Jinlai Xu

PhD Student, School of Information Sciences
Graduate Student Assistant, The Laboratory for Education and Research on Security Assured Information Systems (LERSAIS)
University of Pittsburgh (PITT)
Email: xujinlai [at] gmail.com
Full Curriculum Vitae

RESEARCH INTERESTS:

Cloud Computing, Machine Learning, Computer Vision, Robotics.

EDUCATION

September 2015 - present: PhD (expected), Information Science University of Pittsburgh Advisor: Balaji Palanisamy
September 2012 - July 2015: Master of Software Engineering China University of Geosciences (211) Advisor: Zhongwen Luo
GPA – 89.9/100, Major GPA – 91.9/100
September 2008 - July 2012: Bachelor of Engineering in Software Engineering ,China University of Geosciences (211) Advisor: Zhongwen Luo
GPA – 88.6/100, Major GPA – 92.9/100, ranked 1st/96.

Introduction

This talk is by Mr. Anthony Fung.

Data is a huge asset to the Commonwealth. How do we turn data into value? What are the challenges that have been encountered to get to there? Find out what programs and initiatives the Secretary of Technology has been developing and underway to help the cause.

Thoughts

Data means money, Big Data means a lot of money. How to bring the data into money is a difficult question because there are many questions that need to be handled, just like how to get more precise data, how to extract information from huge data, how to protect the privacy of the data, etc.

Any of these is difficult but important for the processing of Big Data. Especially privacy problem, it’s important because if we cannot solve the problem, we cannot use the data in the public area to produce more value.

Introduction

This talk is by Dr. Miguel A. Labrador.

In this talk, Dr. Labrador will walk you through his research endeavors from 2000 when he graduated from Pitt until today. He will briefly touch on his past research on ATM networks, Active Queue Management, TCP friendliness and TCP variants, Wireless Mobile Ad Hoc Networks and Wireless Sensor Networks. He will show how these research activities smoothly transfer into Ubiquitous Sensing, his current area of research. Then, he will elaborate on the most important research challenges in this area and some of his recent results and projects. Finally, he will talk about an NSF-funded REU Site that he has been directing for more than 10 years and how useful it has been for his research and for the students.

Thoughts

How to find a research area is difficult for the new PhD student. From this topic, I get a way that is quit efficient. You can propose a topic from what you did before and compare that with what you want to do to change the people’s lives.

Then you can get the topic you can do for now. Dr. Miguel A. Labrador did ATM networks, Active Queue Management in the past research. But he smoothly transfers into Ubiquitous Sensing which is quite different from the previous topic. He just used the above mechanism. He thought about the works he did before and combined with them with the works which extract and illustrate the data from the mobile devices. Then he chose Ubiquitous Sensing and succeeded.

Introduction

This talk is by Dr. Michael Stonebraker.

This Turing Award talk intermixes a bicycle ride across America during the summer of 1988 with the design, construction and commercialization of Postgres during the late 80’s and early 90’s. Striking parallels are observed, leading to a discussion of what it takes to build a new DBMS. Also, indicated are the roles that perseverance and serendipity played in both endeavors.

Thoughts

That’s is the first time I saw the Turing Award owner. This is amazing because the person who has the award is not as different as I imaged before.

He talks about the experience in his bike travel across America compared with the path the Postgresql being proposed. Both are difficult but exciting. Every experience has its track with both Highs and lows. So the truth of success is to shine during highs and persist during lows.

Introduction

This talk is by Dr. Fred Schneider.

Cybersecurity today is focused largely on defending against known attacks. We learn about the latest attack and find a patch to defend against it. Our defenses thus improve only after they have been successfully penetrated. This is a recipe to ensure some attackers succeed—not a recipe for achieving system trustworthiness. We must move beyond reacting to yesterday’s attacks and instead start building systems whose trustworthiness derives from first principles. Yet, today we lack such a science base for cybersecurity. That science of security would have to include attacks, defense mechanisms, and security properties; its laws would characterize how these relate. This talk will discuss examples of such laws and suggest avenues for future exploration.

Thoughts

Security is a difficult question for all the systems. The philosophy aspect of security is also an important question every scientist in this area want to answer perfectly.

CIA(confidentiality, integrity, and availability) is the basic principle for security. There is a possibility that scientists can design a law to define the security, which is the ultimate goal in this area. If this is done, every system can make sure its security by obey this laws.