SUNMONTUEWEDTHUFRISAT
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Events for November
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A Baseband, Impulse Ultra Wideband Transceiver for Low Power Applications
Tue, Nov 07, 2006 @ 03:30 PM - 04:30 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Dr. Ian O'Donnell, UC BerkeleyAbstract: Low bit-rate, short range radios are being proposed for a variety of applications including remote sensing/control, asset tracking, security, and as a replacement for wired interconnect. While not demanding aggressive throughput, these applications do require low cost, power efficient operation and optionally the ability to perform distance measurements. Unfortunately, current radio performance is up to an order of magnitude away from these cost and power targets. However, ultra-wideband signaling using short impulses presents an attractive alternative that is well-suited to a highly integrated, low power implementation. This talk explores the system performance and power consumption trade-offs, discusses the system specification and low power circuit design, and demonstrates a low power, impulse ultra-wideband transceiver. Based on a digital correlating filter architecture, this transceiver employs the novel approach of duty-cycling the analog gain and sampling circuitry between received pulses to further reduce power consumption. A single-chip front-end design, implemented in a standard digital 0.13micron CMOS process, will be presented. The front-end is comprised of a 1-bit, 1.92Gsample/s ADC, a 50-Ohm input match, 0dB to 42dB of variable gain, programmable control logic, a sub-1-PPM trimmable 60MHz oscillator, and a pulse transmitter. Power consumption was measured at 4mW (RX) and 2mW (TX) for a 30Mpulse/s pulse rate and 0.6mW (RX) and 0.4mW (TX) for 1Mpulse/s at 1.1V. The digital backend functionality was emulated, and extracted simulations predict a power consumption of 3.8mW (tracking) and 33mW (acquisition) during reception at 30Mpulse/s and 0.1mW (tracking) and 1.1mW (acquisition) at 1Mpulse/s.Bio: Ian David O'Donnell received his B.S., M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from the University of California at Berkeley in 1993, 1996 and 2006 respectively. His master's topic was in the area of digital, low power, CMOS circuit and system design for a wireless LAN receiver as part of the InfoPad project. From 1996 to 1999 he worked at Silicon Graphics, Inc. as a digital ASIC designer, and in 1999 he joined NVIDIA, Inc. where he worked on high-speed serial design. In 1998 he returned to Berkeley at the Berkeley Wireless Research Center to investigate low cost, low power, short range radio design. His Ph.D. research focused on the demonstration of ultra low power communication through the use of impulse-based ultra-wideband signaling combined with an examination of performance and power consumption trade-offs at the system and circuit levels. In 2006 he received the Jack Neubauer Award from the IEEE Vehicular Technology Society for the best system paper of the year.Host: Prof. Keith Chugg, chugg@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. -
SHORT COURSE on CODING and OPTIMIZATION
Fri, Nov 10, 2006 @ 09:30 AM - 01:00 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
SPEAKER: Dr. Pascal Vontobel (HP Labs)ABSTRACT: Whenever information is transmitted across a channel, we have to ensure its integrity against errors. The ground-breaking work of Shannon showed (at least theoretically) how such integrity can be achieved, namely by using an appropriately chosen encoder at the sender side and an appropriately chosen decoder at the receiver side.From a practical point of view, so-called low-density parity-check (LDPC) and turbo codes together with message-passing iterative decoders have become increasingly popular in the last decade. It is fair to say that these codes and decoding algorithms (and ideas related to them) have thoroughly changed much of modern communications. Before this backdrop, a good understanding of these types of communication techniques is obviously highly desirable, especially the understanding of iterative decoding of finite-length codes.Another interesting development in coding theory is the linear programming decoder that was recently proposed by Feldman, Karger, and Wainwright. Simulation results indicate that this decoding algorithm seems to have a similar decoding behavior as iterative decoding.Ideas from optimization theory have arguably played a key role in the two above-mentioned developments. This stems from the fact that decoding can be formulated as an optimization problem. Given that this optimization problem cannot be solved efficiently for good codes, one has to look for suboptimal, yet efficient, algorithms that approximately solve the optimization problem. Both message-passing iterative decoding and linear programming decoding can be seen as successful attempts to formulate such algorithms.Starting from the optimization setup, the first part of this tutorial will introduce message-passing iterative decoding