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Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Events for April
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Convex Optimization for Systems Science: From Control to Statistics
Mon, Apr 01, 2013 @ 10:30 AM - 11:30 AM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Parikshit Shah, Ph.D., Wisconsin Institute of Discovery
Talk Title: Convex Optimization for Systems Science: From Control to Statistics
Abstract: Large-scale dynamic systems are becoming ubiquitous in modern science and engineering, with applications in diverse areas such as robotic teams, supply chains, and power networks. Systems science is an exciting area that deals with understanding systems and developing tools for analysis, model selection, and decision-making.
In this talk we will discuss two fundamental and challenging problems that arise in this area: (a) data-driven modeling of dynamic systems (traditionally known as system identification), and (b) decentralized decision making in the presence of limited information (also known as decentralized control). Some of the basic challenges in these problems are computational ones, which we will overcome by devising principled convex optimization based approaches. Along the way, we will establish novel connections between control and some combinatorial concepts such as partially ordered sets and Moebius inversion; and between system identification and high-dimensional statistics.
Biography: Parikshit Shah is currently a Member of Research Staff at Philips Research, New York. He has been a research associate at the University of Wisconsin (affiliated with the Wisconsin Institutes of Discovery) in 2011-2012. He received his PhD in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in June 2011. Earlier, he received a Master's degree from Stanford and a Bachelor's degree from the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay. His research interests lie in the areas of convex optimization, control theory, system identification, and statistics. He has held the School of Engineering Fellowship at Stanford University, and a visiting appointment at the Institute for Pure and Applied Mathematics (IPAM) at UCLA
Host: Prof. Richard Leahy
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 248
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Talyia Veal
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Seminars in Biomedical Engineering
Mon, Apr 01, 2013 @ 12:30 PM - 01:50 PM
Alfred E. Mann Department of Biomedical Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Mehmet Akcakaya, Ph.D., Instructor in Medicine, Harvard Medical School Senior Research Scientist, Cardiac MR Center, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA
Talk Title: Acceleration Methods for High-Resolution Cardiac MRI Using Compressed Sensing
Host: Biomedical Engineering
Location: Olin Hall of Engineering (OHE) - 122
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Mischalgrace Diasanta
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EE-EP Seminar
Mon, Apr 01, 2013 @ 02:00 PM - 03:00 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Chris Mi, University of Michigan-Dearborn
Talk Title: Wireless Charging of Electric Vehicle Batteries for Economic and Safe Future Transportation
Abstract: Electric vehicles (EVs) and plug-in hybrid electric vehicles (PHEVs) have attracted worldwide attentions because of their capabilities to improve energy and environment sustainability. However, inconvenience of charging, high cost, short driving range, and safety concerns of the battery system have hindered the mass market penetration of EVs and PHEVs. This presentation will look at studies which address some of these issues.
The first part of the presentation will focus on wireless charging technology that helps eliminate the need of carrying cables and plugging in, and offer significant improvement in convenience and electric safety for EV and PHEV charging. Although Wireless Power Transmission (WPT) has been commercialized for consumer electronics and also investigated for EV wireless charging, the size, efficiency, and cost are key obstacles that prevent WPT from widely deployed. Our research in this area aims at novel designs that can considerably reduce size and cost while increase coupling coefficient and system efficiency. The second part will look at EV battery study that addresses safety and reliability concerns and provides diagnostic and prognostic functions. Finally, there will be some discussion on the latest research activities at the GATE Center of Electric Drive Transportation that further enhance safety and cost advantages of EVs and PHEVs.
Biography: Chris Mi is Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering and the Director of DOE funded GATE Center for Electric Drive Transportation at the University of Michigan, Dearborn. He is a fellow of IEEE. He received the B.S. and M.S. degrees from Northwestern Polytechnical University, Xi’an, China, and the Ph.D. degree from the University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada, all in electrical engineering. Previously he was an Electrical Engineer with General Electric Canada Inc. He was the President and the Chief Technical Officer of 1Power Solutions, Inc. from 2008 to 2011.
His research interests are in electric and hybrid vehicles. He has taught tutorials and seminars on the subject of HEV/PHEV for the Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE), the IEEE, workshops sponsored by the National Science Foundation (NSF), and the National Society of Professional Engineers. He has delivered courses to major automotive OEMs and suppliers, including GM, Ford, Chrysler, Honda, Tyco Electronics, A&D Technology, Johnson Controls, Quantum Technology, Delphi, Siemens, and the European Ph.D School.
Dr. Mi is the recipient of “Distinguished Teaching Award” and “Distinguished Research Award” of University of Michigan Dearborn. He is the recipient of 2007 IEEE Region 4 “Outstanding Engineer Award,” IEEE Southeastern Michigan Section “Outstanding Professional Award.” and “SAE Environmental Excellence in Transportation (E2T) Award,” and ranked four times as “Top Associate Editors” by IEEE Transactions on Vehicular Technology. Dr. Mi is Associate Editor of three IEEE Transactions and an editorial board member of two IET Journals.
Dr. Mi was the Chair (2008-2009) and Vice Chair (2006-2007) of the IEEE Southeastern Michigan Section, the general Chair of the 5th IEEE Vehicle Power and Propulsion Conference. He is the topic chair for the 2011 IEEE International Future Energy Challenge, and the General Chair for the 2013 IEEE International Future Energy Challenge. He is a Distinguished Lecturer (DL) of the IEEE Vehicular Technology Society.
Host: EE-Electrophysics
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 248
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Marilyn Poplawski
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Harshvardhan Vathsangam, USC (PhD Defense)
Mon, Apr 01, 2013 @ 02:30 PM - 04:00 PM
Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Harshvardhan Vathsangam, USC
Talk Title: Sense and Sensibility: Statistical Techniques for Human Energy Expenditure Estimation Using Kinematic Sensors
Series: PhD Defense Announcements
Abstract: Sense and Sensibility: Statistical Techniques for Human Energy Expenditure Estimation Using Kinematic Sensors ==== Healthcare is undergoing a shift from the episodic, expert-driven, curative approaches of the past towards a self-empowered, preventative model for the future. Central to this is the treatment of chronic illnesses. This treatment will require the adoption of behavioral changes on one's lifestyle. In this thesis, we focus on the negative effects of one such chronic illness: physically inactivity.
Regular physical activity is associated with decreased mortality, lower risk of cardiovascular disease, diabetes mellitus, colon and breast cancer.
Despite this knowledge, physical activity levels are not adequate.
Central to the need to get people to be more active is the ability to accurately measure and characterize physical activity in a cost-effective yet ubiquitous manner. One dimension of characterization of physical activity is the energy expended as a result of that activity. In this dissertation, we aim to demonstrate how kinematic sensors in combination with statistical techniques can accurately predict energy expenditure due to physical activity.
We cast the problem of determining energy expenditure in a mathematical framework and discuss various functional maps. We derive a set of frequency-based features that are robust to location on the human body and orientation. We use these features to determine the most accurate 'per-person' technique to map movement to energy expenditure. We compare prediction accuracies using different sensor streams and algorithms. A comparative study of accuracy versus inference time is also performed. We extend this work to be able to generate maps given a minimal set of morphological descriptors such as height, weight, age etc. We present and compare a set of models including nearest neighbor models, weight-scaled models, a set of hierarchical linear models and speed-based approaches. We show how these approaches can be used to evaluate the best subset of morphological descriptors and the best individual descriptor to generate personalized maps across people. These contributions are a step towards designing cost-effective, accurate and ubiquitous solutions to estimate physical activity levels and designing interventions based on accurately measured data.
Host: Lizsl DeLeon
Location: Ronald Tutor Hall of Engineering (RTH) - 406
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Assistant to CS chair
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Codes for Reliability and Security in Distributed Storage Systems
Tue, Apr 02, 2013 @ 10:30 AM - 11:30 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Salim El Rouayheb, Princeton University
Talk Title: Codes for Reliability and Security in Distributed Storage Systems
Abstract: Distributed storage systems are now a growing paradigm for providing online storage of data and making it accessible anywhere and anytime. Such services are now being commercially offered by data centers, such as those run by Google and Amazon, and peer-to-peer (p2p) systems such as Wuala. These systems rely on large distributed networks of individually unreliable commodity nodes to reliably store the data. At this high level of scale and distributivity, new questions arise in terms of understanding the fundamental theoretical tradeoffs among the different system resources (storage, bandwidth, disk I/O, latency, energy, computational complexity, etc.) in order to meet a targeted level of data availability and security.
