Colloquium

Many complex domains offer limited information about their exact state and the way actions affect them. There, autonomous agents need to make decisions at the same time that they learn action models and track the state of the domain.

Game Theory is important for the study of large competitive environments, such as the Internet, the market, and even social and biological systems. A key tool in analyzing such systems (games) is the study of their stable states, that is, their equilibria.

We discuss the contents, structure and uses of WordNet, a large machine-tractable lexical database developed and maintained at Princeton. This semantic network contains information about tens of thousands of English lexicalized concepts. WordNet enables automatic systems to "understand" the meanings

With the rapid growth of the Internet, network link speeds have become faster every year to accommodate more Internet users. Measuring and monitoring the traffic on such high-speed links has become an ever challenging problem.

Concurrency, as a basic primitive for software construction, is more relevant today than ever before, primarily due to the multi-core revolution. General-purpose software applications must find ways to exploit concurrency explicitly in order to take advantage of multiple cores.

Once viewed as passive consumers, media fans today are not just active, they are organized.

The reality of multi-core hardware has made concurrent programs pervasive. Unfortunately, writing correct concurrent programs is difficult. As programmers are used to sequential thinking, concurrent programs can easily run wild.

Modern complexity theory is a vast, loosely defined area. Its methods and methodology can be successfully applied whenever one has a set of tasks, a class of admissible solutions, and numerical characteristics to measure the ``quality'' of a solution.

This talk describes three of the most beautiful pieces of code that I have ever written: three different implementations of Hoare?s classic Quicksort algorithm. The first implementation is a bare-bones function in about a dozen lines of C.

Probabilistic graphical model is a formalism that exploits the conjoined talents of graph theory and probability theory to build complex models out of simpler pieces.