- talks - lists.cs.princeton.edu

Rob Dockins FPO
by Melissa M. Lawson 17 Aug '12

17 Aug '12

Rob Dockins will present his FPO on Friday August 24 at 10AM in Room 402. The members of his committee are: Andrew Appel, advisor; David Walker and Xavier Leroy (INRIA), readers; David August and Mark Braverman, nonreaders. A copy of his thesis, "Operational Refinement for Compiler Correctness", is available in Room 310. Everyone is invited to attend his talk.

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A Vijayaraghavan FPO
by Melissa M. Lawson 16 Aug '12

16 Aug '12

Aravindan Vijayaraghavan will present his FPO on Thursday August 23 at 2PM in Room 402. The members of his committee are: Moses Charikar, advisor; Sanjeev Arora and Mark Braverman, readers; David Blei and Konstantin Makarychev (Microsoft Research), nonreaders. A copy of his thesis, "Beyond Worst Case Analysis in Approximation Algorithms", is on display in Room 310. Everyone is invited to attend his talk.

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Chong Wang FPO
by Melissa M. Lawson 05 Jul '12

05 Jul '12

Chong Wang will present his FPO on Tuesday July 10 at 11AM in Room 402. The members of his committee are: David Blei, advisor; Rob Schapire and Eric Xing (CMU), readers; Olga Troyanskaya and Andrea LaPaugh, nonreaders. A copy of his thesis, "Hierarchical Bayesian Modeling: Efficient Inference and Applications", is on display in Room 310. Everyone is invited to attend his talk.

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11am Tue May 29 talk on FloodLight OpenFlow controller
by Jennifer Rexford 27 May '12

27 May '12

Speaker: Mike Cohen, BigSwitch Networks Title: The FloodLight OpenFlow Controller Date/time: 11am-noon on Tuesday May 29 Location: room 402 in the CS building Abstract Software-Defined Networking (SDN) and OpenFlow are quickly emerging as powerful trends in the networking industry. By separating the control and data planes, these technologies are accelerating the innovation cycle and creating opportunities for new application research and development. This talk will provide an overview of SDN and OpenFlow and introduce Floodlight, an Apache-licensed OpenFlow controller. Floodlight is driven by a community of developers including Big Switch Networks and was designed to offer a fast, easy-to-use programming environment, a rich set of development tools, an interoperability with a wide array of networking devices. The talk will also discuss other useful SDN development tools and highlight active areas for research and development. Biography of Speaker Mike Cohen is a product manager at Big Switch Networks. He was previously an early engineer on VMware’s hypervisor team and a search infrastructure product manager at Google. Mike holds a B.S.E in Electrical Engineering from Princeton and Masters from Harvard.

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R Kiefer general exam
by Melissa M. Lawson 18 May '12

