Event

The use of regret and forgiveness

Dr Steve Marsh.

Regret, the emotion arising from counterfactual reasoning about action
and inaction, is a powerful tool in the arsenal of trust-reasoning and
enabling technologies. One aspect of the tool, Regret Management, is the
enforcement of a view of System Trust in technological approaches in
order to preserve and encourage respect for concerns such as data
protection, privacy, and cyber-social interaction. Forgiveness, as a
tool in the broad spectrum of computational trust, helps agents reason
about and rebuild relationships that may have been damaged by some
action, and is particularly useful in areas where, as online, cheap
pseudonyms can exist. This talk will examine regret and forgiveness from
the point of view of agents or devices in connected environments, where
humans are present actors, and show how enforcement of regret management
and forgiveness measures may be efficacious.

Steve Marsh is a Research Scientist in the Network Security Group at in
the Communications Research Centre in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada.

His PhD (University of Stirling, 1994) was a seminal work that
introduced the first formalisation of the phenomenon of trust (the
concept of ‘Computational Trust’), and applied it to Multi Agent
Systems. As a milestone in trust research, it brought together disparate
disciplines and attempted to make sense of a vital phenomenon in human
and artificial societies, and is still widely referenced today. Steve’s
current work builds extensively on this model, applying it to network
security, MANETs, and mobile device security.

His research interests include computational trust, trust management,
regret and regret management, and socially adept technologies. He is the
Canadian delegate to IFIP Technical Committee 11: Security and Privacy
Protection in Information Processing Systems. He is an adjunct professor
at UNB (Computer Science), UOIT (Business and IT) and Carleton
University (Systems and Computer Engineering and Cognitive Science).

Event details

  • When: 26th July 2011 14:00 - 15:00
  • Where: Cole 1.33a
  • Format: Talk

Evaluation of network resilience and survivability: analysis, simulation, tools, and experimentation

Abstract

As the Internet becomes increasingly important to all aspects of society, the consequences of disruption are increasingly severe. Thus it is critical to increase the resilience and survivability of the future networks in general, and the Internet in particular. We define resilience as the ability of the network to provide desired service even when the network is challenged by attacks, large-scale disasters, and other failures. Resilience subsumes the disciplines of survivability, fault-tolerance, disruption-tolerance, traffic-tolerance, dependability, performability, and security. After an introduction to the disciplines and challenges to network resilience, this presentation will discuss analytical, simulation, and experimental emulation techniques for understanding, evaluating, and improving the resilience of the Future Internet. This includes a multilevel state-space based approach that plots network service delivery against operational state that is the basis for both mathematical- and simulation-based analysis, and approaches that embed fundamental properties such as redundancy and diversity into all aspects of network structure, mechanism, and protocols. A set of tools to help in this analysis has been developed: KU-LoCGen (Location and Cost-Constrained Topology Generation), KU-TopViwe (Topology Viewer), and KU-CSM (Challenge Simulation Module). Plans to experimentally evaluate resilience include using the international programmable testbed GpENI: Great Plains Environment for Network Innovation.

Bio:

James P.G. Sterbenz is Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering & Computer Science and a member of technical staff at the Information & Telecommunication Technology Center at the University of Kansas, and is a Visiting Professor of Computing in InfoLab 21 at Lancaster University in the UK. He has previously held senior staff and research management positions at BBN Technologies, GTE Laboratories, and IBM Research. His research interests include resilient, survivable, and disruption tolerant networking, future Internet architectures, active and programmable networks, and high-speed networking and components. He is director of the ResiliNets Research Group, currently PI in the NSF-funded FIND and GENI programs, the EU-funded FIRE ResumeNet project, leads the GpENI international programmable network testbed project, and leads a US DoD project in highly-mobile ad hoc disruption-tolerant networking. He received a doctorate in computer science from Washington University in 1991. He has been program chair for IEEE GI, GBN, and HotI; IFIP IWSOS, PfHSN, and IWAN; and is on the editorial board of IEEE Network. He is principal author of the book High-Speed Networking: A Systematic Approach to High-Bandwidth Low-Latency Communication.

Event details

  • When: 12th July 2011 14:00 - 15:00
  • Where: Cole 1.33a
  • Format: Seminar

Arduino workshop

The School will hold an all day Arduino workshop on Sunday the 26th of June hosted by Dr David McKeown from UCD in Ireland. Thanks also to Ben Arent, an interaction designer based in Dublin for his help in supporting this.
The Arduino workshop preceeds the Summer School on Multimodal Systems for Digital Tourism that will be held in the School from 27th June to 1st July.

Arduino and Kinect equipment

Arduino and Kinect equipment for the workshop and summer school


Continue reading

Event details

  • When: 26th June 2011
  • Where: Cole Bldg
  • Format: Workshop

Summer School on Multimodal Systems for Digital Tourism

The focus of this summer school is to introduce a new generation of researchers to the latest research advances in multimodal systems, in the context of applications, services and technologies for tourists (Digital Tourism). Where mobile and desktop applications can rely on eyes down interaction, the tourist aims to keep their eyes up and focussed on the painting, statue, mountain, ski run, castle, loch or other sight before them. In this school we focus on multimodal input and output interfaces, data fusion techniques and hybrid architectures, vision, speech and conversational interfaces, haptic interaction, mobile, tangible and virtual/augmented multimodal UIs, tools and system infrastructure issues for designing interfaces and their evaluation.
We have structured this summer school as a blend of theory and practice.

Further information on the summer school on the SACHI site.

Event details

  • When: 27th June 2011 - 1st July 2011
  • Where: Honey Bldg
  • Format: Summer School

From Recommendation to Reputation: Information Discovery Gets Personal

Speaker: Barry Smyth
Affiliation: University College Dublin
Biography: Prof. Barry Smyth holds the Digital Chair of Computer Science in University College Dublin.He is the Director of CLARITY

These lectures will focus on how personalization techniques and recommender systems are being used in response to the information overload problem that face web users everyday. Personalization research brings together ideas from artificial intelligence, user profiling, information retrieval and user-interface design to provide users with more proactive and intelligent information services that are capable of predicting the needs of individuals and adapting to their implicit preferences. We will review core ideas from recommender systems research, drawing on the many practical examples that have underpinned modern web success stories, from e-commerce to mobile applications. In addition we will explore how the next generation of web search is likely to be influenced by recommender systems techniques that can facilitate a more social and collaborative approach to web search, which complements the purely algorithmic focus of contemporary search engines.

Programme:
Physics: Lecture Theatre B: 11.00-12.00noon
Purdie: Lecture Theatre A:14.0-17.00

Downloads:

Event details

  • When: 22nd June 2011
  • Series: Distinguished Lectures Series
  • Format: Lecture

Towards Pervasive Personal Data

Dr Graham Kirby, Senior Lecturer, School of Computer Science, University of St Andrews.

This talk will outline an embryonic project to develop a software infrastructure supporting pervasive data, in which file data will flow automatically to the places that it is needed. Equilibrium will be achieved when the data reaches all the necessary places. When the equilibrium is perturbed, due to either the data or the necessary places changing, the infrastructure will react to restore the equilibrium by initiating new data flows.

The infrastructure will approximate the ideal of all of a user’s files being available at all locations all of the time. The user will be able to exert high-level influence on how this approximation is achieved, by specifying the desired equilibrium declaratively. The user will also be able to define policy that influences the priorities attached to restoring various non-equilibrium aspects of the system.

Event details

  • When: 5th May 2011 14:30 - 15:30
  • Where: Phys Theatre B
  • Series: CS Colloquia Series
  • Format: Colloquium