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Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Events for January

  • NL Seminar-Learning Neural Network Structures for Natural Language

    Fri, Jan 06, 2017 @ 03:00 PM - 04:00 PM

    Information Sciences Institute

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Kenton Murray, Univ. of Notre Dame

    Talk Title: Learning Neural Network Structures for Natural Language

    Abstract: In recent years, deep learning has had a huge impact on natural language processing surpassing the performance of many other statistical and machine learning methods. One of the many promises of deep learning is that features are learned implicitly and that there is no need to manually engineer features for good performance. However, neural network performance is highly dependent on network architecture and selection of hyper-parameters. In many ways, architecture engineering has supplanted feature engineering in NLP tasks. In this talk, I will focus on two ways neural network structures can be learned while concurrently training models. First, I'll present a regularization scheme for learning the number of neurons in a neural language model during training (Murray and Chiang 2015) and show how it can be used in a Machine Translation task. Then, I'll move onto a Visual Question Answering task where denotations are selected by executing a probabilistic program that models non-determinism with neural networks (Murray and Krishnamurthy 2016).



    Biography: Kenton Murray is a PhD student in the Natural Language Processing Lab at the University of Notre Dame's Computer Science and Engineering Department working with David Chiang. His research is on neural methods for human languages, particularly machine translation and question answering. Prior to Notre Dame, he was a Research Associate at the Qatar Computing Research Institute QCRI and received a Master's in Language Technologies from Carnegie Mellon University and a Bachelor's in Computer Science from Princeton University.



    Host: Marjan Ghazvininejad and David Chiang

    More Info: http://nlg.isi.edu/nl-seminar/

    Location: Information Science Institute (ISI) - 11th Flr Conf Rm # 1135, 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

    Seminars in Biomedical Engineering

    Mon, Jan 09, 2017 @ 12:30 PM - 01:50 PM

    Alfred E. Mann Department of Biomedical Engineering

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Tzung Hsiai, MD, PhD, Professor Department of Bioengineering Division of Cardiology, Department of Medicine

    Talk Title: Integrating 3-D Micro-Sensors and 4-D Light-Sheet Imaging: From Detection to Discovery

    Biography: http://www.bioeng.ucla.edu/tzung-hsiai-ph-d/

    Host: Qifa Zhou

    Location: Olin Hall of Engineering (OHE) - 122

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Mischalgrace Diasanta

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  • Repeating EventUSC Stem Cell Seminar: Pierre Drapeau, Universite de Montreal

    USC Stem Cell Seminar: Pierre Drapeau, Universite de Montreal

    Tue, Jan 10, 2017 @ 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM

    Alfred E. Mann Department of Biomedical Engineering

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Pierre Drapeau, Universite de Montreal

    Talk Title: TBD

    Series: Eli and Edythe Broad Center for Regenerative Medicine and Stem Cell Research at USC Distinguished Speakers Series

    Host: USC Stem Cell

    More Info: http://stemcell.usc.edu/events

    Webcast: http://keckmedia.usc.edu/stem-cell-seminar

    Location: Eli & Edythe Broad CIRM Center for Regenerative Medicine & Stem Cell Resch. (BCC) - First Floor Conference Room

    WebCast Link: http://keckmedia.usc.edu/stem-cell-seminar

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    View All Dates

    Contact: Cristy Lytal/USC Stem Cell

    Event Link: http://stemcell.usc.edu/events

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  • NL Seminar-Speech-to-Translation Alignment for Documentation of Endangered Languages

    Tue, Jan 10, 2017 @ 03:00 PM - 04:00 PM

    Information Sciences Institute

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: David Chiang, Univ. of Notre Dame

    Talk Title: Speech-to-Translation Alignment for Documentation of Endangered Languages

    Series: Natural Language Seminar

    Abstract: I will give an overview of this project, focusing on the pieces that my student, Antonios Anastasopoulos, and I have been most involved in. Our work is based on the premise that spoken language resources are more readily annotated with translations than with transcriptions. A first step towards making such data interpretable would be to automatically align spoken words with their translations. I'll present a neural attentional model (Duong et al., NAACL 2016) and a latent-variable generative model (Anastasopoulos and Chiang, EMNLP 2016) for this task.





    Biography: David Chiang (PhD, University of Pennsylvania, 2004) is an associate professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Notre Dame. His research is on computational models for learning human languages, particularly how to translate from one language to another. His work on applying formal grammars and machine learning to translation has been recognized with two best paper awards (at ACL 2005 and NAACL HLT 2009). He has received research grants from DARPA, CIA, NSF, and Google, has served on the executive board of NAACL and the editorial board of Computational Linguistics and JAIR, and is currently on the editorial board of Transactions of the ACL.

    Host: Marjan Ghazvininejad and Kevin Knight

    More Info: http://nlg.isi.edu/nl-seminar/

    Location: Information Science Institute (ISI) - 11th Flr Conf Rm # 1135, Marina Del Rey

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Peter Zamar

    Event Link: http://nlg.isi.edu/nl-seminar/

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  • Epstein Institute Seminar

    Tue, Jan 10, 2017 @ 03:30 PM - 04:50 PM

    Daniel J. Epstein Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Dr. Timoth W. Simpson, Pennsylvania State University

    Talk Title: Perspectives from an Additive Manufacturing Demonstration Facility

    Host: Dr. Yong Chen

    More Information: January 10, 2017_Simpson.pdf

    Location: Ethel Percy Andrus Gerontology Center (GER) - 206

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Michele ISE

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  • Distinguished Lecture Series

    Thu, Jan 12, 2017 @ 12:45 AM - 01:50 PM

    Mork Family Department of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Dr. Nathan Price , University of Washington

    Talk Title: Harnessing big data for biological and medical discovery

    Series: Distinguished Lecture

    Host: Professor Nick Graham

    Location: James H. Zumberge Hall Of Science (ZHS) - 159

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Martin Olekszyk

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  • CS Colloquium: David Rosenblum (National University of Singapore) - Uncertainty in Computer Systems: Problems and Results

    Fri, Jan 13, 2017 @ 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM

    Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: David Rosenblum, National University of Singapore

    Talk Title: Uncertainty in Computer Systems: Problems and Results

    Series: CS Colloquium

    Abstract: This lecture satisfies requirements for CSCI 591: Computer Science Research Colloquium.

    For the past several years, my research has spanned problems in diverse areas including probabilistic verification, software testing, ubiquitous computing and the Internet of Things. A common theme of this research has been the need to deal with various forms of uncertainty, which is an increasingly important concern in the design of modern computer systems. In this talk I will describe recent research on perturbation analysis for probabilistic model checking, which provides systematic ways of computing the effect that uncertainty in the probability parameters of stochastic models has on verification results. Time permitting, I will also discuss recent research on the use of contextual bandit algorithms to deal with uncertainty in service composition for the Internet of Things, and research on how uncertainty in software testing can mask the existence of software faults.

