Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Events for October
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EE 598 Cyber-Physical Systems Seminar Series
Mon, Oct 03, 2016 @ 02:00 PM - 03:00 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Laith Shalalfeh, PhD Candidate, University of Southern California
Talk Title: Early-Warning Signals to Power System Blackouts
Abstract: The rapid deployment of Phasor Measurement Units (PMUs) can keep the smart grid in a secure and reliable state. The large amount of data collected from the power grid by PMUs requires new algorithms to detect abnormal and potentially catastrophic events. In this presentation, we introduce a novel method to assess the distance to blackout or other instability of the smart grid. Based on the existence of long-range correlation in the PMU data, we exhibit an increase in the frequency Hurst exponent before the blackout. The increase in the Hurst exponent is quantified by Kendall rank correlation coefficient, which is known as Kendall's tau. High Kendall's tau of the frequency Hurst exponent is proposed as an early-warning signal for power system blackout.
Biography: Laith Shalalfeh is a PhD candidate in Electrical Engineering department at the University of Southern California. He received a B.S. degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Jordan in 2009, and an M.S. degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Southern California in 2012. His research interests include electric vehicles, load modeling, voltage collapse, smart grid, and phasor measurement units.
Host: Paul Bogdan
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 248
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Estela Lopez
This event is open to all eligible individuals. USC Viterbi operates all of its activities consistent with the University's Notice of Non-Discrimination. Eligibility is not determined based on race, sex, ethnicity, sexual orientation, or any other prohibited factor. -
EE 598 Computer Engineering Seminar
Thu, Oct 06, 2016 @ 04:00 PM - 05:00 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Vivek Sarkar, Professor, Rice University
Talk Title: Software Challenges for Extreme Scale Systems, or how to play the End-Game for Moore's Law
Abstract: It is widely recognized that a major disruption is under way in computer hardware as processors strive to extend the end-game of Moore's Law by an increased reliance on parallelism and heterogeneity, leading to systems with thousands/millions/billions of processor cores at the node/rack/data-center levels. Unlike previous generations of hardware evolution, these "extreme scale" systems will have a profound impact on future software.
In this talk, we summarize experiences gained in the Habanero Extreme Scale Software Research Laboratory at Rice University in addressing the software challenges for extreme scale systems. Our overall approach is based on introducing a set of unified primitives for structured parallelism, which can be used to enable new advances in programming models, compilers, and runtime systems for future hardware. Some of these primitives have already influenced industry standards for parallelism including the doacross construct in OpenMP 4.5, the task blocks library for C++, and Java's Phaser library, as well as the open source Open Community Runtime (OCR) system project.
Biography: Vivek Sarkar is Professor and Chair of Computer Science at Rice University. He currently leads the Habanero Extreme Scale Software Research Laboratory at Rice University, and is PI of the DARPA-funded Pliny project on "big code" analytics. Prior to joining Rice in July 2007, Vivek was Senior Manager of Programming Technologies at IBM Research. His research projects at IBM included the X10 programming language, the Jikes Research Virtual Machine for the Java language, the ASTI optimizer used in IBM's XL Fortran product compilers, and the PTRAN automatic parallelization system. Vivek became a member of the IBM Academy of Technology in 1995, the E.D. Butcher Chair in Engineering at Rice University in 2007, and was inducted as an ACM
Fellow in 2008. Vivek has been serving as a member of the US Department of Energy's Advanced Scientific Computing Advisory Committee (ASCAC) since 2009, and on CRA's Board of Directors since 2015.
Host: Xuehai Qian
Location: OHE 100D
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Estela Lopez
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. -
Techniques for Analysis of Folding Development in the Cerebral Cortex
Fri, Oct 07, 2016 @ 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Rosita Shishegar, University of Melbourne
Talk Title: Techniques for Analysis of Folding Development in the Cerebral Cortex
Series: Medical Imaging Seminar Series
Abstract: Gyrification describes the series of events through which the immature cortex develops from a smooth surface to a folded sheet. While there is considerable speculation about the biological mechanisms that underpin the formation of gyri and sulci, little known about the events that directly lead to folding. In this talk, Rosita Shishegar will introduce the open problems in understanding cortical gyrification and provide an overview of a research program aimed at expanding knowledge in this area through the longitudinal study of brain development in the fetal sheep. In particular, she will focus on tools for morphometric analysis of the structural and diffusion-weighted MRI data, and present a new gyrification index derived from Laplace Beltrami eigenfunction level sets that combines the strengths of surface-based and curvature-based gyrification metrics.
