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Events for January 18, 2011
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Technical Resume Workshop
Tue, Jan 18, 2011 @ 12:30 AM - 01:30 PM
Viterbi School of Engineering Career Connections
Workshops & Infosessions
Does your resume highlight the skills that will land an interview? Learn how to create a resume that will serve as the marketing tool that will get your foot inside industry's door!
Location: Ronald Tutor Hall of Engineering (RTH) - 211
Audiences: All Viterbi Students
Contact: RTH 218 Viterbi Career Services
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Legal Aspects of Aviation Safety (LEGAL)
Tue, Jan 18, 2011 @ 08:00 AM - 04:00 PM
Aviation Safety and Security Program
University Calendar
This course is designed to provide information on the legal risks inherent in aviation operations and an overview of the legal system as it relates to aviation safety. The judicial process, current litigation trends, legal definitions and procedures will be covered.
Location: Aviation Safety & Security Campus
Audiences: Aviation Professionals
Contact: Harrison Wolf
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Efficient Solution of Large Overdetermined Systems of Equations by a Monte Carlo Method
Tue, Jan 18, 2011 @ 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Yunsong Huang , Ph.D. student
Talk Title: Efficient Solution of Large Overdetermined Systems of Equations by a Monte Carlo Method
Abstract: Large overdetermined system of linear equations, expressed as A x = b, arises from applications such as seismic imaging. The rows of the matrix A can be randomly encoded and lumped up, resulting in a matrix with much fewer number of rows, thereby allowing a more efficient solution. This manipulation step can be embedded in least-squares iterative solution of the original system of equations. At each iteration, an independently encoded and lumped matrix is in effect, guiding the update of x, in the least-squares sense. Overall, this approach results in significant savings in computational cost. Experiments in seismic imaging validate the merits of the proposed method.
Biography: Yunsong Huang received a B.S. degree in physics from the University of Science and Technology of China, and a master's degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Southern California. He is currently a Ph.D. student in the Earth Science and Engineering Program at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST). His research interests include seismic imaging and signal processing.
Host: Prof. B. Keith Jenkins
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - EEB 248
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Talyia Veal
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2011 Ming Hsieh Institute Ph.D. Scholar Finalist Competition
Tue, Jan 18, 2011 @ 12:30 PM - 03:00 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Each finalist will present a 12-minute talk about their research, Ming Hsieh Institute
Talk Title: MHI Ph.D. Scholar Finalist Presentation
Abstract: You are all invited to an exciting event being held for the first time in our department: talks by nine stellar Ph.D. students competing to become 2011 Ming Hsieh Institute Ph.D. Scholars. The Ph.D. Scholar Program is a venture of the newly-founded Ming Hsieh Institute, that aims to support senior Ph.D. students interested in pursuing an academic career. These finalists have been selected from nominations submitted by faculty. At the event each finalist will present a 12-minute talk about their research. It is anticipated that five MHI Scholars will be selected from this pool, based on an evaluation of their talks by a faculty panel.
All Electrical Engineering students and faculty are invited. Light refreshments will be served.
Please find below the list of finalists and the titles of their talks.
â¢Firooz Aflatouni- "Electronically Assisted Phase Control of Semiconductor Lasers"
â¢Chiranjib Choudhuri -"On the Capacity and State estimation of Networks"
â¢Prasanta Ghosh - "A computational framework for exploring the role of speech production in speech recognition"
â¢Longbo Huang -"Improving the Lyapunov Network Optimization Technique"
â¢Chih-ping Li - "Delay and Power-Optimal Control in Multi-Class Queueing Systems"
â¢Jason Sanders "Megawatts in Nanoseconds: Engineering New Pulsed Power Systems that Enable Scientific Discovery"
â¢Samir Sharma - "Accelerated Water-Fat MRI"
â¢Chuan Wang - "High-Performance Separated Carbon Nanotube Thin-Film Transistors for Macroelectronic Integrated Circuit and Display Electronic applications"
â¢Omer Yilmaz - "Advanced Nonlinear Optical Signal Processing Techniques for High Speed, Reconfigurable Optical Fiber Networks"
Host: Bhaskar Krishnamachari, Co-Director - Ming Hsieh Institute
Location: Seeley Wintersmith Mudd Memorial Hall (of Philosophy) (MHP) - 106
Audiences: Department Only
Contact: Danielle Hamra
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Astani Dept. of Civil and Environmental Engineering Seminar
Tue, Jan 18, 2011 @ 02:00 PM - 03:00 PM
Sonny Astani Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Lea Hildebrandt, Carnegie Mellon University, Department of Chemical Engineering
Talk Title: Atmospheric Organic Nanoparticles:Importance, Challenges and Progress
Abstract: Atmospheric nanoparticles (aerosols) affect society in multiple ways. For example, they affect human health by damaging the respiratory and cardiovascular systems, they degrade visibility, and they perturb Earthâs climate by reducing the penetration of solar radiation and by influencing cloud formation and lifetime.