In this talk, I will answer some of these questions and present new efficient codes for distributed storage that we call Distributed Replication-based Exact Simple Storage (DRESS) codes. DRESS codes permit fast system repair and growth with minimum bandwidth, disk reads, and computational cost at the price of a minimal storage overhead. I will present optimal code constructions from projective planes and Steiner systems and describe simple randomized constructions based on balls-and-bins models. I will also discuss fundamental information theoretic bounds for protecting the data confidentiality and integrity in distributed storage systems in the face of eavesdroppers and malicious adversaries.
Biography: Salim El Rouayheb is an associate research scholar at the Electrical Engineering Department at Princeton University. He was a postdoctoral research fellow with the Wireless Foundations (WiFo) Lab at the Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences (EECS) Department, University of California, Berkeley (2010-2011). His research interests lie in the broad area of communications with a focus on distributed storage systems, network coding, and information-theoretic security.
He received his Diploma degree in electrical engineering from the Lebanese University, Roumieh, Lebanon, in 2002, and his M.S. degree in computer and communications engineering from the American University of Beirut, Lebanon, in 2004. He received his Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering from Texas A&M University, College Station, in 2009. During Summer 2006, he was an intern at the Mathematics of Communication Research Department at Bell Labs. He was awarded the Charlie S. Korban award for outstanding graduate student, and the Texas Telecommunication Engineering Consortium (TXTEC) Graduate Fellowship.
Host: Andreas Molisch, x04670, molisch@usc.edu
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 248
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Gerrielyn Ramos
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CS Colloquium: Mehmet Dogar (CMU): Physics-Based Robotic Manipulation in Human Environments
Tue, Apr 02, 2013 @ 03:30 PM - 05:00 PM
Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Mehmet Dogar, Carnegie Mellon
Talk Title: Physics-Based Robotic Manipulation in Human Environments
Series: CS Colloquium
Abstract: The list of physics-based actions that we humans use to push, pull, throw, tumble, and play with the objects around us is nearly endless.
My research strives to develop robots with similar capabilities by incorporating physical predictions into manipulation planning. Most existing manipulation planners do not use physical predictions and therefore are limited to pick-and-place actions. I develop manipulation algorithms which enable robots to move beyond pick-and-place.
In this talk I will focus on using physics-based pushing actions. I will describe how a robot can plan pushing actions that are robust to high degrees of uncertainty in the environment. I will show that pushing manipulation leads to very efficient plans in cluttered environments, while pick-and-place manipulation treats clutter like a game of chess where each piece is moved one-by-one. Finally, I will talk about how contact sensor feedback can be used during physics-based actions to reduce uncertainty and to account for errors in the robot's physical predictions.
Biography: Mehmet Dogar is a PhD student at the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. His research focuses on using physics-based predictions in robotic manipulation which enables robots to accomplish useful tasks in dynamic and cluttered human environments. He received his M.S. and B.S. degrees in Computer Engineering from the Middle East Technical University, Turkey. He was a Finalist for the Best Paper Award at IROS 2010. He received the Fulbright Award for Outstanding Foreign Students in 2008.
Host: Stefan Schaal
Location: Seaver Science Library (SSL) - 150
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Assistant to CS chair
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Epstein Institute / ISE 651 Seminar Series
Tue, Apr 02, 2013 @ 03:45 PM - 05:00 PM
Daniel J. Epstein Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Liam Oââ¬â¢Neill, Associate Professor, School of Public Health, University of North Texas Health Science Center
Talk Title: "The Happy Hospital: The Impact of Hospital Design and Capacity Management on Patient Satisfaction"
Series: Epstein Institute Seminar Series
Abstract: As mandated by the Affordable Care Act, part of a hospital's reimbursement (1 - 2%) is now based on patient satisfaction. The purpose of this research is to measure the impact of OM functions, such as capacity management, nurse staffing, and hospital design, on patient satisfaction. We distinguish between those organizational and environmental factors that are under management control vs. uncontrollable factors. The study was based on 155 Texas hospitals, including general acute care, teaching, specialty cardiac and orthopedic hospitals. Three databases were used in this study: AHA, HCAHPS, and THCIC. Private rooms, more nurses-per-bed, and physician ownership were associated with increased patient satisfaction. For-profit ownership, a high percentage of Medicaid and emergency admissions, and higher occupancy levels were associated with decreased patient satisfaction. Hospital managers can significantly improve their patient satisfaction scores -- and hence their bottom line -- by focusing on OM core functions, such as nurse staffing, bed utilization, and hospital design.
Biography: Liam Oââ¬â¢Neill is an associate professor in the School of Public Health at the University of North Texas Health Science Center. His primary research interests are in health care operations and information systems, including hospital efficiency analysis, hospital marketing, technology diffusion, and managerial benchmarking. Before joining the faculty at the University of North Texas in 2006, Oââ¬â¢Neill was on the faculties of the University of Iowa and Cornell University. He serves on the editorial board of Health Care Management Science and other journals and is past president of the Health Care Applications Section of INFORMS.
Host: Daniel J. Epstein Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering
More Information: Seminar-O'Neill.doc
Location: Von Kleinsmid Center For International & Public Affairs (VKC) - Room 100
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Georgia Lum
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CS Colloquium: Stefano Tessaro (MIT CSAIL): Theoretical Foundations for Applied Cryptography
Wed, Apr 03, 2013 @ 03:30 PM - 05:00 PM
Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Stefano Tessaro, MIT CSAIL
Talk Title: Theoretical Foundations for Applied Cryptography
Series: CS Colloquium
Abstract: My talk explains that obtaining quality applied cryptography (i.e., with the desired combination of security assurance and performance) requires significant and deep advances in theory. I will discuss three illustrative examples.
First, I will present my results on a process called security amplification that may be used to make block ciphers (the workhorses of modern cryptography under which encryption is ubiquitously
performed) more secure against cryptanalysis.
Second, I will introduce my theory of multi-instance security, which may be applied to provide the first theoretical analysis of the effectiveness of the classical practice of password salting.
Third, I will bridge a 35-year gap between the information & coding community and the cryptography community by providing cryptographic foundations, as well as schemes with optimal parameters, for private communication based solely on the assumption that the communication channel from sender to adversary is noisier than the one from sender to receiver. The resulting schemes, being keyless, are particularly attractive in wireless communication scenarios.
Biography: Stefano Tessaro is currently a research scientist in the Cryptography and Information Security group at MIT CSAIL. He received his MSc and PhD from ETH Zurich in 2005 and 2010, respectively. From 2010 to 2012, he was a postdoctoral scholar at the University of California, San Diego. His research interests are in cryptography and its connections to theoretical computer science and information theory.
Host: David Kempe
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 248
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Assistant to CS chair
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AME - Department Seminar
Wed, Apr 03, 2013 @ 03:30 PM - 04:30 AM
Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Yogendra M. Gupta , Regents Professor of Physics Director of Institute for Shock Physics Department of Physics and Institute for Shock Physics Washington State University Pullman, WA 99164
Talk Title: Understanding Materials Dynamics under Rapid Impulsive Loading
Abstract:
Dynamic compression experiments (~5 to 200 GPa) subject materials to large compressions, deformations, and high temperatures on very short time scales (ps to üs) resulting in a rich array of physical and chemical changes. Credibly linking and understanding the dynamic response of materials in real-time across different length scales constitutes the major scientific challenge in the field. After a brief introduction about shock wave compression, this talk will summarize recent research activities, experimental developments, and future opportunities to understand condensed matter dynamics at high stresses and short times.
Wednesday, April 3, 2013
3:30 PM
Seaver Science Library, Room 150 (SSL 150)
Refreshments will be served at 3:15 pm.
