Colloquium

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. Some of the virtual worlds have been rocked by scandals where sys admins take bribes to add special features like unbeatable armor to favored players.

The good news is that we can build strong, virtual worlds that give users the basis for trust and the ability to verify the fairness of a game. The algorithms are well-known and tested, to some extent, by time. This talk will review a number of the classic results designed for playing poker or distributing digital cash, and explore how they can be used to stop some of the most blatant cheating affecting the more sophisticated online world.

Peter Wayner is the author of 13 books including "Policing Online Games". (www.wayner.org/books/)

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. This eclectic talk presents a series of lessons drawn from the Internet experience that may help us better understand how to proceed with new research. It considers the design of protocols, general principles, technologies, the underlying architecture, the effect of economics on networking research, and ways that experimental research projects can be organized to ensure success.

Douglas Comer is VP of Research at Cisco systems, and Distinguished Professor of Computer Science at Purdue University, where he is currently on an extended leave. An internationally recognized expert on computer networking, Comer has been involved in Internet research since the late 1970s. His series of ground-breaking textbooks have been translated into 16 languages, and are used by professional engineers and students around the world. For twenty years, Comer was editor-in-chief of the journal Software -- Practice And Experience. He is a Fellow of the ACM.

Commodity operating systems still retain the design principles developed when processor cycles were scarce and RAM was precious. These out-dated principles have led to performance/functionality trade-offs that are no longer needed or required; I have found that, far from impeding performance, features such as safety, consistency and energy-efficiency can often be added while improving performance over existing systems. I will describe my work developing Speculator, which provides facilities within the operating system kernel to track and propagate causal dependencies.

Using Speculator, I will show that distributed and local file systems can provide strong consistency and safety guarantees without the poor performance these guarantees usually entail.

Bio:

Ed Nightingale is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Michigan. His research focuses on experimental software systems, especially operating systems, distributed systems and mobile computing.

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. People living in the rural developing world have many information needs that could, but are not, being met by information technology. Technology for this context must be low-cost, accessible and appropriate given the local infrastructure, including conditions of intermittent power and connectivity.

In this talk, I describe my experiences developing CAM - a toolkit for mobile phone data collection for the rural developing world. Designing technologies for an unfamiliar context requires understanding the needs and capabilities of potential users. Drawing from the results of an extended design study conducted with microfinance group members in rural India (many of whom are semi-literate or illiterate), I outline a set of user interface design guidelines for accessibility to such users.

The results of this study are used to inform the design of CAM, a mobile phone application toolkit including support for paper-based interaction; multimedia input and output; and disconnected operation. I provide evidence of CAM's usability, breadth, and real-world applicability. Regarding real-world applicability, a CAM application for microfinance data collection is now being used by 17 NGO (non-governmental organization) staff to serve over 10000 group members in two states of India. Regarding breadth, I list some important rural data collection applications - including for retail supply chain tracking, agricultural monitoring and health care - that we have implemented, or can be implemented, using the CAM toolkit. I conclude by discussing possible topics for future work and my long-term research vision.

Bio: Tapan S. Parikh is an Intel Fellow and Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Washington. Earlier, he received a M.S. degree in Computer Science from UW and a Sc.B. degree in Molecular Modeling (with Honors) from Brown University. Tapan's research interests include human-computer interaction (HCI), systems engineering and information and communication technologies for development (ICTD).

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. Unfortunately, their code is exceptionally hard to get right: it must anticipate all failures and crashes, and always correctly recover from them, regardless of the current system state. In this talk, I will describe EXPLODE, a storage system checking tool we developed that makes it easy to systematically check real storage systems for errors. EXPLODE practically adapts ideas from model checking, a comprehensive, heavyweight formal verification technique, which makes it systematic while being lightweight. We applied EXPLODE to a broad range of real storage systems, and found serious data-loss errors in every system checked, typically with little effort.