Organic aerosol globally comprises a significant fraction (20-90%) of the submicron particle mass. It is composed of thousands of species, many of them unidentified, and has a myriad of sources â both anthropogenic and biogenic, particle phase and gas phase. Furthermore, organic aerosol is dynamic: most of its components are semi-volatile and can evaporate, can be transported and further processed in the atmosphere, and can repartition to the particle phase, making it very challenging to trace the organic aerosol sources. Three-dimensional chemical transport models often significantly under-predict the concentration, oxidation state and diurnal cycle of organic aerosol, suggesting that our understanding of organic aerosol and, more generally, atmospheric nanoparticles is incomplete. We need to better understand atmospheric nanoparticles and update our models which will then allow us to develop effective policy actions to mitigate atmospheric particles and their adverse effects.
I will present recent results from our laboratory experiments and ambient measurements which shed light on organic aerosol formation, the interaction of different organic aerosol types, and their chemical transformation (aging). Firstly, aerosol production experiments using a state-of-the-art environmental chamber showed that aerosol mass yields from anthropogenic organic aerosol precursors such as toluene (methylbenzene) are much higher than previously reported. Secondly, in order to understand the interaction of organic aerosol from different sources, we developed a new experimental method using isotopically labeled compounds (13C or D) and a High Resolution Time-of-Flight Aerosol Mass Spectrometer. Our results are consistent with pseudo-ideal mixing of anthropogenic and biogenic organic aerosol components at equilibrium. This confirms that the presence of anthropogenic organic aerosol enhances the concentration of biogenic organic aerosol. Finally, our measurements at a remote coastal site on the island of Crete suggest that the variability between different organic aerosol types decreases significantly with chemical transformation (aging). The photochemical age of organic aerosol may be just as important as the aerosol source in understanding its concentrations and characteristics.
All of these findings have been used to more accurately represent organic aerosol in chemical transport models. The updated models agree well with observations of organic aerosol concentrations, approximate oxidative states and diurnal cycles in highly polluted (Mexico City) as well as pristine environments (Crete).
Location: Kaprielian Hall (KAP) - 209
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Evangeline Reyes
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CS Colloquium
Tue, Jan 18, 2011 @ 03:30 PM - 05:00 PM
Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Dr. David DeVault, USC Institute for Creative Technologies (ICT)
Talk Title: Toward flexible, robust, and rapid understanding of user speech in natural language dialogue systems
Abstract: This talk presents recent research that targets two of the major limitations in current natural language dialogue systems. One limitation is that while systems face substantial uncertainty in understanding user speech, they usually have only a rudimentary ability to overcome uncertainty in their dialogues. A second and related limitation arises from the fact that human speakers are by nature highly interactive while speaking, using incremental responses such as backchannels, interruptions, and overlapping speech to signal their understanding and resolve uncertainty when it arises. However, most implemented dialogue systems have little or no support for incremental interaction.
In the first part of the talk, I will present a probabilistic approach to dialogue management, called "contribution tracking", which I developed as a way to improve the flexibility of dialogue systems in overcoming uncertainty. On this approach, when faced with an ambiguous utterance, systems can spawn multiple threads of interpretation to track the likely meanings as the dialogue proceeds. I will highlight several concrete results and benefits of this approach in an implemented dialogue system that plays a collaborative reference game. These benefits include improved robustness to clarification failure, flexible aggregation of information across utterances with probabilistic inference, and the use of successful
ambiguity resolution to automatically improve the agent's understanding models with machine learning.
