2012-2013 Past Talks

CS Talk: Dr.Howard Karloff

Disjoint-Path Facility Location: Theory and Practice: After receiving his PhD from UC Berkeley, Howard Karloff taught at the University of Chicago and Georgia Tech before joining AT&T Labs–Research in 1999. An editor of ACM’s Transactions on Algorithms and an ACM Fellow, he has served on the program committees of numerous conferences, chaired the 1998 Symposium of Discrete Algorithms (SODA) program committee, and was general chair of the 2012 Symposium on the Theory of Computing (2012). He is the author of numerous journal and conference articles and the Birkhauser book “Linear Programming.” His research interests span theoretical computer science but extend to more applied areas of computer science such as databases and networking.

Date: Sep 11, 2012, 12pm
Location: STM326

CS Talk: Dr.Wen-Ying Sylvia Chou

Web 2.0 and health communication: Understanding the role of social media through multi-disciplinary approaches: Wen-Ying Sylvia Chou, PhD, MPH, is a Program Director in the Health Communication and Informatics Research Branch (HCIRB) of the National Cancer Institute. Her research interests include technologies and social media for health, patient-provider communication, and end-of-life and palliative care communication. Trained as a sociolinguist, she has extensive experience conducting mixed methods research on patient-provider interactions and illness narratives. Her recent publications have examined the changing communication landscape and impact on clinical care and public health practice. As a Program Director, she supervises a portfolio of research on health literacy, patient-centered communication, health disparities, and Web 2.0 technologies and health. Dr. Chou completed a post-doctoral fellowship through NCI’s Cancer Prevention Fellowship Program; she holds a MS and PhD in Linguistics from Georgetown University, and a Master of Public Health from the Interdisciplinary MPH program at UC Berkeley.

Date: Nov 30, 2012, 11am
Location: STM326

CS Talk: Dr.Pradipta Mitra

Wireless Connectivity from Scratch: Pradipta Mitra is a Postdoctoral Researcher at Reykjavik University, where he studies wireless network algorithms. Pradipta completed his PhD in Computer Science from Yale in 2008. He wrote his thesis on clustering algorithms for Random Graphs. Between Yale and Reykjavik, Pradipta worked for Google for a year and half.

Date: Oct 9, 2012, 10am
Location: STM326

CS Talk: Dr.Erik T. Mueller

The Watson Question Answering System: Erik T. Mueller is a Research Staff Member at the IBM Thomas J.Watson Research Center. He is currently working on applying Watson to decision support systems for medical diagnosis. He received his S.B. in Computer Science and Engineering from MIT and his M.S. and Ph.D. in Computer Science from UCLA. He is the author of the books Commonsense Reasoning, Natural Language Processing with ThoughtTreasure, and Daydreaming in Humans and Machines. (http://amazon.com/author/erikmueller)

Date: Jan 25, 2013, 11am
Location: STM326

CS Talk: Prof.Greg N. Frederickson

Geometric Dissections as Algorithmic Mathematical Art: Greg N. Frederickson received a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Maryland in 1977. He is now a Professor of Computer Science at Purdue University, in West Lafayette, Indiana, with his primary area of research in the design and analysis of algorithms. He has served on the editorial boards of SIAM Journal on Computing, SIAM Journal on Discrete Mathematics, Algorithmica, and IEEE Transactions on Computers. He also pursues interests in mathematical recreations, specifically geometric dissection. On this topic he has published three books and a number of articles. He has twice won the George Polya Award from the Mathematical Association of America.

Date: Oct 26, 2012, 11am
Location: STM326

CS Talk: Prof.Nick Feamster

The Battle for Control of Online Communications: Nick Feamster is the Darnell-Kanal Associate Professor of Computer Science in the Department of Computer Science at University of Maryland, and an associate professor at Georgia Tech, where he leads the Network Operations and Internet Security Group. He received his Ph.D. in Computer science from MIT in 2005, and his S.B. and M.Eng. degrees in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from MIT in 2000 and 2001, respectively. His research focuses on many aspects of computer networking and networked systems, including the design, measurement, and analysis of network routing protocols, network operations and security, and anonymous communication systems. In December 2008, he received the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE) for his contributions to cybersecurity, notably spam filtering. His honors include the Technology Review 35 “Top Young Innovators Under 35” award, a Sloan Research Fellowship, the NSF CAREER award, the IBM Faculty Fellowship, and award papers at SIGCOMM 2006 (network-level behavior of spammers), the NSDI 2005 conference (fault detection in router configuration), Usenix Security 2002 (circumventing web censorship using Infranet), and Usenix Security 2001 (web cookie analysis).

