Select a calendar:
Filter March Events by Event Type:
SUNMONTUEWEDTHUFRISAT
Events for March 21, 2024
-
Human Factors in Aviation Safety HFH 24-3Thu, Mar 21, 2024 @ 08:00 AM - 04:00 PM
Aviation Safety and Security Program
University Calendar
Humans design, build, operate, and maintain the aviation system. It is no wonder that the majority of aviation accidents and incidents have roots in human factors. With this realization comes the conclusion that quality human factors training is effective in improving safety. This course presents information on human factors in a manner that can be readily understood and applied by aviation practitioners. Emphasis is placed on identifying the causes of human error, predicting how human error can affect performance, and applying countermeasures to reduce or eliminate its effects. The course content follows the subjects recommended in FAA Advisory Circular 120-51E. The course also addresses topics recommended in the International Civil Aviation Organization’s Human Factors Digest No. 3: Training Operational Personnel in Human Factors. The emphasis is from the pilot’s perspective but applies to all phases of aviation operations. The course relies heavily on participation, case studies, demonstrations, self-assessment, and practical exercises.
Location: Century Boulevard Building (CBB) - 960
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Daniel Scalese
Event Link: https://avsafe.usc.edu/wconnect/CourseStatus.awp?&course=24AHFH3
-
Advanced System Safety Analysis ADVSS 24-1
Thu, Mar 21, 2024 @ 08:00 AM - 04:00 PM
Aviation Safety and Security Program
University Calendar
This course is a continuation of the <a href="https://aviationsafety.usc.edu/courses/system-safety/">System Safety</a> course focused on engineering aspects of the course. The objective is to address advanced issues in system safety analysis and broaden the trainees’ perspective on system safety issues. Engineering methods addressed in the System Safety course are reviewed, and special advanced topics are addressed. Additional methods for system safety analysis are addressed, focusing on the application of these methods.
Location: Century Boulevard Building (CBB) - 960
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Daniel Scalese
Event Link: https://avsafe.usc.edu/wconnect/CourseStatus.awp?&course=24AADVSS1
-
CS Colloquium: Andrew Ilyas - Making machine learning predictably reliable
Thu, Mar 21, 2024 @ 10:00 AM - 11:00 AM
Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Andrew Ilyas, MIT
Talk Title: Making machine learning predictably reliable
Abstract: Despite ML models' impressive performance, training and deploying them is currently a somewhat messy endeavor. But does it have to be? In this talk, I overview my work on making ML “predictably reliable”---enabling developers to know when their models will work, when they will fail, and why.To begin, we use a case study of adversarial inputs to show that human intuition can be a poor predictor of how ML models operate. Motivated by this, we present a line of work that aims to develop a precise understanding of the ML pipeline, combining statistical tools with large-scale experiments to characterize the role of each individual design choice: from how to collect data, to what dataset to train on, to what learning algorithm to use. This lecture satisfies requirements for CSCI 591: Research Colloquium
Biography: Andrew Ilyas is a PhD student in Computer Science at MIT, where he is advised by Aleksander Madry and Constantinos Daskalakis. His research aims to improve the reliability and predictability of machine learning systems. He was previously supported by an Open Philanthropy AI Fellowship.
Host: Vatsal Sharan
Location: Olin Hall of Engineering (OHE) - 136
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: CS Faculty Affairs
-
NL Seminar -The Data Provenance Initiative: A Large Scale Audit of Dataset Licensing & Attribution in AI
Thu, Mar 21, 2024 @ 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Information Sciences Institute
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Anthony Chen and Shayne Longpre, MIT
Talk Title: The Data Provenance Initiative: A Large Scale Audit of Dataset Licensing & Attribution in AI
Abstract: REMINDER: This talk will be a live presentation only, it will not be recorded. Meeting hosts only admit guests that they know to the Zoom meeting. Hence, you’re highly encouraged to use your USC account to sign into Zoom. If you’re an outside visitor, please provide your: Full Name, Title and Name of Workplace to (nlg-seminar-host(at)isi.edu) beforehand so we’ll be aware of your attendance. Also, let us know if you plan to attend in-person or virtually. More Info for NL Seminars can be found at: https://nlg.isi.edu/nl-seminar/ The arms race to train language models on vast, diverse, and inconsistently documented datasets has raised pressing concerns about the legal and ethical risks for practitioners. To remedy these practices threatening data transparency and understanding, we introduce the Data Provenance Initiative, a multi-disciplinary effort between legal and machine learning experts to systematically audit and trace 1800+ text datasets. We develop tools and standards to trace the lineage of these datasets, from their source, creators, series of license conditions, properties, and subsequent use. Our landscape analysis highlights the sharp divides in composition and focus of commercially open vs closed datasets, with closed datasets monopolizing important categories: lower resource languages, more creative tasks, richer topic variety, newer and more synthetic training data.
