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Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Events for January
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Biomedical Engineering SeminarsMon, Jan 08, 2018 @ 12:30 PM - 01:50 PM
Alfred E. Mann Department of Biomedical Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Professor Qifa Zhou, Professor of BME & Ophthalmology (USC)
Talk Title: Introduction, Syllabus, Expectations
Host: Professor Qifa Zhou
Location: Olin Hall of Engineering (OHE) - 122
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Mischalgrace Diasanta
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Center for Systems and Control (CSC@USC) and Ming Hsieh Institute for Electrical Engineering
Mon, Jan 08, 2018 @ 02:00 PM - 03:00 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Bassam Bamieh, University of California at Santa Barbara
Talk Title: Multiplicative Noise as a Structured Stochastic Uncertainty Problem
Abstract: Linear systems with multiplicative, time-varying noise exhibit varied and rich phenomenology. We study such systems in a framework similar to that used in robust control where the stochastic parameters are viewed as a "structured uncertainty". In particular, a purely input-output approach is developed to characterize mean-square stability. This approach clarifies earlier results in this area and also easily produces new ones in the case of correlated uncertainties. Applications of this framework to networked dynamical systems with link failures and stochastic topologies will be illustrated. In addition, an application to a model of the Cochlea will be described which potentially explains otoacoustic emissions as an instability mechanism. Finally, we illustrate some interesting connections of this work with the phenomenon of Anderson Localization which is a canonical problem in the statistical physics of disordered media.
Biography: Bassam Bamieh is Professor of Mechanical Engineering and Associate Director of the Center for Control, Dynamical Systems and Computation (CCDC) at the University of California at Santa Barbara. His research interests are in the fundamentals of Control and Dynamical Systems such as Robust, Optimal and Distributed Control, as well as the applications of systems and feedback techniques in several physical and engineering systems including shear flow transition and turbulence, and the use of feedback in thermoacoustic energy conversion devices. He is a past recipient of the AACC Hugo Schuck Best Paper Award, and the IEEE Control Systems Society G. S. Axelby Outstanding Paper Award (twice). He is a Fellow of the International Federation of Automatic Control (IFAC), and a Fellow of the IEEE.
Host: Mihailo Jovanovic, mihailo@usc.edu
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 132
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Gerrielyn Ramos
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Towards Stochastic Geometry for Smart Cities and Internet of Things
Wed, Jan 10, 2018 @ 02:00 PM - 03:30 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Harpreet S. Dhillon, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Virginia Tech
Talk Title: Towards Stochastic Geometry for Smart Cities and Internet of Things
Series: Center for Cyber-Physical Systems and Internet of Things
Abstract: Stochastic geometry deals with the study of random spatial patterns. Such patterns appear in all major technological systems of critical importance to smart cities, such as communication networks, transportation, and smart grid. For instance, locations of wireless nodes, vehicles, and electric vehicle charging stations can all be visualized as random point patterns and can hence be modeled as point processes. Somewhat less obviously, the layout of roads in a city can also be visualized as a random spatial pattern (and can hence be modeled as a line process).
In this talk, our focus will be on doubly-stochastic spatial models and their applications to problems of interest to communications and CPS communities. We will start our discussion with networks formed on roadways. In order to model these networks, we will construct a doubly-stochastic model in which the layout of roads is modeled using a line process and locations of vehicles (and other infrastructure elements) on each road as a Poisson point process. Using this model, we will first characterize the performance of a wireless link formed by a typical vehicle with another vehicle in the same network. This basic construct can be used to characterize wireless performance in emerging V2X/C-V2X technologies. We will then apply the same model to study the problem of infrastructure placement (such as electric vehicle charging stations) along the roads. In such problems, we generally need to measure distances along the roads (similar to Manhattan distance) because of which the resulting analysis has a significantly different flavor compared to that of wireless networks. In the remaining time, we will focus on Poisson cluster process, which is a doubly-stochastic spatial model that is useful in capturing spatial coupling in the locations of wireless nodes. We will discuss its applications to both Internet of Things and cellular networks (time permitting). Interested readers can refer to the following two representative papers to get more rigorous details: https://arxiv.org/abs/1709.08577 (line process) and https://doi.org/10.1109/TCOMM.2017.2782741 (cluster process).
Biography: Harpreet S. Dhillon received the B.Tech. degree in Electronics and Communication Engineering from IIT Guwahati in 2008, the M.S. degree in Electrical Engineering from Virginia Tech in 2010, and the Ph.D. degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Texas at Austin in 2013. In academic year 2013-14, he was a Viterbi Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Southern California. He joined Virginia Tech in August 2014, where he is currently an Assistant Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering. He has held short-term visiting positions at Bell Labs, Samsung, and Qualcomm. His research interests include communication theory, stochastic geometry, cyber-physical systems, and wireless ad hoc and heterogeneous cellular networks.
Dr. Dhillon is a Clarivate Analytics Highly Cited Researcher and has coauthored five best paper award recipients including the 2016 IEEE Communications Society (ComSoc) Heinrich Hertz Award, the 2015 IEEE ComSoc Young Author Best Paper Award, the 2014 IEEE ComSoc Leonard G. Abraham Prize, and two conference best paper awards at IEEE ICC 2013 and European Wireless 2014. His other academic honors include the 2017 Outstanding New Assistant Professor Award from the Virginia Tech College of Engineering, the 2013 UT Austin Wireless Networking and Communications Group (WNCG) leadership award, the UT Austin Microelectronics and Computer Development (MCD) Fellowship, and the 2008 Agilent Engineering and Technology Award. He currently serves as an Editor for the IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications, the IEEE Transactions on Green Communications and Networking, and the IEEE Wireless Communications Letters.
Host: Professor Paul Bogdan
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 248
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Talyia White
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W.V.T. RUSCH ENGINEERING HONORS COLLOQUIUM
Fri, Jan 12, 2018 @ 01:00 PM - 01:50 PM
USC Viterbi School of Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Dr. Deniz K. Armani, SMP Engineering, Inc.
