Seminars

The talk will move from capsule robots for gastrointestinal endoscopy toward a new generation of surgical robots and devices, having a relevant reduction in invasiveness as the main driver for innovation. Wireless capsule endoscopy has already been extremely helpful for the diagnosis of diseases in the small intestine. Specific wireless capsule endoscopes have been proposed for colon inspection, but have never reached the diagnostic accuracy of standard colonoscopy. In the first part of the talk, we will discuss enabling technologies that have the potential to transform colonoscopy into a…

At the heart of the new enterprise is the ability to continuously gather information about business entities of interest (of any shape/form/size), run analytics against them (to cluster, correlate, learn patterns, predict future behavior), and inform ongoing business transactions with insights gained through such analysis (for fraud detection, cross-selling, customer management etc).

To support this future of operational decision-making, the META project is developing a scalable, contextual reasoning platform. This platform is built on the three legs of event processing,…

As computing devices are increasingly consolidated and shared by multiple, potentially distrusting, applications, hardware must be able to provide strong isolation among software entities. For example, automative systems must be able to ensure that safety-critical control modules cannot be affected by passenger entertainment systems. In order to provide high assurance, hardware-level protection mechanisms must be verified to be implemented securely without any unintended bugs or backdoors, and be able to prevent all forms of software-visible information flows including timing channels.…

Formal verification and theorem proving have been used successfully in many discrete applications, such as chip design and verification.  However, computation is not confined to the discrete world of desktop computing.  Increasingly, we depend on discrete software to control safety-critical components of continuous physical systems (for example, adaptive cruise control in cars and collision avoidance in aircraft).  It is vital that these hybrid (discrete and continuous) systems behave as designed, or they will cause more damage than they intend to fix.  In this talk, I will present several…

This talk will focus on the design of distributed estimation systems that are formed by multiple non-collocated components. A shared network is used to disseminate information among the components.

I will discuss two recent results: Assuming that the network is characterized by an incomplete directed communication graph, the first result characterizes the existence of omniscience-achieving schemes for which all components that observe only a portion of the output of an underlying plant can estimate the entire state with error that vanishes asymptotically. Our approach hinges on key…