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SUNMONTUEWEDTHUFRISAT
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Events for February
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Oblivious Cooperation of Wireless Colocated Transmitters
Fri, Feb 01, 2008 @ 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
SPEAKER: Professor Shlomo Shamai, Technion - Israel Institute of TechnologyABSTRACT: We consider a scenario where a source sends information to a remote destination and where a relay terminal is occasionally present in close proximity to the source, but without the source's awareness. We assume slow fading (block fading) independent channels between the source and the occasional relay to destination, while the channel between the source to the relay is assumed to be additive Gaussian, due to their relatively close proximity. The focus is on oblivious cooperative schemes which make efficient use of the relay when it is present, and still maintain single user optimality when the relay is absent. One such scheme is shown to be Block Markov decode-and-forward which involves correlated transmissions of the source and the relay. The optimal correlation for this scheme is found by solving the optimal outage performance of a 2 X 1 multiple-input single-output (MISO) link under individual power constraints and a correlation constraint. Finally, quantization schemes based on various levels of side information are also discussed.Joint work with Michael Katz, EE Department, Technion, Haifa 32000, Israel.BIO: Shlomo Shamai (Shitz) is now the William Fondiller Professor of Telecommunications at the Department of Electrical Engineering, Technion---Israel Institute of Technology. His research interests encompasses a wide spectrum of topics in information theory and statistical communications.Dr. Shamai (Shitz) is an IEEE Fellow and a member of the Union Radio Scientifiqu e Internationale (URSI). He is the recipient of the 1999 van der Pol Gold Medal of URSI, and a co-recipient of the 2000 IEEE Donald G. Fink Prize Paper Award, the 2003, and the 2004 joint IT/COM societies paper award, and the 2007 IEEE Information Theory Society Paper Award. He is also the recipient of the 2000 Technion Henry Taub Prize for Excellence in Research. He has served as Associate Editor for the Shannon Theory of the IEEE Transactions on Information Theory}, and also serves on the Board of Governors of the Information Theory Society.HOST: Prof. Giuseppe Caire, caire@usc.edu
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. -
Designing Synthetic Biological Networks
Mon, Feb 04, 2008 @ 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
SPEAKER: Dr. Desmond Lun, Computational Biologist, Broad Institute MIT; Research Fellow, Harvard Medical SchoolABSTRACT: The engineering of simple living organisms such as microbes in a well-defined, systematic manner---in much the same way as computer systems or communication systems are engineered---has recently emerged as an exciting, realizable prospect. Such engineering, which is often referred to as synthetic biology, promises new, improved ways of producing drugs and fuels as well as to serve functions that are yet to be imagined. But, as with all engineering, synthetic biology requires design, and, at present, few design tools or principles exist for synthetic biology.In this talk, we discuss how mathematical optimization can be used to aid the design of synthetic microbes. In particular, we focus on the problem of engineering E. coli to produce biofuel and discuss a network optimization problem that arises in this context. We outline a local-search heuristic that we have implemented to tackle this problem, and we discuss potential areas for improvement as well as general future directions in the nascent field of analytical design for synthetic biology.BIO: Desmond Lun is a Computational Biologist at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard and a Research Fellow in Genetics at Harvard Medical School. Prior to his present position, he was a Postdoctoral Research Associate in the Coordinated Science Laboratory at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He received bachelor's degrees in mathematics and computer engineering from the University of Melbourne, Australia in 2001, and S.M. and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering and computer science from MIT in 2002 and 2006, respectively.Dr. Lun's research interests are in networking and in synthetic and systems biology. He is co-author, with Tracey Ho, of "Network Coding: An Introduction," forthcoming from Cambridge University Press.HOST: Prof. Giuseppe Caire, caire@usc.edu
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. -
Motion-Compensated Orthogonal Video Transforms
Mon, Feb 04, 2008 @ 01:30 PM - 03:00 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Abstract:
In 1989, Torbjorn Kronander observed that techniques known at that time for 3D subband coding of image sequences do not use motion compensation. Knowing the importance of motion compensation for efficient video coding, he proposed a method for invertible motion fields. Unfortunately, motion compensation is, in general, not invertible and subsequent research addressed the problem of motion-compensated subband coding.In this talk, we review the basic concepts of video compression, stress advantages and disadvantages of popular compression schemes, and present a new class of motion-compensated orthogonal video transforms. This class offers strictly orthonormal subbands while permitting general motion compensation.Bio:
