Select a calendar:
Filter April Events by Event Type:
SUNMONTUEWEDTHUFRISAT
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Events for April
-
Convex Optimization for Systems Science: From Control to Statistics
Mon, Apr 01, 2013 @ 10:30 AM - 11:30 AM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Parikshit Shah, Ph.D., Wisconsin Institute of Discovery
Talk Title: Convex Optimization for Systems Science: From Control to Statistics
Abstract: Large-scale dynamic systems are becoming ubiquitous in modern science and engineering, with applications in diverse areas such as robotic teams, supply chains, and power networks. Systems science is an exciting area that deals with understanding systems and developing tools for analysis, model selection, and decision-making.
In this talk we will discuss two fundamental and challenging problems that arise in this area: (a) data-driven modeling of dynamic systems (traditionally known as system identification), and (b) decentralized decision making in the presence of limited information (also known as decentralized control). Some of the basic challenges in these problems are computational ones, which we will overcome by devising principled convex optimization based approaches. Along the way, we will establish novel connections between control and some combinatorial concepts such as partially ordered sets and Moebius inversion; and between system identification and high-dimensional statistics.
Biography: Parikshit Shah is currently a Member of Research Staff at Philips Research, New York. He has been a research associate at the University of Wisconsin (affiliated with the Wisconsin Institutes of Discovery) in 2011-2012. He received his PhD in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in June 2011. Earlier, he received a Master's degree from Stanford and a Bachelor's degree from the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay. His research interests lie in the areas of convex optimization, control theory, system identification, and statistics. He has held the School of Engineering Fellowship at Stanford University, and a visiting appointment at the Institute for Pure and Applied Mathematics (IPAM) at UCLA
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. -
EE-EP Seminar
Mon, Apr 01, 2013 @ 02:00 PM - 03:00 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Chris Mi, University of Michigan-Dearborn
Talk Title: Wireless Charging of Electric Vehicle Batteries for Economic and Safe Future Transportation
Abstract: Electric vehicles (EVs) and plug-in hybrid electric vehicles (PHEVs) have attracted worldwide attentions because of their capabilities to improve energy and environment sustainability. However, inconvenience of charging, high cost, short driving range, and safety concerns of the battery system have hindered the mass market penetration of EVs and PHEVs. This presentation will look at studies which address some of these issues.
The first part of the presentation will focus on wireless charging technology that helps eliminate the need of carrying cables and plugging in, and offer significant improvement in convenience and electric safety for EV and PHEV charging. Although Wireless Power Transmission (WPT) has been commercialized for consumer electronics and also investigated for EV wireless charging, the size, efficiency, and cost are key obstacles that prevent WPT from widely deployed. Our research in this area aims at novel designs that can considerably reduce size and cost while increase coupling coefficient and system efficiency. The second part will look at EV battery study that addresses safety and reliability concerns and provides diagnostic and prognostic functions. Finally, there will be some discussion on the latest research activities at the GATE Center of Electric Drive Transportation that further enhance safety and cost advantages of EVs and PHEVs.
Biography: Chris Mi is Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering and the Director of DOE funded GATE Center for Electric Drive Transportation at the University of Michigan, Dearborn. He is a fellow of IEEE. He received the B.S. and M.S. degrees from Northwestern Polytechnical University, Xi’an, China, and the Ph.D. degree from the University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada, all in electrical engineering. Previously he was an Electrical Engineer with General Electric Canada Inc. He was the President and the Chief Technical Officer of 1Power Solutions, Inc. from 2008 to 2011.
His research interests are in electric and hybrid vehicles. He has taught tutorials and seminars on the subject of HEV/PHEV for the Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE), the IEEE, workshops sponsored by the National Science Foundation (NSF), and the National Society of Professional Engineers. He has delivered courses to major automotive OEMs and suppliers, including GM, Ford, Chrysler, Honda, Tyco Electronics, A&D Technology, Johnson Controls, Quantum Technology, Delphi, Siemens, and the European Ph.D School.
Dr. Mi is the recipient of “Distinguished Teaching Award” and “Distinguished Research Award” of University of Michigan Dearborn. He is the recipient of 2007 IEEE Region 4 “Outstanding Engineer Award,” IEEE Southeastern Michigan Section “Outstanding Professional Award.” and “SAE Environmental Excellence in Transportation (E2T) Award,” and ranked four times as “Top Associate Editors” by IEEE Transactions on Vehicular Technology. Dr. Mi is Associate Editor of three IEEE Transactions and an editorial board member of two IET Journals.
Dr. Mi was the Chair (2008-2009) and Vice Chair (2006-2007) of the IEEE Southeastern Michigan Section, the general Chair of the 5th IEEE Vehicle Power and Propulsion Conference. He is the topic chair for the 2011 IEEE International Future Energy Challenge, and the General Chair for the 2013 IEEE International Future Energy Challenge. He is a Distinguished Lecturer (DL) of the IEEE Vehicular Technology Society.
Host: EE-Electrophysics
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 248
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. -
Codes for Reliability and Security in Distributed Storage Systems
Tue, Apr 02, 2013 @ 10:30 AM - 11:30 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Salim El Rouayheb, Princeton University
Talk Title: Codes for Reliability and Security in Distributed Storage Systems
Abstract: Distributed storage systems are now a growing paradigm for providing online storage of data and making it accessible anywhere and anytime. Such services are now being commercially offered by data centers, such as those run by Google and Amazon, and peer-to-peer (p2p) systems such as Wuala. These systems rely on large distributed networks of individually unreliable commodity nodes to reliably store the data. At this high level of scale and distributivity, new questions arise in terms of understanding the fundamental theoretical tradeoffs among the different system resources (storage, bandwidth, disk I/O, latency, energy, computational complexity, etc.) in order to meet a targeted level of data availability and security.
In this talk, I will answer some of these questions and present new efficient codes for distributed storage that we call Distributed Replication-based Exact Simple Storage (DRESS) codes. DRESS codes permit fast system repair and growth with minimum bandwidth, disk reads, and computational cost at the price of a minimal storage overhead. I will present optimal code constructions from projective planes and Steiner systems and describe simple randomized constructions based on balls-and-bins models. I will also discuss fundamental information theoretic bounds for protecting the data confidentiality and integrity in distributed storage systems in the face of eavesdroppers and malicious adversaries.
Biography: Salim El Rouayheb is an associate research scholar at the Electrical Engineering Department at Princeton University. He was a postdoctoral research fellow with the Wireless Foundations (WiFo) Lab at the Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences (EECS) Department, University of California, Berkeley (2010-2011). His research interests lie in the broad area of communications with a focus on distributed storage systems, network coding, and information-theoretic security.
He received his Diploma degree in electrical engineering from the Lebanese University, Roumieh, Lebanon, in 2002, and his M.S. degree in computer and communications engineering from the American University of Beirut, Lebanon, in 2004. He received his Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering from Texas A&M University, College Station, in 2009. During Summer 2006, he was an intern at the Mathematics of Communication Research Department at Bell Labs. He was awarded the Charlie S. Korban award for outstanding graduate student, and the Texas Telecommunication Engineering Consortium (TXTEC) Graduate Fellowship.
