Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Events for February
-
Ming Hsieh Institute Seminar Series on Integrated Systems
Fri, Feb 01, 2019 @ 02:00 PM - 03:30 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Dr. David R. Smith, Professor, Duke University
Talk Title: Engineering Systems with Metamaterials
Host: Profs. Hossein Hashemi, Mike Chen, Dina El-Damak, and Mahta Moghaddam
More Information: MHI Seminar Series IS - David Smith.pdf
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 132
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Jenny Lin
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. -
Fall 2018 Joint CSC@USC/CommNetS-MHI Seminar Series
Mon, Feb 04, 2019 @ 02:00 PM - 03:00 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Shaunak Bopardikar, Michigan State University
Talk Title: Sensor selection via randomized sampling
Abstract: With continual advancement of numerous technologies, multiple classes of smart devices and vehicles are being developed and improved around the world that promise several novel applications. Notable examples of these are robotic surveillance of large environments, smart mobility and transportation, brain activity monitoring among humans, disease monitoring and control, to name a few. A common theme among these applications is the efficient use of only a select few sensors that are expected to provide an accurate description of the underlying complex system. This motivates a natural question of how many sensors are sufficient to obtain a desired level of accuracy to observe the underlying complex system?
This talk will be centered on the problem of, given a linear dynamical system, how does one select a subset of the sensors such that the observability Gramian of the new system is approximately equal to that of the original system? I will first formalize a randomized algorithm that samples the sensors with replacement as per specified distributions and will present explicit bounds on the number of samples required by the algorithm to probabilistically satisfy the Gramian requirement. I will then demonstrate how the randomized procedure can be used for recursive state estimation using fewer sensors than the original system and can yield a high probability upper bound on the initial error covariance. Finally, I will discuss some recent extensions of the randomized techniques and present future directions for this work.
Biography: Shaunak D. Bopardikar is an Assistant Professor with the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department, and is affiliated with the Center for Connected Autonomous Networked Vehicles for Active Safety (CANVAS) at the Michigan State University. His research interests lie in scalable computation and optimization, in cyber-physical security and in autonomous motion planning and control. He received the Bachelor of Technology (B.Tech.) and Master of Technology (M.Tech.) degrees in Mechanical Engineering from Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay, India, in 2004, and the Ph.D. degree in Mechanical Engineering from the University of California at Santa Barbara, USA, in 2010. From 2004 to 2005, he was an Engineer with General Electric India Technology Center, Bangalore, India. From 2011 to 2018, he was a Staff Research Scientist with the Controls group of United Technologies Research Center (UTRC) at East Hartford, CT, USA and at Berkeley, CA. Prior to joining UTRC, Dr. Bopardikar worked as a post-doctoral associate at UC Santa Barbara (2010-2011) during which he developed randomized algorithms for solving large matrix games. He is a member of the IEEE Control Systems Society, has over 40 refereed journal and conference publications and has 2 inventions filed for a U.S. patent.
Host: Jyotirmoy Vinay Deshmukh, jdeshmuk@usc.edu
More Info: http://csc.usc.edu/seminars/2019Spring/bopardikar.html
More Information: 19.02.04 Shaunak D.Bopardikar CSCUSC Seminar.pdf
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 132
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Brienne Moore
Event Link: http://csc.usc.edu/seminars/2019Spring/bopardikar.html
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. -
Center for Cyber-Physical Systems and Internet of Things and Ming Hsieh Institute Seminar Series
Wed, Feb 06, 2019 @ 03:00 PM - 04:00 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Mani Srivastava , University of California, Los Angeles
Talk Title: Quality of Time: Enabling Robust, Secure, and Efficient IoT
Series: Center for Cyber-Physical Systems and Internet of Things
Abstract: Nanoscale electronics, pervasive connectivity, and cloud computing have together ushered in the Internet of Things (IoT). Accurate and reliable knowledge of time is essential for IoT systems to perform their tasks via a complex web of feedback loops where data are collected from myriads of sensors; distributed and processed multi-tiered networks and distributed computing substrates; and, eventually influences and controls the states of natural, engineered, and human systems. Applications depend on precise knowledge of time with a diversity of semantics for purposes such as coordinated sensing, efficient wireless communication, correctly ordered computation, location awareness, and appropriately choreographed actuation.
