[Pl-seminar] Semantics seminar schedule

[Aaron Turon]

This Wednesday, Oct 28, we have two interesting events:

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Logicomix
Author: Christos Papadimitriou
Wed., October 28, 2009
12:00 p.m.
90 Snell Library

This beautiful graphic novel tells the true story of Bertrand Russell,
British logician, anti-war activist, and Nobel Prize winner, and his
colleagues in the fields of math, science, and philosophy. It is set
against the historical backdrop of major twentieth century events,
including the two World Wars, and explores Russell’s passionate quest
for mathematical truth.

"Some superheroes leap tall buildings with a single bound. Others
catch thieves just like flies. But the ones in Apostolos Doxiadis and
Christos H. Papadimitriou’s graphic novel just think—really hard—about
an incredibly difficult dilemma. Like all the best superheroes, they
are deeply, fascinatingly flawed characters."
—Financial Times

"This is an extraordinary graphic novel, wildly ambitious in daring to
put into words and drawings the life and thought of one of the
greatest philosophers of the last century, Bertrand Russell…A rare
intellectual and artistic achievement, which will, I’m sure, lead its
readers to explore realms of knowledge they thought were forbidden to
them."
—Howard Zinn, author of A People’s History of the United States.

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Title: A New Era of Resource Responsibility for Sensor Networks
Speaker: Matt Welsh, Harvard University

Wednesday, October 28, 2009
Time: 11:00am
Location: 366 WVH

Abstract:
Sensor networks have taken off, but they are still notoriously
difficult to program. Our group has deployed sensor networks for
volcano monitoring and rehabilitation medicine, and each time we find
that tuning the network to achieve the right tradeoff in terms of data
quality, battery lifetime, and bandwidth usage is quite painful. To
make things worse, resource availability fluctuates over time, as does
the load that the application places on those resources. The severely
constrained and decentralized nature of sensor networks makes this
problem fairly challenging.

In this talk, I will argue that the software for sensor networks
should be designed around the fundamental abstraction of
resource-aware programming. In this model, the application has direct
visibility and control over resources as a first-class primitive. This
requires the application code to take responsibility for its own
resource management decisions, since it cannot expect a "bailout" from
the OS. This approach enables much more effective adaptations to
changing conditions, and supports a rich space of resource-management
policies.

In this talk, I will present three related systems that leverage this
approach: Pixie, a new sensor node operating system; Lance, a
network-wide resource management plane; and Mercury, a platform for
maximizing data quality in a wearable sensor network. I will present
examples and evaluations based on our real-world deployments.

Bio:

Matt Welsh is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at Harvard
University, where he has been on the faculty since 2003. His research
interests span many aspects of distributed systems, operating systems,
and programming languages. His current focus is on wireless sensor
networks including new OS and language designs to enable efficient,
high-data-rate applications. Prior to joining Harvard, he spent one
year at Intel Research, Berkeley. He completed his Ph.D. at UC
Berkeley and his B.S. at Cornell University.