18 May '12

Rob Kiefer will present his research seminar/general exam on Thursday May 24 at 9AM in Room 402. The members of his committee are: Michael Freedman (advisor), Jen Rexford, and Margaret Martonosi. 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. ------------ Abstract: User devices are being used in increasingly diverse ways and conditions, and are connected to increasingly diverse network resources. Different conditions call for different network resources to be used (e.g., using cellular connectivity when away from Wi-Fi access points), and different resources come with varying restrictions (e.g., monthly data caps) that determine how and when they should be used. In addition, users carrying these devices are increasingly mobile, which means that the best network resource to utilize can change relatively quickly. Today, this decision process is typically done manually by the user, which is both clumsy and suboptimal. In this work, empowered by the new Serval network stack that supports transparent connection migration, we design and prototype a framework that allows users or applications to write network policies against a library containing system conditions such as battery statistics, interface statistics, and ongoing network flow statistics. This framework provides a coherent solution for determining how a device’s network resources should be used on a per-flow basis. The framework continuously evaluates each flow against a policy, which determines what action to take on the flow (e.g., “migrate this flow to Wi-Fi”). Policies are expressed as scripts to allow them to be flexible and expressive. We evaluate several different sample policies on our Android- and Linux-based prototype, including one for resilient connectivity, for minimizing latency, and for maximizing throughput. Reading list: 1. J.H. Saltzer, D.P. Reed and D.D. Clark. End-to-end arguments in system design. 2. A. C. Snoeren and H. Balakrishnan. An end-to-end approach to host mobility. In MOBICOM, Aug. 2000. 3. D. Wischik, C. Raiciu, A. Greenhalgh, and M. Handley. Design, implementation and evaluation of congestion control for multipath TCP. In NSDI, Mar. 2011. 4. Shyamnath Gollakota and Dina Katabi, "ZigZag Decoding: Combating Hidden Terminals in Wireless Networks," ACM SIGCOMM, 2008. 5. H. Soroush, P. Gilbert, N. Banerjee, B. Levine, M. Corner, L. Cox, "Concurrent Wi-Fi for Mobile Users: Analysis and Measurements", in the 7th International Conference on emerging Networking EXperiments and Technologies (CoNEXT'11), Tokyo, Japan, December 2011. 6. Srikanth Kandula, Kate Ching-Ju Lin, Tural Badirkhanli and Dina Katabi. FatVAP: Aggregating AP Backhaul Bandwidth. NSDI 2008. 7. "MultiNet: Connecting to Multiple IEEE 802.11 Networks Using a Single Wireless Card". Ranveer Chandra, Paramvir Bahl and Pradeep Bahl. Proceedings of IEEE Infocom 2004, Hong Kong, March 7-11, 2004. 8. “Juggler: Virtual Networks for Fun and Profit”, Anthony J. Nicholson, Scott Wolchok, Brian D. Noble, IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing, vol. 9 (2010), pp. 31-43. 9. Mobile Apps: It's time to move up to ConDOS. David Chu, Aman Kansal, Jie Liu, Feng Zhao. (HotOS 2011) 10. Erik Nordstrom, David Shue, Prem Gopalan, Rob Kiefer, Matvey Arye, Steven Ko, Jennifer Rexford, and Michael J. Freedman. Serval: An End-Host Stack for Service-Centric Networking. 11. Computer networks: a systems approach. Larry L. Peterson and Bruce S. Davie. (Textbook)

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Fwd: final abstract and reading list
by Melissa M. Lawson 18 May '12

18 May '12

Omri Weinstein will present his research seminar/general exam on Wednesday May 23 at 2PM in Room 402. The members of his committee are: Mark Braverman (advisor), Zeev Dvir, Sanjeev Arora. 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. -------------------------------- Abstract: In the late 1940's Shannon developed his information theory in order to understand the one way data transmission problem. His work revealed the tight connection between communication and information, namely, that a the description length of a one-way message is essentially equivalent to the amount of information it contains. The goal of our ongoing research is to extend this theory, develop the right tools, and understand how information behaves in *interactive* settings, where two (or more) parties must engage in an interactive conversation in order to accomplish some desirable task. Motivated by applications in communication complexity, our main quantity of interest is the Information Complexity of a problem, which informally measures the average amount of information the players need to reveal each other about their inputs in order to solve the problem. We provide the first general technique for proving information lower bounds on two-party communication problems, by showing that the discrepancy lower bound (which applies to randomized communication complexity) also applies to information complexity. More precisely, if the discrepancy of a two-party function $f$ with respect to a distribution $\mu$ is $Disc_\mu f$, then any two party randomized protocol computing $f$ must reveal at least $\Omega(\log (1/Disc_\mu f))$ bits of information to the participants. As a corollary, we obtain that any two-party protocol for computing a random function on $\{0,1\}^n\times\{0,1\}^n$ must reveal $\Omega(n)$ bits of information to the participants. The proof of our main result develops a new simulation procedure that may be of an independent interest. In addition, we prove that the discrepancy of the Greater-Than function is $\Omega(1/\sqrt{n})$, which provides a simplified proof of the $\Omega(\log n)$ lower bound on the communication complexity of this well-studied function and, combined with our main result, proves the tight $\Omega(\log n)$ lower bound on its information complexity. I will try to cover some of our recent results: An optimal zero-error information-cost protocol for the notable AND function, which in turn enables us to compute the *exact* (0.48n) communication complexity of the well studied Disjointness function. Our results contribute to the characterization and understanding of several properties of the information complexity function, and in particular leads to the computability of this measure. The first result is a joint work with Mark Braverman, and the second, with Mark Braverman, Denis Pankratov and Ankit Garg. READING LIST: 1) Information = Amortized Communication [BR]. 2) How to Compress Interactive Communication [BBCR]. 3) Interactive Communication Complexity [Bra]. 4) Strong Direct Product [JPY]. 5) The communication complexity of Gap Hamming Distance [Shrestov]. 6) The communication complexity of Correlation [HJMR]. BOOK: Computational Complexity - A modern approach [Arora Barak].

