Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Events for March
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NL Seminar-Linguistic Annotation Using Video Games with a Purpose
Fri, Mar 04, 2016 @ 03:00 PM - 04:00 PM
Information Sciences Institute
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: David Jurgens, Stanford University
Talk Title: Linguistic Annotation Using Video Games with a Purpose
Series: Natural Language Seminar
Abstract: Building systems that understand human language often requires access to large amounts of text annotated with all the features and nuances of human communication. However, building these annotated corpora is often prohibitive due to the time, cost, and expertise required to annotate. While crowdsourcing the work can help, untrained workers still incur costs and the workers may not be as motivated to answer correctly. In this talk, I will describe how to solve this annotation bottleneck using video games in which traditional annotation tasks are transformed into core video game mechanics and embedded in the kinds of games you might play on your mobile phone. Our video games are not only fun to play but are capable of annotating a wide variety of linguistic phenomena at costs lower that crowdsourcing and have quality equal to that of experts. Using four games, I will demonstrate how their creation process can be distilled into reusable design patterns to create new games for different types of tasks in linguistics and beyond.
Biography: David Jurgens is postdoctoral scholar in the department of Computer Science at Stanford University. He received his PhD in Computer Science from UCLA in 2014 and has been a visiting researcher at HRL Laboratories, research scientist at Sapienza University of Rome and postdoctoral scholar at McGill University. His research focuses on two areas: natural language processing, where he works on new methods for understanding the meaning of text, and computational social science where he investigates population dynamics through peoples' language and demographics. He is currently a co-chair of the International Workshops on Semantic Evaluation (SemEval) and of the workshop on Natural Language Processing and Computational Social Science. His research has been featured in Forbes, MIT Technology Review, Business Insider, and Schneier on Security.
Host: Xing Shi and Kevin Knight
More Info: http://nlg.isi.edu/nl-seminar/
Location: Information Science Institute (ISI) - 11th Flr Conf Rm # 1135, 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. -
NL Seminar-Extracting Biomolecular Interactions Using Semantic Parsing of Biomedical Text
Fri, Mar 11, 2016 @ 03:00 PM - 04:00 PM
Information Sciences Institute
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Sahil Garg, USC/ISI
Talk Title: Extracting Biomolecular Interactions Using Semantic Parsing of Biomedical Text
Series: Natural Language Seminar
Abstract: We advance the state of the art in biomolecular interaction extraction with three contributions: (i) We show that deep, Abstract Meaning Representations (AMR) significantly improve the accuracy of a biomolecular interaction extraction system when compared to a baseline that relies solely on surface- and syntax-based features; (ii) In contrast with previous approaches that infer relations on a sentence-by-sentence basis, we expand our framework to enable consistent predictions over sets of sentences (documents); (iii) We further modify and expand a graph kernel learning framework to enable concurrent exploitation of automatically induced AMR (semantic) and dependency structure (syntactic) representations. Our experiments show that our approach yields interaction extraction systems that are more robust in environments where there is a significant mismatch between training and test conditions.
Biography: Sahil Garg is a PhD student, advised by Prof. Aram Galstyan, in computer science department of Viterbi school of engineering at University of Southern California. He is interested in problem oriented research. In the past, he developed machine learning, information theoretic algorithms for real world problems such as sensing environmental dynamics using mobile robotic sensors. In this talk, he is going to discuss his recent work on extracting bio-molecular interactions from bio-medical text using semantic parsing, especially in relevance to Cancer disease.
Host: Xing Shi and Kevin Knight
More Info: http://nlg.isi.edu/nl-seminar/
Location: Information Science Institute (ISI) - 11th Flr Conf Rm # 1135, 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. -
AI Seminar
Thu, Mar 24, 2016 @ 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Information Sciences Institute
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Johan Bollen, Univeristy of Indiana
Talk Title: Social factors in the quantification of online happiness
Abstract: More than 1/7th of the worlds population is actively using social media to establish and maintain social relations across linguistics, geographic, and economic boundaries. The introduction of social media has however had contradictory effects. Whereas as a social species we require social relations for our well-being, recent results indicate that widespread social media use leads to increased feelings of dissatisfaction and reduced happiness. The key to this paradox may lie in the unequal distribution of social relations in social networks and their interaction with collective and individual subjective well-being. In this talk I will highlight two results of our investigations of how subjective well-being interacts with, and is shaped by, the structural properties of large-scale social networks. Our research provides a framework for understanding how online social networking may have contradictory effects on collective happiness and well-being, and how to mitigate these effects
Biography: Johan Bollen is associate professor at the Indiana University School of Informatics and Computing. He was formerly a staff scientist at the Los Alamos National Laboratory and an Assistant Professor at the Department of Computer Science of Old Dominion University. He obtained his PhD in Experimental Psychology from the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB) in 2001. He has published more than 75 articles on computational social science, social media analytics, informetrics, and digital libraries. His research has been funded by the NSF, IARPA, and Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Johan lives inBloomington, Indiana with his wife and daughter. In his free time he enjoys P90x and DJing in the local Bloomington clubs as DJ Angst.
