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Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Events for November
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Communications, Networks & Systems (CommNetS) Seminar
Wed, Nov 12, 2014 @ 02:00 PM - 03:00 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Dr. Rajgopal Kannan, Louisiana State University
Talk Title: Balancing Delay and Congestion Costs in Scheduling and Computing Bottleneck Congestion Equilibria
Series: CommNetS
Abstract: We consider the problem of minimum cost scheduling of an arbitrary sequence of packet arrivals over a given time frame where the cost of transmission during a slot is the sum of an arbitrary function of the congestion (number of packets transmitted) during that slot and the delay incurred by these packets. This problem could arise in various contexts such as wireless link transmissions where both congestion costs and scheduling delays must be balanced as well as in transactional memory systems where one can complete a transaction during a slot by paying a cost proportional to the number of interfering transactions during that slot (the congestion) or defer by some slots and try again. We find the offline optimal solution to this problem given the exact sequence of packet arrivals and then develop algorithms with constant factor competitive ratio for the online version of the problem in which the sequence of packet arrivals is unknown. For the second part of the talk, we consider the problem of computing bottleneck congestion equilibria in networks. This problem has been shown to be PLS complete and we describe an algorithm for finding logN approximate equilibra.
Biography: Rajgopal Kannan is a Professor in the Computer Science Department at Louisiana State University. He obtained his PhD from the University of Denver and a B.Tech from IIT-Bombay. His areas of interest are in wireless network algorithms, game-theory and cybersecurity. He is currently on sabbatical at the ANRG group at USC with Prof. Bhaskar Krishnamachari.
Host: Prof. Ashutosh Nayyar and the Ming Hsieh Institute
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. -
Hand-portable NMR Instrument for Point of Care Diagnostics
Fri, Nov 14, 2014 @ 10:30 AM - 11:30 AM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Dr. Pablo Prado, One Resonance, LLC
Talk Title: Hand-portable NMR Instrument for Point of Care Diagnostics
Series: Medical Imaging Seminar Series
Abstract: Open-concept NMR sensors have been used in the oil industry for over 20 years. Single-sided NMR probes are effective tools for in-situ material assessment for large objects. This has been demonstrated in applications such as moisture in wood, near surface water content in soil and rubber cross-linking in tires. Similar concepts can be utilized to inspect skin tissue and even fat content in the human liver. During this presentation we will discuss general aspects of open-concept NMR instrumentation.
Biography: Dr. Prado is the President of One Resonance LLC and co-founder and CEO of One Resonance Sensors, LLC. He has more than 20 years of experience with NMR instrumentation. In previous positions he was Senior Department Manager and New Product Introduction Lead at GE; VP Development at T2 Biosystems; VP Engineering at Quasar Federal Systems; and CTO at Progression, Inc.Dr. Prado is inventor for 9 issued patent and author of 2 book chapters and over 40 peer-reviewed articles.
Host: Professor Krishna Nayak
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 132
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. -
Integrated Seminar Series
Fri, Nov 14, 2014 @ 03:00 PM - 04:30 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Dr. Zach Griffith, Teledyne Scientific
Talk Title: TBA
Biography: Hosted by Prof. Hossein Hashemi, Prof. Mike Chen and Prof. Mahta Moghaddam
Organized and hosted by Masashi Yamagata
For questions or additional details, please email myamagat@usc.edu
Host: Hosted by Prof. Hossein Hashemi, Prof. Mike Chen, Prof. Mahta Moghaddam, and Masashi Yamagata
More Info: http://mhi.usc.edu/events/event-details/?event_id=910781
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 132
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Elise Herrera-Green
Event Link: http://mhi.usc.edu/events/event-details/?event_id=910781
This event is open to all eligible individuals. USC Viterbi operates all of its activities consistent with the University's Notice of Non-Discrimination. Eligibility is not determined based on race, sex, ethnicity, sexual orientation, or any other prohibited factor. -
Communications, Networks & Systems (CommNetS) Seminar
Wed, Nov 19, 2014 @ 02:00 PM - 03:00 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Dr. Anant Sahai, UC Berkeley
Talk Title: Information Theory Meets Control
Series: CommNetS
Abstract: Control is an intellectual sibling to communication. Both are about removing uncertainty with limited resources --- communication by sharing something about the world and control by shaping the world itself. While information theory has for decades been providing insights into problems of communication, traditional approaches to control did not use information-theoretic techniques or ideas. Recently, we have found some surprising connections between wireless information theory and some central problems in decentralized control. In addition, we have begun to understand how modern insights can be used to better make wireless protocols that support control problems for the Internet of Things.
