Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Events for February
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AI Seminar-Metaphor: Linguistic Anthropology Meets Computational Linguistics
Fri, Feb 13, 2015 @ 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Information Sciences Institute
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Jerry Hobbs and Suzanne Wertheim, USC/ISI
Talk Title: Metaphor: Linguistic Anthropology Meets Computational Linguistics
Series: Artificial Intelligence Seminar
Abstract: Metaphors are more than just colorful or poetic linguistic expressions. They are also cognitive models that permeate both thought and speech, comparing categories and scenarios, and contributing to the shared set of understandings that we commonly refer to as âculture.â The MICS project, led by ISI since 2011, has been researching and creating solutions to problems posed by natural language processing of metaphor. When in Year 3 of the program, the focus was shifted from automatic metaphor identification and categorization to automated cross-cultural comparisons, computer science alone was not enough to solve the problems posed by the new tasking. In this talk, we will describe the collaboration between linguistic anthropology and computational linguistics that resulted both in a new theoretical framework of metaphorical structure and in a successful end-to-end system that produces meaningful category comparisons with minimal human interference.
Biography: Jerry Hobbs Bio:
Dr. Jerry R. Hobbs is a prominent researcher in the fields of computational linguistics, discourse analysis, and artificial intelligence. He earned his doctor's degree from New York University in 1974 in computer science. He has taught at Yale University and the City University of New York. >From 1977 to 2002 he was with the Artificial Intelligence Center at SRI International, Menlo Park, California, where he was a Principal Scientist and Program Director of the Natural Language Program. He has written numerous papers in the areas of parsing, syntax, semantic interpretation, information extraction, knowledge representation, encoding commonsense knowledge, discourse analysis, the structure of conversation, and the Semantic Web. He has done groundbreaking work in the areas of granularity, representing qualitative concepts, encoding commonsense psychology, and interpreting natural language using abduction. He is the author of the book "Literature and Cognition", and was also editor of the book "Formal Theories of the Commonsense World". He led SRI's text-understanding research, and directed the development of the abduction-based TACITUS system for text understanding, and the FASTUS system for rapid extraction of information from text based on finite-state transducers. The latter system constituted the basis for an SRI spinoff, Discern Communications. In September 2002 he took a position as research professor and ISI Fellow at the Information Sciences Institute, University of Southern California, where he is now a Chief Scientist. He has been a consulting professor with the Linguistics Department and the Symbolic Systems Program at Stanford University. He has served as general editor of the Ablex Series on Artificial Intelligence. He is a past president of the Association for Computational Linguistics, and is a Fellow of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence. In January 2003 he was awarded an honorary Doctorate of Philosophy from the University of Uppsala, Sweden. In August 2013 he received the Association for Computational Linguistics Lifetime Achievement Award.
Suzanne Wertheim Bio:
Since completing her Ph.D. at Berkeley, Suzanne Wertheim has taught both linguistics and linguistic anthropology at Northwestern, Georgetown, and UCLA. Dr. Wertheim has been collaborating with computer scientists since 2007, and in 2011, she founded Worthwhile Research & Consulting, which specializes in research involving language and culture. Her research interests include the intersection of linguistic anthropology and AI; intercultural communication; bilingualism; and language and gender.
Host: Ashish Vaswani
Webcast: http://webcasterms1.isi.edu/mediasite/Viewer/?peid=67b78c7d28ce4e0da1029e7af24445d81dLocation: Information Science Institute (ISI) - 11th Flr Conf Rm # 1135, Marina Del Rey
WebCast Link: http://webcasterms1.isi.edu/mediasite/Viewer/?peid=67b78c7d28ce4e0da1029e7af24445d81d
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Peter Zamar
This event is open to all eligible individuals. USC Viterbi operates all of its activities consistent with the University's Notice of Non-Discrimination. Eligibility is not determined based on race, sex, ethnicity, sexual orientation, or any other prohibited factor. -
NL Seminar- Efficient Computation of Substring Posteriors from Lattices using Weighted Factor Automata
Fri, Feb 13, 2015 @ 03:00 PM - 04:00 PM
Information Sciences Institute
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Dogan Can, USC/SAIL
Talk Title: Efficient Computation of Substring Posteriors from Lattices using Weighted Factor Automata
Series: Natural Language Seminar
Abstract: Efficient computation of substring posteriors from lattices has applications in the estimation of document frequencies in spoken corpora and lattice-based minimum Bayes-risk decoding in statistical machine translation. In this talk, we present a new algorithm for exact substring posterior computation that leverages the following observations to speed up computation: i) the set of substrings for which the posteriors will be computed typically comprises all n-grams in the lattice up to a certain length, ii) posterior probability is equivalent to expected count for substrings that do not repeat on any path of the input lattice, iii) there are efficient algorithms for computing expected counts from lattices. We present experimental results comparing our algorithm with the best known algorithm in literature as well as a baseline algorithm based on finite state automata operations.
