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Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Events for April
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Making Fuel and Drug-Producing Microbes through Analysis, Modeling and Design
Thu, Apr 03, 2008 @ 10:30 AM - 11:30 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Desmond Lun, Ph.D.Abstract:Engineering microorganisms that efficiently produce drugs and fuels is an exciting and challenging problem
with large potential impact on energy supply, the environment, and global health. Such engineering is greatly
aided by systematic design and, in this talk, we discuss how systematic design can be achieved through the
analysis and modeling of microbial metabolic networks. We discuss approaches that we are developing for
modeling metabolism and gene regulation and for using these models to guide design. In particular, we
describe a network optimization problem that arises in the context of optimal design and discuss algorithmic
approaches for its solution. We describe our progress in engineering E. coli for petroleum production from
simple sugars and in other engineering directions.Biography: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 synthetic biology, systems biology, and networking. He is coauthor,
with Tracey Ho, of "Network Coding: An Introduction," forthcoming from Cambridge University Press.Host: Professor C.-C. Jay KuoLocation: 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. -
Interference Channels with Generalized Feedback
Thu, Apr 03, 2008 @ 02:00 PM - 03:00 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
SPEAKER: Professor Daniela Tuninetti, ECE Department, University of Illinois-ChicagoABSTRACT: In the past years, there has been a renewed interest to characterize the ultimate performance of InterFerence Channels (IFC). Classical IFCs model competition among uncoordinated source-destination pairs. IFCs with generalized feedback model scenarios where the sources can sense the current channel activity, like in wireless channels, and use this information to communicate cooperatively. Although cooperative communications is not equivalent to virtual MIMO communications, it has been shown that it benefits the performance of all the involved source-destination pairs without increasing neither the transmit powers nor the channel bandwidth. In this talk, we will review recent progresses for IFCs with and without generalized feedback. We will describe the currently best achievable and outer-bound regions. We will conclude by comparing those regions for Gaussian IFCs under different feedback configurations, and pointing out open problems.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. -
Going Beyond Diffusion Tensor Imaging: Local Reconstruction and Tractography in High Angular..
Fri, Apr 04, 2008 @ 10:30 AM - 11:30 AM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Maxime Descoteaux, Ph.D. NMR Lab Neurospin / CEA Saclay
FRANCE Abstract:
At the current resolution of diffusion-weighted (DW) magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), research groups agree that there are between one third to two thirds of imaging voxels in the human brain white matter that contain multiple fiber bundles crossing. This presentation tackles the important problem of recovering crossing fiber bundles from high angular resolution diffusion imaging (HARDI) data. The main goal is to overcome the limitations of diffusion tensor imaging (DTI). It is well-known that imaging voxels where there are multiple fiber crossings are locations where DTI is limited and inadequate. In this presentation, a simple, fast and robust Q-ball imaging (QBI) reconstruction is presented using spherical harmonics. QBI is a recent HARDI technique that reconstructs the orientation distribution function (ODF) of the average diffusion of the water molecules in the underlying fiber population. It is able to describe multiple fiber populations crossing. From this diffusion ODF, we describe how we can reconstruct the fiber ODF in order to perform accurate tractography. We develop a new spherical deconvolution sharpening method that transforms the diffusion ODF into a fiber ODF. Finally, we develop a new deterministic tractography algorithm and a new probabilistic tractography algorithm exploiting the full multi-directional information of the fiber ODF. We show local reconstructions and tracking results on complex fiber regions with known fiber crossings from simulated HARDI data, from a biological phantom and from multiple human brain datasets. Most current DTI based methods neglect these complex fibers, which might lead to wrong interpretations of the brain anatomy and functioning.Host: Professor Richard LeahyLocation: Hedco Neurosciences Building (HNB) - 100
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. -
EE Students Practical Guide Seminar Series - Picking a Research Topic
Fri, Apr 04, 2008 @ 11:30 AM - 01:00 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Seminar Leaders: Profs. Konstantinos Psounis and Alan WillnerWebsite: http://ee.usc.edu/news/practical-guide/* Pizza will be provided by the EE Department.*Abstract: Selecting a research topic is important. It sets the course for the next three-four years of a student's life. What is more, it will define the area of a PhD's job search, and it my very well define the area of interest of a researcher in the industry or academia for years to come. The right research topic can set you on a successful path, and choosing wisely can be a combination of insight and luck. Alternatively, choosing the wrong research topic can cause major problems for any graduate student. Following some introductory remarks regarding right ways and wrong ways to approach this critical problem, this will be an informal conversational meeting with Dr. Psounis and Dr. Lidar, where students will be free to ask any questions about how to choose a good research topic.Biographical SketchesProf. Konstantinos Psounis is an assistant professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of Southern California. He received his first degree from the department of Electrical and Computer Engineering of National Technical University of Athens, Greece, in June 1997, the M.S. degree in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University, California, in January 1999, and the Ph.D. degree in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University in December 2002. Konstantinos models and analyzes the performance of a variety of networks, including the Internet, mobile ad hoc networks, delay and disruptive tolerant networks, sensor networks, mesh networks, peer to peer networks and the web. He also designs methods and algorithms to solve problems related to such systems. He is the author of more than 40 research papers on these topics. Konstantinos has received faculty awards from NSF and the Zumberge foundation, has been a Stanford graduate fellow throughout his graduate studies, and has received the best-student National Technical University of Athens award for graduating first in his class.
