Department of Computer Science and Engineering

Get Involved - Colloquia & Symposia

Colloquia & Symposia

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 the colloquium series. This is a great opportunity for graduate students to learn more about the various research areas in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Electrical Engineering and other related fields.

Suggestions for speakers are always welcome!
For more information please contact:

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Dr. Kostas Bekris
Email: bekris@cse.unr.edu
Phone: (775) 784-4527

Dr. Mehmet Gunes
Email: mgunes@cse.unr.edu
Phone: (775) 784-4313

Dr. Sami Fadali
Email: fadali@ieee.org
Phone: (775) 784-6951

Richard Volpe
Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL)

Biography Richard Volpe is Manager of the Mobility and Robotic Systems Section at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). The section is a team of over 80 robotics engineers doing research and spaceflight implementation of robotic systems for Roving, Digging, Ballooning, Drilling, and other modes of in-situ planetary exploration. Additionally, Richard is a member of JPL's Science and Technology Management Committee, and has been a member of the 2007 Phoenix Mission Robotic Arm Team. From 2001 through 2004, Richard served as the manager of Mars Regional Mobility and Subsurface Access in JPL's Space Exploration Technology Program Office. In addition to guiding technology development for future robotic exploration of Mars and the Moon, he has been actively involved in 2003 & 2011 rover mission development, and 2007 lander mission operations. This has included managing internal JPL rover technology development, as well as external university research funded by the Mars Technology Program. Richard received his Ph.D. in Applied Physics from Carnegie Mellon University in 1990.

Location: SEM-234
Friday, February 5, 2010, at 12:00pm
Sponsored and organized by the CSE, EBME, IEEE

"JPL Robotics Technology for Space Exploration Missions" The Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, is NASA's lead center for robotic exploration of the solar system. Several decades of technology development has seen the maturation of key capabilities for deployment of robotic systems to space. Scientific investigation of Mars has been of primary importance, with recent operation of the Mars Exploration Rovers and the Phoenix Lander, and construction of the 2011 Mars Science Laboratory rover. Technology development for steep terrain access, and sample acquisition and caching, is also being prepared for the next decade. But Mars is not the only focus of ongoing efforts -- prototypes are under development for mobile habitats on the Moon, as well as aerial exploration of Titan and Venus. This presentation provides an overview of the technology development and mission infusion pathways for these challenging scenarios, and some recent results from our Mars exploration experience.

UNR CSE Host: Dr. George Bebis

Roland Philippsen
Stanford Robotics and AI Lab

Biography Roland Philippsen is a Research Associate at the Stanford Robotics and AI Lab. He received his Ph.D. from EPFL, Switzerland, in 2005, for work on mobile robot path planning and obstacle avoidance. His expertise lies in interweaving reasoning, planning, and control. He has successfully contributed to real-world robotics projects such as the tour-guide robots at the Swiss Expo.02, the EPFL student robot contest 2001-2004, robotic actors for a theater play in 2005, the European Cognitive Robot Companion in 2006, and the PR2 of Willow Garage, Inc. Roland is currently focusing on integrating whole-body task-oriented control and planning for human-centered robotics, as well as pushing for robust open source software in this area. He believes autonomous robots can improve the lives of all humanity, provided we openly share knowledge and implementations.

Location: SEM-234
Friday, February 12, 2010, at 12:00pm
Sponsored and organized by the CSE, EBME, IEEE

"Bridging the Gaps between Planning, Control, and Perception in Human-Centered Robotics." Human-centered robotics is an interdisciplinary research field including mechatronics, AI, cognitive sciences, and human-robot interaction -- to name just a few of the aspects required to develop applications in human environments and in close interaction with untrained persons. This talk explores the frequently neglected questions of how to actually ensure that lower-level control and higher-level reasoning are operating on data that is coherent across their differing information needs, and that information from perception processes as well as from the executing behaviors can be stored and retrieved in meaningful manners. We propose a representational system centered around a live world database that helps to bridge this gap. This research is still in an early stage and it is hoped that the talk will inspire fruitful discussions around the questions we are trying to address and the kinds of approaches that are promising. Our efforts so far have centered around integrating whole-body operational space control with a symbolic reasoning system, adapting to changes in the environment while a plan is being executed, and allowing sensori-motor exploration to become part of the world model. The two most pressing questions are now to integrate 3D perception on the one hand and concept learning on the other.

UNR CSE Host: Kostas Bekris

Cristina Nita-Rotaru. Associate Professor, Department of Computer Science at Purdue University

Biography Cristina Nita-Rotaru is an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Purdue University where she established the Dependable and Secure Distributed Systems Laboratory (DS2). She is a member of the Center for Education and Research in Information Assurance and Security (CERIAS) and is associated with the Center for Wireless Systems and Applications (CWSA) at Purdue University. Her research interests lie in designing distributed systems, network protocols and applications that are robust to failure, mis-configuration, and malicious attacks. Cristina Nita-Rotaru is a recipient of the NSF Career Award in 2006. She has served on the Technical Program Committee of numerous conferences in security, networking, and distributed systems.

Location: SEM-234
Friday, January 29th, 2010, at 12:00pm
Sponsored and organized by the CSE, EBME, IEEE

Toward Secure Network Coding in Wireless Networks: Threats and Challenges In recent years, network coding has emerged as a new communication paradigm that can significantly improve the efficiency of network protocols by requiring intermediate nodes to mix packets before forwarding them. Several real-world systems have been proposed to leverage network coding in wireless networks. Although the theoretical foundations of network coding are well understood, a real-world system needs to solve a plethora of practical aspects before network coding can meet its promised potential. These practical design choices expose network coding systems to a wide range of attacks.

In this talk we identify two general frameworks (inter-flow and intra-flow) that encompass several network coding-based systems proposed in wireless mesh networks. Our systematic analysis of the components of these frameworks reveals vulnerabilities to a wide range of attacks, which may severely degrade system performance. We then focus on addressing the most severe and generic attack against network coding systems, known as packet pollution attack. We show that existing cryptographic mechanisms that were proposed to solve the problem have a prohibitive cost that makes them impractical in wireless mesh networks. We propose the first practical defense mechanisms to pollution attacks in network coding for wireless mesh networks. The experimental results show that the proposed mechanisms can effectively filter out polluted packets and quickly identify and isolate attacker nodes while incurring small computation and bandwidth overhead.

UNR CSE Host: Dr. Mehmet Gunes