SUNMONTUEWEDTHUFRISAT
Events for March 24, 2015
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Electrical Engineering Seminar
Tue, Mar 24, 2015 @ 10:30 AM - 11:30 AM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Swagath Venkataramani, Purdue University
Talk Title: Addressing the Efficiency Gap with Approximate Computing
Abstract: The âefficiency gapâ created by diminishing benefits from semiconductor technology scaling on the one hand, and projected growth in computing and data demand on the other, has created an urgent need to identify new sources of computing efficiency across the computing stack. Fortunately, the workloads that drive the demand for computing efficiency also present new opportunities. In data centers and the cloud, the demand for computing is driven by the need to organize, search through, analyze, and draw inferences from, exploding amounts of digital data. In mobile and embedded devices, the need to more naturally and intelligently interact with the physical world, and process richer media drive much of the computing demand. A common pattern that emerges from both ends of the spectrum is that these applications are largely not about calculating a precise numerical answer; instead, âcorrectnessâ is defined as producing results that are good enough, or of sufficient quality, to produce an acceptable user experience. As a result, these workloads are endowed with a high degree of intrinsic resilience to their underlying computations being executed in an approximate or inexact manner. Approximate computing broadly refers to exploiting the forgiving nature (or intrinsic resilience) of applications to design more efficient (faster, lower power) computing platforms. In this talk, I will describe how current workload trends are driving interest in approximate computing, and describe a vision for approximate computing at all layers of the computing stack. To realize this vision, I will outline a holistic approach that includes automatic frameworks to synthesize approximate circuit blocks, a model for programmable approximate processors that explicitly codifies the notion of quality into the HW/SW interface, and finally software techniques to systematically identify resilient computations within an application and to apply approximate computing to achieve a favorable quality-efficiency tradeoff. I will conclude with an overview of the other research directions that I am exploring to address the efficiency gap viz. computing with spintronics, and heterogeneous many-core accelerators for emerging workloads.
Biography: Swagath Venkataramani is a 5-year PhD student in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Purdue University. His research interests include, Approximate Computing, Computing with Spintronic Devices, Heterogeneous Parallel Architectures, and Computational Imaging. His dissertation research was awarded the Intel PhD fellowship in computing leadership and Purdue Bilsland Dissertation fellowship. It has also been featured in MIT Technology Review, Slashdot, Physics Today, and NSF News from the Field. Swagath graduated with a Bachelors degree in Electrical and Electronics Engineering from College of Engineering, Guindy, Anna University, India as the university gold medalist. He has worked with the Exa-scale Computing Group at Intel as part of the US DOEâs FastForward Program, and with the Sensing and Energy Research Group at Microsoft Research.
Host: Prof. Alice C. Parker
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. -
Viterbi Keynote Lecture
Tue, Mar 24, 2015 @ 04:00 PM - 05:00 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Dr. H. Vincent Poor / Dean, School of Engineering and Applied Science, Princeton University
Talk Title: Fundamental Limits on Information Security and Privacy
Series: Distinguished Lecturer Series
Abstract: As has become quite clear from recent headlines, the ubiquity of technologies such as wireless communications and on-line data repositories has created new challenges in information security and privacy. Information theory provides fundamental limits that can guide the development of methods for addressing these challenges. After a brief historical account of the use of information theory to characterize secrecy, this talk will review two areas to which these ideas have been applied successfully: wireless physical layer security, which examines the ability of the physical properties of the radio channel to provide confidentiality in data transmission; and utility-privacy tradeoffs of data sources, which quantify the balance between the protection of private information contained in such sources and the provision of measurable benefits to legitimate users of them. Several potential applications of these ideas will also be discussed.
Biography: H. Vincent Poor (Ph.D., Princeton 1977) is Dean of the School of Engineering and Applied Science at Princeton University, where he is also the Michael Henry Strater University Professor. From 1977 until he joined the Princeton faculty in 1990, he was a faculty member at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He has also held visiting appointments at a number of other universities, including most recently at Stanford and Imperial College. His research interests are primarily in the areas of information theory and signal processing, with applications in wireless networks and related fields. Among his publications in these areas is the recent book Principles of Cognitive Radio (Cambridge University Press, 2013). At Princeton he has developed and taught several courses designed to bring technological subject matter to general audiences, including âThe Wireless Revolutionâ (in which Andrew Viterbi was one of the first guest speakers) and âSix Degrees of Separation: Small World Networks in Science, Technology and Society.â
Dr. Poor is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and the National Academy of Sciences, and is a foreign member of the Royal Society. He is a former President of the IEEE Information Theory Society, and a former Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Transactions on Information Theory. He currently serves as a director of the Corporation for National Research Initiatives and of the IEEE Foundation, and as a member of the Council of the National Academy of Engineering. Recent recognition of his work includes the 2014 URSI Booker Gold Medal, and honorary doctorates from several universities in Asia and Europe.
Host: Dr. Sandeep K. Gupta
More Info: https://bluejeans.com/770154652
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 132
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Mayumi Thrasher
Event Link: https://bluejeans.com/770154652
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.
