Voices in the Valley

Microsoft Research Silicon Valley and Search Labs -- Distinguished Speaker Series

 

Robbert VanRenesse, May 19th 2008

Bruce Croft, June 9th 2008

Michael Stonebraker

 

 

Practical Information

2007 Speakers

Series Coordinators

2008

Robbert Van Renesse

Co-founder and Technical advisor, FAST Enterprise Search

Principal Research Scientist, CS dept, Cornell University

 

Talk date: May 19th 2008, 3:00pm

Talk title: Building scalable and fault-tolerant enterprise search platforms

 

Talk abstract:  Enterprise search has become a critical part of an organization's infrastructure.  At large organizations, documents are generated at a high rate and have to be available for search within seconds.  High availability and high performance for search are both essential, while the use of specialized hardware should be avoided.  In this talk I will cover some of the distribution and replication techniques that we have developed in order to meet the difficult requirements.

 

Joint work with Fred B. Schneider, Johannes Gehrke, and Dag Johansen

 

rvr-small.jpg Dr. Robbert van Renesse is a Principal Research Scientist at the Department of Computer Science.  He received his Ph.D. from the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam in 1989 where he developed the Amoeba Distributed Operating System.  Subsequently he worked on the Plan 9 operating system at AT&T Bell Laboratories.  Since joining Cornell in 1991 he has worked on fault-tolerant distributed systems.  He co-founded D.A.G. Labs that was acquired by FAST, and Reliable Network Solutions whose technology was acquired by Amazon.com.  Other companies that use technology developed by Van Renesse include Microsoft, IBM, and Stratus.

 

FAST is a global provider of enterprise search technologies.  FAST's solutions are used by more than 2,600 global customers and partners, including America Online, Dell, IBM, Reuters, and the US Army.  FAST is headquartered in Norway.  The FAST Group operates globally with presence in Europe, the United States, Asia Pacific, Australia, South America, and the Middle East. For further information about FAST, please visit www.fastsearch.com.

Bruce Croft

Distinguished Professor, University of Massachusetts Amherst

Director of the Center for Intelligent Information Retrieval

 

Talk date: June 9th 2008, 3:00pm

Talk title: Longer Queries, Better Answers?

 

Talk Abstract: Web search engines produce effective rankings for queries consisting of a small number of keywords, within the accepted limitations of what it means for a Web page to be “relevant” to a query.  On the other hand, people are perfectly capable of describing what they are looking for more precisely with a longer query. The problem is that we currently don’t know what to do with these longer queries, unless they happen to be a “factoid” query of the type used in question answering systems. Even in TREC evaluations, where query response times are not an issue, long queries generally are less effective than short queries. In this talk, I will review the approaches that have been taken with longer queries, and present two pieces of our research related to this issue; generating keyword queries from long queries and finding answers in a community-based question and answer archive.

 

 

croft_thumb.jpg W. Bruce Croft is a Distinguished Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, which he joined in 1979. In 1992, he became the Director of the Center for Intelligent Information Retrieval (CIIR), which combines basic research with technology transfer to a variety of government and industry partners.  He has published more than 180 articles related to information retrieval. Dr. Croft was elected a Fellow of ACM in 1997, received the Research Award from the American Society for Information Science and Technology in 2000, and received the Gerard Salton Award from the ACM Special Interest Group in Information Retrieval (SIGIR) in 2003.

 

Michael Stonebraker

Adjunct Professor of Computer Science at M.I.T

 

cid:image002.jpg@01C8748C.760631A0 Dr. Michael Stonebraker has been a pioneer of data base research and technology for more than a quarter of a century. He was the main architect of the INGRES relational DBMS, the object-relational DBMS, POSTGRES, and the federated data system, Mariposa. All three prototypes were developed at the University of California at Berkeley where Stonebraker was a Professor of Computer Science for twenty five years. He is the founder of three successful Silicon Valley startups, whose objective was to commercialize these prototypes.

Professor Stonebraker is the author of scores of research papers on data base technology, operating systems and the architecture of system software services. He was awarded the prestigious ACM System Software Award in 1992, for his work on INGRES. Additionally, he was awarded the first annual Innovation award by the ACM SIGMOD special interest group in 1994, and has been recognized by Computer Reseller News as one of the top five software developers of the century. Moreover, Forbes magazine named him one of the 8 innovators driving the Silicon Valley wealth explosion during their 80th anniversary edition in 1998. He was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 1998 and is presently an Adjunct Professor of Computer Science at M.I.T.

 

 

 

Practical Information:

Talks are open to the public.  Events will be held in the Titan conference room in Building 6 on Microsoft’s Silicon Valley Campus (1288 Pear Avenue), and light refreshments will be served. E-mail will be sent to lab members a few weeks before each appearance.

