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Events for October 09, 2015
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AI SEMINAR
Fri, Oct 09, 2015 @ 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Information Sciences Institute
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Pedro Szekely, Research Associate Professor
Talk Title: Domain Specific Search Where No Search Has Gone Before
Series: AI Seminar
Abstract: We are investigating crawling, extraction, alignment, entity resolution, database and indexing technologies to enable rapid creation of large domain-specific knowledge graphs. We are also investigating analytics, query and visualization techniques that use these graphs to deliver sophisticated, yet easy to use query and analysis capabilities to end-users. Our goal is to build technology that can use any source of information on the Web, including Web pages and services, text, images, text-delimited files and databases, and that scales to 1 billion Web pages. The project is a collaboration of the ISI information integration and natural language processing groups, Columbia University (deep learning for image analysis), JPL (Web crawling), Inferlink (extraction from Web pages and entity resolution) and NextCentury (user interface and visualization). The MEMEX program runs at a frantic pace (interview and demos in CBS 60 minutes, briefings and demos in the White House situation room, deployment to law enforcement in February 2015). The talk will cover the goals and key challenges of the project, and describe the system we built in several domains, including the human trafficking domain with over 50 million escort ads updated hourly, and the deployment to users in law enforcement.
Biography: Dr. Pedro Szekely is a Research Team Leader at the USC Information Sciences Institute (ISI) and a Research Associate Professor at the USC Computer Science Department. Dr. Szekely joined USC in 1988 after receiving his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University in 1982 and 1987 respectively. His research interests include Big-Data, Semantic Web and Human-Computer Interaction. His focus is on techniques and tools to extract and integrate data from a wide variety of sources (Web pages, databases, spreadsheets, etc.), and on methods to index the integrated data to support accurate querying and sophisticated analysis. The resulting software tools, Karma and DIG, released as Open Source, have been used in a variety of applications, including intelligence analysis, bioinformatics, environmental engineering and cultural heritage. A notable example is the work with the Smithsonian American Art Museum to publish the meta-data about the museums collection as Linked Open Data. Dr. Szekely is currently applying this work to combat human trafficking, deploying the tools to victim-support agencies and law enforcement.
Host: Craig Knoblock
Location: Information Science Institute (ISI) - 1135 - 11th fl Large CR
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. -
NL Seminar-Using Highways for Bounded-Suboptimal Multi-Agent Path Finding
Fri, Oct 09, 2015 @ 03:00 PM - 04:00 PM
Information Sciences Institute
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Liron Cohen, USC
Talk Title: Using Highways for Bounded-Suboptimal Multi-Agent Path Finding
Series: Natural Language Seminar
Abstract: Multi-agent path-finding (MAPF) is important for applications such as the kind of warehousing done by Kiva systems. Solving the problem optimally is NP-hard, yet finding low-cost solutions is important. Bounded-suboptimal MAPF algorithms, such as enhanced conflict-based search (ECBS), often do not perform well in warehousing domains with many agents. We therefore develop bounded-suboptimal MAPF algorithms, called CBS+HWY and ECBS+HWY, that exploit the problem structure of a given MAPF instance by finding paths for the agents that include edges from user-provided highways, which encourages a global behavior of the agents that avoids collisions. On the theoretical side, we develop a simple approach that uses highways for MAPF and provides suboptimality guarantees. On the experimental side, we demonstrate that ECBS+HWY can decrease the runtimes and solution costs of ECBS in Kiva-like domains with many agents if the highways capture the problem structures well.
Biography: Liron received a B.S. in Computer Engineering in 2007 and an M.S. in Computer Science in 2012, both from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Liron is interested in combinatorial problems related to constraint-based reasoning and symbolic planning. Specifically, he is looking at novel algorithmic techniques for exploiting structure in such combinatorial problems.
Host: Nima Pourdamghani and Kevin Knight
More Info: http://nlg.isi.edu/nl-seminar/
Location: 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.