Biography: Yogendra M. Gupta, Regents Professor in the Department of Physics and Director of the Institute for Shock Physics, has been a faculty member at Washington State University (WSU) since 1981. Prior to his appointment at WSU, he spent nearly seven years at the Stanford Research Institute (now SRI International) preceded by two years of postdoctoral research. Since 1970, Gupta has been engaged in experimental and theoretical research related to shock wave and high pressure compression of condensed matter. His work has emphasized real-time examination and understanding of microscopic processes using a variety of time-resolved measurements and related analyses (optical spectroscopy, x-ray diffraction, and several continuum methods) in a wide range of materials. Gupta and his collaborators have worked on a broad range of condensed matter phenomena: structural transformations, chemical reactions, and deformation and fracture. These studies have resulted in over 275 publications. Currently, Professor Gupta is leading a major experimental effort to establish the Dynamic Compression Sector at the Advanced Photon Source (Argonne), a DOE/NNSA supported user facility. Since joining WSU, he has supervised the work of more than 100 graduate students and research associates. Professor Gupta is a Fellow of both the American Physical Society (1991) and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (2002), and has served on numerous committees related to U.S. national security programs. In 2001, he received the American Physical Society's Shock Compression Science Award, the premier award in the field. In 2005, he was the recipient of Washington State University's highest faculty recognition, the Eminent Faculty Award.
Host: Veronica Eliasson
Location: Seaver Science Library (SSL) - 150
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Kristi Villegas
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EE-EP Seminar
Thu, Apr 04, 2013 @ 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Jia Zhu, University of California, Berkeley and Lawrence Berkeley National Lab
Talk Title: Nanostructured Energy Devices---phonons, electrons and photons on the nanoscale
Abstract: Supplying the world with sustainable energy is one of the most pressing issues in modern society. Dramatically improved control over heat, electricity and solar energy is essential to create a new energy paradigm. Nanomaterials with carefully tailored properties (such as interface, geometry) can be used to manipulate the flow of phonons, electrons and photons, to enable novel energy devices in an unconventional manner. In this talk, I will present two examples of nanostructure-enabled energy devices.
As a significant amount of energy is consumed worldwide just for controlling heat flows, advanced thermal power devices for self-control heat flow are very desirable, but significantly underdeveloped. Here I will present the world’s first switchable thermal rectifier, a three terminal nonlinear device for advanced thermal control. It opens the door for a variety of applications, including on-chip cooling, building efficiency, and thermal energy storage.
Photon management, involving both absorption enhancement and reflection reduction, is
critical to all photovoltaic devices. Here I will demonstrate a novel nanodome solar
cell structure with an efficient photon management design. Two types of photovoltaic devices, amorphous silicon and dye sensitized solar cells, are used to demonstrate the concept. They both achieve the highest short circuit current, and state of art conversion efficiency. More strikingly, the design and process is not in principle limited to any specific material system, hence it opens up exciting opportunities for all classes of photovoltaic devices.
Biography: Jia Zhu is currently a postdoctoral scholar at University of California, Berkeley and Lawrence Berkeley National Lab. His scientific research interest is in the area of nanomaterials and devices. Dr. Zhu has published approximately 20 papers in peer-reviewed journals. He is a reviewer of over 20 scientific journals. He received his M.S. and Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University, and B.S. in Physics from Nanjing University. He has received several awards, including: Division of Inorganic Chemistry Yong Investigator Award (American Chemical Society, 2011), Gold Medal of Graduate Student Award (Material Research Society, 2010).
Host: EE-Electrophysics
Location: Seaver Science Library (SSL) - 150
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Marilyn Poplawski
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Focused on parallel and distributed computingThu, Apr 04, 2013 @ 02:00 PM - 03:00 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: TBA, TBA
Talk Title: TBA
Series: EE598 Seminar Course
Abstract: Weekly seminars given by researchers in academia and industry including senior doctoral students in EE, CS and ISI covering current research related to parallel and distributed computation including parallel algorithms, high performance computing, scientific computation, application specific architectures, multi-core and many-core architectures and algorithms, application acceleration, reconfigurable computing systems, data intensive systems, Big Data and cloud computing.
Biography: Prerequisite: Students are expected to be familiar with basic concepts at the level of graduate level courses in Computer Engineering and Computer Science in some of these topic areas above. Ph.D. students in Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering and Computer Science can automatically enroll. M.S. students can enroll only with permission of the instructor. To request permission send a brief mail to the instructor in text format with the subject field ââ¬ÅEE 598ââ¬Â. The body of the mail (in text format) should include name, degree objective, courses taken at USC and grades obtained, prior educational background, and relevant research background, if any.
Requirements for CR:
1. Attending at least 10 seminars during the semester
There will be a sign-in sheet and a sign-out sheet at every seminar. All students must sign-in (before 2:00pm) and sign-out (after 3:00pm). The sign-in sheet will not be available after 2:00pm, and the sign-out sheet will not be available before 3:00pm.
2. Submitting a written report for at least 5 seminars
The written report for each seminar must be 1-page single line spaced format with font size of 12 (Times) or 11 (Arial) without any figures, tables, or graphs. The report must be submitted no later than 1 week after the corresponding seminar, and must be handed only to the instructor either on the seminar times or during office hours. Late reports will not be considered.
The report must summarize studentââ¬â¢s own understanding of the seminar, and should contain the following:
- Your name and submission date [1 line]
- Title of the seminar, name of the speaker, and seminar date [1 line]
- Background of the work (e.g., applications, prior research, etc.) [1 paragraph]
- Highlights of the approaches presented in the seminar [1-2 paragraphs]
- Main results presented in the seminar [1-2 paragraphs]
- Conclusion (your own conclusion and not what was given by the speaker) [1 paragraph]
Reviewing papers related to the topic of the seminar, and incorporating relevant findings in the
reports (e.g., in the conclusion section) is encouraged. In such cases, make sure to clearly indicate
the reference(s) used to derive these conclusions.
Host: Professor Viktor K. Prasanna
More Information: Course Announcement_EE598_Focused on parallel and distributed computing_(Spring 2013).pdf
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) -
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Janice Thompson
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Predictive Modeling of Patient State and Therapy Optimization
Thu, Apr 04, 2013 @ 02:00 PM - 03:00 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Zoran Obradovic, Director, Data Analytics and Biomedical Informatics Center, Professor, Computer and Information Sciences Department, Professor, Statistics Department, Fox School of Business (secondary appointment), Temple University
Talk Title: Predictive Modeling of Patient State and Therapy Optimization
Series: EE598 Seminar Course
Abstract: This talk will discuss the results of our ongoing DARPA DLT project aimed to develop and validate effective predictive modeling technology to achieve the following sepsis treatment related aims for acute inflammation on high dimensional and noisy data at a clinically relevant scale: (1) Personalized sepsis therapy optimization for an individual patientââ¬â¢s state improvement; (2) Early diagnosis of sepsis and accurate detection of change in the state of sepsis, and (3): Gene expression analysis for sepsis biomarkers identification. These aims are addressed by developing advanced methods for analysis of temporal dependencies in high dimensional multi-source sepsis related data, which show significant mortality reduction in severe sepsis patients.
This is joint research with Mohamed Ghalwash, Qiang Lou, Vladan Radosavljevic, Dusan Ramljak and Kosta Ristovski.
Biography: Zoran Obradovicââ¬â¢s research interests include data mining, machine learning and complex networks applications in climate modeling and health management. He is the executive editor at the journal on Statistical Analysis and Data Mining, which is the official publication of the American Statistical Association and is an editorial board member at eleven journals. He is general co-chair for 2013 and 2014 SIAM International Conference on Data Mining and was the program or track chair at many data mining and biomedical informatics conference. His data analytics work is published in more than 260 articles and is cited more than 10,000 times (H-index 41 and I10-index 86). For more details see http://www.dabi.temple.edu/~zoran/.
