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• Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars (48)
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• Student Activity (4)

Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Events for March

• Mar

  01

  BME 533 Seminar Series (NO CLASS, SPRING BREAK)

  Sun, Mar 01, 2009

  Alfred E. Mann Department of Biomedical Engineering

  Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars

  
  

  Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

  Contact: Mischalgrace Diasanta

  

• Mar

  02

  Helicopter Accident Investigation - Mar.2-6, 2009

  Mon, Mar 02, 2009

  Aviation Safety and Security Program

  Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars

  
  

  HAI 09-2
  For more information and to register for Aviation Safety and Security Program courses, please visit http://viterbi.usc.edu/aviation.

  Audiences: Registered Audiences Only

  Contact: Viterbi Professional Programs

  

• Mar

  02

  Degrees of Freedom for Mutually Interfering Broadcast Channels

  Mon, Mar 02, 2009 @ 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM

  Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

  Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars

  
  

  Inkyu Lee,
  Korea UniversityAbstract: In this talk, we present an expression of spatial degrees of
  freedom (DOF) for two mutually interfering broadcast channels (IFBC) as
  a function of arbitrary numbers of transmit antennas and users. The
  lower bound on the DOF is obtained by showing that the zero-forcing
  solution suffices to achieve all the DOF. Also, the upper bound which
  coincides with the lower bound is shown using Jafar's earlier work. From
  the derived result, we observe that disabling receive cooperation of the
  MIMO interference channel causes the DOF loss. Additionally, we propose
  a linear precoding scheme for the IFBC by extending one designed for
  broadcast channels with an aim of maximizing the sum rate performance.
  We utilize the fact that the precoding matrices in stationary point
  always satisfy the zero-gradient condition. Our result is confirmed
  through numerical simulations on the sum rate performance of the
  proposed precoding technique.Biography: Inkyu Lee is currently a visiting scholar at USC. Prof. Lee
  received the B.S. degree (Hon.) in control and instrumentation
  engineering from Seoul National University, Seoul, Korea in 1990, and
  the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering from Stanford
  University in 1992 and 1995, respectively. From 1995 to 2001, he was a
  Member of Technical Staff at Bell Laboratories, Lucent Technologies,
  where he studied high-speed wireless system design. He later worked for
  Agere Systems (formerly the Microelectronics Group of Lucent
  Technologies), Murray Hill, NJ, as a Distinguished Member of Technical
  Staff from 2001 to 2002. In September 2002, he joined the faculty of
  Korea University, Seoul, Korea, where he is currently a Professor in the
  School of Electrical Engineering. His research interests include digital
  communications, signal processing, and coding techniques applied to
  wireless systems with an emphasis on MIMO-OFDM. Dr. Lee currently serves
  as an Associate Editor for the IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON COMMUNICATIONS and
  the IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON WIRELESS COMMUNICATIONS. Also, he has been a
  Chief Guest Editor for the IEEE JOURNAL ON SELECTED AREAS IN
  COMMUNICATIONS (Special Issue on 4G Wireless Systems).Host: Giuseppe Caire, caire@usc.edu, EEB 528, x07326

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

  Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

  Contact: Gerrielyn Ramos

  

• Mar

  02

  BME 533 Seminar Series: NO SEMINAR

  Mon, Mar 02, 2009 @ 12:30 PM - 01:50 PM

  Alfred E. Mann Department of Biomedical Engineering

  Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars

  
  

  NO SEMINAR

  Location: Olin Hall of Engineering (OHE) - 132

  Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

  Contact: Mischalgrace Diasanta

  

• Mar

  03

  The Role of Feedback in Communication

  Tue, Mar 03, 2009 @ 01:30 PM - 02:30 PM

  Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

  Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars

  
  

  Speaker: Young-Han Kim,
  UC San DiegoAbstract: Many common communication situations are over inherently two-way channels, such as telephone systems, digital subscriber lines (DSL), cellular networks, and the Internet. In fact, even ``point-to-point'' systems, where the end goal is to transfer information in one direction, often give rise to two-way communication scenarios due to the presence of feedback. In such systems, one can receive feedback from the other end of the channel, which can be used to improve the quality of communication. Although feedback is present in many communication systems, and is being used in certain primitive forms as in channel estimation and automatic repeat request (ARQ), the theory behind its use is far from complete.In this talk, we focus on two recent findings in information theory to discuss the role of feedback in communication networks. Our first result characterizes the feedback capacity of nonwhite Gaussian channels, answering a long-standing open problem studied by many researchers, and shows how dramatic performance improvements can be achieved with optimal use of feedback. Our second result proposes an efficient and robust coding method for more realistic systems with noisy feedback. Although this coding method is still at a conceptual level, it brings up a new paradigm of cross-layer design.Based on joint work with Tsachy Weissman and Amos Lapidoth.Biography: Young-Han Kim is an assistant professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of California, San Diego. Professor Kim's research primarily focuses on network information theory and the role of feedback in communication networks.
  More broadly, he is interested in statistical signal processing and information theory, with applications in communication, control, computation, networking, data compression, and learning.Professor Kim received his B.S. degree with honors in Electrical Engineering from Seoul National University, in 1996, where he was a recipient of the General Electric Foundation Scholarship. After a three-and-half-year stint as a software architect at Tong Yang Systems, Seoul, Korea, working on several industry projects such as developing the communication infrastructure for then newly opening Incheon International Airport, he resumed his graduate studies at Stanford University, and received his Ph.D. degree in Electrical Engineering (M.S. degrees in Statistics and in Electrical Engineering) in 2006. Professor Kim is a recipient of the 2008 NSF Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Award. Host: Urbashi Mitra, ubli@usc.edu, EEB 540, x04667
  

  Location: Frank R. Seaver Science Center (SSC) - 319

  Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

  Contact: Gerrielyn Ramos

  

• Mar

  03

  Third-Generation Conversational Interfaces

  Tue, Mar 03, 2009 @ 02:00 PM - 04:00 PM

  Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

  Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars

  
  

  Speaker: Dr. Giuseppe RiccardiAbstract: Communicating with machines is becoming pervasive to the point we rely entirely on them to find (vital) information over the web, perform on-line (trans)actions and communicate with people speaking different languages. In the last decade we have seen tremendous research and technology advancement in the speech and text based interfaces. We are now faced with the problem of overcoming their limitations and investigate multimodal input, adaptive interfaces, communicative paradigms and tame task complexity. In this talk we discuss new research towards third-generation conversational interfaces.Bio: Prof. Riccardi received his Laurea degree in Electrical Engineering and Master in Information Technology, in 1991, from the University of Padua and CEFRIEL Research Center, respectively. From 1990-1993 he collaborated with Alcatel-Telettra Research Laboratories (Milan, Italy). In 1995 he received his Phd in Electrical Engineering from the Department of Electrical Engineering at the University of Padua, Italy. From 1993-2005, he worked first at AT&T Bell Laboratories and then AT&T Labs-Research where he worked in the Speech and Language Processing Lab. In 2005 he joined the faculty of Engineering at University of Trento (Italy) and is affiliated with the interdisciplinary Department of Information and Communication Technology and Center for Mind/Brain Sciences. He is the founder and director of the Adaptive Multimodal Information and Interfaces (AMI2) Lab.
  Prof. Riccardi's research on stochastic finite state machines for speech and language processing has been applied to a wide range of domains for task automation. He and his colleagues designed the state-of-the-art AT&T spoken language system ranked first in the 1994 DARPA ATIS evaluation. He pioneered the speech and language research in spontaneous speech for the well-known "How May I Help You?" research program which led to breakthrough speech services. His research on learning finite state automata and transducers has lead to the creation of the first large scale finite state chain decoding for machine translation (Anuvaad).
  Prof. Riccardi has co-authored more than 80 papers and 25 patents in the field of speech processing, speech recognition, understanding and machine translation. His current research interests are language modeling and acquisition, language understanding, spoken/multimodal dialog, affective interfaces, machine learning and machine translation. Prof. Riccardi has received many national and international awards and more recently the Marie Curie Research Excellence grant by the European Commission and 2009 IEEE SPS Best Paper Award. Host: Professor Shrikanth Narayanan
  

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

  Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

  Contact: Mary Francis

  

• Mar

  03

  CS Colloquium

  Tue, Mar 03, 2009 @ 04:00 PM

  Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science

  Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars

  
  

  Collection, Cataloging, Preservation, Access and Education using Video testimonies of Holocaust and other genocide survivors at the USC Shoah Foundation Institute
  Speaker: Sam Gustman, USC Shoah Foundation
  Host: Prof. Ellis HorowitzAbstract:
  The USC Shoah Foundation Institute was originally a non-profit founded by Steven Spielberg in 1994 called the Shoah Foundation. In 2006, the archives and staff became a part of USC. The technology for collecting, cataloging, indexing, digitally preserving, accessing and educating at the Institute will be discussed. This includes methodology for making over 100,000 hours of video available online and the infrastructure necessary to preserve the testimonies.Biography:
  Sam Gustman has been Chief Technology Officer of the Shoah Foundation since 1994 and was responsible for overseeing the 2006 move of the Foundation's archives to USC. As CTO of the USC Shoah Foundation Institute, Gustman ensures the archive's accessibility for academic and research communities at USC and around the world. He is responsible for the operation, preservation, and cataloging of the Institute's 105,000 hours of video testimony, the 8 petabyte digital video preservation effort, and 135-terabyte digital library effort, one of the largest public video databases in the world. His office offers technical support for universities and organizations that subscribe to the Institute's Visual History Archive. Gustman has sixteen years of leadership experience in information technology, and is the inventor of 11 patents on digital library technology for the USC Shoah Foundation Institute. He has also been the primary investigator on National Science Foundation research projects with a cumulative funding total of more than $8 million. Gustman has a bachelor of science in engineering, with a focus in computer engineering, from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.

