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Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Events for November
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Ming Hsieh Institute Communications, Networks & Systems (CommNetS) Seminar
Wed, Nov 02, 2016 @ 02:00 PM - 03:00 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Dr. Nanpeng Yu, UC Riverside
Talk Title: Enabling Smart Energy Communities with Proactive Demand Participation and Distribution System Operator Market
Series: CommNetS
Abstract: This talk focuses on proactive demand participation and distribution system market design. An innovative customer interaction scheme called proactive demand participation is developed. Under the proactive demand participation framework, an intelligent energy scheduling agent take initiative to convert control models for flexible loads and customer preferences into price sensitive demand bids. This new scheme allows customers to actively express and communicate their electricity consumption preferences to the distribution system/market operators and participate in the wholesale market dispatch and price formation process. A distribution system market design, a three-phase iterative direct current optimal power flow algorithm with fictitious nodal demand and three-phase LMP decomposition method will be presented.
Biography: Dr. Yu received his B.S. in Electrical Engineering from Tsinghua University, Beijing, China, in 2006. Dr. Yu also received his M.S. degrees in Electrical Engineering and Economics and Ph.D. degree from Iowa State University in 2010. Before joining University of California, Riverside, Dr. Yu was a senior power system planner and project manager at Southern California Edison from Jan, 2011 to July 2014. Currently, he is a tenure track assistant professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of California, Riverside, CA.
Host: Dr. Insoon Yang
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. -
Munushian Seminar - Philip Wong, Friday, November 4th in EEB 132 at 2:00pm
Fri, Nov 04, 2016 @ 02:00 PM - 03:30 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Philip Wong, Stanford University
Talk Title: Computing Performance: N3XT 1,000x
Abstract: 21st century information technology (IT) must process, understand, classify, and organize vast amount of data in realtime.
21st century applications will be dominated by memory-centric computing operating on Tbytes of active data with little
data locality. At the same time, massively redundant sensor arrays sampling the world around us will give humans the perception
of additional "senses" blurring the boundary between biological, physical, and cyber worlds. Abundant-data processing, which
comprises real-time big-data analytics and the processing of perceptual data in wearable devices, clearly demands computation
efficiencies well beyond what can be achieved through business as usual.
The key elements of a scalable, fast, and energy-efficient computation platform that may provide another 1,000x in computing
performance (energy-execution time product) for future computing workloads are: massive on-chip memory co-located with highly
energy-efficient computation, enabled by monolithic 3D integration using ultra-dense and fine-grained massive connectivity. There
will be multiple layers of analog and digital memories interleaved with computing logic, sensors, and application-specific devices.
We call this technology platform N3XT - Nanoengineered Computing Systems Technology. N3XT will support computing
architectures that embrace sparsity, stochasticity, and device variability.
In this talk, I will give an overview of nanoscale memory and logic technologies for implementing N3XT. I will give examples of
nanosystems that have been built using these technologies, and provide projections on their eventual performance.
Biography: H.-S. Philip Wong is the Willard R. and Inez Kerr Bell Professor in the School of
Engineering. He joined Stanford University as Professor of Electrical Engineering in September,
2004. From 1988 to 2004, he was with the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center.
At IBM, he held various positions from Research Staff Member to Manager and Senior Manager.
While he was Senior Manager, he had the responsibility of shaping and executing IBM's strategy
on nanoscale science and technology as well as exploratory silicon devices and semiconductor
technology.
Professor Wong's research aims at translating discoveries in science into practical technologies.
His works have contributed to advancements in nanoscale science and technology, semiconductor
technology, solid-state devices, and electronic imaging.
Host: EE-Electrophysics
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. -
Center for Cyber-Physical Systems and Internet of Things and Ming Hsieh Institute for Electrical Engineering Joint Seminar Series on Cyber-Physical Systems
Mon, Nov 07, 2016 @ 02:00 PM - 03:00 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Michael Papamichael, Researcher at Microsoft Research
Talk Title: Catapult: Powering the World's First Hyperscale Configurable Cloud
Abstract: Project Catapult is the technology behind Microsoft's hyperscale acceleration fabric that uses reconï¬gurable logic to accelerate both network plane functions and applications. In this Conï¬gurable Cloud architecture a layer of reconï¬gurable logic (FPGAs) is placed between the network switches and the servers, enabling network ï¬ows to be programmably transformed at line rate, enabling acceleration of local applications running on the server, and enabling the FPGAs to communicate directly, at datacenter scale, to harvest remote FPGAs unused by their local servers. In this talk, I will provide a brief overview of the Catapult project, discuss the evolution of our acceleration fabric, and highlight examples of how we are using our Configurable Cloud to offer enhanced networking functionality and accelerate datacenter applications and services
Biography: Michael K. Papamichael is a Researcher at Microsoft Research working on the Catapult project. His research interests are in the broader area of computer architecture with emphasis on hardware acceleration, reconfigurable computing, on-chip interconnects, and methodologies to facilitate hardware specialization. He holds a PhD in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University.
