SUNMONTUEWEDTHUFRISAT
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Events for March
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Methods for Detecting Focal Lesions in Brain Images
Tue, Mar 04, 2014 @ 03:00 PM - 04:00 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Frithjof Kruggel, M.D., Ph.D., University of California, Irvine
Talk Title: Methods for Detecting Focal Lesions in Brain Images
Series: Medical Imaging Seminar Series
Abstract: The development of neuroimaging methods to detect and diagnose intracranial pathology is a success story in modern medicine. In contrast, the potential of using quantitative image-based parameters that describe the properties and progression of pathological processes has not yet been realized. We will review methods for quantifying properties of focal brain lesions, discuss strategies for method development, and pinpoint issues that still impede routine clinical usage.
Biography: Frithjof Kruggel joined the Department of Biomedical Engineering at UC Irvine as a Professor in 2005. His research focuses on developing Computer Vision algorithms to extract meaningful, quantitative information from neuroimaging data to understand the relation between structure and function of the human brain, and to support clinical diagnosis and therapeutic decisions. Frithjof received his M.S. in Chemistry from Ruhr-University, Bochum (Germany) in 1983, and his M.D. and Ph.D. from Ludwig Maximilian University, Munich (Germany) in 1989. Following his training in Clinical Neurology, he assisted in building up the Max-Planck-Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, where he headed the Workgroup on Signal and Image Analysis from 1995-2004. From 2002-2004, he served as a Professor for Image Analysis and Computer Graphics in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Leipzig (Germany).
Host: Prof. Richard Leahy
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 248
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Talyia Veal
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. -
Extracting Hidden Structure From Data: Provable Phase Retrieval by Non-Convex Optimization
Wed, Mar 05, 2014 @ 10:00 AM - 11:00 AM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Mahdi Soltanolkotabi, Stanford University
Talk Title: Extracting Hidden Structure From Data: Provable Phase Retrieval by Non-Convex Optimization
Abstract: A major challenge in modern data analysis is to reliably and automatically discover hidden structure in data with little or no human intervention. However, many mathematical abstractions of these problems are provably intractable in their most general form. Nevertheless, it may be possible to overcome these hardness barriers by focusing on realistic cases that rule out intractable instances.
In this talk we consider the question of recovering the seemingly hidden phase of an object from intensity-only measurements, a problem which naturally appears in X-ray crystallography, speech analysis and related disciplines. We study a physically realistic setup where one can modulate the signal of interest and then collect the intensity of its diffraction pattern. We show that a non-convex formulation of the problem recovers the phase information exactly from a number of near minimal random modulations. To solve this non-convex problem, we develop an iterative algorithm that combines a careful initialization together with a novel update that escapes all local minima and provably converges to the global optimum with a geometric rate. Our proposed scheme is near optimal in terms of usage of computational and data resources. We illustrate our methods with various real data experiments.
We will also briefly discuss other problems involving hidden structure in data (in particular subspace clustering and sparse recovery with coherent and redundant dictionaries) and conclude with a discussion of directions for future research.
Biography: Mahdi Soltanolkotabi is a Ph.D. candidate in Electrical Engineering at Stanford University, advised by Emmanuel Candes. Previously, he received a Master's degree in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University (2011) and a Bachelor's degree in Electrical Engineering from Sharif University of Technology (2009). His research interests include optimization, machine learning, signal processing, high-dimensional statistics, and geometry with emphasis on applications in the information and physical sciences. He was awarded the Benchmark Stanford Graduate Fellowship (2009-2012) as well as the Stanford teaching fellowship in electrical engineering (2011).
Host: Salman Avestimehr, avestimehr@ee.usc.edu, EEB 526, x07326
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 248
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. -
Wavefield Modeling and Signal Processing for Sensor Arrays of Arbitrary Geometry
Wed, Mar 05, 2014 @ 11:30 AM - 12:30 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Mário Costa, Aalto University
Talk Title: Wavefield Modeling and Signal Processing for Sensor Arrays of Arbitrary Geometry
Abstract: This talk considers wavefield modeling and its application to sensor array signal processing. In particular, we will see that wavefield modeling allows one to develop computationally-efficient and asymptotically-optimal array processing methods regardless of the array geometry. Wavefield modeling also facilitates incorporating array nonidealities, commonly present in real-world arrays, into array processing methods and performance bounds. Parameter estimation and beamforming in the azimuth-elevation-polarimetric domain will be addressed. Tools from harmonic analysis on the sphere, which are needed in wavefield modeling and manifold separation, will also be covered and novel results in the field will be provided. In addition to a review of well-known results in wavefield modeling, on-going research and open-problems in the area will be given.
