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Events for February 18, 2016
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CS Colloquium: Alec Jacobson (Columbia University) - Breaking Barriers between Humans and Geometry
Thu, Feb 18, 2016 @ 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Alec Jacobson, Columbia University
Talk Title: Breaking Barriers between Humans and Geometry
Series: CS Colloquium
Abstract: This lecture satisfies requirements for CSCI 591: Computer Science Research Colloquium
In the field of geometry processing, I work to make sense of existing geometric data and provide interfaces to put that data to further use. Today, we find many sources of geometric data and increasingly find useful applications effecting our daily lives. Climate analysis, self-driving cars, 3d-printed prosthetics, virtual dressing rooms and video games all share the essential tasks of collecting, processing and utilizing geometric data.
Unfortunately, barriers stand between geometric data and the people who want to analyze and understand that data. Potential consumers and content creators cannot access or edit geometry because of poor human-computer interfaces. Meanwhile, some data never reaches its intended users because processing breaks down due to lack of robustness to noise.
My long-term research goal is to dismantle the barriers between humans and geometry. In this talk, I will show how I attack this problem on both fronts. I bring ideas from differential geometry and finite-element analysis to model geometric problems more intuitively and more robustly. Meanwhile, I pursue better user interfaces to reduce human effort and increase creative or scientific exploration of geometric data. I will present my work in robust geometry processing, higher-order PDEs, real-time shape articulation, and fabricating user interfaces. Each parallel branch of investigation, while self-motivating, complements the others, and together they invite exciting new directions for future research.
Biography: Alec Jacobson is a post-doctoral researcher at Columbia University working with Prof. Eitan Grinspun. He received a PhD in Computer Science from ETH Zurich, and an MA and BA in Computer Science and Mathematics from the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, New York University. His thesis on real-time deformation techniques for 2D and 3D shapes was awarded the ETH Medal and the Eurographics Best PhD award. Leveraging ideas from differential geometry and finite-element analysis, his work in geometry processing improves exposure of geometric quantities, while his novel user interfaces reduce human effort and increase exploration. He has published several papers in the proceedings of SIGGRAPH. He leads development of the geometry processing library, libigl, winner of the 2015 SGP software award.
Host: CS Department
Location: Olin Hall of Engineering (OHE) - 136
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Assistant to CS chair
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Faculty Candidate Seminar
Thu, Feb 18, 2016 @ 01:00 PM - 02:30 PM
Daniel J. Epstein Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Pro, Private
Talk Title: The Power of Nonconvex Paradigms for High-Dimensional Estimation
Host: Epstein Department of ISE
Location: Ronald Tutor Hall of Engineering (RTH) - 211
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Michele ISE
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MHI Distinguished Visitor Talk
Thu, Feb 18, 2016 @ 02:00 PM - 04:00 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Prof. Petros Maragos, School of E.C.E., National Technical University of Athens, Greece
Talk Title: Audio-Visual Attention, Computational Saliency and Movie Summarization
Abstract: In this talk we will present an overview of ideas, methods and research results in multimodal sensory processing with emphasis on audio-visual signal fusion as applied to problems of attention and multimodal event detection for information summarization. We shall begin with a brief synopsis of important findings from audio-visual perception. Then we shall outline efficient signal processing front-ends and improved computational saliency models for audio and visual salient event detection, followed by fusion schemes for multimodal saliency estimation. This will lead to movie video summarization based on audio, visual, and text modalities. For objective evaluations we have developed a movie database, which includes sensory and semantic saliency annotation as well as cross-media relations. The above research has been conducted in the framework of the Greek basic research project COGNIMUSE.
More information, related papers and current results can be found in http://cvsp.cs.ntua.gr and http://cognimuse.cs.ntua.gr.
Biography: Petros Maragos received the Diploma in E.E. from the National Technical University of Athens (NTUA) in 1980 and the M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees from Georgia Tech, Atlanta, in 1982 and 1985. In 1985, he joined the faculty of the Division of Applied Sciences at Harvard University, where he worked for eight years as professor of electrical engineering affiliated with the Harvard Robotics Lab. In 1993, he joined the faculty of the School of ECE at Georgia Tech. During periods of 1996-98 he had a joint appointment as director of research at the Institute of Language and Speech Processing in Athens. Since 1998, he has been working as a professor at the NTUA School of ECE. He has held a visiting scientist position at MIT LIDS in fall 2012. He is currently the Director of the NTUA Division of Signals, Control and Robotics, and the Director of the Intelligent Robotics and Automation Lab. His research and teaching interests include signal processing, systems theory, pattern recognition, image processing and computer vision, audio and speech/language processing, cognitive systems, and robotics. In the above areas he has published numerous papers, book chapters, and has also co-edited three Springer research books, one on multimodal processing and interaction and two on shape analysis. He has served as: Associate Editor for the IEEE Trans. on ASSP, IEEE Trans. on PAMI, and editorial board member and guest editor for several journals on signal processing, image analysis and vision; co-organizer of several conferences and workshops, including VCIP 1992 (GC), ISMM 1996 (GC), VLBV 2001 (GC), MMSP 2007 (GC), ECCV 2010 (PC), ECCV 2010 Workshop on Sign, Gesture and Activity, EUSIPCO 2012 (TC), 2011 & 2014 Dagstuhl Symposia on Shape, 2015 IROS Workshop on Cognitive Mobility Assistance Robots; member of the IEEE committees on DSP, IMDSP and MMSP. He is currently organizing EUSIPCO 2017 (GC).