Biography: Dogan Can is a fifth year Ph.D. student at USC SAIL (Signal Analysis and Interpretation Lab). He works with Professor Shrikanth Narayanan on a range of topics including lattice indexing for spoken information retrieval, concurrent/online speech processing architectures and statistical modeling of psychotherapy sessions. His research interests include weighted finite state automata, automatic speech recognition, information retrieval, dialogue modeling and behavioral informatics.
Host: Nima Pourdamghani and Kevin Knight
More Info: http://nlg.isi.edu/nl-seminar/
Location: Information Science Institute (ISI) - 6th Flr Conf Rm # 689, Marina Del Rey
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Peter Zamar
Event Link: http://nlg.isi.edu/nl-seminar/
This event is open to all eligible individuals. USC Viterbi operates all of its activities consistent with the University's Notice of Non-Discrimination. Eligibility is not determined based on race, sex, ethnicity, sexual orientation, or any other prohibited factor. -
Creativity in People and Computers
Wed, Feb 18, 2015 @ 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Information Sciences Institute
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Paul Thagard, University of Waterloo
Talk Title: Creativity in People and Computers
Abstract: Abstract: An idea is creative if it is new, valuable, and surprising. This talk will describe neural mechanisms for human creativity, including multimodal representations, binding of representations into new ones, and competition among them to become conscious. These mechanisms contrast with current computational models of creativity such as Chef Watson, but suggest how computers might become more creative.
Biography: Paul Thagard is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Waterloo.
His most recent books are The Brain and the Meaning of Life (Princeton University Press, 2010) and The Cognitive Science of Science: Explanation, Discovery, and Conceptual Change (MIT Press, 2012).
Host: Greg Ver Steeg
Location: Information Science Institute (ISI) - 11th floor large conference room
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Kary LAU
This event is open to all eligible individuals. USC Viterbi operates all of its activities consistent with the University's Notice of Non-Discrimination. Eligibility is not determined based on race, sex, ethnicity, sexual orientation, or any other prohibited factor. -
Introduction to Internetworking
Fri, Feb 20, 2015 @ 02:00 PM - 03:00 PM
Information Sciences Institute
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Dr. Mujtaba Khambatti, Bing Search Engine
Talk Title: Why do we care about Performance
Abstract: This talk will discuss Bings approach to web performance. Bing is known for its rich search experiences that powers over a third of all US search traffic (from Bing.com, Yahoo, Baidu, Siri, Windows search, and several mobile entry points). Despite the richness and the high volume of traffic, it remains a superfast site, delivering results within a couple blinks of an eye. This is possible due to a deep rooted culture that balances speed with a desire to deliver beautiful experiences to its users; and several technical investments to improve performance like browser side enhancements, rendering enhancements, network/CDN optimizations, and server optimizations. The talk will dive into details on several of these technology investments including how Bing is able to measure performance at scale for hundreds of millions of page views daily. Bingâs focus on improving search speed has shown a provable impact to user engagement and revenue thereby fueling an even greater investment in web performance across Bing. Mujtaba will also share some of the advanced creative ideas like HTTP2, smart network caching, and so on that are being explored with the intent to reduce all unneeded latency in the search experience. Bing believes in the quest to create engaging websites that are both beautiful and fast, something nearly all websites need to have. This talk will share an approach that is essential to the success of any web property (websites, web apps, services) in the new Web 2.0 world.
Biography: Dr. Mujtaba Khambatti is a Principal Program Manager Lead in the Bing team at Microsoft. He runs several engineering teams that power the engine of Bing. He currently runs the web performance team, the UX platform team that powers Bingâs experiences across tablet, mobile and desktop devices, the Bing API team that creates and manages access to Bing search via REST APIs, and the Agility/Core Engineering team. In the past he worked in Windows on various engineering teams doing work on OS reliability, servicing and security. Here he managed engineering of monthly security & non-security updates to 1 billion Windows users worldwide, built several features to improve key reliability concerns like: Recovery, Hang Reporting, Resource Exhaustion Prevention, and Reliability Monitor. He is the recipient of numerous corporate awards for team and technical success including 5 engineering excellence awards. Mujtaba received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Arizona State University (2003).
Host: Alefiya Hussain
Location: SLH 100
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Alefiya Hussain
This event is open to all eligible individuals. USC Viterbi operates all of its activities consistent with the University's Notice of Non-Discrimination. Eligibility is not determined based on race, sex, ethnicity, sexual orientation, or any other prohibited factor. -
NL Seminar: Semantic Parsing as Machine Translation
Fri, Feb 20, 2015 @ 03:00 PM - 04:00 PM
Information Sciences Institute
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Jonathan May, USC/ISI
Talk Title: Semantic Parsing as Machine Translation
Series: Natural Language Seminar
Abstract: We cast the generation of semantic graphs from natural language text as a machine translation problem, where the source language is English and the target language is a labeled graph representing a semantic interpretation, known as an Abstract Meaning Representation (AMR). Via a series of data transformations we create a training set that is amenable to a string-to-tree syntax mt decoder. Previous work in SBMT and AMR parsing is combined to yield a trainable system that achieves state-of-the-art parsing results.