Host: Professor Cauligi S. Raghavendra
More Information: Course Announcement_EE598_Focused on parallel and distributed computing_(Spring 2013) 2.pdf
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 248
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Janice Thompson
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CS Colloquium Series Lecture: Greg ver Steeg (ISI): Detecting Influence in Social Networks
Thu, Apr 04, 2013 @ 03:30 PM - 05:00 PM
Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Greg ver Steeg, Information Sciences Institute (ISI)
Talk Title: Detecting Influence in Social Networks
Series: CS Colloquium
Abstract: Current tests for contagion in social network studies are flawed due to the confounding effects of latent homophily (i.e., ties form preferentially between individuals with similar hidden traits). We demonstrate a general method to lower bound the strength of causal effects in observational social network studies, even in the presence of arbitrary, unobserved individual traits. Our test requires no parametric assumptions and is based on connections with algebraic geometry and Bell inequalities in quantum physics. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach by correctly deducing the causal effects for examples previously shown to expose defects in existing methodology. Finally, we discuss preliminary results on data taken from the Framingham Heart Study showing that the spread of obesity cannot be explained by latent homophily.
I will also give a brief summary of other recent and ongoing research. One goal is to construct an information-theoretic foundation for unsupervised learning with preliminary success in discovering predictable relationships in social networks based only on content dynamics. Other topics include the statistical physics of networks and solving machine learning problems with quantum annealing.
Biography: Greg Ver Steeg is a computer scientist at USC's Information Sciences Institute. Ver Steeg received his PhD in physics from Caltech in 2009 for research in quantum information theory. His research has explored a diverse set of connections between computer science and physics dealing with machine learning, information theory, causal inference, and information processing. He is the recent winner of an AFOSR Young Investigator Award.
Host: CS Colloquium Series Lecture
Location: Seaver Science Library (SSL) - 150
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Assistant to CS chair
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Informational Limits of Systems with Humans and Machines
Thu, Apr 04, 2013 @ 03:30 PM - 05:00 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Lav R. Varshney, IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center
Talk Title: Informational Limits of Systems with Humans and Machines
Abstract: New communication and computing technologies are enabling people to come together to achieve higher quality of life and to develop innovative products and services. The down-to-earth problem of building these informational systems, however, is entangled with theoretical questions of what is possible and what is impossible when bringing together ubiquitous informational technologies with the people and organizations they are transforming. Group decision-making, information factories, and crowdsourcing are all ways of structuring systems to draw on the strengths of many, allowing collective intelligence rather than cacophony to emerge.
In this talk, I will discuss a mathematical model of human decision-making and show the benefits of diversity in groups. Next I will present a model of crowdsourcing with strategic players, and further show empirical evidence from a large-scale system we built that indicates the importance of drawing human attention. A thermodynamic interpretation leads us to ask: is there a Carnot limit for knowledge work? In closing, I discuss how fundamental limits on the transmission of information provide insight into systems with humans and machines.
Biography: Lav Varshney is a research scientist at the IBM T. J. Watson Research Center, where his current research focuses on sociotechnical systems, computational creativity, statistical signal processing, information and coding theory, and data analytics. He received the B. S. degree with honors in electrical and computer engineering (magna cum laude) from Cornell University. He received the S. M., E. E., and Ph. D. degrees in electrical engineering and computer science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
He held an NSF fellowship at MIT, and his masterââ¬â¢s thesis was awarded the E. A. Guillemin Thesis Award for best electrical engineering thesis and his doctoral thesis received the J.-A. Kong Award Honorable Mention for best electrical engineering thesis. He has also received a best paper award at the 2012 SRII Global Conference, and best student paper awards at the 2006 IEEE Data Compression Conference, the 2004 IEEE Conference on the History of Electronics, and the 2003 IEEE Radar Conference. He has received an IBM eminence and excellence award for his work on crowdsourcing and has been named a Forward Thinker by IBM for his work on culinary computational creativity.
Host: Prof. Shrikanth Narayanan
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 248
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Mary Francis
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Integrated Systems Seminar Series
Fri, Apr 05, 2013 @ 10:30 AM - 11:30 AM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Prof. Danijela Cabric, UCLA
Talk Title: Energy-Efficient Wideband Spectrum Sensing and Modulation Classification
Abstract: Motivated by the spectrum scarcity problem, Cognitive Radios (CRs) have been proposed as a way to opportunistically allocate unused spectrum licensed to Primary Users (PUs). In this context, Secondary Users (SUs) sense the spectrum to detect the presence or absence of PUs, and use the unoccupied bands while maintaining a predefined probability of misdetection. Further, modulation classification, the process of identifying the modulation class employed by the transmitter, helps identify who is occupying a given frequency band and distinguish PUs from other users and interference. Sensing wideband channels increases the chance of finding unoccupied spectrum, and therefore increases the throughput of the CR network. The narrow-band approach for wideband spectrum sensing involves sensing multiple narrow-band channels either simultaneously, or in parallel. Both solutions either require additional receiver chains, or incur additional delays in the sensing results. Therefore, sensing wideband channels in an energy-efficient manner is highly desirable. However, wideband spectrum sensing unfolds many challenges that have not been considered in the past. In this work, we aim at answering the following fundamental question: What are the limitations of wideband spectrum sensing and modulation classification, and what are the methods to overcome them? We propose low-complexity algorithms for both cyclostationary spectrum sensing and modulation classification. Further, as a result of wideband sampling, high-rate and high-resolution ADCs become hard to design and are power hungry. As a solution to that, we propose a method to perform cyclostationary spectrum sensing using compressive sensing measurements. Moreover, given that the sampling rate of the sensing radio cannot be adapted to all signals being sensed, we study the impact of sampling clock offsets and imperfect estimates of transmit parameters on cyclostationary features. This comprehensive system level study is vital to the robust and energy-efficient design of wideband spectrum sensing and modulation classification engines for CRs.
Biography: Dr. Danijela Cabric received the Dipl. Ing. degree from the University of Belgrade, Serbia, in 1998, and the M.Sc. degree in electrical engineering from the University of California, Los Angeles, in 2001. She received her Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering from the University of California, Berkeley, in 2007, where she was a member of the Berkeley Wireless Research Center. In 2008, she joined the faculty of the Electrical Engineering Department at the University of California, Los Angeles as an Assistant Professor. Dr. Cabric received the Samueli Fellowship in 2008, the Okawa Foundation Research Grant in 2009, Hellman Fellowship in 2012 and the National Science Foundation Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Award in 2012. She serves as an Associate Editor in IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications (Cognitive Radio series) and IEEE Communications Letters, and TPC Co-Chair of 8th International Conference on Cognitive Radio Oriented Wireless Networks (CROWNCOM) 2013. Her research interests include novel radio architecture, signal processing, and networking techniques to implement spectrum sensing functionality in cognitive radios.
Host: Prof. Hossein Hashemi and Prof. Mike Chen
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 248
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Hossein Hashemi
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W.V.T. Rusch Honors Colloquium; MultiRobot Systems: From Algorithms to Ocean Deployments
Fri, Apr 05, 2013 @ 01:00 PM - 01:50 PM
USC Viterbi School of Engineering, Viterbi School of Engineering Student Affairs
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Professor Christopher M. Clark, Harvey Mudd College
Talk Title: MultiRobot Systems: From Algorithms to Ocean Deployments
Host: W.V.T. Rusch Honors Program
Location: Seeley G. Mudd Building (SGM) - 101
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Christine Viterbi Admission & Student Affairs
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AME Seminar
Fri, Apr 05, 2013 @ 02:00 PM - 03:00 PM
Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Duà ¡an M. StipanoviÃâ¡, Associate Professor Department of Industrial and Enterprise Systems Engineering and Control and Decision Group at the Coordinated Science Laboratory University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Talk Title: Control of Multi-Vehicle Systems
Abstract: In this talk, a number of control designs for controlling multi-vehicle systems will be presented. These control designs highly depend on the type of vehicles which are controlled such as differential drives, cars, helicopters or quadrotors. They also depend on the information that is available to vehicles and vehiclesââ¬â¢ objectives to be accomplished as well as various uncertainties including perturbations and delays. In addition to some simulation results a number of experimental results including autonomous and semi-autonomous (that is, teleoperated) ground vehicles (conducted in Mechatronics and Robotics Laboratories at the University of Illinois) and aerial vehicles (in collaboration with the Boeing Company) will be presented.
