SUNMONTUEWEDTHUFRISAT
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Events for December
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MHI/EE-Electrophysics Seminar
Fri, Dec 02, 2016 @ 10:00 AM - 11:30 AM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: David Allstot, University of California at Berkeley
Talk Title: Switched-Capacitor Circuits: From Maxwell to the Internet of Things
Abstract: Maxwell introduced the concept of the equivalent switched-capacitor resistance in Vol. 2 of his Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism in 1873. The concept laid dormant for almost a century until it became commercially viable by exploiting the switches, native capacitors, and operational amplifiers of MOS IC technology. CMOS switched-capacitor circuits have been used in high-volume data converters and signal processing ICs for nearly four decades, and are ubiquitous in modern RF transceiver circuits and emerging as a dominant design approach in CMOS bio-medical and internet-of things circuits and systems, etc.
This talk will begin with a brief history of SC circuits as applied to data converters, precision high-order filters, operational amplifiers, etc.
Next, SC circuits are described for body-area-networks (BAN) that integrate multiple sensor nodes in the portable and wearable bio-medical systems that are revolutionizing healthcare. A typical BAN comprises several bio-signal and motion sensors and uses ultra-low-power short-haul radios in conjunction with nearby smart-phones or handheld devices (with GPS capabilities) to communicate via the internet with a doctor or other healthcare professional. Higher energy efficiency is critical to the development of feature-rich, wearable and reliable personal health monitoring systems.
The amount of data transmitted to the smart-phone increases as more sensors are added to the BAN. Because the energy consumed for RF transmission is proportional to the data rate, it is advantageous to compress the bio-signal at the sensor prior to digitization and transmission. This energy-efficient paradigm is possible using compressed sensing-”a sampling theory wherein a compressible signal can be acquired using only a few incoherent measurements. For ECG signals, for example, large compression factors are achievable which means similar reductions in energy consumption.
SC circuits are having a huge impact on wireless communications. A major challenge is the RF power amplifier dissipates a large fraction of the total power of a transceiver because of its low efficiency. Despite more than two decades of extensive research, the challenge of on-chip RF Pas with high efficiency in digital-friendly CMOS technologies has not been met. Switching PA topologies with relatively high efficiency have gained momentum, and relatively high output power is being delivered using power combining techniques. Supply regulation techniques have enabled higher efficiency when amplifying non-constant envelope modulated signals. The switched-capacitor RF power amplifier technique which meets many of the remaining challenges is described and some future directions are presented.
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. -
Ming Hsieh Institute Seminar Series on Integrated Systems
Fri, Dec 02, 2016 @ 02:00 PM - 04:00 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Dr. Walid Ali-Ahmad, VP Technology, Qualcomm Inc.
Talk Title: RF Front-Ends and Transceiver Systems Issues for Carrier Aggregation based 4G User Equipment
Host: Prof. Hossein Hashemi, Prof. Mike Chen, and Prof. Mahta Moghaddam
More Information: MHI Seminar Series IS - Walid_Ali-Ahmad.pdf
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 132
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Jenny Lin
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
Fri, Dec 02, 2016 @ 04:00 PM - 05:00 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Lorenzo Alvisi , Professor, Cornell University/University of Texas, Austin
Talk Title: The Pit and the Pendulum
Abstract: Since the elegant foundations of transaction processing were established in the mid 70's with the notion of serializability and the codification of the ACID (Atomicity, Consistency, Isolation, Durability) paradigm, performance has not been considered one of ACID's strong suits, especially for distributed data stores. Indeed, the NoSQL/BASE movement of the last decade was born out of frustration with the limited scalability of traditional ACID solutions, only to become itself a source of frustration once the challenges of programming applications in this new paradigm began to sink in. But how fundamental is this dichotomy between performance and ease of programming? In this talk, I will share what my students and I have recently learned while trying to overcome the traditional terms of this classic tradeoff.
Biography: Lorenzo Alvisi is a University Distinguished Teaching Professor at the University of Texas at Austin, where he holds an Endowed Professorship in Computer Science. He is spending 2016-17 as a visiting scholar in the Computer Science Department at Cornell University, where he received his Ph.D. after earning a Laurea degree Summa cum Laude in Physics from the University of Bologna, Italy. His research interests are in the theory and practice of distributed computing, with a particular focus on dependability. He is a Fellow of the ACM and IEEE, an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Fellow, and the recipient of a Humboldt Research Award, an NSF Career Award, and several teaching awards. He serves on the editorial boards of ACM TOCS and Springer's Distributed Computing and is a council member of the CRA's Computing Community Consortium. In addition to distributed computing, he is passionate about western classical music and red Italian motorcycles
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. -
Greening a Top-20 Economy: Energy-Efficient Timely Transportation of Heavy-Duty Trucks
Wed, Dec 07, 2016 @ 02:00 PM - 03:00 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Minghua Chen, Chinese University of Hong Kong
Talk Title: Greening a Top-20 Economy: Energy-Efficient Timely Transportation of Heavy-Duty Trucks
Abstract: In 2015, the US trucking industry hauls 70.1% of all freight tonnage and collects $726.4 billion in gross freight revenues. This impressive number corresponds to 2.3x of Hong Kong GDP and would rank 19 worldwide if measured against countries. Meanwhile, only 4% of total vehicle population, heavy-duty trucks consume 17.6% of energy in transportation sector (including cars, trucks, airplanes, pipelines, and railways). This alerting observation, together with that fuel cost is the largest operating cost (34%) for truck operators, makes it critical to reduce fuel consumption for cost-effective and environment-friendly heavy-duty truck operation.
