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Events for February 22, 2016
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Six Sigma Black Belt Mon, Feb 22, 2016
Executive Education
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Abstract: Course Dates (15 Day Program)
Week 1: February 22-26, 2016
Week 2: April 11-15, 2016
Week 3: May 2-6, 2016
Learn the advanced problem-solving skills you need to implement the principles, practices and techniques of Six Sigma to maximize performance and cost reductions in your organization. During this three-week practitioner course, you will learn how to measure a process, analyze the results, develop process improvements and quantify the resulting savings. You will be required to complete a project demonstrating mastery of appropriate analytical methods and pass an examination to earn Six Sigma Black Belt Certificate.
This practitioner course for Six Sigma implementation provides extensive coverage of the Six Sigma process as well as intensive exposure to the key analytical tools associated with Six Sigma, including project management, team skills, cost analysis, FMEA, basic statistics, inferential statistics, sampling, goodness of fit testing, regression and correlation analysis, reliability, design of experiments, statistical process control, measurement systems analysis and simulation. Computer applications are emphasized.
More Info: https://gapp.usc.edu/professional-programs/short-courses/industrial-systems/six-sigma-black-belt
Audiences: Registered Attendees
Contact: Viterbi Professional Programs
Event Link: https://gapp.usc.edu/professional-programs/short-courses/industrial-systems/six-sigma-black-belt
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CS Seminar: Jim Boerkoel (Harvey Mudd) - Temporal Planning for Robust Human-Robot Teamwork
Mon, Feb 22, 2016 @ 12:00 AM - 01:00 PM
Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Jim Boerkoel, Harvey Mudd
Talk Title: Temporal Planning for Robust Human-Robot Teamwork
Series: CS Seminar Series
Abstract: Our work explores what it takes for teams of robots and humans to schedule robust interactions in the messiness of the real world.Temporal planning enables robots to automatically coordinate when the activities in their schedule should occur. In general, we want temporal plans that are adaptable to events that are beyond the direct control of agents; e.g., a robot may experience slippage or sensor failures. To do this, we must answer two questions: (1) how and when do new or unexpected events arise in practice?, and (2) how "good" is the temporal plan at adapting to unexpected events that might otherwise invalidate the plan? We have proposed a new metric called robustness, which assesses the likelihood that a multi-robot plan succeeds. We have shown that robustness is a better measure of multi-robot plan quality and that we can generate plans that optimize for robustness.
We also explore how to plan and schedule robots' interactions with humans on shared activities so that the exchanges are fluid and intuitive. For instance, one of our ongoing projects considers whether an agent can learn about the experiences of its human teammate in order to nudge them towards more optimal behavior. Another considers the roles that trust and cooperation play in human-robot interactions and how these differ from how humans trust and cooperate with each other.
Learn more: https://www.cs.hmc.edu/HEAT/
Host: Sven Koenig
Location: Henry Salvatori Computer Science Center (SAL) - 322
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Assistant to CS chair
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CS Colloquium: Muhammad Naveed (UIUC) - Making the World a Better Place with Cryptography
Mon, Feb 22, 2016 @ 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Muhammad Naveed, UIUC
Talk Title: Making the World a Better Place with Cryptography
Series: CS Colloquium
Abstract: This lecture satisfies requirements for CSCI 591: Computer Science Research Colloquium
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services reports that the health records of up to 86% of the U.S. population have been hacked. The Ashley Madison breach revealed the private information of 37 million individuals and led to suicides and shattered families. The Apple iCloud breach led to the public release of nude photos of several celebrities. Data breaches like these abound.
In this talk, I will first describe my research toward understanding the security of existing data breach prevention systems. To thwart data breaches, property-preserving encryption has been adopted in many encrypted database systems such as CryptDB, Microsoft Cipherbase, Google Encrypted BigQuery, SAP SEEED, and the soon-to-be-shipped Microsoft SQL Always Encrypted system. To simultaneously attain practicality and functionality, property-preserving encryption schemes permit the leakage of certain information such as the relative order of encrypted messages. I will explain the practical implications of permitting such leakage, and show in real-world contexts that property-preserving encryption often does not offer strong enough security.
