Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Events for October
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NL Seminar-NLP in Computational Journalism: notes from the field at the New York Times
Thu, Oct 03, 2019 @ 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Information Sciences Institute
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Alex Spangher, USC/ISI
Talk Title: NLP in Computational Journalism: notes from the field at the New York Times
Series: Natural Language Seminar
Abstract: Computational journalism is an emerging field seeking to enhance traditional journalistic processes -- story finding, production, distribution, funding, evaluation and security using computational techniques. Such advances comes at a critical time: journalists' ability to play a watchdog role in society is severely endangered by industry contraction and budget shortfalls.
Many exciting developments in computational journalism require research in NLP. In this talk, I'll discuss some prior work at the New York Times, including generative localized news articles, human-in-the-loop chat-bots, personalization, and coverage-pattern modeling. I'll also discuss long-term challenges we identified in a broad survey article done at Stanford University this summer, as well as my current research directions here at USC.
Biography: Alex Spangher was a data scientist at the New York Times, where he worked with journalists and newsroom stakeholders on data science to improve journalism coverage and revenue. He interned at Microsoft Research and spent a year as a PhD student at Carnegie Mellon University before transferring to the University of Southern California to work with Emilio Ferrara and Nanyun Peng. He has an M.S. in Journalism and an M.S. in Data Science from Columbia University, and received his B.S. from Columbia as well, in neuroscience and computer science. He enjoys playing classical piano and double bass.
Host: Emily Sheng
More Info: https://nlg.isi.edu/nl-seminar
Webcast: https://bluejeans.com/684525530Location: Information Science Institute (ISI) - CR #689
WebCast Link: https://bluejeans.com/684525530
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Peter Zamar
Event Link: https://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-Answering Complex Questions in the Wild
Thu, Oct 17, 2019 @ 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Information Sciences Institute
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Peng Qi, Stanford University
Talk Title: Answering Complex Questions in the Wild
Series: Natural Language Seminar
Abstract: Open domain question answering (open-domain QA) systems greatly improve our access to the knowledge in large text corpora, but most previous work on this topic lacks the ability to perform multi-hop reasoning, limiting how textual knowledge can actually be used. For instance, to answer What's the Aquaman actor's next movie?", one needs to reason about the entity Jason Momoa instead of just comparing the question to a local context, making the task more challenging.
In this talk, I will present our recent work on enabling text based multi-hop reasoning in open-domain question answering. First, I will talk about how we collected one of the first datasets on multi-hop QA, making it possible to train and evaluate systems to perform explainable complex reasoning among millions of Wikipedia articles. Then, I will present a QA system we developed on this dataset. Iterating between finding supporting facts and reading the retrieved context, our model outperforms all previously published approaches, many of which based on powerful pretrained neural networks like BERT. As our model generates natural language queries at each step of its retrieval, it is also readily explainable to humans, and allows for intervention when it veers off course. I will conclude by comparing our model to other recent developments on this dataset, and discussing future directions on this problem.
Biography: Peng Qi is a PhD student in Computer Science at Stanford University. His research interests revolve around building natural language processing systems that better bridge between humans and the large amount of textual information we are engulfed in. Specifically, he is interested in building knowledge representations, open-domain question answering, explainable models, and multi-lingual NLP systems. He is also interested in linguistics, and builds tools for linguistic structure analysis applicable to many languages.
Host: Emily Sheng
More Info: https://nlg.isi.edu/nl-seminar
Webcast: https://bluejeans.com/s/BmBxPLocation: Information Science Institute (ISI) - CR #689
WebCast Link: https://bluejeans.com/s/BmBxP
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Peter Zamar
Event Link: https://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. -
Quantum Physics Seminar
Mon, Oct 21, 2019 @ 09:00 AM - 10:00 AM
Information Sciences Institute
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Dr. Alan Kadin, Consultant for various companies (see bio)
Talk Title: Why We Should be Skeptical about Quantum Computing
Abstract: It is widely believed that quantum computing is on the threshold of practicality, with performance that will soon surpass that of classical computing. On the contrary, it is argued that both the present and the future of quantum computing may be highly uncertain, for the following reasons:
• The promised performance depends on entanglement-based scaling to massive parallelism, which has not been verified, and may be tested [1].
• Even if the theory were correct, exponential sensitivity to noise for highly entangled states could make the technology impractical [2].
• Evidence for entanglement in superconducting qubits may be explained using the nonlinear properties of classical Josephson junctions [3].
• Evidence for entanglement in arrays of coupled qubits may be explained using conventional energy-band theory with delocalized states.
* Poster presented at APS Meeting, March 2019. Available online at http://vixra.org/abs/1903.0501
[1] A.M. Kadin and S.B. Kaplan, Proposed experiments to test the foundations of quantum computing, 2016, http://vixra.org/abs/1607.0105.
