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Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Events for September
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Distributed Interference Management and Scheduling in LTE-A Wireless Femto Networks
Thu, Sep 09, 2010 @ 02:00 PM - 03:00 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Ritesh Madan, Qualcomm, NJ
Talk Title: Distributed Interference Management and Scheduling in LTE-A Wireless Femto Networks
Abstract: Femto base stations deployed at homes and offices offer cell-splitting gains and better coverage, and can help improve the performance of mobile applications. However, Femto networks are unplanned; moreover, they may operate in closed subscriber group (CSG) mode where only a few specific mobiles are allowed to connect to a given Femto base station. Such a deployment can lead to high interference; thus distributed interference management techniques become essential. Moreover, since only a few (or just one) mobiles may be connected to a Femto base station, the aggregated load in each cell can vary quickly with time. Thus, the scheduling and resource allocation across cells needs to be at a fast time scale and coordinated. In addition, it is desirable to keep the control overhead and latency for this coordination to be low.
In this talk, we focus on the design of distributed scheduling and interference management algorithms with very low overhead. We describe a framework for distributed scheduling across multiple Femto cells where a limited amount of information is exchanged between interfering links. Specifically, each transmitter has a limited knowledge of the buffer and channel states in its neighborhood. In this framework, we design a scheduling heuristic to achieve rate fairness across cells for best effort applications (e.g., FTP), and at the same time obtain low latency for delay sensitive applications (e.g., voice, real time video). The heuristic is motivated by the maximum weight scheduling algorithm in wireless networks. We discuss the impact of coordination delay on the mechanism and algorithm design.
Biography: Ritesh Madan received a Ph.D. in 2006 and a M.S. in 2003 from Stanford University, and a B.Tech from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Bombay in 2001, all in Electrical Engineering. At Stanford, he was a recipient of the Sequoia Capital Stanford Graduate Fellowship. He is currently at Corporate R&D in Qualcomm, NJ. His research interests include methods for resource allocation in wireless networks, stochastic control, and optimization.
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 539
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. -
Distinguished Speaker Series
Fri, Sep 10, 2010 @ 10:00 AM - 11:00 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Supratik Guha - Director of Physical Sciences, IBM T. J. Watson Research Center
Talk Title: Photovoltaics Research at IBM
Abstract: In this talk I will describe research in three different areas in photovoltaics that are ongoing at IBM Research--concentrator photovoltaics, solar cells from earth abundant materials, and nanowire based solar cells. Ă‚Â Concentrator photovoltaics, which can have the highest power conversion efficiencies at the system level, has suffered from the lack of the benefits of economies of scale, which is rapidly allowing flat panel systems to lower costs. Yet, provided the manufacturing of these systems can be highly automated, CPV stands a very good chance for cost reduction--the challenge here is one of simplicity of construction, weight reduction and optical and thermal system design. Ă‚Â Earth abundant thin films, that can support manufacturing rates of >10-20 GW/yr is an important (and increasingly fashionable) topic of research. Ă‚Â I will describe results that we have in this area with the copper-zinc-tin-sulfide (CZTS) system. Ă‚Â Finally, I will describe some results of our work on silicon nanowire photovoltaics, where the benefits are one of enhanced light trapping and, possibly, the ability to effectively have devices that are small enough so that generated carriers can be collected without relying upon minority carrier diffusion. Ă‚Â However, a big drawback here has been the detrimental role of surfaces and interfaces that has prevented nanowire solar cells (and other nanostructured solar cells) from demonstrating high efficiencies.
Biography: Supratik Guha is the Director of the Physical Sciences Department at IBM Research and in this capacity is responsible for overseeing IBM’s worldwide research strategy in the physical sciences. His technical work, over the past dozen years, has been in the area of new materials for silicon microelectronics where he has been responsible for some of the key material advances that are now part of IBM's common platform high k metal gate technology, developed by IBM with its alliance partners, and representing major changes in the way that a silicon transistor is built.  More recently, his own research work has been on new materials for energy conversion devices.  As a manager, he has established many successful research programs at IBM including ones in silicon nanophotonics, thermal physics, photovoltaics, and nanowire based technologies.  Supratik  is also an adjunct professor of materials science at Columbia University.  Prior to joining IBM in 1995, he worked on semiconductor lasers at the 3M Corporate Research Labs from 1992-95  He received his Ph.D. in materials science from the University of Southern California in 1991, and a B. Tech in Metallurgical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, in 1985.  He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society.