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. -
Center for Cyber-Physical Systems and Internet of Things and Ming Hsieh Institute for Electrical Engineering Joint Seminar Series on Cyber-Physical Systems
Mon, Nov 07, 2016 @ 02:00 PM - 03:00 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Michael Papamichael, Researcher at Microsoft Research
Talk Title: Catapult: Powering the World's First Hyperscale Configurable Cloud
Abstract: Project Catapult is the technology behind Microsoft's hyperscale acceleration fabric that uses reconï¬gurable logic to accelerate both network plane functions and applications. In this Conï¬gurable Cloud architecture a layer of reconï¬gurable logic (FPGAs) is placed between the network switches and the servers, enabling network ï¬ows to be programmably transformed at line rate, enabling acceleration of local applications running on the server, and enabling the FPGAs to communicate directly, at datacenter scale, to harvest remote FPGAs unused by their local servers. In this talk, I will provide a brief overview of the Catapult project, discuss the evolution of our acceleration fabric, and highlight examples of how we are using our Configurable Cloud to offer enhanced networking functionality and accelerate datacenter applications and services
Biography: Michael K. Papamichael is a Researcher at Microsoft Research working on the Catapult project. His research interests are in the broader area of computer architecture with emphasis on hardware acceleration, reconfigurable computing, on-chip interconnects, and methodologies to facilitate hardware specialization. He holds a PhD in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University.
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. -
Center for Cyber-Physical Systems and Internet of Things and Ming Hsieh Institute for Electrical Engineering Joint Seminar Series on Cyber-Physical Systems
Mon, Nov 07, 2016 @ 02:00 PM - 03:00 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Michael Papamichael, Researcher at Microsoft Research
Talk Title: Catapult: Powering the World's First Hyperscale Configurable Cloud
Abstract: Project Catapult is the technology behind Microsoft's hyperscale acceleration fabric that uses reconï¬gurable logic to accelerate both network plane functions and applications. In this Conï¬gurable Cloud architecture a layer of reconï¬gurable logic (FPGAs) is placed between the network switches and the servers, enabling network ï¬ows to be programmably transformed at line rate, enabling acceleration of local applications running on the server, and enabling the FPGAs to communicate directly, at datacenter scale, to harvest remote FPGAs unused by their local servers. In this talk, I will provide a brief overview of the Catapult project, discuss the evolution of our acceleration fabric, and highlight examples of how we are using our Configurable Cloud to offer enhanced networking functionality and accelerate datacenter applications and services.
Biography: Michael K. Papamichael is a Researcher at Microsoft Research working on the Catapult project. His research interests are in the broader area of computer architecture with emphasis on hardware acceleration, reconfigurable computing, on-chip interconnects, and methodologies to facilitate hardware specialization. He holds a PhD in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University.
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. -
Center for Cyber-Physical Systems and Internet of Things and Ming Hsieh Institute for Electrical Engineering Joint Seminar Series on Cyber-Physical Systems
Mon, Nov 07, 2016 @ 02:00 PM - 03:00 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Michael Papamichael, Researcher at Microsoft Research
Talk Title: Catapult: Powering the World's First Hyperscale Configurable Cloud
Abstract: Project Catapult is the technology behind Microsoft's hyperscale acceleration fabric that uses reconï¬gurable logic to accelerate both network plane functions and applications. In this Conï¬gurable Cloud architecture a layer of reconï¬gurable logic (FPGAs) is placed between the network switches and the servers, enabling network ï¬ows to be programmably transformed at line rate, enabling acceleration of local applications running on the server, and enabling the FPGAs to communicate directly, at datacenter scale, to harvest remote FPGAs unused by their local servers. In this talk, I will provide a brief overview of the Catapult project, discuss the evolution of our acceleration fabric, and highlight examples of how we are using our Configurable Cloud to offer enhanced networking functionality and accelerate datacenter applications and services.
Biography: Michael K. Papamichael is a Researcher at Microsoft Research working on the Catapult project. His research interests are in the broader area of computer architecture with emphasis on hardware acceleration, reconfigurable computing, on-chip interconnects, and methodologies to facilitate hardware specialization. He holds a PhD in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University.
