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Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Events for January
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USC Stem Cell Seminar: Bing Ren, University of California, San Diego
Tue, Jan 05, 2016 @ 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Alfred E. Mann Department of Biomedical Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Bing Ren, Professor, Department of Cellular and Molecular Medicine, University of California, San Diego
Talk Title: The 3D genome organization and long-range control of gene expression
Series: Eli and Edythe Broad Center for Regenerative Medicine and Stem Cell Research at USC Distinguished Speakers Series
Abstract: The 3D genome organization plays an essential role in orchestrating the many essential nuclear processes including gene regulation. Great strides have been made recently to characterize the 3D chromatin architecture in mammalian cells, with the development of both technologies for genome-wide study of chromatin interactions at increasing precision and concepts such as "chromosome territories," "topologically associating domains" and "chromatin loops." I will discuss how these new concepts are transforming the study of gene regulatory mechanisms in mammalian cells, by giving specific examples that illustrate the role of 3D chromatin organization in developing revolutionary tools in sequencing diploid genomes, understanding molecular basis of genetic disorders caused by genome structural variations and predicting target genes of enhancers.
Host: Andy McMahon
More Info: http://stemcell.usc.edu/events/details/?event_id=916784
Webcast: keckmedia.usc.edu/stem-cell-seminar (username: stem; password: seminar)Location: First Floor Seminar Room
WebCast Link: keckmedia.usc.edu/stem-cell-seminar (username: stem; password: seminar)
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Cristy Lytal/USC Stem Cell
Event Link: http://stemcell.usc.edu/events/details/?event_id=916784
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CS Seminar: Bo An (Nanyang Technological University, Singapore) - Computing Optimal Monitoring Strategy for Detecting Terrorist Plots
Thu, Jan 07, 2016 @ 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Bo An, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore
Talk Title: Computing Optimal Monitoring Strategy for Detecting Terrorist Plots
Series: Teamcore Seminar
Abstract: In recent years, terrorist organizations (e.g., ISIS or al-Qaeda) are increasingly directing terrorists to launch coordinated attacks in their home countries. One example is the Paris shootings on January 7, 2015. By monitoring potential terrorists, security agencies are able to detect and stop terrorist plots at their planning stage. Although security agencies may have knowledge about potential terrorists (e.g., who they are, how they interact), they usually have limited resources and cannot monitor all terrorists. Moreover, a terrorist planner may strategically choose to arouse terrorists considering the security agency's monitoring strategy. This talk will discuss our contributions toward the challenging problem of computing optimal monitoring strategies: 1) A new Stackelberg game model for terrorist plot detection; 2) A modified double oracle framework for computing the optimal strategy effectively; 3) Complexity results for both defender and attacker oracle problems; 4) Novel mixed-integer linear programming (MILP) formulations for best response problems of both players; and 5) Effective approximation algorithms for generating suboptimal responses for both players.
Biography: Bo An is a Nanyang Assistant Professor with the School of Computer Engineering, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. His current research interests include artificial intelligence, multiagent systems, game theory, and optimization. He has published over 40 referred papers at AAMAS, IJCAI, AAAI, ICAPS, JAAMAS and IEEE Transactions. Dr. An was the recipient of the 2010 IFAAMAS Victor Lesser Distinguished Dissertation Award, an Operational Excellence Award from the Commander, First Coast Guard District of the United States, the Best Innovative Application Paper Award at AAMAS'12, and the 2012 INFORMS Daniel H. Wagner Prize for Excellence in Operations Research Practice. He is a member of the Board of Directors of IFAAMAS and the Associate Editor of JAAMAS.
Host: Teamcore Group
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 248
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Assistant to CS chair
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Rafael Ferreira da Silva (USC ISI) - Task Resource Consumption Prediction for Scientific Applications and Workflows
Mon, Jan 11, 2016 @ 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Rafael Ferreira da Silva, USC ISI
Talk Title: Task Resource Consumption Prediction for Scientific Applications and Workflows
Series: CS Colloquium
Abstract: This lecture satisfies requirements for CSCI 591: Computer Science Research Colloquium
Estimates of task runtime, disk space usage, and memory consumption, are commonly used by scheduling and resource provisioning algorithms to support efficient and reliable scientific application executions. Such algorithms often assume that accurate estimates are available, but such estimates are difficult to generate in practice. In this work, we first profile real scientific applications and workflows, collecting fine-grained information such as process I/O, runtime, memory usage, and CPU utilization. We then propose a method to automatically characterize task requirements based on these profiles. Our method estimates task runtime, disk space, and peak memory consumption. It looks for correlations between the parameters of a dataset, and if no correlation is found, the dataset is divided into smaller subsets using the statistical recursive partitioning method and conditional inference trees to identify patterns that characterize particular behaviors of the workload. We then propose an estimation process to predict task characteristics of scientific applications based on the collected data. For scientific workflows, we propose an online estimation process based on the MAPE-K loop, where task executions are monitored and estimates are updated as more information becomes available. Experimental results show that our online estimation process results in much more accurate predictions than an offline approach, where all task requirements are estimated prior to workflow execution.
Biography: Rafael Ferreira da Silva is a Computer Scientist in the Collaborative Computing Group at the USC Information Sciences Institute. He received his PhD in Computer Science from INSA-Lyon, France, in 2013. In 2010, he received his Master's degree in Computer Science from Universidade Federal de Campina Grande, Brazil, and his BS degree in Computer Science from Universidade Federal da Paraiba, in 2007. His research focuses on the execution of scientific workflows on heterogeneous distributed systems such as clouds and grids. See http://www.rafaelsilva.com for further information.
Host: Computer Science Department
Location: Olin Hall of Engineering (OHE) - 136
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Assistant to CS chair
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Seminars in Biomedical EngineeringMon, Jan 11, 2016 @ 12:30 PM - 01:49 PM
Alfred E. Mann Department of Biomedical Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Talk Title: TBA
Host: K. Kirk Shung, PhD
Location: Olin Hall of Engineering (OHE) - 122
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Mischalgrace Diasanta
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USC Stem Cell Seminar: Rudolf Jaenisch, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Tue, Jan 12, 2016 @ 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Alfred E. Mann Department of Biomedical Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Rudolf Jaenisch, Member, Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research; Professor of Biology/ Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Talk Title: iPS cell technology and disease research
Series: Eli and Edythe Broad Center for Regenerative Medicine and Stem Cell Research at USC Distinguished Speakers Series
Abstract: The development of iPS cell technology has revolutionized our ability to study human diseases in defined in vitro cell culture systems. A major problem with using iPS cells for this "disease in the dish" approach is the choice of control cells, because of the unpredictable variability between different iPS/ES cells to differentiate into a given lineage. Recently developed efficient gene editing methods such as the CRISPR/Cas system allow for the creation of genetically defined models of monogenic as well as polygenic human disorders. This seminar will cover the state of pluripotency, disease modeling and iPS cells, and Parkinson's disease.
Host: Qi-Long Ying
More Info: https://stemcell.usc.edu/events/details/?event_id=916785
Location: First Floor Seminar Room
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Cristy Lytal/USC Stem Cell
Event Link: https://stemcell.usc.edu/events/details/?event_id=916785
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CS Colloquium: Emilio Ferrara (USC ISI) - Predicting human behavior in techno-social systems: fighting abuse and illicit activities
Tue, Jan 12, 2016 @ 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Emilio Ferrara, Information Sciences Institute
Talk Title: Predicting human behavior in techno-social systems: fighting abuse and illicit activities
Series: CS Colloquium
Abstract: This lecture satisfies requirements for CSCI 591: Computer Science Research Colloquium.
The increasing availability of data across different socio-technical systems, such as online social networks, social media, and mobile phone networks, presents novel challenges and intriguing research opportunities. As more online services permeate through our everyday life and as data from various domains are connected and integrated with each other, the boundary between the real and the online worlds becomes blurry. Such data convey both online and offline activities of people, as well as multiple time scales and resolutions.