On the theoretical side, it turns out that the machinery of linear deterministic models that has been so helpful in understanding problems of relaying and interference in communication can be brought to shed light on the fundamental limits of performance in control. Approximately-optimal strategies can be found and the control-theoretic counterparts to ideas like generalized degrees-of-freedom and cut-set bounds can be discovered. There are control/estimation counterparts to ideas like non-coherent communication channels.
All this suggests that there is an entire parallel realm of information theory that connects to control problems --- just waiting to be explored. This talk will give some glimpses into this.
Biography: Anant Sahai received his B.S. in 1994, from the University of California, Berkeley, and his S.M. and Ph.D. from MIT in 1996 and 2001, respectively. He is an associate professor in the EECS Department at Berkeley, where he joined as an assistant professor in 2002. Prior to that, he spent a year as a research scientist at the wireless startup Enuvis in South San Francisco, developing software-radio signal-processing algorithms to enable very sensitive GPS receivers for indoor operation. From 2007 to 2009, he was the treasurer for the IEEE Information Theory Society. His current research interests are at the intersection of information theory and decentralized control, as well as in wireless communication, particularly dynamic spectrum sharing and its regulatory dimensions. He enjoys working very closely with his small group of graduate students on fun and deep problems. He usually teaches small intimate courses but this semester, is teaching a giant intro course with hundreds of students.
Host: Dr. Ashutosh Nayyar and the Ming Hsieh Institute
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. -
Read a Lot, Talk as Fast as You Can
Thu, Nov 20, 2014 @ 10:00 AM - 11:00 AM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Peter C. Gordon, Ph.D., University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
Talk Title: Read a Lot, Talk as Fast as You Can
Abstract: Substantial effort has been devoted to understanding how variability in component cognitive abilities contributes to individual differences in reading skill. As skilled readers rapidly move their eyes through sequences of words, deeper comprehension of earlier words continues while encoding occurs for the word that is currently fixated. Therefore, skilled reading depends on robust, easily accessible word knowledge as well as the ability to efficiently process multiple linguistic units in parallel. The current project investigates how individual differences in each of these skills affect reading ability by examining eye-movement patterns during reading in relation to two very different measures of individual differences: the Author Recognition Task, which primarily taps word knowledge, and Rapid Automatized Naming, which requires rapid responses to a series of items. Results show that word recognition and the ability to coordinate multiple processes in parallel are independent skills, and shed new light on the nature of the cognitive mechanisms underlying reading ability.
Biography: Dr. Peter C. Gordon received his B.S. in Psychology from Georgetown University in 1975 and his Ph.D. in Experimental Psychology from the University of Michigan in 1984. He was Assistant and Associate Professor in the Psychology Department at Harvard University from 1984 through 1993, and subsequently joined the faculty at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill where he is Professor of Psychology and Faculty Fellow at the Frank Porter Graham Child Development Center. He is a Fellow of the Association for Psychological Science and a superannuated member of the Psychological Round Table; his awards include appointment as John and Ruth Hazel Associate Professor at Harvard University and a W.N. Reynolds Leave from the University of North Carolina. He has served as a reviewer for multiple NSF programs (Cognition & Perception, Information & Intelligent Systems and Linguistics) and as a member of the Language and Communication panel at NIH. He served a four-year term as Associate Editor at Psychological Science, has been on the editorial boards of major journals (Cognitive Psychology, JEP:LMC) and in January 2015 will begin a term as Consulting Editor at Psychological Review. Dr. Gordonâs program of research focuses on uncovering the psychological basis of language comprehension and production, with a particular focus on the nature of discourse coherence and on the interaction of discourse-level processing and lower-level processes such as word recognition. His research on the processing of written and spoken language has been highly interdisciplinary, including long-term collaborations with researchers trained in computer science, linguistics and neuroscience, as well as researchers with clinical specializations. His recent research has involved coordinated use of behavioral and neural methods for studying how language processing is coordinated with perception, attention, memory and motor control, and has additionally involved development of eye-tracking and computational-linguistic methods for studying cognitive and interpersonal processes in normal and impaired populations.
Host: Prof. Shrikanth Narayanan
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 132
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Tanya Acevedo-Lam
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. -
It Takes Time to Prime: Semantic Priming in Ocular Response Tasks
Thu, Nov 20, 2014 @ 02:00 PM - 03:00 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Renske S. Hoedemaker, Ph.D., University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
Talk Title: It Takes Time to Prime: Semantic Priming in Ocular Response Tasks
Abstract: Semantic priming - the facilitation in processing a word when it is preceded by a semantically related word - is very robust in tasks where words are recognized in isolation but is quite limited during text reading. We evaluate the contributions of response mode and task goals to semantic priming by replacing the manual response mode typically used in isolated word recognition tasks with an eye-movement response through a sequence of words. These ocular response tasks combine the explicit control of subjectsâ goals found in isolated word-recognition asks with the fast, well-practiced ocular response mode used in reading text. Across both lexical decision and recognition memory tasks, ocular response times are much shorter than manual responses for the same words in comparable tasks, yet show a strong relationship with word frequency as well as a robust effect of semantic priming. Ongoing work on this project uses Ex-Gaussian distribution fits to investigate how task goals may interact with semantic priming effects on eye movements during visual word recognition.
