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2002 Conferences

• ASIAN'02, the 7th Asian Computing Science Conference, Dec. 4-6, 2002, Hanoi, Vietnam.
  The popular success of the Internet is due in large part to the World Wide Web. The Web was initially designed as a system for the storage and retrieval of distributed data.
  We are witnessing an evolution of the services supported by the Global Network. More and more, applications run over the net will consist in complex data search and retrieval (electronic commerce...), and high performance computing tasks, for the Laboratory user (physics, biology, ...), the Industrial user (aeronautics, pharmaceutics, ...) as well as for the end user (weather services, stock market, ... ).
  For the middleware and application developers, Internet is now more and more seen as a programming environment for data mining, data processing, cooperative work etc. This has lead to "Internet Computing", a fast growing scientific area, encompassing distributed computing and networking.
  Together with the associated concepts of Grids and Peer-to-Peer exchanges, Internet Computing is the source of several scientific and technological challenges. Among those: the efficient and fair sharing of the globalized resources, and the total yet transparent security of exchanges of data.

2002 Tutorials

• Internet Performance — An introduction to Performance evaluation with application to communication networks, by: Prof. Alain Jean-Marie, University of Montpellier 2, France.
  Monday december 2nd, 2002, 9:00 – 17:00, Asian Institue of Technology
  Registration Fee: 3,000 THB
  Registration Deadline : November 20th, 2002
  Enquiries: Patcharee Basu ,+66 2524 6619
  This tutorial is an introduction to the field of Performance Evaluation, with applications to problems concerning the Quality of Service in the Internet, and communication networks in general. The tutorial will first review the basic mathematical tools and results used in the modeling of telecommunication systems: stochastic processes, Markov Chains, and the theory of queues. Then, as illustrations and applications, we will detail models of several algorithms or protocols used in networks: routing algorithms; flow control mechanisms, including TCP; mechanisms for service differentiation, including IntServ and DiffServ.
  Tentative list of topics:
  
  • Introduction: methodology of performance evaluation in networks
  • The basics of random processes
  • Markov chains
  • The theory of queues: description, measures of performance, general properties
  • Stochastic models of network traffic
  • Application 1: capacity and route planning in networks
  • Application 2: estimating loss probabilities in networks
  • Application 3: analysis of the differential service in the Internet
  • Application 4: analysis of flow control mechanisms in networks
  • Application 5: calculation of performance guarantees with the Network Calculus
  About the Speaker:
  Alain Jean-Marie received the Maîtrise Es-Sciences in Mathematics, and the Doctorat de 3e cycle, from the University of Paris XI at Orsay, in 1985 and 1987 respectively. During 1988 – 89, he was a Post-Doctoral fellow at the University of Maryland. From 1987 to 1999, he has been a member of the performance evaluation group at INRIA, Sophia Antipolis, France. He is now professor at the University of Montpellier, France. His research interests include modeling and performance evaluation for real-time systems and communication networks, control theory, analysis of algorithms and parallel computing.