Talk Title: One Engineer's Professional Journey, From School to Industry
Host: Dr. Prata & EHP
Location: Henry Salvatori Computer Science Center (SAL) - 101
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Su Stevens
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Low Cost Platforms for EE Education
Fri, Jan 12, 2018 @ 01:30 PM - 02:30 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Patrick Kane, Cypress Semiconductor Corporation
Talk Title: Low Cost Platforms for EE Education
Abstract: By 2020 there will be 50 Billion devices connected to the internet (MIT, 2017). More and more institutions are implementing IoT courses as part of their curriculum (Class Central, 2017; MIT, 2017; UC San Diego, 2017).
The lecture will introduce attendees to available development kits suitable for IoT as well as an overview of the Cypress University Alliance program and demonstrations of Cypress kits that can be used in the lab section of a variety of courses including (but not limited to): Fundamentals of Digital Logic, Op Amp filters, robotics, mechatronics, embedded systems and IoT.
Biography: Patrick Kane is the director of the Cypress University Alliance Program (CUA) at Cypress Semiconductor Corporation. The Cypress University Alliance Program is dedicated to partnering with academia to ensure that professors and students have access to the latest Cypress PSoC technology for use in education and research. Mr. Kane joined Cypress to begin a university program at Cypress in July 2006. Before joining Cypress, Mr. Kane spent over 13 years at Xilinx in a variety of technical and marketing roles including Applications Engineering, Aerospace and Defense, Automotive, Technical Training, and managed the Xilinx University Program (XUP) from 1998 through 2002. Prior to Xilinx, Mr. Kane spent a number of years at both Advanced Micro Devices and Lattice Semiconductor Inc. He holds ASEET, BSEE, and MBA degrees and has authored numerous articles and conference papers. Mr. Kane is currently pursuing a doctorate in educational technology.
Host: Professor Sandeep Gupta
Location: Ronald Tutor Hall of Engineering (RTH) - 105
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Talyia White
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Seminars in Biomedical Engineering
Fri, Jan 12, 2018 @ 02:00 PM - 04:00 PM
Alfred E. Mann Department of Biomedical Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: John Oghalai, MD, Tiber Alpert Professor and Chair USC Caruso Department of Otolaryngology -“ Head and Neck Surgery
Talk Title: How Cochlear Biomechanics Tunes Mammalian Hearing
Abstract: The exquisite sensitivity and frequency discrimination of mammalian hearing derive from forces generated by outer hair cells (OHCs) within the auditory portion of the inner ear, the cochlea. These forces amplify the sound-induced vibrations within the tissues of the cochlea to enhance quiet sounds and sharpen frequency tuning. Our group has pioneered the technique of using optical coherence tomography to measure sound-induced vibrations within the mammalian cochlea without opening the bone that surrounds it, thus minimizing artifacts. Furthermore, we study transgenic mice with targeted mutations that affect different biomechanical aspects of the cochlea to localize the underlying processes necessary for normal hearing. The goal of this work is to understand the fundamental biomechanical changes that underlie progressive hearing loss and to develop treatments to overcome them.
Biography: http://keck.usc.edu/john-s-oghalai-to-lead-otolaryngology/
Host: Shri Narayanan, PhD & Brent Liu, PhD
More Information: Oghalai Announcement.pdf
Location: Corwin D. Denney Research Center (DRB) - 145
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Mischalgrace Diasanta
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Biomedical Engineering Seminars
Mon, Jan 15, 2018 @ 12:30 PM - 01:50 PM
Alfred E. Mann Department of Biomedical Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: NO CLASS MLK HOLIDAY, NO CLASS MLK HOLIDAY
Talk Title: NO CLASS- MLK HOLIDAY
Host: Professor Qifa Zhou
Location: Olin Hall of Engineering (OHE) - 122
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Mischalgrace Diasanta
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Formal Methods for Building a Multi-Robot Task Server
Tue, Jan 16, 2018 @ 02:00 PM - 03:00 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Rupak Majumdar, Max Planck Institute for Software Systems
Talk Title: Formal Methods for Building a Multi-Robot Task Server
Series: Center for Cyber-Physical Systems and Internet of Things
Abstract: In this talk, I will talk about synthesis challenges that arose in our attempts to build Antlab, an end-to-end system that takes streams of user task requests and executes them using collections of robots. In Antlab, each request is specified declaratively in linear temporal logic extended with quantifiers over robots. The user does not program robots individually, nor know how many robots are available at any time or the precise state of the robots. The Antlab runtime system manages the set of robots, schedules robots to perform tasks, automatically synthesizes robot motion plans from the task specification, and manages the co-ordinated execution of the plan.
We are using Antlab as an end-to-end application of formal methods in cyber-physical systems.I will describe techniques to bridge the gap between continuous and discrete worlds,and hierarchical synthesis tools based on repeated re-planning and dynamic conflict resolution.On the theoretical side, I will describe compositional synthesis for continuous systems and some new classes of synthesis problems.On the practical side, I will describe ongoing work in using natural language for declarative specifications of tasks.
This talk represents joint work with Brendon Boldt, Eva Darulova, Rayna Dimitrova, Ivan Gavran, Kaushik Mallik, Vinayak Prabhu, Indranil Saha, Anne-Kathrin Schmuck, Sadegh Soudjani, and Damien Zufferey.
Biography: Rupak Majumdar is a Scientific Director at the Max Planck Institute for Software Systems. Previously, he was a faculty member at the University of California, Los Angeles.His research interests are in the verification and control of reactive, real-time, hybrid, and probabilistic systems, software verification and programming languages, logic, and automata theory. He received the President's Gold Medal from IIT, Kanpur, the Leon O. Chua award from UC Berkeley, an NSF CAREER award, a Sloan Foundation Fellowship, an ERC Synergy award, and "Most Influential Paper" awards from PLDI and POPL.