Biography: Jonathan May is a computer scientist at USC-ISI, where he also received a PhD in 2010. His current focus areas are in machine translation, machine learning, and natural language understanding. Jonathan co-developed and patented a highly portable method for optimizing thousands of features in machine translation systems that has since been incorporated into all leading open source MT systems. He has previously worked in automata theory and information extraction and at SDL Language Weaver and BBN Technologies.
Host: Nima Pourdamghani and Kevin Knight
More Info: http://nlg.isi.edu/nl-seminar/
Location: Information Science Institute (ISI) - 6th Flr Conf Rm # 689, Marina Del Rey
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Peter Zamar
Event Link: http://nlg.isi.edu/nl-seminar/
This event is open to all eligible individuals. USC Viterbi operates all of its activities consistent with the University's Notice of Non-Discrimination. Eligibility is not determined based on race, sex, ethnicity, sexual orientation, or any other prohibited factor. -
Seminar Series
Thu, Feb 26, 2015 @ 02:00 PM - 03:00 PM
Information Sciences Institute
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Dr. Anuradha Annaswamy , MIT Mechanical Engineering
Talk Title: Decision and Control in Energy Cyber Physical Systems
Abstract: Any physical system with a rudimentary level of complexity includes interaction with a cyber structure that helps, monitors, predicts, or manages its function. As the level of complexity increases, this interaction between the cyber and physical components needs to be specific, systematic, nuanced, and robust. The field of study that pertains to these interactions, collectively known as
Cyber Physical Systems (CPS), is an emerging topic of significant attention both nationally and
globally. Several areas in science and technology including transportation, healthcare, energy generation and distribution, and manufacturing automation are witnessing significant research activities related to CPS. Our laboratory has focused on a key area in CPS, pertaining to fundamental decision and control tools for Smart Grid, an ideal example of a physical world interacting with the
cyberworld of computations and communications through control. The challenges due to increased
penetration of renewables, combined presence of uncertainties in both the cyber and physical world,
complexities due to the simultaneous control of several applications, limited resources, and complex
platform architectures, and stringent performance specifications have led us to the development of
novel methodologies. In this talk, I will present the underpinnings of such methods in energy CPS,
examples, and recent results.
Biography: Dr. Anuradha Annaswamy received the Ph.D. degree in Electrical Engineering from Yale
University in 1985. She has been a member of the faculty at Yale, Boston University, and MIT where
currently she is the director of the Active Adaptive Control Laboratory and a Senior Research Scientist
in the Department of Mechanical
Engineering. Her research interests pertain to adaptive control theory and applications to aerospace
and automotive control, active control of noise in thermofluid systems, control of autonomous
systems, decision and control in smart grids, smart cities, and critical infrastructures, and codesign of
control and platform architectures in cyber physical systems.
Dr. Annaswamy has received several awards including the George Axelby and Control Systems
Magazine best paper awards from the IEEE Control Systems Society, the Presidential Young
Investigator award from the National Science Foundation, the Hans Fisher Senior Fellowship from the
Institute for Advanced Study at the Technische Universität München in 2008, and the Donald Groen
Julius Prize for 2008 from the Institute of Mechanical Engineers. Dr. Annaswamy is a Fellow of the
IEEE and a member of AIAA.
Dr. Annaswamy is an active member of the IEEE Control Systems Society (CSS) and the American
Automatic Control Council. She was a nominated and elected member of the CSS Board of Governors
for 1993 and 2010 to 2012, respectively. She was a Program Chair of the American Control
Conference (ACC) during 2003, General Chair of the 2008 ACC, and Program Chair for the 2nd
Virtual Control Conference on Smart Grid Technology. Currently she is the Vice President for
Conference Activities in the IEEE CSS Executive Committee.
Dr. Annaswamy is a co-editor of the IEEE CSS report on Impact of Control Technology: Overview,
Success Stories, and Research Challenges, 2011 (1st Edition) and 2014 (2nd Edition) along with Tariq
Samad. She is the project lead on the publication, âVision for Smart Grid Controls: 2030 and Beyond,â
(Eds: A.M. Annaswamy, M. Amin, C. DeMarco and T. Samad), 2013.
Host: Alefiya Hussain and Petros Ioannou
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 248
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Alefiya Hussain
This event is open to all eligible individuals. USC Viterbi operates all of its activities consistent with the University's Notice of Non-Discrimination. Eligibility is not determined based on race, sex, ethnicity, sexual orientation, or any other prohibited factor.