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. -
Ming Hsieh Institute Communications, Networks & Systems (CommNetS) Seminar
Wed, Nov 09, 2016 @ 02:00 PM - 03:00 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Christopher Miller, UC Berkeley
Talk Title: Optimal precommitment strategies in some time-inconsistent control problems
Series: CommNetS
Abstract: Time-inconsistency is a feature of a dynamic optimization problem which causes the Dynamic Programming Principle to fail. This arises in many applications including dynamic optimization of certain risk measures (e.g., conditional value-at-risk, mean-variance, etc.) and problems whose objective function depends non-linearly on an expected value. There are various interpretations and notions of solution to a time-inconsistent problem. In this talk, we focus on optimal precommitment strategies in continuous-time and demonstrate cases where the time-inconsistent problem may be re-written as an optimization problem over the value function of an auxiliary time-consistent optimization problem. While the auxiliary value function typically has a higher dimensional state space, we discuss instances where structure of the problem allows a dimensionality reduction.
Biography: Christopher W. Miller is a Ph.D. candidate in Applied Mathematics at the University of California, Berkeley. Previously, he received a B.S. in Mathematics and Biomedical Engineering with a minor in Economics from the University of Texas at Austin. His research focuses on applications of partial differential equations and optimal stochastic control, particularly in mathematical finance.
Host: Prof. Insoon Yang
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, Nov 10, 2016 @ 04:00 PM - 05:00 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Jason Cong, Professor, University of California, Los Angeles
Talk Title: Customizable Computing at Datacenter Scale
Abstract: Customizable computing has been of interest to the research community for over three decades. The interest has intensified in the recent years as the power and energy become a significant limiting factor to the computing industry. For example, the energy consumed by the datacenters of some large internet service providers is well over 109 Kilowatt-hours. FPGA-based acceleration has shown 10-100X performance/energy efficiency over the general-purpose processors in many applications. With Intel's $17B acquisition of Altera completed in December 2015, customizable computing is going from advanced research projects into mainstream computing technologies.
In this talk, I shall first present evaluation of several CPU+FPGA platforms for datacenter level integration, and the acceleration results in multiple application domains, including medical imaging, machine learning, and computational genomics. Programming effort remains to be a serious challenge. So, the second part of my talk discusses our ongoing effort in automating compilation with source-code level transformation and optimization coupled with high-level synthesis, as well as developing efficient runtime support for scheduling and transparent resource management for integration of FPGAs for cloud-scale acceleration.
Biography: Jason Cong received his B.S. degree in computer science from Peking University in 1985, his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in computer science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1987 and 1990, respectively. Currently, he is a Chancellor's Professor at the UCLA Computer Science Department, the director of Center for Customizable Domain-Specific Computing (CDSC). He served as the department chair from 2005 to 2008. Dr. Cong's research interests include electronic design automation, energy-efficient computing, customized computing for big-data applications, and highly scalable algorithms. He has over 400 publications in these areas, including 10 best paper awards, and the 2011 ACM/IEEE A. Richard Newton Technical Impact Award in Electric Design Automation. He was elected to an IEEE Fellow in 2000 and ACM Fellow in 2008. He received the 2010 IEEE Circuits and System (CAS) Society Technical Achievement Award "For seminal contributions to electronic design automation, especially in FPGA synthesis, VLSI interconnect optimization, and physical design automation" and the 2016 IEEE Computer Society Technical Achievement Award "For setting the algorithmic foundations for high-level synthesis of field programmable gate arrays." He is the only one who received a Technical Achievement Award from both the IEEE Circuits and Systems Society and the Computer Society.
Dr. Cong has graduated 34 PhD students. Nine of them are now faculty members in major research universities, including Cornell, Fudan Univ., Georgia Tech., Peking Univ., Purdue, SUNY Binghamton, UCLA, UIUC, and UT Austin. One of them is now an IEEE Fellow, six of them got the highly competitive NSF Career Award, and one of them received the ACM SIGDA Outstanding Dissertation Award. Dr. Cong has successfully co-founded three companies with his students, including Aplus Design Technologies for FPGA physical synthesis and architecture evaluation (acquired by Magma in 2003, now part of Synopsys), AutoESL Design Technologies for high-level synthesis (acquired by Xilinx in 2011), and Neptune Design Automation for ultra-fast FPGA physical design (acquired by Xilinx in 2013). Currently, he is a co-founder and the chief scientific advisor of Falcon Computing Solutions, a startup dedicated to enabling FPGA-based customized computing in data centers.