and linear programming decoding and show how they are tightly connected. (This part of the tutorial is planned to be accessible to an broad audience with a general background in communication theory / decision theory.) The second part will go more into the details of certain topics as listed below.First Part: a) Motivation for coding theory, b) Factor graphs and message-passing iterative decoding, c) Linear programming decoding, d) Graph-cover decoding as a way to connect message-passing iterative decoding and linear programming decodingSecond Part: a) Geometry and properties of the fundamental cone, b) Pseudo-weights; lower bounds on the minimum pseudo-weight, c) Low-complexity algorithms for linear programming decoding, d) Bounds on the threshold of linear programming decoding(Based on joint work with Ralf Koetter, UIUC.)BIO: Pascal O. Vontobel received a diploma in electrical engineering in 1997, a post-diploma in information techniques in 2002, and a PhD degree in electrical engineering in 2003, all from ETH Zurich, Switzerland. After being a postdoctoral research associate at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the University of Wisconsin-Madison (visiting assistant professor), and at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he joined the Information Theory Research Group at Hewlett-Packard Labs in Palo Alto, CA, in the summer of 2006 as a research scientist. For his PhD thesis he was awarded the ETH medal.He is interested in information theory and signal processing in general. More specifically, for his diploma thesis he worked on source coding. Since then, he has mainly looked at the construction of LDPC and turbo codes based on algebraic principles, the calculation and bounding of capacities and information rates of finite-state machine channels, and connections between factor graphs, the summary-product algorithm, and electrical networks. Most recently, he has worked towards an understanding and characterization of the summary-product algorithm on factor graphs with cycles and its connections to linear programming (LP) decoding.Host: Dr. Giuseppe Caire, caire@usc.edu
Location: James H. Zumberge Hall Of Science (ZHS) - 360
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. -
Fundamental Limits on Wide Bandwidth Signal Acquisition (A Convexity and Optimization Perspective)
Fri, Nov 10, 2006 @ 02:00 PM - 03:00 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
SPEAKER: Professor Moe Z. Win, MITABSTRACT: Signal acquisition is a challenging task in wide bandwidth transmission systems. The problem involves searching for a location of sequence-phase within a required accuracy, which is inversely proportional to the transmission bandwidth. To address this, we propose a search technique that takes advantage of multipath, which has long been regarded as deleterious for efficient communication, to aid the sequence acquisition in dense multipath channels. Using optimization and convexity theories, we determine the fundamental limits of achievable mean acquisition times (MATs) for a class of serial-search strategies. In particular, we derive both the minimum and maximum MATs and the conditions for achieving these limits. We prove that a fixed-step serial search, a form of non-consecutive serial search, achieves the near-optimal MAT. Our results also show that the conventional serial search, in which consecutive cells are tested serially, should be avoided since it results in the maximum MAT. We also consider a randomized search strategy and show that the corresponding MAT is at most two times the MAT of the optimal serial search. These results are valid for all signal-to-noise ratio values, regardless of the specifics of the detection layer and the fading distributions.Joint work with Watcharapan Suwansantisuk.Bio: Moe Win is an Associate Professor at the Laboratory for Information & Decision Systems (LIDS), Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Prior to joining MIT, he spent 5 years at AT&T Research Laboratories and 7 years at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. As a Presidential Fellow at USC, he received both an M.S. degree in Applied Mathematics and the Ph.D. degree in Electrical Engineering in 1998. His main research interests are the application of mathematical and statistical theories to communication, detection, and estimation problems. Specific current research topics include measurement and modeling of time-varying channels, design and analysis of multiple antenna systems, ultra-wide bandwidth (UWB) communications systems, optical communications systems, and space communications systems.Dr. Win has been involved actively in organizing and chairing a number of international conferences. He is the current chair and past secretary (2002-2004) for the Radio Communications Committee of the IEEE Communications Society. He served as Area Editor (2003-2006) for Modulation and Signal Design and Editor (1998-2006), both for the IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON COMMUNICATIONS. He was Guest-Editor for the 2002 IEEE JOURNAL ON