University of Nevada, Reno - Department of Computer Science & Engineering [Past Colloquia]

Past Colloquia

organized by
The Department of Computer Science & Engineering
and
The Northern Nevada IEEE

Welcome to our Colloquium Series. All faculty and students are encouraged to attend. In particular, this is an excellent opportunity for graduate students to become familiar with various research areas in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Electrical Engineering, and other related fields. The current colloquium schedule is shown below, updated as speakers are confirmed. Suggestions for speakers are always welcome! For more information please contact:

Dr. Sergiu Dascalu

E-mail: dascalus@cse.unr.edu
Phone: (775) 784-4613

Dr. Sami Fadali

E-mail: fadali@ieee.org
Phone: (775) 784-6951

The following list consists of all Colloquia in which the Department of Computer Science & Engineering has been involved. The entries are listed in chronological order, with the most recent events listed first.

Dr. Konstantinos Bekris

Department of Computer Science, Rice University

Location: SEM 201

Wednesday, April 9th, 2008 at 11:00a.m.

Sponsored and organized by the CSE

Vehicular Localization in Urban Environments using a Wireless Mesh Network

Locating a device's position using information from wireless communication has attracted a lot of attention in several research communities because it provides with a multitude of location-based services. This report focuses on the instance of this problem that involves such a device carried by a vehicle driven in an urban environment that is covered by a wireless mesh network. The proposed approach uses data gathered by a location-aware vehicular user of the network to build a model of expected observations in the covered region. Subsequently, vehicles can be localized online using only information from a wireless adapter and by applying a bayesian, probabilistic inference method. The localization accuracy is at the block level, allowing applications, such as specialized web search, navigation, social networking or high-level activity inferencing.

UNR CSE Host

Dr. George Bebis

Dr. Biplab Sikdar

Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute

Biography

Biplab Sikdar is currently an Associate Professor in the Department of Electrical, Computer and Systems Engineering of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, NY, USA. He received the B. Tech degree in electronics and communication engineering from North Eastern Hill University, Shillong, India, the M. Tech degree in electrical engineering from Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur and Ph.D in electrical engineering from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, NY, USA in 1996, 1998 and 2001, respectively. His research interests include wireless MAC protocols, network routing and transport protocols, performance evaluation and queueing theory.

Location: MS 321

Friday, April 4th, 2008 at 11:00a.m.

Sponsored and organized by the CSE/EBE/IEEE

Energy Efficient Transmission Strategies for Body Sensor Networks with Energy Harvesting

The limitations caused by current battery technology is one of the main obstacles in the path of widespread deployment of Body Sensor Networks (BSNs), which have the potential to significantly benefit numerous medical and non-medical applications and services. This presentation will describe our work on addressing the problem of developing energy efficient transmission strategies for body area sensor networks with energy harvesting capabilities. Taking into account the energy harvesting capabilities of the sensor, decision policies are developed to determine the transmission mode to use at a given instant of time in order to maximize the quality of coverage. The problem is formulated in a Markov Decision Process (MDP) framework and the performance of the transmission policy thus derived is compared with that of an energy balancing policy as well as an aggressive policy. An upper bound on the performance of arbitrary policies is determined and lower bounds specific to the energy balancing and aggressive policies are also developed. Our results show that the quality of coverage associated with the MDP formulation outperforms the other policies.

UNR CSE Host

Dr. Murat Yuksel

Mr. Samir Tamer

Ingersoll Rand Security Technologies

Biography

Samir Tamer researches biometric technologies at Ingersoll Rand Security Technologies, a supplier of biometric and non-biometric security devices. Samir is primarily linked to hand geometry devices used for physical access control and time management. Over 200,000 handreaders have been deployed since the company�s inception in 1986 in such diverse locations as airports, banks, hospitals, and manufacturing floors. Mr. Tamer is a representative to the INCITS M1 Technical Committee on Biometrics and a U.S. delegate to the SC37 ISO/IEC Joint Technical Committee on biometrics. He holds engineering degrees from Duke University and the University of Virginia, and an MBA from Santa Clara University.

Location: MS 321

Friday, March 7th, 2008 at 11:00a.m.

Sponsored and organized by the CSE/EBE/IEEE

Hand Geometry and the Biometrics Industry

When you lock a door, how secure is it really? Keys prove that you HAVE something required to enter. Passwords prove that you KNOW something required to enter. Only biometrics prove that you ARE someone authorized to enter. Biometric devices are those that automatically verify or identify the identity of humans based on biological/behavioral traits such as face geometry, hand geometry, fingerprint patterns, iris patterns, speech patterns, or even vein topologies. This discussion will provide a history of the biometrics market, an introduction to the major biometric modalities mentioned above, and recent trends in the industry (technological advances, corporate consolidation, privacy concerns, and government mandates).

UNR CSE Host

Dr. George Bebis

José P. Zagal

Biography

José Zagal is a PhD candidate in the College of Computing, Georgia Institute of Technology. He has an MSc in engineering sciences and a BS in industrial engineering from Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Chile. His research interests include the use of online communities for collaborative learning and the development of frameworks for describing, analyzing, and understanding games. He is a member of the Electronic Learning Communities Lab and the Experimental Game Lab at Georgia Institute of Technology. In his free time he loves to design and play games.

Location: WRB 2020

Thursday, March 6th, 2008 at 2:00p.m.

Sponsored and organized by the CSE

Exploring the Issues and Challenges of Learning about Videogames

On the surface, it seems like teaching about games should be easy. After all, students are highly motivated, enjoy engaging with course content, and have extensive personal experience with videogames. Games education in reality is surprisingly complex. This talk will discuss the educational and learning issues involved in studying games. It will also describing the design and use of two online learning environments for supporting learning about games: GameLog and the Game Ontology Wiki. GameLog is an online blogging environment designed to help students reflect on their game playing experiences. GameLog differs from traditional blogging environments because each user maintains multiple parallel blogs, with each blog devoted to a single game. The Game Ontology wiki provides an authentic context for students to contribute and participate in a games studies research endeavor: the Game Ontology Project, a hierarchy of elements of gameplay. This talk will address the results of using GameLog and the Game Ontology Wiki in university level games-related classes and discuss the importance that online collaborative environments like these can play in providing students with opportunities for leveraging their personal knowledge of games while helping them achieve a deeper understanding.

Konstantinos Bekris

Location: WRB 3005

Tuesday, March 4th, 2008 at 4:00p.m.

Sponsored and organized by the CSE

Real-Time Kinodynamic Planning: Physically-Realistic, Fast, Safe and Distributed

Many exciting applications, ranging from simulations and games to the control of robots, require real-time computation of collision-free trajectories given only partial knowledge of a potentially dynamic environment. One promising and general approach to address such problems is to employ the sampling-based kinodynamic framework, which can accommodate a variety of systems and directly addresses both geometric and dynamic aspects of motion planning. However, as a search-based approach, it poses computational challenges when time limitations are imposed for real-time performance. This results in low quality paths or partial paths that do not reach the goal. Moreover there are safety considerations, in terms of collision-avoidance, when a system has to respect dynamic motion constraints and operate under time limitations.

This talk describes four contributions in the context of real-time sampling-based kinodynamic planning. Firstly, we incorporate physical simulators in planning so as to be able to better represent realistic dynamics of the physical world, such as drift, friction, contacts and gravity. Secondly, we work on "informed" versions of sampling-based kinodynamic planners, where any vailable workspace information is utilized to reduce solution time, improve path quality and provide a high level guidance in the case of replanning. Thirdly, we propose a "continuous" replanning approach that guarantees the safety of a system with dynamics in tasks with static obstacles. Finally, we have extended this solution to a distributed algorithm for multiple communicating vehicles operating in the same environment. We show that through coordination multiple vehicles can also achieve collision avoidance in real-time while employing sampling-based kinodynamic planners.

