Seminars

Distinguished Lecturer Series

Current Series
Past Series

Other Talks

Current Talks
Past Talks

View video of our seminars here

Distinguished Lecture Series

Every academic year the Department of Computer Science hosts a series of talks featuring distinguished scientists from across the country. Renowned experts in their fields, these speakers provide an opportunity for faculty and students to keep abreast of some of the latest developments in the ever-evolving landscape that defines our discipline.

Current Series - 2012 - 2013
September 20, 2012- S. Muthu" Muthukrishnan, Rutgers University Title: Internet Ad Systems Auctions, Optimizations and Exchanges
November 5, 2012 - Ben Shneiderman, Univ. of Maryland, College Park Title: Information Visualization for Knowledge Discovery
February 7, 2013 - Jon Peha, Carnegie Mellon University Title: A New Era in Spectrum Management
March 7, 2013 - Mary Jean Harrold, Georgia Institute of Technology Title: Software Testing: A Roadmap
March 14, 2013 - Julia Hirschberg, Columbia University Title: What Siri can’t do: Creating Clarification Questions for Spoken Dialogue Systems
April 18, 2013 - Dawn Song, University of California, Berkeley Title: BitBlaze-WebBlaze-DroidBlaze: Automatic Security Analysis inBinary, Web and Android

2011 - 2012
October 13, 2011- Anne Condon, University of British Columbia Title: Some How's and Why's of Programming DNA Molecules
October 27, 2011 - Helen Nissenbaum, NYU Title: A Contextual Approach to Privacy Online
November 10, 2011 - Martin C. Rinard, MIT Title: Compilers that (Intentionally) Change the Result Your Program Produces
April 12, 2012 - Umesh Dayal, HP Labs Title: Next Generation Business Intelligence
February 2, 2012 - Rajeev Alur, University of Pennsylvania Title: Computer Augmented Program Engineering
February 16, 2012 - Michael A. Eisenberg, University of Colorado Boulder Title: Designing Technologies for Learning: The Move from Cognitive Science to Anthropology
November 3, 2011 3:00 p.m. - Dan Garcia, University of California, Berkeley Title: Best Practices and Teaching Tips to Improve CS Education

2010 - 2011
November 18, 2010 - Craig Boutilier, University of Toronto Title: Computational Social Choice: A Decision-theoretic Perspective
January 14, 2011 - Mitchel Resnick, MIT Title: Programming for Everyone: Rethinking Literacy and Creativity for the 21st Century View this seminar
January 27, 2011 - Karem Sakallah, University of Michigan Title: Scalable Formal Hardware Verification Through Automatic Abstraction View this seminar
February 3, 2011 - Joan Feigenbaum, Yale Title: The DISSENT Approach to Anonymous, Interactive Communication on the Internet View this seminar
March 3, 2011 - Somesh Jha, University of Wisconsin, Madison Title: Retrofitting Legacy Code for Security View this seminar
April 7, 2011 - Michael Goodrich, University of California, Irvine Title: Turning Privacy Leaks into Floods: Surreptitious Discovery of Social Network Freindships and Other Sensitve Binary Attribute Vectors View this seminar

2009 - 2010
November 10, 2009 - Mihalis Yannakakis, Columbia Title: Computational aspects of equilibria. Host: Bhaskar Dasgupta View this seminar
November 19, 2009 - Leora Morgenstern, IBM Watson Title: Formal Theories of Business Strategy and Narration for Commercial Applications Hosts: Bob Sloan & Gyorgy Turan View this seminar
December 3, 2009 - Hector Garcia-Molina, Stanford Title: A Social Site for Academic Course Planning and Evaluation Host: Philip Yu View this seminar
February 18, 2010 - Martha Pollack, Michigan Title: Computing Outside the Box Host: Barbara Di Eugenio View this seminar
April 1, 2010 - Maurice Herlihy, Brown Title: Transactional Memory Today Host: Ajay Kshemkalyani View this seminar
April 22, 2010 - John Holland, Michigan - This seminar has been canceled Title: Signals and Boundaries Host: Leilah Lyons

