SCD events

The summer school on Design and Security of Cryptographic Functions, Algorithms and Devices will take place in Albena (Bulgaria) from 30 June - 5 July 2013

The summer school is jointly organized by COSIC, KU Leuven; Incidence Geometry Group, UGent; ETRO, VUB and the Institute of Mathematics and Informatics, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences.

The school aims at bringing together PhD students, postdoc researchers and security experts from industry interested in the following topics:

• Boolean functions
• Block ciphers
• Hash functions
• Differential and linear cryptanalysis
• Implementation attacks
• Fault injection attacks
• Countermeasures
• Leakage-resilient cryptography
• White-box cryptography
• Security of embedded systems

The school will be organized as follows:

• 3 days of introductory lectures, including a half day with presentations by the participants in the school.
• 2 days parallel sessions with more advanced lectures on (1) Design and Cryptanalysis of SK algorithms and (2) HW/SW Security

CrossFyre 2013 is a 1 ½ day event that will take place from June 20th to June 21th, 2013 in Leuven, Belgium. The program will be announced shortly. You are kindly invited to attend and give a short presentation of your research topic to your fellow participants.

26th Simon Stevin Lecture on Optimization in Engineering

"Algorithmic Optimization: new challenges in the old field"

Yurii Nesterov
Department of Mathematical Engineering, Université catholique de Louvain (UCL)

Center for Operations Research and Econometrics (CORE)

Link to poster, link to flyer

Abstract

During the last decades, Optimization Theory was one of the most developing fields of Computational Mathematics. Now it consists of several powerful approaches, which can treat problems of very big size up to a high accuracy. In many cases, an intelligent use of problem structure allows to overcome the efficiency bounds of the standard optimization theory. At the same time, new randomized algorithms open a possibility of solving problems of practically unlimited dimension. Theoretical complexity analysis of optimization methods became a powerful tool for designing the new schemes, which are able to prove their superiority both in theory and in practical computations. Awareness of all these developments is important for people interested in different applications of optimization technique.

In this lecture, we describe the state of art in Convex Optimization. We start from discussion of general principles of complexity analysis and explain the key elements of classification of optimization problems and efficiency of optimization schemes.

Biographical Information

Yurii Nesterov is professor at the Department of Mathematical Engineering at the Catholic University of Louvain (UCL).

He studied at the Moscow State University where he obtained his master degree in 1977. He obtained his PhD degree in Applied Mathematics at the Institute of Control Sciences, Moscow, in 1984. Until 1992 he was researcher at the Central Economical and Mathematical Institute of USSR Academy of Sciences. In 1993 he became a professor at the Center for Operations Research and Econometrics (CORE) at INMA, Université Catholique de Louvain, where he is until today. Yurii Nesterov made important contributions to many areas of optimization, in particular Black-Box Convex Optimization, the theory of self-concordant functions and Interior-Point Methods, General Nonlinear Optimization, Positive polynomials and sums of squares, and approximate solutions of combinatorial problems. Among his many honors, he received the "George B. Dantzig prize" in 2000, which is awarded triennially by SIAM and the Mathematical Optimization Society for research which by its originality, breadth and scope has a major impact on the field of mathematical optimization and he also got the "John von Neumann Theory Price" from INFORMS in 2009.

About the Lecture Series:

The "Simon Stevin Lecture Series on Optimization in Engineering" is set up in order to promote optimization in engineering. For this aim, every quarter of the year an outstanding international scholar is invited to report on latest progress in the development of optimization algorithms and their applications in engineering.

Simon Stevin (1548-1620) was a Flemish mathematician and engineer. Among other, he helped to advance the use of decimal fractions, was the first to explain the tides by the attraction of the moon, and discovered the hydrostatic paradox. He made numerous inventions, among them a wind propelled carriage with sails, the "land yacht", which once impressed Prince Maurice of Orange as it moved faster than horses, in around 1600 on the beach between Scheveningen and Petten. Simon Stevin was fond of promoting the use of science in daily life and in craftmanship, and translated various mathematical terms into dutch. Among other, he introduced the dutch word for mathematics, "wiskunde".