In this talk, I'll discuss my research efforts aimed at characterizing and predicting human behavior and activities in techno-social worlds: starting by discussing network structure and information spreading on large online social networks, I'll move toward characterizing entire online conversations, such as those around big real-world events, to capture the dynamics driving the emergence of collective attention and trending topics. I'll describe a machine learning framework leveraging these insights to detect promoted campaigns that mimic grassroots conversation. Aiming at learning the signature of abuse at the level of the single individuals, I'll illustrate the challenges posed by characterizing human activity as opposed to that of synthetic entities (social bots) that attempt emulate us, to persuade, smear, tamper or deceive. I'll draw a parallel with detecting illicit activities in the real world leveraging the traces left by criminals' interactions via mobile phones.
I'll conclude envisioning the design of computational systems that will help us making effective, timely decisions (informed by social data), and create actionable policies to contribute create a better future society.
Biography: Dr. Emilio Ferrara is a Computer Scientist at the USC's Information Sciences Institute. Ferrara's research interests include designing machine-learning systems to model and predict individual behavior in techno-social systems, characterize information diffusion and information campaigns, and predict crime and abuse in such environments. He has held research positions in institutions in Italy, Austria, and UK (2009-2012). Before joining USC in 2015, he was a Research Assistant Professor at the School of Informatics and Computing of Indiana University (2012-2015).
Ferrara earned a Ph.D. in Mathematics and Computer Science from University of Messina (Italy), and has published over 60 articles on machine learning, network science, and social media, appeared in top venues including PNAS, Communications of the ACM, Physical Review Letters, and several ACM and IEEE transactions and top conferences (WWW, CSCW, etc.). His research on social network abuse and crime prediction has been featured on the major news outlets (TIME, BBC, The New York Times, etc.) and tech magazines (MIT Technology Review, Vice, Mashable, New Scientist, etc). His research has been supported by DARPA, ONR, and IARPA.
Ferrara is Guest Editor of two special issues on network science and computational social sciences, published respectively on EPJ Data Science and Future Internet. He's member of the PC for conferences including ACM WWW, ICWSM, and SocInfo. Ferrara is co-chair of workshops recurring at ECCS, WWW, SocInfo, and WebScience; he was Local & Sponsor Chair of ACM Web Science 2014 and Publicity co-chair of SocInfo 2014. In 2015, Ferrara was named IBM Watson Analytics VIP Influential in Big Data.
Host: Computer Science Department
Location: Olin Hall of Engineering (OHE) - 136
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Assistant to CS chair
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Epstein Institute Seminar - ISE 651
Tue, Jan 12, 2016 @ 03:30 PM - 04:50 PM
Daniel J. Epstein Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Dr. Denis Cormier, Rochester Institute of Technology
Talk Title: Multifunctional 3D Printing
Host: Yong Chen
More Information: January 12, 2016_Cormier.pdf
Location: Ethel Percy Andrus Gerontology Center (GER) - 206
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Michele ISE
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EE-EP Seminar, Ashwin Seshia, January 13th, EEB 132 @ 11:00am
Wed, Jan 13, 2016 @ 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Ashwin A. Seshia, University of Cambridge
Talk Title: Dynamics-Enhanced Sensory Processing
Abstract: Instruments based on resonant and oscillatory elements have historically been employed to conduct some of the most accurate physical measurements. This talk describes research to enable miniaturized electromechanical sensor systems wherein precise engineering of the dynamical response is instrumental in enabling new modes of transduction, energy conversion and sensing. A series of research results from my group will be provided to illustrate the approach. First, seismic-grade accelerometers based on resonant output principles will be described where the interaction of mechanical nonlinearities and noise processes sets limits on the achievable resolution. Further, by engineering the principle of vibration mode localization in weakly coupled resonators, passive immunity to environmental drift is achieved by recording eigenstate variations as a measure of differential structural perturbations. Next, net-zero power strain sensors for structural health monitoring applications are enabled by integrating vibration energy harvesters together with low-power temperature compensated resonant strain gauges. By engineering the principle of parametric resonance for vibration energy harvesting it is possible to engineer vibration energy harvesters with multi-frequency responsivity and substantially larger recoverable electrical power as compared to classical approaches based on direct (linear) resonance under specified conditions. Finally, with a view towards future application of engineered non-linearity in micro- and nanoelectromechanical systems, I will describe results from electro-acoustic biosensors utilizing noise and non-linear response as readout modalities, and the mutual synchronization of non-linear microelectromechanical oscillators demonstrating significantly improved frequency stability and potentially enabling fundamentally new energy-efficient approaches to sensory information processing. Micro- and nanofabricated devices engineered using these and similar approaches are now being integrated into monitoring tools and sensor systems for a variety of application scenarios.
Biography: Ashwin A. Seshia received the B. Tech. degree in engineering physics from IIT Bombay, India, in 1996; the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering and computer science from the University of California at Berkeley, Berkeley, CA, USA, in 1999 and 2002, respectively; and the M.A. degree from the University of Cambridge, Cambridge, U.K., in 2008. He joined the faculty of the Department of Engineering, University of Cambridge, in 2002, where he is currently a Reader in Microsystems Technology and a Fellow of Queens' College. His Research interests are in the domain of micro- and nano-engineered dynamical systems. He serves on the editorial boards of the IEEE Journal of Microelectromechanical Systems, the IEEE Transactions on Ultrasonics, Ferroelectrics and Frequency Control, IOP Journal of Micromechanics and Microengineering, and the IEEE Transactions of Nanotechnology.
Host: EE-Electrophysics
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 132
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Marilyn Poplawski
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Communications, Networks & Systems (CommNetS) Seminar
Wed, Jan 13, 2016 @ 02:00 PM - 03:00 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Dr. Emrah Akyol, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Talk Title: "Communication in Strategic Environments: Crawford-Sobel Meet Shannon"
Series: CommNetS
Abstract: Over thirty years ago, economists Vincent Crawford and Joel Sobel introduced the concepts of strategic information transmission (SIT) and cheap talk in their seminal Econometrica paper, as a way of understanding how information is strategically revealed (or not) by agents whose interests are only partially aligned. This theory has had tremendous success in explaining situations ranging from advertising to expert advice sharing, and many extensions of the original SIT model and the broader "principal-agent" class of problems have been extensively studied in the economics literature since. However, despite its name and even superficially obvious connection with information theory (IT), SIT has so far received very little attention from the IT community.
In this talk, I will present approaches to address such strategic communication problems from the lens of information and game theories. Specifically, I will focus on a strategic communication paradigm where the better-informed transmitter communicates with a receiver who makes the ultimate decision concerning both agents. While the economists have extensively studied the Nash equilibrium variant of this problem, the more relevant Stackelberg equilibrium enables the use of Shannon theoretic tools. I will present the fundamental limits of strategic compression and communication problems in the SIT context. Particularly, three problem settings will be considered, focusing on the quadratic distortion measures and jointly Gaussian variables: compression, communication, and the simple equilibrium conditions without any compression or communication. The analysis will then be extended to the receiver side information setting, where the strategic aspect of the problem yields rather surprising results regarding optimality of uncoded communication. Finally, several applications of the results within the broader context of decision theory will be presented.
Biography: Emrah Akyol received the Ph.D. degree in 2011 from the University of California at Santa Barbara. From 2006 to 2007, he held positions at Hewlett-Packard Laboratories and NTT Docomo Laboratories, both in Palo Alto, CA where he worked on topics in video compression and streaming. From 2013 to 2014, Dr. Akyol was a postdoctoral researcher in the Electrical Engineering Department, University of Southern California. Currently, Dr. Akyol is a postdoctoral research associate in the Coordinated Science Laboratory, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His current research is on the interplay of networked information theory, game theory, communications, sensing and control. Dr. Akyol received the 2010 UCSB Dissertation Fellowship, the 2014 USC Postdoctoral Training Award and was an invited participant of the 2015 NSF Early-Career Investigators Workshop on CPS and Smart City.
Host: Prof. Ashutosh Nayyar
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 248
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Annie Yu
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Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering Seminar Series
Wed, Jan 13, 2016 @ 03:30 PM - 04:30 PM
Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Stefan Llewellyn Smith, Professor in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at the University of California, San Diego
Talk Title: Hollow Vortices
Series: Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering Seminar Series
Abstract: Hollow vortices are vortices whose interior is at rest. They posses vortex sheets on their boundaries and can be viewed as a desingularization of point vortices. After giving a history of point vortices, we obtain exact solutions for hollow vortices in linear and nonlinear strain and examine the properties of streets of hollow vortices. The former can be viewed as a canonical example of a hollow vortex in an arbitrary flow, and its stability properties depend on a single non-dimensional parameter. In the latter case, we reexamine the hollow vortex street of Baker, Saffman and Sheffield and examine its stability to arbitrary disturbances, and then investigate the double hollow vortex street. Implications and extensions of this work are discussed.