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R Kiefer general exam
by Melissa M. Lawson 17 May '12

17 May '12

Rob Kiefer will present his research seminar/general exam on Thursday May 24 at 9AM in Room 402. The members of his committee are: Michael Freedman (advisor), Jen Rexford, and Margaret Martonosi. 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. -------------------- Abstract: User devices are being used in increasingly diverse ways and conditions, and are connected to increasingly diverse network resources. Different conditions call for different network resources to be used (e.g., using cellular connectivity when away from Wi-Fi access points), and different resources come with varying restrictions (e.g., monthly data caps) that determine how and when they should be used. In addition, users carrying these devices are increasingly mobile, which means that the best network resource to utilize can change relatively quickly. Today, this decision process is typically done manually by the user, which is both clumsy and suboptimal. In this work, empowered by the new Serval network stack that supports transparent connection migration, we design and prototype a framework that allows users or applications to write network policies against a library containing system conditions such as battery statistics, interface statistics, and ongoing network flow statistics. This framework provides a coherent solution for determining how a device’s network resources should be used on a per-flow basis. The framework continuously evaluates each flow against a policy, which determines what action to take on the flow (e.g., “migrate this flow to Wi-Fi”). Policies are expressed as scripts to allow them to be flexible and expressive. We evaluate several different sample policies on our Android- and Linux-based prototype, including one for resilient connectivity, for minimizing latency, and for maximizing throughput. Reading list: 1. J.H. Saltzer, D.P. Reed and D.D. Clark. End-to-end arguments in system design. 2. A. C. Snoeren and H. Balakrishnan. An end-to-end approach to host mobility. In MOBICOM, Aug. 2000. 3. D. Wischik, C. Raiciu, A. Greenhalgh, and M. Handley. Design, implementation and evaluation of congestion control for multipath TCP. In NSDI, Mar. 2011. 4. Shyamnath Gollakota and Dina Katabi, "ZigZag Decoding: Combating Hidden Terminals in Wireless Networks," ACM SIGCOMM, 2008. 5. H. Soroush, P. Gilbert, N. Banerjee, B. Levine, M. Corner, L. Cox, "Concurrent Wi-Fi for Mobile Users: Analysis and Measurements", in the 7th International Conference on emerging Networking EXperiments and Technologies (CoNEXT'11), Tokyo, Japan, December 2011. 6. Srikanth Kandula, Kate Ching-Ju Lin, Tural Badirkhanli and Dina Katabi. FatVAP: Aggregating AP Backhaul Bandwidth. NSDI 2008. 7. "MultiNet: Connecting to Multiple IEEE 802.11 Networks Using a Single Wireless Card". Ranveer Chandra, Paramvir Bahl and Pradeep Bahl. Proceedings of IEEE Infocom 2004, Hong Kong, March 7-11, 2004. 8. “Juggler: Virtual Networks for Fun and Profit”, Anthony J. Nicholson, Scott Wolchok, Brian D. Noble, IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing, vol. 9 (2010), pp. 31-43. 9. Mobile Apps: It's time to move up to ConDOS. David Chu, Aman Kansal, Jie Liu, Feng Zhao. (HotOS 2011) 10. Erik Nordstrom, David Shue, Prem Gopalan, Rob Kiefer, Matvey Arye, Steven Ko, Jennifer Rexford, and Michael J. Freedman. Serval: An End-Host Stack for Service-Centric Networking. 11. Computer networks: a systems approach. Larry L. Peterson and Bruce S. Davie. (Textbook)

