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Please note: All technical sessions locations are at the Santa Clara Convention Center.

TECHNICAL SESSIONS: Wednesday, June 20 | Thursday, June 21 | Friday, June 22

Wednesday, June 20, 2007
8:45 a.m.–10:30 a.m. Wednesday
Opening Remarks, Awards, Keynote
Hall A-2/3

MP3 IconListen to the opening remarks in MP3 format

Keynote Address
The Impact of Virtualization on Computing Systems

Mendel Rosenblum, Stanford University

MP3 IconListen to the keynote in MP3 format

This talk describes how virtualization is changing the way computing is done in the industry today and how it is causing users to rethink how they view hardware, operating systems, and application programs. The talk will describe this new view of computing and the benefits driving users to adopt it. The roles of hardware and operating systems will be discussed, along with what changes will be needed to support this new computing model efficiently and simply.

10:30 a.m.–11:00 a.m.   Break     
11:00 a.m.–12:30 p.m. Wednesday
REFEREED PAPERS
Hall A-2

Tricks with Virtual Machines
Session Chair: Andrew Warfield, Cambridge University and XenSource

Energy Management for Hypervisor-Based Virtual Machines
Jan Stoess, Christian Lang, and Frank Bellosa, University of Karlsruhe, Germany

Xenprobes, a Lightweight User-Space Probing Framework for Xen Virtual Machine
Nguyen Anh Quynh and Kuniyasu Suzaki, National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology, Japan

Virtual Machine Memory Access Tracing with Hypervisor Exclusive Cache
Pin Lu and Kai Shen, University of Rochester

INVITED TALKS
Hall A-3

Life Is Not a State-Machine: The Long Road from Research to Production
Werner Vogels, VP and CTO, Amazon.com

MP3 IconListen in MP3 format

Traditionally a technology adaption cycle progresses at least 10–15 years before technologies become mature enough for wide-spread adaption. That time period is dramatically shortened as there is a need for technologies that can satisfy the unlimited appetite for ultra-scalable, highly-reliable, high-performance, and cost-effecient software architectures by the top Internet companies. In reality, however, it turns out to be very difficult to speed up the adoption process. In this presentation I will review some of the obstacles that are in the way of adoption of research results into production environments and will revist the principles of "worse is better" and Occam's razor in the context of technology transition.

THE GURU IS IN
Ballroom H

Python Programming Language
Guido van Rossum, Google, Inc.

Guido van Rossum is the creator of Python, one of the major programming languages on and off the Web. The Python community refers to him as the BDFL (Benevolent Dictator for Life), a title straight from a Monty Python skit. Guido now works for Google (spending 50% of his time on Python!).

12:30 p.m.–2:00 p.m.   Lunch (on your own)
2:00 p.m.–3:30 p.m. Wednesday
REFEREED PAPERS
Hall A-2

Network Monitoring and Management
Session Chair: Brian Noble, University of Michigan

Awarded Best Paper!
Hyperion: High Volume Stream Archival for Retrospective Querying
Peter Desnoyers and Prashant Shenoy, University of Massachusetts

Load Shedding in Network Monitoring Applications
Pere Barlet-Ros, Technical University of Catalonia; Gianluca Iannaccone, Intel Research Berkeley; Josep Sanjuàs-Cuxart, Diego Amores-López, and Josep Solé-Pareta, Technical University of Catalonia

Configuration Management at Massive Scale: System Design and Experience
William Enck and Patrick McDaniel, Pennsylvania State University; Subhabrata Sen, Panagiotis Sebos, and Sylke Spoerel, AT&T Research; Albert Greenberg, Microsoft Research; Sanjay Rao, Purdue University; William Aiello, University of British Columbia

