Abstract:

In this talk we look in detail at several forms of external memory search and how they have been run in parallel. In addition to comparing metrics provided in research papers, we also describe our new approach which minimizes writes in external memory search. We describe the parallel performance of the approach, and provide the details of performing a full breadth-first search of the single-agent Chinese Checkers game, which has 1.88x10^12 states.

Author Bio:

Dr. Nathan Sturtevant is an Assistant Professor in the Computer Science Department at the University of Denver. His scientific research focuses on Artificial Intelligence and search in single and multi-agent settings, including applications to real-time environments, such as games, and more competitive environments.

Abstract:

In this talk, I will address the problem of optimal path finding for multiple agents. Given a start state and a goal state for each of the agents, the task is to find minimal paths for the different agents while avoiding collisions. Previous work on solving this problem optimally used traditional single-agent search variants of the A* algorithm. However, as I will show, A* has a few drawbacks when dealing with this problem. For this problem the branching factor is exponential in the number of agents for a given problem. A* can not handle very large branching factors. I will elaborate on this problem and present methods to deal with it. This problem is also characterized by an extremely large (exponential) search space. Searching even a small portion of the state space is usually intractable. I will elaborate on this problem and present special techniques for dealing with it.

Author Bio:

Guni Sharon is a PhD student in Ben-Gurion University, Israel. His scientific research focuses on Artificial Intelligence and search in multi-agent settings.

Abstract:

Author Bio:

Abstract:

In this talk we will discuss software testing. We will work through a thought experiment around an API test. We will discuss the importance of good test data, especially in the context of regression test data sets. Then we will discuss the attributes of a good tester, and will talk about the value of test driven development. These are key skills for creating quality software.

Author Bio:

Baird is a test engineer working on electronic promotions and digital coupons. In this role, he focuses on point of sale software testing. Baird joined Google in 2011 when it acquired Zave Networks, where he had worked for two and a half years. Prior to Zave Networks, Baird worked as a senior systems analyst at Sprint Nextel Corp. where he lead support for the voice mail and Call Tones platforms. Baird has a master's degree from Nazarene Theological Seminary where he graduated with honors. He earned a bachelor's degree in sociology and social thought from Hillsdale College.

Abstract:

Finding the locations in a text where a string occurs is an operation familiar to anyone who has used a text editor or word processor. Some algorithms for solving this problem take time proportional to the length of the text to search for the occurrences. However, in bioinformatics and other areas, it is sometimes the case that a large text is searched intensively by an algorithm that generates many searches. In this case, it pays to preprocess the text to speed up each search. It is then possible to find all k occurrences of a string of length m in O(m+k) time, which is independent of the length of the text. Previous data structures that accomplish this are built with algorithms that are notoriously complicated. We describe a data structure for this problem that is suitable for an undergraduate data structures courses.

Author Bio:

Dr. Ross McConnell is an alumnus of D.U., having earned his M.S. in computer science here in 1985. He received his Ph.D. from C.U. Boulder in 1994, and is an Associate Professor in the computer science department at Colorado State University. His research is on algorithms, especially algorithms for problems in graph theory and combinatorial problems arising in perfect graph theory, bioinformatics, and scheduling theory.

Abstract:

We learn a lot about software engineering in school (at least you do now), but what is it like out in the real world? I’ll present a personal look at one engineer’s experiences during more than 30 years of writing code for a living. What has worked, what hasn’t and some general observations.

Author Bio:

Jim McMaster has been writing code since it was punched on cards. He is also a long-time fan of developer testing and agile methodologies. He is a Software Engineer at Google, Inc. in Boulder, working mainly on Google Drive. He also acts as world-wide publisher for Testing on the Toilet. Jim has degrees in Computer Science and Electrical Engineering, and Management Information Science from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1977).

