Seminar 2016-02-05: Douglas Carmean - What Could Possibly go Wrong? A Look at the Dark Side of Computer Architecture

A clear market need, compelling usage models and a dream team create the perfect storm for a fantastically successful product. Compromises, unforeseen challenges and poor decision making can conspire to turn a brilliant product into a merely successful endeavor. This talk will explore the underbelly of computer architecture and product definition. It will look at things that went wrong and lessons learned from the execution of a major product development. While the scope of the project was to create new business opportunities in excess of $1B, some of the lessons are surprisingly applicable to everyday computer architecture projects.

Gernot Heiser — IEEE Fellow 2015-12-10
Congratulations to Gernot Heiser for being named an IEEE Fellow, commencing in 2016. This is a distinction reserved for select IEEE members whose extraordinary accomplishments in any of the IEEE fields of interest are deemed fitting of this prestigious grade elevation..more

Seminar 2015-11-16: Professor Gene Tsudik - Scalable Embedded Device Attestation

Today, large numbers of smart interconnected devices providesafety and security critical services for energy grids, industrial controlsystems, building automation, transportation, and critical infrastructure. These devices often operate in groups, forming large, dynamic, and even self-organizing, networks. Collective integrity verification of software for device groups is necessary to ensure their correct and safe operation as well as to protect them against malware infestations. However, current device attestation schemes assume a single prover and do not scale to groups thereof. We discuss the design of SEDA -- the first attestation scheme for device groups. This work includes a formal security model for swarm attestation and two proof-of-concept SEDA implementations based on two recent attestation architectures for embedded systems. SEDA can efficiently attest device groups with dynamic or static topologies.

Rob van Glabbeek joins Royal Holland Society of Sciences and Humanities
2015-11-01 Rob van Glabbeek has been selected as a foreign member of the Royal Holland Society of Sciences and Humanities, a Dutch organisation founded in 1752 to to promote science in the broadest sense. Members are nominated by invitation only, based on their scientific achievements. So far 19 computer scientists have been awarded a membership

SYNTCOMP 2015
2015-10-30 Adam Walker wins the synthesis competition again this year in his category Sequential realizability More: