8 Sept 2008: Jayadev Misra

15 Sept 2008: Hector Garcia-Molina

22 Sept 2008: Bill Swartout

3 Nov 2008: Madhu Sudan

17 Nov 2008: Andrew McCallum

24 Nov 2008: Ken Birman

26 Jan 2009: Mario Gerla

9 Feb 2009: Sanjeev Arora

23 Mar 2009: Marc Levoy

To Main Distinguished Lecturer Page

8 SEPTEMBER 2008
Speaker: Jayadev Misra, Professor and Schlumberger Centennial Chair in Computer Sciences, University of Texas at Austin
Title: Structured Wide-Area Programming
Host School: NCSU
Duke Host: Landon Cox (lpcox at cs.duke.edu)
UNC Host: Jasleen Kaur (jasleen at cs.unc.edu)
NCSU Host: Munindar Singh (singh at cs.ncsu.edu)

Abstract
Internet today provides a wide range of services associated with web sites; examples include getting a stock quote, making an airline reservation, compressing a file or inverting a matrix. Each service may be likened to a basic operation in a computer, the internet computer. An application is a program written over the basic services, i.e., an orchestration of the services. This research is directed toward designing, implementing and studying an appropriate model of orchestration that would allow us to develop wide-area applications succinctly.

Just as structured programming gave programmers effective tools to organize the control flow of sequential programs, our research introduces mechanisms to organize the communication, synchronization and coordination in programs that run on wide-area networks. We have developed a programming model, called Orc, for structured wide-area programming. Orc includes constructs to orchestrate the concurrent invocation of services to achieve a goal -- while managing time-outs, priorities, and failure of sites or communication. The talk will give an introduction to Orc, and some of the ongoing research on enhancing the model.

The Orc web page is at http://orc.csres.utexas.edu

Biography
Jayadev Misra is a professor and holder of the Schlumberger Centennial chair in Computer Sciences at the University of Texas at Austin. He has been the past editor of several journals including: Computing Surveys, Journal of the ACM, Information Processing Letters and the Formal Aspects of Computing. He is the author of two books, Parallel Program Design: A Foundation, Addison-Wesley, 1988, co-authored with Mani Chandy, and A Discipline of Multiprogramming, Springer-Verlag, 2001. Misra is a fellow of ACM and IEEE; he held the Guggenheim fellowship during 1988-1989. He was the Strachey lecturer at Oxford University in 1996, and he held the Belgian FNRS International Chair of Computer Science in 1990.

Misra's research interests are in the area of concurrent programming, with emphasis on rigorous methods to improve the programming process. He is currently spearheading an effort, jointly with Tony Hoare, to establish a grand challenge project to automate large-scale program verification.

15 SEPTEMBER 2008
Speaker: Hector Garcia-Molina, Leonard Bosack and Sandra Lerner Professor in the Departments of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering at Stanford University
Title: Flexible Recommendations in CourseRank
Host School: Duke
Duke Host: Shivnath Babu (shivnath at cs.duke.edu)
UNC Host: Ketan Mayer-Patel (kmp at cs.unc.edu)
NCSU Host: Kemafor Anyanwu (kogan at ncsu.edu)

Abstract
CourseRank is a course planning tool we have developed for Stanford students, and is already in use by most undergraduates. For CourseRank, we have developed a "flexible recommendations" engine for defining recommendation strategies as high level workflows. By selecting a workflow and providing parameters (e.g., a filter condition for biology classes), students can receive personalized recommendations that better suit their needs. In this talk I will give an overview of CourseRank and its recommendation engine.

Biography
Hector Garcia-Molina is the Leonard Bosack and Sandra Lerner Professor in the Departments of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering at Stanford University, Stanford, California. He was the chairman of the Computer Science Department from January 2001 to December 2004. From 1997 to 2001 he was a member the President's Information Technology Advisory Committee (PITAC). From August 1994 to December 1997 he was the Director of the Computer Systems Laboratory at Stanford. From 1979 to 1991 he was on the faculty of the Computer Science Department at Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey. His research interests include distributed computing systems, digital libraries and database systems. He received a BS in electrical engineering from the Instituto Tecnologico de Monterrey, Mexico, in 1974. From Stanford University, Stanford, California, he received in 1975 a MS in electrical engineering and a PhD in computer science in 1979. He holds an honorary PhD from ETH Zurich (2007). Garcia-Molina is a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery and of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences; is a member of the National Academy of Engineering; received the 1999 ACM SIGMOD Innovations Award; is on the Technical Advisory Board of DoCoMo Labs USA, Yahoo Search & Marketplace; is a Venture Advisor for Diamondhead Ventures, and is a member of the Board of Directors of Oracle and Kintera.