Biography: Mário Costa was born in Portugal in 1984. He received the M.Sc.(Tech.) degree with distinction in Communications Engineering from Universidade do Minho, Portugal, in 2008, and the D.Sc.(Tech.) degree in Electrical Engineering from Aalto University (former Helsinki Univ. of Technology), Finland, in 2013. He has been with the Department of Signal Processing and Acoustics, Aalto University, Finland, since 2007. During 2007 as a Research Assistant, from 2008 to 2013 as a Researcher, and currently as a postdoctoral Researcher. From January to July 2011 he was an External Researcher at Connectivity Solutions Team, Nokia Research Center. His research interests include sensor array and statistical signal processing as well as wireless communications.
Host: Andreas Molisch, molisch@usc.edu, EEB 530, x04670
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 349
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. -
EE-Electrophysics Seminar - Axel Scherer
Wed, Mar 05, 2014 @ 02:00 PM - 03:30 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Axel Scherer, California Institute of Technology
Talk Title: From Lab-on-a-Chip to Lab-in-the-Body: The Role of Nanotechnology in the Miniaturization of Medical Diagnostic Tools
Abstract: Miniaturization of devices has fueled the rapid evolution of microelectronic systems over the past decades. More recently, silicon has also emerged as an opto-electronic and electro-mechanical material. The manufacturability of high resolution silicon micro- and nanostructures is unparalleled, and the control over the precise geometry of silicon devices has followed the predictable path of Moore's law. In anticipation of the evolution of this trend, we will describe the opportunities of reducing the sizes of silicon devices to below 10nm to control mechanical, optical and electronic properties of silicon â with particular applications in medical instruments. We show some examples of nanostructures with dimensions below 10nm in all dimensions. This control enables many interesting devices with new optical, electrical and mechanical opportunities.
As the size of devices is reduced, it is possible to contemplate their integration within more complex and compact optical and electronic systems. During the second part of the presentation, the opportunities for integrated spectroscopy and data communications systems for implantable health monitors will be explored. The combination of power supply, data communications and biochemical detectors within small chips enables us to contemplate new microsystems for healthcare monitoring. Such systems could be implanted as glucometers, neural probes and other metabolic measurement tools and will enable a new class of continuous digital health monitors that hopefully leads to preventative healthcare at lower cost.
Biography: Axel Scherer is the Bernard A. Neches Professor of Electrical Engineering, Applied Physics, Medical Engineering and Physics at Caltech as well as a visiting professor at Dartmouth. He received his PhD in 1985, and after working in the Microstructures Research Group at Bellcore, joined the Electrical Engineering option at Caltech in 1993. Professor Scherer's group now works on micro- and nanofabrication of optical, magnetic and fluidic devices and their integration into microsystems. He has co-authored over 300 publications and holds over 100 patents in the fields of optoelectronics, microfluidics, and nanofabrication. Professor Scherer has co-founded three high-technology companies and built a state of the art cleanroom at Caltech. He has pioneered vertical cavity surface emitting lasers, microdisks, photonic crystals, silicon photonics and surface plasmon nanodevices, as well as microfluidic technologies. His group has perfected the fabrication and characterization of ultra-small structures with sizes down to 2nm, which are used in transistors and sensors. Presently, Professor Scherer works on the integration of microfluidic, electronic, photonic and magnetic devices for the purpose of building wireless implantable health monitors. The goal of this effort is to build inexpensive medical diagnostic tools that can provide feedback for the patients to control their health. Professor Scherer’s group also develops inexpensive and automated point-of-care instruments for clinical pathology.
Host: EE-Electrophysics
Location: EEB 132
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Marilyn Poplawski
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. -
The Maturing of Scan Compression Technology
Fri, Mar 07, 2014 @ 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Dr. Rohit Kapur, Synopsys
Talk Title: The Maturing of Scan Compression Technology
Abstract: The topic is IC testing. In the year 2000 scan technology went through a complete overhaul and complex IP was inserted in the scan chains to control the cost of test. The new architectures now go under the name scan compression where a few inputs and outputs are used to feed test data to the ICs that have many internal scan chains. The presenter will give a historical perspective of scan compression technology before describing one of the latest architectures being developed at Synopsys today.
Biography: Rohit Kapur is an IEEE Fellow and a Scientist at Synopsys. At Synopsys he has been the inventor of many technologies including the ones delivered by Synopsys for Scan Compression. Rohit is known for his work in CTL an IEEE standard, and he currently chairs all the standard activities in test within IEEE.