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - B18
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. -
Ming Hsieh Institute Seminar Series on Integrated Systems
Fri, Oct 07, 2016 @ 02:00 PM - 04:00 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Prof. Sebastian Hoyos, Texas A&M University
Talk Title: Equalization Architectures for High Speed ADC-Based Serial I/O Receivers
Host: Prof. Hossein Hashemi, Prof. Mike Chen, and Prof. Mahta Moghaddam
More Information: MHI Seminar Series IS - Sebastian_Hoyos_Flyer.pdf
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 132
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Jenny Lin
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. -
Ming Hsieh Institute CommNetS seminar
Fri, Oct 07, 2016 @ 02:00 PM - 03:00 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Mauro Da Lio, University of Trento
Talk Title: From vehicle dynamics to human-robot interactions
Series: CommNetS
Abstract: This seminar will provide a panorama of the main ideas of my main research line. I will start with the original problem of assessing the maneuverability of unstable vehicles - such as motorcycles - which was solved by imagining that these vehicles were driven "optimally". I will then introduce the (not surprising) discovery that minimum time optimal control of motorcycles matches the way trained race drivers actually drive. I will then shift to the problem of modeling which optimality criterion holds for ordinary drivers, introducing some theories about optimality of human control (in particular minimum jerk).
I will show the use of Optimal Control to model ideal ordinary drivers and its application to produce "reference maneuvers" used as gold standard in Advanced Driver Assistance Systems, showing, in particular, the application of these ideas in the PReVENT project. I will then touch the problem of modelling human driver behavior when multiple choices are possible, reviewing the Simulation Hypothesis of Cognition and its implication for the inference of intentions of drivers (a process that in natural cognition is called mirroring - from mirror neuron theory - and which can also be considered as a "mother nature" version of model-based state estimation). I will show, in particular, the application of this mechanism in the EU InteractIVe project. I will review the notions of subsumption and layered control architecture and, in particular, the role of action selection, and finally introduce the notion of artificial (co)driver agents showing the current status of such an agent for the EU AdaptIVe project. In the conclusions I will introduce the Dreamn4Cars project and the related idea of using dream-like mechanisms to train the sensory-motor architecture of an artificial driver for rare situations developed as variations of real world (near miss) events.
Biography: I am professor of mechanical systems with the University of Trento, Italy. My initial research activity was focused on modeling and simulation of mechanical multibody systems, and on methods for generating the equations of motions symbolically. In particular, I developed symbolic models for vehicle and spacecraft dynamics and - exploiting the availability of symbolic equations - I worked on model-based control, and in particular Optimal Control. This was initially used to study the maneuverability and handling of motorcycles (which are unstable vehicles that cannot be studied otherwise in open loop) and later extended to the modeling of "optimal" drivers. More recently my focus shifted to the modeling of human sensory-motor control, in particular drivers and motor impaired people. In this framework, optimal control motor primitives are part of layered control architectures that can reproduce (to some extent) complex cognition and action-selection processes of humans. According to recent theories this in turn enables several possibilities for human-robot interactions.
Prior of academic carrier I worked for an off-shore oil research company in underwater robotics (an EU EUREKA project). I have been involved in several EU framework programme 6 and 7 projects (PReVENT, SAFERIDER, interactIVe, VERITAS, adaptIVe, No-Tremor) in the domains of Intelligent Vehicles and Virtual Physiological Humans. I am currently the coordinator of the EU Horizon 2020 Dreams4Cars Research and Innovation Action: a 4.3M Euro collaborative project in the Robotics domain which aims at increasing the cognition abilities of artificial driving agents by means of an offline simulation mechanism broadly inspired to the dream states.
Host: Prof. Petros Ioannou
More Info: http://ee.usc.edu/~ashutosn/CommNetS2016/dokuwiki/doku.php?id=start
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 248
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Annie Yu
Event Link: http://ee.usc.edu/~ashutosn/CommNetS2016/dokuwiki/doku.php?id=start
This event is open to all eligible individuals. USC Viterbi operates all of its activities consistent with the University's Notice of Non-Discrimination. Eligibility is not determined based on race, sex, ethnicity, sexual orientation, or any other prohibited factor. -
EE 598 Cyber-Physical Systems Seminar Series
Mon, Oct 10, 2016 @ 02:00 PM - 03:00 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Ajay Jayant Joshi, Associate Professor, Boston University
Talk Title: Designing Energy-efficient and Secure Accelerators for Machine Learning Applications
Abstract: Today's mobile applications like activity tracking, photo/document sorting, fingerprint matching, search suggestions, etc. are increasingly data driven and commonly use Machine Learning (ML) algorithms. Executing these ML algorithms locally on the mobile system is sometimes preferable/necessary, but this local execution can be very energy intensive. At the same time, keeping these ML algorithm secure is becoming increasingly critical for application vendors as the use of the right ML algorithm can provide significant competitive (and in turn financial) advantage in the market. Hence, there is a need to execute these ML algorithms in an energy-efficient and secure manner. This talk focuses on the design of energy-efficient and secure hardware accelerators for ML-based applications. In the first half of my talk I'll present an adaptive classifier design that leverages the wide variability in data complexity to enable energy-efficient data classification operations. This adaptive classifier takes advantage of varying classification 'hardness' across data to dynamically allocate an appropriate classifier and improve energy efficiency. In the second half of my talk, I'll present a backside imaging approach that can be used to detect any insertion of Hardware Trojans during the fabrication phase. In particular, we engineer the fill cells in a standard cell library to be highly reflective at near-IR wavelengths so that they can be readily observed in an optical image taken through the backside of the chip. The pattern produced by their locations produces an easily measured watermark of the circuit layout. Any replacement, modification or re-arrangement of the fill cells to add a Hardware Trojan can therefore be detected through rapid post-fabrication backside imaging.