  Location: Seaver Science Library (SSL) - 150

  Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

  Contact: CS Colloquia

  

• Mar

  04

  Organic Computing - a Generic Approach to Controlled Self-organization in Adaptive Systems

  Wed, Mar 04, 2009 @ 03:30 PM

  Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science

  Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars

  
  

  Speaker: Prof. Hartmut Schmeck, University of Karlsruhe
  Host: Prof. Neno MedvidovicAbstract:
  Organic Computing is a recent paradigm for the design and management of complex technical systems, addressing the need for adaptive, self-organizing systems which are capable of dealing with changing requirements and unanticipated situations in a robust and trustworthy way and which allow an external "observer" or "user" to interfere and influence the system whenever it does not show acceptable behavior by itself. Research in this area is supported by a priority program of the German Research Foundation ( www.organic-computing.de/SPP ). The talk will present the generic observer/controller architecture of Organic Computing and describe our research on organic traffic control and on smart energy systems. Furthermore, the talk will highlight the close connection to COMMputation, a newly formed focus area of research at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, emphasizing the inherent combination of communication and computation in a broad range of complex application systems.Biography:
  Hartmut Schmeck is a Full Professor of Applied Informatics at the University of Karlsruhe within the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology - KIT (Gernany). He is (co-)author of more than 110 publications on advanced algorithms and architectures, in particular on bio-inspired methods in optimization and algorithms for reconfigurable architectures. His current major research interest is on self-organization and adaptivity in complex technical systems. He is the principal investigator of research projects on information and communication technologies in energy and traffic systems. He has been program and conference chair for several international workshops and conferences, is a key member of the "Organic Computing Initiative" and coordinator of the DFG priority program SPP 1183 on "Organic Computing". At the KIT, he is the Scientific Spokesperson of the newly formed KIT-Focus Area "COMMputation" addressing the inherent combination of communication and computation that is a characteristic feature of smart application systems.

  Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

  Contact: CS Colloquia

  

• Mar

  04

  Sea Level Rise: How the Oceans Respond to a Warming World

  Wed, Mar 04, 2009 @ 03:30 PM - 04:30 PM

  Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering

  Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars

  
  

  Josh Willis Scientist Jet Propulsion Laboratory Pasadena, CA As the planet heats up, over 80 percent of the excess heat goes toward warming the oceans. In essence, the oceans are the Earth's heat capacitors, absorbing the heat from global warming and setting the time scale for climate change. As they warm, ocean waters expand, causing sea level rise. Rising ocean levels are one of the most serious and visible consequences of global warming. However, projections of future sea level rise remain very crude and have so far underestimated the actual rate of rise. To accurately project sea level rise, it is important to understand its causes. Since 2003, two new global ocean observing systems have begun to address this issue. The Argo array of profiling floats now provides nearly global observations of temperature and salinity in the upper ocean, and the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) satellites provide monthly estimates of the ocean's total mass. Using data from these and other instruments, the first attempts to explain the causes of present data sea level rise have been made. Results suggest that although warming and thermal expansion played a large role in sea level rise during the 1990s, the melting of glaciers and ice sheets is accelerating and may have become the dominate source in recent years.
  

  Location: Seaver Science Library, Rm 150

  Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

  Contact: April Mundy

  

• Mar

  05

  Wenchuan Earthquake Damage to Infrastructural Facilities

  Thu, Mar 05, 2009 @ 02:00 PM - 03:00 PM

  Sonny Astani Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering

  Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars

  
  

  Speaker: Dr. Depei Zhou,
  Chairman and Professor of Geotechnical Engineering Department, Southwest Jiaotong University, Chengdu, Sichuan, ChinaAbstract:The 5.12.2008 Wenchuan earthquake caused widespread damage to infrastructural facilities in the affected areas. Based on results of the post-earthquake emergency investigation and inspection, Professor Zhou will describe the damage to road engineering systems, retaining structures, highway bridges, and railways systems. The main focus will be on the geological hazards caused by the Wenchuan earthquake. Professor Zhou will also discuss the lessons learnt from this devastating earthquake regarding design and construction of infrastructural facilities in earthquake active areas. Moreover, the current status of reconstruction in the earthquake affected areas will be presented and the international collaboration in geotechnical earthquake engineering will be outlined. During the presentation, many slides of photos will be shown.

  Location: Kaprielian Hall (KAP) - 209

  Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

  Contact: Evangeline Reyes

  

• Mar

  05

  A Survey of Some Recent Research at the Border of Game Theory and Theoretical Computer Science

  Thu, Mar 05, 2009 @ 04:00 PM

  Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science

  Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars

  
  

  CS Distinguished Lecture
  Speaker: Prof. Anna Karlin, University of Washington
  Host: Prof. David KempeAbstract:
  The design of protocols for resource allocation and electronic commerce among parties with diverse and selfish interests has spawned a great deal of recent research at the boundary between economics, game theory and computer science.In the process, completely new areas of research have emerged such as computational economics. We need to understand the complexity of computing various equilibria. New notions such as the "price of anarchy" arise in an attempt to quantify the efficiency lost due to selfish behavior in natural games. Finally, there is "mechanism design", a fascinating subfield of game theory and microeconomics, focusing on "incentive engineering". A mechanism is an algorithm or protocol that is explicitly designed so that rational participants, motivated solely by their self-interest, will end up achieving the designer's goals.In this talk, we survey some of the research and open problems in these areas. (No background in game theory will be assumed.)Biography:
  Anna Karlin is a Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Washington. She received her Ph.D. from Stanford University and then spent 5 years as a researcher at (what was then) Digital Equipment Corporation's Systems Research Center before coming to the University of Washington. Her professional activities have included serving on the National Research Council's Computer Science and Telecommunications Board, the editorial board for SIAM Journal on Computing, the committee to award the ACM Paris Kanellakis Theory and Practice Award (including chairing that committee in 2006), and serving as Program Chair for the 1997 IEEE Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science. She has given a number of Distinguished Lectures at major universities including among others MIT, Brown, Penn and Duke.Her research is primarily in theoretical computer science: the design and analysis of algorithms, particularly probabilistic and online algorithms. Much of her work is also at the interface between theory and other areas, such as economics and game theory, data mining, operating systems, networks, and distributed systems.Outside of work, her main claim to fame is having formerly been part of "an obscure and very bad rock band of furry Palo Alto geeks" (according to the Rolling Stones) called Severe Tire Damage (or STD for short). STD was the first band to broadcast live over the Internet (back in 1993).

  Location: Seaver Science Library (SSL) - 150

  Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

  Contact: CS Colloquia

  

• Mar

  06

  W.V.T. Rusch Engineering Honors Colloquium

  Fri, Mar 06, 2009 @ 01:00 PM - 01:50 PM

  Viterbi School of Engineering Student Affairs

  Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars

  
  

  Prof. Thomas Heaton, Professor of Engineering Seismology and Director of the Earthquake Engineering Research Laboratory at the California Institute of Technology will offer a lecture entitled "Simulating Damage and Collapse of Tall Buildings in Large Earthquakes."

  Location: Olin Hall of Engineering (OHE) - 122

  Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

  Contact: Viterbi Admissions & Student Affairs

  

• Mar

  09

  Aviation Safety Management Systems - Mar.9-20, 2009

  Mon, Mar 09, 2009

  Aviation Safety and Security Program

  Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars

  
  

  ASMS 09-3
  For more information and to register for Aviation Safety and Security Program courses, please visit http://viterbi.usc.edu/aviation.

