All the talks will be in Spanish
Dr. David Padua
Affiliation: Computer Science Department, University of Illinois, USA
Title: On Automatic Exploration of the Space of Algorithms and Implementations
Abstract: With the development of memory hierarchies and the popularization of multiprocessors, computers have become increasingly complex and therefore the development of fast and efficient programs is now more difficult. For us, computer scientists, the natural solution to this problem is to automate program optimization. The optimization phases in compilers are the most notorious example of this automation strategy but not the only or the best solution in all cases. In the last ten years a methodology known as autotuning has emerged as a complementary alternative to optimization by compilers. This strategy consist on automatically explore the space of algorithms and implementations searching for the fastest version for each machine of interest. As the search can also be done in the space of algorithms, this approach has a wider range than that of compilers which only operate in the space of implementations. When the search is done empirically, in other words, when the evaluation of each version is done by measuring the execution time on a real machine, the strategy produces accurate results. Compilers frequently use inaccurate approximated heuristics and models which can produce programs slower than the original. On the other hand, autotuning presents a number of difficulties including the magnitude of the space of possibilities. Several autotuning systems and strategies will be discussed as well as suggestions for further research.
Biography: David Padua is a Donald Biggar Willett Professor of Computer Science at the University of Illinois where he has been a faculty member since 1985. He received a BS degree in Computer Science from the Central University of Venezuela in 1972 and a PhD, also in Computer Science, from the University of Illinois in 1980. From 1981 to 1985 he was an Associate Professor at the Simón Bolívar University. Padua has done research in programming languages, compilers and parallel programming and has published 170 articles in those areas. He has supervised 26 PhD theses and was a member of the Program Committee of 70 conferences in his area. He has been the editor of several scientific journals including the International Journal of Parallel Programming (1993-present), Journal of Parallel and Distributed Computing (1993-present), Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems (2007-10), and IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems (1992-96). Padua is a Fellow of the ACM and the IEEE.
Dr. Esteban Clua
Affiliation: Universidade Federal Fluminense, Brazil
Title: Parallel Computing and Video-Games: Facts and Challenges
Abstract: High parallel computing are becoming a commodity and giant clusters can be easily built with a low cost budget. This enables lot’s of new trends to be included in video-games. This talk will present different researches and tendencies, such as Ray-tracing in video-games, artificial intelligence in GPUs and new interface paradigms, among others.
Biography: Esteban Walter Gonzalez Clua is graduated in Computer Science at Universidade de São Paulo and has master’s and PhD degree in Computer Science. Today Esteban is associated professor at the computer science of Universidade Federal Fluminense, in Rio de Janeiro, and director of UFF Medialab. Esteban is one of the founders of SBGames – Brazilian Symposium of Digital Entertainment and Video Games (the largest conference in the subject in South America), is director of Academia of IGDA Rio, president of the Brazilian Computing Society Game Committee and member of program committees of many conferences in Video Games, such as ACM Siggraph Sandbox, IEEE Gameon and SBC SBGames. In 2007 received the prize of the personality which most contributed for the growth of the video game industry in Brazil and in 2009 received the prize of Young Scientist of the State of Rio de Janeiro. Esteban is the coordinator of the first Latin America NVidia Center of Excellence.
Dr. Francisco Tirado
Affiliation: Facultad de Ciencias Físicas, Universidad Complutense, Spain
Title: Computers in the XXI Century: An Unpredictable Development
Abstract: Since its inception almost 50 years ago, processors have doubled their speed every 18 months. This has been due, in part, to advances in the integration of circuits that allows doubling the number of transistors every 18 months and a higher clock speed and on the other part, its architecture enhancements (internal organization of the different operational modules) designed to execute a growing number of instructions per cycle. The dedication of resources to increase the performance of a processor has reached a point where the performance one obtains in return is small. However, the ability to have more resources on a chip continues to increase at each technology generation. Instead, factors such as power and thermal dissipation as of today are a determining factor in the design of the chips. Under these conditions the performance/consumption factor has determined that manufacturers bet on the exploitation of multiple levels of parallelism in the chip. The lecture will try to review these issues and analyze the microarchitectural solutions adopted, motivating the introduction of current multicore and multithreading designs, and introducing the architectural and programming aspects of these new architectures, as well as the problems that can be glimpsed in the foreseeable end of the Law Moore.