22 SEPTEMBER 2008
Speaker: William Swartout, Director of Technology for the Institute for Creative Technologies and Research Professor of Computer Science at the University of Southern California
Title: Toward the Holodeck: Integrating Graphics, Artificial Intelligence, Entertainment and Learning
Host School: NCSU
Duke Host: Vincent Conitzer (conitzer at cs.duke.edu)
UNC Host: Fred Brooks (brooks at cs.unc.edu)
NCSU Host: Michael Young (young at cs.ncsu.edu)

Abstract
Using the Holodeck from Startrek as our inspiration, researchers at the USC Institute for Creative Technologies have been pushing back the boundaries of the possible with the goal of creating immersive experiences so compelling that people will react to them as if they were real. In this talk I will describe our research in photo-real computer graphics, interactive virtual humans, immersive virtual reality and computer-based tutoring that moves us closer to realizing the vision of the Holodeck. I will also discuss how entertainment content in the form of engaging stories and characters can heighten these experiences, and how such experiences can be used for learning.

Biography
William Swartout is Director of Technology for USC's Institute for Creative Technologies (ICT) and a research professor of computer science at USC. He received his Ph.D. and M.S. in computer science from MIT and his bachelor's degree from Stanford University.

Dr. Swartout has been involved in the research and development of AI systems for over 30 years. His particular research interests include virtual humans, explanation and text generation, knowledge acquisition, knowledge representation, knowledge sharing, education, intelligent agents and the development of new AI architectures.

As Director of Technology at the ICT, Dr. Swartout provides overall direction for the ICT's research programs. He led the Mission Rehearsal Exercise project, which created an immersive virtual reality environment in which trainees interact with computer generated virtual humans. This project received awards for outstanding innovation in modeling and simulation from the NTSA and has received other awards including first place for innovative application of agent technology at the 2001 International Conference on Autonomous Agents.

Dr. Swartout is a Fellow of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), has served on the Board of Councilors of the AAAI and is past chair of the Special Interest Group on Artificial Intelligence (SIGART) of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). His is a member of the US Joint Forces Command Transformation Advisory Group, the Board on Army Science and Technology of the National Academies, and a past member of the Air Force Scientific Advisory Board.

3 NOVEMBER 2008
Speaker: Madhu Sudan, MIT CSAIL
Title: Communicating Computers and Computing Communicators: A need for a new unifying theory
Host School: UNC
Duke Host:
UNC Host:
NCSU Host:

Abstract
The theories of computing (Turing, ~1930s) and communication (Shannon, Hamming ~1940s) have had a profound impact of the development of the two fields and the resulting technologies have drastically altered our lives today. Part of the success of the two theories can be attributed to a clean separation of the computing elements from the communicating elements. Today, however, communication and computing are coming ever closer together, often leaving the human out of the loop. This merger is posing new
challenges, definitional and algorithmic, to the theory of communication. In this talk I will describe some of the concrete challenges that we have looked at. I will also describe our attempts at modelling these problems and, in some cases, describe some preliminary
solutions.

Biography
Madhu Sudan received his Bachelor's degree from the Indian Institute of Technology at New Delhi in 1987 and his Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley in 1992. From 1992-1997 he was a Research Staff Member at IBM's Thomas J. Watson Research Center. In 1997, he moved to MIT where he is now the Fujitsu Professor
of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, and as Associate Director of MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL). He was a Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study from 2003-2004, and a Guggenheim Fellow from 2005-2006.

Madhu Sudan's research interests include computational complexity theory, algorithms and coding theory. He is best known for his works on probabilistic checking of proofs, and on the design of list-decoding algorithms for error-correcting codes. He has served on numerous program committees for conferences in theoretical computer science, and was the program committee chair of the IEEE Conference on Computational Complexity '01, and the IEEE Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science '03. He is the chief editor of Foundations and Trends in Theoretical Computer Science, a new journal publishing surveys in the field. He is currently a member of the editorial boards of the Journal of the ACM and the SIAM Journal on Computing. Previously he served on the boards of the SIAM Journal on Discrete Mathematics, Information and Computation, and the IEEE Transactions on Information Theory.

