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November 2009
November
23
End Date
Media Cloud and Quantitative News Media Analysis, Hal Roberts and Ethan Zuckerman (Harvard Berkman Center)
Maxwell Dworkin 119
The rapid rise of participatory media technologies – weblogs, social networks, microblogging, video sharing sites – are transforming the news media landscape, reshaping how ideas are spread. Much of the early research on the influence of participatory media on existing institutions focuses on specific, successful cases where media frames developed online influenced offline media. Our project seeks to complement this work with tools to facilitate quantitative analysis of the relationship between media sources. We will present our prototype system to retrieve, tag, cluster and analyze blog and newspaper data, and discuss how the Media Cloud platform will be used in our future experiments, and can be used by other researchers to analyze patterns of influence in news media.
November
20
End Date
Bob Metcalfe "Enernet: Internet Lessons for Solving Energy"
Maxwell Dworkin G115
Bob Metcalfe,
Polaris Venture Partners.
Abstract: Solving energy is a lot about thermodynamics, but more about networking. Many lessons from 63 years of Internet history apply to meeting needs for cheap and clean energy. If the Internet is any guide, we'll end up using not less energy but much more. Promising new sources -- efficiency, coal, oil, gas, wind, geothermal, fission, solar fusion -- will be distributed and networked. Beware Washington. Trust entrepreneurship. And the energy movement's color should be blue.
November
19
End Date
November
19
End Date
November
18
End Date
Kit Parker: Tales of a Soldier/Engineer
Maxwell Dworkin G115
Kit Parker, US Army major and Harvard biomedical engineering professor, will discuss his experiences after finishing his second tour in Afghanistan. This event is free and open to all.
November
18
End Date
No More Teachers? No More Books? Higher Ed in the Networked Age
Lowell Lecture Hall
This panel discussion explores what it means to offer higher education in a world of ubiquitous connectivity and a knowledge base that is hyperlinked and broadly accessible.
November
18
End Date
Wyss Seminar Series
Hugh Herr, MIT
November
18
End Date
A Model of Computation for MapReduce, Sergei Vassilvitskii, Yahoo Research
Maxwell Dworkin 319
In recent years the MapReduce framework has emerged as one of the most
widely used parallel computing platforms for processing data on the
terabyte and petabyte scales. Used daily at companies such Yahoo!, Google,
Amazon, and Facebook and adopted more recently by several universities, it
allows for easy parallelization of data intensive computations over many
machines. One key feature of MapReduce that differentiates it from
previous models of parallel computation is that it interleaves sequential
and parallel computation. We propose a model of efficient computation using
the MapReduce paradigm. Our model allows each machine to perform
sequential computations in time polynomial in the size of the input that
machine receives. Moreover, since MapReduce is designed for computations
over massive data sets, our model limits the number of machines and the
memory per machine to be (substantially) sublinear in the size of the input.
We compare MapReduce to the PRAM model of computation. We prove a
simulation lemma showing that a large class of PRAM algorithms can be
efficiently simulated via MapReduce. The strength of MapReduce, however,
lies in the fact that it uses both sequential and parallel computation. We
show how algorithms can take advantage of this fact to compute an MST of a
dense graph in only two rounds, as opposed to $O(\log(n))$ rounds needed by a
standard PRAM. We also show to evaluate a wide class of functions using
the MapReduce framework. We conclude by applying this result to show how
to compute many basic algorithmic problems such as undirected connectivity
in the MapReduce framework.
Upcoming TOC seminars and related talks:
---------------------------------------------------
Mon 11/23 4:15pm: Eddie Farhi physics colloquium
12/2: Emanuele Viola, Northeastern University
November
18
End Date
November
16
End Date
Pixar Animation Studios -Presentation and interviews for jobs/summer internships
Office of Career Services, Downstairs Conference Room
PIXAR ANIMATION STUDIOS, the creator of Toy Story, Finding Nemo, The Incredibles, Cars, Wall-e, and Up, is coming to Harvard to interview students for jobs and summer internships!
Next Monday, November 16th, come and learn about how we artistically direct the physics and math that bring our characters and their worlds to life. We will be conducting interviews for jobs and summer internships on Tuesday, November 17th. Students of all concentrations and years are encouraged to attend the presentation and apply, particularly students of CS, Physics, Engineering, and VES.
COMPANY PRESENTATION
Monday, November 16
12:00 pm
OCS Downstairs Conference Room
FREE PIZZA, for the hungry and between-classy.
INTERVIEWS
Tuesday, November 15th
We will be conducting interviews for full time positions and summer internships in our Production, Tools, and Production Engineering departments. Interviews will be held on Tuesday, November 17th. Interested students should send a resume and cover letter, along with any samples of computer graphics, art, or design work, to recruiting@pixar.com. THE DEADLINE TO APPLY IS 5 PM ON SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 15TH.
Please email Najeeb Tarazi '07 at najeeb@pixar.com with any questions or visit www.pixar.com for more information.
See you next Monday!
November
13
End Date
Paul Chaikin, NYU, "Photonic QuasiCrystals and other problems in Experimental Geometry"
Pierce 209
Paul Chaikin,
Department of Physics,
New York University.
Abstract: QuasiCrystals can have symmetries which are forbidden for conventional crystals, e.g. five fold in two dimensions and icosahedral in three dimensions. We thought that this might be useful in creating a complete photonic band gap material. The gap should be more isotropic with icosahedral symmetry than, for example, cubic symmetry. The problem was that we couldn’t, and can’t do the calculation. The problem is that quasi-crystals are have incommensurate periodicities, they are not periodic. So we made the “biggest” quasicrystal and measured its spectrum. We found large gaps and surprisingly what looks like a well defined Brillouin zone. The talk will discuss the experiments, attempts to understand the gaps in two and three dimensions, some new results on the nature of photonic gaps and possibly other cases where experiments are the only way we know of solving a physical or mathematical/geometrical problem.
November
13
End Date
Jim Williams, Hewlett's Remarkable Sine Wave Oscillator
Maxwell Dworkin G125
In 1938 a pair of young engineers named Hewlett and Packard began work (in the proverbial "garage") on a commercial product, based on a novel variant of the Wien bridge sinewave oscillator that Hewlett devised as part of his graduate thesis at Stanford, in which he made use of new concepts and ideas by Nyquist, Black, and Meacham. On Jan 1, 1939, they formalized their partnership, deciding the company's name with a flip of a coin. As the saying goes, "the rest is history." How does this invention look, with the hindsight of contemporary electronics? In a word, stunning. Hewlett possessed an uncanny knack for combining diverse ideas to achieve a result on a higher plane. The oscillator is a beautiful example of lateral thinking: the whole problem was considered in an inter disciplinary spirit, and not just from the standpoint of traditional circuit design. This is the signature of superior problem solving, and admirable engineering. Although the theoretics and technology now look quaint, the quality of Hewlett's thinking remains rare, and singularly human. No computer-driven "expert system" could emulate such lateral thinking, advertising copy to the contrary notwithstanding. The talk will conclude with contemporary adaptations of Hewlett's guidance. HANDOUTS: Hewlett's thesis, a detailed production schematic of the oscillator, and contemporary versions of the circuit. DOOR PRIZE (!): Jim's hand-built "Oliver Network Study"
November
12
End Date
Kavita Bala, Cornell
Maxwell Dworkin G125
When is a rendered image good enough? Perceptually-Based Realistic Rendering
November
11
End Date
Veterans' Day
Veteran's Day Holiday
November
9
End Date
CRCS Lunch Seminar
Maxwell Dworkin 2nd Floor Lounge Area
Internet Companions: technical and Social Issues, Yorick Wilks, Oxford Internet Institute
November
6
End Date
Research in Applied Mathematics at Schlumberger-Doll Research
MD 119
Research in Applied Mathematics at Schlumberger
The search for oil and gas has three objectives: to identify and evaluate hydrocarbon-bearing reservoirs; to bring hydrocarbons to the surface safely and cost-effectively, without harming the environment; and to maximize the yield from each discovery. This talk will focus on some aspects of research in applied mathematics at Schlumberger.
