2003-2004 CS Lunch Schedule

WEEK (DATE) TOPIC SPEAKER(S)
Fall 2003
week 2 (9/8) Meet the Sysadmins Jeff Knerr, Renuka Nayak, Sorelle Friedler, Elizabeth Holman, Josh Berney
week 3 (9/15) "Deterministic Media Access and Bandwidth Allocations for Periodic Streams" Zac Rider
week 4 (9/22) "Analyzing Networks of Queuing Systems: Modeling vs Simulation" Josh Hudner
week 5 (9/29) CS graduate school information panel The CS faculty
week 6 (10/6) CS graduate school information panel cont. The CS faculty
week 8 (10/27) Optical Character Recognition for Pointed Hebrew Text Adrian Packel
week 9 (11/3) A Java-Based DSM with Multiple Coherence Protocols Professor Brad Richards
Vassar College Computer Science Dept.
week 10 (11/10) VisConx: A Tool for Visualizing Neural Networks in Pyro Matthew Fiedler
week 11 (11/17) The Governor Architecture: Avoiding Catastrophic Forgetting in Neural Networks Evan Moses, Jeremy Stober
week 12 (11/24) Establishing a Hierarchy of Transducers Daniel Turetsky
week 13 (12/1) Mangrove: Enticing Ordinary People onto the Semantic Web via Instant Gratification Luke McDowell
University of Washington CS Department
Spring 2004
week 2 The history of the CS department and a look our new department in the Science Center Lisa Meeden
week 3 Social Lunch -
week 4
(2/9) 		Robobot: A human-robot interface for NIST's Urban Search & Rescue Fritz Heckel and Nick Ward
week 5
(2/16) 		"Everything you ever wanted to know about CS, but were afraid to ask"
A session devoted to asking and answering questions about CS terms that you think you should know, but for some reason you don't. 		Sorelle Friedler, Elizabeth Holman, Renuka Nayak
week 6
(2/23) 		"WHO CARES ABOUT DIEBOLD?: The real story behind the SCDC lawsuit and the growing Free Culture movement." Luke Smith and Nelson Pavlosky
week 14
(4/28) (note that this is on Wednesday!) 		"Swarthmore College and the Senseval-3 Competition" Emily Thomforde, Adrian Packel, Ben Mitchell, and Richard Wicentowski

Fall 2004 Schedule

(note: this year we held lunches in Sharples, so there were fewer presentations)
WEEK (DATE) TOPIC SPEAKER(S)
week 2
(9/6) 		Social Lunch Everybody
week 4
(9/20) 		CS Graduate School Question & Answer Session CS faculty and Kuzman Ganchev'02 (current UPenn gradstudent)
week 5
(9/27) 		More CS Graduate School Q&A CS faculty
week 6
(10/x) 		social lunch -
week 7
(10/ 		social lunch -
week 8
() 		social lunch -
week 9
(11/1) 		Electronic voting hardware and software Informal Discussion Topic
week 10
(11/9) 		Come meet Eben Moglen (Swarthmore '80), a professor of Law and Legal History at Columbia University, and general counsel to Free Software Foundation and co-author of the GNU General Public License. informal discussion
week 11
(11/15) 		social lunch -
week 12
(11/22) 		Hal Pomeranz '89, an independent computer security consultant and lecturer, will join us for informal discussion. informal discussion

Talk Abstracts

CS Lunch talk Monday, September 15th, 2003:

Zac Rider will discuss his summer research work with Professor Erkan:

" Deterministic Media Access and Bandwidth Allocations for Periodic Streams "

Distributed real-time applications require the underlying network to provide bandwidth allocations and time-constrained message deliveries. However, CSMA/CD based MAC protocols do not provide these services. In this project, we use OPNET to develop a virtual token based data-link layer protocol whose token visit pattern is generated according to a rate monotonic schedule. We consider how this protocol can be used in an environment where most of the communication consists of periodic streams. This protocol is a building block in our efforts to create a distributed real-time network scheduling logic.

