CS/TTI Grad Student Cake Talk Series

Details

Where: Ry 255 (unless said otherwise)

When: 1200 noon

Schedule for Spring 2006

                   eat(walnut)

Future talks this quarter include Borja Sotomajor on "A Gentle Introduction to Software Engineering and Project Management".

Schedule for Winter 2006

As can be seen from the schedule below, we are still looking for several student volunteers to give talks (and provide munchies). If you'd like to volunteer to do either, please email the current organizer.

Date	Speaker	Title	Munchies
11 Jan	Jacob Abernathy (TTI)	"An Empirical Study of Balance"	Sonjia Waxmonsky
	We kickstart the series with a non-research show by one of the best jugglers in Illinois, who also happens to be a graduate student at the Toyota Technological Institute.
18 Jan	Dinoj Surendran	"Automating the creation of Glyph-enhanced 3d scatterplots	Sonjia
	We present Ndaona, a Matlab toolkit that produces visually appealing and informative glyph-enhanced 4d scatterplots with Partiview. We demonstrate its use for visualizing the results of several pattern recognition algorithms, and for global networks.
25 Jan	Xuehai Zhang	Virtual Clusters - dynamic execution environments for Grid cluster applications	Lisa Alano
1 Feb	Nobody
8 Feb	Nobody
15 Feb	Borja Sotomayor	A Gentle Introduction to Grid Computing (SLIDES)	Borja (Spanish Munchies)
	Grid Computing has become one of the most talked about technologies in recent years. But... what exactly is Grid Computing? There are a lot of definitions floating around, and most non-Grid people usually just think of it as "something like SETI@Home... on steroids!". This talk aims to provide a quick and concise (15 mins) introduction to Grid Computing, providing specific examples of how it is used in both academia and industry. This talk in intended specifically for students, faculty, etc. who are not involved in Grid research and want to know what all the buzz is about. After the intermission, the talk will continue for 15-20 minutes with more technical details given, with emphasis on how Grid Computing relates to existing technologies. The speaker will also talk briefly about the research he is carrying out for his Master's thesis.
22 Feb	Ioan Raicu	Harnessing Grid Resources to Enable the Dynamic Analysis of Large Astronomy Datasets (SLIDES)
	Grid computing has emerged as an important new field focusing on large-scale resource sharing and high-performance orientation. The astronomy community has an abundance of imaging datasets at its disposal which are essentially the "crown jewels" for the astronomy community; however the terabytes of data makes the traditional analysis of these datasets a very difficult process. Large astronomy datasets are generally very large (terabytes +) and contain many objects (100 million +) separated into many files (100,000+). We propose to use grid computing as the main mechanism to enable the dynamic analysis of large astronomy datasets. There are 5 reasons why analyzing these large datasets is not trivial: 1. the large size of the datasets; 2. the large number of users; 3. the large amount of resources needed; 4. the dispersed geographic distribution of the users and resources; 5. the heterogeneity of the resources. The key question we try to answer is: "How can the analysis of large astronomy datasets be made a reality for the astronomy community using Grid resources? Our answer is the AstroPortal, a science gateway to grid resources that is specifically tailored for the astronomy community. Some of the interesting and innovative research work that are the building blocks of the AstroPortal are: 1. resource provisioning; 2. data management; 3. distributed resource management.
1 Mar	Catalin Dumitrescu	User-Transparent Scheduling of Structured Parallel Applications in Grid Environments (SLIDES)	Catalin
	The problem of scheduling parallel applications on Grids is notoriously difficult: schedulers must consider the heterogeneity of involved resources and management systems, and they often require from users to provide information about the expected application behavior. We suggest that increasingly popular structured programming approaches using components with well-defined semantics, facilitate a more efficient and user-transparent scheduling. We illustrate our approach to scheduling using HOCs (Higher-Order Components) that capture typical patterns of parallelism (Farm-HOC, Pipeline-HOC, etc.) and come as Web Services with pre-packaged implementation and middleware setup. We take a particular Grid scheduler, KOALA, and enhance it for Grid applications built of HOCs; we propose and implement a novel scheduling algorithm that optimizes communications in such structured applications. We report experimental results of running our scheduler on the DAS-2 Grid testbed combining over 200 nodes at five sites in the Netherlands
8 Mar	Davide Fossati (UIC)	Automatic Ontology Mapping (EACL paper)	Irina Matveeva
	This paper presents a general architecture and four algorithms that use Natural Language Processing for automatic ontology matching. The proposed approach is purely instance based, i.e., only the instance documents associated with the nodes of ontologies are taken into account. The four algorithms have been evaluated using real world test data, taken from the Google and LookSmart online directories. The results show that NLP techniques applied to instance documents help the system achieve higher performance.

A note on format (from the second week on) : The time will be from 1200 noon to 1215, at which time there will be a break, and those who wish to leave can do so. The speaker can choose to continue with a talk for those who wish to stay (e.g. those in the same research group).

What speakers should do: Announce their topics - by sending an email to phd-students@cs.uchicago.edu by Tuesday morning, the day before the talk. This email should contain the title and description of the talk. Descriptions can be sent out earlier, of course.