Host: Andreas Molisch, x04670, molisch@usc.edu
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. -
EE-EP Seminar
Thu, Apr 04, 2013 @ 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Jia Zhu, University of California, Berkeley and Lawrence Berkeley National Lab
Talk Title: Nanostructured Energy Devices---phonons, electrons and photons on the nanoscale
Abstract: Supplying the world with sustainable energy is one of the most pressing issues in modern society. Dramatically improved control over heat, electricity and solar energy is essential to create a new energy paradigm. Nanomaterials with carefully tailored properties (such as interface, geometry) can be used to manipulate the flow of phonons, electrons and photons, to enable novel energy devices in an unconventional manner. In this talk, I will present two examples of nanostructure-enabled energy devices.
As a significant amount of energy is consumed worldwide just for controlling heat flows, advanced thermal power devices for self-control heat flow are very desirable, but significantly underdeveloped. Here I will present the world’s first switchable thermal rectifier, a three terminal nonlinear device for advanced thermal control. It opens the door for a variety of applications, including on-chip cooling, building efficiency, and thermal energy storage.
Photon management, involving both absorption enhancement and reflection reduction, is
critical to all photovoltaic devices. Here I will demonstrate a novel nanodome solar
cell structure with an efficient photon management design. Two types of photovoltaic devices, amorphous silicon and dye sensitized solar cells, are used to demonstrate the concept. They both achieve the highest short circuit current, and state of art conversion efficiency. More strikingly, the design and process is not in principle limited to any specific material system, hence it opens up exciting opportunities for all classes of photovoltaic devices.
Biography: Jia Zhu is currently a postdoctoral scholar at University of California, Berkeley and Lawrence Berkeley National Lab. His scientific research interest is in the area of nanomaterials and devices. Dr. Zhu has published approximately 20 papers in peer-reviewed journals. He is a reviewer of over 20 scientific journals. He received his M.S. and Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University, and B.S. in Physics from Nanjing University. He has received several awards, including: Division of Inorganic Chemistry Yong Investigator Award (American Chemical Society, 2011), Gold Medal of Graduate Student Award (Material Research Society, 2010).
Host: EE-Electrophysics
Location: Seaver Science Library (SSL) - 150
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. -
Focused on parallel and distributed computingThu, Apr 04, 2013 @ 02:00 PM - 03:00 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: TBA, TBA
Talk Title: TBA
Series: EE598 Seminar Course
Abstract: Weekly seminars given by researchers in academia and industry including senior doctoral students in EE, CS and ISI covering current research related to parallel and distributed computation including parallel algorithms, high performance computing, scientific computation, application specific architectures, multi-core and many-core architectures and algorithms, application acceleration, reconfigurable computing systems, data intensive systems, Big Data and cloud computing.
Biography: Prerequisite: Students are expected to be familiar with basic concepts at the level of graduate level courses in Computer Engineering and Computer Science in some of these topic areas above. Ph.D. students in Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering and Computer Science can automatically enroll. M.S. students can enroll only with permission of the instructor. To request permission send a brief mail to the instructor in text format with the subject field ââ¬ÅEE 598ââ¬Â. The body of the mail (in text format) should include name, degree objective, courses taken at USC and grades obtained, prior educational background, and relevant research background, if any.
Requirements for CR:
1. Attending at least 10 seminars during the semester
There will be a sign-in sheet and a sign-out sheet at every seminar. All students must sign-in (before 2:00pm) and sign-out (after 3:00pm). The sign-in sheet will not be available after 2:00pm, and the sign-out sheet will not be available before 3:00pm.
2. Submitting a written report for at least 5 seminars
The written report for each seminar must be 1-page single line spaced format with font size of 12 (Times) or 11 (Arial) without any figures, tables, or graphs. The report must be submitted no later than 1 week after the corresponding seminar, and must be handed only to the instructor either on the seminar times or during office hours. Late reports will not be considered.
The report must summarize studentââ¬â¢s own understanding of the seminar, and should contain the following:
- Your name and submission date [1 line]
- Title of the seminar, name of the speaker, and seminar date [1 line]
- Background of the work (e.g., applications, prior research, etc.) [1 paragraph]
- Highlights of the approaches presented in the seminar [1-2 paragraphs]
- Main results presented in the seminar [1-2 paragraphs]
- Conclusion (your own conclusion and not what was given by the speaker) [1 paragraph]
Reviewing papers related to the topic of the seminar, and incorporating relevant findings in the
reports (e.g., in the conclusion section) is encouraged. In such cases, make sure to clearly indicate
the reference(s) used to derive these conclusions.
Host: Professor Viktor K. Prasanna
More Information: Course Announcement_EE598_Focused on parallel and distributed computing_(Spring 2013).pdf
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) -
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Janice Thompson
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. -
Predictive Modeling of Patient State and Therapy Optimization
Thu, Apr 04, 2013 @ 02:00 PM - 03:00 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Zoran Obradovic, Director, Data Analytics and Biomedical Informatics Center, Professor, Computer and Information Sciences Department, Professor, Statistics Department, Fox School of Business (secondary appointment), Temple University
Talk Title: Predictive Modeling of Patient State and Therapy Optimization
Series: EE598 Seminar Course
Abstract: This talk will discuss the results of our ongoing DARPA DLT project aimed to develop and validate effective predictive modeling technology to achieve the following sepsis treatment related aims for acute inflammation on high dimensional and noisy data at a clinically relevant scale: (1) Personalized sepsis therapy optimization for an individual patientââ¬â¢s state improvement; (2) Early diagnosis of sepsis and accurate detection of change in the state of sepsis, and (3): Gene expression analysis for sepsis biomarkers identification. These aims are addressed by developing advanced methods for analysis of temporal dependencies in high dimensional multi-source sepsis related data, which show significant mortality reduction in severe sepsis patients.
This is joint research with Mohamed Ghalwash, Qiang Lou, Vladan Radosavljevic, Dusan Ramljak and Kosta Ristovski.
Biography: Zoran Obradovicââ¬â¢s research interests include data mining, machine learning and complex networks applications in climate modeling and health management. He is the executive editor at the journal on Statistical Analysis and Data Mining, which is the official publication of the American Statistical Association and is an editorial board member at eleven journals. He is general co-chair for 2013 and 2014 SIAM International Conference on Data Mining and was the program or track chair at many data mining and biomedical informatics conference. His data analytics work is published in more than 260 articles and is cited more than 10,000 times (H-index 41 and I10-index 86). For more details see http://www.dabi.temple.edu/~zoran/.
Host: Professor Cauligi S. Raghavendra
More Information: Course Announcement_EE598_Focused on parallel and distributed computing_(Spring 2013) 2.pdf
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 248
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Janice Thompson
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. -
Informational Limits of Systems with Humans and Machines
Thu, Apr 04, 2013 @ 03:30 PM - 05:00 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Lav R. Varshney, IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center
Talk Title: Informational Limits of Systems with Humans and Machines
Abstract: New communication and computing technologies are enabling people to come together to achieve higher quality of life and to develop innovative products and services. The down-to-earth problem of building these informational systems, however, is entangled with theoretical questions of what is possible and what is impossible when bringing together ubiquitous informational technologies with the people and organizations they are transforming. Group decision-making, information factories, and crowdsourcing are all ways of structuring systems to draw on the strengths of many, allowing collective intelligence rather than cacophony to emerge.
