SUNMONTUEWEDTHUFRISAT
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Events for August
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Center for Energy Nanoscience and Technology Distinguished Speaker Series
Fri, Aug 12, 2011 @ 12:00 PM - 01:00 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Garry Rumbles, National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) Golden, Colorado and Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry University of Colorado, Boulder
Talk Title: Comparing the Primary Electron Transfer Process in Photosynthetic Reaction Centers with Organic Photovoltaic Heterojunctions
Abstract: Abstract:
This presentation will focus on some of the fundamental science associated with the rapidly emerging field of organic
photovoltaics (OPV). It will include a discussion of how the OPV field is evolving, examine some of the fundamental
scientific issues that underpin the subject, and will discuss how spectroscopy can help to understand these issues. The
goal is to enable both a better understanding of how these systems function and consequently help to advance solar
energy conversion efficiencies of future OPV devices.
So-called organic photovoltaic devices have seen certified power conversion efficiencies increase from 2.5% in 2001 to
~9% in 2011. Close inspection of the strategies employed to realize this impressive improvement in performance reveal
a common approach of synthesizing new donor polymers, fullerene acceptors and, in some cases, new device
architectures. It is questionable as to whether this approach will result in a similar four-fold level of improvement over the
next ten years. And it is this question that motivates the work that will be described.
At the heart of all OPV devices is the donor-acceptor interface, where photogenerated excitons are dissociated into
separated charge carriers. Using flash photolysis, timeresolved microwave conductivity as a tool for detecting mobile
carriers, a number of recently-studied systems will be demonstrated. These may include systems that contain new
conjugated polymers, novel derivatives of fullerenes, single-walled carbon nanotubes and colloidal quantum dots, to
name a few. These studies will serve to highlight a fundamental issue that we have yet fully understand: how are these
carriers created with such efficiency and yield, and in a system that does not immediately suggest that this is possible?
The talk will therefore include a speculative discussion about how we might better understand this process by looking at
the function of Natureâs photosynthetic reaction centers
Biography: Bio:
Dr. Garry Rumbles is a Research Fellow at the U.S. DOE National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL). Dr. Rumbles
joined NREL in 2000 and is widely recognized for his research in photochemistry and photophysics of conjugated
molecular systems, energy conversion in organic light emitting diodes and organic photovoltaic devices, and nanoscale
morphology. In May 2009, he became a Professor Adjoint in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry at CU
Boulder; and in October 2009 a Fellow of the joint CU/NREL adventure: Renewable and Sustainable Energy Institute
(RASEI). In 2004, he was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry. Dr. Rumbles has published more than 130
journal articles and more than 10 book sections.
Host: P. Daniel Dapkus, Center Director
More Information: Rumbles.pdf
Location: Grace Ford Salvatori Hall Of Letters, Arts & Sciences (GFS) - 106
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Eliza Aceves
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. -
On the Design and Player Satisfaction Evaluation of an Immersive Gestural Game: The Case of Tortellino X-Perience at the Shanghai World Expo
Mon, Aug 15, 2011 @ 11:00 PM - 12:00 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Dr. Gustavo Marfia & Professor Marco Roccetti, Computer Science Department, University of Bologna, Italy
Talk Title: On the Design and Player Satisfaction Evaluation of an Immersive Gestural Game: The Case of Tortellino X-Perience at the Shanghai World Expo
Abstract: The role of human-computer interaction technologies has advanced to the point of becoming a prominent factor that most can determine the successful introduction of new computer games. Players, in fact, wish to experience playful exchanges with the objects and characters that compose games. To reach this aim, new technologies have come into the play that comprise the use of video cameras and gesture recognition software. The great news is that such types of technologies could be exploited not only while playing at home on a console, but also in public spaces, thus broadening the use of games to new segments of customers. Nonetheless, to the best of our knowledge, neither relevant exemplars of such specific type of games (that can be played in public spaces) have yet emerged, nor extensive measurement studies exist regarding how players enjoy games in public immersive environments (e.g., fairs, museums and exhibits), the motivation being that those technologies that support completely hands-free gaming have been commercialized only very recently. Hence, our contribution with this article is twofold: on one side we want to illustrate the main design principles we have devised to design a gestural game to be played in a public space, based on novel hand following and gesture recognition techniques. On the other side we wish to report on real measurements we took when over one hundred players enjoyed our gestural game in a public arena at the Shanghai 2010 World Expo. We feel that our work brings an important contribution to the DOC (Design Of Communication) field, as our techniques can be generally exploited to provide a support to all those performing events to be enjoyed publicly, where a predefined set of gestures need to be automatically recognized to permit a natural experience to customers/players.
