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Princeton Robotics Seminar: Sonia Chernova, Friday, Dec 1 at 11am
by Emily C. Lawrence 28 Nov '23

28 Nov '23

Speaker: Sonia Chernova, Georgia Tech Date: Friday, December 1, 2023 Time: 11:00 AM ET Location: CS 105 Event page: [ https://robo.princeton.edu/seminar | https://robo.princeton.edu/seminar ] Title: Autonomy in the Human World: Developing Robots that Handle the Diversity of Human Lives Abstract: Reliable operation in everyday human environments – homes, offices, and businesses – remains elusive for today’s robotic systems. A key challenge is diversity, as no two homes or businesses are exactly alike. However, despite the innumerable unique aspects of any home, there are many commonalities as well, particularly about how objects are placed and used. These commonalities can be captured in semantic representations, and then used to improve the autonomy of robotic systems by, for example, enabling robots to infer missing information in human instructions, efficiently search for objects, or manipulate objects more effectively. In this talk, I will discuss recent advances in semantic reasoning, particularly focusing on semantics of everyday objects, household environments, and the development of robotic systems that intelligently interact with their world. Bio: Sonia Chernova is an Associate Professor in the College of Computing at Georgia Tech. She directs the Robot Autonomy and Interactive Learning lab, where her research focuses on the development of intelligent and interactive autonomous systems. Chernova’s contributions span robotics and artificial intelligence, including semantic reasoning, adaptive autonomy, human-robot interaction, and explainable AI. She also leads the NSF AI Institute for Collaborative Assistance and Responsive Interaction for Networked Groups (AI-CARING), whose mission is to develop collaborative AI partners-in-care that help support a growing population of older adults, helping them sustain independence, improve quality of life, and increase effectiveness of care coordination across their care network.

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Udaya Ghai will present his FPO "A Game-theoretic Lens for Robustness in Control" on Monday, December 18, 2023 at 4:00 PM in CS 402.
by CS Grad Department 21 Nov '23

21 Nov '23

Udaya Ghai will present his FPO " A Game-theoretic Lens for Robustness in Control " on Monday, December 18, 2023 at 4:00 PM in CS 402 . Location: CS 402 The members of Udaya ’s committee are as follows: Examiners: Elad Hazan (Adviser), Ryan Adams , Naomi Leonard Readers: Sanjeev Arora , Anirudha Majumdar A copy of his thesis is available upon request. Please email gradinfo(a)cs.princeton.edu if you would like a copy of the thesis. Everyone is invited to attend his talk. Abstract follows below: The control of dynamical systems is a fundamental problem with a vast array of applications, from robotics to biological engineering. Recently, the game-theoretic primitive of regret minimization has been applied to control, yielding novel instance-optimal performance guarantees in more challenging non-stochastic control settings. This thesis further explores the benefits of a multi-agent perspective of control. Concretely, we begin with a new algorithm for generating disturbances for controller verification, which relies on recasting the players in the nonstochastic control game. Next, we provide a cooperative multi-agent extension of the nonstochastic control setting, involving a reduction from our multi-agent game to single agent regret minimization. Furthermore, we show new notions of robustness to failure can be attained through this perspective, even in a single-agent setting. While control is a powerful tool, it relies heavily on knowledge of the dynamics. The final chapters provide two very different approaches to robustness without such a model. The first approach extends the nonstochastic control methodology to model-free reinforcement learning. In an alternative approach, we consider unknown systems with dynamics that are \emph{approximately} linear using tools from classical control theory.

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Princeton Robotics Seminar: Stephanie Gil, Friday 11/17 at 11am
by Emily C. Lawrence 14 Nov '23