In this talk, I will discuss a mathematical model of human decision-making and show the benefits of diversity in groups. Next I will present a model of crowdsourcing with strategic players, and further show empirical evidence from a large-scale system we built that indicates the importance of drawing human attention. A thermodynamic interpretation leads us to ask: is there a Carnot limit for knowledge work? In closing, I discuss how fundamental limits on the transmission of information provide insight into systems with humans and machines.
Biography: Lav Varshney is a research scientist at the IBM T. J. Watson Research Center, where his current research focuses on sociotechnical systems, computational creativity, statistical signal processing, information and coding theory, and data analytics. He received the B. S. degree with honors in electrical and computer engineering (magna cum laude) from Cornell University. He received the S. M., E. E., and Ph. D. degrees in electrical engineering and computer science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
He held an NSF fellowship at MIT, and his masterââ¬â¢s thesis was awarded the E. A. Guillemin Thesis Award for best electrical engineering thesis and his doctoral thesis received the J.-A. Kong Award Honorable Mention for best electrical engineering thesis. He has also received a best paper award at the 2012 SRII Global Conference, and best student paper awards at the 2006 IEEE Data Compression Conference, the 2004 IEEE Conference on the History of Electronics, and the 2003 IEEE Radar Conference. He has received an IBM eminence and excellence award for his work on crowdsourcing and has been named a Forward Thinker by IBM for his work on culinary computational creativity.
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. -
Integrated Systems Seminar Series
Fri, Apr 05, 2013 @ 10:30 AM - 11:30 AM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Prof. Danijela Cabric, UCLA
Talk Title: Energy-Efficient Wideband Spectrum Sensing and Modulation Classification
Abstract: Motivated by the spectrum scarcity problem, Cognitive Radios (CRs) have been proposed as a way to opportunistically allocate unused spectrum licensed to Primary Users (PUs). In this context, Secondary Users (SUs) sense the spectrum to detect the presence or absence of PUs, and use the unoccupied bands while maintaining a predefined probability of misdetection. Further, modulation classification, the process of identifying the modulation class employed by the transmitter, helps identify who is occupying a given frequency band and distinguish PUs from other users and interference. Sensing wideband channels increases the chance of finding unoccupied spectrum, and therefore increases the throughput of the CR network. The narrow-band approach for wideband spectrum sensing involves sensing multiple narrow-band channels either simultaneously, or in parallel. Both solutions either require additional receiver chains, or incur additional delays in the sensing results. Therefore, sensing wideband channels in an energy-efficient manner is highly desirable. However, wideband spectrum sensing unfolds many challenges that have not been considered in the past. In this work, we aim at answering the following fundamental question: What are the limitations of wideband spectrum sensing and modulation classification, and what are the methods to overcome them? We propose low-complexity algorithms for both cyclostationary spectrum sensing and modulation classification. Further, as a result of wideband sampling, high-rate and high-resolution ADCs become hard to design and are power hungry. As a solution to that, we propose a method to perform cyclostationary spectrum sensing using compressive sensing measurements. Moreover, given that the sampling rate of the sensing radio cannot be adapted to all signals being sensed, we study the impact of sampling clock offsets and imperfect estimates of transmit parameters on cyclostationary features. This comprehensive system level study is vital to the robust and energy-efficient design of wideband spectrum sensing and modulation classification engines for CRs.
Biography: Dr. Danijela Cabric received the Dipl. Ing. degree from the University of Belgrade, Serbia, in 1998, and the M.Sc. degree in electrical engineering from the University of California, Los Angeles, in 2001. She received her Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering from the University of California, Berkeley, in 2007, where she was a member of the Berkeley Wireless Research Center. In 2008, she joined the faculty of the Electrical Engineering Department at the University of California, Los Angeles as an Assistant Professor. Dr. Cabric received the Samueli Fellowship in 2008, the Okawa Foundation Research Grant in 2009, Hellman Fellowship in 2012 and the National Science Foundation Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Award in 2012. She serves as an Associate Editor in IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications (Cognitive Radio series) and IEEE Communications Letters, and TPC Co-Chair of 8th International Conference on Cognitive Radio Oriented Wireless Networks (CROWNCOM) 2013. Her research interests include novel radio architecture, signal processing, and networking techniques to implement spectrum sensing functionality in cognitive radios.
Host: Prof. Hossein Hashemi and Prof. Mike Chen
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 248
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Hossein Hashemi
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. -
Sequential Decision-making in Decentralized Systems
Mon, Apr 08, 2013 @ 10:30 AM - 12:00 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Ashutosh Nayyar, PhD, UC Berkeley
Talk Title: Sequential Decision-making in Decentralized Systems
Abstract: Decentralized systems are ubiquitous in the modern world. Communication systems, sensor networks, power systems and economic systems like markets and auctions are all examples of decentralized systems. Such systems are characterized by the presence of multiple decision-making agents acting on different information. In this talk, I focus on the problem of finding optimal decision-strategies for co-operative agents in a decentralized system. In particular, I consider a decentralized stochastic decision-making problem with multiple decision-makers that share information with each other with a fixed delay. Such decision problems arise in queuing networks, wireless communication networks, distributed control systems, sensing and surveillance systems etc. In spite of initial conjectures as early as 1971, finding the general structure of agents' optimal decision-strategies with delayed information sharing had remained an open problem for 40 years. My research provides a conceptual framework that not only identifies the structure of optimal decision strategies but also provides a sequential decomposition of the optimization problem. Moreover, the methodology developed here is shown to be applicable to a broader class of decentralized decision making problems arising in diverse application domains.
Biography: Ashutosh Nayyar received the B.Tech. degree in Electrical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi, India in 2006. He received the MS degree in in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science in 2008, the MS degree in Applied Mathematics in 2011 and the PhD degree in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science in 2011, all from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He worked as a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign from Fall 2011 to Summer 2012. He is currently a post-doctoral researcher at the University of California, Berkeley. His research interests include decentralized stochastic control, game theory, mechanism design and their applications in sensing and communication systems, decentralized control systems and electric power systems.
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 Distinguished Lecturer Series - CANCELED
Wed, Apr 10, 2013 @ 03:00 PM - 04:00 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Erik Winfree, Ph.D., Professor, Computer Science, Computation and Neural Systems, Bioengineering, California Institute of Technology
Abstract: Inspired by the information processing core of biological organisms and its ability to fabricate intricate machinery from the molecular scale up to the macroscopic scale, research in synthetic biology, molecular programming, and nucleic acid nanotechnology aims to create information-based chemical systems that carry out human-defined molecular programs that input, output, and manipulate molecules and molecular structures. For chemistry to become the next information technology substrate, we will need improved tools for designing, simulating, and analyzing complex molecular circuits and systems. Using DNA nanotechnology as a model system, I will discuss how programming languages can be devised for specifying molecular systems at a high level, how compilers can translate such specifications into concrete molecular implementations, how both high-level and low-level specifications can be simulated and verified according to behavioral logic and the underlying biophysics of molecular interactions, and how design and analysis methods can cope with the inherent stochasticity and uncertainties of molecular systems.