INVITED TALKS
Hall A-3

Exploiting Online Games
Gary McGraw, Cigital

MP3 IconListen in MP3 format

This talk (based on a book of the same title co-authored by Greg Hoglund) frankly describes controversial security issues surrounding MMORPGs such as World of Warcraft. This no-holds-barred approach is fully loaded with code examples, debuggers, bots, and hacks, of interest whether you are a gamer, a game developer, a software security person, or an interested bystander. I will cover:

  • Why online games are a harbinger of software security issues to come
  • How millions of gamers have created billion-dollar virtual economies
  • How game companies invade your privacy
  • Why some gamers cheat
  • Techniques for breaking online game security
  • How to build a bot to play a game for you
  • Methods for total conversion and advanced mods
Ultimately, this talk is mostly about security problems associated with advanced massively distributed software. With hundreds of thousands of interacting users, today's online games are a bellwether of modern software yet to come. The kinds of attack and defense techniques I describe are tomorrow's security techniques on display today.
THE GURU IS IN
Ballroom H

Advanced Perl
Tom Christiansen, Consultant

If you've a task you're wondering how to approach coding up in Perl, Tom will suggest strategies and modules to get you started. Problems that are short enough, especially tasks involving daunting regular expressions, he'll hack out in real time—and show you how to write them maintainably, too. If you've some Perl code that's not running fast enough, bring along code samples and Tom will give it a quick look-over to see whether a few simple structural changes might not speed up execution. Finally, if you've any questions about the core Perl language, you'll get them answered here.

Tom is a consultant and lecturer on all things Perl, and the co-author of both of O'Reilly's Perl bibles, Programming Perl and the Perl Cookbook, as well as the 2nd edition of Learning Perl. He's been programming Perl almost every day since it was first released almost 20 years ago.

3:30 p.m.–4:00 p.m.   Break     
4:00 p.m.–5:30 p.m. Wednesday
REFEREED PAPERS
Hall A-2

Programming Abstractions for Network Services
Session Chair: Mike Swift, University of Wisconsin, Madison

Events Can Make Sense
Maxwell Krohn, MIT CSAIL; Eddie Kohler, University of California, Los Angeles; M. Frans Kaashoek, MIT CSAIL

MapJAX: Data Structure Abstractions for Asynchronous Web Applications
Daniel S. Myers, Jennifer N. Carlisle, James A. Cowling, and Barbara H. Liskov, MIT CSAIL

Sprockets: Safe Extensions for Distributed File Systems
Daniel Peek, Edmund B. Nightingale, and Brett D. Higgins, University of Michigan; Puspesh Kumar, IIT Kharagpur; Jason Flinn, University of Michigan

INVITED TALKS
Hall A-3

Second Life
Rob Lanphier and Mark Lentczner, Linden Lab

MP3 IconListen in MP3 format: Talk | Q & A

Second Life is a 3D online world with a rapidly growing population from more than 100 countries around the globe. Residents create and build the world, which includes homes, vehicles, nightclubs, stores, landscapes, clothing, and games. In January 2007, Linden Lab (creators of Second Life) released the source code of the client ("viewer") application under the terms of the GNU General Public License.

Rob Lanphier, Linden Lab's Open Source Busybody, and Mark Lentczner, who directs a software engineering studio at Linden Lab, will talk about the release of the Second Life viewer source code: what that means, what it might mean, and what it doesn't mean. He'll provide a brief overview of the technology and history of Second Life, discuss the astronomical growth in use of Second Life, and explain what Linden Lab is doing to cope with the ever-increasing stress on the system. He'll discuss some key improvements Linden Lab is making in the protocols used by the product—utilizing a Web services model to increase scalability and to decouple versioning between clients and servers, as well as server-to-server communication.

Prior to starting with Linden Lab in September 2006, Rob Lanphier worked at a number of companies, including Microsoft, Asymetrix, Conjungi, and RealNetworks, as well as working as an independent consultant specializing in MediaWiki development. During his nine years at RealNetworks, Rob was a key contributor to two important multimedia standards (RTSP and SMIL) and was a leading force behind RealNetworks' open source initiative (Helix Community).

