Meeting Agenda

Date:	September 30, 2010
Location:	DC 1331
Time:	10:30
Chair:	Philippe Lamoureux

1. Acceptance of the Agenda - additions or deletions

2. Coffee Hour

Coffee hour last week:: Tiffany- thanks!
Coffee hour this week:: NOT Marshall
Coffee hour next week:: Volunteers?

3. Forthcoming

Date:	October 7, 2010	October 14, 2010	October 21, 2010	October 28, 2010
Location:	DC 1331 10:30	NOT DC 1331 10:30	DC 1331 1:30	DC 1331 10:30
Chair:	Ben Lafreniere	Tiffany Inglis	Ed Lank	Stephen Mann
Technical Presentation:	Zainab AlMeraj	Tiffany Inglis	Ben Lafreniere	Philippe Lamoureux

4. Technical Presentation

Gabriel Esteves	Title : Run-time generation of QMC-Kalman filters for track fitting Abstract: One of the bottlenecks of the pattern recognition task in High Energy Physics is that of on-line track reconstruction. This has been traditionally divided into the sub-tasks of track finding and track fitting. The latter involves estimating the state of a particle inside a detector moving under the influence of a magnetic field. For the last twenty or so years, the most popular solution to the track fitting problem is the Kalman filter (KF). As powerful as it is, the assumptions under which the KF is guaranteed to compute the optimal estimator are not met in the track fitting problem. In particular, the dynamics are clearly non-linear and the process and measurement noise in the model are strongly non-Gaussian due to effects such as multiple Coulomb scattering and energy loss. A proposed solution is the "Gaussian sum" filter (GSF), which runs a bank of KFs to estimate each of the modes of the noise distribution, modeled here as a Gaussian mixture. In this paper, we take advantage of Intel's recent parallel frameworks dynamic code generation features to create a GSF that matches the given (observation) noise distribution. We further combat non-linearity by having the GSF drive, instead of KFs, the recently proposed quasi-Monte Carlo Kalman Filters, a generalization of the sigma-point KFs. The generated code is not only tailored to the data, but takes advantage of several levels of parallelism in multi-core processors.

Gabriel Esteves

Title : Run-time generation of QMC-Kalman filters for track fitting
Abstract:
One of the bottlenecks of the pattern recognition task in High Energy Physics is that of on-line track reconstruction. This has been traditionally divided into the sub-tasks of track finding and track fitting. The latter involves estimating the state of a particle inside a detector moving under the influence of a magnetic field. For the last twenty or so years, the most popular solution to the track fitting problem is the Kalman filter (KF). As powerful as it is, the assumptions under which the KF is guaranteed to compute the optimal estimator are not met in the track fitting problem. In particular, the dynamics are clearly non-linear and the process and measurement noise in the model are strongly non-Gaussian due to effects such as multiple Coulomb scattering and energy loss. A proposed solution is the "Gaussian sum" filter (GSF), which runs a bank of KFs to estimate each of the modes of the noise distribution, modeled here as a Gaussian mixture. In this paper, we take advantage of Intel's recent parallel frameworks dynamic code generation features to create a GSF that matches the given (observation) noise distribution. We further combat non-linearity by having the GSF drive, instead of KFs, the recently proposed quasi-Monte Carlo Kalman Filters, a generalization of the sigma-point KFs. The generated code is not only tailored to the data, but takes advantage of several levels of parallelism in multi-core processors.

5. Discussion Items

None so far...

6. Action Items

Poster!
DC 1331 is not available on October 14, but DC 1316 is. DC 1331 is not available on December 2, and neither is anything else (except perhaps the lab).
Graphically enhance the 488 course?
What language should replace the hideous "language" Scheme for 1st year courses?

7. Conferences and Special Journal Issues

Recent Additions

Upcoming Deadlines

Oct 01, 2010: EG11 Full paper submission

8. Directors' Meeting

9. Seminars and Events

2010 Sep 29, 15:00 . Database Research Group Seminar
Kelly Lyons, University of Toronto
Mediating Human-to-Human Interactions through Social Media Technology
2010 Sep 30, 10:30 . Computer Graphics Research Group PhD Seminar
Rodolfo (Gabriel) Esteves, PhD candidate, David R. Cheriton School of Comp. Sci., Univ. Waterloo
Run-time generation of QMC-Kalman filters for track fitting
2010 Oct 04, 10:30 Software Engineering Research Group Seminar
Prof Rainer Koschke, University of Bremen, Germany
Begun the Software Clone War Has
2010 Oct 07, 10:00 . Computer Science Seminar
Subhash Suri, University of California, Santa Barbara, USA
New Directions in Algorithms and Computational Geometry
2010 Oct 08, 15:30 . Programming Languages Lab PhD Seminar
Mona Mojdeh, PhD candidate, David R. Cheriton School of Comp. Sci., Univ. Waterloo
Personalized Email Spam Filtering with Minimal or No User Training
2010 Oct 12, 09:00 . Software Engineering Research Group PhD Thesis Defence
Zarrin Langari, PhD candidate, David R. Cheriton School of Comp. Sci., University of Waterloo
Modelling and Analysis of Dynamic Systems
2010 Oct 14, 09:30 . Database Research Group PhD Thesis Defence
Iman Elghandour, PhD candidate, David R. Cheriton School of Comp. Sci., Univ. Waterloo
Automatic Physical Design for XML Databases
2010 Oct 14, 14:30 . Database Research Group Seminar
Alkis Polyzotis, University of California, Santa Cruz
Semi-Automatic Index Tuning for Database Systems
2010 Oct 14, 16:30 . Distinguished Lecture Series Seminar
Madhu Sudan, MIT/Microsoft Research
Towards Universal Semantic Communication
2010 Oct 19, 13:30 . Database Research Group PhD Thesis Defence
Yingying Tao, PhD candidat, David R. Cheriton School of Comp. Sci., Univ. Waterloo
Mining Time-Changing Data Streams
2010 Oct 20, 11:00 . Software Engineering Research Group PhD Thesis Defence
Abram Hindle, PhD candidate, David R. Cheriton School of Comp. Sci., Univ. Waterloo
Evidence-Based Software Process Recovery
2010 Nov 01, 13:30 . Artificial Intelligence Lab PhD Thesis Defence
Tyrel Russell, PhD candidate, David R. Cheriton School of Comp. Sci., Univ. Waterloo
A Computational Study of Problems in Sports

Also see other Math and CS postings.