Host: Geoffrey Spedding
Location: Kaprielian Hall (KAP) - 144
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Kristi Villegas
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NL Seminar- Abe Kazemzadeh:
Fri, Apr 05, 2013 @ 03:00 PM - 04:00 PM
Information Sciences Institute
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Abe Kazemzadeh, USC
Talk Title: Sentiment and Sarcasm in the 2012 US Presidential Election
Series: Natural Language Seminar
Abstract: Abstract: Political discourse is challenging from a sentiment analysis point of view because political issues are subjective and highly dynamic. Political language may contain neologisms that do not occur frequently in general purpose lexical sentiment models. Also, the presence of humor, sarcasm, and comparatives may introduce errors in sentiment analysis. In Twitter, these issues are amplified by the use of Twitter-specific features and constrained message lengths. In this presentation, we will present a collaborative project between the University of Southern California (USC) Signal Analysis and Interpretation Laboratory, USC Annenberg Innovation Laboratory, and IBM. Our system is relies on manual curation of keywords and hashtags, crowd-sourced annotation, statistical machine learned sentiment models, and a real-time visualization that is ideal for display during live events. We describe our corpus and several experiments using different settings of our sentiment models. Among our findings are that sentiment in politics is skewed towards negative, annotation agreement tend to be low, and that sarcasm is a factor that explains some of the annotator disagreement.
Biography: http://sail.usc.edu/~kazemzad/
Short Bio:
Abe Kazemzadeh is a PhD candidate at the USC Computer Science Dept and a research assistant at the Signal Analysis and Interpretation Laboratory (SAIL). His interests include natural language, logic, emotions, games, and algebra. He is currently the chief technology officer at the USC Annenberg Innovation Laboratory (AIL).
Host: Qing Dou
More Info: http://nlg.isi.edu/nl-seminar/
Location: Information Science Institute (ISI) - Marina Del Rey-11th Flr Conf Rm # 1135
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Peter Zamar
Event Link: http://nlg.isi.edu/nl-seminar/
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Astani CEE Seminar
Fri, Apr 05, 2013 @ 04:00 PM - 05:00 PM
Sonny Astani Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Dr. Karl Ropkins, Senior Research Fellow, Institute for Transport Studies (ITS) University of Leeds, Leeds,
Talk Title: source Apportionment: Making the Most of Environmental Time - Series
Abstract: Source apportionment techniques, most notably receptor modeling and related data visualization methods, provide an often unique description of the relative contributions of different pollutant sources. At the most fundamental level they answer the question of ââ¬ËWhat emission impacts are we having on our environment?ââ¬â¢ However, in some of the most sensitive areas, e.g. in sites near large facilities such as metal works, airports and ports, and at busy roadsides where emissions are not always easily managed, they have the potential to be one of the most effective feedbacks for informing, evaluating and shaping mitigation programs.
Here, examples are presented from both previously published studies and on-going work that demonstrate the use of source apportionment as an integrated component of air quality management activities. These include:
• The use of data visualization techniques to enhance preliminary source characterization work.
• The integration of different data sources (e.g. multiple site air quality data and single site air quality and meteorological data) to provide better resolved source descriptions.
• The application of single time-series (peak) and multiple time-series (feature) isolation methods for the quantification of individual pollution events.
• The use of receptor modeling information as an input for pollution event prediction systems, providing early warnings for bad pollution days.
Host: Prof. Ronald Henry
Location: John Stauffer Science Lecture Hall (SLH) - 102
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Evangeline Reyes
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Sequential Decision-making in Decentralized Systems
Mon, Apr 08, 2013 @ 10:30 AM - 12:00 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Ashutosh Nayyar, PhD, UC Berkeley
Talk Title: Sequential Decision-making in Decentralized Systems
Abstract: Decentralized systems are ubiquitous in the modern world. Communication systems, sensor networks, power systems and economic systems like markets and auctions are all examples of decentralized systems. Such systems are characterized by the presence of multiple decision-making agents acting on different information. In this talk, I focus on the problem of finding optimal decision-strategies for co-operative agents in a decentralized system. In particular, I consider a decentralized stochastic decision-making problem with multiple decision-makers that share information with each other with a fixed delay. Such decision problems arise in queuing networks, wireless communication networks, distributed control systems, sensing and surveillance systems etc. In spite of initial conjectures as early as 1971, finding the general structure of agents' optimal decision-strategies with delayed information sharing had remained an open problem for 40 years. My research provides a conceptual framework that not only identifies the structure of optimal decision strategies but also provides a sequential decomposition of the optimization problem. Moreover, the methodology developed here is shown to be applicable to a broader class of decentralized decision making problems arising in diverse application domains.
Biography: Ashutosh Nayyar received the B.Tech. degree in Electrical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi, India in 2006. He received the MS degree in in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science in 2008, the MS degree in Applied Mathematics in 2011 and the PhD degree in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science in 2011, all from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He worked as a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign from Fall 2011 to Summer 2012. He is currently a post-doctoral researcher at the University of California, Berkeley. His research interests include decentralized stochastic control, game theory, mechanism design and their applications in sensing and communication systems, decentralized control systems and electric power systems.
Host: Rahul Jain
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 248
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Annie Yu
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Dian Gong (USC), Student Seminar Series
Mon, Apr 08, 2013 @ 12:00 PM - 02:00 PM
Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Dian Gong, USC Electrical Engineering Ph.D. Student
Talk Title: Machine Learning to Structured Time Series Analysis
Series: Student Seminar Series
Abstract: Time series and sequential data have been investigated for several decades in statistics, signal processing and econometrics. The success of machine learning techniques brings opportunities to efficiently analyze more complex, high dimensional and large-scale time series data. In this talk, we present a non-parametric learning framework to multivariate time series data. The raw time series is first temporally decomposed into different units with certain semantic meanings by our newly proposed Kernelized Temporal Cut (KTC). KTC is an online non-parametric change-point detection method that can detect regime changes for complex sequential data. Given two time series units, the similarity (distance) can be calculated by using spaito-temporal alignment methods such as DTW. To handle the nonlinearity of multivariate time series data in many applications, we propose Dynamic Manifold Warping (DMW). DMW is a combination of DTW and manifold learning by exploring the intrinsic manifold structure of time series data. After temporal segmentation and the design of distance metric, we can treat each time series unit as one data instance, and many tasks can be performed, such as clustering, classification and retrieval. We apply this framework to human action analysis and achieve promising results.
Biography: Dian Gong is a PhD Candidate major in Electrical Engineering and minor in Computer Science at USC. His advisor is Prof. Gerard Medioni, and his research areas are machine learning to structured time series, manifold learning and probabilistic Tensor Voting. He also uses cutting-edge machine learning techniques to computer vision applications such as human activity recognition. His works are published at conferences such as AISTATS 2010, ICCV 2011, ICML 2012 and ECCV 2012. He worked as a summer quantitative trading associate at Barclays Capital New York office. He also worked as research intern at Sony US Research, San Jose, CA on distance metric learning, and Microsoft Research Asia, on probabilistic graphical model. In the past, he won several mathematics contest awards such as the Gold medal of China Mathematics Olympiad, and selected as national team candidate for International Mathematics Olympiad. He got his BS in Electronic Engineering from Tsinghua University.
Advisor: Gerard Medioni
Refreshments will be provided
Host:
More Info: https://mhi.usc.edu/events/event-details/?event_id=901927
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 248
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Assistant to CS chair
Event Link: https://mhi.usc.edu/events/event-details/?event_id=901927
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Seminars in Biomedical Engineering
Mon, Apr 08, 2013 @ 12:30 PM - 01:50 PM
Alfred E. Mann Department of Biomedical Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Donald Arnold, Ph.D. USC, Associate Professor Department Molecular Biology Division Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences University of Southern California
Talk Title: Now you see 'em, Now you don't: New molecular tools for visualizing and ablating endogenous proteins in living cells.
