- talks - lists.cs.princeton.edu

Colloquium Speaker, Sept. 22- Dick Sites
by Nicole E. Wagenblast 16 Sep '10

16 Sep '10

Identifying Dark Latency Richard L. Sites, Google, Inc. Wednesday, September 22, 2010, 4:30 PM Small Small Auditorium CS105 In astronomy and cosmology, dark matter is hypothetical matter that is undetectable by its emitted radiation, but whose presence can be inferred from gravitational effects on visible matter. [Wikipedia] By analogy, dark latency in software is latency that is undetectable directly, but whose presence can be inferred from overall application delays. We bring four tools to bear to observe dark latency in some Google web services, then identify and fix several root causes, in low-level Google libraries and in the TCP stack. The talk makes a case for building and using very low-overhead tools to do bursty tracing of hundreds of thousands of timestamped events per second. A methodology of time-aligning multiple traces (remote procedure call, network, CPU, and lock-contention) across scores of interacting machines is the minimum needed to understand some sources of latency in real web services. Dick Sites is a Senior Staff Engineer at Google, where he has worked for 6 years. He previously worked at Adobe Systems, Digital Equipment Corporation, Hewlett-Packard, Burroughs, and IBM. His accomplishments include co-architecting the DEC Alpha computers, advancing the art of binary translation for computer executables, adding electronic book encryption to Adobe Acrobat, decoding image metadata for Photoshop, and building various computer performance monitoring and tracing tools at the above companies. He also taught Computer Science for four years at UC/San Diego. Most recently he has been working on Unicode text processing and on CPU and network performance analysis at Google. Dr. Sites holds a PhD degree in Computer Science from Stanford and a BS degree in Mathematics from MIT. He also attended the Master's program in Computer Science at University of North Carolina 1969-70. He holds 34 patents and was recently elected to the U.S. National Academy of Engineering.

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U Syed FPO today - time change
by Melissa Lawson 26 Aug '10

26 Aug '10

Umar's FPO has been moved from 2PM to 3PM today. It will still be held in Room 402. --Melissa

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U Syed FPO
by Melissa Lawson 20 Aug '10

20 Aug '10

Umar Syed will present his FPO on Thursday August 26 at 2PM in Room 402. The members of his committee are: Rob Schapire, advisor; David Blei and Warren Powell (ORFE), readers; Yael Niv (PSY) and Michael Littman (Rutgers), nonreaders. A copy of his thesis, "Reinforcement Learning Without Rewards", is available in Room 310. Everyone is invited to attend his talk.

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M Mahmoody Ghidary FPO
by Melissa Lawson 20 Aug '10

20 Aug '10

Mohammad Mahmoody Ghidary will present his FPO on Wednesday August 25 at 2PM in Room 402. The members of his committee are: Boaz Barak, advisor; Bernard Chazelle and Russell Impagliazzo (IAS and UCSD), readers; Sanjeev Arora and Moses Charikar, nonreaders. A copy of his thesis, "Studies in the Efficiency and (versus) Security of Cryptographic Tasks", is on display in Room 310. Everyone is invited to attend his talk.

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S Nikolova FPO
by Melissa Lawson 09 Jul '10

09 Jul '10

Sonya Nikolova will present her FPO on Friday July 16, 2010 in Room 402 at 10AM. The members of her committee are: Perry Cook, advisor; Christiane Fellbaum and Marilyn Tremaine (Rutgers), readers; Adam Finkelstein and Szymon Rusinkiewicz, nonreaders. A copy of her thesis, "Improving Word-Finding in Assistive Communication Tools: A Mixed-Initiative Approach", is on display in Room 310. Everyone is invited to attend her talk.