Signal Processing for Monitoring Cerebral Hemodynamics in Neonates

10:30 - 10:40: Registration and Welcome

10:40 - 11:00: Prof. Sabine Van Huffel and Prof. Gunnar Naulaers
Introduction to Neonatal Brain Monitoring: Why? How?

11:00 - 11:30: Ir. Hans De Clercq
Wearable Electronics for Signal Acquisition at the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit

11:30 - 12:00: Prof. Martin Wolf
How to Measure Oxygenation by Near Infrared Spectroscopy (NIRS)?

12:00 - 12:30: Dr. Ilias Tachtsidis
Non-Invasive In-Vivo Brain Biomarkers in Perinatal Hypoxia-Ischaemia

12:30 - 13:00: Prof. Frank van Bel
NIRS-monitored Cerebral Oxygenation: Clinical Application in the Neonate

13:00 - 14:00: Lunch Break

14:00 - 16:30: Alexander Caicedo
Signal Processing for Monitoring Cerebral Hemodynamics in Neonates -PhD Defense-

16:30 - 18:00: Reception

PhD was lead by:

• Prof. Dr. Sabine van Huffel
• Prof. Dr. Gunnar Naulaers

Development of computational methods to detect copy number alterations in human genomes

Jury

• Prof. dr. ir. A. Bultheel, chairman
• Prof. dr. ir. Y. Moreau, promotor
• Prof. dr. ir. J. Vermeesch, co-promotor
• Prof. dr. ir. N. Buys
• Prof. dr. ir. B. De Moor
• Dr. ir. P. Van Loo
• Prof. dr. ir. O. C. Lingjaerde (Oslo university)

Programme

14h00-14h30: Arnaud Installé, ESAT-SCD (SISTA)
14h30-14h40: Questions and Discussion

14h40-15h10: Ben Van Calster, Department of Development & Regeneration, KU Leuven 15h10-15h20: Questions and Discussion

15h20-15h40: Coffee Break

15h40-16h10: Kirsten Van Hoorde, ESAT-SCD (SISTA)
16h10-16h20: Questions and Discussion

16h20-16h50: Laure Wynants, ESAT-SCD (SISTA)
16h50-17h00: Questions and Discussion

Perinatology is the medical field that is concerned with the health of mother and child before, during and after birth. Recent decades have seen important advances in perinatal monitoring technology, aimed e.g. at early detection of fetal asphyxia and impending premature birth, assessing fetal condition during delivery, assessing neonatal cerebral autoregulation status, and improving neonatal comfort. This symposium provides a survey of the state of the art and trends in this field, both from a technological and from a clinical perspective. The symposium serves also to honor Prof. Sabine Van Huffel, one of the leading specialists in perinatal monitoring, on the occasion of the award of her honorary doctorate by Eindhoven University of Technology.

Surrounding the symposium there will be an exhibition with scientific posters and real-life demonstrations (e.g. a smart neonatal mattress and jacket, serious obstetric game, electrophysiological pregnancy monitoring).

Jury

• Prof. dr. ir. Yves Willems, chairman
• Prof. dr. ir. S. Van Huffel, promotor
• Prof. dr. Bart Nuttin, promotor
• Prof. dr. ir. Carmen Bartic, promotor
• Prof. dr. ir. Mirjana Popovic (Belgrade University, Serbia)
• Prof. dr. ir. Maarten De Vos (University of Oldenburg, Germany)
• Dr. ir. Joleen H. Blok (Department of Clinical Neurophysiology, Erasmus MC, The Netherlands)
• Prof. dr. ir. Marc Van Hulle
• Prof. dr. ir. Robert Puers

In this talk, we describe a scalable and accurate quantum tomography (QT) recovery framework with approximation guarantees. Our objective is to accurately recover a d x d complex positive semi-definite (PSD) matrix X with a known rank r from dimensionality reducing measurements as y=A(X)+e, where A is a subsampled Pauli operator, and e is some bounded perturbation.

The QT problem has three salient aspects that set it apart from the existing low-rank recovery problems:

1. Standard nuclear norm minimization approaches are not directly applicable in QT since X is a PSD density matrix and must have a trace of 1.

2. The Pauli measurement operator A in QT creates a major scalability bottleneck as the range of its adjoint is fully dense and the size of X is exponential in the number of quantum bits q (qubits): d=2^q.

