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Events for March 24, 2016
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PhD Defense - Leandro Marcolino
Thu, Mar 24, 2016 @ 10:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science
University Calendar
Title: Three Fundamental Pillars of Decision-Centered Teamwork
Location: RTH 526
Date: March 24th
Time: 10am.
Phd Candidate: Leandro Marcolino
Committee members:
Prof. Milind Tambe (Chair)
Prof. Gaurav Sukhatme
Prof. William Swartout
Prof. Craig Knoblock
Prof. Nicholas Weller
Abstract:
This thesis introduces a novel paradigm in artificial intelligence: decision-centered teamwork. Decision-centered teamwork is the analysis of agent teams that iteratively take joint decisions into solving complex problems. Although teams of agents have been used to take decisions in many important domains, such as: machine learning, crowdsourcing, forecasting systems, and even board games; a study of a general framework for decision-centered teamwork has never been presented in the literature before.
I divide decision-centered teamwork in three fundamental challenges: (i) Agent Selection, which consists of selecting a set of agents from an exponential universe of possible teams; (ii) Aggregation of Opinions, which consists of designing methods to aggregate the opinions of different agents into taking joint team decisions; (iii) Team Assessment, which consists of designing methods to identify whether a team is failing, allowing a "coordinator" to take remedial procedures.
In this thesis, I handle all these challenges. For Agent Selection, I introduce novel models of diversity for teams of voting agents. My models rigorously show that teams made of the best agents are not necessarily optimal, and also clarify in which situations diverse teams should be preferred. In particular, I show that diverse teams get stronger as the number of actions increases, by analyzing how the agents' probability distribution function over actions changes. This has never been presented before in the ensemble systems literature. I also show that diverse teams have a great applicability for design problems, where the objective is to maximize the number of optimal solutions for human selection, combining for the first time social choice with number theory. All of these theoretical models and predictions are verified in real systems, such as Computer Go and architectural design. In particular, for architectural design I optimize the design of buildings with agent teams not only for cost and project requirements, but also for energy-efficiency, being thus an essential domain for sustainability.
Concerning Aggregation of Opinions, I evaluate classical ranked voting rules from social choice in Computer Go, only to discover that plurality leads to the best results. This happens because real agents tend to have very noisy rankings. Hence, I create a ranking by sampling extraction technique, leading to significantly better results with the Borda voting rule. A similar study is also performed in the social networks domain, in the context of influence maximization. Additionally, I study a novel problem in social networks: I assume only a subgraph of the network is initially known, and we must spread influence and learn the graph simultaneously. I analyze a linear combination of two greedy algorithms, outperforming both of them. This domain has a great potential for health, as I run experiments in four real-life social networks from the homeless population of Los Angeles, aiming at spreading HIV prevention information.
Finally, with regards to Team Assessment, I develop a domain independent team assessment methodology for teams of voting agents. My method is within a machine learning framework, and learns a prediction model over the voting patterns of a team, instead of learning over the possible states of the problem. The methodology is tested and verified in Computer Go and Ensemble Learning.
Location: Ronald Tutor Hall of Engineering (RTH) - 526
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Lizsl De Leon
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Efficient Redundancy Techniques to Reduce Delay in Cloud Systems
Thu, Mar 24, 2016 @ 10:30 AM - 11:30 AM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Gauri Joshi, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Talk Title: Efficient Redundancy Techniques to Reduce Delay in Cloud Systems
Abstract: Ensuring fast and seamless service to users is critical for today's cloud services. However, guaranteeing fast response can be challenging due to random service delays that are common in today's data centers. In this talk I explore the use the redundancy to combat such service variability. For example, replicating a computing task at multiple servers and then waiting for the earliest copy saves service time. But the redundant tasks can cost more computing resources and also delay subsequent tasks. I present a queuing-theoretic framework to answer fundamental questions such as:
1) How many replicas to launch?
2) Which queues to join?
3) When to issue and cancel the replicas?
This framework reveals surprising regimes where replication reduces both delay as well as resource cost. The task replication idea can also be generalized to analyze latency in content download from erasure coded storage. More broadly, this work lays the theoretical foundation for studying queues with redundancy, uncovering many interesting future directions in cloud infrastructure, crowdsourcing and beyond.
Biography: Gauri Joshi is a Ph.D candidate at MIT EECS where she completed an S.M. in 2012. Her research interests include probabilistic modeling, coding theory and statistical inference. Before coming to MIT, she completed a B.Tech and M. Tech in Electrical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Bombay in 2010. She has held summer internships at Google, Bell Labs and Qualcomm. Gauri's awards and honors include the Best Thesis Prize in Computer science at MIT (2012), Institute Gold Medal of IIT Bombay (2010), Claude Shannon Research Assistantship (2015-16), and Schlumberger Faculty for the Future fellowship (2011-2015).
Host: Viktor Prasanna
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 248
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Suzanne Wong
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CS Colloquium: Joseph Lim (MIT) - Toward Visual Understanding of the Physical World for Interaction
Thu, Mar 24, 2016 @ 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Joseph Lim, MIT
Talk Title: Toward Visual Understanding of the Physical World for Interaction
Series: CS Colloquium
Abstract: This lecture satisfies requirements for CSCI 591: Computer Science Research Colloquium
Recently, the computer vision community has made impressive progress on object recognition with deep learning approaches. However, for any visual system to interact with objects, it needs to understand much more than simply recognizing where the objects are. The goal of my research is to explore and solve physical understanding tasks for interaction -- finding an object's pose in 3D, interpreting its physical interactions, and understanding its various states and transformations. Unfortunately, obtaining extensive annotated data for such tasks is often intractable, yet required by recent popular learning techniques.
