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 <channel>
  <title>URCS Seminars &amp; Talks</title>
  <link>http://www.cs.rochester.edu/dept/seminar</link>
  <description>Upcoming Seminars &amp; Talks from the Computer Science Department at the University of Rochester</description>
  <language>en-us</language>
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   <url></url>
   <title>Computer Science Department, University of Rochester</title>
   <link>http://www.cs.rochester.edu/dept/seminar</link>
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  <lastBuildDate>Sat, 07 Nov 2009 15:33:40 -0500</lastBuildDate>
  
   <item>
    <title>Dr. Hany Farid: Digital Image Forensics</title>
    <link>http://www.cs.rochester.edu/dept/seminar/view/419</link>
    <description>[Monday, November 09, 2009 at 11:00 AM in Computer Studies Bldg. Room 209] Photography lost its innocence many years ago.  Shortly after the
first commercially available camera was introduced, photographs were
being manipulated and altered.  With the advent of high-resolution
digital cameras, powerful personal computers and sophisticated
photo-editing software, the manipulation of digital images is becoming
more common.  We are seeing the impact of these technologies in nearly
every corner of our lives.  As the technology that allows for digital
media to be manipulated and distorted is developing at break-neck
speeds, our understanding of the technological, ethical, and legal
implications is lagging behind.  I will discuss some of these issues
and describe computational techniques which we have developed for
detecting tampering in digital media.

Bio:  Hany Farid received his undergraduate degree in Computer Science and Applied Mathematics from the University of Rochester in 1989. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Pennsylvania in 1997. Following a two year post-doctoral position in Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT, he joined the Computer Science Department at Dartmouth in 1999. Hany is the William H. Neukom 1964 Distinguished Professor of Computational Science, and the Director of the Neukom Institute for Computational Science. Hany is the recipient of an NSF CAREER award, a Sloan Fellowship and a Guggenheim Fellowship.

From working with federal law enforcement agencies on digital forensics, to the digital reconstruction of Ancient Egyptian tombs, Hany works and plays with digital media at the crossroads of computer science, engineering, mathematics, optics, and psychology.

Refreshments will be provided at 10:45</description>
    <ev:startdate>20091109T160000Z</ev:startdate>
    <ev:enddate>20091109T170000Z</ev:enddate>
    <guid>http://www.cs.rochester.edu/dept/seminar/view/419</guid>
   </item>
  
   <item>
    <title>Kyle Richardson: John Bell Pragmatics Papers (cont&#39;d)</title>
    <link>http://www.cs.rochester.edu/dept/seminar/view/459</link>
    <description>[Friday, November 13, 2009 at  3:30 PM in CSB 703] We will continue our discussion of John Bell&#39;s work on pragmatics from last week.</description>
    <ev:startdate>20091113T203000Z</ev:startdate>
    <ev:enddate>20091113T213000Z</ev:enddate>
    <guid>http://www.cs.rochester.edu/dept/seminar/view/459</guid>
   </item>
  
   <item>
    <title>Lane A. Hemaspaandra: The Shield that Never Was: Societies with Single-Peaked Preferences Are More Open to Manipulation and Control</title>
    <link>http://www.cs.rochester.edu/dept/seminar/view/435</link>
    <description>[Monday, November 16, 2009 at 11:00 AM in Computer Studies Bldg. Room 209] uch work has been devoted, during the past twenty years, to using
complexity to protect elections from manipulation and control.  Many
results have been obtained showing NP-hardness shields, and recently
there has been much focus on whether such worst-case hardness
protections can be bypassed by frequently correct heuristics or by
approximations.  Our work takes a very different approach: We argue
that when electorates follow the canonical political science model of
societal preferences the complexity shield never existed in the first
place.  In particular, we show that for electorates having
single-peaked preferences, many existing NP-hardness results on
manipulation and control evaporate.  This talk is on joint work with
Piotr Faliszewski, Edith Hemaspaandra, and Joerg Rothe</description>
    <ev:startdate>20091116T160000Z</ev:startdate>
    <ev:enddate>20091116T170000Z</ev:enddate>
    <guid>http://www.cs.rochester.edu/dept/seminar/view/435</guid>
   </item>
  
   <item>
    <title>Xipeng Shen: Making Programs Learn as Birds Do ---Input-Centric Program Behavior Analysis and Optimizations</title>
    <link>http://www.cs.rochester.edu/dept/seminar/view/431</link>
    <description>[Monday, November 23, 2009 at 11:00 AM in Computer Studies Bldg. Room 209] Unlike a bird, which can learn to fly better and better, existing
programs are sort of dumb---the one millionth run of a program is
typically not a bit better than the first-time run. One of the main
reasons is the insufficient consideration of program inputs in current
program optimizations. The limitation has resulted in a set of
shortcomings that have prevented the current programming systems from
meeting the new challenges imposed by the continuous increases in
hardware parallelism and software complexity.