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. -
Codes and Capacity for Bidirectional Communication on Lines, Stars, and Rings
Fri, Apr 04, 2008 @ 01:00 PM - 02:00 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
SPEAKER: Dr. Gerhard Kramer, Member of Technical Staff, Communications and Statistical Sciences Dept., Bell Labs, Alcatel-LucentABSTRACT: This talk describes codes and capacity bounds for two-way communication in three classes of networks that are elements of larger networks. We begin by considering bidirectional line networks with both edge and node capacity constraints, as well as multiple multi-cast traffic sessions. For wired line networks, we construct an explicit binary network code that achieves capacity. The converse theorem requires using our progressive d-separating edge set (PdE) bound, which is a fundamental generalization of a standard cut bound. Second, we extend the results to line networks with broadcasting nodes by studying a two-way relay channel with three nodes: two sources and a relay. We develop several coded modulation techniques that achieve all rate points inside the capacity region. Third, we extend coding for the three-node topology to many nodes and develop a separation-based coding method that achieves good rates. We show that this approach achieves capacity if the broadcast channels are physically degraded and the multi-access channels exhibit uniform-phase fading. Finally, we outline extensions of the ideas to star and ring networks.BIO: Gerhard Kramer received the B.Sc. and M.Sc. degrees in electrical engineering from the University of Manitoba in Canada and the Dr. sc. techn. (Doktor der Technischen Wissenschaften) degree from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zurich, Switzerland. From July 1998 to March 2000, he was with Endora Tech AG, Basel, Switzerland, as a communications engineering consultant. Since May 2000 he has been with Bell Laboratories, Murray Hill, NJ, USA. His research has been focused on information theory, communications theory, iterative decoding, and source coding.Dr. Kramer is currently serving as an Associate Editor for Shannon Theory for the IEEE Transactions on Information Theory. He served as Guest Editor-in-Chief for an IEEE Transactions on Information Theory Special Issue on Relaying and Cooperation in Communication Networks in 2006-2007, and as Publications Editor for the same Transactions during 2004-2005. He is serving as Co-Chair of the Technical Program Committee for the 2008 IEEE International Symposium on Information Theory. Dr. Kramer is a co-recipient of the IEEE Communications Society 2005 Stephen O. Rice Prize paper award, a Bell Labs President's Gold Award in 2003, and a recipient of an ETH Medal in 1998.HOST: Dr. Alan Willner, willner@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. -
DICIT - An Example of Acoustic Scene Analysis and Distant-talking Based Spoken Dialogue System
Mon, Apr 07, 2008 @ 10:00 AM - 11:00 AM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Maurizio OmologoAbstract:The aim of this talk is to introduce the DICIT EC project. DICIT focuses on the development of advanced
acoustic sensor based technologies and the related application to the smart-home environment. The main
foreseen application is an automatic voice interaction system, with users at a distance of up to some meters from
a set of microphones. Voice input operates in a complementary modality to the use of remote control, this way allowing one to control TV and related devices in a natural and flexible way. Due to the interference of other
coexisting active sound sources (e.g. loudspeakers, other talkers and noise sources) and to the effect of room
acoustics, both the processing and the understanding of given speech utterances become more problematic with
respect to the ideal situation tackled when using a close-talking microphone. To this regard, the talk will
provide an overview of the basic problems and technologies being developed as far as the multi-microphone
front-end are concerned. Other activities and results obtained during the first 18 months of the project will then be presented together with some video-clips showing the potential of the technologies so far developed.Bio:Maurizio Omologo was born in Padova (Italy) in 1959, and received the Laurea degree with honours in
Electrical Engineering (University of Padova) in 1984. From 1984 to 1987 he was Researcher at the Speech
