********************Talk 1 on database:********************

Title: Managing Uncertain Databases

Abstract: Data uncertainty is inherent in emerging applications such as pervasive computing, sensor networks, biological databases, and data integration. In this seminar, we will study some interesting issues that we have encountered during the development of the ORION, a system prototype developed to handle the storage and retrieval of a large amount of uncertain information. We will cover topics like uncertain data modeling, probabilistic query classification, query quality, and uncertain data indexing.

Bio:

Reynold Cheng received the BEng degree in computer engineering and the MPhil in computer science and information systems from the University of Hong Kong (HKU) in 1998 and 2000, and the MSc and PhD degrees from the Department of Computer Science, Purdue University in 2003 and 2005. He is currently an associate professor in the Department of Computer Science at HKU.

Dr. Cheng was granted a HKU Outstanding Young Researcher Award 2011-12. He was the recipient of the 2010 Research Output Prize in the Department of Computer Science. From 2005 to 2008, he was an assistant professor in the Department of Computing at Hong Kong Polytechnic University, where he received two Performance Awards. He is a member of IEEE, ACM, ACM SIGMOD, and UPE. He is a PC area chair of CIKM 2014, and the workshop co-chair of ICDE 2014. He has served on the program committees and review panels for leading database conferences and journals. He is a member of the editorial board of Information Systems and DAPD journal. His research interests include database management, as well as querying and mining of uncertain data.

********************Talk 2 on graphics:********************

Title: Data-Driven Color Theme Enhancement for Digital Photos

Abstract:

It is often important for designers and photographers to convey or enhance desired color themes in their work. A color theme is typically defined as a template of colors and an associated verbal description. In this talk, I present a data-driven method for enhancing a desired color theme in a digital photo. We formulate our goal as a unified optimization that simultaneously considers a desired color theme, texture-color relationships as well as automatic or user-specified color constraints. Quantifying the difference between an image and a color theme is made possible by color mood spaces and a generalization of an additivity relationship for two-color combinations. We incorporate prior knowledge, such as texture-color relationships, extracted from a database of photographs to maintain a natural look of the edited photos. Experiments and a user study have confirmed the effectiveness of our method.

Bio:

Yizhou Yu is a professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Hong Kong. He received a PhD degree in Computer Science from University of California at Berkeley. He is currently on the editorial board of two international journals, and has served on the program committee of many leading international conferences, including SIGGRAPH, SIGGRAPH Asia, and International Conference on Computer Vision. He has research interests in both computer graphics and computer vision, including computational photography, geometry processing, and video analytics.

********************Talk 3 on system/network(jointly given by Prof. Cho-li Wang and me):********************

Title: The Cloud Computing Research in CS@HKU

Abstract:

High Performance Computing (HPC) has traditionally been seen as a specialist area where most of its applications are scientific applications that require large CPU capabilities (e.g., at petaFLOPS scale). With the advent of cloud computing and the new paradigm of "everything-imaginable-as-a-service", scientists and researchers are able to deploy their HPC applications in the cloud. Entering the era of "Big Data', HPC has rapidly evolved in ways that are substantially different from its past.

In this talk, Prof. Wang will introduce HKU's eXCloud project that implemented a handful of migration techniques working at diverse granularities to achieve better data locality for high-performance cloud computing. He will also report preliminary results of the Crocodiles project which realizes the concept of Cloud-on-Chip (CoC) for supporting Big Data computing on a single many-core chip.

Dr. Wu will introduce her research projects on cloud-based CDN systems and cloud economics. Especially, she will report her studies of enabling social media applications with high scalability and cost efficiency on geo-distributed clouds, as well as her recent work on pricing and scheduling of the computing resources using online auctions.

Bio:

Cho-Li Wang is currently a Professor in the Department of Computer Science at The University of Hong Kong. Wang's research is broadly in the areas of parallel architecture, software systems for Cluster computing, and virtualization techniques for Cloud computing. His recent research projects involve the development of parallel software systems for multicore/GPU computing and multi-kernel operating systems for future manycore processor. Prof. Wang has published more than 140 papers in various peer reviewed journals and conference proceedings. He is/was on the editorial boards of 8 scholarly journals, including IEEE Transactions on Cloud Computing and IEEE Transactions on Computers (2006-2010). He is the primary investigator of China's 863 project "Hong Kong Grid Point'' (2006-2011) and member of China's Supercomputing and Innovation Alliance. Visit his webpage at: http://www.cs.hku.hk/~clwang/.

Chuan Wu is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Hong Kong. She received her B.Engr. and M.Engr. degrees in 2000 and 2002 from the Department of Computer Science and Technology, Tsinghua University, China, and her Ph.D. degree in 2008 from the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Toronto, Canada. Her research is in the areas of cloud computing, online and mobile social networks, and wireless networks. She is a member of IEEE and ACM, and the Chair of the Interest Group on Multimedia services and applications over Emerging Networks (MEN) of the IEEE Multimedia Communication Technical Committee (MMTC) from 2012 to 2014. She has served as TPC members and reviewers for international conferences and journals. Visit her webpage at: http://www.cs.hku.hk/~cwu/.