February 26-28, 2004

Electrical Engineering & Computer Sciences

College of Engineering

U. C. Berkeley

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Abstracts & Biographies

Abstracts

The Case for Technology Research for Developing Regions
--Eric Brewer

Moore's Law and the wave of technologies it enabled have led to tremendous improvements in productivity and the quality of life in the First World. Yet, technology has had almost no effect on the four billion people that make less than a dollar per day. In this talk I argue that decreasing costs of computing and wireless networking make this the right time to spread the benefits of technology, and that the biggest missing piece is a lack of focus on the problems that matter. After covering some example applications that have shown very high impact, I take an early look at the research agenda for developing regions. Finally, I examine some of the economic and social issues that are inherent in the space. My goal is to convince EECS researchers that technology for developing regions is an important and viable research topic.

Wireless Sensor Nets - EECS and Beyond
--David Culler

Motivated by the vision of SmartDust, catalyzed by the TinyOS 'mote' platform, and nurtured by CITRIS, a broad research program has developed in Wireless Sensor Networks that involves dozens of researchers throughout UCB, with EECS at its core. This talk will describe several key aspects of this powerful research thrust, ranging from underlying technology, systems challenges, networking, information theory, and query processing to applications and real-world deployments. We will explore how real applications have driven the systems agenda and speculate on the impact of this emerging technology.

Embedded Software: Better Models, Better Code
--Thomas A. Henzinger

Embedded software is increasingly deployed in safety-critical applications, from medical implants to drive-by-wire technology. This calls for a rigorous design and verification methodology. The main difference between embedded and traditional software is that in the embedded case non-functional aspects, such as reactivity with respect to physical processes, resource usage, and timing, are integral to the correct behavior of the software. Yet traditional software techniques, beginning with high-level programming languages, rarely address these non-functional aspects; indeed, the systematic abstraction of real time and other physical constraints has been one of the great success stories in computer science, from Turing machines to thread-based concurrency models. For the principled design of embedded software, instead, we have to recombine computation and physicality.

We present one approach how such a recombination might be achieved. We start with a programmer's model and the corresponding high-level language which specifies both the functionality and the timing of an embedded program. It is now the job of the compiler to produce code that implements the specified functionality and also the specified timing. In other words, the programmer specifies the reactivity of a program, and the compiler checks its schedulability. For this, the compiler needs information about the platform, such as worst-case execution times, but it produces deterministic code whose observable behavior is independent of execution-time variations and scheduling decisions. Furthermore, the program can be recompiled on different platforms and composed with other programs, without changing its functionality nor its timing. We have illustrated the effectiveness of this approach by programming, once, the flight-control software of several model helicopters with different hardware configurations.

New Directions at the Micro/Nano Structure Interface
--Roger Howe

The challenge of merging synthetic and "top-down" nanostructure fabrication processes is central to the rapid development of new devices and systems. Research at Berkeley is exploring a variety of approaches to building new devices based on a combination of nanofabrication techniques. Spacer lithography is a powerful tool for the fabrication nanostructures using silicon technology, with applications in advanced MOSFETs and biosensing. By localizing nanowire synthesis, microstructures can be used to transduce changes in mass caused by chemical adsorption. A new project is investigating biomimetic fabrication of 3D nanostructures based on the chemistry used by diatoms, a class of marine algae, to form elaborate microshells. From these examples, insights can be drawn into promising approaches for exploiting microfabrication techniques for extending the capabilities of synthetic nanofabrication processes.

Statistical Machine Learning: Applications to Bioinformatics, Systems Design and Information Retrieval
--Michael Jordan

Statistical learning algorithms are being used in a wide variety of applications in AI and beyond. Many recent developments fall into one of two broad classes: "probabilistic graphical models," a formalism that exploits the conjoined talents of graph theory and probability theory to build complex models out of simpler pieces, and "kernel methods," a formalism which combines convex optimization with generalized notions of similarity. I provide an introduction to these ideas and I discuss a number of applications: (1) finding bugs in computer programs, (2) gene-finding with DNA from multiple species, (3) automatic image annotation, (4) functional annotation of proteins, (5) learning hierarchical topic models of document collections.