Host: Professor Paul Bogdan
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 248
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Talyia White
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Epstein Institute Seminar, ISE 651
Tue, Jan 16, 2018 @ 03:30 PM - 04:50 PM
Daniel J. Epstein Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Dr. Mayank Kejriwal, USC Information Sciences Institute (ISI)
Talk Title: Building Domain-Specific Search Engines for Investigative Decision Support
Host: Prof. Carl Kesselman
More Information: January 16, 2018.pdf
Location: Ethel Percy Andrus Gerontology Center (GER) - 206
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Grace Owh
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Seminar
Wed, Jan 17, 2018 @ 04:00 PM - 05:00 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Dr. Jerry M. Mendel, University of Southern California
Talk Title: A Remarkable Trajectory-” From AI back to AI, With Many Stops Along the Way
Series: Remarkable Trajectory Seminar Series
Abstract: In honor and celebration of his retirement and 44 years of service at USC, the Viterbi School of Engineering invites Jerry M. Mendel to share the trajectory of his remarkable career. His talk will describe some of the research (that began with AI and concluded with AI), educational and administrative paths along this trajectory.
Biography: Jerry M. Mendel has published close to 600 technical papers (more than 125 individually authored) and is author and/or co-author of 12 books, including Uncertain Rule-based Fuzzy Systems: Introduction and New Directions, 2nd ed. (Springer 2017), Perceptual Computing: Aiding People in Making Subjective Judgments (Wiley & IEEE Press, 2010), and Introduction to Type-2 Fuzzy Logic Control: Theory and Application (Wiley & IEEE Press, 2014).
Host: Drs. Sandeep Gupta and Richard Leahy
More Information: 20180117 Mendel Poster.pdf
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 132
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Gloria Halfacre
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CS Colloquium: Gale Lucas (University of Southern California) - The Best of Both Worlds: Social Agents Leverage Rapport and Social Safety to Increase Trust
Thu, Jan 18, 2018 @ 11:00 AM - 12:20 PM
Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Gale Lucas, University of Southern California
Talk Title: The Best of Both Worlds: Social Agents Leverage Rapport and Social Safety to Increase Trust
Series: Computer Science Colloquium
Abstract: There are risks and benefits to trusting others. For example, when one shares a secret, the discloser can experience benefits (e.g., catharsis, sometimes even health benefits); however, they have to trust the recipient won't use or hold it against them. There are two key factors that increase willingness to engage in such actions that require trust. The first is social safety: the sense that one's identity is protected (i.e., anonymous) and won't be judged. The second is rapport: the harmony, fluidity, synchrony, and flow felt during interaction. These two factors -social safety and rapport- are normally set in opposition to each other. The former is maximized in the absence of another human, while the latter is maximized in intensive face-to-face (i.e., non-anonymous) interactions. Thus, usually, there is a trade-off, where either social safety or rapport has to be chosen, but not both. Social agents (virtual humans or robots), however, offer the best of both worlds. They can engage in rapport-building like their human counterparts, but also foster a sense of social safety (anonymity, lack of judgement). In this talk, I present research showing how social safety and rapport, both together and separately, can be leveraged to increase trust in agents and robots. I discuss effects across various user outcomes related to trust: sharing personal information and honest disclosure, as well as feeling comfortable practicing negotiation with social agents, trusting them to control the physical environment, and taking their advice. Finally, I discuss implications for user design and describe possibilities for future research.
This lecture satisfies requirements for CSCI 591: Research Colloquium. Please note, due to limited capacity in OHE 100D, seats will be first come first serve.
Biography: Gale M. Lucas is a Senior Research Associate at University of Southern California's Institute for Creative Technologies (ICT). While earning her PhD from Northwestern University, she was awarded a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship to test models of emotion, motivation, and social interaction. After completing her doctorate, she spent two years teaching in a liberal arts context. She then went on to complete her post-doctoral work at ICT, where she established a research program in the areas of Affective Computing and Human-Computer Interaction. Now as a Senior Research Associate, she continues her line of work in affective and personality computing that focuses on models predicting mental health, perceptions of trust and emotion in real-world situations. Her work in HCI is centered around understanding how various social factors affect trust in agents and robots.
Host: Kevin Knight
Location: Olin Hall of Engineering (OHE) - 100D
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Computer Science Department
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CS Colloquium: Joshua Garcia (UC Irvine) - Automated Android Security Assessment: Malware, Vulnerabilities, and Exploits
Thu, Jan 18, 2018 @ 04:00 PM - 05:20 PM
Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Joshua Garcia, UC Irvine
Talk Title: Automated Android Security Assessment: Malware, Vulnerabilities, and Exploits
Series: Computer Science Colloquium
Abstract: Android has become the dominant mobile platform. Millions of Android apps have been produced and disseminated across app markets, spurred by the relative ease of construction using the Android development framework. Unfortunately, this ease of dissemination and construction, and access to millions of users, has attracted malicious app developers and contributed to a growing number of exploitable software vulnerabilities. In this talk, to address these aforementioned challenges, I present two approaches for Android security assessment that I have constructed: LetterBomb, the first approach for automatically generating exploits for Android apps, and RevealDroid, a lightweight, obfuscation-resilient approach for malware detection and family identification that leverages machine learning and static analysis of both conventional and unconventional code (i.e., reflective code and native code).
In the first part of this talk, I introduce LetterBomb, which relies on a combined path-sensitive symbolic execution-based static analysis, and the use of software instrumentation and test oracles. I ran LetterBomb on 10,000 Android apps from Google Play, where I identified nearly 200 exploits from over 800 vulnerable apps, including popular apps with up to 10 million downloads. Compared to a state-of-the-art detection approach for three ICC-based vulnerabilities, LetterBomb obtains 30%-60% more vulnerabilities at a 7 times faster speed.
In the second part of this talk, I present RevealDroid, which operates without the need to perform complex program analyses or to extract large sets of features, and examines unconventional code. Specifically, our selected features leverage categorized Android API usage, reflection-based features, and features from native binaries of apps. I assessed RevealDroid on more than 54,000 malicious and benign apps, where it achieved an accuracy of 98% for detection of malware, an accuracy of 95% for determination of their families, and very high obfuscation resiliency. I further demonstrate RevealDroid's superiority against state-of-the-art approaches.
This lecture satisfies requirements for CSCI 591: Research Colloquium.
