An Ethical Crisis in Computing
Moshe Y. Vardi, Rice University – Abstract: Computer scientists think often of “Ender’s Game” these days. In this award-winning 1985 science-fiction novel by Orson Scott Card, Ender is being trained at Battle School, an institution designed to make young children into military commanders against an…
Programming Non-Volatile Memory
James Larus, School of Computer and Communication Sciences (IC) at EPFL (École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne)”” – Abstract: New memory technologies are changing the computer systems landscape. Motivated by the power limitations of DRAM, new, non-volatile memory (NVM) technologies — such as ReRAM, PCM, and…
Programming Non-Volatile Memory
James Larus, School of Computer and Communication Sciences (IC) at EPFL (École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne)”” – Abstract: New memory technologies are changing the computer systems landscape. Motivated by the power limitations of DRAM, new, non-volatile memory (NVM) technologies — such as ReRAM, PCM, and…
HOW I THINK ABOUT RESEARCH
Professor Alan V. Oppenheim , Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) – Abstract: In the context of our roles in mentoring doctoral students, there are many ways of finding and formulating research problems and ideas. My own approach over many decades has been to focus on…
Bioinformatics: a Servant or the Queen of Molecular Biology? (INESC-ID and IST Distinguished Lecture)
Pavel A. Pevzner, Department of Computer Science and Engineering University of California at San Diego Abstract While some experimental biologists view bioinformatics as a servant, I argue that it is rapidly turning into the queen of molecular biology. I will illustrate this view by showing…
AI for Social Good: Learning and Planning in the End-to-End, Data-to-Deployment Pipeline (Distinguished Lecture)
Prof. Milind Tambe, University of Southern California – Abstract: With the maturing of AI and multiagent systems research, we have a tremendous opportunity to direct these advances towards addressing complex societal problems. I will focus on the problems of public safety and security, wildlife conservation…
Generating Software Tests (Distinguished Lecture)
Andreas Zeller, CISPA Helmholtz Institute for IT Security – Abstract: Software has bugs. What can we do to find as many of these as possible? In this talk, I show how to systematically test software by generating such tests automatically, starting with simple random “fuzzing”…
Origins of NP and P (Distinguished Lecture)
Jack Edmonds, – Abstract: NP and P have origins in “the marriage theorem”: A matchmaker has as clients the parents of some boys and some girls where some boy-girl pairs love each other. The matchmaker must find a marriage of all the girls to distinct…
Modeling Interactive Information Retrieval and Social Media Interaction as Stochastic Process (Distinguished Lecture)
Norbert Fuhr, University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany – Abstract: Stochastic models have a long history in information retrieval (IR). For modeling sequences of interactions, different variants of Markov models have been proposed by a number of researchers. Here a user moves stochastically between different model states,…
Mixing Consistency in Geodistributed Transactions (Distinguished Lecture)
Andrew Myers, Cornell University, USA – Abstract: Programming concurrent, distributed systems that mutate shared, persistent, geo-replicated state is hard. To enable high availability and scalability, a new class of weakly consistent data stores has become popular. However, some data needs strong consistency. We introduce mixed-consistency…
Upcoming Events
Mathematics, Physics & Machine Learning Seminar Series (Online)

The Mathematics, Physics & Machine Learning seminar series has started on October 2020 and runs until March 2021.
The seminars aim to bring together mathematicians and physicists interested in machine learning (ML) with ML and AI experts interested in mathematics and physics, with the goal of introducing innovative Mathematics and Physics-inspired techniques in Machine Learning and, reciprocally, applying Machine Learning to problems in Mathematics and Physics.
Attendance is free but registration is required.
More information is available here.
International European Conference on Parallel and Distributed Computing

The 27th International European Conference on Parallel and Distributed Computing (Euro-Par 2021) will take from August 30 to September 3 2021 in Lisbon.
Euro-Par is the prime European conference covering all aspects of parallel and distributed processing, ranging from theory to practice, from small to the largest parallel and distributed systems and infrastructures, from fundamental computational problems to full-fledged applications, from architecture, compiler, language and interface design and implementation, to tools, support infrastructures, and application performance aspects.
The 2021 edition of Euro-Par will be organized as a collaboration between INESC-ID and Instituto Superior Técnico (IST).
Important Dates:
– Abstract Submission: February 5, 2021
– Paper Submission Deadline: February 12, 2021
– Author Notification: April 30, 2021
– Camera-Ready Papers: June 6, 2021
More information is available here.