2013 – 2014 Past Talks

CS Talk: Dr.Elad Yom-Tov

Discovering medical information from user-generated content: Elad Yom-Tov is a Senior Researcher at Microsoft Research. Before joining Microsoft he was with Yahoo Research, IBM Research, and Rafael. Dr. Yom-Tov studied at Tel-Aviv University and the Technion, Israel. He has published two books, over 80 papers (of which 3 were awarded prizes), and filed more than 30 patents (16 of which have been granted so far). His primary research interests are in applying large-scale Machine Learning and Information Retrieval methods to medicine. The results of his work have flown at four times the speed of sound, enabled people to communicate with computers using only their brain-waves, and analyzed the cellphone records of a significant portion of the worlds’ population. He is a Senior Member of IEEE and held the title of Master Inventor while at IBM.

Date: Nov 11, 2013, 11am
Location: STM326

CS Talk: Dr.William Hersh

Information Retrieval Evaluation in the Ubiquitous Search Era: A View from the Biomedical/Health Domain: William Hersh is Professor and Chair of the Department of Medical Informatics & Clinical Epidemiology in the School of Medicine at Oregon Health & Science University (OHSU) in Portland, Oregon, USA. His research originally focused in the area of information retrieval (also known as search), where he has authored over 125 scientific papers as well as the book, Information Retrieval: A Health and Biomedical Perspective (Springer, 2009), now in its third edition. Dr. Hersh’s recent research work focuses on the application of information retrieval methods to the electronic health record (EHR), with a focus on identifying patients who might be candidates for clinical studies. He also was one of the main organizers of the Text Retrieval Conference (TREC) Medical Records Track in 2011-2012. Dr. Hersh received his BS in Biology from the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana in 1980 and his MD from the University of Illinois at Chicago in 1984. After completing a Residency in Internal Medicine at University of Illinois Hospital in 1987, he completed a Fellowship in Medical Informatics at Harvard University in 1990. Since that time, he has been a faculty member in the OHSU School of Medicine.

Date: Nov 15, 2013, 12pm
Location: STM326

CS Talk: Dr.Otthein Herzog

Genre-specific Semantic Video Abstracting: Dr. Otthein Herzog received his PhD in Computer Science in 1976 from the Technical University Dortmund, Germany. From 1977 to 1993, Dr. Herzog worked with IBM Germany in various software-related and managerial positions in research and software development. From 1993 to 2009 he held the position of the chaired professor of Artificial Intelligence at Universitaet Bremen, Germany. Since 1998 he holds also an affiliate professorship at the Machine Learning and Inference Laboratory at George Mason University. Since 2010 he holds the Wisdom Professorship of Visual Information Technologies at Jacobs University Bremen. In 1995, he founded the TZI – Center for Computing and Communication Technologies and directed it until 2009 with more than 160 full-time researchers. His research interests include Integrated Wearable and Mobile Computing for work, health and AAL applications, multi-agent systems for logistics planning and scheduling, and the content-based analysis and generation of images and videos. He has (co-)authored more than 220 scientific publications and is elected Fellow of the Gesellschaft fur Informatik, elected Fellow of acatech – German National Academy of Science and Engineering, and member of the ACM. He also serves on various boards of German research institutions and enterprises.

Date: Nov 7, 2013, 3:30pm
Location: Reiss 284

CS Talk: Robert Lychev

Is the juice worth the Squeeze? Evaluating S*BGP Security Benefits in Full and Partial Deployment: I am currently a PhD student at Georgia Institute of Technology at the College of Computing, working with Alexandra Boldyreva and Nick Feamster. I am primarily interested in applying cryptographic and game theoretic concepts to problems of security and incentives in routing and accountability. In the recent past I was working with Yevgeniy Vorobechik at Sandia National Laboratories Livermore, California as a summer intern. Before that, for two years I was a visiting researcher at Boston University Security Group working with Sharon Goldberg. Before joining Georgia Tech I obtained bachelors and masters degrees at University of Massachusetts Amherst, where I was advised by Kevin Fu.

Date: Nov 5, 2013, 2pm
Location: TBD

CS Talk: Dr.Nodari Sitchinava

Locality-conscious parallel algorithms: Nodari Sitchinava received Bachelor and Master degrees in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from MIT and a PhD in Computer Science from the University of California, Irvine. He is currently a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute for Theoretical Informatics at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology. From January he will be starting as an assistant professor at the University of Hawaii. His research concentrates on developing accurate models of computation for modern parallel architectures and designing algorithms for them. In particular, his PhD dissertation concentrated on combining cache-efficiency with parallelism for multi-core architectures and on the development of a number of fundamental combinatorial, graph and geometric algorithms in the new model.