Host: Professor C.-C. Jay Kuo
Location: Seaver Science Library (SSL) - 150
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. -
Power Efficiency of Partial Frequency Reuse for Cellular Networks
Wed, Aug 17, 2011 @ 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Christoph F. Mecklenbräuker, Institute of Telecommunications
Talk Title: Power Efficiency of Partial Frequency Reuse for Cellular Networks
Abstract: We apply constrained optimization techniques to optimally allocate bandwidth and transmit power to the users in a cellular network. We utilize partial frequency reuse as inter-cell interference mitigation technique considering multiple users uniformly distributed in the cell. The maximization of the minimum rate is used to optimally allocate the bandwidth and power to the users. Simulation results indicate that partial frequency reuse is more power efficient than reuse-1 or reuse-3.
Joint work with: Bujar Krasniqi
Biography: Christoph Mecklenbräuker received the Dipl-Ing. degree in Electrical Engineering from Vienna University of Technology in 1992 and the Dr.-Ing. degree from Ruhr-University of Bochum in 1998, respectively. His doctoral thesis was awarded with the Gert Massenberg Prize. From 1997-2000, he worked for Siemens AG Austria where he was a delegate to the Third Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) and engaged in the standardisation of the radio access network for UMTS. Since June 2000, he was a senior researcher at the Telecommunications Research Center Vienna (ftw.) in the field of mobile communications. Between 2006 and 2009, he coordinated the Sixth Framework project "Multiple-Access Space-Time Coding Testbed" (MASCOT). He lead the Special Interest Group on mobile-to-mobile communications within COST Action 2100 Pervasive Mobile and Ambient Wireless Communications. In 2006, he joined the Institute of Communications and Radio Frequency Engineering at Vienna University of Technology as a full professor. Since July 2009 and leads the Christian Doppler Laboratory for Wireless Technologies for Sustainable Mobility. His current research interests include radio interfaces for future peer-to-peer networks (car-to-car communications, personal area networks, and wireless sensor networks), ultra-wideband radio (UWB) and MIMO-OFDM based transceivers (UMTS long term evolution, WiMax, and 4G). Christoph Mecklenbräuker is a member of the IEEE, the Antennas and Propagation Society, the Vehicular Technology society, the Signal Processing society, and EURASIP. He is the councilor of the IEEE Student Branch Wien. He is associate editor of the EURASIP Journal of Applied Signal Processing.
Host: Andreas Molisch, 04670, EEB 530, molisch@usc.edu
Location: Henry Salvatori Computer Science Center (SAL) - 322
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. -
Using Technology to Support Effective Literacy Instruction
Fri, Aug 19, 2011 @ 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Carol McDonald Connor, Ph.D., Florida State University, Florida Center for Reading Research
Talk Title: Using Technology to Support Effective Literacy Instruction
Abstract: Accumulating evidence is revealing that the effect of particular types of reading instructional strategies on studentsâ literacy outcomes depends on the oral language and reading skills they bring to the classroom; called child characteristic X instruction interactions. This means that to conduct effective literacy instruction, teachers need to be able to translate assessment data into meaningful recommendations for instruction. The centerpiece in a series of randomized control field trials in kindergarten through third grade. Assessment-to-instruction (A2i) online software was designed to support teachersâ ability to implement assessment-informed instruction. The software relies on algorithms that use each studentâs vocabulary, word reading, and reading comprehension scores to compute recommended amounts and types of instruction. This presentation will present this technology, the results of the studies, and implications for improving the efficacy of literacy instruction.
Biography: Dr. Connor is an Associate Professor at Florida State University in Developmental Psychology and the Florida Center for Reading Research. Her research examines the links between young childrenâs language and literacy development with the goal of illuminating reasons for the perplexing difficulties children who are atypical and diverse learners have developing basic and advanced literacy skills. Most recently, her research interests have focused on childrenâs learning in the classroom â from preschool through third grade. These studies indicate that the effectiveness of specific instructional activities depends on the language and reading skills children bring with them to school; these child-by-instruction interactions are evident as early as preschool and continue at least through third grade for a number of child language and literacy outcomes. Awarded the Presidentsâ Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE, 2008), the Society for Research in Child Development (SRCD, 2009) Early Career Award, and the Richard Snow Award (APA, 2008), she is the principal investigator for studies funded by the US Department of Education, Institute for Education Sciences and the National Institute for Child Health and Human Development. She also conducts research focusing on the language and literacy development of profoundly deaf children including those who use cochlear implants.
