The Taub Faculty of Computer Science Events and Talks

The availability of effective exact or heuristic solution methods for general Mixed-Integer Programs (MIPs) is of a paramount importance for practical applications. Unfortunately, in most practical large scale problems, a general-purpose MIP solver may prove not effective even after a clever tuning. In the present ...
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In this paper we study the identity testing problem of arithmetic read-once formulas (ROF) and some related models. A read-once formula is formula (a circuit whose underlying graph is a tree) in which the operations are {+, ×} and such that every input variable labels ...
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Computer systems are everywhere, often controlling critical processes and containing sensitive secret information. However, the ubiquitous nature of computer systems also means that such systems often operate in hostile environments where they are subjected to various attacks by adversarial parties. Even if the system's security ...
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Existing resource management frameworks for large scale cloud systems leave unresolved the problematic tension between high resource utilization and job's performance predictability - respectively coveted by operators and users. In this talk, I will present recent efforts to resolve this tension through temporal planning: unlike ...
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CS will hold a symposium honoring Prof. Johann Makowsky’s retirement on: Logic in Computer Science and Combinatorics On the agenda greetings by CS Dean Prof. Irad Yavneh and talks by: Moshe Y. Vardi Eldar Fischer Tomer Kotek Nadia Labai Elena Ravve Johann Makowsky More details ...
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For the past 40 years computer scientists generally believed that NP-complete problems are intractable. In particular, Boolean satisfiability (SAT), as a paradigmatic automated-reasoning problem, has been considered to be intractable. Over the past 20 years, however, there has been a quiet, but dramatic, revolution, and ...
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With the proliferation of multi-core processors, shared-memory concurrent programming has become increasingly important. Nevertheless, despite decades of research, there are still no adequate answers to the following fundamental questions: 1. What is the right semantics for concurrent programs in higher-level languages? 2. Which reasoning principles ...
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In this talk I will present some of the research I have been involved in concerning the specification and monitoring of timed, continuous and hybrid behaviors using formalism such as Signal Temporal Logic and Timed Regular Expressions. I will discuss the similarities and differences between ...
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We present recent developments in randomness extractors theory and applications to classical, long-standing, open problems such as Ramsey graphs constructions and privacy amplification protocols. This exciting progress heavily relies on two new pseudo-random primitives we call correlation breakers and independence-preserving mergers, which we discuss. Short ...
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The study and design of concurrent data structures has mostly focused on verifying their correctness and proving general progress guarantees. In contrast, very little work has been done on analyzing the running time of these data structures, possibly due to a lack of a good ...
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Challenges in simulation, optimization and control of natural gas transmission systems and their coupling to power transmission systems are reviewed in this presentation describing research on the subject by the Grid Science Team at LANL. In this presentation I will describe opportunities but also challenges ...
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When transmitting information over a noisy channel, two approaches are common: assuming the channel errors are independent of the transmitted content and devising an error-correcting code, or assuming the errors are data dependent and devising a constrained-coding scheme that eliminates all offending data patterns. In ...
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Delivery of social notifications has become a popular component in many electronic services. While a small number of services for social notifications, e.g., Twitter, are dedicated, an increasingly large number of such services are provided as an enhancement of the main functionality. For example, the ...
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In recent years, genetic studies have revolutionized our understanding of common diseases like diabetes and cancer. However, the analysis of genetic studies of disease poses substantial statistical and computational challenges, owing to the data collection scheme and to the extremely large data dimensionality. We propose ...
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Facebook Engineers will come to CS and will offer you full-time positions and internship opportunities on Wednesday, December 14, 2016, 12:30-13:30, at CS Taub Building, Room , 3rd Floor, and will give an Engineering Tech Talk on: Data Driven Engineering @ Facebook: At Facebook, we ...
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We will start with presenting the basic notions of (co)homomology of simplical complexes (which requires only basic linear algebra over the field of order 2) and then we will indicate its relevance for several topics in computer science and combinatorics: 1) Property testing.: 2) Quantum ...
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Reliable performance evaluations require representative workloads. This has led to the use of accounting logs from production systems as a source for workload data in simulations. I will survey 20 years of ups and downs in the use of workload logs, culminating with the idea ...
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Capsule Endoscopy for the Colon is an emerging market with the potential to become a screening tool for detecting colorectal cancer. The patient swallows a pill that includes cameras which provide a video of the digestive system. If a significant polyp, which is a precursor ...
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There are *many* photos in the world. An average user might have thousands of photos in their personal photo collection. We have reached a point where photo acquisition is trivial, and the next challenge lies in arranging and easily editing such large photo collections. I ...
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OpenMP is an API for writing multithreaded, shared memory parallelism, it consists of a set of compiler directives none intrusive to the original serial code. In addition I shall present parfor concept in MATLAB which is useful where you need many loop iterations of a ...
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The Internet infrastructure relies almost entirely on network protocols that are based on open standards. However, the majority of network devices on the Internet, e.g. routers and switches, are proprietary and closed source. Hence, there is no straightforward way to analyze them. Specifically, one cannot ...
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We address a new online problem, referred to as min-cost perfect matching with delays (MPMD), where requests arrive in a continuous time online fashion at the points of a finite metric space $mathcal{M}$ and should be served by matching them to each other. The algorithm ...
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Network Function Virtualization (NFV) is a novel paradigm that enables flexible and scalable implementation of network services on cloud infrastructure, while Network Survivability is an traditional well-studied subject for maintaining network service continuity in the presence of failures. This talk will address these two important ...
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Within the wide field of sparse approximation, convolutional sparse coding (CSC) has gained increasing attention in recent years. This model assumes a structured-dictionary built as a union of banded Circulant matrices. Most attention has been devoted to the practical side of CSC, proposing efficient algorithms ...
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Network providers must dynamically allocate scarce physical resources among their clients to maximize benefit. Network pricing is one way for providers to maximize client benefit by allowing them to share available bandwidth according to their willingness to pay for it. The resulting allocation grants additional ...
