Select a calendar:
Filter March Events by Event Type:
SUNMONTUEWEDTHUFRISAT
Events for March 03, 2011
-
Words in Your Face: Poetry, Performance and Politics
Thu, Mar 03, 2011 @ 06:30 AM - 08:00 AM
USC Viterbi School of Engineering
Receptions & Special Events
Join us for an evening of captivating performances by internationally recognized spoken-word poets Shihan, Mayda del Valle, Gina Loring and Rudy Francisco. The soundtrack to the evening will be provided by Los Angelesâbased DJ Brutha Gimel. Their energizing performances will be followed by a discussion exploring the role of the arts and artists in politics, education, community building and the public sphere.
For bios of the artists, visit the event page: http://web-app.usc.edu/ws/eo2/calendar/113/event/873362
Admission is free.
Organized by Javon Johnson (American Studies and Ethnicity).
For further information on this event:
visionsandvoices@usc.edu
Location: George Finley Bovard Administration Building (ADM) -
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Daria Yudacufski
-
Multimodal Signal Processing: Signals from, to, and for humans
Thu, Mar 03, 2011 @ 10:30 AM - 12:30 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Panayiotis (Panos) Georgiou, University of Southern California
Talk Title: Multimodal Signal Processing: Signals from, to, and for humans
Abstract: The 90's saw an explosion of ideas in merging traditional signal processing techniques with personal communication and entertainment supported by www technologies. We are presently experiencing yet another paradigm change in human interaction and communication such as through social media and in online information sharing. Notably, there has been significant movement in employing information and communications technologies towards transforming access and participation of people in their health and well-being.
My research lies in the exciting convergence of signal processing, multimedia, and speech applications centered on novel processing of signals from, to, and for humans. This effort entails a range of challenges in the sensing, recognition, interpretation, and context exploitation of complex human behavior, both at the explicit and implicit levels. Importantly, the effort includes the creation of algorithms and models that are inspired by, and emulate, how humans make use of the behavioral signal information in specific, societally-meaningful application settings.
In this talk, using specific examples, I will focus on two aspects of my work that aim at capturing an exploiting human interaction and their environment in a context aware way: (1) The convergence of multimodal signal processing and evidence based assessment in observational practice in mental health. Specifically I will discuss our recent efforts in instrumenting, collecting, and analyzing multimodal data for assessing behavioral cues relevant to the field of family psychology. The approach relies on array signal processing and machine learning techniques based on training data labeled by domain experts. We exploit both existing data and pursue new multimodal data acquisition approaches.
(2) The inherently rich nature of the human communication channel raises interesting challenges when one or more aspects are compromised due to human or environmental factors. We have been developing speech-to-speech translation technologies especially targeting cross-lingual/cross-cultural urban healthcare settings. Many open questions remain including what information is relevant and how it needs to be captured and transferred from source to target (e.g. lexical and paralinguistic) and how conceptual information encoded in the speech signal can be modeled in a communication-channel framework. I will highlight some of the advances and open questions in these two domains.
Biography: Panayiotis G. Georgiou received his B.A. and M.Eng degrees with Honors from Cambridge University (Pembroke College), U.K. in 1996. He received his MSc and PhD degrees from the University of Southern California in 1998 and 2002 respectively. During the period 1992-96 he was awarded a Commonwealth scholarship from Cambridge-Commonwealth Trust.
Since 2003 he has been a member of the Speech Analysis and Interpretation Lab, first as a Research Associate and currently as a Research Assistant Professor. His interests span the fields of Human Social and Cognitive Signal Processing. He has worked on and published over 70 papers in the fields of statistical signal processing, alpha stable distributions, speech and multimodal signal processing and interfaces, speech translation, language modeling, immersive sound processing, sound source localization, and speaker identification. He has been an Investigator, and co-PI on several federally funded projects notably including the DARPA Transtac âSpeechLinksâ and the NSF (Large) âAn Integrated Approach to Creating Enriched Speech Translation Systemsâ. He is currently serving as guest editor of the Computer Speech and Language journal. He has received best paper awards for his pioneering work in analyzing the multimodal behaviors of users in speech- to-speech translation and for automatic classification of married couplesâ behavior using audio features.
