Past events

The University of Minnesota will be closed for New Year's Day.

View the full schedule of University holidays.
 

The University of Minnesota will be closed (floating holiday).

View the full schedule of University holidays.
 

The application deadline for the computer science and data science majors is December 30.

Students typically apply to a major while enrolled in fall semester courses during their sophomore year (third semester).

Submit your application at the appropriate link below:

• CSE student application (Computer Science B.S. & Data Science B.S. programs)
• CLA student application (Computer Science B.A. programs)

All applicants will be notified of their admission decision via email within three weeks of the application deadline.
 

The University of Minnesota will be closed for Christmas Day.

View the full schedule of University holidays.
 

The University of Minnesota will be closed (floating holiday).

View the full schedule of University holidays.
 

The last day of the fall 2020 semester is Wednesday, December 23.

View the full academic schedule on One Stop.
 

Final exams for fall 2020 will be held between Thursday, December 17 and Wednesday, December 23.

View the full academic schedule on One Stop.
 

The last day of instruction for the fall 2020 semester is Wednesday, December 16.

View the full academic schedule on One Stop.
 

The computer science colloquium takes place on Mondays from 11:15 a.m. - 12:15 p.m.

This week's talk is a part of the Cray Distinguished Speaker Series. This series was established in 1981 by an endowment from Cray Research and brings distinguished visitors to the Department of Computer Science & Engineering every year.

Our speaker, Ken Perlin (New York University), will be giving a talk titled "How to Build a Holodeck".

Abstract

In the age of COVID-19 it is more clear than ever that there is a compelling need for better remote collaboration.  Fortunately a number of technologies are starting to converge which will allow us to take such collaborations to a whole new level.  Imagine that when you join an on-line meeting you are present with your entire body, and that you can see and hear other people as though you are all in the same room.

There are many challenges to realizing this vision properly.  The NYU Future Reality Lab and its collaborators are working on many of them.  This talk will give an overview of many of the key areas of research, including how to guarantee universal accessibility, user privacy and rights management, low latency networking, design and construction of shared virtual worlds, correct rendering of spatial audio, biometric sensing, and a radical rethinking of user interface design.

Biography

Ken Perlin is a professor in the Department of Computer Science at NYU, where he directs the Future Reality Lab, and is lead PI for the NSF-funded NYU Holodeck project. Research interests include future reality, computer graphics and animation, user interfaces and education. He is chief scientist at Parallux Inc., Tactonic Technologies and Autotoon Inc. Awards include an Academy Award for Technical Achievement and the 2008 ACM/SIGGRAPH Computer Graphics Achievement Award. He was general chair of the UIST 2010 conference, and a featured artist at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Education: Ph.D. in Computer Science from NYU; B.A. in theoretical mathematics from Harvard.

The computer science colloquium takes place on Mondays from 11:15 a.m. - 12:15 p.m.

This week's speaker, Kangjie Lu (University of Minnesota), will be giving a talk titled "Building Vulnerability-Less Operating-System (OS) Kernels".

Abstract

An operating-system (OS) kernel is arguably the most important piece of software in a computer. Modern OS kernels have become extremely large and complex, containing millions of lines of code. As a result, they are unfortunately very buggy, and a single security bug (or vulnerability) may compromise the whole computer.  Detecting and eliminating security bugs in OS kernels are thus imperative. However, kernel-bug detection has been considered a hard problem due to inherent limitations with whole-kernel analysis and the lack of bug specifications or detection oracles.  In this talk, I will share my recent research on detecting and eliminating security bugs in OS kernels, with three research endeavors: (1) development of building-block techniques that enable precise whole-kernel analysis, (2) automated type agnostic detection of kernel bugs, and (3) timely and safe patching of critical kernel bugs. In addition, I will briefly share our patching experience with OSS communities.

Biography

Dr. Kangjie Lu is an assistant professor in the Computer Science & Engineering Department of the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities. His research interests include security and privacy, program analysis, and operating systems. He is particularly interested in developing foundational techniques that enable security mechanisms and analyses, automatically finding and eliminating classes of vulnerabilities introduced by both developers and compilers, and hardening systems while preserving their reliability and efficiency. He won the best paper award at ACM CCS 2019. His research results are regularly published at top-tier venues and have led to many important security updates in the Linux kernel, the Android OS, the FreeBSD kernel, Apple’s iOS, OpenSSL, etc. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the Georgia Institute of Technology. More details can be found at https://www-users.cs.umn.edu/~kjlu