Lalitha Venkataramanan
Program Manager in the Math & Modeling department in Cambridge, MA.
Lalitha is a senior research scientist at Schlumberger Doll Research in Ridgefield, CT. She is program manager of the measurement interpretation program in the Math and Modeling department. Her research activities include working on inversion algorithms for nuclear magnetic resonance data obtained downhole and more recently, working on answer products from permanent downhole measurements. Lalitha earned her Master’s degree in mathematics (topology) from Cornell University. After Cornell, she taught at a nearby liberal arts college before starting at the Schlumberger-Doll Research Center in Ridgefield, Connecticut in 1984, writing computer codes for electromagnetic tools. While working at Schlumberger-Doll Research she earned her Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Yale University. She is the author or co-author of 12 peer-reviewed journal articles and 3 patents.
November
6
End Date
Research in Applied Mathematics at Schlumberger
MD 119
Research in Applied Mathematics at Schlumberger
The search for oil and gas has three objectives: to identify and evaluate hydrocarbon-bearing reservoirs; to bring hydrocarbons to the surface safely and cost-effectively, without harming the environment; and to maximize the yield from each discovery. This talk will focus on some aspects of research in applied mathematics at Schlumberger.
November
6
End Date
Angela Belcher "Engineering Organisms as Building Block Materials for Energy and Electronics"
Pierce 209
Angela Belcher,
MIT,
Department of Materials Science and Engineering.
Abstract: Organisms have been making exquisite inorganic materials for over 500 million years. Although these materials have many desired physical properties such as strength, regularity, and environmental benign processing, the types of materials that organisms have evolved to work with are limited. However, there are many properties of living systems that could be potentially harnessed by researchers to make advanced technologies that are smarter, more adaptable, and that are synthesized to be compatible with the environment. One approach to designing future technologies which have some of the properties that living organisms use so well, is to evolve organisms to work with a more diverse set of building blocks. These materials could be designed to address many scientific and technological problems in electronics, military, medicine, and energy applications. Examples include a virus enabled lithium ion rechargeable battery we recently built that has many improved properties over conventional batteries, as well as materials for solar and display technologies. This talk will address conditions under which organisms first evolved to make materials and scientific approaches to move beyond naturally evolved materials to genetically imprint advanced technologies.
November
6
End Date
Mark Cutosky, Stanford University Applying principles from the biology to the design and operation of bio-inspired robots
MD G125
Mark Cutosky, Stanford University
Collaboration between biologists and engineers has resulted in a new generation of bio-inspired robots. Drawing inspiration from the locomotion of animals, these robots are faster, more versatile, more robust and easier to control than their predecessors. The design process begins with identifying exemplars from nature that excel at a particular task, such as running rapidly over rough terrain or climbing vertical surfaces. The next step is to hypothesize design principles that underlie the animals’ success. These design principles represent an abstraction of the complex structures and behaviors observed in animal models. The design principles guide the development of robots, which take advantage of recent developments in rapid prototyping technology to create tuned multi-material structures with embedded sensors and actuators that exhibit the desired characteristics and behavior. Testing and evaluating the robots reveals where the design principles should be refined or augmented. The resulting insights are valuable to both roboticists and biologists to deepen their understanding about what is important, and why.
The bio-inspired design process will be illustrated with several running and climbing and perching robots that have grown out of collaborations between researchers in robotics and integrative biology.
November
5
End Date
Ben Livshits, Microsoft
Maxwell Dworkin G125
Improving the Performance and Security of AJAX Web Applications
November
5
End Date
November
4
End Date
IIC Colloquium
Maxwell Dworkin G115
Particle-Based Fluid Simulations Using GPU-Accelerated Algorithms, Lorena Barba
November
4
End Date
The Randomized k-Server Conjecture (Online Algorithms meet Linear Programming), Niv Buchbinder, Microsoft Research
Maxwell Dworkin 319
The k-server problem is one of the most central and well studied problems in competitive analysis and is considered by many to be the "holy grail" problem in the field. In the k-server problem, there is a distance function d defined over an n-point metric space and k servers located at the points of the metric space. At each time step, an online algorithm is given a request at one of the points of the metric space, and it is served by moving a server to the requested point. The goal of an online algorithm is to minimize the total sum of the distances traveled by the servers so as to serve a given sequence of requests. The k-server problem captures many online scenarios, and in particular the widely studied paging problem.
A twenty year old conjecture states that there exists a k-competitive online algorithm for any metric space. The randomized k-server conjecture states that there exists a randomized O(log k)-competitive algorithm for any metric space.
While major progress was made in the past 20 years on the deterministic conjecture, only little is known about the randomized conjecture.
We present a very promising primal-dual approach for the design and analysis of online algorithms. We survey recent progress towards settling the k-server conjecture achieved using this new framework.
Upcoming TOC seminars and related talks: --------------------------------------------------- 11/4: Niv Buchbinder, Microsoft Research 11/18: Serguei Vassilvitskii, Yahoo Research
Mon 11/23 4:15pm: Eddie Farhi physics colloquium
12/2: Emanuele Viola, Northeastern University
November
4
End Date
November
2
End Date
Aura: Programming with Authorization and Audit, Jeffrey Vaughan, Harvard CRCS
Maxwell Dworkin 119
Standard programming models do not provide direct ways of managing secret or untrusted data. This is a problem because programmers must use ad hoc methods to ensure that secrets are not leaked and, conversely, that tainted data is not used to make critical decisions. This talk will advocate integrating cryptography and language-based analyses in order to build programming environments for declarative information security, in which high-level specifications of confidentiality and integrity constraints are automatically enforced in hostile execution environments.
I will introduce describes Aura, a family of programing languages, which integrate functional programming, access control via authorization logic, automatic audit logging, and confidentially via encryption. Aura’s programming model marries an expressive, principled way to specify security policies with a practical policy-enforcement methodology that is well-suited for auditing access grants and protecting secrets.
Aura security policies are expressed as propositions in an authorization logic. Such logics are suitable for discussing delegation, permission, and other security-relevant concepts. Aura’s (dependent) type system cleanly integrates standard data types, like integers, with proofs of authorization-logic propositions; this lets programs manipulate authorization proofs just like ordinary values. In addition, security-relevant implementation details—like the creation of audit trails or the cryptographic representation of language constructs—can be handled automatically with little or no programmer intervention.
Bio: Jeff Vaughan’s research lies at the intersection of computer security, programming languages, and formal methods. He is particularly interested in access control, information flow, the theory and application of dependent types, and mechanized metatheory. Jeff will be receiving his PhD from the University of Pennsylvania.
October 2009
October
30
End Date
Kerry Vahala "Phonon Lasers in Cavity Optomechanics"
Pierce 209
Kerry Vahala
Division of Engineering and Applied Science
CALTECH
Abstract: The ability to couple mechanical and optical degrees of freedom by way of optical forces has created a worldwide effort directed toward ground-statecooling of macro-mechanical structures. Recent work has shown that optical forces can be used to create phonon laser devices in which stimulated emission of phonons overcomes mechanical loss, leading to coherent motion. The same principles also apply in cavity optomechanical systems. I will review both phonon laser action in trapped ions and in two-level, cavity optomechanical systems.
