November 3, 2016

Computing in the 21st Century 2016

2016-11-03

Location: Seoul, Republic of Korea

A leading expert in social network theories, Dr. Yong-Hak Kim places emphasis on the importance of facilitating “extelligence,” the improvement of intelligence through the coupling of otherwise estranged bright ideas. After becoming the 18th President of Yonsei University in February 2016, one of his first initiatives was to establish the “Creative Playground” in the University Library, a habitat where students can share opinions for interdisciplinary research and cultivate experimental ideas to develop innovative startups. As we enter a generation with a 100-year life expectancy, the world must explore uncharted territory due to the revolutionary developments in science and technology and information communication. This demands a new university paradigm. Accordingly, Dr. Kim has commenced forward-thinking innovation of the university’s research, administration, and education system to become a pioneering leader of our rapidly changing society.

Dr. Kim has served on the editorial boards of the American Journal of Society, Rationality and Society, and Korean Journal of Sociology. He also has held positions in various government committees as a policy advisor, including the Consulting Committee of the president of Korea and the Neural Science Review Committee of the Ministry of Science and Technology.

After receiving his bachelor’s degree in sociology from Yonsei University, Professor Kim received his master’s and doctorate degrees from the University of Chicago. Since beginning his professorship at Yonsei University in 1987, Dr. Kim previously served in various senior administrative positions such as Vice President of the Admissions Office, Dean of the University College, Dean of the College of Social Sciences, and Dean of the Graduate School of Public Administration.

Dr. Peter Lee is a computer scientist, technology innovator, and Corporate Vice President at Microsoft Research. He leads Microsoft’s New Experiences and Technologies organization (NExT), with the mission to create research-powered technologies and products, and to advance human knowledge through fundamental scientific research. While NExT openly publishes its research work, its technology projects are often conducted more secretly. Still, recently publicized projects are illustrative of Dr. Lee’s approach to bringing advanced research ideas into the real world, for example: advances in artificial intelligence, such as deep neural networks for computer vision and the simultaneous language translation feature in Skype; new silicon and post-silicon computer architectures for Microsoft’s Azure cloud, and experimental under-sea datacenters; next-generation augmented-reality experiences for HoloLens and virtual reality devices; large-scale digital storage in DNA; and AI-powered socio-technological experiments such as XiaoIce and Tay.

Prior to joining Microsoft, Dr. Lee held executive positions in both government and academia. At the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), he founded a new division focused on research and development programs in computing and related areas in the social and physical sciences. One example of his work at DARPA was the DARPA Network Challenge, an open competition that mobilized millions of people worldwide in a hunt for red weather balloons — a unique experiment in social media and open innovation that altered the thinking throughout the Department of Defense on the power of social networks.

Before DARPA, Lee served as Head of Carnegie Mellon University’s top-ranked computer science department and also briefly as the university’s Vice Provost for Research. As a Professor of Computer Science, he carried out research in computer security, software reliability, program analysis, and language design. He published over 90 research papers in peer-reviewed journals and conference proceedings, several of which have been recognized with “test of time” awards, including the ACM SIGOPS 2006 Hall of Fame Award, for their seminal contributions to the field. At CMU, he was a devoted, award-winning teacher, and advised doctoral students to 15 completed Ph.D.’s who today are working across academia and industry.

Peter Lee is a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery. He is a dedicated advocate for the academic research community, serving in a variety of national and international venues. In 2016, he was appointed by President Obama to the President’s Commission on Enhancing National Cybersecurity. He is a member of the National Academies’ Computer Science and Telecommunications Board, where he recently chaired key studies on the impact of federal research investments on economic growth. Dr. Lee is a member of the Advisory Committee for the National Science Foundation’s Computer and Information Science and Engineering Directorate, and the former Chair of Board of the Computing Research Association. In 2010, Dr. Lee co-chaired a review of federal investments in networking and information technology for the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology. Dr. Lee has also appeared before both the US House Science and Technology Committee and the US Senate Commerce Committee, testifying on the importance of federal investments in basic research – the Federal NITRD program and the America COMPETES Act – to the nation’s economy, global competitiveness, innovation, and national security. In the tech industry, Dr. Lee is a highly sought public speaker, widely quoted on industry trends and disruptive innovation organizations such as the New York Times, MIT Technology Review, Wired, Fast Company, The Economist, ArsTechnica, CNN, Seattle Times, and dozens of other universities and media outlets.
Chasing the Next Big Thing: Why Top Companies are Betting on Research

Abstract:

We are living in a world that is witnessing an incredible pace of innovation. Despite all the rapid advancements – or perhaps, because of them – top companies are working incredibly hard to find new ideas that will create new business opportunities. In other words, companies are more desperate than ever to find the Next Big Thing that will shake up the industry and create growth. What is remarkable today is that, in this quest, companies are increasingly turning to advanced research. This talk will outline the excitement in the industry that surrounds these eventful times, with a focus on the exhilarating journey that researchers are experiencing at Microsoft.

