Colloquium Archive

January 31 Wednesday 1:30-2:30 pm  369 Link Hall	Title:  Application- and Network-Aware Architectures for Wireless Sensor Networks Speaker:  Dr. Wendi Heinzelman (University of Rochester) Abstract: It is estimated that by the year 2010 more than 10 billion wireless sensors will be deployed for use in applications as diverse as environmental monitoring, machine health monitoring, surveillance, and medical monitoring. For these sensor networks to last for months or years unattended, it is vital to make them as energy-efficient as possible. To accomplish this goal, many new cross-layer protocols have been proposed that tailor the communication functions of the protocol stack to the specific needs of the sensor network application. While this approach improves energy efficiency and hence extends network lifetime, these networks lack flexibility and make it difficult to design and deploy new applications for sensor networks. What is needed is a more general architecture that enables protocols to adapt to current network conditions as well as changing application requirements on a per-node basis. In this talk, I will motivate the need to manage sensors on an individual, time-varying basis to best support the application goals. I will further discuss the pros and cons of cross-layer protocol design and sensor management, and I will describe work we are doing to create a cross-layer information-sharing architecture to enable protocols to easily exchange information while retaining a layered structure, allowing the protocols to re-focus on their primary communication functions. I will show how this architecture enables sensor networks be application- and network-aware by optimizing their protocols based on current application goals and network conditions.  About the Speaker:  Wendi B. Heinzelman is an associate professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and the Computer Science Department at the University of Rochester. She received a B.S. degree in Electrical Engineering from Cornell University in 1995 and M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from MIT in 1997 and 2000, respectively. Her current research interests lie in the areas of wireless communications and networking, mobile computing, and multimedia communication. Dr. Heinzelman received the NSF CAREER award in 2005 for her research on cross-layer architectures for wireless sensor networks, and she received the ONR Young Investigator Award in 2005 for her work on balancing resource utilization in wireless sensor networks. She is a member of Sigma Xi and the ACM and a senior member of the IEEE.
***CANCELLED**** February 14 Wednesday 1:30-2:30 pm 369 Link Hall	Title: Incorporating Privacy Values, Policies and Law in Information Systems Speaker: Dr. Annie I. Anton (North Carolina State University) Abstract: Effective solutions for privacy protection are of interest to industry, government and society at large, but the challenge is to satisfy the often-conflicting requirements of all these stakeholders. Legislation (such as HIPAA, COPPA and GLBA) that constrains privacy and security practices within systems and organizations present additional technical challenges. This talk will discuss mechanisms that enterprises can use to ensure that their systems are compliant with both the policies they articulate and law. Additionally, we will address the need to understand how to specify, deploy, communicate and enforce transparent privacy policies. Legislators and regulatory bodies need mechanisms to verify how privacy-related laws are actually enforced by enterprises in their software systems. To this end, we are developing compliance monitors to detect violation of stakeholder rights and obligations as expressed in law. Finally, end-users must be able to easily understand privacy policies and need effective, transparent and comprehensible online privacy-protection mechanisms -- we will discuss results of our most recent survey of 975 Internet users in which we compared various ways to represent privacy management information to online healthcare consumers. About The Speaker: Dr. Annie I. Antón is an Associate Professor of Software Engineering in the College of Engineering at the North Carolina State University. She received her Ph.D. in Computer Science in June of 1997 from the College of Computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta. She received a BS in Information and Computer Science with a minor in Technical and Business Communication in 1990 and an MS in Information and Computer Science in 1992 (also from Georgia Tech). After one year at the University of South Florida, Dr. Antón joined the computer science department at NC State. She was awarded an NSF CAREER Award in 2000, named a CRA Digital Government Fellow in 2002, nominated and selected for the 2004-2005 IDA/DARPA Defense Science Study Group, and received the CSO (Chief Security Officer) Magazine "Woman of Influence in the Public Sector" award at the 2005 Executive Women's Forum. She is associate editor of IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering and the cognitive issues area editor for the Requirements Engineering Journal. She is a member of the International Association of Privacy Professionals, a senior member of the IEEE as well as a member of the ACM U.S. Public Policy Executive Committee. Antón currently serves on several boards: the NSF Computer & Information Science & Engineering Directorate Advisory Council, the CRA Board of Directors, the Distinguished External Advisory Board for the TRUST Research Center at U.C. Berkeley, the CRA-W Board, and an Intel Advisory Board. Dr. Antón is director of The PrivacyPlace.Org (http://theprivacyplace.org), and co-director of the NC State Electronic Commerce Studio. Her URL is: http://www.csc.ncsu.edu/faculty/anton.