In this talk, I take a step away from expensive, manually labeled datasets. Instead, I develop learning algorithms that are supervised through physical constraints combined with structured priors. I will first talk about how to build learning algorithms, including a deep learning framework (e.g., convolutional neural networks), that can utilize geometric information from 3D CAD models in combination with real-world statistics from photographs. Then, I will show how to use differentiable physics simulators to learn object properties simply by watching videos.
Biography: Joseph Lim is a postdoctoral researcher at Stanford University. He received a PhD in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he was advised by Professor Antonio Torralba. His research interests are in computer vision and machine learning. He is particularly interested in deep learning, structure learning, and multi-domain data. Joseph graduated with BA in Computer Science from UC Berkeley, where he worked under Professor Jitendra Malik.
Host: CS Department
Location: Olin Hall of Engineering (OHE) - 136
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Assistant to CS chair
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AI Seminar
Thu, Mar 24, 2016 @ 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Information Sciences Institute
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Johan Bollen, Univeristy of Indiana
Talk Title: Social factors in the quantification of online happiness
Abstract: More than 1/7th of the worlds population is actively using social media to establish and maintain social relations across linguistics, geographic, and economic boundaries. The introduction of social media has however had contradictory effects. Whereas as a social species we require social relations for our well-being, recent results indicate that widespread social media use leads to increased feelings of dissatisfaction and reduced happiness. The key to this paradox may lie in the unequal distribution of social relations in social networks and their interaction with collective and individual subjective well-being. In this talk I will highlight two results of our investigations of how subjective well-being interacts with, and is shaped by, the structural properties of large-scale social networks. Our research provides a framework for understanding how online social networking may have contradictory effects on collective happiness and well-being, and how to mitigate these effects
Biography: Johan Bollen is associate professor at the Indiana University School of Informatics and Computing. He was formerly a staff scientist at the Los Alamos National Laboratory and an Assistant Professor at the Department of Computer Science of Old Dominion University. He obtained his PhD in Experimental Psychology from the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB) in 2001. He has published more than 75 articles on computational social science, social media analytics, informetrics, and digital libraries. His research has been funded by the NSF, IARPA, and Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Johan lives inBloomington, Indiana with his wife and daughter. In his free time he enjoys P90x and DJing in the local Bloomington clubs as DJ Angst.
Host: Emilio Ferrara
Location: 11th floor large conference room
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Kary LAU
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The Business of Oil and Gas
Thu, Mar 24, 2016 @ 01:00 PM - 02:00 PM
Mork Family Department of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Mr. Adel Heiba,
Talk Title: Real Options in Shale Plays: Opportunities for Data Science
Series: USC Energy Institute Seminar Series
Host: USC Energy Institute
Location: Ronald Tutor Hall of Engineering (RTH) - 324
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Juli Legat
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Astani Civil and Environmental Engineering Seminar
Thu, Mar 24, 2016 @ 02:00 PM - 03:00 PM
Sonny Astani Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Dr. Roland Cusick, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Talk Title: Elucidating the potential of capacitive energy storage technologies for brackish water desalination
Abstract: See attachment
Host: Dr. Adam Smith
More Information: Cusick Announcement.pdf
Location: Thomas & Dorothy Leavey Library (LVL) - 17
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Evangeline Reyes
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CS Colloquium: Jason Polakis (Columbia U.) -Protecting Users in the Age of the Social Web
Thu, Mar 24, 2016 @ 04:00 PM - 05:00 PM
Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Jason Polakis, Columbia University
Talk Title: Protecting Users in the Age of the Social Web
Series: CS Colloquium
Abstract: This lecture satisfies requirements for CSCI 591: Computer Science Research Colloquium
In this talk I will focus on my research efforts to better understand and protect against such loss. I will start with a focused review on the importance of online privacy, and highlight the privacy risks of location proximity, which has been adopted by major web services and mobile apps. This work demonstrated novel threats that can neutralize existing countermeasures used by the industry and pinpoint a user's location with high accuracy within seconds. To protect users, I developed a practical defense in the form of privacy-preserving proximity that obfuscates the user's location, which has been adopted by Facebook and Foursquare. I will demonstrate how user privacy also affects security mechanisms, and present my analysis of the threat surface of Facebook's social authentication system. I will then present a novel social authentication system that is robust against advanced targeted attacks and prevents adversaries from compromising user accounts, and conclude by sharing my thoughts for future directions.
This lecture will be available to stream HERE.
Biography: Jason Polakis is a postdoctoral research scientist at Columbia University. He earned his PhD in 2014 from the Computer Science Department of the University of Crete, Greece, where he was supported by the Foundation of Research and Technology Hellas (FORTH). He is broadly interested in identifying the security and privacy limitations of Internet technologies, designing robust defenses and privacy-preserving techniques, and enhancing our understanding of the online ecosystem and its threats. His research has revealed significant flaws in popular services, and major vendors such as Google, Facebook and Foursquare have deployed his proposed defenses. His work has been published in top tier security conferences (Security and Privacy, CCS, and NDSS) as well as other top tier computer science conferences (WWW).
Host: CS Department
More Info: https://bluejeans.com/313531059
Location: Henry Salvatori Computer Science Center (SAL) - 101
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Assistant to CS chair
Event Link: https://bluejeans.com/313531059
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The Claro Group Info Session
Thu, Mar 24, 2016 @ 05:30 PM - 06:30 PM
Viterbi School of Engineering Student Organizations
Workshops & Infosessions
The Claro Group is a financial advisory and management consulting firm. Come out to network with USC Alumni and hear about internship/job opportunities with The Claro Group! Dress Casually. Resume optional.
Location: Von Kleinsmid Center For International & Public Affairs (VKC) - 158
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: USC Institute of Industrial Engineers