SELECTED AREAS IN COMMUNICATIONS (Special Issue on Ultra-Wideband Radio in Multiaccess Wireless Communications). He received the IEEE Antennas and Propagation Society Sergei A. Schelkunoff Transactions Prize Paper Award in 2003. In 2004, he received the Fulbright Fellowship, the Institute of Advanced Study Natural Sciences and Technology Fellowship, and the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers from the White House. In 2006 he was co-recipient (jointly with Professor Robert A. Scholtz) of the Eric E. Sumner Award, an IEEE Technical Field Award, "for pioneering contributions to ultra-wide band communications science and technology." Professor Win is an IEEE Distinguished Lecturer and elected Fellow of the IEEE, cited "for contributions to wideband wireless transmission."Host: Prof. Robert Scholtz, scholtz@usc.edu
Location: Frank R. Seaver Science Center (SSC) - 319
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. -
From Universal Channel Coding to the Tracking of Stopping Times
Mon, Nov 13, 2006 @ 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
SPEAKER: Dr. Aslan Tchamkerten, Postdoctoral Associate, MITABSTRACT: We consider point-to-point communication over discrete memoryless channels. Since early 1960's it has been known that, without feedback, the set of achievable rates strongly depends on whether the channel statistics are revealed to the communicating parties. In contrast, if noiseless feedback is available, there is no rate loss under very general assumptions. However, if we now consider the second order question "what is the optimal tradeoff between delay and error probability for universal communication?" the answer is far from clear. Are there blind feedback schemes that perform as quickly and as reliably as if the channel were revealed to the communicating parties? Except for trivial cases (e.g., binary erasure channel) this has been an open question since mid 1970's.In the first part of the talk, we first show that there exist non-trivial families of channels for which universally optimal feedback schemes exist. Maybe somewhat surprisingly, these schemes are not training based. Second, given a pair of channels, we give a simple criterion under which no universally optimal scheme exist for that pair.As part of our quest for robust communication, in the second part of the talk, we address the situation where the feedback channel is noisy. This setting leads to an important synchronization issue when encoder and decoder decide on the basis of stopping times. We provide insights into this issue by solving a new statistical problem, the tracking stopping times problem. Interestingly, this problem is a generalization of the celebrated (Bayesian) change-point problem, and it has several applications in other areas, such as detection and forecasting.This is based on joint work with U. Niesen, E. Telatar, and G. Wornell.Bio: Aslan Tchamkerten received the engineer physicist diploma from the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland, in 2000. After finishing the graduate school in communication systems at EPFL in 2001, he started his Ph.D. in the Information Theory Lab., and graduated in 2005. Since 2005 he has been a postdoctoral associate at MIT (EECS).Host: Prof. Giuseppe Caire, caire@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. -
Design of Asynchronous Pipelined Systems
Mon, Nov 13, 2006 @ 02:00 PM - 03:00 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
CENG SEMINAR SERIES"Design of Asynchronous Pipelined Systems"Prof. Montek SinghDepartment of Computer ScienceUniversity of North Carolina at Chapel HillAbstract:In this talk, I will present some of our recent work on several aspects of the design of asynchronous pipelined systems. I will begin with an overview of our asynchronous pipelined circuit styles, focusing especially on Mousetrap, which is a high-speed pipeline style suitable for efficient standard-cell implementations. Mousetrap was chosen for the industrial-strength asynchronous pipelined synthesis flow being developed under the DARPA CLASS program. I will present our recent accomplishments in and experiences with the CLASS synthesis flow. Next I will present a novel approach to "counterflow pipelining," which enables several useful architectural concepts (e.g. preemption, speculation, eager evaluation) to be efficiently implemented in asynchronous pipelined ASICs. The key idea is to send "anti-tokens" opposite to the flow of data in order to preempt computations whose results are deemed to be no longer useful. Unlike existing approaches, our approach is arbiter-free, yet correctly handles all metastability issues. Finally, I will describe a high-level synthesis approach called "loop pipelining," which alleviates performance bottlenecks in iterative specifications. We introduce a novel self-timed ring architecture and a synthesis approach, which allows multiple problem instances to be concurrently computed, thereby obtaining substantial performance improvements (1.3-9.7X).Bio:Montek Singh has been an assistant professor in Computer Science at the University of North Carolina (UNC) at Chapel Hill since 2001. He received the PhD degree from Columbia University in 2002, and the BTech degree from IIT Delhi, India. His research interest is in the area of asynchronous circuits and systems. His work has been transfered to industry, including IBM, Boeing, and Handshake Solutions (a Philips subsidiary). He is co-Program Chair for ASYNC 2007. He has received a Best Paper award and a Best Paper Finalist nomination at the ASYNC Symposium, an IBM Faculty Award, and was awarded a contract under the prestigious DARPA CLASS program.Host: Prof. Peter Beerel, Ext. 04481