Dr. Samee Khan

Biography

Samee U. Khan is a postdoctoral research fellow in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at the Colorado State University. He received his Ph.D. degree in computer science from the University of Texas, Arlington in 2007. His research interest include designing, building, analyzing, and measuring large-scale autonomous distributed computing systems using game theoretical and algorithmic mechanism design techniques, passive optical network layouts, designing secure systems, combinatorial games, and combinatorial optimization. His research work in these areas is published in 40 technical papers. Dr. Khan is a member of the European Association of Theoretical Computer Science, the Game Theory Society, the IEEE Communications Society, the IEEE Computer Society, and the Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers.

Location: WRB 2025

Monday, February 25th, 2008 at 2:00p.m.

Sponsored and organized by the CSE

Optimizing the Energy Consumption and Performance of Computational Grids

Energy consumption is a critical and crucial problem in large-scale computing systems, such as computational grids because they consume massive amounts of energy and have high cooling costs. These systems must be designed to meet functional and timing requirement while being energyefficient. Resource allocation in computational grids is already a challenging problem due to the need to address deadline constraints and system heterogeneity. The problem becomes more challenging when energy management is an additional design objective because energy consumption of the system must be carefully balanced against other performance measures. This talk focuses on the topic of resource allocation in computational grids with the aim to minimize energy consumption and makespan subject to the constraints of deadlines and architectural requirements. A solution from cooperative game theory based on the concept of Nash Bargaining Solution will be presented. In this game theoretical technique, machines collectively arrive at a decision that describes the best task allocation for the entire computational grid. This collective decision ensures that the allocations are both energy and makespan optimized. We also will look at some experimental results which verify that the cooperative game theoretical technique achieves superior performance compared to other traditional resource allocation techniques.

Dr. Gordon K. Lee

San Diego State University

Biography

Dr. Lee is currently a full Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. His research interests are in the areas of robotics and control systems, particularly intelligent evolutionary control algorithms, fuzzy systems and neural networks, as well as in the applications of these methods to mobile robotic colonies. He has published over 250 technical documents; Dr. Lee is a senior member of IEEE, a member of AIAA and a senior member of ISCA. He is also currently an Associate Editor for the International Journal on Intelligent Automation and Soft Computing.

Location: MS 227

Friday, February 22nd, 2008 at Noon

Sponsored and organized by the CSE/EBE/IEEE

Evolutionary Learning Algorithms for Intelligent Systems

There exist many applications in military, commercial and civilian scenarios where intelligent systems must perform complex tasks in an uncertain environment. For example, autonomous intelligent robot colonies may be used in reconnaissance missions or seek-and-capture scenarios involving a complex set of interactions between machines as well as between machines and humans and may cover long distances to remote sites. Because of the nature of the tasks, new classes of intelligent systems will be required that have a high level of specification for efficiency and reliability. This, we believe, can only be accomplished through sophisticated control and efficient sensor integration as an integral part of the design of the robot and the robot's supporting systems. Evolutionary techniques present a feasible approach to this task. This seminar presents an overview of on-going research in the development of evolutionary learning algorithms that may be applied to a multitude of applications. The talk will include a discussion on adaptive fitness functions, learning algorithms and convergence properties of evolutionary methods.

UNR CSE Host

Dr. Sergiu Dascalu

Dr. Jim Kenyon

Department of Physiology and Cell Biology, UNR

Biography

Dr. Kenyon received his Ph.D. in Physiology and Biophysics in 1977 from the University of Vermont where he identified a component of K+ current important in cardiac excitation. He did post-doctoral work at the University of Maryland studying the details of ion channel gating and then took a faculty position at the University of Texas Health Sciences Center at Dallas where his research focused on cardiac excitation and the activation of contraction. He joined the Department of Physiology and Cell Biology in the University of Nevada School of Medicine in 1987. At Reno, he began studies of the control of intracellular Ca2+ in primary afferent nociceptive neurons, i.e. the neurons where pain starts. He is currently the Director of the Nevada IDeA Network of Biomedical Research Excellence (INBRE), an NIH funded project to develop research infrastructure and personnel in Nevada.

Location: SEM 261

Friday, February 15th, 2008 at 2:30p.m.

Sponsored and organized by the CSE/EBE/IEEE

Information transfer in electrically excitable cells: studies with electrodes, fluorescence, and modeling

Although the electrical nature of signaling in the nervous system was appreciated in the 18th century, essentially no progress toward a useful understanding of the mechanism of this signaling was made until the coming together of a unique experimental preparation, appropriate electrical amplifiers, and prepared minds at the end of the second World War. This presentation will review that event with particular attention to the mathematical model that reconstituted the action potential of the squid giant axon from measurements of voltage-dependent conductances. This conceptual approach led the way for modeling numerous cellular activities with particular success in studies of the control of intracellular calcium. This presentation will review recent data and modeling with particular attention to the current failure of the modeling.

UNR EBE Host

Dr. Sami Fadali

Dr. Tom Malzbender

Hewlett-Packard Laboratories

Biography

Tom is a Senior Research Scientist in the Mobile and Media Systems Lab within Hewlett-Packard Laboratories. Tom works at the intersection of computer graphics, computer vision and signal processing. He has developed the techniques of Reflectance Transformation, Polynomial Texture Mapping and Fourier Volume Rendering. Tom also developed the capacitive sensing technology that allowed HP to penetrate the consumer graphics tablet market. His PTM methods are used by the National Gallery in London, the Tate Gallery and in the fields of criminal forensics, paleontology and archeology. His recent work on imaging the Antikythera Mechanism led to the deciphering of this ancient astronomical computer.

Tom is on the program committee for several 3D graphics and vision conferences. More information can be found at http://www.hpl.hp.com/personal/Tom_Malzbender/ .

Location: OSN 203

Friday, February 1st, 2008 at 11:00a.m.

Sponsored and organized by the CSE/EE/IEEE

Reflectance Imaging: A Simple Approach to Seeing Surface Detail

The appearance of a 3D object depends on viewpoint, lighting conditions, surface shape and reflectance properties. Photography captures the appearance of an object directly, holding the viewpoint and lighting conditions constant. Although simple to capture, photographs sample a limited subset of this "appearance space" and are poorly suited to quantitative analysis. 3D geometry capture of shape is an increasingly popular approach to permit further quantitative analysis of target objects, but is expensive and problematic. Additionally, 3D capture mechanisms are often finicky and fail for locations on the object that are dark or shiny. We present a photographic method, reflectance imaging, that avoids these problems by directly capturing the appearance of an object across lighting variations. Comparable to conventional photography in its simplicity and robustness, it allows quantitative analysis as well as interactive control of lighting, unlike a conventional 2D image. Capturing the reflectance properties of an object also allows enhancements that often allow one to see surface detail not apparent even when directly inspecting the object. We will present 6 years of practical experience with this method in the areas of paleontology, archeology, criminal forensics, artifact and art conservation. Demos and tools useful for experimentation will be described and can be accessed online at www.hpl.hp.com/ptm.

UNR CSE Host

Dr. George Bebis

Mr. Jim Hunt

Bally Technologies

Biography

Jim Hunt has been a quality assurance engineer at Bally Technologies Since July 2002. He manages the companies automated testing groups. Previously, Mr. Hunt was a software consultant specializing in software configuration management, where he analyzed the software development processes of over 200 different companies. Mr. Hunt received a Bachelor of Science degree in electrical engineering from the University of Missouri - Rolla in 1986. Then he gained experience in the design of computer controlled vending and slot machines.