February 28 Wednesday 1:30-2:30 pm 347 Hinds Hall	Title: Assessing Terror Networks Speaker: Dr. Kathleen Carley (Carnegie Mellon University) Abstract: How are terrorist groups structured? How can they be disrupted? What are their vulnerabilities. Questions such as these can be addressed using dynamic network analytic techniques. This talk presents such techniques, and demonstrates how they can be used to assess terror networks. Dynamic network techniques differ from traditional social network techniques in that they make it possible to simultaneously consider multiple, probabilistic, and evolving connections among various entities such as people, resources, events, and locations rather than just binary connections among people at a single time period. This makes it possible to ask who is critical, and what are they doing or what resources do they have or where are they. About the Speaker Kathleen M. Carley received her Ph.D. from Harvard in Mathematical Sociology and is currently a full professor in the Institute for Software Research International in the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University. She is also the director of the center for Computational Analysis of Social and Organizational Systems (CASOS). In 2001 she received a life time achievement award for her work in computational modeling. She is a founding editor of the journal Computational and Mathematical Organization Theory, the founding president of the North American Association for Computational Social and Organizational Science, and has served on multiple national academy panels on simulation and modeling. Kathleen M. Carley's research combines cognitive science, social networks and computer science to address complex social and organizational problems. Her specific research areas are computational social and organization theory, group, organizational and social adaptation and evolution, social and dynamic network analysis, computational text analysis, and the impact of telecommunication technologies and policy on communication, information diffusion, disease contagion and response within and among groups particularly in disaster or crisis situations. Her models meld multi-agent technology with network dynamics and empirical data. Three of the large-scale multi-agent network models she and the CASOS group have developed in the counter-terrorism area are: BioWar a city, scale model of weaponized biological attacks and response; DyNet a model of the change in covert networks, naturally and in response to attacks, under varying levels of uncertainty; and VISTA a model for informing officials (e.g., military and police) of possible hostile and non hostile events (e.g., riots and suicide bombings) in urban settings as changes occur within and among red, blue, and green forces. One of her tools, ORA, produces intelligence reports identifying vulnerabilities in groups and organizations. She has co-edited several books in the computational organizations and dynamic network area and written over 100 papers in the area.
March 20 Tuesday 1:30-2:30 pm 369 Link Hall	Title: Wireless Sensing Systems: From Ecosystems to Human Systems Speaker: Dr. Deborah Estrin (University of California - Los Angeles)    Abstract:  Miniaturization and Moore’s law has enabled us to combine sensing, computation and wireless communication in integrated, low-power devices, and to embed networks of these devices in the physical world. By placing sensing devices up close to the physical phenomena we are now able to study details in space and time that were previously unobservable. Looking back over the past few years we have made significant progress toward the vision of programmable, multi-modal, multi-scale, and multi-use observatories. We have made our greatest strides in these applications using: judicious application of server-side and in situ processing, mobility at multiple scales, and multi-scale data and models as context for in situ measurements,. We are now applying these lessons learned and technical approaches to human as well as natural systems, in particular by exploring use of the installed base of image and acoustic sensors that we all carry around in our pockets or on our belts—cell phones. About the Speaker Deborah Estrin is a Professor of Computer Science at UCLA, holds the Jon Postel Chair in Computer Networks, and is Founding Director of the NSF-funded Center for Embedded Networked Sensing (CENS). Estrin received her Ph.D. (1985) in Computer Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and her B.S. (1980) from U.C. Berkeley. Before joining UCLA she was a member of the University of Southern California Computer Science Department Since the late 90's Professor Estrin has been collaborating with her colleagues and students to develop protocols and systems architectures needed to realize rapidly-deployable and robustly-operating networks of physically-embedded devices. She is particularly interested in the application of spatially and temporally dense embedded sensors to environmental monitoring. Most recently this work includes participatory-sensing systems, based on automated, programmable, and adaptive collection of environmental, physiological, and social parameters at the personal and community level.