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - -248
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Rosine Sarafian
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. -
Interface between Information Theory and Estimation Theory: THEORY AND APPLICATIONS
Tue, Nov 14, 2006 @ 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
SPEAKER: Prof. Antonia Tulino, University of NaplesABSTRACT: For signals observed in Gaussian noise, there are several interesting intersections between information theory and linear and nonlinear minimum mean-square error (MMSE) estimation.A recently unveiled fundamental relationship between the input-output mutual information and the MMSE achievable by the optimal estimator of the input is now emerging as a powerful new tool that provides with explicit expressions for the sought derivative of the mutual information. This relationship holds for arbitrarily distributed scalar and vector signals, as well as for discrete-input discrete-output channels.Using this new tool, we have been able to analytically solve some of the long-standing constrained optimization problems in information theory. One example of such optimization problems is the problem often encountered in transmitter design of allocating a certain amount of power among a bank of parallel noninteracting channels. Examples abound, both in the wireline and the wireless domains are:* Multicarrier transmission. Signalling takes place over a number of distinct frequency bands, each of which constitutes a parallel channel. These bands may be nonoverlapping or, as in OFDM (orthogonal frequency division multiplexing), overlapping but with spectral shapes designed to ensure orthogonality. A prime application in the wireline world is the DMT (discrete multitone) technique employed in digital subscriber lines.* Multiantenna communication. If multiple transmit and receive antennas are employed and the transmitter knows the transfer coefficients between the antennas, the left singular vectors of the resulting matrix can be used for signaling and the right singular vectors for reception. The outcome is a set of parallel noninteracting channels.* Power control for fading channels. When the gain of an individual frequency-flat channel varies over time, it can be seen as a collection of parallel channels where each such channel encompasses a group of symbols over which the fading coefficients are identical.* Dispersive channels. For linear dispersive channels or parallel channels with correlated noises, a power-preserving orthonormal linear transformation at transmitter and receiver turns the channel into one with parallel branches with uncorrelated noises and possibly different signal-to-noise ratios.Another example of problems that use this fundamental link between information theory and estimation theory we have been able to analytically solve is the monotonic Decrease of the Non-Gaussianness of the Sum of independent Random Variables. Although long suspected that the non-Gaussianness decreases at each convolution, it was not shown until 2004 (in the equivalent version of increasing differential entropy) by Artstein, Ball, Barthe and Naor by means of a tour-de-force in functional analysis. Using the relationship between non-Gaussianness and MMSE in Gaussian channels, we will give a simplified proof of the above result dealing with the more general setting of non-identically distributed random variables.Bio:
Antonia Maria Tulino was born in Napoli, Italy, on September 12, 1971. She received the Dr. Engr. degree (summa cum laude) from the Universita degli Studi di Napoli Federico II, Napoli, Italy, in 1995 and the Ph.D. degree in electronic engineering from the Seconda Universita degli Studi di Napoli, Napoli, Italy, in 1999. In 1999, she was a Research Scientist at the Center for Wireless Communications (CWC), Oulu, Finland. From January 2000 to February 2001, she was a post-doctoral visitor with Princeton University, Princeton, NJ. From February 2001 to November 2002, she was an Assistant Professor with the Dipartmento di Ingegneria delle Telecomunicazioni, Universita degli Studi del Sannio, Benevento, Italy. From November 2002 she has been an Associate Professor with the Dipartmento di Ingegneria Elettronica e delle Telecomunicazioni, Universita degli Studi di Napoli "Federico II", Napoli, Italy. She is periodically appointed as a visiting research staff member in the Department of Electrical Engineering, Princeton University. Her current research interests are in the areas of statistical signal processing, information theory, and random matrix theory.Host: Prof. Giuseppe Caire, caire@usc.eduLocation: 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. -
