- talks - lists.cs.princeton.edu

James Gordon Stewart will present his FPO Thursday, 4/16/2015 at 9AM in 401
by Nicki Gotsis 09 Apr '15

09 Apr '15

James Gordon Stewart will present his FPO Thursday, 4/16/2015 at 9AM, 401 Computer Science Building. The members of his committee are: Andrew Appel (advisor), readers: David Walker, and Zhong Shao (Yale) and nonreaders: David August and Sharad Malik (ELE). A copy of his thesis "Verified Separate Compilation for C" is available in rm 310. Everyone is invited to attend his talk.

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Yossi Gilad talk, Tuesday April 7, 11am
by Nicole E. Wagenblast 07 Apr '15

07 Apr '15

Yossi Gilad, IBM Tuesday, April 6, 11am Friend Center, 108 CDN-on-Demand: Fighting DoS with Untrusted Clouds We present the design and implementation of CDN-on-Demand, a system that provides low-cost protection for websites against DDoS attacks, without impacting on website operation and expenses under normal operating conditions. CDN-on-Demand is a software package rather than a service, it migrates websites to a scalable infrastructure in case of high-load and serves clients from proxies that it automatically deploys on multiple low cost cloud services. In contrast to current CDN services, CDN-on-Demand protects against rogue service providers and compromised proxies by introducing an object security mechanism; this eliminates the need to trust the host with private keys or certificates. Furthermore, CDN-on-Demand protects the website against economic and degradation of service attacks that exploit the automatic scaling mechanism; we show that popular services are vulnerable to such attacks. We provide an open-source implementation of CDN-on-Demand, which we use to evaluate each component as well as the integrated CDN-on-Demand system. Joint work with Amir Herzberg and Michael Sudkovich

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Keller Center Leadership Keynotes: Mobile Data and Pricing- Paul Jacobs and Dennis Strigl 4/9/15 (RSVP required by 4/7 to attend)
by Scott Karlin 07 Apr '15

07 Apr '15

Please note: RSVP to bjarvie(a)princeton.edu by Tuesday 4/ 7 is required to attend this event. Keller Center Leadership Keynots: Mobile Data and Pricing Thursday, April 9, 2015, 9:15am-11:45am Friend Center Convocation Room Mobile Innovation: Delivering Increased Capacity and Efficiency Paul Jacobs Executive Chairman and former CEO of Qualcomm Data Pricing Evolution: A Carrier's Perspective Dennis Strigl Former CEO of Verizon Wireless and COO of Verizon RSVP Required to Attend send email by April 7 to bjarvie(a)princeton.edu

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April 13 - Software-Defined Networking at the National Security Agency (Bryan Larish, NSA)
by Nick Feamster 06 Apr '15

06 Apr '15

Software-Defined Networking at the National Security Agency Byan Larish, National Security Agency. CS/CITP SPECIAL EVENT Date: Monday, April 13, 2015 Location: 105 Computer Science Time: 4:30 pm This event is co-sponsored by CITP and the Department of Computer Science. The IT department at the NSA is similar to many other large organizations; budgets and manpower are declining, while at the same time demands for higher reliability and additional services are increasing. Because of these factors, these IT departments must change how they do business when building their IT infrastructure. Open networking and software defined networking (SDN) are two promising technology trends that the NSA is applying to resolve these challenges in different areas of its network architecture. This talk will detail that element’s open networking and SDN initiatives in three areas: an OpenStack data center; a data center that hosts a storage cloud; and the campus area networks at branch offices. The talk will describe the motivation for each initiative, the architectures and solutions considered, and early-on lessons learned from development and deployment. Bio: Bryan Larish is the Technical Director for Enterprise Connectivity & Specialized IT Services at the National Security Agency (NSA), and he is responsible for setting the technical direction of the development and operation of NSA’s global network infrastructure. Prior to joining NSA, Bryan worked in the Chief Engineer’s office at the U.S. Navy’s Space and Naval Warfare Systems Command (SPAWAR). In that role, he was responsible for implementing engineering techniques used to manage, architect, and plan the U.S. Navy’s communications/IT systems portfolio. Bryan’s other experience includes Technical Director for Navy engineering policy and various engineering roles at SPAWAR. Bryan holds a Ph.D. and M.S. in electrical and computer engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology and a B.S.E. in electrical engineering from Arizona State University.