  Audiences: Registered Audiences Only

  Contact: Viterbi Professional Programs

  

• Mar

  09

  BME 533 Seminar Series

  Mon, Mar 09, 2009 @ 12:30 PM - 01:50 PM

  Alfred E. Mann Department of Biomedical Engineering

  Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars

  
  

  Shuliang Jiao, PhD, Associate Professor, Department of Ophthalmology, USC:
  "Light polarization and optical coherence tomography"

  Location: Olin Hall of Engineering (OHE) - 132

  Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

  Contact: Mischalgrace Diasanta

  

• Mar

  10

  A Framework of Test-to-Test Transformations to Improve Fault Detection Efficacy

  Tue, Mar 10, 2009 @ 04:00 PM

  Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science

  Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars

  
  

  Speaker: Prof. Sebastian Elbaum, University of Nebraska
  Host: Prof. Neno MedvidovicAbstract:
  Testing is the most common practice to assess and improve software quality. Testing is also expensive, often consuming more than fifty percent of software development costs. To reduce such costs, companies must focus their testing efforts on specific and limited types of tests. This tactic, however, sacrifices timely fault detection. To address this problem we have developed an approach to transform existing tests into new tests with complementary fault detection power and applicability. In this talk I will discuss two of such test-to-test transformations: 1) a carving transformation that partitions system tests into unit tests for developers to use earlier in the life cycle, and 2) an aggregating transformation that stitches unit tests to form integration tests that exercise untested behavior. I will conclude by presenting a vision for a framework of test representations and transformations that will enable researchers and practitioners to treat tests as data that can be easily manipulated, abstracted, and composed to create new tests with unique capabilities.Biography:
  Sebastian Elbaum is an Associate Professor at the Computer Science and Engineering Department at the University of Nebraska - Lincoln. His research aims to improve software dependability through testing, monitoring, and analysis. He is the recipient of an NSF Career Award, an IBM Innovation Award, two ACM SigSoft Distinguished Paper Awards, and an UNL Award for Excellence in Graduate Education. He served as Program Chair for the 2007 International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis, and as Program Co-Chair for the 2008 Empirical Software Engineering Symposium. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Idaho, and a Systems Engineering degree from Universidad Catolica de Cordoba, Argentina.

  Location: Seaver Science Library (SSL) - 150

  Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

  Contact: CS Colloquia

  

• Mar

  11

  Measurement, Modeling and Rendering for Realistic Computer Graphics

  Wed, Mar 11, 2009 @ 10:30 AM - 11:30 AM

  Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science

  Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars

  
  

  Speaker: Dr. Abhijeet Ghosh, ICT, USC
  Host: Prof. Shahram GhandeharizadehAbstract:
  Throughout its history, the field of computer graphics has been striving towards increased realism. Photo-realistic image synthesis has traditionally involved the development of algorithms for the simulation of physically accurate light transport in a scene. However, the quality of rendering produced by these algorithms is limited by the quality of the input scene descriptions such as materials and illumination models. With the advances within the field of digital photography over the last decade, there has been significant interest in acquiring material and illumination models from photographs. This acquisition method has led to the development of image-based modeling and rendering techniques for realistic computer graphics.In this talk, I will present a set of new techniques for efficient acquisition and modeling of reflectance properties of real world materials and human faces, as well as new algorithms for high quality rendering with acquired data. In particular, I will describe a novel high speed approach for the acquisition of bidirectional reflectance distribution functions (BRDFs) of materials by projecting basis illumination, and a technique for practical modeling and rapid measurement of layered facial reflectance using a few controlled lighting conditions. Here, I will discuss some approaches for separation of individual reflectance components and fitting measured data to appropriate reflectance and scattering models. I will also touch upon rendering techniques for such measured data. In particular, I will present some Monte Carlo strategies for efficient sampling of static as well as dynamic environmental illumination, as well techniques for efficient rendering of layered subsurface scattering.

  Location: Henry Salvatori Computer Science Center (SAL) - 222

  Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

  Contact: CS Colloquia

  

• Mar

  11

  Stochastic Network Optimization and the Theory of Network Throughput, Energy, and Delay

  Wed, Mar 11, 2009 @ 01:00 PM - 02:00 PM

  Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

  Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars

  
  

  Speaker: Michael J. Neely,
  USCAbstract: This talk has two parts:
  (i) We first summarize the landmark results in the theory of stochastic network optimization over the past two decades. This theory treats routing, scheduling, resource allocation, and flow control in general networks, including ad-hoc mobile networks with time-varying topologies and unreliable channels. We consider the history of network capacity and stability theory, as well as our more recent contributions on joint stability and performance optimization. This allows for optimization of time averages of network utilities and costs (such as throughput, fairness, energy, reliability, etc.) subject to general time average constraints. Simple techniques of backpressure, max-weight decision making, and virtual queues can be used to optimize these performance metrics to any degree of accuracy, with an explicit tradeoff in end-to-end average network delay. (ii) We then focus on the delay metric itself by treating a particular network: A multi-user wireless downlink (or uplink). We generalize the Berry-Gallager bound to this multi-user case, establishing a fundamental tradeoff between average power expenditure and average delay. Scheduling to achieve the optimal tradeoff is a problem that is notoriously complex, and the complexity quickly explodes as the number of users is increased beyond 1. Nevertheless, we overcome this complexity explosion through a novel dynamic control policy that aggressively steers drift in desired directions. The policy works with low complexity, is real-time implementable, does not require knowledge of the channel or traffic statistics, and has quick convergence for any number of users.Details of these results can be found in the following references: 1. L. Georgiadis, M. J. Neely, L. Tassiulas, "Resource Allocation and Cross-Layer Control in Wireless Networks," Foundations and Trends in Networking, Vol. 1, no. 1, pp. 1-144, 2006. http://www-rcf.usc.edu/~mjneely/pdf_papers/NOW_stochastic_nets.pdf2. M. J. Neely, "Optimal Energy and Delay Tradeoffs for Multi-User Wireless Downlinks," IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, vol. 53, no. 9, pp. 3095-3113, Sept. 2007. http://www-rcf.usc.edu/~mjneely/pdf_papers/energy-delay-it.pdfBiography: Michael J. Neely received B.S. degrees in both Electrical Engineering and Mathematics from the University of Maryland, College Park, in 1997. He then received a 3 year Department of Defense NDSEG Fellowship for graduate study at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he received an M.S. degree in EECS in 1999 and a Ph.D. in 2003. During the Summer of 2002, he worked as an intern in the Distributed Sensor Networks group at Draper Labs in Cambridge. He is currently an Assistant Professor in the Communication Sciences Institute (CSI), within the Electrical Engineering Department at the University of Southern California. His research interests are in the areas of stochastic network optimization and queueing theory, with applications to wireless, satellite, mobile ad-hoc networks, and switching systems. Michael received the NSF Career award in 2008. He is a member of Tau Beta Pi and Phi Beta Kappa.
  

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

  Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

  Contact: Gerrielyn Ramos

  

• Mar

  11

  Alternative Fuels for Commercial and Military Aviation

  Wed, Mar 11, 2009 @ 03:30 PM - 04:30 PM

  Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering

  Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars

  
  

  Marty Bradley Technical Fellow The Boeing Company Huntington Beach, CA Boeing is working with our military and commercial aviation customers to develop alternative fuels for aviation. In this presentation, Dr. Bradley will discuss a range of alternative fuel options and show why Boeing is concentrating on drop-in replacement fuels for aviation. Synthetic fuels and biofuels will be compared and evaluated for energy efficiency, environmental impact, and sustainability. The suitability of biomass feedstocks will be compared. Dr. Bradley will also discuss recent developments involving progress toward the certification of alternative fuels and recent highly successful commercial and military flight demonstrations.
  

  Location: Seaver Science Library Rm 150

  Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

  Contact: April Mundy

  

• Mar

  12

  Opportunities and Challenges in the Pursuit of Energy Savings Using Membranes for Large Scale Chemic

  Thu, Mar 12, 2009 @ 12:45 PM

  Mork Family Department of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science

  Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars

  
  

  Lyman Handy Colloquium SeriesPresentsWilliam KorosProfessor, Dept. of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, Georgia Tech, Atlanta, GA 30332Abstract:
  Purification and separation processes to provide commodities needed for a high standard of living are energy intensive, accounting for roughly 15% of global energy usage. This significant figure is invisible to most of society, since it is embedded in massive plants used to provide the products we all rely upon. Over the next three decades, global demands for commodities such as water, fuel and basic chemicals will escalate by three to four-fold beyond those in 2009. This demand growth will be fueled not only by population growth but also by a need to provide a high standard of living in emerging economies. Basing expanding commodity capacity on current technology to meet such a demand growth would require a huge increase in global energy consumption and create additional carbon dioxide environmental burdens. If such capacity expansions occur with current energy-inefficient technologies, economic barriers will impede decommissioning of these facilities, despite their environmental burdens. It is imperative, therefore, that alternative large scale separation and purification approaches be developed and implemented within the next decade to address this challenge. Membranes offer the best option for a 10X reduction in separation and purification process energy intensity. Emerging membrane technology involving crosslinked polymers, inorganic-polymer hybrids and pure inorganic or carbon materials have the potential to economically address this challenge in different applications. Practical approaches to enable this perfection and deployment will be outlined with a focus on novel materials, their manufacture and implementation in revolutionary large scale processes.
  