(With Alex Aiken, David Blei, Nello Cristianini, Gert Lanckriet, Ben Liblit, Jon McAuliffe, William Noble, Lior Pachter, Martin Wainwright, and Alice Zheng).

Beyond the Genome: Current Trends in Computational Molecular Biology
--Richard Karp

With the advent of whole-genome shotgun sequencing and the availability of high-throughput technology for measuring macromolecules within cells, the data available to molecular biologists has multiplied and the level of aspiration of the field has been raised. Knowledge about the regulation and expression of genes, the structures and functions of proteins, and the classification of proteins into families is codified in large and growing databases. The central questions now concern systems in which many genes, proteins, protein complexes and small chemical molecules interact to perform cellular functions. These systems are increasingly studied through the lenses of evolution and development: an organism is not considered as a static and isolated entity, but rather through comparison with its relatives in the Tree of Life, and in terms of how its cells have differentiated during embryonic development. The analysis of these systems requires new tools from machine learning, statistics, mathematics and combinatorial algorithms. The speaker will discuss ongoing projects within EECS concerned with the regulation of gene transcription, the identification of protein complexes and regulatory cascades using interspecies comparisons, and the study of embryonic development.

Silicon at the End of the Roadmap ... and Beyond
--Tsu Jae King

The integrated-circuit (IC) industry has relied on shrinking transistor geometries for improvements in circuit performance and cost per function for more than three decades. Continued transistor scaling will not be as straightforward in the future as it has been in the past, however, because new materials and non-classical transistor structures will be needed in order to meet the performance specifications of the International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors. This seminar will begin by describing how new materials and transistor structures may provide a technological pathway for scaling CMOS devices to atomic dimensions. Then, it will give examples of alternative approaches to reducing cost per function, beyond transistor scaling.

Intra-Planetary Storage Networks: In search of Ubiquitous, Dependable, and Indestructible Storage
--John Kubiatowicz

In the past decade we have seen astounding growth in the performance of computing devices. Even more significant has been the rapid pace of miniaturization and related reduction in power consumption of these devices. Based on these trends, many envision a world of ubiquitous computing devices that add intelligence and adaptability to ordinary objects such as cars, clothing, books, and houses. Given this vision, however, one question immediately comes to mind: where does persistent information reside?

Berkeley has several related efforts directed at answering this question. One possible answer to this question is OceanStore, a utility infrastructure designed to span the globe and provide continuous access to persistent information. OceanStore builds upon peer-to-peer technologies to provide stable behavior in the face of unstable components. OceanStore data is protected through redundancy and cryptographic techniques. To improve performance, data is allowed to be cached anywhere, anytime. Additionally, monitoring of usage patterns allows adaptation to regional outages and denial of service attacks; monitoring also enhances performance through pro-active movement of data.

In this talk, OceanStore will serve as a motivating framework to describe several interesting research efforts here at Berkeley. Naturally, we will discuss the mechanisms of OceanStore and discuss the status of its implementation. We will also discuss the new PetaByte store project, seeking to provide tapeless backup services to EECS as well as other UC campuses through global redundancy. In the course of this talk, we will discuss how self-organizing peer-to-peer technologies are providing vital services to projects such as OceanStore, the PeteByte Store, and database query engines.

Universal Access: Computing for Anyone, Anywhere (but not Everyone, Everywhere)
--Jennifer Mankoff

Computers are becoming ubiquitous. Cellphones, PDAs, cruise control, voting machines, the web and the internet represent a cultural and cross-cultural phenomenon that is changing the way we communicate, interact, and work. As researchers, we are tasked with helping to define this new reality. Even more importantly, we must help to insure that it does not create a new class system: haves and have-nots; people who can control and people who are controlled by; people who give up information and entities that gather and use it.

At Berkeley, the Group for User Interface Research is exploring these issues. We are developing applications and tools in support of ubiquitous computing. Our work encompasses not only the technology-savvy early adopters so common to the Bay Area, but also people in developing countries, people with disabilities, and end users with minimal computing experience. We are designing and building applications, and investigating overarching issues such as privacy and control.

Although we can help to define the direction that universal access will take, the majority of applications will be developed by others. An important challenge, then, is helping others to create truly usable accessible or ubiquitous applications. To this end, we are developing tools and techniques for helping designers to more effectively meet users' needs.