Host: Center for Energy Nanoscience and Technology
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. -
Two Studies: Plasmon-Enhanced Absorption in Silicon Substrate and On the Universal Behavior of Electro-Optical Materials
Fri, Sep 10, 2010 @ 03:00 PM - 04:00 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Uzi Efron , Professor/Ben-Gurion University, Negev, Beer-Sheva, Israel.
Talk Title: Two Studies: Plasmon-Enhanced Absorption in Silicon Substrate and On the Universal Behavior of Electro-Optical Materials
Abstract:
1. Computer simulation studies of absorption enhancement in a silicon substrate by nanoshell-related Localized Surface Plasmon Resonance (LSPR) based on a Finite Difference Time Domain (FDTD) analysis will be presented. The results of these studies show significant enhancement of over 4X in the near band gap spectral region of Si, using 30nm diameter, 2-Dimensional,cylindrical Ag nanoshell structure. The studies also indicate a clear advantage of the cylindrical nanoshell structure over that of a completely filled Ag-nano- cylinders. The enhancement was studied as a function of the metallic shell thickness. The results suggest that the main enhancement mechanism in this case of cylindrical nanoshells embedded in Si substrate, is that of field-enhanced absorption caused by the strongly LSPR-enhanced electric field, extending into the silicon substrate.
2. Electro-optical light modulators are key components for a number of optical systems including displays, optical interconnects, optical processing, optical beam steering and adaptive optics . The performance of these modulators can be characterized by three main physical parameters: The electro-optical coefficient, the RF frequency bandwidth and the optical spectral bandwidth. A recent study [1] has shown that the product of these three parameters, which we term ”Susceptibility-Bandwidth Product” (SBP), is remarkably constant within 1-2 orders of magnitude, across a wide range of different material systems, including Liquid Crystals (LC) , Solid State Electro-Optical Materials and Multiple Quantum Well structures. This, despite the fact that all three parameters vary over many orders of magnitude across this range of materials. The feasibility of the SBP constancy based on material stability considerations has already been proposed several years ago [2]. The main purpose of this study was to perform a detailed study of the SBP in Nematic Liquid Crystal (NLC) materials based on the electro-optics of the electrically controlled birefringence effect. The work includes the derivation of a theoretical expression for the SBP in NLC materials, as well as its comparison to experimental data. The results are found to be in good agreement with the theoretical prediction for this product.
References
1. U. Efron, in Handbook of Opto-Electronics, J.P. Dakin and R.G.W.Brown, Editors, Taylor and Francis, London, 2006, Vol. 2.
2. U. Efron “Spatial Light Modulators and Applications for Optical Information Processing”, in “Real Time Signal Processing for Industrial Applications”, Proc. SPIE, vol.960 (1988).
Biography: Uzi Efron (M’87) received the B.Sc., M.Sc., and Ph.D. degrees from Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv, Israel, in 1967, 1970, and 1976, respectively, all in physics. He was a Principal Scientist at Hughes Research Laboratories, Malibu, CA, where he conducted research on photo-activated and charge-coupled device (CCD)-addressed liquid crystal light valves as well as multiple-quantum-well spatial light modulators and their applications in projection/head-mounted displays, optical data processing, and adaptive optics. He is currently an Associate Professor at the Electro-Optics Engineering Department, Ben-Gurion University, Negev, Beer-Sheva, Israel. He also heads the OPTO-ULSI Laboratory at Holon Academic Institute of Technology, Holon, Israel. He is currently conducting research on liquid crystal devices, plasmonics, CMOS-ultra-large-scale integration (ULSI) technology, and image processing for applications in smart goggle/head-mounted display devices, low-vision aids, face recognition techniques, and beam-steering devices. Dr. Efron is a Fellow of the Optical Society of America.