Biography: Ajay Joshi received his Ph.D. degree from the ECE Department at Georgia Tech in 2006. He then worked as a postdoctoral researcher in the EECS Department at MIT. In 2009, he joined the ECE department at Boston University, where he is currently an Associate Professor. His research interests span across various aspects of VLSI design including circuits and architectures for communication and computation. He received the NSF CAREER Award in 2012 and Boston University ECE Department's Award for Excellence in Teaching in 2014.
Host: Paul Bogdan
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 248
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Estela Lopez
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. -
Learning to Live with Errors: The Challenges and Solutions for Memory Reliability in the Sub-20nm Regime
Wed, Oct 12, 2016 @ 10:00 AM - 11:30 AM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Prashant J. Nair, Ph.D. Candidate, Georgia Institute of Technology
Talk Title: Learning to Live with Errors: The Challenges and Solutions for Memory Reliability in the Sub-20nm Regime
Abstract: Technology scaling, the prime driver for high-capacity memory systems, continues to be critical for current applications and acts as a key enabler for future applications. Unfortunately, scaling DRAM below sub-20nm is already becoming a challenge due to small feature sizes and flaky cells. Designers are also investigating alternative technologies such as die-stacking and Non-Volatile Memories (NVM), which makes the memory system susceptible to new failure modes (such as TSV failures). At these high error rates and failure modes, memory reliability challenges pose a serious threat to scaling. Furthermore, the cost of mitigating these failures with traditional solutions becomes impractically high. The goal of my thesis is to investigate architectural techniques to enable reliable and scalable memory systems at negligible overheads. In this talk, I will discuss three low-cost techniques to mitigate memory failures.
First, I will advocate a cross-layer approach to tolerating memory failures, whereby the scaling faults are exposed to the architecture level and a simple error-correction code is used to tolerate scaling failures. Such a scheme can tolerate error rates as high as 100 parts per million with a negligible storage overhead. Second, I will discuss the challenges of TSV-failures for die-stacked memory systems and present techniques that can mitigate TSV and other large failures at runtime using a RAID-based technique. Finally, I will discuss a scheme called XED that can obtain Chipkill-level reliability by using 2x fewer chips for memory systems with On-Die ECC. XED mitigates the performance and power overheads of Chipkill without requiring any changes to the memory interface and transparently exposing the error detection information from each chip to the memory controller. Overall, this talk aims to showcase techniques that will enable dense, efficient and reliable memories that are robust to the pitfalls of technology scaling and die-stacking.
Biography: Prashant J. Nair is a Ph.D. candidate in Georgia Institute of Technology where he is advised by Professor Moinuddin Qureshi. He received his MS (2011-2013) from Georgia Institute of Technology and his BE in Electronics Engineering (2005-2009) from University of Mumbai. His research interests include reliability, performance, power and refresh optimizations for current and upcoming memory systems. In these areas, he has authored and co-authored 9 papers in top-tier venues such as ISCA, MICRO, HPCA, ASPLOS and DSN. Prashant organized the "Memory Reliability Forum" (co-located with HPCA 2016) to highlight the importance of memory reliability to the wider architecture community. He served as the Submission's Co-chair of MICRO 2015 and in the ERC of ISCA 2016. During his Ph.D., he interned at several leading industrial labs including AMD, Samsung, Intel and IBM.
Host: Murali Annavaram
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 248
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Estela Lopez
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. -
MHI CommNetS Seminar
Wed, Oct 12, 2016 @ 02:00 PM - 03:00 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Dr. Athina Petropulu, Rutgers University
Talk Title: Optimal Co-Design for Co-existence of MIMO Radars and MIMO Communication Systems
Series: CommNetS
Abstract: Spectrum congestion in commercial wireless communications is a growing problem as high-data-rate applications become prevalent. In an effort to relieve the problem, US federal agencies intend to make available spectrum in the 3.5 GHz band, which was primarily used by federal radar systems for surveillance and air defense, to be shared by both radar and communication applications. Even before the new spectrum is released, high UHF radars overlap with GSM communication systems, and S-band radars partially overlap with Long Term Evolution (LTE) and WiMax systems. When communication and radar systems overlap in the frequency domain, they exert interference to each other. Spectrum sharing is a new line of work that targets at enabling radar and communication systems to share the spectrum efficiently by minimizing interference effects. The current literature on spectrum sharing includes approaches which either use large physical separation between radar and communication systems, or optimally schedule dynamic access to the spectrum by using OFDM signals, or allow radar and communication system to co-exist in time and frequency via use of multiple antennas at both the radar and communication systems. The latter approach greatly improves spectral efficiency as compared to the other approaches. This talk presents our recent work on the latter approach. In particular, we discuss optimal co-design of MIMO radars and MIMO communication system signaling schemes, so that the effective interference power to the radar receiver is minimized, while a desirable level of communication rate and transmit power are maintained.