Internet Indirection Infrastructure: Towards a more Flexible and Robust Internet
--Ion Stoica

The original Internet was built around the point-to-point communication abstraction. The simplicity of this abstraction is one of the main reason behind the scalability and efficiency of today's Internet. However, as the Internet evolves into a global economic infrastructure, there is an increasing need to support more general services such as multicast, anycast, and host mobility. However, attempts to generalize the Internet's point-to-point communication abstraction to provide these services have faced challenging technical problems and deployment barriers.

To address this problem, in this talk I will present an overlay-based Internet Indirection Infrastructure (i3) that offers a rendezvous-based communication abstraction. Instead of explicitly sending a packet to a destination, each packet is associated with an identifier; this identifier is then used by the receiver to obtain delivery of the packet. This level of indirection decouples the act of sending from the act of receiving, and allows i3 to efficiently support a wide variety of fundamental communication services such as multicast, anycast, mobility and service composition.

Electronics Everywhere: Organic Circuits on Plastic, Paper and Even Cloth!
--Vivek Subramanian

The skyrocketing cost of silicon fabs has led to the exploration of alternative material systems targeted at penetrating the ultra-low cost consumer appliance market. Organic semiconductors have received substantial attention in recent years due to their low potential cost, ease of fabrication, and versatile material system. In particular, organic semiconductors have made substantial progress in the arena of flat-panel displays, and the first organic semiconductor-based display products have recently entered the marketplace. In the future, organic semiconductors may see increased use in flexible low-cost display, high-brightness high-resolution displays, low-cost electronics applications, and in numerous sensing and actuating applications. In this presentation, I will discuss the state of the art of organic semiconductor technology and will discuss the potential future of this dynamic field of research. I will introduce various technological challenges that lie ahead and will discuss potential methods for overcoming the same. Finally, I will discuss novel applications of organic semiconductors in various non-tradition systems including clothes, food packaging, and various other systems driven by cost and/or integrated display, computation, and sensing requirements.

Wireless Foundations is a newly-formed fundamental core of UC Berkeley researchers with the mission of addressing the theoretical and algorithmic challenges of tomorrow's wireless systems. We will provide a brief overview of our mission and organization. As an illustration of how our group can play a key foundational role in tomorrow's wireless systems, we will provide a sampling of our preliminary research activities in a couple of areas, including the 3 R's of spectrum management (reduce, reuse and recycle), and a new architectural paradigm for tomorrow's multimedia-over-wireless systems.

Security and Privacy
--David Wagner

I will present an overview of research on security and privacy being undertaken here at Berkeley. I will highlight some of the major directions being investigated by EECS department members, including techniques for dependable and secure storage infrastructures; viruses, worms, and network defense; software security and techniques for detecting, eliminating, and mitigating software vulnerabilities; sensor network security, privacy in pervasive computing, and achieving privacy with security; and other directions.

Biographies

Eric A. Brewer

Professor Brewer focuses on all aspects of Internet-based systems, including technology, strategy, and government. As a researcher, he has led projects on scalable servers, search engines, network infrastructure, wireless data services and security. He received an MS and Ph.D. in EECS from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and a BS in EECS from UC Berkeley. Current research topics include giant-scale Internet-based services, technology for developing regions, and sensor networks.

In 1996, he co-founded Inktomi Corporation with a Berkeley grad student based on their research prototype, and helped lead it onto the Nasdaq 100 before it was bought by Yahoo! in March 2003.

In 2000, he founded the Federal Search Foundation, a 501-3(c) organization focused on improving consumer access to government information. Working with President Clinton, Dr. Brewer helped to create FirstGov.gov, the official portal of the Federal government, which launched in September 2000.

Major awards include fellowships from the Sloan Foundation, the Okawa Foundation and the Office of Naval Research. He was named a "Global Leader for Tomorrow" by the World Economic Forum, by the Industry Standard as the "most influential person on the architecture of the Internet", by InfoWorld as one of their top ten innovators, by Technology Review as one of the top 100 most influential people for the 21st century (the "TR100"), and by Forbes as one of their 12 "e-mavericks", for which he appeared on the cover.