Host: Professor Shrikanth Narayanan
Location: Hedco Neurosciences Building (HNB) - 100
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. -
GreenDroid: An Architecture for the Dark Silicon Era
Fri, Aug 19, 2011 @ 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Michael B. Taylor, Assistant Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of California, San Diego
Talk Title: GreenDroid: An Architecture for the Dark Silicon Era
Abstract: The Dark Silicon Era kicked off with the transition to multicore and will be characterized by a wild chase for seemingly ever-more insane architectural designs. At the heart of this transformation is the utilization wall, which states that, with each new process generation, the percentage of transistors that a chip can switch at full frequency is dropping exponentially due to power constraints. This has led to increasingly larger and larger fractions of a chip's silicon that must remain passive, or dark.
Our research attacks this dark silicon problem directly through a set of energy-saving accelerators, called Conservation Cores, or c-cores. C-cores are a post-multicore approach that constructively uses dark silicon to reduce the energy consumption of an application by 10x or more. To examine the utility of c-cores, we are developing GreenDroid, a multicore chip that targets the Android mobile stack. Our mobile application processor prototype targets a 32-nm process and is comprised of hundreds of automatically generated, specialized, patchable c-cores. These cores target specific Android hotspots, including the kernel. Our preliminary results suggest that we can attain an average 7x improvement in energy efficiency using a modest 7 mm^2 of silicon.
Biography: Michael B. Taylor is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at UC San Diego. His research interests focus around the design of novel computing artifacts. His recent projects include Kremlin, a tool best described as "like gprof, but for parallelization"; GreenDroid, jointly led with Steven Swanson; and SD-VBS, a vision benchmark suite. As a PhD student at MIT, Michael was the lead architect of the 16-core MIT Raw processor, which was later commercialized into the 100-core Tilera chips. Prior to that, he co-authored the first version of the Connectix VirtualPC x86-to-PowerPC translator, and hacked microkernels at Apple. He received the NSF CAREER Award in 2009, a PhD from MIT in 2007, and an AB from Dartmouth College in 1996. He has been writing code for 86% of his life.
Host: Professor Timothy M. Pinkston
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. -
Ph.D. Defense
Tue, Aug 23, 2011 @ 01:30 PM - 03:30 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Hoang Le, Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical Engineering
Talk Title: High Performance Architectures for Packet Forwarding and String Pattern Matching
Abstract: Internet routers in the backbone must move traffic to the correct destination as fast as possible. However, packet forwarding has long been a performance bottleneck. While the throughput requirements continue to grow, memory efficiency has also been an additional critical concern. Along with the rapid development of the Internet, network security has arisen as a major challenge. Computer networks are constantly assailed by attacks and scams, ranging from nuisance hacking to more nefarious probes and activities. Therefore, network traffic must be filtered to protect the network from these malicious activities.
The focus of my Ph.D research has been on the use of low-power memory, such as static random access memory (SRAM), combined with application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) and/or field programmable gate array (FPGA) technology. The goals are to develop high-throughput, memory-efficient, and flexible algorithmic solutions for packet forwarding (used in core routers) and string pattern matching (used in network intrusion detection systems).
We have proposed tree-based algorithms and data structures for the IP lookup problem. The algorithm partitions a routing table into groups of prefixes to minimize the total memory consumption. Data structures that achieve superior memory efficiency and support quick incremental updates are also introduced. We have developed two algorithms to compress the uni-bit trie representation of a given routing table. These algorithms determine the optimal maximum skip distance at each node of the trie to minimize the total memory requirement. For IP lookup in virtual routers, we have given a simple merging algorithm whose performance is not sensitive to the number of routing tables considered is offered. The performance solely depends on the total number of prefixes. For string pattern matching problem, we have also designed an algorithm called leaf-attaching to efficiently disjoint a given dictionary without increasing the number of patterns is given. Our proposed solutions are evaluated using state-of-the-art ASIC/FPGA platforms. The implementation results demonstrate superior performance over the state-of-the-art, with respect to throughput and memory consumption.
Biography: Hoang Le received a B.S. (summa cum laude) and a M.S. in Computer Engineering from George Mason University, in 2005 and 2007, respectively. He also received a MS degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Southern California in 2010. Hoang is currently a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at USC. His research spans from high-performance architectures in network router to dictionary-based pattern matching in network security. He has also done research in secured embedded systems and cryptographic hardware. His primary focuses are on algorithm design, algorithm mapping on custom hardware, memory efficient data structures, and high-speed architectures.