Adi Shamir is one of the world’s pre-eminent authorities on cryptography. He is a co-inventor of the RSA public-key cryptography algorithm which encodes and decodes messages, a method used in many internet-based commercial transactions. He also co-invented a zero-knowledge proof scheme and has been a major contributor to the field of differential cryptanalysis, having developed the Shamir secret sharing scheme, breaking the Merkle-Hellman knapsack cryptosystem, and researched visual cryptography and the TWIRL and TWINKLE factoring devices. He is one of the co-discoverers of differential cryptanalysis, a method for blocking cyphers. His contributions to the overall field of computer science include finding the first linear time algorithm for 2-satisfiability and showing the equivalence of the complexity classes PSPACE and IP.

Dr. Shamir has received a number of awards for his contributions, which include the 2002 ACM Turing Award, the Paris Kanellakis Theory and Practice Award, the Israel Mathematical Society’s Erdős Prize, the IEEE’s W.R.G. Baker Award and Koji Kobayashi Computers and Communications Award, the Pontifical Academy of Sciences’ Pius XI Gold Medal, and the Israel Prize for computer sciences. He is currently a member of the faculty of Mathematics and Computer Science at the Weizmann Institute, where he obtained his MSc and PhD degrees. He did his postdoc at the University of Warwick and has done research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
IoT: The Insecurity of Things

Abstract:

In this talk I will describe some of the highlights of the coming revolution of the Internet of Things, with special emphasis on its security aspects. I will introduce a taxonomy of types of attacks and describe several published attacks of each type. I will then describe some of my own research in the field, including various ways to use and misuse smart lights, and end with a number of suggestions and action items for our research community.

Dr. Marti Hearst is a Professor in the School of Information and the Computer Science Division at UC Berkeley.  Before joining Berkeley as a professor in 1997, she was a Member of the Research Staff at Xerox PARC.  She is the author of Search User Interfaces, the first academic book on that topic, and has written more than a hundred research articles in the areas of computational linguistics, information visualization, search user interfaces, human-computer interfaces, and how to improve learning at scale.  In summer of 2007, she visited MSR in Redmond in the search group.

Dr. Marti Hearst is currently Vice Present Elect of the Association for Computational Linguistics and a Fellow of the ACM, and has received 4 student-initiated Excellence in Teaching Awards.  She received her PhD in Computer Science from UC Berkeley.
Learning at Scale as a Driver of Innovation

Abstract:

How can we educate the world’s population in a scalable, affordable way?  This question is driving fascinating research at the intersection of human-computer interaction, social computing, natural language processing, machine learning, and learning sciences.    I’ll discuss the state-of-the-art in what is becoming known as learning at scale, with a focus on how to improve peer feedback, how to automate grading, and how to help instructors understand what the students understand.  I will emphasize how tackling this problem is leading to new socio-technical innovations.

Fred B. Schneider is Samuel B. Eckert Professor of Computer Science at Cornell University and chair of the department. He joined Cornell’s faculty in Fall 1978, having completed a Ph.D. at Stony Brook University and a B.S. in Engineering at Cornell in 1975.

Schneider’s research has focused on various aspects of trustworthy systems — systems that will perform as expected, despite failures and attacks. His early work concerned formal methods to aid in the design and implementation of concurrent and distributed systems that satisfy their specifications. He is author of two texts on that subject: On Concurrent Programming and (co-authored with D. Gries) A Logical Approach to Discrete Mathematics. He is also known for his research in theory and algorithms for building fault-tolerant distributed systems.

His paper on the “state machine approach” for managing replication received (in 2007) an SOSP “Hall of Fame” award for seminal research.

More recently, his interests have turned to system security. His work characterizing what policies can be enforced with various classes of defenses is widely cited, and it is seen as advancing the nascent science base for security. He is also engaged in research concerning legal and economic measures for improving system trustworthiness.

Schneider was elected Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (1992), the Association of Computing Machinery (1995), and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (2008). He was named Professor-at-Large at the University of Tromso (Norway) in 1996 and was awarded a Doctor of Science honoris causa by the University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne in 2003 for his work in computer dependability and security. He received the 2012 IEEE Emanuel R. Piore Award for “contributions to trustworthy computing through novel approaches to security, fault-tolerance and formal methods for concurrent and distributed systems”. The U.S. National Academy of Engineering elected Schneider to membership in 2011, and the Norges Tekniske Vitenskapsakademi (Norwegian Academy of Technological Sciences) named him a foreign member in 2010.

Schneider is a frequent consultant to industry, believing this to be an efficient method of technology transfer and a good way to learn about the real problems. He provides technical expertise in fault-tolerance and computer security to a variety of other firms, including Intel, Lincoln Laboratories, and Riskive. In addition, Schneider has testified about cybersecurity research at hearings of the US House of Representatives Armed Services Committee (subcommittee on Terrorism, Unconventional Threats, and Capabilities), as well as the Committee on Science and Technology (subcommittee on Technology and Innovation and subcommittee on Research and Science Education).
A Science of Cyber – Security?