Biography: Stefan G. Llewellyn Smith received his Ph.D. in applied mathematics from the University of Cambridge in 1996. He was a research fellow of Queens' College, Cambridge, from 1996 to 1999, working in the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics. He spent a year from 1996 to 1997 on a Lindemann Trust Fellowship at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla. He joined the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at UCSD in 1999 as Assistant Professor of Environmental Engineering. His research interests include fluid dynamics, especially its application to environmental and engineering problem, acoustics and asymptotic methods.
Location: Seaver Science Library (SSL) - 150
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Valerie Childress
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MFD - Chemical Engineering and Materials Science Lyman L. Handy Series: Joseph Heremans
Thu, Jan 14, 2016 @ 12:45 PM - 02:00 PM
Mork Family Department of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Joseph Heremans, Ohio State Univ.
Talk Title: Solid-state thermal energy converters based on thermal spin-torque
Series: MFD Lyman L. Handy
Host: Prof. Jayakanth Ravichandran
Location: James H. Zumberge Hall Of Science (ZHS) - 159
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Jason Ordonez
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Shared Memory Reconfigurable Computing for the Cloud
Fri, Jan 15, 2016 @ 10:45 AM - 11:45 AM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Dr. Peter Hofstee, IBM Austin Research Laboratory
Talk Title: Shared Memory Reconfigurable Computing for the Cloud
Abstract: This talk covers recent work on shared memory reconfigurable computing. We start with enhancements made to the Power 8 processor, in particular the CAPI interface that allows for off-chip accelerators with full coherent access to all shared system resources. Next we cover some examples of how this kind of acceleration can improve system functions such as networking and storage. We then turn to gene sequencing as an example of compute acceleration and show that each of the major stages can be improved with reconfigurable logic. We end by discussing prototype cloud-based infrastructure that researchers can use to develop and deploy their own solutions.
Biography: H. Peter Hofstee (Ph.D. California Inst. of Technology, 1995) is a distinguished research staff member at the IBM Austin Research Laboratory, USA, and a part-time professor in Big Data Systems at Delft University of Technology, Netherlands. Peter is best known for his contributions to heterogeneous computer architecture as the chief architect of the Synergistic Processor Elements in the Cell Broadband Engine processor, used in the Sony Playstation3 and the first supercomputer to reach sustained Petaflop operation. After returning to IBM research in 2011 he has focused on optimizing the system roadmap for big data, analytics, and cloud, including the use of accelerated compute. His early research work on coherently attached reconfigurable acceleration on Power 7 paved the way for the new coherent attach processor interface on POWER 8. Peter is an IBM master inventor with more than 100 issued patents and a member of the IBM Academy of technology.
Host: Prof. Viktor Prasanna
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 248
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Annie Yu
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SmartCare: A Discovery and Clinical Decision Support System for Personalized Healthcare
Fri, Jan 15, 2016 @ 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Information Sciences Institute
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Mihaela van der Schaar, UCLA
Talk Title: Ai Seminar: SmartCare: A Discovery and Clinical Decision Support System for Personalized Healthcare
Series: Artificial Intelligence Seminar
Abstract: Modern technology makes it possible to collect more and more data for each patient; modern record-keeping makes it possible to access more and more data from past patients. Unfortunately, it has so far not been possible to make use of all this data to create a system of personalized diagnosis and treatment.Instead, current diagnosis and treatment continues to rely on Clinical Practice Guidelines, which are largely based on experience and opinion rather than on scientific analysis and evidence, are geared towards the -lowest common
denominator-, ignore the strengths of a given institution (e.g. specialists, technology) and are targeted toward a representative patient rather than toward the unique characteristics of the current patient.
In this talk, I will present a novel framework SmartCare that integrates the (longitudinal, multi-modal) data of the current patient (demographic information, current medical condition, medical/family history, availability of home care, etc.) with what has been learned from previous patients to recommend personalized diagnosis and treatment. To do so,
SmartCare must overcome enormous conceptual, theoretical and practical challenges, some of which will
be discussed in the talk.
SmartCare has already recorded an important (even remarkable) success: a vastly improved procedure for breast cancer screening. Current clinical practice (BI-RADS: Breast Imaging
Report and Data System) results in an enormous number of false positives, leading to many further invasive and unnecessary procedures (including surgery) that involve needless risk,
suffering and expense. The SmartCare procedure reduces false positives by 39% while maintaining the same misdetection rate. In the U.S. alone, this means 80,000 fewer false positives per year.
Biography: Mihaela van der Schaar is Chancellor's Professor of Electrical Engineering at University of California, Los Angeles. She received an NSF CAREER Award (2004), the Okawa Foundation Award (2006), the IBM Faculty Award (2005, 2007, 2008), and several best paper awards, including the 2011 IEEE Circuits and Systems Society Darlington Award Best Paper Award. She holds 33 granted US patents. She is also the founding and managing director of the UCLA Center for Engineering Economics, Learning, and Networks (see http://netecon.ee.ucla.edu). Her research interests are in data science, medical informatics, machine learning, game theory, and network science. For more information about her research visit: http://medianetlab.ee.ucla.edu/
Host: Greg Ver Steeg
Webcast: http://webcasterms1.isi.edu/mediasite/Viewer/?peid=2cad8868c8314e248c72e1ba11c4c0e61dLocation: Information Science Institute (ISI) - 6th Flr Conf Rm # 689, Marina Del Rey
WebCast Link: http://webcasterms1.isi.edu/mediasite/Viewer/?peid=2cad8868c8314e248c72e1ba11c4c0e61d
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Peter Zamar
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NL Seminar-Learning Open Domain Knowledge From Text
Fri, Jan 15, 2016 @ 03:00 PM - 04:00 PM
Information Sciences Institute
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Gabor Angeli, Stanford University
Talk Title: Learning Open Domain Knowledge From Text
Series: Natural Language Seminar
Abstract: The increasing availability of large text corpora holds the promise of acquiring an unprecedented amount of knowledge from this text. However, current techniques are either specialized to particular domains or do not scale to large corpora. This dissertation develops a new technique for learning open-domain knowledge from unstructured web-scale text corpora. A first application aims to capture common sense facts: given a candidate statement about the world and a large corpus of known facts, is the statement likely to be true? We appeal to a probabilistic relaxation of natural logic -- a logic which uses the syntax of natural language as its logical formalism -- to define a search problem from the query statement to its appropriate support in the knowledge base over valid (or approximately valid) logical inference steps. We show a 4x improvement at retrieval recall compared to lemmatized lookup, maintaining above 90% precision. This approach is extended to handle longer, more complex premises by segmenting these utterance into a set of atomic statements entailed through natural logic. We evaluate this system in isolation by using it as the main component in an Open Information Extraction system, and show that it achieves a 3% absolute improvement in F1 compared to prior work on a competitive knowledge base population task. A remaining challenge is elegantly handling cases where we could not find a supporting premise for our query. To address this, we create an analogue of an evaluation function in game playing search: a shallow lexical classifier is folded into the search program to serve as a heuristic function to assess how likely we would have been to find a premise. Results on answering 4th grade science questions show that this method improves over both the classifier in isolation and a strong IR baseline, and achieves the best published results on the task.
Biography: Gabor is a new graduate from Chris Manning's natural language processing lab. He graduated with a BS in electrical engineering/computer science from UC Berkeley in 2010, and defended his Ph.D. in the fall of 2015. His research focuses on natural language understanding, ranging from relation extraction and knowledge base population, textual entailment, common-sense reasoning, and question answering. He has led the Stanford knowledge base population project for the past three years, with Stanford ranking 5th, 1st, and 1st (tied) among teams participating in the TAC-KBP competition over those three years. In addition to publications at ACL, EMNLP and NAACL, he co-authored an EMNLP best dataset paper on collecting a large dataset for textual entailment. Outside of academia, he was the NLP architect for Baarzo in 2014 (acquired by Google), and is currently a fellow at XSeed Capital. In his free time, Gabor enjoys hiking, board games, and binge-watching Netflix shows.