David Culler

David Culler is a Professor of Computer Science at the University of California, where he has been on the faculty at Berkeley since 1989 and has served as Vice Chair for Industrial Relations and Vice Chair for Computing and Networking. He was founding Director of Intel Research, Berkeley, which works in collaboration with the University. David received his B.A. from Berkeley in 1980, M.S. from MIT in 1985 and Ph.D. from MIT in 1989. He was selected in Scientific American's Top 50 researchers in 2003 and Technology Review's 10 Technologies that will Change the World. He was awarded the NSF Presidential Young Investigator in 1990 and the Presidential Faculty Fellowship in 1992. He is a fellow of the ACM and a Senior Member of the IEEE. His research addresses vast networks of small, embedded wireless devices, parallel computer architecture, parallel programming languages, and high performance communication.

Tom Henzinger

Professor Henzinger is a Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences at the University of California, Berkeley. He holds a Dipl.-Ing. degree in Computer Science from Kepler University in Linz, Austria, an M.S. degree in Computer and Information Sciences from the University of Delaware, and a Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from Stanford University (1991). He was an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Cornell University (1992-95), and a Director of the Max-Planck Institute for Computer Science in Saarbruecken, Germany (1999). His research focuses on modern systems theory, especially formalisms and tools for the component-based and hierarchical design, implementation, and verification of embedded, real-time, and hybrid systems. His HyTech tool was the first model checker for mixed discrete-continuous systems.

Roger T. Howe

Professor Howe received the B.S. degree in physics from Harvey Mudd College, Claremont, CA in 1979 and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering from the University of California at Berkeley in 1981 and 1984. He was on the faculty of Carnegie-Mellon University during 1984-85 and was an Assistant Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology from 1985-87. In 1987, he joined the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences at the University of California at Berkeley, where he is now a Professor, as well as the Associate Chair for Electrical Engineering and a Director of the Berkeley Sensor & Actuator Center. In 1997, he was appointed a Professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering.

His research interests include micro electromechanical system (MEMS) design, micromachining processes, and massively parallel assembly processes. He was the Technical Program Chair of the 12th International Conference on Solid-State Sensors, Actuators, and Microsystems (Transducers 2003), the Co-General Chair of the 1990 IEEE Micro Electro Mechanical Systems Workshop (MEMS 1990), and the General Chair of the 1996 Solid-State Sensor and Actuator Workshop at Hilton Head, S.C. He is co-recipient with Richard S. Muller of the 1998 IEEE Cledo Brunetti Award "for leadership and pioneering contributions to the field of microelectromechanical systems." He is the co-author, with Prof. C. G. Sodini of MIT, of Microelectronics: an Integrated Approach, Prentice Hall, 1997, an undergraduate textbook.

Michael Jordan

Michael Jordan is Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and the Department of Statistics at the University of California, Berkeley. He received his Masters from Arizona State University, and earned his PhD from the University of California, San Diego. He was a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology from 1988 to 1998. His research has spanned a number of areas in computer science, statistics, and psychophysics, and he has published over 200 research papers in these fields. In recent years he has focused on algorithms for approximate probabilistic inference in graphical models, on kernel machines, and on applications of machine learning to problems in bioinformatics, information retrieval, and signal processing. He has given invited plenary lectures at the International Conference on the Mathematical Theory of Networks and Systems, the American Association for Artificial Intelligence, the International Joint Conference on Neural Networks, the ACM Conference on Computational Learning Theory, the Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence, and the Valencia Conference on Bayesian Statistics.

John Kubiatowicz

Professor Kubiatowicz is an Associate Professor at the University of California, Berkeley, where he is the technical lead and principal investigator for OceanStore. In addition to global-scale storage systems, his interests include computer architecture, multiprocessor design, quantum computing, and continuous dynamic optimization. He is a recipient of the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE) from National Science Foundation, and was one of the Scientific American 50 top researchers in 2002. He received two BS degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1987, one in electrical engineering and one in physics; he also received an MS (1993) and a PhD (1998) from MIT in electrical engineering and computer science.