Location: SEM 261

Monday, December 3rd, 2007 at 4:00p.m.

Sponsored and organized by the CSE/EE/IEEE

Essentials of Software Configuration Management

One of the most challenging aspects of software product design is the organization of the artifacts of that design. Configurable items result in each area of the software development life cycle and must be managed across the organization. A brief taxonomy of SCM methods will be presented.

UNR CSE Host

Dr. Sergiu Dascalu

Dr. Philippe Dugerdil

University of Applied Sciences, Geneva, Switzerland

Biography

Since November 2002 Dr. Philippe Dugerdil has been a Professor of Software Engineering in the School of Business of the University of Applied Sciences in Geneva, Switzerland. Between 1993 and 2002 he served as Vice President of Pictet Bank, Geneva, where he headed the front office software development and software engineering departments. Before that, he held positions as group leader and development manager in the software industry and, in late 1980s, worked as an Assistant Professor with the University of Neuchatel, Switzerland. Dr. Dugerdil received an Electrical Engineer degree from the Swiss Institute of Technology, Lausanne, Switzerland (1982), an MBA degree from the Institute for Management Development (IMD), Lausanne (2001), and a PhD degree in Computer Science from the Aix-Marseille University, France (1988). His main research interests are on software engineering and reengineering, program understanding, reverse engineering, and software development processes.

Location: SEM 261

Wednesday, November 21st, 2007 at 4:00p.m.

Sponsored and organized by the CSE/EE/IEEE

Using Execution Trace Segmentation Techniques to Identify Dynamic Clusters of Classes in Legacy Systems

In dynamic analysis (i.e. execution trace analysis), an important problem is to cope with the volume of data to process. However, in the literature, no definitive solution has yet been proposed. Generally, the techniques start by compressing the execution trace before proceeding with the analysis. On the contrary, we propose a way to process the uncompressed execution trace using a segmentation technique. This has the strong advantage to keep the temporal relationships between the calls. First, we present the concept of temporally omnipresent class that is the analogy of the "noise" in signal processing. Then, during analysis, the omnipresent classes can be filtered out to concentrate only on relevant ones. Next, we show a way to recover the components of a legacy system by segmenting the trace. We finally present an application of this approach to a medium size industrial software system, as well as the tool that supports our approach. As a conclusion, we suggest that our noise reduction and clustering techniques are both efficient and scalable.

UNR CSE Host

Dr Sergiu Dascalu

Dr. Andre Bernat

Executive Director, Computer Research Association

Biography

Dr. Andrew Bernat is the current Executive Director of the Computing Research Association (www.cra.org), an association of more than 250 North American academic departments of computer science, computer engineering, and related fields; laboratories and centers in industry, government, and academia engaging in basic computing research; and affiliated professional societies. As founding member and Chair of the Computer Science Department at the University of Texas at El Paso, he developed an acclaimed model of student involvement in research, secured external funding, attracted and hired high quality faculty, and directed the renovation of a building to house the department. In recognition of "... his success in creating arguably the strongest computer science department at a minority-serving institution", the Computing Research Association honored him with the A. Nico Habermann Award. In developing and leading the National Science Foundation-funded Model Institutions for Excellence project at UTEP, he forged working groups across different departments and colleges that dramatically transformed the campus and led to qualitative and quantitative improvement in student achievement. He has led national efforts to increase the participation of underrepresented minorities and women in the computing profession. The workshop series he initiated with colleagues in Mexico dramatically increased the activity and productivity of the Mexican computer science community. While a Program Director at the National Science Foundation, he oversaw the Federal Cyber Service: Scholarship for Service program. His experience ranges from scientific research, with some 62 invited presentations and publications, to educational reform and innovation, with some thirty invited presentations and publications.

Location: HREL 109

Thursday, November 15th, 2007 at 10:30a.m.

Sponsored and organized by the CSE/EE/IEEE

Federal Funding for Computing Research, Building Community and Words from My Sponsor

The Computing Research Association is the Washington-based non-profit looking out for the health of the computing research enterprise by focusing on the people and money necessary to conduct computing research. Since CRA pays my salary, I start with what CRA is doing in general to support the people doing computing research and how students and faculty can make use of these efforts. I then bring people up to date on what is going on with research funding at the federal level and what CRA is doing to improve the situation. This leads into a discussion of the new Computing Community Consortium effort.

UNR CSE Host

Dr. Yaakov Varol

Dr. Felix Schuermann

Biography

Felix Schürmann is the General Project Manager of the Blue Brain Project at the Brain Mind Institute at the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne(EPFL) in Switzerland. He started his studies of physics at the University of Heidelberg, Germany supported by the German National Academic Foundation. He obtained his master's degree (M.S.) in physics from the State University of New York, Buffalo, USA, under the supervision of Richard Gonsalves. During this time he was a Fulbright Scholar. His master thesis dealt with the foundations of computing: the simulation of quantum computing. He received his Ph.D. in physics from the University of Heidelberg, Germany under the supervision of Karlheinz Meier in 2005. The focus of his work was on alternative approaches to computing: Using mixed-signal VLSI he co-designed an efficient implementation of a neural network in hardware and was the first to adopt "Liquid Computing" in hardware.

Location: MS 321

Friday, November 9th, 2007 at 11:00a.m.

Sponsored and organized by the CSE/EE/IEEE

The Blue Brain Project - Simulation-based Research in Neuroscience

The initial phase of the Blue Brain Project aims to reconstruct the detailed cellular structure and function of the neocortical column (NCC) of the young rat. As a collaboration between the Brain Mind Institute of the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne (EPFL) and IBM the project is based on the many years of experimental data from an electrophysiology lab and a dedicated massively parallel computing resource (4-rack BlueGene/L). Over the last 2 years an interdisciplinary team of 35 researchers has cast the reverse-engineering of the biological pieces and the forward construction of detailed mathematical models in an iterative process that allows continuous refinement. The refinement is directed by a bottom-up calibration that aligns the model across all levels - from the ion channels to the emergent network phenomena - with the experimental data. In order to put the expert in the loop, extensive use of visualization and interactive analysis is made, which is powered by a second dedicated supercomputer (SGI Prism Extreme, 16 graphic pipes, 300GB shared memory) in order to realize short turn-around times.

UNR CSE Host

Dr. Fred Harris

Dr. Norimichi Tsumura

Chiba University, Japan

Location: EJCH 205

Friday, November 2nd, 2007 at 11:00a.m.

Sponsored and organized by the UNR Psychology and CSE/EE/IEEE

Appearance Reproduction for Industrial Applications

In the process of product development, the appearance of a product is usually evaluated by directly observing trial pieces. The shape of products can be evaluated by making a mock up or showing a computer graphics image. However, it is difficult to evaluate the actual appearance without making trial pieces, since they are dependent on the viewing devices and environmental illuminant. The evaluation of appearance thus becomes a bottle neck in the production cycle, suggesting the need for better procedures to predict the appearances of products in various industries. In this talk, I will introduce our practical approaches for appearance reproduction in 3D soft proofing, skin color reproduction and e-commerce (Norimichi T., Appearance reproduction and multi-spectral imaging, Color Research and Application Vol. 31, No. 4 pp. 270-277, 2006).

UNR Host

Dr. Michael Webster

Dr. Rafael Fierro

University of New Mexico

Biography

Rafael Fierro received a M.Sc. degree in control engineering from the University of Bradford, UK and a Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering from the University of Texas at Arlington in 1990 and 1997, respectively. He held a postdoctoral appointment with the GRASP Lab, University of Pennsylvania, and a faculty position with the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Oklahoma State University. Dr. Fierro is currently an associate professor in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department, University of New Mexico. His research interests include hierarchical hybrid and embedded systems, optimization-based cooperative control, and robotics. He is the recipient of a Fulbright Scholarship and a 2004 National Science Foundation CAREER Award.