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. -
Center for Cyber-Physical Systems and Internet of Things and Ming Hsieh Institute for Electrical Engineering Joint Seminar Series on Cyber-Physical Systems
Mon, Nov 14, 2016 @ 02:00 PM - 03:00 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Jyotirmoy V. Deshmukh, Principal Research Engineer , Toyota Technical Center
Talk Title: Formal Reasoning for the Cyber-Physical Systems of Tomorrow
Abstract: As cyberphysical systems (CPS) researchers, we are in the process of shaping human societies of tomorrow. Smart transportation infrastructures, autonomous driving cars, medical devices, avionics systems, unmanned aerial vehicles, smart agriculture are just a few examples of technologies that will have a major impact on how we will lead our lives. CPS is not just a buzzword: it truly represents a convergence of a number of separate streams of science and engineering. Today, building a smart CPS requires a deep understanding of the physical aspects of the system being controlled in addition to being able to program intelligence into the controlling software. Increasingly, such software combines sophisticated algorithms from control theory with machine learning and AI algorithms. Often, system designers also have to model the underlying communication between the physical and the cyber worlds. The result is that even the simplest closed-loop model of a CPS is very complex and typically not amenable to reasoning in a formal sense. The burning question is: how do we increase our confidence in the correctness of system-designs with such complexities when even their models are not amenable to rigorous mathematical reasoning? This talk gives some directions to tackle this problem in the setting of model-based development of CPS designs.
Correctness of engineered systems is typically judged in an application-specific and manual fashion; a key step before we can formally reason about system correctness is to have a formalism to express correctness of the CPS being designed. We will discuss the use of logical formalisms based on real-time temporal logics as a possible requirement language for the CPS domain. The other main challenge is to automate the process of testing and finding undesirable behavior with respect to a given set of requirements. We will look at how the use of logical formalisms can greatly aid test automation and in some specific cases give formal guarantees. We will conclude by considering the data deluge problem for CPS; we will suggest techniques to learn logical patterns from time-series data to aid our understanding of the system under study.
Biography: Jyotirmoy Deshmukh is a Principal Research Engineer at Toyota Technical Center in Gardena, California. His research interests are in requirement engineering, temporal logic, formal testing, verification, automatic synthesis and repair of systems, with special focus on cyberphysical system models. Previously, Jyotirmoy got his Ph.D. from the University of Texas at Austin, on the topic of verification of sequential and concurrent software libraries using techniques such as the theory of tree automata and static program analysis. After his Ph.D., he worked as a post-doctoral researcher as part of the Computing Innovation Fellows program at the University of Pennsylvania. His current research interest is in techniques for improving reliability of embedded control software used in cyber-physical systems.
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. -
Modeling Speech Production: From MRI Data to Articulatory Gestures
Thu, Nov 17, 2016 @ 01:00 PM - 02:00 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Dr. Asterios Toutios, Research Associate/USC
Talk Title: Modeling Speech Production: From MRI Data to Articulatory Gestures
Abstract: Novel technologies for imaging the vocal tract, such as real-time MRI, offer extraordinary opportunities for moving speech production research forward. A long-term goal of my research is to develop a modular architecture for synthesizing personalized, highly intelligible and natural-sounding speech, by combining vocal-tract imaging with mathematical modeling and linguistic knowledge. My approach is to model direct observations of the time-varying changes in vocal-tract shaping, in order to derive functional mappings from linguistic structures to synthesized vocal-tract dynamics, which will then drive a realistic simulation of the formation of speech acoustics by the dynamically changing vocal tract. Such an effort may have important technological impact, and validate ample scientific knowledge on the mechanisms of human speech production. In this talk, I will discuss a framework for deriving from real-time MRI data the spatiotemporal deployment of articulatory gestures (which may be viewed as linguistic, cognitive, or motor control targets) in fluent speech and in a speaker-specific manner. The framework includes: automatic segmentation of articulators in real-time MRI videos; the derivation of a guided factor analysis model of the vocal-tract geometry; a locally-linear mapping between deformations of articulators and vocal-tract constrictions; and the application of a novel convolutive non-negative matrix factorization algorithm.
Biography: Asterios Toutios is a research associate with the Signal Analysis and Interpretation Laboratory (SAIL) at USC, where he leads and coordinates the Speech Production and Articulation kNowledge (SPAN) group. His main research interest is modeling human speech production on the basis of direct observations of the vocal-tract dynamic configuration, with a view to informing and enhancing speech technologies like synthesis, recognition, and speaker identification. He received his academic degrees in Thessaloniki, Greece: Diploma/MEng in Electrical and Computer Engineering (1999, Aristotle University); MSc in Information Systems (2002, University of Macedonia); PhD in Applied Informatics (2007, University of Macedonia). Next, he occupied postdoctoral research positions in France, at LORIA and TELECOM ParisTech, before moving to Southern California in June 2012. He has authored or co-authored more than 40 peer-reviewed publications in journals and international conferences. He has also translated from English to Greek a book on mathematical finance, published a few poems, and sung for a little-known alternative rock band.