Markus Flierl is Visiting Assistant Professor at the Max Planck Center for Visual Computing and Communication at Stanford University. He received the Doctorate in Engineering from Friedrich Alexander University, Germany, in 2003. From 2003 to 2005, he has been a senior researcher at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne, Switzerland. He has authored the book 'Video Coding with Superimposed Motion-Compensated Signals: Applications to H.264 and Beyond.' He has been named the recipient of the 2007 VCIP Young Investigator Award. His research interests include visual communication networks and video representations.Host: Professor Antonio Ortega, x02320, ortega@sipi.usc.edu
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 248
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Gloria Halfacre
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. -
Protocol Design Issues in Underwater Acoustic Networks
Fri, Feb 08, 2008 @ 11:30 AM - 12:30 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
SPEAKER: Professor Michele Zorzi, Department of Information Engineering, University of PadovaABSTRACT: Interest in underwater acoustic networking research has grown rapidly in the past few years. Fundamental differences between underwater acoustic propagation and terrestrial radio propagation call for new criteria for the design of communications systems and networking protocols. In this talk, we will provide an overview of the main challenges posed by the underwater acoustic propagation environment, with special emphasis on networking and protocol design issues, and provide novel insights that are useful in guiding both protocol design and network deployment. We will then address in more detail some specific examples of how the unique features of underwater propagation and acoustic modems affect protocol design. In particular, we will (1) focus on the energy consumption profile of acoustic modems and its impact on the design of topology control mechanisms and on the trade-off between sleep cycles and wake-up modes, and (2) present a novel energy-efficient routing protocol for underwater networks that explicitly accounts for the relationship between hop distance, bandwidth, and energy consumption.BIO: Michele Zorzi is a Professor at the Department of Information Engineering of the University of Padova. Prior to his current appointment, he was employed at the Politecnico di Milano, the University of Ferrara and the University of California at San Diego, with which he still has an active collaboration. He received a PhD in Electrical Engineering from the University of Padova in 1994. Michele was the EiC of the IEEE Wireless Communications magazine in 2003-2005, is now the EiC of the IEEE Transactions on Communications, and has served on the Editorial Boards of the top journals in his area of research and on the Organizing and Technical Program Committee for many international conferences. He is an IEEE Fellow. His main research interest are in the area of wireless communications and networking, ad hoc and sensor network, and energy-efficient protocol design.HOST: Prof. Urbashi Mitra, ubli@usc.edu
Location: Hedco Petroleum and Chemical Engineering Building (HED) - 116
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. -
Scaling Laws of Multiple Antenna (Group) Broadcast Channels
Wed, Feb 13, 2008 @ 04:00 PM - 05:00 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
SPEAKER:Professor Tareq Al-Naffouri, King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals, Dhahran, Saudi Arabia; Fulbright Research Visitor, Communication Sciences InstituteABSTRACT:Broadcast (or point to multipoint) communication has attracted a lot of research recently. In this talk we consider the scaling laws for two broadcast scenarios.In the first part of the talk, we consider the effect of spatial correlation between transmit antennas on the sum-rate capacity of the MIMO broadcast channel (i.e., downlink of a cellular system). Specifically, for a system with a large number of users n, we analyze the scaling laws of the sum-rate for the dirty paper coding (DPC) and for different types of beamforming transmission schemes. When the channel is i.i.d., it has been shown that for large number of users n, the sum rate is equal to M*loglog(n) + M*log SNR where M is the number of transmit antennas. When the channel exhibits some spatial correlation with a covariance matrix R, we show that this results in an SNR hit that depends on 1) the multiuser broadcast technique and 2) on the eigenvalues of the correlation matrix R. We quantify this hit for DPC and various beamforming techniques.In the second part of the talk, we consider the multiple antenna group broadcast channel where a base station is to transmit to a group of users and where the users' pool is divided into K groups, each group of which is interested in common information. Such a situation occurs for example in digital audio and video broadcast where the users are divided into various groups according to the shows they are interested in. We study the scaling laws of the sum-rate in the large number of users and/or large number of antennas regimes. Intuitively, the group broadcast capacity should decrease with the number of users. We show that in order to achieve a constant rate per user, the number of transmit antennas should scale at least logarithmically with the number of users.This is a joint work with Masoud Sharif (Boston University), Amir Dana (Qualcomm Corporation), and Babak Hassibi (California Institute of Technology)BIO: Dr. Tareq Al-Naffouri obtained his B.S. in Mathematics in 1994 from