29 April 2010

Workshop on Facilitating Adoption of Parallel Computing

May 5th, 2010
Workshop on Facilitating Adoption of Parallel Computing
Place:
Carnegie Mellon University, USA

On Wednesday, May 5, in GHC 7501, the Carnegie Mellon Portugal sponsored Æminium - Freeing Programmers from the Shackles of Sequentiality project is holding an informal workshop at Carnegie Mellon University. 

With the rise of multicore processors and the increasing richness of application functionality, leveraging parallel computation is increasingly necessary to achieve good performance. However, parallel computing is also difficult for programmers, due to the need to decompose the problem into sub-parts which can be solved in parallel, and due to the challenges of managing potential interference between concurrent* tasks.

This workshop focuses on research approaches intended to facilitate the practical adoption of parallel computing. These may include engineering approaches, new models of parallel computing, approaches for verification and reasoning in the presence of concurrency, and approaches for teaching parallel computing.

The current schedule of topics is listed below. We would like to emphasize discussion in the workshop, so our plan is to avoid long presentations. However, potential participants may propose to give a 5-minute lightning talks in one or two sessions, the purpose being to introduce ideas for discussion. The organizers will select a number of talks consistent with leaving the majority of each session for open discussion. We want to encourage discussion of work in progress; therefore, participants should be aware that some ideas presented may not yet be published and therefore should not be shared outside the workshop.

Program
9:00 a.m. Welcome and Workshop Introduction
9:15 a.m. Engineering Parallelism: What Works in Practice
10:15 a.m. Break
10:30 a.m. New Programming Models Facilitating Adoption of Parallelism
12:00 p.m. Lunch (provided for workshop participants, RSVP below)
1:00 p.m. Verification: Helping Developers Reason about Concurrency
2:00 p.m. Hardware Factors in Parallel Computing
2:45 p.m. Break
3:00 p.m. Teaching Parallel Computing
3:30 p.m. Wrapup
4:00 p.m. Informal Follow-up

* Please RSVP * to kari+@cs.cmu.edu for lunch, and optionally provide a topic on which you would like to give a lightning talk.

* Note: we use the term parallel to mean that many computations occur simultaneously on different processor cores, including both data parallelism and task parallelism. We use concurrent to mean a programming model with multiple threads of control, which may introduce non-determinism due to interference, and may or may not be executed in parallel. The workshop discussion will include both deterministic and concurrent forms of parallelism.

Interested faculty and students are invited to participate.

Seminar Series on ICTs Policy Research: Innovations and Upgrades in Virtualized Network Architectures

May 4th, 2010
Seminar Series on ICTs Policy Research: Innovations and Upgrades in Virtualized Network Architectures
Speaker: Dr. Paul Laskowski, Graduate of the UC Berkeley School of Information
Place: Instituto Superior Técnico, Lisbon or through WebEx

Abstract:
Within today’s network industry, certain markets are renowned for their abundance of innovation (file-sharing networks, social networking applications), while others are more famous for resisting new technologies (land-line telephones, network-layer architecture). In this talk, I will argue that such differences are rooted in the way money flows through the network system. A simple model reveals three representative paths that money can take among users, network providers, and service providers. Using a novel economic theory, the classic model of Cournot competition can be generalized to explore all three market types, and compare them in terms of investment levels.
Applying this theory, I will investigate the contemporary movement to large-scale, “virtualized” testbeds. Faced with the difficulty of making changes to the internet architecture, researchers have recently turned to testbeds as a place to deploy new services. Despite the excitement, uncertainty surrounds the question of how technologies can bridge the gap from testbed to global availability. It is recognized that no amount of validation will spur today’s providers to make architectural changes, so if new services are to reach a widespread audience, the testbed itself must provide that reach. I will therefore analyze two questions: First, would today’s network providers (or a new set of providers) ever support a virtualized architecture on a global scale? Second, even if they did, would such a network, spanning a great many domains, support the adoption of new services or upgrades to the infrastructure?

More informations available at www.cmuportugal.org 

27 April 2010

Priberam Machine Learning Lunch Seminar: "Towards Closing the Loop: Active Learning for Robotics"

April 29, 2010 - Instituto Superior Técnico, Lisbon
Priberam Machine Learning Lunch Seminar: "Towards Closing the Loop: Active Learning for Robotics"
Speaker: Ruben Martinez-Cantin
htpp://www.cmuportugal.org/tiercontent.aspx?id=2602

05 April 2010

Second Round of Applications for 2010: Professional Master's dual degree in Software Engineering (MSE)

The University of Coimbra and the Carnegie Mellon University offer jointly the professional Master's dual degree in Software Engineering (MSE), under the Carnegie Mellon | Portugal program.

Second Round of Admissions: Application Deadline May 28th, 2010

More information's available at http://mse.dei.uc.pt/.



Second round of Applications for the 2010: Professional Master’s dual degree in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI)

The Human Computer Interaction Institute (HCII) at Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Madeira offer a professional Master’s dual degree in Human-Computer Interaction under the Carnegie Mellon | Portugal program.

Change your career! - Second round of applications for the 2010 edition due 15th April - Apply now!

Scholarships available! - Students admitted to the MHCI will be eligible for scholarships from company sponsors and the Madeira Science and Technology Center.

More informations at: http://www.m-iti.org/mhci