Location: SEM 201

Friday, October 19th, 2007 at 11:00a.m.

Sponsored and organized by the CSE/EE/IEEE

Coordination Algorithms for Cooperative Dynamic Networks

Recent advances in communication, computation, and embedded technologies support the development of cooperative dynamic networks (e.g., teams of robots, UAVs). The development of these systems is motivated by the recognition that, by distributing computer power and other resources, teams of mobile agents can perform many tasks more efficiently and robustly than an individual robot. For example, teams of robots can complete tasks such as multi-point surveillance, distributed localization and mapping, and cooperative transport. However, currently available coordination schemes are still ad-hoc, and have not yet explored the fundamental limits in terms of achievable performance, energy consumption and operational time in dynamic environments.

In this talk, I will present some methodologies and tools that are being developed to facilitate the design of coordination algorithms for cooperative networks of robots. Additionally, I will briefly describe COMET -- a COoperative MultivehiclE Testbed for research in networked embedded systems. Finally, I will provide some preliminary results on a geometric optimization approach to detecting and intercepting dynamic targets using mobile sensors.

UNR EE host

Dr. Sami Fadali

Dr. Michael Mozer

University of Colorado

Biography

Michael Mozer is a Professor in the Department of Computer Science and the Institute of Cognitive Science at the University of Colorado at Boulder, where he joined the faculty in 1988. Dr. Mozer received his Ph.D. in psychology and cognitive science at the University of California at San Diego and was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Toronto with Geoffrey Hinton. His primary research focus is on computational models in cognitive neuroscience, particular phenomena of visual attention and its pathologies, perceptual learning, and awareness. His interests include application of machine learning techniques to problems in engineering and artificial intelligence. Dr. Mozer has served on technical advisory boards of multiple start-up companies involved in data mining (including Athene, Umbria Communications, and AnswerOn Technologies), and is a co-founder and research scientist at Sensory Inc. which focuses embedded speech technologies for consumer electronics.

Location: WRB 2023

Friday, October 12th, 2007 at 11:00a.m.

Sponsored and organized by the CSE/EE/IEEE

Rational Models of Cognitive Control

Human behavior is remarkably flexible. An individual who drives the same route each day easily adjusts for a traffic jam or to pick up groceries. Any theory of human cognition must explain not only routine behavior, but how behavior is flexibly modulated by the current environment and goals. In this talk, we discuss this ability, often referred to as cognitive control. We focus on rational models, which argue that cognitive control optimizes performance to the statistical structure of the environment, subject to limitations on current knowledge or processing hardware. We describe how characteristics of the environment and task domain can be estimated from experience, and how these characteristics can then be exploited to make behavior more efficient. We validate our theories via simulation studies that model human data from tasks involving visual search (locating a visual target in a cluttered display) and object categorization.

UNR CSE Host

Dr. Bobby D. Bryant

Carl Franklin, J.D.

Political Science and Criminal Justice, Southern Utah University

Biography

Dr. Franklin is the author of ''Investigator's Guide to Computer Crime'', and several other books on legal and political issues, along with journal articles, including one related to cyber-stalking and another related to municipal response to computer crime. He has worked in the law and the legal profession starting as a Police Officer and then as a Law Clerk, a Prosecutor, and an Attorney. He has been involved in higher education since 1992. More information on his work and experience are available on his website at http://www.suu.edu/faculty/franklinc/

Location: WRB 2030

Wednesday, October 10th, 2007 at Noon

The Computer Crime Investigation

This presentation is on applying Computer Science and the Law to solving various cases and challenges. Included in the presentation are issues related to both hardware and software, identifying a variety of computer crimes and civil issues, describing the criminology related to computer crime, and finally, some examples of both how one can prepare to be a Computer Forensics expert, and the people and the tasks with whom one will work.

Dr. Valerio Pascucci

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and U.C. Davis, USA

Biography

Dr. Valerio Pascucci is a Computer Scientist and Project Leader at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Center for Applied Scientific Computing since May 2000 and Adjunct Professor at Computer Science Department of University of California Davis since July 2005. Prior to his CASC tenure, he was a senior research associate at the University of Texas at Austin, Center for Computational Visualization, CS and TICAM Departments. Dr. Pascucci earned a Ph.D. in computer science at Purdue University in May 2000, and a EE Laurea (Master), at the University "La Sapienza" in Roma, Italy, in December 1993, as a member of the Geometric Computing Group. Dr. Valerio Pascucci came to the U.S. in 1995 after having grown up in Roma, Italy.

Location: EJCH 205

Friday, September 28th, 2007 at 11:00a.m.

Sponsored and organized by the CSE/EE/IEEE

Robust Multi-scale Morse Theory for Quantitative Analysis of Massive Scientific Data

Recent advances in scientific computing and data acquisition technologies have produced an "information big bang" that has created a major data analysis and understanding challenge widely acknowledged as a primary bottlenecks in contemporary science. For example, at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, which houses several supercomputers including BlueGene/L (the largest supercomputer in the world), scientific simulations routinely generate terabytes of data that must be rigorously explored and analyzed as part of the scientific discovery process. This task cannot be undertaken with classical techniques due to performance barriers. More importantly, current tools lack the robustness necessary to handle the unprecedented complexity of the features represented in these massive datasets.

In this talk I will present recent advances in the use of classical Morse theory for the development of a formally sound and practically robust approach to analyze massive scientific models. In this work we have developed a combinatorial equivalent of smooth topological techniques that retain their formal mathematical foundations while enabling practical implementations that do not introduce numerical approximations. The result is a multi-scale data analysis framework that is provably robust and provides error bounded, quantitative feature extraction and tracking.

I will demonstrate the practical application of this family of techniques for the analysis of Hydrodynamic Instabilities, in which we have identified and quantified for the first time different stages of a turbulent mixing process, and for the analysis of porous media, for which we have provided a new characterization of their structural properties amenable for a multi-scale computational framework.

Presentation Slides

UNR CSE Host

Dr. George Bebis

Dr. Karlene A. Hoo

Texas Tech University, Lubbock, TX

Biography

Dr. Karlene A. Hoo is the Associate Vice President for Research at Texas Tech University, Lubbock, TX and Professor in the Department of Chemical Engineering at the same university. Her research interests encompass modeling of chemical and biochemical processes, dynamics and control, system identification, multivariate statistical analysis, energy efficient plants, energy for sustainability, cardiovascular research as it relates to hemodynamic flow in venous systems, and assistive technologies. She is is the author of 5 invited book chapters, more than 50 journal articles, and more than 100 conference papers. Dr. Hoo advised 6 doctoral and 7 master students who graduated so far and is currently supervising 10 PhD and 7 MS students.

Location: WRB 2003

Friday, March 9th, 2007 at Noon

Sponsored and organized by the IEEE/CHE-MET-EE

Designing Operability into Complex Integrated Processes

The design of a chemical process is a very challenging task due to the high dimensionality, nonlinearity, and the complexities of the material recycle and energy integration. For the process to operate at the designed conditions a control system must itself be designed and integrated with the process. Currently, the process and controller designs are serial tasks. The design of a chemical process is a steady state task with the end product, the process flowsheet, justifed primarily on its economic potential (a steady state balance sheet). There is almost no accounting of controllability, flexibility, and operability - all dynamic propositions - of the designed process even though it is widely known that the process design constrains the achievable control performance.

