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.
Creating Autonomous Mobility from the Ground Up
Amirhossein Tamjidi
Software Engineer
Zoox
04/21/2021
Zoox is transforming mobility-as-a-service by developing a fully autonomous, purpose-built fleet that is designed for AI to drive and humans to enjoy. In the first part of this presentation I will introduce the main components of the Zoox's software stack and its hardware. I will discuss the challenges of localization, perception, prediction, and planning in autonomous vehicles. In the second part of this presentation, I will share some resources that students can use to learn more about different aspects of autonomous vehicle technology and prepare to become a researcher or practitioner in this field.