His is the recipient or co-recipient of several awards for his academic work, including a 1983 Sigma Xi best thesis award, a 1987-1992 National Science Foundation Presidential Young Investigator Award, a 1988 IEEE SPS Young Author Best Paper Award, a 1994 IEEE SPS Senior Best Paper Award, the 1995 IEEE W.R.G. Baker Prize Award, the 1996 Pattern Recognition Society's Honorable Mention Award, the EURASIP 2007 Technical Achievement Award for contributions to nonlinear signal, image and speech processing, and the Best Paper Award of the IEEE CVPR-2011 Gesture Recognition Workshop. He was elected a Fellow of IEEE in 1995 and a Fellow of EURASIP in 2010 for his research contributions.
Host: Prof. Shrikanth Narayanan, Theodora Chaspari, and Zisis Skordilis
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 248
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Tanya Acevedo-Lam/EE-Systems
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CS Colloquium: Animashree Anandkumar (UC Irvine) - Guaranteed Non-convex Algorithms for Modern Machine Learning through Tensor Factorization
Thu, Feb 18, 2016 @ 04:00 PM - 05:00 PM
Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Animashree Anandkumar, UC Irvine
Talk Title: Guaranteed Non-convex Algorithms for Modern Machine Learning through Tensor Factorization
Series: CS Colloquium
Abstract: This lecture satisfies requirements for CSCI 591: Computer Science Research Colloquium
Modern machine learning involves processing massive datasets of diverse varieties such as text, images, videos, biological data, and so on. Designing efficient algorithms which are guaranteed to learn in a fast and a scalable manner is one of grand challenges. Most machine learning tasks can be cast as optimization problems, but unfortunately a majority of them are NP-hard non-convex problems. I will provide broad guidelines for overcoming this hardness barrier by: (i) focusing on conditions which make learning tractable, (ii) replacing the given optimization objective with better behaved ones, and (iii) exploiting non-obvious connections that abound in learning problems.
I will demonstrate the above guidelines using concrete examples: (i) unsupervised learning of latent variable models and (ii) training multi-layer neural networks, through a new framework involving spectral decomposition of moment matrices and tensors. Tensors are rich structures that can encode higher order relationships in data. Despite being non-convex, tensor decomposition can be solved optimally using simple iterative algorithms under mild conditions. These positive results demonstrate that previous theory on computational hardness of learning is overly pessimistic, and that we need new theoretical tools to explain the recent empirical success of non-convex learning algorithms.
This meeting will be available to stream HERE. Please right-click, open in new tab for best results.
Biography: Anima Anandkumar is a faculty at the EECS Dept. at U.C.Irvine since August 2010. Her research interests are in the areas of large-scale machine learning, non-convex optimization and high-dimensional statistics. In particular, she has been spearheading the development and analysis of tensor algorithms for a variety of learning problems. She is the recipient of several awards such as the Alfred. P. Sloan Fellowship, Microsoft Faculty Fellowship, Google research award, ARO and AFOSR Young Investigator Awards, NSF CAREER Award, Early Career Excellence in Research Award at UCI, Best Thesis Award from the ACM SIGMETRICS society, IBM Fran Allen PhD fellowship, and best paper awards from the ACM SIGMETRICS and IEEE Signal Processing societies. She received her B.Tech in Electrical Engineering from IIT Madras in 2004 and her PhD from Cornell University in 2009. She was a postdoctoral researcher at MIT from 2009 to 2010, and a visiting faculty at Microsoft Research New England in 2012 and 2014.
Host: CS Department
Webcast: https://bluejeans.com/267704433Location: Henry Salvatori Computer Science Center (SAL) - 101
WebCast Link: https://bluejeans.com/267704433
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Assistant to CS chair
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IEEE Professor Speaker Series: Chris Kyriakakis
Thu, Feb 18, 2016 @ 05:00 PM - 06:00 PM
Viterbi School of Engineering Student Organizations
Student Activity
Is it possible to take a journey through time and space? Come find out as Professor Kyriakakis describes the signal processing challenges of capturing impulse responses in ancient structures and recreating the acoustics of spaces that one day will no longer exist! Free pizza and refreshments will be served!
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 132
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers
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FedEx Ground Information Session
Thu, Feb 18, 2016 @ 05:30 PM - 07:30 PM
Viterbi School of Engineering Career Connections
Workshops & Infosessions
Information regarding the different types of Engineering positions within the FedEx Ground network.
Location: Seeley G. Mudd Building (SGM) - 101
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: RTH 218 Viterbi Career Connections
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Viterbi Spotlight Series: Computer Science and Computer Engineering
Thu, Feb 18, 2016 @ 07:00 PM - 08:00 PM
Viterbi School of Engineering Career Connections
Workshops & Infosessions
Students will hear from alumni regarding their academic and professional experiences.
Location: Ronald Tutor Hall of Engineering (RTH) - 211
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: RTH 218 Viterbi Career Services
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Viterbi CECS Alumni Spotlight Panel
Thu, Feb 18, 2016 @ 07:00 PM - 08:00 PM
Viterbi School of Engineering Career Connections, Viterbi School of Engineering Student Affairs
Workshops & Infosessions
To register, click here https://myviterbi.usc.edu/vasa/?PostingID=1234567988.Location: 211
Audiences: Undergrad
Contact: Diane Yoon
Event Link: https://myviterbi.usc.edu/vasa/?PostingID=1234567988