Abstract:

Successful software systems evolve: they are enhanced, corrected, and ported to new platforms. To ensure the quality of modified systems, software engineers perform regression testing, but this can be expensive depending on the size of the systems and their complexity and it is responsible for a significant percentage of the costs of software. For reasons such as this, researchers have spent a great deal of time creating and empirically studying various techniques for improving the cost-effectiveness of regression testing. Despite the progress this research has achieved to date, several important aspects have not been considered, such as factors involving testing context and the system lifetime view. In this talk, I'll present research activities that can address these limitations as follows: (1) creating cost-effective regression testing techniques that address the testing process and domain contexts, and (2) creating regression testing strategies that address system lifetimes, (3) creating economic models that enable the adequate assessment of techniques and strategies, and (4) evaluating and refining these techniques and strategies through rigorous empirical approaches.

Author Bio:

Dr. Hyunsook Do's research interests lie in software engineering, particularly software testing, maintenance, and empirical methodologies. She has been working on problems on evolution-aware testing techniques for object-oriented systems, including test selection, prioritization, test case generation, and unit/integration testing. She received a National Science Foundation CAREER Award in 2012 for her research on software maintenance and testing. Dr. Do received the Ph.D. in Computer Science from University of Nebraska-Lincoln, the M.S. in Computer Science from Tokyo Institute of Technology in Tokyo and a B.S. in Computer Science from Sungshin Women's University in South Korea. Dr. Do was previously employed as a senior research staff in Electronics and Telecommunication Research Institute (ETRI), South Korea.

Abstract:

In Mobile Ad-Hoc Networks (MANETs), the network topology typically changes frequently due to device mobility, or link failures. Consequently, a fast response to connectivity changes is one of the most important challenges in MANETs. Most proactive and reactive routing protocols detect changes by exchanging control messages. The Neighborhood Discovery Protocol (NHDP) specifies the exchange of these kind of messages. As shown in prior studies, the proposed fixed intervals of NHDP and similar protocols cause unnecessary protocol overhead and/or avoidable delay regarding link as well as link break detection. The talk will discuss theoretical limits of NHDP and introduce fundamental concepts of MANETs along with challenges in neighborhood maintenance. We will see different approaches allowing to significantly decrease the link up detection. Some cause a very high protocol overload but guarantee very fast detection while others have limited and even zero extra protocol overhead.

Author Bio:

Raphael Ernst studied Computer Science at the University of Bonn and the Bonn-Aachen International Center for Information Technology, and received his Diploma degree in 2009 (Master equivalent). Since 2009 he is a Ph.D. student at the University of Bonn and worked for the University of Kiel, University of Bonn, and the Bundeswehr Technical Center for Ships and Naval Weapons (WTD71) as a scientific staff member. His research focus are maritime and mobile ad hoc networks.

Abstract:

This talk will provide an introduction to how the Intel x86 architecture works in detail behind the scenes, some of the design decisions made by Intel to optimize for speed or performance over security. Each of these decisions will then be shown as vulnerable, using a number of attacks published over the last few years. The major take away is to consider security when designing a system, not as an add-on at a later date.

Author Bio:

Jacob Torrey is a Research Engineer at Assured Information Security, Inc, where he leads the Computer Architectures group and acts as the site lead for the Colorado branch. Jacob has worked extensively with low-level x86 and MCU architectures, having written a BIOS, OS, hypervisor and SMM handler. His major interest is how to (mis)use an existing architecture to implement a capability currently beyond the limitations of the architecture.

Abstract:

Who am I and where have I been? These are perhaps the two most crucial concerns for identity. Authentication (who I am) and tracking (where I am) impact-and are impacted by-the current state of privacy and security. On the one hand, there are many different ways to track an individual-on-line activity, mobile phone GPS, retail activity, public surveillance, etc.-all of which may benefit specific security needs. On the other hand, there is the reduction in privacy associated with authenticating (non-reputable identification) the person. Tracking is not authentication; for example, what if someone is borrowing/stealing your mobile phone? Also, people may opt out of specific monitoring activities. On the other hand, what about the (perhaps inadvertent) losses of privacy due to narcissism and convenience-for example, Facebook and GPS services, respectively? In this talk, the tradeoff between privacy and security needs will be discussed in the context of the rapidly changing nature of what identity really means now and in the years to come. Solutions to some of these challenges will be outlined, including the adoption of supply chain, analytics and dynamic biometric approaches to afford varying degrees of anonymity in the continuum between privacy and security.

