Please reply by Friday, August 13th by calling 213.740.2502]]> http://viterbi.usc.edu/cgi-bin/cal_make.pl?p1=EVE201008191530165000.000.008 WHAT: Computational Creativity from a Model of Music Cognition

WHO: Geraint Wiggins, Professor of Computational Creativity, Department of Computing, Goldsmiths' College

WHEN: Thursday, August 19, 2010, 3:30PM - 4:50PM

WHERE: EEB 248

Abstract: This talk is about computational modeling of a process of musical composition, based on a cognitive model of human behaviour. The idea is to try to study not only the requirements for a computer system which is capable of musical composition, but also to relate it to human behaviour during the same process, so that it may, perhaps, work in the same way as a human composer, but also so that it may, more likely, help us understand how human composers work. We take a purist approach to our modeling: we are aiming, ultimately, at a computer system which we can claim to be creative. Therefore, we must address in advance the criticism that usually arises in these circumstances: "a computer can't be creative because it can only do what it has explicitly been programmed to do". This argument does not hold,because, with the advent of machine learning, it is no longer true that a computer is limited to what its programmer explicitly tells it, especially in a relatively unsupervised learning task like composition (as compared with the usually-supervised task of learning, say, the piano). Thus, a creative system based on unsupervised machine learning can, in principle, be given credit for creative output, much as Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart is deemed the creator of The Magic Flute, and not Leopold Mozart, Wolfgang's father, teacher and de facto agent. Because music is a very complex phenomenon, we focus on a relatively simple aspect, which is relatively easy to isolate from the many other aspects of music: tonal melody. In order to compose music, one normally needs to learn about it by hearing it, so we begin with a perceptual model, which has proven capable of simulating relevant aspects of human listening behaviour better than any other in the literature. We also consider the application of this model to a different task, musical phras segmentation, because doing so adds weight to its status as a good, if preliminary, model of human cognition. We then consider using this model to generate tonal melodies, and show how one might go about evaluating the resulting model of composition scientifically. We place the discussion in the context of current models of creative cognition.

Biography: Geraint A. Wiggins has an MA from the University of Cambridge, in Mathematics and Computer Sciences, and PhDs from the University of Edinburgh, in Artificial Intelligence and in Musical Composition. He works in the Department of Computing and directs the Centre for Cognition, Computation and Culture at Goldsmiths, University of London, where he holds the Chair of Computational Creativity and leads the Intelligent Sound and MusicSystems (ISMS) research group. His research interests cover a wide range, centred around computational cognitive modeling of creative behaviour, particularly in the context of music, the aim being to understand better how human creativity arises, both in evolutionary and mechanistic terms, and to begin to understand how it works, on an individual basis. Geraint has published and co-published several practical and theoretical papers on computational creativity, and was responsible for the instigation of one of the workshop series (under the aegis of the AISB convention) which eventually merged to form the International Conference on Computational Creativity. He recently co-edited (with Irène Deliège) the first ever collection of papers dedicated to the cognitive psychology of musical creativity, Musical Creativity: Current Research in Theory and Practice (Psychology Press). He is an Associate Editor of Musicae Scientiae, the journal of the European Society for the Cognitive Sciences of Music, and a Consulting Editor of Music Perception, its North American counterpart. From 2000-2004, he was chair of AISB, the UK learned society for Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Science.

Host: Prof. Elaine Chew\N]]> http://viterbi.usc.edu/cgi-bin/cal_make.pl?p1=SEM201008191400150000.000.002 Hosted by Prof. Raghu Raghavendra

