CS Department Colloquium Series

Nicholas Negroponte today is best known for founding the MIT Media Lab in 1985. But before the Media Lab, he founded the Architecture Machine Group at MIT in 1968 (Arch Mach for short).

How can a machine specify a computation to another one and then, without executing the computation, check that the other machine carried it out correctly? And how can this be done without assumptions about the performer (replication, trusted hardware, etc.) or restrictions on the computation?

Designers in many fields rely on examples for inspiration, and examples play an important role in art and design curricula. In this talk, I'll describe several ways that examples help the creative process by illustrating concepts and alternatives.

Wireless networking traditionally assumes that radios are half-duplex. On a given frequency, a half-duplex radio can either transmit or receive, but not both at the same time.

The last decade has seen a paradigm shift in the architecture of computing platforms: Uni-processors have given way to multi-core (many-core) processors, and now the industry is moving toward heterogeneous architectures that combine CPUs and GPUs on the same chip, as we can see from Intel, AMD, NVID

A connectome is a map of a nervous system in the form of a directed graph in which nodes represent neurons and edges represent synapses. The ability to rapidly map connectomes could arguably revolutionize neuroscience, much as genomics has impacted biology.

The electric power grid pre-dates computer and digital networking technologies. As these technologies have progressed the power grid has shifted from electro-mechanical devices toward networked computers as a foundation for intelligence and control.

Over the last several years, JavaScript malware has emerged as one of the most popular ways to deliver drive-by attacks to unsuspecting users through the browser. This talk covers recent Microsoft Research experiences with finding malware on the web. It highlights two tools: Nozzle and Zozzle.

A source of independent and uniform random bits is a basic resource in many computational tasks, such as cryptography, game theoretic protocols, algorithms and physical simulations.

The wireless medium is a shared resource. If nearby devices transmit at the same time, the transmitted signals interfere, resulting in a collision.