually degrade their performances. As a consequence, a conventional LC VCO, relying on tank quality factor, is not expected to improve. In this work we discuss a new topology for Voltage Controlled Oscillators, based on inductor splitting, showing low noise and wide tuning range in ultra-scaled nodes. Speaker: Prof. Borivoje Nikolić University of California, Berkeley Talk Title : Resilient, Wide-Voltage-Range RISC-V Processors in 28nm Technologies Borivoje_Nikolic (1)Date: Thursday, December 3, 2015 Time: 4:30 – 5:45 p.m. Location: Princeton University, Department of Electrical Engineering Engineering Quadrangle, Room B205 Olden Street Princeton, NJ 08544 Abstract: This talk presents a design of an energy-efficient microprocessor that implements several techniques for operation in a very wide voltage range. A particular implementation is based on an open Berkeley RISC-V architecture. To enable agile dynamic voltage and frequency scaling, with high energy efficiency the design implements an integrated switched-capacitor DC-DC converter. A custom-designed SRAM-based cache operates in a wide 0.45-1V supply range. Techniques that enable low-voltage SRAM operation include 8T cells, assist techniques and differential read. Architectural resiliency techniques include the use of error correction and dynamic column redundancy. The processor is implemented by using an agile design methodology. Contact Info: Nagi Naganathan, nagisub(a)gmail.com or Kaushik Sengupta, kaushiks(a)princeton.edu

1 0

Yida Wang will present his Pre-FPO on Tuesday, November 24, 2015 at 9am in CS 401
by Nicki Gotsis 17 Nov '15

17 Nov '15

Yida Wang will present his Pre-FPO on Tuesday, November 24, 2015 at 9am in CS 401. The members of his committee are: Kai Li (adviser), Jonathan Cohen (Princeton Neuroscience institute, reader), Nicholas Turk-Browne (Princeton Neuroscience institute, reader), Olga Troyanskaya (non-reader), Sebastian Seung (non-reader). Everyone is invited to attend his talk. The talk title and abstract follow below. Title: Exploring Brain Interactions Using Full Correlation Matrix Analysis Abstract: Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) measures human brain activity by detecting changes associated with blood flow. Neuroscientists have been analyzing fMRI data to study human brain by mostly focusing on the activities of brain regions. This dissertation proposes, designs and implements full correlation matrix analysis (FCMA) to study whole brain interactions in an unbiased way using a compute cluster within a tractable time. Traditional exhaustive full correlation computations would takes years to complete on a modern computer server. In this dissertation, we propose algorithm optimizations and implementation optimizations to speedup by orders of magnitude. In addition, we optimize the most computationally intensive component of FCMA, the voxel selection, on Intel Xeon Phi coprocessors to finish the whole process in seconds. We also adapt FCMA algorithms to the online fashion and build a real-time fMRI system to analyze the interactions of the whole brain interactively to provide the neurofeedback in real time. For offline analysis, our FCMA toolbox finishes a typical brain interaction study in a few minutes using 48 compute nodes; our real-time fMRI system returns a neurofeedback generated by FCMA under 1 second, and updates the voxel selection and the training model in 3 seconds using 48 compute nodes, which meet the real-time fMRI study requirements. We have used the FCMA toolbox to conduct an initial neuroscience study to show the effectiveness of FCMA. When applying FCMA to a simple fMRI dataset in which subjects viewed blocks of faces or scenes, FCMA identifies category-selective brain regions in terms of correlation in medial prefrontal cortex which cannot be found using traditional activity-based analysis approaches.

1 0

Colloquium Speaker Song-Chun Zhu Monday, Nov 16, 12:30pm
by Nicole E. Wagenblast 16 Nov '15

