Friday 18 January 2013

View the recording on Lecturecast (UCL login required) here

Limits in computing power and our ability to interact with computers have also imposed limits on our understanding of the world around us.  Increasingly, those limits are being removed, clearing the way for new advances in almost every kind of human endeavor.

Rick Rashid, Microsoft chief research officer and head of Microsoft Research, will present his vision of the future of computing research in light of these breakthroughs and the opportunities that lie ahead.

Tuesday 15 September 2012

View the recording on Lecturecast (UCL login required) here

It's very hard to understand the field of network protocols by focusing on the details of one particular protocol. Issues are clouded by marketing hype and protocol group rivalry. What is really intrinsic to the differences between one protocol and another? This talk covers some of the ways in which solutions can differ, as well as demystifying some especially confusing pieces of this field, such as what is really the difference between "layer 2 solutions" and "layer 3 solutions", why we need both Ethernet and IP, the evolution of Ethernet from its original invention (CSMA/CD) through spanning tree and now TRILL, and some things that people assume to be true that may not be. The talk includes some possible research areas.

Radia Perlman is a Fellow at Intel Labs, specializing in network protocols and security protocols.  Many of the technologies she designed have been deployed in the Internet for decades, including link state routing, the spanning tree algorithm, and TRILL, which improves upon spanning tree while still "being Ethernet".  She has also made contributions to network security, including assured delete of data, design of the authentication handshake of IPSec, trust models for PKI, and network infrastructure robust against malicious trusted components. She is the author of the textbook "Interconnections: Bridges, Routers, Switches, and Internetworking Protocols", and co-author of "Network Security". She has a PhD from MIT in computer science, holds over 100 issued patents, and has received various industry awards including lifetime achievement awards from ACM's SIGCOMM and Usenix, and an honorary doctorate from KTH.

Wednesday 3 October 2013

View the recording on Lecturecast (UCL login required) here 

We all have a pet behaviour we would like to change, such as eating better, exercising more, or reducing our energy consumption. Many of us would also like to manage our time more effectively, by spending less time randomly Googling, sofa slouching or looking out the window. How can we design new technologies to help people change their behaviour? Nudging methods, derived from behavioural economics and social psychology, have become increasingly popular. But how effective are they and can technology be designed to exploit them? In this talk, Yvonne will describe our investigations into how decision environments can be restructured in innovative ways, using pervasive, ambient and wearable technologies to nudge behaviour in ways that are desirable to the individual. Our goal is to help people make better-informed decisions in situ. Underlying all of this, however, is the nagging question of whether it is ethical, desirable or sustainable to be nudging people in a desired direction. Or, is it a case of technological fudging, where we may be covering over deeper problems?

Yvonne's research interests are in the areas of ubiquitous computing, interaction design and human-computer interaction. A central theme is how to design interactive technologies that can enhance life by augmenting and extending everyday, learning and work activities. This involves informing, building and evaluating novel user experiences through creating and assembling a diversity of pervasive technologies. Yvonne has been awarded a prestigious EPSRC dream fellowship and is currently (until June 2012) rethinking the relationship between ageing, computing and creativity. Yvonne is also visiting Professor at the Open University, Indiana University, and Sussex University, and has spent sabbaticals at Stanford, Apple, Queensland University, and UCSD. Central to her work is a critical stance towards how visions, theories and frameworks shape the fields of HCI, cognitive science and Ubicomp. She has been instrumental in promulgating new theories (e.g. external cognition), alternative methodologies (e.g. in the wild studies) and far-reaching research agendas (e.g. "Being Human: HCI in 2020 manifesto).

Wednesday 14 September 2013

View the recording here

The principles of information processing in the brain are still far from understood. But progress in computer technology means that we can now realistically contemplate building computer models of the brain that can be used to probe these principles much more readily than is feasible, or ethical, with a living biological brain. What might these models tell us about brain function, and what might we learn that can then be applied to building more efficient, fault-tolerant, parallel computers?

Wednesday 21 March 2012

Download the slides here

Shari Lawrence Pfleeger is Director of Research for the Institute for Information Infrastructure Protection at Dartmouth College. She joined the I3P after serving for almost nine years as a senior researcher at the RAND Corporation. Previously, she headed Systems/Software, Inc., a consultancy specializing in software engineering and technology.  She has been a developer and maintainer for real-time, business-critical software systems, a principal scientist at MITRE Corporation's Software Engineering Center, and manager of the measurement program at the Contel Technology Center. She has also held several research and teaching positions at universities world-wide.

Shari is well-known for her work in empirical studies of software engineering and is the author of many books and articles, including Analyzing Computer Security (with Charles P. Pfleeger), Security in Computing (4e, with Charles P. Pfleeger), and Software Engineering: Theory and Practice (4e, with Joanne Atlee). She has been associate editor of IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, associate editor-in-chief of IEEE Software, and she is currently associate editor-in-chief of IEEE Security & Privacy. Shari has been named repeatedly by the Journal of Systems and Software as one of the world's top software engineering researchers..  Shari earned a BA in mathematics from Harpur College, an MA in mathematics from Penn State, an MS in planning from Penn State, a PhD in information technology and engineering from George Mason University, and was awarded a Doctor of Humane Letters by Binghamton University.