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Events for March 06, 2017
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CS Colloquium: Adish Singla (ETH Zurich) - Learning With and From People
Mon, Mar 06, 2017 @ 11:00 AM - 12:20 PM
Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Adish Singla, ETH Zurich
Talk Title: Learning With and From People
Series: CS Colloquium
Abstract: This lecture satisfies requirements for CSCI 591: Computer Science Research Colloquium.
People are becoming an integral part of computational systems, fueled primarily by recent technological advancements as well as deep-seated economic and societal changes. Consequently, there is a pressing need to design new data science and machine learning frameworks that can tackle challenges arising from human participation (e.g. questions about incentives and users' privacy) and can leverage people's capabilities (e.g. ability to learn).
In this talk, I will share my research efforts at the confluence of people and computing to address real-world problems. Specifically, I will focus on collaborative consumption systems (e.g. shared mobility systems and sharing economy marketplaces like Airbnb) and showcase the need to actively engage users for shaping the demand who would otherwise act primarily in their own interest. The main idea of engaging users is to incentivize them to switch to alternate choices that would improve the system's effectiveness. To offer optimized incentives, I will present novel multi-armed bandit algorithms and online learning methods in structured spaces for learning users' costs for switching between different pairs of available choices. Furthermore, to tackle the challenges of data sparsity and to speed up learning, I will introduce hemimetrics as a structural constraint over users' preferences. I will show experimental results of applying the proposed algorithms on two real-world applications: incentivizing users to explore unreviewed hosts on services like Airbnb and tackling the imbalance problem in bike sharing systems. In collaboration with an ETH Zurich spinoff and a public transport operator in the city of Mainz, Germany, we deployed these algorithms via a smartphone app among users of a bike sharing system. I will share the findings from this deployment.
Biography: Adish Singla is a PhD student in the Learning and Adaptive Systems Group at ETH Zurich. His research focuses on designing new machine learning frameworks and developing algorithmic techniques, particularly for situations where people are an integral part of computational systems. Before starting his PhD, he worked as a Senior Development Lead in Bing Search for over three years. He is a recipient of the Facebook Fellowship in the area of Machine Learning, Microsoft Research Tech Transfer Award, and Microsoft Gold Star Award.
Host: CS Department
Location: Ronald Tutor Hall of Engineering (RTH) - 217
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Assistant to CS chair
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Seminars in Biomedical Engineering
Mon, Mar 06, 2017 @ 12:30 PM - 01:50 PM
Alfred E. Mann Department of Biomedical Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Wei Wu, PhD, Associate Professor, USC Viterbi Electrical Engineering/Electrophysics
Talk Title: Sub-5 nm Patterning and Applications
Host: Qifa Zhou
Location: Olin Hall of Engineering (OHE) - 122
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Mischalgrace Diasanta
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Center for Cyber-Physical Systems and Internet of Things and Ming Hsieh Institute for Electrical Engineering Joint Seminar Series on Cyber-Physical Systems
Mon, Mar 06, 2017 @ 02:00 PM - 03:30 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Aranya Chakrabortty, Associate Professor, North Carolina State University, Raleigh, NC
Talk Title: Cyber-Physical Challenges for Wide-Area Control of Power Systems
Abstract: In this talk I will present a novel cyber-physical architecture for wide-area control of power systems using massive volumes of Synchrophasor data. The first half of the talk will focus on the computational aspects of the control design, where I will present several recent results on a new design approach called "control inversion". By this approach, very large-dimensional power system models can be projected conveniently into lower dimensional spaces by exploiting the inherent clustering properties of the network dynamics; then, a reduced-order controller is designed for this simple model, and, finally, this controller is projected back to the full-dimensional network for actual implementation. The method not only improves the tractability of the design, but also provides significant savings in the number of communication links needed for feedback. In the second half of the talk, I will shift my attention towards two of the most important challenges in data communication arising in wide-area control- namely, sensitivity to delays and data sparsification. Using the concepts of modal participation factors and relative gain arrays, I will propose a distributed communication architecture by which control centers can implement a sparse realization of wide-area controllers with very little loss in the overall response. I will also describe a co-design strategy by which one can spot the most important generators in the system for the purpose of oscillation damping after any disturbance in real-time, and, thereafter, prioritize the communication of states from these special generators to minimize the overall delay in the feedback path. I will present simulations to illustrate the pros and cons of such data prioritization, and their associated protocol designs. The talk will end with some final remarks about the resilience of these wide-area protocols against denial-of-service and data manipulation attacks.
The overall goal of the talk will be to pinpoint some of the most challenging CPS problems for today's grid where power engineers can largely benefit from collaborations with communication engineers, computer scientists, and numerical analysts. The content will highlight my recent works with PhD students Nan Xue and Abhishek Jain at NC State, as well as my work with Dr. Anuradha Annaswamy and her postdocs from MIT.
Biography: Aranya Chakrabortty received his PhD degree in Electrical Engineering from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, NY, in 2008. Following that he was a postdoctoral research associate at the University of Washington Seattle, for a year. From 2009 to 2010, he was an Assistant Professor at Texas Tech University. Since 2010, Aranya has joined the Electrical and Computer Engineering department of North Carolina State University, where he is currently an Associate Professor. His research interests are in the general area of power system dynamics, modeling, stability, and control, with a special focus on wide-area monitoring and control using Synchrophasors. He is a senior member of IEEE, and currently serves as an Associate Editor of IEEE Transactions on Control Systems Technology. He received the NSF CAREER award in 2011.
Host: Paul Bogdan
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 132
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Estela Lopez
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Schlumberger Information Session
Mon, Mar 06, 2017 @ 06:30 PM - 08:00 PM
Viterbi School of Engineering Career Connections
Workshops & Infosessions
Learn about possible internships and career opportunities with company representatives!
Location: Seeley G. Mudd Building (SGM) - 101
Audiences: All Viterbi
Contact: RTH 218 Viterbi Career Connections