Host: Prof. Sandeep Gupta
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 110
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Annie Yu
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. -
Integrated Systems Seminar Series - Spring 2014
Fri, Mar 07, 2014 @ 03:30 PM - 05:00 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Jacques Rudell, University of Washington
Talk Title: CMOS RF & mm-Wave ICs enter the Era of “Big Data”
Abstract: The last 15 years has witnessed revolutionary changes in mobile computing and wireless communication. This was fueled in large part through Moore’s Law, coupled with research and development of new highly-integrated, silicon CMOS devices which transformed large bulky transceiver components into a single chip for wireless applications. These single-chip radios freed up valuable space for more memory and powerful processors, making the modern smartphone, as we know it today, so common and ubiquitous. Although the architectures, circuits, and system-level design methodologies to realize these low-cost, highly-integrated ICs have largely been defined, questions remain on how to enable chips for emerging applications in an era of large scale data acquisition, and communication, for a variety of devices ranging in use from wireless sensing, to high-speed mobile and point-to-point data communication. Recent work at the University of Washington’s FAST lab has explored some of these challenges and developed all-CMOS chip sets to demonstrate concepts which address some of the future IC challenges associated with ultra-broadband communication.
This presentation will describe a 50-70 GHz broadband receiver intended for use in a high-element phased-array system which utilizes a low-power heterodyne architecture to reduce LO power consumption, while passing the entire 20 GHz bandwidth through the IF, to baseband. The IF stage has one of the highest fractional bandwidths reported to date. Other broadband techniques are described with a compact 24-54 GHz bandpass distributed amplifier which exploits recursive Norton Transforms to reduce silicon area while improving selectivity and maintaining a high fractional bandwidth. In addition, a new PA/transmitter approach is described for long-range sensor standardized data communication. This talk will also briefly highlight some of the other work from our lab with respect to medical devices, including PET imaging systems and stimulation electronics for neural interface applications. Lastly, thoughts are presented on reducing transmit-to-receive self-interference by utilizing a low spurious emission PA, and TX-to-RX cancellation network to enable broadband RF transmission, possibly removing the need for any front-end RF or duplex filters.
Biography: Jacques “Chris”tophe Rudell received degrees in electrical engineering from the University of Michigan (BS), and UC Berkeley (MS, PhD). After completing his degrees, he worked for several years as an RF IC designer at Berkana Wireless (now Qualcomm), and Intel Corporation. In January 2009, he joined the faculty at the University of Washington, Seattle as an Assistant Professor of Electrical Engineering. While a PhD student at UC Berkeley, Dr. Rudell received the Demetri Angelakos Memorial Achievement Award, a citation given to one student per year by the EECS department. He has twice been co-recipient of the best paper awards at the International Solid-State Circuits Conference, the first of which was the 1998 Jack Kilby Award, followed by the 2001 Lewis Winner Award. He received the 2008 ISSCC best evening session award, and the 2011 RFIC Symposium best student paper award. Dr. Rudell served on the ISSCC technical program committee (2003-2010) and on the MTT-IMS Radio Frequency Integrated Circuits (RFIC) Symposium steering committee (2002-2013) where he was the 2013 General Chair. He is also an Associate Editor for the Journal of Solid-State Circuits (2009-present).
Host: Hossien Hashemi, Mike Chen, Mahta Moghaddam, Sushil Subramanian
More Info: http://mhi.usc.edu/activities/integrated-systems/
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 248
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Sushil Subramanian
Event Link: http://mhi.usc.edu/activities/integrated-systems/
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. -
Intelligent Power Systems: From Physics of Power Flows to Data Analytics
Mon, Mar 10, 2014 @ 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Baosen Zhang, Stanford University
Talk Title: Intelligent Power Systems: From Physics of Power Flows to Data Analytics
Abstract: The power system is undergoing a dramatic transformation to the meet the challenges and opportunities of renewable and distributed energy resources. In this talk, I will show how an understanding between the energy producers, consumers and the physical network allows us to design a smarter and more efficient grid. The first part of this talk will give a geometric understanding of the geometry of power flows in the network through the optimal power flow (OPF) problem, which is known to be non-convex and difficult to solve. By investigating the feasible injection region of the problem, we show that the Pareto-Front of the injection region is invariant under the convex hull operation for distribution networks. Therefore the OPF problem can be solved exactly in the distribution networks. Furthermore, this geometric picture allows us to design algorithms that are either distributed or even without any explicitly communication. The second part will focus on consumer behaviors to illustrate how and who should implement these algorithms in practice. Using real smart meter data from households in Northern California, I will show that there is a natural set of customer groupings that there are much more efficient customer management architectures than those employed by current utilities. The key is to identify the optimal trade-off between managing the uncertainties in the system and efficiency loss bought on by large groups. Extending this idea to large scale renewable producers, a central theme emerges: there is a “correct” level of collaboration among the resources that is crucial to the design for new power systems.
