›› General Information

This quarter we continue the tradition of the UCSB CS department faculty research seminar: Every week, one of the CS faculty members will give a talk on their current research. This is a great opportunity for you to get informed about what's going on in our department. In particular, this course allows you to

• Be exposed to various possible areas and topics of research in computer science,
• Learn research opportunities available in various research groups of our department.
• Meet and familiarize with the interest areas and research backgrounds of faculty members.

You can attend this seminar for 1 point of course credit. Only requirement for course credit is regular attendance. Of course, everyone is welcome to just sit in and attend sessions selectively.

Class Kickoff

›› Lecture Schedule (tentative, subject to change)

Date	Topics	Presenter
Jan. 11	The Span From Wireless Protocols to Social Applications [ppt]	Prof. Kevin Almeroth
Jan. 18	No Class
Jan. 25	Minos: Control Data Attack Prevention through a Simple Information Flow Tracking Architecture	Prof. Fred Chong
Feb. 1	Analyzing Conversations of Web Services [ppt]	Prof. Tevfik Bultan
Feb. 8	Interactive combinatorial supercomputing [ppt]	Prof. John Gilbert
Feb. 15	Computational Grid Computing: When you Really want to make a Mesh of Things	Prof. Rich Wolski
Feb. 22	Managing the Complexities of Open Spectrum	Prof. Heather Zheng
Mar. 1	Next-Generation User Interfaces	Prof. Matthew Turk & Prof. Tobia Hollerer
Mar. 8	No lecture	No lecture

›› Lecture Abstracts (tentative, subject to change)

• The Span From Wireless Protocols to Social Applications -- Prof. Kevin Almeroth, Jan. 11, 2006
  One recent trend in the evolution of the Internet is the growing pervasiveness of access to the network. This pervasiveness has largely been driven by one of the more recent technology explosions: wireless communication. From one perspective, there are a number of interesting research problems in enabling wireless devices to connect seamlessly to the vast Internet. The general problem in which we are most interested is overcoming the unique physical characteristics of the wireless medium. In particular, what can client devices do to provide the most efficient and timely communication channel to other devices. From a different perspective, what opportunities does near ubiquitous Internet-capable devices provide for users? Because of mobility, and through new social computing applications, new modes of interaction are beginning to appear. More importantly, these new modes hint at vast future opportunities. This talk covers a span of projects at UCSB focused on solving many of the unique challenges created by the intersection of wireless technology and social computing.
• Minos: Control Data Attack Prevention through a Simple Information Flow Tracking Architecture -- Prof. Fred Chong, Jan. 25, 2006
  I introduce Minos, a tagged microprocessor architecture which implements Biba's low-water-mark policy, but focuses on data used for control decisions. The key advantage of Minos is that it allows systems to be secured without application-specific policies. We have implemented Minos on a Pentium-based emulator and deployed Minos-enhanced Linux and Windows systems on the internet. These systems detect and prevent dozens of known and unknown attacks per day. Extensive stress tests show that Minos is a stable, robust, and securable system. Further work exploits Minos to suspend system state at attack time to automatically analyze zero-day vulnerabilities.
  Bio:
  Fred Chong is a Professor of Computer Science at the University of California at Santa Barbara. Previously, he was an Associate Professor and Chancellor's Fellow at the University of California at Davis. He received his Ph.D. in 1996 from MIT and is a recipient of the National Science Foundation's CAREER award. His current research focuses on novel computing technologies, architectural support for computer security and reliability, and next-generation embedded systems.
• Analyzing Conversations of Web Services -- Prof. Tevfik Bultan, Feb. 1, 2006
  ABSTRACT: A composite Web service can be modeled as a set of individual services, called peers, which interact with each other via asynchronous messages. A conversation is a global sequence of messages exchanged among peers participating to a composite Web service and a conversation protocol is an automaton which specifies a set of conversations. There are two interesting properties in this framework: realizability and synchronizability. A conversation protocol is realizable if the corresponding conversation set can be generated by a set of asynchronously communicating web services. On the other hand, a set of asynchronously communicating web services are synchronizable if their conversation set does not change when asynchronous communication is replaced with synchronous communication. I will talk about a tool called Web Service Analysis Tool (WSAT) for analyzing conversations. WSAT verifies properties of conversations and checks sufficient conditions for realizability and synchronizability.
• Interactive Combinatorial Supercomputing -- Prof. John Gilbert, Feb. 8, 2006
  ABSTRACT: High-performance computing is being used to understand large data sets that are combinatorial rather than numerical in nature, in applications as diverse as sparse matrices, graph matching, machine learning, search and information retrieval, and computational biology. How can combinatorial methods be used by people who are not experts in discrete mathematics? How can supercomputers be used by people who need to explore such data interactively?
• Computational Grid Computing: When you Really want to make a Mesh of Things -- Prof. Rich Wolski, Feb. 15, 2006
  The continuing proliferation of network connectivity brings with it the possibility of building applications that can use globally distributed resources to achieve high performance levels. The Computational Grid is an emerging paradigm for supporting such applications in which programs draw computational "power" from a global resource pool the same way appliances draw electrical power from a power utility -- seamlessly, ubiquitously, and anonymously.
  
