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Events for March 28, 2016

  • CS Colloquium: David Fouhey (CMU) -Towards A Physical and Human-Centric Understanding of Images

    Mon, Mar 28, 2016 @ 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM

    Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: David Fouhey, CMU

    Talk Title: Towards A Physical and Human-Centric Understanding of Images

    Series: CS Colloquium

    Abstract: This lecture satisfies requirements for CSCI 591: Computer Science Research Colloquium

    One primary goal of AI from its very beginning has been to develop systems that can understand an image in a meaningful way. While we have seen tremendous progress in recent years on naming-style tasks like image classification or object detection, a meaningful understanding requires going beyond this paradigm. Scenes are inherently 3D, so our understanding must also capture the underlying 3D and physical properties. Additionally, our understanding must be human-centric since any man-made scene has been built with humans in mind. Despite the importance of obtaining a 3D and human-centric understanding, we are only beginning to scratch the surface on both fronts: many fundamental questions, in terms of how to both frame and solve the problem, remain unanswered.

    In this talk, I will discuss my efforts towards building a physical and human-centric understanding of images. I will present work addressing the questions: (1) what 3D properties should we model and predict from images, and do we actually need explicit 3D training data to do this? (2) how can we reconcile data-driven learning techniques with the physical constraints that exist in the world? and (3) how can understanding humans improve traditional 3D and object recognition tasks?


    Biography: David Fouhey is a Ph.D. student at the Robotics Institute of Carnegie Mellon University, where he is advised by Abhinav Gupta and Martial Hebert. His research interests include computer vision and machine learning with a particular focus on scene understanding. David's work has been supported by both NSF and NDSEG fellowships. He has spent time at Microsoft Research and University of Oxford's Visual Geometry Group.


    Host: CS Department

    Location: Olin Hall of Engineering (OHE) - 136

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Assistant to CS chair

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  • Seminars in Biomedical Engineering

    Mon, Mar 28, 2016 @ 12:30 PM - 01:49 PM

    Alfred E. Mann Department of Biomedical Engineering

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Huizhong Tao, PhD, Associate Professor of Cell & Neurobiology Zilkha Neurogenetic Institute

    Talk Title: Dissecting Neural Circuits for Visual Processing and

    Abstract: The long-term goal of my lab is to understand the neural circuits underlying cortical processing of sensory information and sensory evoked behaviors. We have combined a set of cutting-edge techniques, including in vivo whole-cell patch-clamp recording, two-photon imaging guided recording and optogenetics, to dissect local and long-range synaptic circuits for specific visual cortical processing functions. I will present our recent data on the circuits underlying the auditory modulation of orientation selectivity of visual cortical neurons, and those underlying the visual cortical modulation of an innate visual behavior.

    Host: K. Kirk Shung, PhD

    Location: Olin Hall of Engineering (OHE) - 122

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Mischalgrace Diasanta

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  • EE 598 Cyber-Physical Systems Seminar Series

    Mon, Mar 28, 2016 @ 02:00 PM - 03:00 PM

    Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Krishnendu Chakrabarty, Professor, Duke University

    Talk Title: Digital Microfluidic Biochips: From Manipulating Droplets to A Cyberphysical System for Quantitative Gene-Expression Analysis

    Abstract: Advances in microfluidics have led to the emergence of biochips for automating laboratory procedures in molecular biology. These devices enable the precise control of nanoliter volumes of biochemical samples and reagents. As a result, non-traditional biomedical applications and markets (e.g., high-throughout DNA sequencing, portable and point-of-care clinical diagnostics, protein crystallization for drug discovery), and fundamentally new uses are opening up for ICs and systems. This lecture will first introduce electrowetting-based digital microfludic biochips and provide an overview of market drivers such as immunoassays and DNA sequencing. The audience will next learn about design automation and reconfiguration aspects of microfluidic biochips. Synthesis tools will be described to map assay protocols from the lab bench to a droplet-based microfluidic platform and generate an optimized schedule of bioassay operations, the binding of assay operations to functional units, and the layout and droplet-flow paths for the biochip. The role of the digital microfluidic platform as a "programmable and reconfigurable processor" for biochemical applications will be highlighted. The speaker will describe dynamic adaptation of bioassays through cyberphysical system integration and sensor-driven on-chip error recovery.
    Finally, the speaker will highlight recent advances in utilizing cyberphysical integration for quantitative gene-expression analysis. This framework is based on a real-time resource-allocation algorithm that responds promptly to decisions about the protocol flow received from a firmware layer. Results will be presented on how this adaptive framework efficiently utilizes on-chip resources to reduce time-to-result without sacrificing the chip's lifetime.


    Biography: Krishnendu Chakrabarty received the B. Tech. degree from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, in 1990, and the M.S.E. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, in 1992 and 1995, respectively. He is now the William H. Younger Distinguished Professor of Engineering in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Professor of Computer Science at Duke University. He also serves as Director of Graduate Studies for Electrical and Computer Engineering. Prof. Chakrabarty is a recipient of the National Science Foundation Early Faculty (CAREER) award, the Office of Naval Research Young Investigator award, the Humboldt Research Award from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, Germany, the IEEE Transactions on CAD Donald O. Pederson Best Paper award (2015), and 11 best paper awards at major IEEE conferences. He is also a recipient of the IEEE Computer Society Technical Achievement Award (2015) and the Distinguished Alumnus Award from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur (2014). He is a Research Ambassador of the University of Bremen, Germany. He has been a Visiting Professor at University of Tokyo, Japan (2013), a Chair Professor at Tsinghua University, China (2009-2014), and a Visiting Chair Professor at National Cheng Kung University, Taiwan (2012-2013).