Biography: Erik Winfree is Professor of Computer Science, Computation and Neural Systems and Bioengineering at Caltech. He is the recipient of the Feynman Prize for Nanotechnology (2006), the NSF PECASE/CAREER Award (2001), the ONR Young Investigator Award (2001), a MacArthur Fellowship (2000), the Tulip prize in DNA Computing (2000), and MIT Technology Review's first TR100 list of "top young innovators" (1999). Prior to joining the faculty at Caltech in 1999, Winfree was a Lewis Thomas Postdoctoral Fellow in Molecular Biology at Princeton, and a Visiting Scientist at the MIT AI Lab. Winfree received a B.S. in Mathematics and Computer Science from the University of Chicago in 1991, and a Ph.D. in Computation and Neural Systems from Caltech in 1998.
Host: Dr. Alice Parker
More Info: http://ee.usc.edu/news/dls/
More Information: 20130410 Winfree Print.pdf
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. -
Focused on parallel and distributed computing
Thu, Apr 11, 2013 @ 02:00 PM - 03:00 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: TBA, TBA
Talk Title: TBA
Series: EE598 Seminar Course
Abstract: Weekly seminars given by researchers in academia and industry including senior doctoral students in EE, CS and ISI covering current research related to parallel and distributed computation including parallel algorithms, high performance computing, scientific computation, application specific architectures, multi-core and many-core architectures and algorithms, application acceleration, reconfigurable computing systems, data intensive systems, Big Data and cloud computing.
Biography: Prerequisite: Students are expected to be familiar with basic concepts at the level of graduate level courses in Computer Engineering and Computer Science in some of these topic areas above. Ph.D. students in Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering and Computer Science can automatically enroll. M.S. students can enroll only with permission of the instructor. To request permission send a brief mail to the instructor in text format with the subject field ââ¬ÅEE 598ââ¬Â. The body of the mail (in text format) should include name, degree objective, courses taken at USC and grades obtained, prior educational background, and relevant research background, if any.
Requirements for CR:
1. Attending at least 10 seminars during the semester
There will be a sign-in sheet and a sign-out sheet at every seminar. All students must sign-in (before 2:00pm) and sign-out (after 3:00pm). The sign-in sheet will not be available after 2:00pm, and the sign-out sheet will not be available before 3:00pm.
2. Submitting a written report for at least 5 seminars
The written report for each seminar must be 1-page single line spaced format with font size of 12 (Times) or 11 (Arial) without any figures, tables, or graphs. The report must be submitted no later than 1 week after the corresponding seminar, and must be handed only to the instructor either on the seminar times or during office hours. Late reports will not be considered.
The report must summarize studentââ¬â¢s own understanding of the seminar, and should contain the following:
- Your name and submission date [1 line]
- Title of the seminar, name of the speaker, and seminar date [1 line]
- Background of the work (e.g., applications, prior research, etc.) [1 paragraph]
- Highlights of the approaches presented in the seminar [1-2 paragraphs]
- Main results presented in the seminar [1-2 paragraphs]
- Conclusion (your own conclusion and not what was given by the speaker) [1 paragraph]
Reviewing papers related to the topic of the seminar, and incorporating relevant findings in the
reports (e.g., in the conclusion section) is encouraged. In such cases, make sure to clearly indicate
the reference(s) used to derive these conclusions.
Host: Professor Viktor K. Prasanna
More Information: Course Announcement_EE598_Focused on parallel and distributed computing_(Spring 2013).pdf
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) -
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Janice Thompson
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 598: ELECTRICAL ENGINEERING RESEARCH SEMINAR COURSE #12
Thu, Apr 11, 2013 @ 02:00 PM - 03:00 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Nam Ma, PhD Candidate, Computer Science, USC Viterbi School of Engineering
Talk Title: DAG Scheduling with Weak Dependencies on Multiââ¬Âcore Systems
Series: EE598 Seminar Course
Abstract: Many computational solutions can be expressed as directed acyclic graphs (DAGs) with weighted nodes.
In parallel computing, a fundamental challenge is to efficiently distribute tasks to computing resources,
while preserving the precedence constraints among the tasks. Traditionally, such constraints are
preserved by starting a task after all its preceding tasks have completed. However, for a class of DAG
structured computations, a task can be partially executed with respect to each preceding task. We define
such relationship between the tasks as weak dependency. In this talk, we present our DAG scheduling
technique to exploit weak dependencies in a DAG. The exploitation of weak dependencies exposes more
parallelism for the task graph and reduces the execution time. On a stateââ¬Âofââ¬Âtheââ¬Âart generalââ¬Âpurpose
multicore system, the weak dependency based scheduler shows superior performance compared with a
baseline scheduler that is based on the traditional scheduling method.
Biography: Nam Ma is a Ph.D. candidate working with Prof. Viktor K. Prasanna in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles. His research interests include parallel algorithms, high performance computing, and large scale machine learning. His PhD thesis focuses on the
scalability of probabilistic inference in graphical models on multicore platforms. He is a recipient of the Vietnam Education Foundation (VEF) fellowship award in 2008. He earned his BSc degree in Computer Science from Vietnam National University.
More Info: http://halcyon.usc.edu/~pk/prasannawebsite/teaching/ee598sp2013/
More Information: Course Announcement_EE598_Focused on parallel and distributed computing_(Spring 2013) 2.pdf
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 248
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Janice Thompson
Event Link: http://halcyon.usc.edu/~pk/prasannawebsite/teaching/ee598sp2013/
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. -
How Hard is it to Decide if a Quantum State is Separable or Entangled?
Fri, Apr 12, 2013 @ 10:00 AM - 11:00 AM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Mark M. Wilde, McGill University
Talk Title: How Hard is it to Decide if a Quantum State is Separable or Entangled?
Abstract: Suppose that a physical process, described as a sequence of local interactions that can be executed in a reasonable amount of time, generates a quantum state shared between two parties. We might then wonder, does this physical process produce a quantum state that is separable or entangled? Here, we give evidence that it is computationally hard to decide the answer to this question, even if one has access to the power of quantum computation. In order to address this question, we begin by demonstrating a two-message quantum interactive proof system that can decide the answer to a promise version of this problem. We then prove that this promise problem is hard for the class ``quantum statistical zero knowledge'' (QSZK) by demonstrating a polynomial-time reduction from the QSZK-complete promise problem ``quantum state distinguishability'' to our quantum separability problem. Thus, the quantum separability problem (as phrased above) constitutes the first nontrivial promise problem decidable by a two-message quantum interactive proof system while being hard for both NP and QSZK. This is joint work with Patrick Hayden and Kevin Milner, it will be presented at the 2013 IEEE Conference on Computational Complexity, and it is available as arXiv:1211.6120.
Biography: Mark M. Wilde received the Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering from the University of Southern California, Los Angeles, California, in 2008. Until recently, he has been a Postdoctoral Fellow at the School of Computer Science, McGill University, and he will start in August 2013 as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy and the Center for Computation and Technology at Louisiana State University. He is the author of the text "Quantum Information Theory" which will soon be published by Cambridge University Press. His current research interests are in quantum Shannon theory, quantum optical communication, quantum computational complexity theory, and quantum error correction.