Biography: Prof. PhD. Francisco Tirado obtained his BS in Physics at UCM in 1973 and his PhD in 1977 also at UCM. He has been a professor at the Department of Computer Architecture and Automation since 1978, first as Assistant Professor of Automation and since 1986 as Professor of Architecture and Computer Technology. He has worked in different areas of research within Systems Architecture, High Performance Computing, GRID Computing, Automatic IC Design and Processors Architecture. Within these areas, he actively boosted the creation of the Computer Architecture Group, which has led to the current Department of Computer Architecture and Automation. Within it, he has boosted the creation of a research group (Artecs) which he currently coordinates, with more than 30 researchers who have a strong reputation in the fields of High Performance Computing and Synthesis of Digital Systems. Until now he has co-authored about 290 publications in international journals and conferences. He has participated in the organization of more than 80 prestigious international conferences as General Chair, Program Chair, Program Committee Member, Session Chair, Keynote Speaker and reviewer of articles. He has given over 75 lectures at international conferences and universities. He has been principal investigator of more than 50 national and international projects financed by public funds (CICYT, EU, CAM, MEC, USA-Spain Joint Committee) and industrial projects.
Dr. Jorge Lobo
Affiliation: Jorge Lobo is an ICREA Research Professor at the Department of Information and Communication Technologies at Universitat Pompeu Fabra (UPF) and a Research Staff Member at IBM T. J. Watson Research Center, New York (currently on leave)
Title: A Declarative Approach to Distributed Computing
Abstract: Recent results in the area of distributed systems and networks have promoted the use of high-level declarative languages for the development of executable specifications of distributed systems (e.g. Web data management, routing protocols). Computations are data driven; computational nodes communicate with each other through the exchange of data to solve a distributed problem. Data is collected locally and shared with others as defined by the application. Changes in local data shared with other peer application nodes can trigger those peers to take appropriate action in response to these changes. These languages are extensions of Datalog (SQL + recursion) that include constructs to specify the physical distribution properties typical of networks, e.g., where tuples in distributed database tables are generated, stored or sent, as well as continuous queries over streams and table updates. Leveraging on this body of work, I will describe a project in which I am involved to develop a general framework for the specification of distributed solutions to computational tasks in terms of declarative programs that are not only executable but verifiable. The key insight is to exploit the similarities between the computational model of the Datalog approach to distributed computation and the theories of action description languages developed over many years in artificial intelligence to develop the framework. Programs can be analyzed with respect to a variety of properties and under different communication models. A few examples of how the framework has been used for analysis of routing protocols will be discussed.
Biography: Jorge Lobo is an ICREA Research Professor in the Department of Information and Communication Technologies at UPF since October 2012 – on leave from IBM T. J. Watson Research Center. Previous to IBM, he was principal architect at Teltier Technologies, a startup company in the wireless telecommunication area, and now part of Cisco Systems. Before Teltier, he was member of technical staff at Bell Labs and associate professor of computer science at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Jorge did pioneer work at Bell Labs in policy-based network management developing the policy language PDL that has been used for the management of the first generation of Lucent Technologies softswitchs. Jorge received a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Maryland at College Park, and a MSc and a BE from Simon Bolivar University in Venezuela. He is an ACM Distinguished Scientist.
Dr. Miguel Salichs
Affiliation: Systems Engineering and Automation Department, Universidad Carlos III, Madrid, Spain
Title: Robots y Emociones
Abstract: Emotions play a key role in higher animals. They are an essential element which influences many facets of animal activity: perception, decision making, interaction with other animals, etc. Many researchers believe that robots should be also equipped with emotions, and that these would have a role similar to that played in animals. This talk presents an analysis on what emotions are, the role they would play in the particular case of robots, what should be done to provide robots with them and what potential problems could arise from making machines with emotions.
