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SUNMONTUEWEDTHUFRISAT
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Events for November
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CS Colloquia: Engineering Self-Organizing Systems
Mon, Nov 05, 2007 @ 04:00 PM - 05:30 PM
Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Title: Engineering Self-Organizing SystemsSpeaker: Prof. Radhika Nagpal(Harvard)ABSTRACT:
Biological systems, from embryos to ant colonies, achieve tremendous
mileage by using vast numbers of cheap and unreliable components to
achieve complex goals reliably. We are rapidly building embedded systems
with similar characteristics, from self-assembling modular robots to vast
sensor networks. How do we engineer robust collective behavior?In this talk, I will describe two projects from my group where we have
used inspiration from nature, both cells and social insects, to design
decentralized algorithms for programmable self-assembly. In the first
project, we use insights from social insects to design algorithms for
collective construction by simple mobile robots. In the second project we
use insights from multicellular tissues to design a modular robot that can
form complex environmentally-adaptive shapes. In both cases we can achieve
global-to-local compilation: the agents rely on simple and local
interactions that provably self-organize a wide class of user-specified
global goals.BIO:
Radhika Nagpal is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Harvard
University since 2004. She received her PhD degree in Computer Science
from MIT, and spent a year as a research fellow at Harvard Medical School.
She is a recipient of the 2005 Microsoft New Faculty Fellowship award and
the 2007 NSF Career award. Her research interests are
biologically-inspired engineering principles for multi-agent systems and
modelling multicellular biology.Location: Seaver Science Library (SSL) - 150
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: CS Colloquia
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.
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CS Colloquia: Expanders and Extractors from Parvaresh-Vardy Codes
Tue, Nov 06, 2007 @ 04:00 PM - 05:30 PM
Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Title: Expanders and Extractors from Parvaresh-Vardy CodesSpeaker: Prof. Chris Umans(CALTECH)ABSTRACT:
Expanders and extractors are fundamental combinatorial objects with
a wide variety of applications in theoretical computer science.In this work we give the best-to-date explicit construction of highly
unbalanced bipartite expander graphs with expansion arbitrarily
close to the degree. Our expanders have a short and self-contained
description and analysis, based on the ideas underlying the recent
list-decodable
error-correcting codes of Parvaresh and Vardy (FOCS `05).Our expanders can be interpreted as near-optimal ``randomness
condensers,'' that reduce the task of extracting randomness from
sources of arbitrary min-entropy rate to extracting randomness
from sources of min-entropy rate arbitrarily close to 1, which is
a much easier task. Using this connection, we obtain a new
construction of randomness extractors that is optimal up to
constant factors, while being much simpler than the previous
construction of Lu et al. (STOC `03) and improving upon it when
the error parameter is small.Joint work with Venkat Guruswami and Salil Vadhan.BIO:
Chris Umans received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Berkeley in 2000.
After spending two years as a postdoc in the Theory Group at Microsoft
Research, he joined the Computer Science faculty at Caltech in 2002. His
research interests are in theoretical computer science, especially complexity
theory. He is the recipient of an NSF CAREER award, an Alfred P. Sloan
Research Fellowship, and two CCC Best Paper Awards.Location: Seaver Science Library (SSL) - 150
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: CS Colloquia
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 Colloquia: Robotic Planetary Science: the Mars Exploration Rovers and Beyond
Thu, Nov 15, 2007 @ 04:00 PM - 05:30 PM
Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Title: Robotic Planetary Science: the Mars Exploration Rovers and BeyondSpeaker: Dr. Ashley Stroupe(JPL)ABSTRACT:
This talk will present the present and future of robotic Mars exploration,
including the current Mars missions and system prototypes for future missions
to the Moon and Mars. The talk will begin with an overview of the the Mars
Exploration Rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, which have been exploring Mars for
nearly 4 years. We will focus on autonomous rover capabilities, highlights of
mission science discoveries, and lessons learned. Following, there will be a
brief discussion of the next Mars missions, Phoenix and Mars Science
Laboratory. We will conclude by looking at some prototypes for future
missions, including Lunar exploration (with Athlete) and difficult terrain
exploration (with TRESSA).BIO:
Ashley W. Stroupe is a staff engineer at Jet Propulsion Laboratory in
Pasadena, California. She works as a rover driver with the Mars
Exploration Rover Project, building sequences of commands to drive the rover
and deploy science instruments. Dr. Stroupe does research focusing on
multi-robot teams in complex environments and behavior-based control, with
applications to exploration and mapping, dynamic target observation, and
cooperative manipulation. She has published multiple conference papers, book
chapters, and journal articles in robotics and is an active participant in
multiple education and outreach programs. She received a B.S. in physics from
Harvey Mudd College in 1990, an M.S. in electrical engineering from George
Mason University in 1998, an M.S. in robotics from Carnegie Mellon University
in 2001, and a Ph.D. in robotics from Carnegie Mellon University in 2003.Location: Seaver Science Library (SSL) - 150
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: CS Colloquia
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 Colloquia: Partitioned and Hybrid Methods for Visual Servo Control
Thu, Nov 29, 2007 @ 04:00 PM - 05:30 PM
Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Title: Partitioned and Hybrid Methods for Visual Servo ControlSpeaker: Prof. Seth Hutchinson(UIUC)ABSTRACT:
Visual servo control concerns the problem of controlling robots using
real-time computer vision feedback. While numerous approaches have
evolved, and many systems have been demonstrated in laboratories around
the world, most can be classified as either position-based or image-based,
depending on whether camera pose or image features are used in the control
law. Each approach has well-documented performance problems.In this talk, after a brief description of these methods and their
respective shortcomings, I will describe two approaches to overcoming
their performance problems. With the first approach, the control system
is partitioned along its spatial degrees of freedom. Rotation about and
translation along the optical axis are controlled by a specifically
designed controller, and the remaining degrees of freedom are controlled
with a traditional image-based method. With the second approach, a
hybrid, switched control system selects either an image-based or
position-based controller at each time instant, using a state-based
switching scheme. The performance of both of these approaches have been
verified by a variety of simulated and experimental results. If time
permits, I will also describe recent results applying a switched method to
the control of a unicycle robot with field-of-view constraints.BIO:
Seth Hutchinson received his Ph.D. from Purdue University in 1988. In
1990 he joined the faculty at the University of Illinois in
Urbana-Champaign, where he is currently a Professor in the Department of
Electrical and Computer Engineering, the Coordinated Science Laboratory,
and the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology. Dr.
Hutchinson serves as the Editor-in-Chief for the RAS Conference Editorial
Board, and on the editorial boards of the International Journal of
Robotics Research and the Journal of Intelligent Service Robotics. He
served as Associate and then Senior Editor for the IEEE Transactions on
Robotics and Automation, now the IEEE Transactions on Robotics, from
1997-2005. In 1996 he was a guest editor for a special section of the
Transactions devoted to the topic of visual servo control, and in 1994 he
was co-chair of an IEEE Workshop on Visual Servoing. In 1996 and 1998 he
co-authored papers that were finalists for the King-Sun Fu Memorial Best
Transactions Paper Award. He was co-chair of IEEE Robotics and Automation
Society Technical Committee on Computer and Robot Vision from 1992 to
1996, and has served on the program committees for more than fifty
conferences related to robotics and computer vision. He has published
more than 150 papers on the topics of robotics and computer vision, and is
coauthor of the books 'Principles of Robot Motion: Theory, Algorithms, and
Implementations', published by MIT Press, and 'Robot Modeling and
Control', published by Wiley.Location: Seaver Science Library (SSL) - 150
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: CS Colloquia
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.