Despite it being so critical, time is taken for granted with little thought given to the uncertainty in the knowledge of time. The uncertainty in the knowledge of time varies across network nodes, hardware and software layers, and over time. Moreover, many of the methods used in modern computing systems for improved performance make uncertainty worse. Oblivious of these uncertainties system designs typically overcompensate, and resulting systems that are over-designed, in-efficient, and fragile. This talk presents research under Roseline, an NSF CPS Frontier Project led by UCLA with collaborators from CMU, UCSB, UCSD, and the University of Utah, where we formalize uncertainty in the knowledge of time as a "Quality of Time (QoT)" metric that is made observable and controllable in order to robustly support time-aware applications across the edge-middle-cloud tiers. QoT is made visible to the applications so that they can adapt; exchanged across the hardware and software layers so as to tune clock generation, OS scheduling etc.; and propagated across the network so as to optimize distributed coordination. The talk will describe the enabling system abstractions and run-time mechanisms that we have developed to help realize the QoT concept. Lastly, QoT can also be manipulated by adversarial actors such as a compromised OS and network network nodes, causing time-aware applications to fail. The talk will close by describing some of the vulnerabilities that exist in current systems, and methods to mitigate them.
Biography: Mani Srivastava is on the faculty at UCLA where he is associated with the ECE Department with a joint appointment in the CS Department. His research is broadly in the area of networked human-cyber-physical systems, and spans problems across the entire spectrum of applications, architectures, algorithms, and technologies. His current interests include issues of energy efficiency, privacy and security, data quality, and variability in the context of systems and applications for mHealth and sustainable buildings. He is a Fellow of both the ACM and the IEEE. More information about his research is available at his lab's website: http://www.nesl.ucla.edu and his Google Scholar profile at https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=X2Qs7XYAAAAJ.
Host: Paul Bogdan
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 132
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Talyia White
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. -
Munushian Seminar - Paul McEuen, Friday, February 15th at 11am in EEB 132
Fri, Feb 15, 2019 @ 11:00 AM - 12:30 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Paul McEuen, Cornell University
Talk Title: Cell-sized Sensors and Robots
Abstract: Fifty years ago, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman claimed that a revolution was underway where information, computers, and machines would be shrunk to incredibly small dimensions. History has proven him mostly right: integrated circuits and Moore's law have given us cell phones, the internet, and artificial intelligence. But the third leg of Feynman's dream, the miniaturization of machines, is only just getting underway. Can we create functional, intelligent machines at the scale that biology does? The size of, say, a single-celled organism like a Paramecium? And if so, how? In this talk, I'll take a look at some of the approaches being explored, focusing on a Cornell effort to combine microelectronics, optics, paper arts, and 2D materials to create a new generation of cell-sized smart, active sensors and microbots that are powered and communicate by light.
Biography: Paul McEuen is the John A. Newman Professor of Physical
Science at Cornell University and Director of the Kavli institute at Cornell for Nanoscale Science. His research explores the electronic, optical, and mechanical properties of nanoscale materials; he is currently excited about using these materials to construct functional micron-scale machines. He is also a novelist, and his scientific thriller SPIRAL won the debut novel of the year from the International Thriller Writers Association. He is a fellow of the American Physical Society, the National Academy of Sciences, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Host: EE-Electrophysics
More Info: https://minghsiehee.usc.edu/about/lectures/munushian/
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 132
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Marilyn Poplawski
Event Link: https://minghsiehee.usc.edu/about/lectures/munushian/
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. -
Closing the Gap between Quantum Algorithms and Machines with Hardware-Software Co-Design
Fri, Feb 15, 2019 @ 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Fred Chong, University of Chicago
Talk Title: Closing the Gap between Quantum Algorithms and Machines with Hardware-Software Co-Design
Abstract: Quantum computing is at an inflection point, where 72-qubit (quantum bit) machines are being tested, 100-qubit machines are just around the corner, and even 1000-qubit machines are perhaps only a few years away. These machines have the potential to fundamentally change our concept of what is computable and demonstrate practical applications in areas such as quantum chemistry, optimization, and quantum simulation.
Yet a significant resource gap remains between practical quantum algorithms and real machines. The key to closing this gap is to develop techniques to specialize algorithms for hardware and vice versa. Quantum computing is the ultimate vertically-integrated domain-specific application, and computer engineers are sorely needed to tackle grand challenges that include programming language design, software and hardware verification, debugging and visualization tools, defining and perforating abstraction boundaries, cross-layer optimization, managing parallelism and communication, mapping and scheduling computations, reducing control complexity, machine-specific optimizations, learning error patterns, and many more. I will also describe the resources and infrastructure available for starting research in quantum computing and for tackling these challenges.
