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Events for March 11, 2010
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What Have We Learned Lately about Prospects for Carbon Dioxide Sequestration in Deep Geological Form
Thu, Mar 11, 2010 @ 12:45 PM
Mork Family Department of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Lyman Handy Colloquium SeriesPresentsSally BensonStanford UniversityAbstract:In little more than a decade, carbon dioxide (CO2) capture from point source emissions and sequestration in deep geological formations has emerged as one of the most important options for reducing CO2 emissions. Two major challenges stand in the way of realizing this potential: the high cost of capturing CO2 and gaining confidence in the capacity, safety, and permanence of sequestration in deep geological formations. Building on examples from laboratory and field based studies of multiphase flow of CO2 in porous rocks; this talk addresses the current prospects for carbon dioxide sequestration. Which formations can provide safe and secure sequestration? At what scale will this be practical and is this scale sufficient to significantly reduce emissions? What monitoring methods can be used to provide assurance that CO2 remains trapped underground? What can be done if a leak develops? What are the potential impacts to groundwater resources and how can these be avoided? The status of each these questions will be discussed, along with emerging research questions.
Location: James H. Zumberge Hall Of Science (ZHS) - 159
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Petra Pearce Sapir
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Photonics Seminar: Resonant single sideband modulators
Thu, Mar 11, 2010 @ 01:00 PM - 02:00 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Dr. Andrey Matsko, OEwaves Inc.Abstract: Optical modulators up-convert RF signals to the optical domain and are key components in all microwave photonics applications. Modulators that have a very large bandwidth are naturally desired in wideband applications. This is generally obtained at the expense of lower power efficiency. Unlike standard wideband lithium niobate and electro-absorption varieties, modulators in narrowband microwave photonics feature extremely high efficiency. The high efficiency is obtained with resonance coupling to RF electrodes and/or the use of optical resonance devices. This approach leads to filtering, in addition to light modulation, which is desirable in virtually all narrowband applications. Here we present a new class of modulators with the unique feature of providing a narrow modulation bandwidth over a very wide RF frequency range. This feature opens up new and compelling applications such as widely tunable microwave photonic receivers as well as tunable opto-electronic oscillators.Bio: Dr. Andrey Matsko is an internationally recognized expert in theory of whispering gallery mode micro-resonators as well as quantum and nonlinear optics. He has over 100 journal publications in the fields and holds 12 US patents. He is a Principal Engineer at OEwaves Inc., where he is involved in studies of properties and applications of whispering gallery modes in dielectric optical resonators. Previously, being employed as a principal member of technical staff at Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), he has initiated, participated, and led theoretical investigations of RF photonic receivers, miniature electro-optical modulators, opto-electronic oscillators, and tunable narrowband filters. He has studied and developed theoretical models based on which novel types of whispering gallery mode resonators with novel functionalities have been produced. He has investigated and developed models for noise and stability parameters of novel oscillators based on linear and nonlinear properties of whispering gallery mode resonators. He received 2005 JPL's Lew Allen Award for Excellence ("For seminal and unique theoretical contributions in quantum optics, in particular, the nonlinear interactions of optical crystalline whispering gallery mode resonators, leading to the establishment of this new area of research at JPL") and a NASA Space Act Award in recognition of contributions to the National Space Program and to the mission of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 248
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Jing Ma
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Long-Term Context Modeling for Acoustic- Linguistic Emotion Recognition
Thu, Mar 11, 2010 @ 02:00 PM - 03:00 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Abstract:
The automatic estimation of human affect from the speech signal is an important step towards making virtual agents more natural and human-like. Thus, we present a novel technique for incremental recognition of the
user's emotional state as it is applied in a Sensitive Artificial Listener (SAL) system, designed for socially competent human-machine communication. Our method is capable of using acoustic, linguistic, as well as long-range contextual information in order to continuously predict the current quadrant in a two-dimensional emotional space spanned by the dimensions valence and activation. The main system components are a hierarchical Dynamic Bayesian Network for detecting linguistic keyword features and Long Short-Term Memory recurrent neural networks which model phoneme context and emotional history to predict the affective state of the user. We evaluate various keyword spotting model architectures for linguistic feature generation as well as different strategies for extracting relevant acoustic features from the speech signal. Conducting experiments on the SAL corpus of non-prototypical real-life emotional speech, we obtain a quadrant prediction accuracy that is comparable to the average inter-labeler consistency.
Bio:
Martin Wöllmer works as a researcher funded by the European Community's Seventh Framework Programme project SEMAINE at the Technische Universität München (TUM). He obtained his bachelor degree and his
diploma in Electrical Engineering and Information Technology from TUM for his works in the field of multimodal data fusion and robust automatic speech recognition, respectively. His current research and teaching activity includes the subject areas of pattern recognition and speech processing. Thereby his focus lies on robust keyword detection in emotionally colored and noisy speech, emotion recognition, and speech feature enhancement. Publications of his in various journals, books, and conference proceedings cover novel and robust modeling architectures for speech and emotion recognition such as Switching Linear Dynamic Models, Long Short-Term Memory recurrent neural nets, or Graphical Models.Location: Ronald Tutor Hall of Engineering (RTH) - 320
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Mary Francis
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Validation of TES Ozone Satellite Data: ....