14 Nov '23

Speaker: [ https://gil.seas.harvard.edu/ | Stephanie Gil ] , Harvard Date: Friday, 11/17/23 Time: 11:00 AM ET Location: CS 105 Event page: [ https://robo.princeton.edu/seminar | https://robo.princeton.edu/seminar ] Title: Resilient Coordination in Networked Multi-Robot Teams Abstract: Multi-robot systems are becoming more pervasive all around us, in the form of fleets of autonomous vehicles, future delivery drones, and robotic teammates for search and rescue. As a result, it becomes increasingly critical to question the robustness of their coordination algorithms to reliable information exchange, security threats and/or corrupted data. This talk will focus on the role of control and information exchange for enhancing situational awareness and security of multirobot systems. An example is the consensus problem where classical results hold that agreement cannot be reached when malicious agents make up more than half of the network connectivity; this quickly leads to limitations in the practicality of many multi-robot coordination tasks. However, with the growing prevalence of cyber-physical systems comes novel opportunities for detecting attacks by using cross-validation with physical channels of information. In this talk we consider the class of problems where the probability of a particular (i,j) link being trustworthy is available as a random variable. We refer to these as “stochastic observations of trust.” We show that under this model, strong performance guarantees such as convergence for the consensus problem can be recovered, even in the case where the number of malicious agents is greater than ½ of the network connectivity and consensus would otherwise fail. We will present both a theoretical framework, and experimental results, for provably securing multi-robot distributed algorithms through careful use of communication. Lastly, we will present promising results on new communication-centric methods for learning and sequential decision-making in tomorrow’s multi-robot systems. Bio: Stephanie is an Assistant Professor in the John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) at Harvard University. Her work centers around trust and coordination in multi-robot systems for which she has received the Office of Naval Research Young Investigator award (2021) and the National Science Foundation CAREER award (2019). She has also been selected as a 2020 Sloan Research Fellow for her contributions at the intersection of robotics and communication. She has held a Visiting Assistant Professor position at Stanford University during the summer of 2019, and an Assistant Professorship at Arizona State University from 2018-2020. She completed her Ph.D. work (2014) on multi-robot coordination and control and her M.S. work (2009) on system identification and model learning. At MIT she collaborated extensively with the wireless communications group NetMIT, the result of which were two U.S. patents recently awarded in adaptive heterogeneous networks for multi-robot systems and accurate indoor positioning using Wi-Fi. She completed her B.S. at Cornell University.

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Our AI Futures: Critical Humanistic Perspectives - today at 5pm
by Emily C. Lawrence 13 Nov '23

13 Nov '23

[ https://anthropology.princeton.edu/ | Anthropology@Princeton Seminar ] Monday, Nov 13, 2023 5:00 pm – 6:30 pm Covocation Room, 113 Friend Center Speakers: Alondra Nelson, Harold F. Linder Professor of Social Science, Institute for Advanced Study Alex Hanna, Distributed AI Research Institute Widely known for her pioneer research at the intersection of science, technology, and politics, Alondra Nelson holds the Harold F. Linder Chair in the School of Social Science of the Institute for Advanced Study. From 2021–23, she was deputy assistant to President Joe Biden, and acting director and principal deputy director for science and society of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. She is the past president of the Social Science Research Council and the first Social Science Dean at Columbia University. In 2023, she was included in the inaugural TIME100 list of the most influential people in AI. Dr. Alex Hanna is Director of Research at the Distributed AI Research Institute (DAIR). A sociologist by training, her work centers on the data used in new computational technologies, and the ways in which these data exacerbate racial, gender, and class inequality. She also works in the area of social movements, focusing on the dynamics of anti-racist campus protest in the US and Canada. In conversation with Anthropology Assistant Professor Beth Semel, Princeton University Event page: [ https://anthropology.princeton.edu/events/our-ai-futures-critical-humanisti… | https://anthropology.princeton.edu/events/our-ai-futures-critical-humanisti… ]

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ECE Seminar: Udit Gupta, Nov 10 at 2pm
by Emily C. Lawrence 07 Nov '23