In 2002, Madhu Sudan was awarded the Nevanlinna Prize, for outstanding contributions to the mathematics of computer science, at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Beijing. Madhu Sudan's other awards include the ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award (1992), the IEEE Information Theory Society Paper Award (2000) and the Godel Prize (2001), Distinguished Alumnus Award of the University of California at Berkeley (2003), and Distinguished Alumnus Award of the Indian Institute of Technology at Delhi (2004).

17 NOVEMBER 2008
Speaker: Andrew McCallum, Associate Professor of Computer Science, University of Massachusetts at Amherst
Title: Information Extraction, Data Mining and Joint Inference
Host School: Duke
Duke Host: Alexander Hartemink (amink at cs.duke.edu)
UNC Host:
NCSU Hosts:

Abstract

Biography
Andrew McCallum is an Associate Professor at University of Massachusetts, Amherst. He was previously Vice President of Research and Development at WhizBang Labs, a company that used machine learning for information extraction from the Web. In the late 1990's he was a Research Scientist and Coordinator at Justsystem Pittsburgh Research Center. He was a post-doctoral fellow at Carnegie Mellon University after receiving his PhD from the University of Rochester in 1995. He is on the editorial board of the Journal of Machine Learning Research. For the past eight years, McCallum has been active in research on statistical machine learning applied to text, especially information extraction, document classification, finite state models, and semi-supervised learning.

24 NOVEMBER 2008
Speaker: Ken Birman, Professor of Computer Science, Cornell University
Title: Live Distributed Objects
Host School: UNC
Duke Host: Xiaowei Yang (xwy at cs.duke.edu)
UNC Host:
NCSU Host:

Abstract
Although we've been building distributed systems for decades, it remains remarkably difficult to get them right. Distributed software is hard to design and the tools available to developers have lagged far behind the options for building and debugging non-distributed programs targeting desktop environments. At Cornell, we're trying to change this dynamic. The first part of this talk will describe "Live Distributed Objects," a new and remarkably easy way to create distributed applications, with little or no programming required. Supporting these kinds of objects forced us to confront a number of scalability, security and performance questions not addressed by prior research on distributed computing platforms. The second part of the talk will look at Cornell's Quicksilver system and the approach it uses to solve these problems.

Biography
Ken Birman is Professor of Computer Science at Cornell University. He currently heads the QuickSilver project, which is developing a scalable and robust distributed computing platform. Previously he worked on fault-tolerance, security, and reliable multicast. In 1987 he founded a company, Isis Distributed Systems, which developed robust software solutions for stock exchanges, air traffic control, and factory automation. The author of several books and more than 200 journal and conference papers, Dr. Birman was Editor in Chief of ACM Transactions on Computer Systems from 1993-1998 and is a Fellow of the ACM.

26 JANUARY 2009
Speaker: Mario Gerla, Professor, UCLA, Network Research Lab
Title: Vehicular Urban Sensing: Dissemination and Retrieval
Host School: NCSU
NCSU Host: Injong Rhee (rhee at eos.ncsu.edu)
Duke Host:
UNC Host:

Abstract

Biography
Dr. Gerla was born in Milan, Italy. He received a graduate degree in engineering from the Politecnico di Milano, in 1966, and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in engineering from UCLA in 1970 and 1973, respectively. From 1973 to 1976, Dr. Gerla was a manager in Network Analysis Corporation, Glen Cove, NY, where he was involved in several computer network design projects for both government and industry, including performance analysis and topological updating of the ARPANET under a contract from DoD. From 1976 to 1977, he was with Tran Telecommunication, Los Angeles, CA, where he participated in the development of an integrated packet and circuit network. Since 1977, he has been on the Faculty of the Computer Science Department of UCLA. His research interests include the design, performance evaluation, and control of distributed computer communication systems and networks. His current research projects cover the following areas: design and performance evaluation of protocols and control schemes for Ad Hoc wireless networks; routing, congestion control and bandwidth allocation in wide area networks, and; traffic measurements and characterization.