March 28 Wednesday 1:30-2:30 pm  369 Link Hall	Title: Distributed Learning in Sensor Networks Speaker: Dr. Sanjeev Kulkarni (Princeton University) Abstract: One of the key challenges for sensor networks is learning and high-level decision-making. These tasks must be accomplished in a distributed setting and in the face of scarce resources (time, bandwidth, and power). This talk describes some of our recent work in this area. Specifically, we describe some results on a problem of aggregating probability forecasts and use a similar approach for learning in a distributed setting that combines ideas from kernel methods and graphical models. About the Speaker Sanjeev Kulkarni received the B.S. in Mathematics, B.S. in E.E., M.S. in Mathematics from Clarkson University in 1983, 1984, and 1985, respectively, the M.S. degree in E.E. from Stanford University in 1985, and the Ph.D. in E.E. from M.I.T. in 1991. From 1985 to 1991 he was a Member of the Technical Staff at M.I.T. Lincoln Laboratory. Since 1991, he has been with Princeton University where he is currently Professor of Electrical Engineering. He is also an affiliated faculty member in the Department of Operations Research and Financial Engineering and the Department of Philosophy. Prof. Kulkarni served as Associate Dean in the School of Engineering and Applied Science from 2003-2005 and has been serving as Master of one of Princeton's residential colleges since 2004. He spent January 1996 as a research fellow at the Australian National University, 1998 with Susquehanna International Group, and Summer 2001 with Flarion Technologies. Prof. Kulkarni received an ARO Young Investigator Award in 1992, an NSF Young Investigator Award in 1994, and several teaching awards at Princeton University. He is a Fellow of the IEEE and has served as an Associate Editor for the IEEE Transactions on Information Theory. Prof. Kulkarni's research interests include statistical pattern recognition, nonparametric statistics, learning and adaptive systems, information theory, wireless networks, and image/video processing.
April 11 Wednesday 1:30-2:30 pm 369 Link Hall	Title: Combinatorial Optimization Algorithms for Fault Diagnosis in Complex Systems Speaker: Dr. Krishna Pattipati (University of Connecticut) Abstract: System fault diagnosis is a key component of an integrated logistics process supporting system readiness. Fault Diagnosis involves identifying the cause of a malfunction by observing its effects at various monitoring points in a system. In this talk, we will first discuss a hybrid model-based technique that seamlessly employs quantitative (analytical) models and graph-based dependency models for intelligent diagnosis. Then, we focus on two key problems related to system fault diagnosis. The first problem involves on-equipment (also termed on-board), real-time diagnosis of most likely set of faults based on a sequence of, possibly uncertain, test outcomes. This is an intractable combinatorial optimization problem with a number of applications in engineering and medicine involving inference in factorial hidden Markov models and dynamic fusion of classifiers. We develop a polynomial algorithm with measurable performance based on Lagrangian relaxation and Viterbi decoding algorithms for dynamic multiple diagnosis. The second problem is one of constructing a diagnostic test sequence that achieves high fault isolation accuracy and yet consumes the lowest expected test cost and fault isolation time. This problem is related to the binary identification problem, another NP-hard optimization problem; it has applications in off-equipment (also called off-board), possibly remote, diagnosis of systems. Efficient troubleshooting and repair procedures, both on-board and off-board, help in minimizing the maintenance wait time, and in reducing and managing the spares in the supply chain management process. This paper provides brief review of algorithms for these two problems, along with a list of successful applications from aerospace, power, HVAC, and automotive industries. About the Speaker:  Krishna R. Pattipati is a Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Connecticut, Storrs, CT, USA. He has published over 330 articles, primarily in the