Host: Prof. B. Keith Jenkins
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. -
Multi-Dimensional EXIT Analysis and Optimization for Multi-User Receivers
Wed, Sep 15, 2010 @ 02:00 PM - 03:00 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Bathiya Senanayake, Australian National University, Australia
Talk Title: Multi-Dimensional EXIT Analysis and Optimization for Multi-User Receivers
Abstract: For the first time we develop a multi-dimensional extrinsic information transfer (EXIT) analysis for a power allocated multi-user detectora s a tool to better understand the convergence behavior of iterative decoding schemes. We derive a K dimensional EXIT chart in order to analyze a system with K power levels. We state a theorem that predicts the convergence point of the system. The presented analysis is used to perform power optimization. We show through simulation our analysis closely matches the simulation results. The multi-dimensional EXIT analysis discussed here provides new insight in to receiver performance analysis and can be used to design near capacity achieving multi-user systems.
Biography: Mr. Bathiya Senanayake was awarded a Bachelor of Engineering/IT degree from the Australian National University in 2006 (with honours 1), and a Masters of ICT from the ANU in 2007. Now he is a PhD student in the Research School of Information Sciences and Engineering, the Australian National University, Australia. His research interests are in the area of iterative receiver design, multiple-access communications, digital signal processing, DSP synthesis in hardware (HDL), with emphasis on CDMA/IDMA systems.
Host: Keith Chugg
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. -
Low Cost – Highly Accurate Timer for Embedded and Networked Systems
Fri, Sep 17, 2010 @ 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Dr. Young Cho, USC-Information Sciences Institute
Talk Title: Low Cost – Highly Accurate Timer for Embedded and Networked Systems
Abstract: Time synchronization is an important service for networked and embedded systems.  High quality timing information allows embedded network nodes to provide accurate time-stamps, fast localization, efficient duty cycling schedules, and other essential functions. In this presentation, I will present a new type of local clock source called Crystal Compensated Crystal based Timer (XCXT) and the novel algorithms that use the timer to (1) obtain highly stable concept of time, (2) retain low-power operation, and (3) automatically calibrate the nodes in a network.  The XCXT has timing stabilities similar to the timers based on temperature compensated crystal oscillators (TCXO) but has a lower implementation cost and requires less power. I will present the initial 8MHz prototype XCXT unit made with Tmote. Using the simplest algorithm, the XCXT achieves an effective frequency stability of ±1ppm and consumes only 1.27mW. On the other hand, commercially available TCXOs with similar stability can cost over 10 times as much and consume over 20mW. I will also describe an enhanced algorithm that improves the XCXT's power consumption up to 50% depending on the target application and environmental conditions. Then, I will describe an algorithm that will allow XCXT equipped network nodes to quickly, automatically, and adaptively calibrate the timer.  This algorithm not only ensures high timing accuracies for all the nodes, it provides resilience to other common problem seen in other types of oscillators, such as crystal aging.  Finally, I will discuss some of the recent work that seeks to apply the concept to CMOS based oscillators.  Successful transition may have significant impact on the way CMOS devices are clocked. Preliminary findings indicate promising results.
Biography: Young Cho is a research scientist at Division 7 of University of Southern California - Information Sciences Institute. Ă‚Â He is also research assistant professor at CS department of USC. Ă‚Â Given his academic and industrial experience in high performance computer architecture and networking, he is currently leading a number several research efforts that surrounding field programmable gate arrays (FPGA) applications and wireless sensor network; especially that of underwater sensing. Ă‚Â He has three patents and over 30 conference and journal publications in computer network security, FPGA based applications, and wireless sensor networks. Prior to joining USC-ISI in September of 2008, he conducted research as a visiting professor at Washington University in St. Louis from 2005-2007 where he led a high performance data clustering project and as a post-doctoral scholar at UCLA where he led a research in high stability timers for wireless sensor network in 2007-2008. Ă‚Â He received his PhD in Electrical Engineering from UCLA, MS in Computer Engineering from UT Austin, and BA in Computer Sciences from UC Berkeley. Ă‚Â Between his BA and MS, he worked as an engineer for a start-up company, Myricom Inc., for three years to design high performance networking products as well as automatic target recognition system funded by Department of Defense.
