SUNMONTUEWEDTHUFRISAT
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Events for September
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Communications, Networks & Systems (CommNetS) Seminar
Wed, Sep 02, 2015 @ 02:00 PM - 03:00 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Takashi Tanaka, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Talk Title: LQG Control with Minimal Information: Semidefinite Programming Approach
Series: CommNetS
Abstract: Real-time decision-making procedures in general require continuous acquisition of information from the environment. In this talk, we revisit one of the most fundamental questions in real-time decision-making theory: what is the minimal information acquisition rate to achieve sequential decision-making with desired accuracy? We tackle this question using basic tools from control theory, information theory, and convex optimization theory. Specifically, we consider a Linear-Quadratic-Gaussian (LQG) control problem where Massey's directed information from the state sequence to the control sequence is taken into account. We show that the most "information-frugal" decision-making policy achieving desired LQG control performance admits an attractive three-stage separation structure comprised of (1) an additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) channel, (2) Kalman filter, and (3) a certainty equivalence controller. We also show that an optimal policy can be synthesized using a numerically efficient algorithm based on semidefinite programming (SDP).
Biography: Takashi Tanaka received his B.S. degree from Tokyo University in 2006, M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2009 and 2012, all in Aerospace Engineering. Currently, he is a postdoctoral associate at the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems (LIDS) at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His research interests are in the joint area of control, optimization, game theory and information theory.
Host: Dr. Ashutosh Nayyar
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. -
Computer Engineering Seminar
Fri, Sep 04, 2015 @ 10:30 AM - 11:30 AM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Dr. Yiorgos Makris, University of Texas at Dallas
Talk Title: Applications of Machine Learning in the Design of Trusted and Reliable Analog/RF ICs
Abstract: As electronics continue to penetrate every facet of contemporary life, the analog/RF integrated circuit (IC) market is experiencing unprecedented growth, with its current annual value standing at over $45B. With application domains mainly in wireless communications, real-time control, remote sensing, automotive and health, ensuring reliability and trustworthiness of analog/RF integrated circuits becomes paramount. This seminar elucidates the role that machine learning and statistical analysis can play towards this end. Specifically, we will discuss (i) a classification-based test method for testing whether the performances of a fabricated analog/RF IC meet its specifications, (ii) a regression-based calibration method for tuning the performances of each fabricated device through the use of on-chip knobs in order to increase yield, (iii) a statistical side-channel fingerprinting method for detecting malicious circuit inclusions (a.k.a. hardware Trojans) in wireless cryptographic ICs, and (iv) the design of on-chip analog neural networks for enabling post-deployment built-in self-test, self-repair and self-trust evaluation. Results will be provided using industrial test data and measurements from custom-designed analog/RF ICs.
Biography: Yiorgos received the Diploma of Computer Engineering and Informatics from the University of Patras, Greece, in 1995 and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Engineering from UC San Diego, in 1998 and 2001, respectively. After spending a decade on the faculty of Yale University, he joined UT Dallas where he is now a Professor of Electrical Engineering, leading the Trusted and RELiable Architectures (TRELA) Research Laboratory. His research focuses on applications of machine learning and statistical analysis in the development of trusted and reliable integrated circuits and systems, with particular emphasis in the analog/RF domain. He is the 2016 general chair and was the 2013-2014 program chair of the IEEE VLSI Test Symposium as well as the 2010-2012 program chair of the Test Technology Educational Program (TTEP). He is an associate editor of the IEEE Design & Test periodical and the Springer Journal of Electronic Testing: Theory and Applications, and served as a guest editor for the IEEE Trans. on Computers and the IEEE Trans. on Computer-Aided Design of Integrated Circuits and Systems, and as a topic coordinator and/or program committee member for several IEEE and ACM conferences. He is a Senior Member of the IEEE, a recipient of the 2006 Sheffield Distinguished Teaching Award and a recipient of the Best Paper Award from the 2013 Design Automation and Test in Europe (DATE'13) conference. His research activities have been supported by NSF, ARO, SRC, DARPA, Boeing, IBM, LSI, Intel, and Texas Instruments.
