IEEE
Computer Society - Vancouver Chapter
Calendar of Upcoming Event
Wednesday November 19th, 2008, at 6:00, talk at 6:30pm
UBC Robson (downtonw campus) 800 Robson st., Room C.100
Attacking Information Overload in Software Development
Dr. Gail Murphy
University of British Columbia, Computer Science
Abstract: The productivity of software developers is continually degrading due to an inundation of information: source code is easier and easier to traverse and to find, email inboxes are stuffed to capacity, RSS feeds provide a continual stream of technology updates, and so on. To enable software developers to work more effectively, tools are often introduced that provide even more information. The effect of more and more tools producing more and more information is placing developers into overload. To combat this overload, we have been building approaches rooted in structure and inspired by human memory models. As an example, the Mylyn project packages and makes available the structure that emerges from how a programmer works in an episodic-memory inspired interface. Programmers working with Mylyn see only the information they need for a task and can recall past task information with a simple click. We have shown in a field study that Mylyn makes programmers more productive; the half a million programmers now using Mylyn seem to agree. In this talk, I will describe the overload faced by programmers today and discuss several approaches we have developed to attack the problem, some of which may also pertain beyond the domain of software development.
Bio:Gail Murphy is a Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of British Columbia after receiving a B.Sc. from the University of Alberta, an M.S. and Ph.D. from the University of Washington and working for 5 years as a software developer. She works primarily on building simpler and more effective tools to help developers manage software evolution tasks. In 2005, she held a UBC Killam Research Fellowship and also received the AITO Dahl-Nygaard Junior Prize for her work in software evolution. In 2006 she received an NSERC Steacie Fellowship and the CRA-W Anita Borg Early Career Award. In 2007, she helped co-found Tasktop Technologies Inc. In 2008, she served as the program committee chair for the ACM SIGSOFT FSE conference and received the University of Washington College of Engineering Diamond Early Career Award. One of the most rewarding parts of her career has been collaborating with many very talented graduate and undergraduate students.
Recent Events
Monday October27th, 2008, at 6:00 talk at 6:30pm
Hosted by Sophos, 580 Granville, Vancouver (map) Skytrain: Granville stn
Software Best Pratices -- Agile deconstructed
Dr. Steven Fraser, SM IEEE
Director (Engineering), Cisco Research Center; Cisco systems
Abstract: “Best” really depends on context – and this introduction to software “best” practices will focus on the evaluation and integration of the practices that constitute many of todays “Agile” methods. One of the interesting observations made by members of the software community is that “what is old – is new again” when it comes to Agile. Another observation is that “best” is not universally applicable and boundary conditions do apply – due to variations in customers, competition, context, culture, tools, scale and scope - of the systems developed. This talk – intended for researchers, practitioners, managers and educators and does not require any specific programming knowledge – has evolved over the past three years and is based on experience gleamed at several multinational organizations developing large software systems.
Bio: Steven Fraser joined Cisco Systems in July 2007 in San Jose, California as a Director (Engineering) where he is responsible for the Cisco Research Center. Previously, Steven was a senior staff member of Qualcomm's Learning Center in San Diego, California with responsibilities for technical learning. Steven held a variety of technology management roles at BNR and Nortel including: Process Architect, Senior Manager, Design Process Engineering Advisor, and Software Reuse Program Prime in BNR’s Computing Research Lab (CRL). In 1994 he spent a year as a Visiting Scientist at the SEI at CMU collaborating on the development of team-based domain analysis (software reuse) techniques. Fraser was the General Chair for XP2006 and is the Corporate Support Chair for OOPSLA'08 and Tutorial Co-Chair for both XP2008 and ICSE 2009. Fraser holds a doctorate in Electrical Engineering (software specification validation) from McGill University in Montreal - and is a member of the ACM and a senior member of the IEEE.
In collaboration with 
September 17th, 2008, 6:30pm
@ SFU Harbour Centre (room: RBC Dominion Securities Exec.),
515 West Hastings st, Vancouver (map)
Joint event with the IEEE Systems, Man, and Cybernetics chapter (Ozge Uncu, chair)
The Robotics Tsunami - do you hear the wave of the next computer revolution?
Dr. Reuven Granot, Spark Integration Technologies Inc.
Abstract: As inexpensive and feature rich sensors and actuators come to the consumer market, the need to interconnect them becomes an inevitable must. Today, many believe this will bring the next computer revolution or as it is also called "The Web of Things". Intelligent interconnection is necessary to make the required integrated products attractive and usable by all generations, which means they must have autonomous features at some level and very user friendly interfaces. In order to make the control and integration software as inexpensive as the other components, it is required to reuse software and assemble it from smaller independent units we call Agents. Spark Integration Technologies Inc. has developed a disruptive technology called the Distributed Integration Operating SchemaT (DIOST) that enables fast development and delivery of integrated software and hardware solutions for a variety of applications, while saving money in development costs, maintenance of systems, and future upgrades. DIOS is a middleware which is intended to enables engineers to start the development of their products within their expertise, and without the need to struggle first to implement advanced computer science and computer software engineering techniques. I shall discuss Agent based software development and its relations with the Human Supervisory Control paradigm (also called Tele-robotics.) Agent based software development is necessary to make these integrated products display some level of autonomy and intelligent reactivity to dynamic changes in their environment. .