Mark Lentczner directs a software engineering studio at Linden Lab. His studio is primarily focused on the architectural extension of Second Life and the software infrastructure to support it. He has worked in Silicon Valley for over 20 years leading engineering teams on projects including virtual machines, software tools, cell phone browsers, and audio processing. Find out more here.

THE GURU IS IN
Ballroom H

Programming Languages
Stephen C. Johnson, The MathWorks, Inc.

Join me to speculate on the following: What will be the next popular programming language? Will it look more like Perl, Python, C#, or C++? How will we program 100-core CPUs? Will languages and operating systems get more entangled? I'll seed the discussion with some provocative statements—bring your biases and air them out!

Steve Johnson is a former president of USENIX who has been involved with C and UNIX since their earliest days. He is the author of Yacc, lint, and the Portable C Compiler. He also spent 15 years in Silicon Valley, most recently at Transmeta. He is currently employed at The MathWorks, Natick, MA, where he works on the MATLAB language.

6:00 p.m.–7:30 p.m. Wednesday
Poster Session & Happy Hour
Ballroom A/B/C/D

Session Chair: Mike Swift, University of Wisconsin, Madison

Don't miss the cool new ideas and the latest preliminary research on display at the Poster Session & Happy Hour. Take part in discussions with your colleagues over complimentary drinks and snacks. Check out the list of accepted posters and available abstracts.

TECHNICAL SESSIONS: Wednesday, June 20 | Thursday, June 21 | Friday, June 22

Thursday, June 21, 2007
9:00 a.m.–10:30 a.m. Thursday
REFEREED PAPERS
Hall A-2

Distributed Storage
Session Chair: Yuanyuan Zhou, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Awarded Best Paper!
SafeStore: A Durable and Practical Storage System
Ramakrishna Kotla, Lorenzo Alvisi, and Mike Dahlin, The University of Texas at Austin

POTSHARDS: Secure Long-Term Storage Without Encryption
Mark W. Storer, Kevin M. Greenan, and Ethan L. Miller, University of California, Santa Cruz; Kaladhar Voruganti, Network Appliance

Dandelion: Cooperative Content Distribution with Robust Incentives
Michael Sirivianos, Jong Han Park, Xiaowei Yang, and Stanislaw Jarecki, University of California, Irvine

INVITED TALKS
Hall A-3

Specializing General-Purpose Computing: A New Approach to Designing Clusters for High-Performance Technical Computing
Win Treese, SiCortex, Inc.

MP3 IconListen in MP3 format: Talk | Q & A

High-performance technical computing stresses computer systems in many ways, from CPU performance to memory systems to inter-system communication. Over the past twelve years, clusters of commodity hardware running Linux have become the most common tool for high-performance computing. However, the dynamics of such applications are often very different from those of applications that drive the design of commodity computer systems, which means that commodity systems may be cheap for computing, but they are not efficient for many technical applications.

At the same time, it has become increasingly clear that the costs of software dominate the overall investment. Providing more efficient computing for the same software can therefore be extremely valuable in improving the delivered performance for technical applications. With Linux on clusters as the primary environment for such applications, we can consider how to design a system optimized for executing high-performance technical code on Linux. SiCortex has recently introduced one example of such a system. The SC5832 and SC648 are computer systems designed from the silicon up to run Linux cluster applications. The systems feature a large number of processor cores, integrated high-speed interconnect fabric, a small footprint, and low power usage. In essence, the hardware design has taken the important components for a cluster node and shrunk them onto a single chip (plus DRAM); the software provides a coherent, turnkey Linux cluster computing environment.

We will examine the technology trends that converge to make this design approach both feasible and attractive, including the role of lowering power consumption as a means of gaining performance. In addition, we will describe the design of individual processor nodes, the interconnect fabric, and the challenges of assembling a Linux cluster distribution.