Host: Prof. Sandeep Gupta
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 349
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. -
Integrated Systems Seminar Series
Fri, Sep 04, 2015 @ 02:00 PM - 03:30 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Professor Josephy Bardin, University of Massachusetts, Amherst
Talk Title: BiCMOS Circuits for Ultra Sensitive Scientific Sensor Systems
Series: Integrated Systems Seminar
Abstract: In a variety of critical scientific fields, the highest performance instrumentation exploits cryogenically cooled electronics to achieve levels of performance far beyond what is feasible using room temperature electronics. For example, the free-space optical communications link-”currently under development by NASA for Gbps communication with spacecraft-”requires the use of superconducting nanowire single photon detectors (SNSPD) operating at 1 K physical temperature to achieve sufficient earth terminal sensitivity. While much research has been focused on novel device technologies to enable new and more sensitive scientific instrumentation, limited work has focused on the use of semiconductor circuits to optimize the performance of these systems. In this talk, we will describe our research efforts in ultra-sensitive cryogenically cooled SiGe BiCMOS electronics for scalable scientific instruments. The talk will begin with a review of the physics and performance of SiGe HBTs at deep cryogenic temperatures (e.g., 4 K) and a discussion of challenges encountered by designers targeting this unconventional temperature range. We will then present the design, characterization, and system impact of novel circuits for a variety of applications ranging from THz focal plane arrays for radio astronomy to detector systems for quantum optics.
Biography: Joseph Bardin received the BS, MS, and PhD degrees in Electrical Engineering from UCSB, UCLA, and Caltech in 2003, 2005, and 2009, respectively. From 2003-2005, he was with the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. In the Spring of 2011, he joined the department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Massachusetts Amherst as an Assistant Professor. His research group explores a broad range of topics in the field of high-frequency circuit design ranging from device modeling to the implementation of sophisticated integrated circuits. He is the recipient of a 2011 DARPA Young Faculty Award, a 2014 NSF CAREER Award, and a 2015 ONR YIP Award.
Host: Hosted by Prof. Hossein Hashemi, Prof. Mike Chen, and Prof. Mahta Moghaddam. Organized and hosted by SungWon Chung.
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 132
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Elise Herrera-Green
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. -
High-resolution Imaging of Myocardial Blood Flow: Enabling Techniques Using First-Pass MRI and Potential Clinical Applications
Thu, Sep 10, 2015 @ 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Dr. Behzad Sharif, Cedars-Sinai Medical Center
Talk Title: High-resolution Imaging of Myocardial Blood Flow
Series: Medical Imaging Seminar Series
Abstract: This talk will cover recent technical advances in MRI methods for assessing blood flow to the heart muscle. I will discuss non-Cartesian data sampling strategies and pulse sequences that mitigate image artifacts and improve the reliability of blood flow measurements across different myocardial layers. I will also discuss image reconstruction techniques that use time-varying sparsity constraints (adaptive compressed sensing). Finally, I will discuss recent translational/clinical studies using these methods.
Biography: Behzad Sharif is an Assistant Professor at the Biomedical Imaging Research Institute, Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, Los Angeles. He obtained his undergraduate degree in Electrical Engineering from Sharif University of Technology in Tehran, Iran, and MS and PhD degrees in Electrical Engineering from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, under Yoram Bresler. His current research focuses on the development of cardiovascular MRI methods that enable quantification of dynamics in the cardiovascular system, with the goal of addressing unresolved challenges in clinical cardiology. He received the 2013 Early Career Award from the Society for Cardiovascular Magnetic Resonance, a national Scientist Development Grant from the American Heart Association, and a K99/R00 Pathway to Independence Award from the National Institutes of Health.
