Department Events


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Monday, December 10, 2012, 4:30 PM - 5:30 PM
CS Department Colloquium Series
Computer Science Small Auditorium (Room 105)
Host: Thomas Funkhouser
What makes Big Visual Data hard?
Alexei (Alyosha) Efros, Carnegie Mellon University
[view abstract].

Friday, December 7, 2012, 12:00 PM - 1:30 PM
Talk
Computer Science 302
Host: Michael Freedman
Making the Mobile Web Fast
Matt Welsh, Google Inc.
[view abstract].

Wednesday, December 5, 2012, 12:30 PM - 1:30 PM
Talk
Computer Science 302
ASPEN: Seamless Declarative Programming across Sensors, Streams, and the Cloud
Zachary Ives, University of Pennsylvania
[view abstract].

Friday, November 30, 2012, 3:30 PM - 4:30 PM
CS Department Colloquium Series
Computer Science Small Auditorium (Room 105)
Host: Rebecca Fiebrink
CANCLED: Information Extraction from Music Audio
Juan Bello, New York University
[view abstract].

Thursday, November 29, 2012, 4:30 PM - 5:30 PM
Distinguished Colloquium Series Speaker
Computer Science Small Auditorium (Room 105)
Host: Mark Braverman
Algorithms, Graph Theory, and the Solution of Laplacian Linear Equations
Dan Spielman, Yale University
[view abstract].

Monday, November 26, 2012, 4:30 PM - 5:30 PM
Talk
Computer Science 402
Software-based Services for Cloud Networks
Anees Shaikh, IBM Research
[view abstract].

Monday, November 19, 2012, 4:30 PM - 5:30 PM
Distinguished Colloquium Series Speaker
Computer Science Small Auditorium (Room 105)
Host: Sanjeev Arora (Hosted by CS and PACM)
How to Design Simple Efficient Mechanisms that are also Composable
Eva Tardos, Cornell University
[view abstract].

Friday, November 16, 2012, 1:00 PM - 3:00 PM
Undergrad Event
Friend Center Convocation Room
Explore Engineering
Undergrads, not sure what to major in? Trying to pick spring classes? The School of Engineering and Applied Sciences is hosting Explore Engineering. Learn about the academic department and certificate options. Meet current students and faculty. Enjoy free pizza and refreshments.

Tuesday, November 13, 2012, 4:30 PM - 5:30 PM
Distinguished Colloquium Series Speaker
Computer Science Small Auditorium (Room 105)
Host: Michael Freedman
What are the Right Roles for Formal Methods in High Assurance Cloud Computing?
Ken Birman, Cornell University
[view abstract].

Monday, November 12, 2012, 10:00 AM - 11:00 AM
Talk
Computer Science 402
Host: Jennifer Rexford
Broadband Internet Performance: A View From the Gateway
Renata Teixeira, University of Paris (LIP6)
[view abstract].

Thursday, November 8, 2012, 3:30 PM - 4:30 PM
CITP Event
Sherrerd Hall 101
Election 2012: What Does It Mean for the Internet?
Gigi B. Sohn, President & CEO of Public Knowledge

The result of the 2012 election are in, and the millions of people who signed petitions, called Congressional offices and otherwise protested SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) and PIPA (Protect IP Act) want to know: What does it mean for the Internet? Gigi Sohn, President and CEO of the public interest organization Public Knowledge, will talk about what technology policy issues the next President and Congress will focus on over the next term. She will also discuss a number of critical technology policy cases now in the federal courts that could have a great impact on whether the Internet stays open and free. These issues include: copyright enforcement, copyright reform, broadband competition, network neutrality, data caps and the future of the first sale doctrine. She will also discuss the changing role of government in protecting Internet users.

Wednesday, November 7, 2012, 4:30 PM - 5:30 PM
CS Department Colloquium Series
Computer Science Small Auditorium (Room 105)
Host: Rebecca Fiebrink
"To the first machine that can appreciate the gesture:" Nicholas Negroponte and the MIT Architecture Machine Group
Molly Steenson, Assistant Professor, School of Journalism & Mass Communication, University of Wisconsin-Madison PhD
[view abstract].