Host: Emilio Ferrara
Location: 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. -
AI Seminar-The Structure of Sequences Mining and Interpreting Networks from Event Log Data
Fri, Mar 25, 2016 @ 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Information Sciences Institute
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Brian Keegan, Harvard University
Talk Title: The Structure of Sequences Mining and Interpreting Networks from Event Log Data
Series: Artificial Intelligence Seminar
Abstract: Network science provides a rich set of theories and methods to understand the structure and dynamics of complex social, information, and biological systems. These approaches traditionally demand data with explicitly declared dyadic relationships or interactions such as friendship or affiliation. However, socio-technical systems like Wikipedia, Github, or Twitter often encode latent relationships within event logs and other databases. Temporal adjacencies in these event logs reveal sequences of actions that have complex and non-random properties that illuminate hidden structures within peer production systems. Using several case studies, I describe how complex networks can be extracted from event logs to understand the behavior of both users and artifacts within these systems. These networks encode a variety of rich structural and dynamic data distinct from traditional network approaches and illustrate user social roles within distributed collaboration as well as context and shifting interests of users based on their contributions. This approach has rich implications for mixed-methods research as it allows researchers to collapse large-scale event log data into more parsimonious network representations that can motivate qualitative analysis, visualization, and statistical modeling of complex behavior in socio-technical systems.
Biography: Brian Keegan is a research associate and data scientist for the Harvard Business School Hbx online learning platform. He received his PhD from the Northwestern University School of Communication in 2012 and was a post-doctoral research fellow in network and computational social science at Northeastern University until 2014. His research analyzes the structure and dynamics of online knowledge collaborations such as Wikipedia, Twitter, and online education under high-tempo and bursty conditions.
Host: Emilio Ferrara
Webcast: http://webcasterms1.isi.edu/mediasite/Viewer/?peid=0b39bdb4046d4835af24d94a23ddf6061dLocation: Information Science Institute (ISI) - 11th Flr Conf Rm # 1135, Marina Del Rey
WebCast Link: http://webcasterms1.isi.edu/mediasite/Viewer/?peid=0b39bdb4046d4835af24d94a23ddf6061d
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-Capturing More Linguistic Structure with Graph-Structured Parsing
Fri, Mar 25, 2016 @ 03:00 PM - 04:00 PM
Information Sciences Institute
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Jonathan Kummerfeld, Univ. of Berkeley
Talk Title: Capturing More Linguistic Structure with Graph-Structured Parsing
Series: Natural Language Seminar
Abstract: The correct interpretation of any sentence is obscured by a vast array of alternatives. Previous work on disambiguating meaning has focused on representations of syntax using tree structures. Simplifying syntax in this way often means leaving out long-distance relations between words, providing less information to downstream tasks such as dialog and question answering. We propose a new algorithm that is able to efficiently search over graph structures, fully capturing argument structures as a directed acyclic graph. Our dynamic program uniquely decomposes structures, and is sound and complete with respect to the class of one-endpoint crossing graphs.
Biography: Jonathan is a Ph.D. candidate at UC Berkeley working on natural language processing with Dan Klein. His research focuses on new algorithms for interpreting text and analyzing system behavior. In particular, he has built search-based error analysis tools for syntactic parsing and coreference resolution, and a graph-based syntactic parser.
Host: Xing Shi and Kevin Knight
More Info: http://nlg.isi.edu/nl-seminar/
Location: Information Science Institute (ISI) - 11th Flr Conf Rm # 1135, 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. -
RECRUITING SEMINAR
Tue, Mar 29, 2016 @ 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Information Sciences Institute
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Mayank Kejriwal, University of Texas at Austin
Talk Title: Populating a Linked Data Entity Name System
Series: Recruitng Seminar
Abstract: Resource Description Framework (RDF) is a graph-based data model used to publish data as a Web of Linked Data. RDF is an emergent foundation for large-scale data integration. An Entity Name System (ENS) is a thesaurus for entities, and is a crucial component in a data integration architecture. Populating a Linked Data ENS is equivalent to solving an Artificial Intelligence problem called instance matching, which concerns identifying pairs of entities referring to the same underlying entity.