  Location: Olin Hall of Engineering (OHE) - 122

  Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

  Contact: Petra Pearce Sapir

  

• Mar

  12

  DLS: The Internet History and its Flexible Future

  Thu, Mar 12, 2009 @ 03:00 PM - 04:00 PM

  Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

  Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars

  
  

  Distinguished Lecturer: Dr. Leonard KleinrockAbstract:
  In this presentation we discuss the history and future of the Internet. The early work on packet switching is traced and then a brief description of the critical events in the growth of the Internet is given. We will present a vision of where the Internet is heading with a focus on the edge where user participation, flexible applications and services, and innovation are appearing. We foresee a network with extreme mobility, ubiquity, personalization, adaptivity, video addiction and surprising applications as yet unimagined.Biography:
  Dr. Leonard Kleinrock developed the mathematical theory of packet networks, the technology underpinning the Internet, while a graduate student at MIT. This was in the period 1960-1962, nearly a decade before the birth of the Internet which occurred in his laboratory when his Host computer at UCLA became the first node of the Internet in September 1969. He wrote the first paper and published the first book on the subject; he also directed the transmission of the first message ever to pass over the Internet. He was listed by the Los Angeles Times in 1999 as among the `50 People Who Most Influenced Business This Century'. He was also listed as among the 33 most influential living Americans in the December 2006 Atlantic Monthly. Kleinrock's work was further recognized when he received the 2007 National Medal of Science, the highest honor for achievement in science bestowed by the President of the United States. Leonard Kleinrock received his Ph.D. from MIT in 1963. He has served as a Professor of Computer Science at the University of California, Los Angeles since then, serving as Chairman of the department from 1991-1995. He received his BEE degree from CCNY in 1957 and his MS degree from MIT in 1959. He also received Honorary Doctorates from CCNY in 1997, from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst in 2000, from the University of Bologna in 2005, from Politecnico di Turino in 2005 and from the University of Judaism in 2007. He was the first President and Co-founder of Linkabit Corporation, the company that spawned numerous wireless spinoffs in San Diego. He is Co-founder and Chairman of Nomadix, Inc., a high-technology firm located in Southern California. He is also Founder and Chairman of TTI/Vanguard, an advanced technology forum organization based in Santa Monica, California. He has published approximately 250 papers and authored six books on a wide array of subjects including packet switching networks, packet radio networks, local area networks, broadband networks, gigabit networks, nomadic computing, performance evaluation, and peer-to-peer networks. During his tenure at UCLA, Dr. Kleinrock has supervised the research for 47 Ph.D. students and numerous M.S. students. These former students now form a core group of the world's most advanced networking experts. A number are full professors at leading universities, and many are associated with major research firms in the area of computer-communications. Dr. Kleinrock is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, an IEEE fellow, an ACM fellow, an INFORMS Fellow, an IEC fellow, a Guggenheim fellow and a founding member of the Computer Science and Telecommunications Board of the National Research Council. Among his many honors, he is the recipient of the L.M. Ericsson Prize, the NAE Charles Stark Draper Prize, the Marconi International Fellowship Award, the Okawa Prize, the IEEE Internet Millennium Award, the ORSA Lanchester Prize, the ACM SIGCOMM Award, the NEC Computer and Communcations Award, the Sigma Xi Monie A. Ferst Award, the CCNY Townsend Harris Medal, the CCNY Electrical Engineering Award, the UCLA Outstanding Faculty Member Award, the UCLA Distinguished Teaching Award, the UCLA Faculty Research Lecturer, the INFORMS Presidents Award, the ICC Prize Paper Award, the IEEE Leonard G. Abraham Prize Paper Award and the IEEE Harry M. Goode Award.Lecture: 3:00-4:00PM (SAL 101)
  Reception: 4:00-5:00PM (SAL lobby/courtyard)
  

  Location: Henry Salvatori Computer Science Center (SAL) - Auditorium (-101)

  Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

  Contact: Estela Lopez

  

• Mar

  13

  Joint Source-Channel Coding at the Application Layer

  Fri, Mar 13, 2009 @ 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM

  Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

  Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars

  
  

  Speaker: Ozgun Bursalioglu Yilmaz
  PhD. StudentAbstract: The multicasting of an independent and identically distributed
  Gaussian source over a binary erasure broadcast channel is considered.
  This model applies to a one-to-many transmission scenario in which some
  mechanism at the physical layer delivers information packets with losses
  represented by erasures, and users are subject to different erasure
  probabilities. The reconstruction signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) region
  achieved by concatenating a multi-resolution source code with a
  broadcast channel code is characterized and four convex optimization
  problems corresponding to different performance criteria are solved.
  Each problem defines a particular operating point on the dominant face
  of the SNR region. Layered joint source-channel codes are constructed
  based on the concatenation of embedded scalar quantizers with binary
  raptor encoders. The proposed schemes are shown to operate very close to
  the theoretical optimum.Biography: Ozgun Bursalioglu Yilmaz is a PhD. student working with Prof.
  Caire at Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical Engineering, University of
  Southern California (USC) where she was honored with Dean's Graduate
  Fellowship and USC Annenberg Graduate Fellowship Awards. Previously she
  received M.S. and B.S. degrees from University of California, Riverside
  (2006) and Middle East Technical University (METU), Ankara, Turkey
  (2004), respectively. Her senior design project was selected for
  "Innovative and Robust Design Award" by METU Electrical Engineering
  Department. She received best student paper award with her co-authors at
  International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing,
  Toulouse, France, May 2006.Host: Giuseppe Caire, caire@usc.edu, EEB 528, x07326

  Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 539

  Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

  Contact: Gerrielyn Ramos

  

• Mar

  13

  W.V.T. Rusch Engineering Honors Colloquium: Power to Change the World

  Fri, Mar 13, 2009 @ 01:00 PM - 01:50 PM

  Viterbi School of Engineering Student Affairs

  Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars

  
  

  Dr. Suzanne Klein of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory offers a lecture entitled Power to Change the World: Alternative Energy and the Rise of the Solar City.

  Location: Olin Hall of Engineering (OHE) - 122

  Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

  Contact: Viterbi Admissions & Student Affairs

  

• Mar

  13

  Integrated Sys Seminar-Challenges of 10Gb/s Integrated Optoelec. Transceivers (Dr. Analui, Luxtera)

  Fri, Mar 13, 2009 @ 02:00 PM - 03:00 PM

  Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

  Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars

  
  

  Speaker - Dr. Behnam Analui (Luxtera)

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

  Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

  Contact: Hossein Hashemi

  

• Mar

  16

  BME 533 Seminar Series: NO CLASS, SPRING BREAK

  Mon, Mar 16, 2009 @ 12:30 PM - 01:50 PM

  Alfred E. Mann Department of Biomedical Engineering

  Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars

  
  

  Location: Olin Hall of Engineering (OHE) - 132

  Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

  Contact: Mischalgrace Diasanta

  

• Mar

  23

  Human Factors In Aviation Safety - Mar.23-27, 2009

  Mon, Mar 23, 2009

  Aviation Safety and Security Program

  Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars

  
  

  HFH 09-4
  For more information and to register for Aviation Safety and Security Program courses, please visit http://viterbi.usc.edu/aviation.

  Audiences: Registered Audiences Only

  Contact: Viterbi Professional Programs

  

• Mar

  23

  BME 533 Seminar Series

  Mon, Mar 23, 2009 @ 12:30 PM - 01:50 PM

  Alfred E. Mann Department of Biomedical Engineering

  Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars

  
  

  Lilianne Mujica-Parodi, PhD, Asst Professor, Depts of Biomedical Engineering and Psychiatry, State University of New York at Stony Brook:"Heart to Brain: Adapting Control Systems Modeling from Autonomic to Limbic Dysregulation"

  Location: Olin Hall of Engineering (OHE) - 132

  Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

  Contact: Mischalgrace Diasanta

  

• Mar

  24

  An Introduction to NetApp

  Tue, Mar 24, 2009 @ 03:30 PM - 04:30 PM

  Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science

  Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars

  
  

  Speaker: Steven Kleiman, Network Appliance
  Host: Prof. Shahram GhandeharizadehAbstract:
  NetApp is a $3B company you may not a have heard of, yet it stores the data of many of the world's largest companies. NetApp has a different approach to data storage. This talk will discuss some of these innovative approaches, and why data storage is such an interesting problem.Biography:
  Steve Kleiman is currently Senior Vice President and Chief Scientist at Network Appliance and is responsible for setting future technology directions for the company. He has been involved with the design and development of file systems, UNIX and workstation architecture since 1977; first at Bell Telephone Laboratories, where he helped develop the first x86 based UNIX product, and then at Sun Microsystems Inc. At Sun he was a Distinguished Engineer and chief architect of clustered UNIX systems. Previously, as Chief Technologist for Sun's Interactive Services Group, he designed Sun's first video server product line. He was also the lead architect for multithreading and multiprocessing in Solaris and is a member of the POSIX Pthreads committee. He was the developer of the Vnodes file system interface and was a member of the original NFS development team at Sun. He was also the project leader of the original port of SunOS to SPARC. He received an M.S. in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University in 1978 and a B.S. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from M.I.T in 1977. He is the author or co-author of 17 conference or journal papers, 40 patents, and 1 book.