THE GURU IS IN
Ballroom H

Building and Running an Open-Source Community: The FreeBSD Project
Marshall Kirk McKusick, Author and Consultant

This guru session will cover the running of an open-source project using the FreeBSD Project as its example. The FreeBSD project started with the open-source release from Berkeley. The FreeBSD project patterned its initial community structure on the development structure built up at Berkeley. It evolved and expanded that structure to create a self-organizing project that supports an ever growing and changing group of developers around the world. We will include a discussion of the roles played by the thousands of volunteer developers that make up the FreeBSD Project of today.

Dr. Marshall Kirk McKusick's work with UNIX and BSD development spans nearly thirty years. It begins with his first paper on the implementation of Berkeley Pascal in 1979; goes on to his pioneering work in the eighties on the BSD Fast File System, the BSD virtual memory system, and the final release of 4.4BSD-Lite from the UC Berkeley Computer Systems Research Group; and carries on with his work on FreeBSD. A key figure in UNIX and BSD development, his experiences chronicle not only the innovative technical achievements but also the interesting personalities and philosophical debates in UNIX over the past thirty years.

10:30 a.m.–11:00 a.m.   Break     
11:00 a.m.–12:30 p.m. Thursday
REFEREED PAPERS
Hall A-2

Data and Indexing
Session Chair: Terence Kelly, Hewlett-Packard Labs

Using Provenance to Aid in Personal File Search
Sam Shah, University of Michigan; Craig A.N. Soules, HP Labs; Gregory R. Ganger, Carnegie Mellon University; Brian D. Noble, University of Michigan

Supporting Practical Content-Addressable Caching with CZIP Compression
KyoungSoo Park and Sunghwan Ihm, Princeton University; Mic Bowman, Intel Research; Vivek S. Pai, Princeton University

Short Paper: Implementation and Performance Evaluation of Fuzzy File Block Matching
Bo Han and Pete Keleher, University of Maryland, College Park

INVITED TALKS
Hall A-3

Live Malware Attack!
Paul Ducklin, Sophos

MP3 IconListen in MP3 format

If you are interested in the source code of tools used during the demo, please email conference@usenix.org for more information.

Pretty much everyone knows that there is a lot of hostile code out there. But how does a malware attack unfold? How do exploits work in real life? How easily might you be phished? More important, how do you deliberately go about watching malware at work (in both senses of "at work"), especially if it is malware that relies on the Internet to function?

This talk will feature a live—but entirely self-contained, and therefore safe!—demonstration of a modern malware attack in action. Gain insight into how the bad guys think and operate, and you learn how better to defend yourself against them.

The talk will also examine some of the tricks and techniques that can be used in a malware research lab to get even an apparently complex and heavily obfuscated piece of malware to reveal its secrets in safety.

Paul Ducklin works for Sophos in Australia, where he does assorted security stuff. He is Head of Technology, Asia Pacific. If you find out what this means, please attend his talk so that you can tell him.

THE GURU IS IN
Ballroom H

Datacenters
Cary Roberts, Tellme, Inc.

Cary Roberts is a hardware hacker at heart who has spent the last eleven years building out datacenters, constructing metro and wide area communication networks, and helping design high density, power efficient, remotely manageable servers. Cary can answer your questions about datacenter efficiency. This includes efficient, uninterruptible power systems, power distribution, and cooling methods.

12:30 p.m.–2:00 p.m.   Lunch (on your own)
2:00 p.m.–3:30 p.m. Thursday
REFEREED PAPERS
Hall A-2

System Security
Session Chair: Win Treese, SiCortex, Inc.