Author Bio:

Dr. Steven Simske is an HP Fellow and the Director of HP Labs' anti-counterfeiting, document security and security printing teams. He has advanced degrees in Biomedical, Electrical and Aerospace Engineering. His background is in image processing, image analysis and document understanding, and is writing a book for Wiley on a toolset used for architecting massive intelligent systems - meta-algorithmics - affording the combination of two or more intelligent systems to create more robust, accurate and often faster larger systems, or "ecosystems". Steve has completed portable medical monitoring systems, developed animal life support hardware, performed experiments on a dozen US Space Shuttle missions, written the first optimal reconstruction system for impedance tomography, and co-invented "lifetime" orthopedic implants. He is a member of the World Economic Forum Global Agenda Council on Illicit Trade, has 50 US patents and nearly 300 peer-reviewed publications.

Abstrac:

Recent studies in the literature have shown that syntax remains a significant barrier to novice computer science students in the field. While this syntax barrier is known to exist, whether and how it varies across programming languages has not been carefully investigated. In this talk, I will discuss four empirical studies on programming language syntax in addition to other recent literature on the usability of general purpose programming languages. Specifically, this talk will include the presentation of two surveys conducted with students on the intuitiveness of syntax, which were used to try and help garner clues on which words and symbols might be hard to understand. Second, we will discuss two studies on the accuracy rates of novices initially using a total of six programming languages: Ruby, Java, Perl, Python, Randomo, and Quorum. Randomo was designed by randomly choosing some keywords from the ASCII table (a metaphorical placebo). One broad result in this work is that, surprisingly, languages using a more traditional C-style syntax (both Perl and Java) did not afford accuracy rates significantly higher than a language with randomly generated keywords, but that languages which deviate (Quorum, Python, and Ruby) did. These results, including the specifics of syntax that are particularly problematic for novices, may help inform the debate on the impact of syntactic choices on student users of programming languages.

Author Bio:

Dr. Andreas Stefik is an assistant professor at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville. He completed his Ph.D. in computer science at Washington State University in 2008 and also holds a bachelor's degree in music. Dr. Stefik's research focuses on computer programming languages and development environments, including their use by sighted, blind, and visually impaired people. He won the 2011 Java Innovation Award for his work on the NSF funded Sodbeans programming environment and has developed a computer programming language, Quorum, designed to be easy for novices to use.

Abstract:

Finding good moves in imperfect information games is a challenging computational task with many real-world applications. Following the tradition of game AI research focussing on benchmark decision problems in which the best humans currently outperform the best algorithmic solutions, in this presentation I will describe our progress in creating the world's best Skat playing program. Skat is a Bridge-like trick-taking card game played by 3 players, which is very popular in Germany, Poland, and France, and also played in North-America. A few years back, our program Kermit reached expert-level performance by using state evaluations and card inference based on human training data combined with fast Monte Carlo search. In this presentation I will describe Kermit's inner workings and discuss recent developments which we have reason to believe have improved Kermit beyond human Skat playing abilities.

Author Bio:

Michael Buro is a full professor in the computing science department at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada. He received his PhD in 1994 for his work on Logistello - an Othello program that defeated the reigning human World champion 6-0 later in 1997. His current research interests include heuristic search, action and state abstraction, inference, and opponent modeling in traditional games as well as video games. In the past few years Michael has been active bringing together game developers and AI researchers by organizing a series of video game AI competitions and workshops on heuristic search and planning in games.

Abstract:

Peg solitaire is a very old puzzle invented over 300 years ago, yet it still provides challenges for modern computers and computer programmers. I will introduce the standard versions of the game, and discuss three interesting questions which can be answered by analysis and/or programming. First, what is the role of the board shape on the puzzle, in particular regarding which problems are solvable? Second, how can we find the shortest solution to a particular peg solitaire problem? And finally, how can we quickly identify good and bad moves from a particular board position? A bad move, by definition, is one where the target finishing position can no longer be reached. When the same jumping rules are used but with no captures, one obtains the game of Chinese checkers. We can make this into a 1-person game or puzzle by attempting to move a set of pieces across the board as quickly as possible, or by considering the shortest possible game. Many questions about Chinese checkers and peg solitaire can be answered by AI search techniques, primarily variations to the A* algorithm.