Biography: Athina Petropulu received her undergraduate degree from the National Technical University of Athens, Greece, and the M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees from Northeastern University, Boston MA, all in Electrical and Computer Engineering. Since 2010, she is Professor of the Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) Department at Rutgers, having served as chair of the department during 2010-2016. Before that she was faculty at Drexel University. Dr. Petropulu's research interests span the area of statistical signal processing, wireless communications, signal processing in networking, physical layer security, and radar signal processing. Her research has been funded by various government industry sponsors including the National Science Foundation, the Office of Naval research, the US Army, the National Institute of Health, the Whitaker Foundation, Lockheed Martin and Raytheon.
Dr. Petropulu is Fellow of IEEE and recipient of the 1995 Presidential Faculty Fellow Award given by NSF and the White House. She has served as Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing (2009-2011), IEEE Signal Processing Society Vice President-Conferences (2006-2008), and member-at-large of the IEEE Signal Processing Board of Governors. She was the General Chair of the 2005 International Conference on Acoustics Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP-05), Philadelphia PA. In 2005 she received the IEEE Signal Processing Magazine Best Paper Award, and in 2012 the IEEE Signal Processing Society Meritorious Service Award for "exemplary service in technical leadership capacities". She was selected as IEEE Distinguished Lecturer for the Signal Processing Society for 2017-2018.
More info on her work can be found at www.ece.rutgers.edu/~cspl
Host: Dr. Ashutosh Nayyar
More Info: http://ee.usc.edu/~ashutosn/CommNetS2016/dokuwiki/doku.php?id=start
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 248
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Annie Yu
Event Link: http://ee.usc.edu/~ashutosn/CommNetS2016/dokuwiki/doku.php?id=start
This event is open to all eligible individuals. USC Viterbi operates all of its activities consistent with the University's Notice of Non-Discrimination. Eligibility is not determined based on race, sex, ethnicity, sexual orientation, or any other prohibited factor. -
EE 598 Computer Engineering Seminar
Thu, Oct 13, 2016 @ 04:00 AM - 05:00 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Josep Torrellas, Professor, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
Talk Title: Toward Extreme-Scale Manycore Architectures
Abstract: As transistor sizes continue to scale, we are about to witness stunning levels of chip integration, with 1,000 (simple) core on a single die, and increasing levels of die stacking. Transistors may not be much faster, but there will be many more of them. In these architectures, energy and power will be the main constraint, efficient communication and synchronization a major challenge, and programmability an unknown.
In this context, this talk presents some of the technologies that we will need to deploy to exploit these architectures. Cores need to flexibly operate at a range of voltages, and techniques for efficient energy use such as power gating and voltage speculation need to be widespread. To enable data sharing, we need to rethink synchronization and fence hardware for scalability. Hardware extensions to ease programming will provide a competitive edge. A combination of all of these techniques-and additional disruptive technologies-are needed.
Biography: Josep Torrellas is the Saburo Muroga Professor of Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He leads the Center for Programmable Extreme-Scale Computing, a center focused on architectures for extreme energy and power efficiency. He has been the director of the Intel-Illinois Parallelism Center (I2PC), a center created by Intel to advance parallel computing. He has made contributions to parallel computer architecture in the areas of shared memory multiprocessor organizations, cache hierarchies and coherence protocols, thread-level speculation, and hardware and software reliability. He is a Fellow of IEEE and ACM. He received the 2015 IEEE CS Technical Achievement Award.
Host: Xuehai Qian
Location: Olin Hall of Engineering (OHE) - OHE 100D
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Estela Lopez
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
Thu, Oct 13, 2016 @ 02:00 PM - 03:00 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Dr. Simon Su, US Army Research Laboratory
Talk Title: Scientific Visualization Research at ARL
Abstract: A typical scientific visualization process involves the use of a favorite visualization toolkit to read the simulation data stored on a file system. Once the data is loaded, computational scientists will use the data analysis capabilities provided by the visualization toolkit to analyze the data, in an attempt to understand the output of a simulation. The scientists will then use the visualization toolkit to generate images and movies from the data to further understanding of the data. In most cases, a high performance computing center will have visualization staff members that can help the scientists to create a more elaborate movies for presentations. In an attempt to provide the computational scientists with alternative visualization technologies, the visualization team at ARL has extended ParaView to support 3D immersive and interactive visualization running on the zSpace virtual reality display. Furthermore, for large scale simulation datasets, we have also extended ParaView to include the capability for high-resolution interactive visualization.
Biography: Simon Su is a Computer Scientist at the US Army Research Lab. He received his PhD from the Department of Computer Science, at the University of Houston in 2001. He has 14 years of experience in virtual reality and scientific visualization research and development. He is currently working on using large scale high-resolution and virtual reality technologies to support data visualization to enable scientific discovery and exploration of large scale scientific data. His research interests include interactive information visualization to support data analysis, and applying 3D immersive and interactive technologies to enable research in other interdisciplinary field including education, and journalism.
Host: Prof. Viktor Prasanna
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. -
Ming Hsieh Institute Seminar Series on Integrated Systems
Fri, Oct 14, 2016 @ 02:00 PM - 04:00 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Stacy Ho, Deputy Director, Analog Circuit Design, MediaTek, Inc.
