BEGIN:VCALENDAR
VERSION:2.0
PRODID:-//Memento EPFL//
BEGIN:VEVENT
SUMMARY:IC Monday Seminars : Network Science and the Allure of Big Data: I
 nternet Connectivity as a Case Study
DTSTART:20120221T161500
DTSTAMP:20260610T024404Z
UID:58c932a8578466ea947c17104abb014b0a17a430f601cdd402b99993
CATEGORIES:Conferences - Seminars
DESCRIPTION:Walter Willinger\, AT&T Labs Research - Hosted by Prof. Patric
 k Thiran\nAbstract\nNetwork science prides itself on the fact that many of
  the new ideas that have contributed to its enormous popularity are based 
 on (big) data and meticulous observations. Unfortunately\, an inconvenient
  truth about most large-scale\, real-world\, and highly-engineered or high
 ly-evolved systems is that the many things we can and do measure about the
 se systems are generally not the quantities we want to measure. Largely un
 willing to deal with this inconvenient truth\, network science has more or
  less succeeded in making this discrepancy a non-issue by labeling scienti
 fic tasks such as assessing data quality or ensuring data hygiene as unnec
 essary\, small-minded\, and even counter-productive for scientific discove
 ry. The Internet is a prime example of a large-scale and highly-engineered
  real-world system where the available observations are everything but met
 iculous and where ignoring this inconvenient truth has resulted in new mod
 els\, theories\, and predictions that - despite their general appeal and h
 eadline-grabbing nature - have nothing to do with reality and quickly coll
 apse when scrutinized with carefully vetted measurements and readily avail
 able domain knowledge. Using a number of widely-used and easily-available 
 datasets of different types of Internet connectivity measurements\, I will
  illustrate in this talk what it means to get to know your data (i.e.\, as
 sessing its quality) and to develop a network science that is serious abou
 t big data and adamant about its proper use for scientific discovery.\n\nB
 iography\nWalter Willinger studied Mathematics at the ETH Zurich\, Switzer
 land\, and received the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from the School of ORIE\, C
 ornell University\, Ithaca\, NY. For the last 15 years\, he has worked at 
 AT&T Labs - Research\, the research arm of AT&T. Before that\, he was a Me
 mber of Technical Staff at Bellcore Applied Research (1986-1996)\, the res
 earch consortium that was jointly own by the 7 Baby Bells. He is a Fellow 
 of ACM (2005)\, IEEE (2005)\, AT&T (2007)\, and SIAM (2009)\, and for his 
 work on the self-similar (``fractal'') nature of Internet traffic\, he rec
 eived the 1996 IEEE W.R.G. Baker Prize Award from the IEEE Board of Direct
 ors\, the 1994 W.R. Bennett Prize Paper Award from the IEEE Communications
  Society\, and the 2006 "Test of Time" Paper Award from ACM SIGCOMM.
LOCATION:INM 202
STATUS:CONFIRMED
END:VEVENT
END:VCALENDAR