Biography: Joshua Garcia is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Institute for Software Research at the University of California, Irvine (UCI) and the Software Engineering and Analysis Lab at UCI's Department of Informatics in the Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences. His current research interests including mobile security, testing, and analysis-”and addressing problems of software architectural drift and erosion. He received three degrees from the University of Southern California: a B.S. in computer engineering and computer science, an M.S. in computer science, and a Ph.D. in computer science. His industrial experience includes software-engineering or research positions at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the Southern California Earthquake Center, and Xerox Special Information Systems.
Host: Chao Wang
Location: Henry Salvatori Computer Science Center (SAL) - 101
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Computer Science Department
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W.V.T. RUSCH ENGINEERING HONORS COLLOQUIUM
Fri, Jan 19, 2018 @ 01:00 PM - 01:50 PM
USC Viterbi School of Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Michael Affeldt, Director, LARiverWorks at Office of Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti
Talk Title: Los Angeles River Revitalization Program
Abstract:
Host: Dr. Prata & EHP
Location: Henry Salvatori Computer Science Center (SAL) - 101
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Su Stevens
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NL Seminar-Attention Is All You Need
Fri, Jan 19, 2018 @ 03:00 PM - 04:00 PM
Information Sciences Institute
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Ashish Vaswani, Jakob Uszkoreit, and Niki Parmar , Google Brain
Talk Title: Attention Is All You Need
Series: Natural Language Seminar
Abstract: The dominant sequence transduction models are based on complex recurrent or convolutional neural networks in an encoder decoder configuration. The best performing models also connect the encoder and decoder through an attention mechanism. We propose a new simple network architecture, the Transformer, based solely on attention mechanisms, dispensing with recurrence and convolutions entirely. Experiments on two machine translation tasks show these models to be superior in quality while being more parallelizable and requiring significantly less time to train. Our model achieves 28.4 BLEU on the WMT 2014 English to German translation task, improving over the existing best results, including ensembles by over 2 BLEU. On the WMT 2014 English-to-French translation task, our model establishes a new single-model state of the art BLEU score of 41.8 after training for 3.5 days on eight GPUs, a small fraction of the training costs of the best models from the literature. We show that the Transformer generalizes well to other tasks by applying it successfully to English constituency parsing both with large and limited training data.
Biography: Niki Parmar is currently a Research Engineer in Google Brain, where she works on generative modeling for tasks across different modalities like Machine Translation, conditional Image generation and super-resolution. Previous to Brain, she worked within Google Research to experiment and evaluate models for Query Similarity and Question Answering used within Search. Niki recieved her Masters in Computer Science from USC before joining Google.
Jakob Uszkoreit is currently a member of the Google Brain research team. There, he works on neural networks generating text, images and other modalities in tasks such as machine translation or image super-resolution. Before joining Brain, Jakob led teams in Google Research and Search, developing neural network models of language that learn from weak supervision at very large scale and designing the semantic parser of the Google Assistant. Prior to that, he worked on Google Translate in its early years. Jakob received his MSc in Computer Science and Mathematics from the Technical University of Berlin in 2008.
Ashish Vaswani is Research Scientist at Google Brain, where he works with fun people on non-sequential generative models that seem to translate well and generate reasonable images of cars and faces. He's also interested in non autoregressive models for generating structured outputs. Before Brain, he spent many wonderful years at ISI, first as a PhD student, working on fast training of neural language models and MDL inspired training of latent-variable models with David Chiang and Liang Huang, and later as a scientist. He misses his colleagues in LA but he prefers the weather in San Francisco.
Host: Marjan Ghazvininejad and Kevin Knight
More Info: http://nlg.isi.edu/nl-seminar/
Location: Information Science Institute (ISI) - 11th Flr Conf Rms # 1135 and #1137, Marina Del Reys
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Peter Zamar
Event Link: http://nlg.isi.edu/nl-seminar/
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Biomedical Engineering Seminars
Mon, Jan 22, 2018 @ 12:30 PM - 01:50 PM
Alfred E. Mann Department of Biomedical Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Cesar Blanco, Ph.D, AMI Project Director at USC
Talk Title: TBA
Host: Professor Qifa Zhou
Location: Olin Hall of Engineering (OHE) - 122
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Mischalgrace Diasanta
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Center for Systems and Control (CSC@USC) and Ming Hsieh Institute for Electrical Engineering
Mon, Jan 22, 2018 @ 02:00 PM - 03:00 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Miroslav Krstic, University of California, San Diego
Talk Title: Traffic Congestion Control: A PDE Backstepping Perspective
Abstract: Control of freeway traffic using ramp metering is a "boundary control" problem when modeling is approached using widely adopted coupled hyperbolic PDE models of the Aw-Rascle-Zhang type, which include the velocity and density states, and which incorporate a model of driver reaction time. Unlike the "free traffic" regime, in which ramp metering can affect only the dynamics downstream of the ramp, in the "congested traffic" regime ramp metering can be used to suppress stop-and-go oscillations both downstream and upstream of the ramp -“ though not both simultaneously. Controlling the traffic upstream of a ramp is harder -“ and more interesting -“ because, unlike in free traffic, the control input doesn't propagate at the speed of the vehicles but at a slower speed, which depends on a weighted difference between the vehicle speed and the traffic density. I will show how PDE backstepping controllers, which have been effective recently in oil drilling and production applications (similarly modeled by coupled hyperbolic PDEs), can help stabilize traffic, even in the absence of distributed measurements of vehicle speed and density, and when driver reaction times are unknown.