Bio: Dr. Reuven Granot is on the board of advisors for Spark Integration Technologies in Vancouver, and also teaching robotics in Israel at the Unviersity of Haifa and Technion -- Israel Institute of Technology-- as well as at the School of Engineering of Bar Ilan University. Former Chief Scientist, Israeli Ministry of Defense - Scientific Deputy for Research and Technology; Consultant to several Israeli industries. In his previous role with the Israeli Ministry of Defense, Reuven led the development of Israeli supercomputer and introduced state-of-the-art computer technologies into the defence community. Reuven's research is in the area of development of robotic software control agents to represent a human operator interfacing with a complex tele-robotic system environment as well as the progression from tele-operated equipment to human supervised autonomous control. He has a Ph. D. in Physics from the Weizman Institute. And he is an IEEE member.
April 10th, 2008, 5:30pm,
@ UBC - ECE, 2356 Main Mall, room Mcleod 418, Vancouver (map)
Joint event with the IEEE Communication Society Chapter, and part of the Computer Society's Distinguished Visitor Program.
Dynamic Data Management in MANET
Sanjay Madria, University of Missouri-Rolla
Abstract: In ad hoc networks, due to frequent network partition, data accessibility is lower than that in conventional fixed networks. This problem can be solved by replicating data items on mobile hosts. However, the movement of nodes, limited storage space and frequent disconnections limit the availability. In this talk, I will discuss three dynamic replica allocation methods by taking into account the read/write patterns at mobile hosts for each data item, the status of the network connection, topology and by considering a periodic updates and integrating user profiles of mobile users\' schedules. These methods allow dynamic relocation of replicas to maintain availability. I will discuss the performance evaluation of our proposed methods and show their comparison using extensive simulation experiments based on parameters such as write frequency, relocation period, data accessibility, radio communication range, limited memory, among others. This talk is partly based on forthcoming pa per in IEEE Transaction on Mobile Computing .
Bio: Sanjay Madria received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi, India in 1995. He is an Associate Professor, Department of Computer Science, at University of Missouri-Rolla, USA. Earlier he was Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science, Purdue University, West Lafayette, USA. He has published more than 120 Journal and conference papers in the areas of Mobile databases, web data warehousing and XML, and nested transaction management and performance issues. He guest edited WWW Journal and Data and Knowledge Engineering Sp. Issues on Web data management and Data warehousing. He has co-authored a book "Web Data Management: A Warehouse Approach", published by Springer-verlag. He served as Program Co-chair for ECWEB 00&01 conferences held, UK and Germany. He is serving as PC member of various database conferences (ICDE'07, DASFAA'07 - area chair), co-chair of XSDM'06 and reviewer for many reputed database journals published by ACM, IEEE and Springer among others. His research is supported by grants from NSF, DOE, UM research board and from industry. He is an IEEE Senior Member.
March 17th, 2008, 6:30pm,
@ Sierra Systems, 1177 West Hastings, Vancouver (map) In collaboration with 
Human Aspects of Software Engineering: Social and Cognitive Perspectives
Dr. Orit Hazzan, Technion
Abstract: The talk focuses on human aspects of software engineering and illustrates how agile software development helps coping with some challenges of software projects. The talk is based on the working assumption that the people involved in software development processes deserve more attention. In this spirit, the talk attempts to highlight the world of software engineering from the perspective of the main actors -- mainly, individuals and teams -- involved in software development processes in general and in agile software development environments in particular. Specifically, social and cognitive aspects are highlighted, by addressing the following topics: collaboration, abstraction processes and testing..
Bio: Dr. Orit Hazzan is an associate professor at the Department of Education in Technology and Science of the Technion - Israel Institute of Technology and the associate dean of the Technion Undergraduate Studies. In May 2004 she published her book Human Aspects of Software Engineering, co-authored with the late Jim Tomayko. Her second book Agile Software Engineering, co-authored with Yael Dubinsky, will be published by Springer in Spring 2008. In parallel to her research work, she is a consultant for several software projects in the Israeli software industry. She is the author of about 100 papers and presents her research at computer science and software engineering education conferences (e.g., SIGCSE), as well as at conferences that deal with software engineering in general (such as, ICSE) and agile software development in particular (e.g., the XP and the Agile Conferences).
