CS Colloquium Series

Ronald Reagan was fond of saying "trust but verify". Alas, the modern virtual world of games gives users no basis for trust and no mechanism for verification. Foolish people wager real money on a hand of cards dealt to them by an offshore server.

The Internet ranks among the greatest achievements of 20th century Computer Science. The basic technology was so well conceived that it has remained virtually unchanged despite completely new applications and dramatic growth in the number of connected computers and traffic.

Commodity operating systems still retain the design principles developed when processor cycles were scarce and RAM was precious.

Recent history has seen an increase in disparity between the rich and poor regions of the world. Disproportionate access to information is both a symptom and a factor contributing to this disparity.

Storage systems such as file systems, databases, and RAID systems have a simple, basic contract: you give them data, they do not lose or corrupt it.

We analyze the effectiveness of two techniques intended to make it harder for attackers to exploit vulnerable programs: W-xor-X and ASLR. W-xor-X marks all writable locations in a process' address space nonexecutable.

Among the three billion bases contained in the human genome, only 1.5% are well characterized, primarily in the form of protein-coding genes.

Stochastic models on networks introduce novel algorithmic challenges. These challenges arise from diverse application fields, such as molecular biology, computer networks and social networks. In this talk I will survey some recent progress in this area.

In order to reach their large audiences, today's Internet publishers primarily use content distribution networks (CDNs) to deliver content. Yet the architectures of the prevalent commercial systems are tightly bound to centralized control, static deployments, and trusted infrastructure, thus inheren