Biography: Miroslav Krstic is Distinguished Professor of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, holds the Alspach endowed chair, and is the founding director of the Cymer Center for Control Systems and Dynamics at UC San Diego. He also serves as Associate Vice Chancellor for Research at UCSD. As a graduate student, Krstic won the UC Santa Barbara best dissertation award and student best paper awards at CDC and ACC. Krstic has been elected Fellow of seven scientific societies - IEEE, IFAC, ASME, SIAM, AAAS, IET (UK), and AIAA (Assoc. Fellow) - and as a foreign member of the Academy of Engineering of Serbia. He has received the ASME Oldenburger Medal, Nyquist Lecture Prize, Paynter Outstanding Investigator Award, Ragazzini Education Award, Chestnut textbook prize, the PECASE, NSF Career, and ONR Young Investigator awards, the Axelby and Schuck paper prizes, and the first UCSD Research Award given to an engineer. Krstic has also been awarded the Springer Visiting Professorship at UC Berkeley, the Distinguished Visiting Fellowship of the Royal Academy of Engineering, the Invitation Fellowship of the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, and honorary professorships from four universities in China. He serves as Senior Editor in IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control and Automatica, as editor of two Springer book series, and has served as Vice President for Technical Activities of the IEEE Control Systems Society and as chair of the IEEE CSS Fellow Committee. Krstic has coauthored twelve books on adaptive, nonlinear, and stochastic control, extremum seeking, control of PDE systems including turbulent flows, and control of delay systems.
Host: Mihailo Jovanovic, mihailo@usc.edu
More Information: krstic.jpg
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 132
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Gerrielyn Ramos
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Epstein Institute Seminar, ISE 651
Tue, Jan 23, 2018 @ 03:30 PM - 04:50 PM
Daniel J. Epstein Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Dr. Young-Jun Son, Professor, The University of Arizona
Talk Title: Distributed Federation of Multi-paradigm Simulation and Decision Models for Planning and Control
Host: Prof. Suvrajeet Sen
More Information: January 23, 2018.pdf
Location: Ethel Percy Andrus Gerontology Center (GER) - 206
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Grace Owh
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CS Distinguished Lecture: Ronitt Rubinfeld (MIT and Tel Aviv University) - Testing Properties of Distributions Over Big Domains
Tue, Jan 23, 2018 @ 04:00 PM - 05:20 PM
Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Ronitt Rubinfeld, MIT and Tel Aviv University
Talk Title: Testing Properties of Distributions Over Big Domains
Series: Computer Science Distinguished Lecture Series
Abstract: We describe an emerging research direction regarding the complexity of testing global properties of discrete distributions, when given access to only a few samples from the distribution. Such properties might include testing if two distributions have small statistical distance, testing various independence properties, testing whether a distribution has a specific shape (such as monotone decreasing, k-modal, k-histogram, monotone hazard rate,...), and approximating the entropy. We describe bounds for such testing problems whose sample complexities are sublinear in the size of the support.
This lecture satisfies requirements for CSCI 591: Research Colloquium.
Biography: Ronitt Rubinfeld is a professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and a member of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. Ronitt's main research area is theory of computation. Ronitt received her PhD from the University of California, Berkeley in 1991, and prior to that graduated from the University of Michigan with a BSE in Electrical and Computer Engineering. Before coming to MIT, Ronitt held postdoctoral researcher positions at Princeton University and Hebrew University. In 1992, she joined the faculty of the Computer Science Department at Cornell University, where she was an ONR Young Investigator, a Sloan Research Fellow, the 1995 Cornell Association for Computer Science Undergraduates Faculty of the Year, and a recipient of the Cornell College of Engineering Teaching Award. From 1999 to 2003, Ronitt was a Senior Research Scientist at NEC Research Laboratories, and in 2004, she was a Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study.
Ronitt's research interests include randomized and sublinear time algorithms. In particular, her work focuses on what can be understood about data by looking at only a very small portion of it.
Host: Computer Science Department
Location: Henry Salvatori Computer Science Center (SAL) - 101
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Computer Science Department
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Adversarial Machine Learning: The Case of Optimal Attack Strategies Against Recommendation Systems
Wed, Jan 24, 2018 @ 10:30 AM - 11:30 AM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Negar Kiyavash, Associate Professor/UIUC
Talk Title: Adversarial Machine Learning: The Case of Optimal Attack Strategies Against Recommendation Systems
Abstract: Adversarial machine learning which lies in the intersection of learning and security aims to understand the effects of adversaries on learning algorithms and safe guard against them by design of protection mechanisms. In this talk, we discuss the effect of strategic adversaries in recommendation systems. Such systems can be modeled using a multistage sequential prediction framework where at each stage, the recommendation system combines the predictions of set of experts about an unknown outcome with the aim of accurately predicting the outcome. The outcome is often the "rating/interest" of a user in an item. Specifically, we study an adversarial setting in which one of the experts is malicious and his goal is to impose the maximum loss on the system. We show that in some settings the greedy policy of always reporting false prediction is asymptotically optimal for the malicious expert. Our result could be viewed as a generalization of the regret bound for learning from expert advice problem in the adversarial setting with respect to the best dynamic policy, rather than the conventional regret bound for the best action (static policy) in hindsight.
Biography: Negar Kiyavash is Willett Faculty Scholar at the University of Illinois and a joint Associate Professor of Industrial and Enterprise Engineering and Electrical and Computer Engineering. She is also affiliated with the Coordinated Science Laboratory (CSL) and the Information Trust Institute. She received her Ph.D. degree in electrical and computer engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2006. Her research interests are in design and analysis of algorithms for network inference and security. She is a recipient of NSF CAREER and AFOSR YIP awards and the Illinois College of Engineering Dean's Award for Excellence in Research.
Host: Sandeep Gupta, sandeep@usc.edu, x02251
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 248
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Mayumi Thrasher
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Secure Hardware Platforms for the Internet of Things (IoT)
Wed, Jan 24, 2018 @ 02:00 PM - 03:00 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Srini Devadas, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Talk Title: Secure Hardware Platforms for the Internet of Things (IoT)
Series: Center for Cyber-Physical Systems and Internet of Things
Abstract: The Internet is expanding into the physical world, connecting billions of devices. In this Internet of Things, two contradictory trends are appearing. On the one hand, the cost of security breaches is increasing as we place more responsibilities on the devices that surround us. On the other hand, wireless computing elements are becoming small, unsupervised, and physically exposed. Unfortunately, existing systems do not address many new attacks, such as resource sharing and physical attacks.