Host: Viktor K. Prasanna (Committee Chair)
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. -
Communications, Networks & Systems (CommNetS) Seminar
Wed, Aug 24, 2011 @ 02:00 PM - 03:00 PM
Daniel J. Epstein Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering, Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Brandon Franzke, EE Department, USC
Talk Title: Noise Benefits in Markov Chains
Series: Communications, Networks & Systems (CommNetS) Seminar
Abstract: Markov chains underlie important models in physics, chemistry, economics, and data mining. I will discuss results that show for the first time that noise can benefit a very general class of Markov chains. I will show how noise can drive Markov chains to explore novel solutions and speed convergence to steady-state.
During the talk I will demonstrate the noise benefits results over three Markov models. The first shows noise benefits in the Ehrenfest diffusion model and illustrates the noise-benefit mechanism in the large class of birth-death processes. The second uses a noisy Wright-Fisher stochastic population-genetics model to show a faster time to find the steady-state genomic probabilities. The third uses noise in an empirical Zeolite synthesis pathway to show that noise benefits may exist even in an empirically derived Markov process.
The talk will cover fundamental Markov chain concepts and extend the results into future areas of application such as Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC), benefits for massive Markov models such as the Google PageRank algorithm, and new research avenues to study the profound possibility of speeding evolution in preferred directions.
Biography: Brandon Franzke received a joint B.S. degree in Biomedical and Electrical engineering with a minor in neuroscience from the University of Southern California (USC) in 2002. He is finishing Ph.D. studies at USC on noise benefits in statistical signal processing under the supervision of Professor Bart Kosko. His efforts focus on profound applications of noise in fundamental arenas of chemistry, biology, and physics and his work bridges formal theory to the experimental laboratory.
Host: Rahul Jain
More Info: http://csi.usc.edu/~dimakis/CommNetSLocation: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 248
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Rahul Jain
Event Link: http://csi.usc.edu/~dimakis/CommNetS
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. -
Ph.D. Defense
Mon, Aug 29, 2011 @ 03:00 PM - 05:00 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Shuping Liu, Computer Engineering
Talk Title: Intelligent Control and Automatic Anomaly Detection/Prediction in Sensor based Systems
Abstract: Sensors are increasingly used for collecting data from the field for monitoring and detecting anomalous behavior. In this thesis a network of sensors are used for data collection, analysis, and detecting abnormal situations in two domains of patient health monitoring and failures in rod pump systems in an oilfield. In these application domains, there are two challenging problems: intelligent control for wireless sensor operations to make decisions on sampling to optimize life time of a sensor network and accurate anomaly detection and prediction using the collected data.
For the health monitoring application domain, a new policy-based framework of Markov Decision Processes (MDP) is formulated for energy efficient optimization problem. The optimal global policy obtained from MPD formulation can be used by distributed sensors to achieve adaptive sampling for optimal and intelligent control of both energy consumption (system lifetime) and detection accuracy. The size of MDP policy may be large with increasing number of sensors having limited memory and discretization granularity of the problem. A decision tree-based learning algorithm is applied for a compact policy representation. Computational complexity is also exponential to the number of sensors and proportional to the discretization granularity of the problem, which causes the computational scalability problem and limits the application of MDP framework on large state space cases. In order to overcome computational scalability problem, three computationally efficient learning algorithms are developed based on approaches to learn local policies for each sensor: RLAA Learning Algorithm, AMRL Learning Algorithm and COL Learning Algorithm. We successfully applied our approaches to healthcare monitoring system, and compared the performance with other methods. The results show that all three learning algorithms are scalable to sensor networks with large state space.
For the oil field domain, learning-based automatic anomaly detection and prediction algorithms are developed for artificial lift rod pump systems which fail due to various reasons and fixing them can be costly and difficult because most parts are underground. Currently, failures in such systems are detected by field experts, which take time and incur labor costs. Our approach is supervised learning-based anomaly detection techniques from field data and we developed a novel combination of two supervised learning algorithms, AdaBNet and AdaDT for this problem. These techniques are successfully applied to detecting and predicting failures in rod pump systems with real data from oilfields. Our automated anomaly detection and prediction approach can allow automated surveillance of large number of wells in an oil field to reduce cost while monitoring wells remotely.
Biography: Shuping Liu received a M .S. (2004) in Electrical Engineering from Helsinki University of Technology in Finland. He also received a 2nd M. S. (2010) in Computer Science from University of Southern California. He obtained a B.S. degree (1998) from Anhui University of Technology in China. Shuping is currently a Ph.D. candidate in the department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at USC. His research spans from wired and wireless networking, mobile computing and security to machine learning and data mining. His primary focuses are on algorithm design, stochastic optimization theorem, wireless body sensor networks for health monitoring, and anomaly detection and prediction.
Host: Raghu Raghavendra (Chair)
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.