    Biography: David S. Rosenblum is Provost's Chair Professor of Computer Science at the National University of Singapore (NUS). He holds a Ph.D. from Stanford University and joined NUS in April 2011 after holding positions as Member of the Technical Staff at AT&T Bell Laboratories (Murray Hill); Associate Professor at the University of California, Irvine; Principal Architect and Chief Technology Officer of PreCache (a technology startup funded by Sony Music); and Professor of Software Systems at University College London. David is a Fellow of the ACM and IEEE, and he serves as Editor-in-Chief of the ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology (ACM TOSEM). He was previously Chair of the ACM Special Interest Group in Software Engineering (ACM SIGSOFT). He has received two "test-of-time" awards for his research papers, including the ICSE 2002 Most Influential Paper Award for his ICSE 1992 paper on assertion checking, and the first ACM SIGSOFT Impact Paper Award in 2008 for his ESEC/FSE 1997 on Internet-scale event observation and notification (co-authored with Alexander L. Wolf).

    Host: CS Department

    Location: Grace Ford Salvatori Hall Of Letters, Arts & Sciences (GFS) - 116

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Assistant to CS chair

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  • TBA

    Mon, Jan 16, 2017 @ 12:30 PM - 01:50 PM

    Alfred E. Mann Department of Biomedical Engineering

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: No Class (Martin Luther King, Jr. Holiday), No Class (Martin Luther King, Jr. Holiday)

    Talk Title: No Class (Martin Luther King, Jr. Holiday)

    Host: Qifa Zhou

    Location: Olin Hall of Engineering (OHE) - 122

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Mischalgrace Diasanta

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  • USC Stem Cell Seminar: Alex Meissner, Harvard Stem Cell Institute

    USC Stem Cell Seminar: Alex Meissner, Harvard Stem Cell Institute

    Tue, Jan 17, 2017 @ 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM

    Alfred E. Mann Department of Biomedical Engineering

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Alex Meissner, Harvard Stem Cell Institute

    Talk Title: TBD

    Series: Eli and Edythe Broad Center for Regenerative Medicine and Stem Cell Research at USC Distinguished Speakers Series

    Host: USC Stem Cell

    More Info: http://stemcell.usc.edu/events

    Webcast: http://keckmedia.usc.edu/stem-cell-seminar

    Location: Eli & Edythe Broad CIRM Center for Regenerative Medicine & Stem Cell Resch. (BCC) - First Floor Conference Room

    WebCast 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

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  • CS Colloquium: Sungjin Ahn (University of Montreal) -Recent Advances and the Future of Recurrent Neural Networks

    Tue, Jan 17, 2017 @ 11:00 AM - 12:20 PM

    Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Sungjin Ahn, University of Montreal

    Talk Title: Recent Advances and the Future of Recurrent Neural Networks

    Series: CS Colloquium

    Abstract: This lecture satisfies requirements for CSCI 591: Computer Science Research Colloquium.

    Although the recent resurgence of Recurrent Neural Networks (RNN) has achieved remarkable advances in sequence modeling, we are still missing many abilities of RNN necessary to model more challenging yet important natural phenomena. In this talk, I introduce some recent advances in this direction, focusing on two new RNN architectures: the Hierarchical Multiscale Recurrent Neural Networks (HM-RNN) and the Neural Knowledge Language Model (NKLM). In the HM-RNN, each layer in a multi-layered RNN learns different time-scales, adaptively to the inputs from the lower layer. The NKLM deals with the problem of incorporating factual knowledge provided by knowledge graph into RNNs. I argue the advantages of these models and then conclude the talk with a discussion on the key challenges that lie ahead.

    Biography: Sungjin Ahn is currently a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Montreal, working with Prof. Yoshua Bengio on deep learning and its applications. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science at the University of California, Irvine, under the supervision of Prof. Max Welling. During his Ph.D. program, He co-developed the Stochastic Gradient MCMC algorithms and awarded two best paper awards from the International Conference on Machine Learning in 2012 and the ParLearning 2016, respectively. His research interests include deep learning (on recurrent neural networks, deep generative models), approximate Bayesian inference, and reinforcement learning.

    Host: Yan Liu

    Location: Ronald Tutor Hall of Engineering (RTH) - 217

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Assistant to CS chair

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  • Epstein Institute Seminar

    Tue, Jan 17, 2017 @ 03:30 PM - 04:50 PM

    Daniel J. Epstein Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Dr. Timothy Chan, University of Toronto

    Talk Title: Inverse Optimization: Closed-Form Solutions, Geometry and Goodness of Fit

    Host: Dr. Phebe Vayanos

    More Information: January 17, 2017_Chan.pdf

    Location: Ethel Percy Andrus Gerontology Center (GER) - 206

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Michele ISE

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  • CS Distinguished Lecture: Vitaly Shmatikov (Cornell) - Machine Learning and Privacy: Friends or Foes?

    Thu, Jan 19, 2017 @ 04:00 PM - 05:20 PM

    Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Vitaly Shmatikov, Cornell University

    Talk Title: Machine Learning and Privacy: Friends or Foes?

    Series: CS Distinguished Lectures

    Abstract: Recent advances in machine learning provide powerful new tools and juicy new targets for data privacy research. I will first show how to use machine learning against systems that partially encrypt data in storage while computing over it. Then, I will turn machine learning against itself, to extract sensitive training data from machine-learning models --- including black-box models constructed using Google's and Amazon's "learning-as-a-service" platforms. I will conclude with open research questions at the junction of machine learning and privacy.

    Biography: Vitaly Shmatikov is a professor at Cornell Tech, where he works on computer security and privacy. He most recently served as the program chair of the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy ("Oakland").

    Host: Aleksandra Korolova

    Location: Henry Salvatori Computer Science Center (SAL) - 101

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Assistant to CS chair

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  • CS Colloquium and CAIS Seminar: Eva K Lee (GATECH) - System interoperability & Machine Learning: Multi-site Evidence-based Best Practice Discovery

    Fri, Jan 20, 2017 @ 11:00 AM - 11:50 AM

    Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Eva K Lee, Georgia Institute of Technology

    Talk Title: System interoperability & Machine Learning: Multi-site Evidence-based Best Practice Discovery

    Series: Center for AI in Society (CAIS) Seminar Series

    Abstract: This lecture satisfies requirements for CSCI 591: Computer Science Research Colloquium.

    This study establishes interoperability among electronic medical records from 737 healthcare sites and performs machine learning for best practice discovery. A mapping algorithm is designed to disambiguate free text entries and to provide a unique and unified way to link content to structured medical concepts despite the extreme variations that can occur during clinical diagnosis documentation. Redundancy is reduced through concept mapping. A SNOMED-CT graph database is created to allow for rapid data access and queries. These integrated data can be accessed through a secured web-based portal. A classification model ((DAMIP) is then designed to uncover discriminatory characteristics that can predict the quality of treatment outcome. We demonstrate system usability by analyzing Type II diabetic patients. DAMIP establishes a classification rule on a training set which results in greater than 80% blind predictive accuracy on an independent set of patients. By including features obtained from structured concept mapping, the predictive accuracy is improved to over 88%. The results facilitate evidence-based treatment and optimization of site performance through best practice dissemination and knowledge transfer. This project receives the 2016 NSF Health Organization Transformation award.

