Meeting Agenda
Wednesday, January 27, 1999
- Location:
- DC1304
- Time:
- 1:30
- Chair:
- Ian Stewart
Member
List
1. Adoption of the Agenda - additions or deletions
2. Coffee Hour
- Coffee hour this week:
- Daming Yao
- Coffee hour next week:
- You. Volunteer now! Fame, fortune, and food.
3. Next meeting
- Date:
- Wednesday, February 3rd, 1999
- Location:
- DC1304
- Time:
- 1:30
- Chair:
- Daming Yao
- Technical presentation:
- Ian Stewart
4. Forthcoming
- Chairs:
-
- Ian Bell
- Blair Conrad
- Tech Presenters:
-
- Daming Yao
- Ian Bell
5. Technical Presentation
- Presenter:
- Mark Riddell
-
- Title:
Volumetric Textures
- Abstract:
-
I will be giving an overview of some of the main techniques of producing
or simulating a volume texture within an object. While there is no
general solution to the problem as of yet, I will cover procedural 3D
textures, particle systems, volume data sets and a few hacks.
6. General Discussion Items
- CD burner (Ian)
- Lack of home pages, .plan (Blair)
7. Action List
8. Director's Meeting
9. Seminars
Master's Thesis Presentation
- Thursday, January 28, 1999
Fletcher Lu, of the Department of Computer Science, University of
Waterloo, will speak on "The Use of Augmented Matrices to Solve
General Sparse Systems".
TIME: 10:00 AM
ROOM: MC5158
Abstract.
Let Ax = b be a large sparse system of linear equations. A
common method of solving this problem is to factor A using Gaussian
elimination with partial pivoting into upper and lower triangular
matrices, U and L respectively. Solving the triangular systems Ly = b
and U x = y will then give us x.
A second approach to solving this problem would be to consider the
augmented system
K x = 0 where K = dI A'
s b A -dI
for some small parameter d > 0. Finding a solution to the augmented
system can be used to find a solution for x. The matrix K is a symmetric
quasidefinite matrix. Every symmetric quasidefinite matrix has an LDL'
decomposition, where D is a diagonal matrix. If d = 0, K may also be
factored using a Bunch-Kaufman LDL' decomposition, where D is a block
diagonal matrix composed of 2 x 2 blocks.
This presentation demonstrates a number of the relationships that exist
among these three methods. We show that, for a fixed ordering, the
Bunch-Kaufman decomposition of K performs nearly the same computations as
Gaussian elimination with partial pivoting performed on A. We further
show that the number of nonzeros of the lower triangular Cholesky factor L is
bounded below by the number of nonzeros of the lower triangular
Bunch-Kaufman factor L.
Have a say in who gets hired...
CS Grad Interview with Faculty Applicant Tao Jiang
Tuesday, January 28th from 3:30-4:00PM in DC2121
Tao Jiang is an established CS theory / Computation Biology researcher
who is applying for a faculty position. He will be giving a talk on
Thursday January 28th from 10:30-11:30 in DC1304 titled Approximation
Algorithms for Multiple Sequence Alignment.
On Thursday afternoon graduate students are encouraged to attend an
interview with Tao in order to ask questions and submit our opinions
to the faculty.
I have a copy of his (lengthy) C.V. Send me an e-mail if you are
interested in having a look.
If you are interested in attending, drop by or send me e-mail to let
me know you are planning to attend. Computational Biology students are
particularly encouraged to attend and ask relevant questions.
Hope to see you all there!
- Kevin
Unix Tutorial Part II
Wednesday 27 January, 1999 16:30 MC 3006 See uw.talks for more.
Master's Essay Presentation
- Wednesday, February 3, 1999
Terry Siu, graduate student, Dept. Comp. Sci.,
University of Waterloo, will speak on ``Active
Networks''.
TIME: 2:30-3:30 p.m.
ROOM: DC 1304
ABSTRACT
Current network technology behaves more or less like a
"bit pipe" where data is passed opaquely, without
examination or modification, from node to node. This
"passive" infrastructure switches or routes the data
efficiently, but the "intelligence" required for
meaningful interpretation of that data must reside in
applications at each end of the communications path.
With the proliferation in the uses of data by end-user
applications, and increasing client, network, and media
variability, the modern Internet must deal with
multiple users competing for bandwidth as they request
a diverse set of services. Emerging applications can
benefit from new network services tailored to the
application and device characteristics of an end host.
However, wide-scale deployment of new services is too
slow due to the long standardization process required
for achieving interoperability and backwards
compatibility in the existing network infrastructure.
This essay investigates active networking, a new
paradigm proposed by DARPA to address the problem of
slow service evolution. An active network supports a
user-network interface, allowing the nodes of the
network to be programmed by the end user. This
flexibility enables a user to tailor the processing of
an application data flow, effectively, providing a
platform to test and deploy new services faster. I
will begin by presenting DARPA's architectural
framework for active networks and reviewing the various
research efforts of several DARPA-funded institutions.
Based on these discussions, I will present a set of
< Talk abstract truncated >
infraNET Project
"Practical Solutions for Web Site Content Management and Personalization"
David Boswell (President of LivePage Corporation)
Thursday, January 28, 2:30 - 4:00 p.m. DC 1302
10. Lab Cleanup