Modern control systems themselves involves high performance sensing and actuation components that must act synergistically to achieve the demanding tasks of regulation, safety, profit, and effciency. What is not known well and not quantified at all is the dependence that the control system imposes on the achievable performance of the process. Without a priori knowledge and analysis of this bi-directional dependence, the combined pro- cess and control designs may never operate satisfactorily at the designed operating condition.

The problem of designing operability and ultimately controllability into complex integrated processes will be addressed using a particular flowsheet decomposition and plantwide control design method. Appropriate examples will be presented to demonstrate this approach.

UNR CHE-MET Host

Dr. Nicholas Tsoulfandis

Ken Sheppard

PC-Doctor, Inc.

Biography

Ken Sheppard is responsible for all engineering and product development activities at PC-Doctor, Inc. He led the team that built PC-Doctor for Windows, which ships on millions of personal computers made by IBM, Lenovo, HP, Gateway and other leading manufacturers.

Sheppard joined the company as a software engineer in 2000, and quickly rose to senior design engineer. He was appointed to his current position as chief technology officer in May 2005.

Before joining PC-Doctor, Sheppard was in the U.S. Army where he rapidly achieved the rank of captain. He served as information technology and communications officer for a 450-soldier command at Fort Sill, Okla. where he managed a team of 16 soldiers who engineered, installed and maintained an information-technology infrastructure that included more than 200 workstations and six servers. Previously, as a top-rated lieutenant, he conducted fire direction for a howitzer platoon and was responsible for the welfare and training of 40 soldiers.

Sheppard also served as a software engineer for the Hydrologic Engineering Center in Davis, Calif. He is a Sun Certified Programmer for Java 2 and a Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer.

A distinguished graduate of the Reserve Officer Training Corps at the University of California, Davis, Sheppard received a bachelor's degree in computer science and engineering from the university in 1996.

Location: PE 208

Tuesday, March 6th, 2007 at 09:30a.m.

Sponsored and organized by the CSE/EE/IEEE

Pragmatic Development at PC-Doctor

As a software product grows in complexity, maintaining the flexibility to meet fast changing customer requirements and to easily adapt to changes in the industry can become a problem. At PC-Doctor, Inc., a relatively small team of developers needs to maintain, improve, and constantly change a product that needs to support Windows, DOS and UNIX operating systems. The software is also localized in 12 different languages and shipped on millions of PC's each month.

As a way to address this problem, PC Doctor, Inc. uses agile development methodologies, which are designed to facilitate communication and power individuals to make decisions. A subset of these lightweight methodologies that we have distilled down is what we call pragmatic development; these are a set of rules that developers need to constantly keep in mind to ensure they are producing high-quality software as efficiently as possible. In this talk, the set of guidelines will be presented and put into perspective within the domain of everyday use.

UNR CSE Host

Dr. Sergiu Dascalu

Dr. Justin Schonfeld

University of Nevada Reno

Biography

Justin Schonfeld graduated from Oregon State University with Honors Bachelors degrees in Computer Science and General Science in 2000 and from Iowa State University with a Ph.D. in Bioinformatics in 2006. He is currently working as a Postdoc in the Evolutionary and Computation Systems Lab at the University of Nevada, Reno. His research interests include: evolutionary computation, bioinformatics, computational intelligence applied to data mining, and evolved life.

Location: SEM 234

Friday, December 1st, 2006 at Noon

Sponsored and organized by the CSE/EE/IEEE

A modular data analysis pipeline for the discovery of novel RNA motifs

This talk introduces a modular software pipeline that searches collections of RNA sequences for novel RNA motifs. In this case the motifs incorporate elements of primary and secondary structure. The motif search pipeline breaks up sets of RNA sequences into shortened segments of RNA primary sequence. The shortened segments are then folded to obtain low energy secondary structures. The distance estimation module of the pipeline then calculates distances between the folded bricks, and then analyzes the resulting distance matrices for patterns.

An initial implementation of the pipeline is applied to synthetic and biological data sets. This implementation introduces a new distance measure for comparing RNA sequences based on structural annotation of the folded sequence as well as a new data analysis technique called non-linear projection. The modular nature of the pipeline is then used to explore the relationships between several different distance measures on random data, synthetic data, and a biological data set consisting of iron response elements. It is shown that the different distance measures capture different relationships between the RNA sequences. The non-linear projection algorithm is used to produce 2-dimensional projections of the distance matrices which are examined via inspection and k-means multiclustering. The pipeline is able to successfully cluster synthetic RNA sequences based only on primary sequence data as well as the iron response elements data set.

CSE UNR Host

Dr. Sushil Louis.

Joachim Holtz, IEEE Distinguished Speaker

University of Wuppertal

Biography

Joachim Holtz graduated in 1967 and received the Ph.D. degree in 1969 from the Technical University Braunschweig, Germany. In 1969 he became Associate Professor and, in 1971, Full Professor and Head of the Control Engineering Laboratory, Indian Institute of Technology in Madras, India. He joined the Siemens Research Laboratories in Erlangen, Germany, in 1972. From 1976 to 1998, he was Professor and Head of the Electrical Machines and Drives Laboratory, Wuppertal University, Germany. He is presently Professor Emeritus and a Consultant.

Dr. Holtz has published extensively, including 12 invited papers in journals. He has earned 12 Prize Paper Awards. He is the coauthor of four books, and holds 31 patents. He is the recipient of the IEEE Industrial Electronics Society Dr. Eugene Mittelmann Achievement Award, the IEEE Industrial Applications Society Outstanding Achievement Award, the IEEE Power Electronics Society William E. Newell Field Award, the IEEE Third Millenium Medal, and the IEEE Lamme Gold Medal. He is a Fellow of the IEEE.

Dr. Holtz is Past Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Transactions on Industrial Electronics, Distinguished Speaker of the IEEE Industrial Applications Society and IEEE Industrial Electronics Society.

Location: SEM 331

Monday, November 27th, 2006 at 4:00p.m.

Sponsored and organized by the IEEE

Insightful Dynamic Analysis of AC Machines

AC motors have proliferated as the most important machine type used in speed variable drive systems. The dynamic analysis and description of revolving field machines is supported by well-established theories: Park's transformation (1929), and the space vector theory by Kovacs and Racz (1959). Yet some inconsistencies with the theory of dynamic systems exist: The machine eigenvalues suggest the existence of two damped oscillators; it appears unsatisfactory that the respective eigenfrequencies change with the velocity of the reference frame. This contradicts the common understanding according to which the eigenfrequency is an inherent system property.

A clarification is reached using a novel approach for the dynamic analysis. The approach is based on complex state variables. It permits relating a transient condition to the propagation processes in space of distributed magnetic fields. The formal analysis constitutes an extension to the space vector theory and to the theory of dynamic systems. Its application eases the design of closed loop control systems for ac machine drives.

UNR EE Host

Dr. Andy Trzynadlowski

Dr. Vic Grout and Mr. Stuart Cunningham

Centre for Applied Internet Research, University of Wales, UK

Biography

Dr. Vic Grout

Vic Grout was awarded the BSc(Hons) degree in Mathematics and Computing from the University of Exeter (UK) in 1984 and the PhD degree in Communication Engineering from Plymouth Polytechnic (UK) in 1988.

He has worked in senior positions in both academia and industry for twenty years and has published and presented over 100 research papers. He is currently a Reader in Computer Science at the University of Wales NEWI, Wrexham in the UK, where he leads the Centre for Applied Internet Research (CAIR). His research interests and those of his research students span several areas of computational mathematics, particularly the application of heuristic principles to large-scale problems in network design and management.

