Distinguished Lecture Series
2017-2018 Speakers

Concurrent Disjoint Set Union

Thursday, October 12, 2017

Abstract:
The disjoint set union problem is a classical problem in data structures with a simple and efficient sequential solution that has a notoriously complicated analysis. In certain applications the problem instances can be very large, raising the question of whether concurrency can produce significant speedups. My talk explores this question. I shall describe concurrent versions of standard sequential algorithms that use single and double compare-and-swap primitives for synchronization, making them wait-free. The concurrent algorithms have work bounds that grow logarithmically with the number of processors, suggesting the possibility of significant speedup in practice. These results are part of ongoing joint work with Siddhartha Jayanti, a graduate student at M.I.T. previously at Princeton.

Bio:
Dr. Tarjan has been a Chaired Professor at Princeton since 1985, having previously held academic positions at Cornell, Berkeley, Stanford and NYU. He has held industrial research positions at Bell Labs, NEC, HP, Microsoft and Intertrust Technologies. He received the Nevanlina Prize in Informatics, given by the International Mathematical Union (IMU), in 1982, and the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) A.M. Turing Award in 1986. He is a member of the U.S. National Academy of Science (NAS), the U. S. National Academy of Engineering (NAE), a Fellow of the American Philosophical Society (APS) and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (AAAS). Dr. Tarjan has published more than 250 papers, mostly in the areas of the design and analysis of data structures and graph and network algorithms.

Ubiquitous Computing Approaches to Personalized Healthcare

Tuesday, November 21, 2017

Bio:
Dr. Mynatt is the Executive Director of Georgia Tech’s Institute for People and Technology (IPaT), a College of Computing Professor and the Director of the Everyday Computing Lab at Georgia Tech. She investigates the design and evaluation of health information technologies, including creating personalized mobile technology. She is also one of the principal researchers in the Aware Home Research Initiative. She has been recognized as an ACM Fellow, a member of the SIGCHI Academy, and a Sloan and Kavli research fellow. She has published more than 100 scientific papers and chaired the CHI 2010 conference, the premier international conference in human-computer interaction. Prior to joining the Georgia Tech faculty in 1998, Dr. Mynatt was a member of the research staff at Xerox PARC.

One Map To Rule Them All?

Thursday, January 18, 2018

Abstract:
Knowing where you are fo*r *ever, irrespective of weather and lighting remains an intriguing challenge for vision based robotics systems. Without doubt such system is invaluable for long term autonomy which is valuable to us.

In this talk I’ll describe an ongoing thread of work to produce metric and large scale visual localisers that are

a) data efficient
b) robust

to really quite extraordinary scene change. Our goal is to have a minimal visual impression of every place and always, whatever the weather, whatever the time of day, be able to localise relative to it metrically (and then drive relative to it). This challenge beyond goes far beyond an obvious substantive systems deployment and development, it is a big data problem that needs us to address problems of spatial representation, visual encoding, loop closing, temporal adaptation, robust registration and lighting and seasonal invariance.

Bio:
Paul Newman is the BP Professor of Information Engineering at the University of Oxford. He is Director of the Oxford Robotics Institute within the Department of Engineering Science. The ORI enjoys a world-leading reputation in mobile autonomy – developing machines which roll, walk, poke, swim and fly, in the real world. His focus lies on pushing the boundaries of navigation and autonomy techniques in terms of both endurance and scale. In 2014, he founded Oxbotica – a spinout company focused on Robotics and Autonomous Systems. He was elected fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering and the IEEE with a citation for outstanding contributions to robot navigation.