Meeting Agenda

Wednesday, February 18, 1998

Location:: DC1304
Time:: 1:30
Chair:: Richard Bartels

1. Adoption of the Agenda - additions or deletions

2. Coffee Hour

Coffee hour this week:: ???
Coffee hour next week:: ???

3. Next meeting

Date:: Wednesday, February 25, 1998
Location:: DC1304
Time:: 1:30
Chair:: Wilkin Chau
Technical presentation:: Richard Bartels

4. Forthcoming

Chairs:

Blair Conrad (Mar 4th)
Bill Cowan (Mar 11th)
Itai Danan (Mar 18th)

Tech Presenters:

Wilkin Chau (Mar 4th)
Blair Conrad (Mar 11th)
Bill Cowan (Mar 18th)

5. Technical Presentations

Presenter:: Clara Tsang
Title:: Animated Pasting
Abstract:: Surface pasting is a process in which the details are added to a base surface without increasing the complexity of the base surface by applying displacement mapping method. Surface Pasting is a good modeling method and can be applied on animation. However, we have a question "How well do pasted surfaces behave under animation?". In this presentation, I will give some ideas of my thesis.

6. General Discussion Items

Recruiting seminar, Monday, 10:30 (see seminars below)
Alias/SideFX talks coming; send abstracts to Mike McCool
Need student rep for U of T visit (to contact van@dgp)

7. Action List

Visiting prospective faculty members.
Deadline for submission of Theses/Essays for Spring Convocation 1998 is May 30, 1998.
Alias/SideFX talks coming; send abstracts to Mike McCool
Blair Conrad coordinates U of T visit (with van@dgp)

8. Director's Meeting

9. Seminars

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

Title:   Deep Blue: IBM's Massively Parallel Chess Machine

Speaker:  Gabriel M. Silberman, IBM Centre for Advanced Studies
          IBM Toronto Laboratory

Place: DC1302

Time: 2.30pm, Wednesday February 18th, 1998

Abstract:
   IBM's premiere chess system, based on an IBM RS/6000 SP
   scalable parallel processor, made history by defeating
   world chess champion Garry Kasparov.  Deep Blue's chess
   prowess stems from its capacity to examine over 200
   million board positions per second, utilizing the computing
   resources of a 32-node IBM RS/6000-SP, populated with 512
   special purpose chess accelerators.

   In this talk we describe some of the technology behind
   Deep Blue, how chess knowledge was incorporated into its
   software, as well as the attitude of the media and general
   public during the match.

Biography:
Gabriel M. Silberman is program director for CAS, the Centre for
Advanced Studies at IBM's Toronto Laboratory.  Dr. Silberman comes
to CAS from the applications systems technologies department at the
IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, Yorktown Heights, NY, where he managed
the Wideband Processor and I/O Architectures group.  He received his
B.Sc. and M.Sc. degrees in computer science from the Technion - Israel
Institute of Technology, and the Ph.D. degree in computer science from
the State University of New York at Buffalo.

From  1980 to 1990 Dr. Silberman was with the faculty of
both Computer Science and Electrical Engineering Departments at the
Technion, Haifa, Israel, and from 1988 to 1990 he was visiting faculty
at the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department, Carnegie Mellon
University, Pittsburgh, PA.  From 1990 to 1994 he was a research staff
member in the High Performance VLSI Architectures group, at IBM
Research, working mainly on VLIW architecture and compiler issues,
and from 1994 to 1997 he headed the Wideband Processor and I/O
Architectures group.

His current research interests include computer architecture,
particularly in the area of low latency, high bandwidth
interconnects, operating systems and high performance I/O.

During the original Kasparov vs. Deep Blue match, and again
for the rematch, Dr. Silberman's group provided the technical
infrastructure and support for the computing and audio-visual
systems, both on- and off-site.  This year he also served as
Deep Blue team coordinator and liaison to the Kasparov team.

