- talks - lists.cs.princeton.edu

time and room change for Friday talk on network measurement (now 3pm in CS 402)
by Jennifer Rexford 21 Sep '09

21 Sep '09

*** NOTE: ROOM AND TIME HAVE CHANGED *** Speaker: Professor Z. Morley Mao, U. Michigan Title: Intelligent Network Measurement for Diagnosis and Attack Defenses Date/time: 3:00-4:00pm on Friday September 25 Location: CS 402 Please let me know if you would like to meet with Professor Mao during her visit... Abstract: Measurement is a powerful and indispensable technique for discovering the state of the network and for assisting operational management of networked systems to ensure good performance and security properties. Designing the effective measurement technique depending on the problem context is especially challenging for Internet-based systems due to issues such as a lack of access, overhead concerns, and measurement noise. In this talk, I present our experience in designing and deploying measurement systems for several important applications, e.g., diagnosing routing performance disruptions and prefix hijacking attacks from end systems, uncovering spammer behavior through campaign-based analysis, and detecting network neutrality violation in backbone ISPs. I will summarize lessons learned and discuss our future work on applying intelligent measurement to relatively new application domains such as data cellular networks and data center systems. Z. Morley Mao is an assistant professor of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Michigan. Morley received most of her degrees (Ph.D., M.S., and B.S.) from the University of California at Berkeley. She is a recipient of the NSF CAREER award in 2007, an IBM Faculty Award in 2008, Sloan Research Fellowship in 2009, and was recently named the Morris Wellman Faculty Development Professor at Michigan. Her research interests encompass network measurements, routing protocols, distributed systems, and network security.

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4:30pm Wed Oct 7 colloquium on Internet privacy
by Jennifer Rexford 20 Sep '09

20 Sep '09

Speaker: Balachander Krishnamurthy, AT&T Labs--Research Title: On the Internet Someone Knows You Are a Dog Date/time: 4:30pm Wed Oct 7 (tea at 4pm in tea room) Location: CS 105 (small auditorium) Abstract: We have been examining the leakage of privacy on the Internet: how information related to individual users is aggregated as they browse seemingly unrelated Web sites. Thousands of Web sites across numerous categories, countries, and languages are studied to generate a "privacy footprint". I report on a longitudal study consisting of multiple snapshots of examination of such diffusion over five years. I'll talk about the technical ways by which third-party aggregators acquire data, the depth of user-related information acquired, the techniques for protecting privacy diffusion and limitations of such techniques. Such increasing aggregation of user-related data is carried out by a steadily decreasing number of entities: a handful are able to track users' movement across almost all of the popular web sites. Virtually all the protection techniques have significant limitations highlighting the seriousness of the problem and the need for alternate solutions. I will also talk about a recent discovery of large-scale leakage of personally identifiable information (PII) via Online Social Networks (OSN). Third-parties can link PII with user actions both within OSN sites and elsewhere on non-OSN sites. http://www.cs.princeton.edu/events/event/219

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Colloquium-Tuesday, September 22
by Michele J. Brown 18 Sep '09