Talk Title: Recent Advances in ADCs for Mobile Applications: 4G to 5G
Host: Prof. Hossein Hashemi, Prof. Mike Chen, and Prof. Mahta Moghaddam
More Information: MHI Seminar Series IS - Stacy_Ho_Flyer.pdf
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 248
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Jenny Lin
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. -
Center for Cyber-Physical Systems and Internet of Things and Ming Hsieh Institute for Electrical Engineering Joint Seminar Series on Cyber-Physical Systems
Mon, Oct 17, 2016 @ 02:00 PM - 03:00 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Yuanzhang Xiao, Northwestern University, Postdoctoral Fellow
Talk Title: Towards Efficient Electricity Markets For Smart Grid
Abstract: Electricity markets, as the major instrument in balancing supply and demand, have been crucial for the stability of current power systems. However, it is increasingly challenging for electricity markets to remain efficient as the power systems are transitioning into "smart grid", which is featured by a large number of distributed (renewable) energy sources. The challenges are faced by both the market designer (i.e., the independent system operator) and the market participants (i.e., energy suppliers). For the market designer, the challenge is to design market mechanisms that induce efficient outcomes without having to monitoring a large number of market participants. For the market participants, the challenge is to maximize their profits under incomplete knowledge about their opponents and uncertainty of their own renewable energy generation. Using tools from game theory, optimization, and reinforcement learning, we will present some of our works towards addressing these challenges.
Biography: Yuanzhang Xiao is a postdoctoral fellow in Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at Northwestern University. He is broadly interested in game theory, optimization, and learning, and their applications in designing cyber-physical systems. His recent focus has been smart grid. He received his PhD in Electrical Engineering from UCLA in 2014, and B.S. and M.S. degrees from Tsinghua University in 2006 and 2009.
Host: Paul Bogdan
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 248
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Estela Lopez
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. -
MHI CommNetS Seminar
Wed, Oct 19, 2016 @ 02:00 PM - 03:00 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Dr. Amir Salimi, N/A
Talk Title: Generalized cut-set bounds and Symmetrical Projections of Entropy region
Series: CommNetS
Abstract: In this talk, we show two combinatorial optimization problems, which arise from network information theory. Many multi-terminal communication networks, content delivery networks, cache networks and distributed storage systems, can be modeled as a broadcast network. An explicit characterization of the capacity region of the general network coding problem is one of the best known open problems in network information theory. A simple set of bounds that are often used in the literature to show that certain rate tuples are infeasible are based on the graph-theoretic notion of cut. The standard cut-set bounds, however, are known to be loose in general when there are multiple messages to be communicated in the network. A new set of explicit network coding bounds, which combine different simple cuts of the network via a variety of set operations (not just the union), are established via their connections to extremal inequalities for submodular functions.
Moreover, it is known that there is a direct relationship between network coding solution and characterization of entropy region. We talk about the symmetric structures in network coding problems and their relation with symmetrical projections of entropy region and introduce new aspects of entropy inequalities. First, inequalities relating average joint entropies rather than entropies over individual subsets are studied. Second, the existence of non-Shannon type inequalities under partial symmetry is studied using the concepts of Shannon and non-Shannon groups.
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. -
EE 598 Computer Engineering Seminar
Thu, Oct 20, 2016 @ 04:00 PM - 05:00 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Subhasish Mitra, Professor, Stanford University
Talk Title: Robust Systems: From Today to the N3XT 1,000X
Abstract: Today's mainstream electronic systems typically assume that transistors and interconnects operate correctly over their useful lifetime. With enormous complexity and significantly increased vulnerability to failures compared to the past, future system designs cannot rely on such assumptions. At the same time, there is explosive growth in our dependency on such systems.
Robust system design is essential to ensure that future systems perform correctly despite rising complexity and increasing disturbances. For coming generations of silicon technologies, several causes of hardware failures, largely benign in the past, are becoming significant at the system-level. Furthermore, emerging nanotechnologies such as carbon nanotubes are inherently highly subject to imperfections. Such Nano-Engineered Computing Systems Technologies (N3XT) are key to building transformative nanosystems since future computing demands far exceed the capabilities of today's electronics.
This talk will address the following major robust system design goals:
• New approaches to thorough test and validation that scale with tremendous growth in complexity.
• Cost-effective tolerance and prediction of failures in hardware during system operation.
• A practical way to build nanosystems that can overcome substantial inherent imperfections in emerging nanotechnologies and deliver three orders of magnitude energy efficiency improvements for future data-intensive applications.
Significant recent progress in robust system design impacts almost every aspect of future systems, from ultra-large-scale networked systems all the way to their nanoscale components.
Biography: Professor Subhasish Mitra directs the Robust Systems Group in the Department of Electrical Engineering and the Department of Computer Science of Stanford University, where he is the Chambers Faculty Scholar of Engineering. Before joining Stanford, he was a Principal Engineer at Intel.