Host: Xing Shi and Kevin Knight
More Info: http://nlg.isi.edu/nl-seminar/
Location: Information Science Institute (ISI) - 6th Flr Conf Rm # 689, Marina Del Rey
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Peter Zamar
Event Link: http://nlg.isi.edu/nl-seminar/
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Seminars in Biomedical Engineering
Mon, Jan 18, 2016 @ 12:30 PM - 01:49 PM
Alfred E. Mann Department of Biomedical Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: NO CLASS, MLK JR. HOLIDAY, NO CLASS, MLK JR. HOLIDAY
Talk Title: NO CLASS, MLK JR. HOLIDAY
Host: K. Kirk Shung, PhD
Location: Olin Hall of Engineering (OHE) - 122
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Mischalgrace Diasanta
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NSF Overview and Advanced Manufacturing Funding Opportunities
Tue, Jan 19, 2016 @ 10:00 AM - 11:30 AM
Daniel J. Epstein Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Zhijian Pei, NSF - Program Director
Talk Title: NSF Overview and Advanced Manufacturing Funding Opportunities
Host: Qiang Huang
More Information: ZJ Pei Abstract and Bio for USC.pdf
Location: Ethel Percy Andrus Gerontology Center (GER) - 206
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Michele ISE
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USC Stem Cell Seminar: James Wells, Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center
Tue, Jan 19, 2016 @ 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Alfred E. Mann Department of Biomedical Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: James Wells, Professor, Developmental Biology; Director for Basic Research, Endocrinology; Director of the Pluripotent Stem Cell Facility/Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center
Talk Title: Pluripotent stem cell-derived tissues to study development and disease of the GI tract
Series: Eli and Edythe Broad Center for Regenerative Medicine and Stem Cell Research at USC Distinguished Speakers Series
Abstract: Research in the Wells Lab focuses on identifying the molecular mechanisms that control organogenesis and on using this information to direct the differentiation of pluripotent stem cells into human organ tissues (organoids) including pancreas, stomach and intestine. Organoids are being used to model diabetes and diseases of the gastrointestinal tract and are being studied for their therapeutic potential to restore function to damaged tissues.
Host: Senta Georgia
More Info: http://stemcell.usc.edu/events/details/?event_id=916786
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Cristy Lytal/USC Stem Cell
Event Link: http://stemcell.usc.edu/events/details/?event_id=916786
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Epstein Institute Seminar - ISE 651
Tue, Jan 19, 2016 @ 03:30 PM - 04:50 PM
Daniel J. Epstein Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Dr. Michael N. Katehakis, Rutgers University
Talk Title: Asymptotically Optimal Policies for Mult Armed Bandit Models Under Generalized Ranking
Host: Sheldon Ross
More Information: January 19, 2016_Katehakis.pdf
Location: Ethel Percy Andrus Gerontology Center (GER) - 206
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Michele ISE
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CS Colloquium & Yahoo! Labs Seminar: Jure Leskovec (Stanford) - Machine Learning for Human Decision Making
Tue, Jan 19, 2016 @ 04:00 PM - 05:00 PM
Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Jure Leskovec, Stanford University
Talk Title: Machine Learning for Human Decision Making
Series: Yahoo! Labs Machine Learning Seminar Series
Abstract: This lecture satisfies requirements for CSCI 591: Computer Science Research Colloquium
In many real-life settings human judges are making decisions and choosing among many alternatives in order to label or classify items: Medical doctor diagnosing a patient, criminal court judge making a decision, a crowd-worker labeling an image, and a student answering a multiple-choice question. Gaining insights into human decision making is important for determining the quality of individual decisions as well as identifying mistakes and biases. In this talk we discuss the question of developing machine learning methodology for estimating the quality of individual judges and obtaining diagnostic insights into how various judges decide on different kinds of items. We develop a series of increasingly powerful hierarchical Bayesian models which infer latent groups of judges and items with the goal of obtaining insights into the underlying decision process. We apply our framework to a wide range of real-world domains, and demonstrate that our approach can accurately predict judges decisions, diagnose types of mistakes judges tend to make, and infer true labels of items.
The lecture will be available to stream HERE. [For best quality, right click -> open in new tab]
Biography: Jure Leskovec is assistant professor of Computer Science at Stanford University and chief scientist at Pinterest. His research focuses on mining large social and information networks, their evolution, and the diffusion of information and influence over them. Computation over massive data is at the heart of his research and has applications in computer science, social sciences, economics, marketing, and healthcare. This research has won several awards including a Lagrange Prize, Microsoft Research Faculty Fellowship, Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship, and numerous best paper awards. Leskovec received his bachelor's degree in computer science from University of Ljubljana, Slovenia, and his PhD in in machine learning from the Carnegie Mellon University and postdoctoral training at Cornell University. You can follow him on Twitter @jure
Host: Yan Liu
More Info: http://www-bcf.usc.edu/~liu32/mlseminar.html
Webcast: https://bluejeans.com/469517570Location: Henry Salvatori Computer Science Center (SAL) - 101
WebCast Link: https://bluejeans.com/469517570
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Assistant to CS chair
Event Link: http://www-bcf.usc.edu/~liu32/mlseminar.html
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CiSoft Seminar
Wed, Jan 20, 2016 @ 02:00 PM - 03:00 PM
Mork Family Department of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Mr. Jim Crompton, founder of Reflections Data Consulting
Talk Title: No Document Left Behind: Digital Asset Lifecycle Management
Series: CiSoft Seminar
Host: CiSoft
More Information: CiSoft Seminar Crompton 1-20-16.pdf
Location: Ronald Tutor Hall of Engineering (RTH) - 324
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Juli Legat
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Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering Seminar Series
Wed, Jan 20, 2016 @ 03:30 PM - 04:30 PM
Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Assad Oberai, Professor in the Department of Mechanical, Aerospace and Nuclear Engineering at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
Talk Title: Biomechanical Imaging: Shall We See How You Feel?
Series: Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering Seminar Series
Abstract: Certain types of diseases lead to changes in the microstructural organization of tissue. Altered microstructure in turn leads to altered macroscopic tissue properties, which are often easier to image than the microstructure itself. Thus the measurement of macroscopic properties offers a window into tissue microstructure and health. In Biomechanical Imaging (BMI) we aim to utilize this association between the macroscopic mechanical properties of tissue and its health by generating images of the mechanical properties and using these to infer tissue microstructure and health.
At the heart of BMI lies the solution of an inverse problem in continuum mechanics: given the deformation of the medium (tissue) and a constitutive model, determine the spatial distribution of the material properties. In this talk, I will discuss the well-posedness of this inverse problem and describe efficient and robust algorithms for solving it. I will also describe the development of new constitutive models that are motivated by tissue microstructure, and applications of BMI that include improved in-vivo diagnosis of breast cancer, and imaging elastic properties of tissue at the cellular, and sub-cellular levels.
Biography: Assad Oberai is a Professor in the Department of Mechanical Aerospace and Nuclear Engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI). He is also the Associate Dean for Research and Graduate Studies in the School of Engineering, and the Associate Director of the Scientific Computation Research Center (SCOREC). Assad is a recipient of the National Science Foundation Career award in 2005 and the Department of Energy Early Career award in 2004. He was awarded the Thomas J.R. Hughes Young Investigator Award by the American Society of Mechanical Engineers in 2007. He received the Humboldt Foundation Award for experienced researchers in 2009, and the Erasmus Mundus Master Course Lectureship at Universidad Politécnica de Cataluña, Barcelona in 2010. In 2015, he was awarded the Research Excellence Award by the School of Engineering at RPI, and was elected as a Fellow of the United States Association of Computational Mechanics (USACM). In 2016, he was elected as a Fellow of the American Institute of Medical and Biological Engineering (AIMBE). He is on the board of academic editors for the journal PlosOne.
Host: Prof. Roger Ghanem
Location: Seaver Science Library (SSL) - Biomechanical Imaging: Shall We See How You Feel?
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Valerie Childress
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Introduction to COMSOL Multiphysics
Thu, Jan 21, 2016 @ 12:45 PM - 02:00 PM
Mork Family Department of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Mina Sierou, COMSOL Inc.