  Location: Olin Hall of Engineering (OHE) - 122

  Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

  Contact: CS Colloquia

  

• Mar

  24

  Quality Assurance Techniques for Web Applications

  Tue, Mar 24, 2009 @ 04:00 PM

  Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science

  Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars

  
  

  Speaker: William G. J. Halfond, Georgia Institute of Technology
  Host: Prof. Nenad MedvidovicAbstract:
  Over the past decade, web applications have become big business. They are used to provide a variety of services, such as banking, online shopping, and entertainment, to millions of users. Thisgrowth in web applications has driven a need for specialized quality assurance techniques that can help developers prevent security vulnerabilities and ensure that their web applications run reliably.Although there has been an extensive amount of research in the area of software quality assurance, the majority of existing techniques are not directly applicable to web applications. Part of the reason for this is that traditional abstractions used in these techniques, such as control-flow, data-flow, and interfaces, look very different in web applications. This talk provides an overview of my research in quality assurance for web applications and also discusses in more detail my working one aspect of this problem, interface definitions, and its application to test-input generation and verification of web applications.Biography:
  William Halfond is a final year PhD student in the College of Computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology. He works with Professor Alessandro Orso in the area of software engineering. He is interested in quality assurance techniques for web applications and has worked on various topics including program analysis, test-input generation, testing requirements, runtime analysis, and security.
  

  Location: Seaver Science Library (SSL) - 150

  Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

  Contact: CS Colloquia

  

• Mar

  25

  Seminar: Design-for-reliability for scaled electronic technologies: Opportunities and challenges

  Wed, Mar 25, 2009 @ 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM

  Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

  Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars

  
  

  Abstract: This talk will motivate design-for-reliability initiatives that anticipate the paradigm shift to error-aware and error-tolerant design of integrated circuits, both of which are required to address the problem of increasing hardware failures in future technology nodes. These concerns are only
  exacerbated as we look forward to emerging technology alternatives. Using graphene as an example, I will go on to describe the modeling, simulation, and design advances that we believe are essential to
  address the complexity challenges associated with such scaled electronic technologies.Bio: Kartik Mohanram received the B.Tech. degree in electrical engineering from IIT-Bombay in 1998, and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in computer engineering from UT-Austin in 2000 and 2003 respectively. He is currently an assistant professor in the department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Rice University. His primary research interests are in computer engineering and systems, with an emphasis on modeling, simulation, and computer-aided design of integrated circuits. He is a
  recipient of the NSF CAREER Award, the ACM/SIGDA Technical Leadership Award, and the A. Richard Newton Graduate Scholarship.

  Location: Ronald Tutor Hall of Engineering (RTH) - 306

  Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

  Contact: Annie Yu

  

• Mar

  25

  DLS: Control: The Hidden Thechnology

  Wed, Mar 25, 2009 @ 02:00 PM - 03:00 PM

  Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

  Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars

  
  

  Distinguished Lecturer: Dr. Karl AstromAbstract:
  Although feedback has been used for hundreds of years the discipline of control emerged in the 1940s. Control being the first systems discipline was a paradigm shift that fitted poorly in structures organized in civil,mechanical, electrical and chemical engineering. The field has developed very rapidly and control systems are now ubiquitous in engineering. The lecture presents some reflections on the dynamic development of the field the driving forces and the achievements. A brief overview of the historical development is given, development of the central ideas will be discussed and important application areas described. The interplay of theory and applications are discussed together with relations to specific engineering disciplines and mathematics, computer science, physics and biology. It is attempted to assess the current status of the field and to speculate about its future development. An explanation of the title will also be given.Biography:
  Karl Johan Astrom was educated at The Royal Institute in Stocholm. After working for IBM Research for five years he was appointed Professor of the Chair of Automatic Control at Lund Institute of Technology (LTH)/Lund University where he established a new department. In 1999 he became Emeritus in Lund and part time professor at UCSB. Astrom has broad interests in automatic control including, stochastic control, modeling, system identification, adaptive control,computer control and computer-aided control engineering. He is listed in ISA Highly Cited and he has Erdos number 3. One paper on self-tuning control, co-authored with B. Wittenmark, was selected for the IEEE Book Control Theory: Twenty-five seminal papers 1932-81. He has several patents, one on automatic tuning of PID controllers, held jointly with T. Hagglund, has led to substantial production. Astrom is a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Engineering Sciences (IVA) and the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences (KVA). He is a Fellow of IEEE and IFAC, a foreign member of the US National Academy of Engineering, the Russian Academy of Sciences, and the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. Astrom has received many honors among them six honorary doctorates, the 1987 Quazza Medal from IFAC, the 1993 IEEE Medal of Honor and the 2002 Great Gold Medal of the Royal Swedish Academy of Engineering.Lecture: 2:00-3:00PM,
  Reception: 3:00-4:00

  Location: Hedco Pertroleum and Chemical Engineering Building (HED) - co Neuroscience Auditorium (HNB 100)

  Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

  Contact: Estela Lopez

  

• Mar

  25

  Phononic Characteristics of Lattice Structures: ....

  Wed, Mar 25, 2009 @ 02:00 PM - 03:00 PM

  Sonny Astani Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering

  Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars

  
  

  ..From Theoretical and Computational Aspects to Applications
  in Smart Multifunctional DevicesDr. Stefano Gonella,
  Department of Mechanical Engineering, Northwestern UniversityAbstract:
  Within the family of periodic solids, lattice structures and cellular materials have been the object of special scientific interest as a result of their unique mechanical and thermal properties and their excellent strength-to-weight ratio, which make them ideal for automotive and aerospace engineering applications. One well-known example is represented by hexagonal and auxetic honeycomb structures, which are used in conventional sandwich plates as well as in "truss-core" composite beams. Analysis of the wave propagation characteristics of these structures reveals a whole new set of peculiar mechanical properties, which suggests applications in novel smart structures and metamaterials. The phenomenon of phononic bandgaps, for instance, can be exploited to design tunable vibration isolation devices and mechanical filters. The directionality of the elastic wavefields for specific frequencies of excitation suggests the possibility to design frequency-controlled waveguides and directional actuators and sensors. Finally, the interplay between phononic characteristics and piezoelectric microstuctures can be used to envision a new class of multifunctional devices for energy generation and conversion.In this presentation, a finite-element-based homogenization technique is
  introduced to extract the equivalent dynamic properties of lattices with arbitrary internal geometry. A computational unit cell approach is then used to investigate the in-plane phononic characteristics of hexa-chiral lattice structures. Finally, a novel concept is presented for piezoelectric microstructured devices combining vibration isolation and
  energy harvesting capabilities.

  Location: Kaprielian Hall (KAP) - 209

  Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

  Contact: Evangeline Reyes

  

• Mar

  25

  The Looming Crisis of Air Traffic Capacity - Can Vortex Dynamics Help

  Wed, Mar 25, 2009 @ 03:30 PM - 04:30 PM

  Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering

  Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars

  
  

  Fazle HussainDept of Mech Engr, Univ of HoustonCurrently, Moore Distinguished Scholar, CaltechCullen Distinguished ProfessorDirector, Institute of Fluid Dynamics and TurbulenceABSTRACTBy 2025, the air traffic capacity will be tripled, demanding a tripling of runways at major airports of the world. Primarily mandated by aircraft separation for safe flight, this is not only already a challenge during takeoffs and landings, but will become a major problem also during cruise in the crowded skies. Motivated by this scenario, we propose a method of breaking up the trailing vortices and inducing their rapid decay so that separation between aircraft can be significantly reduced, thus minimizing the need for additional runways and flight delays.We study via direct numerical simulation the evolution of a vortex column embedded in fine-scale turbulence. We then explore three potential mechanisms for core perturbation growth:
  (a) centrifugal instability due to vortex circulation overshoot, (b) Kelvin wave growth in the core due to resonance with the external turbulence, and (c) transient growth of perturbations in the normal-mode-stable vortex. We
  show that transient growth of bending waves can produce orders of magnitude growth in core turbulence and hence possible breakup of trailing vortices and their faster decay - particularly at Reynolds numbers relevant to aircraft trailing vortices.
  

  Location: Seaver Science Library, Rm 150

  Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

  Contact: April Mundy

  

• Mar

  26

  Third Annual George Bekey Keynote Lecture - Tom Mitchell

  Thu, Mar 26, 2009 @ 04:00 PM - 05:30 PM

  Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science

  Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars

  
  

  **Third Annual George Bekey Keynote Lecture**Title: Brains, Meaning and Corpus StatisticsSpeaker: Prof. Tom Mitchell, CMUHost: Prof. Ellis Horowitz, Prof. Craig KnoblockLight Refreshments: 3:30 PM Abstract:
  How does the human brain represent meanings of words and pictures in terms of the underlying neural activity? This talk will present our research using machine learning methods together with fMRI brain imaging to study this question. One line of our research has involved training classifiers that identify which word a person is thinking about, based on their neural activity observed using fMRI. A more recent line involves developing a computational model that predicts the neural activity associated with arbitrary English words, including words for which we do not yet have brain image data. This computational model is trained using a combination of fMRI data associated with several dozen concrete nouns, together with statistics gathered from a trillion-word text corpus. Once trained, the model predicts fMRI activation for any other concrete noun appearing in the text corpus, with highly significant accuracies over the 60 nouns for which we currently have fMRI data.Biography:
  Tom M. Mitchell is the E. Fredkin Professor and head of the Machine Learning Department at Carnegie Mellon University. Mitchell is a past President of the American Association of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), and a Fellow of the AAAS and of the AAAI. His general research interests lie in machine learning, artificial intelligence, and cognitive neuroscience. Mitchell believes the field of machine learning will be the fastest growing branch of computer science during the 21st century.
  