Thursday, November 1, 2012, 1:30 PM - 5:00 PM
CITP Event
streaming online at
E-Voting: Risk and Opportunity
The Center for Information Technology Policy at Princeton is pleased to host “E-Voting: Risk and Opportunity,” a live streamed symposium on the state and future of voting technology. At 1:30pm (Eastern) on November 1, 2012, electronic voting experts from across the United States will discuss what to expect on Election Day, how we might build a secure, convenient, high-tech voting system of the future, and what policymakers should be doing. The current U.S. e-voting system is a patchwork of locally implemented technologies and procedures — with varying degrees of reliability, usability, and security. Different groups have advocated for improved systems, better standards, and new approaches like internet-based voting. Panelists will discuss these issues and more, with a keynote by Professor Ron Rivest, one of the pioneers of modern cryptography. You can watch the event streamed live at https://citp.princeton.edu, or view the recording after the event.

Hashtag: ask questions and add comments via Twitter at #PrincetonEvoting


Friday, October 26, 2012, 3:30 PM - 4:30 PM
CS Department Colloquium Series
Computer Science Small Auditorium (Room 105)
Host: Michael Freedman
Making proof-based verified computation almost practical
Michael Walfish, The University of Texas at Austin
[view abstract].

Thursday, October 18, 2012, 4:30 PM - 5:30 PM
Grad Event
Computer Science Small Auditorium (Room 105)
Evolution of Software Architecture at Facebook
Sanjeev Kumar*02, Facebook

Over the years, the software architecture at Facebook has been built to not only scale efficiently but also to support the different needs of a large number of new products. In this talk, I will discuss the overall software architecture and illustrate its evolution using a few case studies.

Sanjeev Kumar is an Engineering Manager at Facebook Inc. where he focuses on a variety of infrastructure projects including multi-datacenter architecture, BLOB storage (for photos and videos), fault tolerance, and power management. Prior to Facebook, Sanjeev was a Senior Staff Researcher at Intel Corp. where he investigated software, hardware, and applications for many-core architectures. Sanjeev holds a Ph.D. from Princeton University, a M.S. from Indiana University, and a B.Tech from Indian Institute of Technology, Chennai (all in Computer Science).


Friday, October 12, 2012, 3:30 PM - 4:30 PM
CS Department Colloquium Series
Computer Science Small Auditorium (Room 105)
Host: Michael Freedman
Full Duplex Wireless
Phil Levis, Stanford University
[view abstract].

Thursday, October 11, 2012, 4:30 PM - 5:30 PM
CS Department Colloquium Series
Computer Science Small Auditorium (Room 105)
Host: Adam Finkelstein
The Power of Examples
Scott Klemmer, Stanford University
[view abstract].

Wednesday, October 10, 2012, 12:30 PM - 1:30 PM
Talk
Computer Science 402
Tractable market making in combinatorial prediction markets
Miroslav Dudik*07, Microsoft Research New York City
[view abstract].

Wednesday, October 3, 2012, 4:30 PM - 5:30 PM
CS Department Colloquium Series
Computer Science Small Auditorium (Room 105)
Host: Margaret Martonosi
When GPUs meet CPUs: opportunities, challenges and solutions in heterogeneous architectures
Hyesoon Kim, Georgia Institute of Technology
[view abstract].

Thursday, September 27, 2012, 5:30 PM - 6:30 PM
Talk
Computer Science Tea Room
Jane Street Tech Talk: NILE [view abstract].

Tuesday, September 25, 2012, 6:00 PM - 7:30 PM
Undergrad Event
Computer Science Small Auditorium (Room 105)
Facebook Tech Talk: Rewriting the Facebook App for iphone
Adam Ernst'10, Facebook

The Facebook app for iPhone is one of the most downloaded apps on iTunes. It was also didn't perform to many of our users expectations.

Join Software Engineer Adam Ernst (Princeton '10) and learn how we completely rewrote the Facebook mobile app to radically improve performance and reliability. Get an inside look at the Facebook development culture and practices and the tradeoffs we faced.

Please RSVP on our Facebook event page so we know to expect you and how much food to order.

Internships and full time positions in software engineering are currently posted with Michele Brown so please apply accordingly.


Please see this link for more information.


Tuesday, September 25, 2012, 12:00 PM - 1:30 AM
Talk
Computer Science 302
Host: Margaret Martonosi
Virtualization Management and Data Center Monitoring for Energy-efficient Clouds
Canturk Isci, IBM Research
[view abstract].