October
30
End Date
Prof Kenneth Shepard, Columbia Graphene field-effect transistors for RF applications
MD G125
Prof Kenneth Shepard, Columbia University
There has been growing interest in graphene as a replacement for III-V materials in MMIC applications because of its high mobility, its potential for high saturation velocity, and its nearly perfect two-dimensional electrostatics. We present results from the first experimental high-frequency measurements of graphene field-effect transistors (GFETs)
We present detailed measurement and analysis of velocity saturation in GFETs, demonstrating the potential for velocities approaching 108 cm/sec and the effect of an ambipolar channel on current-voltage characteristics. We find that the saturation velocity is sheet-carrier dependent and limited by interfacial phonon scattering from the silicon dioxide
substrate upon which the graphene is fabricated. We will also discuss recent work on scaling these devices to short channel lengths and the associated challenges.
October
29
End Date
October
29
End Date
October
29
End Date
October
28
End Date
October
26
End Date
Rethinking Higher Education in India
Pierce Hall 209
His Excellency Mr. Kapil Sibal, Minister for Human Resource Development Government of India, discusses the creation of 21st century innovation universities
October
23
End Date
Paul McEuen "Carbon nanotubes: particle physics writ large"
Pierce 209
Paul McEuen
Department of Physics
Cornell University
Abstract: Carbon nanotubes present many interesting analogies to high energy physics. For example, the quantization of the electron motion around the circumference of a tube gives rise to electron-hole symmetric subbands analogous to particle/antiparticle pairs. Here we present new results on nanotubes in the spirit of this analogy, including the observation of topological spin-orbit coupling due to the nanotube’s curled up dimension, and measurements of ultra-efficient electron-hole pair production by high energy carriers.
October
23
End Date
Where the Physical World Meets the Virtual World
MD G125
One of the joys of being an EE is the ability to change the "principle problems" of the field as technology and societal needs change. Over the past century EE has changed focus multiple times. Stanford's EE was created to help move power from Hoover Dam to the west, then moved to radio and radar. From there it moved to digital communication / information theory and solid state. This lead to the growth in IC research, and the focus changed to explore the explosion in computing systems and the general IT area. With the rapid decrease in cost of electronic systems and the maturing of the underlying technology, we are now in for another transition in the focus of EE. We are moving from the creation of the underlying IT technology, to exploiting it to better connect the rapidly growing world of information (the virtual world), with the physical world. Devices (sensors, actuators, photonics, nano etc) and systems (cameras, medical instruments, environmental sensing, smart power control, etc) at this interface are already critical and will grow in importance in the near future. This research area is broad enough to energize most areas of EE, but will especially push work in modern signal processing / extracting information from data, system design (especially embedded systems), and creating improved sensing technology.
October
22
End Date
October
22
End Date
October
21
End Date
Wyss Seminar Series
Dan Anderson, MIT, will present combinatorial development of biomaterials for tissue engineering and drug delivery
October
21
End Date
Potential-based agnostic boosting, Varun Kanade, Harvard University
Maxwell Dworkin 319
Boosting is a technique to obtain highly accurate classifiers using an ensemble
of weakly accurate classifiers. We present a boosting algorithm in the agnostic
learning framework of Kearns, Schapire and Sellie. The algorithm (like adaboost,
madaboost, etc) can be viewed as reducing a potential-function and is extremely simple. A remarkable feature of the boosting algorithm is that it never changes weights on unlabelled examples, but only modifies their labels. This allows
boosting with respect to specific distributions. We show that recent
non-trivial results in agnostic learning can be viewed as corollaries of our
boosting theorem.
Joint work with Adam Tauman Kalai (Microsoft Research, New England)
Upcoming TOC seminars and related talks:
---------------------------------------------------
11/4: Niv Buchbinder, Microsoft Research
11/18: Serguei Vassilvitskii, Yahoo Research
Mon 11/23 4:15pm: Eddie Farhi physics colloquium
12/2: Emanuele Viola, Northeastern University
October
21
End Date
October
20
End Date
Industry Talk: The Netflix Prize: Quest for $1,000,000, Yehuda Koren Senior Researcher, Yahoo!
Maxwell Dworkin Building, Room G115
The Netflix Prize: Quest for $1,000,000
Yehuda Koren Senior Researcher, Yahoo!
The collaborative filtering approach to recommender systems predicts user preferences for products or services by learning past user-item relationships. Their significant economic implications made collaborative filtering techniques play an important role at known e-tailers such as Amazon and Netflix. This field enjoyed a surge of interest since October 2006, when the Netflix Prize competition commenced. Netflix released a dataset containing 100 million anonymous movie ratings and challenged the research community to develop algorithms that could beat the accuracy of its recommendation system, Cinematch. This talk will survey the competition together with some of the principles and algorithms, which have led us to winning the Grand Prize in the competition.
Yehuda Koren is a Senior Researcher at Yahoo! Research, Haifa. Prior to this, he was a member of AT&T Labs-Research. He obtained his Ph.D. in Computer Science from The Weizmann Institute in 2003. His thesis topic was algorithms for drawing, clustering and visualizing large graphs. He was awarded best paper award at INFOVIS 2005 for the work on directed graph layout through constrained energy minimization. More recently he won KDD 2009 best research paper award for his work on collaborative filtering with temporal dynamics. Yehuda is a member of the teams that won the grand prize and the two progress prizes in the Netflix Prize competition.
Hosted by Prof. David Parkes
Refreshments will be served
October
20
End Date
Industry Talk: The Netflix Prize: Quest for $1,000,000, Yehuda Koren Senior Researcher, Yahoo!
Maxwell Dwoking Building, Room 119
The Netflix Prize: Quest for $1,000,000
Yehuda Koren Senior Researcher, Yahoo!
The collaborative filtering approach to recommender systems predicts user preferences for products or services by learning past user-item relationships. Their significant economic implications made collaborative filtering techniques play an important role at known e-tailers such as Amazon and Netflix. This field enjoyed a surge of interest since October 2006, when the Netflix Prize competition commenced. Netflix released a dataset containing 100 million anonymous movie ratings and challenged the research community to develop algorithms that could beat the accuracy of its recommendation system, Cinematch. This talk will survey the competition together with some of the principles and algorithms, which have led us to winning the Grand Prize in the competition.
Yehuda Koren is a Senior Researcher at Yahoo! Research, Haifa. Prior to this, he was a member of AT&T Labs-Research. He obtained his Ph.D. in Computer Science from The Weizmann Institute in 2003. His thesis topic was algorithms for drawing, clustering and visualizing large graphs. He was awarded best paper award at INFOVIS 2005 for the work on directed graph layout through constrained energy minimization. More recently he won KDD 2009 best research paper award for his work on collaborative filtering with temporal dynamics. Yehuda is a member of the teams that won the grand prize and the two progress prizes in the Netflix Prize competition.
October
16
End Date
October
16
End Date
October
16
End Date
"Computing Inexactly: Good Enough Answers in Complex Systems in Nanoscale Limits"
Maxwell Dworkin G115
Joint Applied Physics/Electrical Engineering Colloquium
Sandip Tiwari
School of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Cornell University
and
Director, National Nanotechnology Infrastructure Network
Abstract: "It is the mark of an instructed mind to rest satisfied with the degree of precision which the nature of the subject permits and not to seek an exactness where only an approximation of the truth is possible," so said Aristotle. In attempting to solve complex problems, we mostly deal with inexact inputs using inexact models, and limited resources, which at nanoscale have variability, unreliability and other constraints. What could one achieve if we relaxed the requirement of total predictability and reproducibility required of the current computation model?
October
16
End Date
Joint Applied Physics/Electrical Engineering Colloquium "Computing Inexactly: Good Enough Answers in Complex Systems in Nanoscale Limits"
Maxwell Dworkin G115
Sandip Tiwari
School of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Cornell University
Director, National Nanotechnology Infrastructure Network
Abstract: "It is the mark of an instructed mind to rest satisfied with the degree of precision which the nature of the subject permits and not to seek an exactness where only an approximation of the truth is possible," so said Aristotle. In attempting to solve complex problems, we mostly deal with inexact inputs using inexact models, and limited resources, which at nanoscale have variability, unreliability and other constraints. What could one achieve if we relaxed the requirement of total predictability and reproducibility required of the current computation model?
