Spring 2021
Presented by the Computer Science Department
Wednesdays 12:00 - 12:50pm, Online
All lectures free and open to all: Zoom link
Toxicity in Two On-line Platforms: Dissenter and GitHub
Robert Beverly and Erik Rye
Naval Postgraduate School
02/03/2021
Understanding efforts by community-driven on-line platforms to enforce legal and policy-based norms are especially timely as these services rise in prominence and importance. For instance, recent actions to curb toxicity in such platforms have driven debate on censorship, de-platforming, and the emergence of unrestricted alternatives.
In this talk, we present a data-driven analysis of toxicity in two on-line platforms: the fringe "dissenter" overlay and the widely used GitHub code collaboration service. Dissenter is a browser that provides a conversational overlay for any web page -- thereby removing the power of content creators to control conversation on their content. In our IMC 2020 work, we obtain the full history of Dissenter comments, users, and websites being discussed, and analyze more than 1.6M comments to characterize users, toxicity, and the conditional probability of hateful comments given website political bias.
Last, we describe our initial work in mining and characterizing non-inclusive language and toxicity in program code and commit messages as publicly available in GitHub. Rather than residing in a fringe community, toxicity in GitHub may have important implications to broadening participation in STEM.
How does AI Perceive You?
Nina Marhamati
Assistant Professor
Computer Science Sonoma State University
02/10/2021
Have you ever wondered how Siri, Alexa, or any chat-bot perceives you? We are interested in answering this question by making it possible to receive feedback from interactions with AI. Understanding the human message and emotion when approaching a machine is a valuable psychological experience and can tell us a lot about ourselves and our society. In collaboration with the Art Department, we are using AI methods to create a reaction to people’s interaction with machines. The interaction received through sensory inputs is processed by the machine and the content of the interaction is decoded. Using deep learning models for natural language processing, the emotional state of the interaction is detected from the content. The detected state is used to visualize, in 2D or 3D, what the machine has perceived from the interaction. The final product will give the user a personalized interaction with the machine through a piece of art that reflects the user's emotion. This product can be combined with VR equipment and used for providing more realistic experience for game players, online training participants, or interaction with chat-bots.
Juneau: Managing and Guiding Data Science
Zachary Ives
Adani President's Distinguished Professor and Department Chair, Computer and Information Science Department
University of Pennsylvania
02/17/2021
How do we promote large-scale data science and data sharing, e.g., in the sciences or across organizations? Many modern data science applications have been leveraging data lakes: schema-agnostic repositories of data files and data products, which offer limited organization and management capabilities. There is a need to build a new generation of data science environments, which leverage data lakes so scientists and analysts can find tables, schemas, workflows, and datasets useful to their task at hand. Juneau incorporates search and management solutions into the Jupyter Notebook data science platform, to enable scientists to augment training data, find potential features to extract, clean data, and find joinable or linkable tables. Our core methods also generalize to other settings where computational tasks involve execution of programs or scripts.
How We Got Here: A brief history of the evolution of parallel processing in high-performance computing
David Barkai
HPC Consultant
02/24/2021
HPC underwent several dramatic changes in system architecture over the last 50 years. From the pre-70’s mainframe, to vector processors and multiprocessors of the 80s, followed by the emergence of the “killer micros” and shift to commodity processors and clusters. From shared memory to distributed memory systems, and the addition of accelerators (GPUs). This journey is accompanied by tracking the transition from a single thread program execution to ever increasing levels of parallelism, and the implications to the software tools and the application end user. HPC today is much more than the domain of numerical simulations. It includes data analytics and AI.
Addressing Climate Change through Drone Swarms
Emily Spahn
Software Engineer
DroneSeed
03/03/2021
Climate change is a major issue of concern worldwide. Trees are currently among the best ways to capture carbon. DroneSeed has been a leader in mass reforestation by drone, and is uniquely able to reforest after wildfires. We'll explore the evolution of technological needs to support this goal. Let's talk about how we went from the idea of combining biology with the emerging drone industry, to arrive at the realities of a startup putting seeds on the ground in post-wildfire environments.
Distributed Cache Invalidation at Scale
Greg Cooper
Software Engineer
Google
03/10/2021
Dr. Cooper will describe some of the challenges involved in building a large-scale distributed cache invalidation system and will present the design for one such system, called Thialfi, which was built and operated at Google for most of the past decade. He will also discuss the limitations of that design and touch on ways in which modern infrastructure allows improvements to it. The work is joint with Atul Adya, Phil Bogle, Dennis Geels, Brice Hulse, Larry Kai, Vishesh Khemani, Nick Kline, Colin Meek, Amanda Moreton, Daniel Myers, and Michael Piatek.
Securing Drone Identity
Zachary Peterson
Associate Professor
Computer Science Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo
03/17/2021
The future of drones and other autonomous vehicles is exciting—they promise to change the way we do business, manufacturing, travel, and delivery logistics, all while increasing convenience, lowering cost, and lessing the impact on the environment. They will also significantly transform our cityscapes and put new security pressures on the critical infrastructure to support them. Among these pressures is the need for technologies that support secure remote identity—the ability to prove an assertion of identity from a vehicle whose operator may be many miles away (or not exist at all!). There have numerous proposals, including new rules just established by the FAA, for remotely identifying drones. Sadly, all existing schemes either ignore or leave optional the elements that secure identity, leaving open the possibility of impersonation, forgeries, and other malicious behavior. In this talk, we discuss the setting, the requirements, and the challenges in deploying a secure identity system for drones and other autonomous vehicles.
Machine Learning Enhanced Video Accessibility for Blind and Low Vision Individuals
Ilmi Yoon
Professor, Computer Science Dept.
San Francisco State University
04/07/2021
The blind or visually impaired often miss out on the visual information conveyed through videos. The vast majority of online video material is currently not accessible to millions of visually-impaired people who would significantly benefit from improved access to videos for education, employment, and entertainment purposes.
This work addresses two major issues:
- Enhancing video accessibility for blind or visually-impaired individuals.
- Generating well-structured training data to advance the state of the art in video understanding.
How Do Film, Television, and other Media Influence Girls to Pursue STEM?
Kim Bishop
Mechanical Engineer
04/14/2021
What types of female STEM role models do girls see in television and film today? Are they represented at all? We will explore what the current STEM media landscape looks like, what plans are for the future, and how STEM professionals and media professionals can work together to expand female STEM roles in media.
Advanced Software Design Project - CS 470 - Virtual Showcase
Anamary Leal
Assistant Professor, Computer Science Dept.
Sonoma State University
04/28/2021
Dr. Leal will facilitate a virtual showcase of students’ advanced software design projects from CS 470 this semester.
Spring 2021 Short Presentations Of Student Research
STUDENT PRESENTATIONS
05/05/2021
Short presentations of research carried out by Sonoma State Computer Science Students.