What:	ES colloquium with
	- Jake Beal on "Spatial Computing: From Manifold Geometry to Networking and Biology"
	- Giovanna Di Marzo Serugendo on "SmartContent: A self-protecting and context-aware active content"
When:	May 29, 11:30 - 13:00
Where:	EWI main building, room 09.150


Program:

May 29, 11:30 - 12:15

    "Spatial Computing: From Manifold Geometry to Networking and Biology"
    Jake Beal, BBN Technologies, Boston, USA

    ABSTRACT: An increasing number of distributed systems may be viewed as
    spatial computers---collections of devices distributed to fill a physical
    space in which the difficulty of moving information between any two devices
    is strongly dependent on the distance between them.  Examples include
    peer-to-peer wireless networks, engineered biological cells, wireless
    sensor networks, robotic swarms and reconfigurable computing platforms
    (e.g. FPGAs), as well as natural systems like animal swarms and cells
    during morphogenesis.

    Spatial computers pose a major programming and control challenge due
    to their potential scale and radical decentralization.  In this talk,
    I will present an approach in which we view the network as a discrete
    approximation of the physical space through which devices are distributed.
    Using this "amorphous medium" abstraction and a carefully chosen set
    of space-time primitives, the Proto spatial computing language allows
    a programmer to express global behaviors in terms of simple geometric
    computations.  These are then automatically transformed into a program
    that uses local interactions between devices to robustly and scalably
    approximate the specified global behavior.  I will illustrate this
    approach with applications in sensor networks, synthetic biology, and
    morphogenetic engineering.

    BIO: Dr. Jacob Beal is a scientist at BBN Technologies, a research
    affiliate of MIT, and a Science Commons Fellow.  His research interests
    center on the engineering of robust adaptive systems, with a focus on
    problems of modelling and control for spatially-distributed systems like
    sensor networks, robotic swarms, and natural or engineered biological
    cells.  Dr. Beal completed his Ph.D. in 2007 under Prof. Gerald Jay
    Sussman at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.


May 29, 12:15 - 13:00

    "SmartContent: A self-protecting and context-aware active content"
    Prof. Giovanna Di Marzo Serugendo, University of Geneva, Switzerland

    ABSTRACT: Nowadays, anyone can publish and share content, personal or
    not, on the Internet. In addition, the ubiquitousness of mobile devices
    makes it possible to access content anywhere, at anytime on different
    platforms. This often leads to situations of potential intentional or
    unintentional misuse of contents as well as privacy problems. In this
    talk, we discuss SmartContent, an approach for content protection and
    privacy. SmartContent acts autonomously and embeds with the content the
    notion of context and policy.  In this approach a document is an active
    entity that decides on its own to reveal itself or to be transferred. The
    decision depends on the current environment in which the document is
    evolving. A personal document evaluates its context of use and denies
    access to its content if it determines that the situation and the intended
    action on the document is unusual or unauthorized. The context of use
    is a composition of diverse information such as the current location,
    current viewer, social or physical neighbors, etc. This talks presents
    a general model for SmartContent and an example implementation.

    BIO: Giovanna Di Marzo Serugendo is the Director of the Institute
    of Services Science (ISS) at the University of Geneva. Her research
    interests relate to the engineering of decentralized software with
    self-organizing and emergent behavior. She is exploring the use of
    appropriate architectures for developing trustworthy, dependable and
    controllable self-organizing and self-managing systems.  She co-founded the
    IEEE International Conference on Self-Adaptive and Self-Organizing Systems
    (SASO) and the ACM TAAS, for which she served as EiC from 2005 to 2011.