Prof. Mitra's research interests include robust systems, VLSI design, CAD, validation and test, nanosystems, and neurosciences. His X-Compact technique for test compression has been key to cost-effective manufacturing and high-quality testing of a vast majority of electronic systems, including numerous Intel products. X-Compact and its derivatives have been implemented in widely-used commercial Electronic Design Automation tools. He, jointly with his students and collaborators, demonstrated the first carbon nanotube computer, and it was featured on the cover of NATURE. The US NSF presented this work as a Research Highlight to the US Congress, and it also was highlighted as "an important, scientific breakthrough" by the BBC, Economist, EE Times, IEEE Spectrum, MIT Technology Review, National Public Radio, New York Times, Scientific American, Time, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, and numerous others worldwide.
Prof. Mitra's honors include the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers from the White House, the highest US honor for early-career outstanding scientists and engineers, the ACM SIGDA/IEEE CEDA A. Richard Newton Technical Impact Award in Electronic Design Automation, "a test of time honor" for an outstanding technical contribution, the Semiconductor Research Corporation's Technical Excellence Award, and the Intel Achievement Award, Intel's highest corporate honor. He and his students published several award-winning papers at major venues: IEEE/ACM Design Automation Conference, IEEE International Solid-State Circuits Conference, IEEE International Test Conference, IEEE Transactions on CAD, IEEE VLSI Test Symposium, Intel Design and Test Technology Conference, and the Symposium on VLSI Technology. At Stanford, he has been honored several times by graduating seniors "for being important to them during their time at Stanford."
Prof. Mitra has served on numerous conference committees and journal editorial boards. He served on DARPA's Information Science and Technology Board as an invited member. He is a Fellow of the ACM and the IEEE.
Host: Xuehai Qian
Location: OHE 100D
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Estela Lopez
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. -
Ming Hsieh Institute Seminar Series on Integrated Systems
Fri, Oct 21, 2016 @ 02:00 PM - 04:00 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Dr. Brian Ginsburg, RF Design Manager, Texas Instruments
Talk Title: Compact mm-Wave Imaging and Sensing
Host: Prof. Hossein Hashemi, Prof. Mike Chen, and Prof. Mahta Moghaddam
More Information: MHI Seminar Series IS - Brian_Ginsburg_Flyer.pdf
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 132
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Jenny Lin
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. -
Center for Cyber-Physical Systems and Internet of Things and Ming Hsieh Institute for Electrical Engineering Joint Seminar Series on Cyber-Physical Systems
Mon, Oct 24, 2016 @ 02:00 PM - 03:00 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Mihailo Jovanovic, Professor, University of Minnesota
Talk Title: Controller Architectures: Tradeoffs between Performance and Complexity
Abstract: This talk describes the design of controller architectures that achieve a desired tradeoff between performance of cyber-physical systems and controller complexity. Our methodology consists of two steps. First, we design controller architecture by incorporating regularization functions into the optimal control problem and, second, we optimize the controller over the identified architecture. For large-scale networks of dynamical systems, the desired structural property is captured by limited information exchange between physical and cyber layers and the regularization term penalizes the number of communication links. In the first step, the controller architecture is designed using a customized proximal augmented Lagrangian algorithm. This method exploits separability of the sparsity-promoting regularization terms and transforms the augmented Lagrangian into a form that is continuously differentiable and can be efficiently minimized using a variety of methods. Although structured optimal control problems are, in general, nonconvex, we identify classes of convex problems that arise in the design of symmetric systems, undirected consensus and synchronization networks, optimal selection of sensors and actuators, and decentralized control of positive systems. Examples are provided to demonstrate the effectiveness of the framework.
Biography: Mihailo Jovanovic (www.umn.edu/~mihailo) received the PhD degree from UC Santa Barbara, in 2004. He is a professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Minnesota and has held visiting positions with Stanford University and the Institute for Mathematics and its Applications. His current research focuses on design of controller architectures, dynamics and control of fluid flows, and fundamental limitations in the control of large networks of dynamical systems. He serves as an Associate Editor of the SIAM Journal on Control and Optimization, Vice Chair of the APS External Affairs Committee, and had served as an Associate Editor of the IEEE Control Systems Society Conference Editorial Board from July 2006 until December 2010. Prof. Jovanovic received a CAREER Award from the National Science Foundation in 2007, the George S. Axelby Outstanding Paper Award from the IEEE Control Systems Society in 2013, and the Distinguished Alumni Award from UC Santa Barbara in 2014.
Host: Paul Bogdan
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 248
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Estela Lopez
This event is open to all eligible individuals. USC Viterbi operates all of its activities consistent with the University's Notice of Non-Discrimination. Eligibility is not determined based on race, sex, ethnicity, sexual orientation, or any other prohibited factor. -
EE-EP Seminar
Tue, Oct 25, 2016 @ 02:30 PM - 04:00 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Prasad Gogineni, University of Kansas
Talk Title: Ultrawideband (UWB) Radars for Remote Sensing of Snow, Soil Moisture and Ice
Abstract: Ultra-wideband (UWB) radars operating over the frequency range from about 100 MHz to 94 GHz and integrated into small Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS) can support scientific and operational research on snow, soil moisture, and ice. Two major impacts of climate change are related to fresh water resources and sea level rise. We need more information on snow water equivalent (SWE) and soil moisture to manage water resources in the future. Soil moisture is a key variable in scientific research and operational applications, including the forecasting of floods and agriculture. Also, soil moisture controls evaporation of land surfaces and is an input variable in predictions of summer rainfall over the continents. UWB radars operating over the frequency range of 150-600 MHz and UWB microwave radars operating over the frequency range of 2-18 GHz integrated into small and medium-scale UASs can provide valuable information on soil moisture and SWE. Also, we need accurate information on the bed topography, basal conditions, and snow accumulation of large ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica to generate accurate estimates of sea level increase over the century. UWB radars can also provide much-needed data for improving ice sheet models used to generate sea level rise projections.
