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Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Events for May
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Analyzing Large Wired and Wireless Networks
Tue, May 01, 2012 @ 10:00 AM - 11:00 AM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Shirin Jalali, Ph.D., The Center for Mathematics of Information, California Institute of Technology
Talk Title: Analyzing Large Wired and Wireless Networks
Abstract: Emergence of the Internet and mobile wireless networks has given rise to large networks involving hundreds or thousands of users and relay nodes. While such networks have been around for a few decades, our limited resources in addition to the ever-increasing demands have pushed these networks to their limits. For instance, in cellular networks dropped calls are becoming a norm in populated areas these days. This demands for a fresh look at the problem of communication over large networks. While computing the high-dimensional capacity region of such networks is still of interest, in many cases it is more crucial to answer other fundamental questions such as the structure of capacity-achieving codes, or the amount of loss incurred by applying the existing codes. Answering these types of questions helps us strategize in terms of improving the performance of a given network, by either designing more efficient communication algorithms or redesigning the network's structure. In this talk, I will discuss some new approaches for analyzing large wired and wireless networks. In particular, I will describe new methods that allow us to answer questions about general noisy networks without computing their capacity regions. I will also explain a new hierarchical network analysis approach. For a given network, this new method enables us to find simpler networks of smaller sizes whose capacity regions provide upper or lower bounds on the capacity region of the original network. This is based on a joint work with Michelle Effros and Tracey Ho.
Biography: Shirin Jalali received her Ph.D. and M.Sc. degrees from Stanford University in 2009, in Electrical Engineering and Statistics, respectively. Since then, she has been a postdoctoral scholar at the Center for Mathematics of Information at California Institute of Technology. She has received her B.Sc. in Electrical Engineering from Sharif University of Technology in 2002 and her M.Sc. in Electrical Engineering from the same institution in 2004. Her main researchinterests are information theory and statistical signal processing. She is particularly interested in problems in network information theory and universal compression, acquisition and denoising.
Host: Prof. Urbasi Mitra
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 110
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. -
Adaptive Feedback-Based Detection and Compensation of Dynamic System Failures and Damage
Wed, May 02, 2012 @ 10:00 AM - 11:00 AM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Professor Gang Tao, University of Virginia
Talk Title: Adaptive Feedback-Based Detection and Compensation of Dynamic System Failures and Damage
Abstract: Actuator and sensor failures, and system structural damage can cause control system performance deterioration and even lead to instability and catastrophic accidents. Effective date action and compensation of failures and damage are crucial for performance-critical systems. In this talk, we present some of our recently developed adaptive failure and damage detection and compensation techniques whose main features are feedback-based detection with guaranteed stability and direct compensation with fast and improved performance. Actuator failures are characterized by some unknown system inputs stuck at some unknown fixed or varying values at
unknown time instants and cannot be influenced by the applied control signals. Sensor failure and uncertainties cause errors in measuring the system output signals for feedback control. System damage can cause large structural and parametric uncertainties. The task of direct adaptive compensation is to design the feedback control signals in a way that despite uncertain failures and damage, the adaptive control system can automatically achieve desired stability and asymptotic tracking.
A key feature of many fault detection schemes is that they require the system to be detected remains stable when a fault (failure or damage) occurs. This may limit the applicability of such schemes in performance-critical systems applications such as aircraft flight control systems which may become unstable when a fault occurs. A desirable detection scheme should be designed in a feedback framework to ensure the needed stability for effective fault detection. We will address some technical issues in direct adaptive failure and damage compensation and in feedback-based fault detection: system modeling with failures and damage, redundant actuation and sensing, plant-model matching, system invariance under damage, error systems with faults, adaptive detection and compensation design, stability and tracking analysis, and system performance evaluation.
Biography: Gang Tao received his B.S. (EE) degree from University of Science and Technology of China in 1982, M.S. (EE, CpE, ApMath) degrees and Ph.D. (EE) degree from University of Southern California during 1984-1989. For over 25 years, he worked in the areas of adaptive control, with particular interests in adaptive control of systems with multiple inputs and multiple outputs and with nonsmooth nonlinearities and actuator failures, in stability and robustness of adaptive control systems, and in passivity characterizations of dynamic systems. Recently he has been working on adaptive control of systems with uncertain actuator failures and nonlinearities, structure damage and sensor uncertainties, with applications to aircraft flight control.