    Biography: Dr. Lee is a Professor in the H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering at Georgia Institute of Technology, and Director of the Center for Operations Research in Medicine and HealthCare, a center established through funds from the National Science Foundation and the Whitaker Foundation. The center focuses on biomedicine, public health, and defense, advancing domains from basic science to translational medical research; intelligent, quality, and cost-effective delivery; and medical preparedness and protection of critical infrastructures. She is a Distinguished Scholar in Health Systems, Health System Institute at Georgia Tech and Emory University. She is also the Co-Director of the Center for Health Organization Transformation, an NSF Industry/University Cooperative Research Center. Lee partners with hospital leaders to develop novel transformational strategies in delivery, quality, safety, operations efficiency, information management, change management and organizational learning. Lee's research focuses on mathematical programming, information technology, and computational algorithms for risk assessment, decision making, predictive analytics and knowledge discovery, and systems optimization. She has made major contributions in advances to medical care and procedures, emergency response and medical preparedness, healthcare operations, and business operations transformation.
    Dr. Lee serves on the National Preparedness and Response Science Board. She is the principle investigator of an online interoperable information exchange and decision support system for mass dispensing, emergency response, and casualty mitigation. The system integrates disease spread modeling with response processes and human behavior; and offers efficiency and quality assurance in operations and logistics performance. It currently has over 9500+ public health site users. Lee has also performed field work within the U.S. on mass dispensing design and evaluation, and has worked with local emergency responders and affected populations after Hurricane Katrina, the Haiti earthquake, the Fukushima Japan radiological disaster, and Hurricane Sandy. Lee has received multiple analytics and practice excellence awards including INFORMS Franz Edelman award, Daniel H Wagner prize for novel cancer therapeutics, bioterrorism emergency response dispensing for mass casualty mitigation, optimizing and transforming clinical workflow and patient care, vaccine immunity prediction, and reducing hospital acquired conditions. Dr. Lee is an INFORMS Fellow. She has received seven patents on innovative medical systems and devices. A brief glimpse of Dr. Lee's healthcare work can be found in the following link: http://www2.isye.gatech.edu/~evakylee/Eva_Lee_Intl_Innovation_139_Research_Media_HR.pdf

    Host: Milind Tambe

    Location: Seeley G. Mudd Building (SGM) - 101

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Assistant to CS chair

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  • BME Special Seminar

    BME Special Seminar

    Fri, Jan 20, 2017 @ 02:30 PM - 03:30 PM

    Alfred E. Mann Department of Biomedical Engineering

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Dominique Duncan, Assistant Professor of Neurology, Keck School of Medicine, LONI

    Talk Title: Predicting Epileptogenesis after Traumatic Brain Injury and Using Virtual Reality to Correct Segmentation Errors in MRI

    Abstract: The first part of my talk focuses on identifying biomarkers that can predict epileptogenesis after traumatic brain injury (TBI). This project, The Epilepsy Bioinformatics Study for Antiepileptogenic Therapy (EpiBioS4Rx), is a multi-site, international collaboration including a parallel study of humans and rats, collecting MRI, EEG, and blood samples.

    Because the development of epilepsy following TBI is a multifactorial process and
    crosses multiple modalities, identifying biomarkers to quantify the condition has proved difficult. Without a full understanding of the underlying biological effects, there are currently no cures for epilepsy. This study hopes to address both issues, calling upon data generated and collected at sites spread worldwide among different laboratories, clinical sites, in different formats, and across multicenter preclinical trials. Before these data can even be analyzed, a central platform is needed to standardize these data and provide tools for searching, viewing, annotating, and analyzing them. We are building a centralized data archive for EEG that will link to the Laboratory of Neuro Imaging (LONI) Image Data Archive (IDA) for MRI data and allow the broader epilepsy research community to access this shared data in addition to analytic tools to identify and validate biomarkers of epileptogenesis in images and electrophysiology as well as in molecular, serological, and tissue studies.

    The second part of this talk focuses on crowdsourcing manual validation of algorithmically-segmented brain volumes using virtual reality. LONI has the largest collection/repository of neuroanatomical MRI scans in the world. One of the lab's workflow processes involves algorithmic segmentation of the scans into labeled anatomical regions using FreeSurfer software. Since this automation cannot yet achieve perfect accuracy, there is a team of students who are trained to fix these errors manually, which is a tedious, time-consuming process. We are working on transforming the way this is accomplished using VR technology (HTC Vive) to deal with the volumes directly in 3D space, which aims to be both more intuitive and efficient. The goal is to crowdsource this task to make the process even more efficient.


    Biography: http://loni.usc.edu/about_loni/people/indiv_detail.php?people_id=568

    Host: Biomedical Engineering Department

    Location: 146

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Mischalgrace Diasanta

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  • NL Seminar-HOW I LEARNED TO STOP WORRYING AND LOVE EVALUATIONS (AND KEEP WORRYING)

    Fri, Jan 20, 2017 @ 03:00 PM - 04:00 PM

    Information Sciences Institute

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Jon May, USC/ISI

    Talk Title: HOW I LEARNED TO STOP WORRYING AND LOVE EVALUATIONS (AND KEEP WORRYING)

    Series: Natural Language Seminar

    Abstract: Bake-offs, shared tasks, evaluations: these are names for short, high-stress periods in many CS researchers' lives where their algorithms and models are exposed to unseen data, often with reputations and funding on the line. Evaluations are sometimes perceived to be the bane of much of our work lives. We grouse about metrics, procedures, glitches, and all the time "wasted" chasing scores, rather than doing Real Science (TM). In this talk I will argue that despite valid criticisms of the approach, coordinated evaluation is a net benefit to NLP research and has led to accomplishments that might not have otherwise arisen. This argument will frame a more in-depth discussion of several pieces of recent evaluation-grounded work: rapid generation of translation and information extraction for low-resource surprise languages (DARPA LORELEI) and organization of SemEval shared tasks in semantic parsing and generation.




    Biography: Jonathan May is a Research Assistant Professor at the University of Southern California's Information Sciences Institute (USC/ISI). Previously, he was a research scientist at SDL Research (formerly Language Weaver) and a scientist at Raytheon BBN Technologies. He received a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Southern California in 2010 and a BSE and MSE in Computer Science Engineering and Computer and Information Science, respectively, from the University of Pennsylvania in 2001. Jon's research interests include automata theory, natural language processing, machine translation, and machine learning.

    Host: Marjan Ghazvininejad and Kevin Knight

    More Info: http://nlg.isi.edu/nl-seminar/

    Location: Information Science Institute (ISI) - 6th Flr -CR#689 (ISI/Marina Del Rey)

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Peter Zamar

    Event Link: http://nlg.isi.edu/nl-seminar/

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  • CS Colloquium: Reza Shokri (Cornell) - Data Privacy: How to Survive the Inference Avalanche

    Mon, Jan 23, 2017 @ 11:00 AM - 12:20 PM

    Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Reza Shokri , Cornell University

    Talk Title: Data Privacy: How to Survive the Inference Avalanche

    Series: CS Colloquium

    Abstract: This lecture satisfies requirements for CSCI 591: Computer Science Research Colloquium.