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The interest in subspace codes has increased recently due to their application in error correction for random network coding. In order to study their properties and find good constructions, the notion of cyclic subspace codes was introduced by using the extension field structure of the ...
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Distance based reconstruction methods of phylogenetic trees consist of two independent parts: first, inter-species distances are estimated assuming some stochastic model of sequence evolution; then the inferred distances are used to construct the tree. These methods rely heavily on comparisons of the inferred distances and ...
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A celebrated result by Impagliazzo and Wigderson is that under complexity theoretic hardness assumptions, every randomized algorithm can be transformed into one that uses only logarithmically many bits, with polynomial slowdown. Such algorithms can then be completely derandomized, with polynomial slowdown. In the talk I ...
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Users of solid-state disks and mobile devices may benefit from the ability to hide sensitive data in a manner that disallows powerful adversaries from detecting that data has been hidden. In this talk I present a new technique to achieve this goal by manipulating the ...
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Hyperspectral (HS) images or "hyperspectral data-cubes" contain radiance spectrum information at high spectral resolution for each point in the scene. Until recently, acquiring such information involved expensive, bulky equipment which required long exposure times - making HS imaging impractical for "natural" imaging (ground-level, horizontally viewed ...
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Projected gradient descent (PGD), and its close variants, are often considered the methods of choice for solving a large variety of machine learning optimization problems, including empirical risk minimization, statistical learning, and online learning. This is not surprising, since PGD is often optimal in a ...
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Google's Cloud & Networking group will visit CS and will give a Tech Talk presenting ithe technical highlights and challenges of building a project called "Effingo" - Google's internal (very) large scale file copy service, as well as on their hiring process. Please pre-register.
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Many algorithms for the computation of correspondences​ ​between deformable shapes rely on some variant of​ ​nearest neighbor matching in a descriptor space. Such are,​ ​for example, various point-wise correspondence recovery​​ algorithms used as a post-processing stage in the functional​ ​correspondence framework. Such frequently used techniques​ ...
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Everyone wants to program with "high-level concepts", rather than meddle with the fine details of the implementation, such as pointers, network packets, and asynchronous callbacks. This is usually achieved by introducing layers of abstraction - but every layer incurs some overhead, and when they accumulate, ...
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In the classical Node-Disjoint Paths (NDP) problem, the input consists of an undirected $n$-vertex graph $G$, and a collection $M=\{(s_1,t_1),\ldots,(s_k,t_k)\}$ of pairs of its vertices, called source-destination, or demand, pairs. The goal is to route the largest possible number of the demand pairs via node-disjoint ...
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Please see details in the Hebrew page.
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Finding correspondence between 3D shapes is one of the prototypical problems in computer graphics, geometric processing, and vision. Different flavors of this problem arise in applications ranging from texture mapping and animation to marker-less motion capture. The recent progress in the development of commercial real-time ...
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An (n, N, k, m, t)-batch code abstracts the following distributed database problem: n items are to be distributed among m servers in such a way that any (multi)set of k items can be retrieved by reading at most t items from each server with ...
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Learning from membership queries has flourished due to its many applications in group testing, blood testing, chemical leak testing, chemical reactions, electric shorting detection, codes, multi-access channel communications, molecular biology, VLSI testing and AIDS screening. Many of the new applications raised new models and new ...
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Branching program is a combinatorial model of computation which models space in Turing machines. One of the holy grail in complexity theory is to understand the relationship between efficient space (class L, logarithmic space in input) and efficient time (class P, polynomial time in input). ...
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Network function cloudification aims at executing virtual network functions on the cloud to enable rapid deployment of new services with greater flexibility and better CAPEX and OPEX efficiencies. While the cloud provides a convenient overlay abstraction to the underlying compute and network infrastructure, the data ...
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​We present a general framework for solving partial differential equations on manifolds represented by meshless points, i.e. point clouds, without parameterization or connection information. Our method is based on a local approximation of the manifold as well as functions defined on the manifold, such as ...
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Functional Safety and IT-Security are the most important quality factors for future real-time embedded systems. This talk will cover state of the art techniques and research results covering functional safety and IT-Security in relation to functional safety. Focus mainly on your knowledge and experience in ...
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Embedded real-time systems focusing on functional safety applications must be error-free and have to master faults occurring during operation. In this talk we will deal with types of faults and how the system architecture will control them. We will ask the question: "How much safety ...
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One of the most exciting possibilities opened by deep neural networks is end-to-end learning: the ability to learn tasks without the need for feature engineering or breaking down into sub-tasks. This talk will present three cases illustrating how end-to-end learning can operate in machine perception ...
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This talk will present some basic concepts to help (aspiring) users of 3D printing. The talk will focus on the pipeline and use of the common FDM printers found in the CGGC lab.
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One of the fundamental tasks in many computational settings is finding the maximum cut. Surprisingly, it has been insufficiently studied in the classic distributed settings, where vertices communicate by synchronously sending messages to their neighbours according to the underlying graph. In the talk we will ...
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We consider the Multiway Cut problem, a basic graph partitioning problem in which the goal is to find the minimum weight collection of edges disconnecting a given set of special vertices called terminals. Multiway Cut admits a well known simplex embedding relaxation, where rounding this ...
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On-chip heterogeneity has been shown to be an effective mechanism to improve execution efficiency for general purpose and embedded computing. Existing heterogeneous designs either feature a single ISA or multiple ISAs that statically partition work. In this talk, PhD candidate from UC San Diego Ashish ...
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In the analysis of high-dimensional data, manifold learning methods are used to reduce the dimensionality of the data, while preserving local neighborhoods and revealing meaningful structures. Out-of-sample function extension techniques are then used for analyzing new points, yet these techniques are inherently limited for handling ...
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The field of distributed graph algorithms deals with solving graph problems in a network (graph) of independent agents while minimizing the amount of communication between nodes. One such fundamental problem is weighted vertex cover. We show a fast distributed (2+epsilon)-approximation algorithm using the local ratio ...
