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Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Events for September
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CS Colloquium Series: Dr Pradeep Varakantham: Multi-Agent Systems for improving Quality of Life in Urban Environments
Thu, Sep 05, 2013 @ 12:00 PM - 01:00 PM
Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Dr Pradeep Varakantham, Singapore Management University
Talk Title: Multi-Agent Systems for improving Quality of Life in Urban Environments
Series: CS Colloquium
Abstract: In this talk, I will present our research on large scale multi-agent systems for improving quality of life in urban cities of today. Technically, we focus on problems of allocating resources to multiple agents in cooperative, selfish or adversarial settings, while considering different objectives, e.g., maximizing revenue or utility, minimizing energy consumption or wait times, etc. We have provided generic solutions to these problems that are at the intersection of Artificial Intelligence (Planning and Scheduling), Game Theory, Behavioral Economics and Optimization. Finally, we have demonstrated the utility of our techniques in the context of applications in:
(a) Transportation: By developing extensions to the well known Congestion Games model to account for involuntary movements of taxi drivers (dictated by customer movement) and providing scalable mechanisms for solving the new representation, we optimized taxi fleet operations of a major taxi company (more than 8000 taxis) with respect to revenue of taxi drivers and availability of taxis.
(b) Leisure/Entertainment: By exploiting network structure and limited impact of each individual patron's movement, our work builds on reward sharing games and orienteering problems to minimize wait times for individual patrons at large theme parks. This was demonstrated on a well known theme park in Singapore.
(c) Energy: In conserving energy at office buildings, we proposed new approaches for scheduling meetings that are based on exploiting flexibility of individual participants. By analyzing 32k meeting requests, studying user behaviors w.r.t providing flexibility in meeting requests and exploiting the flexibility, we predicted a potential benefit of 17k$ annually at one of the buildings in University of Southern California with our approach.
(d) Security: Based on using Stackelberg Games, we have developed approaches to compute randomized patrolling strategies for protecting the rail networks in many large cities of today. This was demonstrated on Singapore rail network that consists of more than 100 stations spread over 7 lines.
Biography: Pradeep Varakantham received his Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from the University of Southern California and he was a post doctoral fellow at Carnegie Mellon University. Currently, he serves as assistant professor at Singapore Management University, where he teaches advanced topics in intelligent decision support, which includes techniques on distributed problem solving; planning/scheduling; and game-theoretic approaches. He is author or co-author of more than 40 international publications and has served as co-chair of the International Workshop on Multiagent Sequential Decision Making under Uncertainty in 2007 and 2008, and also the AAAI Symposium on Multi-Agent Coordination under Uncertainty in 2011. He has also served on the program committee of most major conferences (AAMAS, AAAI, ICAPS, IJCAI) and reviewers at most major journals (JAIR, AIJ, JAAMAS) in Artficial Intelligence . He was nominated for best senior program committee member at AAMAS'13 and one of his papers was nominated for best student paper at AAMAS'09.
Host: Milind Tambe
Location: Ronald Tutor Hall of Engineering (RTH) - 526
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Assistant to CS chair
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The iCub project: a common open source platform for robotics research
Thu, Sep 19, 2013 @ 11:00 AM - 12:30 PM
Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Dr. Giorgio Metta, Italian Institute of Technology
Talk Title: The iCub project: a common open source platform for robotics research
Series: CS Colloquium
Abstract: I will present the iCub humanoid, a robotic platform designed for research in embodied cognition. At 104 cm tall, the iCub has the size of a three and half years old child. It can crawl on all fours and sit up to manipulate objects. Its hands have been designed to support sophisticate manipulation skills. The iCub is distributed as Open Source following the GPL/FDL licenses and can now count on a worldwide community of enthusiastic developers. The entire design is available for download from the project homepage and repository (http://www.iCub.org). About 25 robots have been built so far which are available in laboratories in Europe, US, and soon in Japan. It is one of the few platforms in the world with a sensitive full-body skin to deal with the physical interaction with the environment including possible people.
SPECIAL NOTE: The iCub robot will be available for hands-on experience in RTH 422 from 9am to 3pm.
Biography: The iCub stance on cognition posits that manipulation plays a fundamental role in the development of cognitive capability [1-4]. As many of these basic skills are not ready-made at birth, but developed during ontogenesis [5], we aim at testing and developing this paradigm through the creation of a child-like humanoid robot: i.e. the iCub. This "baby" robot is meant to act in cognitive scenarios, performing tasks useful for learning while interacting with the environment and humans. The small (104cm tall), compact size (approximately 22kg and fitting within the volume of a child) and high number (53) of degrees of freedom combined with the Open Source approach distinguish RobotCub from other humanoid robotics projects developed worldwide.