Monday, September 24, 2012, 12:00 PM - 1:30 PM
Talk
Computer Science 302
Host: Jennifer Rexford
A Library-based Network Operating System for the Cloud
Dr. Anil Madhavapeddy, University of Cambridge
[view abstract].

Wednesday, August 22, 2012, 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Talk
Carl Icahn Lab, 208
Host: Olga Troyanskaya
Bug Bytes: Bioinformatics for Metagenomics and Microbial Community Analysis
Curtis Huttenhower*08, Harvard University
[view abstract].

Tuesday, May 29, 2012, 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Talk
Computer Science 402
Host: Jennifer Rexford
The FloodLight OpenFlow Controller
Mike Cohen, BigSwitch Networks
[view abstract].

Thursday, May 17, 2012, 4:30 PM - 5:30 PM
CS Department Colloquium Series
Computer Science Small Auditorium (Room 105)
Host: Jennifer Rexford
Security and Privacy for the Smart Grid
Carl A. Gunter, University of Illinois
[view abstract].

Tuesday, May 15, 2012, 4:30 PM - 5:30 PM
CS Department Colloquium Series
Friend Center 008
Host: David Blei
Mapping connectomes with crowd and machine intelligence
Sebastian Seung, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
[view abstract].

Friday, May 11, 2012, 10:00 AM - 5:30 PM
CITP Event
Friend Center Convocation Room
CITP Conference: Patent Success or Failure? The America Invents Act and Beyond
On September 16, 2011, President Obama signed the Leahy-Smith America Invents Act (AIA), the most significant change to the US Patent system since the Patent Act of 1952. The result of years of efforts to revise and reform the laws governing patent practice in the US, many consider the AIA to be a success. However, the AIA is not without its critics. “Patent Success or Failure?” will bring together government officials, judges, lawyers, and academics to consider the effects of the AIA on the patent landscape.

Registration required


Please see this link for more information.


Monday, May 7, 2012, 1:30 AM - 2:30 AM
CS Department Colloquium Series
Computer Science Small Auditorium (Room 105)
Host: Michael Freedman
Finding Malware on a Web Scale
Ben Livshits, Microsoft Research
[view abstract].

Tuesday, May 1, 2012, 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Talk
Computer Science 402
Host: Jennifer Rexford
Scalable Label Assignment in Data Center Networks
Meg Walraed-Sullivan, University of California, San Diego
[view abstract].

Thursday, April 19, 2012, 4:30 PM - 5:30 PM
Talk
Engineering Quadrangle B205
Will The Global Village Fracture into Tribes: The Impact of Recommender Systems on Consumers
Kartik Hosanagar, The Wharton School
[view abstract].

Wednesday, April 11, 2012, 4:30 PM - 5:30 PM
Talk
Computer Science Small Auditorium (Room 105)
Host: Jennifer Rexford
Network Virtualization for Large Data Centers and Enterprises
Dr. Changhoon Kim, Microsoft Azure
[view abstract].

Wednesday, April 4, 2012, 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Talk
Computer Science 302
Host: Jennifer Rexford
From Theory to Practice in Wireless Multimedia Delivery
Amitabh Ghosh, Princeton University
[view abstract].

Monday, April 2, 2012, 12:30 PM - 1:20 PM
Talk
Computer Science 302
Host: Jennifer Rexford
Improving network agility with seamless BGP reconfigurations
Laurent Vanbever, UCL (Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium)
[view abstract].

Monday, April 2, 2012, 12:30 PM - 1:20 PM
Talk
Computer Science 302
Host: Jennifer Rexford
The Bloom Paradox: When not to Use a Bloom Filter?
Ori Rottenstreich, Technion
[view abstract].

Friday, March 30, 2012, 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Talk
Computer Science Small Auditorium (Room 105)
Host: Jennifer Rexford
Smarter Energy: The Promise of Cyber-Physical Systems
Shivkumar Kalyanaraman, IBM Research
[view abstract].

Wednesday, March 28, 2012, 12:30 PM - 1:30 PM
Talk
Sherrerd Hall 306
Host: Jennifer Rexford
Symantec's WINE System for Repeatable, Data-Intensive Experiments in Cyber Security
Tudor Dumitras, Symantec
[view abstract].