    Underestimating the power of inference attacks is the major reason why data privacy mechanisms fail. In this talk, I will describe my general approach to quantifying privacy and illustrate its applications by showing how to rigorously measure privacy risks of location data and machine-learning models. I will then discuss my current research at the junction of privacy and data science in two important practical scenarios: generating privacy-preserving synthetic data and building accurate deep-learning models that respect privacy of the training data.

    Biography: Reza Shokri is a postdoctoral researcher at Cornell Tech. His research focuses on quantitative analysis of privacy, as well as design and implementation of privacy technologies for practical applications. His work on quantifying location privacy was recognized as a runner-up for the Award for Outstanding Research in Privacy Enhancing Technologies (PET Award). Recently, he has focused on privacy-preserving generative models and privacy in machine learning. He received his PhD from EPFL.

    Host: Aleksandra Korolova

    Location: Ronald Tutor Hall of Engineering (RTH) - 217

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Assistant to CS chair

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  • Seminars in Biomedical Engineering

    Seminars in Biomedical Engineering

    Mon, Jan 23, 2017 @ 12:30 PM - 01:50 PM

    Alfred E. Mann Department of Biomedical Engineering

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Jacques Van Dam, MD, PhD, Director of USC Digestive Health Center, Professor of Medicine (Clinical Scholar), Keck School of Medicine

    Talk Title: Technical Advances in Clinical Medicine

    Biography: Dr. Van Dam is an internationally recognized expert in therapeutic gastrointestinal endoscopy. He specializes in treating patients with gastrointestinal cancer but also manages patients with benign conditions such as common bile duct stones, large colon polyps, Barrett's esophagus, and acute/chronic pancreatitis. Professor Van Dam has been invited to give lectures and/or live demonstrations throughout the United States, Europe and Asia. An expert in endoscopic retrograde cholangiopancreatography (ERCP) he was one of the first to perform endoscopic ultrasonography (EUS). He teaches these and other advanced procedures as part of USC's ACGME-approved fellowship training program.

    Collaborating with American industry partners and the Chinese Ministry of Health, Dr. Van Dam is currently leading an international effort to train Chinese physicians in these very same life-saving procedures. Professor Van Dam is an active clinical researcher who has published more than 300 peer reviewed scientific papers, reviews and editorials, books, book chapters and abstracts. He holds more than 20 patents and has won numerous awards including the AMA's Inspirational Physician Award (2014) and the ASGE's Distinguished Service Award (2015). Dr. Van Dam is Past President of both the Bockus International Society of Gastroenterology and the American Society for Gastrointestinal Endoscopy. He has been named TOP DOCTOR by Pasadena and Los Angeles Magazine. Dr. Van Dam was recently honored by USC by being named a "Clinical Scholar" in the Department of Medicine at the Keck School of Medicine.

    Host: Qifa Zhou

    Location: Olin Hall of Engineering (OHE) - 122

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Mischalgrace Diasanta

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  • Center for Cyber-Physical Systems and Internet of Things and Ming Hsieh Institute for Electrical Engineering Joint Seminar Series on Cyber-Physical Systems

    Center for Cyber-Physical Systems and Internet of Things and Ming Hsieh Institute for Electrical Engineering Joint Seminar Series on Cyber-Physical Systems

    Mon, Jan 23, 2017 @ 02:00 PM - 03:30 PM

    Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Qi Zhu, Assistant Professor , University of California, Riverside

    Talk Title: Addressing Time and Security in Cyber-Physical Systems

    Abstract: Cyber-physical systems such as autonomous vehicles, smart buildings, and industrial automation systems, are poised to bring immense economic and societal benefits. However, the design and operation of these systems faces tremendous challenges, many of which center around two factors -“ time and security. In this talk, I will discuss some of the unique timing and security challenges for cyber-physical systems, and introduce our work in addressing them. These include 1) a software synthesis framework that addresses timing holistically throughout task generation and task mapping, and enables trade-offs with emerging design metrics such as security and extensibility, 2) a contract-based framework that quantitatively explores timing constraints for multiple conflicting design metrics and across multiple abstraction layers, and 3) co-design of control layer and embedded platform for cyber-physical security and its application in automotive electronic systems and vehicular networks.

    Biography: Dr. Qi Zhu is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering in University of California, Riverside. Prior to joining UCR, he was a research scientist at the Strategic CAD Labs in Intel from 2008 to 2011. Dr. Zhu received a Ph.D. in EECS from University of California, Berkeley in 2008, and a B.E. in CS from Tsinghua University in 2003. His research interests include model-based design and software synthesis for cyber-physical systems, CPS security, energy-efficient buildings and infrastructures, and system-on-chip design. He received best paper awards at the Design Automation Conference (DAC) 2006, DAC 2007, International Conference on Cyber-Physical Systems (ICCPS) 2013, and ACM Transactions on Design Automation of Electronic Systems (TODAES) 2016. He received the National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER award in 2016. Dr. Zhu has served on the technical program committees and as session organizer and chair for a number of international conferences, including DAC, ICCAD, DATE, ASP-DAC, CODES+ISSS, RTSS, RTAS, SAC, SIES, MEMOCODE, etc. He is the education committee chair of the IEEE Technical Committee on Cyber-Physical Systems. He received the ACM SIGDA Service Award in 2015.

    Host: Pierluigi Nuzzo

    Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 132

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Estela Lopez

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  • USC Stem Cell Seminar: Kathryn Anderson, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center

    USC Stem Cell Seminar: Kathryn Anderson, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center

    Tue, Jan 24, 2017 @ 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM

    Alfred E. Mann Department of Biomedical Engineering

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Kathryn Anderson, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center

    Talk Title: TBD

    Series: Eli and Edythe Broad Center for Regenerative Medicine and Stem Cell Research at USC Distinguished Speakers Series

    Host: USC Stem Cell

    More Info: http://stemcell.usc.edu/events

    Webcast: http://keckmedia.usc.edu/stem-cell-seminar

    Location: Eli & Edythe Broad CIRM Center for Regenerative Medicine & Stem Cell Resch. (BCC) - First Floor Conference Room

    WebCast 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

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  • Recruiting Seminar

    Tue, Jan 24, 2017 @ 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM

    Information Sciences Institute

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Shobeir Fakhraei, Ph.D. candidate at the Department of Computer Science, University of Maryland College Park

    Talk Title: Collective Multi-relational Network Mining

    Series: AI Seminar

    Abstract: Our world is becoming increasingly interconnected and so is the data collected from it. Developing computational models capable of correctly representing the underlying interrelated structure and the heterogeneous characteristics of the real-world data is essential for representing and reasoning about it. Domains such as biology, online social networks, the World Wide Web, information networks, recommender systems, and scholarly networks are just a few examples that include explicit or implicit interdependent structures.