Hardware to the rescue! This talk will describe how secure systems can be built from the ground up. Physical Unclonable Functions (PUFs) are a tamper resistant way of establishing shared secrets with a physical device. They rely on the inevitable manufacturing variations between devices to produce private keys that can be used as a hardware root of trust in a secure processor. Architectural isolation can be used to secure computation on a remote secure processor with a private key where the privileged software is potentially malicious as recently deployed by Intel's Software Guard Extensions (SGX). The Sanctum secure processor architecture offers the same promise as SGX, namely strong provable isolation of software modules running concurrently and sharing resources, but is much more lightweight and protects against an important class of additional software attacks that infer private information by exploiting resource sharing.
Biography: Srini Devadas is the Webster Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) where he has been on the faculty since 1988. Devadas's research interests span Computer-Aided Design (CAD), computer security and computer architecture. He is a Fellow of the IEEE and ACM. He has received the 2014 IEEE Computer Society Technical Achievement award, the 2015 ACM/IEEE Richard Newton technical impact award, and the 2017 IEEE Wallace McDowell award for his research. Devadas is a MacVicar Faculty Fellow and an Everett Moore Baker teaching award recipient, considered MIT's two highest undergraduate teaching honors.
Host: Professor Paul Bogdan
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 132
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Talyia White
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CS Colloquium: Jay Pujara (University of Southern California) - Probabilistic Models for Large, Noisy, and Dynamic Data
Thu, Jan 25, 2018 @ 11:00 AM - 12:20 PM
Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Jay Pujara, University of Southern California
Talk Title: Probabilistic Models for Large, Noisy, and Dynamic Data
Series: Computer Science Colloquium
Abstract: We inhabit a vast, uncertain, and dynamic universe. To succeed in such an environment, artificial intelligence approaches must handle massive amounts of noisy, changing evidence. My research addresses the problems of building scalable, probabilistic models amenable to online updates. To illustrate the potential of such models, I present my work on knowledge graph identification, which jointly resolves the entities, attributes, and relationships in a knowledge graph by combining statistical NLP signals and semantic constraints. Using probabilistic soft logic, a statistical relational learning framework I helped develop, I demonstrate how knowledge graph identification can scale to millions of uncertain candidate facts and tens of millions of semantic dependencies in real-world data while achieving state-of-the-art performance. My work further extends this scalability by adopting a distributed computing approach, reducing the inference time of knowledge graph identification from two hours to ten minutes. Updating large, collective models like those used for knowledge graphs with new information poses a significant challenge. I develop a regret bound for probabilistic models and use this bound to motivate practical algorithms that support low-regret updates while improving inference time over 65%. Finally, I highlight several active projects in causal explanation, sustainability, bioinformatics, and mobile analytics that provide a promising foundation for future research.
This lecture satisfies requirements for CSCI 591: Research Colloquium. Please note, due to limited capacity in OHE 100D, seats will be first come first serve.
Biography: Jay Pujara is a research scientist at the University of Southern California's Information Sciences Institute whose principal areas of research are machine learning, artificial intelligence, and data science. He completed a postdoc at UC Santa Cruz, earned his PhD at the University of Maryland, College Park and received his MS and BS at Carnegie Mellon University. Prior to his PhD, Jay spent six years at Yahoo! working on mail spam detection, user trust, and contextual mail experiences, and he has also worked at Google, LinkedIn and Oracle. Jay is the author of over thirty peer-reviewed publications and has received three best paper awards for his work. He is a recognized authority on knowledge graphs, and has organized the Automatic Knowledge Base Construction (AKBC) and Statistical Relational AI (StaRAI) workshops, has presented tutorials on knowledge graph construction at AAAI and WSDM, and has had his work featured in AI Magazine. For more information, visit https://www.jaypujara.org
Host: Stefan Scherer
Location: Olin Hall of Engineering (OHE) - 100D
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Computer Science Department
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Optimal Stochastic Control for Generalized Network Flow Problems
Thu, Jan 25, 2018 @ 02:00 PM - 03:00 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Eytan Modiano, Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Talk Title: Optimal Stochastic Control for Generalized Network Flow Problems
Series: Center for Cyber-Physical Systems and Internet of Things
Abstract: We will describe a new online dynamic policy, called Universal Max-Weight (UMW), for throughput-optimal routing and scheduling in wireless networks with an arbitrary mix of unicast, broadcast, multicast and anycast traffic. To the best of our knowledge, UMW is the first throughput-optimal algorithm for solving the generalized network-flow problem. Building upon UMW, we also design an admission control, routing and scheduling policy that maximizes network utility, while simultaneously keeping the physical queues in the network stable.
When specialized to the unicast setting, the UMW policy yields a throughput-optimal, loop-free, routing and link-scheduling policy. This is in contrast to the Back-Pressure (BP) policy which allows for packet cycling, resulting in excessive latency. Extensive simulation results show that the proposed UMW policy incurs substantially smaller delays as compared to backpressure. Conceptually, the UMW policy is derived by relaxing the precedence constraints associated with multi-hop routing and then solving a min-cost routing and max-weight scheduling problem on a virtual network of queues. The proof of optimality combines ideas from stochastic Lyapunov theory with a sample path argument from adversarial queueing theory.
Biography: Eytan Modiano received his B.S. degree in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from the University of Connecticut at Storrs in 1986 and his M.S. and PhD degrees, both in Electrical Engineering, from the University of Maryland, College Park, MD, in 1989 and 1992 respectively. He was a Naval Research Laboratory Fellow between 1987 and 1992 and a National Research Council Post Doctoral Fellow during 1992-1993. Between 1993 and 1999 he was with MIT Lincoln Laboratory. Since 1999 he has been on the faculty at MIT, where he is a Professor and Associate Department Head in the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics, and Associate Director of the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems (LIDS).
His research is on communication networks and protocols with emphasis on satellite, wireless, and optical networks. He is the co-recipient of the MobiHoc 2016 best paper award, the Wiopt 2013 best paper award, and the Sigmetrics 2006 Best paper award. He is the Editor-in-Chief for IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking, and served as Associate Editor for IEEE Transactions on Information Theory and IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking. He was the Technical Program co-chair for IEEE Wiopt 2006, IEEE Infocom 2007, ACM MobiHoc 2007, and DRCN 2015. He is a Fellow of the IEEE and an Associate Fellow of the AIAA, and served on the IEEE Fellows committee.
