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Events for April 05, 2018
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EE Seminar - Beyond Binary Failures in Networks
Thu, Apr 05, 2018 @ 10:00 AM - 11:00 AM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Monia Ghobadi, Researcher, Microsoft Research Mobility and Networking
Talk Title: Beyond Binary Failures in Networks
Abstract: Fiber optic cables are the workhorses of today's Internet services, but they are an expensive resource and require significant monetary investment. Their importance has driven a conservative deployment approach with redundancy baked into multiple layers of the network under the assumption that links have a constant reliability status and operate at a fixed capacity. In this talk, I take an unconventional approach and argue that link failures should not be always considered binary events; this approach enables the foundation of a framework for network links with dynamic capacity and reliability. I investigated this idea by conducting the first ever large-scale study of operational optical signals, analyzing over 2,000 channels in a wide-area network for a period of three years, as well as 350,000 links in 20 data center networks worldwide. My analysis uncovered several findings that enable cross-layer optimizations and smart algorithms to improve traffic engineering, increase capacity, and reduce cost. First, the capacity of 99% of wide-area links can be augmented by at least 50 Gbps, leading to an overall capacity gain of more than 100 Tbps. This means we get higher capacity and better availability using the same links. Second, I will show that 99.99% of data center links have an incoming optical power level that is higher than the design threshold; by allowing links to have multiple reliability levels, we can cut the cost of data center networks by nearly half. Finally, the framework opens the door to revisiting several classical networking problems, such as the maximum-flow problem and graph abstractions. Microsoft has invested in this new framework and is rolling out the necessary infrastructure for deployment.
Biography: Monia Ghobadi is a researcher at the Microsoft Research Mobility and Networking research group. Prior to MSR, she was a software engineer at Google. She received her Ph.D. in Computer Science at the University of Toronto and B.Eng. in Computer Engineering at the Sharif University of Technology. Monia is a computer systems researcher with a networking focus and has worked on a broad set of topics, including data center networking, optical networks, transport protocols, network measurement, and hardware-software co-design. Many of the technologies she has helped develop are part of real-world systems at Microsoft and Google. Monia was recognized as an N2women rising star in networking and communications in 2017. Her work has won the best dataset award, Google research excellent paper award (twice), and the ACM IMC best paper award.
Host: Konstantinos Psounis, kpsounis@usc.edu
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 248
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Mayumi Thrasher
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Landscape of Practical Blockchain Systems and their Applications
Thu, Apr 05, 2018 @ 02:00 PM - 03:00 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Chandrasekaran Mohan, IBM Almaden Research Center
Talk Title: Landscape of Practical Blockchain Systems and their Applications
Series: Center for Cyber-Physical Systems and Internet of Things
Abstract: The concept of a distributed ledger was invented as the underlying technology of the public or permissionless Bitcoin cryptocurrency network. But the adoption and further adaptation of it for use in the private or permissioned environments is what I consider to be of practical consequence and hence only such private blockchain systems will be the focus of this talk.
Computer companies like IBM, Intel, Oracle, Baidu and Microsoft, and many key players in different vertical industry segments have recognized the applicability of blockchains in environments other than cryptocurrencies. IBM did some pioneering work by architecting and implementing Fabric, and then open sourcing it. Now Fabric is being enhanced via the Hyperledger Consortium as part of The Linux Foundation. A couple of the other efforts include Enterprise Ethereum, Sawtooth and R3 Corda.
While currently there is no standard in the private blockchain space, all the ongoing efforts involve some combination of database, transaction, encryption, virtualization, consensus and other distributed systems technologies. Some of the application areas in which blockchain pilots are being carried out are: smart contracts, derivatives processing, e-governance, Know Your Customer (KYC), healthcare, supply chain management and provenance management.
In this talk, I will describe some use-case scenarios, especially those in production deployment. I will also survey the landscape of private blockchain systems with respect to their architectures in general and their approaches to some specific technical areas. I will also discuss some of the opportunities that exist and the challenges that need to be addressed. Since most of the blockchain efforts are still in a nascent state, the time is right for mainstream database and distributed systems researchers and practitioners to get more deeply involved to focus on the numerous open problems.