In this talk, I will discuss the need for remote sensing of snow, soil moisture, and ice, as well as present preliminary results from UWB measurements on these targets. I will also discuss advances required to develop medium and small UAS integrated with UWB radars to support scientific and operational applications.
Biography: Dr. Gogineni is the Deane E. Ackers Distinguished Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of Kansas with more than two decades of research and teaching experience in radar remote sensing of the Earth, including polar ice sheets. He has successfully led several multi-disciplinary research projects funded by NASA and NSF. Dr. Gogineni served as the Director of the Radar Systems and Remote Sensing Laboratory at the University of Kansas before serving as Manager of NASA's Polar Research Programs during 1997-1999. He is currently the Director of the Center for Remote Sensing of Ice Sheets, where he continues to manage a center that connects science and engineering in polar research. Dr. Gogineni and his colleagues at CReSIS have successfully demonstrated SAR imaging of the ice-bed interface and generated fine-resolution 3-D topography of an ice-bed covered in over 3 km of ice. The Center has also succeeded in sounding and imaging the ice bed of three important glaciers in Greenland.
He received a Ph.D. in electrical engineering from the University of Kansas, Lawrence, Kansas, in 1984. He has authored or co-authored over 125 archival journal publications and more than 240 technical reports and conference presentations. His research interests include the application of radars to the remote sensing of the polar ice sheets, sea ice, ocean, atmosphere, and land. He developed several radar systems currently being used at the University of Kansas for sounding and imaging of polar ice sheets, and has also participated in field experiments in the Arctic and Antarctica.
Host: Mahta Moghaddam - AWARE
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 132
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. -
Machine Learning Center and Ming Hsieh Institute Series on Mathematical Foundations of Learning from Data and Signals Joint Seminar
Thu, Oct 27, 2016 @ 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Sewoong Oh, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
Talk Title: Fundamental Limits and Efficient Algorithms in Adaptive Crowdsourcing
Series: MHI
Abstract: Adaptive schemes, where tasks are assigned based on the data collected thus far, are widely used in practical crowdsourcing systems to efficiently allocate the budget. However, existing theoretical analyses of crowdsourcing systems suggest that the gain of adaptive task assignments is minimal. To bridge this gap, we propose a new model for representing practical crowdsourcing systems, which strictly generalizes the popular Dawid-Skense model, and characterize the fundamental trade-off between budget and accuracy. We introduce a novel adaptive scheme that matches this fundamental limit. We introduce new techniques to analyze the spectral analyses of non-back-tracking operators, using density evolution techniques from coding theory.
Biography: Sewing Oh is an Assistant Professor of Industrial and Enterprise Systems Engineering at UIUC. He received his PhD from the department of Electrical Engineering at Stanford University. Following his PhD, he worked as a postdoctoral researcher at Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems (LIDS) at MIT. He was co-awarded the Kenneth C. Sevcik outstanding student paper award at the Sigmetrics 2010, the best paper award at the SIGMETRICS 2015, and NSF CAREER award in 2016.
Host: Mahdi Soltanolkotabi
More Information: Oh Seminar Announcement.png
Location: Henry Salvatori Computer Science Center (SAL) - 101
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Gloria Halfacre
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. -
Toward Exascale Resilience: Hardware Mechanisms and Containment Domains
Thu, Oct 27, 2016 @ 04:00 PM - 05:00 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Mattan Erez, University of Texas, Austin
Talk Title: Toward Exascale Resilience: Hardware Mechanisms and Containment Domains
Series: EE 598 Computer Engineering Seminar Series
Abstract: In this talk I will present a scalable and efficient resiliency scheme based on the concept of Containment Domains. Containment domains are programming and system constructs that encapsulate and express application resiliency needs and interact with the system to tune and specialize error detection, state preservation and restoration, and recovery schemes. Containment domains have weak transactional semantics and are nested to take advantage of the machine hierarchy and to enable distributed and hierarchical state preservation, restoration, and recovery as an alternative to non-scalable and inefficient checkpoint-restart (and variants). One of the key motivations behind this work is the idea of proportionality, where the resources devoted to a feature are proportional to the application and scenario needs. Proportionality is critical to continued scaling and performance under the increasing constraints of bandwidth, power, and energy. Essentially, one-size-fits-all and worst-case design approaches are no longer sufficient to building reliable and efficient systems. I will also briefly discuss some of the hardware mechanisms necessary for reliability and resilience and the tradeoffs they offer for proportionality.