Host: Professor Krishna Nayak
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 132
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Talyia White
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, Sep 16, 2015 @ 02:00 PM - 03:00 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Mahdi Soltanolkotabi, Assistant Professor, USC
Talk Title: Structured signal recovery without the shackles of convexity
Series: CommNetS
Abstract: Many problems in science and engineering ask for solutions to underdetermined systems of linear equations. The last decade has witnessed a flurry of activity in understanding when and how it is possible to solve such problems using convex programming. Structured signal recovery via convex methods has arguably revolutionized signal acquisition, enabling signals to be measured with remarkable fidelity using a small number of measurements. In this talk I will argue that the over insistence on convex methods has stymied progress in this field. I will review my past and ongoing research efforts to "unshackle" structured signal recovery from the confines of convexity opening the door for new applications. This is based on joint work with collaborators who shall be properly introduced during the talk.
Biography: Dr. Soltanolkotabi obtained his B.S. in electrical engineering at Sharif University of Technology, Tehran, Iran in 2009. He completed his M.S. and Ph.D. in electrical engineering at Stanford University in 2011 and 2014, respectively, under the supervision of Emmanuel Candes. He was a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of California, Berkeley from August 2014 - August 2015. He joined the EE Department at USC in 2015 as an assistant professor.
Host: Dr. Ashutosh Nayyar
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. -
Munushian Seminar
Fri, Sep 18, 2015 @ 02:00 PM - 03:30 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Dan M. Goebel, Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology
Talk Title: The Asteroid Retrieval Robotic Mission using High Power Electric Propulsion
Abstract: Recent splashes in the media about asteroid mining by two new companies backed by celebrities is based on a real idea by John Brophy of JPL: retrieve all or part of an asteroid and bring it close enough to Earth using advanced, high power electric propulsion to easily send astronauts out to mine it. The same mission may also investigate deflecting an asteroid in anticipation that an ARMAGEDDON-like killer asteroid is found headed toward Earth. A recent study at the Keck Institute at Caltech backed by further work by NASA has investigated robotically capturing and returning a near-earth asteroid (NEA) to various Earth and lunar orbits for study by astronauts and potentially mining by commercial ventures. Moving an asteroid up to several meters in diameter weighing nearly 500,000 kg is a daunting task, but not impossible. Studies show that recent breakthroughs in high power electric thrusters at JPL and the possibility of large area, high voltage solar arrays directly driving these thrusters makes the concept of rearranging the solar system feasible. The ideas behind asteroid retrieval and mining, novel direct drive electric thrusters, and capturing and studying NEA by astronauts in the vicinity of the moon will be explored and described.
Biography: Dan M. Goebel received a B.S. in physics, an M.S. in electrical engineering, and a Ph.D. in applied plasma physics from the University of California, Los Angeles, in 1977, 1978 and 1981 respectively. He is a Senior Research Scientist at Jet Propulsion Laboratory, an Adj. Prof. of Electrical Engineering at USC and an Adj. Prof. of Aerospace Engineering at UCLA. At JPL he is responsible for the development of high efficiency ion and Hall thrusters and advanced components such as cathodes and grids. Previously he was a Research Scientist at HRL Laboratories in Malibu, CA and Principal Scientist at Hughes/Boeing EDD in Torrance, CA where he was the supervisor of the Advanced Technology Group for microwave tube development and the lead scientist of the XIPS ion thruster program for commercial satellite station keeping. Dr. Goebel is a membe3r of the National Academy of Engineering, a Fellow of the AIAA, Fellow of the IEEE, Fellow of the American Physical Society (APS). He is the author of over 125 technical journal papers, 150 conference papers, one book entitled Fundamentals of Electric Propulsion: Ion and Hall Thrusters published in 2008, and holds 43 patents.
Host: EE-Electrophysics
More Info: http://ee.usc.edu/news/munushian
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 132
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Marilyn Poplawski
Event Link: http://ee.usc.edu/news/munushian
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. -
Behavioral Signal Processing
Wed, Sep 23, 2015 @ 12:30 PM - 01:30 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Dr. Matthew P. Black, Research Computer Scientist, ISI-USC
Talk Title: Behavioral Signal Processing
Abstract: Understanding human behavior is a central goal of many fields in human-centered science and engineering. This includes not only understanding how people move, communicate, and interact, but also understanding how people judge human behavior. Human judgments on behavior occur everywhere (e.g., everyday life, educational settings, human-centered research, clinical/medical settings) and are an important part of interpersonal interactions and many assessment and intervention designs. While people have evolved to be adept at processing behavioral information, there are some basic challenges. Human descriptions on behaviors are oftentimes qualitative, and there is natural variability between people's judgments due to the subjective nature of the judgment process. These challenges present many exciting research opportunities for high-impact signal processing work that supports and enhances human decision-making with machine decision-making. Automatic engineering methods may be better suited at quantifying aspects of human behavior (e.g., a speaker's pitch) and could provide an invaluable ancillary in some cases and enable novel insights in others.