Biography: Bio 1:Anthony Chen is an engineer at Google DeepMind doing research on factuality and long-context language models. He received his PhD from UC Irvine last year where he focused on generative evaluation and factuality in language models. Bio 2: Shayne Longpre is a PhD candidate at MIT with a focus on data-centric AI, language models, and their societal impact. If speakers approve to be recorded for this NL Seminar talk, it will be posted on our USC/ISI YouTube page within 1-2 business days: https://www.youtube.com/user/USCISI. Subscribe here to learn more about upcoming seminars: https://www.isi.edu/events/
Host: Jon May and Justin Cho
More Info: https://nlg.isi.edu/nl-seminar/
Webcast: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=np9HeJN6miwLocation: Information Science Institute (ISI) - Virtual and ISI-Conf Rm#689
WebCast Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=np9HeJN6miw
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Pete Zamar
Event Link: https://nlg.isi.edu/nl-seminar/
-
Virtual Trojan Talk with Enterprise Mobility
Thu, Mar 21, 2024 @ 12:00 PM - 01:00 PM
Viterbi School of Engineering Career Connections
Workshops & Infosessions
Trojans, come learn about Enterprise Mobility and the amazing career opportunities we have offer. You’ll learn about the origins of the company, our founding values, philanthropy and our award winning business management trainee program.
This information session will take place on Thursday, March 21st at 12pm (PST) via Zoom.
RSVP in connectSC events by clicking the “Attend” button and through the employer link:
Please register for the event HERE
If you have any questions, please email me at karen.gerstenacker@em.comLocation: Virtual Event
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: RTH 218 Viterbi Career Connections
Event Link: http://tinyurl.com/yu7uv3az
-
USC SleepHuB Special Seminar
Thu, Mar 21, 2024 @ 12:00 PM - 01:00 PM
Alfred E. Mann Department of Biomedical Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Rebecca Spencer, Ph.D., Professor of Psychological and Brain Sciences and Director of the Sleep Lab Core Facility -University of Massachusetts at Amherst
Talk Title: Cognitive benefits of sleep in spite of sleep loss in older adults
Abstract: Sleep benefits memory consolidation in young adults. Evidence suggests that this benefit reflects the active reorganization of memories, moving them from short-term hippocampal storage which is susceptible to interference to long-term more stable storage in the neocortex. Synchronized oscillations in the hippocampus and neocortex during slow wave sleep underlie this memory stabilization. Older adults have reduced slow wave sleep and yet, in many cases, sleep-dependent memory consolidation is preserved. It is important to understand this resilience as it may speak to ways to prevent or intervene in age-related memory loss. In my talk, I will present studies demonstrating the benefits of sleep on memories in older adults as well as the limitations of this process. I will also present some evidence of possible mechanisms supporting memory consolidation in the face of reduced slow wave sleep with aging. These studies hold relevance for those studying aging from a clinical and cognitive perspective.
Biography: Rebecca Spencer, Ph.D., is Professor of Psychological and Brain Sciences and Director of the Sleep Lab Core Facility in the Institute of Applied Life Sciences at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Her research focuses on the role of sleep in cognition and brain changes, specifically lifespan changes in sleep-dependent cognitive processing. In young children, she is interested in how the high levels of sleep during development relate to the massive amount of learning and brain development at this age. In old adults, she studies how age-related changes in sleep contribute to changes in memory and emotion processing. After graduating from Purdue with a PhD in neuroscience in 2002, she went to UC Berkeley where she was a postdoctoral fellow and research scientist in the Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute until 2008. She was the recipient of a NIH Pathways to Independence Award (K99/R00). Her work is currently funded by 3 NIH R01 awards and an NSF grant. She chairs the Associated Professional Sleep Societies (APSS) Program Committee.