March 6th, 2008, 5:30pm,
@ UBC - ECE, 2356 Main Mall, room Mcleod 418, Vancouver (map)
Denial of Memory Service in Multi-Core Systems and Preventing it via Fair Memory Controllers
Dr. Onur Mutlu, Microsoft Research
Abstract: We are entering the multi-core era in computer science and engineering. All major high-performance processor manufacturers have integrated at least two cores (processors) on the same chip — and it is predicted that chips with many more cores will become widespread in the near future. As cores on the same chip share the DRAM memory system, multiple programs executing on different cores can interfere with each others’ memory access requests, thereby adversely affecting one another’s performance. In this talk, I will first show that current multi-core processors are vulnerable to a new class of Denial of Service (DoS) attacks because the memory system is “unfairly” shared among multiple cores. A low-importance application can maliciously destroy the performance of a high-importance application running on the same chip. We call such an application a memory performance hog (MPH). With the widespread deployment of multi-core systems in commodity computers and with the rapid increase in number of on-chip cores, we expect MPHs to become a prevalent security issue that could affect almost all computer users. I will next describe our solution to the problem, "stall-time fair memory scheduling." By making the memory access scheduling fair at the memory controller hardware, we can not only prevent denial of service attacks but also improve system performance. Our experimental results illustrate that the solution is effective at containing memory performance hogs and allowing better system utilization. I will also describe how applications with different priorities can be seamlessly supported by our proposed solution to provide different levels of Quality of Service. If time permits, I will briefly describe other problems we are working on solving in the Computer Architecture Group at Microsoft Research.
Bio:
Onur Mutlu is a researcher at Microsoft Research and a Research Fellow at the University of Texas at Austin. He is interested in computer architecture and systems research, especially in hardware/software cooperation. He received his PhD and MS in Electrical and Computer Engineering from UT-Austin and his BS degrees in Computer Engineering and Psychology from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. During his graduate studies, he worked at Intel Corporation and Advanced Micro Devices. He was a recipient of the Intel PhD fellowship in 2004 and the University of Texas George H. Mitchell Award for Excellence in Graduate Research in 2005. In his spare time, he enjoys wandering on the snow-covered trails of the Pacific Northwest.
More at http://research.microsoft.com/~onur/
January 22nd, 2008, 6:00pm,
@ Fairleigh Dickinson University, 842 Cambie st., Vancouver
Dr. Eduard Babulak, Senior Member IEEE
Abstract: The current technological advancements in Internet and Telecommunications Technologies, facilitate easy access to information resources to anyone, at any time and anywhere on this planet. Internet access has become essential for any establishments in business, academia, manufacturing, law, medicine, government worldwide. New generation of Internet applications will facilitate creation of global work-place and learning environment utilizing the fully-automated information cyberspace systems.
The author discusses his own vision and concepts of ultimate automated information cyberspace and how this technology might apply in the world of work, education and at home. The author also discusses the current state of the art in the world of Telecommunications and Internet Technologies, new technological trends directions in the Internet and Automation Industries, Ubiquity, Convergence, as well as the concept of the Fully-automated Home, Microsoft project on Easy Living and Future Tech. Author believes that time when ubiquitous fully-automated cyberspace technologies will be considered as a regular equipment in workplaces and homes worldwide is not too far.
For example, a person working from home in Vancouver engages in an augmented video-teleconference with a colleague at the office in London. The home in Vancouver and office in London will have number of task specific computers, special computational sensors embedded with intelligent software agents and multiple cameras and displays. The switch plates may be mounted near the door of each room may monitor the privacy-state of each room, providing simple touch-screen interfaces to common room controls. Both, the office and home are aware of where people are. The automatic switch would allocate the best video feed for the particular video session. The office in London and home in Vancouver computational devices will be interconnected creating a typical office and home environment at the same time.
In light of current innovation communication technologies by IBM, HP, Microsoft, Philips, Sony, authors work promotes formation of inter-disciplinary international teams of experts, scientists, researchers and engineers.
Bio: Eduard Babulak is international scholar, researcher, consultant, educator, professional engineer and polyglot with more than twenty five years of teaching experience and industrial experience as a professional engineer and consultant. Professor Babulak published and presented numerous International Journal and Conference papers, Invited Keynote, Plenary, Panel, Conference, and Colloquial Talks worldwide.
He worked as a University Professor, Associate Professor, Senior Lecturer, Lecturer, College Lecturer and Researcher of Mathematics, Electrical, Computer Engineering and Computing Science in USA, Canada, UK, Spain, Germany, Austria, Cyprus, Turkey, Czech Republic and Slovakia. His academic and engineering work was recognized internationally by the Canadian Association of Professional Engineers, Engineering Council in UK and European Federation of Engineers. His research interests are in MIS, IT, Ubiquitous Computing, Educational Technologies, E-Manufacturing, Quality of Service provision, Computer Networks, Telematics and Telecommunications Communications Infrastructures, Electronic Health Record and Automation.