Refreshments start at 3:30 p.m.
Lecture begins at 4:00 p.m.
October
16
End Date
All-hands Meeting
Maxwell Dworkin G115
Please save the date for an "all hands" meeting on Friday, October 16th from 1:30-2:30 in Maxwell Dworkin G115.
October
15
End Date
October
14
End Date
October
12
End Date
Columbus Day
Columbus Day Holiday
October
9
End Date
Eric Mazur "Optical Hyperdoping: Silicon Sees the Infrared Light"
Pierce 209
Eric Mazur,
Harvard University,
Abstract: Shining intense, ultrashort laser pulses on the surface of a crystalline silicon wafer drastically changes the optical, material, and electronic properties of the wafer. The resulting textured surface is highly absorbing and looks black to the eye. The properties of this ‘black silicon’ make it useful for a wide range of commercial devices. In particular, we have been able to fabricate highly-sensitive photodetectors using this material. The sensitivity extends to wavelengths of 1600 nm making them particularly useful for applications ranging from communications to photovoltaics.
October
9
End Date
Harvey M. Friedman, Ohio State University: Decision Procedures for Verification
Pierce Hall 100F
We discuss some decision procedures involving finite strings, and explore the boundary between decidability and undecidability. A form of some of these decision procedures has been implemented and is being used to automatically verify VCs (verification conditions) arising from various basic string processing programs written in an imperative language (the language RESOLVE developed at Ohio State).
October
9
End Date
Luca Dal Negro, Boston University, Deterministic Aperiodic Structures for Nanonphotonics and Sensing Applications
MD-G125
Deterministic Aperiodic Structures (DAS) are generated by the mathematical rules of L-systems and number theory, manifest unique light localization and transport properties associated with a great structural complexity, and can be fabricated on-chips using conventional nano-lithographic techniques. When combined with metal-dielectric nanostructures, they give rise to large energy gaps like periodic media (i.e. photonic-plasmonic crystals) and highly localized, enhanced field states like disordered random media, including the formation of Anderson-localized modes, forbidden in periodic scattering media. However, contrary to random media, DAS possess controllable transport properties from ballistic to anomalous diffusion (slower diffusion than classical random walks) and strongly localized field states with large fluctuations of the photonic mode density – essential attributes to achieve spatio-temporal energy localization and to enhanced light-matter coupling, i.e. radiative rates of fluorescent molecules, absorption cross-sections, non-linear optical processes on the nanoscale.
October
8
End Date
Jack Stankovic, Univ. of Virginia
Maxwell Dworkin G125
Dust to Doctors: Wireless Sensor Networks for Home Medical Care
October
8
End Date
CMP Seminar: Igor Mazin, Naval Research Laboratory, "General properties of the s+- superconductors "
Lyman 425
I will review the general properties of the so-calles s+- superconducitity, which has emerged as the leading candidate for the order parameter symmetry in the Fe-based superconductors. I will first dicuss the general prerequisites for emerging of such a state, and will explain why many microscopically contradictory models nevertheless yield the same superconducting state. Then I will try to answer the question, which distinct exterimental propreties distinguish the s+- state from alterantive symmetries and will review the current experimental situation.
October
7
End Date
October
5
End Date
Eran Tromer, MIT, Side Channels and Vulnerabilities in Cloud Computing
Maxwell Dworkin 2nd Floor Lounge Area
Today's computers typically run numerous processes of varying sensitivity and trustworthiness. The platform purports to protect these from each other, but side channels arise from lower architectural layers (such as contention for shared hardware resources), and create inadvertent cross-talk between processes. These leakages can be exploited for stealing cryptographic keys and other sensitive information.
Such cross-talk is especially grievous in the context of third-party cloud computing, a prominent technological trend. Services, such as Microsoft’s Azure and Amazon’s EC2, allow users to acquire computational capacity on demand in the form of virtual machines (VMs). Virtualization allows the service provider to maximize resource utilization by multiplexing many customer VMs across a shared physical infrastructure. However, the presence of multiple mutually-untrusting virtual machines on the same hardware makes them potentially vulnerable to the aforementioned side channels.
Using a commercial cloud service as a case study, we show that it is possible to map the internal cloud infrastructure, identify where a particular target VM is likely to reside and instantiate new VMs that are co-resident with the target on the same physical machine. We then show that co-residence allows attackers to exfiltrate information across VM boundaries by use of side channels and covert channels such as cache contention and timing variability.
We discuss potential solutions, including work-in-progress on mitigating side channels using just-in-time program transformation.
Joint works with Saman Amarasinghe, Austin Chu, Dag Arne Osvik, Thomas Ristenpart, Ron Rivest, Stephan Savage, Hovav Shacham and Adi Shamir.
--
Upcoming talks:
----------------
11/2: Jeff Vaughan, Harvard CRCS
11/23: Hal Roberts and Ethan Zuckerman, Harvard Berkman Center
12/14: Ian Kash, Harvard CRCS
October
2
End Date
Matthew Lang "Single Molecule Studies of Kinesin and the ClpXP Protease"
Pierce 209
Matthew Lang
Departments of Mechanical Engineering and Bioengineering
MIT
Abstract: Force generation in kinesin involves folding between the N-terminal cover strand and neck linker to form the cover neck bundle, a mechanism that is directly tested by measurements of kinesin mutants. The ClpXP protease, a member of the AAA+ class of motors, destroys protein substrates by coordinating machinery for recognition, denaturation, translocation and degeneration, events which are measured by a new assay using a series of GFP based substrates.
October
2
End Date
Special CMP Seminar: Ville Pietilä , Helsinki University of Technology, "Quasi-2D antiferromagnetic spin-1 Bose gas at finite temperature" ,
Lyman 330
Recently, the Berezinskii-Kosterlitz-Thouless transition was found to be mediated by half-quantum vortices (HQVs) in two-dimensional (2D) antiferromagnetic Bose gases [Phys. Rev. Lett. 97, 120406 (2006)]. We study theoretically the thermal activation of HQVs in the experimentally relevant trapped quasi-2D systems and find that the crossover temperature is shifted upwards if skyrmions are allowed. Above the defect binding temperatures we find transitions corresponding to the onset of a coherent condensate and a quasi-condensate.
October
2
End Date
RoboBees: A Convergence of Body, Brain, and Colony
Maxwell Dworkin G115
This seminar will feature short talks from RoboBee investigators describing the vision and research challenges for body, brain, and colony towards the ultimate realization of an autonomous colony of robotic bees.
October
2
End Date
Dr. Michael Zimmerman, Scientific Director at Saint-Gobain's Northboro & Worcester R&D Center
Pierce 213, Brooks Room
Dr. Mike Zimmerman will provide an overview of Saint-Gobain including it’s technologies, Research & Development, and highlighting areas of interest for future products and innovation challenges that Saint-Gobain is currently engaged in pursuing.
The Research and Development Center in Northboro, Massachusetts, is the largest ceramic research center in the United States and is also the main research location for high-performance plastics and coated abrasives. With more than 1,000 subsidiaries in 59 countries, Saint-Gobain is the world's largest manufacturer and distributor of building materials, and a leader in the production of high-performance materials and glass containers.
Founded in 1665 and headquartered in Paris, Saint-Gobain is listed among the 100 largest industrial groups worldwide, with three core sectors: Glass, Housing, and High Performance Materials. It uses its technological know-how and knowledge of its markets to meet increasingly diversified customer needs around the globe.