Talk Title: Introduction to COMSOL Multiphysics
Abstract: COMSOL Multiphysics is a general purpose software platform for modeling and simulating a large variety of physical phenomena. With more than 30 add-on products, COMSOL gives you access to dedicated physics interfaces and tools applicable for electrical, mechanical, fluid flow and chemical & electrochemical applications. This seminar will introduce the software through a live demonstration and presentation of example models in a wide range of fields.
Host: Professor Jayakanth Ravichandran
Location: James H. Zumberge Hall Of Science (ZHS) - 159
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Martin Olekszyk
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AI Seminar
Fri, Jan 22, 2016 @ 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Information Sciences Institute
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Yisong Yue, Cal Tech
Talk Title: A Decision Tree Framework for Data-Driven Speech Animation
Abstract: n many animation projects, the animation artist typically spends significant time animating the face, which involves many labor-intensive tasks that offer little potential for creative expression. One particularly tedious task is speech animation: animating the face to match spoken audio. Indeed, the often prohibitive cost of speech animation has limited the types of animations that are feasible, including localization to different languages.
In this talk, I will show how to view speech animation through the lens of data-driven sequence prediction. In contrast to previous sequence prediction settings, speech animation is an instance of contextual spatiotemporal sequence prediction, where the output is continuous and high-dimensional (e.g., a configuration of the lower face), and also depends on an input context (e.g., audio or phonetic input).
I will present a decision tree framework for learning to generate context-dependent spatiotemporal sequences given training data. This approach enjoys several attractive properties, including ease of training, fast performance at test time, and the ability to robustly tolerate corrupted training data using a novel latent variable approach. I will showcase this approach in a case study on speech animation, where our approach outperforms several competitive baselines in both quantitative and qualitative evaluations, and also demonstrates strong robustness to corrupted training data.
This is joint work with Taehwan Kim, Sarah Taylor, Barry-John Theobald, and Iain Matthews.
Biography: Yisong Yue is an assistant professor in the Computing and Mathematical Sciences Department at the California Institute of Technology. He was previously a research scientist at Disney Research. Before that, he was a postdoctoral researcher in the Machine Learning Department and the iLab at Carnegie Mellon University. He received a Ph.D. fromCornell University and a B.S. from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Yisong's research interests lie primarily in the theory and application of statistical machine learning. He is particularly interested in developing novel methods for spatiotemporal reasoning, structured prediction, interactive learning systems, and learning with humans in the loop. In the past, his research has been applied to information retrieval, recommender systems, text classification, learning from rich user interfaces, analyzing implicit human feedback, data-driven animation, sports analytics, policy learning in robotics, and adaptive routing & allocation problems.
Host: Ashish Vaswani
More Info: http://webcasterms1.isi.edu/mediasite/SilverlightPlayer/Default.aspx?peid=6147027e077e4570919a58730193abf91d
Location: Information Science Institute (ISI) - 11th floor large conference room
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Kary LAU
Event Link: http://webcasterms1.isi.edu/mediasite/SilverlightPlayer/Default.aspx?peid=6147027e077e4570919a58730193abf91d
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EE-EP Seminar, Jae-Sun Seo, Friday, January 22nd at 2:00pm in EEB 132
Fri, Jan 22, 2016 @ 02:00 PM - 03:30 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Jae-sun Seo, Arizona State University
Talk Title: Designing Power-Efficient Neuromorphic VLSI Systems That Can Learn and Infer
Abstract: In recent years, both industry and academia have shown large interest in low-power hardware designs for neuromorphic computing (e.g. TrueNorth) and machine learning algorithms (e.g. convolutional neural networks) for a wide range of image, speech, and biomedical applications. State-of-the-art algorithms are computation-/memory-/communication-intensive, however, making it difficult to perform low-power real-time training and classification. Furthermore, to optimize system-level power, efficient power delivery and voltage regulation of such VLSI systems also becomes a critical concern.
In this talk, I will present our exemplary research on low-power digital neuromorphic processor design with on-chip learning, as well as workload-adaptive integrated voltage regulators. I will discuss our work on on-chip STDP (spike-timing dependent plasticity) learning for pattern recognition (45nm), spiking clustering for deep-brain sensing (65nm), and a versatile neuromorphic processor design that can support various STDP learning / inhibition rules found in neuroscience literature with large fan-in/out per neuron. To provide an efficient and stable power supply for such processors against fluctuating workloads, integrated switched-capacitor voltage regulator designs are proposed with fast on-chip current sensing (32nm) and capacitance dithering (65nm).
I will also briefly discuss our machine learning hardware designs for speech and biometric applications, and present future research directions to vertically integrate and further improve the power-efficiency of neuromorphic systems while bridging the gap with machine learning approaches.
Biography: Jae-sun Seo received his Ph.D. degree from the University of Michigan in 2010 in electrical engineering. From 2010 to 2013, he was with IBM T. J. Watson Research Center, where he worked on neuromorphic chip design for the DARPA SyNAPSE project and energy-efficient circuits for IBM's high-performance processors. Since January 2014, he has been with Arizona State University as an assistant professor in the School of ECEE. During the summer of 2015, he was a visiting faculty at Intel Circuits Research Lab. His research interests include efficient hardware design of learning algorithms and integrated power management. He received the IBM outstanding technical achievement award in 2012, and serves on the technical program committee for ISLPED and the organizing committee for ICCD.
Host: EE-EP
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 132
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Marilyn Poplawski
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NL Seminar-EXTRACTING USER INFORMATION FROM ONLINE SOCIAL MEDIA
Fri, Jan 22, 2016 @ 03:00 PM - 04:00 PM
Information Sciences Institute
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Jiwei Li, Stanford University
Talk Title: EXTRACTING USER INFORMATION FROM ONLINE SOCIAL MEDIA
Series: Natural Language Seminar
Abstract: The overwhelming popularity of online social media creates an unprecedented opportunity to display aspects of oneself. Inferring information about these users has the potential to benefit many downstream applications such as recommendation engines and targeted advertising. In this talk I will show how to extract important personal information such as major life events and personal attributes (e.g., gender, education, job) from social evidence such as the text produced by users and their friends and from properties of their social network. I will describe algorithms making use of a variety of frameworks, including distant supervision, and a deep learning architecture that learns user representations by integrating many heterogeneous social signals.
Biography: Jiwei Li is a PH.D. student in the computer science department at Stanford University, working with Prof. Dan Jurafsky. His research interests include discourse, language generation, and social networks, with a focus on deep learning methods. Jiwei receives his B.S. from Peking University in 2012. He was rewarded the Facebook Fellowship in 2015.
Host: Xing Shi and Kevin Knight
More Info: http://nlg.isi.edu/nl-seminar/
Webcast: http://webcasterms1.isi.edu/mediasite/Viewer/?peid=6b5348f2f8dc4a4dbb595eca444410d51dLocation: Information Science Institute (ISI) - 6th Flr Conf Rm # 689, Marina Del Rey
WebCast Link: http://webcasterms1.isi.edu/mediasite/Viewer/?peid=6b5348f2f8dc4a4dbb595eca444410d51d
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Peter Zamar
Event Link: http://nlg.isi.edu/nl-seminar/
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Astani Civil and Environmental Engineering Ph.D. Seminar
Fri, Jan 22, 2016 @ 03:00 PM - 04:00 PM
Sonny Astani Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Yoichi Mukai Associate Professor, Dr.Eng. , Department of Architecture, Kobe University
Talk Title: Introduction of the real-time hybrid simulator with shaking-table in Kobe University
Abstract:
Dr. Mukai's research group has been interested in re-assessment of existing buildings and re-evaluation of traditional and historical structures. For this purpose, we are researching about development of practical techniques for sounding of damaged building conditions or for evaluation and estimation of structural mechanism of traditional structures, through monitoring and sensing techniques. Dr. Mukai's research group is currently developing a real-time hybrid simulator for investigating structural response control systems with semi-active-active control devices. This activity, to develop the real-time hybrid simulator, are carried out by the collaboration with Prof. Fujitani & Dr. Ito's research group, mainly researching on development of advanced seismic-isolation system with semi-active controlling dampers retrofit for high-rise building structures with newly proposing slit-inserted steel plate dampers, etc. The real-time hybrid simulator is actualized by installing real-time response generator of the inside numerical model as the additional function on the actual shaking-table. We make the shaking-table generate interactive movement between the inside numerical model and the actual external specimen devices. This system can be exactly simulate computed interaction movement, so we can operate hybrid experimental test of whole structural system by connecting vertically the actual specimen to the internal model while we don't need to prepare in whole the structural system but to prepare limited part only which we actually focus on and want to know its behavior in detail.