3. The Pauli measurement operator A has the rank restricted isometry property (RIP) from O(rdlog^6d) measurements.

We show how to achieve provable QT recovery in linear space and quadratic time (in d) and computationally demonstrate 16-qubit recovery from 4rd Pauli measurements. To this end, we derive new sparse simplex projections, leverage randomized SVD’s, and propose a new online subspace reweighting technique. We also describe how our algorithmic developments apply to seemingly different problems, where convex relaxations of the sparsity and rank appear as constraints, such as measure learning, Markowitz portfolio optimization, and metric learning problems.   

BIOMED workshop

Challenges in Biomonitoring

Thursday, February 21 2013, from 14h till 17h

PLACE:

KU Leuven, Department of Electrical Engineering, Kasteelpark Arenberg 10, 3001 Leuven,  room 01.60

Programme:

14h00-14h30:  Prof. Qun Wan, Chengdu, China

14h30-14h50: Yipeng Liu, ESAT-SCD

14h50-15h00: Questions and Discussion

15h00-15h20:  Devy Widjaja, ESAT-SCD

15h20-15h40:  Tim Willemen, BMe and ESAT-SCD

15h40-15h50: Questions and Discussion

15h50-16h10: Coffee Break

16h10-16h30: Carolina Varon, ESAT-SCD

16h30-16h50: Milica Milosevic, ESAT-SCD

16h50-17h00: Questions and Discussion

 "Shape and topology optimization of structural components: formulations and efficient solution algorithms"

prof. Pierre Duysinx (Department of Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering, ULg) 

ABSTRACT 

To face the challenge of higher performance and better energy efficiency, engineers call for efficient and rational tools to handle large and complex design problems. Combining computer aided design and mathematical programming algorithms provides an efficient and rationale approach to engineering design. Structural optimization has been developed now for more than 30 years with a growing success. Leading edge research is still pushing ahead the frontiers trying to solve larger scale problems, more general formulations, including more physics.

 Initiated by the pioneer work of Bendsøe and Kikuchi (1988), topology optimization is one of the most flexible and general approaches. The design problem is formulated as an optimum material distribution. Because of the bitmap description of the geometry, the formulation introduces a large number of design variables, so that a global performance function is generally preferred in the design problem statement. An interesting contribution consists in extending the scope of the minimum compliance problem to local design restrictions such as local material failure. We are also investigating strongly non-linear problems arising in MEMS design problems dominated by coupled electro mechanical behaviors.

 More recently, the (topology) optimal material description has been challenged by the novel level set description of the geometry. This implicit description of boundaries enables a flexible description of the geometry allowing a certain modification of the topology but with a smoother description of the shape. The level set description is naturally combined with the eXtended Finite Element Method (XFEM) to be able to relax the constraint of using conforming meshes, simplifying strongly the user interaction with the optimization process. The approach naturally enables a higher capability in handling various design constraints. For instance, level set description is applied to the shape optimization of flexible bodies subject to dynamics loading in complex multibody systems. Thus shape optimization using level set description provides a very nice complementary tool to topology optimization.

 Finally a major characteristic of the research approach that is developed lies in the great attention paid to tailor efficient solution algorithms coping with the larger and larger scale optimization problems. The approach relies on the so-called sequential convex programming approach: the implicit and non-linear optimization problem is replaced by a sequence of explicit approximations. Then the convex sub-problems are solved by resorting to efficient math programming algorithms, in particular the dual maximization optimizer.

(slides)

Hoewel niet altijd onderkend door de maatschappij, valt de bijdrage van vele ingenieurs tot de vooruitgang in de geneeskunde niet te onderschatten. De gebundelde krachten van de ingenieursfaculteit, de Faculteit Geneeskunde, IMEC en UZ Leuven zorgen zelf voor heel wat mooie voorbeelden en toepassingen op dit vlak. De bedoeling van deze forumavond is om een inzicht te geven in toekomstige technologische mogelijkheden en verwachtingen in de medische wereld, zowel vanuit het standpunt van de ingenieur als van de geneesheer.