    In this talk, I will present approaches to model heterogeneous interlinked data ranging from feature-based and embedding-based approaches to statistical relational learning methods that more explicitly model the dependencies between entities. I will discuss different methods of modeling node classification and link inference in networks for several domains and highlight the effect of two important aspects: (1) Heterogeneous entities and multi-relational structures, (2) joint inference and collective classification of the unlabeled data. I will also introduce a model for link inference that serves as a template to encode a variety of information such as structural, biological, social, and contextual interactions in various domains.

    Biography: Shobeir Fakhraei is a Ph.D. candidate at the Department of Computer Science, University of Maryland College Park (UMD) and a visiting researcher at University of California Santa Cruz (UCSC). He holds two M.Sc. degrees specialized on Data Mining and Biomedical Informatics, and Computer Engineering, and has been recognized with awards such as outstanding graduate research assistant recognition award, and General Motors academic scholarship award. He has collaborated with several research teams in academia and industry including at Microsoft Research Redmond, Yahoo! Research Sunnyvale, Turi (Dato), Ifwe (Tagged), and Henry Ford Health System. His research interests include Machine Learning, Multi-Relational Graph Mining, Recommender Systems, Social Network Analysis, and Biomedical and Health Informatics

    Host: Jose Luis Ambite and Kristina Lerman

    Webcast: http://webcastermshd.isi.edu/Mediasite/Play/b53b0a1dfd3c44c8bda7a4001e8b3f101d

    Location: Information Science Institute (ISI) -

    WebCast Link: http://webcastermshd.isi.edu/Mediasite/Play/b53b0a1dfd3c44c8bda7a4001e8b3f101d

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Alma Nava / Information Sciences Institute

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  • The Office of Naval Research - Science and Technology in Support of the US Navy and Marine Corps

    Tue, Jan 24, 2017 @ 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM

    Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Ellen S. Livingston, Ph. D., Office of Naval Research, Arlington VA

    Talk Title: The Office of Naval Research - Science and Technology in Support of the US Navy and Marine Corps

    Abstract: The Department of Defense supports basic and applied research at universities and laboratories through the program offices of the three services: the Office of Naval Research (ONR), the Army Research Office (ARO), and the Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR). In this talk, we focus on opportunities at the Office of Naval Research and provide an introduction to ONR sponsored programs. We provide an overview of the areas of interest to ONR and show how to find programs and program managers in these areas. In addition, we will cover similar information about ARO and AFOSR. Finally, we briefly discuss the process for DURIP and MURI funding as well as the Vannevar Bush Faculty Fellowship funding process.

    Biography: Dr. Ellen Livingston manages the University Research Initiatives Program at the Office of Naval Research (ONR) in Arlington, VA. This program sponsors basic research through the Multidisciplinary Research Initiative, the Defense University Research Instrumentation Program, the Presidential Early Career Awards, as well as the Vannevar Bush Faculty Fellowship Program. From 2010 to 2014, she was the Associate Director for Ocean Science Research at ONR Global in London, UK. From 1996 to 2009, she served as the ONR Ocean Acoustics Program Manager, supporting high-quality, basic and applied research in underwater acoustics, including extensive at-sea experimental work. From 1985 to 1995, Dr. Livingston was an experimental research mathematician in the Acoustic Signal Processing branch of the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, DC. She has been a member of the NATO Scientific Committee of National Representatives in La Spezia, IT, a Visiting Scientist in the Department of Ocean Engineering at MIT, and is a Senior Member of the IEEE Oceanic Engineering Society. She received her PhD in Mathematics from Washington University in St. Louis.


    Host: Alan Willner, x04664, willner@usc.edu

    Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 248

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Gerrielyn Ramos

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  • CS Colloquium: Ruslan Salakhutdinov (Carnegie Mellon) - Learning Deep Unsupervised and Multimodal Models

    Tue, Jan 24, 2017 @ 04:00 PM - 05:20 PM

    Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Ruslan Salakhutdinov, Carnegie Mellon

    Talk Title: Learning Deep Unsupervised and Multimodal Models

    Series: NVIDIA Distinguished Lecture Series in Machine Learning

    Abstract: This lecture satisfies requirements for CSCI 591: Computer Science Research Colloquium.

    In this talk I will first introduce a broad class of unsupervised deep learning models and show that they can learn useful hierarchical representations from large volumes of high-dimensional data with applications in information retrieval, object recognition, and speech perception. I will next introduce deep models that are capable of extracting a unified representation that fuses together multiple data modalities and present the Reverse Annealed Importance Sampling Estimator (RAISE) for evaluating these deep generative models. Finally, I will discuss models that can generate natural language descriptions (captions) of images and generate images from captions using attention, as well as introduce multiplicative and fine-grained gating mechanisms with application to reading comprehension.

    Part of NVIDIA Distinguished Lecture Series in Machine Learning.

    Biography: Ruslan Salakhutdinov received his PhD in computer science from the University of Toronto in 2009. After spending two post-doctoral years at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Artificial Intelligence Lab, he joined the University of Toronto as an Assistant Professor in the Departments of Statistics and Computer Science. In 2016 he joined the Machine Learning Department at Carnegie Mellon University as an Associate Professor. Ruslan's primary interests lie in deep learning, machine learning, and large-scale optimization. He is an action editor of the Journal of Machine Learning Research and served on the senior programme committee of several learning conferences including NIPS and ICML. He is an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellow, Microsoft Research Faculty Fellow, Canada Research Chair in Statistical Machine Learning, a recipient of the Early Researcher Award, Google Faculty Award, Nvidia's Pioneers of AI award, and is a Senior Fellow of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research.

    Host: Yan Liu

    Location: Henry Salvatori Computer Science Center (SAL) - 101

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Assistant to CS chair

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  • Acoustic Event Detection

    Wed, Jan 25, 2017 @ 10:00 AM - 12:00 PM

    Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Jort Gemmeke, Google

    Talk Title: Acoustic Event Detection

    Abstract: Research in audio signal processing has been dominated by speech and music research, but many of the sounds in our real-life environments are non-speech events such as cars passing by, wind, warning beeps and animal sounds. These acoustic events contain much information about the environment and physical events that take place in it, enabling application areas such as accessibility, safety, health monitoring and investigation of biodiversity. In this talk I will give a brief overview of the field, followed by detailing our work in training state-of-the-art neural networks on millions of hours of audio, as well as introducing a new, large-scale human rated dataset for research in this area.

    Biography: Jort F. Gemmeke is a research scientist at Google. In 2011, he received the Ph.D degree from the University of Nijmegen, The Netherlands, on the subject of noise robust speech recognition. From 2011 to 2014, he worked as a postdoc at KU Leuven, Belgium, leading a project to develop self-taught vocal interfaces for dysarthric speakers. After a brief stint Audience, Mountain View, he joined Google where he works on acoustic event detection. He also works as a team development facilitator with teams from all over Google. When not talking about himself in the third person, he enjoys sailing, kayaking and hiking with his family.