Host: Todd Brun, x03503, tbrun@usc.edu
Location: Frank R. Seaver Science Center (SSC) - 319
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. -
Pushing the Limits of Sparse Recovery: The Interplay of Structured Sampling and Correlation Awareness
Fri, Apr 12, 2013 @ 10:30 AM - 11:30 AM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Piya Pal , California Institute of Technology (Caltech)
Talk Title: Pushing the Limits of Sparse Recovery: The Interplay of Structured Sampling and Correlation Awareness
Abstract: Modern Sensing and Signal Processing Systems face a fundamental challenge in the extraction of meaningful information from large, complex and often distributed datasets. Such ââ¬ÅBig Dataââ¬Â routinely arises in sensor networks, genomics, physiology, imaging, particle physics, social networks, and so forth. Fortunately however, the amount of information buried in the data in most scenarios is substantially lower compared to the number of raw samples acquired. This key observation has led to the design of sensing systems that can directly capture the information using far fewer samples typically acquired via random projections. In many natural scenarios however, the physics of the problem itself imposes ââ¬Åstructureââ¬Â on the ensuing acquisition scheme. Also often, one can make informed realistic assumptions about the ââ¬Åstatistical propertiesââ¬Â of the data, in the form of priors. Recent approaches to sparse sensing and reconstruction have only begun to investigate the advantages that such structure and prior knowledge can offer over more traditional approaches to sparse recovery.
In this talk, I will describe how ââ¬Åsparse structured samplingââ¬Â strategies and the use of ââ¬Åpriorsââ¬Â in the form of correlation of the data can dramatically push the limits of extraction of low dimensional information buried in high dimensional data (e.g. the spatio temporal signal received by an array of sensors), much beyond what is guaranteed by existing methods. In particular, I will develop novel sparse samplers (temporal and spatial) in one and multiple dimensions that can directly exploit the prior information contained in the correlation and/or higher order moments of the data to greatly increase the number of identifiable parameters. I will also develop new fast and robust algorithms for sparse recovery that work on a low dimensional data and guarantees recovery of sparsity levels that can be orders of magnitude larger than that achieved by existing approaches. This new paradigm of sparse support recovery that explicitly establishes the fundamental interplay between sampling, statistical priors and the underlying sparsity, leads to exciting future research directions in a variety of application areas, and also gives rise to new questions that can lead to stand-alone theoretical results in their own right.
Biography: Piya Pal is a Ph.D candidate in the Department of Electrical Engineering at California Institute of Technology (Caltech), Pasadena, CA, working in the Digital Signal Processing Lab, supervised by Prof. P. P. Vaidyanathan. She received the B. Tech degree in Electronics and Electrical Communication Engineering from Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur in 2007 and the M.S. degree in Electrical Engineering from Caltech in 2008. Her research interests include statistical signal processing, sparse sampling and reconstruction techniques, optimization, and sensor array processing. She received the Best Student Paper Award at the 14th IEEE DSP Workshop, 2011 held at Sedona, Arizona, USA. She was also one of the recipients of the Student Paper Award at the 45th Asilomar Conference on Signals, Systems and Computers, 2011 held at Pacific Grove, California, USA. She is one of the three winners of the Everhart Lecture Series for the year 2013, selected across all disciplines at Caltech.
Host: Prof. Antonio Ortega
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. -
Robust Quantum Self-Testing and Binary Nonlocal XOR Games
Fri, Apr 12, 2013 @ 02:00 PM - 03:00 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Carl Miller, University of Michigan
Talk Title: Robust Quantum Self-Testing and Binary Nonlocal XOR Games
Abstract: A quantum input-output device is "self-testing" if the internal behavior of the device (i.e., its initial state and measurements) can be verified based only on the correlation between its classical inputs and outputs. Results on self-testing, which began with the work of D. Mayers and A. Yao in 1998, are crucial building blocks in proofs of security for quantum cryptography. Past results have shown that certain nonlocal games, such as the Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger game, can serve as self-tests for quantum devices. The work discussed in this talk (arXiv:1207.1819) attempts to begin a systematic classification of quantum self-tests. We prove a necessary and sufficient criterion for self-testing within the class of binary nonlocal XOR games. Our methods invite generalization to larger classes of games. This is joint work with Yaoyun Shi.
Biography: Carl Miller is a research fellow in the University of Michigan Electrical Engineering & Computer Science department. His primary research is on the theory of quantum computation and communication. He previously worked as a postdoc in the math department at Michigan (2007-2010), where he taught courses in math and theoretical computer science. He was a member of the American team to the International Math Olympiad in 1996, and he received a Ph.D. in mathematics from Berkeley in 2007.
Host: Host: Ben Reichardt, x0-7229, ben.reichardt@usc.edu
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. -
Integrated Systems Seminar Series
Fri, Apr 12, 2013 @ 02:30 PM - 03:30 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Ken Poulton, Agilent Research Laboratories
Talk Title: ADC for RF Instruments: Performance and Perils
Abstract: Our group at Agilent Technologies recently published a 2.5 GSa/s, 14-bit ADC.This uses both analog and digital techniques to get world's best performance in several dimensions, including 78 dB SFDR up to 1 GHz input frequency and a metastable error rate of 1e-17.
I'll describe some of the techniques we use, including the use of over two hundred on-chip self-calibration loops. I'll also describe some of the problems that arose in this high-power chip design and how we solved them.
Biography: Ken Poulton received a B.S. in Physics and an M.S. in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University in 1980. He then joined Hewlett-Packard Laboratories in Palo Alto, CA (now Agilent Research Laboratories in Santa Clara, CA) where he has developed chips for data conversion in GaAs MESFET, GaAs HBT, silicon bipolar, BiCMOS and CMOS technologies.
Ken has published papers on eight world's-fastest data converters. He was a member of the ISSCC technical program committee from 1998 to 2003. He holds 10 patents. Ken is an IEEE Fellow.
Host: Prof. Hossein Hashemi and Prof. Mike Chen
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 248
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Hossein Hashemi
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. -
Sequential Decoding Of General Quantum Communication Channels
Wed, Apr 17, 2013 @ 02:00 PM - 03:00 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Mark M. Wilde, McGill University
Talk Title: Sequential Decoding Of General Quantum Communication Channels
Abstract: Despite the fact that a quantum measurement generally disturbs the state of a quantum system, recent work of Seth Lloyd and collaborators demonstrates that a sender and receiver can communicate at the Holevo rate even when the receiver performs a large number of sequential measurements to determine the message of the sender. The present work contributes to this direction, by addressing three questions that have arisen from the work on sequential decoding. First, we show that Pranab Sen's non-commutative union bound applies for a sequence of general measurements (not merely projective ones). Next, we use this result to prove that sequential decoding works well even in the "one-shot" regime, where we are given a single instance of a channel and wish to determine the maximal number of bits that can be communicated up to a small failure probability. Finally, we demonstrate two ways in which a receiver can recover a state close to the original state after it has been decoded by a sequence of measurements that each succeed with high probability. The second of these methods will be useful in realizing an efficient decoder for fully quantum polar codes, should a method ever be found to realize an efficient decoder for classical-quantum polar codes. This work is available as arXiv:1303.0808.
Biography: Mark M. Wilde received the Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering from the University of Southern California, Los Angeles, California, in 2008. Until recently, he has been a Postdoctoral Fellow at the School of Computer Science, McGill University, and he will start in August 2013 as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy and the Center for Computation and Technology at Louisiana State University. He is the author of the text "Quantum Information Theory" which will soon be published by Cambridge University Press. His current research interests are in quantum Shannon theory, quantum optical communication, quantum computational complexity theory, and quantum error correction.