King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals, Saudi Arabia, his MS in Electrical Engineering from Georgia Institute of Technology in 1998, and his PhD in Electrical Engineering in 2004 from Stanford University. In 2005, he was a visiting researcher in the Electrical Engineering Department at California Institute of Technology. In September 2005, he joined the Electrical Engineering Department at King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals, Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, as an assistant professor.Dr. Al-Naffouri's research interests are in adaptive and statistical signal processing and their application to wireless communications and in multiuser wireless networks. His research on adaptive signal processing won the best student paper award in an international meeting. He has held internship and research positions in NEC, Tokyo, National Semiconductors, Santa Clara, CA, Beceem Communications, Santa Clara, CA, the University of California at Los Angeles, and California Institute of Technology.http://faculty.kfupm.edu.sa/EE/naffouri/Host: Prof. Giuseppe Caire, caire@usc.edu
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. -
EE Students Practical Guide Seminar Series - How to Pursue an Academic Career
Fri, Feb 15, 2008 @ 11:30 AM - 01:30 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Seminar Speakers: Profs. Bhaskar Krishnamachari and
Krishna Nayak Organizer: Prof. Alan Willner* Pizza will be graciously provided by the EE Department.*Abstract: Abstract: Are you considering an academic career after graduate school? We will host an informal discussion of the process of deciding on, obtaining, and transitioning to an academic career. It is a little bit more complicated than it seems, but if you're prepared for what's to come, it can be a smooth process.
- Is an academic career right for me?
- How do I land a great academic position?
- What can I do now, to be better prepared?Location: Seaver Science Library (SSL) - 150
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Gerrielyn Ramos
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. -
Heterostructures: From Physics to Devices and Back (A Personal Perspective)
Wed, Feb 20, 2008 @ 03:30 PM - 04:30 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Dr. Herbert KroemerUniversity of California, Santa BarbaraNobel Laureate, Physics, 2000Abstract
In semiconductor heterostructures the basic semiconductor itself– not just the doping– changes with position, and the transition region between the different semiconductorsplays an essential role in the operation of the device. The underlying physics is that in the transition region the forces acting on electrons and holes are no longer of purely electrostatic
origin, but contain an essentially quantum-mechanical component that is decoupled from the electrostatic forces. In fact, the resulting net forces can act in the same direction for electrons and holes, something fundamentally impossible with purely electrostatic forces.
The added forces give the device designer a powerful new degree of freedom that ranges from performance improvements
in already-existing devices, to the creation of devices that are fundamentally unachievable in homostructures, like the double-heterostructure laser. Today, all compound semiconductor devices of importance are heterostructure devices, and Si-Ge heterostructures have invaded mainstream silicon technology.
In addition to their importance in practical devices, heterostructures are playing a similarly dominant role in basic semiconductor physics. The best-known example–recognized by the 1998 Nobel Prize in Physics–is the fractional quantum Hall effect in the 2D electron gas at certain hetero-interfaces. Numerous other research areas in semiconductor
physics involve heterostructures in an essential way. Examples are nanostructures like quantum wires and quantum dots, superlattice Bloch Oscillators, and induced superconductivity in InAs quantum wells.Bio
Herbert Kroemer was born in 1928 in Weimar, Germany. He received a Doctorate in Theoretical Solid-State Physics
in 1952 from the University of Göttingen, Germany. Since then, he has worked on the physics and technology of semiconductors and semiconductor devices in a number of research laboratories in Germany and the U.S. Since 1976, he has been with the University of California at Santa Barbara.
Dr. Kroemer is the originator of several device concepts, including the heterostructure bipolar transistor, the double-heterostructure laser, and other heterostructure topics. During the '60s, he also worked on microwave device problems,
and in 1964 he was the first to publish an explanation for the Gunn Effect. With the emergence of molecular beam epitaxy in the mid-'70s, he returned to heterostructure devices, and he was one of the first to apply the emerging new technology to new and unconventional materials combinations, such as GaP-on-Si, GaAs-on-Si, and InAs/(Al,Ga)Sb structures, making several contributions to the development of MBE itself.
Dr. Kroemer is a Fellow of the IEEE and of the APS, and a Member of both the National Academy of Engineering and the National Academy of Sciences. He holds honorary doctorates from the Technical University of Aachen, Germany,
the University of Lund, Sweden, the University of Colorado, and the University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany. He has received numerous awards, most recently, in 2000, the Nobel Prize in Physics, "for developing semiconductor heterostructures used in high-speed and optoelectronics," and in 2002 the IEEE Medal of Honor.
