Select a calendar:
Filter March Events by Event Type:
SUNMONTUEWEDTHUFRISAT
Events for March 07, 2013
-
IMSC Retreat 2013
Thu, Mar 07, 2013
Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science
Workshops & Infosessions
We are pleased to have you for IMSC Retreat 2013. This retreat is scheduled as a whole-day event for Thursday March 7, 2013, to be held at USC, in the Davidson Conference Center.
The Keynote will be given by Hanan Samet, Professor of Computer Science at the University of Maryland, College Park. The details of his talk are below:
Keynote Talk of the IMSC 2013 Annual Retreat
(Open, no RSVP required)
NewsStand: A Map Query Interface for News
By Professor Hanan Samet
Department of Computer Science
University of Maryland
College Park, MD 20742
hjs@cs.umd.edu
www.cs.umd.edu/~hjs
Abstract:
The NewsStand system is an example application of a general framework that we are developing to enable people to search for information using a map query interface, where the information results from monitoring the output of over 8,000 RSS news sources and is available for retrieval within minutes of publication. The advantage of doing so is that a map, coupled with an ability to vary the zoom level at which it is viewed, provides an inherent granularity to the search process that facilitates an approximate search. This distinguishes it from today's prevalent keyword-based conventional search methods that provide a very limited facility for approximate searches which are realized primarily by permitting a match via use of a subset of the keywords. However, it is often the case that users do not have a firm grasp of which keyword to use, and thus would welcome the capability for the search to also take synonyms into account. In the case of queries to spatially-referenced data, the map query interface is a step in this direction as the act of pointing at a location (e.g., by the appropriate positioning of a pointing device) and making the interpretation of the precision of this positioning specification dependent on the zoom level is equivalent to permitting the use of spatial synonyms. The issues that arise in the design of such a system including the identification of words that correspond to geographic locations are discussed, and examples are provided of the utility of the approach (including an adaptation to Tweets resulting in the TwitterStand system), thereby representing a step forward in the emerging field of computational journalism.
Biography:
Hanan Samet is a Professor of Computer Science at the University of Maryland, College Park and is a member of the Institute for Computer Studies. He is also a member of the Computer Vision Laboratory at the Center for Automation Research where he leads a number of research projects on the use of hierarchical data structures for database applications involving spatial data. He has a Ph.D from Stanford University. His doctoral dissertation dealt with proving the correctness of translations of LISP programs which was the first work in translation validation. He is the author of the recent book "Foundations of Multidimensional and Metric Data Structures" published by Morgan-Kaufmann, San Francisco, CA, in 2006 (http://www.mkp.com/multidimensional), an award winner in the 2006 best book in Computer and Information Science competition of the Professional and Scholarly Publishers (PSP) Group of the American Publishers Association (AAP), and of the first two books on spatial data structures titled "Design and Analysis of Spatial Data Structures" and "Applications of Spatial Data Structures: Computer Graphics, Image Processing and GIS" published by Addison-Wesley, Reading, MA, 1990. He is the Founding Editor-In-Chief of the ACM Transactions on Spatial Algorithms and System (TSAS), the founding chair of ACM SIGSPATIAL, a recipient of the 2009 UCGIS Research Award, 2011 ACM Paris Kanellakis Theory and Practice Award, the 2010 CMPS Board of Visitors Award at the University of Maryland, a Fellow of the ACM, IEEE, AAAS, and IAPR (International Association for Pattern Recognition), and an ACM Distinguished Speaker. He received best paper awards in the 2008 SIGMOD Conference and the 2008 SIGSPATIAL ACMGIS'08 Conference, and a best demo award at the 2011 SIGSPATIAL ACMGIS'11 Conference. His paper at the 2009 IEEE International Conference on Data Engineering (ICDE) was selected as one of the best papers for publication in the IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering.More Information: imsc_retreat__agenda_2013_schedule_only.pdf
Location: Charlotte S. & Davre R. Davidson Continuing Education Conference Center (DCC) -
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Assistant to CS chair
-
EPSTEIN ISE SEMINAR
Thu, Mar 07, 2013 @ 10:45 AM - 11:45 AM
Daniel J. Epstein Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Please contact Julia L. Higle at julie.higle@usc.edu for speaker's name, and afiliation
Talk Title: Please contact Julia L. Higle at julie.higle@usc.edu for speaker's title
Abstract: Some of the significant features in our era include the design of large scale systems, the prevalence of large data-sets, numerous advancements in medicine; healthcare; and public policy, and the presence of multiple stakeholders with multiple objectives and incentives structures. A unifying theme that arises in these areas is the need for sound decision making. This talk will present recent advances in one of the foundational aspects of decision making: the accurate representation of preferences using a multiattribute utility function. These new methods include (i) using a general expansion theorem for multiattribute utility functions and the notion of a utility diagram; (ii) using a utility copula function to incorporate dependence using single attribute assessments, and (iii) deriving the functional form by asserting the number of preference switches that may occur for lotteries defined on a subset of the attributes as the level of the remaining attributes varies. Ongoing research projects on decision Making using crowd-sourcing and decision making in large-scale systems will also be presented.
