Let's find out what's happening in the world of School of Engineering
research (and have some Free Lunch at the same time)!
Sponsored by a generous gift from National Semiconductor,
these forums are
open to all SOE graduate students, faculty, researchers, lecturers and
staff. We hope you will join us to meet with each other, hear about our
on-going and future research projects and share in refreshments. The
speakers will give a broad overview of their research topic. There is plenty
of time for question/answer and discussion.
May 18th, 2005 speaker was: Bruce R. Montague
Topic: "Elements of Operating System and Internet History: A BSD Perspective"
E2-280 at 1pm.
Abstract:
This talk is an introduction to how operating
systems and networks came to be the way they are
today. This is done primarily by examining elements
in the technical history of the BSD family of operating
systems, while also considering some developments
in software licensing, government policy, open source
software, and the origins of commercial operating
systems and the Internet. While accessible to all,
this talk should be of special interest to system
programmers and system software researchers who are
unfamiliar with the historical development of the
field.
Biography of the Speaker:
Bruce R. Montague has worked with both research and
commercial system software for over 30 years. He has
worked on the design and implementation of a number
of commercial operating systems, filesystems, networks,
database technologies, and programming languages.
Bruce has been a civilian Air Force computer scientist,
a member of the staff of the computer science
department of the Naval Postgraduate School, and a
senior engineer at Digital Research, Inc. He has
been associated with a number of startup companies
and contract projects and has implemented commercial
filesystems widely used by IBM and Apple, worked on
the implementation of a wireless router operating
system for Nokia, and (at UCSC) wrote the first
embedded operating system designed specifically to
run Java. He has a Ph.D. in Computer Science from
the University of California, Santa Cruz.
Topic: "Computer Vision Applications for the Visually Impaired"
E2-215 at noon.
Abstract:
Living without vision is challenging. Simple tasks such as walking to
places, reading signs, orienting oneself and finding objects may become
overwhelming for a blind individual. Computer vision algorithms,
originally designed for robot guidance, hold the promise to enable
tools that can help visually impaired individuals in their daily life.
In this talk I will present an overview of computer vision-based
assistive technology approaches developed in recent year at UCSC and
elsewhere.
March 10th, 2005 speaker was:
Professor Ram Akella, ISTM Dept., UCSC
Topic: "Research in Information Systems and Technology Management"
BE-330 at noon.
Abstract:
The objective of technology firms is not only to develop cool
technologies, but to grow and be profitable while doing so. I will
describe prior, ongoing, and developing research on the following topics
in the context of high tech and automotive industries:
* New Product Development using Knowledge Management and Semantic Mining
* Data and semantic mining in the aerospace area (under development)
* Process Learning using statistics, queueing, and dynamic programming
* Stochastic dynamic programming in supply chain management
* Financial engineering in options contracts
* IT Services Management (under development)
I will also briefly touch upon developing opportunities in these areas at
HP, IBM, Cisco, and NASA.
February 23rd, 2005 speaker was:
Professor Don Wiberg, EE Dept., UCSC
Topic: "Engineering and Adaptive Optics"
BE-330 at noon.
Abstract:
We give an overview of the work on adaptive optics (AO) at the Center for
Adaptive Optics at UCSC, and its relationship to the Baskin School of
Engineering. The first part will be some pretty pictures showing the need
for AO, the design of AO, and the results of AO in large astronomical
telescopes. The second part will be an informal conversation about further
uses of AO in ophthalmology, defense, and communications.
Biography of the Speaker:
Don Wiberg is the Emeritus Professor at the Electrical Engineering Department, UCSC, and a research Professor at the Center for Adaptive Optics (CFAO).
He has supervised 19 Ph.D. and 47 Masters students in his 29 years tenure at UCLA (retired 1994). He has been the Vice-Chair of the UCLA EE Department, reviewer for 16 technical journals, and the associate reviewer for two technical journals.
Prof. Wiberg received his PhD. degree in Engineering from California Institute of Technology, Caltech, in 1965.
He is an IEEE member with the grade of Fellow, Senior Fulbright Fellow, Denmark (1976-1977), and Norway (1983-1984).
He is the author of two books, seven chapters in books and 70 published papers.
February 09th, 2005 speaker was:
Andrea Di Blas, CE Dept., UCSC
After a loss of interest in SIMD architectures until a few years ago, big
players in the computer architecture field are now looking with renewed
interest at vector and SIMD accelerators. This talk will introduce the
UCSC Kestrel SIMD parallel processor, its architecture and its
performance. Entirely designed and built by Prof. Hughey's group at UCSC,
this machine originally designed for computational biology has proven very
effective in a number of different applications. This 10-year-old
accellerator was so ahead of its time that it can still outperform
state-of-the-art CPUs clocked 50 times faster and higher, on some
problems. The group is currently finishing the design and test of the
next-generation model, Kestrel2, that will be mentioned too.
Biography of the Speaker:
Andrea Di Blas received his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical
Engineering from Politecnico di Torino, Italy, in 1994 and 2000. He has
been a researcher at University of California, Santa Cruz, since 1999,
where he is also a lecturer with the Department of Computer Engineering.
His research interests include parallel processing methodologies and
applications, computer architecture, image processing, and combinatorial
optimization. He is a member of the IEEE Computer Society.