Host: Dr. Sandeep K. Gupta
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. -
MHI CommNetS seminar
Thu, Nov 17, 2016 @ 02:00 PM - 03:00 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Dr. G.P.Papavassilopoulos, National Technical University of Athens
Talk Title: University-Students Game
Series: CommNetS
Abstract: The purpose of this paper is to formulate and study a game where there is a player who is involved for a long time interval and several small players who stay in the game for short time intervals. Examples of such games abound in practice. For example a Bank is a long term player who stays in business for a very long time whereas most of its customers are affiliated with the Bank for relatively short time periods. A University and its Students provide another example and it is this model that we use here for motivating and posing the questions. The University is considered to have an infinite time horizon and the Students are considered as players who stay in the game for a fixed period of five years (indicative number). A class of Students who start their studies at a certain year is considered as one player /Student who is involved for five years. This player overlaps in action with the other students who entered at different years and with the University. We study this game in a Linear Quadratic, Deterministic, Discrete and Continuous Time setups, where the players use Linear Feedback Strategies and are in Nash or Stackelberg equilibrium, and where the Students have the same cost structure independently of the year they started their studies. An important feature of the solutions derived is that they lead to Riccati type equations for calculating the gains, which are interlaced in time i.e. their evolution depends on present and past values of the gains. In the continuous time setup this corresponds to integrodifferential equations.
Biography: G. P. Papavassilopoulos received the Diploma in Mechanical and Electrical Engineering from the National Technical University of Athens in 1975 and the MSc and PhD degrees in Electrical Engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign in 1977 and 1979 respectively. In 1979 he joined the Dept. of Electrical Engineering-Systems of the University of Southern California as an Assistant Professor and was later promoted to Associate and Full Professor with tenure. In 2000 he joined the Dept. of Electrical and Computer Engineering of the National Technical University of Athens as Full Professor where he is also the director of the Control and Decision Laboratory. His basic areas of interest are Controls, Optimization, and Dynamic Games. A considerable part of his research is in the area of Dynamic Stochastic Games. He has also conducted research in Decentralized Adaptive Control, Robotics, Optimization Algorithms, Target Interception, Jamming, Stochastic Learning Automata, Linear Complementarity Problems and Bilinear Matrix Inequalities for Robust Control, Computational Complexity, Markovian Learning, Parallel Algorithms for Nonconvex Problems, Genetic Algorithms, and Nonlinear Filtering. He is also interested in applications to Biomedical Engineering, Economics, Organizational Structures, Energy and Telecommunication Policy, and Environmental Problems. (For more information: http://www.control.ece.ntua.gr/)
Host: Prof. Petros Ioannou
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, Nov 17, 2016 @ 04:00 PM - 05:00 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Nickolai Zeldovich, Associate Professor, MIT
Talk Title: Certifying a Crash-Safe File System
Abstract: Users and applications rely on file systems to store their data, but file systems themselves can have bugs that lead to data loss, especially after a system crashes and restarts.
This talk will describe our work on FSCQ, the first file system that (1) comes with a precise specification of its behavior, including what can occur after a crash, and that (2) provides a machine-checked proof that its implementation meets this precise specification, using the Coq proof assistant. FSCQ's proofs avoid crash-safety bugs that have plagued file systems, such as forgetting to insert a disk write barrier between writing the data to the log and writing the log's commit block. FSCQ's specification also allows applications to prove their own crash safety, avoiding application-level bugs such as forgetting to invoke fsync on both the file and the containing directory. As a result, applications on FSCQ can provide strong guarantees: they will not lose data under any sequence of crashes.
Our experimental evaluation shows that the FSCQ prototype achieves reasonable I/O performance, on par with Linux ext4, and that, empirically, the theorems appear to work: FSCQ can recover from all possible crashes for small test programs, and FSCQ passes a variety of stress tests. One limitation of the FSCQ prototype is its high CPU overhead, owing to its use of Haskell for generating executable code.
Biography: Nickolai Zeldovich is an Associate Professor at MIT's department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, and a member of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. His research interests are in building practical secure systems, from operating systems and hardware to programming languages and security analysis tools. He received his PhD from Stanford University in 2008, where he developed HiStar, an operating system designed to minimize the amount of trusted code by controlling information flow. In 2005, he co-founded MokaFive, a company focused on improving desktop management and mobility using x86 virtualization.