Host: Dr. Michael Khoo
Location: Ethel Percy Andrus Gerontology Center (GER) - 224
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Carla Stanard
-
PhD Thesis Defense - Kushal Chawla
Thu, Mar 21, 2024 @ 01:30 PM - 03:30 PM
Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science
University Calendar
PhD Defense - Kushal Chawla
Title: Computational Foundations for Mixed-Motive Human-Machine Dialogue
Committee Members: Gale Lucas (Chair), Jonathan Gratch, Jonathan May, Peter Kim, Maja Mataric
Abstract: Success in a mixed-motive interaction demands a balance between self-serving and other-serving behaviors. For instance, in a typical negotiation, a player must balance maximizing their own goals with the goals of their partner so as to come to an agreement. If the player asks for too much, this can push the partner to walk away without an agreement, hence, hurting the outcomes for all the parties involved. Such interactions are ubiquitous in everyday life, from deciding who performs household chores to customer support and high-stakes business deals. Consequently, AI tools capable of comprehending and participating in such mixed-motive or other social influence interactions (such as argumentation or therapy) find broad applications in pedagogy and conversational AI.
In this thesis, we present our foundational work for enabling mixed-motive human-machine dialogue. I will discuss our progress in three key areas: 1) The design of a novel task and dataset of grounded human-human negotiations that has fueled our investigations into the impact of emotion expression and linguistic strategies, 2) Techniques for mixed motive dialogue systems that learn to strike a balance between self and partner interests, and 3) Promoting a research community for dedicated efforts and discussion in this area.
https://usc.zoom.us/j/96411089883?pwd=WDNuMjF1NDNTTXV5cDdGaWJzOG9Gdz09Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 110
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: CS Events
Event Link: https://usc.zoom.us/j/96411089883?pwd=WDNuMjF1NDNTTXV5cDdGaWJzOG9Gdz09
-
ECE-EP seminar - Saransh Sharma, Thursday, March 21st at 2pm in EEB 248
Thu, Mar 21, 2024 @ 02:00 PM - 03:30 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Saransh Sharma, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Talk Title: Miniaturized Biomedical Devices for Navigation, Sensing and Stimulation
Series: ECE-EP Seminar
Abstract: Medical electronic devices are an integral part of the healthcare system today and are used in a variety of applications around us. The design of such devices has several stringent requirements, the key being miniaturization, low-power operation, and wireless functionality. In this talk, I will present CMOS-based miniaturized, low-power and wireless biomedical devices in three broad domains: (a) in-vivo navigation and tracking, (b) in-vivo sensing of biomarkers and physiological signals, and (c) in-vivo stimulation and drug delivery. For the first part, I will talk about ingestible and implantable devices that can be used to achieve sub-mm tracking accuracy in 3D and in real time inside the human body, which is very useful for localizing devices in the GI tract, during precision surgeries and minimally invasive procedures. In the second part, I will present the design of a novel on-chip 3D magnetic sensor that is highly miniaturized and low- power, thus making it suitable for many biomedical applications. In the last part, I will briefly talk about my recent work on a wearable device for multi-modal sensing from sweat, followed by ongoing work on devices for stimulation and drug-delivery. I will end the talk with a glimpse of my future research direction.
Biography: Saransh Sharma received the B.Tech. degree in Electronics and Electrical Communication Engineering from IIT Kharagpur, India, in 2017 and the M.S. and Ph.D. degree in Electrical Engineering from Caltech, Pasadena, CA, USA, in 2018 and 2023 respectively. He is currently a post- doctoral scholar at MIT, Cambridge, MA, USA. His research is on integrated circuits and systems design, with special emphasis on low-power biomedical applications. He was a recipient of the Demetriades-Tsafka-Kokkalis award for best PhD thesis at Caltech in biotechnology and related fields, the Jakob van Zyl Predoctoral Research award at Caltech, Lewis Winner Award for Outstanding Paper at ISSCC 2024, Charles Lee Powell Fellowship at Caltech, and Excellence in Mentorship award at Caltech for mentoring undergraduate and graduate research students.
