2013-02-26: Seminar Panangaden (McGill University) on Duality for Transition Systems
In this talk we consider the problem of representing and reasoning about systems, especially probabilistic systems, with hidden state. � We consider transition systems where the state is not completely visible to an outside observer. Instead, there are observables that partly identify the state

2013-02-21: Seminar Stumm (University of Toronto) on Improving Memory Access Locality
While parallel hardware substrate has evolved considerably over time, a key performance problem has remained the same: how best to feed processing cores with data fast enough. Managing locality is a key aspect of mitigating the memory wall. Yet this is non-trivial given unpredictable memory sharing patterns, coupled with complex and distributed memory hierarchies.

2013-02-05: First NICTA Software Systems Summer School - Sydney Australia.
Featuring lectures by international leaders in computer systems from industry and academia, interspersed with short student talks and poster sessions. Topics include virtual machines, hypervisors, compilers, operating systems, language implementation, memory management and security.

2013-02-01: Seminar Agrawal (UCSB) on Managing Geo-replicated Data in Multi-Datacenters

Over the past few years, cloud computing and the growth of global large scale computing systems have led to applications which require data management across multiple datacenters. Initially the models provided single row level transactions with eventual consistency. Although protocols based on these models provide high availability, they are not ideal for applications needing a consistent view of the data.

2012-12-11: Seminar Fisher (DARPA) on Forest - A Language and Toolkit for Programming with Filestores

A filestore is a structured collection of data files housed in a conventional hierarchical file system. Many applications use filestores as a poor-man's database, and the correct execution of these applications requires that the collection of files, directories, and symbolic links stored on disk satisfy a variety of precise invariants. Moreover, all of these structures must have acceptable ownership, permission, and timestamp attributes. Unfortunately, current programming languages do not provide support for documenting assumptions about filestores, detecting errors in them, or safely loading from and storing to them.