Host: Todd Brun, x03503, tbrun@usc.edu
Location: Frank R. Seaver Science Center (SSC) - 319
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. -
Human Motion Analysis in the Interplay of Multimodality, Representation and Learning
Thu, Apr 18, 2013 @ 01:30 PM - 03:00 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Ferda Ofli, University of California - Berkeley
Talk Title: Human Motion Analysis in the Interplay of Multimodality, Representation and Learning
Abstract: Human motion analysis is one of the most challenging research areas in computer vision in which one can seek to perform better by fusing information from multi-sensory data, by proposing richer feature representations, and by developing more efficient learning algorithms. In this talk, I will first describe the Berkeley MHAD, recently released comprehensive multimodal human action database, and present action recognition results for individual modalities as well as combinations of different modalities using state-of-the-art feature representations together with kernel-based methods. Then, I will introduce a new skeletal representation of human actions based on orderings of the most informative joints and demonstrate on multiple datasets that the new representation is discriminative for human action recognition and performs better than state-of-the-art feature representations. Finally, I will talk about a multimodal analysis framework for learning and synthesis of human body motions in the context of dance performances.
Biography: Ferda Ofli received B.Sc. degrees both in Electrical and Electronics Engineering and Computer Engineering, and the Ph.D. degree in Electrical Engineering from Koc University, Istanbul, Turkey, in 2005 and 2010, respectively. He is currently a postdoctoral researcher in the Teleimmersion Lab at the University of California at Berkeley, Berkeley, CA. His research interests span the areas of multimedia signal processing, computer vision, pattern recognition and machine learning. He received Graduate Studies Excellence award in 2010 for outstanding academic achievement at Koc University. http://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/~fofli/
Host: Prof. Shrikanth Narayanan
Location: Ronald Tutor Hall of Engineering (RTH) - 320
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. -
Focused on parallel and distributed computing
Thu, Apr 18, 2013 @ 02:00 PM - 03:00 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: TBA, TBA
Talk Title: TBA
Series: EE598 Seminar Course
Abstract: Weekly seminars given by researchers in academia and industry including senior doctoral students in EE, CS and ISI covering current research related to parallel and distributed computation including parallel algorithms, high performance computing, scientific computation, application specific architectures, multi-core and many-core architectures and algorithms, application acceleration, reconfigurable computing systems, data intensive systems, Big Data and cloud computing.
Biography: Prerequisite: Students are expected to be familiar with basic concepts at the level of graduate level courses in Computer Engineering and Computer Science in some of these topic areas above. Ph.D. students in Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering and Computer Science can automatically enroll. M.S. students can enroll only with permission of the instructor. To request permission send a brief mail to the instructor in text format with the subject field ââ¬ÅEE 598ââ¬Â. The body of the mail (in text format) should include name, degree objective, courses taken at USC and grades obtained, prior educational background, and relevant research background, if any.
Requirements for CR:
1. Attending at least 10 seminars during the semester
There will be a sign-in sheet and a sign-out sheet at every seminar. All students must sign-in (before 2:00pm) and sign-out (after 3:00pm). The sign-in sheet will not be available after 2:00pm, and the sign-out sheet will not be available before 3:00pm.
2. Submitting a written report for at least 5 seminars
The written report for each seminar must be 1-page single line spaced format with font size of 12 (Times) or 11 (Arial) without any figures, tables, or graphs. The report must be submitted no later than 1 week after the corresponding seminar, and must be handed only to the instructor either on the seminar times or during office hours. Late reports will not be considered.
The report must summarize studentââ¬â¢s own understanding of the seminar, and should contain the following:
- Your name and submission date [1 line]
- Title of the seminar, name of the speaker, and seminar date [1 line]
- Background of the work (e.g., applications, prior research, etc.) [1 paragraph]
- Highlights of the approaches presented in the seminar [1-2 paragraphs]
- Main results presented in the seminar [1-2 paragraphs]
- Conclusion (your own conclusion and not what was given by the speaker) [1 paragraph]
Reviewing papers related to the topic of the seminar, and incorporating relevant findings in the
reports (e.g., in the conclusion section) is encouraged. In such cases, make sure to clearly indicate
the reference(s) used to derive these conclusions.
Host: Professor Viktor K. Prasanna
More Information: Course Announcement_EE598_Focused on parallel and distributed computing_(Spring 2013).pdf
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) -
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Janice Thompson
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 598: ELECTRICAL ENGINEERING RESEARCH SEMINAR COURSE #13
Thu, Apr 18, 2013 @ 02:00 PM - 03:00 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Farnoush Banaei-Kashani, PhD, Computer Science, USC Viterbi School of Engineering
Talk Title: Indexes for Efficient Spatial Query Processing on Cloud
Series: EE598 Seminar Course
Abstract: With exclusive access to geospatial data and the hardware platform to develop and serve data-rich geospatial applications, large IT companies have created a monopoly on development of these applications; hence, hindering healthy competition and economic growth. We argue that introduction of cloud computing has recently opened the door to break this monopoly by providing open access to both data and hardware platform, and consequently, enabled any interested entity to develop cloud-based geospatial services and applications. Accordingly as a means to facilitate this transition, we investigate, design and develop Geo-SaaS (short for Geospatial Software-as-a-Service), a framework for geospatial service/SaaS development on cloud platforms. Geo-SaaS provides the programming environment and the query re-writing toolset required for porting the existing geospatial queries and access methods to the parallel platform of cloud. Practitioners (e.g., various businesses) can use the geospatial services developed based on GeoSaaS to implement their cloud-based geospatial applications, and academics can extend the toolsets provided by GeoSaaS by developing their own geospatial services. In this talk, I start by further motivating Geo-SaaS, and then review sample results from our prior work as well as our ongoing work.
Biography: Farnoush Banaei-Kashani is a Research Associate and Associate Director of Research at NSF's Integrated Media Systems Center (IMSC) at the University of Southern California. He received his B.S. in Computer Engineering from Sharif University of Technology in 1996, and his M.S. and Ph.D. Degrees in Computer Networks and Computer Science from the University of Southern California in 2002 and 2006, respectively. His research is focused on fundamental and applied data management with special interest in Data-driven Decision-making Systems (DDSs), i.e., systems that automate the process of decision-making based on data. Toward this end, his research objective is to introduce novel solutions for all components of the DDS data management cycle (namely, data collection, transfer, preprocessing, storage for querying, analysis and mining, visualization, and actuation) under various combinations of the Big Data V3 challenges relevant for the desired DDS applications. Dr. Banaei-Kashani has authored more than forty research articles in the areas of Sensor and Peer-to-Peer Databases, Distributed Databases, and Spatial Databases, Data Streams, Cloud Computing, and Social Network Analysis. He regularly serves on the program committee of various database conferences.
Host: Professor Viktor K. Prasanna
More Information: Course Announcement_EE598_Focused on parallel and distributed computing_(Spring 2013) 2.pdf
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 248
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Janice Thompson
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. -
Backscatter, MIMO, Ultra-Wideband: Three Independent Worlds?