07 Nov '23

ECE Seminar [ https://ece.princeton.edu/events/sustainable-computing-implications-challen… | Sustainable Computing: Implications, Challenges, Opportunities | Electrical and Computer Engineering (princeton.edu) ] Speaker: Udit Gupta, Cornell Tech. Title: Sustainable Computing: Implications, Challenges, Opportunities Day: November 10, 2023 Time: 2:00 – 3:30pm Location: Room 004, Friend Center. Host: David Wentzlaff Abstract: Computing has a substantial environmental impact, with far-reaching consequences. Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) alone contribute to 4% of global carbon emissions, a figure equivalent to the aviation industry's carbon footprint. This impact is poised to increase as the demand for computing continues to surge, particularly at the edge and within massive hyperscale data centers. Creating environmentally sustainable computing solutions presents unique challenges that go beyond energy efficiency optimization. It necessitates a holistic approach that considers various factors. For example, sustainable computing devices must account for the carbon emissions generated during the manufacturing process, the influence of renewable energy sources that fluctuate by location and time on a system's operational emissions, and the intricate interplay between embodied and operational emissions. In this presentation, we will delve into recent breakthroughs and the research challenges we confront as we strive to transition to environmentally responsible computing systems. With a primary focus on the carbon footprint of computing, we will explore recent initiatives aimed at characterizing and comprehending the environmental impact of computing. We will also introduce new carbon accounting models and frameworks, highlighting their application in pertinent domains, such as AI, to promote the development of sustainable AI solutions. Bio: Udit Gupta is an Assistant Professor at Cornell Tech, where his research is dedicated to pioneering the development of cutting-edge and ethically responsible AI platforms through the innovation of novel computer systems and hardware. His recent endeavors are centered around the design and optimization of data center-based, deep learning-driven personalized recommendation systems and championing eco-friendly computing by meticulously considering the ecological implications associated with the entire hardware life cycle. Udit's groundbreaking research has been tested and validated within production data centers at a large scale but has also found its place in established benchmarks and infrastructures that are widely embraced by the research community. His contributions were acknowledged with an honorable mention as an IEEE MICRO Top Picks selection in 2020 and further distinguished with an IEEE MICRO Top Picks award in 2021 and 2022. His work earned nominations for the Best Paper awards at PACT 2019 and DAC 2018. Furthermore, his doctoral research received the prestigious SIGARCH Outstanding Ph.D. Dissertation award honorable mention and the SIGMICRO Outstanding Ph.D. Dissertation award honorable mention.

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Ziyang Xu will present his Pre FPO "PROMPT: A Fast and Extensible Memory Profiling Framework" on December 11, 2023 at 10am in CS 302.
by Gradinfo 06 Nov '23

06 Nov '23

Ziyang Xu will present his Pre FPO "PROMPT: A Fast and Extensible Memory Profiling Framework" on December 11, 2023 at 10am in CS 302. Committee: Prof. David I. August (Advisor) Prof. Amit Levy (Examiner) Prof. Aarti Gupta (Examiner) Prof. Zachary Kincaid (Reader) Prof. Simone Campanoni (Reader, Associate Professor at Northwestern University) All are welcome to attend. PROMPT: A Fast and Extensible Memory Profiling Framework Abstract: Memory profiling captures programs' dynamic memory behavior, assisting programmers in debugging, tuning, and enabling advanced compiler optimizations like speculation-based automatic parallelization. As each use case demands its unique program trace summary, various memory profiler types have been developed. Yet, designing practical memory profilers often requires extensive compiler expertise, adeptness in program optimization, and significant implementation efforts. This often results in a void where aspirations for fast and robust profilers remain unfulfilled. To bridge this gap, this dissertation presents PROMPT, a pioneering framework for streamlined development of fast memory profilers. With it, developers only need to specify profiling events and define the core profiling logic, bypassing the complexities of custom instrumentation and intricate memory profiling components and optimizations. Two state-of-the-art memory profilers were ported with PROMPT while all features preserved. By focusing on the core profiling logic, the code was reduced by more than 65% and the profiling speed was improved by 5.3x and 7.1x respectively. To further underscore PROMPT's impact, a tailored memory profiling workflow was constructed for a sophisticated compiler optimization client. In just 570 lines of code, this redesigned workflow satisfies the client's memory profiling needs while achieving more than 90% reduction in profiling time and improved robustness compared to the original profilers. PROMPT overcomes the limitations of traditional compile-time instrumentation memory profilers by integrating dynamic binary instrumentation capabilities. It automatically infers the characteristics of external function calls, significantly reducing dependence on binary instrumentation and enhancing performance. Memory profiling events generated by both methods are formatted consistently, ensuring that modules developed with PROMPT are adaptable and retain their functionality irrespective of the instrumentation technique employed. In acknowledgment of the complexity inherent in memory behaviors and profiler implementations, PROMPT utilizes a novel testing technique. This method involves inverting memory analysis algorithms to generate synthetic programs with known memory behaviors. Such a strategy is instrumental in detecting and rectifying errors in memory profiler implementations created with PROMPT, thus bolstering confidence in the accuracy of the profilers.

