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Events for April 03, 2015
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Meet USC: Admission Presentation, Campus Tour, & Engineering Talk
Fri, Apr 03, 2015
Viterbi School of Engineering Undergraduate Admission
Receptions & Special Events
This half day program is designed for prospective freshmen and family members. Meet USC includes an information session on the University and the Admission process, a student led walking tour of campus, and a meeting with us in the Viterbi School. During the engineering session we will discuss the curriculum, research opportunities, hands-on projects, entrepreneurial support programs, and other aspects of the engineering school. Meet USC is designed to answer all of your questions about USC, the application process, and financial aid.
Reservations are required for Meet USC. This program occurs twice, once at 8:30 a.m. and again at 12:30 p.m. Please make sure to check availability and register online for the session you wish to attend. Also, remember to list an Engineering major as your "intended major" on the webform!Location: Ronald Tutor Campus Center (TCC) - USC Admission Office
Audiences: Prospective Undergrads and Families
Contact: Viterbi Admission
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PhD Defense - Zhuoliang Kang
Fri, Apr 03, 2015 @ 10:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science
University Calendar
Ph.D candidate: Zhuoliang Kang
Title: Accurate 3D Model Acquisition from Imagery Data
Date: Friday, April 3, 10:00 AM
Location: EEB 131A
Committee:
Prof. Gerard Medioni (chair)
Prof. Hao Li
Prof. Alexander Sawchuk (outside member)
Abstract:
Acquisition of 3D models from 2D imagery has been essential for various applications. In particular, this dissertation investigates two important application scenarios: city-scale 3D reconstruction from aerial imagery and general 3D model acquisition with a commodity camera.
The first part of this dissertation explores an online solution to the problem. We propose an approach to solve camera pose estimation and dense reconstruction from Wide Area Aerial Surveillance (WAAS) videos captured by an airborne platform. Our approach solves them in an online fashion: it incrementally updates a sparse 3D map and estimates the camera pose as each new frame arrives; depth maps of selected key frames are computed using a variational method and integrated to produce a full 3D model via volumetric reconstruction. In practice, WAAS videos are usually captured using a multi-camera system. We parallelize our approach on multiple GPUs to efficiently handle the multi-camera imagery. The approach is also extended for progressive 3D scanning with a hand-held camera.
In many scenarios, online approach is not a necessity and accuracy has higher priority over efficiency. In the second part, we present two offline solutions. The first work generates dense 3D model based on depth map fusion, which combines variational multi-scale depth map estimation with volumetric reconstruction. We also present MeshRecon, a mesh-based offline system composed of three modules: a dense point cloud is generated using multi-resolution plane sweep method; an initial mesh model is extracted from the point cloud via global optimization considering visibility information of all images; the mesh model is then iteratively refined to capture structural details by optimizing the photometric consistency and spatial regularization. The major processes are also parallelized on GPU for efficiency. We validate its performance on real-world objects of different types at different scales in both indoor and outdoor environments. For aerial imagery case, we evaluate the approach on several real-world aerial imagery datasets each covering an urban scenario of several square kilometers. Quantitative result shows that the reconstructed model is highly accurate with mean error smaller than 1 meter over the entire city. Based on city 3D models generated at different times, we present a system for city-scale geometric change detection by performing comparisons at the 3D geometry level. Our system is able to detect geometric changes at different scales, ranging from a building cluster to vegetation changes, with high accuracy.
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 131A
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Lizsl De Leon
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AI Seminar- Predicting human behaviors in techno-social systems: fighting abuse and illicit activities
Fri, Apr 03, 2015 @ 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Information Sciences Institute
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Emilio Ferrara , Indiana University
Talk Title: Predicting human behaviors in techno-social systems: fighting abuse and illicit activities
Series: Artificial Intelligence Seminar
Abstract: The increasing availability of data across different socio-technical systems, such as online social networks, social media, and mobile phone networks, presents novel challenges and intriguing research opportunities. As more online services permeate through our everyday life and as data from various domains are connected and integrated with each other, the boundary between the real and the online worlds becomes blurry. Such data convey both online and offline activities of people, as well as multiple time scales and resolutions.