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[Released] Z Khan preFPO
by Melissa Lawson 07 Jul '10

07 Jul '10

Zia Khan will present his preFPO on Friday, July 23, 2010 at 1:30pm in Carl Ichan Lab (CIL) 200. The members of his committee are: Mona Singh (CS) advisor, Leonid Kruglyak (EEB) advisor, Ben Garcia (MOL) reader, Hillary Coller (MOL), and Saeed Tavazoie (MOL) nonreaders. Everyone is invited to attend his talk. His abstract follows below. Title: Efficient Algorithms for Liquid Chromatography Coupled Mass Spectrometry Based Protein Quantification Abstract: One of the driving aims of studies that conduct comprehensive, quantitative surveys of proteins and across many experimental samples and replicates is the identification of genes and genetic pathways effected in disease and disease treatment. The prevailing experimental tool for such surveys is instrumentation known as liquid chromatography coupled tandem mass spectrometry (LC-MS/MS). LC-MS/MS generates large data sets in the form of thousands to millions of mass spectra in a single experiment. Converting these spectra into interpretable quantitative output that shows changes in amounts of proteins, their peptide fragments, or enrichment and depletion of post translational modifications presents a substantial computational challenge. This thesis describes a new application of space partitioning data structures: a series of algorithms that leverage fast geometry queries supported by these data structures to significantly improve the speed and quality LC-MS/MS data analysis. In addition, this thesis develops a collection methods, implemented in an open-source software system called PVIEW (http://compbio.cs.princeton.edu/pview), that use the output of these algorithms to enable accurate quantification of proteins, protein fragments, and post translational modifications. These methods are evaluated for quantitative quality and computational efficiency on a wide range of experimental data sets spanning several experimental methodologies and source protein samples.

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11am Tue Jun 15 talk on wide-area route control for distributed services
by Jennifer Rexford 14 Jun '10

14 Jun '10

Speaker: Vytautas Valancius, Georgia Tech Title: Wide-Area Route Control for Distributed Services Date/time: 11:00-11:45am, Tuesday June 15 Location: 402 in CS building Abstract: Many distributed services would benefit from control over the flow of traffic to and from their users, to offer better performance and higher reliability at a reasonable cost. Unfortunately, although today's cloud-computing platforms offer elastic computing and bandwidth resources, they do not give services control over wide-area routing. We propose replacing the data center's border router with a Transit Portal (TP) that gives each service the illusion of direct connectivity to upstream ISPs, without requiring each service to deploy hardware, acquire IP address space, or negotiate contracts with ISPs. Our TP prototype supports many layer-two connectivity mechanisms, amortizes memory and message overhead over multiple services, and protects the rest of the Internet from misconfigured and malicious applications. Our implementation extends and synthesizes open-source software components such as the Linux kernel and the Quagga routing daemon. We also implement a management plane based on the GENI control framework and couple this with our four-site TP deployment and Amazon EC2 facilities. Bio: Vytautas Valancius is a Ph.D candidate at Georgia Institute of Technology, advised by professor Nick Feamster. His research interests include interdomain routing, Internet economics, and network virtualization. Prior to his Ph.D studies, Vytautas obtained M.S. in KTH, Sweden and worked in the networking industry as a consultant for 5 years, earning CCIE#14359 certification.

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R Fiebrink preFPO
by Rebecca A. Fiebrink 07 Jun '10

07 Jun '10

Rebecca Fiebrink will present her preFPO on Monday, June 14 at 3:00 PM in room 402. The members of her committee are: Perry Cook, advisor; Dan Morris of Microsoft Research and Dan Trueman, readers; Adam Finkelstein and Ken Steiglitz, nonreaders. Everyone is invited to attend her talk. Her abstract follows below. -------------------------------------------- Title: Real-time Human-Computer Interaction with Supervised Learning Algorithms for Music Composition and Performance Abstract: Supervised learning offers a useful set of algorithmic tools for many problems in computer music composition and performance. Through the use of training examples, these algorithms offer human musicians a means to implicitly specify the relationship between low-level, human-generated control signals (such as gesturally-manipulated sensor outputs or audio captured by a microphone) and the desired computer response (such as a change in synthesis or structural parameters of dynamically-generated audio). In my work, I explore how to most effectively enable users to interact with supervised learning algorithms to compose and perform new music. I have built a general-purpose software system for applying standard supervised learning algorithms in real-time problem domains. This system, called the Wekinator, supports human interaction throughout the entire supervised learning process, including the generation of training examples and the application of trained models to real-time inputs. Already, the Wekinator has enabled the creation of several new compositions and instruments. Furthermore, this system has enabled me to study several aspects of human-computer interaction with supervised learning in computer music. I have used the Wekinator as a foundation for a participatory design process with practicing composers, work with non-expert users in a classroom context, and the design of a gesture recognition system for a sensor-augmented cello bow. This research has led to a clearer characterization of the requirements and goals of instrument builders and composers, a better understanding of how to design user interfaces for supervised learning in both real-time and creative application domains, and a greater insight into the roles that interaction (encompassing both human-computer control and computer-human feedback) can play in the development of systems containing supervised learning components. This work highlights how music and other creative endeavors differ from more traditional applications of supervised learning, and it contributes to a broader HCI perspective on machine learning practice.