Host: ECE-EP
Webcast: WldndTF6ZGZPbHFJUT09More Information: Saransh Sharma Seminar Announcement.pdf
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 248
WebCast Link: WldndTF6ZGZPbHFJUT09
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Marilyn Poplawski
-
PhD Dissertation Defense - Arvin Hekmati
Thu, Mar 21, 2024 @ 02:30 PM - 04:30 PM
Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science
University Calendar
PhD Dissertation Defense - Arvin Hekmati
Committee: Prof. Bhaskar Krishnamachari (Chair), Prof. Cauligi Raghavendra, and Prof. Aiichiro Nakano
Title: AI-Enabled DDoS Attack Detection in IoT Systems
Abstract:
"In this thesis, we develop AI-enabled mechanisms for detecting Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks in Internet of Things (IoT) systems. We introduce a novel, tunable DDoS attack model that emulates benign IoT device behavior using a truncated Cauchy distribution. We investigate these futuristic DDoS attacks that use large numbers of IoT devices and camouflage their attack by having each node transmit at a volume typical of benign traffic. We propose innovative correlation-aware, learning-based frameworks that leverage IoT node correlation data for enhanced detection accuracy. We extensively analyze the proposed architectures by evaluating five different neural network models trained on a dataset derived from a 4060-node real-world IoT system. We observe that long short-term memory (LSTM) and a transformer-based model, in conjunction with the architectures that use correlation information of the IoT nodes, provide higher detection performance than the other models and architectures, especially when the attacker camouflages itself by following benign traffic distribution on each IoT node. We evaluated our findings through practical implementation on a Raspberry Pi-based testbed. In order to address the challenge of leveraging massive IoT device arrays for DDoS attacks, we introduce heuristic solutions for selective correlation information sharing among IoT devices. To overcome the challenge of fixed input limitations in conventional machine learning, we propose a model based on the Graph Convolutional Network (GCN) to manage incomplete data in IoT devices caused by network losses. We introduce various IoT device graph topologies, including Network, Peer-to-Peer, and Hybrid topologies with scenarios of both directed and undirected edges. Our simulations reveal that the Hybrid topology, employing correlation-based peer-to-peer undirected edges, achieves the highest detection performance with at most 2% drop in the performance despite a 50% network connection loss, highlighting the proposed GCN-based model's effectiveness in detecting DDoS attacks under lossy network conditions. Finally, we explore the application of Large Language Models (LLMs) for detecting DDoS attacks and explaining the detection rationale, demonstrating the potential of fine-tuning and few-shot prompt engineering methods to achieve high accuracy and provide insightful detection reasoning."Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 132
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Ellecia Williams
Event Link: https://usc.zoom.us/j/4677088430
-
Boost Your Interview - Presented by Viterbi Alumni Lorenzo Laxamana
Thu, Mar 21, 2024 @ 06:00 PM - 07:30 PM
Viterbi School of Engineering Career Connections
Workshops & Infosessions
Date: Thursday, March 21st
Time: 6-7:30 pm
Location: RTH 211
RSVP Required - Pizza will be served!
This workshop is intended to give aspiring engineering professionals a bit of insight on the interview process and everything adjacent; We’ll also go over some tips and tricks you can use to boost your presence in an interview.
In this workshop, we’ll cover topics like: warm-up, body language, scheduling tactics, resume narrative, vocal exercises, post-interview insight, etc!This workshop’s inspiration pulls from a myriad of both personal experiences from being an alum of USC’s AME department, Toastmasters, winter sliding sports, a passion for car review writing, etc
About Lorenzo: View him on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lorenzolaxamana/
-He graduated from Viterbi with a BS in Mechanical Engineering in 2020
-He is a Software Systems Engineer at Supernal
-He worked previously as a systems engineer at RaytheonLocation: Ronald Tutor Hall of Engineering (RTH) - 211
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: RTH 218 Viterbi Career Connections