Fri, Apr 19, 2013 @ 10:30 AM - 11:30 AM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Daniel Arnitz, Duke University
Talk Title: Backscatter, MIMO, Ultra-Wideband: Three Independent Worlds?
Abstract: Three systems have independently revolutionized the physical layer of wireless communications in the past decade: backscatter communications, multi-input-multi-output systems, and ultra-wideband signaling. Yet, are these concepts as independent and incompatible as they initially appear, or can these fields learn from each other? The talk will span topics from backscatter tag localization (i.e. secondary radar), ultra-wideband backscatter propagation channels, and MIMO wireless power transfer, to a potential new application of these technologies: real-time ultra-wideband channel modeling.
Biography: Daniel Arnitz is a PostDoc at Duke University (NC, USA), working on backscatter channel modeling and prediction, MIMO wireless power transfer, and RFID localization. He received his Master degree Dipl.-Ing.(FH) in electrical engineering from the University of Applied Sciences FH Joanneum Kapfenberg, Austria, in 2005, and a Ph.D. (Dr. techn.) degree from Graz University of Technology, Austria, in 2011 (both degrees with honors). His Ph.D. thesis covers the field of tag localization in passive UHF RFID and his diploma thesis focused on a feasibility study of (burst) error correcting codes for long-range RFID systems. Daniel is TPC Chair of IEEE RFID 2012 and 2013 and maintainer of the PARIS simulation framework, an open-source simulation engine intended for researching (ultra-)wideband backscatter systems.
Host: Andreas Molisch, x04670, molisch@usc.edu
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. -
Integrated Systems Seminar Series
Fri, Apr 19, 2013 @ 02:30 PM - 03:30 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Prof. Donhee Ham, Harvard University
Talk Title: Solid-state and Biological Systems Interface
Abstract: The complexity, programmability, small size, and low cost of solid-state devices in direct contact with living organisms or their in vitro or ex vivo subsystems can open up new exciting vistas in biology and biotechnology. In this talk, I would like to review some recent developments along this direction, especially, some past and on-going works in my own research group at Harvard. These will include spin-resonance based radio-frequency (RF) biomolecular sensors, and a variety of silicon + electrochemistry interfaces aimed at analyzing proteins, DNA, and population cellular dynamics for personalized medicine, genetics, and neurotechnology.
Biography: Donhee Ham, from Busan, South Korea, and a 2011, 2012, and 2013 Harvard Yearbook Favorite Professor, is Gordon McKay Professor of Applied Physics and EE at Harvard University. He earned a B.S. degree in physics from Seoul National University where he graduated summa cum laude with the Presidential Prize, ranked top 1st across the College of Natural Sciences, and also with the Physics Gold Medal (sole winner). Following a 1.5 years of mandatory military service in the Republic of Korea Army, he went to Caltech for graduate training in physics. There he worked on general relativity and gravitational astrophysics under Professor Barry Barish, and later obtained a Ph.D. in EE winning the Charles Wilts Prize awarded for the best thesis in EE. His doctoral work examined the statistical physics of electrical circuits. He was the recipient of the IBM Doctoral Fellowship, Li Ming Scholarship, IBM Faculty Partnership Award, IBM Research Design Challenge Award, the KFAS fellowship,the Hoopes prize (/w William Andress), and the recognition by MIT Technology Review as among the world's top 35 young innovators in 2008 (TR35). Ham was one of 8 Harvard Thinks Big speakers in 2012 (8 Harvard faculty chosen by college-wide votes). He is an IEEE Distinguished Lecturer. Donhee Ham's work experiences include Caltech-MIT Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory (LIGO), IBM T. J. Watson Research, Consulting Visiting Professorship at POSTECH, IEEE conference technical program committees, advisory board, or associated/guest editorships in, for example, the IEEE ISSCC, IEEE ASSCC, IEEE ISCAS, IEEE T-Biocas, and IEEE JSSC, and various US, Korea, and Japan industry, government, & academic technical advisory positions. The current intellectual focus efforts of his group are in: 1) solid-state and biological systems interface; 2) nanoscale and/or low-dimensional plasmonics, spintronics, and quantum devices; 3) analog, RF/microwave, and mixed-signal integrated circuits.
Host: Prof. Hossein Hashemi and Prof. Mike Chen
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 248
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Hossein Hashemi
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. -
Magneto-electric Nanoparticles for Enabling Personalized NanoMedicine
Mon, Apr 22, 2013 @ 02:00 PM - 03:00 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Sakhrat Khizroev, Florida International University
Talk Title: Magneto-electric Nanoparticles for Enabling Personalized NanoMedicine
Abstract: The use of nanoparticles is often considered as an enabling force of personalized nanomedicine (PNM). Using nanoparticles to precisely navigate a drug through the patient’s body and control its dosage and composition as well as to detect even minute disease-caused changes in the surrounding cellular microenvironment can make personalized treatment a reality. However, the fundamental physics that underlies the nanoparticles’ characteristics in the perspective of the intrinsic interaction with the patient’s body in the aforementioned applications is poorly exploited. Our recent discovery of the unprecedented capabilities of magneto-electric nanoparticles (MENs) helps fill this gap. MENs could be used as energy-efficient and dissipation-free field-controlled nano-vehicles for targeted delivery and on-demand release of anti-Cancer and anti-HIV drugs as well as nano-stimulators for field-controlled non-invasive treatment of patients with central nervous system (CNS) disorders. Further, the intrinsic coupling between electric and magnetic forces within MENs enables molecular specificity that provides an entirely new dimension even to conventional state-of-the-art diagnostic methods such as MRI, PET-CT, the emerging diagnostic technique of magnetic nanoparticle imaging (MNI), and others. The talk will present the MEN applications developed in the Khizroev laboratory to treat and diagnose Cancer, HIV, Parkinsons Diseases and other dementia.
Biography: Sakhrat Khizroev is an inventor with an expertise in nanomagnetic/spintronic devices with a current research focus on nanotechnology applications in Personalized Nanomedicine and Information Processing. He is a tenured Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering and a Professor and Vice Chair at the Department of Immunology of Herbert Wertheim College of Medicine at FIU. He is also the founding Director of Center for Personalized NanoMedicine at the Institute of Neuro-Immune Pharmacology. From 2006 to 2010, Dr. Khizroev was a tenured Professor at the Department of Electrical Engineering, University of California, Riverside (UCR), where his group conducted several groundbreaking demonstrations in the area of nanoelectronics and nanodiagnostics. Perpendicular magnetic recording (PMR), three-dimensional (3-D) magnetic memory and Nanolasers for 5-nm diagnostics, low-damping spin-oscillator devices are among the pioneering and patented technologies which emerged under the supervision of Professor Khizroev. Prior to his academic career, Prof. Khizroev spent almost four years as a Research Staff Member with Seagate Research (1999-2003) and one year as a Doctoral Intern with IBM Almaden Research Center (1997-1998). He holds over 30 granted US patents and many international patents. He has authored over 120 refereed papers, 1 book and many book chapters in the broad area of nanomagnetic/spintronic devices. He is a Fellow of National Academy of Inventors (NAI). He has acted as a guest science and technology commentator on television and radio programs across the globe. He has served as an Editor for IEEE Transactions on Nanotechnology, Nanotechnology, and IEEE Transactions on Magnetics and sits on editorial boards of several Science and Technology journals. Khizroev received a BS in Quantum Electronics and Applied Physics from Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology, a MS in Physics from the University of Miami, and a PhD in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Carnegie Mellon University in 1992, 1994, and 1999, respectively.