Dr. Grout is a Chartered Engineer, Chartered Scientist and Chartered Mathematician, a member of the IMA, IEE, ACM and IEEE and a Fellow of the British Computer Society (BCS). He chairs the biennial international conference series on Internet Technologies and Applications (ITA).

Stuart Cunningham

Stuart Cunningham was awarded his BSc degree in Computer Networks in 2001, and in 2003 was awarded the MSc Multimedia Communications degree with Distinction, both from the University of Paisley (UK). He is a Member of the British Computer Society and the Institute of Engineering & Technology. Stuart is also a member of the MPEG Music Notation Standards working group.

Since 2003, he has been working at the University of Wales as a lecturer where he teaches audio visual computing and computer systems architecture. Stuart is also a PhD student at the University of Wales, studying under the supervision of Dr. Vic Grout.

Location: SEM 261

Wednesday, November 15th, 2006 at 4:00p.m.

Sponsored and organized by the CSE/EE/IEEE

Optimising Internet Access Control Lists

Access Control Lists (ACLs) are becoming increasingly widespread in networking, both in their number and range of use. An ACL, or packet filter, consists of an ordered sequence (or some other structure) of rules, each rule being of the form permit A B C ... or deny X Y Z ..., where A B C ... X Y Z are characteristics of the traffic being filtered. Typical characteristics could be the source or destination address (or range of addresses) or packet type (eg, IP, ICMP, TCP, UDP, etc.). More sophisticated characteristics may be used, however, and combinations are also normal. Each incoming (or sometimes outgoing) packet is tested against each rule until a match is found, at which point the packet is permitted or denied accordingly.

The original use of ACLs, as the rule notation suggests, was simply to pass or block traffic, maybe of a specified type, to or from certain parts of an internet. However, ACLs now have a much wider purpose in selecting packets for any traffic policy to be applied at key points in or between domains. Traffic shaping, tunnelling, NAT, policy-based routing, etc. all use ACLs or their equivalents to select packets to which to apply the policy (and to ignore the rest). It is common now for a packet to be matched against several ACLs across a single router or switch, more through a domain and many across an internet.

This all takes time; more time for larger lists and more again for more lists. The increased use of ACLs can increase packet latency across an internet beyond acceptable limits. There is clearly merit in attempting to optimise this process - to find the best structure and combination of ACLs to achieve a specified purpose. Unfortunately, this is no simple objective. There are partial solutions in both hardware and software (and combinations of both), working both on- and off-line, but no utopia as yet. This talk considers the problem from first principles, discusses possible approaches and suggests some directions for the future.

UNR CSE Host

Dr. Sergiu Dascalu

Mr. Jeff Elpern

Reno/Tahoe Software Quality Institute

Biography

Jeff Elpern is a high-tech executive and entrepreneur. Currently he is the V.P. of Software for a Silicon Valley telecommunications component manufacturer, founder and CEO of the Software Quality Institute (SQI, Inc.) based in Reno, and founder of the non-profit Open Source Nevada. He was founder of two startups and on the executive teams for two other start-ups. Earlier in his career, he ran the largest quantitative marketing operation on Madison Avenue and was part of the Lee Iacocca turn-around team at Chrysler. He is a native Nevadan. He did his undergraduate work at UNR and received a Masters of Science in Quantitative Analysis from Carnegie Mellon University.

Location: SEM 261

Monday, October 30th, 2006 at 4:00p.m.

Sponsored and organized by the CSE/EE/IEEE

A Framework for Understanding the Open Revolution

The Open Source Revolution is already having dramatic impact on the computer industry. Web services based on Open Source technologies play a major role in the Internet. The Linux operating system has achieved the dominating position within the embedded controller segment of the telecommunication industry. And, recently, Open Source applications have passed Mac applications in penetration into the PC market. Why is this happening? Should we be surprised? Is it a sustained phenomenon?

I'll present a framework for understanding the Open Source Revolution by identifying a number of market forces driving the revolution and placing these forces within historical perspective. I'll show that the Open Source Revolution is a natural response, and part of a continuing effort, by Users to increase their returns from technology by controlling the market power of commercial software developers. The core argument is based on economics. As Users pursue maximizing the economic returns of their software portfolios, they gravitate toward software solutions that limit the market power of commercial developers. An example of this is the movement toward more and more standards. The adoption of Open Source is a natural next step for Users in the battle for the control of market power.

Thus, the Open Source Revolution is the current "front line" in the battle between software developers and Users on how economic returns from technologies are allocated between the two. In addition, Open Source will be shown to be a "Disruptive" technology - as defined by Clayton Christensen in "The Innovator's Dilemma." This market force explains the "why now" issue. As the current commercial software leaders' efforts for "Sustaining Technology Innovations" exceeds the User's ability to absorb new features and power, the seeds for the entry of a disruptive technology are sowed. Open Source fits all three criteria for a disruptive technology, which will be discussed in the presentation. It is also important to note that a paradigm shift like this, the shift from proprietary code to Open Source, always changes the face of winners and losers, and this will affect everyone in the industry.

Finally, my presentation will include scenarios of why people and corporations participate in Open Source by defining Open Source business models, current and emerging.

UNR CSE Host

Dr. Sergiu Dascalu

Dr. Risto Miikkulainen

University of Texas at Austin

Biography

Risto Miikkulainen is a Professor of Computer Sciences at the University of Texas at Austin. His recent research focuses on methods for evolving neural networks and applying these methods to game playing, robotics, and intelligent control. He is an author of over 200 articles on neuroevolution, connectionist natural language processing, and the computational neuroscience of the visual cortex. He is an editor of the Machine Learning Journal and Journal of Cognitive Systems Research.

Location: REL 109

Friday, October 13th, 2006 at Noon

Sponsored and organized by the CSE/EE/IEEE

Solving Sequential Decision Tasks With Neuroevolution

Neuroevolution, or training neural networks through genetic algorithms, is a policy-iteration method that can potentially solve difficult reinforcement learning tasks. Recurrent neural networks can be evolved to map sequences of states directly to optimal actions, which is a robust approach with continuous domains and with hidden states. In this talk, I will review recent advances in neuroevolution methods, and present several applications ranging from rocket control and autonomous vehicles to robotics and games.

UNR CSE Host

Dr. Bobby Bryant

Dr. Kenneth O. Stanley

University of Central Florida

Biography

Kenneth O. Stanley is an Assistant Professor in the School of Computer Science at the University of Central Florida. His research focuses on artificially evolving complex solutions to difficult real-world tasks. He graduated magna cum laude with a B.S.E. in Computer Science Engineering and a minor in Cognitive Science from the University of Pennsylvania in 1997. He received an M.S. in Computer Science in 1999, and a Ph.D. in 2004 at the University of Texas at Austin. He has won best paper awards for his work on NEAT (at the 2002 Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference) and for his work on NERO (at the IEEE 2005 Symposium on Computational Intelligence and Games), and also won the Independent Games Festival Student Showcase Award (at the 2006 Game Developers conference) for NERO. He has published papers in JAIR, Evolutionary Computation, IEEE Transactions on Evolutionary Computation, and Artificial Life journals.

Location: REL 109

Friday, October 6th, 2006 at Noon

Sponsored and organized by the CSE/EE/IEEE

Real-time Neuroevolution and the NERO Video Game

A major goal for AI is to allow users to interact with agents that learn in real time, making possible new kinds of interactive simulations, training applications, and digital entertainment. This talk will introduce such a learning technology, called real-time NeuroEvolution of Augmenting Topologies (rtNEAT), and describes how rtNEAT was used to build a new genre of video game in which the player teaches agents in real time to perform novel tasks. The game, NeuroEvolving Robotic Operatives (NERO), took a team of over 30 volunteer programmers and artists over two years to create and has received significant recognition since its release. This talk explains the rtNEAT method for evolving increasingly complex neural networks and the NERO video game. Providing laymen the capability to effectively train agents in real time with no prior knowledge of AI or machine learning has broad implications, both in promoting the field of AI and making its achievements accessible to the public at large.

