Title: Scalable Integrity-Guaranteed AJAX(slides)

Abstract:

Interactive web systems are the de facto vehicle for implementing sensitive applications, e.g., personal banking, business workflows. Existing web services provide little protection against compromised servers, leaving users to blindly trust that the system is functioning correctly, without being able to verify this trust. Document integrity systems support stronger guarantees by binding a document to the (non-compromised) integrity state of the machine from whence it was received, at the cost of substantially higher latencies. Such latencies render interactive applications unusable. This paper explores cryptographic constructions and systems designs for providing document integrity in AJAXstyle interactive web systems. The Sporf systems exploits pre-computation to offset runtime costs to support negligible latencies. We detail the design of an Apache-based server supporting content integrity proofs, and perform a detailed empirical study of realistic web workloads. Our evaluation shows that a software only solution results in latencies of just over 200 milliseconds on a loaded system. An analytical model reveals that with a nominal hardware investment, the latency can be lowered to just over 81 milliseconds, achieving nearly the same throughput as an unmodified system.

Biography:

Patrick McDaniel is a Professor in the Computer Science and Engineering Department at the Pennsylvania State University and co-director of the Systems and Internet Infrastructure Security Laboratory. Prof. McDaniel is the Editor-in-Chief of the ACM Transactions on Internet Technology (TOIT), and serves as associate editor of the journals ACM Transactions on Information and System Security, IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, and IEEE Transactions on Computers. Patrick's research efforts centrally focus on network, telecommunications, and systems security, language-based security, and technical public policy. Patrick was awarded the National Science Foundation CAREER Award and has chaired several top conferences in security including, among others, the 2007 and 2008 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy and the 2005 USENIX Security Symposium. He has authored over 100 books, papers, and reports and given over 100 invited talks.

Title: Context-Aware Analytics: From Applications to a System Framework(slides)

Abstract:

With the information explosion on the Web, within enterprises, and in the network systems, the capability to adapt application or system behaviors to the relevant contexts of users or systems is the key to achieving user satisfaction or high system performance. As a result, a recent Gartner report lists context-aware computing as one of four trends (along with cloud, business impact of social computing, and pattern based strategy) that will change IT and the economy in the next ten years.
Context-awareness refers to the ability of an application that understands and uses the current context of the user and adapts the application’s operations to deliver high-quality and well-personalized user experience. In this talk, I will discuss several context-aware applications that involve various context types and technical challenges in supporting such applications. I will also outline a vision on a generic system framework for supporting context-aware computing.

Biography:

Dr. Min Wang is a Distinguished Technologist and the Director of HP Labs China, which focuses on information analysis and networking.
Prior to joining HP, Dr. Wang led a 10-year career at IBM Research, most recently as a Research Staff Member and the manager of the Unified Data Analytics Department at IBM's Thomas J. Watson Research Center in Hawthorne, New York, where she pursued her research interests in database systems and information management.
Over the course of her career at IBM, she has led several projects in the areas of Query Processing and Optimization for relational, XML, and streaming data, Information Integration, Electronic Commerce and Database Security, including the design and implementation of a significant component in DB2 9 pureXML release. She also has published broadly in the areas of database systems and information management.
In 2009, she received the ACM SIGMOD 2009 Test of Time Award for her 1999 SIGMOD paper, "Approximate Computation of Multidimensional Aggregates of Sparse Data Using Wavelets”. The award acknowledges the best paper from the SIGMOD conference proceedings 10 years prior, based on the criterion of identifying the paper that has had the most impact (research, products, methodology) over the intervening decade.
She received her Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from Duke University and the B.S. and M.S. degrees, both in Computer Science, from Tsinghua University, Beijing, China.

Title: Managing and Mining Billion-Node Graphs(slides)

Abstract:

We are facing challenges at all levels ranging from infrastructures to programming models for managing and mining large graphs. A lot of algorithms on graphs are ad-hoc in the sense that each of them assumes that the underlying graph data can be organized in a certain way that maximizes the performance of the algorithm. In other words, there is no standard graph systems based on which graph algorithms are developed and optimized. In response to this situation, a lot of graph systems have been proposed recently. In this tutorial, we discuss several representative systems. Still, we focus on providing perspectives from a variety of standpoints on the goals and the means for developing a general purpose graph system. We highlight the challenges posed by the graph data, the constraints of architectural design, the different types of application needs, and the power of different programming models that support such needs.

Biography:

Haixun Wang is a senior researcher at Microsoft Research Asia in Beijing, China, where he manages the group of Data Management, Analytics, and Services. Before joining Microsoft, he had been a research staff member at IBM T. J. Watson Research Center for 9 years. He was Technical Assistant to Stuart Feldman (Vice President of Computer Science of IBM Research) from 2006 to 2007, and Technical Assistant to Mark Wegman (Head of Computer Science of IBM Research) from 2007 to 2009. Haixun Wang has published more than 120 research papers in referred international journals and conference proceedings. He is on the editorial board of Distributed and Parallel Databases (DAPD), IEEE Transactions of Knowledge and Data Engineering (TKDE), Knowledge and Information System (KAIS), Journal of Computer Science and Technology (JCST). He is PC co-Chair of CIKM 2012, ICMLA 2011, WAIM 2011. Haixun Wang got the ER 2008 Conference best paper award (DKE 25 year award), and ICDM 2009 Best Student Paper run-up award.