Input-centric program behavior analysis is a technique for intelligent
programming systems. The key is the concentration on program input, a
factor deciding program behavior but having been insufficiently
understood and exploited. Input-centric behavior analysis opens the
door to evolvable computing, where, the optimizer learns program
behavior patterns incrementally across production runs, and improves
the program continuously. Just as a bird learns to fly better and
better, in evolvable computing, a program may learn to run faster and
faster.

This talk will focus on the influence of program inputs on program
behaviors, the handling of input complexity, and the modeling of the
connections between inputs and runtime behaviors through incremental
statistical learning. The effectiveness of input-centric analysis is
demonstrated in its applications in enhancing runtime optimizations in
Java Virtual Machine, improving cost-efficiency in software
speculation, and alleviating optimization obstacles for GPU (Graphic
Processing Unit) programs.

Bio:  Xipeng Shen has been an assistant professor at The College of William
and Mary since 2006. He received his Ph.D. and Master degree in
Computer Science from University of Rochester in 2006 and 2003
respectively. He received the M.S. degree in Pattern Recognition from
Chinese Academy of Sciences in 2001, and the B.S. degree from The
North China University of Technology.  Xipeng Shen&#39;s main research
lies in the area of Compiler Technology and Programming Systems,
covering Optimizing Compilers, Parallel Computing, GPU Computing,
Program Behavior Analysis, etc.  He leads the Compilers and Adaptive
Programming Systems research group at The College of William and
Mary. The group have been focusing on integrating automatic learning,
adaptation, and evolvement into different computing layers to form a
whole-system synergy.

 Refreshments will be provided at 10:45</description>
    <ev:startdate>20091123T160000Z</ev:startdate>
    <ev:enddate>20091123T170000Z</ev:enddate>
    <guid>http://www.cs.rochester.edu/dept/seminar/view/431</guid>
   </item>
  
   <item>
    <title>Dr. Arun Chauhan: TBA</title>
    <link>http://www.cs.rochester.edu/dept/seminar/view/432</link>
    <description>[Monday, November 30, 2009 at 11:00 AM in Computer Studies Bldg. Room 209] </description>
    <ev:startdate>20091130T160000Z</ev:startdate>
    <ev:enddate>20091130T170000Z</ev:enddate>
    <guid>http://www.cs.rochester.edu/dept/seminar/view/432</guid>
   </item>
  
   <item>
    <title>Robbert Van Renesse: Refining the way to Consensus</title>
    <link>http://www.cs.rochester.edu/dept/seminar/view/451</link>
    <description>[Monday, December 07, 2009 at 11:00 AM in Computer Studies Bldg. 209] Consensus protocols, typically a dozen or so lines of high-level pseudo-code,
are notoriously difficult to comprehend.  For this reason, they are usually accompanied
by correctness proofs, but few people are prepared to slog through those details.  And
although the proofs should constitute a way to understand the protocols, they are
rarely illuminating and do not distinguish between important insights and the myriad of
low-level technical details that also need to be right.  So people are more likely to do
operational reasoning, where they look at various hand-simulated sample executions 
and attempt to understand how and why the protocols work based on those.  
Moreover, little effort is made to relate the different protocols even though all seem to
be constructed from a relatively small number of underlying mechanisms, such as
rounds of messaging and quorum intersection.  We present a different approach to
understanding consensus protocols.  Specifically, we present a sequence of
specifications of consensus with gradually increasing lower-level detail. Each such
refinement step involves an important insight about how and why consensus protocols
work.

 
Bio: Robbert Van Renesse is a Principal Research Scientist at the Department of
Computer Science. He received his Ph.D. from the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam in
1989 where he developed the Amoeba Distributed Operating System. Subsequently he
worked on the Plan 9 operating system at AT&amp;T Bell Laboratories. Since joining Cornell
in 1991 he has worked on fault-tolerant distributed systems.  Robbert van Renesse is a
co-founder of D.A.G. Labs, which was acquired by FAST Search &amp; Transfer, which was
acquired by Microsoft, and a co-founder of Reliable Network Solutions, Inc.
 

 Refreshments provided at 10:45</description>
    <ev:startdate>20091207T160000Z</ev:startdate>
    <ev:enddate>20091207T170000Z</ev:enddate>
    <guid>http://www.cs.rochester.edu/dept/seminar/view/451</guid>
   </item>
  
   <item>
    <title>Rocco Servedio: TBA      </title>
    <link>http://www.cs.rochester.edu/dept/seminar/view/453</link>
    <description>[Monday, January 25, 2010 at 11:00 AM in Computer Studies Bldg. 209] </description>
    <ev:startdate>20100125T160000Z</ev:startdate>
    <ev:enddate>20100125T170000Z</ev:enddate>
    <guid>http://www.cs.rochester.edu/dept/seminar/view/453</guid>
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