Jointly Sponsored by:
Department of Electrical Engineering & Computer Science and the CASE Center

Colloquium Archive

 

February 4 Prof. William Wallace	Title:  Topics in Emergency Management: Restoration of Service and Diffusion of Warnings Speaker:  Professor William A. Wallace, Polytechnic Institute, School of Engineering, Dept. of Decision Sciences Engineering Systems Abstract: The restoration problem in this research will focus on "getting life back to normal as soon as possible". A mathematical representation of the problem of restoration of services is presented and an integrated algorithm proposed for solving it. . Using data provided by the respective system managers, a realistic representation of the power, communications and subway systems of a large portion of Manhattan was developed. A disruption with effects similar to the September 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center was proposed and solved for the best restoration plan that considers interdependencies, the limit of resources, and assignment and scheduling costs. Diffusion occurs in various contexts and generally involves a network of entities that interact in some way. Through these interactions, some property, e.g. information, idea, innovation, disease, etc., is diffused through the network. The model is based on a small number of parameterized diffusion axioms. We use the model to explore how social network structure, population inhomogeneity, and seed set selection affect the diffusion process. Simulation experiments were performed on three simulated networks: grid; Erdos-Renyi; scale free; and one LiveJournal blog comment network. The context of the experiments was an evacuation scenario where a warning message is diffused through the network and the goals are to propagate the message and perform evacuation. Bio: Professor William (Al) Wallace is a Professor in the Decision Sciences and Engineering Systems Department, with joint appointments in the Civil and Environmental Engineering, and Cognitive Science Departments at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and is presently Director of Rensselaer's Center for Infrastructure and Transportation Studies. He received the International Emergency Management and Engineering Conference Award for Outstanding Long-Term Dedication to the Field of Emergency Management, The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Third Millennium Medal and is a Fellow of the IEEE, and received the 2004 INFORMS President’s Award for work that advances the welfare of society. _______________________________ Jointly Sponsored by Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and CASE Center http://www.lcs.syr.edu/academic/dept_electricalengcompsci/colloquium.aspx
March 4    Prof. V. S. Subramanian	Title: CARA - A Cultural Reasoning Architecture Speaker:  Dr. V.S. Subramanian, Professor of Computer Science and Director of the UM Institute for Advanced Computer Studies (UMIACS), University of Maryland Abstract:   This talk will briefly describe the CARA architecture for reasoning about adversaries situated in a foreign culture. The talk will briefly overview three classes of algorithms to predict what a group might do in a given situation - one based on solving some enormous linear programs, another based on identifying similarities between a new situation and a hypothetical situation, and a third based on an analysis of how the group has changed. Experimental results identifying the strengths and weaknesses of these algorithms will also be presented.                              **************************** Bio:  V.S. Subrahmanian received his PhD in Computer Science from Syracuse University in 1989. He then came to work at the University of Maryland where he currently holds the rank of Professor of Computer Science and Director of the UM Institute for Advanced Computer Studies (UMIACS). Prof. Subrahmanian has worked on probabilistic reasoning, non-monotonic reasoning, and hybrid reasoning. He has edited four books, co-authored an advanced database textbook (Morgan Kaufman, 1997), and a book on heterogeneous software agents and is the sole author of the best known textbook on multimedia databases (Morgan Kaufmann). Prof. Subrahmanian has published over 180 articles in leading international conferences and journals. He was recently named to ISIHighlyCited.com which currently lists the top 320 most cited computer scientists of all time. He was named to the top 20 best computer science “mentors” (post 1993) in a worldwide study by the Indian Institute of Science in 2004. He received the NSF Young Investigator Award in 1993 and the Distinguished Young Scientist Award from the Maryland Academy of Science/Maryland Science Center in 1997. He was elected a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2008. Prof. Subrahmanian is or has previously been on the editorial board of IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering, Artificial Intelligence Communications, Multimedia Tools and Applications, Journal of Logic Programming, Annals of Mathematics and Artificial Intelligence, Distributed and Parallel Database Journal, and Theory and Practice of Logic Programming.