9 FEBRUARY 2009
Speaker: Sanjeev Arora, Professor of Computer Science, Princeton University
Title:Semidefinite programming and approximation algorithms: A survey of recent results
Host School: Duke
Duke Host: Kamesh Munagala (kamesh at cs.duke.edu)
UNC Host:
NCSU Hosts:

Abstract
Computing approximately optimal solutions is an attractive way to cope with NP-hard optimization problems. In the past decade or so, semidefinite programming or SDP (a form of convex optimization that generalizes linear programming) has emerged as a powerful tool for designing such algorithms, and the last few years have seen a
profusion of results (worst-case algorithms, average case algorithms, impossibility results, etc).

This talk will be a survey of this area and these recent results. We will see that analysing semidefinite program draws upon ideas from a variety of other areas, and has also led to new results in mathematics. At the end we will touch upon work that greatly improves
the running time of SDP-based algorithms, making them potentially quite practical.

The survey will be essentially self-contained.

Biography
Sanjeev Arora is Professor of Computer Science at Princeton University and works in computational complexity theory, approximation algorithms for NP-hard problems, geometric algorithms, and probabilistic algorithms. He has received the ACM Doctoral
Dissertation Award, the SIGACT-EATCS Goedel Prize, and the Packard Fellowship.

23 MARCH 2009
Speaker: Marc Levoy, Professor, Computer Science and Electrical Engineering, Stanford University.
Title: Light field photography and microscopy
Host School: UNC
Duke Host:
UNC Host:
NCSU Host:

Abstract
Light field photography is a technique for recording light intensity as a function of position and direction in a 3D scene. Unlike conventional photographs, light fields permit manipulation of viewpoint and focus after the imagery has been recorded. At Stanford we have built a number of devices for capturing light fields, including (1) an array of 128 synchronized video cameras, (2) a handheld camera in which a microlens array has been inserted between the main lens and sensor plane, and (3) a microscope in which a similar microlens array has been inserted at the intermediate image plane.

The third device permits us to capture light fields of microscopic biological (or industrial) objects in a single snapshot. Although diffraction limits the product of spatial and angular resolution in these light fields, we can nevertheless produce useful perspective flyarounds and 3D focal stacks from them. Since microscopes are inherently orthographic devices, perspective flyarounds represent a new way to look at microscopic specimens. Focal stacks are not new, but manual techniques for capturing them are time-consuming and hence not applicable to moving or light-sensitive specimens. Applying 3D deconvolution to these focal stacks, we can produce a set of cross sections, which can be visualized using volume rendering. Ours is the first technology (of which we are aware) that can produce volumetric models from a single photograph.

In this talk, I will describe a prototype light field microscope and show perspective views, focal stacks, and reconstructed volumes for a variety of biological specimens. I will also survey some promising directions for this technology. For example, by introducing a second microlens array and a video projector, we can control the light field arriving at a specimen as well as the light field leaving it. Potential applications of this idea include microscope scatterometry - measuring reflectance as a function of incident and reflected angle, and "designer illumination" - illuminating one part of a microscopic object while avoiding illuminating another.

Biography
Marc Levoy is a Professor of Computer Science and (jointly) Electrical Engineering at Stanford University. He received a Bachelor's and Master's in Architecture from Cornell University in 1976 and 1978, and a PhD in Computer Science from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1989. In the 1970's Levoy worked on computer animation, developing an early computer-assisted cartoon animation system. This system was used by Hanna-Barbera Productions from 1983 until 1996 to produce The Flintstones, Scooby Doo, and other shows. In the 1980's Levoy worked on volume rendering, a family of techniques for displaying sampled three-dimensional functions, for example computed tomography (CT) or magnetic resonance (MR) data. In the 1990's he worked on technology and algorithms for digitizing three-dimensional objects. This led to the Digital Michelangelo Project, in which he and a team of researchers spent a year in Italy digitizing the statues of Michelangelo using laser scanners. His current interests include light field sensing and display, computational photography, and applications of computer graphics in microscopy and biology. Awards: Charles Goodwin Sands Medal for best undergraduate thesis (1976), National Science Foundation Presidential Young Investigator (1991), ACM SIGGRAPH Computer Graphics Achievement Award (1996), ACM Fellow (2007). Recent professional service: Papers Chair of SIGGRAPH 2007.