Codes for Optical CDMA
Tue, Nov 14, 2006 @ 03:30 PM - 04:30 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
SPEAKER: Mr. Reza Omrani, Communication Sciences Institute, University of Southern CaliforniaABSTRACT: There has been a recent upsurge of interest in applying code division multiple access (CDMA) techniques to optical networks. This interest is in part due to the increase in security afforded by OCDMA as measured for instance, by the increased effort needed to intercept an OCDMA signal, and in part due to the flexibility and simplicity of network control afforded by optical-CDMA (OCDMA). There are two main approaches to code design for OCDMA systems. The first approach uses direct sequence encoding, which employs {0,1} sequences with good correlation properties as code sequences, and the data sequence modulates the code sequence simply by switching it on or off. These may be termed as 1-D optical orthogonal codes (OOC) since the code sequences are only associated with the time dimension. It has recently been recognized that in order to bring down the required chip rate to within practical limits, it is desirable that 2-D {0,1} codes be used in which the code sequence consist of a 2-D pattern in which the second dimension corresponds to wavelength.The second OCDMA approach is via phase encoding in which the code sequences are collections of complex numbers of unit magnitude with each entry associated to a carrier of different wavelength. The phase of an element in the λ-th sequence corresponds to the phase of the λ-th carrier. The focus of our work is on efficient code design for OCDMA systems under both direct sequence and phase encoding approaches.We first introduce some new bounds on the size of 1-D and 2-D OOCs. Subsequently, the focus is on explicit constructions for 2-D wavelength-time OOCs. We introduce four major constructions for wavelength-time OOCs which include a method to map 1-D OOCs to 2-D OOCs, a method based on Reed-Solomon Codes, a method which concatenates a constant weight code with a Reed-Solomon based 2-D OOC and finally a function-plot method in which the values of an appropriately-chosen function are used to derive the 2-D codes. The functions used in function plot construction include polynomial functions and rational functions.A major drawback of OCDMA systems is their low spectral efficiency. In this work we explore a modulation scheme for OCDMA systems which has the potential for increasing the spectral efficiency manyfold. We term this scheme code-cycle modulation (CCM). Under this modulation scheme, different cyclic shifts of the code sequence assigned to each user are used to transmit M-ary information. While this means of modulation was known earlier in the literature, most prior modulation schemes needed M different receiver units to recover the data resulting in increased complexity and power. In this work we provide a novel receiver architecture with significantly reduced power requirements and complexity.Following this, we turn our attention to phase-encoded OCDMA. We first derive a mathematical model for the output of this system and based on this model we introduce a metric to design code sequences for asynchronous transmission. Then, a connection between the phase-encoding sequence design problem and the PMEPR (peak to mean envelope power ratio) problem which arises in OFDM transmission is established. We construct a family of phase sequences which are based on the theory of generalized bent functions and with properties desirable for asynchronous phase encoding OCDMA systems.BIO: Reza Omrani received his B.S. degree from the University of Tehran, Tehran, Iran, and his M.S. degree from the University of Southern California (USC), Los Angeles, both in electrical engineering, in 1999 and 2002, respectively. He did his PhD dissertation under the supervision of Professor P. Vijay Kumar at the Communication Sciences Institute, Department of Electrical Engineering-Systems, USC. His research interests include low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes, network coding, combinatorics and signal design for good correlation properties.Host: Michael J. Neely, mjneely@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. -
The Information Lost in Erasures
Wed, Nov 15, 2006 @ 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