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In a profoundly influential paper, Shannon introduced information theory and used it to study the one-way data transmission problem, initiating the study of data compression. In the last few decades, the study of efficient communication using tools from information theory has led to many interesting ...
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Controlled light conditions improve considerably the performance of most computer vision algorithms. Dynamic light conditions create varying spatial changes in color and intensity across the scene. These condition, caused by a moving shadow for example, force developers to create algorithms which are robust to such ...
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An inconsistent database is a database that violates some of the integrity constraints assumed to hold. Managing data inconsistency has been one of the major challenges in the research and practice of database management. In the Big Data era, applications often collect and integrate information ...
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With intelligent processing, cameras have great potential to link the real world and the virtual world. We review advances and opportunities for algorithms and applications that retrieve information from large databases using images as queries. For rate-constrained applications, remarkable improvements have been achieved over the ...
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The SIFT method is the first efficient image comparison model. It was the first method to propose a practical scale-space sampling and to put in practice the theoretical scale invariance in scale-space theory. SIFT associates with each image a list of translation, rotation and scale ...
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CS invites all degrees students to attend the first information fair and to check out the variety of CS projects, seminars and advanced courses to be given in the 2016-2017 academic year. The event will take place on Wednesday's Noon, 12:30-14:30, at the lobby of ...
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Guruswami and Smith (Journal of the ACM, to appear) present a construction for an explicit codes for additive channels (channels that can induce a fixed error) that succeeds with high probability. Furthermore Guruswami and Smith gave an explicit construction against channels of size n^c if ...
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Image and texture synthesis is a challenging task that has long been drawing attention in the fields of image processing, graphics, and machine learning. This problem consists of modelling the desired type of images, either through training examples or via a parametric modeling, and then ...
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Task-based programming is an emerging paradigm that simplifies parallel programming. Task-based models, however, mostly focus on expressing concurrency and, for the most part, do not reason about data synchronization. The recently proposed O-structures memory versioning model is intended to fill this gap and dynamically track ...
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We present a model in which extremely simple agents, able only to detect how many other agents are in a sector directly in front of them, without ever knowing actual bearings towards any other agent, come to an agreement about a common center of rotation ...
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Computer science and optics are usually studied separately -- separate people, in separate departments, meet at separate conferences. This is changing. The exciting promise of technologies like virtual reality and self-driving cars demand solutions that draw from the best aspects of computer vision, computer graphics, ...
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A collision resistant hash function is a function that compresses the input, yet it is computationally infeasible to find two inputs on which it has the same output. Collision resistant hash functions are widely used for making digital signatures efficient and have many other applications ...
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Auto-parallelization of programs that have not been developed with parallelism in mind is one of the holy grails in computer science. It requires understanding the source code's data flow to automatically distribute the data, parallelize the computations, and infer synchronizations where necessary. We will discuss ...
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Parameter estimation is performed by fitting data measurements to a model using Bayesian statistics, assuming additional prior information. The estimation requires a numerical solution of a large scale optimization problem, whose objective traditionally includes data fidelity and regularization terms. In this talk we will concentrate ...
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Motion capture is the process of recording the movement of objects or people by sensors and transforming it into computer readable format. To achieve best results, the environment needs to be optimally covered by the sensors. I will propose my latest advances in optimally placing ...
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The 5th TCE Summer School on Cyber and Computer Security will be held on Sunday-Thursday, September 4th-8th, 2016. Location: Room 1003, Meyer Building (EE), Technion, Haifa. Attendance is free, but registration is required Topics include innovation and entrepreneurship in big data: from preaching to (effective, ...
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Real systems for mining dynamic data streams should be able to detect changes that affect the accuracy of their model. A distributed setting is one of the main challenges in this kind of change detection. In a distributed setting, model training requires centralizing the data ...
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In modern architectures memory operations may be reordered and executed non-atomically. Consistency is guarantied for single thread execution, but not across threads. Both software and hardware Relaxed Memory Models are defined to capture the possible execution behaviors. Each Relaxed Memory Model poses its own challenges ...
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Text categorization is a prominent task of labeling documents with predefined categories. The main approach to performing text categorization is learning from labeled examples. For many tasks, it may be difficult to find examples in one language but easy in others. The problem of learning ...
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Studying the evolution of software is an emerging topic, receiving much attention and focus as every line of code written today is more likely to belong to an existing piece of software. Our work is an effort at modeling and quantifying the semantic impact of ...
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Generic frame fields are important for many applications in computer graphics such as texture mapping and quadrangulation. The vast majority of existing approaches rely on computing an intermediate metric induced by an ambient Euclidean space, thus increasing the complexity and restricting the space of possible ...
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Collaboration between multiple robots (or agents) pursuing common or individual tasks is important in numerous problem domains, including cooperative autonomous navigation, mapping and 3D reconstruction, tracking and active sensing. A key required capability is to autonomously determine robot actions while taking into account different sources ...
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Mobile phones and tablets are becoming the main devices to access the Internet, and wireless proximity technology has improved significantly over the last years. This creates the right environment for mobile applications that rely on proximity and close peers to improve their performance. One possible ...
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Software Defined Networks (SDN) is a new approach to computer networking that provides simple network management by the abstraction of higher level functionality. The SDN framework enables flexible and frequent updates, and it introduces challenges in terms of consistency and scalability. This seminar considers the ...
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Switch codes are a coding scheme which enables one to encode the input packets into the banks such that the packet requests by the output ports can be answered efficiently. Mathematically speaking, a switch code is required to satisfy the following property. Assume that there ...
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Resource allocation problems arise in a wide range of applications. In many of these classic problems, we are given a set of requests competing for resources, where each request utilizes predefined amounts of the resources. We seek a feasible allocation of the resources, subject to ...
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It is often the case in biological measurement data that results are given as a ranked list of quantities, for example differential expression (DE) of genes as inferred from microarrays or RNA-seq. Recent years brought considerable progress in statistical tools for enrichment analysis in ranked ...