In this talk, I'll discuss my research efforts aimed at characterizing and predicting human behaviors and activities in techno-social worlds: starting by discussing network structure and information spreading on large social networks, I'll move toward characterizing entire online conversations, such as those around big real-world events, to capture the dynamics driving the emergence of collective attention and trending topics. I'll describe a machine learning framework leveraging these insights to detect promoted campaigns that mimic grassroots conversation. Aiming at learning the signature of abuse at the level of the single individuals, I'll illustrate the challenges posed by characterizing human activity as opposed to that of synthetic entities (social bots) that attempt emulate us, to persuade, smear, tamper or deceive. I'll draw a parallel with detecting illicit activities in the real world leveraging the traces left by criminals' interactions via mobile phones.
I'll conclude envisioning the design of computational systems that will help us making effective, timely decisions (informed by social data), and create actionable policies to contribute create a better future society.
Biography: Emilio Ferrara is research assistant professor at the School of Informatics and Computing of Indiana University, where he teaches I400/590 Mining the Social Web, and research scientist at the IU Network Science Institute. He holds a PhD in Mathematics & Computer Science with honors [University of Messina (IT), program ranked 2nd in Italy, top100 worldwide]. During his PhD years he was a visiting scholar at the Vienna University of Technology and at the Royal Holloway University of London. He was a postdoctoral fellow of the Center for Complex Networks and Systems Research at Indiana University, working with Alessandro Flammini and Fil Menczer for 2.5 years. He lead the DARPA/SMISC project on campaigns and social bots detection, and the DARPA Social Bot Detection Challenge for the IU team.
Emilioâs research interests lie at the intersection between Network Science, Data Science, Machine Learning, and Computational Social Science. His work explores Social Networks and Social Media Analysis, Criminal Networks, and Knowledge Engineering. His research appears on top journals like Communications of the ACM and Physical Review Letters, and on several ACM and IEEE Transactions Journals and Conference Proceedings.
He is Lead Guest Editor of the EPJ Data Science thematic series on Collective Behaviors and Networks, and serves in the Program Committees of several prestigious conferences like WWW, ICWSM, and SocInfo. Emilio is co-chair of various workshops recurring at ECCS, WWW, SocInfo, and WebScience; he was also the local & sponsor chair of ACM Web Science 2014 and publicity co-chair of SocInfo 2014.
His work has been featured on tech and business magazines like MIT Technology Review, TIME, New Scientist, Fast Company, Engadget, Wired, and Mashable, and on the popular press including on the Guardian, the Washington Post, the Seattle Times, the Atlantic, and BBC!
Emilio is a top 0.5% Kaggle competitor and enjoys participating to various data science competitions.
Host: Aram Galstyan
Webcast: http://webcasterms1.isi.edu/mediasite/Viewer/?peid=0de28f610b2344099f9759c6f8e566f61dLocation: Information Science Institute (ISI) - 11th Flr. Conf Rm # 1135, Marina Del Rey
WebCast Link: http://webcasterms1.isi.edu/mediasite/Viewer/?peid=0de28f610b2344099f9759c6f8e566f61d
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Peter Zamar
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W.V.T. Rusch Engineering Honors Colloquium
Fri, Apr 03, 2015 @ 01:00 PM - 02:00 PM
USC Viterbi School of Engineering, Viterbi School of Engineering Student Affairs
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Dr. George Hajj, Principal Engineer at JPL
Talk Title: From Science to Wall Street, and Back
Host: W.V.T. Rusch Engineering Honors Program
Location: Seeley G. Mudd Building (SGM) - 101
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Jeffrey Teng
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Hierarchical Bayesian Methods for Sparse Signal Recovery
Fri, Apr 03, 2015 @ 02:00 PM - 03:00 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Bhaskar D. Rao, University of California, San Diego
Talk Title: Hierarchical Bayesian Methods for Sparse Signal Recovery
Abstract: Compressive sensing (CS) as an approach for data acquisition has recently received much attention. In CS, the signal recovery problem from the observed data requires the solution of a sparse vector from an underdetermined system of equations. The underlying sparse signal recovery problem is quite general with many applications and is the focus of this talk. The main emphasis will be on a hierarchical Bayesian framework with a detailed discussion of an empirical Bayesian method, the Sparse Bayesian Learning (SBL) method. To develop this framework, priors modeled as scale mixtures of normal distributions will be discussed which include super-Gaussian and student-t priors as special cases. The talk will also discuss Bayesian methods for sparse recovery problems with structure; Intra-vector correlation in the context of the block sparse model and inter-vector correlation in the context of the multiple measurement vector problem.