In the second part of the talk, I will present more recent work, carried out within the dialogue group at the USC Institute for Creative Technologies, which has aimed to enable incremental interaction and overlapping speech in our SASO-EN virtual humans. This work has created a data-driven approach to incremental understanding and prediction of user utterance meaning during user speech. Among the results I will discuss is a prototype system that often enables a virtual human to anticipate how a user's utterance will end, and to quickly generate and utter a completion of the user's utterance for them. (Joint work with Kenji Sagae and David Traum.)
Biography: David DeVault is a Research Scientist at the USC Institute for Creative Technologies (ICT), where he is a member of the natural language dialogue group. David obtained his Ph.D. from the Department of Computer Science at Rutgers University in 2008, and was a Postdoctoral Research Associate at USC/ICT from 2008-2010. David's research focuses on the development of techniques to enable dialogue systems to respond to the inevitable uncertainties of communication in a way that is more flexible, more robust, and more human-like. His work spans the areas of natural language understanding, dialogue management, and natural language generation.
Host: Prof. Kevin Knight
Location: Seaver Science Library (SSL) - 150
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Kanak Agrawal
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Epstein Institute Seminar
Tue, Jan 18, 2011 @ 03:30 PM - 04:50 PM
Daniel J. Epstein Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: John Fontanesi, PhD., Director, Ctr for Mgmt Science in Health, UC San Diego School of Medicine
Abstract: Health care delivery in the U.S. is wasteful, fragmented, difficult for patients to navigate and too often lethal. Application of modern management techniques have failed to improve Emergency Room overcrowding or ambulance diversion, Operating Room under-utilization or staff overtime, reduce âno-showâ rates or improve access in ambulatory care. A fundamental reason is the failure to establish either a descriptive or explanatory theory of health care quality. This presentation will offer a framework for developing a quantitative model of health care delivery from the perspectives of individual patients, provider, health care organizations and society as a whole generating extensive form sub-game Bayesian Nash Equilibrium.
Biography: Dr. Fontanesi is a professor in the School of Medicine, University of California, San Diego with joint appointments to the Department of Medicine, Division of General Internal Medicine and the Department of Family and Preventive Medicine. He is a member of a number of national committees committees including a core member of Clinical Laboratory Improvement Advisory Committee for the Federal government
Dr. Fontanesi is the Principle Investigator for a number of studies examining the operational conditions and organizational structures that facilitate or constrain organizational effectiveness in providing quality care. Recent studies include work flow analysis and simulation in emergency department re-design, optimized scheduling in ambulatory specialty care clinics, the logistical and fiscal requirements of alternative delivery sites for influenza vaccinations, improving patient compliance through work re-design and restructuring the role and relationships between the Vaccines for Children field staff and Providers. Recent publications range form the cost and efficiencies of mass vaccination clinics, discrete event simulation of ambulatory clinics, modeling patient arrival times and the role of measurement in improving quality of care in ambulatory care clinics.
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - Room 248
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Georgia Lum
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Preparing for the Career Expo
Tue, Jan 18, 2011 @ 05:00 PM - 06:00 PM
Viterbi School of Engineering Career Connections
Workshops & Infosessions
Make a great first impression! Learn how to optimize your time, approach employers and prepare for the recruiting event of the semester.
Location: Ronald Tutor Hall of Engineering (RTH) - 211
Audiences: All Viterbi Students
Contact: RTH 218 Viterbi Career Services
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Alpha Omega Epsilon Info Night
Tue, Jan 18, 2011 @ 07:00 PM - 08:00 PM
Viterbi School of Engineering Student Organizations
Workshops & Infosessions
In Alpha Omega Epsilon, we promote individual integrity and honesty, while stressing the importance of character and self-confidence. As a sorority, we promote unity, friendship and professionalism. As an integral part of the Viterbi School of Engineering, we strive to achieve high scholastic standards and a strong relationship with faculty and fellow students.
Come enjoy an hour of fun with the sisters of AOE. Our info nights are a great way to learn more about the sorority. Food and drink will be provided.Location: Grace Ford Salvatori Hall Of Letters, Arts & Sciences (GFS) -
Audiences: Undergrad
Contact: Alpha Omega Epsilon USC
