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Pizza, Puzzle and Presentation Lunch (P-cubed L)

(former Brown Bag Lecture Series)

P-cubed L Series is a series of talks by graduate students in CS department to allow them to share their research with the community, get feedback on their ideas and practice their oratory skills. Presentations will be done on purely voluntary basis.

For more information on P-cubed L Series, please, contact Nadya Kuzmina.


Fall 2006

Thursday, September 14, 12:20 - 1:15 pm
EN, 4066
Joe Pohl
"Constructive Membership Predicates as Index Types"
Summary: In the constructive setting, membership predicates over recursive types are inhabited by terms indexing the elements that satisfy the criteria for membership. In this paper, we motivate and explore this idea in the concrete setting of lists and trees. We show that the inhabitants of membership predicates are precisely the inhabitants of a generic shape type. We show that membership of $x$ (of type $T$) in structure $S$, $(x\in_T{}S)$ can not, in general, index all parts of a structure $S$ and we generalize to a form $\rho\in{}S$ where $\rho$ is a predicate over $S$. Under this scheme, $(\lambda{}x.True)\in{}S$ is the set of all indexes into $S$, but we show that not all subsets of indexes are expressible by strictly local predicates. Accordingly, we extend our membership predicates to predicates that retain state ``from above'' as well as allow ``looking below''. Predicates of this form are complete in the sense that they can express every subset of indexes in $S$. These ideas are motivated by experience programming in Nuprl's constructive type theory and the theorems for lists and trees have been formalized and mechanically checked.
Download:
TUESDAY, September 26, 12:20 - 1:15 pm
(please, note the change of day to TUESDAY for just this week)
EN, 4066
Paul Maxim
"Where are You?"
Summary: The ability of robots to quickly and accurately localize their neighbors is extremely important in swarm robotics. Prior approaches generally rely either on global information provided by GPS, beacons, and landmarks, or complex local information provided by vision systems. In this paper we provide a new technique, based on trilateration. This system is fully distributed, inexpensive, scalable, and robust. In addition, the system provides a unified framework that merges localization with information exchange between robots. The usefulness of this framework is illustrated on a number of applications.
Download:
Thursday, October 12, 12:20 - 1:15 pm
EN, 4066
To be Added.
To be Added.
Summary:
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Thursday, October 26, 12:20 - 1:15 pm
EN, 4066
Miranda Bryant
To be Added.
Summary:
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Thursday, November 9, 12:20 - 1:15 pm
EN, 4066
To be Added.
To be Added.
Summary:
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Thursday, November 23, 12:20 - 1:15 pm
EN, 4066
To be Added.
To be Added.
Summary:
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Thursday, December 7, 12:20 - 1:15 pm
EN, 4066
To be Added.
To be Added.
Summary:
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Spring 2006

Thursday, March 30, 12:20 - 1:15 pm
EN, 4066
Ryan Harkins
"Resource-Bounded Measure in Double Exponential Time"
Summary: Since the inception of resource-bounded measure for computational complexity by Lutz in 1990, research has investigated the measure of classes within E, EXP, ESPACE, EXPSPACE, and even within P and PSPACE. But very little has been examined at the double-exponential time setting or any other higher class. We build upon the tools for resource-bounded measure to explore measure in classes of higher time complexity. We extend previous results for martingales into this higher setting and observe several conclusions. The first is that measure separation propagates upwards, in that if the measure of NP is not 0, then the measure of NE is not 0, whereas class inequality was known to propagate downwards. We also strengthen some recent results and prove measure equivalence of some randomized classes.
Download: PDF
Thursday, April 13, 12:20 - 1:15 pm
EN, 4066
Christer Karlsson
Network Intrusion Detection: an Attempt to Use Multiple Anomaly Detectors to Classify Cyber-attacks.
Summary: Network Intrusion Detection Systems (NIDS) is an area of research that has been active for some time with well-developed technologies. The intrusion detection techniques can be classified into two approaches: misuse detection and anomaly detection. The misuse detection systems rely upon signatures of known attacks or pre-defined rules to match and identify known attacks. The anomaly detection system usually establishes the normal usage profile of a system that is a model of the expected observable behavior and any large deviation will be identified as a possible attack. We present a novel approach that tries to bridge the gap between the two systems. The creation of an ensemble of classifiers reveals more information about the class of an attack thus it far surpasses the ability of any single classifier.
Thursday, April 27, 12:20 - 1:15 pm
EN, 4066
Lucas Shaw
Vaccination Strategies for Virus Spread via Air Travel.
Flu vaccine shortage worries and fear of a global flu pandemic have been common stories in the mass media. Effective use of existing vaccine supplies is important for preventing an epidemic of a virus. Work on modeling the spread of a virus via air travel between the 12 cities with the busiest airports is examined. Differential equations are used to model the spread of the virus within each city while a Markov chain models approximately 2,000 daily airplane flights between the cities, whose total population is approximately 55,000,000 people. Given various supplies of vaccine, an Evolutionary Algorithm (EA) develops optimal vaccination allocation policies. These policies are significantly more effective than benchmark vaccine policies. Analysis of the differential equations and Markov chain reveals important elements of the EA's policies, yielding an explanation of the EA's policies in simple terms. From this analysis we extract more meaningful vaccination policies. There is some evidence that, with parameters roughly describing the flu virus, the model is predictive in comparing the results with the spread of flu at the end of 2005. The framework used is fully generalizable to modeling the spread of many harmful substances in a loosely connected set of populations, including the spread of computer viruses and animal pathogens.

