Events

Rina Wehbe, PhD candidate
David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science

Designing difficulty levels in platformer games is a challenge for game designers. It is important because design decisions that affect difficulty also directly affect player experience. Consequently, design strategies for balancing game difficulty are discussed by both academics and game designers. 

Chenyan Xiong, PhD candidate
Carnegie Mellon University

Search engines and other information systems have started to evolve from retrieving documents to providing more intelligent information access. However, the evolution is still in its infancy due to computers’ limited ability in representing and understanding human language. 

Michael Abebe, PhD candidate
David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science

Cloud storage systems typically choose between replicating or erasure encoding data to provide fault tolerance. Replication ensures that data can be accessed from a single site but incurs a much higher storage overhead, which is a costly downside for large-scale storage systems. Erasure coding has a lower storage requirement but relies on encoding/decoding and distributed data retrieval that can result in increased response times. 

Kimon Fountoulakis, Postdoctoral fellow and co-PI
University of California at Berkeley and International Computer Science Institute

Cong Guo, PhD candidate
David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science

Consolidation of multiple workloads is cost-effective for system operators. However, it is difficult to determine how to share resources among multiple tenants to achieve both performance isolation and work conservation. The primary shared resource in the server are the CPU cores. We show that current solutions cannot handle CPU sharing very well in various multi-tenancy scenarios.

Please note: This seminar has been cancelled

Thomas Steinke, Postdoctoral researcher
IBM Almaden Research Center, San Jose, California

As data is being more widely collected and used, privacy and statistical validity are becoming increasingly difficult to protect. Sound solutions are needed, as ad hoc approaches have resulted in several high-profile failures.

Rina Wehbe, PhD candidate
David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science

Why do we care if our teammates are not human? This study seeks to uncover whether or not the perception of other players as human or artificial entities can influence player experience. We use both deception and a between-participants blind study design to reduce bias in our experiment. 

Haifeng Xu, PhD candidate
Computer Science Department, University of Southern California

Strategic interactions among self-interested agents (a.k.a., games) are ubiquitous, ranging from economic activity in daily life and the Internet to defender-adversary interactions in national security. A key variable influencing agents' strategic decision making is the information they have available about their environment as well as the preferences and actions of others. 

Daniel Recoskie, PhD candidate
David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science

Hicham El-Zein, PhD candidate
David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science