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. -
Center for Cyber-Physical Systems and Internet of Things and Ming Hsieh Institute for Electrical Engineering Joint Seminar Series on Cyber-Physical Systems
Mon, Nov 21, 2016 @ 02:00 PM - 03:00 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Jim Kapinski, Senior Principal Engineer, Toyota Technical Center
Talk Title: Advanced Techniques for Test and Verification of Industrial Cyber-Physical Systems
Abstract: Cyber-physical systems (CPSs) are used in safety critical applications such as automotive, aerospace, and medical devices, and so it is vital that these systems work correctly. Complex CPSs are developed and evaluated using approaches from the fields of software and control design. This talk contrasts the software and control design perspectives in the context of CPS and provides background on the roots of the model-based development (MBD) design paradigm, which is often used to develop CPSs. The talk also provides an overview of modern techniques used to test industrial CPSs and describes advanced approaches to verification for these systems.
One advanced approach to verifying CPSs uses numerical simulations to discover Lyapunov functions. Lyapunov functions for continuous dynamical systems are analogous to ranking functions for software systems; they can be used to certify convergence and also to obtain performance bounds on behaviors, but they are difficult to discover. Our technique uses simulation traces to discover Lyapunov functions for nonlinear and hybrid dynamical systems. In cases where Lyapunov functions cannot be obtained, Lyapunov-like functions are used to automatically identify non-convergent behaviors that demonstrate incorrect system behaviors. The technique can be used to either verify stability and obtain performance bounds for CPS designs or to automatically provide examples of incorrect system behavior.
Biography: Jim Kapinski is a Senior Principal Engineer at the Toyota Technical Center. He received his Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Carnegie Mellon University in 2005 and was a postdoctoral researcher at CMU from 2007 to 2008. He went on to found and lead Fixed-Point Consulting, serving clients in the defense, aerospace, and automotive industries. He has been with Toyota since 2012. His work at Toyota focuses on advanced research into verification techniques for embedded software for powertrain control systems. Jim's research interests include verification techniques for embedded control system designs and analysis of hybrid dynamical systems.
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. -
Center for Cyber-Physical Systems and Internet of Things and Ming Hsieh Institute for Electrical Engineering Joint Seminar Series on Cyber-Physical Systems
Mon, Nov 28, 2016 @ 02:00 PM - 03:00 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Luca Foschini , Co-founder and Chief Data Scientist, Evidation Health
Talk Title: Learn Health (from Your Wrist)
Abstract: Wearable technologies have seen a tremendous development in recent years: step and calorie counters have long made their way to our phones and watches, and new consumer-grade sensors can now measure a breadth of physiological functions that until recently could only be found in the monitoring equipment of intensive care units. However, despite the undisputed short-term benefits due to the user increased awareness, quantifying the potential value of wearable technologies in improving longer-term health outcomes remains an open question. In this talk we will present evidence that activity tracking data contains a wealth of information that is predictive of metrics directly related to health outcomes, ranging from medication adherence to lifestyle. To this end, we will show how machine learning tools need to be adapted to take full advantage of densely sampled, multi-variate time series of tracker data. Finally, we will reflect on how the predictive power of wearable data can be harnessed to inform behavior change interventions, and how expertise in computer science, clinical medicine, and behavioral psychology will have to join forces to overcome obstacles in adoption, user engagement, and regulations.
Biography: As Co-founder and Chief Data Scientist at Evidation Health, Luca Foschini PhD is responsible for data analytics, computing, research and development. Dr. Foschini has driven research collaborations with machine learning experts at MIT, behavioral economics departments at Harvard Business School and the Wharton School. Prior to his role at Evidation, Dr. Foschini held research positions in industry and academic institutions, including Ask.com, Google, ETH Zurich, and UC Santa Barbara. He has published numerous papers and co-authored several patents on efficient algorithms for partitioning and detecting anomalies in massive networks.Dr. Foschini is an alumnus of the Sant'Anna School of Pisa, Italy.
