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Events for February 13, 2015
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Meet USC: Admission Presentation, Campus Tour, & Engineering TalkFri, Feb 13, 2015
Viterbi School of Engineering Undergraduate Admission
Receptions & Special Events
This half day program is designed for prospective freshmen and family members. Meet USC includes an information session on the University and the Admission process, a student led walking tour of campus, and a meeting with us in the Viterbi School. During the engineering session we will discuss the curriculum, research opportunities, hands-on projects, entrepreneurial support programs, and other aspects of the engineering school. Meet USC is designed to answer all of your questions about USC, the application process, and financial aid.
Reservations are required for Meet USC. This program occurs twice, once at 8:30 a.m. and again at 12:30 p.m. Please make sure to check availability and register online for the session you wish to attend. Also, remember to list an Engineering major as your "intended major" on the webform!Location: Ronald Tutor Campus Center (TCC) - USC Admission Office
Audiences: Prospective Undergrads and Families
Contact: Viterbi Admission
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Epstein ISE Department Seminar
Fri, Feb 13, 2015 @ 09:00 AM - 10:00 AM
Daniel J. Epstein Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Jason D. Lee, PhD Candidate, Computational and Mathematical Engineering, Stanford University
Talk Title: Selective Inference via the Condition on Selection Framework and Communication-efficient Sparse Regression
Abstract: Selective Inference is the problem of testing hypotheses that are chosen or suggested by the data. Inference after variable selection in high-dimensional linear regression is a common example of selective inference; we only estimate and perform inference for the selected variables. We propose the Condition on Selection framework, which is a framework for selective inference that allows selecting and testing hypotheses on the same dataset. In the case of inference after variable selection (variable selection by lasso, marginal screening, or forward stepwise), the Condition on Selection framework allows us to construct confidence intervals for regression coefficients, and perform goodness-of-fit testing for the selected model.
In the second part of the talk, we consider the problem of sparse regression in the distributed setting. The main computational challenge in a distributed setting is harnessing the computational capabilities of all the machines while keeping communication costs low. We devise an approach that requires only a single round of communication among the machines. We show the approach recovers the convergence rate of the (centralized) lasso as long as each machine has access to an adequate number of samples.
Biography: Jason Lee is a fifth year PhD student in Stanford University advised by Trevor Hastie and Jonathan Taylor. His research interests are in high-dimensional statistics, selective inference, optimization, and machine learning. In 2010, he graduated from Duke University with a BS in Mathematics, under the supervision of Mauro Maggioni. Jason received the NDSEG, NSF, and Stanford graduate fellowships.
Host: Daniel J. Epstein Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering
More Information: Seminar-Lee_Jason.doc
Location: Ethel Percy Andrus Gerontology Center (GER) - 206
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Georgia Lum
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AI Seminar-Metaphor: Linguistic Anthropology Meets Computational Linguistics
Fri, Feb 13, 2015 @ 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Information Sciences Institute
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Jerry Hobbs and Suzanne Wertheim, USC/ISI
Talk Title: Metaphor: Linguistic Anthropology Meets Computational Linguistics
Series: Artificial Intelligence Seminar
Abstract: Metaphors are more than just colorful or poetic linguistic expressions. They are also cognitive models that permeate both thought and speech, comparing categories and scenarios, and contributing to the shared set of understandings that we commonly refer to as âculture.â The MICS project, led by ISI since 2011, has been researching and creating solutions to problems posed by natural language processing of metaphor. When in Year 3 of the program, the focus was shifted from automatic metaphor identification and categorization to automated cross-cultural comparisons, computer science alone was not enough to solve the problems posed by the new tasking. In this talk, we will describe the collaboration between linguistic anthropology and computational linguistics that resulted both in a new theoretical framework of metaphorical structure and in a successful end-to-end system that produces meaningful category comparisons with minimal human interference.
