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Events for March 05, 2014
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Six Sigma Black BeltWed, Mar 05, 2014 @ 09:00 AM - 05:00 PM
Executive Education
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: TBA,
Talk Title: Six Sigma Black Belt
Abstract: Course Overview
This course teaches you the advanced problem-solving skills you'll need in order to measure a process, analyze the results, develop process improvements and quantify the resulting savings. Project assignments between sessions require you to apply what you've learned. This course is presented in the classroom in three five-day sessions over a three-month period.
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 IIE's 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.
NOTE: Participants must bring a laptop computer running Microsoft Office to the seminar.
Course Topics
* Business process management
* Computer applications
* Design of experiments (DOE)
* Design for Six Sigma (DFSS)
* DMAIIC
* Enterprisewide deployment
* Lean enterprise
* Project management
* Regression and correlation modeling
* Statistical methods and sampling
* Statistical process control
* Team processes
Benefits
Upon completion of this course, you will be able to:
* Analyze process data using comprehensive statistical methods
* Control the process to assure that improvements are used and the benefits verified
* Define an opportunity for improving customer satisfaction
* Implement the recommended improvements
* Improve existing processes by reducing variation
* Measure process characteristics that are critical to quality
Who Should Attend
* VPs, COOs, CEOs
* Employees new to a managerial position
* Employees preparing to make the transition to managerial roles
* Current managers wanting to hone leadership skills
* Anyone interested in implementing Lean or Six Sigma in their organization
Program Fees
On-Campus Participants: $7,245
Includes continental breakfasts, lunch and all course materials. The fee does not include hotel accommodations or transportation.
Online Participant with Live Session Interactivity: $7,245
Includes attendee access codes for live call-in or chat capabilities during class sessions. Also includes all course and lecture materials available for live stream or download.
Reduced Pricing:
Institute of Industrial Engineers (IIE): Reduced pricing is available for members of IIE. Please contact professional@gapp.usc.edu for further information.
Trojan Family: USC alumni, current students, faculty, and staff receive 10% reduced pricing on registration.
Boeing: Boeing employees receive 20% off registration fees (please use Boeing email address when registering).
Location
Two course delivery options are available for participants, on-campus and online with interactivity:
On-Campus Course is held in state-of-the-art facilities on the University of Southern California campus, located in downtown Los Angeles. Participants attending on-campus will have the option to commute to the course or stay at one of the many hotels located in the area. For travel information, please visit our Travel section.
Overview of on-campus option:
* The ability to interact with faculty and peers in-person.
* Access to hard copy course materials.
* Ability to logon and view archived course information - up to 7 days after the course has been offered. This includes course documents and streaming video of the lectures.
* If there is a conflict during any on-campus course dates, on-campus participants can elect to be an online/interactive student.
* Parking, refreshments and lunch are provided for on-campus participants unless otherwise specified.
Online (Interactivity) Course delivery is completely online and real-time, enabling interaction with the instructor and fellow participants. Participants have the flexibility of completing the course from a distance utilizing USC's Distance Education Network technology. Students are required to be online for the entirety of each day's session.
Overview of online (interactive):
* Virtually participate in the course live with the ability to either ask questions or chat questions to the entire class.
* WebEx technologies provide the option to call into the class and view the entire lecture/materials on a personal computer, or to participate on a computer without having to utilize a phone line.
* Ability to logon and view archived course information up to 7 days after the course has been offered. This includes course documents and streaming video of the lectures.
Continuing Education Units
CEUs: 10.5 (CEUs provided by request only)
USC Viterbi School of Engineering Certificate of Participation is awarded to all participants upon successful completion of course.
Upon completion, participants will also receive their Institute of Industrial Engineers certification in Six Sigma Black Belt.
Host: Corporate and Professional Programs
More Info: http://gapp.usc.edu/professional-programs/short-courses/industrial%26systems/six-sigma-black-belt
Audiences: Registered Attendees
Contact: Viterbi Professional Programs
Event Link: http://gapp.usc.edu/professional-programs/short-courses/industrial%26systems/six-sigma-black-belt
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Extracting Hidden Structure From Data: Provable Phase Retrieval by Non-Convex Optimization
Wed, Mar 05, 2014 @ 10:00 AM - 11:00 AM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Mahdi Soltanolkotabi, Stanford University
Talk Title: Extracting Hidden Structure From Data: Provable Phase Retrieval by Non-Convex Optimization
Abstract: A major challenge in modern data analysis is to reliably and automatically discover hidden structure in data with little or no human intervention. However, many mathematical abstractions of these problems are provably intractable in their most general form. Nevertheless, it may be possible to overcome these hardness barriers by focusing on realistic cases that rule out intractable instances.