UNR CSE Host

Dr. Bobby Bryant

Dr. Bill Labate

Associate Director for Research Computing Technologies, University of California, Los Angeles

Biography

Dr. Bill Labate is the Associate Director for Research Computing Technologies with UCLA's Office Of Information Technology. He is also the Vice-Chairman of the University of California Research Computing Group and has worked in the information technology field for over twenty-five years with technical and management positions in the private sector, defense industry, private consulting as well as academia. Bill is also the project manager for the UC Grid as well as the UCLA Grid Project.

Location: SEM-234

Friday, September 29th, 2006 at Noon

Sponsored and organized by the CSE/INBRE/IEEE

The UC Grid Portal: Locally Managed, Virtually Available

The University of California system is working to build out a UC Grid Cyberinfrastructure. The goal of the project is to enable access to a vast array of high performance computing, visualization, and storage resources located throughout the UC system regardless of location and to make cross-campus and cross-disciplinary teams from an HPC standpoint a reality. The project sets the course for jointly aggregating and building resources to achieve greater capabilities for individual researchers. The ultimate vision is an overlay to HPC resources world-wide to enable secure, unified, "anytime/anywhere" access to resources formerly available only to researchers who could master the complexities of running HPC systems and had the budgets and manpower to maintain them. This talk will focus on an overview of the challenges the UC system is currently facing, what we hope to achieve with the Grid, a discussion of the architecture of both the campus and UC Grids, the resource "pool" concept, current capabilities and future enhancements, and a hardware and manpower requirement breakdown.

UNR CSE Host

Dr. Fred Harris

Dr. Murray Campbell

Research Scientist, IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, Yorktown Heights, NY

Biography

Dr. Campbell is a research scientist at the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, New York. He is a member of the team that developed Deep Blue, the first computer to defeat the World Chess Champion in a regulation match, for which he was awarded the Fredkin prize and the Allen Newell Research Excellence Medal. Dr. Campbell received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University in 1987. He was a strong expert-level player while still in high school and brought this knowledge to the development of Deep Blue's evaluation function--the component of Deep Blue that assesses the value of the current position in a game. He also worked closely with the team's chess consultant, international grandmaster Joel Benjamin, in developing Deep Blue's opening book. Dr. Campbell is now manager of the Intelligent Information Analysis group at IBM, which focuses on analysis of real-time sensor data for early warning applications, as well as indexing and searching of multimedia data.

Location: IGT Training Center, The Wisdom World room

Tuesday, May 23rd, 2006 at 1:30p.m.

Sponsored and organized by the 2006 IGT-UNR Symposium

Looking Back at Deep Blue

It has been nine years since IBM Research's Deep Blue defeated Garry Kasparov, the thenreigning world chess champion, in an epic six-game match that was closely watched by millions. In this talk I will present the background that led up to the decisive match, review the match itself, and discuss some of the broader implications of Deep Blue's victory. Issues I will cover include Deep Blue's connections to high-performance computing, what “intelligence” really means, and the roles that games play in the fields of artificial intelligence, education, and entertainment.

UNR Event

IEEE CIG'06 Symposium

Dr. Norm Brown

CEO, Quadrant-One, Inc., Washington, DC

Biography

Dr. Brown began life as a software developer and manager, then went on to tackle the $42 Billion spent annually by the Department of Defense on developing software for its weapons systems and other needs. He founded the Department of Defense's Software Program Managers Network, and its Airlie Software Council, recruiting the likes of Tom Demarco, Ed Yourdan, Tom McCabe, Capers Jones, and others to reformulate how to improve development of largescale software. Dr. Brown advised the Undersecretary of Defense and served with the Defense Science Board Software Study. What they found is, not surprisingly, directly applicable to virtually all large-scale software development, including gaming, and key implications of these findings will be revealed in his presentation.

Location: IGT Training Center, !e Wisdom World room

Tuesday, May 23rd, 2006 at 11:00a.m.

Sponsored and organized by the 2006 IGT-UNR Symposium

How Dark Matter Affects Software Development, and How to Deal with It

Software Dark Matter typically comprises a significant portion of software development efforts. Such Dark Matter consumes developer time and effort, along with test resources; and, as with ordinary galactic Dark Matter, is typically invisible — usually only discernable by its effect upon developers and its substantial contribution to unnecessary development delays and additional unnecessary efforts. Two high-leverage techniques for identifying and reducing the amount of Software Dark Matter in your development and consequently creating a happier workplace, improving development schedules, and reducing cost, will be addressed.

UNR Event

IEEE CIG'06 Symposium

Dr. Henry Markram

EPFL, Lausanne, Switzerland

Biography

Dr. Henry Markram moved to EPFL in 2002 as full professor. From 1995 to 2001, he was at the Weizmann Institute where he received early tenure and was Stanley and Hellen Diller Professor of Neuroscience. In 1994-95, he was Minerva Fellow in Laboratory of Nobelist Bert Sakmann at the Max Planck Institute, where he discovered calcium transients in dendrites evoked by sub-threshold activity, and by single action potentials propagating back into dendrites. He also began studying the connectivity between neurons and published a paper describing in great detail how layer 5 pyramidal neurons are inter-connected. In 1992-93, he was Senior Fulbright Scholar at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), where he studied ion channels on synaptic vesicles.

He was the first to alter the precise millisecond relative timing of single pre and postsynaptic action potentials to reveal a highly precise learning mechanism operating between neurons which has now been reproduced in many brain regions and is now commonly know as spike timing-dependent synaptic plasticity (STDP). At Weizmann, he started systematically dissecting out the neocortical column, and discovered that synaptic learning can also involve a change in synaptic dynamics rather than merely changing the strengths of connections. He also revealed a spectrum of new principles governing neocortical microcircuit structure, function, and emergent dynamics. Based on the emergent dynamics of the neocortical microcircuit he, together with Wolfgang Maass developed the theory of liquid computing or high entropy computing. At the BMI, he has continued to unravel the blue print of the neocortical column at a greatly accelerated pace building the state of art tools to carry out multi-neuron patch clamp recordings combined with laser and electrical stimulation as well as multi-site electrical recording (up to 12 patch-clamp recordings) and chemical imaging and gene expression.

He has received numerous awards, including the Ebner Science Award in 2001, the James Heinemann Prize in 1999, and the Abramson Research Award in 1998, and has published over 75 papers. In April, 2005 the EPFL signed the agreement with IBM to launch one of the largest single initiatives in neuroscience — the Blue Brain Project.

Dr. Henry Markram obtained his B.Sc. (Hons) from the University of Cape Town, South Africa, under the supervision of Rodney Douglas and his Ph.D from the Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel, under the supervision of Menahem Segal.

Location: SEM 261

Friday, May 12th, 2006 at 10:45a.m.

Sponsored and organized by the UNR Brain Computation Lab & the Office of the VP for Research

The Frontier of Cognitive Computing: The Blue Brain Project

The Blue Brain Project was launched to make the first step towards building a biologically accurate software model of the brain of mammals, eventually including that of man. The seminar will describe the first phase of the project which is to build a neocortical column consisting of 10,000 morphologically complex neurons interconnected with around 20 million synapses each precisely placed on neurons in 3D space.

The experimental basis for the model as well as the technology platform that uses Linux machines, PCs, and two different supercomputers; IBM's Blue Gene and SGI's Altix Extreme Series will be described. Results from the first simulations of the Blue Column will also be presented.