Biography: Jerry Hobbs Bio:
Dr. Jerry R. Hobbs is a prominent researcher in the fields of computational linguistics, discourse analysis, and artificial intelligence. He earned his doctor's degree from New York University in 1974 in computer science. He has taught at Yale University and the City University of New York. >From 1977 to 2002 he was with the Artificial Intelligence Center at SRI International, Menlo Park, California, where he was a Principal Scientist and Program Director of the Natural Language Program. He has written numerous papers in the areas of parsing, syntax, semantic interpretation, information extraction, knowledge representation, encoding commonsense knowledge, discourse analysis, the structure of conversation, and the Semantic Web. He has done groundbreaking work in the areas of granularity, representing qualitative concepts, encoding commonsense psychology, and interpreting natural language using abduction. He is the author of the book "Literature and Cognition", and was also editor of the book "Formal Theories of the Commonsense World". He led SRI's text-understanding research, and directed the development of the abduction-based TACITUS system for text understanding, and the FASTUS system for rapid extraction of information from text based on finite-state transducers. The latter system constituted the basis for an SRI spinoff, Discern Communications. In September 2002 he took a position as research professor and ISI Fellow at the Information Sciences Institute, University of Southern California, where he is now a Chief Scientist. He has been a consulting professor with the Linguistics Department and the Symbolic Systems Program at Stanford University. He has served as general editor of the Ablex Series on Artificial Intelligence. He is a past president of the Association for Computational Linguistics, and is a Fellow of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence. In January 2003 he was awarded an honorary Doctorate of Philosophy from the University of Uppsala, Sweden. In August 2013 he received the Association for Computational Linguistics Lifetime Achievement Award.
Suzanne Wertheim Bio:
Since completing her Ph.D. at Berkeley, Suzanne Wertheim has taught both linguistics and linguistic anthropology at Northwestern, Georgetown, and UCLA. Dr. Wertheim has been collaborating with computer scientists since 2007, and in 2011, she founded Worthwhile Research & Consulting, which specializes in research involving language and culture. Her research interests include the intersection of linguistic anthropology and AI; intercultural communication; bilingualism; and language and gender.
Host: Ashish Vaswani
Webcast: http://webcasterms1.isi.edu/mediasite/Viewer/?peid=67b78c7d28ce4e0da1029e7af24445d81dLocation: Information Science Institute (ISI) - 11th Flr Conf Rm # 1135, Marina Del Rey
WebCast Link: http://webcasterms1.isi.edu/mediasite/Viewer/?peid=67b78c7d28ce4e0da1029e7af24445d81d
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Peter Zamar
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EE-Electrophysics Seminar
Fri, Feb 13, 2015 @ 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Alberto Tosi and Federica Villa, Politecnico di Milano - Dipartimento di Elettronica, Informazione e Bioingegneria
Talk Title: Single-Photon Avalanche Diodes
Abstract: Photon counting is the technique of choice for attaining the ultimate sensitivity in measurements of optical signals. Thanks to the Time-Correlated Single-Photon Counting (TCSPC) technique, it is possible to measure optical waveforms with high sensitivity on very fast (picosecond) time scale. Photon counting and timing was introduced and developed with PMTs, but it received new impulse from solid-state detectors, the Single-Photon Avalanche Diodes (SPAD).
SPADs exploit the avalanche phenomenon in a junction with an approach drastically different from the linear amplification of ordinary Avalanche PhotoDiodes (APD). In response to a single photon, a SPAD produces a standard current pulse with macroscopic size and fast rise, which marks the arrival time of the photon with precision of a few tens of picoseconds.
Nowadays, silicon SPADs (both single point and arrays) and InGaAs/InP SPADs are well developed and are commercially available, while new solutions are under development for attaining even better performance.
Silicon SPADs are employed in a wide range of emerging applications in chemistry, biology, medicine, material science, and physics. Commercially-available modules are regularly employed in many experimental setups and proved to be a reliable and high-performance solution for single-photon counting. Recently, gated mode operation of silicon SPADs with very fast rising edge (hundreds of ps) has been successfully exploited in order to widen the dynamic range and speed-up acquisition time in time-resolved measurements.
CMOS SPAD arrays based on smart pixels (that include counting and timing circuitry) are the basis for a single-photon counting cameras with very high frame rate and single-photon sensitivity. Such cameras can be used also for 3D acquisitions thanks to the capability to measure the distance from the objects in the scene.
