IU School of Informatics Upcoming Events

Tomorrow, November 23: A General Framework for Analyzing Sustainability of Social-Ecological Systems

Time: 6:00 p.m.

Place: Neal Marshall Center, Grand Hall

by Elinor Ostrom
Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis, Indiana University and Center for the Study of Institutional Diversity, Arizona State University

Abstract: In this presentation, I would first like to present an article recently published in Science entitled “A General Framework for Analyzing Sustainability of Social-Ecological Systems.” After presenting an overview of the published article, I will go on to discuss some of our current efforts to develop this ontological framework still further.

Biography: Lin is the Arthur F. Bentley Professor of Political Science and Senior Research Director of the Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis, Indiana University, Bloomington; and Founding Director, Center for the Study of Institutional Diversity, Arizona State University. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Academy of Sciences, and the American Philosophical Society, and a recipient of the Reimar Lüst Award for International Scholarly and Cultural Exchange, the Elazar Distinguished Federalism Scholar Award, the Frank E. Seidman Distinguished Award in Political Economy, the Johan Skytte Prize in Political Science, the Atlas Economic Research Foundation’s Lifetime Achievement Award, and the John J. Carty Award for the Advancement of Science.

Lin Ostrom is a recipient of the 2009 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences.

Provided By:

The Cyberinfrastructure for Network Science Center and the School of Library and Information Science.

Tue, November 24: Heterogeneous rates of duplication, loss and transposition of genes

Time: 1:00 p.m.

Place: Informatics East, Room 130

The School of Informatics and Computing will be holding a Dissertation Proposal Colloquium by Mira Han.

As part of the dissertation process, our Ph.D. Informatics students are required to present their proposed dissertation topic in a public colloquium. There will be question and answer time after the presentation.

A surprising discovery from the whole genome sequencing of various mammalian genomes is that the divergence in the structure of two genomes is greater than the total sequence divergence between the homologous genes in the genomes. Thus the variation in genome structure appears to have a significant role complementary to that of sequence divergence in explaining the phenotypic difference across species. However, the studies on the large-scale structural variation are still at an initial stage, compared to the fifty years of research accumulated on sequence variation. My thesis proposes to study the rate of large-scale structural genetic change. We will focus on the genetic changes in the genome that are measured in units of genes instead of amino acids or nucleotides. The variables we are studying are the presence, multiplicity, and arrangement of genes in the genome, and the processes we are examining are operations that change these variables i.e. duplication, loss, and transposition. The study will carefully encode the variation we see between different genomes into manageable pieces of information, build a set of probabilistic models that describe the processes that may generate the variation we observe, and statistically evaluate different models with the empirical data from several genomes of Drosophila, yeast, and mammals. By doing so, we aim to understand the tempo of structural change, and find trends that pertain to specific lineages or patterns associated with specific gene families.

Wed, December 2: Foosball Tournament

Time: 4:00 p.m. - 8:00 p.m.

Place: Informatics East, Room 010

Entry fee:: Free for student teams; $5 per team if any members are faculty, to go towards trophy & pizza.
Format:: Single elimination—winner of 3 out of 5 games to 5 points proceeds to the next round.
Sign up your team:: Fill out this form by Friday, November 27.

Pizza will be served for participants.

Thu, December 3: Life Sciences Day

Time: 11:30 a.m. - 3:30 p.m.

Place: Godfrey Graduate and Executive Education Center, Room 1040

Contact: lifesc@indiana.edu

Join the Center for the Business of Life Sciences at the Kelley School of Business for Life Sciences Day events beginning at 11:30 a.m. A reception will follow the event from 4:00 p.m. to 6:00 p.m.

Colloquia: Fri, December 4: A Retrospective on Grey, A System for Ubiquitous, Smartphone-Based Authority Management

by Michael Reiter
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Time: 3:00 p.m. - 4:00 p.m.

