Dean of Graduate Studies > Events > President's Dream Colloquium > Fall 2012: Emergence and Complexity of Life
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Fall 2012: Emergence and Complexity of Life

Where did we come from? What is consciousness? Are we alone in the universe?

These profound questions have broad significance to all members of our community. From a scientific and philosophical perspective, the origin of life and the evolutionary progression leading to the emergence of human intelligence represents one of the most fundamental questions of our time.

Over the ages, a series of scientific revolutions have changed the way we think about ourselves and the universe we live in.

We are currently poised at the threshold of just such a revolution concerning our origins. Recent breakthroughs in our understanding of the origin of life and the spectacular discovery of thousands of extrasolar planets orbiting nearby stars in our galaxy makes a President’s Dream Colloquium on the emergence and complexity of life timely and exciting.

The series of lectures from internationally recognized experts will incorporate four interlocking themes:

  • Origins of life on Earth
  • Evolving ever-increasing complexity
  • I think, therefore I am
  • Is there anybody else I can talk to?

Graduate students will be the focal point of this colloquium, as they will be responsible for synthesizing background material from a broad range of fields and for presenting the ideas and results of more specialized papers to their colleagues from other disciplines.

Each colloquium will be set up as six bi-weekly seminars led by six different renowned experts in their field.

Each seminar topic will have a two-week focus: In the first week, the group will meet to discuss materials relevant to the following week's seminar, which will be led by the guest speaker. There will be a final student presentation or collaborative project.

Organizers
Nancy Forde, Associate Professor, Physics
Peter Unrau, Associate Professor, Molecular Biology and Biochemistry

Participating Faculty
Holly Andersen, Philosophy
David Boal, Physics
Rosemary Cornell, MBB
Phil Hanson, Philosophy
Harald Hutter, Biological Sciences
Charles Krieger, Biomedical Physiology and Kinesiology (BPK)
Dan Marigold, BPK
John McDonald, Psychology
Ralph Mistlberger, Psychology
Lynne Quarmby, MBB
Lisa Shapiro, Philosophy
Michael Silverman, Biological Sciences

Learn More

If you'd like to be notified about anything related to the Dream Colloquium, please let us know via websurvey. We'll also let you know about any other public events associated with each guest speaker.

If you would like to reserve for the free public lectures, please see the schedule page.

Downloads

* Colloquium-Fall2012-course.pdf
Course description
* ColloquiumApplication-Grad.pdf
Graduate students
* ColloquiumApplication-UGrad.pdf
Senior undergraduates
* Colloquium poster.pdf
Colloquium Poster
* Seager-Exoplanets.pdf
Poster for Sara Seager lectures

About

All SFU graduate students and senior undergraduates may register with permission of their departments. Graduate students in the following departments have been pre-approved to take this course for credit towards their degrees:

  • Biology
  • Biomedical Physiology and Kinesiology
  • Molecular Biology and Biochemistry
  • Philosophy
  • Physics
  • Psychology

Enrolment in the colloquium will be capped at 20 registrants, and admission will be by application only.

Colloquium start date: September 14, 2012

Search the Graduate Studies website

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Defences and Events

  • Adhi Susilo PhD Education Thesis Examination
    10:00 AM - 1:00 PM
    May 30, 2013
    No Description
  • Haiyang Wang, Phd defence, Comp Sci
    11:30 AM - 1:30 PM
    May 30, 2013
    Ph.D. Thesis DEFENSE HAIYANG WANG Master from Tongji University, CHINA 2005 Thursday May 30th, 2013 11:30 a.m. TASC1 9204 West FROM PEERS TO CLOUDS: DISTRIBUTED RESOURCES FOR CONTENT DELIVERY AND USER COLLABORATION In this thesis, we tackle the problem of content delivery and user collaboration with emerging Internet technologies. Our investigation starts from peer-to-peer (P2P) sharing with social relations to contemporary cloud computing with flexible resource provisioning. We seek to leverage distributed resources for efficient sharing and collaboration, which leads to a hybrid system design that seamlessly bridges users' local resources to public datacenters. We first explore social-network-based optimizations in peer-to-peer content delivery. We give solid evidences that long-term social relations can be found and applied to enhance the sharing efficiency in peer-to-peer networks, and present practical implementation strategies for the popular BitTorrent system. We then investigate the performance of cloud-based file synchronization applications and identify the bottlenecks in their system design, in particular, the task interferences. We propose an interference-aware provisioning algorithm, which effectively mitigates the problem. We further examine the users' interactions in state-of-the-art cloud-based distributed interactive applications. We find that, despite the benefit in terms of cost savings and better scalability, the cloud-based deployment greatly increases the users' interaction latency. We demonstrate that a smart assignment algorithms for virtual machines can remarkably reduce such latency. Finally, we present a real-world system design that effectively bridges users' local resources to enterprise cloud platforms. Our measurements as well as system analysis indicate that it serves as a complement of great potentials to enterprise cloud services. Ph.D. Examining Committee: Dr. Jiangchuan Liu, Senior Supervisor Dr. Mohamed Hefeeda, Supervisor Dr. Qianping Gu, Internal Examiner Dr. Kui Ren, External Examiner Dr. Steven Pearce, Chair
  • PhD Defence, Haiyang Wang, Comp Sci
    11:30 AM - 1:30 PM
    May 30, 2013
    Ph.D. Thesis DEFENSE HAIYANG WANG Master from Tongji University, CHINA 2005 Thursday May 30th, 2013 11:30 a.m. TASC1 9204 West FROM PEERS TO CLOUDS: DISTRIBUTED RESOURCES FOR CONTENT DELIVERY AND USER COLLABORATION In this thesis, we tackle the problem of content delivery and user collaboration with emerging Internet technologies. Our investigation starts from peer-to-peer (P2P) sharing with social relations to contemporary cloud computing with flexible resource provisioning. We seek to leverage distributed resources for efficient sharing and collaboration, which leads to a hybrid system design that seamlessly bridges users' local resources to public datacenters. We first explore social-network-based optimizations in peer-to-peer content delivery. We give solid evidences that long-term social relations can be found and applied to enhance the sharing efficiency in peer-to-peer networks, and present practical implementation strategies for the popular BitTorrent system. We then investigate the performance of cloud-based file synchronization applications and identify the bottlenecks in their system design, in particular, the task interferences. We propose an interference-aware provisioning algorithm, which effectively mitigates the problem. We further examine the users' interactions in state-of-the-art cloud-based distributed interactive applications. We find that, despite the benefit in terms of cost savings and better scalability, the cloud-based deployment greatly increases the users' interaction latency. We demonstrate that a smart assignment algorithms for virtual machines can remarkably reduce such latency. Finally, we present a real-world system design that effectively bridges users' local resources to enterprise cloud platforms. Our measurements as well as system analysis indicate that it serves as a complement of great potentials to enterprise cloud services. Ph.D. Examining Committee: Dr. Jiangchuan Liu, Senior Supervisor Dr. Mohamed Hefeeda, Supervisor Dr. Qianping Gu, Internal Examiner Dr. Kui Ren, External Examiner Dr. Steven Pearce, Chair

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