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Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Events for January
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How Hollywood AI Helps Creators Go Global
Tue, Jan 21, 2025 @ 03:00 PM - 04:00 PM
Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Hao Li , CEO/Co-Founder of Pinscreen
Talk Title: How Hollywood AI Helps Creators Go Global
Abstract: In this talk I will talk about our journey on bringing digital humans to life in Hollywood, and how we use AI to democratize technologies for generating and manipulating photorealisitc human faces. I will showcase some use cases of our technologies developed at my startup Pinscreen, and how top film studios and streaming companies have adopted our approach for AI-driven visual effects, including face swapping, actor de-aging, and facial reenactment. One particular scalable application consists of dubbing movies from foreign language into English, where lips are perfectly matched to the translated content using AI. I will show how we are moving from Hollywood adoption to building a consumer product: pindub.ai for any Internet content creator. I will also showcase some our recent research efforts at MBZUAI with focus on more advanced generative AI capabilities and metaverse application such as telepresence using the currently most advanced one-shot head reenactment system.
This lecture satisfies requirements for CSCI 591: Research Colloquium.
Biography: Hao Li is the CEO and Co-Founder of Pinscreen, a Los Angeles-based startup renowned for its pioneering generative AI technologies in visual effects, dubbing, and digital humans. He is also Professor at the Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence (MBZUAI) and the Director of the MBZUAI Metaverse Center. Previously, Hao was a Distinguished Fellow with the Computer Vision Group at UC Berkeley and an Associate Professor of Computer Science at the University of Southern California (USC), where he directed the USC Institute for Creative Technologies. He has also been a visiting professor at Weta Digital, a research lead at Industrial Light & Magic / Lucasfilm, and a postdoctoral fellow at Columbia and Princeton Universities. Hao’s research lies at the intersection of computer vision, computer graphics, and machine learning with a focus on photorealistic human digitization, real-time performance capture, immersive telepresence, and generative video synthesis and manipulation (deepfakes). He is widely recognized for his groundbreaking work in real-time 3D facial tracking, which has led to the technology behind Apple's Animoji, the digital recreation of Paul Walker in the movie Furious 7, and the first real-time deepfake face-swapping technology based on generative AI. His research on facial reenactment has been widely adopted in Hollywood, driving advancements in photorealistic digital doubles and seamless de-aging effects. Additionally, he is known for pioneering production-grade visual dubbing solutions, which have made possible the first fully AI-lip-synced foreign language films and TV shows dubbed into English. Hao and his company, Pinscreen, have earned credits in numerous high-profile motion pictures, including Fallout, Money Heist – Berlin, Slumberland, Free Guy, Blade Runner 2049, Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets, Furious 7, and The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies. His algorithms on deformable shape registration have not only advanced the field of data-driven facial animation and human body modeling, but also improved the radiation treatment for cancer patients all over the world through his collaboration with C-RAD on surface guided radiation therapy. Hao has received numerous accolades, including being named a Top 35 Innovator Under 35 by MIT Technology Review in 2013. he has been awarded the Google Faculty Award, the Okawa Foundation Research Grant, and the Andrew and Erna Viterbi Early Career Chair. In 2018, he won the Office of Naval Research (ONR) Young Investigator Award, and in 2019, he was named to the DARPA ISAT Study Group. He received the ACM Symposium on Computer Animation Best Paper Award in 2009, the ACM SIGGRAPH Real-Time Live! “Best in Show” Award in 2020, and an Epic Megagrant in 2021. Hao has been a speaker at the World Economic Forum in Davos (2020) and was featured in the inaugural season of Amazon’s documentary series re:MARS Luminaries in 2022. Hao earned his PhD from ETH Zurich and his MSc from the University of Karlsruhe (TH).