His research interests continue to be in the physics and technology of semiconductor heterostructures.http://ee.usc.edu/munushianLocation: Ethel Percy Andrus Gerontology Center (GER) - 124
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Ericka Lieberknecht
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. -
Analog Circuit Design in Biomedical Engineering
Mon, Feb 25, 2008 @ 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Christopher D. SalthouseMassachusetts Institute of TechnologyAnalog circuits can be used to solve a variety of problems in biomedical engineering. This talk will present projects from two different areas: a micropower cochlear implant and a fluorescence based imaging technology. Cochlear implants have already given hearing to more than 100,000 deaf patients by directly stimulating nerves in the inner ear, but patients are burdened by battery lives as short as 9 hours. A mixed signal integrated circuit including subthreshold analog signal processing and micropower digital blocks performs the same functions as a commercial DSP solution using only four percent of the power. In biomedical imaging, high-speed analog sampling circuits are used in ratiometric fluorescent-lifetime imaging(RFLI). Unlike the steady-state fluorescence imaging being used in research laboratories today, RFLI uses dual fluorophore probes to measure enzyme activity independent of probe concentration and tissue attenuation. Discrete analog circuits are used to deliver nanosecond pulses from a diode laser and sample the fluorescence signal with subnanosecond temporal resolution to independently measure the signal from two fluorophores at the same wavelength. This technique will be demonstrated in vitro in a time domain fluorimeter(TDF) and in a mouse model using a small animal lifetime imager(SALI).Biography:
Christopher Salthouse received his bachelor and master of electrical engineering degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2000. He finished his Ph.D. in electrical engineering with Prof. Rahul Sarpeshkar at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2006. Since 2006, he has been working as a research fellow in the Center for Molecular Imaging Research at the Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard Medical School.
Location: Hedco Neurosciences Building (HNB) - 100
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Ericka Lieberknecht
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. -
From Edison to Viterbi
Thu, Feb 28, 2008 @ 03:00 PM - 05:00 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
About Jack Keil Wolf:
Jack Keil Wolf received the B.S.E.E. degree from the University of Pennsylvania, and the M.S.E., M.A., and Ph.D. degrees from Princeton University. He has been teaching for more than 40 years. He is currently the Stephen O. Rice Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering and a member of the Center for Magnetic Recording Research at the University of California-San Diego, La Jolla. He also holds a part-time appointment at Qualcomm, Inc., San Diego. Dr. Wolf is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He has received several IEEE awards including: the 1990 E. H. Armstrong Achievement Award, the 1993 Leonard G. Abraham Prize Paper Award (co recipient), the 1975 IEEE Information Theory Group Prize Paper Award (co recipient), the 1998 IEEE Koji Kobayashi Award, the 2001 Claude E. Shannon Award, the 2004 IEEE Richard W. Hamming Medal, and the 2007 Aaron D. Wyner Distinguished Service Award. He held an NSF Senior Postdoctoral Fellowship and a Guggenheim Fellowship.About Andrew J. Viterbi:
Andrew J. Viterbi is a co-founder and retired vice chairman and chief technical officer of QUALCOMM Incorporated. He spent equal portions of his career both in industry, having previously co-founded Linkabit Corporation, and in academia as professor in the Schools of Engineering and Applied Science, first at UCLA and then at UCSD, where he is now professor emeritus. He is currently president of the Viterbi Group, a technical advisory and investment company. His principal research contribution, the Viterbi Algorithm, is used in most digital cellular phones and digital satellite receivers, as well as in such diverse fields as magnetic recording, voice recognition and DNA sequence analysis. More recently, he concentrated his efforts on establishing CDMA as the multiple access technology of choice for cellular telephony and wireless data communication. Viterbi has received numerous honors both in the U.S. and internationally. Among these are four honorary doctorates from the Universities of Waterloo, Rome, Technion and Notre Dame, as well as memberships in the National Academy of Engineering, the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He has received the Marconi International Fellowship Award, the IEEE Alexander Graham Bell and Claude Shannon Awards, the NEC C&C Award, the Eduard Rhein Foundation Award and the Christopher Columbus Medal.About the Viterbi Lecture
The Viterbi Lecture was created as the USC Viterbi School of Engineering’s premier academic distinction in information technology and digital communications, an area of research in which the school of Engineering is a national leader. Each year, an awardee who has made fundamental contributions of profound impact in communication will present the Viterbi Lecture.Location: Andrus Gerontology Center: Reception 3:00 to 4:00PM & Lecture 4:00 to 5:00PM
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Estela Lopez
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.