Biography: Prof. Miguel Salichs is a full professor of the Systems Engineering and Automation Department at the Carlos III University of Madrid (UC3M). He received the Electrical Engineering and Ph.D. degrees from Polytechnic University of Madrid. His research interests include social robots, multimodal human-robot interaction, bio-inspired decision-making systems and cognitive architectures. He has been Vice-Chancellor of the UC3M, Head of the System Engineering and Automation Department of the UC3M, member of the Policy Committee of the International Federation of Automatic Control (IFAC), chairman of the Technical Committee on Intelligent Autonomous Vehicles of IFAC, the responsible of the Spanish National Research Program on Industrial Design and Production, President of the Spanish Society on Automation and Control (CEA) and the Spanish representative at the European Robotics Research Network (EURON). He is currently Chair of the Technical Secretariat of the Spanish Robotics Technology Platform (HispaRob). He is Associate Editor of the International Journal of Social Robotics.
Dr. Ernesto Expósito
Affiliation: INSA de Toulouse, France
Title: Autonomic Communication Services
Abstract: The accelerated development of Internet and the diversity of networked mobile devices (e.g. smartphones, PDAs, tablets, netbooks and laptops) have facilitated the development of a vast family of distributed multimedia applications (e.g. VoD, visio-conferencing, IPTV, VoIP, etc.). Requirements and preferences of these applications become very complex when compared to traditional downloading, web-browsing or emailing applications, for which a reliable and ordered transport service (such as the one offered by the traditional TCP protocol) operating over a wired Best-Effort network service is well suited. However, this new generation of distributed multimedia applications present more complex requirements of Quality of Service (QoS), mainly expressed in terms of time (e.g. end-to-end delay, multimedia synchronization, jitter), bandwidth (e.g. high and variable bandwidth) and reliability (e.g. tolerance for partial reliability and partial order) requirements. In the past years, several initiatives have been carried out to enhance the basic Best-Effort network service in order to provide new QoS-oriented service models (e.g. DiffServ, IntServ, etc). Moreover, new technologies providing high speed, wireless and mobile network services have deeply modified the QoS characterization of the network layer thus leading to a more complex service model in terms of bandwidth, losses, delay or jitter. This important evolution of application and network layers has deeply impacted the traditional transport layer. Indeed, traditional transport protocols (i.e. TCP and UDP) were well dimensioned to the original best-effort network model. However, specializations of transport mechanisms were required to cope with new network technologies (e.g. TCP extensions for satellite or WiFi networks). Likewise, new protocols such as DCCP, SCTP and MPTCP have been proposed to enhance traditional protocols in order to provide new specialized transport functions (e.g. more adapted network congestion avoidance strategies, multihoming support for mobility, or multipath support for devices integrating multiple network interfaces). This talk presents a novel approach in defining new protocols and in applying a specialized software engineering methodology to implement the corresponding services. This methodology based on semantic models and integrating service-oriented, component-based and autonomic computing frameworks is intended to design a next generation of communication services.
Biography: Ernesto Exposito is an Associate Professor at the INSA of Toulouse and he is researcher at the LAAS laboratory of the CNRS, France. In 2004, he worked as Researcher in the National ICT Australia Limited (NICTA) research center in Sydney, Australia. In 1994, he earned his engineer degree in computer science from the “Universidad Centro-occidental Lisandro Alvarado”(Venezuela). In 2003, he earned his PhD in “Informatique et Télécommunications” from the Institut National Polytechnique de Toulouse, France. In 2010, he earned his “Habilitation à diriger des recherches” from the Institut National Polytechnique de Toulouse. He has served as chairman and member for many Program Committees. He has participated in several european and french research projects and currently he is the coordinator at LAAS of the IMAGINE european project related to Dynamic Manufacturing Networks. His research interests include autonomic communication services aimed at satisfying the requirements of new generation distributed applications in heterogeneous networked environments. His research activities include designing, modeling and developing service-oriented, component-based and ontology-driven autonomic transport and middleware communication services.
