Upcoming seminars

Future I/O systems for increasingly data-intensive computing environments face a challenging set of requirements.  Data extraction must be efficient, fast, and flexible; on-demand data annotation -- metadata creation and management -- must be possible without modifying application code; and data products must be available for concurrent use by multiple downstream applications (such as visualization and storage), requiring consistency management and scheduling.  In this talk, I will present a collection of techniques designed to address these challenges by decoupling data operations in space and in time from core application codes.  Our research results show that these techniques can extract data efficiently and without perturbing compute operations, that they can be used to perform application-specific transformations while maintaining acceptable I/O bandwidth and avoiding back-pressure, and that they can decouple "in-band" and "out-of-band" processing to improve overall I/O performance. Bio: Patrick M. Widener is a Senior Research Scientist in the Center for Comprehensive Informatics and Research Assistant Professor in the Department of Biomedical Engineering at Emory University.  His research interests include experimental systems, I/O and storage software for large-data environments, middleware, and the generation and use of metadata.  Dr. Widener received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the Georgia Institute of Technology in 2005, and prior to beginning his Ph.D. studies he was employed as a software developer by several companies which no longer exist.  He also holds a Master of Computer Science degree from the University of Virginia (1992), and a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science from James Madison University (1990).

In this talk I will discuss the role of certain "strange" functions called "mock theta functions" as a liaison between two different areas of mathematics: modular forms, which are complex analytic functions with certain symmetries, and the representation theory of a large class of lie algebras. Despite their "strange" appearance, the mock theta functions in their most classical guises date back to the first part of the 20th century, however their roles in mathematics were not well understood. Only within the last 7 years have we finally begun to understand and develop a greater theory around the mock theta functions in mathematics - relating modular forms and representation theory is just one of their many interesting facets. This talk is intended to be an introduction to this theory.

On Christmas Day, 1801, Thomas Jefferson received a letter from University of Pennsylvania professor Robert Patterson. The last page of the letter was written using the cipher described in the earlier pages, and Patterson withheld the key, writing, ``I may safely defy the united ingenuity of the whole human race to decypher [such writing] to the end of time." The first successful cryptanalysis was done by the speaker in 2007. This talk will describe Patterson's cipher, its place in history, and its solution. This talk is co-sponsored by the Hightower Fund and by the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science.