Location: Olin Hall of Engineering (OHE) - 122
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Mischalgrace Diasanta
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CS Colloquium: Lorenzo Torresani (Dartmouth): Challenges and Opportunities in Visual Recognition with Big Image Data
Mon, Apr 08, 2013 @ 03:30 PM - 05:00 PM
Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Lorenzo Torresani, Dartmouth
Talk Title: Challenges and Opportunities in Visual Recognition with Big Image Data
Series: CS Colloquium
Abstract: The last few years have seen a tremendous explosion of image and video data on the Web. Unfortunately only a small portion of this visual data is annotated with text. Even when tags are available, they often do not describe accurately the semantics of the image or the video. This renders traditional text-search an ineffective tool on these collections. In this talk I will describe some of my recent work on designing visual recognition systems that can help users browse and search image repositories more effectively.
I will begin with an algorithm that addresses the computational challenges posed by visual recognition in Web-scale image databases. Our approach centers around the learning of a compact image code optimized to yield accurate recognition with linear (i.e., efficient) classifiers: even when the representation is compressed to less than 300 bytes per image, linear classifiers trained on our descriptor yield accuracy matching the state-of-the-art but at orders of magnitude lower computational cost.
In the second part of my talk I will present a method that embraces Big Image Data as an opportunity to improve visual recognition. Our algorithm exploits a dataset of 10 million labeled photos to learn a universal semantic distance between images. This metric can be used either as a similarity measure to find pictures by example or as a ââ¬Åkernelââ¬Â in distance-based image classifiers, yielding a significant boost in accuracy over traditional metrics.
Biography: Lorenzo Torresani is an Assistant Professor in the Computer Science Department at Dartmouth College. He received a Laurea Degree in Computer Science with summa cum laude honors from the University of Milan (Italy) in 1996, and an M.S. and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Stanford University in 2001 and 2005, respectively. In the past, he has worked at several industrial research labs including Microsoft Research Cambridge, Like.com, and Digital Persona. His research interests are in computer vision and machine learning. In 2001, Torresani and his coauthors received the Best Student Paper Award at the IEEE Conference On Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR). He is the recipient of a National Science Foundation CAREER Award.=
Host: Gerard Medioni
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 248
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Assistant to CS chair
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Viterbi-Gerontology Digital Aging Retreat
Tue, Apr 09, 2013 @ 09:00 AM - 12:30 PM
USC Viterbi School of Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: ,
Talk Title:
Abstract: Interested faculty should contact Maja Mataric (mataric@usc.edu) as soon as possible.
Host: Maja Mataric
Location: Ronald Tutor Hall of Engineering (RTH) - 526
Audiences: See details
Contact: Maja Mataric
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CS Colloquium: Aditya Parameswaran (Stanford): Human-Powered Data Management
Tue, Apr 09, 2013 @ 03:30 PM - 05:00 PM
Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Aditya Parameswaran, Stanford
Talk Title: Human-Powered Data Management
Series: CS Colloquium
Abstract: Fully automated algorithms are inadequate for a number of data analysis tasks, especially those involving images, video, or text. Thus, there is a need to combine "human computation" (or crowdsourcing), together with traditional computation, in order to improve the process of understanding and analyzing data. My thesis addresses several topics in the general area of human-powered data management. I design algorithms and systems for combining human and traditional computation for: (a) data processing, e.g., using humans to help sort, cluster, or clean data; (b) data extraction, e.g., having humans help create structured data from information in unstructured web pages; and (c) data gathering, i.e., asking humans to provide data that they know about or can locate, but that would be difficult to gather automatically. My focus in all of these areas is to find solutions that expend as few resources as possible (e.g., time waiting, human effort, or money spent), while still providing high quality results.
In this talk, I will first present a broad perspective of our research on human-powered data management, and I will describe some systems and applications that have motivated our research. I will then present details of one of the problems we have addressed: filtering large data sets with the aid of humans. Finally I will argue that human-powered data management is an area in its infancy, by describing a number of open problems I intend to address in my future research program.
Biography: Aditya Parameswaran is a Ph.D. student in the InfoLab at Stanford University, advised by Prof. Hector Garcia-Molina. He is broadly interested in data management, with research results in human computation, information extraction, and recommendation systems. Aditya is a recipient of the Key Scientific Challenges Award from Yahoo! Research (2010), two best-of-conference citations (VLDB 2010 and KDD 2012), and the Terry Groswith graduate fellowship at Stanford University.
Host: Cyrus Shahabi
Location: Seaver Science Library (SSL) - 150
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Assistant to CS chair
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Epstein Institute / ISE 651 Seminar Series
Tue, Apr 09, 2013 @ 03:45 PM - 05:00 PM
Daniel J. Epstein Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: David Morton, Engineering Foundation Professor, Graduate Program in Operations Research & Industrial Engineering, Mechanical Engineering Department, The University of Texas at Austin
Talk Title: "Nested Solutions in Combinatorial Optimization"
Series: Epstein Institute Seminar Series
Abstract: We consider two classes of combinatorial optimization problems in which we maximize a gain function subject to a knapsack constraint. In the first class of models the gain function is supermodular and the knapsack constraint function is submodular and increasing. In the second class, the gain function is increasing and submodular and the knapsack constraint is simply a cardinality constraint. For both classes of models we focus on obtaining, in polynomial time, nested solutions to the parametric model under an increasing budget. We provide motivating examples involving border security, joint chance constraints, clustering, and rapidly detecting cell-phone viruses. This includes joint work with John Hasenbein, Jinho Lee, and Michael Nehme.
Biography: David Morton is Engineering Foundation Professor in the Graduate Program in Operations Research & Industrial Engineering in the Mechanical Engineering Department at The University of Texas at Austin. He has an MS and PhD in Operations Research from Stanford University and, prior to joining the faculty at UT-Austin, was a National Research Council Postdoctoral Fellow at the Naval Postgraduate School.
Host: Daniel J. Epstein Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering
More Information: Seminar-Morton.doc
Location: Von Kleinsmid Center For International & Public Affairs (VKC) - Room 100
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Georgia Lum
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Manish Jain, USC (PhD Defense)
Wed, Apr 10, 2013 @ 01:00 PM - 03:00 PM
Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Manish Jain, USC
Talk Title: Thwarting Adversaries with Unpredictability: Massive-scale Game-Theoretic Algorithms for Real-world Security Deployments
Series: PhD Defense Announcements
Abstract: Protecting critical infrastructure and targets such as airports, transportation networks, power generation facilities as well as critical natural resources and endangered species
is an important task for police and security agencies worldwide. Securing such potential targets using limited resources against intelligent adversaries in the presence of the uncertainty and complexities of the real-world is a major challenge. My research uses a game-theoretic framework to model the strategic interaction between a defender (or security forces) and an attacker (or terrorist adversary) in security domains.
Game theory provides a sound mathematical approach for deploying limited security resources to maximize their effectiveness. While game theory has always been popular in the arena of security, unfortunately, the state of the art algorithms either fail to scale or to provide a correct solution for large problems with arbitrary scheduling constraints. For example, US carriers fly over 27,000 domestic and 2,000 international flights daily, presenting a massive scheduling challenge for Federal Air Marshal Service (FAMS).
My thesis contributes to a very new area that solves game-theoretic problems using insights from large-scale optimization literature towards addressing the computational challenge posed by real-world domains. I have developed new models and algorithms that compute optimal strategies for scheduling defender resources is large real-world domains. My thesis makes the following contributions. First, it presents new algorithms that can solve for trillions of actions for both the defender and the attacker. Second, it presents a hierarchical framework that provides orders of magnitude scale-up in attacker types for Bayesian Stackelberg games. Third, it provides an analysis and detection of a phase-transition that identifies properties that makes security games hard to solve.
These new models have not only advanced the state of the art in computational game-theory, but have actually been successfully deployed in the real-world. My work represents a successful transition from game-theoretic advancements to real-world applications that are already in use, and it has opened exciting new avenues to greatly expand the reach of game theory. For instance, my algorithms are used in the IRIS system: IRIS has been in use by the Federal Air Marshals Service (FAMS) to schedule air marshals on board international commercial flights since October 2009.
