Events for October 2011

Observationally Cooperative Multithreading Part 3, The Quickening

Colloquium

Speaker(s)
Chris Stone, Xiaofan Fang, Stephen Levine, Stuart Pernsteiner, Sean Laguna, Jordan Librande, Mary Rachel Stimson
Date
Thursday, October 6, 2011
Time
4:15 PM – 5:30 PM
Location
Galileo Pryne

The OCM is a new parallel model that makes parallel programs easier to write, especially the kinds of programs that are hard to write in other models. In this talk, you’ll learn, amongst other things: the value of being agnostic, how OCM makes hard code easy, that lock inference really works, some tough lessons about STM transaction commit ordering, how the OCM model can be implemented as a C++ library, and why OCM needs a user study.

What's Going on in Memory Anyway?

Colloquium

Speaker(s)
Melissa O'Neill, Matt Johnson
Date
Thursday, October 6, 2011
Time
4:15 PM – 5:30 PM
Location
Galileo Pryne

Much current research on memory management focuses on Tracing Collection in Java, but is this perspective sufficient? Your gut feeling may be “Surely not!”, but we’re surprisingly far from being able to answer this question in a meaningful way. You’ll find out why, as we edge closer to being able to having some answers.

Harvesting Knowledge from Social Annotations

Colloquium

Speaker(s)
Kristina Lerman
Date
Thursday, October 13, 2011
Time
4:15 PM – 5:30 PM
Location
Rose Hills Theater
More information
Pomona colloquium information

Social Annotation captures the collective knowledge of thousands of Social Web users and can potentially be used to enhance an array of applications including search, personalization and recommendation. In order to make best use of social annotation we need methods that effectively deal with the challenges of data sparseness and noise, as well as take into account inconsistency in the vocabulary, interests, and the level of expertise among individual users. We present computational approaches to extracting knowledge from structured annotations created by thousands of users of the social photo-sharing site Flickr. First, I present the folksonomy learning problem, i.e., learning a common taxonomy from many shallow personal hierarchies created by individual Flickr users. I describe a novel probabilistic approach, based on affinity propagation, that allows us to integrate structural constraints into the inference process in order to combine many smaller structures simultaneously into a larger common structure while avoiding structural inconsistencies. Second, I present some recent results of exploiting geo-referenced metadata on Flickr to learn places and relations between them.


Fall break begins after last class

Date
Friday, October 14, 2011

Fall break begins after the last class today. Classes resume on October 19.

Fall break ends

Date
Wednesday, October 19, 2011

Fall break ends at 8:00 a.m. as classes resume today.