Author Bio:

Dr. George Bell has a Ph.D. in Applied Mathematics from UC Berkeley, where he studied fluid dynamics. Currently he does research in plasma physics at Tech-X Corporation, developing simulation software for the design of particle accelerators and storage rings. Back in the 1990's he created network design software for the telecommunications industry, where he learned discrete math and optimization techniques. He has a life-long interest in recreational math and mechanical puzzles.

Abstract:

There has been considerable research recently in the area of privacy preservation in location based searches. Several techniques have been proposed, but none of the effective ones are widely implemented. The biggest reason for lack of adaptation is that most of them require extensive and fundamental changes to existing wide spread implementations. This is because, they assume thin mobile clients and most of the processing overhead is pushed outside the client end, implementation of which will require architectural changes. So, we experimented with an idea that requires minimal changes to the existing implementations by taking advantage of the computing power of currently available mobile devices. We propose several techniques to improve the performance of existing privacy preserving algorithms to make them suitable for implementing on mobile device itself without compromising user experience. We present empirical results from our implementation of these techniques on both simulated and real mobile devices using real LBS data.

Author Bio:

Wisam Eltarjaman is a PhD student at University of Denver. He has a Master's degree from Higher Institute of Industry, Misratah, Libya and a Bachelor's degree from University of Tripoli, Libya . His research areas are Security, Privacy and Networking.
Prasad Annadata is a PhD student at University of Denver. He has a Master's degree from University of Hyderabad. He has extensive industry experience in, and focuses, on Security and Privacy.

Abstract:

A growing number of model-driven development (MDD) advocates are claiming that MDD is a "success". They point to successful applications, particularly in the embedded systems domain, and the results of surveys that show growing use of MDD technologies in industry. As an advocate I would like to concur, but there is strong evidence that this view is overly optimistic; there remains significant challenges that must be overcome if MDD is to realize its true potential. In this talk, I discuss some of the challenges related to model tooling and analysis that, in my opinion, are friction points in the move towards greater acceptance of MDD, and thus true engineering practices, in industry.

Author Bio:

Dr. Robert France is a Full Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Colorado State University. His research interests are in the area of Software Engineering, particularly in, formal specification, model-based software development, domain-specific languages, and software product lines. He is a founder and an editor-in-chief of the Springer journal on Software and System Modeling (SoSyM), and an editor for the Journal on Software Testing, Verification and Reliability. He was a member of the early UML 1.x revision task forces. He was awarded the Ten Year Most Influential Paper award at MODELS in 2008.

Abstract:

Model based software development promises to strongly improve efficiency and quality in software development projects. However, MBSE has not yet delivered it's promises yet. In the talk, we examine the current state and problems of MBSE and discuss a number of approaches to tackle those. In particular, we discuss how to make use of models in agile development projects, in order to use the best of both worlds. An agile model based development process (both with UML as well as a domain specific modeling language (DSML)) heavily relies on modeling core parts of a system in a redundant free form, having compositional generators to early and repeatedly cut code and tests from these models. We discuss, what refactoring respectively evolution on models means. And we discuss compositionality on models and heterogeneous modeling languages and how it supports agile development as well as reuse of language and tooling infrastructures. We finally discuss what has already been achieved in the language workbench MontiCore developed in our group over the recent years.

Author Bio:

Bernhard Rumpe is chair of the Department for Software Engineering at the RWTH Aachen University, Germany. Before that he chaired the Software Engineering Institute at the TU Braunschweig. He made his Ph.D. and Habilitation an the TU Munich. His main interests are software development methods and techniques that benefit form both rigorous and practical approaches. This includes the impact of new technologies such as model-engineering based on UML-like notations and domain specific languages andevolutionary, test-based methods, software architecture as well as the methodical and technical implications of their use in industry. He has furthermore contributed to the communities of formal methods and UML. Since 2009 he started combining modelling techniques and Cloud Computing. He is author and editor of eight books and Editor-in-Chief of the Springer International Journal on Software and Systems Modeling(www.sosym.org). He is co-Founder and Steering-Committee-member of the GI expert committee on "Modelling" in Germany, Program Committee Chair, PC member, workshop organizer etc. at various opportunities.