Next, I will describe an application-driven approach to developing practical cryptography to secure sensitive data. The approach involves collaborating with application domain experts to formulate the requirements; investigating whether a practical solution meeting the requirements is possible; and, if not, exploring the reasons behind it to relax the requirements so as to find a useful solution for the application. I will describe how I developed a cryptographic model called Controlled Functional Encryption (CFE), and how we can adopt CFE to address the privacy concerns in emerging applications such as personalized medicine.
Biography: Muhammad Naveed is a PhD candidate at UIUC studying applied cryptography and systems security. In applied cryptography, he develops practical-yet-provably-secure cryptographic systems for real applications. In systems security, he explores the fundamental security flaws in popular systems and builds defense systems. His work has had a significant impact on Android security and has helped companies such as Google, Samsung, Facebook, and Amazon secure their products and services, improving security for millions of Android users. He is the recipient of the Google PhD Fellowship in Security, the Sohaib and Sara Abbasi Fellowship, the CS@Illinois C.W. Gear Outstanding Graduate Student Award, and the best paper award at the NYU CSAW Security Research Competition. He was also a finalist in the NYU CSAW Cybersecurity Policy Competition.
Host: CS Department
Location: Olin Hall of Engineering (OHE) - 136
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Assistant to CS chair
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Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering Candidate Series
Mon, Feb 22, 2016 @ 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Khalid Jawed, Ph.D Candidate, Department of Mechanical Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA
Talk Title: Mechanics of Thin Elastic Rods: Computer Graphics Meets Engineering
Abstract: Thin rods are ubiquitous in both nature (e.g. bacterial flagella, human hair) and engineering (ropes, cables), from the micron to the kilometer scale, and often undergo extreme deformation. The geometric nonlinearities that result from the deformation process pose enormous challenges to traditional analytical and numerical tools. Moreover, it is often unfeasible to perform experiments at the original length scale of these systems. We overcome these challenges by combining model experiments and cutting-edge computational tools ported from computer graphics. The prominence of geometry in this class of systems enables the scaling (up or down) of the problem to the desktop scale, which allows for systematic experimental exploration of parameter space. In parallel, we conduct numerical simulations using the Discrete Elastic Rods (DER) method, which was originally developed for the animation industry. For the first time, we port DER into engineering as a predictive computational tool and test ride it against model experiments by studying two a priori unrelated problems, at disparate length scales: (1) coiling of rods on rigid substrate motivated from laying of submarine cables on seabed (kilometer scale), and (2) propulsion and instability in bacterial flagella (micron scale). The excellent agreement found between experiments and simulations illustrates the predictive power of our approach. Scaling (up or down) to the original application then offers unprecedented tools for rationalization and engineering design.
Biography: Khalid Jawed is a PhD candidate in mechanics at the Department of Mechanical Engineering, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (expected graduation: May 2016). His research focuses on the mechanics of slender rods; e.g. fuel pipelines, knots in ropes, bacterial flagella. He attained his Master's degree from the same institution in 2014. He received his undergraduate degrees in Aerospace Engineering and Engineering Physics from the University of Michigan in 2012. His career vision is centered around using computational, experimental, and modeling tools to characterize, enhance, control, and apply the material properties and mechanical instabilities to program the mechanical response of structures. His academic awards include GSNP best speaker award at American Physical Society March Meeting (2014) and outstanding teaching assistant award from MIT Mechanical Engineering (2015).
Location: 211
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Valerie Childress
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Seminars in Biomedical Engineering
Mon, Feb 22, 2016 @ 12:30 PM - 01:49 PM
Alfred E. Mann Department of Biomedical Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Dr. Rong Lu, Assistant Professor Department of Stem Cell Biology and Regenerative Medicine, Keck School of Medicine
Talk Title: TBA
Biography: Professor Rong Lu's lab studies stem cell coordination, regulation and malfunction from a single cell perspective. They use mouse hematopoietic stem cells as a model system and integrate research strategies from various disciplines including molecular biology, cell biology, systems biology, genetics and bioinformatics. Her research focuses on understanding the differences between individual stem cells and how they coordinate with each other. These studies can provide new insights into the origin of diseases such as leukemia and myelodysplastic syndrome as well as identify new therapeutic targets to treat them. http://pibbs.usc.edu/faculty/profile/?fid=457
Host: K. Kirk Shung, PhD
Location: Olin Hall of Engineering (OHE) - 122
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Mischalgrace Diasanta
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Faculty Candidate Seminar
Mon, Feb 22, 2016 @ 01:00 PM - 02:00 PM
Daniel J. Epstein Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Private, Private
Talk Title: Searching for Many Hidden Objects
Host: Epstein Department of ISE
Location: Ethel Percy Andrus Gerontology Center (GER) - 206
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Michele ISE
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Viterbi E-Week Kick Off Carnival
Mon, Feb 22, 2016 @ 02:00 PM - 04:00 PM
Viterbi School of Engineering Student Affairs, Viterbi School of Engineering Student Organizations
Student Activity
E-Week 2016 officially kicks off in carnival style! Join us for free In N Out burgers sponsored by Northrop Grumman, carnival games, and other fun activities to kick off this week celebrating the contributions engineers make to society.
