Saving The World, One Server At A Time!
Parthasarathy Ranganathan, HP Labs, Palo Alto
03/18/2010
Power and energy management, and more recently, sustainability are emerging to be critical challenges for future IT systems. While there has been a lot of prior work in this space, a lot more needs to be done. We must discuss the challenges and opportunities in rethinking how we study and reason about energy efficiency for future systems. Specifically, how confluence of emerging technology and industry trends offer exciting opportunities to systematically rethink the “systems stack” for the next orders of magnitude improvements in energy efficiency.
A Closer Look At Threats To The Domain Name System
Cricket Liu, Infoblox, Santa Clara
03/25/2010
Surely you've been following the story regarding the new DNS security threat and its implications for the security of all Internet and network-based applications. You may have already patched your servers, but you should be aware that more patches are imminent. So what is this all about, really? The short answer is cache poisoning. While cache poisoning is not new, Dan Kaminsky discovered a new way to exploit this vulnerability. What was thought to be too complex or time consuming for hackers to exploit turns out to be simple. Virtually all network based applications -email, Web apps, eCommerce -EVERYTHING is at risk.
Why (I Think) Databases Are Interesting
Allison Holloway, Oracle, Redwood Shores
04/01/2010
Let’s begin with a brief overview of database internals, from a query down to how the data are retrieved from disk. And then let’s discuss new and perennial problems in database design.
3D Virtual Worlds For Business And Education
Ankur Chandra, IBM, San Jose
04/15/2010
3D Virtual Worlds like the one presented in the movie Avatar are captivating, immersive, and a great platform for interacting with students, professors, as well as for conducting business. Let’s survey the virtual world’s landscape, and discuss how universities and companies like IBM are leveraging this technology. Then let’s end this talk with a view into one virtual world and show how IBM is using it to build better service professionals.
Generative Storytelling For Entertainment Software
Jason Shankel, The Stupid Fun Club
04/22/2010
Content development represents a significant bottleneck in the development of entertainment software. The speaker will discuss how basic literary theory and GOFAI (Good Old Fashioned AI) solutions for natural language processing can be applied to create generative interactive storytelling systems capable of producing entertaining content on the fly.