Abstract:

Author Bio:

Abstract:

Web users are confronted with the daunting challenges of creating, remembering, and using more and more strong passwords than ever before in order to protect their valuable assets on different websites. Password manager is one of the most popular approaches designed to address these challenges by saving users' passwords and later automatically filling the login forms on behalf of users. Fortunately, all the five most popular Web browsers have provided password managers as a useful built-in feature. Unfortunately, the designs of all those Browser-based Password Managers (BPMs) have severe security vulnerabilities. In this paper, we uncover the vulnerabilities of existing BPMs and analyze how they can be exploited by attackers to crack users' saved passwords. Moreover, we propose a novel Cloud-based Storage-Free BPM (CSF-BPM) design to achieve a high level of security with the desired confidentiality, integrity, and availability properties. We have implemented a CSF-BPM system into Firefox and evaluated its correctness and performance. We believe CSF-BPM is a rational design that can also be integrated into other popular Web browsers.

Author Bio:

Chuan Yue is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at the University of Colorado Colorado Springs (UCCS). His current research focuses on Web security, Web systems security, and Cloud systems security. His broad research interests include Computer and Network Security, Web-based Systems, Human-Computer Interaction, Collaborative Computing, Distributed and Parallel Computing, and Cloud Computing. He received his B.E. and M.E. degrees in Computer Science from Xidian University, China, in 1996 and 1999, respectively, and his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the College of William and Mary in 2010. He worked as a Member of Technical Staff at Bell Labs China, Lucent Technologies for four years from 1999 to 2003, mainly on the development of Web-based Distributed Service Management System for Intelligent Network.

Abstract:

Is the US or any other nation currently involved in a cyber war? If you believe the media a cyber war has existed since Estonia was attacked. But can we truly classify what we have seen so far as “war?” Not a day goes by without a report of another data breach or some sort of network disruption. Does the constant barrage of hacking, stealing corporate and military secrets, and disruption of networks equate to cyber war? This lecture will explore whether we are currently in a cyber war or is what we are seeing still just electronic espionage? Regardless of how it is classified, what can nations and commercial companies do to defend themselves. Is self-defense in cyberspace an option for nations, private companies?

Author Bio:

David is a leading authority in cyber security and the law. He is a licensed attorney in NY, CT, and CO, and owner of Titan Info Security Group, a Risk Management and Cyber Security law firm, focused on technology and the law, and helping companies lower the risk of a cyber-incident and reducing or eliminating the liability associated with loss or theft of information. He also assists companies with difficult legal/cyber-security issues. David is also a partner of OnlineIntell, an online company that provides brand and reputation protection, corporate intelligence, and domain, trademark, copyright, and patent infringement detection and solutions. He is also on the Board of Advisors with Cylance. David is a retired Army JAG officer. During his 20 years in the Army he provided legal advice in computer network operations, information security and international law to the DoD and NSA and was the legal advisor for what is now CYBERCOM. He has published many articles, such as, “Hacking Back in Self-Defense: Is It Legal; Should It Be?”, “Cyber War or Cyber Cold War?”, and recently, “The Legal Issues of Forensics in the Cloud.” His speaking engagements include: the FBI ICCS conf., RSA (2009-2013) and RSA Europe, CSI, HTCIA, ISSA, FBCINC, the 4th Int'l Cyber Crime Conf., Australia, Cornerstones of Trust, FISSEA, ASIS, ISSA International, Hacker Halted, the OWASP SnowFroc 2013, and others. He holds the CISSP and Security+ certifications and has two LLM’s in International Law and in Intellectual Property law. He is a VP of his local ISSA chapter and a member of InfraGard. He was quoted in a Fox News Exclusive, and his recent article was published on Fox News: Is the US Already Engaged in a Cyber War?