16 Nov '15

Colloquium Speaker Song-Chun Zhu , UCLA Monday, November 16- 12:30pm Computer Science 105 A Cognitive Architecture for Human-Robot Collaborations Based on Spatial, Temporal and Causal And-Or Graphs In this talk, I will present an ongoing effort for developing autonomous robots that can collaborate with humans in real world scenes and tasks. One objective is to explore a cognitive architecture that can embrace modern progresses in vision, cognition, learning, NLP, and cognitive robot using a unified knowledge representation --- the spatial, temporal and causal ang-or graph (STC-AOG). The STC-AOG is a probabilistic, graphical and compositional model that represents stochastic context sensitive grammars for the hierarchical structures in scenes and objects (spatial), in events and actions (temporal), and in the effects of actions on the scenes (causal). In addition, the representation must also consider the theory of mind, i.e the beliefs and intents of others, for collaborations. I will show a few examples of human robot collaborations. Song-Chun Zhu received a Ph.D. degree from Harvard University in 1996. He is currently a professor of Statistics and Computer Science, and director of the Center for Vision, Learning, Cognition and Autonomy at UCLA. His work in computer vision received a number of honors, including the Marr Prize in 2003 for image parsing, the Marr Prize honorary nominations in 1999 for texture modeling and 2007 for object modeling. As a junior faculty he received the Sloan Fellow in Computer Science, NSF Career Award, and ONR Young Investigator Award in 2001. In 2008 he received the Aggarwal prize from the Intl Association of Pattern Recognition for “contributions to a unified foundation for visual pattern conceptualization, modeling, learning, and inference”. He received the Helmholtz Test-of-time prize at 2013. He is a fellow of the IEEE Computer Society since 2011. He is PI of two consecutive ONR MURI projects on Scene/Event Understanding and Commonsense Reasoning respectively. In recent years, he is also interested in situated dialogues and cognitive robots with the support of DARPA MSEE and SIMPLEX projects.

1 1

Colloquium Speaker Song-Chun Zhu Monday, Nov 16, 12:30pm
by Nicole E. Wagenblast 15 Nov '15

15 Nov '15

Colloquium Speaker Song-Chun Zhu , UCLA Monday, November 16- 12:30pm Computer Science 105 A Cognitive Architecture for Human-Robot Collaborations Based on Spatial, Temporal and Causal And-Or Graphs In this talk, I will present an ongoing effort for developing autonomous robots that can collaborate with humans in real world scenes and tasks. One objective is to explore a cognitive architecture that can embrace modern progresses in vision, cognition, learning, NLP, and cognitive robot using a unified knowledge representation --- the spatial, temporal and causal ang-or graph (STC-AOG). The STC-AOG is a probabilistic, graphical and compositional model that represents stochastic context sensitive grammars for the hierarchical structures in scenes and objects (spatial), in events and actions (temporal), and in the effects of actions on the scenes (causal). In addition, the representation must also consider the theory of mind, i.e the beliefs and intents of others, for collaborations. I will show a few examples of human robot collaborations. Song-Chun Zhu received a Ph.D. degree from Harvard University in 1996. He is currently a professor of Statistics and Computer Science, and director of the Center for Vision, Learning, Cognition and Autonomy at UCLA. His work in computer vision received a number of honors, including the Marr Prize in 2003 for image parsing, the Marr Prize honorary nominations in 1999 for texture modeling and 2007 for object modeling. As a junior faculty he received the Sloan Fellow in Computer Science, NSF Career Award, and ONR Young Investigator Award in 2001. In 2008 he received the Aggarwal prize from the Intl Association of Pattern Recognition for “contributions to a unified foundation for visual pattern conceptualization, modeling, learning, and inference”. He received the Helmholtz Test-of-time prize at 2013. He is a fellow of the IEEE Computer Society since 2011. He is PI of two consecutive ONR MURI projects on Scene/Event Understanding and Commonsense Reasoning respectively. In recent years, he is also interested in situated dialogues and cognitive robots with the support of DARPA MSEE and SIMPLEX projects.

1 0

Fwd: EE Seminar - December 1, 2015, 4:30 pm, E-Quad B205 - Muhammad Naveed
by Jennifer Rexford 13 Nov '15