Fall 2005

Thursday, October 6, 12:20 - 1:15 pm
EN, 4066
Joe Pohl
"I don't think I will ever see a program as lovely as a tree: Formalizing trees and recursive types. "
Summary: By introducing some of the basic constructs of type theory, we formalize some basic notions of tree as types. We will then use these trees to show how formal methods and mathematics can play a role in development of specifications for correct by construction software and in algorithms. We finish with some constructions dealing with the equality of tree types and describe decidable types and what can still be obtained if our underlying type is not necessarily decidable.
Thursday, October 20, 12:20 - 1:15 pm
EN, 4066
Nadya Kuzmina
Recovering specifications from programs: a dynamic approach.
Summary: A constraint is a restriction on one or more values of (part of) an object-oriented model or system. Constraints on visual models provide for better documentation, improved precision and communication without misunderstanding. Constraints inserted into program code are helpful in understanding the underlying program logic. Constraints must be preserved when code is modified, thus aiding in program evolution and revealing hidden erroneous behaviour. However, more often than not developers are in too much of a hurry to write constraints. Invariant detection offers a solution to this problem by recovering constraints at certain program points. Daikon is a fully automated implementation of a dynamic invariant detector, which is capable of inferring many kinds of invariants. I am looking into inferring object-oriented OCL constraints for Java programs dynamically to help developers annotate their visual models and code with (editable) constraints.
Download: Open Office Presentation   |   PDF
Thursday, November 3, 12:20 - 1:15 pm
EN, 4066
John Paul
A Formal Approach for Debugging and Vulnerability Analysis in Web Applications.
Summary: A web application is a suite of software programs that run on a web server and interact across a network with a remote user's web browser to provide services to the user. A typical service provided by many web applications is remote user access to information stored in an organization's databases. Web applications are complex and error-prone to develop and to maintain, and because of their high visibility it is especially important to discover early any programming bugs.

This lecture introduces a research project that seeks to apply formal methods to the task of automatically checking source code representations of web applications for programming bugs. The talk will explain a general formalism for modeling a web application as a finite transition system and the applicability of model checking to the debugging task.

Download: PDF
Thursday, November 17, 12:20 - 1:15 pm
EN, 4066
Suranga Hettiarachchi
Swarm Formations for Obstacle Avoidance.
Summary: This lecture presents a novel extension to our artificial physics framework, with the use of a generalized Lennard-Jones force law. We utilized evolutionary algorithms to optimize the parameters of the force laws. These force laws were tested within the context of moving robotic swarm formations through obstacle fields to a goal. In addition, we present novel metrics of performance, namely, the number of robots that collide with obstacles, their connectivity, the number of robots that reach the goal, and the time to the goal. We conclude with comparative results of our force laws using the performance criteria.
Thursday, December 1, 12:20 - 1:15 pm
EN, 4066
Jinwook Shin
The Basic Building Blocks of Attacks.
Summary: This lecture introduces a basic building block discovery algorithm in computer security attacks. By "basic building blocks" we mean the essential elements common to all attack programs in a certain class. To identify the basic building blocks, we first formalize and build attack models from a variety of attack programs. These models take form of finite-state transducers (FSTs). Then, we do induction over the models to extract the basic building blocks of attacks.