References:
[1] L. Fadiga, L. Craighero, and E. Olivier, "Human motor cortex excitability during the perception of others' action," Current Biology, vol. 14 pp. 331-333, 2005.
[2] L. Fadiga, L. Craighero, G. Buccino, and G. Rizzolatti, "Speech listening specifically modulates the excitability of tongue muscles: a TMS study," European Journal of Neuroscience, vol. 15, pp. 399-402, 2002.
[3] G. Rizzolatti and L. Fadiga, "Grasping objects and grasping action meanings: the dual role of monkey rostroventral premotor cortex (area F5)," in Sensory Guidance of Movement, Novartis Foundation Symposium, G. R. Bock and J. A. Goode, Eds. Chichester: John Wiley and Sons, 1998, pp. 81-103.
[4] D. Vernon, G. Metta, and G. Sandini, "A Survey of Cognition and Cognitive Architectures: Implications for the Autonomous Development of Mental Capabilities in Computational Systems," IEEE Transactions on Evolutionary Computation, special issue on AMD, vol. 11, 2007.
[5] C. von Hofsten, "On the development of perception and action," in Handbook of Developmental Psychology, J. Valsiner and K. J. Connolly, Eds. London: Sage, 2003, pp. 114-140.
Host: Stefan Schaal
Location: Ronald Tutor Hall of Engineering (RTH) - 422
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Assistant to CS chair
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CS George A Bekey Distinguished Lecture: Professor Lydia Kavraki (Rice University)
Thu, Sep 19, 2013 @ 03:30 PM - 05:00 PM
Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Lydia Kavraki, Rice University
Talk Title: From Robots to Biomolecules: Computing for the Physical World
Series: CS Keynote Series
Abstract: Over the last decade, the development of fast and reliable motion planning algorithms has deeply influenced many domains in robotics, such as industrial automation and autonomous exploration. Motion planning has also contributed to great advances in an array of unlikely fields, including graphics animation and computational structural biology.
This talk will first describe how sampling-based methods revolutionized motion planning in robotics. The presentation will quickly focus on recent algorithms that are particularly suitable for systems with complex dynamics. The talk will then introduce an integrative framework that allows the synthesis of motion plans from high-level specifications. The framework uses temporal logic and formal methods and establishes a tight link between classical motion planning in robotics and task planning in artificial intelligence. Although research initially began in the realm of robotics, the experience gained has led to algorithmic advances for analyzing the motion and function of proteins, the worker molecules of all cells. This talk will conclude by discussing robotics-inspired methods for computing the flexibility of proteins and large macromolecular complexes with the ultimate goals of deciphering molecular function and aiding the discovery of new therapeutics.
Biography: Lydia E. Kavraki is the Noah Harding Professor of Computer Science and Bioengineering at Rice University. She also holds an appointment at the Department of Structural and Computational Biology and Molecular Biophysics at the Baylor College of Medicine in Houston. Kavraki received her B.A. in Computer Science from the University of Crete in Greece and her Ph.D. in Computer Science from Stanford University. Her research contributions are in physical algorithms and their applications in robotics (robot motion planning, hybrid systems, formal methods in robotics, assembly planning, micromanipulation, and flexible object manipulation), as well as in computational structural biology, translational bioinformatics, and biomedical informatics (modeling of proteins and biomolecular interactions, large-scale functional annotation of proteins, computer-assisted drug design, and systems biology).
Kavraki has authored more than 180 peer-reviewed journal and conference publications and a co-author of the popular robotics textbook "Principles of Robot Motion" published by MIT Press. She is heavily involved in the development of The Open Motion Planning Library (OMPL), which is used in industry and in academic research in robotics and biomedicine. Kavraki is currently on the editorial board of the International Journal of Robotics Research, the ACM/IEEE Transactions on Computational Biology and Bioinformatics, the Computer Science Review, and Big Data. She is also a member of the editorial advisory board of the Springer Tracts in Advanced Robotics. Kavraki is a Fellow of the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM), a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), a Fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), a Fellow of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering (AIMBE), a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), and a Fellow of the World Technology Network (WTN). Kavraki was elected a member of the Institute of Medicine (IOM) of the National Academies in 2012. She is also a member of the Academy of Medicine, Engineering and Science of Texas (TAMEST) since 2012.