In this work, we consider a key yet under-explored problem in heavy-duty truck operation: timely transportation, where a heavy-duty truck travels between two locations across the national highway system subject to a hard deadline constraint. The objective is to minimize the total fuel consumption of the truck, by optimizing both route planning and speed planning. The problem is important for cost-effective and environment-friendly truck operation, and it is uniquely challenging due to its combinatorial nature as well as the need of considering hard deadline constraint. We first show that the problem is NP-Complete; thus exact solution is computational prohibited unless P=NP. We then design a fully polynomial time approximation scheme (FPTAS) that attains an approximation ratio of 1+ \epsilon with a network-size induced complexity of O(mn^2/\epsilon^2), where m and n are the numbers of nodes and edges, respectively. While achieving highly-preferred theoretical performance guarantee, the proposed FPTAS still suffers from long running time when applying to national-wide highway systems with tens of thousands of nodes and edges. Leveraging elegant insights from studying the dual of the original problem, we design a fast subgradient-like solution with O(m+ n log n) complexity. The proposed heuristic allows us to tackle the energy-efficient timely transportation problem on large-scale national highway systems. We further characterize a condition under which our heuristic generates an optimal solution; we also provide performance gap when the condition is not satisfied. We observe that the condition holds in most of the practical instances in numerical experiments, justifying the superior empirical performance of our heuristic. We carry out extensive numerical experiments using real-world truck data over the actual U.S. highway network. The results show that our proposed solutions achieve 17% (resp. 14%) fuel consumption reduction, as compared to a fastest path (resp. shortest path) algorithm adapted from common practice.
Overall, we believe that de-carbonizing heavy-duty truck operation is important for the sustainable development of the trucking industry. Our work serves as a call for participation.
This is a joint work with Lei Deng and Mohammad Hajiesmaili in CUHK and Haibo Zeng in Virginia Tech.
Biography: Minghua Chen received his B.Eng. and M.S. degrees from the Department of Electronic Engineering at Tsinghua University in 1999 and 2001, respectively. He received his Ph.D. degree from the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences at University of California at Berkeley in 2006. He spent one year visiting Microsoft Research Redmond as a Postdoc Researcher. He joined the Department of Information Engineering, the Chinese University of Hong Kong, in 2007, where he currently is an Associate Professor. He is also currently an Adjunct Associate Professor in Tsinghua University, Institute of Interdisciplinary Information Sciences. He received the Eli Jury award from UC Berkeley in 2007 (presented to a graduate student or recent alumnus for outstanding achievement in the area of Systems, Communications, Control, or Signal Processing) and The Chinese University of Hong Kong Young Researcher Award in 2013. He also received several best paper awards, including the IEEE ICME Best Paper Award in 2009, the IEEE Transactions on Multimedia Prize Paper Award in 2009, and the ACM Multimedia Best Paper Award in 2012. He serves as TPC Co-Chair of ACM e-Energy 2016 and General Chair of ACM e-Energy 2017. He is currently an Associate Editor of the IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking. His recent research interests include energy systems (e.g., smart power grids and energy-efficient data centers), intelligent transportation, distributed optimization, multimedia networking, wireless networking, network coding, and delay-constrained network information flow.
Host: Michael Neely, EEB 520, x03505
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 248
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Gerrielyn Ramos
This event is open to all eligible individuals. USC Viterbi operates all of its activities consistent with the University's Notice of Non-Discrimination. Eligibility is not determined based on race, sex, ethnicity, sexual orientation, or any other prohibited factor. -
Center for Cyber-Physical Systems and Internet of Things and Ming Hsieh Institute for Electrical Engineering Joint Seminar Series on Cyber-Physical Systems
Thu, Dec 08, 2016 @ 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Saman Zonouz, Assistant Professor, Rutgers University
Talk Title: Trustworthy Critical Infrastructures via Physics-Aware Just-Ahead-Of-Time Verification
Abstract: Critical cyber-physical infrastructures, such as the power grid, integrate networks of computational and physical processes to provide the people across the globe with essential functionalities and services. Protecting these critical infrastructures is a vital necessity because the failure of these systems would have a debilitating impact on economic security and public health and safety. Our research and development projects aim at provision of real-world solutions to facilitate the secure and reliable operation of next-generation critical infrastructures and require interdisciplinary research efforts across adaptive systems and network security, cyber-physical systems, and trustworthy real-time detection and response mechanisms. In this talk, I will focus on real past and potential future threats against critical infrastructures and embedded devices, and discuss the challenges in design, implementation, and analysis of security solutions to protect cyber-physical platforms. I will introduce novel classes of working systems that we have developed to overcome these challenges in practice, and finally conclude with several concrete directions for future research. Additionally, I will briefly go over our other projects on x86 malware/memory analysis and embedded systems security solutions to support access control applications in cyber-physical settings.
