YALE PATT

University of Michigan
How Should We Use the 100 Million Transistors Each Chip Will Have Available in the Year 2000?

Thursday
November 7
1996

No abstract available

CYNTHIA DWORK

IBM Almaden Research Center
Plausible and Implausible Copyright Protection Techniques

Tuesday
December 3
1996

Abstract

Copyright protection for digital content -- software, still images, video, online databases, text, etc. -- is emerging as an area of intense interest and activity. It is also an area of intense hype. This talk will discuss several proposed software techniques for enhancing copyright protection and will examine the implicit and potentially unreasonable infrastructure assumptions upon which some of these techniques are based.

C.L. LIU

University of Illinois
Algorithmic Aspects of Computer Aided Design of VLSI Circuits

Thursday
January 16
1997

Abstract

Many problems we encounter in the area of computer-aided design of large scale integrated circuits are known to be "computationally difficult." Algorithmic methodologies for solving some of these problems will be discussed. In particular, we shall demonstrate how problems such as floorplanning, performance driven placement, crosstalk constrained routing, and hierarchical compaction are handled.

DR. ANDREW VITERBI

Qualcomm Inc.
Approaching the Shannon Limit: Theorist's Dream and Practitioner's Challenge

Thursday
March 13
1997

Abstract

Nearly half a century after Shannon established the channel capacity of a noisy channel as the insurmountable limit on the rate of reliable communication, a combination of long known but dormant concepts and a fresh approach has brought us to within a remarkably small distance of that limit. For an additive white Gaussian (AWGN) channel, low error probabilities have been achieved at rates greater than eighty percent of capacity, or in terms of bit energy-to-noise density ratio, Eb/No, within less than 1dB of the minimum value which corresponds to operation at channel capacity.

The lecture will present simplified and intuitive approaches to the key concepts which involve concatenated convolutional codes, with pseudorandom interleaving between stages and iterative soft-output decoding of the component codes. The relationship of these recent results to classical theory and practice will be demonstrated.

PROF. LESLIE VALIANT

Harvard University
Cognitive Computation

Thursday
March 20
1997

Abstract

An architecture is proposed for building systems for performing certain classes of tasks that involve large amounts of commonsense or unsystematized knowledge. Such systems would use both inductive learning and explicitly given rules for acquiring knowledge, but would rely crucially on learning mechanisms for ensuring that the acquired knowledge base is robust. While careful design will be needed, the majority of the effort in building such systems may shift towards the task of preparing teaching materials for the system. The general architecture was suggested by a study of the limitations of cortical computation, as suggested by the neuroidal model.

JAMES GOSLING

JavaSoft
Creating Innovative Software

Tuesday
April 22
1997

No abstract available

MR. H.B. SIEGEL

Lucas Digital Ltd.
Synthetic Actors and Environments for Special Effects

Tuesday
May 13
1997

Abstract

Industrial Light+Magic has been at the forefront in the creation of digital synthetic actors since its work in the movie "The Abyss". Through a wide range of techniques combining the best of the vendor tools and our internal proprietary tools, we have built a production pipeline that allows us to design, model, animate, choreograph, and render actors and combine them with background imagery. This speech will demonstrate how a key scene from "Jurassic Park" was constructed featuring the fearsome Tyrannosaurus Rex, and demonstrate how we have expanded our tools to handle complex multiple creature behaviors from the movie "101 Dalmations" that would be virtually impossible using traditional techniques.