We have three special colloquium times this coming week. The information for them is copied below from http://eecs.oregonstate.edu/graduate/colloquium/, which includes the next few colloquiums as well. Hope to see you there!
Monday February 14 9:00 - 9:50 AM Owen 102 Heather Richter Ph.D. Candidate College of Computing Georgia Institute of Technology Designing and Evaluating Meeting Capture and Access Services Many work practices consist of repeated discussions among groups of people. For example, software developers talk to customers to generate requirements, brainstorm and sketch design alternatives and make decisions, and perform code walkthroughs and reviews. A large amount of the rich, unstructured information that is generated during these discussions often does not get recorded as formal knowledge. Yet this information is later useful for providing additional context, details, and decisions surrounding a project. In this talk, I will present several prototypes that demonstrate the application of ubiquitous computing to automatically capture, integrate and store multimedia records of different work discussions. We capture knowledge acquisition sessions with Tagger, and have evaluated the use of captured sessions in creating a requirements document. With the TeamSpace system, we have achieved authentic, long-term use of capture and access in general meetings. I will discuss what we have learned about the motivations and potential benefits for using recorded meeting information. I will also discuss the behavioral patterns we observed and the implications for supporting users with meeting capture and access systems. Biography Heather Richter is a Ph.D. candidate in the College of Computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology. She is a member of the Ubicomp Research Group and GVU Center, where she investigates the use of meeting capture and access systems. Her research interests include Human-Computer Interaction, Software Engineering, and Ubiquitous Computing. She received her B.S. in computer science from Michigan State University in 1995. = Wednesday February 16 9:00 - 9:50 AM Owen 102 Xiaoli Fern Ph.D. candidate Computer Engineering Purdue University Unsupervised Pattern Discovery for Scientific Applications Vast amounts of scientific data are collected everyday. Tools for automatically extracting interesting patterns from the data with limited or no human supervision are critical toward understanding and gaining knowledge from the data. In this talk, I will present my research on two unsupervised pattern discovery problems within the context of Earth Science applications. The first problem, clustering multi-spectral land cover data, poses fundamental challenges to existing unsupervised learning techniques due to the high dimensionality of the data. I will present a method based on random projection and cluster ensemble techniques to tackle the issues caused by high dimensionality. Results on land cover data and other benchmarks will be presented to show that this approach significantly improves the clustering performance on high dimensional data over existing approaches. In the second problem, correlation pattern analysis of vegetation-precipitation data, I will build on the classical statistical method of Canonical Correlation Analysis (CCA) and introduce a novel approach to learning mixtures of CCA models. This approach not only addresses the linearity limitation of the traditional CCA method, but also is capable of finding correlation patterns that are only locally valid in the data. I will demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed approach with both synthetic and real-world data. Biography Xiaoli Fern is a Ph.D. candidate in Computer Engineering at Purdue University. She received her B.S. and M.S. degrees from Shanghai Jiao Tong University in 2000 and 1997 respectively. Her primary research interests are in machine learning and data mining. She is particularly interested in developing practical algorithms for automatically discovering useful patterns from scientific data. = Thursday February 17 9:00 - 9:50 AM Owen 102 Bruce Childers Assistant Professor Computer Science University of Pittsburgh Continuous Compilation for Aggressive and Adaptive Code Transformation Over the past several decades, the compiler research community has developed a number of sophisticated and powerful algorithms for a variety of code improvements. Although there are still promising directions for particular code optimizations, programming languages, and machine architectures, research on optimizations is nearing the point of diminishing returns and other approaches are needed to achieve further performance improvements. Our research aims to address this challenge by investigating and developing an innovative framework and system for continuously and adaptively applying code improvements. Our system, the Continuous Compiler (CoCo), determines "optimization plans" at compile-time that describe the best way in which to apply both static and dynamic code transformations. The plans consider program and machine context, interaction among optimizations, and performance profit. Through such planning, CoCo can tailor and adapt its decisions to more synergistically apply a whole suite of code transformations. This talk will describe the Continuous Compilation approach and present initial results. These results include novel analytic models that can accurately predict the performance benefit (profit) of applying an optimization without actually doing it or running the resulting program code. Using the analytic models, we have developed several planners that can guide a static optimizer. Initial results are very encouraging and show that optimizations can be effectively directed by planning. The talk will conclude with a brief discussion of CoCo's run-time system, including its dynamic code translator, instrumentation optimizer, and source-level debugger for dynamically translated code. Biography Bruce Childers is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Pittsburgh. Dr. Childers received a BS degree (Computer Science, 1991) from the College of William and Mary, and a PhD degree (Computer Science, 2000) from the University of Virginia. His research interests are compilers and software development tools, computer architecture, and embedded systems. Current projects include continuous compilation to synergistically apply both static and dynamic code optimizations, debugging for dynamically translated code, power-aware real-time systems, and demand-driven software testing. _______________________________________________ Colloquium mailing list [email protected] https://secure.engr.oregonstate.edu/mailman/listinfo/colloquium