October
2
End Date
The Value of Characterization for Nanotoxicology, Dr. Raymond M. David, BASF
Pierce Hall 209
Nanotechnology is a rapidly emerging field of great interest and promise. As new materials are developed and commercialized, hazard information also needs to be generated to reassure regulators, workers, and consumers that these materials can be used safely.
The biological properties of nanomaterials are closely tied to the physical characteristics including size, shape, dissolution rate, agglomeration state, and surface chemistry, to name a few. Furthermore, these properties can be altered by the medium used to suspend or disperse these water-insoluble particles.
However, the current toxicology literature lacks much of the characterization information that allows toxicologists and regulators to develop ‘rules of thumb’ that could be used to assess potential hazards. To effectively develop these rules, toxicologists need to know the characteristics of the particle that interacts with the biological system.
Lack of characterization could also lead to different laboratories reporting discordant results on seemingly the same test material because of subtle differences in the particle or differences in the dispersion medium used that resulted in altered properties and toxicity of the particle . For these reasons, good characterization using a minimal characterization data set should accompany and be required of all scientific publications on nanomaterials.
_________________________________________________________________________________________________
Dr. Raymond David is Manager of Toxicology for Industrial Chemicals in the BASF Corporation. He received his Ph.D. in Pharmacology from the University of Louisville, after which he was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Chemical Institute of Toxicology in Research Triangle Park. Prior to his position at BASF, Dr. David worked at Microbiological Associates and Eastman Kodak. He has experience conducting inhalation, pulmonary, reproductive, and systemic toxicity studies.
October
1
End Date
October
1
End Date
Google Open Office Hours
MD 119
*Google Open Office Hours, Thurs. 10/1, 1:30pm to 3:00pm in MD 119*
We'd like to be able to interact with you and answer any burning questions you may have about engineering at Google and work at Google. Come meet former interns, ambassadors and feel free to bring your resumes. No sign-up needed!
October
1
End Date
Google Tech Talk by Grant Dasher (followed by Google open office hours)
MD 119
Tech Talk by Grant Dasher
Grant is a recent Harvard grad and working in the Cambridge office. Alumnus Chrix Finne will also be there to talk about life as a Product Manager.
Lunch will be provided!
This talk will be followed by Google open office hours.
October
1
End Date
CMP Seminar: Erez Berg, Harvard "A Twisted Ladder: relating the Fe superconductors to the high Tc cuprates"
Lyman 425
We construct a two-leg ladder model of an Fe-pnictide superconductor
and discuss its properties and relationship with the familiar two-leg
cuprate model. Our results suggest that the underlying pairing
mechanism for the
Fe-pnictide superconductors is similar to that for the cuprates. A
two-orbital extension of this ladder model allows us to study the
pairing symmetry and nematic ordering in the Fe pnictides.
September 2009
September
30
End Date
IIC Colloquium
Maxwell Dworkin G115
Social Networks+Game-Making: Rethinking Education, Idit Harel Caperton, Founder and President, World Wide Workshop
September
29
End Date
NSEC Research Exchange Seminar
Maxwell Dworkin 119
September
25
End Date
Applied Physics Seminar
Pierce 209
Janet Pan, Yale School of Engineering and Applied Science. The ongoing quest for semiconductor lasers with low threshold has led to the development of new materials (e.g., quantum wires and dots) and new optical resonators (e.g., microdisks). In a novel approach to "thresholdless" lasers, we recently demonstrated the first GaAs deep-center laser. These lasers exhibited a threshold of less than 2A/cm2 with electrical injection in continuous-wave mode at room temperature at the important 1.54um fiber-optic wavelength. We explain the physics of GaAs deep-center lasers.
September
24
End Date
Michael Backes, Saarland University
Maxwell Dworkin G125
Automated Design and Verification of Security Protocols based on
Zero-Knowledge Proofs
September
24
End Date
CMP Seminar: Transport Experiments on Dirty Bosons" Brian DeMarco University of Illinois
Lyman 425
Brian DeMarco, University of Illinois
September
23
End Date
IIC Colloquium
Maxwell Dworkin G115
XAM, Digital Curation and e-Science, Stephen Todd, Software Architect, and Rob Masson, Director, EMC Research US
September
23
End Date
Graph Covers and Quadratic Minimization - Justin Thaler, Harvard (Maxwell Dworkin 323)
Belief propagation (BP) is a widely-used message-passing algorithm that approximately computes marginal distributions in graphical models. A wide
variety of computational problems can be formulated as inference problems in
such models, and BP and its variants such as the min-sum algorithm perform
empirically well in application areas including coding theory, statistical
physics, and linear programming. However, rigorously characterizing their
behavior outside of a few well-structured instances has proven challenging.
In this talk, I will present a new approach to understanding the behavior of
the min-sum algorithm by exploiting the properties of graph covers. I will
first motivate this approach by demonstrating that the standard sufficient
conditions for convergence of min-sum in the case of quadratic minimization
have a natural analog in terms of graph covers. I will then explain how to
use graph covers to understand the frequently-observed periodic behavior of
the min-sum algorithm in some important special cases. Finally, I will show
how to use these results to recover useful estimates from the min-sum
algorithm even in the presence of periodic behavior. Some of our techniques
apply more broadly, and we believe that by capturing the notion of
indistinguishability, graph covers represent a valuable tool for
understanding the abilities and limitations of general message-passing
algorithms.
Joint work with Nicholas Ruozzi and Sekhar Tatikonda of Yale University.
September
22
End Date
September
18
End Date
Issac Silvera "Metallic Hydrogen"
Pierce 209
Issac Silvera, Department of Physics, Harvard University.
Abstract: Solid hydrogen was predicted to dissociate to an atomic metallic solid at a pressure of 0.25 Mbar; also a room temperature superconductor and metastable so that it remains metallic when pressure is released.
At pressures of 3.5 Mbar hydrogen remains a molecular insulator. Recent predictions are that a peak in the melting temperature would be a precursor of metallic hydrogen as a quantum liquid at T = 0 K that would be a two-component superconductor: electron and proton conductivity. We observed the predicted peak in the melting line and will discuss some of the experimental methods aimed at transforming molecular hydrogen to the atomic metallic phase.
Refreshments at 3:30 p.m.
Lecture at 4:00 p.m.
September
17
End Date
September
17
End Date
September
16
End Date
IIC Colloquium
60 Oxford Street, Room 330
High-Throughput Science, Hanspeter Pfister, Gordon McKay Professor of the Practice of Computer Science, Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences
September
16
End Date
Environmental Sci & Eng Seminar
Pierce Hall 114
Dr. Qi Chen, Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, "Mass spectral characterization of submicron biogenic organic particles in the Amazon Basin and chamber studies."
September
15
End Date
Wyss/Bioengineering Seminar
Maxwell Dworkin G125
Darrin Pochan, Associate Professor of Materials Science and Engineering at the University of Delaware, will discuss “Injectable Hydrogels from beta-hairpin peptide folding and self-assembly."
September
14
End Date
CRCS Seminar Series
Maxwell Dworkin
Ariel Procaccia
Given a vector x of ideal locations reported by multiple selfish agents, we would like to select a location f(x) for a public facility; this abstract setting has many interpretations, such as locating a library in a city or a router on a communications network. We wish to design mechanisms for this problem that, at the same time, (i) satisfy game-theoretic desiderata, and (ii) approximately optimize a target function, e.g., the facility's sum of distances to the agents' ideal locations. I will survey recent results with respect to this problem, elaborate on their interfaces with computational social choice and algorithmic mechanism design, and position them in the context of the fresh agenda of approximate mechanism design without money. No background is required, and the presentation will endeavor to replace equations with animations.Based on joint papers with Noga Alon, Michal Feldman, Felix Fischer, and Moshe Tennenholtz.