Coding Department of CSELT - Torino (Italy). In 1988 he joined ITC-irst, as Senior Researcher of the Acoustic
and Speech Recognition group. Since 1998 he has been acting as head of the SHINE (Speech Interaction in
Noisy Environment) project at ITC-irst, now Bruno Kessler Foundation (FBK)-irst. From January 2003 to
December 2005 he was Associate Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Speech and Audio Processing journal. He
also has been teaching "Audio signal processing" at the Department of Information and Communication
Technology - University of Trento, since 2002. Currently, he acts as Coordinator of DICIT, a European Project
of the VI EC Framework Programme.Host: Prof. Shrikanth NarayananLocation: 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. -
Impulse-based UWB Systems and Applications
Mon, Apr 07, 2008 @ 02:00 PM - 03:00 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
SPEAKER: Tor Sverre (Bassen) Lande, Professor, Dept. of Informatics, University of Oslo, NorwayABSTRACT: The old idea of impulse radio dates back to Marconi's first wireless transmissions using sparks. Unlike most wireless today, impulse radio transmissions are extremely wideband signals. The recently FCC-released frequency band from 3.1GHz to 10.6GHz is the widest unlicensed frequency band every released (7.5GHz). This ultra wide bandwidth (UWB) is commercially explored for even faster data transfer using traditional, multi-band (OFDM) RF techniques. However, the available bandwidth is wide enough for impulse radio transmission giving new functionality and new implementation challenges.I will show how power efficient impulse radio solutions are feasible in standard digital CMOS technology. Quite non-standard and untraditional design strategies must be used including time-domain signal processing. Circuit topologies for higher order Gaussian pulse generation and power efficient, correlating RAKE receivers will be explained.Impulse radio transmissions have additional interesting properties compared to narrowband modulation.-With time-domain processing (TDOA) highly accurate positioning is feasible in the millimeter range.-Improved sensitivity for robust communication.-Large number of channels (>100).Novel applications are also feasible using impulse transmission. Combining unconventional design techniques like "Swept-Threshold sampling" and digital lossless integration, micropower impulse radar is feasible in CMOS. A >30GHz sampler is used to accumulate and recover reflected electromagnetic energy. These new sensing devices (medical radar) may be explored for reading vital body signs (pulse, breathing) embedded in your car seat or hospital emergency bed. Just imagine what you can do looking though heavy matter!BIO: Tor Sverre Lande is a professor in the Microelectronic Systems at the Department of Informatics, University of Oslo. From 2004 he is also serving as a visiting professor at the Institute of Biomedical Engineering, Imperial College, London, UK. His primary research is related to microelectronics, both digital and analog. Research fields are neuromorphic engineering, analog signal processing, micropower circuit design, biomedical circuits and systems and impulse radio. He is the author or co-author of more than 90 scientific publications with chapters in two books. He is currently serving as an associate editor of several scientific journals. He has served as guest editor of special issues like IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems, vol. II, special issue on "Floating Gate Circuits and Systems", Jan 2001, and IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems, vol. I, special issue on "Biomedical Circuits and Systems", (Vol 52, 12, Dec. 2005). He is/has been a technical committee member of several international conferences and has served as reviewer for a number of international technical journals. He has served as Technical Program Chair for several international conferences (ISCAS 2003 in Bangkok, NORCHIP 2004 in Oslo, BioCAS workshop 2004 in Singapore, BioCAS 2006 in UK). He was chair elect (2003-2005) of the IEEE Biomedical Circuits and Systems technical committee (BioCAS) and is also a member of other CAS technical committee. In 2006 he was appointed Distinguished Lecturer of the IEEE Circuits and Systems Society (CAS) and elected member of CAS Board of Governors. He is also serving as Editor-in-Chief of the new IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Circuits and Systems. In 2006 he was appointed Senior Member of the IEEE.