Host: Gaurav Sukhatme
More Information: BEKEY_LECTURE_VERTICAL.pdf
Location: Henry Salvatori Computer Science Center (SAL) - 101
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Assistant to CS chair
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Premkumar Natarajan: Some Recent Advances in Offline Handwriting Recognition
Tue, Sep 24, 2013 @ 03:30 PM - 05:00 PM
Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Premkumar Natarajan, USC Information Sciences Institute
Talk Title: Some Recent Advances in Offline Handwriting Recognition
Abstract: For the past three decades, the task of automatically transcribing the text content of handwritten hardcopy documents (usually referred to as offline handwriting recognition) has remained a thorny challenge. Until a few years ago, research efforts in offline recognition have focused exclusively on script-dependent recognition approaches that are developed for a specific target language or script. Progress was spotty and recognition accuracies poor on real-world data. Starting in 2007, with sponsorship from the DARPA MADCAT program, we started developing a script-independent methodology for offline handwriting recognition which has since yielded revolutionary improvements in offline handwriting recognition performance. The research results have had significant impact at the recent NIST OpenHART 2013 (Open Handwriting Evaluation) workshop, all the participants employed our script-independent methodology in their submissions. In this talk, I will present some recent advances we have accomplished in handwriting recognition and also provide a (very) brief overview of salient historical context. In the latter part of the talk, I will discuss current trends and some open research tasks that might be of interest to some in the audience. I will end the presentation with a discursive discussion of some salient research directions at ISI.
Biography: Premkumar (Prem) Natarajan is the Executive Director of the Information Sciences Institute (ISI) at the University of Southern California and a Vice Dean of Engineering in the Viterbi School of Engineering. In his current role, Prem sets the technical vision and operational strategy for ISI. Previously, he served as an Executive Vice President and Principal Scientist at Raytheon BBN Technologies where he oversaw technical and business operations in Speech, Language and Multimedia Technologies at BBN.
Prem�s technical contributions span a wide range of multimedia processing and pattern recognition areas, including optical character recognition (OCR, speech recognition, speech-to-speech translation, video analysis and content extraction, topic classification, and speech triage). He has served as Principal Investigator or Senior Advisor on numerous Department of Defense (DOD) and Intelligence Community sponsored research and deployment projects, including important DARPA-sponsored research efforts such as the TRANSTAC, MADCAT, and DEFT programs; IARPA-sponsored research efforts such as VACE and ALADDIN; and other significant USG-sponsored efforts such as the Army MFLTS Program of Record. He is an active member of the professional communities in document and speech processing, and serves on academic advisory boards.
Host: Gaurav Sukhatme
Location: Henry Salvatori Computer Science Center (SAL) - 101
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Assistant to CS chair
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CS Colloquium: Ashwin Rao
Thu, Sep 26, 2013 @ 03:30 PM - 05:00 PM
Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Ashwin Rao, Founder, ZLemma.com
Talk Title: CS Colloquium: Ashwin Rao
Series: CS Colloquium
Abstract: This talk is for all levels (Undergraduate, Masters and Ph.D.) of students in Computer Science, with the purpose of helping them make sound decisions within the wide array of available job choices, and eventually pick the job/career that is most suited for them. We will particularly focus on jobs for Computer Scientists in the Tech industry (large companies as well as startups) and in the Finance industry (Wall Street as well as hedge funds). We will discuss the different requirements of various jobs, and understand how this work relates to one's academic interests. We will discuss some recent trends in the industry covering Big Data, Functional Programming, Quantitative Modeling, Machine Learning, and Domain-Specific Languages. We will also discuss non-technical aspects of different jobs contrasting between Tech and Finance, between large and small companies, and between 'depth' versus 'breadth' roles. Finally, we will discuss how to prepare a suitable resume and how to prepare for interviews.
Biography: Dr. Ashwin Rao is an entrepreneur based in Palo Alto, California and is the founder of a technology startup - ZLemma.com - that helps students and young professionals identify careers most suited to their talents. Prior to entrepreneurship, Ashwin was a quantitative modeler and trading strategist at Goldman Sachs for ten years in New York, and was subsequently a Managing Director at Morgan Stanley. Ashwin's focus had been on interest rates and mortgage derivatives products. Ashwin holds a Bachelors degree in Computer Science from IIT-Bombay and a Ph.D. in Algorithmic Algebra from University of Southern California. In his personal life, Ashwin is deeply involved in mentoring students at various universities.
Host: Bharath Sankaran
Location: Henry Salvatori Computer Science Center (SAL) - 101
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Assistant to CS chair