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

CS Talk: Dr.David Lewis

Machine Learning for Discovery in Legal Cases: Dave Lewis, Ph.D. (www.DavidDLewis.com) is a Chicago-based consulting computer scientist working in the areas of information retrieval, data mining, natural language processing, and the evaluation of complex information systems. He formerly held research positions at AT&T Labs, Bell Labs, and the University of Chicago. He has published more than 75 scientific papers and 8 patents, and is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Dr. Lewis has served as a consulting and testifying expert on e-discovery issues in civil litigation, including Kleen Products, LLC, et. al. v. Packaging Corporation of America, et. al. and In Re: Actos.

Date: Dec 5, 2012, 11am
Location: STM326

CS Talk: Prof.Nick Feamster

The Battle for Control of Online Communications: Nick Feamster is an associate professor in the College of Computing at Georgia Tech. He received his Ph.D. in Computer science from MIT in 2005, and his S.B. and M.Eng. degrees in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from MIT in 2000 and 2001, respectively. His research focuses on many aspects of computer networking and networked systems, including the design, measurement, and analysis of network routing protocols, network operations and security, and anonymous communication systems. In December 2008, he received the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE) for his contributions to cybersecurity, notably spam filtering. His honors include the Technology Review 35 “Top Young Innovators Under 35” award, a Sloan Research Fellowship, the NSF CAREER award, the IBM Faculty Fellowship, and award papers at SIGCOMM 2006 (network-level behavior of spammers), the NSDI 2005 conference (fault detection in router configuration), Usenix Security 2002 (circumventing web censorship using Infranet), and Usenix Security 2001 (web cookie analysis).

Date: Apr 19, 2013, 11am
Location: STM326

CS Talk: Dr.A.A.Kronik

Ten Questions to a Future Colleague: On Study of Time, Causometry Research & Lifelook Development: A.A. Kronik, a licensed psychologist with clinical practice in Maryland, received his PhD and ScD in psychology (1979, 1995) from the Russian Academy of Sciences Institute of Psychology. He is the coauthor of the goal-and-causal theory of psychological time, published in the book, Psychological Time of Personality (1984/2008). This book with its many practical applications (called causometry) became a winner of the 2009 Golden Psyche award (St. Petersburg, Russia) as the best project in psychological science (in Russian language).

Date: Dec 6, 2012, 12pm
Location: STM326

Klauer Distinguished Guest Lecturer: Dr.Vinton G. Cerf

Internet in the 21st Century: Vinton G. Cerf is vice president and Chief Internet Evangelist for Google. He is responsible for identifying new enabling technologies and applications on the Internet and other platforms for the company. Previously he served at MCI, the Corporation for National Research Initiatives, at DARPA and as a member of the Stanford University faculty. Vint co-invented the architecture and basic protocols of the Internet. He has received the U.S. National Medal of Technology, ACM Turing award, the US Presidential Medal of Freedom and the Japan Prize. He served as chairman of the board of ICANN and as founding president of the Internet Society. He is a Fellow of the IEEE, ACM, and American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the International Engineering Consortium, the Computer History Museum, the National Academy of Engineering and a member of the American Philosophical Society. Vint holds a bachelor’s degree from Stanford University and master’s and Ph.D. degrees from UCLA. He has received eighteen honorary degrees.

Date: Feb 11, 2013, 5:30pm
Location: Healy Hall, Riggs Library

CS Talk: Alina Ene

Submodular cost allocation: applications, algorithms and hardness results: Alina Ene is a PhD student in Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She is part of the Algorithms and Theory group and she is advised by Chandra Chekuri. Her research interests are in theoretical Computer Science and algorithm design, and her work focuses on approximation algorithms for combinatorial optimization problems. She graduated with a BSE degree in Computer Science from Princeton University in 2008.