Host: Mary Eshaghian-Wilner, 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. -
Multi-Core and Heterogeneous High Performance Cloud Computing
Wed, Apr 24, 2013 @ 10:30 AM - 11:30 AM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Dr. Stephen P. Crago, Director, Adaptive Parallel Execution Division, ISI
Talk Title: Multi-Core and Heterogeneous High Performance Cloud Computing
Abstract: Cloud computing has become the dominant paradigm for making computing available at scale while reducing the cost of providing that computing and allowing for dynamic provisioning. Software as a Service (SaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) all provide compute and storage capabilities to users at different levels of the software stack. IaaS provides infrastructure to users at the level of a virtual machine and boot image that can include an operating system and a base software stack, which can be specified by the user. Compute services are typically provided on commodity servers based on the x86 processor architecture that hide hardware architecture details by design. At the same time, data centers (including computing providers) are becoming limited by power and general-purpose single-core processor performance has leveled off and is even decreasing. Applications that require additional computational performance will increasingly rely on exploiting parallelism, compute accelerators (e.g. GPUs), and heterogeneous architectures.
In this talk, I will discuss research that we are performing to make heterogeneous, high-performance computing available in the cloud, and a research agenda based on introspective systems that will enable users and applications to manage parallelism and heterogeneity in increasingly complex and dynamic environments.
Biography: Stephen Crago leads the Adaptive Parallel Execution (APEX) group, which seeks novel ways to automate parallel computing. Such automation is becoming crucial as parallelism gains rapidly outpace manual programming abilities. The team includes experts in computer architecture, parallel programming, cloud computing, reconfigurable computing, wireless communication, and tool development.
Crago’s interests include computer architecture, multiprocessors, high-performance, heterogeneous cloud computing, embedded processing, performance analysis and optimization. He also works in intelligent control of computing resources, and optimizations for processing time, throughput, efficiency and scalability and in algorithm implementation and hardware prototyping for novel computing architectures.
Crago joined ISI in 1997 and has led many projects, large and small, across the range of his research interests. He received his Ph.D. in computer engineering from the University of Southern California.
Host: Dr. Sandeep Gupta
More Information: Crago Seminar Announcement.pdf
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. -
Focused on parallel and distributed computing
Thu, Apr 25, 2013 @ 02:00 PM - 03:00 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: TBA, TBA
Talk Title: TBA
Series: EE598 Seminar Course
Abstract: Weekly seminars given by researchers in academia and industry including senior doctoral students in EE, CS and ISI covering current research related to parallel and distributed computation including parallel algorithms, high performance computing, scientific computation, application specific architectures, multi-core and many-core architectures and algorithms, application acceleration, reconfigurable computing systems, data intensive systems, Big Data and cloud computing.
Biography: Prerequisite: Students are expected to be familiar with basic concepts at the level of graduate level courses in Computer Engineering and Computer Science in some of these topic areas above. Ph.D. students in Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering and Computer Science can automatically enroll. M.S. students can enroll only with permission of the instructor. To request permission send a brief mail to the instructor in text format with the subject field ââ¬ÅEE 598ââ¬Â. The body of the mail (in text format) should include name, degree objective, courses taken at USC and grades obtained, prior educational background, and relevant research background, if any.
Requirements for CR:
1. Attending at least 10 seminars during the semester
There will be a sign-in sheet and a sign-out sheet at every seminar. All students must sign-in (before 2:00pm) and sign-out (after 3:00pm). The sign-in sheet will not be available after 2:00pm, and the sign-out sheet will not be available before 3:00pm.
2. Submitting a written report for at least 5 seminars
The written report for each seminar must be 1-page single line spaced format with font size of 12 (Times) or 11 (Arial) without any figures, tables, or graphs. The report must be submitted no later than 1 week after the corresponding seminar, and must be handed only to the instructor either on the seminar times or during office hours. Late reports will not be considered.
The report must summarize studentââ¬â¢s own understanding of the seminar, and should contain the following:
- Your name and submission date [1 line]
- Title of the seminar, name of the speaker, and seminar date [1 line]
- Background of the work (e.g., applications, prior research, etc.) [1 paragraph]
- Highlights of the approaches presented in the seminar [1-2 paragraphs]
- Main results presented in the seminar [1-2 paragraphs]
- Conclusion (your own conclusion and not what was given by the speaker) [1 paragraph]
Reviewing papers related to the topic of the seminar, and incorporating relevant findings in the
reports (e.g., in the conclusion section) is encouraged. In such cases, make sure to clearly indicate
the reference(s) used to derive these conclusions.
Host: Professor Viktor K. Prasanna
More Information: Course Announcement_EE598_Focused on parallel and distributed computing_(Spring 2013).pdf
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) -
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Janice Thompson
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
Fri, Apr 26, 2013 @ 02:30 PM - 03:30 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Dr. Timothy M. Hancock, MIT Lincoln Laboratory
Talk Title: Hardware Phenomenological Effects on Co-channel Full-Duplex MIMO Relay Performance
Abstract: This presentation will discuss the performance of co-channel full-duplex multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) nodes is considered in the context of models for realistic hardware characteristics. Here, co-channel full-duplex relay indicates a node that transmits and receives simultaneously in the same frequency band. It is assumed that transmit and receive phase centers are physically distinct, enabling adaptive spatial transmit and receive processing to mitigate self-interference. The use of MIMO indicates a self-interference channel with spatially diverse inputs and outputs, although multiple modes are not explored in this analysis. Rather, the focus will be on rank-1 transmit covariance matrices. In practice, the limiting issue for co-channel full-duplex nodes is the ability to mitigate self-interference. While theoretically a system with infinite dynamic range and exact channel estimation can mitigate the self-interference perfectly, in practice, transmitter and receiver dynamic range, nonlinearities, and noise, as well as channel dynamics, limit the practical performance. This presentation will investigate the self-interference mitigation limitations in the context of eigenvalue spread of spatial transmit and receive covariance matrices caused by realistic hardware models.
Biography: Timothy M. Hancock received the B.S. degree in electrical engineering from the Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering from the University of Michigan where he was involved with the development of SiGe integrated microwave circuits from 6 to 77 GHz. In the past he has worked for Conexant Systems on a single chip GPS receiver and at M/A-COM on a Silicon Germanium 24 GHz automotive radar solution. For 6 years he was a staff member in the RF & Quantum Systems Technology Group at MIT Lincoln Laboratory, where he was involved with the development of low-power, small form-factor wireless devices, reconfigurable and multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) communication systems where his work focused on integrated circuit design and wireless system design. Since 2011 he has been the Assistant Leader of the same group where he continues to develop programs in the area of MIMO communications and small form-factor wireless devices as well as technology development for RADAR and ELINT systems. He is a senior member of the IEEE and the 2010 inaugural recipient of the MIT Lincoln Laboratory Early Career Technical Achievement Award.
Host: Prof. Hossein Hashemi and Prof. Mike Chen
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 248
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Hossein Hashemi
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.