Host: Professor Paul Bogdan
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 248
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Talyia White
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CS Colloquium: Laurie Williams (NCSU) - If Not Us, Then Who?
Thu, Jan 25, 2018 @ 04:00 PM - 05:20 PM
Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Laurie Williams, NCSU
Talk Title: If Not Us, Then Who?
Series: Computer Science Colloquium
Abstract: Stolen personal information, hospitals shutdown until they pay in bitcoin to get their data back, spying through our smart TVs-“ cybersecurity breaches are in the news every day. Cyberspace will not be more secure until engineers build more secure systems. Each of has a role in a more secure cyberspace. Teachers have to teach students how to develop securely; researchers have to understand the attackers' motives and actions and develop techniques that can be easily adopted to stop those attackers in their tracks; practitioners need to adopt secure development practices into their workflow; users need to interact with computers more prudently. This talk will present trend analysis obtained by an extensive and longitudinal interview study of security professionals in six business verticals over a five-year period. The interviews from more than 100 companies worldwide focused on the technical and organizational practices adopted by the companies in their quest to develop more secure software. This talk will present lessons learned that can guide all of us in our role toward a more secure cyberspace.
This lecture satisfies requirements for CSCI 591: Research Colloquium.
Biography: Laurie Williams is the Interim Department Head of Computer Science and a Professor in the Computer Science Department of the College of Engineering at North Carolina State University (NCSU). Laurie is a co-director of the NCSU Science of Security Lablet sponsored by the National Security Agency. Laurie's research focuses on software security; agile software development practices and processes; software reliability, and software testing and analysis. In 2018, Laurie was names an IEEE Fellow for contributions to reliable and secure software engineering.
Host: Chao Wang
Location: Henry Salvatori Computer Science Center (SAL) - 101
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Computer Science Department
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W.V.T. RUSCH ENGINEERING HONORS COLLOQUIUM
Fri, Jan 26, 2018 @ 01:00 PM - 01:50 PM
USC Viterbi School of Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Professor William Oakes, Purdue University
Talk Title: Making the World a Better Place by Design
Host: Dr. Prata & EHP
Location: Henry Salvatori Computer Science Center (SAL) - 101
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Su Stevens
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Essentials of Composites Manufacturing
Sat, Jan 27, 2018
Executive Education
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Abstract: Essentials of Composites Manufacturing provides a high-level overview of manufacturing science and engineering for aerospace composite structures, focusing on prepreg and liquid molding processes, including hands-on laboratory demonstrations.
Course participants will complete a multiple-choice quiz as a knowledge assessment, available online at the end of the course. When the course and quiz have been successfully completed, participants will receive USC Continuing Education Units.
Host: Corporate & Professional Programs
More Info: https://viterbiexeced.usc.edu/engineering-program-areas/chemical-engineering-materials-science/essentials-composites-manufacturing/
Audiences: Registered Attendees
Contact: Viterbi Professional Programs
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Biomedical Engineering Seminars
Mon, Jan 29, 2018 @ 12:30 PM - 01:50 PM
Alfred E. Mann Department of Biomedical Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: George Tolomiczenko, Ph.D, HTE Program, University of Southern California
Talk Title: TBA
Host: Professor Qifa Zhou
Location: Olin Hall of Engineering (OHE) - 122
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Mischalgrace Diasanta
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Biomedical Engineering Department Guest Speaker
Mon, Jan 29, 2018 @ 01:00 PM - 02:00 PM
Alfred E. Mann Department of Biomedical Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Bruno Olshausen, PhD, Professor, Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute and School of Optometry Director, Redwood Center for Theoretical Neuroscience University of California, Berkeley
Talk Title: Perception in Brains and Machines
Abstract: The quest to understand intelligence in brains and to build it in machines is certain to become one of the great intellectual and technological endeavors of the 21st century. Here I shall argue for a multidisciplinary approach that sees both neuroscience and engineering as trying to solve a common set of core problems. I shall draw upon three examples: 1)Theories of efficient coding which play a key role in our understanding of the visual system also form the basis of modern image analysis and recognition pipelines; 2) Studies of eye movements and foveated imaging can inform active vision strategies in robotics; and 3) The end of Moore's law is steering engineers to look to neuroscience to understand how reliable computation can be performed with unreliable components such as memristors.
Host: BME
Location: Corwin D. Denney Research Center (DRB) - 145
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Mischalgrace Diasanta
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Center for Systems and Control (CSC@USC) and Ming Hsieh Institute for Electrical Engineering
Mon, Jan 29, 2018 @ 02:00 PM - 03:00 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Ulrich Muenz, Siemens
Talk Title: Future Power System Control Functions: An Industry Perspective
Abstract: This talk provides an overview of Siemens Corporate Technology's recent research on new control functions for future power systems. Three different topics are discussed: (a) adaptive power oscillation damping optimization to increase the stability reserve of power systems, (b) robust power flow optimization to increase power system resilience to volatile generation, and (c) autonomous microgrids that provide autonomous operation and plug-and-produce capabilities.
Biography: Ulrich Muenz is head of the Research Group Autonomous Systems and Control at Siemens Corporate Technology in Princeton, NJ. Prior to this appointment, he was a senior key expert research scientist for power system stability and control at Siemens Corporate Technology in Munich, Germany. He received his Ph.D. degree in Automatic Control from the University of Stuttgart, Germany in 2010, and MSc degrees in Electrical Engineering and Telecommunications from the Universities of Stuttgart, Germany, and Madrid, Spain, both in 2005. He received the EECI European Ph.D. Award on Embedded and Networked Control in 2010. From 2010 to 2011, he was a systems engineer at Robert Bosch GmbH. His main research interests are autonomy technologies based on model- and data-driven methods for applications like power systems and industrial manufacturing.