    Host: Shrikanth Narayanan

    Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 132

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Tanya Acevedo-Lam/EE-Systems

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  • Amgen Seminar: Sean Brown

    Amgen Seminar: Sean Brown

    Wed, Jan 25, 2017 @ 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM

    Alfred E. Mann Department of Biomedical Engineering

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Sean Brown, Amgen

    Talk Title: Interdiction at a protein-protein interface: Structure-based design of Mcl-1 inhibitors

    Series: USC/Amgen Seminar Series

    Host: USC/Amgen

    More Info: http://stemcell.usc.edu/events

    Location: TBD

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Cristy Lytal/USC Stem Cell

    Event Link: http://stemcell.usc.edu/events

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  • MHI CommNetS seminar

    Wed, Jan 25, 2017 @ 02:00 PM - 03:00 PM

    Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Dr. Meeko Oishi, University of New Mexico

    Talk Title: Synthesis of user-interfaces and reachability-based controllers for human-in-the-loop systems

    Series: CommNetS

    Abstract: Methods for the analysis and design of human-in-the-loop systems must account for interactions between the automation, the human, and the environment. We consider two problems: 1) user-interface design, and 2) reachability-based navigation in dynamic, uncertain environments. The user-interface, which provides information to the user about the underlying automation, and allows the user to issue input commands to the system, is key for enabling situational awareness and trust of the automation, yet is often designed in an ad-hoc fashion. We use sensor placement techniques to determine the optimal elements for display in the user-interface, and exploit submodularity properties to facilitate solution of the resulting combinatorial optimization problem. We additionally consider the problem of collaborative navigation in dynamic, uncertain environments. While assurances of safety are computationally intractable, solutions that exploit the forward reachable set are real-time compatible. We describe a method to compute the forward stochastic reachable set and its probability measure efficiently, that enables robust performance in difficult planning problems.

    Biography: Meeko Oishi is an Associate Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of New Mexico. She received the Ph.D. (2004) and M.S. (2000) in Mechanical Engineering from Stanford University, and a B.S.E. in Mechanical Engineering from Princeton University (1998). Her research interests include nonlinear dynamical systems, hybrid control theory, control of human-in-the-loop systems, reachability analysis, and modeling of motor performance and control in Parkinson's disease. She previously held a faculty position at the University of British Columbia at Vancouver. She is the recipient of the NSF CAREER Award, the UNM Regents' Lecturer Award, the UNM Teaching Fellowship, the Peter Wall Institute Early Career Scholar Award, the Truman Postdoctoral Fellowship in National Security Science and Engineering, and the George Bienkowski Memorial Prize, Princeton University. She was a Summer Faculty Fellow at AFRL Space Vehicles Directorate 2013-“2015.

    Host: Prof. Insoon Yang

    Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 248

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Annie Yu

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  • Distinguished Lecture Series

    Thu, Jan 26, 2017 @ 12:45 PM - 01:50 PM

    Mork Family Department of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Dr. Andre Taylor , Yale University

    Talk Title: Advanced Energy Storage and Conversion Devices using Nanostructured Materials

    Series: Distinguished Lecture

    Host: Professor Malancha Gupta

    Location: James H. Zumberge Hall Of Science (ZHS) - 159

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Martin Olekszyk

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  • George A. Bekey Distinguished Lecture with Professor Moshe Y. Vardi (Rice University)

    Thu, Jan 26, 2017 @ 04:00 PM - 05:30 PM

    Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Moshe Y. Vardi, Rice University

    Talk Title: Humans, Machines, and Work: The Future is Now

    Series: CS Keynote Series

    Abstract: This lecture satisfies requirements for CSCI 591: Computer Science Research Colloquium.


    Automation, driven by technological progress, has been increasing inexorably for the past several decades. Two schools of economic thinking have for many years been engaged in a debate about the potential effects of automation on jobs: will new technology spawn mass unemployment, as the robots take jobs away from humans? Or will the jobs robots take over create demand for new human jobs?

    I will present data that demonstrate that the concerns about automation are valid. In fact, technology has been hurting working Americans for the past 40 years. The discussion about humans, machines and work tends to be a discussion about some undetermined point in the far future. But it is time to face reality. The future is now.

    Biography: Moshe Y. Vardi is the George Distinguished Service Professor in Computational Engineering and Director of the Ken Kennedy Institute for Information Technology at Rice University. He is the recipient of three IBM Outstanding Innovation Awards, the ACM SIGACT Goedel Prize, the ACM Kanellakis Award, the ACM SIGMOD Codd Award, the Blaise Pascal Medal, the IEEE Computer Society Goode Award, the EATCS Distinguished Achievements Award, and the Southeastern Universities Research Association's Distinguished Scientist Award. He is the author and co-author of over 500 papers, as well as two books: Reasoning about Knowledge and Finite Model Theory and Its Applications. He is a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery, the American Association for Artificial Intelligence, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the European Association for Theoretical Computer Science, the Institute for Electrical and Electronic Engineers, and the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics. He is a member of the US National Academy of Engineering and National Academy of Science, the American Academy of Arts and Science, the European Academy of Science, and Academia Europaea. He holds honorary doctorates from the Saarland University in Germany, Orleans University in France, and UFRGS in Brazil. He is the Editor-in-Chief of the Communications of the ACM.

    Host: CS Department

    Location: Henry Salvatori Computer Science Center (SAL) - 101

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Assistant to CS chair

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  • BME Special Seminar

    BME Special Seminar

    Fri, Jan 27, 2017 @ 10:00 AM - 11:30 AM

    Alfred E. Mann Department of Biomedical Engineering

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Shaochen Chen, PhD, Professor, University of California (San Diego); Department of NanoEngineering Institute of Engineering in Medicine

    Talk Title: Rapid 3D Bioprinting for Precision Tissue Engineering

    Series: Seminars in BME (Lab Rotations)

    Biography: Dr. Chen is a Professor in the Nanoengineering Department at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD). He is also a faculty member of the Institute of Engineering in Medicine and the Clinical Translational Research Institute at UCSD. Before joining UCSD, Dr. Chen had been a Professor and a Pearlie D. Henderson Centennial Endowed Faculty Fellow in Engineering in the Mechanical Engineering Department at the University of Texas at Austin. From 2008 to 2010, Dr. Chen served as the Program Director for the Nanomanufacturing Program in the National Science Foundation (NSF). For more details, please go to: http://schen.ucsd.edu/

    Host: Brent Liu, PhD

    Location: HNB 100

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Mischalgrace Diasanta

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  • Distinguished Lecture with Professor Moshe Y. Vardi (Rice University) - The Automated-Reasoning Revolution: From Theory to Practice and Back

    Fri, Jan 27, 2017 @ 11:00 AM - 11:50 AM

    Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Moshe Y. Vardi, Rice University

    Talk Title: The Automated-Reasoning Revolution: From Theory to Practice and Back

    Series: CS Keynote Series

    Abstract: This lecture satisfies requirements for CSCI 591: Computer Science Research Colloquium.


