Archive for March, 2008

Wed. April 2, 2008: Ophir Rachman on Virtualization and Security

Monday, March 31st, 2008

The Center for Research on Computation and Society continues its
weekly lunch seminar:

CRCS Privacy and Security Lunch Seminar
Date: Wednesday, 2 April 2008
Time: 12:00pm-1:30 pm
Place: Maxwell Dworkin 119

Topic: Virtualization and Security

Speaker: Ophir Rachman, VMware, Inc.

Ophir will describe various directions where security and virtualization may
meet currently or in the near future (for good and for bad) and will provide
overview of opportunities and challenges.

Ophir Rachman is an R&D director for security products at VMware and is
responsible for mapping the virtualization technology into the security
space. Ophir finished his Ph.D. studies in the Technion, Israel, focusing on
distributed computing and specifically snapshot algorithms in shared memory
distributed environments. Ophir was one of the pioneers in the host based
intrusion prevention space and in 1998 founded a startup focusing on system
call interception and api’s hooking targeting monitoring and deflecting
security threats from within the host operating system. This startup (later
known as Entercept) was acquired by McAfee in 2003 and the basic technology
is embedded today in McAfee’s host protection product line.

Wed. March 19, : Roger Dingledine on How to make the Tor anonymity network play well with the rest

Wednesday, March 19th, 2008
The Center for Research on Computation and Society continues its
weekly lunch seminar:

     CRCS Privacy and Security Lunch Seminar
     Date:  Wednesday, 19 March 2008
     Time:  12:00pm-1:30 pm
     Place: Maxwell Dworkin 119

Topic: How to make the Tor anonymity network play well with the rest
of the Internet

Speaker: Roger Dingledine, The Tor Project

Abstract:
Tor is a free software anonymity network used by several hundred
thousand people daily: ordinary citizens who want protection from
identity theft and prying corporations, corporations who want to look
at a competitor's website in private, law enforcement, and soldiers
and aid workers in the Middle East who need to contact their home
servers without fear of physical harm.

But it's still pretty darn hard to use correctly, and it turns out
not every site on the Internet likes anonymity. How should Slashdot
and Wikipedia handle anonymous users? How can we help individual and
educational users have an easier interface to secure their communications
without upsetting their network admins? What about policy and legal
issues? Roger will explain the roadblocks for simple anonymity online,
and discuss directions for solutions.

For more information about Tor, see http://www.torproject.org/

Bio:
Roger Dingledine is project leader for The Tor Project, a US non-profit
working on anonymity research and development. While at MIT he developed
Free Haven, one of the early peer-to-peer systems that emphasized resource
management while maintaining anonymity for its users. He works with the
Electronic Frontier Foundation, the US Navy, Voice of America, and other
organizations to design and develop systems for anonymity and traffic
analysis resistance. He organizes academic conferences on anonymity,
speaks at such events as Blackhat, Defcon, Toorcon, CCC congresses,
and What the Hack, and also does tutorials on anonymity for national and
foreign law enforcement. Roger was honored in 2006 as one of the top 35
innovators under the age of 35 by Technology Review magazine.
_______________________________________________

Wed. March 12, Ned Gulley on Patterns of Innovation and Collaboration in an Online Programming Contest

Tuesday, March 11th, 2008

The Center for Research on Computation and Society continues its
weekly lunch seminar:

CRCS Privacy and Security Lunch Seminar
Date: Wednesday, 12 March 2008
Time: 12:00pm-1:30 pm
Place: Maxwell Dworkin 319

Topic: Patterns of Innovation and Collaboration in an Online Programming Contest

Speaker: Ned Gulley

Abstract:

Programming contests have become a regular feature of geek culture.
These contests may bring all the participants to one location, or they
may be mediated by the Net, but they tend to share a common format:
given a specific problem and working alone, you have a limited amount
of time to write better code than anyone else. This kind of contest is
a good measure of the talent of isolated individuals, but not of the
collective talent of the entire group. What if there were a contest
that more accurately modeled the way ideas really move through the
world? Suppose, once an idea had been put forward by one person, it
could immediately be freely adopted and modified by anyone else, even
as the contest continued? The winning entry for this kind of contest
would be an amalgamated effort by many people, people who were
simultaneously competing and collaborating. This approach is more like
the messy, organic way in which much software, particularly open
source software, actually gets built. Presumably, then, an open source
programming contest might show us something about how innovation works
in the real world. For several years, we have been running exactly
this kind of contest using the MATLAB programming language, and the
results have given us a fascinating quantitative perspective on the
dynamics of innovation and reward in collaborative programming. This
talk will treat some of the patterns of collaboration that we have
seen in our contest.

Bio:

Ned Gulley works at The MathWorks, Inc. as part of the team that makes
MATLAB. Ned joined the company in 1991 and has led the development of
the Fuzzy Logic Toolbox and the MATLAB IDE team. Since 2001, he has
been leading the MATLAB Central web community team. These days he’s
particularly in the overlap between technical and social computing.