Biography: Fred Chong is the Seymour Goodman Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Chicago. He is also Lead Principal Investigator for the EPiQC Project (Enabling Practical-scale Quantum Computing), an NSF Expedition in Computing. Chong received his Ph.D. from MIT in 1996 and was a faculty member and Chancellor fellow at UC Davis from 1997-2005. He was also a Professor of Computer Science, Director of Computer Engineering, and Director of the Greenscale Center for Energy-Efficient Computing at UCSB from 2005-2015. He is a recipient of the NSF CAREER award and 6 best paper awards. His research interests include emerging technologies for computing, quantum computing, multicore and embedded architectures, computer security, and sustainable computing.
Host: Xuehai Qian, xuehai.qian@usc.edu
More Information: 19.02.15 Fred Chong_CENG Seminar-.pdf
Location: Henry Salvatori Computer Science Center (SAL) - 101
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Brienne Moore
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. -
Ming Hsieh Institute Seminar Series on Integrated Systems
Fri, Feb 15, 2019 @ 02:00 PM - 03:30 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Dr. Gabor C. Temes, Professor, Oregon State University
Talk Title: Noise Filtering and Linearization of Single-Ended Circuits
Host: Profs. Hossein Hashemi, Mike Chen, Dina El-Damak, and Mahta Moghaddam
More Information: MHI Seminar Series IS - Gabor Temes.pdf
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 132
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Jenny Lin
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. -
Center for Cyber-Physical Systems and Internet of Things and Ming Hsieh Institute Seminar Series
Wed, Feb 20, 2019 @ 03:00 PM - 04:00 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Farshad Lahouti, California Institute of Technology
Talk Title: Learning from Oracle or Crowd: Budget fidelity trade-offs and query design strategies
Series: Center for Cyber-Physical Systems and Internet of Things
Abstract: Design of many machine learning systems rely on well-curated datasets. Developing such datasets is an expensive and time-consuming process. Digital crowdsourcing (CS) is a modern approach to infer this from small contributions of a large and potentially non-expert crowd. In this talk, the CS problem, as a human-in-the-loop computation problem, is modeled and analyzed in an information theoretic rate-distortion framework. The purpose is to identify the ultimate fidelity that one can achieve by any form of query from the crowd and any inference algorithm with a given budget. This in turn motivates the design of coded query schemes. Strategies are presented for efficient and reliable query design in presence of a crowd or an oracle. The query rate performance and speed of learning are analyzed and the role of pricing is investigated. Joint work with Victoria Kostina and Babak Hassibi.
Biography: Farshad Lahouti received the Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering from the University of Waterloo, Canada, in 2002. In 2005, he joined the faculty of the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Tehran, where he founded the Center for Wireless Multimedia Communications. Dr Lahouti received the distinguished scientist award from Iran National Academy of Sciences in 2014. He joined the electrical engineering department at Caltech as a visiting faculty in 2013, where he initiated the digital ventures design program. He is also the co-founder and the scientific lead of cntxts Inc inventing the next generation ultra energy efficient IoT technology and its digital AI contexts. His current research interests are coding and information theory, and statistical signal processing with applications to machine learning, wireless networks and biological and neuronal networks. Information on his recent works can be found here: http://www.its.caltech.edu/~lahouti
Host: Salman Avestimehr
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - EEB 132
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Talyia White
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, Biometrics and Computer Vision @ VISTA
Wed, Feb 20, 2019 @ 03:15 PM - 04:15 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Dr. Wael AbdAlmageed, USC-ISI
Talk Title: AI, Biometrics and Computer Vision @ VISTA
Abstract: In this talk, I will describe various ongoing research activities at computer vision group at USC Information Sciences Institute that span core machine learning and artificial intelligence, biometrics, image integrity assessment and fake news detection. In terms of core machine learning, I will present a novel representation (i.e. feature) learning framework for neural networks, called unsupervised adversarial invariance, which learns a split representation of data through competitive learning between a classification task and a reconstruction task coupled with information disentanglement, without needing any labeled information about confounding factors or domain knowledge. Second, in biometrics, I will present the design of a novel biometrics sensor suite that provides rich data for presentation attack detection (i.e. anti-spoofing) for face, iris and fingerprint biometrics. I will also present a deep neural network approach for presentation attack detection using limited amounts of data obtained from the new sensor suite. Finally, I will present two new approaches for assessing the integrity of multimedia assets. The first approach is called BusterNet, in which I will describe a novel convolutional neural network architecture for detection and localization of copy-move image forgeries. The second approach uses joint multimodal embedding to assess the integrity of multimedia packages undergoing semantic manipulations. I will conclude my talk with directions and plans for future research.