Host: Pierluigi Nuzzo
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. -
Center for Cyber-Physical Systems and Internet of Things and Ming Hsieh Institute for Electrical Engineering Joint Seminar Series on Cyber-Physical Systems
Tue, Nov 29, 2016 @ 02:00 PM - 03:00 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Partha Pratim Pande, Professor, Washington State University
Talk Title: Bringing Cores Closer Together: The Wireless Revolution in On-Chip Communication
Abstract: The continuing progress and integration levels in silicon technologies make complete end-user systems on a single chip possible. This massive level of integration makes modern manycore chips all pervasive in domains ranging from weather forecasting, astronomical data analysis, and biological applications to consumer electronics and smart phones. Network-on-Chips (NoCs) have emerged as communication backbones to enable a high degree of integration in manycore platforms. Despite their advantages, an important performance limitation in traditional NoCs arises from planar metal interconnect-based multi-hop communications, wherein the data transfer between far-apart blocks causes high latency and power consumption. The latency, power consumption, and interconnect routing problems of NoCs can be simultaneously addressed by replacing multi-hop wired paths with high-bandwidth single-hop long-range wireless links. In this talk, we will present design of the millimeter (mm)-wave wireless NoC architectures. We will present detailed performance evaluation and necessary design trade-offs for the small-world network-enabled wireless NoCs with respect to their conventional wireline counterparts in presence of both conventional CMP and emerging big data workloads. We will discuss how Machine Learning can be exploited to design energy efficient Wireless NoC architectures. We will finish this presentation by discussing how the wireless NoC paradigm can enable realization of datacenter-on-chip using heterogeneous processing cores.
Biography: Partha Pratim Pande is a Professor and holder of the Boeing Centennial Chair in computer engineering at the school of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Washington State University, Pullman, USA. His current research interests are novel interconnect architectures for manycore chips, on-chip wireless communication networks, and hardware accelerators for biocomputing. Dr. Pande currently serves as the Editor-in-Chief (EIC) of IEEE Transactions on Multi-Scale Computing Systems (TMSCS) and Associate Editor-in-Chief (A-EIC) of IEEE Design and Test (D&T). He is on the editorial boards of IEEE Transactions on VLSI (TVLSI), ACM Journal of Emerging Technologies in Computing Systems (JETC). He was the technical program committee chair of IEEE/ACM Network-on-Chip Symposium 2015. He also serves in the program committee of many reputed international conferences. He has won the NSF CAREER award in 2009. He is the winner of the Anjan Bose outstanding researcher award from the college of engineering, Washington State University in 2013.
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, Nov 30, 2016 @ 02:00 AM - 03:00 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Mohammad Rasouli, University of Michigan
Talk Title: Capacity and Energy Markets for Stable Renewable Economy
Series: CommNetS
Abstract: Existing supportive mechanisms for investment on renewable energies are not sustainable with higher penetration level of renewables. Rather, these mechanism should be replaced by market mechanisms. On the other hand, spot markets in place for conventional energies already suffer from underinvestment problem and there is an ongoing debate on the use of capacity markets for motivating sufficient investment.
In this talk we discuss the economical origins of underinvestment in conventional economies, and how renewables will change the situation. We propose a block investment market mechanism with forward moving approach that has the following features. (F1) The expansion and production allocations corresponding to the unique Nash Equilibrium (NE) of the game induced by the mechanism are the same as those that maximize the sum of utilities of the producers and the demand. (F2) It is budget balanced. (F3) It is individually rational. (F4) It is price efficient that is, the price for electricity at equilibrium is equal to the marginal utility of the demand and to the marginal cost of production by producers with free capacity.
Biography: Mohammad Rasouli is a PhD student in EECS: Systems joint with MSc in Economics at University of Michigan. He has received his Bachelor in EE from Sharif University of Technology. He uses stochastic control, game theory and mechanism design to study emerging cyber-physical systems including energy systems and cyber-security.
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. -
MHI/EE-Electrophysics Seminar, Wednesday, November 30th at 2PM in EEB 132
Wed, Nov 30, 2016 @ 02:00 PM - 03:30 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: David Allstot, University of California at Berkeley
Talk Title: Switched-Capacitor Circuits Research in Wireless Networks and Ultra-low-power Sensor Interfaces
Abstract: Emerging wireless standards aggregate information by selecting combinations of contiguous or non-contiguous channels, thereby enabling wider transmission bandwidths, and hence, higher data rates. Frequency-interleaved analog-to-digital conversion (FI-ADC) is an attractive emerging technique for carrier aggregation receivers because it facilitates an efficient way to dynamically vary the receiver bandwidth in order to address the many possible channel combinations. Compared to their time-interleaved counterparts, the specifications of the samplers in each parallel channel in FI-ADCs are significantly relaxed, thereby resulting in lower overall power consumption in the receiver. This work extends the FI-ADC idea to the quadrature frequency-interleaved oversampled data converter (QFI-ADC) to achieve greater aggregate data rates. Previously, digital-to-analog converter (DAC) and other inter-channel mismatches have limited the performance of QFI-ADCs. We propose a low-complexity element rotation algorithm (ERA) to mitigate DAC mismatches. The ERA is synthesized from the corresponding mismatch transfer function using a rigorous mathematical procedure which is shown to be generally applicable to low-pass, high-pass, band-pass and quadrature ERA's. Simulations confirm that the resulting low-complexity quadrature ERAs have advantages over previously proposed approaches in terms of both performance and hardware complexity. An additional gain calibration technique alleviates image folding due to mismatches between the quadrature DAC elements, which yields higher SNDR.