Series Coordinators

Dahlia Malkhi, MSR, mailto:dalia@microsoft.com

Ariel Fuxman, Search Labs, mailto:arielf@microsoft.com

2007 Speakers:

 

Brewster Kahle,

Digital Librarian, Director and Co-Founder, Internet Archive.

Talk date: Tue, March 27th, 2007 (SVC-1/Jupiter, 12:00pm)

Talk title: Universal Access to Human Knowledge (Or Public Access to Digital Materials)

Talk abstract: The goal of universal access to our cultural heritage is within our grasp. With current digital technology we can build comprehensive collections, and with digital networks we can make these available to students and scholars all over the world. The current challenge is establishing the roles, rights, and responsibilities of our libraries and archives in providing public access to this information. With these roles defined, our institutions will help fulfill this epic opportunity of our digital age.

Brewster has built technologies, companies, and institutions to advance the goal of universal access to all knowledge. He currently oversees the non-profit Internet Archive as founder and Digital Librarian, which is now one of the largest digital archives in the world. As a digital archivist, Brewster has been active in technology, business, and law.

Fernando Pereira,

Andrew and Debra Rachleff professor and chairman, Dept. of Computer and Information Science, U Penn

April 11th, 2007

Talk title: Learning to Analyze Sequences.

Talk abstract: Sequential data --- speech, text, genomic sequences --- floods our storage servers. Much useful information in these data is carried by implicit structure: phonemes and prosody in speech, syntactic structure in text, genes and regulatory elements in genomic sequences. Over the last six years, several of us have been investigating structured linear models, a unified discriminative learning approach to sequence analysis problems. I will review the approach and illustrate it with applications to parsing, information extraction, and gene finding. I will conclude with a summary of other applications and current research questions.

Joint work with Axel Bernal, Koby Crammer, John Lafferty, Andrew McCallum, Ryan McDonald, and Fei Sha.

Professor Fernando Pereira is chairman of the department of Computer and Information Science, University of Pennsylvania. He received a Ph.D. in Artificial Intelligence from the University of Edinburgh in 1982. Before joining Penn, he held industrial research and management positions at SRI International, at AT&T Labs, where he led the machine learning and information retrieval research department from September 1995 to April 2000, and at WhizBang Labs, a Web information extraction company. His main research areas are computational linguistics and machine learning, and he is a main contributor to several advances in finite-state models for speech and text processing in everyday industrial use. He has 97 research publications on computational linguistics, speech recognition, machine learning, and logic programming, and several issued and pending patents on speech and language processing, and on human-computer interfaces. He was elected Fellow of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence in 1991 for his contributions to computational linguistics and logic programming, and he is a past president of the Association for Computational Linguistics.

 

 

Noam Nisan,

Professor, School of Engineering and Computer Science, Hebrew University, and Google.

Talk date: July 26th, 2007 – SVC 1/Saturn, 12:00-14:00

Talk title: Algorithmic Mechanism Design

Talk abstract: One of the challenges that the Internet raises is the necessity of designing distributed protocols for settings where the participating computers are owned and operated by different owners with different goals. Over the last decade or so there has been much research that aims to address these issues using ideas taken from the micro-economic field of mechanism design. In this talk I will survey the current state of the field: how mechanism design is applied in computational settings, how far can classical ideas go, and what are the challenges for further research. Among the applications discussed will be combinatorial auctions, cost sharing, scheduling, and routing in networks.

Professor Noam Nisan received his Ph.D. from the University of California, at Berkeley, and is now a Professor of Computer Science in the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He published three books and numerous research papers on algorithms, complexity theory, communication, computerized auctions, and electronic commerce. He has received several professional awards including the ACM 1988 Distinguished Dissertation award for his dissertation "Using Hard Problems to Create Pseudorandom Generators.", and the Michael Bruno award, granted annually by Yad Hanadiv (also known as the Rothschild Foundation) to outstanding Israelis in the field of science and learning, for his research in the field: Electronic markets and auctions and economic mechanisms in computation.

 

Adi Shamir,

Paul and Marlene Borman Professor, Computer Science and Applied Mathematics, Weizmann Institute.

Talk date: Tue August 28th, 2007 (SVC-1/Jupiter, 12:00pm).

Talk title: A Top View of Side Channel Attacks

 

Talk abstract: Side channel attacks are powerful techniques which can bypass the mathematical security of many cryptosystems by observing the physical properties of their implementations. In this talk I will survey some new side channel attacks developed by me and my colleagues during the last couple of years on PC's, smart cards, RFID tags, etc.