Professor Babulak speaks 14 languages, was nominated Fellow of the British Computer Society (BCS) and Fellow of Association of Computer Machinery (ACM). He is a Senior Member of IEEE, a Corporate Member of IEE, a Professional Member of British Computer Society (BCS), a Professional Member of ACM, a Member of American Society for Engineering Education (ASEE), and Member of the Mathematical Society of America (AMS).
Professor Babulak’s biography was selected for citation in the Cambridge Blue Book 2005, the Cambridge Index of Biographies 2004-2005, the Dictionary of International Biography 2004, published by the Cambridge Centre of International Biographies, Who’s Who in the Science and Engineering 2003, 2005-2006, 2007-2008, Who’s is Who in the Industry and Finance 2004-2005, 2006-2007 and in the Who’s, et Who in the World 2003, 2004, 2006, 2007, 2008.
December 10th, 2007, 7:00 till 9:00pm, @ BCIT, Bldg SE2, Town Square D (map)
Organized jointly with the Communication Society (Admission is free)
Integration of wireless technology in consumer electronic devices
Sean Mercer, Microsoft
Abstract: Today, there is a trend towards widespread adoption of wireless technology. It is being included into many devices that may not traditionally have been thought of as wireless I will introduce the MSN Direct FM broadcast service that we operate (see web site http://www.msndirect.com/). . We broadcast content and appropriately equipped devices can receive and display the information. This will easily lead to some design examples (e.g., watch).
The talk will cover issues of noise and EMI emissions from various non wireless host products and the implications for radio receivers, as well as antenna implementation, then expand further with some higher frequency examples: 2.4GHz and 1.575GHz.
Several examples from past work will be brought along.
Bio: Sean Mercer is a Wireless Technology Architect in the Smart Personal Objects Technology Group at Microsoft Corporation. He is responsible for researching and promoting wireless technologies within the group, in addition to working with partners to achieve successful wireless product implementations. Prior to joining Microsoft, Sean worked as an RF engineer at Palm Inc. Before relocating to the USA in 2000 he spent several years in Vancouver working in an RF capacity for Philips Semiconductors, Motorola, Glenayre and Racal Canada.
He holds a Ph.D in electrical engineering, maintains his CEng status in the UK and has been a MIEEE for over a decade.
October 4th , 2007, 4:00 till 6:30, @ UBC - Electrical and Computer Engineering - 2332 Main mall, Kaiser 2020 (map):
What every developer should know about software performance on multicore processors
Alexandra Fedorova, SFU
Abstract: Multicore processors are becoming the dominant computing platform. Although software written for conventional, single-core, processors can run on these new processors unmodified, it is important to understand the intricacies of application performance on these processors, in order to make the most out of them and to avoid performance anomalies. In this talk I will describe common performance issues on multicore processors and techniques for addressing them. In particular, I will discuss unpredictable and suboptimal performance due to contention for on-chip resources, performance of applications that share data, and scalability of multithreaded applications. I will draw on real performance data from standard benchmarks and commercial applications executed on latest multicore systems..
Bio: Dr. Alexandra Fedorova heads the systems research group at the School of Computing Science at Simon Fraser University. She has graduated with Ph.D. in Computer Science from Harvard University, where she has written a thesis on operating system scheduling for multicore and multithreaded processors. During her Ph.D. program, Fedorova also worked as a researcher at Sun Microsystems labs, where she conducted research on operating system design for multicore processor. Fedorova is a lead inventor on nine US patent applications and has numerous publications in leading academic conferences.
Using Modern Graphics Processors for Non-graphics Applications
Tor Aamodt , UBC
Abstract: Today's top end graphics cards are capable of close to half a teraFLOP of single precision floating point performance (peak) resulting in enormous potential compared with desktop
microprocessors. They achieve this by dedicating far more of their
silicon area to actual computation units than desktop microprocessors. However, the challenge is writing software that can actually take advantage of the massive parallelism offered by the hardware.
This talk is meant to provide a brief "tutorial" on the subject of how to program GPUs to take advantage of their performance potential. I will give an overview of the recent evolution of graphics processors and illustrate with examples how some important non-graphics applications have been mapped to current graphics hardware. A focus of the presentation will be understanding what is required to achieve good performance of non-graphics applications on current graphics processors.
Bio: Dr. Tor Aamodt is an assistant professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of British Columbia. He earned his B.A.Sc., M.A.Sc. and Ph.D. at the University of Toronto where his graduate studies were supported by NSERC scholarships. Prior to joining the faculty at UBC, he worked at NVIDIA on the GeForce 8 series GPU and, while a Ph.D. student, at Intel Corporation in the Microarchitecture Research Lab.
Updated: October 10, 2008 by pbk