In this talk, I will discuss the emerging field of Behavioral Signal Processing (BSP), which entails the development of computational methods that model abstract human behaviors in real-life scenarios. Specifically, I will describe how we automatically quantified and predicted human subjective judgments on human behavior from speech signals in the context of three societally-significant domain applications explored in my Ph.D. dissertation: education (children's literacy assessment), family studies (couples therapy research), and health (autism diagnosis). I will describe the unique technical challenges in BSP (e.g., multiple sources of variability, including heterogeneity of the human behavior and subjectivity in human perception) and highlight the technological contributions of this work. Finally, I will end the talk with ongoing and intended future work and discuss how these research efforts can make an impact by being employed in real-life applications.
Biography: Matthew P. Black received his B.S. in Electrical Engineering (EE) with highest distinction and thesis honors from The Pennsylvania State University in 2005, with minors in Mathematics and Physics. While a member of the Signal Analysis and Interpretation Laboratory, directed by Prof. Shrikanth Narayanan, he received his M.S. (2007) and Ph.D. (2012) in EE from the University of Southern California (USC). Matthew is currently a research computer scientist at the Information Sciences Institute (ISI). From 2012-2014, he worked as a freelance technical consultant in speech and language processing and as an actuary at Farmers Insurance Group, Los Angeles, CA. In the summer of 2007, Matthew was a graduate research intern at the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center in the Human Language Technologies Dept., Yorktown, NY.
Matthew's research interests are in behavioral signal processing (BSP) and informatics, human-centered engineering, speech and language processing, automatic speech recognition and assessment, computational paralinguistics, emotion recognition, affective computing, multi-person interaction modeling, human-computer interaction, pattern recognition, machine learning, and societally-significant applications of technology. He is a member of IEEE and ISCA and a member of the honors societies: Phi Kappa Phi, Tau Beta Pi, and Eta Kappa Nu. Matthew was an EE Ming Hsieh Institute Ph.D. Scholar at USC (2011-2012) and was awarded the Alfred E. Mann Innovation in Engineering Doctoral Fellowship (2010-2012), the Simon Ramo Fellowship (2009-2010), and the Dean's Fellowship (2005-2009) at USC. He won the Best Student Paper Award for the Ming Hsieh Dept. of EE at USC (2010-2011), the ISCA Interspeech Best Paper Award (2010), and was a multi-year winning team member of the ISCA Interspeech Computational Paralinguistics Challenge Award (2011, 2014, 2015). Matthew has authored or co-authored 40 refereed journal, conference, and workshop publications.
Host: Professor Sandeep Gupta, sandeep@usc.edu
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 248
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Mayumi Thrasher
This event is open to all eligible individuals. USC Viterbi operates all of its activities consistent with the University's Notice of Non-Discrimination. Eligibility is not determined based on race, sex, ethnicity, sexual orientation, or any other prohibited factor. -
Communications, Networks & Systems (CommNetS) Seminar
Wed, Sep 23, 2015 @ 02:00 PM - 03:00 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Majid Zamani, Technische Universität München
Talk Title: When Lyapunov meets Church, automated synthesis of complex systems emerges
Series: CommNetS
Abstract: Software plays a crucial role in many everyday applications. Modern vehicles and airplanes, for instance, use interacting software and hardware components to control steering, fuel injection, and airbag deployment. These applications are examples of cyber-physical systems (CPS), where software components interact tightly with physical systems. Recent advances in device manufacturing, computation, storage, and networking have made tremendous advances in hardware and systems platforms for CPS. However, the development of core software controllers that run on these systems is still ad hoc and error-prone. Many CPS applications are safety-critical, and much of the engineering costs today are consumed with ensuring that software works correctly. In this talk, I will proposes a transformative design process, in which the controller code is automatically synthesized from higher-level correctness requirements. Requirements for modern CPS applications go beyond conventional requirements in control theory (stability, synchronization, and tracking) and beyond traditional protocol design in computer science. Accordingly, I will propose unified methodologies for automatic controller synthesis by combining techniques from discrete systems theory from computer science with continuous dynamical systems from control theory. The proposed automated synthesis of correct-by-construction controllers holds the potential to develop complex yet reliable CPS applications while considerably reducing verification and validation costs.