Thu, Mar 11, 2010 @ 02:00 PM - 03:00 PM
Sonny Astani Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
...Implications for regional air qualitymodeling and weather forecasting Speaker: Dr. Christopher Boxe, Research Scientist, JPL Pasadena, CA Absract: The Tropospheric Emission Spectrometer (TES) is one of four science instruments onboard NASA's Aura satellite. Aura is one of a series of satellites in NASA's Earth Observing System (EOS), which supports understanding of the Earth as an integrated system by observing its land surfaces, biosphere, atmosphere and oceans. EOS, in turn, is the principal element of Earth Science Enterprise, an international effort to understand Earth's climate system. TES versions 3 and 4 nadir-stare ozone profiles are compared with ozonesonde profiles from the Arctic Intensive Ozonesonde Network Study (ARCIONS) during the Arctic Research on the Composition of the Troposphere from Aircraft and Satellites (ARCTAS) field mission. The ozonesonde data are from launches timed to match Aura's overpass, where 11 coincidences spanned 44o N to 71o N from April to July, 2008. Using the TES "stare" observation mode, 32 observations are taken in a distance less than ~ 1 km, over each coincident ozonesonde launch. By effectively sampling the same air mass 32 times, comparisons are made between the empiricallycalculated random errors to the expected random errors from measurement noise, temperature, and interfering species, such as water. This study represents the first validation of high latitude (> 60o) TES ozone. We find that the calculated errors are consistent with the actual errors with a similar vertical distribution that varies between 5% and 20%. In general, TES ozone profiles are positively biased (by less than 15%) from the surface to the upper-troposphere (~ 1000 to 100 hPa) and negatively biased (by less than 20%) from the upper-troposphere to the lower-stratosphere (100 to 30 hPa) when compared to the ozone-sonde data. The implications of this study are discussed within the context of modeling and forecasting with the Weather Research and Forecasting Model with coupled chemistry (WRF-Chem).
Location: Kaprielian Hall (KAP) - 209 (Webex is available upon request)
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Evangeline Reyes
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CS Colloq: Kamalika Chaudhuri
Thu, Mar 11, 2010 @ 03:30 PM - 05:00 PM
Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Talk Title: Statistical Algorithms for Modern Datasets
Speaker: Kamalika Chaudhuri
Host: Prof. Gaurav SukhatmeAbstract:
In this talk, we address two issues that arise in learning in modern datasets. First, with the increase in electronic record-keeping, many datasets that learning algorithms work with relate to sensitive information about individuals. Thus the problem of privacy-preserving learning -- how to design learning algorithms that operate on the sensitive data of individuals while still guaranteeing the privacy of individuals in the training set -- has achieved great practical importance. In this talk, we address the problem of privacy-preserving classification, and we present an efficient classifier which is private in the differential privacy model of Dwork et al. Our classifier works in the ERM (empirical lossminimization) framework, and includes privacy preserving logistic regression and privacy preserving support vector machines. We show that our classifier is private, provide analytical bounds on the sample requirement of our classifier, and evaluate it on some real data. A second characteristic of modern datasets is that data is often available from multiple domains or views. For example, when clustering a document corpus such as Wikipedia, we have access to the contents of the documents and their link structure. In this talk, we address this problem of Multiview Clustering -- how to use information from multiple views to improve clustering performance. We present an algorithm for multiview clustering, provide analytical bounds on the performance of our algorithm under certain statistical assumptions, and finally evaluate our algorithm on some real data.Based on joint work with Sham Kakade (UPenn), Karen Livescu (TTI Chicago), Claire Monteleoni (CCLS Columbia), Anand Sarwate (ITA UCSD), and Karthik Sridharan (TTI Chicago).Bio:
Kamalika Chaudhuri received a Bachelor of Technology degree in Computer Science and Engineering in 2002 from Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur, and a PhD in Computer Science from UC Berkeley in 2007. She is currently a postdoctoral researcher at the Computer Science and Engineering Department at UCSD. Kamalika's research is on the design and analysis of machine-learning algorithms and their applications. In particular, her interests lie in -- clustering, online learning, and privacy-preserving machine-learning, and the applications of machine-learning and algorithms to practical problems in other areas.
Location: Seaver Science Library (SSL) - 150
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: CS Front Desk
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Resume Workshop with TEK Systems
Thu, Mar 11, 2010 @ 06:00 PM - 07:30 PM
Viterbi School of Engineering Career Connections
Workshops & Infosessions
Does your resume highlight the skills that will make you a competitive candidate? A TEK Systems representative will be available to help students create a resume that will serve as the marketing tool that will get your foot inside industry's door!
Location: Grace Ford Salvatori Hall Of Letters, Arts & Sciences (GFS) - 106
Audiences: All Viterbi Students
Contact: RTH 218 Viterbi Career Services