From Trusted to Secure: Building and Executing Applications That Enforce System Security
Boniface Hicks, Sandra Rueda, Trent Jaeger, and Patrick McDaniel, Pennsylvania State University

From STEM to SEAD: Speculative Execution for Automated Defense
Michael E. Locasto, Angelos Stavrou, Gabriela F. Cretu, and Angelos D. Keromytis, Columbia University

Dynamic Spyware Analysis
Manuel Egele, Christopher Kruegel, and Engin Kirda, Secure Systems Lab, Technical University Vienna; Heng Yin, Carnegie Mellon University and College of William and Mary; Dawn Song, Carnegie Mellon University

INVITED TALKS
Hall A-3

LiveJournal's Backend Technologies
Brad Fitzpatrick, LiveJournal

MP3 IconListen in MP3 format: Talk | Q & A

Hear the history and lessons learned while scaling a community site (LiveJournal.com) from a single server with a dozen friends to hundreds of machines and 10M+ users: what's worked, what hasn't, and all the things we've had to build ourselves that are now in common use thoughout the Web 2.0 world, including memcached, MogileFS, Perlbal, and our job dispatch systems.

Brad Fitzpatrick created LiveJournal in 1999 and grew the company throughout and after college, later selling it to SixApart, creators of TypePad, MovableType, and Vox. The open souce infrastructure software created to keep LiveJournal alive throughout the years is now popular within the Web 2.0 world. Brad is also responsible for creating OpenID, originally designed for interop among SixApart Web sites.

THE GURU IS IN
Ballroom H

Wireless Networks
Rudi van Drunen, Competa IT/Xlexit

Wireless is not limited to the WiFi at your coffee-hangout or the 802.11b standard. New techniques, protocols, and technologies are emerging or ready to be deployed. By attending this session you can get answers to most of your questions, whether it be what kind of antenna to use, how to deploy a wireless network securely for the enterprise and beyond, or why your clients keep failing to connect to the service.

Rudi van Drunen met the UNIX OS and friends about 25 years ago on VAX 11/750 at the University of Groningen (NL). Apparently the two got along pretty well, as nowadays he is employed as a senior infrastructure and UNIX consultant at Competa IT in the Netherlands. Before that, he was head of IT for a medical lab where he did a.o. UNIX system administration and applied research in image analysis and neural networks. He is one of the tech gurus and a founding board member of Wireless Leiden, the leading wireless community in the Netherlands. Rudi has his own small open source and hardware design company, Xlexit. He has taught a number of classes and given (invited) talks on wireless and other topics at events such as LISA and SANE, and for the Dutch UNIX community.

3:30 p.m.–4:00 p.m.   Break     
4:00 p.m.–5:30 p.m. Thursday
REFEREED PAPERS
Hall A-2

Close to the Hardware
Session Chair: Jeff Chase, Duke University

Evaluating Block-level Optimization Through the IO Path
Alma Riska, Seagate Research; James Larkby-Lahet, University of Pittsburgh; Erik Riedel, Seagate Research

DiskSeen: Exploiting Disk Layout and Access History to Enhance I/O Prefetch
Xiaoning Ding, Ohio State University; Song Jiang, Wayne State University; Feng Chen, Ohio State University; Kei Davis, Los Alamos National Laboratory; Xiaodong Zhang, Ohio State University

Short Paper: A Memory Soft Error Measurement on Production Systems
Xin Li, Kai Shen, and Michael C. Huang, University of Rochester; Lingkun Chu, Ask.com

INVITED TALKS
Hall A-3

MapReduce and Other Building Blocks for Large-Scale Distributed Systems at Google
Jeffrey Dean, Google

MP3 IconListen in MP3 format: Talk | Q & A

MapReduce is a programming model and an associated implementation for processing and generating large data sets. Users specify a Map function which processes a key/value pair to generate a set of intermediate key/value pairs, and a Reduce function which merges all intermediate values associated with the same intermediate key. Programs written in this functional style are automatically parallelized and executed on a large cluster of commodity machines. The MapReduce run-time system takes care of the details of partitioning the input data, scheduling the program's execution across a set of machines, handling machine failures, and managing the required inter-machine communication. This allows programmers without any experience with parallel and distributed systems to easily utilize the resources of a large distributed system. Thousands of MapReduce programs have been implemented, and several thousand MapReduce jobs are executed on Google's clusters every day. In this talk I'll describe the design and implementation of MapReduce and other building blocks for large-scale distributed systems at Google.