In this talk we consider the question of recovering the seemingly hidden phase of an object from intensity-only measurements, a problem which naturally appears in X-ray crystallography, speech analysis and related disciplines. We study a physically realistic setup where one can modulate the signal of interest and then collect the intensity of its diffraction pattern. We show that a non-convex formulation of the problem recovers the phase information exactly from a number of near minimal random modulations. To solve this non-convex problem, we develop an iterative algorithm that combines a careful initialization together with a novel update that escapes all local minima and provably converges to the global optimum with a geometric rate. Our proposed scheme is near optimal in terms of usage of computational and data resources. We illustrate our methods with various real data experiments.
We will also briefly discuss other problems involving hidden structure in data (in particular subspace clustering and sparse recovery with coherent and redundant dictionaries) and conclude with a discussion of directions for future research.
Biography: Mahdi Soltanolkotabi is a Ph.D. candidate in Electrical Engineering at Stanford University, advised by Emmanuel Candes. Previously, he received a Master's degree in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University (2011) and a Bachelor's degree in Electrical Engineering from Sharif University of Technology (2009). His research interests include optimization, machine learning, signal processing, high-dimensional statistics, and geometry with emphasis on applications in the information and physical sciences. He was awarded the Benchmark Stanford Graduate Fellowship (2009-2012) as well as the Stanford teaching fellowship in electrical engineering (2011).
Host: Salman Avestimehr, avestimehr@ee.usc.edu, EEB 526, x07326
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 248
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Gerrielyn Ramos
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CS Colloquium: Arunesh Sinha (CMU) - Audit Games
Wed, Mar 05, 2014 @ 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Arunesh Sinha , Carnegie Mellon University
Talk Title: Audit Games
Series: CS Colloquium
Abstract: Audits complement real time access control in enforcement of policies (e.g., security and privacy policies). It is the primary tool for policy enforcement in scenarios where threats arise from authorized insiders. Considering the lack of provable guarantees of audit mechanisms in real world, there is a pressing need to develop mathematical models to study the audit process and design effective audit mechanisms. Our work aims to provide foundational work in the area of auditing by developing models that capture the essential characteristics of the audit process.Our approach is to model the audit interaction as a game between the organization and the auditees. As a first cut, we proposed an audit mechanism Regret Minimizing Audits, that provably optimizes cost for the organization, when the auditees’ incentives to violate are unknown. This is useful in scenarios like outsourced work, etc., where the auditee behavior cannot be modeled.
A natural intuition is that costs can be further optimized if assumptions are made about the auditee behavior. Following this intuition, we model a simple audit scenario with rational auditees as a Stackelberg game [2]. The main modeling novelty is the inclusion of different levels of punishment in the organization’s action space. The organization chooses a punishment level that maximizes its utility. The model is simple as it allows only one audit inspection. However, even the simple model results in a non-convex optimization problem for computing the equilibrium. Non-convex optimization problems are hard in general; we present a fully polynomial time approx. scheme (FPTAS) for our problem.
Biography: Arunesh Sinha is a graduate student at Carnegie Mellon University in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department, where he is pursuing a PhD. He completed his undergraduate studies at IIT Kharagpur, where he majored in Electrical Engineering. Arunesh worked for four years as a software engineer in Trilogy Software, Bangalore, India, before deciding to do a Ph.D. Arunesh is fortunate to be advised by Prof. Anupam Datta. Arunesh's research interests lie at the intersection of security/privacy, game theory and machine learning.
Host: Teamcore Group
Location: Ronald Tutor Hall of Engineering (RTH) - 306
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Assistant to CS chair
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Wavefield Modeling and Signal Processing for Sensor Arrays of Arbitrary Geometry
Wed, Mar 05, 2014 @ 11:30 AM - 12:30 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Mário Costa, Aalto University
Talk Title: Wavefield Modeling and Signal Processing for Sensor Arrays of Arbitrary Geometry
Abstract: This talk considers wavefield modeling and its application to sensor array signal processing. In particular, we will see that wavefield modeling allows one to develop computationally-efficient and asymptotically-optimal array processing methods regardless of the array geometry. Wavefield modeling also facilitates incorporating array nonidealities, commonly present in real-world arrays, into array processing methods and performance bounds. Parameter estimation and beamforming in the azimuth-elevation-polarimetric domain will be addressed. Tools from harmonic analysis on the sphere, which are needed in wavefield modeling and manifold separation, will also be covered and novel results in the field will be provided. In addition to a review of well-known results in wavefield modeling, on-going research and open-problems in the area will be given.
Biography: Mário Costa was born in Portugal in 1984. He received the M.Sc.(Tech.) degree with distinction in Communications Engineering from Universidade do Minho, Portugal, in 2008, and the D.Sc.(Tech.) degree in Electrical Engineering from Aalto University (former Helsinki Univ. of Technology), Finland, in 2013. He has been with the Department of Signal Processing and Acoustics, Aalto University, Finland, since 2007. During 2007 as a Research Assistant, from 2008 to 2013 as a Researcher, and currently as a postdoctoral Researcher. From January to July 2011 he was an External Researcher at Connectivity Solutions Team, Nokia Research Center. His research interests include sensor array and statistical signal processing as well as wireless communications.