SPEAKER: Professor Sergio Verdu, Princeton UniversityABSTRACT: In this talk we examine the impact of erasures on the fundamental limits of lossless data compression, lossy data compression, channel coding and denoising. Particular attention is focused on the regime of sporadic erasures.We define the erasure entropy of a collection of random variables as the sum of entropies of the individual variables conditioned on all the rest. The erasure entropy rate is shown to be the minimal amount of bits per erasure required to recover the lost information in the limit of small erasure probability.When we allow recovery of the erased symbols within a prescribed degree of distortion, the fundamental tradeoff is described by the erasure rate-distortion function which we characterize. We also examine the decrease of channel capacity due to sporadic erasures. The fundamental limits when no additional encoded information is available are also studied; in this case the erased and corrupted information is reconstructed by the denoiser solely on the basis of its context.Based on joint work with Prof. Tsachy Weissman (Stanford University).Bio: Sergio Verdu is a Professor of Electrical Engineering at Princeton University. He received the Ph.D. degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1984. His 1998 text "Multiuser Detection" earned him the 2000 Frederick E. Terman Award from the American Society for Engineering Education. Elected IEEE Fellow in 1992 for "contributions to multiuser communications and to information theory", he received the IEEE Third Millennium Medal in 2000. In 2005 he was awarded a Doctorate Honoris Causa from the Polytechnic University of Catalonia, Barcelona, Spain.He has received the 1992 IEEE D. Fink Paper Award, the 1998 Information Theory Outstanding Paper Award, a Golden Jubilee Paper Award from the IEEE Information Theory Society, the 2000 Paper Award from the Japan Telecommunications Advancement Foundation, the 2002 Leonard G. Abraham Prize Award from the IEEE Communications Society, and the 2006 Joint IEEE Communications/Information Theory Paper Award.Sergio Verdu served as President of the IEEE Information Theory Society in 1997 and is currently Editor-in-Chief of Foundations and Trends in Communications and Information Theory.Host: Prof. Giuseppe Caire, caire@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. -
Photons in the Bio-Nanotech Era
Thu, Nov 16, 2006 @ 02:00 PM - 03:00 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
DISTINGUISHED LECTURER SERIES"Photons in the Bio-Nanotech Era"Prof. Sadik EsenerUniversity of California, San DiegoGerontology Auditorium (GER-124)Thursday, November 16, 20062:00-3:00p.m.[A reception will follow at 3:00p.m.]Abstract: One of the important scientific missions over the next decade will be the exploration of the "Inner Space" at the cellular and molecular levels. Indeed developing a detailed understanding of the "Intra Cellular Nanoworld" appears to be the key for fighting many major diseases including cancer. This mission to the biological Nanoworld is dictated on one hand by the desire to understand life at the molecular level and on the other hand by the need to reduce suffering, death, and the economic burden of these diseases on the society. Since the invention of the microscope optics and biology have been strongly tied together with the uncovering the cellular structure of biological tissues. However, as the research interest shifts from micro-systems to nano-systems for the exploration of the "inner space" new challenges and opportunities emerge in the use of photons. This presentation will first summarize the techniques we are developing at the NanoTumor Center at UCSD and its partner institutions established by NCI to investigate the use of Nanotechnology to fight cancer. Challenges and opportunities to photonic techniques when compared to these new techniques will be discussed. Several on going experiments and related results will be highlighted.Biography: Sadik Esener is a Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Materials Sciences at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD). He holds a Ph.D. degree in Applied Physics and Electrical Engineering from UCSD (1987). He is the Director and PI of the UCSD Cancer Nanotechnology Center funded by the National Cancer Institute. Previously he served as the Director of the Center for Heterogeneously Integrated Photonics Systems (CHIPS), a multi-university DARPA funded opto-center for biophotonics and nanophotonics. From 1997 to 2001, he has served as the director of the Opto-Electronic Stacked Processors (OESP) industry/university consortium on Free Space Optical Interconnects and on the integration of Vertical Cavity Surface Emitting Laser arrays. From 1998 to 2001, he also was the Director of the Fast Read-out Optical Storage consortium on parallel accessing optical disks, partially supported by DARPA and partially by Industry. He has authored several book chapters, and organized and chaired scientific international conferences. Esener is also a co-founder of several companies including Nanogen Inc. that relates to his work on electrically addressed gene chips, Call/Recall Inc. that relates to his work on multilayer optical disk storage, Optical Micro Machines and Ziva Inc. that relate to his work on all optical switching and free space optics, and Genoptix Inc., that relates to his more recent work in biophotonics. He is a fellow of the Optical Society of America.Host: Prof. Alexander Sawchuk
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Rosine Sarafian
