Distinguished Lectures in Computer Science

Aarti Gupta, Princeton University

Ensuring Network Correctness: Scaling Automated Verification

October 30, 2023 | 5:00pm
Lynn Chu Classroom, Milstein LL002

Aarti Gupta is a Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Princeton University. She received a PhD in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University. Her research interests are in the areas of formal verification of programs and systems, automatic decision procedures, and electronic design automation. She has received several Best Paper Awards from leading conferences and journals, and has been recognized as an ACM Fellow. She is currently serving on the Steering Committee of the Computer Aided Verification (CAV) Conference.

Networks form an essential component of the computing infrastructure that interconnects the world and delivers immensely useful services in modern society. It is important to ensure their correctness, since bugs in network configurations can lead to expensive outages and critical security breaches. However, this is a challenging problem due to the growing complexity of configuration code and network designs. The last decade has seen tremendous advances in formal verification of networks that can find subtle buggy scenarios, which are often missed by methods based on testing or simulation. In this talk, I will describe our work on automated verification of distributed network control planes, where we reason about all possible routing behaviors that emerge from the configurations of routing protocols, to support checking a rich set of correctness properties such as reachability, fault tolerance, and router equivalence. The talk will focus on domain insights that enable effective formulation of the verification problems, and domain-based abstractions that further scale up verification on large-sized networks similar to those used in modern data centers. This talk describes joint work with Ryan Beckett, Ratul Mahajan, Divya Raghunathan, and David Walker.

Ayanna Howard, The Ohio State University

Making the World Better through Robotics and AI

September 29, 2021 | 6:00pm
Lynn Chu Classroom, Milstein LL002

Dr. Ayanna Howard is the Dean of Engineering at The Ohio State University and Monte Ahuja Endowed Dean's Chair. She also holds a faculty appointment in the college’s Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering with a joint appointment in Computer Science and Engineering. Previously she was the Linda J. and Mark C. Smith Endowed Chair in Bioengineering and Chair of the School of Interactive Computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology.

As part of Barnard's Year of Science, we welcome Dr. Ayanna Howard to give the 2021 Barnard Distinguished Lecture in Computer Science. At 27, Dr. Ayanna Howard was hired by NASA to lead a team designing a robot for future Mars exploration missions that could “think like a human and adapt to change.” Her accomplishments since then include being named as one of 2015’s most powerful women engineers in the world and as one of Forbes’ 2018 U.S. Top 50 Women in Tech. From creating robots to studying the impact of global warming on the Antarctic ice shelves to founding a company that develops STEM education and therapy products for children and those with varying needs, Dean Howard focuses on our role in being responsible global citizens. In this talk, Dean Howard will delve into the implications of recent advances in robotics and AI and explain the critical importance of ensuring diversity and inclusion at all stages to make certain that robots are designed to be accessible to all. Throughout the talk, Dr. Howard will weave in her own journey as she navigated her roles at NASA, Georgia Tech, OSU, and in technology startups.

Deborah Estrin, Cornell Tech

Participatory sensing: from ecosystems to human systems

February 13, 2020 | 6:00pm
Lynn Chu Classroom, Milstein LL002

Deborah Estrin is the Robert V. Tishman '37 Professor at Cornell Tech and in the Computer Science Department at Cornell University, and currently serves as Associate Dean for Impact at Cornell Tech. Professor Estrin was chosen as a 2018 fellow of the MacArthur Foundation. She is founder of the Health Tech Hub and directs the Small Data Lab at Cornell Tech, which develops new personal data APIs and applications for individuals to harvest the small data traces they generate daily. Estrin is also co-founder of the non-profit startup, Open mHealth. Earlier, she was the Founding Director of the NSF Center for Embedded Networked Sensing at UCLA, pioneering the development of mobile and wireless systems to collect and analyze real time data about the physical world and the people who occupy it.

In this inaugural Barnard Distinguished Lecture in Computer Science, Professor Estrin will describe her research and practice in leveraging mobile devices and data to address socio-technological challenges, such as environmental monitoring, chronic disease management, and privacy-sensitive personalization.