His current focus is on multimodal environments, behavioral signal processing, and speech-to-speech translation.
Host: Professor Richard Leahy
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) -
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Talyia Veal
-
CS Colloquium
Thu, Mar 03, 2011 @ 03:30 PM - 05:00 PM
Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Haryadi Gunawi, UC Berkeley
Talk Title: Towards Reliable Storage Systems
Abstract: Three trends will dominate the storage systems of tomorrow: increasingly massive amounts of data, the incredible growth of software complexity, and the increasing use of cheap and less reliable hardware. These trends present us with a huge challenge: How can we promise users that storage systems work robustly in spite of their massive software complexity and the broad range of hardware failures that can arise? Addressing this question is not straightforward as current approaches scatter recovery code in thousands of lines of intricate, low-level C code. As a result, reliability problems are often found in current storage systems.
In this talk, I will present how we build a new generation of more robust and reliable storage systems via simpler designs and powerful testing frameworks. Specifically, I will first present new online and offline reliability frameworks (I/O Shepherding and SQCK) that advocate a higher-level strategy where the logic of reliability policies can be described clearly and concisely. I will then describe my most recent work in advancing the current state-of-the-art of cloud testing via FATE and DESTINI, a failure testing service and a framework for declarative recovery specifications. Finally, I will close this talk with my future plans in the area of cloud storage systems.
Biography: Haryadi Gunawi is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the University of California, Berkeley. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin, Madison in 2009. His current research focuses on operating systems and large-scale storage systems. Beyond that, his research experience also spans cross-disciplinary areas such as software engineering, distributed systems, networking, and databases. He has won numerous awards including the 2010 NSF Computing Innovation Fellowship, a co-winner of the 2009 departmental best thesis award, an Honorable Mention for the 2009 ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award, and an NSF CISE Award under the Data-intensive Computing program.
Host: Prof. Ramesh Govindan
Location: Seaver Science Library (SSL) - 150
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Kanak Agrawal
-
Andrew J. Viterbi Distinguished Lecture in Communication
Thu, Mar 03, 2011 @ 04:30 PM - 05:30 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Dr. Elwyn Berlekamp, Professor Emeritus, University of California, Berkeley
Talk Title: "Adventures in Coding Theory"
Series: Distinguished Lecturer Series
Abstract: The inventors of error-correcting codes were initially motivated by problems in communications engineering. But coding theory has since also influenced several other fields, including memory technology, theoretical computer science, game theory, portfolio theory, and symbolic manipulation. This talk will recall some forays into these subjects.
Biography: Elwyn Berlekamp has been Professor of Mathematics and of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at UC Berkeley since 1971, half-time since 1983, and Emeritus since 2002. He also has been active in several small companies in the sectors of computers-communications and finance. He is now chairman of Berkeley Quantitative LP, a small money-management company. He was chairman of the Board of Trustees of MSRI from 1994-1998, and of the International Computer Science Institute from 2001-2003. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Berlekamp has 12 patented inventions, some of which were co-authored with USC Professor Emeritus Lloyd Welch. Some of Berlekampâs algorithms for decoding Reed-Solomon codes are widely used on compact discs; others are NASA standards for deep space communications. He has more than 100 publications, including two books on algebraic coding theory and seven books on the mathematical theory of combinatorial games, including the popular Dots-and-Boxes Game: Sophisticated Childâs Play.
Host: Dr. Alexander A. Sawchuk
More Info: http://ee.usc.edu/news/viterbi_lecture.htmLocation: Ethel Percy Andrus Gerontology Center (GER) -
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Mayumi Thrasher
Event Link: http://ee.usc.edu/news/viterbi_lecture.htm
-
Raytheon Information Session
Thu, Mar 03, 2011 @ 05:30 PM - 07:30 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: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: RTH 218 Viterbi Career Services