Biography: Bhaskar D. Rao received the B.Tech. degree in electronics and electrical communication engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, India, in 1979 and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Southern California, Los Angeles, in 1981 and 1983, respectively. Since 1983, he has been with the University of California at San Diego, La Jolla, where he is currently a Professor in the Electrical and Computer Engineering department. He is the holder of the Ericsson endowed chair in Wireless Access Networks and was the Director of the Center for Wireless Communications (2008-2011). Prof. Raoâs interests are in the areas of digital signal processing, estimation theory, and optimization theory, with applications to digital communications, speech signal processing, and biomedical signal processing.
Prof. Rao was elected fellow of IEEE in 2000 for his contributions to the statistical analysis of subspace algorithms for harmonic retrieval. His work has received several paper awards; 2013 best paper award at the Fall 2013, IEEE Vehicular Technology Conference for the paper âMulticell Random Beamforming with CDF-based Scheduling: Exact Rate and Scaling Laws,â by Yichao Huang and Bhaskar D Rao, 2012 Signal Processing Society (SPS) best paper award for the paper âAn Empirical Bayesian Strategy for Solving the Simultaneous Sparse Approximation Problem,â by David P. Wipf and Bhaskar D. Rao published in IEEE Transaction on Signal Processing, Volume: 55, No. 7, July 2007, 2008 Stephen O. Rice Prize paper award in the field of communication systems for the paper âNetwork Duality for Multiuser MIMO Beamforming Networks and Applications,â by B. Song, R. L. Cruz and B. D. Rao that appeared in the IEEE Transactions on Communications, Vol. 55, No. 3, March 2007, pp. 618 630. (http://www.comsoc.org/ awards/rice.html), among others.
Prof. Rao has been a member of the Statistical Signal and Array Processing technical committee, the Signal Processing Theory and Methods technical committee, the Communications technical committee of the IEEE Signal Processing Society and is currently a member of the Machine learning for Signal Processing technical committee. He has also served on the editorial board of the EURASIP Signal Processing Journal and also as a technical member for several IEEE conferences.
Host: Andreas Molisch, molisch@usc.edu, EEB 530, x04670
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Gerrielyn Ramos
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Integrated Systems Seminar
Fri, Apr 03, 2015 @ 03:00 PM - 04:30 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Prof. Jan Van der Spiegel, University of Pennsylvania
Talk Title: TBD
Series: Integrated Systems Seminar
Host: Hosted by Prof. Hossein Hashemi, Prof. Mike Chen, and Prof. Mahta Moghaddam Organized and hosted by Run Chen
More Info: http://mhi.usc.edu/events/event-details/?event_id=915369
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 132
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Elise Herrera-Green
Event Link: http://mhi.usc.edu/events/event-details/?event_id=915369
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Astani Civil and Environmental Engineering Seminar
Fri, Apr 03, 2015 @ 03:00 PM - 04:00 PM
Sonny Astani Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Prof. Akua Asa-Awuku, University of California, Riverside
Talk Title: How Do Clouds Form? Linking Aerosol Properties to Cloud Condensation Nuclei
Abstract:
TBA
Location: Seeley G. Mudd Building (SGM) - 101
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Evangeline Reyes
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NL Seminar-Keeping Topic Models Fresh: Technical and Practical Challenges
Fri, Apr 03, 2015 @ 03:00 PM - 04:00 PM
Information Sciences Institute
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Don Metzler, Google
Talk Title: Keeping Topic Models Fresh: Technical and Practical Challenges
Series: Natural Language Seminar
Abstract: Topic models are statistical models that can be used to infer the most likely topics that some piece of text is about. Such models are useful for applications that rely on semantic representations of text, such as query classification, document understanding, and measuring semantic similarity. These models are widely used within Google. In this talk, I will first describe the details of one of these models -- one that learns over a million topics covering just about every language. I will then describe a number of technical and practical challenges involved in keeping such a model fresh and up-to-date within real-world applications.