Host: Andreas Molisch, molisch@usc.edu, EEB 530, x04670
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 349
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Gerrielyn Ramos
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Computer Science General Faculty Meeting
Wed, Mar 05, 2014 @ 12:00 PM - 02:00 PM
Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science
Workshops & Infosessions
Computer Science General Faculty Meeting.
Details emailed directly to attendees.
RSVP link also to be provided.Location: Ronald Tutor Hall of Engineering (RTH) - 217
Audiences: Invited Faculty Only
Contact: Assistant to CS chair
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EE-Electrophysics Seminar - Axel Scherer
Wed, Mar 05, 2014 @ 02:00 PM - 03:30 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Axel Scherer, California Institute of Technology
Talk Title: From Lab-on-a-Chip to Lab-in-the-Body: The Role of Nanotechnology in the Miniaturization of Medical Diagnostic Tools
Abstract: Miniaturization of devices has fueled the rapid evolution of microelectronic systems over the past decades. More recently, silicon has also emerged as an opto-electronic and electro-mechanical material. The manufacturability of high resolution silicon micro- and nanostructures is unparalleled, and the control over the precise geometry of silicon devices has followed the predictable path of Moore's law. In anticipation of the evolution of this trend, we will describe the opportunities of reducing the sizes of silicon devices to below 10nm to control mechanical, optical and electronic properties of silicon â with particular applications in medical instruments. We show some examples of nanostructures with dimensions below 10nm in all dimensions. This control enables many interesting devices with new optical, electrical and mechanical opportunities.
As the size of devices is reduced, it is possible to contemplate their integration within more complex and compact optical and electronic systems. During the second part of the presentation, the opportunities for integrated spectroscopy and data communications systems for implantable health monitors will be explored. The combination of power supply, data communications and biochemical detectors within small chips enables us to contemplate new microsystems for healthcare monitoring. Such systems could be implanted as glucometers, neural probes and other metabolic measurement tools and will enable a new class of continuous digital health monitors that hopefully leads to preventative healthcare at lower cost.
Biography: Axel Scherer is the Bernard A. Neches Professor of Electrical Engineering, Applied Physics, Medical Engineering and Physics at Caltech as well as a visiting professor at Dartmouth. He received his PhD in 1985, and after working in the Microstructures Research Group at Bellcore, joined the Electrical Engineering option at Caltech in 1993. Professor Scherer's group now works on micro- and nanofabrication of optical, magnetic and fluidic devices and their integration into microsystems. He has co-authored over 300 publications and holds over 100 patents in the fields of optoelectronics, microfluidics, and nanofabrication. Professor Scherer has co-founded three high-technology companies and built a state of the art cleanroom at Caltech. He has pioneered vertical cavity surface emitting lasers, microdisks, photonic crystals, silicon photonics and surface plasmon nanodevices, as well as microfluidic technologies. His group has perfected the fabrication and characterization of ultra-small structures with sizes down to 2nm, which are used in transistors and sensors. Presently, Professor Scherer works on the integration of microfluidic, electronic, photonic and magnetic devices for the purpose of building wireless implantable health monitors. The goal of this effort is to build inexpensive medical diagnostic tools that can provide feedback for the patients to control their health. Professor Scherer’s group also develops inexpensive and automated point-of-care instruments for clinical pathology.
Host: EE-Electrophysics
Location: EEB 132
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Marilyn Poplawski
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Halliburton Information Session
Wed, Mar 05, 2014 @ 06:00 PM - 08:00 PM
Viterbi School of Engineering Career Connections
Workshops & Infosessions
You're invited to join representatives from Halliburton to learn about the positions they will be recruiting for on campus.
For more information, check their interview schedule posted within the connectSC Jobs & Internships section. You must have On-Campus Recruiting access to apply to the job postings.
Please note, this information session is being held in the Trojan Presentation Room (STU B3)Location: Gwynn Wilson Student Union (STU) - B3
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: RTH 218 Viterbi Career Services
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ASBME GM #18: BMEStart Showcase
Wed, Mar 05, 2014 @ 07:00 PM - 08:00 PM
Viterbi School of Engineering Student Organizations
Student Activity
Come join BMEstart (USC's only biomedical engineering design team) as we showcase the progress we have made over the year. Let us show you what we have done so far and where we plan to go from here. Learn about the struggles we faced, the knowledge we have gained, and get advice on how you jumpstart your own projects off the ground!
Location: THH 201
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Associated Students of Biomedical Engineering