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. -
Error-Control and Constrained Coding Solutions for DNA Microarrays and Aptamer Array Designs
Tue, Nov 21, 2006 @ 11:00 AM - 01:00 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
SPEAKER: Professor Olgica Milenkovic, University of Colorado, BoulderABSTRACT: DNA microarrays and aptamer arrays are two classes of systems used for analyzing the dynamical activity of cells in terms of their RNA and protein fingerprints. These macromolecule arrays provide valuable information for disease diagnostics and monitoring, as well as for the development and testing of genetic drugs and therapeutic RNA antibodies. In the past, substantial efforts were made to increase the quality of the manufacturing process and to improve the reliability of microarrays and aptamer arrays. Nevertheless, there still exist many issues that have to be resolved in order to ensure proper functionality of these arrays in the presence of failures and dropout events occurring during and after the production process.In the first part of the talk, we focus on several problems related to DNA microarrays. We briefly introduce gene regulatory networks and the process of reverse engineering regulatory networks in terms of DNA microarray data. We then proceed to describe how classical error-control coding techniques can be used to increase the accuracy of data generated by DNA arrays subjected to spot failures. We propose an integrated framework for analyzing quality control and error-correction in DNA microarrays generated by photolitographic VLSIPS (Very Large Scale Immobilized Polymer Synthesis) methods. In this context, the issues of base scheduling, mask design and border-length minimization, construction of quality control arrays and good probe multiplexing strategies are addressed. The presented analysis is based on combining and extending results regarding balanced error-correcting codes and superimposed codes.In the second part of the talk, we briefly describe aptamers and the SELEX (Systematic Evolution of Ligands by Exponential Enrichment) process used for identifying and isolating RNA aptamers. We then proceed to describe a generalization of the paradigm of constrained coding and its application to structured selection and generation of RNA aptamers. The proposed approach is based on viewing (folded) RNA aptamers as words of regular and context-free grammars which include bio-chemical constraints in their production rules. The grammar based approach to constrained coding allows for counting the number of aptamer structures and for generating such structures in terms of well known combinatorial techniques.The material to be presented in the talk is self-contained and it is assumed that the audience does not have a background in molecular biology.BIO: Olgica Milenkovic received her MS degree in mathematics and PhD in electrical engineering from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, in 2001 and 2002, respectively. In August 2002, she joined the University of Colorado, Boulder, where she is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. In the summer of 2005, she was a Discrete Mathematics and Theoretical Computer Science (DIMACS) Visitor at Bell Labs, Lucent Technologies. She is currently a Visiting Professor at the Center for Information Theory and Applications at the University of California, San Diego. Her research interests include error-control and constrained coding, analysis of algorithms, combinatorics, probability theory, and bioinformatics.Host: Prof. Keith Chugg, chugg@usc.edu
Location: James H. Zumberge Hall Of Science (ZHS) - 163
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. -
Loop Calculus in Statistical Physics and Information Theory
Mon, Nov 27, 2006 @ 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
SPEAKER: Dr. Michael Chertkov, Los Alamos National LaboratoryABSTRACT: In this talk I describe loop calculus. This recently developed theoretical tool allows to express partition function of a statistical inference physics problem on a graph in terms of a series, where each term is associated with a loop on the graph. Utility of the loop calculus for analysis of modern (Low-Density-Parity-Check) error-correction codes, and also for improving decoding, is demonstrated.Bio: Chertkov's areas of interest include theoretical physics and non-equilibrium statistical physics applied to error-correction (information) theory, turbulence (statistical hydrodynamics) and statistical and nonlinear optics.Chertkov received his Ph.D. in physics from the Weizmann Institute of Science in 1996, and his M.Sc. from Novosibirsk State University in 1990. After his Ph.D., Chertkov spent three years at Princeton University as the R.H. Dicke Fellow in the Department of Physics. He joined Los Alamos National Lab in 1999, initially as the J.R. Oppenheimer Fellow in the Theoretical Division. In 2002, he became a full-term technical staff member in the same division at LANL.Host: Prof. Keith Chugg, chugg@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.
