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Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Events for October
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Seminar Series: Reinforcement Learning and Markov Chain Computations
Tue, Oct 06, 2009 @ 02:00 PM - 03:00 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Prof. Vivek Borkar, Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR), Mumbai, India This two part series shall cover an introduction to reinforcement learning and stochastic approximations, and its application to Markov Chain computations.Part I (Tuesday, Oct. 6) shall highlight the main strands in the reinforcement learning based approaches to approximate dynamic programming for Markov decision processes. In particular, connections to numerical methods for MDPs and convergence issues will be discussed.Speaker Bio:
Vivek Borkar is a Professor in the School of Technology and Computer Science at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR), Mumbai where he has been for the last decade.
He was formerly Dean of the same school. Prior to TIFR, he was a Professor in the Computer Science and Automation department of the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore. He received his Ph.D. from University of California, Berkeley in EECS in 1979. He is well-known for his work in many areas including stochastic processes, mathematical control, game theory and learning. He is the author of several books including a recent book on Stochastic approximations: A Dynamical Systems Viewpoint.Host: Prof. Rahul Jain, 213-740-2246, rahul.jain@usc.edu. If you would like to meet the speaker during his weeklong visit from October 5-9, please contact the host.Location: Hedco Petroleum and Chemical Engineering Building (HED) - 116
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. -
Seminar Series: Reinforcement Learning and Markov Chain Computations
Thu, Oct 08, 2009 @ 02:00 PM - 03:00 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Prof. Vivek Borkar, Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR), Mumbai, India This two part series shall cover an introduction to reinforcement learning and stochastic approximations, and its application to Markov Chain computations.Part II (Thursday, Oct. 8) will present a novel potential application of reinforcement learning algorithms, viz., for certain matrix computations. It will be argued that these present a hybrid scheme situated between pure Monte Carlo and pure numerical iterative schemes. Various trade-offs and acceleration techniques will be discussed.Speaker Bio:
Vivek Borkar is a Professor in the School of Technology and Computer Science at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR), Mumbai where he has been for the last decade.
He was formerly Dean of the same school. Prior to TIFR, he was a Professor in the Computer Science and Automation department of the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore. He received his Ph.D. from University of California, Berkeley in EECS in 1979. He is well-known for his work in many areas including stochastic processes, mathematical control, game theory and learning. He is the author of several books including a recent book on Stochastic approximations: A Dynamical Systems Viewpoint.Host: Prof. Rahul Jain, 213-740-2246, rahul.jain@usc.edu. If you would like to meet the speaker during his weeklong visit from October 5-9, please contact the host.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. -
Combining Large-Vocabulary Continuous Speech Recognition and Spoken Term Detection for Robust Speech
Tue, Oct 20, 2009 @ 10:30 AM - 12:00 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Guest Speaker:
Douglas W. Oard
University of MarylandAbstract: Well tuned Large-Vocabulary Continuous Speech Recognition (LVCSR) has been shown to generally be more effective than vocabulary-independent techniques as a basis for topic-based ranked retrieval of spoken content. Tuning LVCSR systems to a topic domain can be costly, however, and Out-Of-Vocabulary (OOV) query terms can adversely affect retrieval effectiveness when that tuning is not performed. I will show, however, that retrieval effectiveness for queries with OOV terms can be substantially improved by combining evidence from LVCSR with additional evidence from utterance-scale Spoken Term Detection (STD). The combination is performed by using relevance judgments from held-out topics to learn generic (i.e., topic-independent), smooth, non-decreasing transformations from LVCSR and STD system scores to relevance probabilities. I'll describe an evaluation using a test collection that includes, conversational speech audio from an oral history collection, topics based on actual requests for information in that collection, and relevance judgments made by trained experts. For short queries, our combined system recovers 57% of the mean average precision that could have been obtained through LVCSR domain tuning. This is joint work with Scott Olsson, using a test collection built in collaboration with Sam Gustman of the USC Shoah Foundation Institute for Visual History and Education.About the speaker: Douglas Oard is an Associate Professor at the University of Maryland, College Park, with joint appointments in the College of Information Studies and the Institute for Advanced Computer Studies; he is on sabbatical at Berkeley's iSchool for the Fall 2009 semester. Dr. Oard earned his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Maryland. His research interests center around the use of emerging technologies to support information seeking by end users, with recent work on interactive techniques for cross-language information retrieval and techniques for search and sense-making in conversational media. Additional information is available at http://www.glue.umd.edu/~oard/.Hosted by Shrikanth NarayananLocation: 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. -
Boeing AUV Echo Ranger
Wed, Oct 21, 2009 @ 01:00 PM - 02:00 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Please Join us for a Special Seminar and Discussion - Wednesday October
21 at 1 PM in Torrey Web Room of the Allan Hancock Foundation Building (AHF)*Ross Peterson, Boeing Lead Team Engineer for the Boeing Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV) - Echo Ranger
**Boeing & USC Collaboration on Undersea Science.- Overview Boeing AUV "Echo Ranger" capabilities and at-sea operations.
- Discuss viability of Echo Ranger AUV shore based testing from WMSC facilities and waterfront.
- Discuss potential Echo Ranger operations as a survey platform for oceanographic and environmental sensors.
- Discuss Echo Ranger as a technology demonstrator used to test and evaluate high fidelity underwater sensors.Ross and his team will be available for further discussions after the seminar.
Please let me know if you are interested in meeting with them(duguay@usc.edu).Regards, Linda Duguay, Director of Research Wrigley Institute for Environmental Studies, Director USC Sea Grant Program*
Location: Torrey Web Room of the Allan Hancock Foundation Building (AHF)
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. -
Integrated Systems Seminar Series : Prof. Peter Siegel, Caltech
Fri, Oct 23, 2009 @ 02:00 PM - 03:00 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Title: THz in Biology and Medicine: Towards Quantifying and Understanding the Interaction of Millimeter Waves with Cells and Cell Processes Abstract
Careful evaluation of the impact of millimeter and submillimeter wavelength radiation on biological systems is becoming more relevant as high frequency communications, radar and imaging begin to make their way into commercial applications. Especially apropos is the high power density, pulsed millimeter-wave crowd-control system known as active-denial. Methods to identify and quantify the impact of this radiation on a microscopic scale are just beginning to emerge. In this talk we will review traditional THz applications being pursued in the Submillimeter Wave Advanced Technology (SWAT) group at JPL and then turn to this new application area in he life sciences: submillimeter wave interactions with cells. A simple setup is demonstrated for remote temperature monitoring of water, water-based media, and cells exposed to millimeter wave energy. The technique relies on recording changes in the shape of a stretching band of the hydroxyl group in liquid water at 3100 to 3700 cm-1. Temperature changes of 1°C are readily distinguished over a range consistent with cellular processes (25-45°C) using integration times below 10 seconds. The instrument was used to successfully determine the temperature rise of a cluster of H1299 derived human lung cells adhered to polystyrene and immersed in PBS under exposure of RF millimeter wave radiation (60 GHz, 1.3, 2.6 and 5.2 mW/mm2). Following this, our first measurements of low levels of RF power on cell function were performed using a FRET (Forster resonance energy transfer) technique on cells tagged with GFP (green fluorescent protein) to look at the formation of membrane nanopores.Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 248
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Hossein Hashemi
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.