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. -
Pseudospintronics for Ultra-Low Power Logic Devices
Tue, Apr 08, 2008 @ 02:00 PM - 03:00 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Matthew J. GilbertMicroelectronics Research Center, University of Texas at AustinAbstract
As the march towards ever smaller silicon devices continues unabated, we are rapidly approaching size scales where the bulk silicon transistor can no longer deliver sufficient device performance. The main problem with using charge based devices for next generation logic devices is that their performance has basic and fundamental physical limitations. While new device designs may extend the life of CMOS for several years, concerns about the power dissipation in these future generation CMOS devices has fueled the search for new computational state variables and the tools with which to evaluate these new devices.
In this talk, we will discuss the possibility of exploiting the exotic phenomena of strongly interacting systems to produce a completely new generation of logic devices based on collective behavior. In particular, we will discuss the device and transport properties of "pseudospintronic" systems. Pseudospintronics is a variant of spintronics where we represent the layer degree of freedom in a bilayer system (e.g. coupled quantum wells) as a spin. When the layers are separated by a small distance (~1 - 10 nm), the quasiparticles in each of the layers interact with one another. This interaction can greatly enhance the interlayer transport. We will discuss the application of this interaction-enhanced interlayer transport in III-V electron doped bilayers to elucidate the cause of the interlayer currents and the decay of the enhancement with increasing bias known as the "pseudospin torque effect". We also discuss a silicon based pseudospin system consisting of one electron doped layer and one hole doped layer. In this system we find reduced interlayer currents which arise from the discrepancy in dispersion relations between the two layers. Nevertheless, at elevated temperatures, both the III-V and silicon systems lose their interaction based enhancements.
We conclude our discussion by examining separately contacted, non-bonded graphene bilayer systems. These are devices that can have output characteristics very similar to a MOSFET, but while requiring much less switching energy. Furthermore, calculations show that the performance will not degrade at room temperature. Efforts are underway at Stanford University to experimentally realize graphene bilayer nanoswitches. Biography: Matthew Gilbert received the B.S. (Honors), M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from Arizona State University in 2000, 2003, and 2005 respectively all in electrical engineering. His Ph.D. research focused on novel systems for quantum computing and electron-phonon interactions in tri-gate nanowire transistors. He is currently the assistant director of the SouthWest Academy of Nanoelectronics (SWAN) and a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Texas at Austin. His research focuses on emergent semiconductor nanodevice technology which exploits computational state variables beyond that of charge (e.g. spin and phase) and their application to form beyond CMOS architectures. He has published over 40 conference and journal papers in the areas of spintronics, semiconductor nanowire MOS devices, graphene, computational algorithms for efficient transport calculation and correlated many-body systems and theory. Date: Tuesday, April 8, 2008
Place: OHE 120
Time: 2:00 PM – 3:00 PM
Location: Olin Hall of Engineering (OHE) - 120
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. -
Making Quantum Computers Fault Tolerant
Wed, Apr 09, 2008 @ 10:00 AM - 11:00 AM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
SPEAKER: Dr. Ben Reichardt, Postdoctoral Fellow, California Institute of TechnologyABSTRACT: The biggest experimental obstacle to manipulating quantum information and realizing quantum computers is noise, or decoherence. Entangled quantum states are typically difficult to prepare without accumulating errors, and are highly susceptible to noise that collapses them down to merely classical states. General quantum fault-tolerance techniques, invented about a decade ago, can in theory solve both problems, but often require unrealistically low noise rates before they kick in.Over the last few years we have seen a renaissance in fault-tolerance schemes. These new schemes rely on quantum phenomena such as quantum teleportation to isolate the data from errors. I will describe these schemes that simulations indicate may tolerate as much as 3-6% noise per operation! However, as classical simulations of quantum systems are difficult, it is also important to develop rigorous methods to determine if, and how well, these schemes will really work. I will describe a new technique for analyzing these schemes---maintaining analytic control over large, noisy quantum systems---that leads to a rigorous proof that 0.1% gate depolarizing noise is tolerable (in a nonlocal gate model), lending support to the simulations. If the noise model is known, then the rigorous bound is as high as 1%. BIO: Ben Reichardt is a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute for Quantum Information, at the California Institute of Technology. He has a B.S. in mathematics from Stanford University, and a Ph.D. in computer science from the University of California, Berkeley. He studies quantum fault tolerance and quantum algorithms.http://www.its.caltech.edu/~breic/HOST: Todd Brun, tbrun@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. -