Biography:

Junfeng Yang is a Ph.D. candidate in the Computer Science Department at Stanford. His research interests span the areas of systems, security, software engineering and programming languages, focusing on practically checking large, real-world software systems. Junfeng Yang received his MS in Computer Science from Stanford in 2002, and his BS in Computer Science from Tsinghua University, Beijing, China in 2000. He is a receipt of the Siebel Scholarship and the Stanford School of Engineering fellowship. He received the Best Paper Award of OSDI 2004.

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. ASLR randomizes the locations of the stack, heap, and executable code in an address space. Intel recently added hardware to its processors (the "XD bit") to ease W-xor-X implementation. Microsoft Windows Vista ships with W-xor-X and ASLR. Linux (via the PaX project) and OpenBSD also include support for both.

We find that both measures are less effective than previously thought, on the x86 at least. A new way of organizing exploits allows the attacker to perform arbitrary computation using only code already present in the attacked process' address space, so code injection is unnecessary. Exploits organized in the new way chain together dozens of short instruction sequences, each just two or three instructions long. Because of the properties of the x86 instruction set, these sequences might not have been intentionally compiled into the binary; we find them by means of static analysis. Furthermore, the effective entropy of PaX ASLR can be searched by brute force. The attack takes just a few minutes to mount over the network.

Group signatures are a variant of digital signatures that provides anonymity for signers. Any member of a group can sign messages, but the resulting signature keeps the identity of the signer secret. In some systems there is a third party that can undo the signature anonymity (trace) using a special trapdoor. New applications for group signatures include the trusted computing initiative (TCPA) and vehicle safety ad-hoc networks (DSRC). In each case, group signatures provide privacy guarantees for tamper-resistant embedded devices.

We describe a short group signature scheme. Signatures in our scheme are approximately the size of a standard RSA signature with the same security. The mathematical setting for our scheme is certain elliptic curves featuring an efficiently computable bilinear map, a setting that has proved fruitful in recent years. We also consider two choices for handling revocation in our scheme.

Among the three billion bases contained in the human genome, only 1.5% are well characterized, primarily in the form of protein-coding genes. Understanding all functional elements encoded in the remaining 98.5%, or the so-called dark matter, of the human genome is a fundamental challenge for human biology and medicine.

In this talk, I will describe computational methods for systematically dissecting the function of the genomic dark matter. Using pattern recognition, machine learning and comparative genomics, we have uncovered hundreds of novel regulatory motifs in these regions, creating a first systematic catalogue of both transcriptional and post-transcriptional regulatory elements in the human genome. Our systematic analyses also lead to a fundamental change of view on microRNA gene regulation, and the discovery of over 15,000 insulator sequences, which partition the human genome into domains of expression.

In a few years, genome sequences of over 50 mammals will become available. I will discuss how these data will empower our computational methods, and provide an opportunity to unravel all information encoded in the human genome.

BIO: Xiaohui Xie is a computational biologist working at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. His recent research interests are in computational genomics and regulatory motif discovery in particular. Dr. Xie received his M.S. in Computer Science and Ph.D. in Computational Neuroscience, both from MIT, where he continued as a postdoc with Eric Lander.

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 particular, I will discuss the problems of estimating statistical quantities on a given network, reconstructing the network topology from observations at a subset of the nodes and optimization problems defined on stochastic networks.

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 inherently limiting their scope to ensure cost recovery. This talk describes a number of techniques (and the resulting systems) that realize highly-scalable cooperative content distribution. I show how to build a fully self-organizing CDN that efficiently delivers content using unreliable nodes, describe how to transparently dispatch clients to nearby servers, and touch on how to securely leverage even untrusted resources. These ideas have been implemented, deployed, and tested in production systems currently serving several terabytes of data to more than a million people every day. The view of the Internet gained from deploying these systems answered long-standing questions about network configuration, while providing important insights that helped evolve our systems' designs.