Biography: Baosen Zhang is a postdoctoral scholar at Stanford University, jointly hosted by the departments of Civil and Environmental Engineering and Management Sciences and Engineering. He received his Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley in the department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. Before that, he received his B.A.Sc. Degree from the University of Toronto. His interest is in the control and optimization of power systems, especially the connection between data and the physical system. He is a recipient of the Canadian Graduate Scholarship from the government of Canada and a EECS fellowship from Berkeley.
Host: Rahul Jain
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 248
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Annie Yu
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 Seminar
Tue, Mar 11, 2014 @ 10:30 AM - 12:00 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Di Wang , Ph.D. Candidate, Pennsylvania State University
Talk Title: Provisioning and Harnessing Energy Storage in Datacenters
Abstract: Power consumption of datacenters continues to pose serious economic, societal and environmental concerns. A large datacenter spends millions of dollars in yearly operational expenditures (op-ex) paying its electricity bills. An even larger capital expenditure (cap-ex) goes into provisioning the power delivery network, to accommodate the peak power draw, even if this draw is never or rarely sustained. With consumers demanding more for less, extracting the maximum value out of every provisioned and consumed watt in these datacenters is critical to profitability and sustenance.
In this talk, we will focus on leveraging energy storage such as batteries, ultra-capacitors, flywheels, and even compressed air based energy storage device to reduce cap-ex and op-ex costs. Specifically, we will discuss the challenges and issues in provisioning and harnessing these devices for enhancing datacenter power demand response capabilities. First, we will look at our modeling and optimization framework to figure out which devices to use, where to place them and how much capacity to provision given different cost-benefit trade-offs. Then, we will explore the problem from a practical setting, and discuss system software support for virtualizing datacenter power distribution hierarchy. Finally, datacenter power demand characterization and analysis for these studies will be presented.
Biography: Di Wang is currently a Ph.D. candidate, advised by Prof. Anand Sivasubramaniam, in the Computer Science and Engineering department at Penn State University. He received B.E. in computer science and technology from Zhejiang University of China in 2005 and M.S. in computer systems engineering from the Technical University of Denmark in 2008. He worked for Teklatech (an EDA startup company in Copenhagen) as an R&D engineer in 2008, and interned at IBM Almaden research center in the summer of 2011 as well as Microsoft Research in the summers of 2012 and 2013.
Host: Prof. Michel Dubois
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 248
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. -
Lossy Data Compression: Non-asymptotic Fundamental Limits
Thu, Mar 13, 2014 @ 09:30 AM - 10:30 AM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Victoria Kostina, Princeton University
Talk Title: Lossy Data Compression: Non-asymptotic Fundamental Limits
Abstract: The basic tradeoff in lossy compression is that between the compression ratio (rate) and the fidelity of reproduction of the object that is compressed. Traditional (asymptotic) information theory seeks to describe the optimum tradeoff between rate and fidelity achievable in the limit of infinite length of the source block to be compressed. A perennial question in information theory is how relevant the asymptotic fundamental limits are when the communication system is forced to operate at a given, fixed blocklength. The finite blocklength (delay) constraint is inherent to all communication scenarios. In fact, in many systems of current interest, such as real-time multimedia communication, delays are strictly constrained, while in packetized data communication, packets are frequently on the order of 1000 bits.
Motivated by critical practical interest in non-asymptotic information-theoretic limits, we study the optimum rate-fidelity tradeoffs in lossy source coding and joint source-channel coding at a given fixed blocklength. While computable formulas for the asymptotic fundamental limits are available for a wide class of channels and sources, the luxury of being able to compute exactly (in polynomial time) non-asymptotic fundamental limits is rarely affordable. One can at most hope to obtain bounds and approximations to information-theoretic non-asymptotic fundamental limits. Our main findings include tight bounds to the non-asymptotic fundamental limits in lossy data compression and transmission, valid for general sources without any assumptions on ergodicity or memorylessness. Moreover, in the stationary memoryless case we show a simple formula approximating the non-asymptotic optimal coding rate that involves only two parameters of the source.
