Abstract:Modern phones are being equipped with numerous sensors such as cameras, microphones, GPS, accelerometers, and health monitors. This project aims to design a "Virtual Information Telescope", where the "lenses" of the telescope are metaphors for the sensors in people's mobile phones. Using such a telescope, an Internet user will be able to zoom into any part of the human-populated world, and observe events of interest. Users will be able to direct queries to phones located in a given region, and receive real-time responses through automatic sensing or explicit human participation. Example domains that may benefit from this platform include education, healthcare, tourism, disaster management, environment conservation, and social collaborations. Perhaps more fundamentally, a virtual information telescope may change the way we browse, query, learn, and process information. This talk will expand on this vision, and instantiate it through a live system called "Micro-Blog" (see project webpage at at http://synrg.ee.duke.edu/microblog.html). We will discuss a suite of important research challenges underlying the translation of Micro-Blog into a deployable/usable system. Of particular interest are topics on energy-efficient localization, sensor-augmented context identification, and location-privacy. We will close with some thoughts on what lies ahead along the path of mobile, social computing. Biography:Romit Roy Choudhury is an Assistant Professor of ECE and CS at Duke University. He joined Duke in Fall 2006, after completing his PhD from UIUC. His research interests are in wireless protocol design mainly at the PHY/MAC layer, and in distributed mobile computing at the application layer. He received the NSF CAREER Award in January 2008. Visit Romit's Systems Networking Research Group (SyNRG), at http://synrg.ee.duke.edu
Abstract:Multimodal systems are becoming very popular recently because of its promise of delivering experiences in human-computer-interaction which are similar to natural human-to-human interaction, where hand gestures, speech, facial expressions etc. come together in a synergy to communicate some information. As part of the Imagin (Intutive Multimodal and Gestural Interaction) project at HP Labs India, we are looking at natural human modalities for interaction with a machine like, freehand gestures, speech, face etc. We are particularly interested in the synergistic use of these modalities to interact with the machine more efficiently. This leads to the problem of multimodal fusion of modalities at various levels : recognizer level, semantic level and dialog level. In this talk I will present some of the challenges in multimodal systems and interesting research problems we are looking at as part of the project. Biography:Prasenjit Dey is currently a Research Scientist in Hewlett-Packard Labs in Bangalore working in the area of multimodal systems. He obtained his Ph.D. in Communication Systems from Swiss Federal Insitute of Technology (EPFL), Lausanne, Switzerland in 2004. His specific research interests are in the area of Information Theory, Image Processing and Pattern Recognition.
Abstract:Networks and networked applications depend on several pieces of configuration information to operate correctly. Such information resides in routers, firewalls, and end hosts, among other places. Incorrect information, or misconfiguration, could interfere with the running of networked applications. This problem is particularly acute in consumer settings such as home networks, where there is a huge diversity of network elements and applications coupled with the absence of network administrators. To address this problem, we present NetPrints, a system that leverages shared knowledge in a population of users to diagnose and resolve misconfigurations. Basically, if a user has a working network configuration for an application or has determined how to rectify a problem, we would like this knowledge to be made available automatically to another user who is experiencing the same problem. NetPrints accomplishes this by applying decision tree based learning on working and non-working configuration snapshots and by using network traffic based problem signatures to index into configuration changes made by users to fix problems. In this talk, I will describe the design of NetPrints, and using example applications, show that it automatically captures misconfigurations and providing configuration fixes. Biography:Ranjita is a researcher in the Mobility, Networks and Systems group at Microsoft Research, India. Her interests are in the design, implementation and evaluation of distributed systems and networks. Ranjita has a Ph.D. in Computer Engineering from the University of California, San Diego, and a B.Tech. in Computer Science and Engineering from IIT Kharagpu
Biography:Dr. Bhattacharya did his BTech in CSE from IIT Kharagpur and PhD from Univ. Maryland. Currently he is research staff at IBM India Research Lab. His interests are in the area of machine learning, text mining and NLP
Abstract:The main focus of our research is to develop technologies for efficiently coordinating individual resource-constrained components to behave as a single, autonomous and adaptive, large-scale distributed system. In this talk, I will focus on multi-agent/multi-robot based, distributed coordination techniques that enable low-cost, autonomous teams of mobile sensor platforms to collaboratively perform complex tasks in an unknown environment. The mobile sensor platforms (e.g., mini-robots or unmanned aerial vehicles) are characterized by limited on-board computation capabilities, noisy, possibly faulty sensors on the platforms and unreliable communication between the platforms. The unique contribution of our research has been to develop distributed coordination mechanisms that integrate computational economics, game theory and market-based techniques with emergent computing based techniques such as swarming. We have developed novel algorithms for distributed multi-robot task allocation, dynamic path planning, and distributed exploration/coverage by multi-robot teams. In this talk, I will present analytical and empirical results from our research and describe some of the federally sponsored projects where these results are being used. Biography:Dr. Prithviraj (Raj) Dasgupta received his B.E. degree in Computer Science and Engineering from Jadavpur University, Calcutta, India in 1995, and M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Engineering from the University of California, Santa Barbara in 1998 and 2001 respectively. Currently, he is an associate professor in the Computer Science department at the University of Nebraska at Omaha. His research interests include multi-agent algorithms for coordination in swarm-based systems and dynamic pricing algorithms for information markets using software agents. His research has been widely published in highly competitive conferences and journals in the area of multi-agent systems and e-commerce including AAMAS, IAT, Journal of E-commerce Research (Elsevier) and IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering. His research is spossored by grants from federal agencies including the U.S. Department of Defense and NASA.