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Colloquium Speaker Mark Zhandry, Today, 12:30pm
by Nicole E. Wagenblast 06 Apr '15

06 Apr '15

Colloquium Speaker Mark Zhandry, Stanford University Monday, April 6, 12:30pm Computer Science 105 The Surprising Power of Modern Cryptography Modern cryptography is surprisingly powerful, yielding capabilities such as secure multiparty computation, computing on encrypted data, and hiding secrets in code. Currently, however, some of these advanced abilities are still too inefficient for practical use. The goals of my research are two-fold: (1) continue expanding the capabilities of cryptography and its applications, and (2) bring these advanced capabilities closer to practice. In this talk, I will focus on a particular contribution that addresses both of these objectives: establishing a shared secret key among a group of participants with only a single round of interaction. The first such protocols required a setup phase, where a central authority determines the parameters for the scheme; unfortunately, this authority can learn the shared group key and must therefore be trusted. I will discuss how to remove this setup phase using program obfuscation, though the scheme is very impractical due to the inefficiencies of current obfuscators. I will then describe a new technical tool called witness pseudorandom functions and show how to use this tool in place of obfuscation, resulting in a significantly more efficient protocol. Mark Zhandry is a Ph.D. candidate at Stanford University advised by Dan Boneh. He studies cryptography and computer science theory and is currently focusing on developing new cutting-edge cryptographic capabilities and improving the efficiency of these applications. He is visiting Microsoft Research New England and MIT for the 2014-15 academic year.

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Colloquium Speaker Mark Zhandry, Mon April 6, 12:30pm
by Nicole E. Wagenblast 05 Apr '15

05 Apr '15

Colloquium Speaker Mark Zhandry, Stanford University Monday, April 6, 12:30pm Computer Science 105 The Surprising Power of Modern Cryptography Modern cryptography is surprisingly powerful, yielding capabilities such as secure multiparty computation, computing on encrypted data, and hiding secrets in code. Currently, however, some of these advanced abilities are still too inefficient for practical use. The goals of my research are two-fold: (1) continue expanding the capabilities of cryptography and its applications, and (2) bring these advanced capabilities closer to practice. In this talk, I will focus on a particular contribution that addresses both of these objectives: establishing a shared secret key among a group of participants with only a single round of interaction. The first such protocols required a setup phase, where a central authority determines the parameters for the scheme; unfortunately, this authority can learn the shared group key and must therefore be trusted. I will discuss how to remove this setup phase using program obfuscation, though the scheme is very impractical due to the inefficiencies of current obfuscators. I will then describe a new technical tool called witness pseudorandom functions and show how to use this tool in place of obfuscation, resulting in a significantly more efficient protocol. Mark Zhandry is a Ph.D. candidate at Stanford University advised by Dan Boneh. He studies cryptography and computer science theory and is currently focusing on developing new cutting-edge cryptographic capabilities and improving the efficiency of these applications. He is visiting Microsoft Research New England and MIT for the 2014-15 academic year.

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Colloquium Speaker Mark Zhandry, Mon April 6, 12:30pm
by Nicole E. Wagenblast 31 Mar '15

31 Mar '15

Colloquium Speaker Mark Zhandry, Stanford University Monday, April 6, 12:30pm Computer Science 105 The Surprising Power of Modern Cryptography Modern cryptography is surprisingly powerful, yielding capabilities such as secure multiparty computation, computing on encrypted data, and hiding secrets in code. Currently, however, some of these advanced abilities are still too inefficient for practical use. The goals of my research are two-fold: (1) continue expanding the capabilities of cryptography and its applications, and (2) bring these advanced capabilities closer to practice. In this talk, I will focus on a particular contribution that addresses both of these objectives: establishing a shared secret key among a group of participants with only a single round of interaction. The first such protocols required a setup phase, where a central authority determines the parameters for the scheme; unfortunately, this authority can learn the shared group key and must therefore be trusted. I will discuss how to remove this setup phase using program obfuscation, though the scheme is very impractical due to the inefficiencies of current obfuscators. I will then describe a new technical tool called witness pseudorandom functions and show how to use this tool in place of obfuscation, resulting in a significantly more efficient protocol. Mark Zhandry is a Ph.D. candidate at Stanford University advised by Dan Boneh. He studies cryptography and computer science theory and is currently focusing on developing new cutting-edge cryptographic capabilities and improving the efficiency of these applications. He is visiting Microsoft Research New England and MIT for the 2014-15 academic year.