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Nov 8: LLM Forum with Wai Chee Dimock (RSVP)
by Emily C. Lawrence 06 Nov '23

06 Nov '23

The Princeton LLM Forum continues next Wednesday! Please join us for a conversation with Wai Chee Dimock (William Lampson Professor Emeritus of American Studies and English at Yale University and research affiliate at the Harvard University Center for the Environment) on the topic of culture! This session's Princeton respondent will be Meredith Martin (Associate Professor of English and Faculty Director of CDH ). Nov 8, 4:30 – 6:00 pm Friend Center 101 RSVPs encouraged R eception to follow [ https://princeton.us16.list-manage.com/track/click?u=a77a39541c9fc9c8b625cb… | Add to Calendar ] | [ https://princeton.us16.list-manage.com/track/click?u=a77a39541c9fc9c8b625cb… | More info ] | [ https://princeton.us16.list-manage.com/track/click?u=a77a39541c9fc9c8b625cb… | RSVP ] Wai Chee Dimock writes about public health, climate change, and indigenous communities, focusing on the symbiotic relation between human and nonhuman intelligence. She is now at Harvard’s Center for the Environment, working on a new book, “AI, Microbes, and Us: Risky Partners in an Age of Pandemics and Climate Change.” A collaborative project, “AI for Climate Resilience,” is co-sponsored by Stanford’s Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence and Yale’s Jackson School of Global Affairs. Dimock’s most recent book is Weak Planet (2020). Other books include Through Other Continents: American Literature Across Deep Time (2006); Shades of the Planet (2007); and a team-edited anthology, American Literature in the World: Anne Bradstreet to Octavia Butler (2017). Her 1996 book, Residues of Justice: Literature, Law, Philosophy , was reissued in a new edition in 2021. Her essays have appeared in Artforum , The Chronicle of Higher Education , The Hill , the Los Angeles Review of Books , The New York Times , The New Yorker , and Scientific American . Missed the lively [ https://princeton.us16.list-manage.com/track/click?u=a77a39541c9fc9c8b625cb… | conversation with Meredith Whittaker ] and Arvind Narayanan? Catch up at the link below. [ https://princeton.us16.list-manage.com/track/click?u=a77a39541c9fc9c8b625cb… | Watch 10/25 Recording ]

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DeCenter Seminar: Ling Ren, Nov 15 at 4:30pm
by Emily C. Lawrence 06 Nov '23

06 Nov '23

DeCenter Seminar Speaker: Ling Ren, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Talk Title: What insights can we learn from the Bitcoin Algorithm? November 15, 2023 4:30pm talk followed by a reception Friend 113 Convocation Room [ https://decenter.princeton.edu/events/what-insights-can-we-learn-from-the-b… | https://decenter.princeton.edu/events/what-insights-can-we-learn-from-the-b… ] Abstract: Bitcoin's longest-chain algorithm, also known as Nakamoto consensus, is a novel solution to the classic Byzantine fault-tolerant (BFT) consensus problem. What is fundamentally novel about it, and what algorithmic insights can we learn from it? In this talk, I will discuss some insights and inspirations we gained from Bitcoin that led to new advances in BFT consensus. First, Nakamoto consensus supports dynamic participation. The Bitcoin system has operated for over a decade, during which it has witnessed a rapid increase and sudden drops in the participation level. But to support this phenomenal level of robustness, longest-chain protocols suffer from long latency as a fundamental trade-off. Classic BFT protocols, on the other hand, can achieve constant latency but cannot make progress under dynamic participation. I will present a protocol that simultaneously supports dynamic participation and achieves constant latency. The core technique is to extend the classic BFT approach from static quorum size to dynamic quorum size according to the current participation level. Second, Bitcoin uses a sparse peer-to-peer network to reduce communication. This ingredient loosely inspired us to design a Byzantine agreement protocol tolerating minority faults with quadratic communication. This meets the well-known Dolev-Reischuk lower bound and closes a 40-year open problem on the optimal communication complexity of Byzantine agreement. Third, Bitcoin allows individual clients to make their own assumptions about the network and opt for different security-efficiency trade-offs. We propose the notion of flexible Byzantine fault tolerance to capture and generalize this property. If time permits, I will also briefly discuss other core features of Nakamoto consensus that may inspire important future research. Bio : Ling Ren is an assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Prior to joining the University of Illinois, he obtained his Ph.D. from MIT and worked at VMware Research. He has won several awards, including NSF CAREER Award, Google Research Scholar Award, VMware Early Career Faculty Grant, Bitcoin Research Prize, Top Picks in Hardware and Embedded Security, and Best Paper Runner-Up and Best Student Paper at CCS.

