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SUNMONTUEWEDTHUFRISAT
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Events for November
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Data Integration and Planning Techniques for Automatic Web Service Composition
Mon, Nov 06, 2006 @ 03:00 PM - 04:30 PM
Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Dr. Jose Luis Ambite
Computer Scientist
USC/Information Sciences InstituteTITLE: Data Integration and Planning Techniques for Automatic Web Service CompositionABSTRACT:
In this talk, I will present three approaches to web service composition. The first approach uses data integration techniques to automatically generate a composition of information-gathering services.
The advantages of this approach include that the services can be precisely described using logical (Datalog) rules, and that it can generate recursive compositions. However, the modeling of complex inputs is limited. The second approach overcomes such limitations by using planning techniques and a more expressive logic (a first-order logic:
Powerloom) to model complex relational inputs and outputs of services.
This approach has been applied to generate scientific data-processing workflows. Finally, I will briefly describe our current work on extending the previous approaches to consider both information-gathering and causal effects of services.BIO:
Jose Luis Ambite is a Computer Scientist at the Information Sciences Institute of the University of Southern California. His research interests include information integration, automated planning,databases, and knowledge representation. His current focus is on automatic web service composition, a problem that combines aspects of planning and information integration. Dr. Ambite has published extensively on planning and information integration. He has served as technical reviewer and program committee member for major funding agencies, journals and conferences. In 2003, he started a series of international workshops on AI for Service Composition (at ICAPS, AAAI, and ECAI). He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Southern California in 1998.
Location: Hedco Neurosciences Building (HNB) - 107
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Nancy Levien
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USC CS Colloquium Lecture Series
Tue, Nov 14, 2006 @ 03:30 PM - 04:50 PM
Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
John P. WilsonProfessor of GeographyUSCTitle: "Fusing Computer Science and Geography: Research Advances and Opportunities in Geographic Information Science"Abstract:This talk will start from a typical geographic research project – the Green Visions Plan project that provides a vision and tools to support public and private investment to protect and restore native biodiversity, improve watershed health, and remedy inequities in recreational open space across the southern California region. From there, the talk will endeavor to situate this work and similar projects within the rapidly evolving field of geographic information science and the Geographic Information Science and Technology (GIST) Body of Knowledge that was recently published by the University Consortium of Geographic Information Science and the Association of American Geographers. This leads to a discussion of the role of geography and computer science as fundamental building blocks for the next generation geographic information science toolsets. The talk concludes by noting some of the ongoing research projects in the USC GIS Research Laboratory and how they might advance those tools and the accompanying datasets.Biography:Dr. John P. Wilson is Professor of Geography at the University of Southern California where he directs the GIS Research Laboratory and also holds an adjunct appointment as Professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering. From 1998 to 2001 he was Chair of the Department of Geography at the University of Southern California. From 1992 to 1997 he was Professor of Geography in the Department of Earth Sciences, Adjunct Professor of Soil Science in the Department of Plant and Soil Science, and Director of the Geographic Information and Analysis Center at Montana State University. His early career was an Assistant Professor (1984-1990) and then Associate Professor of Geography (1990-1994) with corresponding adjunct appointments in Soil Science at Montana State University. He founded the Geographic Information and Analysis Center at Montana State University in 1989 and the GIS Research Laboratory at the University of Southern California in 1997. He has held several visiting appointments in environmental studies, geography, and planning at the Australian National University, the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands, and the University of Waikato in New Zealand.He founded the journal Transactions in GIS (Blackwell Publishers) in 1996 and has served as Editor-in-Chief since its inception. He has served on the editorial board of Applied Geography (1992-2001) and has just started a four-year term on the editorial board of the Annals of the Association of American Geographers. He has chaired the Applied Geography Specialty Group of the Association of American Geographers (1989-1991) and the Research Committee of the University Consortium for Geographic Information Science (2002-2005). He is currently President of the University Consortium of Geographic Information Science and an active participant in the UNIGIS International Network, a worldwide consortium of 20+ institutions who collaborate on the development and delivery of online geographic information science academic programs. His research is focused on GIS tool development, spatial analysis, and environmental modeling. He has published numerous books and articles on these topics, including two edited volumes Terrain Analysis: Principles and Applications (John Wiley and Sons, New York, 2000) and the Handbook of Geographic Information Science (Blackwell Publishers, Oxford, 2006). Much of this work is collaborative and multidisciplinary in character with the general goal of improving our knowledge and understanding of human impact on both the natural and built environments. The work of his group can be seen on the website http://www.uscgislab.net/. He has received numerous honors for his research and teaching, the most recent being a Mellon Award for Excellence in Mentoring from the Center for Excellence in Teaching at the University of Southern California (2005) and an Albert S. Raubenheimer Outstanding Faculty Award for his research, teaching, and service contributions in the College of Letters, Arts, and Sciences at the University of Southern California (2004). Host: Cyrus Shahabi
Location: Seaver Science Library (SSL) - 150
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Nancy Levien
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CS Distinguished Lecture Series
Thu, Nov 16, 2006 @ 03:30 PM - 04:50 PM
Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Dr. Peter NorvigDirector of Research
Google, Inc.Title: "Theorizing from Data: Avoiding the Capital Mistake" Abstract: "It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data." Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's words from 1891 remain true today. Researchers in computational linguistics and information retrieval now have a million times more data than was available 30 years ago. This talk explores what this data can do for problems in language understanding, translation, information extraction, and inference, and extrapolates to what more data may bring in the future.Biography: Peter Norvig is the Director of Research at. He is a Fellow of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence and co-author of Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach, the leading textbook in the field. Previously he was head of Computational Sciences at NASA and a faculty member at USC and Berkeley.Hosted by: Prof. Ram NevatiaLocation: Seaver Science Library (SSL) - 150
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Nancy Levien
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USC CS Colloquium Series
Tue, Nov 21, 2006 @ 03:30 PM - 04:50 PM
Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Dr. David ChiangComputer ScientistUSC Information Sciences InstituteTitle: Finding Structure in Statistical Machine TranslationAbstract:The introduction of data-driven methods into machine translation (MT) in the 1990s created a whole new way of doing MT, and the recent move from the word-based models developed at IBM to the phrase-based models developed by Och and others has led to a breakthrough in MT performance.
The next breakthrough, the move to syntax-based models that deal with the hierarchical, meaning-bearing, structures of sentences, is waiting in the wings. It is only recently that such models, based on synchronous context-free grammars and related formalisms, have become top contenders in large-scale evaluations such as those conducted by NIST, especially for Chinese-to-English translation. And this framework offers many avenues for potential advances.I will present Hiero, the first grammar-based MT system, to our knowledge, to outperform a phrase-based baseline when measured using the widely-used BLEU metric, and describe several related approaches. Two current challenges for this approach are: (1) how can the training and translation process be made efficient for extremely large amounts of data? (2) how can we obtain synchronous grammars that better model the structure of a parallel corpus? I will present some recent progress and future work at ISI that addresses these two questions.Biography:Dr. David Chiang has been a computer scientist at the Information Sciences Institute since January 2006. He completed his PhD at the University of Pennsylvania under the supervision of Dr. Aravind Joshi, working on formal language theory, statistical natural language processing, and computational biological sequence analysis. His current research is on using grammars and parsing for statistical machine translation.
Location: Seaver Science Library (SSL) - 150
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Nancy Levien
