Winter 2018

This seminar covers various topics related to vulnerability analysis and hacking. A deep understanding of the details of both the vulnerabilities that make security compromises possible and the countermeasures that are required to detect and block the attacks is a necessary prerequisite to address the ever-changing set of security issues that affect applications, operating systems, and networks. The seminar has a practical emphasis, and it is geared towards learning new tools and techniques in a group setting.

Software systems are widely used in enterprises to
help with their business services.
However, there is a serious lack
of fundamental techniques and methods to aid the design of
services constituting of data, workflows and business processes.
In this seminar,
we will focus on formal aspects and foundations of
various issues concerning service design and analysis.

Time:
Organizational meeting: 3pm-3:30pm, Monday, January 22
Regular meeting times will be decided at the organizational meeting

Title: Embedding graphs into vector spaces
Description: In this seminar, we will read recent literature on embedding of graphs/networks into vector spaces. Most of these methods that extend to attributed and dynamic graphs are based on deep learning. 

Description: In this seminar, the students will have the opportunities to read latest papers in the fields of natural language processing, machine learning, and artificial intelligence. The papers are typically from ACL, EMNLP, ICML, NIPS, and ICLR conferences, describing recent advances in the areas of Word Embeddings, Relational Learning, Reinforcement Learning, Generation, Dialog, and Computational Social Science etc. Each student is encouraged to lead the discussion of one paper in a quarter, and there are two papers per session.

The computer science department continues its tradition of having faculty members introducing their exciting works to all students interested in research, especially to new PhD and master students as well as CCS Computing students. The purpose of this seminar is multi-fold: bringing faculty research closer to students, fostering dialogue between faculty and students outside the boundary of research labs, and extending the horizon of students at all stages of their research paths.

String manipulation is a crucial part of modern software systems; for example, it is used extensively in input validation and sanitization, and in dynamic code and query generation. The goal of string-analysis techniques is to determine the set of values that string expressions can take during program execution.

We will cover a diverse state of the art topics related to data management in the cloud.  These will include:

Sometimes techniques already available in one branch of science wait to be rediscovered in some disguise in another. This is particularly true for mathematics and computer science.

This is new graduate-level course on mathematical foundations of data science, based on the forthcoming book Foundations of Data Science by Avrim Blum, John Hopcroft and Ravi Kannan. The current draft of the book is available at http://www.cs.cornell.edu/jeh/

The course will primarily focus on a number of fundamental topics including

Geometry of high-dimensional space
Matrix methods
Machine learning
Clustering
Graph models
Data stream processing