Jeff is a Google Fellow in Google's Systems Infrastructure Group. While at Google, he has worked on Google's crawling, indexing, query serving, and advertising systems and has built various pieces of Google's distributed computing infrastructure. Prior to joining Google, he was at DEC/Compaq's Western Research Laboratory, where he worked on profiling tools, microprocessor architecture, and information retrieval. Prior to graduate school, he worked at the World Health Organization's Global Programme on AIDS.

THE GURU IS IN
Ballroom H

VMware Virtual Infrastructure Tools and Techniques
John Arrasjid, Shridhar Deuskar, Irfan Ahmad, and team, VMware

Are you deploying a virtual infrastructure with VMware or similar virtualization technologies? Are you working to optimize tuning of your virtual infrastructure and virtual machines with them? Are you also looking at opportunities to enhance your disaster recovery capabilities? Are you interested in the suite of products and tools without a lot of marketing fluff?

This session will be an open session to discuss aspects of utilizing and tuning the virtual environment and the virtual machines running within. If you are interested in preparing for virtualization, please consider the F1: Introduction to VMware Virtual Infrastructure session that we will be presenting.

We will be providing an overview of the current technologies available from VMware. We will take questions from the participants with a focus around the VI3 environment and optimization and disaster recovery related questions. Several additional VMware team members will be present with specific areas of expertise for this in-depth session. We will provide feedback on VI3 (ESX Server and VirtualCenter), Lab Manager, desktop products (Workstation, Player, Fusion), VMware Server, and VDI.

TECHNICAL SESSIONS: Wednesday, June 20 | Thursday, June 21 | Friday, June 22

Friday, June 22, 2007
9:00 a.m.–10:30 a.m. Friday
REFEREED PAPERS
Hall A-2

Networked Systems
Srinivasan Seshan, Carnegie Mellon University

Addressing Email Loss with SureMail: Measurement, Design, and Evaluation
Sharad Agarwal and Venkata N. Padmanabhan, Microsoft Research; Dilip A. Joseph, University of California, Berkeley

Wresting Control from BGP: Scalable Fine-Grained Route Control
Patrick Verkaik, University of California, San Diego; Dan Pei, Tom Scholl, and Aman Shaikh, AT&T Labs—Research; Alex C. Snoeren, University of California, San Diego; Jacobus E. van der Merwe, AT&T Labs—Research

A Comparison of Structured and Unstructured P2P Approaches to Heterogeneous Random Peer Selection
Vivek Vishnumurthy and Paul Francis, Cornell University

INVITED TALKS
Hall A-3

Perfect Data in an Imperfect World
Daniel V. Klein, Consultant

MP3 IconListen in MP3 format: Talk | Q & A

It is no secret that we are at the dawn of the digital age—our parents (and, for some of us, even our grandparents) have computers, digital cameras, MP3 players, etc. We each have more computing power in our cell phones than the mainframes of 35 years ago had, and everywhere we find data acquisition and tracking systems. Privacy has never been more zealously guarded nor more freely abandoned, and with the proliferation of digital data collection and dissemination have come new worries.

What is being recorded, why, and by whom? With literally billions of computers around us, how can we keep our data (and ourselves) safe? How can we prevent misappropriation or misuse of information about ourselves? How can we ever expunge flawed records, urban legends, or embarrassing facts? We have become the elephant who never forgets, but what are we remembering?

This talk will take a look at what our world is becoming, and perhaps suggest what we can do to make it a little less imperfect.

Dan Klein began his life of crime in 2nd grade, when he was caught with a pack of firecrackers. Since then his brushes with authority have been sporadic but relentless, but have not managed to deny him a security clearance, a job, or his well-deserved reputation as an off-the-wall maverick. His computer experience has included simulation and process control, the internals of almost every UNIX kernel released in the past 28 years, and graphical user interface management systems.