    For the past 40 years computer scientists generally believed that NP-complete problems are intractable. In particular, Boolean satisfiability (SAT), as a paradigmatic automated-reasoning problem, has been considered to be intractable. Over the past 20 years, however, there has been a quiet, but dramatic, revolution, and very large SAT instances are now being solved routinely as part of software and hardware design.

    In this talk I will review this amazing development and show how automated reasoning is now an industrial reality.

    I will then describe how we can leverage SAT solving to accomplish other automated-reasoning tasks. Counting the the number of satisfying truth assignments of a given Boolean formula or sampling such assignments uniformly at random are fundamental computational problems in computer science with applications in software testing, software synthesis, machine learning, personalized learning, and more. While the theory of these problems has been thoroughly investigated since the 1980s, approximation algorithms developed by theoreticians do not scale up to industrial-sized instances. Algorithms used by the industry offer better scalability, but give up certain correctness guarantees to achieve scalability. We describe a novel approach, based on universal hashing and Satisfiability Modulo Theory, that scales to formulas with hundreds of thousands of variables without giving up correctness guarantees.

    The talk is accessible to a general CS audience.

    Biography: Moshe Y. Vardi is the George Distinguished Service Professor in Computational Engineering and Director of the Ken Kennedy Institute for Information Technology at Rice University. He is the recipient of three IBM Outstanding Innovation Awards, the ACM SIGACT Goedel Prize, the ACM Kanellakis Award, the ACM SIGMOD Codd Award, the Blaise Pascal Medal, the IEEE Computer Society Goode Award, the EATCS Distinguished Achievements Award, and the Southeastern Universities Research Association's Distinguished Scientist Award. He is the author and co-author of over 500 papers, as well as two books: Reasoning about Knowledge and Finite Model Theory and Its Applications. He is a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery, the American Association for Artificial Intelligence, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the European Association for Theoretical Computer Science, the Institute for Electrical and Electronic Engineers, and the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics. He is a member of the US National Academy of Engineering and National Academy of Science, the American Academy of Arts and Science, the European Academy of Science, and Academia Europaea. He holds honorary doctorates from the Saarland University in Germany, Orleans University in France, and UFRGS in Brazil. He is the Editor-in-Chief of the Communications of the ACM.

    Host: CS Department

    Location: May Ormerod Harris Hall, Quinn Wing & Fisher Gallery (HAR) - 101

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Assistant to CS chair

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  • AI Seminar-Optimal structure and parameter learning of Ising models and calibration of the D-Wave quantum computer

    Fri, Jan 27, 2017 @ 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM

    Information Sciences Institute

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Andrey Lokhov , Los Alamos National Lab

    Talk Title: Optimal structure and parameter learning of Ising models and calibration of the D-Wave quantum computer

    Series: Artificial Intelligence Seminar

    Abstract: Reconstruction of structure and parameters of a graphical model from binary samples is a problem of practical importance in a variety of disciplines, ranging from statistical physics and computational biology to image processing and machine learning. The focus of the research community shifted towards developing universal reconstruction algorithms which are both computationally efficient and require the minimal amount of expensive data. In this talk, we introduce a new method, Interaction Screening, which accurately estimates the model parameters using local optimization problems. We provide mathematical guarantees that the algorithm achieves perfect graph structure recovery with a near information-theoretically optimal number of samples and outperforms state of the art techniques, especially in the low-temperature regime which is known to be the hardest for learning. As an application, we show how the method can be used for correction of persistent biases and noise in the D-Wave quantum computer.

    Biography: Currently Postdoctoral Research Assistant at Los Alamos National Laboratory (Theoretical Division and Center for Nonlinear Studies). Working on statistical physics and machine learning.
    Ph.D. (2014) Physics, Laboratoire de Physique Théorique et Modèles Statistiques (LPTMS), Université Paris-Sud (University Paris 11), France
    M.Sc. (2011) Theoretical Physics, Ecole Normale Superieure (ENS), Paris, France
    M.Sc. (2011) Theoretical Physics, Novosibirsk State University, Novosibirsk, Russia
    B.Sc. (2009) Physics, Ecole Polytechnique, Paris, France


    Host: Aram Galstyan

    Webcast: http://webcastermshd.isi.edu/Mediasite/Play/7e04be827bc34fc08ba5f0c2e73254411d

    Location: Information Science Institute (ISI) - 11th Flr Conf Rm # 1135, Marina Del Rey

    WebCast Link: http://webcastermshd.isi.edu/Mediasite/Play/7e04be827bc34fc08ba5f0c2e73254411d

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Peter Zamar

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  • Mark Hersam - Munushian Seminar, Friday, January 27th at 2:00pm in EEB 132

    Fri, Jan 27, 2017 @ 02:00 PM - 03:30 PM

    Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Mark Hersam, Northwestern University

    Talk Title: Processing and Applications of Two-Dimensional Nanoelectronic Heterostructures

    Abstract: Two-dimensional (2D) materials have emerged as promising candidates for next-generation nanoelectronics. As is common for new materials, much of the early work has focused on measuring intrinsic properties on small samples under idealized conditions. However, real-world devices inevitably require large-area samples that are integrated with dielectrics, contacts, and other semiconductors in ambient conditions. This talk will thus explore scalable solution-processing of 2D materials with an eye toward realizing large-area thin-films. For example, density gradient ultracentrifugation allows the solution-based isolation of transition metal dichalcogenides and boron nitride with homogeneous thickness down to the single-layer level. Similarly, 2D black phosphorus is isolated in solution with the resulting flakes showing field-effect transistor mobilities and on/off ratios that are comparable to micromechanically exfoliated flakes. In addition to solution processing, this talk will also report on the integration of 2D materials with dielectrics and other semiconductors. In particular, atomic layer deposition of dielectrics and covalent organic adlayers on 2D black phosphorus suppresses ambient degradation, thereby preserving electronic properties in field-effect transistors at atmospheric pressure conditions. Finally, gate-tunable p-n heterojunction diodes with Type I and Type II band alignments are demonstrated by integrating n-type single-layer MoS2 with p-type semiconducting single-walled carbon nanotubes and pentacene, respectively.

    Biography: Mark C. Hersam is the Walter P. Murphy Professor of Materials Science and Engineering and Director of the Materials Research Center at Northwestern University. He also holds faculty appointments in the Departments of Chemistry, Applied Physics, Medicine, and Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. He earned a B.S. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) in 1996, M.Phil. in Physics from the University of Cambridge (UK) in 1997, and a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from UIUC in 2000. His research interests include nanofabrication, scanning probe microscopy, semiconductor surfaces, and nanoelectronic materials. Dr. Hersam has received several honors including the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers, TMS Robert Lansing Hardy Award, AVS Peter Mark Award, MRS Outstanding Young Investigator, U.S. Science Envoy, MacArthur Fellowship, and six Teacher of the Year Awards. Dr. Hersam is the co-founder of NanoIntegris, which is a commercial supplier of nanoelectronic materials. Dr. Hersam is a Fellow of MRS, AVS, APS, AAAS, SPIE, and IEEE, and also serves as an Associate Editor of ACS Nano.

