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Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Events for November
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Dr. Kensall Wise
Fri, Nov 02, 2007 @ 03:00 PM - 04:00 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Dr. Kensall WiseUniversity of Michigan, Ann Arbor"Wireless Integrated MicroSystems (WIMS):
Coming Revolution in the Gathering of Information"Abstract
Wireless integrated microsystems promise to become pervasive during the coming decade in applications ranging from health care and environmental monitoring to homeland security. Merging low-power embedded computing, wireless interfaces, and wafer-level packaging with microelectromechanical systems (MEMS), the resulting button-sized modules will serve as smart information-gathering nodes that will effectively wire the planet, extending communication
networks to a wide range of new information-gathering applications. These microsystems will be 1cc or less in size, dissipating less than 1mW and communicating over ranges from 1cm to 1km or more. They will be built on generic platforms that are digitally compensated and self-testing, customized by software and by front-end sensor
selection. This talk will highlight several emerging microsystems. A wristwatch-size environmental monitor is being developed to measure parameters such as pressure, temperature, humidity, and air quality. The microsystem includes an integrated gas chromatograph capable of analyzing complex gaseous mixtures with sensitivities in the parts-per-trillion range and response times of a few seconds. It offers exciting possibilities for enhancing homeland security and reducing global pollution. A chronically-implantable neural microsystem integrates high-density three-dimensional microelectrode arrays with embedded signal processing and wireless telemetry. Such neural interfaces are creating breakthroughs in neuroscience and offering new hope for the treatment of disorders such as deafness, blindness, paralysis, and Parkinson's disease.Bio
Kensall D. Wise received the BSEE degree with highest distinction from Purdue University in 1963 and the MS and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering from Stanford University in 1964 and 1969, respectively. From 1963 to 1965 and from 1972 to 1974, he was a Member of Technical Staff at Bell Telephone Laboratories, where his work was concerned with the exploratory development of integrated electronics for use in telephone communications. From 1965 to 1972 he was a Research Assistant and then a Research Associate and Lecturer in the Department of Electrical Engineering at Stanford, working on the development of micromachined solid-state sensors. In 1974 he joined the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, where he is now the J. Reid and Polly Anderson Professor of Manufacturing Technology and Director of the Engineering
Research Center for Wireless Integrated MicroSystems. His present research focuses on the development of integrated microsystems for health care and environmental monitoring.
Dr. Wise organized and served as the first chairman of the Technical Subcommittee on Solid-State Sensors of the IEEE Electron Devices Society (EDS). He was General Chairman of the 1984 IEEE Solid-State Sensor Conference,
served as IEEE-EDS National Lecturer (1986), and was Technical Program Chairman (1985) and General Chairman (1997) of the IEEE International Conference on Solid-State Sensors and Actuators. Dr. Wise received the Paul Rappaport Award from the EDS (1990), a Distinguished Faculty Achievement Award from the University of Michigan (1995), the Columbus Prize from the Christopher Columbus Fellowship Foundation (1996), the SRC Aristotle Award (1997), and the 1999 IEEE Solid-State Circuits Field Award. In 2002 he was named the William Gould Dow Distinguished University Professor at the University of Michigan. He currently holds the 2007 Henry Russel Lectureship at the University, is a Life Fellow of the IEEE, and is a member of the United States National Academy of Engineering.Location: Hedco Neurosciences Building (HNB) - 100
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Ericka Lieberknecht
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. -
Cooperative and Competitive Coalitions in Wireless Interference Channels
Wed, Nov 07, 2007 @ 10:00 AM - 11:00 AM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
