The main purpose of the seminar is to have people from the department (faculty and grad students) interact with each other in an informal environment. All faculty members and grad students are invited, with no discrimination on research interests. The tentative hours are Fridays at 4:00 p.m. in Ry255.

Every Friday will feature a Presenter and an Organizer.

• The Presenter may present his/her own research or some other people's interesting papers, projects, etc. Graduate students may want to exercise their communication skills in front of a friendly¹ audience capable of asking hard and meaningful questions, or may want to check their research ideas with a specialized (and hopefully understanding) community. Graduate students will most likely be the ones who'll benefit most from the faculty members' presentations also... Let's hope the faculty will enjoy the refreshments.

• The Organizer is in charge of:
  • making sure the presenter knows that (s)he has to present that day;
  • announcing the seminar on Thursday morning by email to grad-seminar;
  • choosing and buying the refreshments (within the allocated budget);
  • making sure Ry255 is available (reserve the room with Andrea);
  • borrowing the projector before seminar begins (from techstaff );
  • (organizing the) cleaning of the room after seminar;
  • also, make sure you hand in your receipts for reimbursement to Donna within 30 days;

  The rules of the game:

  • The graduate students are expected to be the organizers.
  • For variety, every other week the Presenter is a faculty member (or maybe a guest), respectively a grad student.
  • Every graduate student should be Organizer at least once. If enough people participate, each grad student will get to organize the seminar at most twice a year.
  • The Presenter and the Organizer of the week are not the same person.
  • The Organizer has the freedom to choose whatever (s)he feels is appropriate (within the budget). However, the Organizer should keep in mind that the participants' mood can be strongly influenced by food.

  The organizing committee (led by professor Foster) invites/nominates (on a volunteering base) the Organizer and the Presenter of the week. It also maintains the Friday Seminar web page, processes suggestions and ignores reclamations. The provisory members of the organizing committee are professor Ian Foster (chairman), Anda Iamnitchi, Matei Ripeanu, Kavitha Ranganathan and Lingyun Yang (volunteers, please contact Lingyun).

  Autum '03

  Day	Speaker	Presentation	Organizer
  October 10	Catalin L. Dumitrescu	Policy issues in virtual organizations (VOs)	Han Gao
  October 24	Adam Kalai	Old Algorithms for the Online Decision Problem	Varsha Dani
  October 31	Robby Findler	Late-binding for Software Contracts	Xuehai Zhang
  November 7	Lingyun Yang	Conservative Scheduling:Using Predicted Variance to Improve Scheduling Decisions in Dynamic Environments	Songyan Feng (Tiger)
  November 14	John Langford	Proofs of Learning	Catalin L. Dumitrescu
  December 5	Robert C. Kirby	The FEniCS project: an introduction to automatic scientific computing	Chuang Liu

  Winter '04

  Day	Speaker	Presentation	Organizer
  January 9	Anne Rogers	The Baton Project: managing patient care as an information problem	Chunyan Song
  January 30	Yu Hu	IBL for replica selection in data intensive Grid applications	Lingyun Yang
  February 6	Catalin L. Dumitrescu	How to simulate a grid	Kavitha
  March 12	Chuang Liu	A Constraint Language Approach to Matchmaking	Jing Cao

  Spring '04    

  Day	Speaker	Presentation	Organizer
  April 2	Xuehai Zhang	Performance Analysis of the Globus Toolkit Monitoring and Discovery Service (MDS2)	Yong Zhao
  April 17	Han Gao	Capability Matching of Data Streams with Network Services	Songyan Feng
  April 23	Gina-Anne Levow	Integrating Text and Acoustic Cues for Topic Segmentation in Speech	Dinoj Surendran
  April 30	Jonathan David Riehl	The Basil Project, or, What I took away from GRAD school	Siwei Wang
  May 7	Dinoj Surendren	An application from astronomy to machine learning	Jing Cao
  May 27	Jacob Matthews	PLT Redex, an embedded domain-specific language	Tiger & FangFang

  
  Last year's seminar