application of systems theory and optimization techniques to large-scale systems. Prof. Pattipati received the Centennial Key to the Future award in 1984 from the IEEE Systems, Man and Cybernetics (SMC) Society, and was elected a Fellow of the IEEE in 1995 for his contributions to discrete-optimization algorithms for large-scale systems and team decision-making. He received the Andrew P. Sage award for the Best SMC Transactions Paper for 1999, Barry Carlton award for the Best AES Transactions Paper for 2000, the 2002 NASA Space Act Award, the 2003 AAUP Research Excellence Award and the 2005 School of Engineering Teaching Excellence Award at the University of Connecticut. He also won the best technical paper awards at the 1985, 1990, 1994, 2002, 2004 and 2005 IEEE AUTOTEST Conferences, and at the 1997 and 2004 Command and Control Conferences. Prof. Pattipati served as Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Transactions on SMC-Cybernetics (Part B) during 1998-2001.
April 26 Thursday, 1:30-2:30 pm            1-218 Center for Science & Technology (CST)	Title: Incorporating Privacy Values, Policies and Law in Information Systems Speaker: Dr. Annie I. Anton (North Carolina State University) Abstract: Effective solutions for privacy protection are of interest to industry, government and society at large, but the challenge is to satisfy the often-conflicting requirements of all these stakeholders. Legislation (such as HIPAA, COPPA and GLBA) that constrains privacy and security practices within systems and organizations present additional technical challenges. This talk will discuss mechanisms that enterprises can use to ensure that their systems are compliant with both the policies they articulate and law. Additionally, we will address the need to understand how to specify, deploy, communicate and enforce transparent privacy policies. Legislators and regulatory bodies need mechanisms to verify how privacy-related laws are actually enforced by enterprises in their software systems. To this end, we are developing compliance monitors to detect violation of stakeholder rights and obligations as expressed in law. Finally, end-users must be able to easily understand privacy policies and need effective, transparent and comprehensible online privacy-protection mechanisms -- we will discuss results of our most recent survey of 975 Internet users in which we compared various ways to represent privacy management information to online healthcare consumers. About The Speaker: Dr. Annie I. Antón is an Associate Professor of Software Engineering in the College of Engineering at the North Carolina State University. She received her Ph.D. in Computer Science in June of 1997 from the College of Computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta. She received a BS in Information and Computer Science with a minor in Technical and Business Communication in 1990 and an MS in Information and Computer Science in 1992 (also from Georgia Tech). After one year at the University of South Florida, Dr. Antón joined the computer science department at NC State. She was awarded an NSF CAREER Award in 2000, named a CRA Digital Government Fellow in 2002, nominated and selected for the 2004-2005 IDA/DARPA Defense Science Study Group, and received the CSO (Chief Security Officer) Magazine "Woman of Influence in the Public Sector" award at the 2005 Executive Women's Forum. She is associate editor of IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering and the cognitive issues area editor for the Requirements Engineering Journal. She is a member of the International Association of Privacy Professionals, a senior member of the IEEE as well as a member of the ACM U.S. Public Policy Executive Committee. Antón currently serves on several boards: the NSF Computer & Information Science & Engineering Directorate Advisory Council, the CRA Board of Directors, the Distinguished External Advisory Board for the TRUST Research Center at U.C. Berkeley, the CRA-W Board, and an Intel Advisory Board. Dr. Antón is director of The PrivacyPlace.Org (http://theprivacyplace.org), and co-director of the NC State Electronic Commerce Studio. Her URL is: http://www.csc.ncsu.edu/faculty/anton.

Colloquium Archive