Department of Computer Science and Information Systems

Research Seminars

The department hosts a programme of research seminars by invited speakers and departmental staff. The seminars are open to all. The following seminars will be taking place at the Department of Computer Science and Information Systems (DCSIS), Birkbeck College, or London Knowledge Lab (LKL), Birkbeck College and Institute of Education.

If you are interested in presenting a seminar please contact

• External seminars
• Seminars from previous years

Academic Year 2012/13

Abstracts

The Power of Prediction: Cloud Bandwidth and Cost Reduction

Dr Osnat Mokryn, School of Computer Science, Academic College of Tel Aviv-Yafo, Israel

Room 160, Birkbeck Main Building - Thursday, 23rd of May 2013, from 16:30 to 17:30

In this paper we present PACK (Predictive ACKs), a novel end-to-end Traffic Redundancy Elimination (TRE) system, designed for cloud computing customers. Cloud-based TRE needs to apply a judicious use of cloud resources so that the bandwidth cost reduction combined with the additional cost of TRE computation and storage would be optimized. PACK’s main advantage is its capability of offloading the cloud-server TRE effort to end-clients, thus minimizing the processing costs induced by the TRE algorithm. Unlike previous solutions, PACK does not require the server to continuously maintain clients’ status. This makes PACK very suitable for pervasive computation environments that combine client mobility and server migration to maintain cloud elasticity. PACK is based on a novel TRE technique, which allows the client to use newly received chunks to identify previously received chunk chains, which in turn can be used as reliable predictors to future transmitted chunks. We present a fully functional PACK implementation, transparent to all TCP-based applications and network devices. Finally, we analyze PACK benefits for cloud users, using traffic traces from various sources.

Joint work with Eyal Zohar and Israel Cidon. The work was presented at SigComm'11, and extended to a ToN paper 2013.

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Datalog containment and hidden web queries

Professor Michael Benedikt, Department of Computer Science, Oxford

Room 160, Birkbeck Main Building - Tuesday, 14th May 2013, from 16:30 to 17:30

The implication/containment problem for the basic recursive query language Datalog has been studied in the database literature for decades. It is known to be undecidable in general, but several decidable subclasses were identified, for example, Monadic Datalog. However, the exact complexity of the problem is not fully understood. In this talk I will overview new techniques for pinpointing how hard containment is for some important subclasses of Datalog, including those that arise from querying the "hidden web" -- data hidden behind web forms.

Time permitting, I will also discuss other work being done in Oxford on querying the hidden web, including, generating query plans and discovering access patterns.

This talk includes joint work with Pierre Bourhis, Georg Gottlob, and Pierre Senellart.

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Lower Bounds for Streaming Problems

Dr Markus Jalsenius, Department of Computer Science, University of Bristol

Room 160, Birkbeck Main Building - Wednesday, 20th March 2013, from 16:30 to 17:30

Time lower bounds for dynamic data structures have historically proven hard to show. The very first log(n) lower bound was obtained as recently as in 2004. Building on the lower bound techniques from data structures, we have proved the very first time lower bounds for streaming problems. In this talk I will consider the following fundamental streaming problems: computing the convolution/cross-correlation (i.e. the inner product) between a fixed vector of length n and the last n numbers of a stream, computing the Hamming distance between a fixed string of length n and the last n symbols of a stream, as well as multiplication of two n digit numbers (here the digits arrive one at a time and the corresponding digit of the product has to be outputted before the next digit arrives). For these problems we obtain lower bounds of log(n) time on average per output. The lower bounds are given in the cell-probe model (hence hold in the RAM model) and hold under randomisation and amortisation. The lower bounds are unconditional, in particular there are no space constraints. I will argue why our lower bounds are unlikely to be improved and how they relate to the currently known upper bounds.

It is joint work with Raphael Clifford and Benjamin Sach.