Coding and Message-Passing for Large-Scale Distributed Storage and Inference
Fri, Apr 11, 2008 @ 10:30 AM - 11:30 AM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
SPEAKER: Alexandros G. Dimakis, EECS Dept, UC BerkeleyABSTRACT: Multiple recent advances in technology have catalyzed a paradigm shift away from centralized schemes and in the direction of distributed and cooperative architectures for large-scale systems. In applications like data centers, sensor networks, and peer-to-peer networks, coding is used to introduce redundancy for robustness. I will show that network coding can surprisingly reduce the communication requirements compared to standard Reed-Solomon codes used in current architectures. Further, I will present novel information theoretic performance bounds and explicit network codes that achieve optimal performance.For the case of large-scale distributed inference, I will present some novel message-passing algorithms and show explicit results on convergence rate. In particular, I will present the first gossip algorithm that scales linearly in the number of nodes for a large class of geometric graphs, resolving an open problem in this active new research area.BIO: Alex Dimakis is a Ph.D. candidate in the department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences at UC Berkeley working with Prof. Martin Wainwright and Prof. Kannan Ramchandran. He received the Diploma degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the National Technical University of Athens in 2003 and the M.S. degree in Electrical Engineering from UC Berkeley in 2005. His research interests include Communications, Signal Processing, and Networking with applications in distributed systems and sensor networks. Mr. Dimakis has received two outstanding paper awards, the UC Berkeley Departmental Fellowship in 2003, and the Microsoft Research Fellowship in 2007.HOST: Prof. Keith Chugg, chugg@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. -
Opportunistic Scheduling with Reliability Guarantees in Cognitive Radio Networks
Fri, Apr 11, 2008 @ 03:00 PM - 04:00 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Rahul UrgaonkarAbstract: We consider a cognitive radio network with static primary users (that are the licensed owners of the spectrum) and potentially mobile secondary users that try to send their data to the access points by utilizing idle primary channels. We develop opportunistic transmission scheduling policies for such networks that maximize the throughput utility of the secondary users subject to maximum collision constraints with the primary users. We use the technique of Lyapunov Optimization to design an online flow control, scheduling and resource allocation algorithm that meets the desired objectives and provides explicit performance guarantees. Specifically, our algorithm provides tight reliability guarantees in the form of a bound on the worst case number of collisions suffered by a primary user in any time interval. This algorithm operates without requiring a-priori knowledge of the mobility patterns of the secondary users and yields an average throughput utility that can be pushed arbitrarily close to the optimal value, with a trade-off in average delay.Bio: Rahul Urgaonkar obtained the B.Tech. degree in Electrical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Bombay in 2002 and the M.S. degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Southern California, Los Angeles in 2005. He is currently a PhD student in Electrical Engineering at USC. His research interests are in the areas of stochastic network optimization, resource allocation, and scheduling in next generation Wireless Networks.
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. -
Capture and Reproduction of Spatial Audio
Mon, Apr 14, 2008 @ 02:00 PM - 03:00 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Ramani Duraiswami, Perceptual Interfaces and Reality Lab, University of Maryland.Abstract: Our ability to perceive space using sound has been understood for a while, but not much exploited in audio systems designed for entertainment, augmented/virtual reality or data display. In this talk I will focus on our research in various aspects of spatial audio and scene understanding. Spherical microphone arrays provide a means of spatial audio capture and sound scene analysis. I will discuss several spherical arrays we have built, their theoretical analysis, and their use in beamforming sound, and in representing spatial sound. Of particular interest is the combination of arrays and video cameras, to obtain more complete scene understanding. We show that the spherical array can be treated as a camera, and combined with normal video cameras to provide geometric scene understanding. I will also discuss the recreation of spatial auditory reality over headphones, using the captured sound and head related transfer functions. A novel method for measurement of HRTFs invented in our lab will also be presented. Bio: Ramani Duraiswami, is an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science and at the Institute for Advanced Computer Studies at the University of Maryland. He has affiliate appointments in the Departments of Electrical Engineering, and in the Applied Mathematics and Scientific Computing Program. Prof. Duraiswami is director of the Perceptual Interfaces and Reality Lab. and has broad research interests in computational audition, scientific computing, computer vision and machine learning and has over 130 publications in these areas. He received an undergraduate degree from the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay; and a Ph.D. from The Johns Hopkins University. More information on his research can be found at www.umiacs.umd.edu/~ramani Host: Prof. Shrikanth Narayanan