13 Nov '15

> > From: "Lori A. Bailey" <lbailey(a)Princeton.EDU> > Subject: EE Seminar - December 1, 2015, 4:30 pm, E-Quad B205 - Muhammad Naveed > Date: November 13, 2015 at 10:41:48 AM EST > To: ee-seminar(a)Princeton.EDU > Reply-To: "Lori A. Bailey" <lbailey(a)Princeton.EDU> > > > > Speaker: Muhammad Naveed > University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign > Title: Inference Attacks on Property-Preserving Encrypted Databases > Date: December 1, 2015 > Time: 4:30 p.m. > Room: E-Quad, Room B205 > Host: Prof. Prateek Mittal > > Abstract: Many encrypted database (EDB) systems have been proposed in the last few years as cloud computing has grown in popularity and data breaches have increased. The state-of-the-art EDB systems for relational databases can handle SQL queries over encrypted data and are competitive with commercial database systems. These systems, most of which are based on the design of CryptDB (SOSP 2011), achieve these properties by making use of property-preserving encryption schemes such as deterministic (DTE) and order-preserving encryption (OPE). > > In this paper, we study the concrete security provided by such systems. We present a series of attacks that recover the plaintext from DTE- and OPE-encrypted database columns using only the encrypted column and publicly-available auxiliary information. We consider well-known attacks, including frequency analysis and sorting, as well as new attacks based on combinatorial optimization. > > We evaluate these attacks empirically in an electronic medical records (EMR) scenario using real patient data from 200 U.S. hospitals. When the encrypted database is operating in a steady-state where enough encryption layers have been peeled to permit the application to run its queries, our experimental results show that an alarming amount of sensitive information can be recovered. In particular, our attacks correctly recovered certain OPE-encrypted attributes (e.g., age and disease severity) for more than 80% of the patient records from 95% of the hospitals; and certain DTE-encrypted attributes (e.g., sex, race, and mortality risk) for more than 60% of the patient records from more than 60% of the hospitals. > > The paper appeared at ACM CCS 2015 and is available at: http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/senyk/pubs/edb.pdf <http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/senyk/pubs/edb.pdf>. > > Biography: Muhammad Naveed is a fifth (and final) year PhD student in computer science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is currently visiting Prof. Elaine Shi at the Cornell University. He develops provably-secure and practical cryptographic systems for real applications. He also works on systems security and genomics privacy. He is a recipient of the 2015 Google PhD fellowship in Security, the Sohaib and Sara Abbasi fellowship (2011–2016), and CS@Illinois C.W. Gear Outstanding Graduate Student Award. See his homepage www.cryptoonline.com <http://www.cryptoonline.com/> for more details.

1 0

EE Seminar Announcement - David Patterson, UC-Berkeley - November 11, 2015
by Nicole E. Wagenblast 11 Nov '15

11 Nov '15

Hi Res PRI_E_electrical_below_w-shield.jpg “Instruction Sets Want to Be Free: A Case for RISC-V” David Patterson, Professor, Electrical Engineering & Computer Science, University of California-Berkeley Wednesday, November 11, 2015 4:30 – 5:45 pm Reception to Follow Friend Center, Convocation Room Abstract: We start by quickly reviewing 50 years of computer architecture to show there is now widespread agreement on instruction set architecture (ISA). Unlike most other fields, despite this harmony there is no open alternative to proprietary offerings from ARM and Intel. Thus, we propose RISC-V (“RISC Five”), which targets Systems on a Chip (SoC). It has: * A small base of <50 classic RISC instructions that run a full open-source software stack. * Opcodes reserved for tailoring an SoC to applications. * Standard instruction extensions optionally included in an SoC. * Incorporated, as an open ISA, community suggestions before extensions are finalized. * A foundation to evolve the RISC-V slowly based solely on technical reasons voted on by members vs. by companies that inflate ISAs rapidly for business as well as technical reasons; ARM and Intel average about 2 new instructions per month. * No restrictions: there is no cost, no paperwork, and anyone can use it. Attendees will get a 2-page reference card (“green card”), which lists all RISC-V extensions, to contrast this minimal ISA with the 3,600-page x86 manual and the 5,400-page ARMv8 manual. We conclude by recapping 10 RISC-V chips built using Agile methods in just 4 years, including how shockingly cheap it is today to manufacture 100 2x2-mm, 28-nm chips. We used Chisel, a new hardware design language that reduces design effort by greatly increasing reuse. Bio: David Patterson joined UC Berkeley nearly 40 years ago. He has been Director of several research labs, Chair of Berkeley’s CS Division, Chair of the Computing Research Association, and President of ACM. His most successful projects are likely Reduced Instruction Set Computers (RISC), Redundant Arrays of Inexpensive Disks (RAID), and Network of Workstations (NOW), all of which helped lead to multi-billion-dollar industries. This research led to many papers, 6 books, and about 35 honors for him and his friends, including election to the National Academy of Engineering, the National Academy of Sciences, and the Silicon Valley Engineering Hall of Fame. He shared the IEEE von Neumann Medal and the NEC C&C Prize with John Hennessy, co-author of two of his books and President of Stanford University. Host: Ruby Lee, Forrest G. Hamrick Professor in Engineering, Professor of Electrical Engineering, Department of Electrical Engineering This seminar is supported with funds from the Korhammer Lecture Series