2008 - 2009
Wesley W. Chu, UCLA A Knowledge-based Medical Digital Library March 19, 2009, 11:00 a.m., Room 1000 SEO
Avrim Blum, Carnegie Mellon University A Computational Theory of Clustering February 6, 2009, 1:00 p.m., Room 636 SEO
H. T. Kung , Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences Use of Ad-hoc Wireless Networks as Backplanes for High-performance Parallel and Distributed Computing November 14, 2008, 2:00 p.m., Room 1000 SEO
Pierre Boulanger , University of Alberta An Advanced Collaborative Infrastructure for Real-Time Computational Steering November 6, 2008, 11:00 a.m., Room 1000 SEO
Edward W. Felten, Professor of Computer Science and Public Affairs, Princeton University Electronic Voting: Danger and Opportunity October 17, 2008, 11:00 a.m., Room 1000 SEO
C. Mohan, IBM Fellow and IBM India Chief Scientis Global Technology Outlook (GTO) September 15, 2008, 11:00 a.m., Room 1000 SEO

2007 - 2008
Mary Lou Soffa, University of Virginia Path-Sensitive Analysis for Security Flaws March 13, 2008, 11:00 a.m., Room 1000 SEO
Sartaj Sahni, University of Florida Data structures and algorithms for packet forwarding and classification, February 14, 2008, 11:00 a.m., Room 1000 SEO
Mary Beth Rosson, Penn State University When Users Do the Programming: Challenges and Opportunities for End User Software Engineering November 15, 2007, 11:00 am, Room 1000 SEO
Bart Selman, Cornell University The Challenge and Promise of Automated Reasoning October 16, 2007, 11:00 a.m., Room 1000 SEO
Leslie Pack Kaelbling , Massachusetts Institute of Technology Learning to Think about the World September 27, 2007, 11:00 a.m., Room 1000 SEO

2006 - 2007
Prabhakar Raghavan, Yahoo! Research "Web Search - from Information Retrieval to Microeconomic Modeling" Monday, April 16, 2007,11:00 a.m., Room 1043 ERF
Susan Dumais, Microsoft Research "Information Retrieval in Context" Thursday, March 22, 2007, 11:00 a.m., Room 1000 SEO
Victor R. Basili, University of Maryland "The Role of Empirical Study in High End Computing" Thursday, November 30, 2006, 11:00 a.m., Room 236 SEO
Jeannette M. Wing, Carnegie Mellon University "Automatic Generation and Analysis of Attack Graphs" Thursday, November 9, 2006, 11:00 a.m., Room 1000 SEO
Ravi Sandhu, George Mason University "The Secure Information Sharing Problem and Solution Approaches" Thursday, October 12, 2006, 11:00 a.m., Room 1000 SEO
Marc Snir, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign "Parallel Programming Models and Languages" Friday, September 29, 2006, 11:00 a.m., Room 1000 SEO

2005 - 2006
Richard M. Stallman, GNU project and Free Software Foundation "The Free Software Movement and the GNU/Linux Operating System" Friday, April 28, 2006, 11:00 a.m., Room 302 SCE
David Harel, The Weizmann Institute of Science "On Comprehensive Biological Modeling: Some Ruminations on the What, the How and the Why" Monday, April 3, 2006, 11:00 a.m., Room 1000 SEO
Yechiam Yemini, Columbia University "IS THERE LIFE AFTER THE INTERNET?" Thursday, March 16, 2006, 11:00 a.m., Room 1000 SEO
Richard Karp, University of California, Berkeley "Geometric Optics, Linear Programming and Congestion in Sensornets" Friday, December 9, 2005, 11:00 a.m., Room 1043 ERF
Elaine Weyuker, AT&T Fellow "I KNOW WHERE YOU'RE HIDING" Friday, November 11, 2005, 11:00 a.m., Room 1000 SEO
Jared Saia, University of New Mexico "Secure Algorithms and Data Structures for Massive Networks" Tuesday, November 8, 2005, 11:00 a.m., Room 1000 SEO
Carlo Ghezzi, Politecnico di Milano "Towards open, dynamic software processes and products: achievements and challenges" Tuesday, November 1, 2005, 11:00 a.m., Room 1000 SEO
Yvonne Rogers, Indiana University "Grown-Up Science: Enabling Students to Learn How to Become Scientists Through Using Pervasive Technologies" Thursday, October 20, 2005, 3:30 p.m., Room 1000 SEO