 

Professor Adi Shamir obtained his MSc and PhD in Computer Science from the Weizmann Institute in 1975 and 1977 respectively. His thesis was titled, "Fixed Points of Recursive Programs". After a year postdoc at Warwick University, he did research at MIT from 1977–1980 before returning to be a member of the faculty of Mathematics and Computer Science of the Weizmann Institute. He was one of the inventors of the RSA algorithm (along with Ron Rivest and Len Adleman), and has made numerous contributions to the fields of cryptography and computer science.

Shamir is the winner of the 2002 ACM Turing award, jointly with Leonard M. Adleman, Ronald R. Rivest, "For their ingenious contribution for making public-key cryptography useful in practice." Shamir has also received ACM's Kannelakis Award, the Erdős Prize of the Israel Mathematical Society, the IEEE's W.R.G. Baker Prize, the UAP Scientific Prize, The Vatican's PIUS XI Gold Medal and the IEEE Koji Kobayashi Computers and Communications Award.

 

Bruce Maggs,

professor, School of Computer Science, CMU, and Vice President, Research Akamai Technologies.

Approximate talk date: October 23rd, 2007 (SVC-1/Jupiter, 12:00pm).

Talk title: Lessons in Engineering Self-Managed Networks

 

Dr. Bruce Maggs received the S.B., S.M., and Ph.D. degrees in computer science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1985, 1986, and 1989, respectively.  His advisor was Charles Leiserson.  In 1994, he joined Carnegie Mellon, where he is now a Professor in the Computer Science Department.  While on a two-year leave-of-absence from Carnegie Mellon, Maggs helped to launch Akamai Technologies, serving as its Vice President for Research and Development, before returning to Carnegie Mellon.  He retains a part-time role at Akamai as Vice President for Research.  Maggs is spending the 2007-2008 academic year at Duke University.  He has also held visiting faculty positions at M.I.T. and Princeton University.

 

Maggs's research focuses on networks for parallel and distributed computing systems.  In 1986, he became the first winner (with Charles

Leiserson) of the Daniel L. Slotnick Award for Most Original Paper at the International Conference on Parallel Processing, and in 1994 he received an NSF National Young Investigator Award.  He was co-chair of the 1993-1994 DIMACS Special Year on Massively Parallel Computation.

Maggs serves on the ACM Council as a Member-at-Large, and and has served on the steering committees for the ACM Symposium on Parallel Algorithms and Architectures (SPAA) and ACM Internet Measurement Conference (IMC).

 

 

Raj Reddy,

Mozah Bint Nasser professor, School of Computer Science, CMU.

Talk date: Dec 3rd, 2007 (SVC-6/Titan, 12:00pm).

      Talk Title: Global Access to Information: Research Issues in Data Mining and Text Mining

 

Talk Abstract:  In this talk we will present research issues that arise when attempting to provide "Global Access to Information".  To be true to this vision, one must also resolve the problems of Language Divide and Literacy Divide.  Over 80% of the global population is not English-literate and over 20% of the population is functionally illiterate, i.e., they cannot read and understand in any language!  We will use example from Million Book Digital Library project (www.ulib.org <http://e2k4.srv.cs.cmu.edu/exchweb/bin/redir.asp?URL=http://www.ulib.org> ) and from a project in India to provide health information to illiterate people (http://www.aarogyasri.org/ <http://e2k4.srv.cs.cmu.edu/exchweb/bin/redir.asp?URL=http://www.aarogyasri.org/>).  Jaime Carbonell stated, about 10 years ago, that the CMU Language Technology Institute research mission is  "getting the right information, to the right people, at the right  time, on the right  medium, in the right  language and with the right  level of detail".  In spite of major advances in search technologies, we are not close to achieving the information society bill of rights in providing global access to iformation.  This talk will provide a forum for discussion on the research agenda in Data Mining and Text Mining necessary for fulfilling this vision.

 

 

Dr. Raj Reddy began his academic career as an Assistant Professor at Stanford in 1966. He has been a member of the Carnegie Mellon faculty since 1969. He served as the founding Director of the Robotics Institute from 1979 to 1991 and the Dean of School of Computer Science from 1991 to 1999. Dr. Reddy's research interests include the study of human-computer interaction and artificial intelligence. His current research interests include Million Book Digital Library Project; a Multifunction Information Appliance that can be used by the uneducated; Fiber To The Village Project;  Mobile Autonomous Robots;  and Learning by Doing.

He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He was president of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence from 1987 to 89. Dr. Reddy was awarded the Legion of Honor by President Mitterand of France in 1984. He was awarded the ACM Turing Award in 1994, the Okawa Prize in 2004, the Honda Prize in 2005, and the Vannevar Bush Award in 2006. He served as co-chair of the President's Information Technology Advisory Committee (PITAC) from 1999 to 2001 under Presidents Clinton and Bush.