Meeting Agenda

Wednesday, December 3, 1997

Location:

DC1304

Time:

1:30

Chair:

Mark Riddell (Dec 3)

1. Adoption of the Agenda - additions or deletions

2. Coffee Hour

Coffee hour this week:

Eric Hall

Coffee hour next week:

Leo Magalhães

3. Next meeting

Date:

Wednesday, December 10, 1997

Location:

DC2303 - The Lab

Time:

1:30

Chair:

Navid Sadikali (Dec 10)

Technical presentation:

Leo Magalhães (Switched with Alberto) (Dec 10)

4. Forthcoming

Chairs:

1. Faramarz Samavat (Dec 17)
2. Ian Stewart (After Holidays)
3. Theresa Yeung (switched with Clara Tsang)

Tech Presenters:

1. Mark Riddell (Dec 17)
2. Navid Sadikali (After Holidays)
3. Faramarz Samavat

5. Technical Presentations

Presenter:

Paul Prescod (Dec 3)

Title:

Trends in document processing and markup languages

Abstract:

Text remains the dominant communications medium of our time. Document
processing is the study of the automation of document manipulation
systems. This includes storing, searching, formatting, converting and
distributing documents. "Markup" has arisen as the premier notation for
representing documents in computers. Examples of markup languages
include LaTeX, HTML and SGML. "Generic markup" is slowly replacing
"procedural markup" as the dominant form of markup. There is evidence
that markup will be increasingly popular in applications outside of what
would traditionally be termed document processing.

This talk will discuss these historical trends and the current situation
and will attempt to extrapolate into the future of document processing
and markup.

6. General Discussion Items

• The Eurographics submission deadline is January 9, 1998. Please see
  http://www.eg98.gpcg.pt/submissions/ for requirements.
  
  
• SIGGRAPH deadline (for North America) is January 14, 1998.
  
  
• Bill's Big Bash - December 17th
  
  




7. Action List






8. Director's Meeting

9. Seminars

DEPARTMENT OF COMPUTER SCIENCE


UNIVERSITY OF WATERLOO


SEMINAR ACTIVITIES



DISTRIBUTED SYSTEMS SEMINAR



             
       -Wednesday, Dec. 3, 1997





Paul  A.S.  Ward,  graduate  student,  Dept. Comp. Sci.

University  of  Waterloo,  will  speak  on ``Towards an

Efficient Representation of Partial Orders''.



TIME:                2:30-3:30 p.m.



ROOM:                DC 1304



ABSTRACT



Distributed   computations   can   be   represented  as

partially  ordered  sets  where the elements of the set

represent  events  in  the  computation and the partial

order  is  the  transitive closure of  communication in

the  computation.  As such   it is extremely  important

to   be  able to manipulate partial orders efficiently.

In  particular,   it  is  desirable that  each  element

in  the  partial  order be  rapidly comparable with any

other   element   in   the   partial  order.   Existing

techniques for achieving this require that each element

be  timestamped  with  a   logical vector timestamp  of

length  equal  to  the  number  of  threads  (or  other

concurrent  entities)  in the computation.  However, it

is  theoretically   possible  to use timestamp  vectors

with  length  no  bigger  than  the  dimension  of  the

partial   order.   Although   the  dimension   can,  in

theory,  be   as  large  as the  number  of threads the

communication   patterns  implied  by   the  proof  are

unlikely   to  occur in a  distributed computation.  We

therefore    wished  to   develop   an understanding of

the  size   of the dimension in  typical    distributed

computations.  We    will describe the algorithms  that

we  have  developed   to  achieve this  and some of the

proofs  they  rest  upon.    A  solid understanding  of

partial-order  theory   is   NOT  required.  All of the

necessary  theoretical  background   will be covered in

the talk.







Friday, December 12, 1997

        
  Ph.D. Oral Defence

         
 ``Performance Optimization for Distributed-Shared-Data Systems''

         
 Craig Steven Bruce, CS Grad (Supervisor: D.J. Taylor)

         
 9:30 a.m.; MC6091A

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10. Lab Cleanup