CS Lunch talk Monday, September 22nd, 2003:

Josh Hudner will discuss his summer research work with Professor Erkan:

"Analyzing Networks of Queuing Systems: Modeling vs Simulation"

The simplest non-deterministic queuing model is M/M/1. In this study, we develop numerous simulations that verify the results of more complex queuing systems such as M/M/1/k and M/M/c. We then model a Jackson network which consists of a network of queuing nodes operating under Markovian traffic and service rates. After experimentally verifying theoretical predictions for average queue length and latency, we switch to traffic sources that are no longer Markovian. We explore the accuracy of the Allen-Cunneen approximation in scaling the Jackson network results for more general and realistic cases. This study allows us to investigate some of the fundamental issues in modeling data networks.

CS Lunch talk Monday, 10/27/03

Adrian Packel will discuss his summer research work with Professor Richard Wicentowski

" Optical Character Recognition for Pointed Hebrew Text "

Hebrew, like other Semitic languages such as Arabic and Farsi, employ a writing system in which the vowels of the language are optional, and often omitted. While native speakers are able to vocalize written texts without vowels, there has been little work in building systems to automatically recover these vowels.

The bottleneck in building such systems is the lack of data available to train statistical models. While there are numerous books and printed newspapers which are written Hebrew and include vowels, virtually none of these are available in a digital format suitable for our purposes. To overcome this, we present an Optical Character Recognizer for pointed Hebrew texts capable of transforming existing printed resources into the digital resources we require.

CS Lunch talk Monday, November 3rd, 2003

Professor Brad Richards
Computer Science Department
Vassar College

will present:

"A Java-Based DSM with Multiple Coherence Protocols"

Distributed Shared Memory (DSM) is a parallel computing model in which a collection of machines with physically distinct memories present the illusion of a single, global memory. Communication between processors occurs automatically when code on a given processor attempts to access non-local data. This communication is managed by a set of rules called a coherence protocol, which ensures that processors see a consistent view of memory. We have developed a Java-based DSM system that supports simultaneous use of multiple coherence protocols. Programmers can select the protocol that most efficiently supports the access patterns of specific shared objects. I will give an overview of DSM, and present recent results from our system indicating the benefits of multiple protocols.

CS Lunch talk Monday, November 10, 2003

Matt Fiedler will discuss his summer research work with Professor Lisa Meeden

" VisConx: A Tool for Visualizing Neural Networks in Pyro "

A neural network is a collection of interconnected nodes which can betrained to solve many types of problems. As networks become morecomplex, the amount of numeric information stored inside the networkbecomes so large that understanding how the network operates can be extremely difficult. This is a particular problem when trying to evaluate a network while training is ongoing, as when monitoring the training of a neural network "brain" for a robot. To deal with these issues, it is often useful to create visual representations of the network's internal data. VisConx makes a number of standard visualizations available for work with robots in Pyro. Pyro is robot-control software being developed at Swarthmore College and Bryn Mawr College, and is funded through an NSF grant.

CS Lunch talk Monday, November 17, 2003

Jeremy Stober and Evan Moses will discuss their summer research work with Professor Lisa Meeden

"The Governor Architecture: Avoiding Catastrophic Forgetting in Neural Networks"

The process of training neural networks online for robot control suffers from catastrophic forgetting. Long sequences of repetitive sensory inputs corresponding to slowly changing environmental stimuli tend to dominate the learning process of neural network controllers. In robot control tasks, however, short critical periods of sensory data are often more vital to the learning process. Traditionally, to enhance the importance of these short critical periods of sensory information, sensory data from the required task is collected and balanced before being used as a training set for an offline neural network. Using vector quantization techniques, we have developed a neural network governor that dynamically samples the input data online so as to excise long sequences of repetitive data that would otherwise prevent shorter critical sequences from being properly learned.

CS Lunch talk Monday, November 24th, 2003

Daniel Turetsky will discuss his summer research work with Professor Kelemen

" Establishing a Hierarchy of Transducers "

Although the Turing machine is used as the standard mathematical model of a computer, in some ways finite state machines make for a more accurate model. One type of finite state machine - the finite automaton - has already been thoroughly investigated, and the results are covered in a standard theory of computing course. The situation for the other form of finite machine - the finite transducer - turns out to be far more complex, and it is this that we investigated. I will explain what a finite transducer is, as well as present some of our results.