Software evolution is the study of how software projects change over a multi-year project
lifetime.
The widescale adoption of software configuration management technology over the 1990's has
resulted
in multiple commercial and open-source systems with long-duration records of the fine-grain
changes
made to software files. The existence of this data raises the opportunity to mine software
configuration management repository data for empirical data concerning software evolution.
Multiple
problems arise in analysing such data, including the reconstruction of checkin and merge
operations,
and how to extract and represent mined software facts. Kenyon is an infrastructure developed
at UCSC
for automating the extraction of facts over the revision history of software project. The
talk
presents an overview of issues in software evolution research, and the Kenyon repository.
Biography of the Speaker:
Jim Whitehead is an assistant professor in the Dept. of Computer Science at UCSC. His
research
interests include software evolution, software configuration management, remote
collaborative
authoring, and application layer protocol development.
December 10th, 2004 was an open forum .
Tired of finals ???
Lack of strength to write one more funding proposal ???
Are you saaaad with the piles of paperwork left on your desk ???
We have the cure for you!!! :)
Come and join us to celebrate the end of the year in this last forum of
2004! This time, we will have an open forum to meet other graduate
students, faculty and staff of the School of Engineering. Come to share
ideas about the school, research, or your favorite subject, while we have
lunch together (= free food)!
This is a great opportunity to socialize with your peers (OK, we admit,
we may not beat the excitements of fire alarm tests, but this forum is gonna be fun too !)
WHEN: Friday, December 10, 2004
TIME: 12-1:30PM
WHERE: E2-280
Topic:"Distributed Optimization-Based Control of Multiagent Systems"
Abstract:
Multiagent systems arise in several domains of engineering. Examples
include arrays of sensor networks for aggregate imagery, autonomous
highways, and formations of unmanned aerial vehicles. In these contexts,
the individual subsystems are governed by decoupled dynamics and the
control
objective is achieved by cooperation. Cooperation refers to the
agreement of the subsystems to 1) have a common objective with
neighboring subsystems, with the objective typically decided off-line,
and 2) share information on-line to realize the objective. To be viable,
the control approach for these types of systems should be distributed,
rather than centralized. This is particularly true when the scale of the
overall system is large. Optimization-based techniques are suited to
multiagent problems, in that such techniques can admit very general
objectives. Receding horizon control is an optimization-based approach
that is applicable when dynamics are present. Researchers have
recently explored the use of receding horizon control to achieve
multi-vehicle objectives. In most cases, the common objective is
formulated, and the resulting control law implemented, in a centralized
way. In this talk, a means of distributing the receding horizon control
law is outlined. The resulting control law is provably asymptotically
stabilizing, as well as scalable. The example of multi-vehicle formation
stabilization will be used as a venue for the theory. The talk is
concluded by previewing recent results demonstrating that the same distributed
algorithm applies and is convergent when subsystems are dynamically coupled, as
is the case in process control.
Biography of the Speaker:
Prof. William B. Dunbar earned a PhD in the Control and Dynamical
Systems department at Caltech in April, 2004. His research
interests include control problems in large-scale networked
environments, consistent numerical methods in optimal control, and
connections between control theory and communication
theory. His dissertation gives a systematic and verifiable
approach for distributing a centralized optimization-based control
technique that has application in several domains of engineering,
including process control and robotics.
Topic:"Survey of Research in Wireless Signal Processing and Networking Laboratory"
Abstract:
Driven by the need to communicate anytime and anywhere,the field of wireless
communications has experienced tremendous growth in the past decade with the
proliferation of mobile telephones and wireless-enabled portable devices.
Large-scale deployments of packet-switched wireless local area networks
(WLANs) and third-generation cellular systems are taking place at a rapid
pace. Wireless networks are evolving from voice-centric services towards
mobile multimedia services. Many new services such as video-on-demand,
mobile workforce applications, voice over Internet Protocol and telemedicine
depend on the higher throughputs and reliability of next-generation wireless
networks. This talk presents a survey of advanced signal processing,
communications and networking techniques for the realization of these new
wireless applications.
Biography of the Speaker:
Ravi Narasimhan received the B.S. degree (with highest honors) in electrical
engineering and the Certificate of Distinction from the University of
California at Berkeley in 1995, and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in electrical
engineering from Stanford University in 1996 and 2000, respectively. From
2000 to 2004, he was involved in research and development for
next-generation wireless systems at Marvell Semiconductor, Inc., Sunnyvale,
CA, most recently as Senior Engineering Design Manager in the Signal
Processing Department. In July 2004, he joined the faculty in the
Electrical Engineering Department at UCSC.
Dr. Narasimhan is a member of Phi Beta Kappa, Sigma Xi and Golden Key
National Honor Society. He received the Warren Y. Dere Memorial Prize from
University of California at Berkeley in 1995. He secured the first rank in
the Ph.D. qualifying examination in electrical engineering at Stanford
University. He also received the Best Student Paper Award for U.S. at the
IEEE International Symposium on Personal, Indoor and Mobile Radio
Communications (PIMRC), held in Boston, MA, September 1998.His biography was
selected for publication in "Who's Who in America" and "Who's Who in Science
and Engineering". His research interests include MIMO systems, multicarrier
modulation, wireless communication, signal processing, and cross-layer
optimization.