Host: Daniel J. Epstein Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering
Location: Ronald Tutor Hall of Engineering (RTH) - Room 526
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Georgia Lum
-
Focused on parallel and distributed computingThu, Mar 07, 2013 @ 02:00 PM - 03:00 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: TBA, TBA
Talk Title: TBA
Series: EE598 Seminar Course
Abstract: Weekly seminars given by researchers in academia and industry including senior doctoral students in EE, CS and ISI covering current research related to parallel and distributed computation including parallel algorithms, high performance computing, scientific computation, application specific architectures, multi-core and many-core architectures and algorithms, application acceleration, reconfigurable computing systems, data intensive systems, Big Data and cloud computing.
Biography: Prerequisite: Students are expected to be familiar with basic concepts at the level of graduate level courses in Computer Engineering and Computer Science in some of these topic areas above. Ph.D. students in Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering and Computer Science can automatically enroll. M.S. students can enroll only with permission of the instructor. To request permission send a brief mail to the instructor in text format with the subject field ââ¬ÅEE 598ââ¬Â. The body of the mail (in text format) should include name, degree objective, courses taken at USC and grades obtained, prior educational background, and relevant research background, if any.
Requirements for CR:
1. Attending at least 10 seminars during the semester
There will be a sign-in sheet and a sign-out sheet at every seminar. All students must sign-in (before 2:00pm) and sign-out (after 3:00pm). The sign-in sheet will not be available after 2:00pm, and the sign-out sheet will not be available before 3:00pm.
2. Submitting a written report for at least 5 seminars
The written report for each seminar must be 1-page single line spaced format with font size of 12 (Times) or 11 (Arial) without any figures, tables, or graphs. The report must be submitted no later than 1 week after the corresponding seminar, and must be handed only to the instructor either on the seminar times or during office hours. Late reports will not be considered.
The report must summarize studentââ¬â¢s own understanding of the seminar, and should contain the following:
- Your name and submission date [1 line]
- Title of the seminar, name of the speaker, and seminar date [1 line]
- Background of the work (e.g., applications, prior research, etc.) [1 paragraph]
- Highlights of the approaches presented in the seminar [1-2 paragraphs]
- Main results presented in the seminar [1-2 paragraphs]
- Conclusion (your own conclusion and not what was given by the speaker) [1 paragraph]
Reviewing papers related to the topic of the seminar, and incorporating relevant findings in the
reports (e.g., in the conclusion section) is encouraged. In such cases, make sure to clearly indicate
the reference(s) used to derive these conclusions.
Host: Professor Viktor K. Prasanna
More Information: Course Announcement_EE598_Focused on parallel and distributed computing_(Spring 2013).pdf
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) -
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Janice Thompson
-
EE 598: ELECTRICAL ENGINEERING RESEARCH SEMINAR COURSE #8
Thu, Mar 07, 2013 @ 02:00 PM - 03:00 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Alok Kumbhare, PhD Student, Computer Science, USC Viterbi School of Engineering
Talk Title: Dynamic Dataflows & Resilient Execution on Clouds
Series: EE598 Seminar Course
Abstract: The emergence of ââ¬ÅBig Dataââ¬Â, due to improvements in scientific processes, deployment of pervasive sensors, and connected devices, coupled with improvements in communication technologies as well as storage and processing capabilities, has led to the need for development of data-intensive applications and application frameworks to analyze this huge collection of stored and continuous streams of Data. In this talk, we discuss the notion of Continuous Dataflows, as an extension to traditional workflows, for processing continuous data streams. In addition, we introduce the concept of Dynamic Dataflows to allow for both domain-driven and infrastructure-driven changes to the application at runtime. In this context, we discuss several challenges due to the dynamic nature of the application as well as the underlying Cloud infrastructure and present several opportunities and preliminary solutions to address those.
Biography: Alok Kumbhare is a PhD student working with Prof. Viktor K. Prasanna and Prof. Yogesh Simmhan in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles. His research focuses on distributed data and computing platforms, especially on the Cloud computing infrastructure. His current research interests include dynamic dataflow programming abstractions and their resilient execution on the dynamic infrastructure provided by the Cloud. In addition, he is working on a distributed Graph oriented file system and to leverage the dynamic dataflows for efficient execution of graph algorithms on extremely large data sets. He earned his BS degree in Computer Science and Engineering from Indian Institute of technology Guwahati in 2008.
Host: Professor Viktor K. Prasanna
More Information: Course Announcement_EE598_Focused on parallel and distributed computing_(Spring 2013) 2.pdf
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 248
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Janice Thompson
-
EE Distinguished Lecturer Series
Thu, Mar 07, 2013 @ 03:00 PM - 04:00 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Mathukumalli Vidyasagar, Ph.D., University of Texas, Dallas
Abstract: In this talk I will review some problems in cancer biology, specifically reverse-engineering gene interaction networks, predicting the responsiveness of patients to specific therapies, and time to recurrence of tumors, and explore how methods of graph theory, machine learning, and compressive sensing can be used to study these problems. Some promising preliminary results will also be presented, and open problems for future research will be indicated.