Biography: Donald Metzler is a Staff Software Engineer at Google Inc. Prior to that, he was a Research Assistant Professor at the University of Southern California (USC) and a Senior Research Scientist at Yahoo!. He has served as the Program Chair of the WSDM, ICTIR, and OAIR conferences and sat on the editorial boards of the major journals. He has published over 40 research papers, has been awarded 4 patents, and co-authored the textbook Search Engines: Information Retrieval in Practice.
Host: Nima Pourdamghani and Kevin Knight
More Info: http://nlg.isi.edu/nl-seminar/
Location: Information Science Institute (ISI) - 6th Flr Conf Rm # 689, Marina Del Rey
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Peter Zamar
Event Link: http://nlg.isi.edu/nl-seminar/
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Ming Hsieh Electrical Engineering Seminar
Fri, Apr 03, 2015 @ 04:00 PM - 05:00 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
University Calendar
The Live Simulation Environment
Friday April 3rd 4 pm – 5 pm EEB248
Dr. Jose Renau of U.C. Santa Cruz
Short bio:
Jose Renau (http://www.soe.ucsc.edu/~renau) is an associate professor of computer engineering at the University of California, Santa Cruz. His research focuses on computer architecture, including design effort metrics and models, infrared thermal measurements, low-power and thermal-aware designs, process variability, thread level speculation, and FPGA/ASIC design. Renau has a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Short Abstract:
Professor Renau will talk about the still not published Live Simulation environment being developed University of California, Santa Cruz. The Live Simulation Environment is a collaborative environment with statistical sampling for very fast
computer architecture simulations. The talk will present the philosophy and a live demo of the setup. The setup can run SPEC benchmarks in few seconds with accurate sampling.
Unlike other statistical simulation simulators, the user does not specify sampling parameters. The user just sets the acceptable simulation error, a set of benchmarks, and the architecture configuration. The Live environment is able to automatically adjust the sampling parameters guaranteeing that the error is within the requested confidence interval.
By adapting the sample parameters per application, benchmark, and core automatically it is possible to accurately run SPEC 2006 in a few seconds.
This is a link of a video showing the "goal"
http://masc.soe.ucsc.edu/livedemo/livedemo.mp4
Host: Dr. Timothy Pinkston
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 248
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Shane Goodoff
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The Live Simulation Environment
Fri, Apr 03, 2015 @ 04:00 PM - 05:00 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
University Calendar
The Live Simulation Environment
Friday April 3rd 4 pm – 5 pm EEB248
Dr. Jose Renau of U.C. Santa Cruz
Short bio:
Jose Renau (http://www.soe.ucsc.edu/~renau) is an associate professor of computer engineering at the University of California, Santa Cruz. His research focuses on computer architecture, including design effort metrics and models, infrared thermal measurements, low-power and thermal-aware designs, process variability, thread level speculation, and FPGA/ASIC design. Renau has a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Short Abstract:
Professor Renau will talk about the still not published Live Simulation environment being developed University of California, Santa Cruz. The Live Simulation Environment is a collaborative environment with statistical sampling for very fast
computer architecture simulations. The talk will present the philosophy and a live demo of the setup. The setup can run SPEC benchmarks in few seconds with accurate sampling.
Unlike other statistical simulation simulators, the user does not specify sampling parameters. The user just sets the acceptable simulation error, a set of benchmarks, and the architecture configuration. The Live environment is able to automatically adjust the sampling parameters guaranteeing that the error is within the requested confidence interval.
By adapting the sample parameters per application, benchmark, and core automatically it is possible to accurately run SPEC 2006 in a few seconds.
This is a link of a video showing the "goal"
http://masc.soe.ucsc.edu/livedemo/livedemo.mp4
Host: Dr. Timothy Pinkston
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 248 Conference Room
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Shane Goodoff
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USC Alumni Reception in Chennai
Fri, Apr 03, 2015 @ 07:30 PM - 10:00 PM
USC Viterbi School of Engineering, Viterbi School of Engineering Alumni
Receptions & Special Events
USC Viterbi is hosting an alumni reception in Chennai, India at the Hyatt Regency, 365 Anna Salai, Teynampet. All USC Alumni are welcome.
To confirm your attendance, please contact Sudha Kumar, india@gapp.usc.edu.
Location: Hyatt Regency, Chennai, India
Audiences: USC Alumni
Contact: James Morse
