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SUNMONTUEWEDTHUFRISAT
Events for February 22, 2011
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Aviation Security Program Management (AVSEC)
Tue, Feb 22, 2011 @ 08:00 AM - 04:00 PM
Aviation Safety and Security Program
University Calendar
This course is designed for individuals responsible for managing and implementing aviation security measures at medium to small size aircraft operators, all airports and Indirect Air Carriers (IAC's). This course demonstrates how to apply the SMS principles in the aviation security environment.
Location: Aviation Safety & Security Campus
Audiences: Aviation Professionals
Contact: Harrison Wolf
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Grad Fair
Tue, Feb 22, 2011 @ 09:00 AM - 04:00 PM
Viterbi School of Engineering Student Affairs
Student Activity
Grad Fair is your one-stop way to get all the information you need about Commencement. All soon-to-be graduates are encouraged to stop by Grad Fair for answers to questions, or to purchase Commencement-related products.
For more information, visit this website:
http://www.usc.edu/dept/pubrel/specialevents/commencement/gradfair.phpLocation: Ronald Tutor Campus Center (TCC) - Ballroom
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Jeffrey Teng
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On Representing Acoustics of Speech for Speech Processing
Tue, Feb 22, 2011 @ 10:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Bishnu S. Atal, Dept. of Electrical Engineering, Univ. of Washington, Seattle, WA
Talk Title: On Representing Acoustics of Speech for Speech Processing
Abstract: Most methods for analyzing speech start by transforming the acoustic time-domain signal into spectral form. The short-time Fourier transform provides a representation of the time-varying characteristics of the signal and has a long history. There are many issues, such as the size and shape of the window, that remain unresolved. The use of a relatively short window is widespread. In early development of the sound spectrograph, use of both narrow and wideband analysis was quite common, but the narrow-band analysis faded away. In digital speech coding applications (multipulse and code-excited linear prediction), high-quality speech is produced at low bit rates only when prediction using both short and long intervals is used. What are the issues that arise in using a short or a long window? What are the relative advantages or disadvantages? In this talk, we will discuss these topics and present results that suggest that a short-time Fourier transform using long windows has advantages. In most speech representations, the Fourier components are not used directly but converted to their magnitude spectrum; the so-called phase is considered to be irrelevant. There are open questions regarding the use of phase information and we will discuss this important issue in the talk.
Biography: Bishnu S. Atal is an Affiliate Professor in the Electrical Engineering Department at the University of Washington, Seattle, WA. He retired in March 2002 after working for more than 40 years at Lucent Bell Labs, and AT&T Labs. He was a Technical Director at the AT&T Shannon Laboratory, Florham Park, New Jersey, from 1997 where he was engaged in research in speech coding and in automatic speech recognition. He joined the technical staff of AT&T Bell Laboratories in 1961, became head of Acoustics Research Department in 1985, and head of Speech Research Department in 1990.
He is internationally recognized for his many contributions to speech analysis, synthesis, and coding. His pioneering work in linear predictive coding of speech established linear prediction as one of the most important speech analysis technique leading to many applications in coding, recognition and synthesis of speech. His research work is documented in over 90 technical papers and he holds 17 U.S. and numerous international patents in speech processing.
He was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 1987 and to the National Academy of Sciences in 1993. He is a Fellow of the Acoustical Society of America and the IEEE. He received the IEEE Morris N. Liebmann Memorial Field Award in 1986, the Thomas Edison Patent Award from the R&D Council of New Jersey in 1994, New Jersey Inventors Hall of Fame Inventor of the Year Award in 2000 and the Benjamin Franklin Medal in Electrical Engineering in 2003.
Bishnu lives in Mukilteo, Washington.
Host: Sanjit Mitra and Shrikanth Narayanan
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 248
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Mary Francis
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E-Week Kickoff!
Tue, Feb 22, 2011 @ 11:00 AM - 02:00 PM
Viterbi School of Engineering Student Organizations
Student Activity
Join us and your fellow engineers to start off E-Week! There will be fun games, including IEEE's Professor Pie Toss, Tau Beta Pi's "bent" bean bag toss, AIChE's Quantum Dots color memory game, as well as a few others.
Stop by for some fun and some food!
Check out the rest of E-Week at: http://viterbistudents.usc.edu/vsc/e-week/Location: E-Quad
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: VSC
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IEEE Professor Pie Toss
Tue, Feb 22, 2011 @ 11:00 AM - 02:00 PM
Viterbi School of Engineering Student Organizations
Student Activity
Come check out the annual IEEE Professor Pie Toss at the E-Week Kickoff Day! Toss whipped cream pies at your favorite electrical engineering professors and administrators while helping us raise funds to support K-12 education in math and science.
The schedule for professors to be pied is set!