THE GURU IS IN
Ballroom H

Security Is Broken
Rik Farrow, Security Consultant

Our computer security model is broken. In fact, it never really has worked well, but is even less suitable for today's users. In this session, I will explain why I feel that current security software and OS design are nothing more than band-aids, and why a totally new way of thinking about computer security is mandatory. Of course, I will be willing to answer more general computer security questions, but will lead off with "Security Is Broken." Plan on participating in a lively discussion.

Rik Farrow has been a consultant in computers, UNIX, and security since 1980, and is currently the Editor of ;login:. He has written two books, taught security courses internationally, and written over 200 magazine articles and columns.

10:30 a.m.–11:00 a.m.   Break     
11:00 a.m.–12:30 p.m. Friday
REFEREED PAPERS
Hall A-2

Kernels
Session Chair: Marc Fiuczynski, Princeton University/PlanetLab

Transparent Checkpoint-Restart of Multiple Processes on Commodity Operating Systems
Oren Laadan and Jason Nieh, Columbia University

Reboots Are for Hardware: Challenges and Solutions to Updating an Operating System on the Fly
Andrew Baumann, University of New South Wales and National ICT Australia; Jonathan Appavoo, Robert W. Wisniewski, Dilma Da Silva, and Orran Krieger, IBM T.J. Watson Research Center; Gernot Heiser, University of New South Wales and National ICT Australia

Short Paper: Exploring Recovery from Operating System Lockups
Francis M. David, Jeffrey C. Carlyle, and Roy H. Campbell, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

INVITED TALKS
Hall A-3

Human Computation
Luis von Ahn, Carnegie Mellon University

MP3 IconListen in MP3 format: Talk | Q & A

Tasks like image recognition are trivial for humans, but continue to challenge even the most sophisticated computer programs. This talk introduces a paradigm for utilizing human processing power to solve problems that computers cannot yet solve. Traditional approaches to solving such problems focus on improving software. I advocate a novel approach: constructively channel human brainpower using computer games. For example, the ESP Game, described in this talk, is an enjoyable online game—many people play over 40 hours a week—and when people play, they help label images on the Web with descriptive keywords. These keywords can be used to significantly improve the accuracy of image search. People play the game not because they want to help, but because they enjoy it. The ESP Game has been licensed by a major Internet company and will soon become the basis of their image search engine.

In addition, I describe my work on CAPTCHAs, automated tests that humans can pass but computer programs cannot. CAPTCHAs take advantage of human processing power in order to differentiate humans from computers, an ability that has important applications in practice.

The results of this work are currently in use by hundreds of Web sites and companies around the world, and over 300,000 people have played some of the games presented here. Practical applications include improvements in areas such as computer vision, image search, adult-content filtering, spam prevention, common-sense reasoning, accessibility, and security in general.

Luis von Ahn is an assistant professor in the Computer Science Department at Carnegie Mellon University, where he received his Ph.D. in 2005. Luis obtained a B.S. in mathematics from Duke University in 2000. He is the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship and was named one of Popular Science magazine's "Brilliant 10" scientists of 2006. His research interests include encouraging people to do work for free, as well as catching and thwarting cheaters in online environments.

THE GURU IS IN
Ballroom H

UNIX/Linux and Active Directory Interoperability
Gerald Carter, Open Source Developer, Samba Team/Centeris

Ever have a question about how to make UNIX hosts and/or services place nicely with Microsoft's AD domains or vice-versa? Then this session is for you. Stop by and bring your hardest or strangest UNIX/Linux/AD interoperability problems.

Gerald Carter has been a member of the Samba Development Team since 1998. He has been developing, writing about, and teaching on open source since the late 90's. He authored LDAP System Administration and the third edition of Using Samba for O'Reilly Publishing. Currently Gerald is employed by Centeris as a Samba and open source developer.