Biography: Victoria Kostina received the Bachelors degree with honors in applied mathematics and physics from the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology, Russia, in 2004, where she was affiliated with the Institute for Information Transmission Problems of the Russian Academy of Sciences, and the Masters degree in electrical engineering from the University of Ottawa, Canada, in 2006. In September 2013, she completed her Ph.D. in electrical engineering at Princeton University, and is currently a postdoctoral researcher working with Prof. Sergio Verdú. Her research interests lie in information theory, theory of random processes, coding, and wireless communications. She is the recipient of two Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada postgraduate fellowships, the Upton Fellowship in Engineering from Princeton University, the University of Ottawa Excellence Scholarship, the University of Ottawa Admission Scholarship and the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology Excellence Scholarship.
Host: Urbashi Mitra, ubli@usc.edu, EEB 540, x04667
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 248
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Susan Wiedem
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 Distinguished Lecturer Series
Thu, Mar 13, 2014 @ 03:00 PM - 04:00 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Bruce Hajek, Prof. Leonard C. and Mary Lou Hoeft Endowed Chair in Engineering, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Abstract: This talk will focus on theory and practice of combinatorial auctions and their application to the sale of wireless spectrum licenses. As new wireless applications emerge worldwide, the wireless industry and government regulators are looking to reallocate wireless spectrum to better match the demand. Combinatorial auctions can play an effective role in the allocation process, but important implementation and theoretical issues remain. The talk will include an overview of recent research on the use of profit sharing contracts and core projecting auctions. (Joint work with Vineet Abhishek and Prof. Steven Williams)
Biography: Bruce Hajek received the BS in Mathematics and MS in Electrical Engineering from the University of Illinois and the Ph. D. in Electrical Engineering from the
University of California at Berkeley. Since 1979 he has been on the faculty of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and the Coordinated
Science Laboratory, at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Dr. Hajek pursues basic research in the area of modeling, analysis, and optimization in communication systems and networks. His recent research has focused on allocation based on game theory, peer-to-peer network protocols, and inference in graphical models. He received the IEEE Kobayashi Award for Computer Communications and the Donald P. Eckman Award of the IEEE Control Systems Society. He was elected to the US National Academy of Engineering in 1999.
Host: Rahul Jain & Michael Neely
More Info: http://ee.usc.edu/news/dls/
More Information: 20140313 Hajek Print (2).pdf
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 132
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Estela Lopez
Event Link: http://ee.usc.edu/news/dls/
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-EP Faculty Candidate Talk
Mon, Mar 24, 2014 @ 02:00 PM - 03:30 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Weihua Guan, BME/ME, Johns Hopkins University
Talk Title: Electrofluidics And Optofluidics: Bringing Moore's Law To Biomedical Diagnostics And Life Sciences
Abstract: Whereas the complex computation problems have been efficiently tackled by the exponentially growing number of transistors integrated into a single chip, solving the incredible complexity of the living organisms (especially at the molecular level) still faces many challenges. As the driving forces for Moore’s law in microelectronics, micro- and nano-scale technologies also hold great promise for unraveling the mystery in life sciences and developing the next generation of high throughput biomedical diagnostic devices and systems.
In this talk, I will discuss how microfluidic, microelectronic and optic technologies can be mingled together (electrofluidics and optofluidics) to develop lab-on-a-chip devices for highly sensitive, specific and reliable biosensing applications. Specifically, I will present three representative examples: (1) silicon-bio interfaces (electrofluidics), (2) aqueous mass spectrometer using RF fields and optical monitoring (electro-opto-fluidics), and (3) digital microfluidics for single molecule detection (opto-fluidics). Micro/nanotechnology-enabled devices and systems serve as a fascinating starting point to increase the bio-analytical power in an exponential fashion and to bring the Moore's law into biomedical diagnostics and life sciences. My vision is that the landscape for life science industry and biomedical diagnostics is set to be transformed by continuing fundamental and translational electrofluidic and optofluidics research.
Biography: Dr. Weihua Guan received his Ph.D. degree in Electrical Engineering from Yale University. He is currently a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Johns Hopkins University. His research interests lie in the translational and fundamental understanding and application of microfluidic, microelectronic, and photonic technologies in lab-on-a-chip devices for biomedical diagnostics and life sciences. Dr. Guan is a recipient of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute International Student Research Fellowship and Chinese Government Award for Outstanding Self-financed Students Abroad.
