Class Meeting:
Mondays and/or Wednesdays, 4:10-5:25pm, 124 HRBB
Course homepage:
http://parasol.tamu.edu/~bs/Courses/681
Seminar Schedule:
681 abstracts
Instructor: Bjarne Stroustrup
url: http://parasol.tamu.edu/~bs
Oct 10: Yingwei Yu (Seismic Micro-Technology, Inc.)
An automated method for estimating missing well log zones using neural networks
Course Goals: The purpose of the course is to expose you to a broad range of current research topics in computer science and related fields. Every graduate student in the department must register for the seminar at least once during their graduate studies.
All graduate students are encouraged to attend as many seminars as possible, not only during the semester(s) during which they are registered. It is useful for you to attend even when the topic seems unrelated to your research - indeed, seminars provide the best way for you to round out your knowledge by exposing you to current research in areas that are not directly related to your own research.
Course Content and Schedule: This course consists of seminars which will be presented roughly once a week, on a monday and/or a wednesday. Generally, after the speaker is finished, there will be a question and answer period where the audience can ask any questions they might have that were not answered during the seminar. This is often quite interesting and is considered part of the seminar (so you should not leave until it is over).
You are responsible for checking the seminar schedule on the web ( http://www.cs.tamu.edu/research/seminars/681seminar) and your email (announcements will be sent to mailing list for all graduate students) for up to date information. Be sure to check each monday and wednesday as sometimes seminars will be announced/cancelled at the last moment.
Although you should reserve the entire scheduled time slot (4:10-5:25), in most cases the seminars will finish around 5:00pm. If the speaker is not finished, or if the question and answer period is ongoing, you are expected to stay until the end, or until 5:25pm, whichever comes first. If this is a problem for you, please see the instructor. If you are in the seminar, you are expected to pay attention and refrain from activities such as doing other work, reading the newspaper, or sleeping. Behavior such as this gives speakers a bad impression of our graduate program and students. Students noticed exhibiting such behavior will not receive credit for attending that seminar. Thus, if you are not interested in a particular seminar, then don't attend - and attend a make-up seminar instead.
Mechanics and Grading: To receive credit for this course you must satisfy all of the following requirements:
To receive credit for a paper summary, students should select a technical paper authored by the speaker, read it, prepare a summary as outlined below, and submit it at the beginning of class in 124 HRBB (i.e., they can only be done for CPSC 681 seminars and must be turned in before the presentation starts). The paper should have appeared in (or accepted to) a peer reviewed conference or journal. Papers should be technically rigorous for the field (e.g., typically papers published in magazines would not be appropriate, but papers in IEEE or ACM journals or conferences would be appropriate); if you are unsure if a particular paper would be acceptable, please contact the instructor.
The goal of the one-page summaries is to allow students to become familiar with the topic of the presentation prior to the presentation. This will enable them to better understand the talk and will give them time to formulate questions. Students are encouraged to discuss a given paper with other students in the course for better understanding of the paper content; each student, however, is required to write an independent paper summary.
Each paper summary will receive a grade of 1, 2 or 3. You must receive a grade of 2 or 3 on the paper summary to receive credit for it towards the 6 required summaries.
The paper summary should be about one page in length (in addition to the coverpage) and should include the other clearly labeled sections listed below:
To receive credit for attending a regular CPSC 681 seminar (this includes distinguished lectures presented during the normal CPSC 681 time slot), students must prepare a short report of the seminar on a form that will be available at the beginning of the seminar. The completed forms are due at the conclusion of the seminar (after the conclusion of the final question and answer session) and will be collected in HRBB 124.
Students will be allowed to make-up for up to 3 missed seminars by attending other relevant seminars. (Note, paper summaries cannot be done for make-up seminars, only for regular CPSC 681 seminars.) A seminar report form must be completed for make-up seminars. In this case, the students should print out a copy of the form (available here) and should return the completed forms to the instructor's mailbox (in the 3rd floor mailroom) or they can slip the forms under her office door (414B HRBB). These reports are due within 3 days of the seminar (e.g., on Monday for a seminar on Friday).
Seminars which are automatically approved are listed below. For other seminars, please see (or email) the instructor for approval.
Oct 10: Yingwei Yu (Seismic Micro-Technology, Inc.)
An automated method for estimating missing well log zones using neural networks
Oct 29: James Caverlee (TAMU CS):
Spam 2.0: Challenges and (Some) Solutions for Web-Based Open Systems
October 1: Mark Hill (UMich). Distinguished Lecture series. See department announcement for time and place.
