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Events for April 24, 2017

  • CS Colloquium Event: Facebook Tech Talk - Query Understanding and Semantic Search

    Mon, Apr 24, 2017 @ 04:00 PM - 05:00 PM

    Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Haixun Wang, Facebook

    Talk Title: Facebook Tech Talk - Query Understanding and Semantic Search

    Series: CS Colloquium

    Abstract: This lecture satisfies requirements for CSCI 591: Research Colloquium.
    Understanding short texts is crucial to many applications, but challenges abound. First, queries do not always observe the syntax of a written language. As a result, traditional natural language processing methods cannot be easily applied. Second, queries usually do not contact in sufficient statistical signals to support many state-of-the-art approaches for text processing such as topic modeling. Third, queries are usually more ambiguous. We argue that knowledge is needed in order to better understand short texts. In this talk, I describe how to use lexical semantic knowledge provided by a well-known semantic network for short text understanding. Our knowledge-intensive approach disrupts traditional methods for tasks such as text segmentation, part-of-speech tagging, and concept labeling, in the sense that we focus on semantics in all the set tasks. We conduct a comprehensive performance evaluation on real-life data. The results show that knowledge is indispensable for short text understanding, and our knowledge-intensive approaches are effective in harvesting semantics of short texts.

    Biography: Haixun Wang is a Research Scientist at Facebook and he manages the Query and Document Understanding team. Before Facebook, he was with Google Research, working on natural language processing. From 2009 to 2013, he led research in semantic search, graph data processing systems, and distributed query processing at Microsoft Research Asia. He had been a research staff member at IBM T. J. Watson Research Center from 2000 -“ 2009. He was Technical Assistant to Stuart Feldman (Vice President of Computer Science of IBM Research) from 2006 to 2007, and Technical Assistant to Mark Wegman (Head of Computer Science of IBM Research) from 2007 to 2009. He received the Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from the University of California, Los Angeles in 2000. He has published more than 150 research papers in referred international journals and conference proceedings. He served PC Chair of conferences such as CIKM'12, and he is on the editorial board of journals such as IEEE Transactions of Knowledge and Data Engineering (TKDE) and Journal of Computer Science and Technology (JCST). He won the best paper award in ICDE 2015, 10 year best paper award in ICDM 2013, and best paper award of ER 2009.

    Host: CS Department

    Location: Mark Taper Hall Of Humanities (THH) - 101

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Assistant to CS chair

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  • LavaLab Demo Night

    Mon, Apr 24, 2017 @ 07:00 PM - 09:00 PM

    Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science

    Student Activity


    LavaLab, the University of Southern California's product incubator, admits the top design, business, and engineering minds to create innovative products over the course of a semester.

    On April 24, the ideas, innovation, and hard work of our seven teams will culminate into product demonstrations at the forefront of student development. Each team comprises of design, business, and engineering students focused on building productive solutions to problems of all kinds. Each has spent the entire semester working with industry experts and customers, refining their products from ideation, to wireframing and prototyping, to implementation.

    Join an audience of tech experts, avid students, and bright minds at LavaLab Demo Night.

    https://www.facebook.com/events/281058385680365/

    Doors open at 6:30pm, pitches begin at 7pm. Light refreshments will be served. Demo time starts at 8pm.

    We're located in the basement of TCC or SKS, in Tommy's Place

    Location: Ronald Tutor Campus Center (TCC) - Tommy's Place

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Ryan Rozan

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