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ECE Korhammer Seminar: Fei Miao, UConn, Tues Nov. 14
by Emily C. Lawrence 06 Nov '23

06 Nov '23

ECE KORHAMMER SEMINAR SERIES Speaker: Fei Miao, University of Connecticut Title: Learning and Control for Safety, Efficiency, and Resiliency of Embodied AI Day: November 14, 2023 Time: 4:30 PM Location: B205 Engineering Quadrangle Hosts: Jaime Fernández Fisac and Chi Jin Abstract: With rapid evolution of sensing, communication, and computation, integrating learning and control presents significant Embodied AI opportunities. However, current decision-making frameworks lack comprehensive understanding of the tridirectional relationship among communication, learning and control, posing challenges for multi-agent systems in complex environments. In the first part of the talk, we focus on learning and control with communication capabilities. We design an uncertainty quantification method for collaborative perception in connected autonomous vehicles (CAVs). Our findings demonstrate that communication among multiple agents can enhance object detection accuracy and reduce uncertainty. Building upon this, we develop a safe and scalable deep multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) framework that leverages shared information among agents to improve system safety and efficiency. We validate the benefits of communication in MARL, particularly in the context of CAVs in challenging mixed traffic scenarios. We incentivize agents to communicate and coordinate with a novel reward reallocation scheme based on Shapley value for MARL. Additionally, we present our theoretical analysis of robust MARL methods under state uncertainties, such as uncertainty quantification in the perception modules or worst-case adversarial state perturbations. In the second part of the talk, we briefly outline our research contributions on robust MARL and data-driven robust optimization for sustainable mobility. We also highlight our research results concerning CPS security. Through our findings, we aim to advance Embodied AI and CPS for safety, efficiency, and resiliency in dynamic environments. Bio: Fei Miao is Pratt & Whitney Associate Professor of the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, a Courtesy Faculty of the Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering, University of Connecticut, where she joined in 2017. She is affiliated to the Institute of Advanced Systems Engineering and Eversource Energy Center. She was a postdoc researcher at the GRASP Lab and the PRECISE Lab of UPenn from 2016 to 2017. She received Ph.D. degree and the Best Doctoral Dissertation Award in Electrical and Systems Engineering, with a dual M.S. degree in Statistics from the University of Pennsylvania in 2016. She received the B.S. degree in Automation from Shanghai Jiao Tong University in 2010. Her research focuses on multi-agent reinforcement learning, robust optimization, uncertainty quantification, and game theory, to address safety, efficiency, robustness, and security challenges of Embodied AI and CPS, for systems such as connected autonomous vehicles, sustainable and intelligent transportation systems, and smart cities. Dr. Miao is a receipt of the NSF CAREER award and a couple of other awards from NSF. She received the Best Paper Award and Best Paper Award Finalist at the 12th and 6th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Cyber-Physical Systems (ICCPS) in 2021 and 2015, Best paper Award at the 2023 AAAI DACC workshop, respectively. This seminar is supported with funds from the Korhammer Lecture Series.

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Bhargav Reddy Godala will present his Pre FPO "Criticality Aware Front-End" on November 6th, 2023 in Friend Center 125 at 10:30am.
by Gradinfo 01 Nov '23

01 Nov '23

Bhargav Reddy Godala will present his Pre FPO "Criticality Aware Front-End" on November 6th, 2023 in Friend Center 125 at 10:30am. The members of his committee are as follows: Examiners: Prof. David August (adviser) Prof. Margaret Martonosi Prof. David Wentzlaff Readers: Gilles Pokam (Intel) Svilen Kanev (Google) (approved by Grad School) Prof. David August (adviser) Talk title and abstract follow below. Title: Criticality Aware Front-End Abstract: Code footprints continue to grow faster than instruction caches, putting additional pressure on existing front-end structures like iCaches, BTBs, and iTLBs. Even with aggressive decoupled front-ends and accurate fetch-directed instruction prefetching (FDIP), modern processors experience significant front-end stalls. To address this, this thesis proposes Priority Directed Instruction Prefetching (PDIP), a novel instruction prefetching technique that complements FDIP by issuing prefetches for targets along the resteer path where FDIP stalls occur. PDIP identifies these targets and associates them with a trigger for future prefetch. When paired with EMISSARY, a recently proposed cost-aware cache management policy, PDIP achieves a geomean IPC speedup of 3.7% across a set of industry-relevant benchmark programs using a budget of only 43.5KB. PDIP achieves 62% of the ideal prefetching performance.

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