[2] G. Kilai, The Quantum Computer Puzzle, 2016, https://arxiv.org/pdf/1605.00992.pdf
[3] J. Blackburn, et al., Survey of Classical and Quantum Interpretations of experiments on Josephson junctions at very low temperatures, Phys. Rep. 611, 2016. https://arxiv.org/pdf/1602.05316.pdf
Biography: Dr. Kadin is a long-time researcher in superconducting devices, and was a faculty member in ECE at the University of Rochester, and then a Senior Scientist at Hypres, Inc. of Elmsford, NY. He wrote the textbook, Introduction to Superconducting Circuits. Recently, he has been a consultant with Hypres and other companies and an adjunct at the College of New Jersey. He has also been an active participant in the IEEE Rebooting Computing Initiative. He received his BS and PhD in physics from Princeton and Harvard, and was also a postdoc at Stony Brook and Minnesota, and a researcher at Energy Conversion Devices, Inc.
Host: Dr. Jonathan Habif
Webcast: https://bluejeans.com/356467557WebCast Link: https://bluejeans.com/356467557
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Michelle Bonner
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. -
Quantum Physics Seminar
Mon, Oct 21, 2019 @ 09:00 AM - 10:00 AM
Information Sciences Institute
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Dr. Alan Kadin, Consultant for various companies (see bio)
Talk Title: Why We Should be Skeptical about Quantum Computing
Abstract: It is widely believed that quantum computing is on the threshold of practicality, with performance that will soon surpass that of classical computing. On the contrary, it is argued that both the present and the future of quantum computing may be highly uncertain, for the following reasons:
• The promised performance depends on entanglement-based scaling to massive parallelism, which has not been verified, and may be tested [1].
• Even if the theory were correct, exponential sensitivity to noise for highly entangled states could make the technology impractical [2].
• Evidence for entanglement in superconducting qubits may be explained using the nonlinear properties of classical Josephson junctions [3].
• Evidence for entanglement in arrays of coupled qubits may be explained using conventional energy-band theory with delocalized states.
* Poster presented at APS Meeting, March 2019. Available online at http://vixra.org/abs/1903.0501
[1] A.M. Kadin and S.B. Kaplan, Proposed experiments to test the foundations of quantum computing, 2016, http://vixra.org/abs/1607.0105.
[2] G. Kilai, The Quantum Computer Puzzle, 2016, https://arxiv.org/pdf/1605.00992.pdf
[3] J. Blackburn, et al., Survey of Classical and Quantum Interpretations of experiments on Josephson junctions at very low temperatures, Phys. Rep. 611, 2016. https://arxiv.org/pdf/1602.05316.pdf
Biography: Dr. Kadin is a long-time researcher in superconducting devices, and was a faculty member in ECE at the University of Rochester, and then a Senior Scientist at Hypres, Inc. of Elmsford, NY. He wrote the textbook, Introduction to Superconducting Circuits. Recently, he has been a consultant with Hypres and other companies and an adjunct at the College of New Jersey. He has also been an active participant in the IEEE Rebooting Computing Initiative. He received his BS and PhD in physics from Princeton and Harvard, and was also a postdoc at Stony Brook and Minnesota, and a researcher at Energy Conversion Devices, Inc.
Host: Dr. Jonathan Habif
Webcast: https://bluejeans.com/356467557Location: M
WebCast Link: https://bluejeans.com/356467557
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Michelle Bonner
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-Neural Unsupervised Dependency Parsing
Thu, Oct 24, 2019 @ 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Information Sciences Institute
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Wenjuan Han , ShanghaiTech University/UCLA
Talk Title: Neural Unsupervised Dependency Parsing
Series: Natural Language Seminar
Abstract: Dependency parsing, as an essential task in Natural Language Processing, is a key step in analyzing and understanding texts. Most of the previous work on unsupervised dependency parsing is based on generative models. In order to effectively induce a grammar, various knowledge priors and inductive biases are manually encoded in the learning process. However, these knowledge priors and inductive biases are mostly local features that can only be defined by experts. Another disadvantage of generative models comes from the context freeness, which limits the information available to dependencies in a sentence. We proposed several approaches to unsupervised dependency parsing that automatically capture useful information: correlations between tokens, context information and multilingual similarity.
Biography: I am now a visiting student in UCLA and expected to graduate in January 2020. I will get the PHD Degree at ShanghaiTech University, where I was advised by Kewei Tu. I did my bachelors at the Nanjing University of Posts and Telecommunications. My current research focuses on the study of probabilistic neural models and follows two researching paths. 1. grammar based representation, inference, and unsupervised learning; and 2. the application of unsupervised learning approaches with hidden variables in a variety of artificial intelligence areas including grammar induction, POS induction and perceptual grouping.
Host: Emily Sheng
More Info: https://nlg.isi.edu/nl-seminar
Webcast: https://bluejeans.com/s/6zkTG/Location: Information Science Institute (ISI) - CR #689
WebCast Link: https://bluejeans.com/s/6zkTG/
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Peter Zamar
Event Link: https://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.
