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Events for March 11, 2022

  • Repeating EventGrammar Tutorials

    Fri, Mar 11, 2022 @ 10:00 AM - 12:00 PM

    Viterbi School of Engineering Student Affairs

    Workshops & Infosessions


    INDIVIDUAL GRAMMAR TUTORING FOR VITERBI UNDERGRADUATE AND GRADUATE STUDENTS

    Meet one-on-one with Viterbi faculty, build your grammar skills, and take your writing to the next level!

    Viterbi faculty from the Engineering in Society Program (formerly the Engineering Writing Program) will help you identify and correct recurring grammatical errors in your academic writing, cover letters, resumes, articles, presentations, and dissertations.
    Bring your work, and let's work together to clarify your great ideas!

    Contact helenhch@usc.edu with questions.




    Location: Zoom

    Audiences: Graduate and Undergraduate Students

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    Contact: Helen Choi

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  • ECE Seminar: Optics, Sensors & AI: Next-Generation Computational Imaging

    ECE Seminar: Optics, Sensors & AI: Next-Generation Computational Imaging

    Fri, Mar 11, 2022 @ 10:00 AM - 11:00 AM

    Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Dr. Vivek Boominathan, Postdoctoral Research Associate, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Rice University

    Talk Title: Optics, Sensors & AI: Next-Generation Computational Imaging

    Abstract: Rapidly growing machine learning techniques such as deep learning have produced powerful computer vision algorithms. However, these algorithms usually apply to images and videos captured with traditional camera designs that have been principally unchanged for decades. Furthermore, real-world applications such as robotics, autonomous navigation, augmented/virtual reality, human-computer interaction, biomedical, and IoT need systems that adhere to fundamental constraints such as size, weight, power, and privacy. These fundamental constraints cannot be addressed by a software-only solution but demand a joint hardware-software solution. In my talk, I will present end-to-end computational imaging systems that execute "computation" at all stages of a physical vision system, from optics to sensors to algorithms. Novel optics such as diffractive and metamaterial optics provide new dimensions of light manipulation, while novel sensors such as SPADs offer new dimensions in light transduction. I will highlight algorithms and AI to explore these new dimensions and accessible nanofabrication techniques to realize novel optics and sensors. I will show applications from photographic 3D imaging to in vivo 3D imaging, achieved using compact coded aperture systems and ultraminiature lensless imaging systems. I will conclude by describing how my works set the stage for designing next-generation imaging systems for various future applications such as biomedical imaging, robotics, IoT, and human-computer interaction.

    Biography: Dr. Vivek Boominathan is a postdoctoral research associate in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Rice University. He received his Ph.D. in 2019, advised by Prof. Ashok Veeraraghavan, and co-advised by Prof. Jacob Robinson and Prof. Richard Baraniuk. His research interests lie at the intersection of computer vision, machine learning, applied optics, and nanofabrication. His contributions have appeared in a broad spectrum of venues such as Science Advances, Nature BME, IEEE journals, optics journals, vision conferences, and circuits conferences. He has also published a review article, in Optica, around his Ph.D. topic of lensless imaging. His work has been covered by news media such as EurekAlert, NPR, Phys.org, and NDTV India. He has co-organized a tutorial on Computational Imaging and Machine Learning in CVPR 2019 and has served as the publication co-chair for ICCP since 2020. More details can be found at https://vivekboominathan.com/.


    Host: Dr. Shri Narayanan, shri@ee.usc.edu

    Webcast: https://usc.zoom.us/j/96039656028?pwd=RnVxeGx3aEZ3RTNsTW5PajFWakN2Zz09

    Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 248

    WebCast Link: https://usc.zoom.us/j/96039656028?pwd=RnVxeGx3aEZ3RTNsTW5PajFWakN2Zz09

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Mayumi Thrasher

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  • CS Colloquium: Harsha V. Madhyastha (University of Michigan) - Inter-connecting society across space and time

    Fri, Mar 11, 2022 @ 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM

    Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Harsha V. Madhyastha, University of Michigan

    Talk Title: Inter-connecting society across space and time

    Series: CS Colloquium

    Abstract: Thanks to the Internet and a range of services that have been developed to take advantage of it -- web, email, social media, instant messaging, etc. -- being in the same place at the same time is no longer a requirement for all of us to share information with each other. Instead, we are able to store our ideas, opinions, and observations on services which enable others to access this information later from anywhere in the world.