2004 - 2005
Andrew C. Yao, Tsinghua University "Quantum Complexity: How Fast Can Quantum Computers Sort?" Wednesday, April 13, 2005, 11:00 a.m., Room 1000 SEO
Aravind K. Joshi, University of Pennsylvania "Discourse connectives and their argument structure: Some aspects of transition from sentence structure to discourse structure" Tuesday, March 8, 2005, >11:00 a.m., Room 1000 SEO
Moshe Vardi, Rice University "And Logic Begat Computer Science: When Giants Roamed the Earth" Thursday, February 3, 2005, 11:00 a.m., Room 1000 SEO
M. Frans Kaashoek, Massachusetts Institute of Technology "PEER-TO-PEER COMPUTING RESEARCH: A FAD?" Tuesday, November 30, 2004, 11:00 a.m., Room 636 SEO
Leslie Lamport, Microsoft Research "Thinking for Programmers" Thursday, October 21, 2004, 11:00 a.m., Room 1000 SEO
Tiziana Catarci, Universit� di Roma "Searching for good quality data? Trust us" Wednesday, October 13, 2004, 10:30 a.m., Room 1000 SEO
Janet L. Kolodner, Georgia Institute of Technology "From Case-Based Reasoning to Learning by Design to Design of Technology for Learning" Tuesday, October 12, 2004, 11:00 a.m., Room 1043 ERF

Other Talks

2011 - 2012
Distinguished CS educator lecture November 3, 2011 3:00 p.m. - Dan Garcia, University of California, Berkeley

2009 - 2010
Dr. William Gropp , University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign BLUE WATERS AND PETASCALE COMPUTING Friday April 23, 2010, 11:00 p.m., Room ERF 1043

2008 - 2009
Tim Hinrichs, University of Chicago Collaborative Programming September 28, 2008, 2:00 p.m., Room SEO 1000
Ed Reingold , Illinois Institute of Technology Lower Bounds for Cops and Robber Pursuit September 25, 2008, 11:00 a.m., Room SEO 1000
Dr. Yaser Sheikh, Robotics Lab, CMU Recovering the Structure of Dynamic Scenes from Moving Cameras August 8, 2008, 11:00 a.m., Room SEO 1000