These simulations provide the first hints at a revolutionary new theory of how the brain may be building perceptions and how we may need to reinterpret the past 50 years of experimental results.

We also believe that biologically accurate models of this part of the neocortex would provide the key foundation to build software models of mammalian brains, which could open up new ways of exploring brain function and causes of neurological and psychiatric disorders as well as new diagnostic methods.

UNR CSE Host

Dr. Fred Harris

Dr. Salil Prabhakar

Digital Persona, Inc.

Biography

Salil Prabhakar received his B.Tech. degree in Computer Science and Engineering from Institute of Technology, Banaras Hindu University, Varanasi, India, in 1996. During 1996-1997 he worked with IBM India as a software engineer. He received his Ph.D. degree in Computer Science and Engineering from Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI 48824, in 2001. He currently leads the Algorithms Research Group at Digital Persona Inc., Redwood City, CA 94063 where he works on fingerprint based biometric solutions.

Location: AGN (SEM 201)

Friday, May 5th, 2006 at 4:00p.m.

Sponsored and organized by the CSE/EE/IEEE

Fingerprint Recognition: Future Directions

Many researchers in the pattern recognition community perceive automatic fingerprint recognition to be a solved problem due to the fact that first successful system was deployed over 30 years ago. But contrary to this notion, fingerprint recognition remains a very challenging and exciting pattern recognition research problem with many open issues and research opportunities, solving which will have profound security and economic implications. In this talk, I will talk about some of the challenges in fingerprint recognition and some possible future research directions.

UNR CSE Host

Dr. George Bebis

Mr. Tamer Uz

University of Nevada, Reno

Location: AGN (SEM 201)

Friday, May 5th, 2006 at 2:00p.m.

Sponsored and organized by the Department of Computer Science & Engineering

Fingerprint Template Synthesis

Additional event details will be made available shortly

UNR CSE Host:

Dr. George Bebis

Mr. Uday Rajanna

University of Nevada, Reno

Location: AGN (SEM 201)

Friday, May 5th, 2006 at Noon

Sponsored and organized by the Department of Computer Science & Engineering

Improving the Performance of Fingerprint Classification

Additional event details will be made available shortly

UNR CSE Host

Dr. George Bebis

Computer Science & Engineering

University of Nevada, Reno

Location: REL 109 & 110

Friday, May 5th, 2006 at 10:30a.m.

Senior Projects

The CS426 and CPE426 Senior Projects represent innovative software and hardware products designed and developed during the year by undergraduate Computer Science & Engineering students under the supervision of Dr. Sergiu Dascalu. Project topics include a framework for behavior-based robotics control, an X10-based home automation system, a software tool for data visualization, a program for student budgeting, a web-based interactive floor plan mapper, a first-person shooter video game, and a virtual reality system for puppet control and animation.

More information about this event may be found on the Workshop Flyer and the Workshop Schedule.

Bobby Bryant, Ph.D. Candidate

University of Texas

Location: SEM 326

Thursday, May 4th, 2006 at 09:30a.m.

Sponsored and organized by the IGT Distinguished Speakers Series

Intelligent Agents for Games and Simulators: Creating Adaptive Teams with Guided Evolution

Autonomous intelligent agents that operate in visible environments such as video games and simulators must behave in ways that viewers find convincingly intelligent. For most agents that behavior needs to be robust, flexible, disciplined, and self-consistent. In this talk I will propose methods for inducing such properties into the behavior of a team of agents operating in a video game. Training with neuroevolution, i.e. evolving neural networks with genetic algorithms, provides the desired robust and flexible behavior, but human-generated examples are needed to make the agents disciplined and self-consistent. Combining examples with evolution makes it possible to induce visibly intelligent behavior in autonomous agents via machine learning, making gameplay more satisfying and simulation environments more realistic.

UNR Host

Department of Computer Science & Engineering

Mehran Asadi

The University of Texas at Arlington

Biography

Mehran Asadi is a PhD candidate in the department of computer science and engineering at the University of Texas at Arlington (UTA). He received his B.S. degree from Amir Kabir University of Technology, Tehran, Iran, in Applied Mathematics and Computer Science and his M.S. degree from the University of Texas at Arlington, in Computer Science and Engineering. From 1994 to 2001, he was with the Semi Conductor Lab, in Iran Electronic Industries and SAPCO Co., Tehran, Iran. His current research interests are in the areas of Intelligent Systems, Game/AI, and Autonomous Systems.

Mehran has been a research associate in Artificial Intelligence laboratory at UTA since 2001, and member of AAAI and IEEE.

Location: MS 227

Tuesday, May 2nd, 2006 at 2:30p.m.

Sponsored and organized by the IGT Distinguished Speakers Series

Structural Knowledge Transfer in Reinforcement Learning Using Action-Dependent Partitioning

Autonomous systems are often difficult to program. Reinforcement learning (RL) is an attractive alternative, as it allows the agent to learn behavior on the basis of sparse, delayed reward signals provided only when the agent reaches desired goals.

Recent attempts to address the dimensionality of RL have turned to principled ways of exploiting temporal abstraction, where decisions are not required at each step, but rather invoke the execution of temporally-extended activities which follow their own policies until termination. This leads naturally to hierarchical control architectures and associated learning algorithms.

We presents a new method for the autonomous construction of hierarchical action and state representations in reinforcement learning, aimed at accelerating learning and extending the scope of such systems. In this approach, the agent uses information acquired while learning one task to discover subgoals for similar tasks. The agent is able to transfer knowledge to subsequent tasks and to accelerate learning by creating useful new subgoals and by learning of corresponding subtask policies as abstract actions (options). At the same time, the subgoal actions are used to construct a more abstract state representation using action-dependent state space partitioning.

This representation forms a new level in the state space hierarchy and serves as the initial representation for new learning tasks. In order to ensure that tasks are learnable, value functions are built simultaneously at different levels of the hierarchy and inconsistencies are used to identify actions to be used to refine relevant portions of the abstract state space.

Together, these techniques permit the agent to form more abstract action and state representations over time. Experiments in Smart Home environment and Computer Game domains show that the presented method can significantly outperform learning on a flat state space representation.

UNR Host

Department of Computer Science & Engineering

Beifang Yi

University of Nevada, Reno

Location: SEM 326

Friday, April 28th, 2006 at 3:00p.m.

Sponsored and organized by the CSE Seminar

A Framework for a Sign Language Interfacing System

Additional event details will be made available shortly

UNR CSE Host

Dr. Fred Harris

Wenji Mao, Ph.D. Candidate

University of Southern California

Biography

Wenji Mao is a Ph.D. candidate in the Computer Science Department at the University of Southern California. She has been working at the USC Institute for Creative Technologies since fall, 2001. Her research is focused on AI, intelligent agents and cognitive modeling for virtual training and interactive entertainment. Prior to joining USC, she was a researcher at the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI GmbH) and a lecturer at the Graduate School of Chinese Academy of Science, where she obtained her M.Sc. in Computer Science. She received her M. Eng. from the University of Southern California in May, 2003.

Location: MS 321

Friday, April 28th, 2006 at 2:00p.m.

Sponsored and organized by the IGT Distinguished Speaker Series

Modeling Multi-Agent Social Interaction in Virtual Training and Entertainment

With the advance of multi-agent interactive systems, user-centric adaptive interfaces and systems that socially interact with people, it is increasingly important to model rich social interactions among intelligent entities (agents and human). In such context, a central issue is to build realistic agent models that mimic the cognitive process and inference of how people evaluate social events so as to drive believable behavior generation for intelligent agents.

In this talk, I will present my work on developing a domain-independent computational framework of social