CS Lunch talk Monday, December 1, 2003, a talk by:

Luke McDowell
Computer Science and Engineering Dept.
University of Washington
Seattle, WA

"Mangrove: Enticing Ordinary People onto the Semantic Web via Instant Gratification"

The "Semantic Web" envisions a portion of the World Wide Web in which the underlying data is machine understandable and applications can exploit this data for improved querying and interaction. Despite numerous efforts, however, the semantic web has yet to achieve widespread adoption. Recently, some researchers have argued that participation in the semantic web is too difficult for "ordinary" people, limiting its growth and popularity.

In response, this talk introduces Mangrove, a system whose goal is to entice non-technical people to semantically annotate their existing HTML data. Mangrove seeks to alter the cost-benefit equation of authoring semantic content. To increase the benefit, Mangrove is designed to make semantic content instantly available to services that consume the content and yield immediate, tangible benefit to authors. To reduce the cost, Mangrove makes semantic authoring as painless as possible by transferring some of the burden of schema design, data cleaning, and data structuring from content authors to the programmers who create semantic services.

We have designed and implemented a Mangrove prototype, built several semantic services for the system, and deployed those services in our department. This talk describes Mangrove's goals, presents the system architecture, and reports on our implementation and deployment experience. Overall, Mangrove demonstrates a concrete path for enabling and enticing non-technical people to enter the semantic web.

The system and corresponding paper are publicly accessible here

CS Lunch talk Monday, Febuary 9th, 2004

Fritz Heckel and Nicolas Ward will discuss their summer research work with Professor Maxwell

" Robobot: A human-robot interface for NIST's Urban Search & Rescue "

The National Institute of Standards and Technology maintains a test course to simulate disaster situations which is used in the AAAI and RoboCup Robotic Urban Search & Rescue Competitions. Perhaps the most important part of preparing for these competitions is developing a strong user interface for guiding and receiving information from the robot. We have developed an interface inspired by our many years of experience playing video games which aims to be (a) easy to use and (b) fuse diverse varieties of information into an understandable display. Though still in its early stages, our interface is very effective, and enabled us to take second place at the IJCAI/AAAI Urban Search & Rescue competition last August.

CS Lunch talk Monday, February 16, 2004

Sorelle Friedler, Elizabeth Holman, and Renuka Nayak present:

"Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About CS But Were Too Afraid to Ask. "

Do you get the feeling that everyone else in the class knows stuff you don't and you can't figure out where they learned it?

What is hexadecimal? binary?
What's a bit? A byte? A mega byte?
What's the difference between ROM and RAM?
How do I remove a directory?

Email us your questions that you're too afraid to ask in class, and we will present a question and answer session of the questions we get.

You can email your questions to any of: Sorelle (friedler@cs), Elizabeth (holman@cs), Renuka (nayak@cs), and Tia (newhall@cs)

CS Lunch talk Monday, 2/23/04

Nelson Pavlosky and Luke Smith present:

" WHO CARES ABOUT DIEBOLD?: The real story behind the SCDC lawsuit and the growing Free Culture movement. "

Not a fan of the RIAA, DMCA, or DRM? Nelson Pavlosky and Luke Smith ('06) describe why computer scientists (and everyone else) should care about developing alternatives to closed models of information production and distribution. And we'll explain (1) all those tasty acronyms and (2) why a couple of Swatties are (successfully) suing a multi-billion-dollar corporation.

CS Lunch talk Wednesday, 4/28/04

Emily Thomforde, Adrian Packel, Ben Mitchell, and Richard Wicentowski present:

" Swarthmore College and the Senseval-3 Competition "

This talk will present a word-sense disambiguation system which was designed by students from the Fall 2003 CS91 class and recently submitted to the international Senseval-3 workshop taking place in Barcelona this July. The system was used to participate in 6 of the Senseval-3 subtasks, which involved working in Romanian, Basque, Italian, Catalan, Spanish, and English. The talk will introduce the goal of Senseval-3 workshop, highlight the components that went into building our final system, and present the results that were obtained.