Recently, remarkable effort has been devoted to the extension of single photon techniques to the near infrared (NIR) spectral range, developing SPADs in InGaAs/InP semiconductors for longer wavelengths, up to 1.6 um. The driving force comes from various application fields, such as: quantum key distribution (QKD) for cryptography in optical fiber communication systems, non-invasive measurement of signals in VLSI chips, eye-safe laser ranging (LIDAR), Raman spectroscopy, Optical Time-Domain Reflectometry (OTDR), PhotoDynamic Therapy (PDT), time-resolved spectroscopy and other fluorescence decay analysis.
Biography: Alberto Tosi was born in Borgomanero, Italy, in 1975. He received the Master's degree in electronics engineering and the Ph.D. degree in information technology engineering from Politecnico di Milano, Italy, in 2001 and 2005, respectively. He has been Associate Professor of Electronics at Politecnico di Milano since 2014. In 2004, he was a student with the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, Yorktown Heights, NY, working on optical testing of CMOS circuits. Currently, he works on silicon, InGaAs/InP and Ge-on-Si single-photon avalanche diodes (SPADs). He develops single-point detectors, arrays of SPADs for 2D/3D applications, and related microelectronics and instrumentation.
Federica Villa received the B.Sc. degree in biomedical engineering and the M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees in electronic engineering from the Politecnico di Milano, in 2008, 2010, and 2014, respectively. In 2010, she interned in the Biochemistry Department, University of California, Los Angeles. She is research associate at Politecnico di Milano and her current research interests include designing CMOS SPAD imagers for 2-D imaging of fluorescence decays and 3-D ranging through on-chip direct time-of-flight method, by means of in-pixel time-to-digital converters.
Host: EE-Electrophysics
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 132
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Marilyn Poplawski
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W.V.T. Rusch Engineering Honors Colloquium
Fri, Feb 13, 2015 @ 01:00 PM - 02:00 PM
USC Viterbi School of Engineering, Viterbi School of Engineering Student Affairs
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Dr. Bil Clemons, Professor of Biochemistry, Caltech
Talk Title: Making a Greasy Protein: A Molecular View of Membrane Protein Biogenesis
Host: W.V.T. Rusch Engineering Honors Program
Location: Seeley G. Mudd Building (SGM) - 101
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Jeffrey Teng
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Munushian Seminar
Fri, Feb 13, 2015 @ 02:00 PM - 03:30 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Stephen Chou, Princeton University
Talk Title: âNanostructure Engineering -- A Unique Path to Discovery and Innovation"
Abstract: New advances in engineering nanostructures open up a unique path to discovery and innovation as well as commercialization. This is because (a) as nanostructures become smaller than a fundamental physical length scale, conventional theory may no longer apply, leading to new phenomena, new knowledge, and revolutionary products in a broad range of disciplines; and (b) new high-throughput and low-cost nanomanufacturing methods will not only accelerate R&D, but also are essential to turn inventions in laboratories into commercial products.
The presentation will give some examples of the authorâs research; particularly, (i) nanodevices (e.g. nano-transistors, new magnetic data storage paradigm (bit-patterned media), new high-efficiency solar cells and LEDs enhanced by nanoplasmonics, and (ii) path-changing high-throughput manufacturing methods (e.g. nanoimprint and self-perfection by liquefaction (SPEL)).
Biography: Stephen Y. Chou, Joseph C. Elgin Professor of Engineering, head of NanoStructure Laboratory at Princeton University, PhD from MIT (1986), a member of US National Academy of Engineering, and a recipient of other 30 awards. Dr. Chou is recognized as a world leader, pioneer and inventor in a broad range of nanotechnologies. His work and inventions over 30 years have shaped new paths and opened up new fields in nanofabrication, nanoscale devices and materials (electrical, optical, magnetic, biological), and have significantly impacted both academia and industry.