Bio:
Ariel Procaccia is a CRCS fellow at Harvard's SEAS. His research interests include Computational Social Choice, Algorithmic Game Theory, and the interplay between these fields and Artificial Intelligence. He received his Ph.D. summa cum laude from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, under the supervision of Prof. Jeffrey Rosenschein. His dissertation, entitled “Computational Voting Theory: Of the Agents, By the Agents, For the Agents”, has won the 2008 IFAAMAS Victor Lesser Distinguished Dissertation Award and Hebrew University’s Schlomiuk Prize. His work in Harvard SEAS is also supported by a Rothschild Postdoctoral Fellowship.
September
11
End Date
CMAP Lecture
Pierce 209
Marko Loncar, Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, "Optical Nanostructures for Advanced Communication Systems"
Abstract: It is now widely accepted that nanostructured materials can enable novel optical, mechanical, and electrical properties that result in advanced devices. For example, reconfigurable wavelength-scale optical resonators can enable on-chip manipulation of photons, and will be important building blocks for optical- and quantum-communication systems.
I will demonstrate that by combining fields of NEMS and nanophotonics it is possible to realize low-power dynamically tunable filters and switches. Bright single-photon source based on diamond nanowire, that we recently discovered, is another example of novel functionalities enabled by nanostructuring.
September
11
End Date
Freshman Study Card Day
Study Card day for Freshman
September
10
End Date
CMP Seminar
Lyman 425
Emanuele Dalla Torre, Weizmann Institute of Science, "Quantum critical states and phase transitions in the presence of non equilibrium noise"
September
10
End Date
Study Card Day
Study Card Day (for all but Freshman)
September
9
End Date
Exploiting and Providing Research Data
Cruft 309
Finding strategies to help researchers with Malcolm Atkinson, UK e-Science Envoy and Director of the e-Science Institute, and David De Roure, Professor of Computer Science, University of Southampton
September
7
End Date
Labor Day
Labor Day Holiday
September
4
End Date
Frank Vollmer "Optical Microcavities - Biosensing Down to Single Virus Particles"
Pierce 209
Dr. Frank Vollmer, The Rowland Institute
Abstract: A resonance is most easily experienced by observing a pendulum or by listening to a violin player. Less intuitive is the example of an optical resonance where coherent light is brought to interfere with itself. I will show how we achieve this feat by confining light in micro-and nanoscale optical cavities. Immune to damping in a liquid, these resonant devices are ultra-sensitive biosensors: Binding events of single Influenza virions are observed from discrete resonance-frequency shifts.
Refreshments: 3:30 p.m. outside of Pierce 209
Lecture: 4:00 p.m.
September
2
End Date
First Day Fall Classes
First Day of Fall Classes for the 2009-2010 Academic Year
September
1
End Date
Upperclass Registration
Registration for classes for upperclass students
August 2009
August
31
End Date
Freshman Registration
Registration for classes for Freshman
August
26
End Date
GSAS Registration
Registration for graduate students
August
25
End Date
August
25
End Date
July 2009
July
30
End Date
Wyss Seminar
Pierce Hall 209
A talk by James Hedrick, Research Staff Member, Advanced Organic Materials Group, IBM Almaden Research Center.
Seminar series sponsored by the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering and the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences.
July
9
End Date
Biointerfacial Aspects of Mussel Adhesive Proteins and their Biomimetic Analogs
Pierce Hall 209
A talk by Phillip B. Messersmith, Depts. of Biomedical Engineering, Materials Science and Engineering and Chemical and Biolobical Engineering, Northwestern University.
Special seminar presented by the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering and the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences.
July
3
End Date
Independence Day (Observed)
July 4 Holiday
July
3
End Date
July
2
End Date
Biologically Inspired Design of Interfaces using Liquid Crystalline Materials
Pierce Hall 209
Special seminar sponsored by the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering and the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences
June 2009
June
10
End Date
Smart Civil Engineering Infrastructure
Maxwell Dworkin 221
The goal of our project is to instrument bridges, tunnels and other large and long-lived civil engineering infrastructure items with sensors that can monitor their natural deterioration. In so doing, we develop an integrated system and discover that commercial offerings of wireless sensor networks are still geared towards research prototypes: they are currently not yet mature for deployment in practical application scenarios.
May 2009
May
31
End Date
Frontiers in Nanoscale Science and Technology workshop
Maxwell Dworkin G115
May
30
End Date
Frontiers in Nanoscale Science and Technology workshop
Maxwell Dworkin G115
May
29
End Date
Frontiers in Nanoscale Science and Technology workshop
Maxwell Dworkin G115
May
22
End Date
Jacques Prost "Constructing a robust description of cell and tissue dynamics; Violating and restoring the fluctuation-dissipation theorem"
Pierce 209
Director
Ecole Supérieure de Physique et de Chimie Industrielles of Paris (ESPCI)
France
Abstract: The Fluctuation-Dissipation Theorem is a central result of statistical thermodynamics...
May
13
End Date
Brandley Malin (Vanderbilt) A Systems Approach to Data Privacy in the Biomedical Domain (Maxwell Dworkin 2nd Floor Lounge Area)
The healthcare community has made considerable strides in the development and deployment of information systems, with particular gains in electronic health records and cheap genome sequencing...
May
6
End Date
Annie Anton (North Carolina State University) Designing Software Systems that Comply with Privacy Laws (Maxwell Dworkin 119)
Properly protecting information is in all our best interests, but it is a complex undertaking. The fact that regulation is often written by non-technologists, introduces additional challenges and...
May
1
End Date
Kathryn Moler "Tireless Electrons in Tiny Rings"
Stanford University
Department of Physics
Stanford University
Abstract: Even though a normal metal ring has a finite resistance, if it also has quantum-mechanical phase coherence, a current should flow forever...
April 2009
April
30
End Date
Jennifer Tour Chayes - Microsoft Research New England
60 Oxford St., Rm. 330
JOINT CS/IIC
NOTE CHANGE OF LOCATION TO 60 OXFORD ST., RM. 330
"Interdisciplinarity in the Age of Networks"
Everywhere we turn these days, we find that networks have become increasing appropriate...
April
29
End Date
Ap298r Seminar: Amir Yacoby
Pierce Hall room 209
Amir Yacoby
Spins and Charges in Low Dimensional Systems
April
29
End Date
Guy Rothblum (MIT) On the Complexity of Differentially Private Data Release: Efficient Algorithms and Hardness Results (Maxwell Dworkin 119)
We consider private data analysis in the setting in which a trusted and trustworthy curator, having obtained a data set containing sensitive information, releases to the public a ``sanitization'' of...
April
28
End Date
NSEC Research Exchange Seminar
Cruft 309
David Issadore
Hybrid Integrated Circuit / Microfluidic Chips for the Control of Living Cells and Ultra-Small Biomimetic Containers
April
27
End Date
Ap298r Seminar: Jennifer Hoffman
Pierce Hall room 209
Jennifer Hoffman
Atomic Resolution Imaging of Wavefunctions in Superconductors
April
24
End Date
Ali Yazdani "Visualizing Pair Formation on the Nanometer Scale and the Riddle of High-Temperature Superconductivity"
Pierce 209
Ali Yazdani
Department of Physics
Princeton University
Abstract:
The pairing of electrons underlies the formation of a superconducting state with zero electrical resistance. After more than...
April
23
End Date
Prof. Johannes Gehrke - Cornell University
Maxwell Dworkin G-125
What Can Database Systems Do For Computer Games?
Databases have the stigma of an association with (boring) enterprise data management. The area of database research, however, has developed a wide...
April
23
End Date
April
22
End Date
Stefan Savage (UCSD) Spamalytics: Exploring the Technical and Economic Underpinnings of Bulk E-mail Scams (Maxwell Dworkin 119)
Maxwell Dworkin 119
When asked why he robbed banks, Willie Sutton famously responded, “Because that’s where the money is”. Today, the same sentiment is widely applied to the Internet as well. The...