Biography: Majid Zamani is an assistant professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Technische Universität München where he leads the Hybrid Control Systems Group. He received a Ph.D. degree in Electrical Engineering and an MA degree in Mathematics both from University of California, Los Angeles in 2012, an M.Sc. degree in Electrical Engineering from Sharif University of Technology in 2007, and a B.Sc. degree in Electrical Engineering from Isfahan University of Technology in 2005. From September 2012 to December 2013, he was a postdoctoral researcher in the Delft Centre for Systems and Control at Delft University of Technology. Between December 2013 and May 2014, he was an assistant professor at Delft University of Technology.
Host: Prof. Ashutosh Nayyar
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. -
Integrated Systems Seminar Series
Fri, Sep 25, 2015 @ 02:00 PM - 03:30 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Prof. John A. McNeill, Worcester Polytechnic Institute
Talk Title: Fundamental Limits on Noise Performance of VCO-Based ADCs
Series: Integrated Systems Seminar
Abstract: Low-cost energy-efficient analog-to-digital converters (ADCs) are needed in many rapidly growing mixed-signal application areas such as wireless communication, autonomously powered sensing and monitoring nodes, and implanted biomedical devices for assistive technology. In systems constrained by battery power or scavenged energy limits, ADC energy efficiency as expressed by the fJ/step figure-of-merit is a critical design driver. Scaling of CMOS to nanometer dimensions has enabled dramatic improvement in digital power efficiency; however, most traditionally dominant ADC architectures are not well suited to the lower supply voltage environment. The improvement in time resolution enabled by increased digital speeds naturally drives design toward time-domain ADC architectures such as voltage-controlled-oscillator (VCO) based ADCs. Despite much recent work on techniques to improve SNR performance, the overhead of additional circuitry to mitigate VCO nonlinearity imposes a power penalty that has until now kept efficiency performance far above the minimum capability of the VCO-based approach. This talk will begin with a brief overview of the VCO-based approach and previous techniques to improve linearity in VCO-based ADCs. Next, the talk covers application of the "split ADC" architecture to enable lookup-table (LUT) based digital background calibration for a family of reconfigurable VCO-based ADCs in 28nm CMOS, targeting sample rates from 1 to 300 MSps and resolutions of 8 to 14 bits. Finally, work on fundamental sources of VCO jitter will be applied to determine the ultimate limit on performance for techniques such as VCO-based ADCs which perform the ADC function in the time domain.
Biography: John McNeill received his bachelor's degree from Dartmouth College in 1983, M.S. from the University of Rochester in 1991, and Ph.D. from Boston University in 1994. From 1983 to 1990 he worked in industry in the design of high speed, high resolution analog-to-digital converters and low noise interface electronics used in wide dynamic range imaging systems. In 1994, he joined Worcester Polytechnic Institute, in Worcester, Massachusetts, where he now is a Professor and Associate Head in the Electrical and Computer Engineering department. In 1999 he received WPI's Award for Outstanding Teaching. In 2006, with co-authors Michael Coln and Brian Larrivee of Analog Devices, he received the Lewis Winner award for Best Paper at the 2005 ISSCC. His research interests are in the areas of low-jitter VCO design and self-calibrating analog-to-digital converters.
Host: Hosted by Prof. Hossein Hashemi, Prof. Mike Chen, and Prof. Mahta Moghaddam. Organized and hosted by SungWon Chung.
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 132
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Elise Herrera-Green
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.
