Guests from Manitoba

(Prof. Saji Hameed on the right).

Prof. Parimala Thulasiraman and Prof. Ruppa K. Thulasiram visited Aizu on October 9. They give us a brief introduction of University of Manitoba, followed by the lectures as announced in the previous article.

Special Lectures by Profs from University of Manitoba

We are pleased to announce the special lectures by two professors, Prof. Parimala Thulasiraman and Prof. Ruppa K. Thulasiram, from University of Manitoba, Canada as follows.

Date and Time: October 9, from 1510 to 1650
Venue: S3 (Research Quadangles 275)
Titles: Traffic Aware Routing in Intelligent Transportation Systems (Prof. Parimala Thulasiraman)

Pricing Financial Option as a Multi-Object Optimiztion Problem using Firefly Algorithm (Prof. Ruppa K. Thulasiram)

The abstract of their lectures and their bios are posted on the following page:

Prof. Parimala Thulasiraman and Prof. Ruppa K. Thulasiram

These lectures are open two public and anyone is welcome.

Poster of Special Lecture on 12/5

Poster of the special lecture by Joana Corte-Real on December 5.

in pdf

Special Lecture by Joana Corte-Real on 12/5

We are pleased to make a preliminary announcement of the special lecture by Ms Joana Corte-Real from University of Porto, Portugal.

The title and abstract of talk are attached at the bottom of this message.

The lecture is primarily targeted to the SCCP class (O3-019 A Peek Inside Computers), but we will make it open to general public.

Here are some information regarding the University of Porto and its relationship to Aizu:

• Aizu and Porto have an exchange program agreement.
• Dr Pedroso from Porto visited Aizu and gave us special lectures Link
• I myself visited Porto and introduced Aizu to Porto Link
• One of our students, Kazuaki Takahashi, visited Porto in 2009 and Dr Pedroso took care of him. Link Link
• A student from Porto, Rui Jorge Rei, was staying with us from January to April 2010 under JASSO scholarship support. Dr Pedroso is his supervisor. Link

Since the lecture is more than six week ahead, there may be a change of schedule and other details. We will keep you posted on this page.

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Date and Time

Dec 5, 2014, from 1810 to 1940

Venue

Research Quadangle 275-S4

Title

Introduction to Inductive Logic Programming

Abstract

Inductive Logic Programming (ILP) is a powerful but often neglected machine learning technique for extracting knowledge from observations; it consists of building a generalized logic model which explains a set of facts, to a degree of accuracy. The main advantage of ILP is its capability to provide classifiers that are interpretable by humans, which makes it popular in different scientific domains. This research area is quite relevant in several field such as knowledge acquisition, inductive program synthesis, inductive data engineering, and knowledge discovery in databases. Much work has been done on finding good models in ILP, but there is still a vast scope for improvements, in particular with respect to attaining faster execution times; because ILP systems must deal with enormous search spaces, they usually incur in non-trivial query checking times. To tackle this issue, it is possible to take advantage of the concurrent sections of the ILP algorithm and paralellize them so as to reduce execution time significantly; a strong case for the parallelization of the search space can be made: on the one hand, there are several sections of the ILP algorithm which could be executed concurrently without adding much to the complexity of the code; on the other hand, the fact that datasets are becoming too large to be stored in one s memory invites to the use of several machines connected in heterogeneous configurations such as clusters, grids or clouds.machine

Speaker's Bio

Joana Corte-Real is a PhD student of the joint Doctoral Program of Universities of Minho, Aveiro and Porto in Computer Science (MAP-i). She obtained her MSc degree from the Faculty of Engineering of University of Porto in 2013, in Computers and Electric Engineering. Her current interests are parallel and distributed computing and machine learning, in particular Inductive Logic Programming techniques. She developed a parallel version of a MapReduce construct for Prolog that obtains linear speed-ups in multicore machines. Currently, she has been researching on how to extend this implementation for hybrid shared and distributed memory architectures and one of the applications of this work is on Inductive Logic Programming. On her free time, she enjoys horse riding and takes german classes; she is also keen on traveling and meeting new people.

Research Quadangles 2nd Floor

Special Lecture by Joao Pedro Pedroso

We are pleased to announce the special lecture by Dr Joao Pedro Pedroso, from University of Porto, Portugal. Here are some of the exchange activities between two schools:

• University of Aizu and University of Porto have singed on the exchange program development. ( LINK),
• A student from Aizu visited Porto and studied for six weeks under supervision of Dr Pedroso ( LINK),
• A student from Porto (who is studying for PhD with Dr Pedroso) visited Aizu for three months under JASSO exchange support program ( LINK),
• Hitoshi Oi has visited Porto several times ( LINK

The detail of his talk is as follows:

Date: December 12,

Time: from 1810 to 1940

Place: University of Aizu, Research Quadangles Bldg, room 281 (S8): Floor plan of the Research Quadangles Bldg is attached at the bottom; Room281 (S8) is marked red.

Title: Optimizing fuel consumption in thermal electricity production

Abstract: Non-nuclear thermal power plants are responsible for emitting a large amount of carbon dioxide, as well as sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxides. In this talk we will present state-of-the-art solution techniques for unit commitment and load dispatch, which can be used for optimizing fuel consumption when meeting electricity demand with thermal power plants. We will put in evidence the impact that the use of recent models and solvers may have in energy savings and in the reduction of emissions.

Keywords: electricity generation; unit commitment; load dispatch

Bio: Dr Pedroso is Assistant Professor in Departamento de Ciência de Computadores (Department of Computer Science) at University of Porto, Portugal. He has PhD in Computational mathematics, Université Catholique de Louvain, Belgium. His research interests include, combinatorial optimization, tree search methods, metaheuristics, simulation and machine learning.

http://www.dcc.fc.up.pt/~jpp/JPP/Welcome.html

Reseach Quadangles 2nd Floor Map

Materials for today's talk

The files used by Dr Pedroso's talk will be placed in the following directory:
/home/course/os10f6/TSP

Dr João Pedro Pedroso from University of Porto, Portugal

On December 17 (Friday), we are going to welcome Dr. João Pedro Pedroso from University of Porto, Portugal. He is Lecturer in Computer Science and was the advisor of Kazuaki Takahashi when he visited Porto under support of Aizu Short Term Abroad Study scholarship ( photos by Kazuaki Takahashi). He is also the supervisor of Rui Jorge Rei, who was studying with us from January to April this year under the support of JASSO scholarship.

He plans to give us a special lecture, titled "An introduction to the Traveling Salesman Problem". The primary audiences of the lecture are the students in the section of the Operating Systems course taught by Hitoshi Oi. However, we plan to make it open to public as the room capacilty allows. The detail will be posted here as it is fixed.

Abstract: One of the most widely studied problems in discrete optimization is the Traveling Salesman Problem. In this talk we will make an introduction to this problem and to strategies that can be used for solving it. We will also present some variants, focusing on applications in subjects related to computer science.

(From Left, Rui, Pedro and Hitoshi).