SPEAKER: Dr. Lalitha Sankar, Postdoctoral Fellow, Princeton UniversityABSTRACT: Cooperation in multi-terminal networks can be induced in many ways. In this talk we investigate the formation of cooperative coalitions among rational users (transmit-receive links) in a K-link interference channel (IC) using coalitional game theory. Modeling the rate achieved by a user as its utility, we show that the stable coalition structure, i.e., set of coalitions from which users have no incentives to defect, depends on the manner in which the rate gains are apportioned among the cooperating users. We study transmitter and receiver cooperation in an IC as two distinct cooperative models and in each case focus on the stability of the grand coalition (GC) of all users for both flexible (transferable) and fixed (non-transferable) apportioning schemes. We show that the GC is the stable sum-rate optimal coalition when only receivers cooperate by jointly decoding (transferable). However the stability of the GC depends on the detector when receivers cooperate using linear multiuser detectors (non-transferable). For transmitter cooperation it is assumed that all receivers cooperate perfectly and that users outside a coalition act as jammers. We present results on the stability of the GC for both the case of perfectly cooperating transmitters (transferrable) and under a partial decode-and-forward strategy (non-transferable). We show that the stability depends on the channel gains for the former and the transmitter jamming strengths for the latter.BIO: Lalitha Sankar received the B.Tech degree in Engineering Physics from the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay in 1992, the MS degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Maryland, Baltimore County in 1994, and the Ph.D degree in Electrical Engineering from Rutgers University in June 2005. She is presently a Science and Technology postdoctoral fellow at Princeton University. After her masters, Lalitha worked for a year at Polaroid Corporation's Engineering R&D, following which she was a Senior Member of Technical Staff at AT&T Shannon Labs until March 2002.Host: Prof. Urbashi Mitra, ubli@usc.edu
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 248
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Mayumi Thrasher
This event is open to all eligible individuals. USC Viterbi operates all of its activities consistent with the University's Notice of Non-Discrimination. Eligibility is not determined based on race, sex, ethnicity, sexual orientation, or any other prohibited factor. -
Distinguished Lecture Series: Information Theory of Wireless Networks: A Deterministic Approach
Wed, Nov 07, 2007 @ 03:30 PM - 04:30 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
SPEAKER: David Tse, University of California BerkeleyABSTRACT: Gaussian channels are commonly used models for multiuser wireless communication. Unfortunately, the capacity of multiuser Gaussian channels is unknown even for simple networks such as the single-relay channel and the two-user interference channel. To make further progress in understanding how to optimally communicate over these and more general networks, we propose a deterministic channel model which focuses on the interaction between the users rather than the noise in the system. We show: 1) the analytical simplicity of this model by computing the capacities of several interference and relay networks based on this deterministic model; 2) how the insights from the deterministic model can be translated into finding near-optimal strategies for the Gaussian counterpart.BIO: David Tse received the B.A.Sc. degree in systems design engineering from University of Waterloo, Canada in 1989, and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1991 and 1994 respectively. From 1994 to 1995, he was a postdoctoral member of technical staff at A.T. & T. Bell Laboratories. Since 1995, he has been at the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences in the University of California at Berkeley, where he is currently a Professor.
He received a 1967 NSERC 4-year graduate fellowship from the government of Canada in 1989, a NSF CAREER award in 1998, the Best Paper Awards at the Infocom 1998 and Infocom 2001 conferences, the Erlang Prize in 2000 from the INFORMS Applied Probability Society, the IEEE Communications and Information Theory Society Joint Paper Award in 2001, and the Information Theory Society Paper Award in 2003. He was the Technical Program co-chair of the International Symposium on Information Theory in 2004, and was an Associate Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Information Theory from 2001 to 2003. He is a coauthor, with Pramod Viswanath, of the text "Fundamentals of Wireless Communication". His research interests are in information theory, wireless communications and networking.HOST: Prof. Caire GiuseppeAudiences: Graduate/Department /Faculty
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 Students Practical Guide Seminar Series - Elements of Successful Proposals
Fri, Nov 09, 2007 @ 11:30 AM - 01:30 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Seminar Speakers: Profs. Hossein Hashemi and P. Vijay Kumar.Organizer: Prof. Alan Willner* Pizza will be graciously provided by the EE Department.*Abstract: Odds are that regardless of where you choose to go after your studies at USC, you will at some point, be asked or required to write a proposal. In some professions, your livelihood may well be at stake. So what exactly is a proposal and what can you hope to gain from writing one? What goes into the making of a successful proposal? While we do not pretend to have all the answers, we will give you our take on this topic and hope at least to leave you better informed.