12:30 p.m.–2:00 p.m.   Lunch (on your own)

2:00 p.m.–3:30 p.m. Friday
REFEREED PAPERS
Hall A-2

Short Papers
Session Chair: Renu Tewari, IBM Almaden Research Center

Short Paper: Supporting Multiple OSes with OS Switching
Jun Sun, Dong Zhou, and Steve Longerbeam, DoCoMo USA Labs

Short Paper: Cool Job Allocation: Measuring the Power Savings of Placing Jobs at Cooling-Efficient Locations in the Data Center
Cullen Bash and George Forman, Hewlett-Packard Labs

Short Paper: Passwords for Everyone: Secure Mnemonic-based Accessible Authentication
Umut Topkara, Mercan Topkara, and Mikhail J. Atallah, Purdue University

Short Paper: Virtually Shared Displays and User Input Devices
Grant Wallace and Kai Li, Princeton University

INVITED TALKS
Hall A-3

Warehouse-scale Computers
Luiz André Barroso, Google Inc.

MP3 IconListen in MP3 format: Talk | Q & A

The computing systems that are powering many of today's large-scale Internet services look less like refrigerators and more like warehouses. Designing efficient warehouse-scale computers requires many of the traditional tools and methods developed by computer architects, and some new tricks as well. In this talk I'll describe some of the defining characteristics of these systems, with a focus on failure handling and power management.

Luiz André Barroso is a Distinguished Engineer at Google, where he has worked across several engineering areas, ranging from applications and software infrastructure to hardware design. Prior to working at Google, he was a member of the Research Staff at Compaq and Digital Equipment Corporation, where his group did some of the pioneering work on computer architectures for commercial workloads. That work included the design of Piranha, a system based on an aggressive chip-multiprocessing, which helped inspire many of the multi-core CPUs that are now in the mainstream.

Luiz has a Ph.D. degree in computer engineering from the University of Southern California and B.S. and M.S. degrees in electrical engineering from the Pontifícia Universidade Católica, Rio de Janeiro.

3:30 p.m.–4:00 p.m.   Break     
4:00 p.m.–5:30 p.m. Friday
Plenary Closing Session
Hall A-2

Crossing the Digital Divide: The Latest Efforts from One Laptop per Child
Mary Lou Jepsen, One Laptop per Child

MP3 IconListen in MP3 format: Talk | Q & A

A lot of people talk about the digital divide—I wanted to do something about it.

This effort emerged as a way to capture the endless momentum of Moore's Law and create a laptop for those far on the other side of the digital divide—the poor children of the world and their families. In fact, the vast majority of the world lives without so many of the things we consider essential, not least of which is access to education and information. This year, we intend to launch with millions of laptops simultaneously in Rwanda, Pakistan, Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, Libya, Nigeria, and Thailand. The children themselves will own these laptops, which will be distributed to them by the Ministries of Education. They should last for five years and are cheaper than five years' worth of textbooks in the average developing country.

We have not created a cost-reduced version of today's laptop; we have created an entirely new approach to the idea of a laptop, which I will discuss in some detail. It has three significant features you would like in your own laptop: (1) it is so low-power that it can make its own electricity, which is critical in a world where 50% of the kids have little or no access to electricity at home; (2) through mesh networking, it is its own hot spot; (3) it has a sunlight readable screen, which is key when so often in the developing world school is held under a tree. As we start mass production, many details of deployment, teacher preparation, content, in-country maintenance, and in-country networking are being finalized. I will discuss our latest efforts and plans in these areas.

Mary Lou Jepsen is co-founder and chief technology officer of One Laptop per Child, where she is responsible for overall hardware management. Previously she was a group executive at Intel and a co-founder and CTO of the MicroDisplay Corporation. She is widely regarded as a display technology pioneer. She is also a professor at the MIT Media Lab.

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Last changed: 18 Oct. 2007 ac