Host: EE-Electrophysics
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 132
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Marilyn Poplawski
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. -
Sparse Representation in Highly Coherent Dictionary by Minimizing Difference of L1 and L2
Tue, Mar 25, 2014 @ 03:00 PM - 04:00 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Prof. Jack Xin, University of California, Irvine
Talk Title: Sparse Representation in Highly Coherent Dictionary by Minimizing Difference of L1 and L2
Series: Medical Imaging Seminar Series
Abstract: Over-complete bases appear in human visual and auditory systems and related mathematical constructions such as Gabor frames and Gammatone filters. Though one gains robustness and resolution, finding an optimal compact representation requires minimization of sparsity or L0. The L1 norm is an effective convex proxy that works very well when dictionary elements (basis vectors) are incoherent enough. However, it may fail when some of the basis vectors are nearly aligned or degeneracy appears (loss of uniqueness of minimizer). We introduce a Lipschitz continuous non-convex alternative, the difference of L1 and L2 norms, and show its analytical and numerical properties for sparse recovery in highly coherent dictionaries. We present the difference of convex algorithms, their convergence and enhancement by sparsity driven simulated annealing strategies. Applications include over-sampled discrete cosine transform, optical spectroscopy, image denoising and reconstruction.
Biography: ack Xin received his B.S in computational mathematics at Peking University in 1985, and Ph.D. in applied mathematics at New York University in 1990. He was a postdoctoral fellow at Berkeley and Princeton in 1991 and 1992. He was assistant and associate professor of mathematics at the University of Arizona from 1991 to 1999. He was a professor of mathematics from 1999 to 2005 at the University of Texas at Austin. He has been a professor of mathematics in the Department of Mathematics, Center for Hearing Research, Institute for Mathematical Behavioral Sciences, and Center for Mathematical and Computational Biology at UC Irvine since 2005. He is a fellow of the Guggenheim Foundation and the American Mathematical Society. His research interests include applied analysis and computation in nonlinear and multi-scale problems, mathematical modeling and signal processing. He authored two Springer books and is involved in undergraduate research training and mentoring such as the iCAMP funded by the NSF.
Host: Hosted By Dr. Angel Pineda
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 132
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Talyia Veal
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 Secure Communication to Secret Computation
Wed, Mar 26, 2014 @ 10:00 AM - 11:00 AM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Hongchao Zhou, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Talk Title: From Secure Communication to Secret Computation
Abstract: Data security and privacy are of utmost importance for businesses, governments, and individuals. In this talk, I will present my research in security from three angles: emerging applications, practical systems and algorithms design.
First, I present an efficient homomorphic encryption framework that supports fast and practical basic arithmetic operations on integer vectors in the encrypted domain. It provides orders of magnitude improvement in computational time compared to existing methods and enables the feasibility of a number of practical encrypted signal-processing applications in cloud storage and distributed sensing. In addition to classical cryptosystems, I further discuss quantum communications as a solution for transmitting information with provable security. In particular, I address critical coding challenges in high-dimensional quantum key distribution, and present the first known practical quantum-communication system that achieves unprecedented performance: 7.0 secure bits per photon and 7.1 Mb/s throughput over 20 km of fiber transmission. Finally, the design and implementation of secure systems rely on the generation of high-quality random bits. Motivated by the original work of von Neumann (1951), I describe the first known optimal algorithm that generates unbiased random bits from an arbitrary finite Markov chain.
Biography: Hongchao Zhou is a postdoctoral associate in the Research Laboratory of Electronics at MIT. He received his M.S. degree and Ph.D. degree in Electrical Engineering from Caltech, in 2009 and 2012, respectively. He studied at Tsinghua University from 2004 to 2008, where he earned an M.S. in control science and a B.S. degree in physics and mathematics. His research interests include information theory and coding, algorithms and complexity, and their applications in data storage systems, secure communication systems and biological computing systems. He received the 2013 Charles Wilts Prize for the best doctoral thesis in EE at Caltech, the 2010 Chinese government award for outstanding self-financed students abroad, and the 2010 IEEE distinguished student humanitarian prize. He worked with IBM China Research as a part-time intern from 2006 and 2008, where he designed and developed the first version of IBM Smartcloud Docs.
Host: Keith Chugg, chugg@usc.edu, EEB 500A, x07294
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 248
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. -
Optimal RNA-Seq Reconstruction: From Informational Limits to Software
Thu, Mar 27, 2014 @ 10:00 AM - 11:00 AM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Sreeram Kannan, University of California, Berkeley
Talk Title: Optimal RNA-Seq Reconstruction: From Informational Limits to Software
Abstract: High throughput sequencing of RNA has emerged in the last few years as a powerful method that enables discovery of novel transcripts and alternatively spliced isoforms of genes, along with accurate estimates of gene expression. In this work, we study the fundamental limits of de novo transcriptome assembly using RNA shotgun-sequencing, where the sequencing technology extracts short reads from the RNA transcripts. We propose a new linear-time algorithm for transcriptome reconstruction and derive sufficient conditions on the length of reads under which the algorithm will succeed. We also derive fundamental information-theoretic conditions for reconstruction by any algorithm, and show that the proposed algorithm is near-optimal on a real data set. Along the way, we show that the NP-hard problem of decomposing a flow into the fewest number of paths can be solved in linear time for a family of instances, and biologically relevant instances tend to fall in this family. We also describe the construction of a software package for RNA assembly based on this theory and show that it obtains significant improvements in reconstruction accuracy over state-of-the-art software.
