Recent News & Accomplishments
2010
James Pinkerton and Rafael Setra, advised by Professor Bill Gasarch came in third place at the Siemens Competition in the team category. Siemens Competition 2010 read more
Atif Memon ranked 8th in the field Systems and Software Engineering in the Journal of Systems and Software Top Scholar survey for 2004-2008. This is an annual survey of publications in systems and software engineering; it identifies the top 15 scholars and institutions in the field over a 5-year period. Each ranking is based on the weighted scores of the number of papers published in TSE, TOSEM, JSS, SPE, EMSE, IST, and Software of the corresponding period. read more
Mohammad Hajiaghayi received a Google Research Award for his proposal "Online Auctions" in the area of algorithms and mechanism design. read more
Professor Emeritus Jack Minker presented invited lectures at two workshops in Lexington, Kentucky, during November 2010 read more
The department's ACM team, comprising of undergraduates Anirudh Bandi, Holman Gao, and Scott Zimmermann, has advanced to the 2011 ACM Intercollegiate Programming Contest (ICPC) World Finals, to be held in Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt. The team is one of 100 teams chosen from over 8700 teams that participated in regional contests worldwide. read more
Robert Kleinberg, Cornell, talks about Converting any algorithm into an incentive-compatible mechanism". Date: November 19, 2010 Time: 1:00 pm Location: CSIC 2107 Does the complexity of algorithms increase dramatically when redesigning them to account for the incentives of selfish users? The theory of algorithmic mechanism design is largely founded on the presumption that the answer is affirmative, a presumption that has been rigorously confirmed under various interpretations of the question. This is unfortunate, since it would be very convenient if there existed generic procedures to convert... read more
Vikash Mansinghka, CTO of Navia Systems talks about Natively Probabilistic Computation: Principles, Artifacts and Applications". Date: November 15, 2010 Time: 1:00 pm Location: AV Williams 3258 Complex probabilistic models and Bayesian inference are becoming increasingly critical across science and industry, especially in large-scale data analysis. They are also central to our best computational accounts of human cognition, perception and action. However, all these efforts struggle with the infamous curse of dimensionality. Rich probabilistic models can seem hard to write and even harder to... read more
Professor Mark D. Hill, University of Wisconsin-Madison talks about Amdahl's Law in the Multicore Era". Date: November 15, 2010 Time: 2:00 pm Location: AV Williams 2460 Over the last several decades computer architects have been phenomenally successful turning the transistor bounty provided by Moore's Law into chips with ever increasing single-threaded performance. During many of these successful years, however, many researchers paid scant attention to multiprocessor work. Now as vendors turn to multicore chips, researchers are reacting with more papers on multi-threaded systems. While this... read more
Graham Cormode, AT&T Labs-Research talks about "Streaming Graph Computations with a Helpful Advisor". Date: November 12, 2010 Time: 1:00 pm Location: CSIC 3117 When handling large quantities of data, it is desirable to outsource the computational effort to a third party: this captures current efforts in cloud computing, but also scenarios within trusted computing systems and inter-organizational data sharing. When the third party is not fully trusted, it is necessary to give assurance that the computation has been perfomed correctly. This talk presents some recent results in designing new... read more
Anthony Hunter, Professor of Artificial Intelligence, and Head of the Intelligent Systems Group, in the UCL Department of Computer Science talks about "Introduction to Computational Models of Argument". Date: November 10, 2010 Time: 11:00 am Location: AV Williams 3258 Computational models of argument are being developed with the aim of reflecting how human argumentation uses conflicting information to construct and analyse arguments. Argumentation involves identifying arguments and counterarguments relevant to an issue (e.g. What are the pros and cons for the safety of mobile phones for... read more