Fall 2021 Schedule

Mon, Aug 30

Fri, Sep 03

Mon, Sep 06

Fri, Sep 10

Mon, Sep 13

Fri, Sep 17

Mon, Sep 20

Fri, Sep 24

Mon, Sep 27

Fri, Oct 01

Mon, Oct 04

Fri, Oct 08

Mon, Oct 11

Fri, Oct 15

Mon, Oct 18 Unpacking the Drop in COVID-19 Case Fatality Rates: A Study of National and Florida Line-Level Data Presented by Helen Zhou, Mon, Oct 18 12-1pm, Remote https://cmu.zoom.us/j/3710473554 Since the COVID-19 pandemic began, the United States's case fatality rate (CFR) has plummeted. Using national and Florida data, we unpack the drop in CFR between April and December 2020, accounting for such confounders as expanded testing, age distribution shift, and detection-to-death lags. Guided by the insight that treatment improvements in this period should correspond to decreases in hospitalization fatality rate (HFR), and using a block-bootstrapping procedure to quantify uncertainty, we find that although treatment improvements do not follow the same trajectory in Florida and nationally (with Florida undergoing a comparatively severe second peak), by December, significant improvements are observed both in Florida and nationally (at least 17% and 55% respectively). These estimates paint a more realistic picture of improvements than the drop in aggregate CFR (70.8%–91.1%). We publish a website where users can apply our analyses to selected demographics, regions, and dates of interest.

Fri, Oct 22

Mon, Oct 25 Toward fairer and more transparent civic participation Monday, October 25th, 2021 from 12-1 pm in GHC 6501. Presented by Bailey Flanigan, CSD Citizens' assemblies are a form of civic participation in which a panel of randomly-chosen constituents convenes to hear testimony from experts, deliberate, and ultimately make a policy recommendation on a political issue. These assemblies offer a unique combination of features: they give everyday people the opportunity to participate directly in political decision-making, while also ensuring that they are well-informed and have spent time digesting and hearing others' perspectives on the issues. In the recent decades, citizens' assemblies are experiencing a surge in popularity worldwide: they are now being administered by more than 40 organizations in over 25 countries; are commissioned by public authorities on municipal, regional, national and supranational levels; and have recently led to the legalization of same-sex marriage in Ireland. Our research on citizens' assemblies aims to ensure that the process by which participants are selected is fair [1,2] and transparent [3]. We provide a set of algorithms for selecting participants of citizens' assemblies, each which is guaranteed to be maximally fair for a different fairness notion [2], propose a simple and transparent method of panel selection by uniform lottery, which we prove is always possible to carry out without meaningful loss in fairness [3], and discuss the prospect of end to end fairness, which deals with giving all members of the population an equal chance of participation [1], rather than all self-identifying willing participants. [1] Neutralizing Self-Selection Bias in Sampling for Sortition [2] Fair Algorithms for Selecting Citizens' Assemblies [3] Fair Sortition made Transparent

Fri, Oct 29

Mon, Nov 01

Fri, Nov 05

Mon, Nov 08

Fri, Nov 12

Mon, Nov 15

Fri, Nov 19 Training Computer Vision Models with Synthetic Images Friday, Nov 19, 2021, from 12-1pm in GHC 6501. Presented by Roger Iyengar Wearable Cognitive Assistance (WCA) applications have the potential to help users with tasks such as assembling physical objects. These applications run on a headset with a camera, and process live image streams to determine when steps of the task have been completed. Images are processed using DNNs that must be trained on thousands of labeled images. Capturing and labeling these images is a huge amount of work, especially when the models must be trained to recognize many different task states. Training these models on synthetic data would thus reduce the amount of work required to develop these models. I will discuss some work that I have done generating synthetic images based on CAD files, and then training computer vision models using this data.

Mon, Nov 22

Fri, Nov 26

Mon, Nov 29

Fri, Dec 03

Mon, Dec 06 High-Dimensional Expanders from Chevalley Groups from 12-1pm in GHC 6501. Presented by Kevin Pratt High-dimensional expanders are a relatively new class of objects that have motivated work on quantum LDPC codes, locally testable codes, and the resolution of the Mihail-Vazirani conjecture on matroids. Despite this, there are only two known families of (local) high-dimensional expanders. In this talk I will discuss constructions of several new families obtained in joint work with Ryan O'Donnell. This generalizes a previous construction due to Kaufman and Oppenheim.

Fri, Dec 10 Centralized Library Management for Heterogeneous IoT Devices Presented by Han Zhang Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices have become attractive targets for attack. One potential threat arises from the extensive use of third-party libraries in IoT devices. In this talk, I will first present my analysis results demonstrating the widespread, problematic library management practices and delays in applying security patches among IoT device vendors. I will discuss Capture, a novel architecture for deploying IoT device firmware by allowing devices on a local network to leverage a centralized, trusted hub to manage third-party libraries for them. I propose a new Virtual Device Entity interface that facilitates access control between mutually-distrustful local devices to ensure isolation. Evaluation results on comprehensive benchmarks show that Capture incurs low overhead, and a single hub can support hundreds of local devices.

Mon, Dec 13

Fri, Dec 17

2022 Spring Feb 18, 25, 28 are unavailble

General Info

The Student Seminar Series is an informal seminar for SCS graduate students to communicate ideas. Each meeting starts at noon and lasts 1 hour. Lunch is provided by the Computer Science Department (thanks to Debbie Cavlovich!). At each meeting, a different student speaker will give an informal, 40-minute talk about his/her research, followed by questions/suggestions/brainstorming. We try to attract people with a diverse set of interests, and encourage speakers to present at a very general, accessible level.

So why are we doing this and why take part? In the best case scenario, this will lead to some interesting cross-disciplinary work among people in different fields and people may get some new ideas about their research. In the worst case scenario, a few people will practice their public speaking and the rest get together for a free lunch.

Steps for Scheduling Talks

To schedule a talk, pick up a free slot and send your (a) name, (b) department, (c) talk title, (d) talk abstract, and (e) a link to your home page to sss@cs at least TWO WEEKS before your talk.

Each speaker may schedule at most 3 talks per semester.

For SCS students willing to give presentations counting toward fulfilling their speaking skills requirement, SSS is an ideal forum to do so. For CSD students, these are roughly 3 steps:

1. Send you talk details as listed above to SSS at least THREE WEEKS before the talk.
2. After you are confirmed with your SSS slot, go to Speakers Club Calendar and add your talk to it.
3. On the day of your talk, bring Speakers Club Evaluation Forms for your evaluators to use.

Each talk starts at noon and lasts 1 hour. The room is booked from 11:30am (30 mins before the talk) to 1:30pm (30 mins after the talk). Students outside of CSD will need to check with their respective departments regarding the procedure. As another example, ISRI students fulfill their speaking requirements by attending a semesterly Software Research Seminar and giving X number of presentations per school year. If you have experience with your department that might help others in your department, please feel free to contribute your knowledge by emailing us. Thank you!

SSS Coordinators

Juncheng Yang, CSD