Biography: Saman Zonouz is an Assistant Professor in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at Rutgers University since September 2014 and the Director of the 4N6 Cyber Security and Forensics Laboratory. His research has been awarded NSF CAREER Award in 2015, Google Security Award in 2015, Top-3 Demo at IEEE SmartGridComm 2015, the Faculty Fellowship Award by AFOSR in 2013, the Best Student Paper Award at IEEE SmartGridComm 2013, the University EARLY CAREER Research award in 2012 as well as the Provost Research Award in 2011. The 4N6 research supporters include National Science Foundation (NSF), Department of Homeland Security (DHS), Office of Naval Research (ONR), Department of Energy (DOE), Advanced Research Projects Agency Energy (ARPA-E), Department of Education (DOE), Siemens Research Labs, WinRiver, GrammaTech, Google, ETAP, and Fortinet Corporation. In addition to research publications, Saman's research efforts have resulted in several tech-to-market transition initiatives such as the founded Kaedago Inc. startup company (as the result of the ARPAE project), and the Siemens-funded project to adopt his developed controller program analysis algorithms (originally supported by NSF CPS program) for programmable logic controllers (PLCs). Saman's current research focuses on systems security and privacy, trustworthy cyber-physical critical infrastructures and embedded platforms, binary/malware analysis and reverse engineering, as well as adaptive intrusion tolerance architectures. Saman has served as the chair, program committee member, guest editor and a reviewer for top international conferences and journals. Saman serves on Editorial Board for IEEE Transactions on Smart Grid. He obtained his Ph.D. in Computer Science, specifically, intrusion tolerance architectures for the cyber-physical infrastructures, from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2011.
Host: Paul Bogdan
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 132
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. -
Hardware Transactional Memory and Beyond
Thu, Dec 08, 2016 @ 04:00 PM - 05:00 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Maurice Herlihy, Professor, Brown University
Talk Title: Hardware Transactional Memory and Beyond
Abstract: A new generation of processor architectures provides hardware transactional memory (HTM), a synchronization mechanism for fast in-memory transactions. This talk will argue that HTM is not just a faster way of doing the same old latches and monitors. Instead, it could bring about a fundamental positive change in the way we program multicores (and eventually perhaps even databases) by allowing us to rethink basic synchronization structures such as locks, memory management, and a variety of concurrent data structures.
Biography: Maurice Herlihy has an A.B. in Mathematics from Harvard University, and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from M.I.T. He has served on the faculty of Carnegie Mellon University, on the staff of DEC Cambridge Research Lab, and is currently the An Wang Professor in the Computer Science Department at Brown University. He is the recipient of the 2003 Dijkstra Prize in Distributed Computing, the 2004 G?del Prize in theoretical computer science, the 2008 ISCA influential paper award, the 2012 Edsger W. Dijkstra Prize, and the 2013 Wallace McDowell award. He received a 2012 Fulbright Distinguished Chair in the Natural Sciences and Engineering Lecturing Fellowship, and he is fellow of the ACM, a fellow of the National Academy of Inventors, and a member of the National Academy of Engineering and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
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, Dec 12, 2016 @ 10:00 AM - 11:00 AM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Jiong Jin, Lecturer, Swinburne University of Technology, Melbourne, Australia
Talk Title: Wireless Networked Robotics
Abstract: With the advancement of communications and microelectronics, it is now technologically feasible and economically viable to develop mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) with sensing and communication capabilities. Meanwhile, in the robotics community, multiple robots with embedded communications functionality have also been studied, leading to the development of multi-robot systems (MRSs). Although extensive research has been conducted separately in the respective WANETs and MRSs domain, little work has been carried out into the combination of these two technologies. The emerging research field of wireless networked robotics is thus introduced by providing complementary support to each technology. It brings together communications, control, mobility and cooperation to allow physical control of robots, and also enables mission objectives and task division to be performed in a closed loop operation with communications and networking. In this talk, wireless networked robotics that is capable of addressing more complex and time-critical tasks will be introduced. In particular, wireless robotic networks and cloud networked robotics will be presented in details, with applications in both smart city and Internet of things domains.
Biography: Dr. Jiong Jin is currently a lecturer (to be senior lecturer from 1 Jan 2017) in the School of Software and Electrical Engineering, Swinburne University of Technology, Melbourne, Australia. He received the B.E. degree with First Class Honours in Computer Engineering from Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, in 2006, and Ph.D. degree from The University of Melbourne, Australia, in 2011. Prior to joining Swinburne, he was a Research Fellow in Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, The University of Melbourne from 2011 to 2013. His research interests include network design and optimization, nonlinear systems and sliding mode control, networked robotics, wireless sensor networks and Internet of things, cyber-physical systems and applications in smart grids and smart cities.
Host: Bhaskar Krishnamachari
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 132
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.