18 Sep '09

*Distinguished Speaker Ivan Sutherland*, Portland State University * *Small Auditorium (105) Computer Science Building 4:30 pm *"Fleet, Infinity & Marina"* This talk describes a radically different architecture for computing called Fleet. Fleet accepts the limitations to computing imposed by physics: moving data costs more energy, more delay, and more chip area than the arithmetic and logical operations ordinarily called "computing." Fleet puts the programmer firmly in charge of the most costly resource: communication. Fleet treats arithmetic and logical operations as side effects of where the programmer sends data. Fleet achieves high performance through fine grain concurrency. Everything Fleet does is concurrent at the lowest level; programmers who wish sequential behavior must program it explicitly. Fleet presents a stark contrast to today's multi-core machines in which programmers seek concurrency in an inherently sequential environment. The Fleet architecture uses a uniform switch fabric to simplify chip design. A few thousand identical copies of a configurable interface will connect a thousand or so repetitions of basic arithmetic, logical, input-output, and storage units to the switch fabric. The uniform switch fabric and the identical configurable interfaces will simplify many of the hard parts of designing the computing elements themselves. Both software and FPGA simulators of a Fleet system are available at UC Berkeley. Berkeley students have written a variety of Fleet programs; their work helped to define what the configurable interface between computing and communication must do. A simple compiler configures both source and destination to provide flow-controlled communication. We expect work on a higher-level language for Fleet to appear soon as a Berkeley PhD dissertation. Last year we built a 90 nanometer TSMC test chip, called Infinity, at Sun Microsystems. Infinity demonstrated the switch fabric running at about 4 GHz. We now have a new test chip, called Marina, also in 90-nanometer TSMC sponsored by Sun. Marina shows correct operation of the configurable switch fabric interface. Together Infinity and Marina give us confidence to build a complete Fleet. We seek participation from sponsors, computer scientists, and hardware designers. *BIO:* Ivan Sutherland is a Visiting Scientist at Portland State University where he and Marly Roncken have recently established the "Asynchronous Research Center" (ARC). The ARC occupies both physical and intellectual space half way between the Computer Science (CS) and Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) departments at the university. The ARC seeks to free designers from the tyranny of the clock by developing better tools and teaching methods for design of self-timed systems. Prior to moving to Portland, Ivan spent 25 years as a Fellow at Sun Microsystems. A 1959 graduate of Carnegie Tech, Ivan got his PhD at MIT in 1963 and has taught at Harvard, The University of Utah, and Caltech. Ivan is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and the National Academy of Sciences.

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1:30-2:30pm Fri Sep 25 talk on Internet measurement in CS 105
by Jennifer Rexford 14 Sep '09

14 Sep '09

Please let me know if you would like to meet with Professor Mao during her visit... Speaker: Professor Z. Morley Mao, U. Michigan Title: Intelligent Network Measurement for Diagnosis and Attack Defenses Date/time: 1:30-2:30pm on Friday September 25 Location: CS 105 (small auditorium) Abstract: Measurement is a powerful and indispensable technique for discovering the state of the network and for assisting operational management of networked systems to ensure good performance and security properties. Designing the effective measurement technique depending on the problem context is especially challenging for Internet-based systems due to issues such as a lack of access, overhead concerns, and measurement noise. In this talk, I present our experience in designing and deploying measurement systems for several important applications, e.g., diagnosing routing performance disruptions and prefix hijacking attacks from end systems, uncovering spammer behavior through campaign-based analysis, and detecting network neutrality violation in backbone ISPs. I will summarize lessons learned and discuss our future work on applying intelligent measurement to relatively new application domains such as data cellular networks and data center systems. Z. Morley Mao is an assistant professor of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Michigan. Morley received most of her degrees (Ph.D., M.S., and B.S.) from the University of California at Berkeley. She is a recipient of the NSF CAREER award in 2007, an IBM Faculty Award in 2008, Sloan Research Fellowship in 2009, and was recently named the Morris Wellman Faculty Development Professor at Michigan. Her research interests encompass network measurements, routing protocols, distributed systems, and network security.

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D Xiao FPO
by Melissa Lawson 18 Aug '09

18 Aug '09

David Xiao will present his FPO on Monday August 24 at 11AM in Room 402. The members of his committee are: Boaz Barak, advisor; Avi Wigderson, Russell Impagliazzo (IAS), Sanjeev Arora, and Rob Schapire. A copy of his thesis, "New Perspectives on the Complexity of Computational Learning and Other Problems in Theoretical Computer Science", is on display in room 310. Everyone is invited to attend his talk.

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M Jacob FPO
by Melissa Lawson 29 Jul '09

29 Jul '09

Matthias Jacob will present his FPO on Wednesday August 5 at 2:30PM in Room 402. The members of his committee are: Ed Felten, advisor; Vivek Pai and Dan Boneh (Stanford), readers; Jennifer Rexford and Brian Kernighan, nonreaders. A copy of his thesis, "Design and Implementation of Secure Trusted Overlay Networks" is on display in Room 310. Everyone is invited to attend his talk.