April
22
End Date
April
22
End Date
April
20
End Date
Alex Samorodnitsky (Hebrew University of Jerusalem) Counting magic squares (Pierce Hall 320)
A magic square is an integer matrix with equal row and column sums. A
contingency table is simply an integer matrix. We will describe a quasi-polynomial-time algorithm to count magic squares and,...
April
20
End Date
April
16
End Date
Prof. Robin Murphy, Texas A&M University
Maxwell Dworkin G-125
"Being There"
Being at disasters is the apotheosis of field robotics; hardware and software must work with real people under challenging temporal and environmental conditions. We have shifted over...
April
16
End Date
April
15
End Date
Katrina Ligett (CMU) Differentially Private Approximation Algorithms (Pierce Hall 100F)
We consider the problem of designing approximation algorithms for discrete optimization problems over private data sets, in the framework of differential privacy (which formalizes the idea of...
April
15
End Date
Mike Collins (Redjack) Its The Hackers’ World, and We Just Live Here: The Pragmatics of Network Defense (Maxwell Dworkin 119)
In 2002, several colleagues and I wanted to get a couple weeks of network traffic traces in order to study user behaviors in react to public holidays. That research effort led to the CENTAUR...
April
15
End Date
April
14
End Date
NSEC Research Exchange Seminar
Maxwell Dworkin 119
Wei Li Wang
Graph of Graphene: Topological Frustration, Magnetic Order and Spintronics
April
13
End Date
Ap298r Seminar: Ray Ashoori
Pierce 209
Ray Ashoori
Precision Measurement of Quantum Energy Levels of Electrons
April
10
End Date
Leo DiCarlo "Two-Qubit Algorithms With A Superconducting Quantum Processor"
Pierce 209
Leo DiCarlo, Post-doctoral Associate
Schoelkopf Lab
Department of Applied Physics
Yale University
Abstract: By harnessing the superposition and entanglement of physical states, quantum computers...
April
9
End Date
Andy Wilson - Microsoft
Maxwell Dworkin G-125
What started as a modest incubation effort has grown into the Surface Computing group at Microsoft. Surface, its first product, is but one example of an exciting new category of form factors and user...
April
9
End Date
April
8
End Date
AP298r Seminar: Ken Crozier
Pierce 209
Ken Crozier
Plasmonics for Spectroscopy, Optical Manipulation and Sensing
April
8
End Date
Stuart Schechter (Microsoft Labs) and Serge Egelman (CMU) Paying people to buy vibrators and lie to their spouse's friends. Two short talks on the latest social science results in online security and privacy (Maxwell Dworkin 2nd Floor Lounge Area)
Many commerce websites post privacy policies to address Internet shoppers' privacy concerns, but few users read or understand them.
Serge Egelman will present the results of a laboratory study in...
April
6
End Date
Alex Slivkins (Microsoft) Multi-Armed Bandits in Metric Spaces (based on joint work with Bobby Kleinberg and Eli Upfal from STOC'08, and recent follow-up work with Bobby Kleinberg.) Pierce Hall 320
In a multi-armed bandit problem, an online algorithm chooses from a set of strategies in a sequence of trials so as to maximize the total payoff of the chosen strategies. While the performance of...
April
6
End Date
April
3
End Date
Evelyn Hu "Michelangelo's Laser: Shaping Form to Function in Nanophotonic Devices"
Pierce 209
Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences
Abstract: Artists have long shaped the material world into forms that delight the eye, by the modulation of colors, textures, and shapes....
April
3
End Date
April
2
End Date
Prof. Victor Zue - MIT
Maxwell Dworkin G-125
"Talking with Computers"
Speech is one of the most natural ways for humans to communicate. Therefore it is not surprising that pundits and Hollywood producers have been predicting for decades that...
April
2
End Date
April
1
End Date
Katie Shilton (UCLA) Participating in Privacy: Enabling Disclosure and Discretion in Mobile Sensing (Maxwell Dworkin 119)
Mobile sensing harnesses mobile phone capabilities, such as location awareness, image capture, motion sensitivity, and user input, to create a platform for individual discovery and community...
March 2009
March
30
End Date
Special Seminar
209 Pierce Hall
Light - the World's Most Unlikely Construction Material
Colin Bain
Dept. of Chemistry, University of Durham, UK
March
30
End Date
David Choi (Harvard) Sample Complexity Bounds for Link Prediction (Pierce Hall 320)
Link prediction is an example of recent activity in the machine learning community on relational data sets, with very visible applications such as collaborative recommendation systems (as used by...
March
26
End Date
March
19
End Date
March
18
End Date
David Pogue, New York Times
Maxwell Dworkin G-115
JOINT CS/IIC
Note change of day (Wednesday) and location (MD G-115)
"Web 2.0 Reality Check"
What do YouTube, MySpace, eBay, and Craigslist have in common? They're all part of "Web 2.0," in which a...
March
18
End Date
Paul Ohm (Colorado Law School) The Probability Of Privacy (Maxwell Dworkin 119)
Nearly every data privacy regulation separates information into two categories: sensitive and non-sensitive. Often, the rules dole out special treatment for those who transform sensitive into...
March
17
End Date
"Modeling Phase Transition Pathways of Nanoscale Olivine Cathodes in Lithium Ion Batteries", Ming Tang, Lawrence Livermore National Lab
Cruft 309
Abstract. Olivine lithium metal phosphates are emerging as important cathode materials in high power batteries for applications such as electric vehicles. Despite their rapid technology success, our...
March
13
End Date
Thomas Bewley "Controls and Fluids: emergent research opportunities at the intersection of disciplines"
Pierce 209
Flow Control and Coordinated Robotics Labs, Dept of MAE, UC San Diego
Abstract: This talk surveys the evolution of a range of related research projects at the intersection of control theory,...
March
12
End Date
Professor Shalom Lappin - King's College London
Maxwell Dworkin G-125
Restricting Distributions for Computational Language Learning
Joint work with Alex Clark of Royal
Holloway College, London
Classical computational learning models like Gold's (1967)...
March
12
End Date
March
11
End Date
Ketan Mulmuley (University of Chicago) On P vs NP, Geometric Complexity Theory, and the Riemann Hypothesis (Pierce Hall 100F)
This series of two talks (first in MIT on 10th and the second in Harvard on 11th) will give a nontechnical, high level overview of geometric complexity theory (GCT), which is an approach to the P vs....
March
11
End Date
Scott Dynes (Dartmouth) Information Security and Critical Infrastructure Resiliency: Results From Field Studies (Maxwell Dworkin 2nd Floor Lounge Area)
It’s no surprise that some firms are better at managing information risk than other firms. What is a surprise is that firms that should do well don’t. This talk will present field studies...
March
9
End Date
March
6
End Date
David Cory "Quantum Information Theory in Practice"
Pierce 209
MIT
Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering
Abstract: Quantum information theory provides a new and systematic approach to controlling complicated systems. I will discuss some recent work...
March
5
End Date
Prof. Ravin Balakrishnan - Univ. of Toronto
Maxwell Dworkin G-125
"Facile interaction with Displays all over the place"
As computing increasingly veers away from the desktop to more mobile and “everywhere” usage scenarios, the user interface must evolve...
March
5
End Date
Wolfram Moebius, Munich, Title TBA
Lyman 425
March
4
End Date
Tal Moran (Harvard CRCS) Shuffle-Sum: Coercion-Resistant Verifiable Tallying for STV Voting (Maxwell Dworkin 110)
There are many advantages to voting schemes in which voters rank all candidates in order, rather than just choosing their favorite. However, these schemes inherently suffer from a coercion problem...