Prior to The MathWorks, Ned was an aerospace engineer working on
flight control research and simulation at NASA Ames Research Center in
Mountain View, California. Ned holds a BSE in Mechanical and Aerospace
Engineering from Princeton University and an MSE in Aeronautical and
Astronautical Engineering from Stanford University.

Resources

MATLAB Central: http://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/
The MATLAB Programming Contest: http://www.mathworks.com/contest/overview.html
“In Praise of Tweaking”, a paper on the contest:
http://www.starchamber.com/gulley/pubs/tweaking/tweaking.html
Ned’s Blog: http://www.starchamber.com/
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Catherine Candee on “Whose knowledge is it? UC takes on IP”

Monday, March 10th, 2008

[This talk is one of a pair of talks on open access that CRCS is co-sponsoring in collaboration with the Berkman Center for Internet & Society and Science Commons.]

Speaker: Catherine Candee

Location: Maxwell Dworkin G125

Time: March 17, 2008, 5-6:30pm

Title: Whose knowledge is it? UC takes on IP

Abstract:

The commercialization of scholarly publishing has stimulated a crisis that threatens to compromise the very mission of our universities. The crisis reduces access to scholarly materials and limits the dissemination of scholarship. In its search for an economically sustainable means of disseminating the fruits of research, teaching, and learning, the University of California has become host to some of the most successful alternative publishing initiatives in the nation. But in 2007, when faculties at all 10 UC campuses launched an initiative similar to Harvard’s FAS resolution-an effort to reshape the management of their copyrights-the effort foundered on issues of implementation. I will discuss lessons learned from the UC experience, the issues at the heart of the open access movement, and what’s at stake for our research universities.

About Catherine

Since May 2000, Catherine Candee has been leading Strategic Publishing Initiatives at the University of California. Until very recently, she directed the publishing group at the California Digital Library (CDL) where she launched the eScholarship Program to provide alternative publication services for the UC community. In 2001, she forged a partnership with UC Press Director Lynne Withey, developing innovative publishing ventures that combined the unique talents and abilities of the Press and the CDL. Today the eScholarship Repository, a full-spectrum publishing platform, is home to more than 20,000 scholarly works, reflecting the output of the 200+ UC departments who publish with UC’s eScholarship Services. More than 2,000 UC Press monographs have been digitally published using XTF, an open source text publishing infrastructure developed at the CDL, and a digital critical edition of Mark Twain’s works was launched in October to wide acclaim.

On November 1, Catherine assumed an expanded leadership role supporting scholarly communication at UC. She is responsible for leveraging the capacity of UC-wide educational publishing and broadcast services, represented by the CDL and its eScholarship program, the Continuing Education of the Bar, the Language Learning Consortium, the Office of Scholarly Communication, University of California Press, UC College Prep Online, and UCTV, as part of the university’s effort to forge a sustainable scholarly publishing system.

Peter Suber on “What Can Universities Do to Promote Open Access?”

Monday, March 10th, 2008

[This talk is one of a pair of talks on open access that CRCS is co-sponsoring in collaboration with the Berkman Center for Internet & Society and Science Commons.]

Speaker: Peter Suber

Location: Maxwell Dworkin G125

Time: March 17, 2008, 12-1:30pm

Title: What Can Universities Do to Promote Open Access?

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Wed. March 5 2008: Thrishantha Nanayakkara on Animal-Robot Mixed Colonies for Humanitarian Land-mine Detection

Tuesday, March 4th, 2008

The Center for Research on Computation and Society continues its weekly lunch seminar:

CRCS Privacy and Security Lunch Seminar
Date: Wednesday, 5 March 2008
Time: 12:00pm-1:30 pm
Place: Maxwell Dworkin 319

Topic: Animal-Robot Mixed Colonies for Humanitarian Land-mine Detection

Speaker: Thrishantha Nanayakkara, PhD

Abstract:

One of the main objectives of humanitarian demining is to detect and remove landmines with minimum damage to the environment, whereas in military demining on-site detonation of land-mines is acceptable. Unfortunately, a lack of appropriate technologies for humanitarian de-mining slows down many post-conflict human re-settlement programs in many developing countries. Since de-mining is a pre-requisite to post-conflict economic revival, there are vast opportunities for novel technologies that could make a direct impact on the speed and safety of de-mining. The talk elaborates a project in progress in Sri Lanka, which has also been proposed to be extended in a Harvard Initiative to develop appropriate technologies for humanitarian de-mining. The current focus is on a heterogeneous system of trained rodents, field robots, and human experts to detect landmines in an unstructured forest environment. A salient feature of the proposed system is that each sub-system (robots, animals, and humans) improve their individual capabilities by interacting with each other. It will also discuss current work on distributed sensing techniques for on-the-go estimation of a parametric model of the distribution of land-mines in a given minefield to improve the efficiency of area coverage.