    Prof. Chakrabarty's current research projects include: testing and design-for-testability of integrated circuits; digital microfluidics, biochips, and cyberphysical systems; optimization of enterprise systems and smart manufacturing. He is a Fellow of ACM, a Fellow of IEEE, and a Golden Core Member of the IEEE Computer Society. He holds seven US patents, with several patents pending. He was a 2009 Invitational Fellow of the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS). He is a recipient of the 2008 Duke University Graduate School Dean's Award for excellence in mentoring, and the 2010 Capers and Marion McDonald Award for Excellence in Mentoring and Advising, Pratt School of Engineering, Duke University. He served as a Distinguished Visitor of the IEEE Computer Society during 2005-2007 and 2010-2012, and as a Distinguished Lecturer of the IEEE Circuits and Systems Society during 2006-2007 and 2012-2013. Currently he serves as an ACM Distinguished Speaker.

    Prof. Chakrabarty served as Editor-in-Chief of IEEE Design & Test of Computers (2010-2012) and ACM Journal on Emerging Technologies in Computing Systems (2010-2015). Currently he serves as the Editor-in-Chief of IEEE Transactions on VLSI Systems. He is also an Associate Editor of IEEE Transactions on Computers, IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Circuits and Systems, IEEE Transactions on Multiscale Computing Systems, and ACM Transactions on Design Automation of Electronic Systems.


    Host: Paul Bogdan

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

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Estela Lopez

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  • CS Colloquium: Tuo Zhao (Johns Hopkins University) - Compute Faster and Learn Better: Machine Learning via Nonconvex Model-based Optimization

    Mon, Mar 28, 2016 @ 03:00 PM - 04:00 PM

    Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Tuo Zhao , Johns Hopkins University

    Talk Title: Compute Faster and Learn Better: Machine Learning via Nonconvex Model-based Optimization

    Series: CS Colloquium

    Abstract: This lecture satisfies requirements for CSCI 591: Computer Science Research Colloquium

    Nonconvex optimization naturally arises in many machine learning problems (e.g. sparse learning, matrix factorization, and tensor decomposition). Machine learning researchers exploit various nonconvex formulations to gain modeling flexibility, estimation robustness, adaptivity, and computational scalability. Although classical computational complexity theory has shown that solving nonconvex optimization is generally NP-hard in the worst case, practitioners have proposed numerous heuristic optimization algorithms, which achieve outstanding empirical performance in real-world applications.

    To bridge this gap between practice and theory, we propose a new generation of model-based optimization algorithms and theory, which incorporate the statistical thinking into modern optimization. Particularly, when designing practical computational algorithms, we take the underlying statistical models into consideration (e.g. sparsity, low rankness). Our novel algorithms exploit hidden geometric structures behind many nonconvex optimization problems, and can obtain global optima with the desired statistics properties in polynomial time with high probability.


    Biography: Tuo Zhao is a PhD student in Department of Computer Science at Johns Hopkins University (http://www.cs.jhu.edu/~tour). His research focuses on high dimensional parametric and semiparametric learning, large-scale optimization, and applications to computational genomics and neuroimaging. He was the core member of the JHU team winning the INDI ADHD 200 global competition on fMRI imaging-based diagnosis classification in 2011. He received Siebel scholarship in 2014 and Baidu's research fellowship in 2015

    Host: CS Department

    More Info: https://bluejeans.com/741584974

    Location: Ronald Tutor Hall of Engineering (RTH) - 526

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Assistant to CS chair

    Event Link: https://bluejeans.com/741584974

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  • CS Colloquium: Bogdan Vasilescu (UC Davis) - Lessons in Social Coding: Software Analytics in the Age of GitHub

    Mon, Mar 28, 2016 @ 04:00 PM - 05:00 PM

    Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Bogdan Vasilescu, UC Davis

    Talk Title: Lessons in Social Coding: Software Analytics in the Age of GitHub

    Series: CS Colloquium

    Abstract: This lecture satisfies requirements for CSCI 591: Computer Science Research Colloquium

    Social media has forever changed the ways in which we communicate and work, programming included. This "social coding" movement (code is meant to be shared!) made popular by GitHub has come to represent a paradigm shift in software development, especially in the open-source world. For example, the "pull request" model has made it easier than ever before for newcomers to submit contributions to a project. As a result, teams are becoming increasingly larger, more distributed, and more diverse. At the same time, the incentives for contributing have evolved. For example, one's social coding activity is starting to replace one's resume, and directly influence their hourly wage. Today, GitHub reports 12 million users and over 30 million repositories, with popular projects having communities the size of small cities. These numbers are unprecedented in open-source!

    This new, social way of developing software opens a great many questions. How do people choose which projects to contribute to? Does prior technical experience matter, or do people learn on the job? Is it efficient to work on many projects in parallel? How does diversity in software teams affect productivity and code quality? What are the main factors that slow down pull request reviews? How does automation help developers do more with less? Does continuous integration help to ensure higher quality code? I will try to answer some of these questions in this talk.

    Biography: Bogdan Vasilescu is currently a postdoctoral researcher at University of California, Davis (USA), where he is a member of the Davis Eclectic Computational Analytics Lab (DECAL). He received his PhD and MSc in Computer Science at Eindhoven University of Technology, both with cum laude distinction. His PhD dissertation won the best dissertation award from the Dutch Institute for Programming Research and Algorithmics in 2015. Follow him on Twitter @b_vasilescu

    Host: CS Department

    More Info: https://bluejeans.com/958446198

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

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Assistant to CS chair

    Event Link: https://bluejeans.com/958446198

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