With rapid development of networks and their proliferated applications, energy consumption of the networks has been a major concern for both network design, management, and applications. Routing protocols and algorithms have important effect on network energy consumption.

While substantial effort has been devoted to understand fraudulent activity in traditional online advertising (search and banner), more recent forms such as video ads have received little attention.

The increasing capabilities of mobile communication devices are changing the way people interconnect today. Similarly, almost ubiquitous connectivity is leading to the expectation that data and media are available everywhere and anytime. 

Traditionally, the vehicle has been the extension of the man’s ambulatory system, docile to the driver’s commands. Recent advances in communications, controls and embedded systems have changed this model, paving the way to the Intelligent Vehicle Grid.

With peta-bytes of data that are continuously collected about various aspects of the Internet, how hard can it be to obtain an accurate picture of its traffic, its physical topology (i.e., router-level Internet), its logical overlays (e.g., the Web, online social networks), or its “dark” sides and associated activities (i.e. cyber crimes)?

The talk will present concepts and basics of distributed computing which are important (at least from the presenter's point of view!), and should be known and mastered by researchers, and Master students. Those include: (a) a characterization of distributed computing (which is too much often confused with parallel computing); (b) the notion of a synchronous system and its associated notions of a local algorithm and message adversaries; (c) the notion of an asynchronous shared memory system and its associated notions of universality and progress conditions; and (d) the notion of an asynchronous message-passing system with its associated broadcast and agreement abstractions, its impossibility results, and approaches to circumvent them. Hence, the talk can be seen as a guided tour to key elements that constitute basics of distributed computing.

Understanding complex physical systems requires knowledge of the interactions among their constituents, in order to be able to predict emergent behaviors (i.e., of the system as a whole).

The main themes of the talk are the optimization of mobile crowd-sensing and recommender system platforms from the point of view of the system designer. In the first part of the talk, we first discuss optimization of mobile crowd-sensing campaigns in terms of total expected quality for a set of tasks to be accomplished, and in terms of compensation cost to task contributors.

To compete in sectors where the customer experience is increasingly digitized, companies are scrambling to expand their portfolio of innovations – from new products and enhanced processes to complementary services and new business models. In the process IT units are figuring out how to share responsibilities with, and coordinate the efforts of, internal stakeholder groups, such as marketing, operations and R&D, as well as the efforts of external parties, such as vendors, business partners, start-ups, and even individual contractors and hobbyists. This seminar will be an opportunity to learn about and discuss the most recent research insights from an MIT CISR research project on digital innovation.

Today's heterogeneous networks comprised of mostly macro cells and indoor small cells will not be able to meet the upcoming traffic demands. Indeed, it is forecasted that at least a 100x network capacity increase will be required to meet the traffic demands in 2020.