Biography: Mattan Erez is an Associate Professor and holder of the Temple Foundation Professor Fellowship (#4) at the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Texas at Austin. His research focuses on improving the performance, efficiency, and scalability of computing systems through advances in hardware architecture, software systems, and programming models. The vision is to increase the cooperation across system layers and develop flexible and adaptive mechanisms for proportional resource usage. Mattan received a B.Sc. in Electrical Engineering and a B.A. in Physics from the Technion, Israel Institute of Technology and his M.S and Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University. He is a recipient of a Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers, an Early Career Research Award from the Department of Energy, and an NSF CAREER Award.
Host: Xuehai Qian, x04459, xuehai.qian@usc.edu
Location: Olin Hall of Engineering (OHE) - 100D
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Gerrielyn Ramos
This event is open to all eligible individuals. USC Viterbi operates all of its activities consistent with the University's Notice of Non-Discrimination. Eligibility is not determined based on race, sex, ethnicity, sexual orientation, or any other prohibited factor. -
EE 598 Computer Engineering Seminar
Fri, Oct 28, 2016 @ 10:00 AM - 11:00 AM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Lin Zhong, Professor, Rice University
Talk Title: The mess at the hardware/software boundary
Abstract: As computing embraces heterogeneity, an increasing fraction of operating system deals with hardware directly, usually with unsafe languages like C and assembly and a primitive programming model based on registers and interrupts. This leads to a mess at the lowest level of software which is error-prone, difficult to maintain and evolve. This talk presents our recent effort in taming this mess with proper designs. We show that with a little bit hardware support, many of the hardware-facing functions can be moved out of device drivers and made generic, leading to much simplified hardware-specific software.
Biography: Lin Zhong is Professor of Electrical & Computer Engineering with Rice University. He received his B.S and M.S. from Tsinghua University and Ph.D. from Princeton University. He has been with Rice University since September 2005. At Rice, he leads the Efficient Computing Group to make computing, communication, and interfacing more efficient and effective. He and his students received the best paper awards from ACM MobileHCI, IEEE PerCom, and ACM MobiSys (3), and ACM ASPLOS. He is a recipient of the NSF CAREER Award, the Duncan Award from Rice University, and the RockStar Award from ACM SIGMOBILE. More information about his research can be found at http://www.recg.org.
Host: Xuehai Qian
Location: Kaprielian Hall (KAP) - 209
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Estela Lopez
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. -
Ming Hsieh Institute Seminar Series on Integrated Systems
Fri, Oct 28, 2016 @ 01:30 PM - 03:30 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Dr. Amin Arbabian, Professor, Stanford University
Talk Title: Microwave-Ultrasound Hybrid Systems in Imaging and Implantable Medical Devices
Host: Prof. Hossein Hashemi, Prof. Mike Chen, and Prof. Mahta Moghaddam
More Information: MHI Seminar Series IS - Amin_Arbabian_Flyer.pdf
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 132
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Jenny Lin
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. -
Virtualization Security: The Good, The Bad and The Ugly
Mon, Oct 31, 2016 @ 10:00 AM - 11:00 AM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Haibo Chen, Shanghai Jiao Tong University
Talk Title: Virtualization Security: The Good, The Bad and The Ugly
Series: EE 598 Computer Engineering Seminar Series
Abstract: The resurgence of virtualization has stimulated its wide adoption in desktop, cloud and mobile environments. With virtualization being a new systems software foundation, virtual machine monitors (or hypervisors) are now treated as the security foundation of the system software stack, due to the promise of being small and providing strict security isolation. In this talk, I will first question whether such a promise still holds in commodity hypervisors by reviewing the historical evolution of virtualization. Based on a negative answer, I will discuss a series of efforts to enhancing the security isolation while minimizing the trusted computing based of the virtualization stack, including leveraging a commodity hypervisor to isolate a group of process, using a nested hypervisor to transparently isolate virtual machines and completely offloading isolation functionalities into on-chip CPU. Finally, I will also describe a set of new security innovation enabled by virtualization, such as live updating, security introspection and fine-grained compartmentalization.
Biography: Haibo Chen is a Professor at the School of Software, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, where he founded and currently leads the Institute of Parallel and Distributed Systems (IPADS) (http://ipads.se.sjtu.edu.cn). Haibo's main research interests are building scalable and dependable systems software, by leveraging cross-layering approaches spanning computer hardware system virtualization and operating systems. He received best paper awards from ICPP, APSys and EuroSys, a bestpaper nominee from HPCA and published intensively on top conferences like SOSP/OSDI/EuroSys/Usenix ATC/ISCA/MICRO/HPCA/FAST/Usenix Security/CCS. He also received the Young Computer Scientist Award from China Computer Federation, the distinguished Ph.D thesis award from China Ministry of Education and National Youth Top-notch Talent Support Program of China, as well as fault research awards/fellowships from NetApp, Google, IBM and MSRA.He is currently the steering committee co-chair of ACM APSys, the general co-chair of SOSP 2017,serves on program committees of ASPLOS 2017, Oakland 2017, EuroSys 2017 and FAST 2017, and is also on the editorial board of ACM Transactions on Storage.
Host: Xuehai Qian, x04459, xuehai.qian@usc.edu
Location: 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.