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ORGANIZING AND FINANCING NEW TECHNOLOGY VENTURES

Dr Pierre Nadeau, Department of Management, Birkbeck, University of London

Room 160, Birkbeck Main Building - Tuesday, 5th of March 2013, from 12:00 to 13:00

In this session, we focus on organizing new ventures, protecting intellectual property, and financing in the early stage. We start with some background on entrepreneurship, its opportunities and risks. We briefly describe proprietorship, partnership, and corporate forms of business organization and contrast benefits, risks, and basic tax aspects of various organizational forms. We discuss the use of patents, trademarks and copyrights and other methods to protect intellectual property and highlight factors that can affect the performance of university spinouts. Then we explain how different types of early-stage financing can be obtained from various sources (e.g. government programs, crowdfunding, angels and venture capitalists) throughout the life cycle of a new venture firm. The interactive session will include short video clips from leading professionals and academics in the fields of technology entrepreneurship and venture capital finance.

Biography of Speaker

Pierre Nadeau is a lecturer in finance at Birkbeck University of London where he received a PhD in Entrepreneurial Finance. He graduated with a B.Eng. (Electronics and Telecoms) in 1981 from the University of Sherbrooke and received a MBA (Finance) in 1984 from the University of Ottawa. He is a member of the American Finance Association, the UK Society for Investment Professionals, Birkbeck Centre for Innovation Management Research and the Editorial Board of Briefings in Entrepreneurial Finance (Wiley). His research interests include: entrepreneurial finance, venture capital and private equity, the finance of innovation and risk management.

Pierre is an experienced technology investment and management executive. He was formerly a general partner at Frontiers Capital where he was responsible for a variety of venture capital fundraising, private placements, investments, restructuring and successful exits in the information and communication technology (ICT) sector in Europe. Notable investments and exit transactions include Synad Technologies, Elata, Volantia, Digital Route, Pervasic and Budget Telecom. Prior to that he was CEO, managing director or general manager of a number of leading public and private technology companies in North America and in Europe including Mitel Semiconductor, LSI Logic, Lucent and Nortel.

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Using Mega Events to Cultivate Innovation Events - Cisco and London 2012

Tom Kneen, Business Development Lead

Room B04, Birkbeck Main Building - 26th February, at 12.30, in Main Building

CISCO seminar

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DIADEM: Self-supervised Extraction of Complex Web Objects.

Dr Giorgio Orsi, Department of Computer Science, Oxford.

Room 160, Birkbeck Main Building - Wednesday, 6th of February 2013, 16:30 to 17:30

Abstract: Search engines are the sinews of the web. These sinews have become strained, however: Where the web's function once was a mix of library and yellow pages, it has become the central marketplace for information of almost any kind. We search more and more for objects with specific characteristics, a car with a certain mileage, an affordable apartment close to a good school, or the latest accessory for our phones. Search engines all too often fail to provide reasonable answers, making us sift through dozens of websites with thousands of offers--never to be sure a better offer isn't just around the corner. What search engines are missing is understanding of the objects and their attributes published on websites.

Automatically identifying and extracting these objects is akin toalchemy: transforming unstructured web information into highly structured data with near perfect accuracy. With DIADEM we present a formula for this transformation, but at a price: we need to provide DIADEM with extensive knowledge about the ontology and phenomenology of the domain, i.e., about entities (and relations) and about the representation of these entities in the textual, structural, and visual language of a website of this domain. We will demonstrate that, in contrast to alchemists, DIADEM has developed a viable formula.

Bio: Giorgio Orsi is a post-doctoral research fellow at the Department of Computer Science of the University of Oxford and a junior James Martin fellow at the Institute for the Future of Computing of the Oxford-Martin School. His research is concerned with the investigation of problems in “Big Data” management on the Web. In particular, large-scale web data extraction and ontological reasoning.

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Analysing Spatial Point Patterns in Nuclear Biology using Aggregate Maps

Dr David Weston, Department of Computer Science and Information Systems, Birkbeck, University of London.

Room 160, Birkbeck Main Building - Wednesday, 23rd of January 2013, 16:30 to 17:30

There have been many investigations into identifying possible relationships between the location of bodies within a cell nucleus and their function. Interesting relationships are identified by comparing how different the locations of the bodies are to what is expected if the locations were chosen at random. However, the number of bodies involved is often very low and this has consequences on the effectiveness of quantitative analysis procedures. It becomes increasingly difficult to distinguish between bodies whose locations have been chosen at random and bodies whose locations have a biologically interesting preference, with decreasing number of bodies involved. Therefore a commonly used approach, which is to analyse cells individually, has the potential to overlook interesting structures. An alternative approach is to aggregate the locations of bodies from multiple cells using simple normalization, but this requires care to choose the appropriate normalization. It is to address this issue that `Aggregate aps' has been proposed. An aggregate map for a collection of cells is constructed simply by fusing the images of individual cells using standard methods for image registration. This talk will be split into two parts. In the first part I will describe how to construct an aggregate map. The second part of the talk will be devoted to the important issue of how to interpret the result.