September 26: Frak van der Strappen (Utrecht)
Geometric Algorithms in Automated Manufacturing
Automated manufacturing systems commonly operate in highly-structured environments. They involve modest sensing capabilities and feature relatively simple physical actions performed by hardware components that are often simpler than those encountered in traditional robotic solutions. These characteristics bear a promise of reliability, easy reconfigurability, low cost, and suitability for automated system design. It turns out that system design poses algorithmic rather than mechanical challenges.
Geometry plays a major role in the development of effective solutions for automated manufacturing tasks. We will focus on two fundamental tasks in manufacturing, part holding and part feeding, and see how geometric concepts and techniques aid in all stages of the design process, from the analysis of part behavior to the actual algorithmic design of all solutions for the manufacturing task at hand.
Short bio: Frank van der Stappen received the PhD degree from Utrecht University in 1994 and MSc and PDEng degrees from Eindhoven University of Technology in 1988 and 1990. Currently, he is an associate professor at the Department of Information and Computing Sciences at Utrecht University in the Netherlands. His current research focuses on the use of geometric techniques in the solution of problems involving manipulation and motion. He has served on various PCs in robotics and automation, and on the editorial board of IEEE T-ASE. He is an associate vice-president for technical activities for the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society, and the program leader of Utrecht University's MSc program on Game and Media Technology.
September 24: Alfredo Weitzenfeld (ITAM).
September 18: Perry Hoffman (HP). IAP Keynote; see deparment announcements for time and place.
Wednesday, September 12 (4:10 in HBB124 as usual):
Prof. Radu Stoleru (TAMU CS):
Title: Wireless Sensor Networks: A systems Approach
Recommended pap: R. Stoleru et al.: A High-Accuracy, Low-Cost Localization System for Wireless Sensor Networks
Abstract: Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) systems have been used in many promising applications including military surveillance, habitat monitoring and wildlife tracking.
In this talk I will describe VigilNet, one of the major efforts in the WSN community to build an integrated system for energy efficient surveillance. This talk will also give key insights into why the node localization problem, i.e., how a node find its position, remains one of the most difficult research chalanges to be solved practically. I will present the answer to this challenge, an asymmetric architecture, in which the complexity associated with node localization is removed from sensor nodes. First, I will present an event-based localization scheme, the first to achieve tens of centimeter accuracy, with virtually no additional hardware on sensor nodes, in a realistic, outdoor deployment. Elements of coding theory and the asymmetry in node localization architecture are used to develop new techniques for efficiently distributing events in the sensor network. Second, I will describe the first localization scheme that, simultaneously, executes extremely fast (milliseconds to seconds) and achieves meter level accuracy. For this image-based, passive localization system we propose a constraint based label relaxation algorithm and four primitive and hybrid constraints.
Bio: Dr. Stoleru is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Texas A&M University. He received his PhD degree from The University of Virginia in 2007, under Prof. John A. Stankovic. Dr. Stoleru's research interests include deeply embedded wireless sensor network systems, distributed computing and computer networking. He is an author and co-author of over twenty publications and was awarded the 2007 Outstanding Graduate Student Research Award from the Department of Computer Science, University of Virginia. Dr Stoleru is a member of ACM and IEEE.
Wednesday, September 5 (4:10 in HBB124 as usual):
Prof. Tiffani Williams (TAMU CS):
Title: Large-Scale Analysis of Collections of Evolutionary Trees
Abstract: Phylogenetics is concerned with inferring the genealogical relationships between a group of organisms (or taxa) and this relationship is usually expressed as an evolutionary tree. However, obtaining such trees is very difficult (most approaches use NP-hard optimization criteria). As a result, most phylogenetic analyses rely on heuristics to obtain accurate (best-scoring) trees. It is not uncommon for heuristics to return hundreds to thousands of best-scoring trees. Hence, fast post-processing techniques are needed in order to summarize effectively the relationships depicted among the evolutionary trees. In this talk, I will present new techniques to compute the topological differences of large phylogenetic tree collections efficiently. In particular, we develop a new family of randomized algorithms to compute the Robinson-Foulds distance matrix for a collection of evolutionary histories. Finally, I will discuss additional applications of our randomized approach to facilitate the reconstruction of accurate phylogenies.
Bio: Tiffani L. Williams is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Texas A&M University. She earned her B.S. in computer science from Marquette University and Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Central Florida. Afterward, she was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of New Mexico. Her honors include a Radcliffe Institute Fellowship, an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship, and a McKnight Doctoral Fellowship. Her research interests are in the areas of bioinformatics and high-performance computing.