Place: Lindley Hall, Rm. 102

School of Informatics and Computing Distinguished Colloquium

Abstract: For years, research groups and companies have explored a vision of the smartphone as a universal access-control device, replacing physical keys, access tokens, and even payment cards. The Grey system is our flavor of this vision, which we have developed over the last half-decade and deployed in buildings at two university campuses. A key design decision in Grey is that each request should be accompanied by a formal, machine-checkable proof that demonstrates why the request satisfies access-control policy. In this talk, we will describe how this led to more flexible policy management and authority delegation than had been available previously, ultimately resulting in quantifiably more usable access-control than conventional approaches. We will survey several interesting questions we faced in the design, deployment and use of this system, and we will describe how, by drawing on research areas as diverse as formal methods, cryptography, machine learning, and human-computer interaction, we attempted to tackle them.

Biography: Michael Reiter is the Lawrence M. Slifkin Distinguished Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC). He received the B.S. degree in mathematical sciences from UNC in 1989, and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science from Cornell University in 1991 and 1993, respectively. He joined AT&T Bell Labs in 1993 and became a founding member of AT&T Labs Ã¢â‚¬â€œ Research when NCR and Lucent Technologies (including Bell Labs) were split away from AT&T in 1996. He then returned to Bell Labs in 1998 as Director of Secure Systems Research. In 2001, he joined Carnegie Mellon University as a Professor of Electrical & Computer Engineering and Computer Science, where he was also the founding Technical Director of CyLab. He joined the faculty at UNC in 2007.

Dr. Reiter's research interests include all areas of computer and communications security and distributed computing. He regularly publishes and serves on conference organizing committees in these fields, and has served as program chair for the flagship computer security conferences of the IEEE, the ACM, and the Internet Society. He presently serves on the editorial board of Communications of the ACM, and he has previously served as Editor-in-Chief of ACM Transactions on Information and System Security and on the editorial boards of IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing, and the International Journal of Information Security. He presently serves on the Emerging Technology and Research Advisory Committee for the United States Department of Commerce.

Dr. Reiter was named an ACM Fellow in 2008.

A printable version of the colloquium flyer is available for printing.

Sun, December 6: Undergraduate Computer Science Talent Show

Time: 6:00 p.m. - 8:00 p.m.

Place: Collins Coffeehouse

Got talent? Please contact Valkyrie Savage (vasavage [at] gmail [dot] com) right away to get on the schedule. ALL computer science undergraduates are warmly invited to attend this event, which promises to be great fun.

Pizza and soft drinks will be served. The talent show is sponsored by the Women in Informatics and Computing (WIC) group.

Colloquia: Fri, December 11: A Multidisciplinary Approach Towards Computational Thinking

by Susanne Hambrusch
Department of Computer Science, Purdue University

Time: 3:00 p.m. - 4:00 p.m.

Place: Informatics East, Rm. 130

Abstract: This talk describes two on-going projects on integrating computational thinking into courses for non-CS majors. Project SECANT is a multi-disciplinary effort developing a course on computational thinking for science majors. At Purdue, all science undergraduates must fulfill a computing requirement, generally by taking a CS course. A new course was developed by CS faculty in collaboration with faculty in Physics, Biology, Chemistry, and Statistics. It uses a problem-driven approach focusing on scientific discovery through computational methods grounded in computer science principles. The main objective is to give science majors a firm foundation of basic programming concepts and to establish an understanding of the algorithmic thought process. Python was chosen as the language as it quickly allows the writing of meaningful programs and is used in serious ways by many scientific communities. Project CS4EDU aims to create new pathways for undergraduate education majors to become computationally educated secondary teachers. This joint effort between CS and Education plans to create a Computer Science Endorsement program based on the Educational Computing Standards set by the International Society for Technology in Education. The pathways to the endorsement program include creating modules on computational thinking for education courses to highlight the pervasiveness of computational metaphors in topics like reasoning, knowledge construction, critical thinking and problem solving.

Biography: Susanne Hambrusch is a professor of computer science at Purdue University. She served as the Department Head from 2002 to 2007. Her research interests are in query and data management in mobile environments, parallel and distributed computation, and analysis of algorithms. She leads two interdisciplinary NSF funded projects, “Science Education in Computational Thinking” and “Computer Science for Education.” She is a member of the editorial boards of Parallel Computing and Information Processing Letters, and she is a co-chair for CACM's Viewpoints section. She also serves on the board of directors of the CRA and the CRA-W.

A printable version of the colloquium flyer is available for printing.