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In this work we revisit the problem of visual odometry. Visual odometry is the process of estimating the motion of the camera by examining the changes that the motion induces on the images made by it. The approach we propose exploits a scene structure typical ...
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While 3D movies are gaining popularity, viewers in a 3D cinema still need to wear cumbersome glasses in order to enjoy them. Automultiscopic displays provide a better alternative to the display of 3D content, as they present multiple angular images of the same scene without ...
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In recent years, due to the spread of multi-level nonvolatile memories (NVM), q-ary write-once memories (WOM) codes have been extensively studied. By using WOM codes, it is possible to rewrite NVMs t times before erasing the cells. The use of WOM codes enables to improve ...
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Over the past 30 years numerous algorithms have been designed for symmetry breaking problems in the LOCAL model, such as maximal matching, MIS, vertex coloring, and edge-coloring. For most problems the best randomized algorithm is at least exponentially faster than the best deterministic algorithm. In ...
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With the rapid development of parallel platforms, optimistic methods become increasingly common. However, existing memory management schemes for such algorithms imposes high performance overhead and are considered notoriously complex. In this talk, I will describe how memory management can benefit from optimistic methods. I will ...
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We are interested in public-setup Zero-Knowledge proof systems for natural languages in NP with poly-logarithmic Verifier and quasi-linear Prover. Systems having such properties can be compiled efficiently to succinct publicly verifiable arguments, that could in practice effect our lives in many aspects. Although the theory ...
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Decisions taken by agents in distributed and multi-agent systems depend on their local information. A novel formulation of the connection between knowledge and action in such systems allows new insights into the design of correct and efficient protocols. This talk will discuss and illustrate how ...
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We introduce a framework allowing domain experts to manipulate computational terms in the interest of deriving better, more efficient implementations. It employs deductive reasoning to generate provably correct efficient implementations from a very high-level specification of an algorithm, and inductive constraint-based synthesis to improve automation. ...
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Virtualization is the ability of modern computer systems to run guest Virtual Machines (VMs). The VM host exposes various I/O devices to its guests such as the Network Interface Controller (NIC), hard disk, etc. Para-virtual I/O is a common technique for presenting the guest VM ...
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CS students in the course "Project in Advanced Programming" invite you to an Arduino project fair on Tuesday, June 21, 2016, between 12:3.30, in the lobby of CS Taub Building. The fair will exhibit new Arduino and Android projects as well as yearly projects. You ...
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In this paper we describe a new method for detecting and counting a repeating object in an image. While the method relies on a fairly sophisticated deformable part model, unlike existing techniques it estimates the model parameters in an unsupervised fashion thus alleviating the need ...
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Write-once memory (WOM) is a storage device consisting of q-ary cells that can only increase their values. A WOM code is a scheme to write messages to the memory without decreasing the cells' levels. There are four models of WOM which depend on whether the ...
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Cassandra is a highly popular distributed data store. It supports flexible consistency semantics over a wide-column data access model. In our work, we propose protocols for hardening Cassandra against Byzantine failures, in which some nodes in the system may act arbitrarily, including in a malicious ...
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A tangent vector field on a surface is the generator of a smooth family of maps from the surface to itself, known as the flow. Given a scalar function on the surface, it can be transported, or advected, by composing it with a vector field's ...
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Contention resolution schemes are an algorithmic technique originally devised in the context of submodular functions maximization. Recent works, however, have extended contention resolution schemes into a robust tool with many applications in various fields such as stochastic optimization, auctions and prophet inequalities. In this talk ...
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Research on the application of game theory in the context of networking has focused on non-cooperative games, where the selfish agents cannot reach a binding agreement on the way they would share the infrastructure. Many approaches have been proposed for mitigating the typically inefficient operating ...
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Gilad Barkai from Google's AUTO-COMPLETE team will give a talk about the system - its daily use, challenges and different features as the programmer sees them. Please pre-register.
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Modern discrete GPUs have been the processors of choice primarily for compute-intensive applications, but using them in large-scale data processing is extremely challenging. Unfortunately, they do not provide important I/O abstractions that have long been established in CPU context, like memory mapped files, which shield ...
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​Computer Science (CS) is the new language of science as Mathematics was until the Twentieth Century. CS generalizes mathematics toward being more versatile. In this talk we will focus on some problems in bio-medical imaging science and discuss and how we try to address them.​ ...
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This work extends a recently proposed robust computational framework for constructing the boundary representation (B-rep) of the volume swept by a given smooth solid moving along a one parameter family h of rigid motions. Our extension allows the input solid to have sharp features, and ...
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This work extends a recently proposed robust computational framework for constructing the boundary representation (B-rep) of the volume swept by a given smooth solid moving along a one parameter family h of rigid motions. Our extension allows the input solid to have sharp features, and ...
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Irregular algorithms, such as sorting and graph algorithms, are prevalent in computer science applications. Until recently, it was assumed that the irregular algorithms also greatly benefited from the the Out-of-Order Execution engines found in most modern day CPU processors. Out-of-Order execution, using branch predictors, speculates ...
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On Image Processing, Visual Information Models and ... why is it so hard for us in Numeric Analysis?
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Proof complexity studies the complexity of mathematical proofs, with the aim of exhibiting (true) statements whose proofs are always necessarily long. One well-known proof system is Hilbert’s Nullstellensatz, which shows that if the family F={f1,…,fm} of n-variate polynomials have no common solution to the system ...
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Planar shape interpolation is a classic problem in computer graphics. We present a novel shape interpolation method that blends C∞ planar harmonic mappings represented in closed-form. The intermediate mappings in the blending are guaranteed to be locally injective C∞ harmonic mappings, with conformal and isometric ...
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One of the primary challenges in single particle reconstruction in cryo-electron microscopy is to find the three-dimensional structure of a molecule using its two-dimensional noisy projection-images. We suggest a method to estimate the unknown imaging orientations of all projection-images that is independent of their distribution. ...