Abstract:Software model checking, an algorithmic, specification-driven approach to software analysis, has emerged as an active area of research in the last few years. While work in this area builds on the 25-year-old literature on model checking of finite-state systems, it has to grapple with several additional issues. A crucial one is that control flow of procedural programs depends on "procedural contexts" defined by the call stack, so that any reasonably precise software model checker needs to analyze pushdown models of programs rather than finite-state ones. This talk addresses the problem of requirement specification for software model checking. I show that temporal logics like the mu-calculus, while mainstays of traditional model checking, cannot specify "context-sensitive" program requirements such as: "A file is read before control leaves the current procedural context." A way to overcome this issue, I demonstrate, is to view a program as a generator not of a computation tree, but of a graph called a nested tree. Temporal logics interpreted on nested trees are now defined, and the model checking problem is re-phrased as: "Does the nested tree generated by a program satisfy a temporal property?" This reformulation turns out to have remarkably nice mathematical properties, allowing us to modularly express and verify properties of procedural contexts while keeping the complexity of model checking the same as before. I also discuss, at far shorter length, some of my current projects, including: (1) the use of nested structures as above in "procedure-modular" verification of concurrent programs; (2) multi-resourcing: a new style of parallel programming targeted towards data-parallel applications running on multi-core systems; and (3) a way to use formal methods to guard programs against "soft errors" arising in hardware at run-time. Biography:Swarat Chaudhuri is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at the Pennsylvania State University. His research lies at the interface of formal methods and programming languages. He is the recipient of the 2007 ACM SIGPLAN Doctoral Dissertation Award, presented annually to the author of the outstanding dissertation on Programming Languages.
Abstract:Cloud computing is a growing computing paradigm where heterogeneous computing resources are accessed remotely and typically owned and operated by a third-party provider in data centers. In this talk, I will give an overview of cloud computing and highlight some of its current limitations. I will present techniques to improving the efficiency of computing resources, reduce the power used in data centers, and improve the quality of service guarantees by providing efficient fault-tolerance. Additionally, I will present techniques to extend existing batch schedulers used in data centers that are incapable of adequately addressing the need for immediate access to resources for interactive jobs. Biography:Vipin Chaudhary is an Associate Professor of Computer Science and Engineering, Center for Computational Research, and the New York State Center of Excellence in Bioinformatics and Life Sciences at University at Buffalo, SUNY. He also maintains an adjunct position at Wayne State University in the Department of Neurological Surgery. Earlier he was the Senior Director of Advanced Development at Cradle Technologies, Inc. and Chief Architect at Corio, Inc. In addition, he is involved with several startup companies. Vipin received the B.Tech. (Hons.) degree in Computer Science and Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, in 1986 and the Ph.D. degree from The University of Texas at Austin in 1992. He was awarded the prestigious President of India Gold Medal in 1986 for securing the first rank amongst graduating students in IIT. His current research interests are in the area of High Performance Computing and its applications in Computational Biology and Medicine; Computer Assisted Diagnosis and Interventions; and Medical Image Processing.