CS Department Colloquium Series Speaker: Prof. Tandy Warnow, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) Date: Monday, Sept 19, 2022 Time: 10:30am EST Location: CS 105 Host: Ben Raphael Event page: https://www.cs.princeton.edu/events/26245 Title: New Algorithms for Large-scale Species Tree Estimation Abstract: Constructing the Tree of Life (i.e., a species tree containing all of the extant species) is a Scientific Grand Challenge that is surprisingly difficult from a computational and statistical perspective. One of the challenges is that different parts of the genome evolve down different trees, due to processes such as incomplete lineage sorting (ILS) and gene duplication and loss (GDL). In this talk, I will present new algorithms that can estimate species trees under both processes with high accuracy, even on very large datasets (thousands of species and genes). Moreover, our new methods for species tree estimation addressing GDL do not require knowledge of orthology. Some of this work is unpublished. Bio: Tandy Warnow is the Grainger Distinguished Chair in Engineering in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Tandy received her PhD in Mathematics at UC Berkeley under the direction of Gene Lawler, and her research focuses on reconstructing complex and large-scale evolutionary histories. She was awarded the David and Lucile Packard Foundation Award (1996), a Radcliffe Institute Fellowship (2003), and the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship (2011). She was elected a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) in 2015 and of the Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in 2021. This talk will not be recorded or live-streamed. Speaker: Prof. Deming Chen, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) Date: Monday, Sept 19, 2022 Time: 12:30pm EST Location: CS 105 Host: Kai Li Event page: https://www.cs.princeton.edu/events/26244 Title: Programmability, Scalability, and Security for Reconfigurable Computing in the Cloud Abstract: Reconfigurable Computing uses FPGAs (Field-Programmable Gate Arrays) as an alternative to microprocessors to enable high-performance and low-energy customized computing. It is becoming a mainstream technology as evident by Intel’s $16.7B acquisition of Altera in 2015 and AMD’s $49B acquisition of Xilinx in 2022. However, challenges remain in terms of FPGA programmability, scalability, and security before reconfigurable computing makes a transformative impact in the computing world, especially in the cloud. In this talk, Dr. Chen will present some new concepts and research results that demonstrate initial promises to overcome these challenges, including shared virtual memory system for computing with FPGAs, scalable high-level synthesis for FPGA programming, and trusted execution environment with accelerators. These results are developed within the AMD-Xilinx Center of Excellence and the Hybrid-Cloud Thrust of the IBM-Illinois Discovery Accelerator Institute at UIUC. Bio: Deming Chen is the Abel Bliss Professor of the Grainger College of Engineering at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). His current research interests include reconfigurable computing, hybrid cloud, system-level design methodologies, machine learning and acceleration, and hardware security. He has published more than 250 research papers, received ten Best Paper Awards and one ACM/SIGDA TCFPGA Hall-of-Fame Paper Award, and given more than 130 invited talks. He is an IEEE Fellow, an ACM Distinguished Speaker, and the Editor-in-Chief of ACM Transactions on Reconfigurable Technology and Systems (TRETS). He is the Director of the AMD-Xilinx Center of Excellence and the Hybrid-Cloud Thrust Co-Lead of the IBM-Illinois Discovery Accelerator Institute at UIUC. He has been involved in several startup companies, such as AutoESL and Inspirit IoT. He received his Ph.D. from the Computer Science Department of UCLA in 2005. This talk will be recorded and live-streamed at https://mediacentrallive.princeton.edu/