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11am Tue Jun 15 talk on wide-area route control for cloud services
by Jennifer Rexford 02 Jun '10

02 Jun '10

Speaker: Vytautas Valancius, Georgia Tech Title: Wide-Area Route Control for Distributed Services Date/time: 11:00-11:45am, Tuesday June 15 Location: 402 in CS building Abstract: Many distributed services would benefit from control over the flow of traffic to and from their users, to offer better performance and higher reliability at a reasonable cost. Unfortunately, although today's cloud-computing platforms offer elastic computing and bandwidth resources, they do not give services control over wide-area routing. We propose replacing the data center's border router with a Transit Portal (TP) that gives each service the illusion of direct connectivity to upstream ISPs, without requiring each service to deploy hardware, acquire IP address space, or negotiate contracts with ISPs. Our TP prototype supports many layer-two connectivity mechanisms, amortizes memory and message overhead over multiple services, and protects the rest of the Internet from misconfigured and malicious applications. Our implementation extends and synthesizes open-source software components such as the Linux kernel and the Quagga routing daemon. We also implement a management plane based on the GENI control framework and couple this with our four-site TP deployment and Amazon EC2 facilities. Bio: Vytautas Valancius is a Ph.D candidate at Georgia Institute of Technology, advised by professor Nick Feamster. His research interests include interdomain routing, Internet economics, and network virtualization. Prior to his Ph.D studies, Vytautas obtained M.S. in KTH, Sweden and worked in the networking industry as a consultant for 5 years, earning CCIE#14359 certification.

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Novel User Interfaces for Audio and Music Computing: Friday 5/28, 2-3pm
by Rebecca A. Fiebrink 18 May '10

18 May '10

Hi everyone, Joern Loviscach is a prolific researcher in music technology, HCI, machine learning, and beyond. He's coming next Friday to give a talk at Princeton, so please come meet him and hear about his work! Abstract & bio are below. Rebecca *** Novel User Interfaces for Audio and Music Computing Friday May 28, 2010, 2-3pm Woolworth Music Building, Room 101 Many tasks in digital music making, audio retrieval, and audio processing become chores, with only few occasions for inspiration and serendipity. This talk is a show & tell presentation of a range of prototypes of enhanced user interfaces developed by the presenter and his collaborators to bring back the fun, such as: * Acoustic and visual support for finding music and sounds * Improved visual feedback in music sequencers and digital audio workstations * Modified on-screen fader controls, modified mice, and color-changing buttons used as controllers for music software * Digital music making with the Wii remote controller, a loudspeaker, and other items, among them a bass guitar For examples, see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eiwj7Td7Pec http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UuUjf-c6L6U http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fTLkafr2Xp8 Bio Joern Loviscach ( www.j3L7h.de ) is a professor of technical mathematics and computer engineering at Fachhochschule Bielefeld (University of Appleid Sciences), Germany. In his research, he aims at connecting human-computer interaction, visual computing, signal processing, machine learning, and electronics. He is a regular contributor to conferences such as SIGGRAPH, Eurographics, AES Convention, and ICMC. In addition, he has published numerous chapters in book series such as Game Programming Gems and ShaderX Programming.

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