Host: Prof. Stefanos Nikolaidis
Location: Kaprielian Hall (KAP) - 267
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science
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. -
CS Colloquium: Corey Baker (USC / ECE) - Patient Centered Systems for Remote Patient Monitoring
Wed, Jan 22, 2025 @ 10:00 AM - 11:00 AM
Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Corey Baker, USC / ECE
Talk Title: Patient Centered Systems for Remote Patient Monitoring
Abstract: Reliance on Internet connectivity is detrimental where modern networking technology is lacking, power outages are frequent, or network connectivity is expensive, sparse, or non-existent (i.e., underserved urban communities, rural areas, natural disasters). Though there has been much research conducted around 5G and 6G serving as the conduit for connecting any and everything; scalability issues are a major concern and real-world deployments have been limited. Realization of the limitations resulting from reliance on Internet and cellular connectivity are prevalent in mHealth applications where remote patient monitoring has improved the timeliness of clinical decision making, decreased the length of hospital stays, and reduced mortality rates everywhere in the nation except in medically underserved and rural communities in the US like Appalachian Kentucky, where chronic disease is approximately 20% more prevalent than other areas. As an alternative, deploying resilient networking technology can facilitate the flow of information in resource-deprived environments to disseminate non-emergency, but life saving data. In addition, leveraging opportunistic communication can supplement cellular networks to assist with keeping communication channels open during high-use and extreme situations. This talk will discuss the pragmatic applications of designing opportunistic systems for particular entities (patients, citizens, etc.); specifically applied to healthcare and increasing patient adherence, permitting any community to become smart and connected while simultaneously keeping network connectivity costs to a minimum.
This lecture satisfies requirements for CSCI 591: Research Colloquium
Biography: Corey E. Baker holds the position of Assistant Professor in the Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Southern California (USC). Prior to joining USC, Baker served as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Kentucky (UK) as well as an Application and Framework Engineer in Health and Research Products at Apple Inc where he worked on medical and research frameworks such as CareKit and ResearchKit. In his current role, Baker directs the Network Reconnaissance (NetRecon) Lab, where his research focuses on developing full-stack systems for distributing, protecting, and authenticating data in opportunistic networking scenarios. These scenarios encompass rural remote patient monitoring, smart cities, and natural disasters, with the ultimate goal of enhancing the well-being of individuals. Baker’s research also involves evaluating the practical applications of opportunistic delay-tolerant networks (DTNs), software-defined networks (SDNs), and human-centered design in empowering device-to-device (D2D) social networks for crowd-sourcing information. By leveraging opportunistic communication, Baker seeks to provide complementary solutions to traditional networks, which often rely on centralized infrastructures such as the Internet.
Host: CS Department
Location: Olin Hall of Engineering (OHE) - 132
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: CS Faculty Affairs
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. -
CS Colloquium: Ben Fielding (Gensyn) - The future of machine learning is decentralized
Mon, Jan 27, 2025 @ 10:00 AM - 11:00 AM
Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Ben Fielding, Gensyn
Talk Title: The future of machine learning is decentralized
Abstract: It is now likely indisputable that machine learning is the next technical evolution.As we move from a world dominated by deterministic and imperative human-machine interactions into a world of probabilities and agentic decisions, the lower layers of our collective software stack must be re-architected to more appropriately cater to these methods. Electricity and compute must scale, raw data must be translated and compressed, human knowledge must be harnessed, and decision making must become much, much faster. In this talk, I’ll describe the progression of machine learning, the problems it faces both technically and philosophically as it rapidly scales throughout the world, and the state-of-the-art solutions that make this possible.Attendees will leave with a clear view on why, how, and when humanity will transcend deterministic machine relationships and become cybernetically diverse. Keywords: AI, Machine Learning, Deep Learning, Cryptography, Compilers, Game Theory, Blockchain. This lecture satisfies requirements for CSCI 591: Research Colloquium
Biography: Ben is a co-founder of Gensyn, the decentralized machine learning compute protocol. Gensyn allows developers to use any GPU, CPU, TPU, etc. in the world to train their machine learning models at any scale and for a fair market price, with the work verified automatically and trustlessly. Ben has a PhD in computer science, where his research focused on evolutionary optimization of deep neural architectures for computer vision applications. He also previously co-founded a data privacy / sovereignty startup.
Host: Sai Praneeth Karimireddy
Location: Olin Hall of Engineering (OHE) - 132
Audiences: Everyone (USC) is invited
Contact: CS Faculty Affairs
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.