Biography: Mathukumalli Vidyasagar received his Ph.D. degree from the University of Wisconsin, Madison, in 1969. Between 1969 and 1989, he was a Professor of Electrical Engineering, mostly in Canada. In 1989 he returned to his native India, and spent the next twenty years in the Government, and in the private sector. In 2009 he retired and joined the University of Texas at Dallas. His current research interests are computational biology of cancer, and control theory. He has received a number of awards in recognition of his research contributions, including Fellowship in The Royal Society, the world’s oldest scientific academy in continuous existence, the IEEE Control Systems (Field) Award, and the Rufus Oldenburger Medal of ASME. He is the author of ten books and nearly 140 papers in peer-reviewed journals.
Host: Dr. Michael Safonov
More Info: http://ee.usc.edu/news/dls/
Webcast: http://geromedia.usc.edu/Gerontology/Play/359011cc9ae04dd29fa949ddf97f4a471dMore Information: 20130307 Vidayasagar Print.pdf
Location: Ethel Percy Andrus Gerontology Center (GER) - 124
WebCast Link: http://geromedia.usc.edu/Gerontology/Play/359011cc9ae04dd29fa949ddf97f4a471d
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Estela Lopez
Event Link: http://ee.usc.edu/news/dls/
-
Bootstrapping Vehicles: a Formal Approach to Unsupervised Sensorimotor Learning Based on Invariance
Thu, Mar 07, 2013 @ 03:30 PM - 05:00 PM
Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Andrea Censi, Caltech
Talk Title: CS Colloquium: Andrea Censi (CalTech)
Series: CS Colloquium
Abstract: Imagine you are a brain that wakes up in an unknown (robotic) body. You are connected to two streams of uninterpreted observations and commands. You have zero prior information on the body morphology, its sensors, its actuators, and the external world. Would you be able to "bootstrap" a model of your body from scratch, in an unsupervised manner, and use it to perform useful tasks? This bootstrapping problem sits at the intersection of numerous scientific questions and engineering problems. Biology gives us a proof of existence of a solution, given that the neocortex demonstrates similar abilities.
I am interested in understanding whether the bootstrapping problem can be formalized to the point where it can be solved with the rigour of control theory. I will discuss a tractable subset of the set of all robots called the "Vehicles Universe", which I consider a pimped-up version, with modern sensors, of Braitenberg's Vehicles. I will show that the dynamics of three "canonical" robotic sensors (camera, range-finder, field sampler) are very similar at the "sensel" level. I will present classes of models that can capture the dynamics of those sensors simultaneously and allow exactly the same agent to perform equivalent spatial tasks when embodied in different robots. I will discuss immediate applications to intrinsic sensor calibration and fault detection.
A key concern of mine is to precisely characterize the "assumptions" of the agents. I will show that assumptions regarding the representation of the data can be described by the largest group of transformations on observations/commands to which the agent behavior is invariant. This suggests that one of the basic concerns of a bootstrapping agent is being able to reject these "representation nuisances".
Reference: the homonymous dissertation, available at http://purl.org/censi/2012/phd
Biography: Andrea Censi is a postdoctoral scholar in Computing and Mathematical Sciences at the California Institute of Technology. He received the Laurea and Laurea Specialistica degrees (summa cum laude) in control engineering and robotics from Sapienza University of Rome, Italy, in 2005 and 2007, respectively, and a Ph.D. in Control & Dynamical Systems from the California Institute of Technology in 2012. He is broadly interested in perception and decision making problems for natural and artificial embodied agents, and in particular in estimation, filtering, and learning in robotics.
Website: http://andrea.caltech.edu/
Host: Fei Sha
Location: Seaver Science Library (SSL) - 150
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Assistant to CS chair
-
VARC Workshop - Presentation Skills
Thu, Mar 07, 2013 @ 05:00 PM - 06:00 PM
Viterbi School of Engineering Student Affairs
Workshops & Infosessions
Making presentations are a big part of college - whether in class, in student organizations, or at internships. Come to this workshop for some quick tips on how to be a more effective presenter.
RSVPs are encouraged but not required: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/viewform?formkey=dE5fbjZfZHNTTkRTcVBOSUc4ZmU5c1E6MQ#gid=0Location: Ronald Tutor Hall of Engineering (RTH) - 222
Audiences: Undergrad
Contact: Viterbi Academic Resource Center
-
International Women's Day Celebration
Thu, Mar 07, 2013 @ 06:30 PM - 07:30 PM
Viterbi School of Engineering Student Affairs
Workshops & Infosessions
Come celebrate International Women's day with other Viterbi Women. We will be watching a portion of "Half the Sky" documentary film and talk about actions we female engineering students can take today to help other women around the world. Delicious movie snacks will be served. You are more than welcome to bring a friend along.
Just make sure to RSVP here: http://bit.ly/YT0Uuk
More Information: international womens day flyer.pdf
Location: Ronald Tutor Hall of Engineering (RTH) - 211
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Women in Engineering