Date: Feb 13, 2013, 10am
Location: STM326

CS Talk: Esther Ezra

On Relative Approximations in Geometry and Their Applications: Esther Ezra is a visiting professor at the Department of Computer Science in Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, New York University. She holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science under the supervision of Prof. Micha Sharir at Tel-Aviv University. Her main research interests are Geometric Optimization, Approximations and their connection to Sensor Networking and Machine Learning. She was a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Computer Science in Duke University over the years 2007-2009, then she continued her postdoctoral research in New York University during the years 2009-2011, where in September 2011 she joined the department as a visiting professor.

Date: Feb 19, 2013, 10:30am
Location: STM326

CS Talk: Ravi Chugh

Static Verification for Web Scripting Languages: Ravi Chugh is a Computer Science Ph.D. student at UC San Diego and holds master’s and bachelor’s degrees from the University of Pennsylvania. Ravi’s primary research interest is developing programming language techniques, such as type systems and program analysis, to improve the reliability and security of modern web applications.

Date: Feb 25, 2013, 10:30am
Location: STM326

CS Talk: Shay Cohen

Improving the Accuracy, Efficiency and Data Use for Natural Language Parsing: Shay Cohen is a postdoctoral research scientist in the Department of Computer Science at Columbia University. He holds a CRA Computing Innovation Fellowship. He received his B.Sc. and M.Sc. from Tel Aviv University in 2000 and 2004, and his Ph.D. from Carnegie Mellon University in 2011. His research interests span a range of topics in natural language processing and machine learning, with a focus on structured prediction. He is especially interested in developing efficient and scalable parsing algorithms as well as learning algorithms for probabilistic grammars.

Date: Feb 22, 2013, 10:30am
Location: STM326

CS Talk: Zachary Tatlock

Securing Software via Design and Proof: Zachary Tatlock is a PhD candidate in Computer Science and Engineering at UC San Diego where he is a member of the Programming Systems group. He received BS degrees in Computer Science and Mathematics from Purdue University. His research draws upon proof assistants, Satisfiability Modulo Theories (SMT) solvers, and type systems to improve software reliability and security in domains ranging from embedded database query languages and compiler optimizations to web browsers.

Date: Mar 1, 2013, 10:30am
Location: STM326

CS Talk: Adam O’Neill

Efficiently Searchable Encryption for Secure Cloud Storage: Adam O’Neill received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the Georgia Institute of Technology in 2010. Since then, he has held postdoctoral research appointments at the University of Texas at Austin and at Boston University, where he is currently hosted by Ran Canetti and Leonid Reyzin. His research is in cryptography, with a general focus on helping to resolve the tension between theory and practice.

Date: Mar 15, 2013, 10am
Location: STM326

CS Talk: Prof.Brian Levine

Fighting Internet-based Sexual Exploitation Crimes Against Children: Brian Levine is a Professor in the School of Computer Science at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, which he joined in 1999. He received his PhD in Computer Engineering from the University of California, Santa Cruz in 1999. His research focuses on mobile networks, forensics, privacy, and the Internet. He received an NSF CAREER award in 2002. He was a UMass Lilly Teaching Fellow in 2003 and was awarded his college’s Outstanding Teacher Award in 2007. In 2008, he received the Alumni Award for Excellence in Science & Technology from the Univ. at Albany. In 2011, he was awarded his college’s Outstanding Research Award. He was TPC co-chair of ACM MobiCom 2011, and TPC co-chair of the 2011 and 2012 DFRWS Annual Forensics Research Conferences. This talk is based in part on NSF award CNS-1018615.

Date: Apr 5, 2013, 11am
Location: STM326

CS Talk: Anduo Wang

Automated formal analysis of Internet routing systems: Anduo Wang is a Ph.D. candidate in the Computer and Information Science Department at the University of Pennsylvania. She received her M.S. degree in Computer Science from University of Pennsylvania in 2009, and her B.S. degree in Computer Science from Tianjin University in 2004. Her research interests center on the application of formal methods and programming languages techniques that enable us to create network systems that are functionally correct, scalable, and easy to manage.

Date: Mar 20, 2013, 11am
Location: STM328

Master’s Thesis Defense: Dongyi Guan

Structured Query Formulation and Result Organization for Session Search: Dongyi Guan is a Master’s student in the Department of Computer Science.

Date: Apr 22, 2013, 2pm
Location: STM326