Tuesday, March 27, 2012, 4:30 PM - 5:30 PM
CS Department Colloquium Series
Computer Science Small Auditorium (Room 105)
Host: Sanjeev Arora
Certifiable Quantum Dice
Umesh Vazirani, University of California, Berkeley
[view abstract].

Monday, March 26, 2012, 4:30 PM - 5:30 PM
CS Department Colloquium Series
Computer Science Small Auditorium (Room 105)
Host: Jennifer Rexford
Embracing Interference in Wireless Systems
Shyamnath Gollakota, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
[view abstract].

Friday, March 16, 2012, 12:00 PM - 1:00 PM
Talk
Green Hall 0-S-6
The Computational Challenges of Connectomics
Sebastian Seung, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
[view abstract].

Wednesday, March 14, 2012, 4:30 PM - 5:30 PM
CS Department Colloquium Series
Computer Science Small Auditorium (Room 105)
Host: Adam Finkelstein
Modeling People from Billions of Photos
Ira Kemelmacher-Shlizerman, University of Washington
[view abstract].

Tuesday, March 13, 2012, 1:00 PM - 3:00 PM
CITP Event
Friend Center Convocation Room
Copyright Cat-and-Mouse: New Developments in Online Enforcement
Copyright enforcement in the digital era has been an ongoing game of cat-and-mouse. As new technologies emerge for storing and transmitting creative works, content creators struggle to identify the best response. The content industry has employed different tactics over time — including technological copy protection, litigation against infringers, and collaboration with Internet Service Providers (ISPs). In August of 2011, some members of the content industry signed an historic Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with some of the largest ISPs, agreeing to a “graduated response” system of policing. ISPs agreed to notify their subscribers if allegedly infringing activity was detected from their connection and, if infringement continued after multiple warnings, to impede access. Meanwhile, a wave of “copyright troll” litigation has continued to sweep the country and burden the courts. Use of takedown notices under the Digital Millenium Copyright Act has continued to evolve. This event will examine enforcement efforts to date, and debate the merits of the new private approach embodied in the MOU framework. It will feature discussions between members of the content industry, internet service providers, web companies, and academics.

For more information and to register: https://citp.princeton.edu/event/copyright-cat-and-mouse/


Monday, March 12, 2012, 4:30 PM - 5:30 PM
CS Department Colloquium Series
Computer Science Small Auditorium (Room 105)
Host: David Walker
Software Testing and Verification with Grammatical Inference
Domagoj Babic, University of California, Berkeley
[view abstract].

Thursday, March 8, 2012, 4:30 PM - 5:30 PM
CS Department Colloquium Series
Computer Science Small Auditorium (Room 105)
Data Privacy Technologies: From Alchemy to an Engineering Discipline
Arvind Narayanan, Stanford University
[view abstract].

Thursday, March 8, 2012, 12:30 PM - 1:30 PM
CITP Event
Sherrerd Hall 306
An Informeation Approach to Trademarks
Deven Desai, Google, Inc.

What if trademark law applied and used information theory as a guide? Trademark law invokes information and search costs to explain its structure and normative outcomes. In this view trademarks are vessels of information, create information marketplaces, and even exhibit signal and noise characteristics. This talk applies Shannon’s view of information to analyze trademark law’s conception of information, challenge some presumptions of trademark law, and explore what trademark law can learn from an information based account of trademarks.

Deven Desai is a law professor and currently on leave. While on leave, he is serving as Academic Research Counsel at Google, Inc. As a law professor, he teaches trademark, intellectual property theory, and information privacy law. He was also a Visiting Fellow at Princeton University’s Center for Information Technology Policy. Professor Desai’s scholarship examines how business interests and economic theories shape privacy and intellectual property law and where those arguments explain productivity or where they fail to capture society’s interest in the free flow of information and development.

His articles include From Trademarks to Brands, Florida Law Review (2012) (forthcoming); The Life and Death of Copyright 2011 Wisc. Law Review 220 (2011); Brands, Competition, and the Law 2010 BYU Law Review 1425 (2010) (Spencer Waller co-author); Privacy? Property?: Reflections on the Implications of a Post-Human World 18 Kansas J. of Law & Public Policy (2009); Property, Persona, and Preservation, 81 Temple Law Review 67 (2008); and Confronting the Genericism Conundrum, 28 Cardozo Law Review 789 (2007) (Sandra L. Rierson, co-author).