De forumavond behandelt de complexiteit van ziektebehandeling en chirurgie en de rol die geneesheren en ingenieurs in het geheel spelen. Daarnaast wordt ook gesproken over de complexiteit van data- en signaalverwerking bij diagnose en behandeling van bepaalde ziektes en welke evoluties men mag verwachten in dit domein. Tot slot wordt een een toelichting gegeven rond de nieuwe discipline van synthetische biologie.

Daarna volgt een panelgesprek met alle sprekers om verder inzicht te krijgen in mogelijke spanningsvelden en oplossingen die de geneeskundigen en ingenieurs elkaar te bieden hebben.

Zeker en vast de moeite waard om te komen luisteren en kijken!

Volgende deskundige sprekers hebben hun medewerking verzekerd:

• Prof. Jan Goffin, dekaan van de Faculteit Geneeskunde, KU Leuven
• Prof. Bart Nuttin, Experimentele Neurochirurgie, UZ Leuven
• Prof. Sabine Van Huffel, Dept. Elektrotechiek - Faculteit Ingenieurswetenschappen, KU Leuven
• Prof. Bart De Moor, Wetenschappelijk directeur iMinds departement ' Future Health' , ESAT, KU Leuven

Start: 19.30 u., broodjes zijn voorzien vanaf 18.30 u. Na de forumavond is er gelegenheid tot napraten met de sprekers en de collega's tijdens een receptie.

Abstract:

In this workshop, we will give an overview of different techniques which have been developed in the framework of the POM2 project in order to maximize productivity of machines and minimize downtime. We will explain a step by step methodology for data driven modeling for run-by-run process optimization and apply it to a  wire processing application. We  have also invited an external speaker Fred Korpel,  Senior Process Research Engineer from Eastman Chemical Company who  will give a presentation about batch processing optimization in the chemical industry. Last but not least a poster session covering different related topics and techniques will be given combined with computer demos to show how these techniques can be practically deployed. 

Abstract

Optimization plays an important role in many machine learning methods. However, the two areas have very different focuses. The gap has caused that, on the one hand, some machine learning tasks may not suitably use optimization techniques, and on the other hand, optimization researchers may wrongly consider irrelevant issues when applying their methodology to machine learning. In this talk I will discuss my experiences on kernel and linear classification. In particular, we discuss support vector machines (SVM), which involve some challenging  optimization problems. As a machine learning researcher with an optimization background, I will show lessons learned in the past and how we eventually construct some widely used machine learning software. 

Biographical Information

Chih-Jen Lin is a distinguished professor at the department of computer science and information engineering at the National Taiwan University. He studied mathematics at the National Taiwan University where he obtained his Bachelor degree in 1993. He received his Master degree and his PhD from the department of industrial and operations engineering  of the University of Michigan in 1996 and 1998 respectively.  After some time as a research associate in Argonne national laboratory, in 1998 he became a professor at the  National Taiwan University, where he is now a distinguished professor. Chih-Jen Lin has received numerous other awards for his research and is, among other, a fellow of the IEEE.

Prof. Chih-Jen Lin will also give 2 tutorials on January 15th and 16th. see 

"Support vector machines and kernel methods: status and challenges" (link)

"Large-scale Machine Learning in Distributed Environments" (link)

About the Lecture Series:

The "Simon Stevin Lecture Series on Optimization in Engineering" is set up in order to promote optimization in engineering. For this aim, every quarter of the year an outstanding international scholar is invited to report on latest progress in the development of optimization algorithms and their applications in engineering.
Simon Stevin (1548-1620) was a Flemish mathematician and engineer. Among other, he helped to advance the use of decimal fractions, was the first to explain the tides by the attraction of the moon, and discovered the hydrostatic paradox. He made numerous inventions, among them a wind propelled carriage with sails, the "land yacht", which once impressed Prince Maurice of Orange as it moved faster than horses, in around 1600 on the beach between Scheveningen and Petten. Simon Stevin was fond of promoting the use of science in daily life and in craftmanship, and translated various mathematical terms into dutch. Among other, he introduced the dutch word for mathematics, "wiskunde". 

You are kindly invited to attend the following seminar:

“3C-­‐based technologies to study the shape of the genome”

By Wouter de Laat
Hubrecht Institute, The Netherlands
(http://www.hubrecht.eu/index.html)

Host: Prof. S. Aerts