March 18 Prof. Stephanie Forrest	Title: Repairing Software Automatically Using Evolutionary Computation Speaker: Prof. Stephanie Forrest is Professor and Chairman of Computer Science at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque and a Research Professor at the Santa Fe Institute. Abstract: A pressing challenge for computer science over the next decade is reducing the total cost of software. This includes the billions of dollars that are lost each year from software defects. The number of software defects far outstrips the resources available for repairing them, and most software is shipped with both known and unknown bugs. This problem arises because human programmers still develop, maintain, and repair computer programs largely by hand, despite many years of progress in machine learning and artificial intelligence. The talk will describe recent research that shows how evolutionary computation can be combined with program analysis methods to automatically repair bugs in off-the-shelf legacy C programs.         Once a program fault is discovered, evolutionary algorithms are used to generate program variants until one is found that both retains required functionality and avoids the defect in question. Standard test cases are used to represent the fault and to encode program requirements. Once a successful variant is discovered, structural differencing algorithms and delta debugging methods are used to minimize its size. Initial results will be presented on a wide range of C programs, including security vulnerabilities such as integer overflow, denial of service, format string, and buffer overflow. Finally, the talk will describe how the automatic repair mechanism can be combined with anomaly intrusion detection to produce a closed-loop repair system.                          **************************** Stephanie Forrest is Professor and Chairman of the Computer Science Department at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque. She is also an External Professor and has served on the Science Board and as Vice President of the Santa Fe Institute. Professor Forrest received M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Computer and Communication Sciences from the University of Michigan (1982, 1985) and a BA from St. John's College (1977). Before joining UNM in 1990 she worked for Teknowledge Inc. and was a Director's Fellow at the Center for Nonlinear Studies, Los Alamos National Laboratory.          Her research studies adaptive systems, including evolutionary computation, immunology, biological modeling, and computer security. In security, she is best known for her early work using system calls for anomaly intrusion detection and her more recent work on automated diversity. She was a recipient of the NSF Presidental Young Investigator's Award and has recently served on the NSF GENI Science Council, the NSF CISE Advisory Committee, and the UCLA CENS Advisory Board.
April 1 Dr. Christine Belcastro	Title: NASA Aviation Safety Research to Reduce Loss-of-Control Accidents: Recent Accomplishments and Future Directions Speaker:  Dr. Christine M. Belcastro, Senior Research Engineer, Integrated Resilient Aircraft Control, Dynamic Systems and Control Branch, NASA Langley Research Center Abstract: Loss of control remains one of the largest contributors to aircraft fatal accidents. Loss of aircraft control is highly complex and can result from numerous causal and contributing factors acting alone or (more often) in combination. Research on aircraft loss of control is of high National importance and poses a highly non-trivial problem to solve. Moreover, preventing or recovering from loss of vehicle control and an ability to operate safely under off-nominal conditions is fundamental to all aerospace vehicles, including military aircraft, unmanned air vehicles (UAVs), and space exploration vehicles. This briefing will provide insight into the aircraft loss of control problem, present recent accomplishments in addressing this problem through NASA’s Aviation Safety Program, and characterize potential future research directions in this area.                            **************************** Biography: Christine M. Belcastro received the Bachelor of Science Degree in Electrical Engineering in May 1980, and the Master of Engineering Degree in May 1986, both from Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia. She received the Ph.D. degree in Electrical Engineering in December 1994 from Drexel University in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Dr. Belcastro has been a research engineer at the Langley Research Center of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) since June 1980. She is a Senior Research Engineer and technical research leader for aviation safety research within the Aeronautics Research Mission Directorate (ARMD) of NASA. Her research interests include robust adaptive and reconfigurable control for fault tolerance and failure and damage accommodation under adverse operating conditions, recovery from loss of control conditions, and the validation of complex integrated adaptive detection and control systems for flight critical aerospace applications.
April 22 Dr. Merrill Skolnik	Title: An Overview of Radar Speaker: Dr. Merrill I. Skolnik, The Radar Division at the US Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, D. C. Abstract: This talk, which is intended mainly for students of electrical engineering, will briefly review what radar does as an important example of an electrical engineering system, how it obtains its information, the subsystems that constitute a radar system, its major applications, and a few areas of current interest for research in radar. _______________________________                                           Jointly Sponsored by Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and CASE Center http://www.lcs.syr.edu/academic/dept_electricalengcompsci/colloquium.aspx
May 1	Title: Speaker: Abstract:

Colloquium Archive