Albion College Mathematics and Computer Science Colloquium

 Title: Multisource network broadcasting: explorations in theory rather than practice, an open problem, and the dark side of research. Speaker: Harold ConnamacherAssistant ProfessorDepartment of Mathematics and Computer ScienceAlbion College Abstract: Imagine that you are the head of development for a media company that is going to broadcast a show on the internet. You have a large number of subscribers that need to receive the broadcast, and both to speed the data transmission and to protect yourself in the event of network or machine problems, you have multiple broadcast sources at different locations on the internet. Your goal is to get the broadcast to the subscribers as quickly as possible. One solution is to flood the network. While this solves the problem, other internet users may not appreciate your hogging the bandwidth. Another possibility is to compute a tree that spans the portion of the network containing the sources and subscribers and to send the transmission along the edges of the tree. It turns out that how we define "as quickly as possible" has a huge effect on both the type of tree we need to compute and how easy or hard it is to compute the tree. This talk will explore these differences, demonstrate techniques used in theoretical computer science, present a possible research problem for interested students, and on the way we will expose a bit of the dark side of research. Location: Palenske 227 Date: 11/10/2005 Time: 3:10 PM

@abstract{MCS:Colloquium:HaroldConnamacherAssistantProfessorDepartmentofMathematicsandComputerScienceAlbionCollege:2005:11:10,
author  = "{Harold ConnamacherAssistant ProfessorDepartment of Mathematics and Computer ScienceAlbion College}",
title   = "{Multisource network broadcasting: explorations in theory rather than practice, an open problem, and the dark side of research.}",
address = "{Albion College Mathematics and Computer Science Colloquium}",
month   = "{10 November}",
year    = "{2005}"
}