Jennifer Mankoff

Dr. Jennifer Mankoff is an Assistant Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) at the University of California at Berkeley. Her research focuses on evaluation techniques appropriate for the application domains of accessible technology and ubiquitous computing. Dr. Mankoff is an active member of the ACM ASSETS, CHI, and UIST research communities, and has served on the program and conference committees at all three conferences. Her research has been supported by the Intel Corporation, Hewlett-Packard, Microsoft Corporation, and the National Science Foundation. She earned her B.A. at Oberlin College and her Ph.D. in Computer Science at the Georgia Institute of Technology, where she was a recipient of an IBM Fellowship, Intel Fellowship, and NSF Traineeship Fellowship.

Gene Myers

Professor Gene Myers joined the faculty of Computer Science at the University of California, Berkeley at the start of 2003. He was formerly Vice President of Informatics Research at Celera Genomics for four years where he and his team determined the sequences of the Drosophila, Human, and Mouse genomes using the whole genome shotgun technique that he advocated in 1996. Prior to that Gene was on the faculty of the University of Arizona for 18 years and he received his Ph.D in Computer Science from the University of Colorado in 1981. His research interests include design of algorithms, pattern matching, computer graphics, and computational molecular biology. His most recent academic work has focused on algorithms for the central combinatorial problems involved in DNA sequencing, and on a wide range of sequence and pattern comparison problems. Among the tools he has developed are Blast -- a widely used tool for protein similarity searches, FAKtory -- a system to support DNA sequencing projects, Anrep -- a pattern matching language for applications in molecular biology, and Mac- & PC-Molecule -- a molecular visualization tool for Apple and Wintel computers. He was awarded the IEEE 3rd Millenium Acheivement Award in 2000, the Newcomb Cleveland Best Paper in Science award in 2001, and the ACM Kanellakis Prize in 2002. He was voted the most influential in bioinformatics in 2001 by Genome Technology Magazine and was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 2003.

Eric Schmidt

Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin recruited Eric Schmidt from Novell, where he led that company's strategic planning, management and technology development as chairman and CEO. Schmidt's Novell experience culminated a 20-year record of achievement as an Internet strategist, entrepreneur and developer of great technologies. Schmidt's well-seasoned perspective perfectly complements Google's needs as a young and rapidly growing search engine with a unique corporate culture. Prior to his appointment at Novell, Schmidt was chief technology officer and corporate executive officer at Sun Microsystems, Inc., where he led the development of Java, Sun's platform-independent programming technology, and defined Sun's Internet software strategy. Before joining Sun in 1983, Schmidt was a member of the research staff at the Computer Science Lab at Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), and held positions at Bell Laboratories and Zilog. Schmidt has a B.S. in electrical engineering from Princeton University, and an M.S. and Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of California-Berkeley. Schmidt is an avid pilot and political junkie who never tires of debating the great issues of our day and the relative merits of small plane jet propulsion systems.

Ion Stoica

Ion Stoica received his PhD from the Carnegie Mellon University in 2000. He is an Assistant Professor in the EECS Department at University of California at Berkeley, where he does research on resource management, scalable solutions for end-to-end quality of service, and peer-to-peer network technologies in the Internet. Stoica is the recipient of a Sloan Foundation Fellowship (2003, a National Science Foundation CAREER Award (2002), the ACM doctoral dissertation award (2001), and an Okawa Foundation Fellowship (2001).

Vivek Subramanian

Professor Subramanian received his BS in electrical engineering from Louisiana State University in 1994. He received his MS and PhD in electrical engineering, in 1996 and 1998 respectively, from Stanford University.

He co-founded Matrix Semiconductor, Inc., in 1998. Since 1998, he has been at the University of California, Berkeley, where he is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Electrical engineering and Computer Sciences. His research interests include advanced CMOS devices and technology and polysilicon thin film transistor technology for displays and vertical integration applications. His current research focuses on organic electronics for display, low-cost logic, and sensing applications. He has authored or co-authored more than 40 research publications and patents.

David Wagner

David Wagner received his Ph.D. from UC Berkeley in computer science. His research interests are computer security, especially security of large-scale systems and networks; applications of static and dynamic program analysis to computer security; theory of cryptography; design and analysis of symmetric-key cryptosystems; operating systems, and theory. He is currently working on software security, wireless security, sensor network security, cryptography, and other topics. He has received the ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award, Sloan Research Fellowship, was selected as one of Popular Science’s “10 Hot Scientists,” and was named “Best Academic Researcher” by Information Security Magazine.