    In this talk, I will discuss my group/s work over the past several years to address some of the fundamental challenges faced by the providers of such global-scale services. I will provide examples of two broad research thrusts: 1) enabling cost-effective development and deployment of geo-distributed services, and 2) optimizing the availability and performance of client-service interactions. I will also briefly discuss my ongoing research in facilitating
    information exchange in domains such as web archival, federated learning, and 3D printing.


    This lecture satisfies requirements for CSCI 591: Research Colloquium

    Biography: Harsha V. Madhyastha is an Associate Professor in CSE at the University of Michigan. His research broadly spans the areas of distributed systems and
    networking. Two of his papers have received the IRTF's Applied Networking Research Prize, and he has also co-authored award papers at OSDI, NSDI, and IMC. He has received multiple Google Faculty Research awards, a NetApp Faculty Fellowship, a Facebook Faculty Award, and an NSF CAREER award.


    Host: Barath Raghavan

    Audiences: By invitation only.

    Contact: Assistant to CS chair

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  • ECE-EP Seminar - Quntao Zhuang, Friday, March 11th at 2pm in EEB 248

    Fri, Mar 11, 2022 @ 02:00 PM - 03:00 PM

    Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Quntao Zhuang, University of Arizona

    Talk Title: Quantum Information Processing: From Fundamentals to Applications

    Abstract: Quantum physics has changed the way we understand nature, and also the way we process information. Starting from the fundamental questions raised a century ago, we have now entered an era of quantum engineering. In this talk, I will introduce our recent results on quantum sensing and communication. Quantum sensing utilizes quantum effects such as coherence, squeezing and entanglement to boost measurement sensitivity. I will summarize the paradigm of distributed quantum sensing, which utilizes multi-partite entanglement to boost the measurement of an arbitrary function of local network parameters, generalizing the famous Heisenberg limit of quantum sensing; distributed quantum sensing has a wide range of applications, including dark matter search in different platforms and quantum machine learning. Then, I will briefly present our recent results on quantum radar and quantum spectroscopy. Finally, I will introduce our works on quantum communication. Claude Shannon established the famous classical capacity of communication channels---the ultimate rate at which classical physics allows us to communicate. Quantum physics has made things more interesting. To begin with, I will introduce our recent works in breaking the Shannon capacity for the first time, by utilizing quantum entanglement; Next, I will briefly summarize works on quantum information transmission, including quantum transduction and quantum repeaters.

    Biography: Quntao Zhuang is an assistant professor in ECE and Optical Sciences at University of Arizona. He joined university of Arizona in 2019 after a brief postdoc at University of California, Berkeley. He got his PHD in physics from MIT in 2018. He received the NSF CAREER award in 2022, DARPA Young Faculty Award and Craig M. Berge Dean's Fellow in 2020.

    Host: ECE-Electrophysics

    Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 248

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Marilyn Poplawski

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  • PhD Thesis Proposal - Aaron Chan

    Fri, Mar 11, 2022 @ 03:00 PM - 05:00 PM

    Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science

    University Calendar


    PhD Candidate: Aaron Chan

    Title: Generating and Utilizing Machine Explanations for Trustworthy NLP

    Time: Friday, March 11, 3:00PM-5:00PM PST

    Committee: Xiang Ren, Robin Jia, Jesse Thomason, Bistra Dilkina, Morteza Dehghani

    Abstract:
    Neural language models (NLMs) have achieved remarkable success on a wide range of natural language processing (NLP) tasks. However, NLMs sometimes exhibit undesirable behavior, which can be difficult to resolve due to NLMs' opaque reasoning processes. Such a lack of transparency poses serious concerns about NLMs' trustworthiness in high-stakes decision-making.

    This motivates the use of machine explanations to automatically interpret how NLMs make decisions. In my thesis proposal, I argue that building human trust in NLP systems requires being able to: (A) generate machine explanations for NLM behavior faithfully and plausibly, and (B) utilize machine explanations to improve language model decision-making.

    First, I introduce a framework for optimizing machine explanations w.r.t. both faithfulness and plausibility, without compromising the NLM's task performance. Second, I present an algorithm for regularizing NLMs via machine explanations, in order to improve NLM task performance. Third, I discuss using limited human-in-the-loop feedback on machine explanations to further improve NLMs' generalization ability.

    Zoom Link: https://usc.zoom.us/j/99570395469?pwd=OE9IMnhLOU5oSmRCYzFiUWdMZ1BuZz09

    WebCast Link: https://usc.zoom.us/j/99570395469?pwd=OE9IMnhLOU5oSmRCYzFiUWdMZ1BuZz09

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Lizsl De Leon

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