This talk describes a system that automatically populates an ENS in a domain-independent fashion. Automation is addressed through inexpensive but well-performing heuristics that are used to generate a training set, which is employed by other machine learning algorithms in the pipeline. Data-driven alignment algorithms are adapted to deal with structural heterogeneity in RDF graphs. The full system is scaled by implementing it on cloud infrastructure using MapReduce algorithms.
Biography: Mayank Kejriwal is finishing up his Ph.D in Computer Science at the University of Texas at Austin under the supervision of Daniel P. Miranker. His research focuses on instance-level information integration in the Semantic Web, and has been published in the International Conference on Data Mining, the Journal of Web Semantics, the International Semantic Web Conference, and the Extended Semantic Web Conference, where he won a best paper award at the 4th annual Know@LOD workshop. Prior to joining UT Austin in 2012, he obtained a dual undergraduate degree in Computer Engineering and Engineering Physics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Host: Craig Knoblock
Webcast: Webcast:http://webcasterms1.isi.edu/mediasite/Viewer/?peid=cd1440ac1ea54794b12eab29e42d60ee1dLocation: Information Science Institute (ISI) - 11th floor Large CR
WebCast Link: Webcast:http://webcasterms1.isi.edu/mediasite/Viewer/?peid=cd1440ac1ea54794b12eab29e42d60ee1d
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Alma Nava / Information Sciences Institute
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. -
Cisco: Stream Processing in Practice
Tue, Mar 29, 2016 @ 11:00 AM - 12:20 PM
Information Sciences Institute
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Dr. Debojyoti Dutta, Cisco: Office of the CTO
Talk Title: Cisco: Stream Processing in Practice
Abstract: Networking is an example of a streaming paradigm in systems. We revisit the basics of networking and networked processing in particular and show how the same basic principles can be used to design real-world scalable streaming systems. We will touch upon streaming computations, frameworks, and event processing, via real world examples. We will cover what it takes to build streaming engines (e.g. a network switch or a data platform like http://ciscozeus.io). In addition we will also cover applied algorithms that work well for such streaming models.
Biography: Dr. Dutta is actively developing streaming analytics solutions for operational insight and actions including optimizing infrastructure for I/O(/data) intensive applications on Openstack, and other scalable platforms for cloud computing and software defined networks. His work has spanned social collaboration techniques, software defined networks, applied algorithms for data mining, IoT platforms, and Cloud Ops. Dr. Dutta is a USC alum and graduated with his PhD from USC in 2004.
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. -
AI SEMINAR
Wed, Mar 30, 2016 @ 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Information Sciences Institute
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Dr. Oren Etzioni, Chief Executive Officer of the Allen Institute for AI
Talk Title: Myths and Facts about the Future of AI
Series: AI Seminar
Abstract: AI recent success has led to excess. We see headlines like : Artificial Intelligence is Coming, and it Could Wipe Us Out if We are Not Careful, Professor Warns. While some successes are real (for example, AlphaGos amazing Go playing), many challenges remain. My talk will put AlphaGo (and related learning systems) in context, and attempt to debunk some of the popular myths about AI. I will conclude by talking about AI2s mission of AI for the Common Good-”as illustrated by our AI-based scientific search engine: Semantic Scholar (www.semanticscholar.org).
Biography: Dr. Oren Etzioni is Chief Executive Officer of the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence. He has been a Professor at the University of Washington's Computer Science department since 1991, receiving several awards including Seattle's Geek of the Year (2013), the Robert Engelmore Memorial Award (2007), the IJCAI Distinguished Paper Award (2005), AAAI Fellow (2003), and a National Young Investigator Award (1993). He was also the founder or co-founder of several companies including Farecast (sold to Microsoft in 2008) and Decide (sold to eBay in 2013), and the author of over 100 technical papers that have garnered over 25,000 citations. The goal of Oren's research is to solve fundamental problems in AI, particularly the automatic learning of knowledge from text. Oren received his Ph.D. from Carnegie Mellon University in 1991, and his B.A. from Harvard in 1986.
Host: Craig Knoblock
Webcast: http://webcasterms1.isi.edu/mediasite/Viewer/?peid=2d841545cb9d4a61bfc960a713d84e821dLocation: Information Science Institute (ISI) - 1135 - 11th fl Large CR
WebCast Link: http://webcasterms1.isi.edu/mediasite/Viewer/?peid=2d841545cb9d4a61bfc960a713d84e821d
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Alma Nava / Information Sciences Institute
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.