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 248
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Mary Francis
This event is open to all eligible individuals. USC Viterbi operates all of its activities consistent with the University's Notice of Non-Discrimination. Eligibility is not determined based on race, sex, ethnicity, sexual orientation, or any other prohibited factor. -
Quantum Information Processing: Spingineering the Future
Fri, Apr 18, 2008 @ 10:30 AM - 11:30 AM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
SPEAKER: Andrew J. Landahl, Research Assistant Professor, Information Physics Group, University of New MexicoABSTRACT: The spin of a quantum particle is a natural candidate for storing quantum information. A number of technologies are based on this idea, including quantum dots, optical lattices, and nuclear magnetic resonance. Devising new protocols for acquiring, processing, and transmitting information in these systems is a "spingineering" task that current and future generations of information technology researchers will face.I will present my work on three specific "spingineering" research problems, one each from the areas of communication, computation, and error correction. First I will show how to engineer a spin network to serve as a "quantum communication bus" that, in the absence of noise, allows arbitrary-distance perfect-fidelity quantum communication. Then I will show how to engineer a spin chain to serve as a "programmable universal quantum computer" that can execute an arbitrary program on an arbitrary input, where both the program and the data are encoded in the initial state of the spins. Finally, I will show how to perform "continuous-time quantum error correction" on a spin network by optimizing a feedback loop that uses weak measurements and Hamiltonian controls.These problems demonstrate that "spingineering" requires a broad-based theoretical background to achieve an engineering solution; in this talk the solutions will rely on quantum mechanics, algebraic coding theory, random walk theory, and feedback control theory.BIO: Andrew Landahl is a Research Assistant Professor in the Information Physics Group at the University of New Mexico. He was a Hewlett-Packard/MIT Postdoctoral Fellow from 2002-05 under the supervision of Professor Seth Lloyd. He earned Physics M.S. and Ph.D. degrees at Caltech (2000 and 2002) under the supervision of Professor John Preskill and earned Physics and Mathematics B.S. degrees, Summa cum Laude, at Virginia Tech (1996), with an Honors Thesis supervised by Professor Lay-Nam Chang.Professor Landahl's research spans the areas of quantum computing, quantum information, and quantum control. His research accomplishments include the fastest quantum algorithm for searching an ordered list, a spin-chain bus enabling lossless quantum communication, a topologically-protected fault-tolerant quantum memory, a printed quantum circuit architecture, and the theory of continuous-time quantum error correction. His refereed publications average over 40 citations per paper. He has supervised or co-supervised the research of seven students.Professor Landahl is a member of the American Physical Society (APS), Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), and the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). He served as a Grand Awards Judge for the 2007 Intel International Science and Engineering Fair (ISEF) and mentored a Siemens-Westinghouse Regional Finalist in 2003-04. He currently serves as Chair of the Local Organizing Committee for QIP 2009, a high-profile annual international conference of over 350 researchers in the field of quantum information to be held in Santa Fe, NM in January 2009.HOST: Prof. Todd Brun, tbrun@usc.edu
Location: Frank R. Seaver Science Center (SSC) - 319
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. -
Assessing Accuracy and Significance of Structural and Functional Brain Images
Wed, Apr 23, 2008 @ 10:00 AM - 11:00 AM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
SPEAKER: Dimitrios Pantazis, Postdoctoral Research Associate, Signal and Image Processing InstituteABSTRACT: Recent developments in instrumentation, coupled with new data analysis tools, have led to unique ways of noninvasively exploring the human brain. For example, whole head Magnetoencephalography (MEG) arrays provide dynamic images of human brain function at a millisecond scale; Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) methods allow access to structural and diffusion brain images, as well as functional maps of hemodynamic response. I will discuss ways of identifying experimental effects in dynamic images of MEG brain activation through the use of random field theory and permutation statistical tests. I will then extend these tests to spatial-spectral activation maps, morphological tests of brain structures, and tumor detection in positron emission tomography. Efficient methods to analyze MEG data through the use of custom analysis of covariance models will be presented and applied in a human visual attention study. I will conclude with an evaluation of manual and automatic human cortex registration methods.BIO: Dimitrios Pantazis is Postdoctoral Research Associate in the Department of Electrical Engineering at the University of Southern California, and the Dornsife Cognitive Neuroscience Imaging Center and House Ear Institute in Los Angeles through the Biomedical Imaging Sciences Initiative in USC. He is a member of the Biomedical Imaging Research Lab lead by Prof. Richard M. Leahy, and has broad research interests in modeling and statistical analysis of anatomical and functional brain signals. He received a diploma in EE from the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki - Greece in 1996, and a M.S and Ph.D. in EE from the University of Southern California in 2003 and 2006 respectively. More information on his research can be found at http://neuroimage.usc.edu/pantazisHOST: Richard Leahy, leahy@sipi.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. -