11:00 AM - 12:00 PM: Professor Gene Bickers
12:00 PM - 1:00 PM: Diane Demetras, EE Graduate Advisor
1:00 PM - 1:45 PM: Professor Mark Redekopp
In addition, Viterbi Student Council will be free 21 choices during the day! Check out the rest of the week at http://viterbistudents.usc.edu/vsc/e-week/Location: E-QUAD
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers
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Got a Brand? The Art of the Interview
Tue, Feb 22, 2011 @ 12:30 PM - 01:30 PM
Viterbi School of Engineering Career Connections
Workshops & Infosessions
Discover tips on how to prepare for both technical and behavioral interviews, as well as the proper steps for follow-up.
Location: Ronald Tutor Hall of Engineering (RTH) - 211
Audiences: All Viterbi Students
Contact: RTH 218 Viterbi Career Services
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Robust Modeling and Analysis of High-Dimensional Data
Tue, Feb 22, 2011 @ 02:00 PM - 03:00 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: John Wright, Ph.D.
Talk Title: Robust Modeling and Analysis of High-Dimensional Data
Abstract: In this talk, I introduce several recent theoretical and algorithmic advances in robust recovery of low-dimensional structure from high-dimensional data. I show how to correctly and efficiently recover two important, closely-related types of low-dimensional structure: sparse vectors and low-rank matrices. For sparse vectors, we prove that as long as the signal of interest has a sufficiently sparse representation in a coherent dictionary, convex programming corrects large fractions of errors. In the same spirit, we prove that convex programming recovers low-rank matrices from large fractions of errors and missing observations. I motivate these general problems from the perspective of automatic face recognition in computer vision, and demonstrate how theoretical advances have inspired progress on this challenging problem. I discuss several additional applications of these tools including robust batch image alignment and registration, 3D shape recovery from multiple images, video stabilization and enhancement, web data analysis, indexing and search.
Biography: John Wright received his PhD in Electrical Engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in October 2009. He is currently a researcher in the Visual Computing group at Microsoft Research Asia. His research focuses on developing provably correct and efficient tools for recovering low-dimensional structure in high-dimensional datasets, even when data are missing or grossly corrupted. These techniques address critical estimation problems in imaging and vision applications such as automatic face recognition, video stabilization and tracking, image and data segmentation, and more. They also find application outside of vision, for example in web data analysis and bioinformatics. His work has received a number of awards and honors, including the 2009 Lemelson-Illinois Prize for Innovation for his work on robust face recognition, the 2009 UIUC Martin Award for Excellence in Graduate Research, a 2008-2010 Microsoft Research Fellowship, a Carver fellowship, and a UIUC Bronze Tablet award.
Host: Prof. Antonio Ortega
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 248
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Talyia Veal
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CS Colloquium
Tue, Feb 22, 2011 @ 03:30 PM - 05:00 PM
Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Dr. Mohit Singh, McGill University
Talk Title: Iterative Methods in Combinatorial Optimization
Abstract: Many fundamental combinatorial optimization problems including minimum spanning tree, matchings, flows are polynomial time solvable but most problems that arise in practice turn out to be NP-hard. Fortunately, many NP-hard problems can be modeled by introducing extra side constraints in some fundamental optimization problem. A natural question to ask is whether we can extend any techniques for solving simple combinatorial optimization problems to NP-hard variants. In this talk we will demonstrate iterative methods as such a general technique to prove near optimal results for many optimization problems.
We will focus on degree bounded network design problems where the task is to minimize the cost of the network and also satisfy given degree bounds on nodes. The most studied problem in this class is the Minimum Bounded Degree Spanning Tree problem. We will present a polynomial time algorithm that returns a spanning tree of optimal cost while exceeding the degree bound of any vertex by at most an additive one. This is the best possible result for this problem and settles a 15-year-old conjecture of Goemans affirmatively.
We will also discuss extensions to degree constrained versions of more general network design problems and give the first additive approximation algorithms using the iterative method. These results add to a rather small list of combinatorial optimization problems which have an additive approximation algorithm.
Biography: Mohit Singh is an Assistant Professor in the School of Computer Science, McGill University since 2010. Mohit Singh received his Bacherlorâs degree in computer science and engineering from Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi in 2003. He obtained his Ph.D. in the Algorithms, Combinatorics and Optimization program from Carnegie Mellon University in 2008 where his advisor was Prof. R. Ravi. He was then a post-doctoral candidate at Microsoft Research, New England. His main research interests are in approximation algorithms, combinatorial optimization and optimization under uncertainty.
Host: Prof. David Kempe
Location: Seaver Science Library (SSL) - 150
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Kanak Agrawal
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Southern California Edison- IT SAP Info Session
Tue, Feb 22, 2011 @ 06:00 PM - 08:00 PM
Viterbi School of Engineering Career Connections
Workshops & Infosessions
Join representatives of this company as they share general company information and available opportunities.
Location: Grace Ford Salvatori Hall Of Letters, Arts & Sciences (GFS) - 106
Audiences: All Viterbi Students
Contact: RTH 218 Viterbi Career Services