Dr. Chouâs most well-known invention is nanoimprint (a paradigm-shift method for nanofabrication, which has become a large industry and a key corner-stone in todayâs nanomanufacturing in many industries). His other inventions include new nanotransistors/memories, patterned medium (a new paradigm for data storage), new subwavelength optical elemen
Host: EE-Electrophysics
More Info: http://ee.usc.edu/news/munushian/
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 132
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Marilyn Poplawski
Event Link: http://ee.usc.edu/news/munushian/
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NL Seminar- Efficient Computation of Substring Posteriors from Lattices using Weighted Factor Automata
Fri, Feb 13, 2015 @ 03:00 PM - 04:00 PM
Information Sciences Institute
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Dogan Can, USC/SAIL
Talk Title: Efficient Computation of Substring Posteriors from Lattices using Weighted Factor Automata
Series: Natural Language Seminar
Abstract: Efficient computation of substring posteriors from lattices has applications in the estimation of document frequencies in spoken corpora and lattice-based minimum Bayes-risk decoding in statistical machine translation. In this talk, we present a new algorithm for exact substring posterior computation that leverages the following observations to speed up computation: i) the set of substrings for which the posteriors will be computed typically comprises all n-grams in the lattice up to a certain length, ii) posterior probability is equivalent to expected count for substrings that do not repeat on any path of the input lattice, iii) there are efficient algorithms for computing expected counts from lattices. We present experimental results comparing our algorithm with the best known algorithm in literature as well as a baseline algorithm based on finite state automata operations.
Biography: Dogan Can is a fifth year Ph.D. student at USC SAIL (Signal Analysis and Interpretation Lab). He works with Professor Shrikanth Narayanan on a range of topics including lattice indexing for spoken information retrieval, concurrent/online speech processing architectures and statistical modeling of psychotherapy sessions. His research interests include weighted finite state automata, automatic speech recognition, information retrieval, dialogue modeling and behavioral informatics.
Host: Nima Pourdamghani and Kevin Knight
More Info: http://nlg.isi.edu/nl-seminar/
Location: Information Science Institute (ISI) - 6th Flr Conf Rm # 689, Marina Del Rey
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Peter Zamar
Event Link: http://nlg.isi.edu/nl-seminar/
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Astani Department CEE Ph.D. Seminar
Fri, Feb 13, 2015 @ 03:00 PM - 04:00 PM
Sonny Astani Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: MINA SUGINO, Graduate School of Engineering, Kyoto University, Japan
Talk Title: Evaluation of dynamic behavior and seismic capacity of
Abstract: Many old wooden buildings collapsed in Kobe earthquake in 1995 or recent inland shallow earthquakes. In these earthquakes, âpulse-like ground motionsâ have been observed which caused severe damage to buildings. Meanwhile, there are many traditional wooden buildings forming a historical townscape in Japan. However, little is known about structural properties of traditional wooden buildings affect the response of the buildings against pulse-like ground motion and few buildings are conducted seismic capacity evaluation.
The objective of my research is to evaluate dynamic behavior of traditional wooden buildings and establish simplified maximum response evaluation method against pulse-like ground motions.
To understand which parameters of pulse-like ground motion affect the response of buildings dominantly, I have proposed a procedure to characterize pulse-like ground motions to simplified
waves as shown in Fig.1 consisting of only simple parameter; duration time, predominant period and maximum velocity.
Shaking table test of traditional wooden frames has been conducted to confirm the dynamic behavior of traditional wooden frames against pulse-like ground motion. From shaking table test
results, it is shown that equivalent natural period which is calculated from response acceleration can be useful to evaluate maximum displacement of wood frame as shown in Fig.2.
To establish simplified maximum response evaluation method, I have suggested a regression equation of dynamic deformation properties of traditional wooden buildings what equivalent natural frequency varies according to maximum deformation angle as shown in Fig.3 from seismic observation, shaking table test and static lateral loading test. Maximum response against expected pulse-like ground motion is easily evaluated from natural frequency which is obtained from microtremor measurement and dynamic deformation properties of traditional wooden buildings applying capacity spectrum method.
Location: Seeley G. Mudd Building (SGM) - 101
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Evangeline Reyes
