Title: TBD

Date/Time: Monday, March 25 4:10 p.m - 5:00 p.m.
Location: TBD
Speaker: Jeff Carver

Abstract: TBD

Biosketch: TBD

Title: TBD

Date/Time: Monday, March  4:10 p.m - 5:00 p.m.
Location: TBD
Speaker: Roby Roberts

Abstract: TBD

Biosketch: TBD

Title: TBD

Date/Time: Monday, March 4 4:10 p.m - 5:00 p.m.
Location: TBD
Speaker: Diane Bimbzock

Abstract: TBD

Biosketch: TBD

Title: TBD

Date/Time: Monday, February 25 4:10 p.m - 5:00 p.m.
Location: TBD
Speaker: Kendra Cook and Griffin Rowell

Abstract: TBD

Biosketch: TBD

Title: Free Software and Your Freedom

Date/Time: Monday, February 11 4:15 p.m - 6:15 p.m.
Location: Inspiration Hall, Norm Asbjornson Hall
Speaker: Richard Stallman

Abstract: The Free Software Movement campaigns for computer users' freedom to cooperate and control their own computing. The Free Software Movement developed the GNU operating system, typically used together with the kernel Linux, specifically to make these freedoms possible.

Biosketch: Dr. Richard Stallman launched the free software movement in 1983 and started the development of the GNU operating system (seewww.gnu.org) in 1984. GNU is free software: every- one has the freedom to copy it and redistribute it, with or without changes. The GNU/Linux system, basically the GNU operating system with Linux added, is used on tens of millions of computers today. Stallman has received the ACM Grace Hopper Award and the ACM Software and Systems Award, a MacArthur Foundation fellowship, the Electronic Frontier Foundation's Pioneer Award, and the the Takeda Award for Social/Economic Betterment, as well as several doctorates honoris causa, and has been inducted into the Internet Hall of Fame.

Title: The Development and Efficacy of Immersive Technologies in Healthcare

Date/Time: Friday, February 8 4:10 p.m - 5:00 p.m.
Location: Barnard Hall 108
Speaker: Laura Stanley

Abstract: Research demonstrates that ten percent of the population becomes addicted to opioids from exposure to narcotics in the operative setting. The abuse and addiction from these drugs have now placed the US in the center of an “opioid epidemic”. As a result, a variety of programs and interventions are being explored to treat the pain and anxiety associated with surgery and the addiction resulting from opioid use disorder while minimizing or eliminating the need for pharmaceutical intervention. One such “alternative” treatment for pain, anxiety, and addiction involves the use of immersive technologies (e.g. virtual, augmented, and mixed reality) as a primary or adjunct technique. Dr. Stanley will present her team’s on-going clinical research trials at Prisma Health involving the development and efficacy of immersive technologies to address pain and anxiety in operative and cancer treatment environments, and addiction for those suffering from opioid use disorder.  She will discuss her cyber-human systems approach to addressing mental health challenges utilizing knowledge from a variety of computing domains such as affective computing, human computer interaction, and computational psychophysiology.

Biosketch: Dr. Stanley holds a B.S. in Industrial & Systems Engineering from Virginia Tech, M.S. and Ph.D. in Engineering (Option: Industrial Engineering) from Montana State University.  She served as Program Director in the Directorate for Computer & Information Science & Engineering at the NSF.  In this capacity, she contributed to ~ $75 million in research funding decisions for Cyber-Human Systems, Cyber-Physical Systems, Smart & Connected Communities, and Smart & Autonomous Systems.  During her time at the NSF, she was appointed to serve on NSF’s Working Group on The Future of Graduate Education.  Dr. Stanley serves as a Guest Editor for IEEE Transactions on Multi-Faceted Driver-Vehicle systems and is an Associate Editor for IEEE Transactions on Human-Machine Systems and Human Factors and Ergonomics in Manufacturing & Service Industries Journal.  Dr. Stanley has authored 71 peer-reviewed publications and has assisted in garnering nearly $13M in research funding at Virginia Tech, Montana State University, and now Clemson University.  Her research interests focus primarily on human factors, human-computer interaction, and human-centered design in technology development.  She has applied those interests across a variety of domains, with the greatest emphasis on applications within the transportation and health care domains.

Title: Securing Our Most Personal Devices and Networks in the Internet of Things

Date/Time: Friday, February 1 4:10 p.m - 5:00 p.m.
Location: Barnard Hall 108
Speaker: Travis Peters

Abstract: In the Internet of Things (IoT) , everyday objects are equipped with the ability to compute and communicate. These smart things  have invaded the lives of everyday people, entering into our homes, our oces, our cars, and are even being constantly carried or worn on our bodies; they have intimate and daily access to our most personal data as well as all of the other devices that we own and encounter throughout our day. Without a doubt, the devices and networks of today are more personal than ever. It should, therefore, come as no surprise that our personal devices and data are frequent targets of ever-present threats. Securing these devices and networks, however, is challenging.

