Colloquium

The IDC CS Colloquium
 

Yariv Aridor - Deep-learning acceleration

The world of computing platforms, from hardware to software and to systems, is going to change dramatically in coming years as a result of the spreading of machine learning. This talk will survey the current trends in parallel computing systems and heterogeneous platforms. Then, I will deep-dive into the domain of deep learning and its acceleration by hardware and software.

03/06/2021 - 13:30

Efrat Salton - Women in STEM: academia & industry perspectives

Women's rates in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) in academia as well as in the industry are meaningfully lower than those of men internationally and in Israel too. The present lecture will present international and local findings on that as well as influencing factors and interventions aimed at promoting change in Women's participation in STEM.

10/06/2021 - 13:30

Guy Hefetz: Discounted-sum automata with multiple discount factors

A Nondeterministic Finite Automaton (NFA) defines a function from finite words to True/False, corresponding to whether or not the word is in the automaton's language. A Nondeterministic Discounted-sum Automaton (NDA) is a weighted automaton that defines a function from finite or infinite words to real numbers. It is an extension of NFAs, realizing the concept that an immediate reward is better than a potential one in the future.

18/06/2020 - 13:30

Shay Deutsch: Robust Methods for Topology Estimation in Unsupervised Learning

Learning graph connectivity has broad-ranging applications from 3D
reconstruction to unsupervised learning. In this talk I will introduce
a new method to learn the graph structure underlying noisy point set
observations assumed to lie near a complex manifold. Rather than
assuming regularity of the manifold itself, as customary, we assume
regularity of the geodesic flow through the boundary of arbitrary

11/06/2020 - 09:00

Shaul Dar and Zuriel Levi: A Big-Data Infrastructure for IDC on AWS

Big Data in combination with Machine Learning are transforming the world around us. This talk will cover the following topics:
We will highlight key concepts and programming paradigms in this exciting technological frontier, including Hadoop, NoSQL Databases, Kafka and Spark, and how they can be used to store, process and analyze massive data sets.
Until recently it was practically impossible to teach big data courses at IDC. We will review a new project which created a Big Data Infrastructure for IDC on AWS, with the following key achievements:

04/06/2020 - 13:30

Michal Kleinbort: Sampling-based robot motion planning - The common bottlenecks and novel methods

The ability to plan collision-free motions is an important aspect of robots' autonomy: While performing tasks in cluttered environments, the robots need to avoid obstacles as well as fellow robots. The motion-planning problem has been extensively studied over the past four decades.  It was primarily investigated as a theoretical problem in computational geometry and has since been the subject of research in robotics as well as computer graphics, computational biology, architectural design, artificial intelligence, and more.
 

30/04/2020 - 13:30

Shay Mozes: Almost Optimal Distance Oracles for Planar Graphs

We present new tradeoffs between space and query-time for exact distance oracles in directed weighted planar graphs.
These tradeoffs are almost optimal in the sense that they are within polylogarithmic, sub-polynomial or arbitrarily small polynomial factors from the naive linear space, constant query-time lower bound.
These tradeoffs include:  
(i) an oracle with space O(n^{1+\epsilon}) and query-time ~O(1) for any constant \epsilon>0,
(ii) an oracle with space ~O(n) and query-time O(n^{\epsilon}) for any constant \epsilon>0, and

05/12/2019 - 13:30

Tomer Weiss: Bridging the Gap between Physical and Virtual Reality

Virtual environments are prevalent and enjoy multiple applications. Novel virtual environment mediums, such as Virtual, Augmented and Mixed Reality (XR), can merge with our physical reality and have the power to revolutionize many fields, including communication, healthcare, and education. Regrettably, current approaches cannot accommodate this evolving front. Bridging this gap requires seamless large-scale virtual content creation and simulation.

07/11/2019 - 13:30

Tami Tamir: Cost-Sharing Games in Real-Time Scheduling Systems

We apply non-cooperative game theory to analyze the server's activation cost in real-time scheduling systems. An instance of the game consists of a single server and a set of unit-length jobs. Every job needs to be processed along a specified time interval, defined by the job's release-time and due-date. Jobs may also have variable weights, which specify the amount of resource they require. We assume that jobs are controlled by selfish agents who act to minimize their own cost, rather than to optimize any global objective.

16/05/2019 - 13:30