  Location: Ethel Percy Andrus Gerontology Center (GER) - entology Auditorium (GER)

  Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

  Contact: CS Front Desk

  

• Mar

  27

  Multirate Anypath Routing in Wireless Mesh Networks - Rafael Laufer

  Fri, Mar 27, 2009 @ 10:00 AM - 11:00 AM

  Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

  Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars

  
  

  Abstract: We present a new routing paradigm that generalizes
  opportunistic routing in wireless mesh networks. In multirate anypath
  routing, each node uses both a set of next hops and a selected
  transmission rate to reach a destination. Using this rate, a packet is
  broadcast to the nodes in the set and one of them forwards the packet on
  to the destination. To date, there is no theory capable of jointly
  optimizing both the set of next hops and the transmission rate used by
  each node. We bridge this gap by introducing a polynomial-time algorithm
  to this problem and provide the proof of its optimality. The proposed
  algorithm runs in the same running time as regular shortest-path
  algorithms and is therefore suitable for deployment in link-state routing
  protocols. We conducted experiments in a 802.11b testbed network, and our
  results show that multirate anypath routing performs on average 80% and up
  to 6.4 times better than anypath routing with a fixed rate of 11 Mbps. If
  the rate is fixed at 1 Mbps instead, performance improves by up to one
  order of magnitude.
  Short Bio: Rafael Laufer received the B. Sc. (cum laude) and the M.Sc.
  degrees in Electrical Engineering from the Federal University of Rio de
  Janeiro (UFRJ), Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, in 2003 and 2005, respectively.
  During his M.Sc. studies, he received the FAPERJ's "Bolsa Nota 10"
  fellowship, awarded to the top two graduate students of Electrical
  Engineering. During 2002, he was with Cisco Systems, Inc. as an intern. He
  is now working towards the Ph.D. degree in Computer Science at the
  University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) with Prof. Leonard Kleinrock.
  Rafael received the Marconi Society's Young Scholar Award in 2008 in
  "recognition of outstanding academic achievement and intellectual promise
  in the field of communications science." His major research interests are
  distributed systems, wireless networking, security, and operating systems.
  He is a member of the IEEE Communications Society and a student member of
  IEEE.
  Host: Bhaskar Krishnamachari bkrishna@usc.edu

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

  Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

  Contact: Shane Goodoff

  

• Mar

  27

  Information Theory Applied to Fiber-Optic Transmission: Limits to Spectral Efficiency of Optical Fib

  Fri, Mar 27, 2009 @ 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM

  Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

  Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars

  
  

  Speaker: Dr. René-Jean Essiambre
  Bell Labs, Alcatel-LucentAbstract: Fiber-optic communication systems constitute the backbone of the communication network infrastructure. The main physical elements of the optical paths in these networks are the optical fiber (as the physical medium for transport) and the optical amplifier (to combat signal attenuation). The transmission bandwidth available over each optical path is enormous, on the order of 10 THz. Despite such a large bandwidth being available, there is a tremendous demand to increase the capacity of fiber-optic communication systems by increasing spectral efficiencies to multiple bits/s/Hz while still maintaining transmission distances on the order of a few thousands of kilometers. Achieving such high spectral efficiency requires using signals with multiple levels in phase and/or amplitude, and possibly using both states of polarization. Transmission of such multilevel signals becomes increasingly impacted by the Kerr fiber nonlinearity, a physical phenomenon unique to the 'fiber channel'. The Kerr nonlinearity results in signal distortions that rapidly increase with signal power. The question then arises: how to apply Shannon's information theory to the `fiber channel' and is there a maximum spectral efficiency associated to the Kerr fiber nonlinearity?In this talk, we will describe how we applied Shannon's theory to the `fiber channel' and present the early results in the direction of conservatively estimating the fiber capacity. A spectral efficiency of ~7 bits/s/Hz (in a single polarization) for transmission over 1000 km in an optically-routed network will be shown to be achievable.Biography: René-Jean Essiambre is a Distinguished Member of Technical Staff at Bell Labs, Alcatel-Lucent. He received his doctorate from Université Laval and studied at the University of Rochester before joining Lucent Technologies (now Alcatel-Lucent) in 1997. Dr. Essiambre is contributing to the design of advanced optical transmission systems, especially in relation to the management of fiber nonlinearities. Interests include modulation formats, detection and optimization techniques for the design of optically routed networks to increase capacity, optical transparency and functionality of wavelength-division multiplexed communication systems. He is a recipient of the 2005 Engineering Excellence Award from OSA, where he is a Fellow.Host: Gerhard Kramer, gkramer@usc.edu, EEB 536, x07229

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

  Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

  Contact: Gerrielyn Ramos

  

• Mar

  27

  MIMO HSDPA Testbed Measurements

  Fri, Mar 27, 2009 @ 12:00 PM - 01:00 PM

  Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

  Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars

  
  

  Speaker: Dipl.-Ing. Christian MehlführerAbstract: In this presentation, throughput measurement results of High Speed Downlink Packet Access (HSDPA) are shown. After a short overview about HSDPA and the utilization of multiple antennas in this standard, the measurement methodology and measurement setups in alpine and urban environments are explained. In both environments, the 2x2 and 4x4 MIMO systems achieve more than twice and four times the throughput of the SISO system, respectively. Furthermore, the measured data throughput is compared to an "achievable" throughput that is closely related to channel capacity. This comparison reveals an SNR loss of 6-9 dB, leaving room for improvements.Biography: Christian Mehlführer was born in Vienna, Austria, in 1979. In 2004 he received his Dipl.-Ing. degree in electrical engineering from the Vienna University of Technology. Besides his diploma studies he worked part time at Siemens AG where he performed integration tests of GSM carrier units. After finishing his diploma thesis on implementation and real-time testing of space-time block codes, for which he received the Vodafone Förderpreis 2006 (together with Sebastian Caban), he now is member of the Christian Doppler Laboratory for Design Methodology of Signal Processing Algorithms and works towards his doctoral thesis at the same institute. His research interests include experimental investigation of MIMO systems, MIMO HSDPA (High Speed Downlink Packet Access), MIMO WiMAX (802.16), as well as the upcoming LTE (Long Term Evolution of UMTS) system.Host: Andreas Molisch, molisch@usc.edu, EEB 530, x04670

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

  Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

  Contact: Gerrielyn Ramos

  

• Mar

  27

  Dongrui Wu Defense

  Fri, Mar 27, 2009 @ 12:30 PM - 02:00 PM

  Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

  Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars

  
  

  Abstract:This research is focused on multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) under uncertainties, especially linguistic uncertainties. This problem is important because many times linguistic information, in addition to numerical information, is an essential input of decision-making. Linguistic information usually conveys more uncertainty, and it is necessary to incorporate and propagate this uncertainty during the decision-making process because uncertainty means risk.MCDM problems can be classified into two categories: 1) multi-attribute decision-making (MADM), which selects the best alternative(s) from a group of candidates using multiple criteria, and 2) multi-objective decision-making (MODM), which optimizes conflicting objective functions under constraints. Perceptual computer, an architecture for computing with words, is implemented in this dissertation for both categories. For MADM, we consider the most general case that the weights for and the inputs to the criteria are a mixture of numbers, intervals, type-1 fuzzy sets and/or words modeled by interval type-2 fuzzy sets. Novel weighted averages are proposed to aggregate this diverse and uncertain information so that the overall performance of each alternative can be computed and ranked. For MODM, we consider how to represent the dynamics of a process (objective function) by IF-THEN rules and then how to perform reasoning based on these rules, i.e., to compute the objective function for new linguistic inputs. Two approaches for extracting the IF-THEN rules are proposed: 1) linguistic summarization to extract rules from data, and 2) a knowledge mining approach to extract rules through survey. Applications are shown for all approaches proposed in this dissertation.Bio:Dongrui Wu received a B.E in Automatic Control from the University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei, Anhui, P.R. China, in 2003, an M.Eng in Electrical Engineering from the National University of Singapore, Singapore, in 2005, and an MS in Electrical Engineering from the University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA, in 2008. Currently he is pursuing his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering at USC. His research interests include computational intelligence, information fusion, machine learning, decision-support systems, signal processing, control theories, and their applications to smart oilfield technologies. Dongrui Wu has more than 20 publications, including a book (co-authored with J. M. Mendel) "Perceptual Computing: Aiding People in Making Subjective Judgments'' by the Wiley-IEEE Press, and a Best Student Paper Award from the 2005 IEEE International Conference on Fuzzy Systems.

  Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 403

  Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

  Contact: Gloria Halfacre

  

• Mar

  27

  W.V.T. Rusch Engineering Honors Colloquium: Reflections on the Impact of Technology on Engineering

  Fri, Mar 27, 2009 @ 01:00 PM - 01:50 PM

  Viterbi School of Engineering Student Affairs

  Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars

  
  

  Julius F. Bogdanowicz, Director, Engineering Programs, Advanced Systems & Technology, Network Centric Systems, Raytheon offers a lecture entitled "Reflections on the Impact of Technology on Engineering" as part of the W.V.T. Rusch Engineering Honors Colloquium.

  Location: Olin Hall of Engineering (OHE) - 122

  Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

  Contact: Viterbi Admissions & Student Affairs

  

• Mar

  27

  The Alfred E Mann Innovation in Engineering Seminars 2009

  Fri, Mar 27, 2009 @ 01:30 PM - 03:00 PM

  Alfred E Mann Institute

  Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars

  
  

  Speaker: Anika Joseph, Mann Fellow - Biomedical Engineering"Hyperspectral Pathology: Image Acquisition and Analysis for a New Digital Gold Standard"

  Location: Hedco Neurosciences Building (HNB) - 100

  Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

  Contact: Susan Cooper

  

• Mar

  27

  Integrated Sys Seminar - Photonic ADCs (Dr. George Valley, Aerospace Corp.)

  Fri, Mar 27, 2009 @ 02:00 PM - 03:00 PM

  Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

  Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars

  
  

  Speaker : Dr. George Valley, Aerospace Corp.Abstract :This tutorial presents the status of electronic ADCs, basic ADC concepts, classes of photonic ADCs, the role of microwave photonic links, and lessons learned from realizing a high resolution, wide bandwidth time-stretch photonic ADC.

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

  Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

  Contact: Hossein Hashemi

  

• Mar

  27

  Digital Audio and Video Broadcasting Methods

  Fri, Mar 27, 2009 @ 02:00 PM - 03:00 PM

  Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

  Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars

  
  

  Dr. Carl-Erik W. Sundberg
  Visiting Senior Scientist, DoCoMo Labs USA
  cews@docomolabs-usa.comAbstract: In this talk we will give a brief overview of the technology building blocks used in current and future digital audio and video broadcasting standards with emphasis on wireless transmission methods, media source coding, digital modulation and channel coding methods. First we will very briefly talk about the early history of broadcasting and analog TV and AM, FM and SW radio. The emphasis is then on wireless digital broadcasting methods including HDTV. We will briefly cover schemes such as digital terrestrial television broadcasting (ATSC, DVB-T, DVB-H, DMB, ISDB-T) and digital audio broadcasting,(Eureka 147,HD Radio, Hybrid IBOC AM and FM, DMB, DRM, MediaFLO ).
  The US terrestrial digital audio broadcasting standard HD Radio will be discussed in some detail, especially the FM in band version. In this context we cover some research areas in coding and modulation for the current version of the HD Radio standard as well as for future potential upgrades and modifications of this standard. This includes areas such as complementary punctured pair convolutional (CPPC) codes with optimized bit placement, List Viterbi Algorithms (LVAs) as well as "Dirty Paper Coding" (DPC) type of precoding methods for simultaneous transmission of analog FM and digital data.
  We will also briefly look at complementary methods of audio and video broadcasting such as satellite, cable and fiber transmission and internet streaming. Finally we will discuss the convergence of digital broadcasting with 3G (e.g. Media Broadcast and Multicast Service, MBMS) and 4G cellular technologies as well as speculate about future wireless broadcasting methods.References:
  [1] C-E. W. Sundberg et al. "Technical Advances in Digital Audio Radio Broadcasting", Proceedings of the IEEE, Vol. 90, No 8, pp 1303-1333, August 2002.[2] www.ibiquity.com[3] H. C. Papadopoulos and C-E. W. Sundberg, "Precoded Modulo- Precancelling Systems for Simulcasting Analog FM and Digital Data", IEEE Transactions on Communications, pp 1279-1288, August 2008. Also see Conference Proceedings, ICC2005, Seoul, Korea, June 2005.Biography: Carl-Erik W. Sundberg (S'69-M'75-SM'81-F'90-LF'08) was born in Karlskrona, Sweden in 1943 and received the M.S.E.E. and the Dr. of Technology (PhD) Degrees from the University of Lund, Sweden in 1966 and 1975 respectively. During 1966 to 1975 he held various research and teaching positions at Lund University. In 1968 he served in the Swedish Navy. During 1976 he was an ESA Research Fellow at the European Space Research and Technology Centre (ESTEC), Noordwijk, The Netherlands. From 1977 to 1984 he was a Research Professor (Docent) in the department of Telecommunication Theory, University of Lund, Sweden. From 1981 to 2000 he was a Distinguished Member of Technical Staff (DMTS) at Bell Laboratories, Murray Hill, New Jersey, USA and during 2001 he was a DMTS at Agere Systems Research, Murray Hill, New Jersey, USA. He retired from Bell Labs/Agere in December 2001. Since 2002 he is President and Chief Scientist at SundComm, Sunnyvale, California, USA. During 2002 he was a Consultant at iBiquity Digital Corp., Warren, NJ, USA. During part of 2003, 2004 and 2005 he was a Visiting Professor at Korea University, Seoul, Korea. Since 2006 he is a Visiting Senior Scientist at DoCoMo Labs, Palo Alto, California. He has published over 110 journal papers and contributed over 150 conference papers. Dr. Sundberg has over 120 US and international patents. Among his scientific and technical contributions that have found real world applications can be mentioned constant amplitude modulation CPM for 2G GSM cellular, Circular Viterbi Tailbiting Decoding for 2G TDMA cellular, CPPC codes for US HD Radio FM, Multi-streaming for US HD Radio AM and Joint Program Audio Coding for US Digital Satellite Radio. Dr. Sundberg is a coauthor of Digital Phase Modulation, (New York: Plenum, 1986), Topics in Coding Theory, (New York: Springer-Verlag, 1989) and Source-Matched Digital Communications (New York: IEEE Press, 1996). In 1986 he and his coauthor received the IEEE Vehicular Technology Society's Paper of the Year Award and in 1989 he and his coauthors were awarded the Marconi Premium Proc. IEE Best Paper Award. Two of his papers were selected for inclusion in the IEEE Communications Society 50th Anniversary Journal Collection in 2002 consisting of the 50 (actually 56) most influential papers published by IEEE Communications Society during its first 50 years (The Best of the Best, IEEE Press/Wiley 2007). He has been guest editor for IEEE Journal on Special Areas in Communications 1988-1989 (Coded Modulation) and 2004-2006 (4G Wireless). He is a Fellow of the IEEE since 1990 and is listed in Marquis Who's Who in America.Host: Giuseppe Caire, caire@usc.edu, EEB 528, x07326
  

  Location: Frank R. Seaver Science Center (SSC) - 319

  Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

  Contact: Gerrielyn Ramos

  

• Mar

  27

  MOBILE IMAGE MATCHING - TOWARDS MOBILE AUGMENTED REALITY

  Fri, Mar 27, 2009 @ 04:00 PM - 05:00 PM

  Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

  Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars

  
  

  Speaker: Professor Bernd Girod,
  Department of Electrical Engineering
  Stanford UniversityAbstract: Hand held mobile devices, such as camera phones or PDAs, are expected to become ubiquitous platforms for visual search and mobile augmented reality applications. For mobile image matching, a visual database is typically stored at a server in the network. Hence, for a visual comparison, information must be either uploaded from the mobile to the server, or downloaded from the server to the mobile. With relatively slow wireless links, the response time of the system critically depends on how much information must be transferred. We review recent advances in mobile matching, using a "bag-of-visual-words" approach with robust feature descriptors, and show that dramatic speed-ups are possible by considering recognition and compression jointly. Real-time implementations of different applications, such as recognition of landmarks or CD covers, demonstrate the relative advantages of image processing on the phone, the server, and/or both.Biography: Bernd Girod is Professor of Electrical Engineering and (by courtesy) Computer Science in the Information Systems Laboratory of Stanford University, California. He was Chaired Professor of Telecommunications in the Electrical Engineering Department of the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg until 1999. His research interests are in the areas of video compression, networked media systems, and image databases. He has published over 400 conference and journal papers, as well as 5 books. Professor Girod has been involved in several startup ventures, among them Polycom (Nasdaq:PLCM), Vivo Software, 8x8 (Nasdaq: EGHT),and RealNetworks (Nasdaq: RNWK). He received the Engineering Doctorate from University of Hannover, Germany, and an M.S. Degree from Georgia Institute of Technology. Prof. Girod is a Fellow of the IEEE and of EURASIP and a member of the German National Academy of Sciences. He received the 2002 EURASIP Best Paper Award, the 2004 EURASIP Technical Achievement Award, and the 2007 IEEE Multimedia Communication Best Paper Award.Host: Professor Antonio Ortega

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

  Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

  Contact: Talyia Veal

  

• Mar

  30

  Aircraft Accident Investigation - Mar.30-Apr.10, 2009

  Mon, Mar 30, 2009

  Aviation Safety and Security Program

  Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars

  
  

  AAI 09-4
  For more information and to register for Aviation Safety and Security Program courses, please visit http://viterbi.usc.edu/aviation.

