Abstract:

The IT industry is undergoing a number of substantial changes that go beyond the "technology revolutions" that marketing strategies periodically generate. The shift in computer systems' scale, the move towards a service model, the reduced total cost of ownership for IT systems, and the added stringent requirements on these systems have changed the predominant balance of the last decades. Instead of general purpose solutions, the trend in system development these days is toward new degrees of customization of both hardware and software. Such customization is predominantly guided by hardware developments, which are introducing significant constraints on how programs run but also opening many new possibilities for those who can exploit them. In this talk, I discuss the trend towards custom design, explain why it is happening, present several examples, and give an overview of the opportunities and challenges it creates for systems research.

Bio:

Gustavo Alonso is a professor at the Department of Computer Science at ETH Zurich in Switzerland. Gustavo has a degree in electrical engineering from the Madrid Technical University in Spain and an MS and PhD in Computer Science from UC Santa Barbara. Before joining ETH, he worked at the IBM Research – Almaden. Gustavo's research interests encompass almost all aspects of systems, from design to runtime. Most of his current research is related to multi-core architectures, large clusters, FPGAs, and data appliances.

Gustavo is a Fellow of the ACM and Fellow of the IEEE. He has been awarded the FCCM 2013 Best paper Award for work on data processing on FPGAs, the AOSD 2012 Most Influential Paper Award for work on dynamic aspect oriented programming, the VLDB 2010 Ten Year Best Paper Award for work on data replication, and the ICDCS 2009 Best Paper Award for work on remote direct memory access. He has served as the chair of EuroSys (the European Chapter of SIGOPS), the VLDB Endowment, the ACM/IFIP/IEEE Middleware Steering Committee, as an associate editor of the VLDB Journal, and as PC-chair/vice-chair of conferences in several areas (VLDB, ICDE, Middleware, EDBT, BPM, and ICDCS).

Abstract:

TBD

Bio:

Jason Nieh is a Professor of Computer Science and Co-Director of the Software Systems Laboratory at Columbia University. He has served as a consultant to both government and industry, including as the technical advisor to nine States on the Microsoft Antitrust Settlement, and as an expert witness before the US International Trade Commission. He was previously Chief Scientist of Desktone, recently acquired by VMware, and is currently Chief Scientist of Cellrox. Professor Nieh has made research contributions in software systems across a broad range of areas, including operating systems, virtualization, thin-client computing, cloud computing, mobile computing, multimedia, web technologies, and performance evaluation. Honors for his research work include the Sigma Xi Young Investigator Award, awarded once every two years in the physical sciences and engineering, a National Science Foundation CAREER Award, a Department of Energy Early Career Award, five IBM Faculty Awards and two IBM Shared University Research Awards, four Google Research Awards, and various best paper awards, including the 2012 SIGCSE Best Paper Award, the 2011 SOSP Best Paper Award, and the 2004 MobiCom Best Student Paper Award. A dedicated teacher, he received the Distinguished Faculty Teaching Award from the Columbia Engineering School Alumni Association for his innovations in teaching operating systems and for introducing virtualization as a pedagogical tool. Professor Nieh earned his B.S. from MIT and his M.S. and Ph.D. from Stanford University, all in Electrical Engineering. He is married to Belinda Nieh and they have four children, Joanna, Caleb, Emma, and Zachary. They live in New York City.

Abstract:

In 1908, the US Supreme Court ruled on a case in which publisher Bobbs-Merrill inserted a notice in its books that any retail sale at a price under $1.00 would constitute an infringement of its copyright. Macy's disregarded the notice and sold the books at a lower price without Bobbs-Merrill's consent. The Supreme Court held that the exclusive statutory right to "vend" applied only to the first sale of the copyrighted work. Once Macy's purchased the books, Bobbs-Merrill's rights were exhausted. Bobbs-Merrill could not control the secondary market. Just over a hundred years later, the music publisher EMI sued ReDigi, a marketplace for used digital goods, to prevent digital music tracks legally purchased and downloaded to be resold. Specifically, once you buy a song from iTunes and download it to your computer, EMI says you cannot resell that song using ReDigi 1.0 technology.

This talk will discuss the business model, social implications, legal challenges, and most of all, the technology used by ReDigi. The talk will try to interpret the 1976 copyright law through the eyes of a computer scientist and not a lawyer, especially as it relates to disembodied digital goods, such as music, ebooks, video games, and software not "fixed in a material object". In other words, as informational objects or virtualized physical objects continue to replace physical objects, computer scientists find themselves on the front lines of this revolution.

Bio:

Larry Rudolph received his PhD in Parallel Processing way back in 1981 when the term "many cores" could be thought of as a type of RAM. He was on the faculty at CMU, Hebrew University, and MIT, where his research in high performance computing slowly evolved into low performance computing, e.g., mobile phones. He left MIT to start a project in mobile phone virtualization at VMware, and then co-founded ReDigi, where he is CTO. He is currently a member of the labs at Two Sigma, a high-tech investment firm.