Event Schedule:

October 24th, 2007

1:00-2:00 : Distinguished Lecture

Self-* Storage
Greg Ganger, Carnegie Mellon University

Human administration for storage is too difficult, with industry reports indicating absurd ratios like "one human needed for each 1-10TB" and "4-7 dollars spent on managing each dollar of storage capital." This dilemma pushes us to pursue "self-*" storage infrastructures: self-organizing, self-configuring, self-tuning, self-healing, self-managing, scalable systems of storage servers. We are constructing a versatile cluster-based storage system to be deployed at CMU as a real resource for other research teams and a source of real experience for PDL researchers, as we pursue the ideal of Self-* Storage. This talk will provide a high-level overview of the project, description of the system architecture, and some early experiences with performance prediction support simplifying tuning and provisioning decisions.

2:00-3:00 : Distinguished Lecture

The Humanoid Robotics Dream
James Kuffner, The Robotics Institute, Carnegie Mellon University

One of the grand challenges in artificial intelligence is to create autonomous humanoid robots. The anthropomorphic shape of a humanoid should enable operation in environments designed for humans, the utilization of human tools and interfaces, and the natural use of human gestures and non-verbal communication. Fundamentally, an intelligent humanoid should be a truly "general-purpose" robot, able to accomplish any task a real human can. This talk will discuss the challenge of motion autonomy for humanoid robots and present an overview of several autonomous motion generation methods designed for application tasks involving navigation, object grasping and manipulation, footstep placement, and full-body motions. Experimental results on several humanoid platforms around the world will be shown, along with some new efforts in "mobile manipulation". Finally, the long-term prospects for the future development of robot autonomy and artificial intelligence based on planning algorithms will be discussed.

4:00-6:00 : OpenHouse

Handout

Address / Driving Directions:

Intel Americas, Inc.
4720 Forbes Avenue Suite 410
CM2
Pittsburgh, PA 15213

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Parking Information:

Limited parking is available in the basement of the CIC(Collaborative Innovation Center) building. Rates are posted at the garage entrance. Payment is on the 1st floor, level 'L'.
Additionally, parking is available in the CMU garage east of the CIC building on CMU's campus as well at the nearby museum.