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Conformal maps are especially useful in geometry processing for computing shape preserving deformations, image warping and manipulating harmonic functions. The Cauchy-Green coordinates are complex-valued barycentric coordinates, which can be used to parameterize a space of conformal maps from a planar domain bounded by a simple ...
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Conformal maps are especially useful in geometry processing for computing shape preserving deformations, image warping and manipulating harmonic functions. The Cauchy-Green coordinates are complex-valued barycentric coordinates, which can be used to parameterize a space of conformal maps from a planar domain bounded by a simple ...
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A major challenge in optimizing network utilization is how to reduce bottleneck links, while taking into account that bandwidth demands may be increased over time. Traffic engineering algorithms attempt to address this challenge by employing smart routing, however current solutions optimization criterion is biased towards ...
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In distributed systems, communication between the participants in the computation is usually the most expensive part of the computation. Theoretical models of distributed systems usually reflect this by neglecting the cost of local computation, and charging only for messages sent between the participants; in particular, ...
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produce design developed in through the years in many fronts and requirements. Today SOC products require aggressive targets in all fronts: frequency, performance, low cost, low power…… To address those new and growing requirement there needs to be a basic change in the design concept ...
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The Sixth CS Research Day for graduate studies will be held on Tuesday, May 31, 2016, between 14:30-16:30, at the lobby of the CS Taub Building. Research Day events are opportunity for our graduate students to expose their researches using posters and presentations to CS ...
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Both 3D models and 2D images contain a wealth of information about everyday objects in our environment. However, it is difficult to semantically link together these two media forms, even when they feature identical or very similar objects. Real-world images are naturally variable in a ...
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As a new advancement of traditional finite element method, isogeometric analysis (IGA) was proposed to integrate design and analysis. In this talk, I will present our latest research on volumetric T-spline parameterization for IGA applications. For arbitrary-topology objects, we first build a polycube whose topology ...
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A functional, computational and mechanistic, explanation of the relationship among visual attention, interpretation of visual stimuli, and eye movements, and how these produce visual behavior, seems elusive. Here, we focus on one component, how selection is accomplished for the next fixation. The popularity of saliency ...
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Generalization, informally, is the ability of a learner to reflect not just its training data, but properties of the underlying distribution from which the data are drawn. When paired with empirical risk minimization, it is a fundamental goal of learning. Typically, we say that a ...
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A significant proportion of computer system resources are devoted to applications that can inherently tolerate inaccuracies in their data, execution and communication. Hence, “approximate computing” is promising for performance and energy efficiency. However, taking advantage of approximate computing needs: language support to specify where and ...
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The 6th annual international TCE conference (Tuesday-Wednesday, May 24-25, 2016) will focus on recent trends in 3D Visual Computing: Graphics, Geometry and everything in between. Conference Chairs: Mirela Ben-Chen (CS Technion), Yoav Schechner (EE Technion) With the advent of widespread consumer devices generating 3D data, ...
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[Note the change of time and date] Generalization and simplification are deeply related to each other: simpler explanations often reveal principles that apply more generally, and predictive scientific theories often boil down to a few simple (and deep) laws. This talk is about a manifestation ...
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Computing shortest paths is one of the fundamental problems of graph algorithms. The goal of *dynamic* single source shortest paths (SSSP) is to maintain a shortest path tree from a fixed source s as the edges of the graph change over time. The most general ...
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The emerging trend of Software Defined Networks (SDN) has been enthusiastically explored by researchers over the last decade, as it provides the flexibility and agility to update networks dynamically, in a way that efficiently utilizes the network resources. In this talk we explore the use ...
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We present a novel framework for high-throughput live cell lineage analysis in time-lapse microscopy images. Our algorithm ties together two fundamental aspects of live cell lineage construction, namely cell segmentation and tracking, via a Bayesian inference of dynamic models. The proposed contribution exploits the Kalman ...
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Many image restoration algorithms in recent years are based on patch-processing. The core idea is to decompose the target image into fully overlapping patches, restore each of them separately, and then merge the results somehow. This concept has been demonstrated to be highly effective, leading ...
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The interest in subspace codes has increased lately due to their application in error correction for random network coding. A subspace code is a collection of subspaces of a vector space under the subspace distance $d_s(U,V)=\dim U + \dim V-2\dim(U\cap V)$. In this dissertation we ...
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The Anscombe transform offers an approximate conversion of a Poisson random variable into unit-variance Gaussian one. This transform is important and appealing, as it is easy to compute, and becomes handy in various inverse problems with Poisson noise contamination. Solution to such problems can be ...
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Gabidulin codes, originally defined over finite fields, are an important class of rank metric codes with various applications. Recently, their definition was generalized to certain fields of characteristic zero. This generalization led to new applications, such as novel constructions of space-time codes and methods for ...
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You are invited to the final stage of the 2015-16 Amdocs Best Project Contest. The competing teams will present and talk about their projects. The event will take place on Sunday,May 8, 2015, 14:30-16:30, in Auditorium 2, CS Taub Building. You are all invited to ...
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Motivated by the problem of zero-error communication over a broadcast channel, we introduce a new notion of graph capacity that generalizes the Shannon capacity of a graph. We derive upper and lower bounds on this quantity for arbitrary graphs, and provide a tighter upper bound ...
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The problem of computing shape correspondence is a fundamental task in Computer Graphics. While recent methods produce semantically meaningful maps globally, the maps are distorted locally. The harmonic map heat flow is a tool for local minimization of the Dirichlet energy, that measures the smoothness ...
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The ubiquitous nature of computer systems means that they often operate in hostile environments where they are subjected to various attacks by adversarial parties. The purpose of such attacks varies, ranging from simply corrupting the system's behaviour to a complete extraction of otherwise-unavailable secret information. ...
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Computational vision, visual computing and biomedical image analysis have made tremendous progress of the past decade. This is mostly due the development of efficient learning and inference algorithms which allow better and richer modeling of visual perception tasks. Hyper-Graph representations are among the most prominent ...
