EECS Colloquium: Feedback Motion Planning with Sum-of-Squares Verification

In this talk, I will present a nonlinear feedback control synthesis algorithm which combines randomized motion planning algorithms, popular in robotics, with sum of squares optimization. In order to drive the system to a goal state or limit cycle, the algorithm systematically populates the controllable subset of state space with a sparse set of trajectories which are locally stabilized with linear feedback and verified with sums of squares; we have now developed efficient methods for performing this verification along trajectories and around limit cycles, on systems with hybrid dynamics, and on systems with mixed polynomial/trigonometric nonlinearities.

TRUST Security Seminar: Electronic Voting Security in India

India uses paperless electronic voting machines (EVMs) nationwide, and the Election Commission of India, the country’s highest election authority, has long maintained that the machines are “perfect,” “infallible,” and “fully tamper-proof.”

New Media RoundTable: Student Research Panel, Caitlin Marshall and William Brown III

Caitlin Marshall’s larger research focuses on voice prosthesis and synthesis, minority discourse, and the sound of civics. Each year in America ten to twelve thousand individuals undergo cancer treatment necessitating laryngectomy, the surgical removal of the larynx. With their sound sources removed, laryngectomees are rendered mute. To counter what many patients describe as the disability of silence, nearly all opt for prosthesis and speech therapy.

Research Exchange: Formal Methods for Dependable Computing: From Models, through Software, to Circuits

Computing has become ubiquitous and indispensable: it is embedded all around us, in cell phones, automobiles, medical devices, and much more. This ubiquity brings with it a growing challenge to ensure that our computing infrastructure is also dependable and secure. We need to develop and maintain complex software systems on top of increasingly unreliable computing substrates under stringent resource constraints such as energy usage.

i4Energy Seminar: Energy Research and Commercialization at SRI

SRI International has been described as the birthplace of some of Silicon Valley’s most important innovations. With a corporate commitment to solving important problems, this talk will cover why SRI believes ensuring affordable, clean, and dependable energy supplies is one of the world’s important problems, highlight current energy projects, and describe SRI’s process for bringing its innovations to market.

BERC Fall Gala

The BERC Fall Gala is the signature fundraising event for Berkeley’s energy and resources community, bringing together industry and alumni with students and faculty to celebrate BERC’s fifth anniversary and to kick off the 2010-11 academic year.

TRUST Security Seminar: Secure Information Flow in Trust Networks

Who is responsible for the harm and risk of security flaws? The advent of worldwide networks such as the internet made software security (or the lack of software security) became a problem of international proportions. There are no mathematical/statistical risk models available today to assess networked systems with interdependent failures. Without this tool, decision-makers are bound to overinvest in activities that don’t generate the desired return on investment or under invest on mitigations, risking dreadful consequences. Experience suggests that no party is solely responsible for the harm and risk of software security flaws but a model of partial responsibility can only emerge once the duties and motivations of all parties are examine and understood. State of the art practices in software development won’t guarantee products free of flaws.

The Evolving Internet: Driving Forces, Uncertainties, and Four Scenarios to 2025

What will the Internet be like in 2025? How much bigger will it have grown from today’s 2 billion users and $3 trillion market? Will it have achieved its full potential to connect the world’s entire population in ways that advance global prosperity, business productivity, education and social interaction?

TRUST Security Seminar: Return-Oriented Programming: The Impact of the Gadget on Civilization

Return-oriented programming is an attack technique that induces arbitrary behavior in the compromised program without injecting new code into its address space. A return-oriented attack combines short sequences of instructions from a target program’s executable image into a Turing-complete set of combinators, called “gadgets,” from which any desired functionality can be synthesized.

Research Exchange: Leveraging Machine-learning and Crowdsourcing to Process Text Messages in the world’s Less-resourced Language

Text-messaging has quickly become the dominant form of remote communication in much of the world, surpassing email, phone calls and even grid electricity. This has social development and crisis response organizations to leverage mobile technologies to support health, banking, access to market information, literacy and emergency response.

Social Entrepreneurship in Developing Nations: A View from the Field

David Green is a MacArthur Fellow, an Ashoka Fellow and is recognized by Schwab Foundation as a leading social entrepreneur. He helped establish Aurolab (India), to produce affordable intraocular lenses (now has 8% of the global market share) and suture. He has also helped develop high-volume, quality eye care programs that are affordable to the poor and self-sustaining from user fees, including Aravind Eye Hospital in India, which performs 300,000 surgeries per year.