"Image Based Detection for Concrete Fracture"
Tomohiro Miki Associate Professor, Dr.Eng.
Department of Civil Engineering, Kobe University
Host: Dr, Maria Todorovska
Location: Seeley G. Mudd Building (SGM) - 101
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Evangeline Reyes
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Seminars in Biomedical Engineering
Mon, Jan 25, 2016 @ 12:30 PM - 01:49 PM
Alfred E. Mann Department of Biomedical Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Sangpil Yoon, Ph.D., , Postdoctoral Research Associate, Department of Biomedical Engineering, USC
Talk Title: Acoustic-transfection: Intracellular delivery of macromolecules using high frequency ultrasound
Host: K. Kirk Shung, PhD
Location: Olin Hall of Engineering (OHE) - 122
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Mischalgrace Diasanta
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USC Stem Cell Seminar: Ioannis Aifantis, New York University
Tue, Jan 26, 2016 @ 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Alfred E. Mann Department of Biomedical Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Ioannis Aifantis, Chair/Department of Pathology, New York University
Talk Title: 3D chromosomal structure in hematopoiesis and leukemia
Series: Eli and Edythe Broad Center for Regenerative Medicine and Stem Cell Research at USC Distinguished Speakers Series
Abstract: The seminar will focus on the mechanisms of regulation of promoters: enhancer interactions during early stem cell differentiation in the bone marrow. DNA-looping and regulation of RNA Pol II elongation will also be the focus of our study.
Host: Rong Lu
More Info: http://stemcell.usc.edu/events/details/?event_id=916787
Webcast: http://keckmedia.usc.edu/stem-cell-seminarWebCast Link: http://keckmedia.usc.edu/stem-cell-seminar
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Cristy Lytal/USC Stem Cell
Event Link: http://stemcell.usc.edu/events/details/?event_id=916787
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Epstein Institute Seminar - ISE 651
Tue, Jan 26, 2016 @ 03:30 PM - 04:50 PM
Daniel J. Epstein Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Dr. Lauren Cipriano, Ivey Business School Western University in London, Canada
Talk Title: Identifying Best Fitting Inputs in Multi Target Model Calibration
Host: Dr. Julia Higle
More Information: January 26, 2016_Cipriano.pdf
Location: Ethel Percy Andrus Gerontology Center (GER) - 206
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Michele ISE
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CS Colloquium: Christopher Ré (Stanford) - DeepDive: A Dark Data System
Tue, Jan 26, 2016 @ 04:00 PM - 05:00 PM
Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Christopher Ré, Stanford
Talk Title: DeepDive: A Dark Data System
Series: Yahoo! Labs Machine Learning Seminar Series
Abstract: This lecture satisfies requirements for CSCI 591: Computer Science Research Colloquium
Many pressing questions in science are macroscopic, as they require scientists to integrate information from numerous data sources, often expressed in natural languages or in graphics; these forms of media are fraught with imprecision and ambiguity and so are difficult for machines to understand. Here I describe DeepDive, which is a new type of system designed to cope with these problems. It combines extraction, integration and prediction into one system. For some paleobiology and materials science tasks, DeepDive-based systems have surpassed human volunteers in data quantity and quality (recall and precision). DeepDive is also used by scientists in areas including genomics and drug repurposing, by a number of companies involved in various forms of search, and by law enforcement in the fight against human trafficking. DeepDive does not allow users to write algorithms; instead, it asks them to write only features. A key technical challenge is scaling up the resulting inference and learning engine, and I will describe our line of work in computing without using traditional synchronization methods including Hogwild! and DimmWitted. DeepDive is open source on github and available from DeepDive.Stanford.Edu.
The lecture will be available to stream HERE . (For best results, right click -> open in new tab).
Biography: Christopher (Chris) Re is an assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science at Stanford University and a Robert N. Noyce Family Faculty Scholar. His work's goal is to enable users and developers to build applications that more deeply understand and exploit data. Chris received his PhD from the University of Washington in Seattle under the supervision of Dan Suciu. For his PhD work in probabilistic data management, Chris received the SIGMOD 2010 Jim Gray Dissertation Award. He then spent four wonderful years on the faculty of the University of Wisconsin, Madison, before moving to Stanford in 2013. He helped discover the first join algorithm with worst-case optimal running time, which won the best paper at PODS 2012. He also helped develop a framework for feature engineering that won the best paper at SIGMOD 2014. In addition, work from his group has been incorporated into scientific efforts including the IceCube neutrino detector and PaleoDeepDive, and into Cloudera's Impala and products from Oracle, Pivotal, and Microsoft's Adam. He received an NSF CAREER Award in 2011, an Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship in 2013, a Moore Data Driven Investigator Award in 2014, the VLDB early Career Award in 2015, and the MacArthur Foundation Fellowship in 2015.
Host: Yan Liu
Webcast: https://bluejeans.com/745105731Location: Henry Salvatori Computer Science Center (SAL) - 101
WebCast Link: https://bluejeans.com/745105731
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Assistant to CS chair
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Communications, Networks & Systems (CommNetS) Seminar
Wed, Jan 27, 2016 @ 02:00 PM - 03:00 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Dr. Adel Javanmard, USC
Talk Title: Phase Transitions in Semidefinite Relaxations
Series: CommNetS
Abstract: Statistical inference problems arising within signal processing, data mining, and machine learning naturally give rise to hard combinatorial optimization problems. These problems become intractable when the dimensionality of the data is large, as is often the case for modern datasets. A popular idea is to construct convex relaxations of these combinatorial problems, which can be solved efficiently for large scale datasets. Semidefinite programming (SDP) relaxations are among the most powerful methods in this family, and are surprisingly well-suited for a broad range of problems where data take the form of matrices or graphs. It has been observed several times that, when the 'statistical noise' is small enough, SDP relaxations correctly detect the underlying combinatorial structures.
In this talk, I will present some classical SDP relaxations for finding hidden partitions in sparse graphs (clustering) with asymptotic predictions for its performance. Time permitting, I will compare such relaxations with the recently developed local algorithms such as non-backtracking spectral partitioning. [Based on joint work with Federico Ricci-Tersenghi and Andrea Montanari]
Biography: Adel Javanmard is an assistant professor in the department of Data Sciences and Operation, Marshall School of Business at the University of Southern California. Prior to joining USC, he was a postdoctoral research fellow for a year at the Center for Science of Information, with worksite at UC Berkeley and Stanford University. He received his PhD and MS in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University in 2014 and 2011 advised by Andrea Montanari. His research interests are broadly in the area of high-dimensional statistics, machine learning, optimization, and graphical models. Adel has won several awards and fellowships, including the Thomas Cover dissertation award from IEEE Society (2015), the CSoI Postdoctoral Fellowship (2014), the Caroline and Fabian Pease Stanford Graduate Fellowship (2010-2012).
Host: Dr. Ashutosh Nayyar
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 248
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Annie Yu
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Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering Seminar Series
Wed, Jan 27, 2016 @ 03:30 PM - 04:30 PM
Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: John Vassberg, Chief Aerodynamicist of Boeing Research and Technology, Long Beach, CA
Talk Title: Boomerang Flight Dynamics
Series: Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering Seminar Series
Abstract: Aerodynamic characteristics and flight dynamics of boomerangs are investigated. A basic aerodynamic model, developed in the 1960's, is expanded upon using Blade Element Theory. The new aerodynamic model is coupled with a gyroscope model for rudimentary analyses. Some significant findings are made regarding the radius of a boomerang's circular flight path, the required inclination angle of its axis-of-rotation, its trim state, as well as its dynamic stability. These discoveries provide a basic understanding of how the interplay between aero-dynamic forces and moments, and gyroscopic precession combine to return the boomerang to its rightful owner by way of a circular flight path.