To register, click here https://myviterbi.usc.edu/vasa/?PostingID=1234567989.Location: Epstein Family Plaza
Audiences: Undergrad
Contact: Jenny Vazquez-Akim
Event Link: https://myviterbi.usc.edu/vasa/?PostingID=1234567989
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CS Colloquium: Robert West (Stanford) - Human Behavior in Networks
Mon, Feb 22, 2016 @ 04:00 PM - 05:00 PM
Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Robert West, Stanford
Talk Title: Human Behavior in Networks
Series: CS Colloquium
Abstract: This lecture satisfies requirements for CSCI 591: Computer Science Research Colloquium
Humans as well as information are organized in networks. Interacting with these networks is part of our daily lives: we talk to friends in our social network; we find information by navigating the Web; and we form opinions by listening to others and to the media. Thus, understanding, predicting, and enhancing human behavior in networks poses important research problems for computer and data science with practical applications of high impact. In this talk I will present some of my work in this area, focusing on (1) human navigation of information networks and (2) person-to-person opinions in social networks.
Network navigation constitutes a fundamental human behavior: in order to make use of the information and resources around us, we constantly explore, disentangle, and navigate networks such as the Web. Studying navigation patterns lets us understand better how humans reason about complex networks and lets us build more human-friendly information systems. As an example, I will present an algorithm for improving website hyperlink structure by mining raw web server logs. The resulting system is being deployed on Wikipedia's full server logs at terabyte scale, producing links that are clicked 10 times as frequently as the average link added by human Wikipedia editors.
Communication and coordination through natural language is another prominent human network behavior. Studying the interplay of social network structure and language has the potential to benefit both sociolinguistics and natural language processing. Intriguing opportunities and challenges have arisen recently with the advent of online social media, which produce large amounts of both network and natural language data. As an example, I will discuss my work on person-to-person sentiment analysis in social networks, which combines the sociological theory of structural balance with techniques from natural language processing, resulting in a sentiment prediction model that clearly outperforms both text-only and network-only versions.
I will conclude the talk by sketching interesting future directions for computational approaches to studying and enhancing human behavior in networks.
The lecture will be available to stream HERE. Please Open in New Tab for best results.
Biography: Robert West is a sixth-year Ph.D. candidate in Computer Science in the Infolab at Stanford University, advised by Jure Leskovec. His research aims to understand, predict, and enhance human behavior in social and information networks by developing techniques in data science, data mining, network analysis, machine learning, and natural language processing. Previously, he obtained a Master's degree from McGill University in 2010 and a Diplom degree from Technische Universität München in 2007.
Host: CS Department
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 248
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Assistant to CS chair
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Schneider Electric Information Session
Mon, Feb 22, 2016 @ 06:00 PM - 07:00 PM
Viterbi School of Engineering Career Connections
Workshops & Infosessions
Schneider Electric China oversea recruiting team is coming to USC campus to meet with our students!
Schneider Electric is a top 500 company globally. With 180 years of aggressive advances of innovation to look back on, it is now widely acknowledged as a global specialist in energy management.
If you are a Chinese student looking for a great opportunity to work in your home country after graduation, you definitely don't want to miss this opportunity to interact with our recruiters and learn more about Schneider Electric China opportunities!
Refreshment will be served. We look forward to seeing you here!Location: Seeley G. Mudd Building (SGM) - 101
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: RTH 218 Viterbi Career Connections
