Monday, July 9, 2012

Come watch the"Tower of Lights" Display at the Theophilus Tower on the UI main campus, July 10, 9:00 - 10:00 PM.


TowerLights is a project of the UI branch of the Association for Computing Machinery - ACM - a club for students in Computer Science and related fields. It involves placing Light Emitting Diodes (LED's) in the front-facing rooms of the Theophilus Tower, and turning them on and off in sync with music. The result is a unique visual experience! The hardware and software have been developed from scratch by ACM students. The individual performances have been put together by artistic students from across campus. TowerLights was started by a group of dedicated Computer Science alumni, and was first presented for Homecoming in 2010. We did a show for Vandal Friday this past spring, and we hope to do another one for homecoming this fall. 

Monday, April 30, 2012

Communication and Swarm Dynamics

CS Colloquium
Date: Tuesday 5/01/2012,
Time: 3:30-4:20pm
Location: Room EP 122

The speaker this week is Joshua Rubini, CS, UI
The talk is titled: Building the Matrix: Comparing Methods of Communication and Swarm Structure Dynamics in Evolved Autonomous Swarms

Abstract:
Current research shows that for many problems, fully autonomous agents with the ability to pass messages to individuals in a local neighborhood are capable of being evolved to solve a diverse range of problems. However, this contrasts with many instances of natural evolution in which hierarchical control systems are found, particularly among more complex organisms such as many mammal and bird species. The "fully distributed swarm" suffers from three distinct problems: time-critical event handling, information staleness, and/or complex data mining, particularly in complex, dynamic problem spaces. This research attempts to show whether hierarchical communication and control structures can help overcome these problems.

Monday, April 23, 2012

How Many Viruses are there in a Pig?

CS Colloquium Series,
Date: Tuesday 4/24/2012,
Time: 3:30-4:20pm
Location: Room EP 122

The speaker this week is James Foster, IBEST, UI
The talk is titled: How many viruses are there in a pig: new inferential statistics for metagenomic data

Abstract: It is now possible to get samples of DNA from every DNA-bearing entity in a given environmental sample. Clustering and string processing algorithms analyze millions to billions of small DNA sequences to determine how many different "species" were present in the original sample, and in what abundances. But there are two confounding factors in the data: the number of sequences is too small (!) for clustering to be completely reliable; and current statistical techniques are purely descriptive, and the sampling power is so weak (!) that descriptions of a sample do not fully reflect the structure of the populations in the original environment. In this talk, I present the results of a study we did to determine how the bacteria-eating virus in pig guts respond to antibiotic treatments. This requires a clustering analysis of large shotgun metagenomics datasets and new statistical techniques to interpret those data - and I promise to describe what all that means.

Monday, April 16, 2012

Large Model Prediction of Full Scale Performance

CS Colloquium
Date: Tuesday 4/17/2012
Time: 3:30-4:20pm
Location: Room EP 122

The speaker this week is Alan R. Griffitts, NSWCCD Acoustic Research Detachment Site Director
The talk is titled: Large Model Prediction of Full Scale Performance

Abstract: The NSWCCD Acoustic Research Detachment (ARD), in Bayview, ID, is the Navy's premier acoustic research test facility. Large Scale Submarine models are utilized to support acoustic testing, with test results providing accurate full scale performance predictions. This talk will identify the advantages, challenges, and efficiencies that come from large scale model testing performed at the ARD.

Tuesday, April 10, 2012

Defining Attacker Behavior Patterns in an Information System

CS Colloquium

Date
: Tuesday 4/10/2012
Time: 3:30-4:20pm
Location: Room EP 122

The speaker is Mark Rounds
The talk is titled: Defining Attacker Behavior Patterns in the Context of an Information System

Abstract:
Information systems are becoming pervasive in our everyday life. Anyone who is online must deal with consequence that such systems are prone to malicious attack. In our attempt to safeguard our systems, determination of the value of security is measures critical and is an area currently undergoing scrutiny by many researchers. There has been much research and development work done on the various technological security tools but there has been less work on the human side. One method to determine the actions and the intent of attackers in this environment is to simulate interactions between an information system, its users and a population of attackers. Initial simulation results suggest that the marginal value of additional security may be positive or negative as can the time rate of change of system value. Models created with this in mind have shown some predictive value but are based on some strong assumptions. The goals of this research are to support or refute some of these assumptions to make a more predictive model.

Monday, March 26, 2012

Formal Specification-Based Testing with Buchi-Automata

CS Colloquium

Date: Tuesday 3/27/2012
Time: 3:30-4:20pm
Location: Room EP 122

The speaker this week is Li Tan, WSU
The talk is titled: Formal Specification-Based Testing with Buchi-Automata

Abstract:
Buchi automata have been widely used for specifying linear temporal properties of reactive systems and they are also instrumental for designing efficient model-checking algorithms. In this talk I will present our work that extends specification-based testing to Buchi automata. A key question in specification-based testing is how to measure the quality (relevancy) of test cases with respect to system specification. I will discuss two state coverage metrics for measuring how well a test suite covers a Buchi-automaton-based requirement. Compared with previous work on specification-based testing with temporal logics which are based on the syntactical structure of a temporal logic specification, our new approach emphasizes on testing the semantics relevancy of the specification with respect to the system under test. The new approach improves the effectiveness of specification-based testing with temporal logics, as demonstrated by our experimental results. I will also discuss a model-checking-assisted test generation algorithm that improves the efficiency of test generation.

Monday, March 19, 2012

A Hybrid Model for Very High-Level Threads

CS Colloquium

Date: Tuesday 3/20/2012
Time: 3:30-4:20pm
Location: Room EP 122

The speaker this week is Jafar Al-Gharaibeh
The talk is titled: A Hybrid Model for Very High-Level Threads

Abstract:
Languages with multiple paradigms or other special-purpose features often are implemented in ways that make true concurrency difficult in the virtual machine or runtime system. Several popular languages feature a global interpreter lock that limits them to pseudo-concurrency. This talk presents lessons learned in developing true concurrency for a goal-directed, object-oriented language called Unicon. Parts of the work were anticipated, such as switching to thread-safe C library functions, while other parts were a surprise, such as eliminating race conditions in self-modifying virtual machine instructions.