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12pm Thu Jul 30, Sharon Goldberg FPO
by Jennifer Rexford 26 Jul '09

26 Jul '09

Sharon Goldberg (ELE) will present her FPO at noon on Thursday July 30 in room 302 in the CS building. Speaker: Sharon Goldberg Title: Towards Securing Interdomain Routing on the Internet Date/time: 12pm Thursday July 30 Place: CS 302 All are welcome to attend.

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W Xu FPO
by Melissa Lawson 24 Jul '09

24 Jul '09

Wen Xu will present her FPO on Thursday July 30 at 2PM in Room 402. The members of her committee are: Jennifer Rexford, advisor; Vivek Pai and Kai Li, readers; Larry Peterson and Andrea LaPaugh, nonreaders. A copy of her thesis, "MIRO: Multi-path Interdomain ROuting", is on display in Room 310. Everyone is invited to attend her talk.

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A Misra FPO
by Melissa Lawson 20 Jul '09

20 Jul '09

Ananya Misra will present her FPO on Monday July 27 at 1PM in Room 402. The members of her committee are: Perry Cook, advisor; Dan Trueman (Music) and Georg Essl (Deutsche Telecom), readers; Szymon Rusinkiewicz and Ken Steiglitz, nonreaders. A copy of her thesis, "TAPESTREA: Techniques and Paradigms for Expressive Synthesis, Transformation, and Re-composition of Environmental Audio", is on display in room 310. Everyone is invited to attend her talk.

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M Hoffman preFPO
by Melissa Lawson 08 Jul '09

08 Jul '09

Matt Hoffman will present his preFPO on Tuesday July 14 at 2PM in Room 402. The members of his committee are: Perry Cook, advisor; David Blei and Ken Steiglitz, readers; Rob Schapire and Adam Finkelstein, nonreaders. Everyone is invited to attend his talk. His abstract follows below. -------------------------------------------- Probabilistic Graphical Models for the Analysis and Synthesis and of Musical Audio Content-based Music Information Retrieval (MIR) systems seek to automatically extract meaningful information from musical audio signals. This thesis applies new and existing generative probabilistic models to several content-based MIR tasks: timbral similarity estimation, semantic annotation and retrieval, and latent source discovery and separation. In order to estimate how similar two songs sound to one another, we employ a Hierarchical Dirichlet Process (HDP) mixture model to discover a shared representation of the distribution of timbres in each song. Comparing songs under this shared representation yields better query-by-example retrieval quality and scalability than previous approaches. To predict what tags are likely to apply to a song (e.g., "rap," "happy," or "driving music"), we develop the Codeword Bernoulli Average (CBA) model, a simple and fast mixture-of-experts model. Despite its simplicity, CBA performs at least as well as state-of-the-art approaches at automatically annotating songs and finding to what songs in a database a given tag most applies. Finally, we extend the HDP to discover the latent sonic sources (e.g. bass drums, guitar chords, etc.) that are present in sets of songs and to allow the isolation or suppression of individual sources. The ability of our Shift-Invariant HDP (SIHDP) to decide how many latent sources are necessary to model the data is particularly valuable in this application, since it is impossible to guess a priori how many sounds will appear in a given song or set of songs. Once they have been fit to data, probabilistic models can also be used to drive the synthesis of new musical audio, both for creative purposes and to qualitatively diagnose what information a model does and does not capture. If our model works on a feature representation of audio, then we need techniques to produce audio characterized by arbitrary feature vectors. In order to address this problem, we develop Feature-Based Synthesis (FBS), a general framework for automatically finding synthesizer parameters that will reproduce arbitrary perceptual features. FBS also allows us to create "non-phonorealistic" renditions of songs that match some but not all of a song's perceptual characteristics. Along similar lines, we can adapt the SIHDP model to create new versions of input audio with arbitrary sample sets, for example, to create a sound file that matches a song as closely as possible by combining spoken text.

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