2010 Fall Colloquium: Neil Spring
Fall Colloquium Series presents Professor Neil Spring.
- Title: Underspecified Network Protocols Complicate Research
- Date: Monday September 20, 2010
- Time: 4pm
- Location: CSIC Building, Room 1115
Network protocols are well-specified where it matters: features necessary for interoperation. For other behaviors, such as heuristics or corner cases, standards are silent or ignored. I describe two research efforts that, at the start, seemed to be straightforward but became interesting because of varied implementation choices in routers and in wireless interfaces.
Maranello is our modification of the ARQ (acknowledgment) component of 802.11 to support partial retransmissions. The potential increase in throughput provided by Maranello depends on the aggressiveness of the underlying implementation: how it performs backoff and how it selects fallback rates. I will describe our exploration of these heuristics and show how well Maranello works when interfaces are well-behaved.
Discarte is our Internet mapping technique that uses the record route IP option to complement the traditional traceroute method. Having two methods to measure the same features exposes weaknesses of each, which in turn makes it possible to use clever techniques to correct errors. I will describe our application of disjunctive logic programming to scalably analyze measurements to derive maps with few errors.
2010 Fall Colloquium: Mihai Pop
Fall Colloquium Series presents Professor Mihai Pop.
- Title: Computational Challenges in Genomics Research
- Date: Monday September 27, 2010
- Time: 4pm
- Location: CSIC Building, Room 1115
During the past few years we have witnessed dramatic advances in DNA sequencing and mapping technologies. These technologies generate data orders of magnitude faster, and at just a fraction of the costs previously possible. As a result, DNA sequencing is rapidly becoming a critical tool in many areas of biology research. At the same time, the wealth of data being generated is rapidly challenging the capacity of the computational infrastructure available to researchers. Also, as sequencing is being applied in new contexts, the resulting data cannot be effectively analyzed by existing computational tools.
In my talk I will describe recent research from my lab that addresses emerging computational challenges in the analysis of genomic data.
During the first half of the talk I will discuss several results we obtained in the broad area of string algorithms. These results include theoretical analyses of the computational complexity of genome assembly, the development of algorithms for inexact matching capable of rapidly processing large numbers of short DNA sequences, and the use of cloud computing infrastructure to "commodify" the computational analysis of large genomic data-sets.
In the second part of my talk I will focus on problems arising from metagenomics research - the genomic analysis of communities of microbes. I will present new algorithms we developed for metagenomic assembly, as well as initial results on using time-series data to infer and model the dynamic interactions between microbes inhabiting an environment.
2010 Fall Colloquium: Amol Deshpande
Fall Colloquium presents Professor Amol Deshpande on October 4, 2010.
2010 Fall Colloquium: Ben Bederson
Fall Colloquium presents Professor Ben Bederson on October 11, 2010.
Department hires three new faculty, including first Minker Professor
Hector Corrada Bravo's work spans the full range of computational genomics analysis: from pre-processing of measurements from high-throughput assays to disease risk models that integrate high-throughput genomic and other data. His research interests include the development of new methods and tools from multiple areas in the computational and statistical sciences: basic bioinformatics/biostatistics, statistical and machine learning, data management and numerical optimization.
Dr. Bravo is joining the Computer Science Department as an Assistant Professor of Computer Science, with a courtesy appointment in UMIACS.
Hal Daume's primary research interests are in understanding how to get human knowledge into a machine learning system in the most efficient way possible. In practice, he works primarily in the areas of Bayesian learning (particularly non-parametric methods), structured prediction and domain adaptation (with a focus on problems in language and biology). He associates himself most with conferences like ACL, ICML, NIPS and EMNLP. He has published over two dozen conference papers and five journal papers, and believes whole-heartedly in the public release of research software.
Dr. Daume is joining the Computer Science department as an Assistant Professor of Computer Science, with courtesy appointments in UMIACS and the Department of Linguistics.
MohammadTaghi Hajiaghayi's research interests are game theory and combinatorial auctions, network design, algorithmic graph theory, combinatorial optimizations and approximation algorithms, distributed and mobile computing, and computational geometry and embeddings. In the course of his professional career in these areas, he published several papers in top conferences and journals of computer science, won a few best paper awards, and served in program committees or editorial boards of several well-known international conferences and journals.
Dr. Hajiaghayi is joining the Computer Science Department as the Minker Assistant Professor of Computer Science, with a courtesy appointment in UMIACS.
Keynote talk: Ramani Duraiswami
Ramani Duraiswami is giving a keynote talk at DAFx-10 in Graz Austria, as well as an invited colloquium at the Acoustics Research Institute of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, Vienna.
Saurabh Srivastava named CI Fellow
Recent Ph.D. graduate Saurabh Srivastava was named a CI Fellow for 2010-2011. He has started as a postdoc at University of California, Berkeley.
Dov Gordon name CI Fellow
Ph.D. student Dov Gordon was named a CI Fellow for 2010-2011. He will begin his postdoc at Columbia University in the fall.
Best Paper Award: Jian Li
Ph.D. student Jian Li's work has recently won the best paper award at the 2010 European Symposium on Algorithms. This paper is also co-authored by Ph.D. student Julian Mestre (now at MPI).
"When LP is the Cure for Your Matching Woes: Improved Bounds for Stochastic Matchings" by Nikhil Bansal, Anupam Gupta, Jian Li, Julian Mestre, Viswanath Nagarajan, Atri Rudra