Committee:
Milind Tambe (chair)
Bhaskar Krishnamachari
Matthew McCubbins (outside member)
Vincent Conitzer
Fernando Ordonez
Host: Lizsl de Leon
Location: 223
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Assistant to CS chair
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EE Distinguished Lecturer Series - CANCELED
Wed, Apr 10, 2013 @ 03:00 PM - 04:00 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Erik Winfree, Ph.D., Professor, Computer Science, Computation and Neural Systems, Bioengineering, California Institute of Technology
Abstract: Inspired by the information processing core of biological organisms and its ability to fabricate intricate machinery from the molecular scale up to the macroscopic scale, research in synthetic biology, molecular programming, and nucleic acid nanotechnology aims to create information-based chemical systems that carry out human-defined molecular programs that input, output, and manipulate molecules and molecular structures. For chemistry to become the next information technology substrate, we will need improved tools for designing, simulating, and analyzing complex molecular circuits and systems. Using DNA nanotechnology as a model system, I will discuss how programming languages can be devised for specifying molecular systems at a high level, how compilers can translate such specifications into concrete molecular implementations, how both high-level and low-level specifications can be simulated and verified according to behavioral logic and the underlying biophysics of molecular interactions, and how design and analysis methods can cope with the inherent stochasticity and uncertainties of molecular systems.
Biography: Erik Winfree is Professor of Computer Science, Computation and Neural Systems and Bioengineering at Caltech. He is the recipient of the Feynman Prize for Nanotechnology (2006), the NSF PECASE/CAREER Award (2001), the ONR Young Investigator Award (2001), a MacArthur Fellowship (2000), the Tulip prize in DNA Computing (2000), and MIT Technology Review's first TR100 list of "top young innovators" (1999). Prior to joining the faculty at Caltech in 1999, Winfree was a Lewis Thomas Postdoctoral Fellow in Molecular Biology at Princeton, and a Visiting Scientist at the MIT AI Lab. Winfree received a B.S. in Mathematics and Computer Science from the University of Chicago in 1991, and a Ph.D. in Computation and Neural Systems from Caltech in 1998.
Host: Dr. Alice Parker
More Info: http://ee.usc.edu/news/dls/
More Information: 20130410 Winfree Print.pdf
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Estela Lopez
Event Link: http://ee.usc.edu/news/dls/
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Epstein ISE Seminar
Thu, Apr 11, 2013 @ 10:30 AM - 11:30 AM
Daniel J. Epstein Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Please contact Julie Higle at julie.higle@usc.edu for speaker, and speaker's afiliation
Talk Title: "Managing Extreme-Scale Computing via Modeling, Analysis and Distributed Methods"
Abstract: With emerging applications such as cloud computing, big data analytics, and smart grids, modern information and service computing networks are growing increasingly complex and large scale. In this talk, we present new performance models, analysis, and distributed methods to study the scalable design and efficient management of future information networks in extreme scale. We first investigate scaling laws and fundamental structural properties that determine the scalability of large information systems. We then present new first-order and second-order approaches for deriving distributed control algorithms in managing large-scale information networks with guaranteed fast convergence.
Host: Daniel J. Epstein Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering
Location: Ronald Tutor Hall of Engineering (RTH) - Room 526
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Georgia Lum
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Focused on parallel and distributed computing
Thu, Apr 11, 2013 @ 02:00 PM - 03:00 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: TBA, TBA
Talk Title: TBA
Series: EE598 Seminar Course
Abstract: Weekly seminars given by researchers in academia and industry including senior doctoral students in EE, CS and ISI covering current research related to parallel and distributed computation including parallel algorithms, high performance computing, scientific computation, application specific architectures, multi-core and many-core architectures and algorithms, application acceleration, reconfigurable computing systems, data intensive systems, Big Data and cloud computing.
Biography: Prerequisite: Students are expected to be familiar with basic concepts at the level of graduate level courses in Computer Engineering and Computer Science in some of these topic areas above. Ph.D. students in Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering and Computer Science can automatically enroll. M.S. students can enroll only with permission of the instructor. To request permission send a brief mail to the instructor in text format with the subject field ââ¬ÅEE 598ââ¬Â. The body of the mail (in text format) should include name, degree objective, courses taken at USC and grades obtained, prior educational background, and relevant research background, if any.
Requirements for CR:
1. Attending at least 10 seminars during the semester
There will be a sign-in sheet and a sign-out sheet at every seminar. All students must sign-in (before 2:00pm) and sign-out (after 3:00pm). The sign-in sheet will not be available after 2:00pm, and the sign-out sheet will not be available before 3:00pm.
2. Submitting a written report for at least 5 seminars
The written report for each seminar must be 1-page single line spaced format with font size of 12 (Times) or 11 (Arial) without any figures, tables, or graphs. The report must be submitted no later than 1 week after the corresponding seminar, and must be handed only to the instructor either on the seminar times or during office hours. Late reports will not be considered.
The report must summarize studentââ¬â¢s own understanding of the seminar, and should contain the following:
- Your name and submission date [1 line]
- Title of the seminar, name of the speaker, and seminar date [1 line]
- Background of the work (e.g., applications, prior research, etc.) [1 paragraph]
- Highlights of the approaches presented in the seminar [1-2 paragraphs]
- Main results presented in the seminar [1-2 paragraphs]
- Conclusion (your own conclusion and not what was given by the speaker) [1 paragraph]
Reviewing papers related to the topic of the seminar, and incorporating relevant findings in the
reports (e.g., in the conclusion section) is encouraged. In such cases, make sure to clearly indicate
the reference(s) used to derive these conclusions.
Host: Professor Viktor K. Prasanna
More Information: Course Announcement_EE598_Focused on parallel and distributed computing_(Spring 2013).pdf
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) -
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Janice Thompson
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EE 598: ELECTRICAL ENGINEERING RESEARCH SEMINAR COURSE #12
Thu, Apr 11, 2013 @ 02:00 PM - 03:00 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Nam Ma, PhD Candidate, Computer Science, USC Viterbi School of Engineering
Talk Title: DAG Scheduling with Weak Dependencies on Multiââ¬Âcore Systems
Series: EE598 Seminar Course
Abstract: Many computational solutions can be expressed as directed acyclic graphs (DAGs) with weighted nodes.
In parallel computing, a fundamental challenge is to efficiently distribute tasks to computing resources,
while preserving the precedence constraints among the tasks. Traditionally, such constraints are
preserved by starting a task after all its preceding tasks have completed. However, for a class of DAG
structured computations, a task can be partially executed with respect to each preceding task. We define
such relationship between the tasks as weak dependency. In this talk, we present our DAG scheduling
technique to exploit weak dependencies in a DAG. The exploitation of weak dependencies exposes more
parallelism for the task graph and reduces the execution time. On a stateââ¬Âofââ¬Âtheââ¬Âart generalââ¬Âpurpose
multicore system, the weak dependency based scheduler shows superior performance compared with a
baseline scheduler that is based on the traditional scheduling method.
Biography: Nam Ma is a Ph.D. candidate working with Prof. Viktor K. Prasanna in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles. His research interests include parallel algorithms, high performance computing, and large scale machine learning. His PhD thesis focuses on the
scalability of probabilistic inference in graphical models on multicore platforms. He is a recipient of the Vietnam Education Foundation (VEF) fellowship award in 2008. He earned his BSc degree in Computer Science from Vietnam National University.
More Info: http://halcyon.usc.edu/~pk/prasannawebsite/teaching/ee598sp2013/
More Information: Course Announcement_EE598_Focused on parallel and distributed computing_(Spring 2013) 2.pdf
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 248
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Janice Thompson
Event Link: http://halcyon.usc.edu/~pk/prasannawebsite/teaching/ee598sp2013/
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CS Colloquium: Nora Ayanian (MIT): Distributed Multirobot Coordination: From Specification to Provably Correct Execution
Thu, Apr 11, 2013 @ 03:30 PM - 05:00 PM
Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Nora Ayanian, MIT
Talk Title: Distributed Multirobot Coordination: From Specification to Provably Correct Execution
Abstract: Using a group of robots in place of a single complex robot to accomplish a task has many benefits, including simplified system repair, less down time, and lower cost. Combining heterogeneous groups of these multi-robot systems allows addressing multiple subtasks in parallel, reducing the time it takes to address many problems, such as search and rescue, reconnaissance, and mine detection. These missions demand different roles for robots, necessitating a strategy for coordinated autonomy while respecting any constraints the environment may impose. Distributed computation of control policies for heterogeneous multirobot systems is particularly challenging because of inter-robot constraints such as communication maintenance and collision avoidance, the need to coordinate robots within groups, and the dynamics of individual robots.