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Matching keypoints by minimizing the Euclidean distance between their SIFT descriptors is an effective and extremely popular technique. Using the ratio between distances, as suggested by Lowe, is even more effective and leads to excellent matching accuracy. Probabilistic approaches that model the distribution of the ...
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Due to the lack of computational power, many users don't perform the computation locally, rather outsource the computation to a remote server. This raises the problem of computational integrity. Using Probabilistically Checkable Proofs (PCP) the remote server can prove to the user (with high probability) ...
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We consider the design of private prediction markets, financial markets designed to elicit predictions about uncertain events without revealing too much information about market participants' actions or beliefs. Our goal is to design market mechanisms in which participants' trades or wagers influence the market's behavior ...
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In 2014, 12.4% of the population in Singapore were above 65 years of age and this is projected to increase to 19% by 2030. Among them, those living alone is likely to increase to 83,000 by 2030, up from 35,000 today. The ability to “age ...
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In recent years much work has been devoted to the development of image processing algorithms using local patches. The main idea in this line of work is to impose a statistical prior on the patches of the desired image. An algorithm following this path extracts ...
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We will discuss two related works:1) "Point Registration via Efficient Convex Relaxation" Point cloud registration is a fundamental task in computer graphics, and more specifically, in rigid and non-rigid shape matching. The rigid shape matching problem can be formulated as the problem of simultaneously aligning ...
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We present a randomized algorithm that computes a Minimum Spanning Tree (MST) in O(log^* n) rounds, with high probability, in the Congested Clique model of distributed computing. In this model, the input is a graph on n nodes, initially each node knows only its incident ...
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This talk considers vector network coding based on rank-metric codes and subspace codes. Our main result is that vector network coding can significantly reduce the required field size compared to scalar linear network coding in the same multicast network. The achieved gap between the field ...
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CS invites you to a STARTUP DAY and recruitment by the presenting firms: Augury, Bidalgo, Checkmarx, Jelly Button, Kaltura, Outbrain, Zerto and more. In addition, lectures will be given by the firms representatives and entrepreneurs . The event will take place on Wednesday, April 20, ...
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Quantum money is a quantum state that can be easily verified but is hard to copy. I will start by reviewing Aaronson & Christiano's quantum money scheme. Then we'll extend their scheme to construct a tokenized blind signature scheme. A (standard) digital signature scheme uses ...
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Many medical images are produced daily. Compression thus plays a major role in storage and transmission applications, while enhancement, such as image de-noising, is important for diagnosis purposes. Requirements could often be conflicting, however. In order to mitigate this limitation we suggest to decompose the ...
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Although chirp-coded signals can theoretically improve the performance of ultrasound medical imaging, they are presently of limited use. Their main advantage is better power delivery without loss of axial resolution. Their drawback, however, is that the biological tissue distorts the ultrasound echo of the chirp, ...
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Rated by Ron Graham as a top-10 mathematical card trick of the 20th century, Diaconis’ mind reader is a magic trick that involves the interaction with five collaborative volunteers. Inspired by this magic, we perform in this talk a card trick that can tolerate bluffing ...
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We study a model of secure computation in which deviating parties are forced to pay monetary penalties, without relying on a trusted party to provide an ideal bank functionality. Our protocols work in a hybrid model where parties have access to claim-or-refund or multilock ideal ...
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In this talk, we will consider coding schemes for multi-party interactive communication over synchronous networks that suffer from stochastic noise, where each bit is independently flipped with probability ε. We analyze the minimal overhead that must be added by the coding scheme in order to ...
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As economic systems "move" to the Internet, they can become much more complex and this new complexity often becomes their defining characteristic. We will consider a very simple scenario of this form: a single seller that is selling multiple items to a single buyer. We ...
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To recover the three dimensional (3D) volumetric distribution of matter in an object, images of the object are captured from multiple directions and locations. Using these images, tomographic computations seek the distribution. In highly scattering media and constrained irradiance, tomography must explicitly account for off-axis ...
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Multiport switches are commonly used as data processing and routing devices in computer networks. A network switch routes data packets between its multiple input and output ports. Packets from input ports are stored upon arrival in a switch fabric comprising multiple memory banks. This can ...
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In anticipation of 3D printers reaching millions of users, I am investigating how to allow future users to interact with the new hardware. I present a series of interactive software+hardware systems that I created to answer this question. They are characterized by two main properties. ...
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You are invited to the event "Leading in Technology": "Presidents on the Edge". Special guests will be Prof. Rivka Carmi, President of Ben-Gurion University and Prof. Peretz Lavie, Technion President. Einav Galili will conduct a panel on "Initiatives - Leading in Technology" hosting entrepreneurs and ...
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In the past few decades, probabilistic checking techniques were shown to yield dramatic efficiency improvements in verifying proofs and approximating distance from error-correcting codes. We show connections between cryptography and ``zero-knowledge'' variants of these techniques, such as Probabilistically Checkable Proofs (PCPs) and PCPs of Proximity ...
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Network Function Virtualization (NFV) is a new networking paradigm where network functions are executed on commodity servers located in small cloud nodes distributed across the network, and where software defined mechanisms are used to control the network flows. This paradigm is a major turning point ...
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The 2016 open day invite outstanding undergraduates from all universities to come to the Technion and learn about the faculties of Computer Science and  Electrical Engineering, meet faculty and graduate students and hear a fascinating talk by Dr. Yoelle Maarek, VP Research for EMEA at ...
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You are invited to a workshop and inauguration event of the Technion Cyber Security Research Center, in the presence of Prof. Peretz Lavie, Technion President and Dr. Evyatar Matanya, head of the National Cyber Bureau​​. The event will be held on Tuesday, April 5th, 2016, ...
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Images of outdoor scenes are often degraded by haze, fog and other scattering phenomena. In this work we show how such images can be dehazed using internal patch recurrence. Small image patches tend to repeat abundantly inside a natural image, both within the same scale, ...