In this talk, I present my work on developing designs, techniques, and tools to harden software and systems in a way that aims to prevent  and detect  prominent threats to our most personal devices and networks. First, I present our Trusted I/O solution for protecting sensitive user data transferred between wirelessly connected (Bluetooth) devices. Specically, I will discuss our BASTION-SGX project, which shows how in-transit data can be protected from privileged threats (e.g., compromised OS) on commodity systems. I present insights into the Bluetooth architecture, Intel's Software Guard Extensions (SGX), and how a Trusted I/O solution can be engineered on commodity devices equipped with SGX. Second, I discuss how we can both improve the utility and security of microcontroller-based devices. Specically, I will discuss our Amulet project and how we successfully built a wearable health hub that can run multiple health applications, provide strong security properties, and operate on a single charge for weeks or even months at a time. I will present the mobile health scenario that Amulet addresses, dig into the software and hardware architectures of the Amulet platform, and present some of the interesting results that Amulet achieves. This talk will conclude with a discussion on some of my planned future work towards improving the state of security within personal devices and networks, as well as a glimpse into some of my ongoing work on the active detection of threats within this context.

Biosketch: Travis Peters is a doctoral candidate in computer science at Dartmouth College, working in the Mobile Health (mHealth) Security & Privacy Lab, led by Professor David Kotz. He received his B.S. in computer science and
mathematics from Western Washington University prior to his arrival at Dartmouth College. While at Dartmouth,
he has worked on two large, multi-university NSF projects, completed two internships at Intel’s Security & Privacy
Research Labs, and published in top systems and security venues such as SenSys, HASP, and MobiCom. His primary
research interests are in computer and network security and privacy, particularly as it applies to mobile and wearable
health systems.

Title: Data-oriented and Trustworthy IoT Services for a Cyber-Physical World

Date/Time: Friday, January 25 4:10 p.m - 5:00 p.m.
Location: Barnard Hall 108
Speaker: Ruozhou Yu

Abstract: The Internet-of-Things (IoT) has the potential to revolutionize our daily lives. Yet, we are facing major challenges in deploying IoT to solve real-world problems. On one hand, the huge volume of data generated by IoT devices must be transmissible and comprehensible by our existing infrastructures. On the other hand, the complexity, heterogeneity and scale of IoT-based systems have led to new security risks in our digital or even physical lives. Resolving these challenges require sophisticated computing and analytical mechanisms in data science, machine learning, cybersecurity, and/or social sciences, but the applicability of these mechanisms in IoT is largely restricted by the limited computing, networking and energy resources in many real-world IoT scenarios.

In this talk, I will focus on my efforts in addressing the above challenges in resource-constrained IoT. To solve the big data challenge, I design algorithmic solutions for cross-layer networking and computing design, providing guaranteed performance for IoT services and applications, while increasing resource utilization, reducing congestion, and improving system robustness. To solve the security challenge, I propose using the blockchain as a basic building block for establishing a secure IoT platform, and introduce how it can be extended to enable a global scale on-demand IoT marketplace. While the proposed solutions can largely address the above challenges in IoT, many of them also have applications and extensions beyond this specific context.

Biosketch: Ruozhou is a PhD candidate in the School of Computing, Informatics, and Decision System Engineering at Arizona State University. His research expertise lies at the intersection of cybersecurity, networking, and distributed systems. His current research interests include blockchain-based IoT, blockchain payment channels, IoT security, big data computing and analytics, etc. His work has been published on top-tier conferences and journals such as IEEE INFOCOM, IEEE JSAC and IEEE/ACM ToN. He has served as reviewers for top journals such as IEEE JSAC, TMC, TPDS, TWC, etc.

Title: Phylofactorization: evolution + a graph-partitioning algorithm = machine learning + human understanding of biological data

Date/Time: Monday, January 14 4:10 p.m - 5:00 p.m.
Location: Barnard Hall 108
Speaker: Alex Washburne

Abstract:  Biologists are obtaining massive datasets of hundreds of thousands of species and their abundances, traits, and other features. From microbes living in our gut to birds found in tropical rainforests, there is a universal need to make sense of which organisms are sensitive to climate change, which are associated with disease, and more. The theory of evolution defines a history of organisms in the form of a tree going back to common ancestors over 3.6 billion years ago. In this talk, I will discuss how that tree - an acyclic graph - can be used to define a graph-partitioning algorithm for interpretable dimensionality reduction of biological data. So far, this algorithm has yielded insights on the evolution of mammals over the past 65 million years, the microbes who thrive in the intestines of patients with Crohn's Disease or Inflammatory Bowel Disease, the microbes differentiating our intestinal communities over America, how mammalian viruses are more or less likely to jump from animals to people, how mammalian reservoirs are more or less likely to have pathogens capable of infecting people, and more. This algorithm connecting the theory of evolution to reduced rank regression, artificial neural networks, and virtually every tool used for data analysis is accelerating the machine learning and human understanding of biological systems.

Biosketch: Dr. Alex Washburne received undergraduate degrees in Biology and Applied Mathematics from the University of New Mexico. He received his Ph.D. from Princeton University in Quantitative and Computational Biology, where he discovered a mathematical commonality between the dynamics of microbes in humans, trees in tropical rainforests, stocks in the stock market and other entities in competitive systems. The underlying symmetry of competition was used to create statistical tests of competitive intensity which landed Dr. Washburne a job in a hedge fund. While working at a hedge fund, he did a post-doc at Duke University with Diana Nemergut who passed away within 3 months of the start date but secured funding for Alex to continue his research for two years. In this time, he conceived phylofactorization and began work on statistical models of pathogen spillover. He is now a research scientist at MSU working with Raina Plowright on Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) funded projects predicting and preempting the spillover of pathogens like Ebola from wildlife to people. He is the founder and head of Selva Analytics LLC, a consulting firm developing statistical tools to facilitate the accumulation of domain expertise for clients in sectors ranging from biotech and energy to finance and resource management.

 Seminars from 2018.