  Audiences: Registered Audiences Only

  Contact: Viterbi Professional Programs

  

• Mar

  30

  Protein Misfolding Diseases ¨C Chemical, Mechanical, Structural and Biomimetics Perspective

  Mon, Mar 30, 2009 @ 12:15 PM

  Mork Family Department of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science

  Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars

  
  

  Distinguished Lecture SeriesPresentsProfessor Ratnesh Lal,University of Chicago AbstractNative protein structures are determined by their primary sequences. Protein misfolding can lead normally folded soluble oligomers to form insoluble amyloid fibrils. In vivo, insoluble amyloid fibrils are linked to protein misfolding diseases, including Alzheimer¡¯s Disease (AD), Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), prion-diseases, type-II diabetes and systemic amyloidosis. The mechanism of amyloid toxicity is poorly understood. Amyloid ¦Â peptide associated with Alzheimer¡¯s Disease forms a U-shaped ¡®¦Â-strand-turn-¦Â-strand¡¯ structure. Computational modeling based on protein folding energetics and mechanical mobility predicts these amyloids to form ion channels. Mutlimodal and mutlidimentional atomic force microscopy (AFM) study provides a new paradigm for amyloid diseases ¨C they belong to channelopathies and provide new avenues for designing therapeutics. This presentation will illustrate new advances in our understanding of amyloid diseases and will provide glimpse of biomimetics, bioMEMS, and other possible engineering approaches for effective diagnostics and therapy. Multiscale biomechanics covering nanoscale dissection, mechanics, rheology, cell micromechanics will also be discussed, in particular, using atomic force microscopy to study biological systems from single macromolecules to cell membrane to cells and tissue. We have obtained information about both their structures and their physiochemical properties with direct relevance to cell and tissue physiology, tissue mechanics, tissue remodeling, and biomimetics.
  

  Location: SLH 100

  Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

  Contact: Petra Pearce Sapir

  

• Mar

  30

  BME 533 Seminar Series

  Mon, Mar 30, 2009 @ 12:30 PM - 01:50 PM

  Alfred E. Mann Department of Biomedical Engineering

  Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars

  
  

  Richard Casaburi, PhD, MD, Professor of Medicine & Associate Chief of Research, Division of Respiratory and
  Critical Care Physiology & Medicine, Harbor-UCLA Medical Center, Torrance, CA:
  "The Era of Large Clinical Trials in COPD"

  Location: Olin Hall of Engineering (OHE) - 132

  Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

  Contact: Mischalgrace Diasanta

  

• Mar

  30

  Modeling and Tracking Activities with Event-Coupled HMMs

  Mon, Mar 30, 2009 @ 04:00 PM

  Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science

  Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars

  
  

  Speaker: Dr. Aram Galstyan, ISI, USC
  Host: Prof. Jonathan GratchAbstract:
  Plan, activity, and intent recognition (PAIR) is concerned with inferring hidden states of agents based on an observable sequence of their actions. Although PAIR has been an active area of research for more than a decade, most studies so far has been limited to systems with a single agent, or a handful of them. I will present our work on activity recognition on a larger scale, where thousands of agents interact with each other by engaging in abstract "attribute trades". Those interactions induce an evolving network, where the nodes and the edges represent the agents and their transactions, respectively. The collective dynamics of this network can be naturally modeled through a novel type of interacting hidden Markov models (HMM), which we call Event-Coupled HMMs. I will discuss our approach to scalable inference-making with EC-HMM, which involves pruning the network through semi-supervised learning, and utilizing an approximate and scalable representation of the hidden process on the reduced network. I will conclude by discussing the notion of "trackability", which can be intuitively defined as one's ability to accurately infer stochastic processes, and present some recent results in the context of binary HMMs.Biography:
  Dr. Aram Galstyan received his Ph.D. in theoretical condensed matter physics from University of Utah, in 2000. He then joined USC Information Sciences Institute where he currently works as a computer scientist at the Intelligent Systems Division. Dr. Galstyan's current research focuses on learning and discovering patterns in large-scale sequential data, statistical network analysis, and semi-supervised learning with graphs. His other research interests include mathematical modeling of complex adaptive systems, emergent coordination in robotic swarms, and learning in multi-agent systems.
  

  Location: Von Kleinsmid Center For International & Public Affairs (VKC) - 210

  Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

  Contact: CS Colloquia

  

• Mar

  31

  Delay-Limited Cooperative Communication with Reliability Constraints in Wireless Networks

  Tue, Mar 31, 2009 @ 02:00 PM - 03:00 PM

  Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

  Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars

  
  

  Speaker: Rahul Urgaonkar
  USC PhD. StudentAbstract: We investigate optimal resource allocation for delay-limited cooperative communication in mobile ad-hoc networks. Motivated by real-time applications that have stringent delay constraints, we develop dynamic cooperation strategies that make optimal use of network resources to achieve a target outage probability (reliability) for each user subject to average power constraints. Using the technique of Lyapunov optimization, we first present a general framework to solve this problem and then derive quasi-closed form solutions for several cooperative protocols proposed in the literature (such as Amplify-and-Forward, Decode-and-Forward, etc.). Our work is the first to treat the problem of delay-limited cooperative communication with reliability constraints in a stochastic network characterized by fading channels, node mobility, and random packet arrivals, where opportunistic cooperation decisions are required.Biography: Rahul Urgaonkar obtained the B.Tech. degree in Electrical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Bombay in 2002 and the M.S. degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Southern California, Los Angeles in 2005. He is currently a PhD student in Electrical Engineering at USC. His research interests are in the areas of stochastic network optimization, resource allocation, and scheduling in next generation Wireless Networks.Relevant papers: R. Urgaonkar and M. J. Neely, "Delay-limited Cooperative Communication with Reliability Constraints in Wireless Networks," IEEE INFOCOM, Mini-conference, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, April 2009Link: http://www-scf.usc.edu/~urgaonka/papers/coop_comm_infocom09.pdfHost: Michael Neely, mjneely@usc.edu, EEB 520, x03505

  Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 539

  Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

  Contact: Gerrielyn Ramos

  

• Mar

  31

  From Game Characters to Game Companions: Practice, Anticipation, and Embodiment

  Tue, Mar 31, 2009 @ 04:00 PM

  Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science

  Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars

  
  

  Speaker: Guy Hoffman
  Host: Prof. Gerard Medioni Abstract:
  Aiming to make computer game agents more engaging and longer-lasting, I propose the notion of "game companions", based on three notions: (a) viewing game play as a collaborative activity, highly coordinated with a human player; (b) modeling practice to improve the agents' skills over time; and (c) moving game characters into the physical world, in the form of personal robots. Framed within an overall methodology that optimizes for engagement instead of efficiency, this talk introduces computational models for two aspects of practice: anticipation and embodiment, and their implementation on game agents and collaborative robots. First, I present an extension to Markov Decision Processes, modeling anticipation for agents collaborating with humans. I discuss the implementation of the model on a game character, which adapts to a human collaborator through repetition. I demonstrate the effect of anticipation on repetitive teamwork by showing this agent to be more efficient and fluent, and to seem significantly more committed and contributing to the team, as rated by human players. Then, I extend this discrete state/action model to a cognitively plausible embodied framework operating on continuous sensory input and performing real-world motor activity. Based on recent neuro- psychological findings supporting an embodied view of cognition, I model practice as priming perceptual simulation and affecting Hebbian learning. Implemented on two robots, I show this framework to have significant effects on both the efficiency of a human-robot team, and on human subjects' perception of the robot's intelligence, fluency, and even gender. With our aims set on long-term engaging interaction with artificial agents, these systems' capacity to physically practice with humans may hold a key to the kind of efficient and satisfying performance that humans are accustomed to from each other. Biography:
  Guy Hoffman is a postdoctoral research associate at the Georgia Institute of Technology Center for Music Technology. Prior, he was a postdoctoral associate at MIT. Hoffman holds a Ph.D. from the MIT Media Lab in the field of Human-Robot Interaction and an M.Sc. in Computer Science from Tel Aviv University. His research investigates practice, anticipation, and joint action between humans and artificial agents, with the aim of designing agents that display more fluent behavior with their human partners. Other research interests include theater and musical performance robots as well as non-anthropomorphic agent design. His robot AUR won the 2007 IEEE International Robot Design Competition; he was animation and software lead on the 2008 World Expo Digital Water Pavilion, one of TIME magazine's "Best Inventions of 2007"; his research has been covered in the international press, including the New York Times, Süddeutsche Zeitung, and Science; Hoffman has held several senior research and product development positions in the Israeli software technology industry; and his work in animation, data visualization, architecture, theater, and new media art has been internationally published and exhibited.

  Location: Seaver Science Library (SSL) - 150

  Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

  Contact: CS Colloquia