Biography: Renske S. Hoedemaker received her BA in Psychology from Lawrence University in 2010 and her MA in Psychology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2012. She is currently a PhD candidate working with Dr. Peter C. Gordon in the cognitive psychology program at UNC Chapel Hill, expecting to graduate in May 2015. Her research focuses on the way skilled readers coordinate different stages of lexico-semantic and other cognitive processes in a goal-driven manner to achieve fast and efficient performance on word recognition and other sequential tasks. Her dissertation explores the nature of semantic priming using ocular response tasks.
Host: Prof. Shrikanth Narayanan
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 132
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Tanya Acevedo-Lam
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. -
Energy Informatics Distinguished Seminar Series
Fri, Nov 21, 2014 @ 10:30 AM - 11:30 AM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Marija Ilic, Carnegie Mellon University
Talk Title: Physics-Based Modeling and Control for Plug-and-Play Electric Energy Systems
Series: Energy Informatics Distinguished Seminar Series
Abstract: In this talk we consider future electric energy grids as interconnections of coupled modules, often hierarchically arranged. We first review current operating practices, and then describe how one could think of cyber design for the changing grids using simpler-to-understand mechanical representations of these systems. We discuss most of the ideas using these coupled mechanical system analogies and propose a new, physically intuitive state space model which lends itself to modular modeling and cyber design for provable performance. Once the model is established, it becomes possible to identify open control and communication problems necessary to define the information exchange among the modules (type, rate of exchange and entities exchanging this information). This modeling paradigm is illustrated for both bulk power grids and for the emerging micro-grids. Fundamentally, the problem of using coupling (interactions) between modules to support cooperative control and communications within either weakly or strongly coupled nonlinear grids is suggested as the problem presenting theoretical challenge to both control and communications design. This very difficult problem is made manageable by combining physics-based models with the cyber design objectives. It is shown how such an approach could be used to integrate fast power electronically-switched control in micro-grids to stabilize the unconventional dynamics resulting from the presence of distributed energy resources (DERs) and the variable speed drives embedded into responsive demand. The same concept can be used to control flow in delivery systems. A very tangible problem of suppressing subsynchronous control instabilities created by the interactions of power electronics controllers is illustrated using this approach.
Biography: Marija D. Ilic received her Doctor of Science Degree in Systems Science at Washington University in St. Louis, MO in 1980. She is currently a Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, with a courtesy appointment in the Public Policy Department. She is the Director of the Electric Energy Systems Group (EESG) at Carnegie Mellon. She was an Assistant Professor at Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, and tenured Associate Professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She was then a Senior Research Scientist in Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, from 1987 to 2002. She has over 30 years of experience in teaching and research in the area of electrical power system modeling and control. Her main interest is in the systems aspects of operations, planning, and economics of the electric power industry. She has co-authored and co-edited a number of books in her field of interest. Her most recent book is Engineering IT-Enabled Sustainable Electricity Services: The Tale of Two Low-Cost Green Azores Islands. Prof. Ilic is an IEEE Fellow.
Host: Viktor Prasanna and the Ming Hsieh Institute
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - EEB 132
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Annie Yu
This event is open to all eligible individuals. USC Viterbi operates all of its activities consistent with the University's Notice of Non-Discrimination. Eligibility is not determined based on race, sex, ethnicity, sexual orientation, or any other prohibited factor. -
Integrated Seminar Series
Fri, Nov 21, 2014 @ 02:00 PM - 03:30 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Prof. Pedram Mohseni, Case Western University
Talk Title: Integrated Systems for High-Fidelit Sensing and Manipulation of Brain Neurochemistry
Biography: Hosted by Prof. Hossein Hashemi, Prof. Mike Chen and Prof. Mahta Moghaddam
Organized and hosted by Masashi Yamagata
For questions or additional details, please email myamagat@usc.edu
Host: Hosted by Prof. Hossein Hashemi, Prof. Mike Chen, Prof. Mahta Moghaddam, and Masashi Yamagata
More Info: http://mhi.usc.edu/events/event-details/?event_id=910785
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 132
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Elise Herrera-Green
Event Link: http://mhi.usc.edu/events/event-details/?event_id=910785
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.