He is currently an associate editor for Automatica and a subject editor for International Journal of Adaptive Control and Signal Processing. He is a Fellow of IEEE.
Host: Petros Ioannou
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 248
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Shane Goodoff
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. -
CMOS Process Variations: A “Critical Operation Point” Hypothesis
Thu, May 03, 2012 @ 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Janak H. Patel, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Talk Title: CMOS Process Variations: A “Critical Operation Point” Hypothesis
Abstract: A brief overview of present and future CMOS process variations will be presented. Prevailing understanding of a chip’s behavior under large process variations with statistical delay assumptions leads one to conclude that a small number of errors are likely as we progress further down on Moore’s Law. This understanding is challenged by a new hypothesis on the behavior of very large CMOS chips in the presence of process variations. A Thought Experiment is presented which leads to the new hypothesis. The new hypothesis states that in every large CMOS chip, there exist critical operations points (frequency, voltage, temperature) such that it divides the 3-D space (F, V, T) in to two distinct spaces: 1. Error-free operation and 2. Massive errors (i.e. completely inoperable). Two attempts at disproving this hypothesis with real physical experiments will be described. Some consequences of the hypothesis on power savings in large data centers are also suggested.
Biography: Janak H. Patel is a Research Professor in Coordinated Science Laboratory and Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Patel’s research contributions include Pipeline Scheduling, Cache Coherence, Cache Simulation, Interconnection Networks, On-line Error Detection, Reliability analysis of memories with ECC and scrubbing, Design for Testability, Built-In Self-Test, Fault Simulation and Automatic Test Generation. Patel has supervised over 85 M.S. and Ph.D. theses and published over 200 technical papers and listed as a Highly Cited Researcher. He was a founding technical advisor to Nexgen Microsystems that gave rise to the entire line of microprocessors from AMD. He was a founder of successful startup, Sunrise Test, a CAD company for chip testing, now owned by Synopsys.
He received a Bachelor of Science degree in Physics from Gujarat University, India and Bachelor of Technology in Electrical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras, India, and a Master of Science and Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University. He is a fellow of ACM and IEEE and a recipient of the 1998 IEEE Piore Award.
Host: Melvin A. Breuer
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. -
Inferring Speaker Affect in Spoken Natural Language Communication
Mon, May 14, 2012 @ 10:30 AM - 12:00 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Heather Pon-Barry, Harvard University
Talk Title: Inferring Speaker Affect in Spoken Natural Language Communication
Abstract: Speech interfaces are now abundant in our everyday lives. Yet, the experience of talking to a dialogue system or posing queries to a smartphone is not as natural or as efficient as conversing with another human. In this talk, I will present my work, at the intersection of spoken language processing and adaptive intelligent systems, that is aimed at making spoken language communication more natural and efficient. Intelligent speech-enabled systems must move beyond recognizing the words that a person is saying; they must also listen to the person’s manner of speaking and detect any emotions or affective signals that are conveyed. As a concrete example, I will address the problem of inferring a speaker’s level of certainty using prosodic information (intonation, rhythm, and energy) from the speech signal. I will present a technique for computing prosodic features from utterance segments that both improves level of certainty classification and can be used to determine the cause of uncertainty. These models are able to accurately classify speaker certainty 75% of the time. I will also discuss a novel method for eliciting affective speech. This method binds the speaker’s uncertainty to a single phrase within the larger utterance, allowing for the comparison of contextually-based feature sets. This work has applications in a wide range of speech-enabled systems, including tutorial dialogue systems, language-learning tools, and voice search applications.
Biography: Heather Pon-Barry is a Ph.D. candidate in Computer Science at Harvard University. She received her B.S. and M.S. in Symbolic Systems at Stanford University. Her research interests include spoken language processing, artificial intelligence, machine learning, and cognitive science. She is the recipient of NSF and NDSEG graduate research fellowships.
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.