Location: Seaver Science Library (SSL) - 150
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. -
Controlling the Future Internet
Fri, Nov 09, 2007 @ 03:30 PM - 04:30 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Abstract:
The current implementation of the Internet relies heavily on Internet Protocol (IP). IP is currently employed to provide inter-networking among heterogeneous access networks. Despite its success, today's Internet implementation has several limitations, some of which include the overloading of the IP address to simultaneously indicate network location and node identity, and the absence of a trustworthy environment for users to communicate. We propose an architecture that addresses this problem and abstracts the functions of the network from the physical network and relies on the use of persistent identifiers (PI) to communicate with every entity on the network.. This is accomplished using software agents that implement the different functions of the network (routing, DNS resolution, storage, etc.) and by viewing the hardware nodes as resource providers to be used by the agents for the completion of their tasks. The agents are then allowed to move autonomously among the nodes of the network in search of nodes that increase the efficiency and effectiveness of their task completion. This then creates a distributed resource allocation problem that we formulate and solve in this talk using a hybrid systems framework and randomized algorithms. Speaker:
Chaouki T. Abdallah obtained his MS and Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology in 1982, and 1988 respectively. He joined the Electrical and Computer Engineering department at the University of New Mexico where he is currently professor, and chair. Professor Abdallah conducts research and teaches courses in the general area of systems theory with focus on control, communications, and computing systems. His research has been funded by national funding agencies (NSF, AFOSR, NRL), national laboratories (SNL, LANL), and by various companies (Boeing, HP). He has also been active in designing and implementing various international graduate programs with Latin American and European countries. He was a co-founder in 1990 of the ISTEC consortium, which currently includes more than 150 universities in the US, Spain, and Latin America. He has co-authored 4 books, and more than 200 peer-reviewed papers. His IEEE professional service credits include being the program chair for IEEE Conference on Decision & Control, Hawaii, 2003, and the general chair for the IEEE Conference on Decision & Control, in 2008. Professor Abdallah is a senior member of IEEE and a recipient of the IEEE Millennium medal.Host: Petros Ioannou, ioannou@usc.edu, ext 04452Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 248
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Shane Goodoff
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. -
A Non-Linear Neural Classifier and its Applications in Testing Analog/RF Circuits
Fri, Nov 16, 2007 @ 10:30 AM - 11:30 AM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Dr. Yiorgos MakrisAbstract: In this talk, I will be discussing a machine learning-based test paradigm for mixed-signal/RF circuits. I will first describe an ontogenic neural classifier that learns to separate the nominal from the faulty chip distributions in a low-dimensional space of inexpensive measurements. The key novelty of this classifier is that its topology is not fixed; rather, it adapts dynamically, in order to match the inherent complexity of the separation problem. Thus, it establishes separation hypersurfaces that reciprocate very well even in the presence of complex chip distributions. I will then discuss the construction of guard-bands, which provide a level-of-confidence indication and support a two-tier test method. In this method, the majority of chips are accurately classified through inexpensive measurements, while the small fraction of chips for which the decision of the classifier has a low level of confidence is re-tested through traditional specification testing. The ability of the proposed method to drastically reduce the cost of mixed-signal/RF testing without compromising its quality will be demonstrated using two example circuits, a switched-capacitor filter and a UHF receiver front-end. Additionally, its application in specification test compaction and its potential for developing a stand-alone analog/RF BIST method will be discussed. Bio: Yiorgos Makris received the Diploma of Computer Engineering and Informatics from the University of Patras, Greece, in 1995, and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Engineering from the University of California, San Diego, in 1997 and 2001, respectively. He then joined Yale University where he is currently an Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and leads the Testable and Reliable Architectures (TRELA) Laboratory. His research interests are in the areas of test and reliability of analog, digital, and asynchronous circuits and systems.
