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May 2015
Seminar: Machines Reasoning about Machines
Presented by J Strother Moore, Department of Computer Sciences, University of Texas at Austin. Abstract: Computer hardware and software can be modelled precisely in mathematical logic. If expressed appropriately, these models can be executable. This allows them to be used as simulation engines or rapid prototypes. But because they are formal they can be manipulated by symbolic means: theorems can be proved about them, directly, with mechanical theorem provers. But how practical is this vision of machines reasoning about machines?…
Find out more »Seminar: Have Performance and Eat Abstraction Too
Have Performance and Eat Abstraction Too: Optimizing Nested Parallel Patterns for Heterogeneous Architectures Presented by Kunle Olukotun, Pervasive Parallelism Lab, Stanford University. Abstract High performance in modern computing platforms requires programs to be parallel, distributed, and to run on heterogeneous hardware. However, programming for this environment is extremely challenging due to the need to use multiple programming models and then combine them together in ad-hoc ways. To optimize applications both for modern hardware and for modern programmers we need a…
Find out more »December 2015
Seminar: Validating Optimizations of Concurrent C/C++ Programs
Speaker: Viktor Vafeiadis The talk will discuss recent work on checking the correctness of LLVM compiler optimisations on C11 programs as far as concurrency is concerned. We have built a validator checks that optimisations performed by the compiler do not change memory accesses in ways disallowed by the C11 and/or LLVM memory models. Although the LLVM concurrency model has not yet fully been formalised, our experiments highlight an important difference between the C11 and LLVM memory models, which has led to…
Find out more »January 2016
Seminar: The past and future of Random Field Theory for neuroimaging inference
Speaker name: Prof. Thomas E. Nichols Abstract: A fundamental goal in "brain mapping" with functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) is localising the parts of the brain activated by a task. The standard tool for making this inference has been Random Field Theory (RFT), a collection of results for Gaussian Processes of the null statistic image (implemented in the two most widely used packages, SPM & FSL). RFT provides inference on individual voxels (voxel-wise) and sets of contiguous suprathreshold voxels (cluster-wise) while controlling…
Find out more »Monitoring the security health of a cloud server or smartphone
Speaker: Professor Ruby B. Lee Abstract: Cloud computing provides computing resources to cloud customers on demand. It should also be able to provide different types and levels of security on demand, at different costs to the customers. But how does the customer know that he is getting the security services he paid for? Towards this end, a cloud provider needs to be able to monitor a server’s security health and see if this matches the security properties the customer requested.…
Find out more »February 2016
Seminar: The SpiNNaker Project
Speaker name: Prof. Steve Furber Abstract: The SpiNNaker project, now offered as one of two neuromorphic platforms supported by the European Union ICT Flagship Human Brain Project, is a digital many-core computer incorporating a million mobile phone processors optimised for real-time brain-modelling research applications. The design of the machine is very much influenced by the biological application it is intended to support, which has a lot to teach us about how we might build more efficient, fault-tolerant parallel computers in the…
Find out more »May 2016
Seminar: Thinking Outside the (Network) Box
Speaker name: Dr. Paolo Costa Abstract: Data centers are the infrastructure providing access to online services such as Amazon, Google Search, Facebook, and Office 365 for hundreds of millions of users around the world. They comprise hundreds of thousands of servers interconnected by a fast network fabric. The network is therefore a critical component of data centers and it is often cited as one of the main bottlenecks, affecting performance and costs. Existing network deployments are heavily influenced by Internet-based…
Find out more »June 2016
Seminar: Domain Specific Design Tools with application to Internet of Things
Speaker name: Dr. Benedict Gaster Abstract Internet of Things is an area of active interest, some people predicting a million unique devices in the next 5 years, all sharing a common lineage low-power and censoring the world. If this is really the case, then these devices must be designed and built by more than professional programmers and system architects! In this talk we introduce the notion of Domain Specific Design Tools (DSDT), that allow users of technology to design their own devices. In itself this is not…
Find out more »Engineering Lecture
Dr Alastair Donaldson will be giving an exciting lecture on his research and its relevance for secondary school students. A booking form and further details will be available soon.
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