A traditional V-shaped boomerang design is developed as a case study for further detailed analyses. Unsteady Reynolds-averaged Navier-Stokes solutions provide accurate aerodynamic characteristics of the subject boomerang. The high-fidelity aerodynamic model is coupled with the equations of motion to provide accurate six-degree-of-freedom simulations of boomerang flight dynamics. Boomerang orientation during its flight trajectory is described by the classical Euler angles.
Biography: Dr. John Vassberg is the Lead Aerodynamicist and Engineer of the Boeing Commercial Airlines Design Center in Southern California. Prior to this, he was Chief Aerodynamicist of Boeing's Research & Technology organization. He is a Boeing Technical Fellow, an AIAA Fellow, and recipient of the AIAA Aerodynamics Award in 2012. Dr. Vassberg actively supports various Boeing Commercial Airlines, Boeing Defense Systems, and Boeing Research and Technology airplane design programs. During his 32-year career at Boeing, Dr. Vassberg has developed, matured, transitioned, and applied numerous computational fluid dynamics (CFD) methods and aerodynamic technologies. In order to accomplish this, he has worked about half of his career in aerodynamic research and technology groups and the other half in aircraft program development organizations. Dr. Vassberg holds over a dozen Patents related to aerodynamic technologies, and has authored over 100 publications. In addition, Dr. Vassberg has introduced and developed new fields of numerical simulation including: in-flight refueling hose-drogue dynamics, towed-decoy dynamics, fast surface-paneling techniques, and globally-elliptic meshing methods.
Location: Seaver Science Library (SSL) - 150
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Valerie Childress
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Communications, Networks & Systems (CommNetS) Seminar
Thu, Jan 28, 2016 @ 10:00 AM - 11:00 AM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Dr. Alireza Vahid, Duke University
Talk Title: Improving Wireless Networks and Data Storage Through Information Theory
Series: CommNetS
Abstract: In this talk, we describe two very different applications of Information and Coding Theory. The first is Wireless Packet Networks, where we turn collisions into opportunities by treating the received analog signal as a linear combination of the collided packets. These linear equations can then be used to greatly improve the network throughput in future phases of communications. We describe how the benefits of this approach depend on the delay in learning the channel state and on the spatial correlation of the communication links.
The second is Computer Memory Systems, where scaling down the feature size requires new coding strategies to prevent significant degradation to the lifetime of memory. We develop a new interface that acts as a bridge between theory and practice, making it possible to introduce coding schemes that extend the lifetime of Flash Memory. We derive a fundamental tradeoff between host-visible capacity and lifetime, and describe several operating points.
Biography: Alireza Vahid received his B.Sc. in Electrical Engineering from Sharif University of Technology, Iran. He obtained his M.Sc. and Ph.D. from the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Cornell University in 2012 and 2015 respectively, where he worked with Professor Salman Avestimehr. He is currently a Postdoctoral Fellow at Duke University, where he works with Professor Robert Calderbank. His research interests include Information and Coding Theory, Wireless Communications, Computer Architecture, and Memory Systems.
He received the Outstanding PhD Thesis Research Award in 2015, and the Director's Ph.D. Teaching Award in 2010 from Cornell University. He was the recipient of the Qualcomm Innovation Award in 2013, and the Jacobs Scholar Fellowship in 2009. He was ranked 2nd in the Iranian National Entrance Exam, and received the Silver Medal in the Iranian National Physics Olympiad.
Host: Dr. Ashutosh Nayyar
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 248
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Annie Yu
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Special Seminar
Thu, Jan 28, 2016 @ 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Information Sciences Institute
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Natali Ruchansky, Postdoc - Boston University
Talk Title: Learn to query and query to learn.
Series: AI Seminar
Abstract: Working with data has never been easy: Netflix wishes to make movies recommendations to users, but their data is incomplete. Biologists have large interesting protein-protein interaction networks, but they don't know how to extract useful insight from them.
The above examples can be viewed as dealing with two components: the data and the inference process.
In the case of Netflix the latter is known and algorithms are needed to complete the missing data; I will call this Learning to Query. In the biology example the data is readily available and an algorithm is needed to query the graph for discoveries; I will call this Querying to Learn. In my work I addressed these two converse problems and proposed simple, but effective algorithms to solve them.
In this talk I will first present my work on the Learning to Query problem through the lens of matrix completion. I will discuss the new problem of Active Matrix Completion which asks to first analyzes the quality of the available data, such as movie ratings on Netflix, then perform the completion and inference, or movie recommendation. I will then present a new algorithm called Order&Extend that tackles the Active Completion problem. By framing the problem in terms of linear systems, Order&Extend identifies which portions of the data do or do not have enough information, suggests how the data can be augmented, and finally produces a completion.
In the second half of my talk I will present my work on the Querying to Learn through the lens of graph mining. Here there is a data set available, and in particular there are some query-nodes of interest; the biologists have a protein-protein-interaction network and wish to study the interactions between three particular proteins. I will present the new notion of a Wiener-Connector that isolates interesting connections among the query-nodes by utilizing the simple relationship of shortest paths. I will then discuss the algorithm for finding the Wiener-Connector along with its applicability and utility, for example, in identifying possible protein-disease associations and providing outputs that are easy to interpret and visualize, making it useful across different domains.
Biography: I am a PhD student in the Computer Science Department at Boston University.
I am a member of the Data Managment Group, and I work with Professor Evimaria Terzi and Professor Mark Crovella.
While 'passionately curious' about (too) many things, my research focus is algorithmic data mining, mathematics, and networks. In particular I am currently working on problems in graph mining, and in matrix and tensor completion through the lense of linear algebra.
Host: Kristina Lerman
Webcast: http://webcasterms1.isi.edu/mediasite/SilverlightPlayer/Default.aspx?peid=0ac4e800c18744fcbac14781671b6d481dLocation: Information Science Institute (ISI) - 11th floor Large CR
WebCast Link: http://webcasterms1.isi.edu/mediasite/SilverlightPlayer/Default.aspx?peid=0ac4e800c18744fcbac14781671b6d481d
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Alma Nava / Information Sciences Institute
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USC Stem Cell Seminar: Didier Stainier, Max Planck Institute for Heart and Lung Research
Thu, Jan 28, 2016 @ 12:00 PM - 01:00 PM
Alfred E. Mann Department of Biomedical Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Didier Stainier, Director, Department of Developmental Genetics/Max Planck Institute for Heart and Lung Research
Talk Title: Imaging heart development and function in zebrafish
Series: Eli and Edythe Broad Center for Regenerative Medicine and Stem Cell Research at USC Distinguished Speakers Series
Abstract: My lab investigates questions related to organogenesis, including cell differentiation, tissue morphogenesis, organ homeostasis and function, as well as organ regeneration. We study these questions in the zebrafish as well as in the mouse and are currently looking at several mesodermal (heart, vasculature) and endodermal (pancreas, lung) organs. We utilize both forward and reverse genetic approaches, and aim to dissect cellular processes using high-resolution live imaging. One goal of our studies is to gain understanding of vertebrate organ development at the single-cell level, and beyond. This talk will focus on cardiac development and function.
Host: Gage Crump
More Info: http://stemcell.usc.edu/events/details/?event_id=917356
Webcast: http://keckmedia.usc.edu/stem-cell-seminarWebCast Link: http://keckmedia.usc.edu/stem-cell-seminar
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Cristy Lytal/USC Stem Cell
Event Link: http://stemcell.usc.edu/events/details/?event_id=917356
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MFD - Chemical Engineering and Materials Science Distinguished Lecture: Linda Broadbelt
Thu, Jan 28, 2016 @ 12:45 PM - 02:00 PM
Mork Family Department of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Linda Broadbelt, Northwestern Univ.