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. -
Regenerating codes for Distributed Storage
Tue, Nov 20, 2007 @ 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Seminar Speaker: Alex Dimakis, Wireless Foundations, EECS, UC Berkeley
11-12 pm November 20, 2007
Host: Bhaskar KrishnamachariRegenerating codes for Distributed StorageData centers and sensor networks require reliable information storage
over individually unreliable nodes. Storing a file using an erasure
code, in fragments spread across nodes, requires less redundancy than
simple replication for the same level of reliability. However, since
fragments must be periodically replaced as nodes fail, a key question
is how to generate a new encoded fragment in a distributed way while
transferring as little data as possible across the network.
We formulate code repair as an optimal flow problem on an infinite
graph and show how appropriate mixing of information (network coding)
can surprisingly reduce the repair bandwidth. We present both
information theoretic lower bounds and code constructions that achieve
optimal performance. Time permitting, some open problems related with
information storage in Data centers will be discussed.Bio: Alex Dimakis received the Diploma degree in Electrical and
Computer Engineering from the National Technical University of Athens
in 2003 and the M.S. degree in Electrical Engineering from UC Berkeley
in 2005. He is currently a Ph.D. candidate in the department of Electrical
Engineering and Computer Sciences at UC Berkeley.
His research interests include Communications, Signal processing, and
Networking with applications in distributed systems and sensor
networks. Mr. Dimakis has received two outstanding paper awards, the UC Berkeley
Departmental Fellowship in 2003, and the Microsoft Research Fellowship
in 2007.Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 248
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Shane Goodoff
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. -
Broadcasting without Knowing the Channel: Outage-Efficient Transmission
Tue, Nov 27, 2007 @ 03:30 PM - 04:30 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
SPEAKER: Dr. Wenyi Zhang, Post-Doc, CSIABSTRACT: A prevailing assumption in multiuser information theory is that the transmitter(s) has perfect channel state information (CSI). However, transmit CSI may not be readily available under certain scenarios, for example, in fading channels, or in lack of an adequate feedback link. In this talk, we investigate a fading Gaussian broadcast channel (BC) without transmit CSI. Specifically, we consider a quasi-static scenario, to model delay-sensitive applications over slowly time-varying fading channels, and characterize system performance by outage achievable rate regions. For scalar-input channels, we propose two coding schemes: blind dirty paper coding (B-DPC), and statistical superposition coding (S-SC). Both schemes lead to the same outage achievable rate region, which always dominates that of time-sharing, irrespective of the particular fading distributions. We also show that the S-SC scheme can be extended to BCs with multiple transmit antennas. (Joint work with S. Kotagiri and J. N. Laneman)BIO: Wenyi Zhang was born in Chengdu, Sichuan, China in 1979. He received B.E. degree in Automation from Tsinghua University, Beijing, China in 2001; and M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering both from the University of Notre Dame, in 2003 and 2006, respectively. He is now affiliated with the Communication Sciences Institute (CSI), the University of Southern California (USC), as a postdoctoral research associate. He was awarded the Michael J. Birck Endowed Graduate Fellowship in 2002-2003, and the Center for Applied Mathematics (CAM) Fellowship of the University of Notre Dame in summer 2004 and 2005-2006. He received the Kaneb Graduate Student Award for Excellence in Teaching in 2005. He is a member of IEEE and Sigma Xi.
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 539
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. -
EE Students Practical Guide Seminar Series - Mentoring
Fri, Nov 30, 2007 @ 11:30 AM - 01:30 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Seminar Speakers: Profs. P. Daniel Dapkus and Alexander Sawchuk.Organizer: Prof. Alan Willner* Pizza will be graciously provided by the EE Department.*Abstract: Ask almost any successful person, and you will find that a mentor played an important role in their career. We will discuss what mentoring is, why it is important, who needs mentoring, who should provide mentoring, how to find a mentor, and how to be a mentor.
Location: Seaver Science Library (SSL) - 150
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.