2002 Seminars

• Development of Information and Communication Technology Curricula: Some Experience, by Professor Finn Arve Aagesen, Department of Telematics, Norwegian University of Science and Technology.
  Friday Nov. 15, 2002, 10:00 – 11:00, CSIM #209
  Information and Communication Technology (ICT) has emerged as a new technological area and a new field of study as a result of the convergence of computer and communications technologies. Many universities including the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) have started re-organizing their existing traditional related departments in order to accommodate this new field of study. Traditional departments that could contribute to this new field include communications engineering, computer science/engineering, electronics engineering and mathematics. This presentation will explain how NTNU has re-organized its faculty and department structure as well as how it has developed and improved its ICT curriculum during the last three years. Details of courses will also be given.
• WebVigil: A Rule-Based Approach to Change Detection in Web Environments,by: Prof. Sharma Chakravarthy, Computer Science and Engineering Department, the University of Texas at Arlington, Arlington, USA.
  Friday, 2 August 2002, 11:00-12:00, CSIM #209
  Active capability introduces a new paradigm for situation monitoring be it for inventory control, intelligent push, E-Commerce, or for event-driven distributed applications. Over the last several years there has been a lot of work in developing event specification languages and event detection algorithms (both centralized and distributed), incorporating active capability using several different approaches, and the development of design and visualization tools.
  In this project, we apply the ECA paradigm for change detection in large network-centric environments. This project investigates timely detection and propagation of changes to arbitrary documents. Details of specification and the architecture will be described in detail. The use of ECA rules and the reuse of components developed in the Sentinel project will be highlighted.
  Finally, we discuss change detection to XML and html documents and the use of remote and local wrappers. We will highlight other projects being carried out.
• Computational Grids: New Challenges for Distributed Computing, by Prof. Yakup Paker, Department of Computer Science, Queen Mary, University of London.
  Friday, March 8, 2002, 13:00-14:00, CSIM #209
  Clustering of a wide variety of geographically distributed resources, such as supercomputers, storage systems, data sources, special facilities, etc., as a unified resource has led to the concept of "Computational Grids". This is analogous to the electrical power grid that provides power to consumers by simple electrical connections, irrespective where the power generators are located or their type. The computational grid technology thus attempts to provide users transparent access to the entire set of resources connected. Thus the computational grid needs to cope with aspects such as authentication, name space, resource management, scheduling, accounting, etc. At the same time, a number of problems in modern distributed computing are being addressed under the area broadly referred as peer-to-peer computing. Under this heading a wide range of technologies are developed to increase the utilisation of information, bandwidth and computing resources in the Internet. This lecture investigates the type of problems posed by the computational grids and to what extend those overlap with or differ from the concerns of peer-to-peer distributed computing.
• ICANN: A Bird's Eye View, by M. Stuart Lynn, ICANN President and CEO.
  Thursday March 7, 2002, 13:00-14:30, Bender Auditorium
  The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) is a small, not-for-profit company which was formed to assume responsibility for the IP address space allocation, protocol parameter assignment, domain name system anagement, and root server system management functions previously performed under U.S. Government contract by IANA and other entities.
  Stuart Lynn will talk about his experience as being the President and CEO of an organization which was formed by a bottom-up process with global participation.
• Eiffel: state of the art and current developments, by Prof. Bertrand Meyer, ETH (Zürich) and ISE (Santa Barbara).
  Monday 4 February 2002, 13:30-15:00, Milton Bender Auditorium, ITServ and Extension Buidling.
  Eiffel is a method and language for object-oriented software development, supported by numerous libraries and several development environments such as ISE Eiffel. This presentation will describe the state of applications of Eiffel in industry and academia, describe the concepts of Eiffel, in particular the method of "Design by Contract" which is central to the approach, present the development environment, and describe recent developments in Eiffel technology.
  Bertrand Meyer is Professor of Software Engineering at ETH Zürich (the Siwss Federal Institute of Technology) and scientific advisor and co-founder of ISE, the originator of Eiffel. He is the author of several well-known books on software engineering and object technology, in particular "Object-Oriented Software Construction, 2nd edition" (1998 Jolt Award), "Eiffel: The Language", "Object Success" and "Introduction to the Theory of Programming Languages".
• An Invitation to Computational Topology and Curve Reconstruction, by Dr. Sumanta Guha, Associate Professor, Electrical Engineering & Computer Science Dept., University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, Milwaukee, USA.
  Wednesday 16 January 2002, 9:00, CSIM #209
  This is a two-part talk. In the first part I will present results of work done in the emerging field of computational topology. We analyze the structure of complexes (objects that have a triangulation) in the real world R^3 and give algorithms to determine certain properties of these objects that remain invariant under "homotopic" transformation. A homotopy is essentially a "plastic" transformation. Eg., the letter "a" is homotopic to the letter "o" - one can be "squeezed" into the other. The topological property that their shapes share is having one "tunnel" through them. Similarly, "B" is homotopic to "8". We give algorithms to compute the number of tunnels through and voids inside a 3D-complex - quantities, called Betti numbers, that remain unchanged by plastic transformation. The talk, including many visual examples, is intended to convey to a general CS audience the flavor of an interesting new discipline that studies shape and geometry.
  The second part of the talk is of a more applied nature and based upon on-going work. The problem we deal with is the following: given a sample of points from some unknown curve attempt to reconstruct the original curve. This problem, as well as its twin problem of surface reconstruction (reconstruct an unknown surface from a sample of points), has many practical applications - in domains such as medical imaging and terrain analysis where sample data is obtained from a digitized scanner. Both the curve and surface reconstruction problems have been of great recent interest in the computational geometry community and a set of algorithms has developed, all based on Delaunay triangulation. We propose a new paradigm to reconstruct curves based on bounding curvature and detecting monotone pieces. Our method is computationally more efficient than Delaunay-based methods and preliminary implementations indicate comparable output. The paradigm potentially extends to surface reconstruction. In the talk I will try to show the main underlying ideas and implementation methodology.

  Contact us: Olivier Nicole

  Last update: Jan 2004