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colloquium speaker Zachary Kincaid Wed, Today, 12:30pm
by Nicole E. Wagenblast 25 Mar '15

25 Mar '15

Colloquium Speaker Zachary Kincaid, University of Toronto Wednesday, March 25, 12:30pm Computer Science 105 Parallel Proofs for Parallel Programs Today's software systems are large and complex - beyond the scope of comprehension of any one person. My research is motivated by the question of how machines can help humans better understand their code and aid the construction of reliable, secure, and efficient systems. Multi-threading is a long-standing obstacle to reasoning by both humans and machines. Conventionally, this obstacle is met by developing clever ways to reason about the program as if it were executing sequentially. In this talk, I will argue that we should embrace parallelism, not hide from it. I will discuss new *fundamentally parallel* foundations for automated program analysis, which allow the parallelism present in a program to be explicitly maintained and enable tractable automated reasoning and succinct proofs. In other words: my talk will be on parallel proofs for parallel programs. Zachary Kincaid is a PhD candidate in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Toronto. He is interested in developing automated reasoning techniques to facilitate the construction of high-performance, dependable software. Zak's research focuses on static analysis and program verification, with a particular emphasis on multi-threaded programs. He has also made contributions to theorem proving and program synthesis.

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colloquium speaker Zachary Kincaid Wed, March 25, 12:30pm
by Nicole E. Wagenblast 24 Mar '15

24 Mar '15

Colloquium Speaker Zachary Kincaid, University of Toronto Wednesday, March 25, 12:30pm Computer Science 105 Parallel Proofs for Parallel Programs Today's software systems are large and complex - beyond the scope of comprehension of any one person. My research is motivated by the question of how machines can help humans better understand their code and aid the construction of reliable, secure, and efficient systems. Multi-threading is a long-standing obstacle to reasoning by both humans and machines. Conventionally, this obstacle is met by developing clever ways to reason about the program as if it were executing sequentially. In this talk, I will argue that we should embrace parallelism, not hide from it. I will discuss new *fundamentally parallel* foundations for automated program analysis, which allow the parallelism present in a program to be explicitly maintained and enable tractable automated reasoning and succinct proofs. In other words: my talk will be on parallel proofs for parallel programs. Zachary Kincaid is a PhD candidate in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Toronto. He is interested in developing automated reasoning techniques to facilitate the construction of high-performance, dependable software. Zak's research focuses on static analysis and program verification, with a particular emphasis on multi-threaded programs. He has also made contributions to theorem proving and program synthesis.

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Colloquium Speaker Aaron Sidford, Today, 4:30pm
by Nicole E. Wagenblast 23 Mar '15

23 Mar '15

Colloquium Speaker Aaron Sidford, Massachusetts Institute of Technology Monday, March 23, 4:30pm Computer Science Iterative Methods, Combinatorial Optimization, and Linear Programming Beyond the Universal Barrier Over the past decade there has been a revolution in the field of algorithmic graph theory. Using techniques from disparate areas of computer science, ranging from numerical analysis, to data structures, to continuous optimization, there have been numerous breakthroughs in improving the running time for solving classic problems in combinatorial optimization. In this talk I will discuss my work in this area and show how it has led to both improved running times for solving fundamental problems in combinatorial optimization and the creation of improved iterative methods for solving classic continuous optimization problems. After briefly discussing this high-level research program, I will provide a more detailed illustration through my recent work on linear programming and the maximum flow problem. In particular, I will present a new algorithm for solving linear programs that improves upon the convergence rate of previous state-of-the-art methods. Where the convergence rate of the previous efficient methods depended on the larger of the number of variables and the number of constraints ours depends on the smaller. Our algorithm approximately matches the convergence rate of the "universal barrier" of Nesterov and Nemirovskii while greatly decreasing the iteration costs. Furthermore, I will discuss how our method outperforms the universal barrier in particular cases, yielding the fastest known running times for solving dense instances of the directed maximum flow problem) and more generally, minimum cost flow. This talk will assume no previous experience with linear programming algorithms, convex optimization, or graph theory. Aaron Sidford is a PhD student in the electrical engineering and computer science department at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, advised by Jonathan Kelner. His research interests lie broadly in the theory of computation and the design of efficient algorithms. He is particularly interested in problems at the intersection of combinatorial optimization and numerical analysis. Since he began his PhD in 2011, his research has focused on improving the running time for solving classic problems in algorithmic graph theory while using and improving tools ranging from convex analysis to data structures to spectral graph theory.

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