The original switched-capacitor power amplifier is a polar power amplifier, amplifying a non-constant envelope modulation by linear combination of the amplitude modulation and phase modulation. It has since been extended to operate across multiple supply domains and to operate using quadrature and multiphase signals. The proposed research will be important to extend the SCPA architecture for future applications. For instance, the SCPA can be used as an enabling technology for massive MIMO, where moderate power, highly efficient, versatile transmitter cores with moderate die area are needed. In massive MIMO, hundreds of transmitter chains drive hundreds of antenna elements to form communications beams that enhance data service to multiple individual users. In addition to massive MIMO, the SCPA offers high efficiency for low-power, high order modulation schemes that are being deployed for wireless sensor systems prevalent in the internet of things. Additionally the SCPA can offer enhanced out-of-band rejection by implementing digital filtering directly in the RF front-end circuitry of a transmitter. This can be by means of weighted summation of an array of small SCPAs. Finally the frequency range of the SCPA can be extended.
Finally, research on the use of CMOS ring amplifier circuits in bio-medical and other ultra-low-power sensor networks is discussed. An analog compressed sensing front-end is used to motivate further investigations.
Biography: David J. Allstot received the B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. degrees from the Univ. of Portland, Oregon State Univ., and the Univ. of California, Berkeley.
He has held several industrial and academic positions. He was the Boeing-Egtvedt Chair Professor of Engineering at the Univ. of Washington from 1999 to 2012 and Chair of the Dept. of Electrical Engineering from 2004 to 2007. In 2012 he was a Visiting Professor of Electrical Engineering at Stanford University and from 2013 to 2016, he held a three-year appointment as the MacKay Professor in Residence in the EECS Dept. at UC Berkeley.
Dr. Allstot has advised about 65 M.S. and 40 Ph.D. graduates, published more than 300 papers, and received several awards for outstanding teaching and research including the 1980 IEEE W.R.G. Baker Award, 1995 and 2010 IEEE Circuits and Systems Society (CASS) Darlington Award, 1998 IEEE International Solid-State Circuits Conference (ISSCC) Beatrice Winner Award, 2004 IEEE CASS Charles A. Desoer Technical Achievement Award, 2005 Semiconductor Research Corp. Aristotle Award, 2008 Semiconductor Industries Assoc. University Research Award, 2011 IEEE CASS Mac Van Valkenburg Award, and 2015 IEEE Trans. on Biomedical Circuits and Systems Best Paper Award. He has been very active in service to the IEEE Circuits and Systems and Solid-State Circuits Societies throughout his career.
Host: MHI/EE-Electrophysics
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. -
MHI CommNetS Seminar
Wed, Nov 30, 2016 @ 02:00 PM - 03:00 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Mohammad Rasouli, University of Michigan
Talk Title: Capacity and Energy Markets for Stable Renewable Economy
Series: CommNetS
Abstract: Existing supportive mechanisms for investment on renewable energies are not sustainable with higher penetration level of renewables. Rather, these mechanism should be replaced by market mechanisms. On the other hand, spot markets in place for conventional energies already suffer from underinvestment problem and there is an ongoing debate on the use of capacity markets for motivating sufficient investment.
In this talk we discuss the economical origins of underinvestment in conventional economies, and how renewables will change the situation. We propose a block investment market mechanism with forward moving approach that has the following features. (F1) The expansion and production allocations corresponding to the unique Nash Equilibrium (NE) of the game induced by the mechanism are the same as those that maximize the sum of utilities of the producers and the demand. (F2) It is budget balanced. (F3) It is individually rational. (F4) It is price efï¬cient that is, the price for electricity at equilibrium is equal to the marginal utility of the demand and to the marginal cost of production by producers with free capacity.
Biography: Mohammad Rasouli is a PhD student in EECS: Systems joint with MSc in Economics at University of Michigan. He has received his Bachelor in EE from Sharif University of Technology. He uses stochastic control, game theory and mechanism design to study emerging cyber-physical systems including energy systems and cyber-security.
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.