Date: Nov 14, 2013, 11am
Location: STM326

CS Talk: Dr.Paul Syverson

A Peel of Onion: Paul Syverson—inventor of onion routing and other technologies, designer of Tor, multiply published author, chair of many security and privacy conferences—has received various patents and awards, several advanced degrees, and an origami magic rabbit folded for him by Gus Simmons. For over two decades as Mathematician at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory, he has investigated authentication, epistemic logic, information flow in probabilistic systems, incentives in protocols and systems, anonymous communication, and other aspects of computer security and privacy. Paul is currently Associate Editor of the Journal of Computer Security, has served as director of international computer security organizations, and has been a visiting scholar and guest faculty member at universities and institutes in the U.S., England, and Italy. You can humor him by feigning interest in any of this or something you find at http://www.syverson.org/.

Date: Dec 6, 2013, 1:30pm
Location: STM104

Master’s Thesis Defense: Chris Wacek

Leveraging Network Maps to Improve Evaluations of Overlay System Performance and Security: Chris Wacek is a Master’s student in the Department of Computer Science.

Date: Dec 9, 2013, 10am
Location: STM326

CS Talk: Prof.Ran Canetti

On Cryptographic Program Obfuscation: Ran Canetti graduated from the Weizmann Institute of Science in 1995. After 12 years as a researcher at IBM Research, he is currently a Professor of Computer Science in Boston University and Tel Aviv university (on leave). Ran heads the Reliable Information Systems and Cyber Security (RISCS) Center at BU and the Check Point Institute for Information Security at Tel Aviv. Ran’s research interests lie in cryptography and system security, with emphasis on the design and analysis of cryptographic protocols and algorithms.

Date: Apr 11, 2014, 11am
Location: STM326

CS Talk: Prof.Maxwell Young

How to Bankrupt an Attacker: Maxwell Young is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computing at Drexel University. Before moving to Philadelphia, he held postdoctoral positions at the University of Michigan and at the National University of Singapore, and he earned his Ph.D. in computer science at the University of Waterloo, Canada. His research interests include security and distributed computing.

Date: Mar 7, 2014, 11am
Location: STM326

CS Talk: Prof.Jonathan Katz

Privacy-Preserving Computation: How, What, and Why.: Jonathan Katz is a professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Maryland, and the director of the Maryland Cybersecurity Center. His research interests are in the areas of cryptography and the science of cybersecurity. He received a PhD in computer science from Columbia University, and holds undergraduate degrees in mathematics and chemistry from MIT. He was a member of the DARPA Computer Science Study Group in 2009-2010.

Date: Apr 3, 2014, 11am
Location: STM404/414

CS Talk: Dr.Dina Demner-Fushman

Extracting Information from Clinical Text: Dina Demner-Fushman, MD, PhD leads research in information retrieval and natural language processing; providing clinical decision support through linking evidence (text and images) to patients’ data; answering clinical and consumer health questions; and extracting information from clinical text. Dr. Demner-Fushman earned her doctor of medicine degree from Kazan State Medical Institute in 1980, and clinical research Doctorate (PhD) in Medical Science degree from Moscow Medical and Stomatological Institute in 1989. She earned her MS and PhD in Computer Science from the University of Maryland, College Park in 2003 and 2006, respectively. She earned her B. degree in Computer Science from Hunter College, CUNY in 2000. Dr. Demner-Fushman is a lead investigator in several NLM projects in the areas of Information Extraction for Clinical Decision Support, EMR Database Research and Development, and Image and Text Indexing for Clinical Decision Support and Education. The outgrowths of these projects are the evidence-based decision support system in use at the NIH Clinical Center since 2009 and an image retrieval engine, OpenI, launched in 2012. She is the author of more than 100 articles and book chapters in the fields of information retrieval, natural language processing, and biomedical and clinical informatics. Dr. Demner-Fushman is a Fellow of the American College of Medical Informatics (ACMI), an editorial board member of the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association, and a founding member of the Association for Computational Linguistics Special Interest Group on biomedical natural language processing. As the secretary of this group, she has been an essential organizer of the yearly ACL BioNLP Workshop since 2007. Dr. Demner-Fushman has received eight staff recognition and special act NLM awards since 2002. In 2012, she received an NIH Award of Merit.

