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Events for February
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PhD Defense - Adam Lammert
Tue, Feb 11, 2014 @ 11:00 AM - 01:00 PM
Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science
University Calendar
Title: Structure and Function in Speech Production
PhD Candidate: Adam Lammert
Date: Tuesday, February 11, 2014
Time: 11:00 AM
Location: RTH 320
Abstract: The mechanisms underlying speech production are some of the most crucial that humans posses, because the ability to produce and perceive speech forms much of the basis for human communication, expression and social interaction. This thesis incorporates a three-part approach to understanding speech production control and behavior. The first component is empirical and involves the collection and processing of high-quality speech production data, of which real-time magnetic resonance imaging is the most useful and important. The second component is computational, and involves the development and application of methods for analyzing speech production behavior. The third component is a theoretical perspective that is grounded in the interplay of structure and function in the speech production apparatus. The structure of any motor apparatus is a central consideration for analyzing its control and behavior, but the speech production apparatus has many special considerations that make structure essential to understanding its function. Most speech articulation takes place in the confined environment (i.e., the vocal tract) that varies widely across speakers, and which ultimately determines many of the acoustic properties of the system, a crucial consideration in speech. These special considerations set up a complex interplay between structure and function that provides leverage toward understanding speech production control and behavior. The work described in this thesis comprises several studies that take advantage of the strucure-function interplay, and lay a foundation for future research along those lines.
Bio: Adam Lammert received an A.B. in Cognitive Science from Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York and an M.S. in Computer Science from North Carolina State University in Raleigh, North Carolina. Before coming to the University of Southern California to pursue a Ph.D., he was Lab Manager for Speech and Hearing Research at the Veterans Affairs Northern California Health Care System in Martinez, California. His research interests are in cognition, perception and action, with an interdisciplinary emphasis on auditory perception and speech motor control.
Defense Committee: Shrikanth Narayanan (Chair), Gerard Medioni, Louis Goldstein (Outside Member)
Location: Ronald Tutor Hall of Engineering (RTH) - 320
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Lizsl De Leon
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Raytheon's Shadow an Engineer Day
Fri, Feb 21, 2014
Viterbi School of Engineering Student Organizations
University Calendar
Please see the following link for more details! http://sweusc.com/raytheon-shadow-an-engineer-day/
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Society of Women Engineers Society of Women Engineers
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USC Graduate Info Session in Mexico City
Fri, Feb 21, 2014 @ 05:00 PM - 06:30 PM
Viterbi School of Engineering Graduate Admission
University Calendar
Location:
Biblioteca Benjamin Franklin
Liverpool 31
Entre Berlin and Dinamarca
Colonia Juarez
Mexico, Distrito Federal
Competitive Admissions: How to Stand out to Recruiters, Scholarship, and Admissions Committees at Selective Universities (Graduate Programs)
The University of Southern California is a consistently top-ranked institution, located in the dynamic city of Los Angeles, and receives international students from 115 countries each year. USC has scholarship agreements with the Banco de México/FIDERH, and with CONACYT for PhD and Master programs, and receives Fulbright fellows every year.
Representatives will include:
Laura Hartman, Director, Graduate and International Recruitment, Viterbi School of Engineering
Adam Montgomery, USC Marshall Center for Global Supply Chain Management
Angela McCracken, Director, Global Initiatives in Mexico
Register NowAudiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Laura Hartman
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PhD Defense - Sumita Barahmand
Mon, Feb 24, 2014 @ 01:00 PM - 02:00 PM
Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science
University Calendar
Title: Benchmarking Interactive Social Networking Actions
PhD Candidate: Sumita Barahmand
Defense Committee: Shahram Ghandeharizadeh (Chair), Ramesh Govindan, Nenad Medvidović and Bhaskar Krishnamachari (Outside Member)
Date: Monday, February 24, 2014
Time: 1:00 PM
Location: EEB 248
Abstract:
Social networking sites such as Google+, Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, are cloud service providers for person to person communications. There are different approaches to building these sites ranging from SQL to NoSQL and NewSQL, Cache Augmented SQL, graph databases and others. Some provide a tabular representation of data while others offer alternative models that scale out. Some may sacrifice strict ACID (Atomicity, Consistency, Isolation, Durability) properties and opt for BASE (Basically Available, Soft-state, Eventual consistency) to enhance performance. Independent of a qualitative discussion of these approaches and their merits, a key question is how do these systems compare with one another quantitatively? This dissertation investigates the viability of a benchmark to address this question.