  Nice idea, but can we build it?
  
  In this talk we will present a novel approach to realizing the Computational Grid vision. To enable Grid programs to adapt to fluctuating resource performance and availability, we have developed the Network Weather Service (NWS). The NWS is a scalable and robust, distributed system for gathering periodic performance measurements from a widely dispersed pool of resources. It also uses a suite of fast and adaptive time-series models to forecast future levels in near-real time. Using NWS forecasts to enable adaptive scheduling, we have developed EveryWare -- a software toolkit for building globally distributable high-performance applications. We present our experiences using EveryWare to deploy a computational mathematics application across four continents as part of a demonstration at a national supercomputing conference.
  
  Finally, if Grid programs are to adaptively acquire and release resources according to load and availability, it is possible that resource allocations will oscillate as independent competing schedulers constantly adjust to load changes they induce. To analyze the stability and efficiency of the Grid as a whole, we present a framework for building Computational Grid resource economies called G-Commerce. Using G- commerce simulations, we show that a computational commodities market out performs auction-based methods as a global resource allocation strategy in terms of equilibrium and price stability.
  
  In other words, the future of computing may be all about weather, real estate, and money. This talk will attempt to explain how such a ridiculous statement could possibly turn out to be true.
• Managing the Complexities of Open Spectrum -- Prof. Heather Zheng, Feb. 22
  Cognitive radios can spark a revolution in wireless communications by making all aspects of wireless transmission and reception programmable. These devices can intelligently select the transmission format and media access technology, and modify them dynamically as needed. Specifically, devices equipped with cognitive radios can continually monitor local spectrum, discover its usage, and dynamically reconfigure themselves to transmit in appropriate frequencies. Existing spectrum licensing policies have resulted in spectrum scarcity, including over-allocation and under-utilization of licensed bands, and an increasingly crowded unlicensed band. By leveraging cognitive radios, open spectrum systems provide opportunistic spectrum access and exploit underutilized allocated spectrum. This addresses spectrum scarcity while creating additional capacity for new wireless devices. After studying open spectrum systems for several years, government, industry and academic groups are now proposing concrete solutions to the complex challenge of spectrum management. Specifically, we are addressing issues such as efficient and fair spectrum allocation, distributed coordination, and power-conservation in spectrum allocation. This talk will provide a general overview of open spectrum networks, followed by a comprehensive study of concepts, challenges and techniques for spectrum management, including state of the art in academic and industrial research.
• Next-Generation User Interfaces -- Prof. Matthew Turk and Prof. Tobias Hollerer, March 1
  We will present an overview of several ongoing projects at the "Four Eyes Lab" for research in Imaging, Interaction, and Innovative Interfaces. The lab is conducting research in the overlapping areas of human-computer interaction, computer vision, computer graphics, and mobile and ubiquitous computing. Matthew will discuss computer vision and the idea of "perceptual interfaces," and then present ongoing research projects in multiflash imaging, facial expression analysis, hand tracking and recognition, and multimodal biometrics. Tobias will introduce the idea of "Anywhere Augmentation", a conceptual extension of mobile augmented reality that aims to enable the linking of location-specific computing services with the physical world, making them readily and directly available in any situation and location. He will also introduce current research that is directed towards creating a 3D volumetric walk-through display (think StarTrek Holodeck) and the first results toward that goal, involving the two-sided interactive FogScreen.


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