Biography: Sreeram Kannan is currently a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California, Berkeley. He received his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering and M.S. in Mathematics from the University of Illinois Urbana- Champaign. He is a co-recipient of the Van Valkenburg research award from UIUC, Qualcomm Roberto Padovani Scholarship for outstanding interns, the Qualcomm Cognitive Radio Contest first prize, the S.V.C. Aiya medal from the Indian Institute of Science, and Intel India Student Research Contest first prize. His research interests include applications of information theory and approximation algorithms to wireless networks and computational biology.
Host: Andreas Molisch, molisch@usc.edu, EEB 530, x04670
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 132
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. -
Integrated Systems Seminar Series - Spring 2014
Fri, Mar 28, 2014 @ 03:30 PM - 05:00 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Alexander Rylyakov , IBM
Talk Title: Silicon Photonics: Believe the Hype or Forget About It?
Series: Integrated Systems Seminar Series
Abstract: Silicon Photonics is certainly not a new technology with early papers published in 1980s and first commercial products available in 1990s. It also has a number of well-known and very significant technical challenges, especially when it is compared to mature III-V based optical communication devices, such as VCSELs and InP photonic integrated circuits. And yet in recent years it very clearly has entered a dramatic hype cycle, with many companies developing the technology (e.g., Cisco/Lightwire, Mellanox/Kotura, Molex/Luxtera, Samsung, IBM, Intel, and many others) and announcing products. The overall situation tends to be extremely polarizing, with hard core proponents citing only the advantages of Silicon Photonics (high level of integration, cost, compatibility with CMOS) and skeptics focusing mostly on the issues (absence of optical gain, coupling losses, device performance). I will try to provide a balanced view, based on my personal experience designing the driver/receiver circuits for Silicon Photonic devices, VCSELs and InP PICs. I will review recent IBM Research results on optical transceivers and switches, comparing key parameters (power efficiency, density, reach) of different approaches. During the review I will necessarily have to touch on sensitive subjects such as direct laser modulation vs different modulator types (MZ, ring, EA), hybrid approach vs monolithic integration of optics and circuits and so on. I don’t have a roadmap or a crystal ball, so I will not make any conclusions or forward looking statements, but so far it has been a very exciting area of research, with a clear potential for more.
Biography: Alexander Rylyakov received the M.S. degree in physics from Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology in 1989 and the Ph.D. degree in physics from State University of New York at Stony Brook in 1997, where he worked on the design and testing of superconductor integrated circuits based on Josephson junctions. In 1999 he joined the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center as a Research Staff Member, working on the design and testing of high-speed digital and mixed-signal communication circuits for optical and channel-limited wireline communications. Many of those circuits, implemented in various generations of CMOS and SiGe bipolar, are now used in IBM products and several of them have established performance records in their respective technologies. Dr. Rylyakov's current research interests are in the areas of digital phase-locked loops for communication and microprocessor clocking, high-speed low power transceivers and equalization for wireline and optical communication, and integrated circuits for silicon photonics. He has published over 80 papers and has 20 patents issued.