Biography: Dr. Wael AbdAlmageed is a Research Team Leader and Supervising Computer Scientist at the USC Information Sciences Institute (USC ISI). He is the Co-Director of the Center for Video, Image, Speech and Text Analytics (VISTA). He is an expert in computer vision, biometrics and machine learning. His research focus is on developing and applying artificial intelligence techniques to vision, bioinformatics and data analytics problems. His research interests also include mapping machine learning and computer vision algorithms to modern high performance computing platforms. Prior to joining ISI, from 2004 to 2013, Dr. AbdAlmageed was a research scientist with the University of Maryland at College Park, where he led research and development efforts for various DARPA, IARPA and ARL programs, such as VIVID, VIRAT, PerSeas and VACE. He obtained his Ph.D. with Distinction from the University of New Mexico in 2003 where he was also awarded the Outstanding Graduate Student award. He has two patents and over 65 publications in top machine learning, computer vision and high performance computing conferences and journals. Dr. AbdAlmageed is the PI for ISI's effort on IARPA Odin, and DARPA MediFor.
Host: Profs Richard Leahy & Shrikanth Narayanan
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 248
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Mayumi Thrasher
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. -
Fall 2018 Joint CSC@USC/CommNetS-MHI Seminar Series
Mon, Feb 25, 2019 @ 02:00 PM - 03:00 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Jorge Cortes, University of California, San Diego
Talk Title: The role of network structure in controlling complex networks
Abstract: Controllability of complex network systems is an active area of research at the intersection of network science, control theory, and multi-agent coordination, with multiple applications ranging from brain dynamics to the smart grid and cyber-physical systems. The basic question is to understand to what extent the dynamic behavior of the entire network can be shaped by changing the states of some of its subsystems, and decipher the role that network structure plays in achieving this. This talk examines this question in two specific instances: characterizing network controllability when control nodes can be scheduled over a time horizon and hierarchical selective recruitment in brain networks. Regarding controllability, we show how time-varying control schedules can significantly enhance network controllability over fixed ones, especially when applied to large networks. Through the analysis of a novel scale-dependent notion of nodal centrality, we show that optimal time-varying scheduling involves the actuation of the most central nodes at appropriate spatial scales. Regarding hierarchical selective recruitment, we examine network mechanisms for selective inhibition and top-down recruitment of subnetworks under linear-threshold dynamics. Motivated by the study of goal-driven selective attention in neuroscience, we build on the characterization of key network dynamical properties to enable, through either feedforward or feedback control, the targeted inhibition of task-irrelevant subnetworks and the top-down recruitment of task-relevant ones.
Biography: Jorge Cortes is a Professor with the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at the University of California, San Diego. He received the Licenciatura degree in mathematics from the Universidad de Zaragoza, Spain, in 1997, and the Ph.D. degree in engineering mathematics from the Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, Spain, in 2001. He held postdoctoral positions at the University of Twente, The Netherlands, and at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA. He was an Assistant Professor with the Department of Applied Mathematics and Statistics at the University of California, Santa Cruz from 2004 to 2007. He is the author of Geometric, Control and Numerical Aspects of Nonholonomic Systems (New York: Springer-Verlag, 2002) and co-author of Distributed Control of Robotic Networks (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009). He received a NSF CAREER award in 2006 and was the recipient of the 2006 Spanish Society of Applied Mathematics Young Researcher Prize. He has co-authored papers that have won the 2008 IEEE Control Systems Outstanding Paper Award, the 2009 SIAM Review SIGEST selection from the SIAM Journal on Control and Optimization, and the 2012 O. Hugo Schuck Best Paper Award in the Theory category. He is an IEEE Fellow and, at the IEEE Control Systems Society, he has been a Distinguished Lecturer (2010-2014), and is currently its Director of Operations and an elected member (2018-2020) of its Board of Governors. His current research interests include distributed control and optimization, network neuroscience, reasoning and decision making under uncertainty, resource-aware control, and multi-agent coordination in robotic, power, and transportation networks.
Host: Ketan Savla, ksavla@usc.edu
More Info: http://csc.usc.edu/seminars/2019Spring/cortes.html
More Information: 19.02.25_Jorge Cortes CSCUSC Seminar.pdf
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 132
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Brienne Moore
Event Link: http://csc.usc.edu/seminars/2019Spring/cortes.html
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.