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4:30pm Thu May 17 talk by Carl Gunter (UIUC) on security and privacy in the smart grid
by Jennifer Rexford 17 May '12

17 May '12

Speaker: Carl A. Gunter, University of Illinois Title: Security and Privacy for the Smart Grid Date/time: 4:30pm Thursday May 17 Location: Computer Science 105 (small auditorium) Host: Jennifer Rexford Abstract The electric power grid pre-dates computer and digital networking technologies. As these technologies have progressed the power grid has shifted from electro-mechanical devices toward networked computers as a foundation for intelligence and control. This trend has culminated in the concept of the "Smart Grid", which envisions the use of networked computers to transform the reliability and efficiency of power delivery. While providing many benefits, this change also invites some of the security and privacy threats that have plagued networked computers in other application areas. This talk will look at a selection of research efforts to address these threats in various power grid environments. These include the home environment, where the Smart Grid brings new ideas for monitoring power in homes to allow consumers to participate more directly in energy markets, and the substation environment, where automation improves remote management through high-speed substation networks. Topics will include remote attestation for electric power meters, verifying responses to load shed instructions, using hardware to provide code white-listing, secure multicast IPsec, and meter infrastructure for rural regions based on cognitive radio and white spaces. The talk will also summarize some of the emerging research questions for the Smart Grid that determine likely threats to security and privacy. Biography Carl A. Gunter is a professor in the Computer Science Department of the University of Illinois. He is director of Illinois Security Lab and director of the HHS Strategic Healthcare IT Advanced Research Projects on Security (SHARPS). He has made research contributions in the semantics of programming languages, formal analysis of networks and security, and privacy. His recent work concerns security and privacy issues for the power grid and healthcare information technology. He is the author of more than 140 scientific research publications and patents and a textbook on semantics of programming languages published by MIT Press. He is a founder of Probaris Technologies, a company that provides identity management technologies.

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Colloquium Speaker Sebastian Seung Tomorrow, Tuesday May 15th 4:30pm-Friend 008
by Nicole E. Wagenblast 15 May '12

15 May '12

Mapping connectomes with crowd and machine intelligence Sebastian Seung , Massachusetts Institute of Technology Tuesday, May 15th 4:30pm Friend 008 A connectome is a map of a nervous system in the form of a directed graph in which nodes represent neurons and edges represent synapses. The ability to rapidly map connectomes could arguably revolutionize neuroscience, much as genomics has impacted biology. However, the only connectome known in its entirety is that of the roundworm C. elegans. A mere 7000 connections between 300 neurons took over a dozen years of labor to map in the 1970s and 80s. Fortunately, technological advances are speeding up the mapping of connectomes. New multibeam scanning electron microscopes will soon generate a petabyte of image data from a cubic millimeter of brain tissue every two weeks. From such images, it should be possible to map every connection between neurons in the volume---in principle. Unfortunately, it could take up to a million years for a single person to carry out this feat manually. Clearly, our capacity to acquire "big data" from the brain has far outpaced our ability to analyze it. My lab has been developing computational technologies to deal with this data deluge. We have invented the first machine learning methods based on genuine measures of image segmentation performance, and have applied these to create artificial intelligence (AI) for tracing the "wires" of the brain, the branches of neurons. We have also developed methods of recruiting, training, and aggregating the "wisdom of crowds" to work with the AI. Both machine and crowd intelligence are harnessed by EyeWire, an online community of laypersons who map connectomes by playing a game of coloring neural images.

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P Sun - general exam date and time change
by Melissa M. Lawson 14 May '12

14 May '12

Peng Sun's research seminar/general exam will now be held on THURSDAY May 17, Noon-2PM in Room 402. Please note change of date and time.

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