2007 - 2008
Sonia Bergamaschi, University of Modena & Reggio Emilia The MOMIS Data Integration System May 2, 2008, 2:00 p.m., Room SEO 200
Ling Liu, Georgia Institute of Technology Location Privacy in Location-Aware Computing April 30, 2008, 11:00 a.m., Room SEO 1000
Gyorgy Turan, Schwartz Lemma and Applications February 6, 2008, 3:00 p.m., Room SEO 512
Jose Zagal, Georgia Tech Supporting Learning about Games December 11, 2007, 2:00 pm, Room SEO 1000
Leilah Lyons, University of Michigan Playing Together at the Museum: Preliminary Results on Factors Affecting Participation in a Multi-User Software-Based Exhibit December 6, 2007, 2:00 pm, Room SEO 1000
Ben Shapiro, Northwestern University Design Research from the Bottom Up: New Infrastructure for School Reform December 3, 2007, 2:00 pm, Room SEO 1000
Jared Saia, University of New Mexico Attack-Resistant Networks November 30, 2007, 12:00 pm, Room SEO 1000
John Reppy, University of Chicago Parallel Concurrent ML November 13, 2007, 11:00 am, Room SEO 1000
Dr. Zahir Tari, RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia Dynamic Load Balancing for Systems Under Heavy Traffic and High Task Variation November 9, 2007, 2:00 pm, Room SEO 1000
Teresa Przytycka , NCBI/NLM/NIH Application of combinatorial optimization to prediction of domain-domain interactions October 17, 2007, 11:00 a.m., Room SEO 1000
Hanan Samet , University of Maryland SPATIAL DATABASES AND GEOGRAPHIC INFORMATION SYSTEMS October 15, 2007, 11:00 a.m., Room SEO 1000
Neil Daswani, Google Emerging Security Vulnerabilities & the Impact to Business October 11, 2007, 11:00 a.m., Room SEO 1000
Matthias Trier, Technical University Berlin, Germany Exploring Patterns of dynamic Networks with event-based Visualization and Analysis October 9, 2007, 10:00 a.m., Room SEO 1000
Mahesh Viswanathan , University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Learning to Verify October 5, 2007, 11:00 a.m., Room SEO 10000
Amit P. Sheth , Wright State University Relationship Web: Spinning the Semantic Web from Trailblazing to Complex Hypothesis Evaluation August 31, 2007, 11:00 a.m., Room SEO 1000

2006 - 2007
Carl Landwehr, Disruptive Technology Office, CASL "Disruptive Technologies for Information Assurance" Friday, July 20, 2007, 11:00 a.m., Room 1000 SEO
Kartik Gopalan, SUNY Binghamton "MemX: Supporting Large Memory Applications in Xen Virtual Machines" Wednesday, June 20, 2007, 3:00 p.m., Room 1000 SEO
Sorin Draghici, Wayne State University "A Systems Biology Approach to Pathway Analysis" Thursday, May 3, 2007, 11:00 a.m., Room 1000 SEO
Mona Singh, Princeton University "Analyzing and Interrogating Protein Interaction Maps" Monday, April 30, 2007, 11:00 a.m., Room 1000 SEO
Roxana Girju, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign "Improving the Interpretation of Noun Phrases with Cross-linguistic Information" Friday, April 27, 2007, 12:00 p.m., Room 512 SEO
Thomas Messerges, Motorola Research Main/Labs "Security for Mobile Financial Applications" Wednesday, April 25, 2007, 3:00 p.m., Room 1043 ERF
Magdi A. Mohamed, Motorola Research Main/Labs "Computational Intelligence and Q-filter Structures" Wednesday, April 25, 2007, 1:00 p.m., Room 1325 SEO
Lenore Zuck, University of Illinois at Chicago "Automatic Verification of Parameterized Systems" Wednesday, April 18, 2007, 3:00 p.m., Room 627 SEO
David Zavattero, City of Chicago Office of Emergency Management and Communications "ITS initiatives nationally and locally and the building of the Chicago TMC" Wednesday, February 28, 2007, 2:00 p.m., Room 1000 SEO
Chris Quintana, University of Michigan "Designing for Learning...Learning about Design The Interplay Between HCI and the Learning Sciences" Wednesday, February 7, 2007, 1:30 p.m., Room 1000 SEO
Deborah Tatar, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University "Practice Into Theory: from serious work about learning in classroom environments to serious questions about the playful nature of control and coordination in computing" Monday, January 29, 2007, 1:30 p.m., Room 1000 SEO
Ryan S. J. d. Baker, University of Nottingham "Detecting and Adapting to When Students Game the System" Tuesday, January 23, 2007, 3:00 p.m., Room 1000 SEO
Brian K. Smith, The Pennsylvania State University "Acts into Artifacts: Computational Tools to Support Experience Capture and Reflection" Tuesday, January 16, 2007, 3:00 p.m., Room 1000 SEO
Luis von Ahn, Carnegie Mellon University "Human Computation" Tuesday, November 14, 2006, 11:00 a.m., Room 1000 SEO
Erik Meijer, Microsoft "VB IsNot C#" Thursday, June 29, 2006, 1:00 p.m., Room SEO 1000

