Seminar

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

Kristofer Siy, Graduate student
Combinatorics and Optimization

Yaron Minsky, Technology Group Head
Jane Street

Trading in financial markets is a data-driven affair, and as such, it requires applications that can efficiently filter, transform and present data to users in real time.

But there's a difficult problem at the heart of building such applications: finding a way of expressing the necessary transformations of the data in a way that is simultaneously easy to understand and efficient to execute over large streams of data.