Seminar

Professor Brian Forrest
Department of Pure Mathematics, University of Waterloo

There are many challenges to teaching mathematics in a fully online environment. In this talk I will show the important role that assigned work plays in mitigating many of these challenges. I will also speak about how my experience in teaching online has impacted the way in which I approach my on campus courses.

Xinan Yan, PhD candidate
David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science

Abel Molina, PhD candidate
David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science

Yao (1993) proved that quantum Turing machines and uniformly generated quantum circuits are polynomially equivalent computational models: t >= n steps of a quantum Turing machine running on an input of length n can be simulated by a uniformly generated family of quantum circuits with size quadratic in t, and a polynomial-time uniformly generated family of quantum circuits can be simulated by a quantum Turing machine running in polynomial time.

Mustafa Korkmaz, PhD candidate
David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science

Data centers consume significant amounts of energy and consumption is growing each year. Alongside efforts in the hardware domain, there are some mechanisms in the software domain to reduce energy consumption. One of these mechanisms is dynamic voltage and frequency scaling (DVFS) and modern servers which are equipped with multi-core CPUs. 

Antonina Kolokolova, Department of Computer Science
Memorial University of Newfoundland

A unifying theme in complexity theory in the past few years has been the duality between lower bounds and algorithms. Indeed, some of the main recent lower bounds have been proven by developing better algorithms. 

Bushra Aloraini, PhD candidate
David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science

Ju Wang, Postdoctoral fellow
David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science

Passive radio frequency identification (RFID) tags are ubiquitous today due to their low cost (a few cents), relatively long communication range (7–11 m), ease of deployment, lack of battery, and small form factor. This talk shows how even hobbyists can transform commodity RFID tags into sensors by physically altering ('hacking') them using COTS sensors and a pair of scissors. Importantly, this requires no change to commercial RFID readers.

Andrew Beltaos / Amenda Chow
University of Waterloo / York University

Teaching via analogies builds upon students' existing knowledge. New concepts that are taught only within the context of mathematics may seem foreign to students at first glance, but if students have already learned analogous concepts elsewhere in life, as educators, we can make use of their existing framework to strengthen their learning. 

Mina Farid, PhD candidate
David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science

RDF has become a prevalent format to represent disparate data that is ingested from heterogeneous sources. However, data often contains errors due to extraction, transformation, and integration problems, leading to missing or contradicting information that propagate to downstream applications. 

Aaron Moss, PhD candidate
David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science