Date: May 2, 2014, 11am
Location: STM326

Master’s Thesis Defense: Jiyun Luo

Prior Art Search and Its Evaluation: Jiyun Luo is a Master’s student in the Department of Computer Science.

Date: Apr 24, 2014, 12pm
Location: Regents Hall room 551

CS Talk: Prof.Yevgeniy Dodis

Random Number Generators, Revisited: Yevgeniy Dodis is a Professor of computer science at New York University. Dr. Dodis received his summa cum laude Bachelors degree in Mathematics and Computer Science from New York University in 1996, and his PhD degree in Computer Science from MIT in 2000. Dr. Dodis was a post-doc at IBM T.J.Watson Research center in 2000, and joined New York University as an Assistant Professor in 2001. He was promoted to Associate Professor in 2007 and Full Professor in 2012. Dr. Dodis’ research is primarily in cryptography and network security. In particular, he worked in a variety of areas including leakage-resilient cryptography, cryptography under weak randomness, cryptography with biometrics and other noisy data, hash function and block cipher design, protocol composition and information-theoretic cryptography. Dr. Dodis has more than 100 scientific publications at various conferences, journals and other venues, was the Program co-Chair for the 2015 Theory of Cryptography Conference, has been on program committees of many international conferences (including FOCS, STOC, CRYPTO and Eurocrypt), and gave numerous invited lectures and courses at various venues. Dr. Dodis is the recipient of National Science Foundation CAREER Award, Faculty Awards from IBM, Google and VMware, and Best Paper Award at 2005 Public Key Cryptography Conference. As an undergraduate student, he was also a winner of the US-Canada Putnam Mathematical Competition in 1995.

Date: May 5, 2014, 1pm
Location: STM404/414

CS Talk: Benjamin Fuller

Key Derivation from Noisy Sources with More Errors than Entropy: Benjamin Fuller is a Ph.D student at Boston University, advised by Leo Reyzin. His research focuses on the use of randomness in cryptography. Of particular interest are the power and limitations of imperfect randomness that comes from actual physical devices. Benjamin is also a staff member at MIT Lincoln Laboratory where he applies this research to build secure authentication systems.

Date: May 5, 2014, 2:15pm
Location: STM404/414

CS Talk: Prof.Yiming Yang

Large scale Structured Learning for Statistical Classification: Yiming Yang is a professor with a joint appointment in the Language Technologies Institute and the Machine Learning Department. She received her Ph.D. in Computer Science from Kyoto University (Japan), and has been a faculty member at Carnegie Mellon University since 1996. Her research has centered on statistical learning methods/algorithms and application to very-large-scale text categorization, web-mining for concept graph discovery, graphical models for topic detection and tracking, semi-supervised clustering, multi-task learning, novelty-based information retrieval, large-scale optimization for online advertising, social network analysis for personalized email prioritization, etc. Her publications have received over 22,000 citations as of Feb 2014 in Google Scholar. She brings strengths in statistical modeling techniques and scalable algorithms.

Date: June 3, 2014, 3pm
Location: STM326

CS Talk: Dr.Gareth J. F. Jones

Towards Effective Retrieval of Spontaneous Conversational Spoken Content: Gareth J. F Jones is a Principal Investigator in the CNGL Centre for Global Intelligent Content, and a Faculty member of the School of Computing at Dublin City University (DCU), Ireland. He holds B.Eng and PhD degrees from the University of Bristol, U.K. He has previously been a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Cambridge, U.K., and was a Toshiba Fellow at the Toshiba Corporation Research and Development Center in Kawasaki, Japan. Prior to joining DCU he was a Lecturer at the University of Exeter, U.K. He has previously held positions as a Visiting Scientist to the Informedia project at Carnegie Mellon University, U.S.A. and a JSPS Visiting Fellow at the National Institute of Informatics, Tokyo, Japan. His research focuses on information retrieval (IR) and access technologies including multilingual, multimedia and mobile applications. He has published more than 300 papers, including receiving Best Paper Awards from ACM SIGIR and ACM Multimedia. He has been active in IR benchmarking activities for many years principally at the EU Cross-Language Evaluation Forum (CLEF) since its foundation in 2000, and since 2010 as co-organiser of the MediaEval multimedia benchmarking initiative. He served as IR track chair for ACM CIKM 2010 and co-PC chair for ECIR 2011, and was General co-chair of ACM SIGIR 2013. He regularly reviews for international conferences, journals and funding agencies, and is on the editorial board of the Journal of Information Retrieval.

Date: June 19, 2014, 11am
Location: STM326