Recent IBM Outstanding Technical Achievement Awards: “Advancements in the Science of Silicon Nanophotonics” (2012), “Development of Digital PLL Technology and Its Establishment in IBM Product Roadmaps” (2013), “Technologies for Terabit/s Optical Transceivers” (2013)
Host: Hossien Hashemi, Mike Chen, Mahta Moghaddam, Sushil Subramanian
More Info: http://mhi.usc.edu/activities/integrated-systems/
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 248
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Sushil Subramanian
Event Link: http://mhi.usc.edu/activities/integrated-systems/
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. -
The constant battle for power-efficient computing
Mon, Mar 31, 2014 @ 10:30 AM - 12:00 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: George Michelogiannakis, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
Talk Title: The constant battle for power-efficient computing
Abstract: Recent technology scaling has led to the realization that communication, and not computation, dominates energy costs. This realization, coupled with the constant increase of parallelism and the fact that power consumption is typically the primary design constraint, results in increased difficulty in providing sufficient communication bandwidth to keep processors busy. Power is a critical challenge for HPC, datacenters and consumer electronics. In HPC, a 1000x improvement in performance is needed with only a 10x increase in power by 2018. Moreover, datacenters require $7B just for cooling in the USA, which is projected to increase by 4x in the near future. Finally, consumer electronics require a 2x increase in performance with no increase in power every two years to remain competitive. In this talk, I will present my recent work on efficient data movement on and off chip, as well as efficient DRAM access. I will focus on collective memory transfers, which maximize DRAM performance and minimize power by guaranteeing in-order access patterns from a collection of processors to the memory. I will also present the channel reservation protocol, which eliminates congestion in system-wide networks caused by adversarial or unbalanced traffic in order to increase throughput and reduce latency for benign traffic, and therefore increase the utilization of costly network bandwidth. I will conclude this talk with an overview of related projects and ideas for the future.
Biography: George Michelogiannakis is currently a postdoctoral research fellow at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. He is part of the computer architecture laboratory which examines key computer architecture research challenges both on and off chip. He completed his PhD at Stanford University in 2012 with Prof. William J. Dally. His past work focuses on on-chip network with numerous contributions to flow control, congestion, allocation, and co-design with chip multiprocessors. His other work includes congestion control for system-wide networks, precision loss avoidance for system-wide reduction operations, and maximizing DRAM efficiency by taking advantage of advanced language constructs. George Michelogiannakis was the recipient of the Stanford Graduate Fellowship, and numerous other awards during his studies.
Host: Massoud Pedram
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 248
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Annie Yu
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-EP Seminar - Lin Han
Mon, Mar 31, 2014 @ 04:00 PM - 05:00 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Lin Han, Biomedical Engineering, Yale University
Talk Title: Microtechnology Platforms to Interrogate Information Flow in Human Society and Single Cell Communication
Abstract: Human beings are living in a society full of information flow. The delivery of information and realization of communication are mostly based on electronic products which are assembled with displays. One important part of my research is electronic materials and devices for flexible organic light-emitting diodes (OLEDs) displays. A novel SiO2-silicone insulator material was invented, which was deposited by plasma enhanced chemical vapor deposition (PECVD) from environmentally friendly hexamethyl disiloxane (HMDSO) and O2 at room temperature. This hybrid is homogeneous and combines the electrical properties of thermal silicon oxide and the mechanical flexibility of polymer. This new hybrid is not only an effective encapsulation barrier to protect OLEDs, but also an excellent gate dielectric for amorphous silicon thin film transistors. As the gate dielectric, it enables transistors with greatly improved performance including output current, electrical stability, and flexibility. This SiO2-silicone hybrid is a promising material to solve the bottleneck of flexible OLEDs displays.
On the other hand the information flow in single cells is determined by the Central Dogma, also called a DNA-RNA-PROTEIN axis, which describes how genetic information is transcribed to messenger RNAs (mRNAs) and expressed to produce proteins that form the building blocks of a living cell and fulfill all biological functions. Despite recent advances in genomic technologies and next generation sequencing, it is still challenging to investigate the genetic information flow through multiple levels of the Central Dogma (e.g., from DNA to RNA) at a single-cell level. Microfluidics-enabled approaches allow for rapid separation of cytoplasmic and nuclear contents of a single cell followed by on-chip amplification of genomic DNA and messenger RNA. This platform is potentially an enabling tool to permit multiple genomic measurements performed on the same single cells and opens new opportunities to tackle a range of fundamental biological questions. It also helps addressing clinical challenges such as diagnosing intra-tumor heterogeneity and dissecting complex cellular immune responses via underlying cell-to-cell communication at single-cell levels.
Biography: Lin Han received her PhD in Electrical Engineering from Princeton University. She is currently a Postdoctoral Associate in Biomedical Engineering at Yale University. Her research mainly focuses on 1) Microfluidic platforms for single-cell genomics, epigenetics, transcriptomics and proteomics; 2) materials and devices for flexible electronics. Microfluidic platform enables us to break the bottleneck of traditional biology technique, and extract the multi-level information (genomic DNA, mRNA, protein secretion, and phenotype) simultaneously from single cells. As a result, we could be able to effectively investigate the dynamic evolutionary dynamics of cancer initiation, progression, evolution of resistance and response to therapy. By applying flexible electronics into biology and biomedical field, we can not only conduct scientific study, but also build functional systems to contribute to human beings health care.
Host: EE-Electrophysics
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 132
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Marilyn Poplawski
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.