Abstract:\NAbstract: In hybrid ad hoc networks, most nodes are stationary, while only a few nodes move at a fast speed.\NBy exploiting the mobility assistance, the network performance, such as route quality and lifetime, can be\Nlargely improved. Specially, a few fast moving nodes (FNs) collect last encounter information while they are\Nmoving within the network. Whenever they encounter stationary nodes (SNs), they diffuse their last\Nencounter information to SNs. Based on the temporal-spatial correlation, both FNs and SNs can compute the\Ndistance with other nodes, therefore the last encounter information can guide route search. Accordingly, we\Ndevelop one mobility assisted routing scheme for so-called hybrid ad hoc networks. The analytical model is\Nalso addressed. Simulation results demonstrate that the route search cost is decreased significantly, and is\Nlinear with the distance between source and destination nodes. Simulation results also illustrate the validation\Nof the analytical model. Moreover, our other related work will be briefly introduced, such as messenger\Nnodes based routing, mobility assisted clustering, mobility assisted service discovery, and mobility assisted\Ndistributed certification.\NBiography:\NDr. Xiaojun Wu is an associate professor in the School of Software Engineering at Xi'an Jiaotong University\N(XJTU), Xi'an, China, where he is also an associate professor in the Department of Computer Science and\NTechnology. He received the B.S. degree in electrical engineering, the M.S. degree in computer science, and\Nthe Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering from XJTU in 1990, 1999, and 2002, respectively. His research\Ninterests include broadband mobile wireless Internet, next-generation wireless communication systems,\Npervasive computing (or ubiquitous networking), web science and service science. He is author (or coauthor)\Nof more than 40 publications. He joined XJTU in July 2005 following a postdoctoral fellowship at Tsinghua\NUniversity (THU), Beijing, China from July 2003 through June 2005. From July 1990 through October 1995,\Nhe was an engineer and programmer in the Tenth Research Institute of Ministry of Post and Telecom, Xi'an,\NChina. He received the Outstanding Ph.D. Grad Award of XJTU in 2002 and the Excellent Ph.D. Degree\NDissertation Award of XJTU in 2004.]]> http://viterbi.usc.edu/cgi-bin/cal_make.pl?p1=OTH201008270000000000.000.017 Reservations are required for Meet USC. This program occurs twice, once at 9:00 a.m. and again at 12:00 p.m. Please visit http://esdweb.esd.usc.edu/unresrsvp/MeetUSC.aspx to check availability and make an appointment. Be sure to list an Engineering major as your "intended major" on the webform!]]> http://viterbi.usc.edu/cgi-bin/cal_make.pl?p1=OTH201012100000000000.000.017 http://viterbi.usc.edu/admission/freshman/interviews/]]> http://viterbi.usc.edu/cgi-bin/cal_make.pl?p1=SEM201008231300150000.000.002 Thesis Abstract:\NPacket forwarding has long been a performance bottleneck in Internet infrastructure including routers and switches. While the throughput requirements continue to grow, power dissipation has emerged as an additional critical concern. Also, as the Internet constantly evolves, packet forwarding engines need to be flexible to enable future innovations. Although ternary content addressable memories (TCAMs) have been widely used for packet forwarding, they have high power consumption and are inflexible for adapting to new addressing and\Nrouting protocols.

This thesis studies the use of low-power memory technology such as static random access memory (SRAM)\Ncombined with field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) to develop high-throughput, power-efficient and\Nflexible solutions for various packet forwarding problems including IP lookup, packet classification and flexible flow matching.

We propose an algorithm-architecture co-design framework to map state-of-the-art packet forwarding\Nalgorithms onto SRAM-based parallel architectures. Several challenges for such mapping are addressed. High\Nthroughput is achieved via pipelining or multi-processing. Meanwhile, enabled by the architecture design, the algorithms are optimized to reduce the memory requirements to fit large forwarding tables in the on-chip memory. In addition to the power reduction achieved by replacing TCAMs with SRAMs, we propose\Narchitecture- and data structure -level optimizations to further lower the power consumption. We prototype our solutions on FPGA and demonstrate that they outperform the state-of-the-art with respect to throughput, memory requirement and power consumption.

Defense Committee: \NMurali Annavaram\NRamesh Govindan\NViktor K. Prasanna (Chair)]]> http://viterbi.usc.edu/cgi-bin/cal_make.pl?p1=STU201008231800220000.000.005 http://viterbi.usc.edu/cgi-bin/cal_make.pl?p1=WOR201008300000000000.000.017 Reservations are required for Meet USC. This program occurs twice, once at 9:00 a.m. and again at 1:00 p.m. Please visit http://esdweb.esd.usc.edu/unresrsvp/MeetUSC.aspx to check availability and make an appointment. Be sure to list an Engineering major as your "intended major" on the webform!]]> http://viterbi.usc.edu/cgi-bin/cal_make.pl?p1=WOR201008300000000000.000.017 Reservations are required for Meet USC. This program occurs twice, once at 9:00 a.m. and again at 1:00 p.m. Please visit http://esdweb.esd.usc.edu/unresrsvp/MeetUSC.aspx to check availability and make an appointment. Be sure to list an Engineering major as your "intended major" on the webform!]]> http://viterbi.usc.edu/cgi-bin/cal_make.pl?p1=OTH201008270000000000.000.017 Reservations are required for Meet USC. This program occurs twice, once at 9:00 a.m. and again at 12:00 p.m. Please visit http://esdweb.esd.usc.edu/unresrsvp/MeetUSC.aspx to check availability and make an appointment. Be sure to list an Engineering major as your "intended major" on the webform!]]>