2005 - 2006
Samir Khuller, University of Maryland "Algorithms for Data Management and Migration" Monday, April 17, 2006, 11:00 a.m., Room 1000 SEO
Kathleen M. Carley, Carnegie Mellon University "Dynamic Network Analysis: A Computational Approach to Counter Terrorism Analyses" Thursday, April 13, 2006, 3:00 p.m., 1000 SEO
Edward Reingold, Illinois Institute of Technology "Determining Plurality" Tuesday March 7, 2006, 11:00 a.m., Room 1000 SEO
Jennifer Golbeck, University of Maryland "Web-based Social Network Analysis for Socially Intelligent Applications" Tuesday, November 22, 2005, 2:00 p.m., Room 1000 SEO
Jinbo Xu, University of Chicago "A Parameterized Algorithm for Protein Structure Alignment" Monday, November 21, 2005, 11:00 a.m., Room 236 SEO
Der-Horng Lee, National University of Singapore "Deployment and Innovation of Intelligent Transportation Systems in Singapore" Thursday, July 14, 2005, 11:00 a.m., Room 1325 SEO

2004 - 2005
Lin Cai, University of Waterloo "Transport layer protocol design for multimedia wireless Internet" Friday, April 29, 2005, 11:00 a.m., Room 1000 SE
Raj Jain, Nayna Networks, Inc. "Computer Networking: Recent Developments, Trends, and Issues" Monday, April 18, 2005, 11:00 a.m., Room 1000 SEO
Riccardo Pucella, Cornell University "A Knowledge-Based Foundation for Security" Tuesday, April 12, 2005, 11:00 a.m., Room 1000 SEO
Lance Fortnow, University of Chicago "The Complexity of Information Markets" Tuesday, April 5, 2005, 11:00 a.m., Room 1000 SEO
John Langford, TTI-Chicago "Fast Exact High Dimensional Nearest Neighbors in Arbitrary Dimensions with a Cover Tree" Tuesday, March 3, 2005, 11:00 a.m., Room 636 SEO
Ray DeCarlo, Purdue University "Software Release Control using Defect Based Quality Estimation" Tuesday, March 1, 2005, 11:00 a.m., Room 1000 SEO
Chris Ding, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory "Link Analysis and Topic Discovery via Spectral Clustering" Wednesday, February 16, 2005, 2:00 p.m., Room 1000 SEO
Paul Dan Cristea, University of Bucharest "GENOMIC SIGNAL ANALYSIS AND PROCESSING" Friday, January 28, 2005, 11:00 a.m., Room 1000 SEO

2003 - 2004
Tao Jiang, University of California "Efficient Rule-Based Haplotype Inference on Pedigrees" Monday, May 3, 2004, 11:00 a.m., Room 1000 SEO
Marianne Winslett, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign "An Introduction to Trust Negotiation" Friday, April 9, 2004, 4:00 p.m., Room 1000 SEO
Tanya Berger-Wolf, University of New Mexico "How to See a Tree for a Forest? Combining Phylogenetic Trees: Reasons, Methods, and Consequences" Tuesday, March 16, 2004, 11:00 a.m., Room 1000 SEO
Tiffani L. Williams, University of New Mexico "Phylogeny Reconstruction and Experimental Algorithmics" Thursday, March 11, 2004, 11:00 a.m., Room 1000 SEO
Mark Guzdial, Georgia Institute of Technology "Collaborative Dynabooks: A Research Agenda on Building Systems to Support Learning through Multimedia" Tuesday March 9, 2004, 1:00 p.m., Room 1000 SEO