Host: Dr. Alexander A. Sawchuk
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) -
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. -
CS Colloquium
Tue, Sep 21, 2010 @ 03:30 PM - 05:00 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Prof. Gert Lankriet, UCSD
Talk Title: Multimodal Music Search and Discovery
Abstract: The revolution in production and distribution of music, which has made millions of audio clips instantly available to millions of people, has created the need for novel music search and discovery technologies.
While successful technologies with great societal impact exist for text-based document search (e.g., Yahoo!, Google, etc.), a Google for Music has yet to stand up: there is no easy way to find a mellow Beatles song on a nostalgic night, scary Halloween music on October 31st, or address a sudden desire for romantic jazz with saxophone and deep male vocals without knowing an appropriate artist or song title.
The non-text-based, multimodal character of Internet-wide information about music (audio clips, lyrics, web documents, artist networks, band images, etc.) poses a new and difficult challenge to existing database technology, due to its dependence on unimodal, text-based data structures. Two fundamental research questions are at the core of addressing this challenge: 1) The automated indexing of non-text based music content and 2) the automated integration of the heterogeneous content of multimodal music databases, to retrieve the most relevant information, given a query.
In this talk, I will outline some of my recent research in machine learning, statistics and optimization, inspired and driven by the previous two research questions in the emerging field of computer audition and music information retrieval. This will cover a spectrum from sparse generalized eigenvalue problems to human computation games, and from clustering graphical models to multiple-kernel partial order embeddings.
Biography: Gert Lanckriet received a Master's degree in Electrical Engineering from the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Leuven, Belgium, in 2000 and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from the University of California, Berkeley in 2001 respectively 2005. In 2005, he joined the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of California, San Diego, where he heads the Computer Audition Laboratory. He was awarded the SIAM Optimization Prize in 2008 and is the recipient of a Hellman Fellowship and an IBM Faculty Award. His research focuses on the interplay of convex optimization, machine learning and applied statistics, with applications in computer audition and music information retrieval.
Host: Prof. Fei Sha
Location: Seaver Science Library (SSL) - 150
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. -
10x10: A New Paradigm for Computer Architecture (Meeting the Challenges of the New Technology Scaling Landscape)
Thu, Sep 23, 2010 @ 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Dr. Andrew A. Chien, Adjunct Professor, Dept of Computer Science and Engineering, UC San Diego
Talk Title: 10x10: A New Paradigm for Computer Architecture (Meeting the Challenges of the New Technology Scaling Landscape)
Abstract: Two decades of microprocessor architecture enabled by transistor scaling in density, speed, and energy delivered 1000-fold performance improvement, enabling computing as we know it today – tiny, powerful, inexpensive, and therefore ubiquitous. Recent semiconductor process generations and technology projections suggest future scaling in density, but only decreasing improvements in transistor speed and energy. In this era of energy-constrained performance, the industry has undertaken a shift to rapidly increasing parallelism (multicore). This shift is broad based, including essentially all computers – smart phones, laptops, cloud data centers, and supercomputers.
In the new technology scaling landscape, more narrowly specialized designs (heterogeneity) become more attractive and have attracted much study, but computer architects have lacked a paradigm to deal with it systematically. We believe it is time to move beyond the general purpose architecture paradigm and 90/10 optimization which has served us well for 25 years, and replace it with a new paradigm, “10x10”, which divides workloads into clusters, enabling systematic exploitation of specialization in the architecture, implementation, and software. We believe such 10x10 can enable 10x improvement in energy efficiency and performance compared to conventional approaches. We call this new paradigm “10x10” because it divides the workloads and optimizes for 10 different 10% cases, not a monolithic 90/10. We will outline the critical challenges to this approach and implications for future computing systems.