    Host: EE-Electrophysics

    Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 132

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Marilyn Poplawski

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  • Astani Civil and Environmental Engineering Ph.D. Seminar

    Fri, Jan 27, 2017 @ 03:00 PM - 04:00 PM

    Sonny Astani Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Ali Ghahramani, Ph.D, Astani Civil Engineering Department

    Talk Title: Online and Adaptive Learning and Optimization for Human-Centered HVAC Systems Operations

    More Information: CEE PhD Seminar by Ali Ghahramani.docx

    Location: John Stauffer Science Lecture Hall (SLH) - 102

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Evangeline Reyes

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  • CS Colloquium: Nadia Polikarpova (MIT CSAIL) - Type-Driven Program Synthesis

    Mon, Jan 30, 2017 @ 11:00 AM - 12:20 PM

    Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Nadia Polikarpova, MIT CSAIL

    Talk Title: Type-Driven Program Synthesis

    Series: CS Colloquium

    Abstract: This lecture satisfies requirements for CSCI 591: Computer Science Research Colloquium.

    Modern programming languages safeguard developers from many classes of common errors, yet more subtle errors-”such as violations of security policies-”still plague software. Program synthesis has the potential to eliminate such errors, by generating executable code from concise and intuitive high-level specifications. The major obstacle to practical program synthesis is in navigating large search spaces to find programs that satisfy a given specification. My work addresses this problem through the design of synthesis-friendly type systems that are able to decompose a synthesis problem into smaller problems and efficiently navigate the search space.

    Based on this principle I developed Synquid, a synthesizer that generates programs from type-based specifications. Synquid is the first synthesizer to automatically discover provably correct implementations of sorting algorithms, as well as balancing and insertion operations on Red-Black Trees and AVL Trees. For these programs, the required specifications are up to seven times more concise than the implementations, and the synthesis times range from fractions of a second (for insertion sort) to under a minute (for Red-Black Tree rotations). Going beyond textbook algorithms, I creates a language called Lifty, which uses type-driven synthesis to automatically rewrite programs that violate information flow policies.

    In our case study, Lifty was able to enforce all required policies in a prototype conference management system.


    Biography: Nadia Polikarpova is a postdoctoral researcher at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab, interested in helping programmers build secure and reliable software. She completed her PhD at ETH Zurich. For her dissertation she developed tools and techniques for automated formal verification of object-oriented libraries, and created the first fully verified general-purpose container library, receiving the Best Paper Award at the International Symposium on Formal Methods. During her doctoral studies, Nadia was an intern at MSR Redmond, where she worked on verifying real-world implementations of security protocols. At MIT, Nadia has been applying formal verification to automate various critical and error-prone programming tasks.

    Host: Chao Wang

    Location: Ronald Tutor Hall of Engineering (RTH) - 217

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Assistant to CS chair

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  • Seminars in Biomedical Engineering

    Seminars in Biomedical Engineering

    Mon, Jan 30, 2017 @ 12:30 PM - 01:50 PM

    Alfred E. Mann Department of Biomedical Engineering

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Adam Weitz, PhD, Assistant Professor of Research Ophthalmology

    Talk Title: Improving the Spatial Resolution of Retinal Prostheses

    Abstract: http://keck.usc.edu/faculty/andrew-weitz/

    Host: Qifa Zhou

    Location: Olin Hall of Engineering (OHE) - 122

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Mischalgrace Diasanta

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  • USC Stem Cell Seminar: Arthur Lander, University of California, Irvine

    USC Stem Cell Seminar: Arthur Lander, University of California, Irvine

    Tue, Jan 31, 2017 @ 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM

    Alfred E. Mann Department of Biomedical Engineering

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Arthur Lander, University of California, Irvine

    Talk Title: Stem cells, lineages and the logic of proliferative control

    Series: Eli and Edythe Broad Center for Regenerative Medicine and Stem Cell Research at USC Distinguished Speakers Series

    Abstract: Producing organs and tissues of precisely specified sizes is one of the greatest engineering challenges that developing organisms face. Whether achieving homeostasis of continuously-renewing epithelia, or building non-renewing organs such as brain and bone, the key to achieving speed, stability and set-point control is feedback regulation of how cells progress through lineage stages. I will discuss the evidence, both experimental and theoretical, in support of this claim, as well as its implications for how we understand stem cells and the lineages to which they give rise.



    Host: USC Stem Cell

    More Info: http://stemcell.usc.edu/events

    Webcast: http://keckmedia.usc.edu/stem-cell-seminar

    Location: Eli & Edythe Broad CIRM Center for Regenerative Medicine & Stem Cell Resch. (BCC) - First Floor Conference Room

    WebCast 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

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  • CS Colloquium: Barath Raghavan (UC Berkeley) -Frontier Networks: Context, Challenges, and Connectivity

    Tue, Jan 31, 2017 @ 11:00 AM - 12:20 PM

    Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Barath Raghavan, UC Berkeley

    Talk Title: Frontier Networks: Context, Challenges, and Connectivity

    Series: CS Colloquium

    Abstract: This lecture satisfies requirements for CSCI 591: Computer Science Research Colloquium.

    In this talk, I discuss Frontier Networks -- networks that expand Internet access to disconnected regions -- and their role in scaling Internet access to the half of the global population that remains offline. I describe how a deep understanding of the context and challenges reveals new approaches to building more reliable, cost-effective, and manageable Frontier Networks. I describe a project I led to build such a network in a previously-disconnected region of Mendocino County, CA, the lessons it taught us about network design and operation, and the systems we built to address the needs that were unmet. I then describe three subsequent challenges -- bootstrapping, planning, and routing -- and describe ongoing projects to address them.

    Biography: Barath Raghavan is a senior researcher at the International Computer Science Institute in Berkeley, CA. His research interests include networked systems, security and applied cryptography, ICTD, and sustainable computing. His work spans a wide range of topics including congestion control, routing security, Internet architecture, software-defined networking, rural Internet access, network function virtualization, network troubleshooting and testing, anonymity systems, and computing for sustainable agriculture. He received his PhD from UC San Diego in 2009 and his BS from UC Berkeley in 2002. He has received a number of paper awards including from ACM SIGCOMM and ACM DEV.

    Host: CS Department

    Location: Ronald Tutor Hall of Engineering (RTH) - 217

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Assistant to CS chair

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  • Epstein Institute Seminar - ISE 651

    Tue, Jan 31, 2017 @ 03:30 PM - 04:50 PM

    Daniel J. Epstein Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Dr. Alexandre Bayen, Professor of Engineering, UC Berkeley

    Talk Title: Distributed Learning Dynamics Convergence in Routing Games

    Host: Dr. Maged Dessouky and Dr. Jong-Shi Pang

    More Information: January 31, 2017_Bayen.pdf

    Location: Ethel Percy Andrus Gerontology Center (GER) - 206

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Grace Owh

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