1 1

MAE Seminar- Allison Okamura, Friday, November 13
by Nicole E. Wagenblast 11 Nov '15

11 Nov '15

Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Seminar Modeling, Planning, and Control for Robot-Assisted Medical Interventions Allison Okamura, Stanford University Friday, November 13, 3:30pm Bowen Hall Room 222 Many medical interventions today are qualitatively and quantitatively limited by human physical and cognitive capabilities. This talk will discuss several robot-assisted intervention techniques that will extend humans’ ability to carry out interventions more accurately and less invasively. First, I will describe the development of minimally invasive systems that deliver therapy by steering needles through deformable tissue and around internal obstacles to reach specified targets. Second, I will review recent results in haptic (touch) feedback for robot-assisted teleoperated surgery, in particular the display of tissue mechanical properties. Finally, I will demonstrate the use of dynamic models of the body to drive novel rehabilitation strategies. All of these systems incorporate one or more key elements of robotic interventions: (1) quantitative descriptions of patient state, (2) the use of models to plan interventions, (3) the design of devices and control systems that connect information to physical action, and (4) the inclusion of human input in a natural way. Allison M. Okamura received the BS degree from the University of California at Berkeley in 1994, and the MS and PhD degrees from Stanford University in 1996 and 2000, respectively, all in mechanical engineering. She is currently a professor in the mechanical engineering department at Stanford University, with a courtesy appointment in Computer Science. She is Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation and an IEEE Fellow. Her academic interests include haptics, teleoperation, virtual and augmented reality, medical robotics, neuromechanics and rehabilitation, prosthetics, and engineering education. Outside academia, she enjoys spending time with her husband and two children, running, and playing ice hockey. For more information about her research, please see the Collaborative Haptics and Robotics in Medicine (CHARM) Laboratory website: http://charm.stanford.edu.

1 0

PL Seminar- Yaron Minsky, Mon Nov 16, 4:30pm
by Nicole E. Wagenblast 10 Nov '15

10 Nov '15

Programming Languages Seminar Yaron Minsky, Jane Street Capital Monday, November 16, 4:30 p.m Computer Science Room 302 Types and abstractions for concurrent programming This talk describes the design of Async, a monadic concurrency library for the OCaml programming language.

1 0

Colloquium Speaker John Leonard, Tues Nov 10- 12:30pm
by Nicole E. Wagenblast 10 Nov '15

10 Nov '15

Colloquium Speaker John Leonard, Massachusetts Institute of Technology Tuesday, November 10, 2015 - 12:30pm Computer Science 105 Mapping, Localization, and Self-Driving Vehicles This talk will discuss the critical role of mapping and localization in the development of self-driving vehicles. After a discussion of some of the recent amazing progress and open technical challenges in the development of self-driving vehicles, we will discuss the past, present and future of Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) in robotics. We will review the history of SLAM research and will discuss some of the major challenges in SLAM, including choosing a map representation, developing algorithms for efficient state estimation, and solving for data association and loop closure. We will also present recent results on object-based mapping in dynamic environments and real-time dense mapping using RGB-D cameras. Joint work with Sudeep Pillai, Tom Whelan, Michael Kaess, John McDonald, Hordur Johannsson, Maurice Fallon, David Rosen, Ross Finman, Paul Huang, Liam Paull, Nick Wang, and Dehann Fourie. John J. Leonard is Samuel C. Collins Professor of Mechanical and Ocean Engineering and Associate Department Head for Research in the MIT Department of Mechanical Engineering. He is also a member of the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL). His research addresses the problems of navigation and mapping for autonomous mobile robots. He holds the degrees of B.S.E.E. in Electrical Engineering and Science from the University of Pennsylvania (1987) and D.Phil. in Engineering Science from the University of Oxford (1994). He was team leader for MIT's DARPA Urban Challenge team, which was one of eleven teams to qualify for the Urban Challenge final event and one of six teams to complete the race. He is the recipient of an NSF Career Award (1998) and the King-Sun Fu Memorial Best Transactions on Robotics Paper Award (2006). He is an IEEE Fellow (2014).

2 4