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This work presents a novel approach for automatically repairing a program with respect to a given set of assertions. Programs are repaired using a predefined set of mutations. We impose no assumptions on the number of erroneous locations in the program, yet we are able ...
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You are invited to a Women and Students in Technology Meeting by Microsoft. The event is held to mark The International Women's Day and will be conducted by executives and senior position representatives, including a professional panel on Career Management. More details and pre-registration.
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One of the major challenges of the research in circuit complexity is proving super-polynomial lower bounds for de-Morgan formulas. Karchmer, Raz, and Wigderson suggested to approach this problem by proving that formula complexity behaves “as expected” with respect to the composition of functions. They showed ...
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In this talk, I introduce a frequency based cache admission policy in order to boost the effectiveness of caches subject to skewed access distributions. Given a newly accessed item and an eviction candidate from the cache, our scheme decides, based on the recent access history, ...
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e-NABLE is an online community that designs, customizes, fabricates, and disseminates 3D-printed prosthetic hands and arms for free. E-NABLE extends the methods and philosophies of Open Source software to hardware, assistive technology development, and human resources. I'll tell the story of this remarkable community, and ...
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In this talk I will first give a brief overview of the topic of bi-level mathematical programming, in which the solution of an inner optimization problem is used within the objective function of a outer problem. These problems were originally studied in the context of ...
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We propose a framework which infers mid-level visual properties of an image by learning about ordinal relationships. Instead of estimating metric quantities directly, the system proposes ordinal relationship estimates for pairs of points in the input image. These probabilistic ordinal measurements are then aggregated and ...
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TCE in Collaboration with Caesarea Rothschild Institute will hold a Lightweight Crypto Day. Lightweight cryptography is an emerging field of research trying to address low-end devices that need security such as RFID tags or devices connected to Internet of Things (IoT). As known security solutions ...
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You are invited to a seminar on "Network Virtualization" held by Amdocs on Sunday, March 27 at 16:30, in class 3, CS Taub Building. Detailed agenda in the attached poster and pre-registration.
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Non-binary low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes significantly outperform their binary counterparts. Moreover, non-binary LDPC codes are especially good for the channels with burst errors and high-order modulations. Unfortunately, their decoding complexity is still large, that is why iterative hard and soft-reliability based decoding majority algorithms are ...
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The field of distributed graph algorithms deals with solving graph problems in a network (graph) of independent agents while minimizing the amount of communication between nodes. One such fundamental problem is weighted vertex cover. We show a fast distributed (2+epsilon)-approximation algorithm using the local ratio ...
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The high speed I/O market in client platforms is going through major changes in the last few years, with latest silicon process that enable high bit rate on the wire while using low power to drive those bits. Where are those trends leading ? what ...
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Geometrical understanding of bendable and stretchable structures is crucial for many applications where comparison, inference and reconstruction play an important role. Moreover, it is the first step in quantifying normal and abnormal phenomena in non-rigid domains. Moving from Euclidean (straight) distances towards intrinsic (geodesic) measures, ...
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Reed-Muller codes encode an m-variate polynomial of degree r by evaluating it on all points in {0,1}^m. Its distance is 2^{m-r} and so it cannot correct more than that many errors/erasures in the worst case. For random errors one may hope for a better result. ...
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The Department of Computer Science and WomenTechPro invite you and you open the annual Spring Hakton HackPRO! where? Computer Science Department, Technion. when? Wednesday-Thursday-Friday in the first week of the spring semester, 16-18 March 2016 Think wearable technology! The Intel Edison is a tiny computer ...
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Submodular maximization captures both classical problems in combinatorial optimization and recent more practical applications that arise in other disciplines, e.g., machine learning and data mining. Typically, the size of the inputs in these applications is very large. Hence, it is interesting to devise algorithms that ...
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Good engineering practice uses the characteristics of existing technologies to optimize implementation. Often, this will mean that design techniques optimal in a previous generation prove impractical or even unusable when a new technology becomes dominant. This rule is all too often forgotten, which we will ...
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The objective of low-delay codes is to protect communication streams from erasure bursts by minimizing the time between the packet erasure and its reconstruction. Previous work has concentrated on the constant-delay scenario, where all erased packets need to exhibit the same decoding delay. We consider ...
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The main topic of our research is creating a multi-scale dictionary learning paradigm for sparse and redundant signal and image representations. The appeal of a multi-scale dictionary is obvious - in many cases data naturally comes at different scales. To date, popular dictionary based approaches ...
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In this work, we consider the list update problem as defined in the seminal work on competitive analysis by [Sleator, Tarjan 85]. In this problem, a sequence of requests, consisting of items to access in a linked list, is given. After an item is accessed ...
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Parkinson’s Disease (PD) is a progressive, degenerative disorder of the central nervous system. It is characterized by significant motor symptom, such as: tremor, slowness of movement, and gait deficiencies; but also entails non-motor symptoms, such as: depression, cognitive slowness and sleep difficulties. Intel Corporation is ...
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In this work, we analyze privacy in a distributed setting, where privacy is measured in an information theoretic way (i.e. no cryptographic assumptions). The three complexity measures we analyze are (1) internal information, which measures the counter-party privacy-loss inherent in a communication protocol, (2) output ...
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Optimal transportation (OT) has gained considerable popularity as a tool for relating signals defined over geometric domains. Despite recent progress developing generic machinery for understanding and optimizing OT problems, considerable effort is still required to transition OT from a theoretical challenge to a practical tool ...
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In recent years much work has been devoted to the development of image processing algorithms using local patches. The main idea in this line of work is to impose a statistical prior on the patches of the desired image. An algorithm following this path extracts ...
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In this work we present a new approach of incorporating kernels into dictionary learning. The kernel K-SVD algorithm (KKSVD), which has been introduced recently, shows an improvement in classification performance, with relation to its linear counterpart K-SVD. However, this algorithm requires the storage and handling ...