Host: Mihailo Jovanovic
More Information: muenz
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 132
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Gerrielyn Ramos
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Quantitative susceptibility mapping (QSM): tissue magnetism, mathematical optimization and clinical applications
Mon, Jan 29, 2018 @ 02:30 PM - 03:30 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Yi Wang, PhD, Department of Biomedical Engineering & Radiology, Cornell University
Talk Title: Quantitative susceptibility mapping (QSM): tissue magnetism, mathematical optimization and clinical applications
Series: Biomedical Engineering Seminar
Abstract: Tissue magnetism refers to the electron-“proton interaction, which is long range with its effects on MRI being treated as static dephasing. In contrast, tissue relaxation refers to the proton-“proton (commonly known as spin-spin) interaction, which is short range with its effect on MRI being treated with nonequilibrium quantum statistical mechanics. The long-range magnetism implies nonlocal blooming artifacts in both T2* hypointensity and phase of MRI signal. Quantitative susceptibility mapping (QSM) is to deconvolve blooming artifacts, using the Bayesian approach to the magnetic field to susceptibility source inverse problem. QSM has become sufficiently accurate and robust for routine applications. QSM is advancing MRI of tissue magnetic susceptibility from simple qualitative detection of hypointense blooming artifacts to precise measurement of biodistributions. Tissue susceptibility contains rich functional and structural information pertinent to molecular electron cloud properties. The dominant susceptibility sources in tissue are biometals, which are vital participants in cellular functions and pathologies. QSM can be useful for diseases that involve neurodegeneration, inflammation, hemorrhage, abnormal oxygen consumption, substantial alterations in highly paramagnetic cellular iron, bone mineralization, or pathologic calcification; and for all disorders in which MRI diagnosis or surveillance requires contrast agent injection. Clinicians should consider integrating QSM into their routine imaging practices by including gradient echo sequences in all relevant MRI protocols.
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 248
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Talyia White
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USC Viterbi Data Analytics Boot Camp
Tue, Jan 30, 2018
Executive Education
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Abstract: What you will learn:
- Students will learn the fundamental and specialized skills necessary to pursue a career or advance in the booming field of data analytics, including Python, JavaScript, Advanced Excel, SQL Databases and more.
- Students are equipped with the technical skills needed to translate data into competitive insights in the workplace, leading to career advancement opportunities.
- Students receive a hands-on, classroom learning experience, conducting robust analytics on a host of real-world problems.
- Students working to change career paths receive career-planning assistance, including industry speakers and company-led events, resume, Linkedln and portfolio support, and interview preparation.
More Info: https://viterbiexeced.usc.edu/engineering-program-areas/computer-science/usc-viterbi-data-analytics-boot-camp/
Audiences: Registered Attendees
Contact: Viterbi Professional Programs
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Six Sigma Green Belt for Process Improvement
Tue, Jan 30, 2018
Executive Education
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
More Info: https://viterbiexeced.usc.edu/engineering-program-areas/six-sigma-lean-certification/six-sigma-green-belt-process-improvement/
Audiences: Registered Attendees
Contact: Viterbi Professional Programs
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Epstein Institute Seminar, ISE 651
Tue, Jan 30, 2018 @ 03:30 PM - 04:50 PM
Daniel J. Epstein Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Dr. Alan Frieze, Professor, Carnegie Mellon University
Talk Title: PROBABILISTIC ANALYSIS OF THE TSP
Host: Dr. John Carlsson
More Information: January 30, 2018.pdf
Location: Ethel Percy Andrus Gerontology Center (GER) - 206
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Grace Owh
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MASCLE Machine Learning Seminar: David Sontag (MIT) - When Inference is Tractable
Tue, Jan 30, 2018 @ 04:00 PM - 05:20 PM
Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: David Sontag, MIT
Talk Title: When Inference is Tractable
Series: Visa Research Machine Learning Seminar Series hosted by USC Machine Learning Center
Abstract: A key capability of artificial intelligence will be the ability to reason about abstract concepts and draw inferences. Where data is limited, probabilistic inference in graphical models provides a powerful framework for performing such reasoning, and can even be used as modules within deep architectures. But, when is probabilistic inference computationally tractable? I will present recent theoretical results that substantially broaden the class of provably tractable models by exploiting model stability (Lang, Sontag, Vijayaraghavan, AI Stats '18), structure in model parameters (Weller, Rowland, Sontag, AI Stats '16), and reinterpreting inference as ground truth recovery (Globerson, Roughgarden, Sontag, Yildirim, ICML '15).
This lecture satisfies requirements for CSCI 591: Research Colloquium.
Biography: David Sontag joined MIT in January 2017 as Assistant Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) and Hermann L. F. von Helmholtz Career Development Professor in the Institute for Medical Engineering and Science (IMES). He is also a principal investigator in the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL). Sontag's research focuses on machine learning and artificial intelligence; at IMES, he leads a research group that aims to use machine learning to transform health care.
Previously, he was an assistant professor in computer science and data science at New York University's Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences and a postdoctoral researcher at Microsoft Research New England. Dr. Sontag received the Sprowls award for outstanding doctoral thesis in Computer Science at MIT in 2010, best paper awards at the conferences Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP), Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence (UAI), and Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS), faculty awards from Google, Facebook, and Adobe, and a NSF CAREER Award. Dr. Sontag received a B.A. from the University of California, Berkeley.
Host: Yan Liu
Location: Henry Salvatori Computer Science Center (SAL) - 101
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Computer Science Department
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Six Sigma Green Belt for Process Improvement
Wed, Jan 31, 2018
Executive Education
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
More Info: https://viterbiexeced.usc.edu/engineering-program-areas/six-sigma-lean-certification/six-sigma-green-belt-process-improvement/
Audiences: Registered Attendees
Contact: Viterbi Professional Programs
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Pioneer Series Lecture
Wed, Jan 31, 2018 @ 02:30 PM - 05:00 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Alexander A. Sawchuk, Leonard Silverman Chair in Electrical Engineering and Professor of Electrical Engineering-Systems
Talk Title: Signal and Image Processing: Analog, Digital, and Everything In Between
Series: MHI Pioneer Series
Host: Ming Hsieh Institute
More Info: https://minghsiehee.usc.edu/mhi-ee-pioneer-series/
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 132
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Benjamin Paul
Event Link: https://minghsiehee.usc.edu/mhi-ee-pioneer-series/