Desensitizing Halfband Interpolation Filters
Wed, Apr 23, 2008 @ 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Professor Alan WillsonElectrical Engineering Department
University of California, Los Angeles, CaliforniaABSTRACTA very common component in digital circuitry for communications systems is the halfband filter. Halfband filters are often used in cooperation with up-samplers and down-samplers when a sampling-rate change is required. While techniques for designing these filters are well known, an entirely new design method has just been discovered wherein these filters can be made to possess a significant desensitivity to the filter's tap coefficient values. Such desensitivity can be exploited to yield halfband filters with reduced hardware requirements, which leads to circuits having lower power consumption, higher operating speeds, and smaller IC area. This talk will give a brief introduction to the concept of halfband filters and the applications of halfband filters. It will then explain the rationale and the method for the desensitizing of the filters and, finally, will illustrate through design examples and further explanation how the desensitivity improves upon the conventional designs.BIOGRAPHYDr. Alan N. Willson, Jr. is a Distinguished Professor of Electrical Engineering at UCLA. He served as Assistant Dean for Graduate Studies in the UCLA School of Engineering and Applied Science from 1977 through 1981, and served as Associate Dean of Engineering from 1987 through 2001. He has been engaged in research concerning computer-aided circuit analysis and design, the stability of distributed circuits, properties of nonlinear networks, theory of active circuits, digital signal processing, analog circuit fault diagnosis, and integrated circuits for signal processing. He is editor of Nonlinear Networks: Theory and Analysis (New York: IEEE Press, 1974). In 1991, he founded Pentomics, Inc. Dr. Willson served as editor of the IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems from 1977 to 1979 and as President of the IEEE Circuits and Systems (CAS) Society in 1984. He was the recipient of the 1978 and 1994 Guillemin-Cauer Awards of the IEEE CAS Society, the 1982 George Westinghouse Award of the American Society for Engineering Education, the 1982 Distinguished Faculty Award of the UCLA Engineering Alumni Association, the 1984 Myril B. Reed Best Paper Award of the Midwest Symposium on CAS, the 1985 and 1994 W. R. G. Baker Awards of the IEEE, the 2000 Technical Achievement Award and the 2003 Mac Van Valkenburg Award of the IEEE CAS Society. In 2007 he and his recent Ph.D. student, Guichang Zhong, were winners of the 44th DAC/ISSCC Student Design Contest.HOST: Professor Sanjit K. Mitra
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. -
Studying Brain Dyanmics in Large-Scale Cortical Networks with MEG Imaging and Human Intracerebral...
Fri, Apr 25, 2008 @ 02:00 AM - 03:00 AM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Karim JerbiNeurophysiology of Action and Perception Collège de France CNRS,Paris, France
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Brain Dynamics and Cognition Lab, INSERM,
Lyon, France Abstract:Increasing evidence from human and non-human primate studies suggests that long-range cerebro-cerebral synchronization might reflect ongoing communication between distant neural populations essential for integrative behaviour. In the first part of this talk I will present the results of an MEG study in which we investigated the task-specific modulation of cerebral oscillations and long-distance cortico-cortical coupling in multiple frequency bands during a sustained visuomotor task. Our results show modulations of oscillatory power in various frequency bands in multiple areas including an increase in high gamma power (60-90 Hz) in motor and premotor areas during visuomotor control. Coherence analysis provides evidence for task-specific increases in low-frequency coherence between the primary motor cortex and multiple cortical and subcortical brain areas forming large-scale functional networks including the fronto-parietal circuit and the cerebello-thalamo-cortical pathway. In the second part of the talk I will provide an overview of some of the ongoing studies performed with intracerebral recordings in humans performing various cognitive tasks. Both online and offline analysis will be presented. The invasive experiments with real-time visual feedback of task-related brain power modulations (/Brain TV/ set-up) are discussed in the context of invasive brain-computer interfaces, neurofeedback as well as its utility basic neuroscience research.Host: Professor Richard LeahyLocation: 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.