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To recover the three dimensional (3D) volumetric distribution of matter in an object, images of the object are captured from multiple directions and locations. Using these images, tomographic computations seek the distribution. In highly scattering media and constrained irradiance, tomography must explicitly account for off-axis ...
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The C preprocessor (cpp) is probably the most familiar macro preprocessor. However, it lacks the expressibility of general purpose programming languages. We propose a language approach to preprocessing, based on writing code in a high-level programming language. Our intent is to make it easy to ...
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Fluent APIs increasingly gain popularity and research interest. It allows an API designer to enforce correct usage of the API by type-safety. Although many people design new fluent APIs manually, the question of automating the process remained unanswered yet. In this work, we explain why ...
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Time: 10:00-10:45 Speaker: Prof Myung Soo Kim (Computer Science and Engineering Department, Seoul National University, Korea) Title: Efficient Voronoi Diagram Construction for Planar Freeform Spiral Curves Abstract: We present a real-time algorithm for computing the Voronoi diagram of planar freeform piecewise-spiral curves. The efficiency and ...
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We propose a novel probabilistic framework to model connectivity patterns in the brain as a latent network graph. In particular, we model the interaction between latent anatomical and functional connectivity and present an intuitive extension to population studies. The method simultaneously infers the templates of ...
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n the past several years, the field of computer vision has chalked up significant achievements, fueled by new algorithms (such as deep neural networks), new hardware (such as consumer 3D cameras) and new available processing (such as GPU’s). When we consider the problems that tomorrow’s ...
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Stochastic analysis of real-world signals consists of 3 main parts: mathematical representation; probabilistic modeling; statistical inference. For it to be effective, we need mathematically-principled and practical computational tools that take into consideration not only each of these components by itself but also their interplay. This ...
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Cloud Computing is considered to be one of the most important paradigm shifts of this century. In this presentation we will explain what cloud computing is all about, review the key drivers and inhibitors of cloud and what is fueling its exponential growth. We will ...
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Training accurate visual classifiers from large data sets critically depend on learning the right representation for the problem. In this talk, I will discuss a representation learning framework based on an iterative interaction of two components: a feature generator suggesting candidate features, and a feature ...
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CS students in the course "Project in Advanced Programming" invite you to an android applications fair on Wednesday, January 20, 2016, between 14:15-16:30, in room 337 (3rd floor) of CS Taub Building. The fair will exhibit new android applications designed to facilitate life in all ...
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A probabilistically checkable proof (PCP) enables checking, for example, the satisfiability of a 3-SAT boolean formula phi, while only examining a constant number of randomly chosen symbols of the proof. Suppose an assignment to phi has length n. A long line of research led to ...
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Graph optimization problems are the most studied problems in theoretical computer science. These problems are not only mathematically intriguing. They have a crucial impact on our increasingly-computerized environment. Among the tractable optimization problems, the most fundamental are shortest paths, maximum flow, minimum cut, maximum matching, ...
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Correctly matching feature points across images is an important preprocessing step for many computer vision applications (specifically such that require geometric reasoning). Once an initial set of putative matches is obtained, the common methods to detect the correct matches, e.g., RANSAC, use a parametric model ...
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CS students in the course "Project in Advanced Programming" invite you to the Winter 2016 Arduino project fair on Sunday, January 17 2016, between 13 00-16.30, in room 337 (3rd floor) of CS Taub Building. The fair will exhibit new Arduino pojects designed to facilitate ...
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In this research we study the long-standing open question regarding the computational complexity of one of the core problems in supply chains management, the periodic joint replenishment problem. This problem has received a lot of attention over the years and many heuristic and approximation algorithms ...
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Traditionally, network measurement takes a small-data approach. Data is expensive, must be gathered unobtrusively, validated carefully, and used to address sharply-defined problems, if we are to obtain reliable answers. The undeniable existence of BigData in and around telephone and data networks (which have merged years ...
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A deterministic preprocessing algorithm, especially designed to deal with repeated structures and wide baseline image pairs, is presented. It generates putative matches and their probabilities. They are then given as input to state-of-the-art epipolar geometry estimation algorithms, improving their results considerably, succeeding on hard cases ...
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Making a Pixar movie involves a team of hundreds of people from widely different disciplines using a lot of sophisticated technology. The scale and complexity of the process make it challenging to create a cohesive story that audiences find moving. This talk looks at how ...
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Pixar’s animated films are created using computer graphics, so the characters are constructed and animated in a virtual 3D world. Manipulating that world involves using physics and math for everything from sculpting the shapes of objects to animating the characters to lighting the scenes to ...
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Traditional combinatorial optimization problems require finding solutions for a single problem instance. However, many real-life applications involve systems that change dynamically over time. Thus, throughout the continuous operation of such a system, it is required to compute solutions for new problem instances, derived from previous ...
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Compositional verification techniques aim to decompose the verification of a large system into the more manageable verification of its components. In recent years, compositional techniques have gained significant successes following a breakthrough in the ability to automate assume-guarantee reasoning. However, automation is still restricted to ...
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The folklore on quantum entanglement is that it is a fragile phenomenon and physically very hard to maintain. In quantum complexity theory this raises the possibility that there is no analog of the classical hardness-of-approximation in the quantum setting, namely a quantum analog of the ...
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The next generation of Intel’s multicore and many-core product lines will use AVX-512, the biggest extension to Intel Instruction Set Architecture (ISA). This extension will provide new HW capabilities, yet poses a critical challenge for SW – how can modern compilers and programmers make efficient ...
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This lecture will address the fundamental question: What are deep neural networks doing to metrics in the data? We know that two important properties of a classification machinery are: (i) the system preserves the important information of the input data; (ii) the training examples convey ...
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While the solution of linear inverse problems (BIPs) under both classical signal models and modern sparsity models has been studied extensively and is well understood, relatively little is known about the solution of bilinear inverse problems. In signal processing, these problems arise in so-called blind ...
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