Talk Title: Designing Chemicals and Materials through Detailed Kinetic Modeling
Series: MFD Distinguished Lecture
Host: Prof. Theo Tsotsis
Location: James H. Zumberge Hall Of Science (ZHS) - 159
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Jason Ordonez
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Mechanistic Modeling of the (Bio)Conversion of (Bio)Macromolecules
Thu, Jan 28, 2016 @ 12:45 PM - 02:00 PM
Mork Family Department of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Professor Linda Broadbelt, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL
Talk Title: Mechanistic Modeling of the (Bio)Conversion of (Bio)Macromolecules
Series: Distinguished Lecture Series
Abstract: Fast pyrolysis, a potential strategy for the production of transportation fuels from biomass, involves a complex network of competing reactions, which result in the formation of bio-oil,
non-condensable gaseous species, and solid char. Bio-oil is a mixture of anhydro sugars, furan derivatives, and oxygenated aromatic and low molecular weight (LMW) compounds. Previously,
the successful modeling of fast pyrolysis reactors for biomass conversion was hampered by lumped kinetic models, which fail to predict the bio-oil composition. Hence, a fundamental understanding of the chemistry and kinetics of biomass pyrolysis is important to evaluate the effects of process parameters like temperature, residence time and pressure on the composition of
bio-oil. In this talk, a mechanistic model that was recently developed to characterize the primary products of fast pyrolysis of cellulose is described. The kinetic model of pyrolysis of pure
cellulose was then extended to describe cellulose decomposition in the presence of sodium salts. To quantify the effect of sodium, a density functional theory study of glucose dehydration, an important class of decomposition reactions of a cellulose-derived intermediate, was carried out. The theoretical results reveal alterations in the reaction rate coefficients when sodium is present and a change in the relative rates of different reactions. These kinetic parameters were used in
the kinetic model to describe Na-mediated pathways, capturing trends in the experimental product distributions as the salt loading was increased based on classic catalytic cycles. In
contrast to pyrolysis, conversion of macromolecules such as cellulose in Nature takes place at ambient temperature, aided by enzymes. Mechanistic details of the action of these enzymes will
also be discussed and contrasted to high-temperature pyrolysis pathways.
We have also developed a computational discovery platform for identifying and analyzing novel biochemical pathways to target chemicals. Automated network generation that defines and
implements the chemistry of what we have coined "generalized enzyme functions" based on knowledge compiled in existing biochemical databases is employed. The output is a set of
compounds and the pathways connecting them, both known and novel. To identify the most promising of the thousands of different pathways generated, we link the automated network
generation algorithms with pathway evaluation tools. The simplest screening metrics to rank pathways are pathway length and number of known reactions. More sophisticated screening tools
include thermodynamic feasibility and potential of known enzymes for carrying out novel reactions. Our method for automated generation of pathways creates novel compounds and
pathways that have not been reported in biochemical or chemical databases. Thus, our method goes beyond a survey of existing compounds and reactions and provides an alternative to the
conventional approaches practiced to develop novel biochemical processes that harness the power of enzymes as catalysts.
Host: Professor Theodore Tsotsis
Location: James H. Zumberge Hall Of Science (ZHS) - 159
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Martin Olekszyk
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Faculty Candidate Seminar
Thu, Jan 28, 2016 @ 01:00 PM - 02:00 PM
Daniel J. Epstein Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Private, Private
Talk Title: Robust Optimal Contgrol for Medical Treatment Decisions - An Application to Type 2 Diabetes
Host: Epstein Department of ISE
Location: Ethel Percy Andrus Gerontology Center (GER) - 206
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Michele ISE
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EE-EP Seminar - Zheshen Zhang, Friday, January 29th at 2:00pm in EEB 132
Fri, Jan 29, 2016 @ 02:00 PM - 03:30 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Zheshen Zhang, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Talk Title: High-Rate Quantum-Secured Communication
Abstract: The advent of quantum computers will doom public-key cryptography's RSA encryption standard. Quantum key distribution (QKD), however, offers a solution for the post-RSA era: quantum physics' no-cloning theorem can ensure safe creation of one-time pads that permit communication with full information-theoretic security. Prevailing QKD protocols use one-photon-per-bit encoding to be protected by the no-cloning theorem. Propagation loss in long-distance transmission then dramatically reduces their received photon flux, and thus limits their secret-key rates to far less than what will be needed for one-time pad encryption of large files. In this talk, I introduce floodlight quantum-secured communication (FL-QSC), a radically different paradigm that thrives by breaking QKD's one-photon-per-bit barrier. FL-QSC employs many photons per bit, so that propagation loss is mitigated. In addition, it uses a huge number of low-brightness optical modes per bit, to maintain the protection afforded by the no-cloning theorem. We show that no-cloning, plus photon-coincidence channel monitoring, makes the new protocol capable of a 2 Gb/s secret-key rate over a 50-km fiber link. Our initial proof-of-concept experiment, done with 10-dB propagation loss (equivalent to a 50-km fiber link), demonstrated a 52 Mb/s secret-key rate against the optimum collective Gaussian attack. This rate is already a two-orders-of-magnitude improvement over all existing QKD demonstrations. Moreover, FL-QSC could be pushed to the long-sought Gb/s secret-key rates with available equipment, i.e., no new technology need be developed.
Biography: Zheshen Zhang is a Research Scientist in the Research Laboratory of Electronics at MIT. He received the B.S. degree in Electrical Engineering from Shanghai Jiao Tong University in June 2006 and the Ph.D. degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology in December 2011. He joined MIT in March 2012 as a Postdoctoral Associate. Dr. Zhang's research covers a wide swath of the theoretical and experimental aspects of quantum communications, quantum sensing, and novel materials for scalable quantum information processing platforms.
Host: EE-EP
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 132
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Marilyn Poplawski
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NL Seminar-Leveraging the Social Web to Enable Open-Domain Interactive Storytelling
Fri, Jan 29, 2016 @ 03:00 PM - 04:00 PM
Information Sciences Institute
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Reid Swanson, USC/ICT
Talk Title: Leveraging the Social Web to Enable Open-Domain Interactive Storytelling
Series: Natural Language Seminar
Abstract: Storytelling is an integral part of human interaction and critical to nearly all forms of entertainment. Since the introduction of TALE-SPIN over thirty years ago, automating the process of storytelling has been an active area of research. However, despite the incredible advances in other areas of computer science, such as 3D graphics and computational physics, that have enabled dazzling immersive interactive environments, there has been little progress in delivering automated *stories* that have the richness and complexity we expect in this genre of discourse.
In this talk I will primarily discuss work done during my thesis that leverages the vast amounts of knowledge hidden implicitly in the social web in order to enable a text-based open-domain interactive storytelling system. In this system the human and computer take turns writing sentences of an emerging fictional story on any topic the author chooses. The system uses an architecture inspired by case-based reasoning with a knowledge base of over a million personal stories about the daily lives and experiences of ordinary people. At each turn the system selects a sentence from the corpus that tries to maximize the semantic and discourse coherence given the text of the story so far.
I will also describe how crowd-sourcing communities were used to collect thousands of collaborative stories with the system and tens of thousands of ratings from hundreds of participants on several subjective evaluation criteria. The best models show significant improvements over the baseline and are judged to be indistinguishable from entirely human written weblog stories from a held out part of the collection.
I will conclude with some more recent and ongoing research that examines additional methods of evaluation and new models of narrative generation based on Recurrent Neural Networks.
Biography: Reid Swanson received his PhD in Computer Science from the University of Southern California in 2010 where he focused on a large-scale text-based interactive storytelling system. His primary research interest is in large-scale open-domain interpretation and generation of interactive narratives.
After graduating he spent a year at the Walt Disney Imagineering Research & Development lab in Glendale, CA. At Disney he worked with an interdisciplinary team of industry engineers, academics, artists and performers to develop technologies for bringing persistent interactive storytelling to select groups of guests at their theme parks and resorts.
From 2011 until 2015, Reid worked as a postdoc at UC Santa Cruz where he participated in a range of different projects. As part of the SIREN project, with Arnav Jhala, he investigated games for teaching conflict resolution management. On the SSIM project, with Michael Mateas, he helped research and develop virtual training environments targeting the military and law enforcement agencies to help prevent conflict escalation in unknown social environments. With Marilyn Walker, he also investigated automated methods for analyzing and mining prototypical arguments on internet debate forums about controversial topics such as gun control, gay marriage and evolution.
In August of 2015 he rejoined the Institute of Technologies as a Research Scientist where he is researching the role of narrative structure in the persuasiveness of an intended message embedded in the story across different cultures.
Host: Xing Shi and Kevin Knight
More Info: http://nlg.isi.edu/nl-seminar/
Location: Information Science Institute (ISI) - 6th Flr Conf Rm # 689, Marina Del Rey
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Peter Zamar
Event Link: http://nlg.isi.edu/nl-seminar/