Please see this link for more information.


Wednesday, March 7, 2012, 1:00 PM - 2:00 PM
Talk
Computer Science 302
Host: Michael Freedman
Using Static Analysis to Diagnose Misconfigured Open Source Systems Software
Ariel Rabkin, University of California, Berkeley
[view abstract].

Tuesday, March 6, 2012, 4:30 PM - 5:30 PM
CS Department Colloquium Series
Computer Science Small Auditorium (Room 105)
Computational approaches for the DNA sequencing data deluge
Ben Langmead, University of Maryland College Park
[view abstract].

Wednesday, February 29, 2012, 9:00 AM - 6:00 PM
Grad Event
(location TBD)
PhD Visit Day
Wednesday
Welcome Dinner 6:00pm Carl Fields Center

Thursday
Breakfast 8:30am CS Tea Room
Scheduled meetings with faculty and current grad students
Departmental Tea 4:00pm


Tuesday, February 28, 2012, 4:30 PM - 5:30 PM
CS Department Colloquium Series
Computer Science Small Auditorium (Room 105)
Host: Robert Schapire
Computation meets Statistics: Trade-offs and fundamental limits
Alekh Agarwal, University of California, Berkeley
[view abstract].

Wednesday, February 22, 2012, 4:30 PM - 5:30 PM
CS Department Colloquium Series
Computer Science Small Auditorium (Room 105)
Host: Rebecca Fiebrink
Crowd-Powered Systems
Michael Bernstein, MIT
[view abstract].

Tuesday, February 21, 2012, 4:30 PM - 5:30 PM
CS Department Colloquium Series
Computer Science Small Auditorium (Room 105)
Host: David Blei
Machine Learning: Higher, Faster, Stronger
Ohad Shamir, Microsoft Research New England
[view abstract].

Thursday, February 9, 2012, 4:30 PM - 6:00 PM
CITP Event
Sherrerd Hall 101
Establishing New Foundations for Cyber Security
Richard Linderman, Air Force Research Laboratory

A lecture by Dr. Richard Linderman, Chief Scientist, Information Directorate, Air Force Research Laboratory, Rome, N.Y ( full biography)

The mission of the US Air Force (AF) is to fly, fight and win in air, space and cyberspace. AF missions are integrated with and enabled by the interdependent network of information technology (IT) infrastructures, including the internet and telecommunication systems, known as cyberspace. With global cyber threat activity growing at an alarming rate, the creation of cyber-based foundational elements are required to form an agile, resilient, trusted, persistent yet affordable cyber infrastructure that can operate in the presence of threats while providing the AF assurance it requires to successfully complete its missions to defend and protect this nation.

Topics will include:

  1. Strategic capabilities that develop roots of trust in the cyber infrastructure. Mitigation of supply chain intervention, trust for applications, functions and missions and development of mathematically proven techniques to represent missions, applications and infrastructure for provably correct mission characterizations in contested environments.
  2. Creating of the next-generation AF cyber warrior. Selection, education, training, and augmentation, and visualization of cyberspace for superior performance of AF cyber warriors.
  3. Development of an affordable, resilient, agile, trusted architectures from a mix of government and commercial components that can avoid, fight through and recover from cyber attacks.
  4. Technology for assuring AF missions while cyber threats are avoided, identified, contained or defeated providing AF mission awareness, integrated full spectrum operations and Command, Control and Decision support.


    Please see this link for more information.


Wednesday, February 8, 2012, 4:30 PM - 5:30 PM
CS Department Colloquium Series
Computer Science Small Auditorium (Room 105)
Host: Moses Charikar
Porting the Computer Science Toolbox to Game Theory and Economics
Tim Roughgarden, Stanford University
[view abstract].

Tuesday, February 7, 2012, 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Talk
Computer Science 302
Host: Jennifer Rexford
Continuous Distributed Counting for Non-monotonic Streams
Zhenming Liu, Harvard University
[view abstract].

Wednesday, January 18, 2012, 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Talk
Computer Science 302
Host: Jennifer Rexford
A Case for a Global Information Network
Yan Shvartzshnaider, NICTA
[view abstract].