An earlier version of this talk was delivered as the opening keynote at the 37th IEEE International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems (ICDCS) in Atlanta (USA) on 6 June 2017. Extensive blockchain related collateral can be found at http://bit.ly/CMbcDB
Biography: Dr. C. Mohan has been an IBM researcher for 36 years in the database and related areas, impacting numerous IBM and non-IBM products, the research and academic communities, and standards, especially with his invention of the ARIES family of database locking and recovery algorithms, and the Presumed Abort distributed commit protocol. This IBM (1997), and ACM and IEEE (2002) Fellow has also served as the IBM India Chief Scientist for 3 years (2006-2009). In addition to receiving the ACM SIGMOD Innovations Award (1996), the VLDB 10 Year Best Paper Award (1999) and numerous IBM awards, Mohan was elected to the US and Indian National Academies of Engineering (2009) and named an IBM Master Inventor (1997). This Distinguished Alumnus of IIT Madras (1977) received his PhD at the University of Texas at Austin (1981). He is an inventor of 50 patents. He is currently focused on Blockchain, Big Data and HTAP technologies (http://bit.ly/CMbcDB, http://bit.ly/CMgMDS). Since 2016, he has been a Distinguished Visiting Professor of China's prestigious Tsinghua University. He has served on the advisory board of IEEE Spectrum, and on numerous conference and journal boards. Mohan is a frequent speaker in North America, Europe and India, and has given talks in 40 countries. He is very active on social media and has a huge network of followers. More information can be found in the Wikipedia page at http://bit.ly/CMwIkP
Host: Prof. Paul Bogdan
Location: Michelson Center for Convergent Bioscience (MCB) - 101
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Talyia White
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EE Seminar - A System Level Approach to the Design of Robust Autonomous Systems
Thu, Apr 05, 2018 @ 03:00 PM - 04:00 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Nikolai Matni, Postdoctoral Scholar, Dept of EECS, UC Berkeley
Talk Title: A System Level Approach to the Design of Robust Autonomous Systems
Abstract: As the systems we build and the environments that they operate in become more complex, first-principle modeling becomes either impossible, impractical, or intractable, motivating the use of machine learning techniques for their control. As impressive as the empirical success of these methods appears to be on stylized test-cases, strong theoretical guarantees of performance, safety, or robustness are few and far between; however, such guarantees are essential when data-driven methods are applied to safety-critical systems or infrastructures. In the first part of this talk, we make concrete steps towards developing performance and stability guarantees in the data-driven setting by considering a classical problem from the optimal control literature, the Linear Quadratic Regulator (LQR), with the added twist that now the system dynamics are unknown. We provide, to the best of our knowledge, the first end-to-end baselines for learning and control in an LQR problem that do not require restrictive or unrealistic assumptions. A key technical tool used in deriving this result is our recently developed System Level Approach (SLA) to Controller Synthesis. The SLA provides a transparent connection between system structure, constraints, and uncertainty and their effects on controller synthesis, implementation, and performance -” we exploit these properties to combine results from contemporary high-dimensional statistics and robust controller synthesis in a way that is amenable to non-asymptotic analysis. We then show how the solution to the "Learning-LQR" problem can be incorporated into an adaptive polynomial-time algorithm that achieves sub-linear regret. In the second part of this talk, we discuss how we can extend these ideas to large-scale data-driven autonomous systems, which encompass future incarnations of the smart-grid, intelligent transportation systems and software-defined networks. In this large-scale distributed setting, an additional challenge must be addressed: even when the system model is exactly known, designing robust systems with optimal performance guarantees is a challenging task. We show how the SLA allows for localized optimal controllers to be synthesized using convex programming, thus extending the performance and robustness guarantees of optimal/robust control, under mild and practically relevant assumptions, to systems of arbitrary size. We illustrate the usefulness of this approach with a frequency regulation problem in the power-grid, and show how it can be used to systematically explore tradeoffs in controller performance, robustness, and synthesis/implementation complexity. We conclude with our vision for a contemporary theory of autonomy and data-driven control, and outline ongoing efforts in extending the previous results to incorporate the guarantees of other learning and control paradigms, such as model predictive control and experiment design.
Biography: Nikolai is a postdoctoral scholar in EECS at UC Berkeley working with Benjamin Recht. Prior to that, he was a postdoctoral scholar in Computing and Mathematical Sciences at the California Institute of Technology. He received the B.A.Sc. and M.A.Sc. in Electrical Engineering from the University of British Columbia, and the Ph.D. in Control and Dynamical Systems from the California Institute of Technology in June 2016 under the advisement of John C. Doyle. His research interests broadly encompass the use of learning, layering, dynamics, control and optimization in the design and analysis of large-scale data-driven cyber-physical systems. He was awarded the IEEE CDC 2013 Best Student Paper Award, the IEEE ACC 2017 Best Student Paper Award (as co-advisor), and was an Everhart Lecture Series speaker at Caltech.
Host: Mihailo Jovanovic, mihailo@usc.edu
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 248
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Mayumi Thrasher
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SHPE's Membership Appreciation Dinner
Thu, Apr 05, 2018 @ 07:00 PM - 12:00 AM
Viterbi School of Engineering Student Organizations
Student Activity
Come celebrate the success of the SHPE familia at our first ever banquet. This event will be a formal (cocktail attire) dinner followed by dancing. Our corporate sponsors, alumni, and undergraduates from Region 2 are all invited. Dean Yortsos has already RSVPed, have you? More information to come, RSVP here: http://evite.me/t2ZwAUqjNR. Cost of attendance is $10 for USC undergraduates, $15 for all other undergraduates, and $20 for alumni and corporate sponsors. Payments can be done via Venmo to our treasurer @Maria-Camasmie. Email shpeusc@gmail.com with any questions or concerns. We hope to see everyone there! RSVP soon as spots will fill up.
Location: Ronald Tutor Campus Center (TCC) - Ballroom
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Society of Hispanic Professional Engineers
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SHPE's Membership Appreciation Dinner
Thu, Apr 05, 2018 @ 11:00 PM - 12:00 PM
Viterbi School of Engineering Student Organizations
Student Activity
Come celebrate the success of the SHPE familia at our first ever banquet. This event will be a formal (cocktail attire) dinner followed by dancing. Our corporate sponsors, alumni, and undergraduates from Region 2 are all invited. Dean Yortsos has already RSVPed, have you? More information to come, RSVP here: http://evite.me/t2ZwAUqjNR. Cost of attendance is $10 for USC undergraduates, $15 for all other undergraduates, and $20 for alumni and corporate sponsors. Payments can be done via Venmo to our treasurer @Maria-Camasmie. Email shpeusc@gmail.com with any questions or concerns. We hope to see everyone there! RSVP soon as spots will fill up.
Location: Ballroom
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Society of Hispanic Professional Engineers