Dr. Silberman is a member of the Association for Computing Machinery,
the International Federation of Information Processing
Working Group 10.3, and a senior member of the Institute of Electrical
and Electronics Engineers Computer Society.  He has served in
numerous organizing and program committees for professional
conferences.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

Speaker:  Chellathurai Thamayanthi

Title:    Numerical solution of stochastic optimal control problems in finance.
Date:     Wednesday, February 18, 1998
Time:     11:30
Location: DC 1304

ABSTRACT:

Dynamic stochastic optimal control problems play an important role
in engineering and finance.  When the underlying stochastic variables follow
a Brownian motion, using Bellman's principle of stochastic dynamic
programming and Ito's theorem leads to a set of behavioral equations for
intertemporal portfolio selection and option valuation.  This results
in solving the Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman partial differential equation in
conjunction with a deterministic constrained optimization problem.  The
talk will focus on the formulation of the HJB equation for specific finance
related problems and its numerical discretization.  The difficulties associated
with the discretization of the mixed derivative term to achieve the discrete
maximum principle will be discussed. Alternative methods will also be discussed.

Supervisors:  Professor K. Ponnambalam

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

                                Radiosity
                                    by
                               Stephen Mann

Radiosity is a  technique for computing the  ambient (indirect)  lighting in
ascene.  In first  half of  my talk,  I will introduce  the radiosity  idea,
give the simplified radiosity  equations, and describe the  two main methods
for solving  these equations.   As the  details of implementing  a radiosity
system are  complex, in the  second half  of the talk,  I will  discuss some
of the details  of a radiosity  system, including form  factor calculations,
shadow boundaries, and meshing issues.

                       Wednesday, February 18, 1998
                                 5:30 pm
                                 DC 1304

                   Tea and doughnaughts will be served

                             C O M P U T E R
                              S C I E N C E
                                 C L U B
                       A Student Chapter of the ACM

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

DEPARTMENT OF COMPUTER SCIENCE
UNIVERSITY OF WATERLOO
SEMINAR ACTIVITIES

COMPUTER SCIENCE SEMINAR

                    -Monday, February 23, 1998

Professor  M.A.  Storey,  School  of Computing Science,
Simon Fraser University, and Dept. Comp. Sci., Univ. of
Victoria,   will speak on ``A Framework for Designing a
Software    Exploration   Tool   to   Enhance   Program
Understanding''.

TIME:                10:30-11:30 a.m.

ROOM:                DC 1302

ABSTRACT

Software  programs,  especially  legacy  programs,  are
often  large,  1complex,  and  poorly  documented.   To
change,  adapt  or improve these programs, a maintainer
must  have some understanding of the source code.  Many
tools  have  been  developed to help programmers during
software  maintenance.   One  class  of tools, software
exploration   tools,   provide  graphical  views  of  a
program's  static  structure linked to textual views of
the  program's  source  code.   Unfortunately, a lot of
these   tools   do   not  have  practical  application.
Programmers   utilize   a   variety  of  strategies  to
comprehend  a  program but this level of variability is
rarely supported by program comprehension tools.

Ideally,  a  set  of guidelines should be available for
these  tool  designers.   We  describe  a  framework of
cognitive  design  elements to be considered during the
design  of  a software exploration tool. Following this
framework,  we  present  a  prototype  of  a  tool  for
software  exploration -- SHriMP Views.  SHriMP combines
several   visualization  methods  and  static  analysis
techniques  to  enable  a  programmer to understand and
document  legacy software systems.  The SHriMP tool has
been  evaluated  and  compared  to other options in two
user  studies.   Observations  from  these studies (and
future  studies)  will be used to improve the cognitive
framework  of  design  elements,  which in turn will be
used  to  improve the design of this and other software
exploration tools.  Many of the lessons learned through
this adaptive approach to design are relevant for other
categories of software engineering tools.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

DEPARTMENT OF COMPUTER SCIENCE
UNIVERSITY OF WATERLOO
SEMINAR ACTIVITIES

SOFTWARE ENGINEERING SEMINAR

                    -Thursday, February 26, 1998

T.C.  Lethbridge,  School of Info. Tech. & Engineering,
University  of  Ottawa  will speak on ``A Survey of the
Relevance    of    Computer    Science   and   Software
Engineering''.  Education

TIME:                10:30-11:30 a.m.

ROOM:                DC 1302

ABSTRACT

We  describe a study of 168 software professionals that
was performed to determine how relevant their education
has  been  to their careers. Starting with a list of 57
topics,  we asked the participants to indicate how much
they learned in university, how much they know now, how
useful  the  material  has  been and whether they would
like  to  learn more. We analyze the data and highlight
potential  changes  to  computer  science  or  software
engineering curricula.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

10. Lab Cleanup

A clean lab is a happy lab.