March
2
End Date
February 2009
February
27
End Date
Mory Gharib "Lessons for Bio-Inspired Design: Morpho-dynamics of the Embryonic Heart"
Pierce 209
Mory Gharib
Departments of Aeronautics and Bioengineering
California Institute of Technology
Abstract: Traditional developmental dogma states that valveless, unidirectional pumping in biological...
February
26
End Date
S. Muthu Muthukrishnan, Google Research
60 Oxford St., Rm. 330
JOINT CS/IIC
NOTE CHANGE OF LOCATION
Title: Internet Ad Auctions: Algorithms, Economics and Directions
For over 5 years, internet companies have been selling ads via auctions and have enabled a...
February
26
End Date
MEMS and Metamaterials: A Perfect Marriage at Terahertz Frequencies - Hu Tiger Tao - Boston University
Maxwell-Dworkin G115
Abstract: The terahertz (THz) region of the electromagnetic spectrum is a scientifically rich but technologically underdeveloped frequency range. Recently, metamaterials have become an extremely...
February
26
End Date
February
25
End Date
Alessandro Acquisti (CMU) Of Frogs and Herds: Behavioral Economics, Malleable Privacy Valuations, and Context-dependent Willingness to Divulge Personal Information (Maxwell Dworkin 119)
We investigate privacy valuations and decision making through the lenses of behavioral economics. Contrary to the assumption in much social science that people have stable, coherent preferences with...
February
24
End Date
Energy Faculty Candidate Feng Tao (Berkeley), "In-situ studies of nanocatalysis and design of catalysts for energy applications"
Cruft 309
He will introduce the research he has done at Berkeley. Then he will present the major challenges in the studies of heterogeneous catalysis (pressure gap, information gap, and materials gap). In his...
February
23
End Date
Zhenming Liu (Harvard) Designing Floating Codes for Expected Performance (Pierce Hall 320)
Floating codes are codes designed to store multiple values in a Write Asymmetric Memory, with applications to flash memory. In this model, a memory consists of a block of $n$ cells, with each cell in...
February
20
End Date
Sarah Kurtz "The Science behind High-efficiency Solar Cells and Why We Might Care"
Pierce 209
"The science behind high-efficiency solar cells and why we might care, "
Sarah Kurtz, Principal Scientist
National Renewable Energy Laboratory, Golden, Colorado
Abstract: The thermodynamic limit...
February
20
End Date
David Xiao (Princeton University) On the Black-box Complexity of PAC Learning (Pierce Hall 320)
The PAC model (Valiant, CACM '84) is one of the central models studied in computational learning theory. There is evidence that many specific classes of functions (e.g. intersections of half-spaces,...
February
19
End Date
Mobile Phones and Multicores
MD G-125
"Mobiel Phones and Multicores: Programming Nightmare or Architectural Renaissance," Prof. Arvind, Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, MIT
February
19
End Date
February
18
End Date
Latanya Sweeney (CMU & Visiting Sch. CRCS) TBD
TBD
Upcoming talks
-------------------
2/25: Alessandro Acquisti, CMU
3/11: Scott Dynes, Dartmouth
3/18: Paul Ohm, Colorado Law Sch.
4/1: Katherine Shilton, UCLA
4/8: Stuart Schechter, Microsoft...
February
13
End Date
Jeff Lichtman "Connectomics"
Pierce 209
Jeff Lichtman, M.D., Ph.D.
Professor, Molecular and Cellular Biology
Center for Brian Science
Harvard University
Abstract: Given the intense interest in brain function, surprisingly little is...
February
12
End Date
Dr. David Bacon, IBM Research and Harvard University
Maxwell Dworkin G-125
Liquid Metal: Eliminating the Boundary between Hardware and Software
This talk will present Liquid Metal, an end-to-end system from language design to co-execution on hardware and software. The goal...
February
12
End Date
February
11
End Date
Sara "Scout" Sinclair (Dartmouth) Access Control as Risk Management (Maxwell Dworkin 2nd Floor Lounge Area)
Abstract: Access control aims to provide the correct permissions to users of a computer system: if Alma can access resources that are not necessary to her job, she may (either willfully or...
February
6
End Date
Paul Canfield "Ending of the tyranny of copper: Intermetallic superconductivity in the post copper-oxide age"
Pierce 209
Paul Canfield
Department of Physics and Astronomy
Ames Laboratory
Iowa State University
Abstract: In this colloquium I will present a broad overview of humanity's 100 year search for higher...
February
6
End Date
Grae Worster "Fluid Mechanics of Sea Ice and Ice Shelves"
Pierce 209
Grae Worster
Institute of Theoretical Geophysics and
Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics
University of Cambridge, UK
Abstract: Ice is an important component of the global...
February
5
End Date
CS Colloquium: David Brooks
Maxwell Dworkin G125
Computer Design in the Nanometer Scale Era: Challenges and Solutions
David Brooks
Associate Professor of Computer Science.
Technology scaling has enabled tremendous growth in the computing industry...
February
4
End Date
Alissa Cooper (Center for Democracy and Technology) From a Series of Tubes to the BarackBerry: Net Neutrality as an Illustration of Talking Technology in Washington (Maxwell Dworkin 119)
From a Series of Tubes to the BarackBerry: Net Neutrality as an Illustration of Talking Technology in Washington
Alissa Cooper
Center for Democracy and Technology
Over the last several years, a...
January 2009
January
22
End Date
January
15
End Date
"Strong-field magneto-transport in a composite medium: How simple can it get?" - David Bergman, Tel Aviv University
Lyman 425
Would you believe that electrical conduction in such a system is
simpler than in the absence of a magnetic field?
In many cases, exact asymptotic results for the strong-field
magneto-transport are...
December 2008
December
11
End Date
Prof. Seth Teller of MIT presents "Development of a Self-Driving Car"
Maxwell Dworkin G-125
In May 2006 we formed a team to compete in DARPA's 2006-2007 "Urban Challenge," the goal of which was to develop a passenger vehicle capable of safe, robust autonomous driving in city traffic. Over...
December
10
End Date
Carl Landwehr (IARPA) IARPA Information Assurance Research (Maxwell Dworkin 2nd Floor Lounge Area)
IARPA, just past its first birthday, sponsors high-risk/high-payoff research that has the potential to provide the U.S. with an overwhelming intelligence advantage over our future adversaries. This...
December
8
End Date
PROOF OF CHURCH'S THESIS (Yuri Gurevich, Microsoft Research) (Maxwell Dworkin 319)
Church’s Thesis asserts that every effectively calculable numerical function is recursive. Why we believe the thesis? Careful analysis shows that existing argumentation is insufficient. Kurt...
December
5
End Date
SEAS Applied Physics Colloquium: Dan Fletcher
Pierce 209
Talk Title "Microfluidic Jets for Medicine and Biology"
December
4
End Date
Prof. Michael Kearns of the University of Pennsylvania
Maxwell Dworkin G-125
"Collective Behavior and Machine Learning"
I will begin by describing an ongoing and extensive series of human subject experiments, conducted at Penn, in collective decision-making and...
December
4
End Date
December
3
End Date
(Ben Edelman, HBS) The Darker Side of Online Advertising (Maxwell Dworkin 119)
The best online ads are well-targeted, unobtrusive, and even useful. But ads can also go far astray. For example, various scammers claim payment for purportedly delivering ads, when in fact the ads...
December
1
End Date
Special Applied Mechanics Seminar
Pierce 209
Dr. Vaios Lappas
Surrey Space Centre, University of Surrey
The Revolution in Space: Small Satellites
The advent of terrestrial microelectronics and computer technology in the past two decades has...
December
1
End Date
Regularity, boosting, and efficiently simulating every high-entropy distribution (Luca Trevisan, UC Berkeley) (Maxwell Dworkin 319)
I will outline recent and ongoing work with Omer Reingold, Madhur Tulsiani,
and Salil Vadhan on connections between techniques and results in additive
combinatorics and techniques and results in...