Abstract:

Cyber-security today is focused largely on defending against known attacks. We learn about the latest attack and find a patch to defend against it. Our defenses thus improve only after they have been successfully penetrated. This is a recipe to ensure some attackers succeed—not a recipe for achieving system trustworthiness. We must move beyond reacting to yesterday’s attacks and instead start building systems whose trustworthiness derives from first principles. Yet, today we lack such a science base for cybersecurity. That science of security would have to include attacks, defense mechanisms, and security properties; its laws would characterize how these relate. This talk will discuss examples of such laws and suggest avenues for future exploration.

Juliana Freire is a Professor of Computer Science and Data Science at New York University. She is the Executive Director of the NYU Moore Sloan Data Science Environment. She holds an appointment at the Courant Institute for Mathematical Science, is a faculty member at the NYU Center for Urban Science and Progress and at the NYU Center of Data Science, where she is also the Director of Graduate Studies. Her recent research has focused on big-data analysis and visualization, large-scale information integration, provenance management, and computational reproducibility.

Prof. Freire is an active member of the database and Web research communities, with over 150 technical papers, several open-source systems, and 11 U.S. patents. She is an ACM Fellow and a recipient of an NSF CAREER, two IBM Faculty awards, and a Google Faculty Research award. She has chaired or co-chaired several workshops and conferences, and participated as a program committee member in over 70 events. Her research grants are from the National Science Foundation, DARPA, Department of Energy, National Institutes of Health, Sloan Foundation, Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, W. M. Keck Foundation, Google, Amazon, the University of Utah, New York University, Microsoft Research, Yahoo! and IBM.
Democratizing Urban Data Analysis

Abstract:

Today, 50% of the world’s population lives in cities and the number will grow to 70% by 2050. Cities are the loci of economic activity and the source of innovative solutions to 21st century challenges. At the same time, cities are also the cause of looming sustainability problems in transportation, resource consumption, housing affordability, and inadequate or aging infrastructure. The large volumes of urban data, along with vastly increased computing power open up new opportunities to better understand cities. Encouraging success stories show better operations, more informed planning, improved policies, and a better quality of life for residents. However, analyzing urban data often requires a staggering amount of work, from identifying relevant data sets, cleaning and integrating them, to performing exploratory analyses over complex, spatio-temporal data.

Our long-term goal is to enable domain experts to crack the code of cities by freely exploring the vast amounts of data cities generate. This talk describes challenges which have led us to fruitful research on data management, data analysis, and visualization techniques. I will present methods and systems we have developed to increase the level of interactivity, scalability, and usability for spatio-temporal analyses.

This work was supported in part by the National Science Foundation, a Google Faculty Research award, the Moore-Sloan Data Science Environment at NYU, IBM Faculty Awards, NYU Tandon School of Engineering and the Center for Urban Science and Progress.

Dr. Hsiao-Wuen Hon is corporate vice president of Microsoft, chairman of Microsoft’s Asia-Pacific R&D Group, and managing director of Microsoft Research Asia. He drives Microsoft’s strategy for research and development activities in the Asia-Pacific region, as well as collaborations with academia.

Dr. Hon has been with Microsoft since 1995. He joined Microsoft Research Asia in 2004 as deputy managing director, stepping into the role of managing director in 2007. He founded and managed Microsoft Search Technology Center from 2005 to 2007 and led development of Microsoft’s search products (Bing) in Asia-Pacific. In 2014, Dr. Hon was appointed as chairman of Microsoft Asia-Pacific R&D Group.

Prior to joining Microsoft Research Asia, Dr. Hon was the founding member and architect of the Natural Interactive Services Division at Microsoft Corporation. Besides overseeing architectural and technical aspects of the award-winning Microsoft Speech Server product, Natural User Interface Platform and Microsoft Assistance Platform, he was also responsible for managing and delivering statistical learning technologies and advanced search. Dr. Hon joined Microsoft Research as a senior researcher in 1995 and has been a key contributor to Microsoft’s SAPI and speech engine technologies. He previously worked at Apple, where he led research and development for Apple’s Chinese Dictation Kit.

An IEEE Fellow and a distinguished scientist of Microsoft, Dr. Hon is an internationally recognized expert in speech technology. Dr. Hon has published more than 100 technical papers in international journals and at conferences. He co-authored a book, Spoken Language Processing, which is a graduate-level textbook and reference book in the area of speech technology used in universities around the world. Dr. Hon holds three dozen patents in several technical areas.

Dr. Hon received a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University and a B.S. in Electrical Engineering from National Taiwan University.
Co-Evolution of Artificial Intelligence and Human Intelligence

Abstract:

Throughout history, human beings have developed tools and technologies which help civilizations evolve and grow. Computers, and by extension, artificial intelligence, has played important roles in that continum of technologies.

Recently artificial intelligence has garnered much interest and discussion. In this talk, I will describe areas such as computer vision and data mining where artificial intelligence has demonstrated human like capabilities. I will also talk about how human can excel in the areas of creativity and judgment. As artificial intelligence are tools that can enhance human capability, a sound understanding of what the technology can and can not do is also necessary to ensure their appropriate use.