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The Future of Search and Discovery in Big Data Analytics: Ultrametric Information Spaces

Professor Fionn Murtagh, Department of Computer Science, Royal Holloway, University of London.

Room 160, Birkbeck Main Building - Wednesday, 21st of November 2012, 16:30 to 17:30

In considering hierarchical clustering for structuring and orienting search and retrieval, I will describe a new linear time hierarchical clustering method. The hierarchy is induced from the Baire distance. This is applied to astronomy data, using Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) spectroscopic data, and to a large database of chemical compounds. This work is motivated, firstly, by the knowledge that as spatial dimensionality becomes very large so too does spatial sparsity and ultrametricity. The latter expresses the property of hierarchically embedded clusters. The second motivation for this work is to benefit computationally from these findings, for the tasks of search, discovery, and data understanding, in massive and possibly very high dimensional data. A major current application field is that of text analysis.

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A Shapley-value approach for influence attribution

Dr Panagiotis Papapetrou

Room 160, Birkbeck Main Building - Wednesday, 7th of November 2012, 16:30 to 17:30

Finding who and what is important is an ever-occurring question. Many methods that aim at characterizing important items or influential individuals have been developed in areas such as bibliometrics, social-network analysis, link analysis, and web search.

In this talk, I will present the problem of attributing influence scores to individuals who accomplish tasks in a collaborative manner. Individuals are assumed to build small teams, in different and diverse ways, in order to accomplish atomic tasks. For each task an assessment of success or importance score is given, and the goal is to attribute those team-wise scores to the individuals. The challenge we face is that individuals in strong coalitions are favoured against individuals in weaker coalitions, so the objective to find fair attributions that account for such biasing.

I will describe an iterative algorithm for solving this problem that is based on the concept of Shapley value. The method is applicable to a variety of scenarios, for example, attributing influence scores to scientists who collaborate in published articles, or employees of a company who participate in projects. The method has been evaluated on two real datasets: ISI Web of Science publication data and the Internet Movie Database.

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A Very Brief Overview of Theories of Consciousness

Dr Steve Minett

Room 160, Birkbeck Main Building - Wednesday, 24th of October 2012, 16:30 to 17:30

What is consciousness? Why do we have it? What’s it for? This presentation is an attempt to survey the ways in which people have tried to answer these questions. It’s a journey through the most prominent theories of consciousness. It starts with every-day ‘Folk Psychology’, stops briefly at Modernism’s de-construction of Folk Psychology, introduces Minsky’s ‘suitcase of consciousness’ and compares this with Deutsch’s ‘sky-scrapper of Reductionism’. Opening the suitcase, the presentation considers; computationalism, Functionalism and biological naturalism, including Searle’s ‘Chinese Room’. It next turns to theories that question Realism, including Velman’s ‘Reflexive Model’ and Varela & Maturana on embodiment. It considers theories of the function of the sentient self from Wegner & Humphrey, and finally takes a very brief look at Penrose & Hammerhoff’s quantum theory of consciousness.

The presentation is a condensation of a four-unit course, the entire content of which is available in the form of multiple, audio-visual clips (totalling about four and a half hours) on the following website:

http://consciousnesstheories-minett.com/

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Learning in Exploratory Environments: Freedom, Control, Research

Dr Sergio Gutierrez-Santos

Room 160, Birkbeck Main Building - Thursday, 11th of October 2012, 16:30 to 17:30

Exploratory Learning Environments (ELE) aim at empowering students to learn while they explore a given domain on their own terms. ELE can make the learning experience more engaging, fun, and productive. On the other hand, they require a lot of support for learners (and teachers), which is very challenging to provide when you are a computer and not a human being. This seminar will introduce the importance of exploratory learning, both pedagogically and technically, and the open research challenges in the field from a technical point of view

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