2011-2012 Past Talks

CS Talk: Prof.Ben Shneiderman

Information Visualization for Medical Informatics: Ben Shneiderman is a Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Founding Director (1983-2000) of the Human-Computer Interaction Library at the University of Maryland. He is a Fellow of the AAAS, ACM, and IEEE, and a Member of the National Academy of Engineering. Professor Shneiderman is the co-author with Catherine Plaisant of Designing the User Interface: Strategies for Effective Human-Computer Interaction (5th ed., 2010). With Stu Card and Jock MacKinlay, he co-authored “Readings in Information Visualization: Using Vision to Think” (1999). His book “Leonardo’s Laptop” appeared in October, 2002, (MIT Press) and won the IEEE book award for Distinguished Literary Contribution. His latest book, with Derek Hansen, and Marc Smith, is “Analyzing Social Media Networks with NodeXL.”

Date: Feb 22, 2012, 5:30PM
Location: McShain Hall

CS Talk: Theophlius Benson

Towards Networks without Management Complexity: Theophilus Benson is passionate about eliminating the complexity and overhead of managing networks both within local area networks and within the cloud. His graduate work has focused on configuration management, data center networks, and cloud computing. This work has earned him an IBM fellowship, a best paper award at IMC 2010, and, more recently, his cloud computing platform was acquired by a large cloud provider. He is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Wisconsin – Madison, where he previously received his M.S. in Computer Science. Prior to that, he received his B.S. at Tufts University and worked as a software engineer at an MIT based startup in Waltham, MA.

Date: Feb 29, 2012, 10:30am
Location: STM326

CS Talk: Dr.Jonathan Huang

Probabilistic models for rankings and orderings: Jonathan Huang is an NSF Computing Innovation (CI) postdoctoral fellow at the geometric computing group at Stanford University. He completed his Ph.D. in 2011 with the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University where he also received a Masters degree in 2008. He received his B.S. degree in Mathematics from Stanford University in 2005. His research interests lie primarily in statistical machine learning and reasoning with combinatorially structured data. His research has resulted in a number of publications in premier machine learning conferences and journals, receiving a paper award in NIPS 2007 for his work on applying group theoretic Fourier analysis to probabilistic reasoning with permutations.

Date: Mar 2, 2012, 11am
Location: STM326

CS Talk: Kai Chen

Architecture Design and Management for Data Center Networks: Kai Chen is a 5th year Ph.D. student in the EECS Department at Northwestern University. Prior to this, he received his B.S. and M.S. degrees in Computer Science in 2004 and 2007 respectively, both from University of Science and Technology of China. His research interests include networks and networked systems, currently focus on data center networks, resource management for cloud computing, Internet measurement and routing. He has actively collaborated with the industry such as Microsoft, AT&T, and NEC Labs. He is interested in finding simple yet deep and elegant solutions to networking and systems problems that generate real-world impact.

Date: Mar 12, 2012, 11am
Location: STM326

CS Talk: Chris Kanich

Understanding Spam Economics: Chris Kanich is a Ph.D. Candidate at the University of California at San Diego in the Computer Science & Engineering Department. His research interests lie within security and computer networks, with an emphasis on the economic and human elements of Internet security. He received a B.S. degree in Computer Science and Mathematics from Purdue University in 2005, and will complete his Ph.D. at UC San Diego in 2012.

Date: Mar 15, 2012, 10am
Location: STM326

CS Talk: Adam Aviv

Novel Side Channels and Communications Enabled by Smartphones: Adam J. Aviv is a 5th year Ph.D. candidate at the University of Pennsylvania advised by Professors Jonathan Smith and Matt Blaze. His research is in security and privacy, particular focused on the impact of smartphones. He has work on varied projects and has wide interests in the field, including distributed systems, mobile/adhoc/delay-tolerate networking, electronic voting, covert channels, trust management, and botnets detection/prevention/mitigation.

Date: Mar 30, 2012, 3pm
Location: STM326

CS Talk: Prof.Ran Libeskind-Hadas

Flowers, Bees, and Trees: Algorithms Help Answer a Question Posed by Darwin: Ran Libeskind-Hadas is the Csilla and Walt Foley Professor of Computer Science and chair of the Department of Computer Science at Harvey Mudd College. He received the A.B. in applied mathematics from Harvard and the M.S. and Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. He works in the areas of applied algorithms and computational biology. With colleagues at Harvey Mudd, he has also been involved in the development of new introductory computer science curricula and related efforts to increase the number of women studying computer science. These activities and their outcomes will also be described at the end of the talk.

Date: Apr 17, 2012, 11am
Location: TBD