Events for February 12, 2016
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Multi-scale integration and modularity in complex dynamical systems
Fri, Feb 12, 2016 @ 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Information Sciences Institute
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Artemy Kolchinsky, Santa Fe Institute
Talk Title: AI Seminar-Multi-scale integration and modularity in complex dynamical systems
Series: Artificial Intelligence Seminar
Abstract: I will discuss two novel approaches to studying distributed organization in complex dynamical systems. In the first [1], we define an information-theoretic measure of the strength of integration at multiple scales, where scale is defined according to an underlying distance metric. We show that our method generalizes several existing complexity measures and is tractable to compute. As demonstrated on human resting state fMRI time-series data, it also captures important aspects of integration in network- and spatially-embedded systems.
In the second approach [2], we address modularity, a pattern of organization in which a system is composed of weakly-coupled subsystems. We develop a technique to decompose dynamical systems based on the idea that modules constrain the spread of perturbations. The method captures variation of modular organization across different system states, time scales, and in response to different kinds of perturbations. It also offers a principled alternative to community detection applied to statistical-dependency networks (e.g. correlation matrices or "functional networks").
[1] A Kolchinsky, MP van den Heuvel, A Griffa, P Hagmann, LM Rocha, O Sporns and J Goñi, Multi-scale Integration and Predictability in Resting State Brain Activity, Frontiers Neuroinformatics, 2014. http://journal.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fninf.2014.00066/abstract
[2] A Kolchinsky, AJ Gates, and LM Rocha, Modularity and the spread of perturbations in complex dynamical systems, PRE, 2015. http://arxiv.org/abs/1509.04386
Biography: Artemy Kolchinsky received his PhD from the Center for Complex Systems and Networks, Dept of Informatics, Indiana University Bloomington in 2015. He is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the Santa Fe Institute, collaborating on projects involving optimal compression of dynamical systems as well as thermodynamic constraints on computation. He is broadly interested in novel methods for understanding multivariate dynamics in application to computational neuroscience, evolutionary biology, and other complex systems.
Host: Greg Ver Steeg
Webcast: http://webcasterms1.isi.edu/mediasite/Viewer/?peid=f413ecae075e40eaa3f6b51123178b791dLocation: Information Science Institute (ISI) - 11th Flr Conf Rm # 1135, Marina Del Rey
WebCast Link: http://webcasterms1.isi.edu/mediasite/Viewer/?peid=f413ecae075e40eaa3f6b51123178b791d
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. -
Facebook's Datacenter and Backbone Networks
Fri, Feb 12, 2016 @ 12:00 PM - 01:20 PM
Information Sciences Institute
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Dr. Rishi Sinha, Facebook
Talk Title: Facebook's Datacenter and Backbone Networks
Abstract: This talk will cover the design, operational, performance and capacity issues in global networking for large online services, using Facebook as a case study. We will describe Facebook's datacenter and backbone network architecture, explain the characteristics and unique demands of traffic generated in serving a billion daily users, detail the motivations for Facebook's decisions to adopt a next-generation fabric network architecture and to design its own network switches and accompanying operating system, and provide insights into the protocol and software engineering work that is applied to solving performance and capacity challenges in Facebook's network. Finally, we will point to open areas for research and commercialization.
Biography: Dr. Sinha is a performance capacity engineer at Facebook and leads several projects on server capacity planning, network capacity planning, efficiency, and data center logistics. Prior to joining Facebook at 2012, he worked at Brocade where he developed analysis tools for flow control bottlenecks in storage networks, and at Akamai where he worked on reliability of real-time streaming. He has extensive experience in packet flow analysis, experimentation and implementation of internet-scale systems and has four patents on networking related technologies. Dr. Sinha is a Trojan and completed his PhD at USC in 2006.
Host: Alefiya Hussain
Location: Mark Taper Hall Of Humanities (THH) - 210
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-Recent Advances in Neural Machine Translation
Fri, Feb 12, 2016 @ 03:00 PM - 04:00 PM
Information Sciences Institute
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Thang Luong, Stanford University
Talk Title: Recent Advances in Neural Machine Translation
Series: Natural Language Seminar
Abstract: Neural Machine Translation (NMT) is a simple new architecture for getting machines to learn to translate. At its core, NMT is a single big recurrent neural network that is trained end-to-end with several advantages such as simplicity and generalization. Despite being relatively new, NMT has already been showing promising results in various translation tasks. In this talk, I will give an overview of NMT and highlight my recent work on (a) how to address the rare word problem in NMT, (b) how to improve the attention (alignment) mechanism, and (c) how to leverage data from other modalities to improve translation.
Biography: Thang Luong is currently a 5th-year PhD student in the Stanford NLP group under Prof. Chris Manning. In the past, he has published papers on various different NLP-related areas such as digital library, machine translation, speech recognition, parsing, psycholinguistics, and word embedding learning. Recently, his main interest shifts towards the area of deep learning using sequence to sequence models to tackle various NLP problems, especially neural machine translation. He has built state-of-the-art (academically) neural machine translation systems both at Google and at Stanford.
Host: Xing Shi 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.
