The David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science invites you to attend the 2019 Cheriton Research Symposium, held on Friday, September 20, 2019 in the Davis Centre.
This year’s symposium consists of presentations by Cheriton Faculty Fellows, Dan Brown and Urs Hengartner.
Posters by David R. Cheriton Graduate Scholarship recipients will be on display in Davis Centre Atrium from 10:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m.
Schedule
Friday, September 20, 2019
| Time | Event |
|---|---|
| 10:00 a.m. |
Mark Giesbrecht, Director, David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science • DC 1302 Welcome and Opening Remarks Refreshments will be served |
| 10:15 a.m. – 11:00 a.m. |
Dan Brown, David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science • DC 1302 Can Computers Write Good Poetry? What Does That Even Mean?
Computers
can
be
programmed
to
do
a
variety
of
tasks, which,
if
a
human
had
done
them,
we
might
identify
as
creative
tasks. But
does
that
mean that
they
themselves
are
creative? We
examine
the
state
of
the
art
in computer-generated
poetry,
and
examine
a
variety
of
ways
in
which
potentially
sensible
ways
of
assessing
whether
a
system is
creative
don't
actually
work
well
in
practice. Finally,
we
discuss
a few
attempts
to
incorporate
advanced
aspects
of
human
poetry
writing, including
editing
one’s
own
work
to
improve
it,
into
a
computational
creativity
system. Dan Brown is Professor in the David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science at the University of Waterloo, where he has been a faculty member since 2000. Dan earned his S.B. degree in Mathematics with Computer Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1995, and his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Cornell University in 2000. His initial research focus was in analysis of genome sequence data, and he was a researcher on the Human and Mouse Genome Projects at the Whitehead Institute / MIT Center for Genome Research (now the Broad Institute) from 2000 to 2001. In recent years, he has studied other kinds of sequential data, such as music scores, lyrics, and poetry, in addition to still finding joy in evolutionary tree reconstruction and DNA sequence analysis. |
| 11:00 a.m. – 11:45 a.m. |
Urs Hengartner, David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science • DC 1302 Breaking Three Defences against Shoulder-Surfing Attacks Many people use knowledge-based authentication, such as PINs or passwords, on their smartphone. However, these authentication schemes are vulnerable against shoulder-surfing attacks. Tilting the smartphone away from observers is an often used defence against such attacks. Researchers have also proposed alternative defences, such as incorporating an “invisible pressure component” into PIN entry or analyzing keystroke input behaviour during password entry. We have evaluated these defences in user studies. Our conclusion is that the defences provide limited protection. We have also built an open-source augmented reality tool for real-time mimicry guidance on smartphones. This is joint work with Hassan Khan and Daniel Vogel. |
| 12:00 p.m. – 1:00 p.m. |
Lunch in Fishbowl, DC 1301 |
| 1:00 p.m. – 4:00 p.m. |
Poster Session • David R. Cheriton Graduate Scholarship Recipients DC Atrium |
| 4:00 p.m. – 4:30 p.m. |
Awards Ceremony Fishbowl, DC 1301 Gelato will be served — everyone is welcome! |
Videos of the symposium presenters
Dan Brown • David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science • Can Computers Write Good Poetry? What Does That Even Mean?
Urs Hengartner • David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science • Breaking Three Defences against Shoulder-Surfing Attacks
Poster session winners
In total, 23 students participated in the 2019 Cheriton Research Symposium poster competition.
Congratulations to the competition winners!
First-place winner — $300 prize
- Omar Farhatfor “Watermark aware scheduler for stream processing engines”
Second-place winners (tie) — $200 prize each
- Stavros Birmpilisfor “Deterministic reduction of integer nonsingular linear system solving to matrix multiplication”
- Allen Wang for “Constrained polynomial optimization and application to SPNs”
Third-place winners (tie) — $100 prize each
- Margaret Foleyfor “Comparing speech recognition and keyboards for phrase composition and transcription on smartphones”
- Daniel Gabric for “Unbordered conjugates of binary words”