Our primary contribution is the design and implementation of a novel benchmark for interactive social networking actions named BG. BG's design decisions are as follows: First, it rates the performance of a system for processing interactive social networking actions by computing two values: Socialites and Social Action Rating (SoAR) using a pre-specified SLA. An example SLA may require 95\% of issued requests to observe a response time faster than 100 milliseconds. Second, BG elevates the amount of unpredictable data produced by a solution to a first class metric, including it as a key component of the SLA (similar to the average response time) and quantifying it as a part of the benchmarking process. It also computes the freshness confidence to characterize the behavior of a weak consistency technique. Third, BG's generated workload is characterized by reads and writes of a very small amount of data from big data. Fourth, BG is a modular, extensible framework that is agnostic to its underlying data store. Fifth, BG employs a logical partitioning of data to scale both vertically and horizontally to thousands of nodes. This is essential for evaluating scalable installations consisting of thousands of nodes. Finally, BG includes a visualization tool to empower an evaluator to monitor an in-progress benchmark and identify bottlenecks.
BG's possible use cases are diverse. One may use BG to compare and contrast various data stores with one another, characterize tradeoffs associated with alternative physical representations of data, or quantify the behavior of a data store in the presence of various failures (either CP or AP of the CAP theorem) among the others. This dissertation demonstrates use of BG in two contexts. First, to rate an industrial strength relational database management system and a document store, quantifying their performance tradeoffs. This analysis includes the use of a middle tier cache (memcached) and its impact on the performance of each system. Second, to gain insight into alternative design decisions for implementing a social action by characterizing their behavior with different social graphs and system loads. BG's proposed framework is quite novel and opens several new research directions that benefit the systems research community.
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 248
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Lizsl De Leon
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SWE
Tue, Feb 25, 2014 @ 06:30 PM - 08:00 PM
Viterbi School of Engineering Student Organizations
University Calendar
Who doesn't want to be a successful new hire or intern? Come to SWE's 2nd GM to learn about the best practice for the first 90 days of your new job or internship. Representives from Sandia will provide different tips based on real life examples. Dinner will be provided as always.
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Society of Women Engineers Society of Women Engineers
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SWE's 2nd GM: Best Practice for the First 90 Days
Tue, Feb 25, 2014 @ 06:30 PM - 08:00 PM
Viterbi School of Engineering Student Organizations
University Calendar
Who doesn't want to be a successful new hire or intern? Come to SWE's 2nd GM to learn about the best practice for the first 90 days of your new job or internship. Representives from Sandia will provide different tips based on real life examples. Dinner will be provided as always.
Location: Waite Phillips Hall Of Education (WPH) - B28
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Society of Women Engineers Society of Women Engineers
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PhD Defense - Jason Yap
Wed, Feb 26, 2014 @ 01:00 PM - 03:00 PM
Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science
University Calendar
Title: Transparent Consistency In Cache Augmented Database Management Systems
PhD Candidate: Jason Yap
Defense Committee:
Prof. Shahram Ghandeharizadeh (Chair)
Prof. Nenad Medvidović
Prof. François Bar (Outside Member)
Date: Wednesday, February 26, 2014
Time: 1:00 PM
Location: Powell Hall (PHE) 223
Abstract:
Cache Augmented Database Management Systems (CADBMSs) enhance the performance of simple operations that exhibit a high read to write ratio, e.g., interactive social networking actions. They are realized by extending a data store such as a Relational Database Management Systems (RDBMS) with a Key Value Store (KVS). At the time of writing, memcached is a popular in-memory KVS in use by a number of Internet service providers such as Facebook, YouTube, Wikipedia and others.
A key insight of CADBMSs is that query result lookup using the KVS is significantly faster than query processing using the RDBMS. A challenge is how to maintain these query results consistent in the presence of updates to the RDBMS. Today’s CADBMS solutions require a developer to design, implement, debug, and maintain software to address this challenge. This dissertation presents novel design decisions to realize physical data independence that hides the details of the storage structure (KVS or RDBMS) from applications and their developers. These designs simplify the complexity of application software to expedite their development life cycle.
The proposed designs can be categorized into two groups. The first group prevents race conditions that cause the KVS to produce stale data. Our primary contribution here is the IQ framework and its simple programming model that employs Inhibit (I) and Quarantine (Q) leases to provide strong consistency. We describe the compatibility of the leases when the KVS is either invalidated or refreshed in the presence of updates to the RDBMS.
The second group includes transparent techniques that invalidate the key-value pairs of the KVS in the presence of updates to the RDBMS.
Our primary contribution is the SQL Query to Trigger translation
(SQLTrig) technique. It provides the application developers with the SQL query language and observes the performance enhancements of a KVS without requiring additional software. It intercepts the queries issued by an application and authors software in the form of triggers that describes the template of the query. It registers these triggers with the RDBMS prior to inserting the query and its result set as a key-value pair in the KVS. An insert, delete, update command to the RDBMS invokes the trigger to compute the query (key) whose result set
(value) has changed. The trigger invalidates this key-value pair from the KVS in a transactional manner.
We describe a software prototype that embodies both the SQLTrig technique and the IQ framework. We use a social networking benchmark to compare this prototype with a nontransparent consistency technique where the developer extends the application software to maintain key-value pairs consistent with the relational data. Obtained results demonstrate that both provide comparable performance.
Location: Charles Lee Powell Hall (PHE) - 223
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Lizsl De Leon
