CS Department Colloquium Series

One of the key challenges in automated software verification is obtaining a conservative, yet sufficiently precise understanding of the contents of data structures in the heap.

Consider a database of sensitive information about a set of participants. Statistical analysis of the data may yield valuable results, but it also poses serious threats to participants' privacy.

What does it mean to "understand" an image? One popular answer is simply naming the objects seen in the image. During the last decade most computer vision researchers have focused on this "object naming" problem.

Structural variation, in the broadest sense, is defined as the genomic changes among individuals that are not single nucleotide variants. Rapid computational methods are needed to comprehensively detect and characterize specific classes of structural variation using next-gen sequencing technology.

Internet availability -- the ability for any two nodes in the Internet to communicate — is essential to being able to use the Internet for delivery critical applications such as real-time health monitoring and response.

Building intelligent systems that are capable of extracting meaningful representations from high-dimensional data lies at the core of solving many Artificial Intelligence tasks, including visual object recognition, information retrieval, speech perception, and language understanding.

What is the total population of the ten largest capitals in the US? Building a system to answer free-form questions such as this requires modeling the deep semantics of language.

Over the last 15 years spatial databases and mapping services have become one of the most important applications on the Internet.

Is there anything to be done about the low reliability of software systems? Formal verification has already become part of standard practice in some domains where the cost of failure is especially high.

Digital cameras have become one of the most ubiquitous forms of computer in existence, but we still don't have a good handle on how to program them, what data we should program them to capture, how that data should be combined to make the photograph, and if a photograph is even the desired output.