Biography: Dr. Andrew A. Chien is former Vice President of Research of Intel Corporation. He served as a Vice President of Intel Labs and Intel Research / Future Technologies Research where he led a “bold, edgy” research agenda in disruptive technologies. Chien has launched imaginative new efforts in robotics, wireless power, sensing and perception, nucleic acid sequencing, networking, cloud, and ethnography. Working with external partners, Chien was instrumental in creation of the Universal Parallel Computing Research Centers (UPCRC) focused on parallel software and Open Cirrus Consortium focused on Cloud computing.
For more than 20 years, Chien has been a global leader in research and education. Chien’s previous positions include the Science Applications International Corporation Endowed Chair Professor in the department of computer science and engineering, and created the Center for Networked Systems at the University of California at San Diego. While at UCSD, he also founded Entropia, a widely-known Internet Grid computing startup. From 1990 to 1998, Chien was a professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign with joint appointments at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) where he was a research leader for parallel computing software and hardware, and developed the well-known Fast Messages, HPVM, and Windows NT Supercluster systems.
Dr. Chien is a Fellow of the American Association for Advancement of Science (AAAS), Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), Fellow of Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), and has published over 130 technical papers. Chien currently serves on the Board of Directors for the Computing Research Association (CRA), Advisory Board of the National Science Foundation’s Computing and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) Directorate, and Editorial Board of the Communications of the Association for Computing Machinery (CACM). Chien received his Bachelor's in electrical engineering, Master's and Ph.D. in computer science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Host: Sr Assoc Dean Timothy Pinkston
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) -
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. -
Three Fundamental Measures of Geometry and Their Role in Model Selection and Sparse Inverse Problems
Fri, Sep 24, 2010 @ 02:30 PM - 03:30 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Dr. Waheed Bajwa , Duke University
Talk Title: Three Fundamental Measures of Geometry and Their Role in Model Selection and Sparse Inverse Problems
Abstract: In this talk, I discuss three measures of matrix geometry, namely, worst-case coherence, average coherence, and spectral norm, in the context of model selection and sparse inverse problems. These geometric measures are a better alternative to related measures such as the oft-studied restricted isometry property, since they can be explicitly computed in polynomial time. In this talk, I introduce a simple algorithm, termed one-step thresholding (OST) algorithm, and utilize the introduced geometric measures to provide an in-depth analysis of OST for both model selection and recovery of sparse signals. In particular, I show that OST has the ability to perform near-optimally for a number of generic (random or deterministic) matrices. In addition, I also talk about explicitly designing matrices with small average coherence, which is the key to guaranteeing that algorithms such as OST succeed.
Biography: Waheed U. Bajwa received BE (with Honors) degree in electrical engineering from the National University of Sciences and Technology, Islamabad, Pakistan in 2001, and MS and PhD degrees in electrical engineering from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, WI in 2005 and 2009, respectively. He was a Postdoctoral Research Associate in the Program in Applied and Computational Mathematics at Princeton University, Princeton, NJ from 2009 to 2010. He is currently a Research Scientist in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Duke University, Durham, NC. His research interests include high-dimensional inference and inverse problems, statistical signal processing, wireless communications, and applications in biological sciences, networked systems, and radar & image processing. Dr. Bajwa was affiliated with Communications Enabling Technologies, Islamabad, Pakistan - the research arm of Avaz Networks Inc., Irvine, CA (now Quartics LLC) - from 2000-2003, with the Center for Advanced Research in Engineering, Islamabad, Pakistan during 2003, and with the RF and Photonics Lab of GE Global Research, Niskayuna, NY during the summer of 2006. He received the Best in Academics Gold Medal and President's Gold Medal in Electrical Engineering from the National University of Sciences and Technology (NUST) in 2001, and the Morgridge Distinguished Graduate Fellowship from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2003. He was Junior NUST Student of the Year (2000), Wisconsin Union Poker Series Champion (Spring 2008), and President of the University of Wisconsin-Madison chapter of Golden Key International Honor Society (2009). He currently serves as a Guest Associate Editor for Elsevier Physical Communication Journal and is a member of the IEEE, Pakistan Engineering Council, and Golden Key International Honor Society.
Host: Urbashi Mitra
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.