I will present algorithms for synthesizing distributed globally convergent feedback policies for navigating groups of heterogeneous robots in known constrained environments. Provably correct by construction, these algorithms automatically and concurrently solve both the path planning and control synthesis subproblems by decomposing the space into cells and sequentially composing local feedback controllers. The approach is useful for many decentralized applications of multirobot systems including task allocation, navigation in formation, and human-robot interaction. Finally, I will extend the algorithm to partially known environments, where dynamic task reassignment allows the team to cope with unknown hazards in the environment while still providing guarantees on convergence and safety.
Biography: Nora Ayanian is a postdoctoral associate in the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at MIT. She received a M.S. and Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania, in 2008 and 2011, respectively.
Host: Fei Sha
Location: Seaver Science Library (SSL) - 150
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Assistant to CS chair
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How Hard is it to Decide if a Quantum State is Separable or Entangled?
Fri, Apr 12, 2013 @ 10:00 AM - 11:00 AM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Mark M. Wilde, McGill University
Talk Title: How Hard is it to Decide if a Quantum State is Separable or Entangled?
Abstract: Suppose that a physical process, described as a sequence of local interactions that can be executed in a reasonable amount of time, generates a quantum state shared between two parties. We might then wonder, does this physical process produce a quantum state that is separable or entangled? Here, we give evidence that it is computationally hard to decide the answer to this question, even if one has access to the power of quantum computation. In order to address this question, we begin by demonstrating a two-message quantum interactive proof system that can decide the answer to a promise version of this problem. We then prove that this promise problem is hard for the class ``quantum statistical zero knowledge'' (QSZK) by demonstrating a polynomial-time reduction from the QSZK-complete promise problem ``quantum state distinguishability'' to our quantum separability problem. Thus, the quantum separability problem (as phrased above) constitutes the first nontrivial promise problem decidable by a two-message quantum interactive proof system while being hard for both NP and QSZK. This is joint work with Patrick Hayden and Kevin Milner, it will be presented at the 2013 IEEE Conference on Computational Complexity, and it is available as arXiv:1211.6120.
Biography: Mark M. Wilde received the Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering from the University of Southern California, Los Angeles, California, in 2008. Until recently, he has been a Postdoctoral Fellow at the School of Computer Science, McGill University, and he will start in August 2013 as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy and the Center for Computation and Technology at Louisiana State University. He is the author of the text "Quantum Information Theory" which will soon be published by Cambridge University Press. His current research interests are in quantum Shannon theory, quantum optical communication, quantum computational complexity theory, and quantum error correction.
Host: Todd Brun, x03503, tbrun@usc.edu
Location: Frank R. Seaver Science Center (SSC) - 319
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Gerrielyn Ramos
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Pushing the Limits of Sparse Recovery: The Interplay of Structured Sampling and Correlation Awareness
Fri, Apr 12, 2013 @ 10:30 AM - 11:30 AM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Piya Pal , California Institute of Technology (Caltech)
Talk Title: Pushing the Limits of Sparse Recovery: The Interplay of Structured Sampling and Correlation Awareness
Abstract: Modern Sensing and Signal Processing Systems face a fundamental challenge in the extraction of meaningful information from large, complex and often distributed datasets. Such ââ¬ÅBig Dataââ¬Â routinely arises in sensor networks, genomics, physiology, imaging, particle physics, social networks, and so forth. Fortunately however, the amount of information buried in the data in most scenarios is substantially lower compared to the number of raw samples acquired. This key observation has led to the design of sensing systems that can directly capture the information using far fewer samples typically acquired via random projections. In many natural scenarios however, the physics of the problem itself imposes ââ¬Åstructureââ¬Â on the ensuing acquisition scheme. Also often, one can make informed realistic assumptions about the ââ¬Åstatistical propertiesââ¬Â of the data, in the form of priors. Recent approaches to sparse sensing and reconstruction have only begun to investigate the advantages that such structure and prior knowledge can offer over more traditional approaches to sparse recovery.
In this talk, I will describe how ââ¬Åsparse structured samplingââ¬Â strategies and the use of ââ¬Åpriorsââ¬Â in the form of correlation of the data can dramatically push the limits of extraction of low dimensional information buried in high dimensional data (e.g. the spatio temporal signal received by an array of sensors), much beyond what is guaranteed by existing methods. In particular, I will develop novel sparse samplers (temporal and spatial) in one and multiple dimensions that can directly exploit the prior information contained in the correlation and/or higher order moments of the data to greatly increase the number of identifiable parameters. I will also develop new fast and robust algorithms for sparse recovery that work on a low dimensional data and guarantees recovery of sparsity levels that can be orders of magnitude larger than that achieved by existing approaches. This new paradigm of sparse support recovery that explicitly establishes the fundamental interplay between sampling, statistical priors and the underlying sparsity, leads to exciting future research directions in a variety of application areas, and also gives rise to new questions that can lead to stand-alone theoretical results in their own right.
Biography: Piya Pal is a Ph.D candidate in the Department of Electrical Engineering at California Institute of Technology (Caltech), Pasadena, CA, working in the Digital Signal Processing Lab, supervised by Prof. P. P. Vaidyanathan. She received the B. Tech degree in Electronics and Electrical Communication Engineering from Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur in 2007 and the M.S. degree in Electrical Engineering from Caltech in 2008. Her research interests include statistical signal processing, sparse sampling and reconstruction techniques, optimization, and sensor array processing. She received the Best Student Paper Award at the 14th IEEE DSP Workshop, 2011 held at Sedona, Arizona, USA. She was also one of the recipients of the Student Paper Award at the 45th Asilomar Conference on Signals, Systems and Computers, 2011 held at Pacific Grove, California, USA. She is one of the three winners of the Everhart Lecture Series for the year 2013, selected across all disciplines at Caltech.
Host: Prof. Antonio Ortega
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 248
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Talyia Veal
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AI SEMINAR
Fri, Apr 12, 2013 @ 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Information Sciences Institute
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Yan Liu, USC, Computer Science Department
Talk Title: When Big meets Complex: Learning and Mining in Large-scale Time Series Data
Abstract: Many emerging applications of machine learning, such as social media analysis, climate modeling, and computational biology, involve time series data with inherent structures. In this talk, I will discuss the practical challenges in analyzing time series data and our solutions via Granger graphical models.
Biography: Yan Liu is an assistant professor in Computer Science Department at University of Southern California from 2010. Before that, she was a Research Staff Member at IBM Research from 2006. She received her M.Sc and Ph.D. degree from Carnegie Mellon University in 2004 and 2006. Her research interest includes developing scalable machine learning and data mining algorithms with applications to social media analysis, computational biology, climate modeling and business analytics. She has received several awards, including NSF CAREER Award, ACM Dissertation Award Honorable Mention, Best Paper Award in SDM, and winner of several data mining competitions, such as KDD Cup and INFORMS data mining competition. She has published over 50 referred articles and served as a program committee of SIGKDD, ICML, NIPS, CIKM, SIGIR, ICDM, AAAI, COLING, EMNLP and co-chair of workshops in KDD and ICDM.
Host: David Chiang
More Info: TBA
Webcast: TBALocation: Information Science Institute (ISI) - Marina del Rey, 11th flr Conf. Room
WebCast Link: TBA
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Kary LAU
Event Link: TBA
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Shiri Chechik (Microsoft Research) Distance Oracles with Local Stretch
Fri, Apr 12, 2013 @ 12:00 PM - 01:30 PM
Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Shiri Chechik , Microsoft Research Silicon Valley
Talk Title: Distance Oracles with Local Stretch
Series: USC CS Theory
Abstract: A Distance Oracle is a succinct data structure that provides fast answers to distance queries between any two points.
Distance oracles are measured by several parameters: construction time (the running time of the algorithm to produce the data structure), size (the worst case size of the data structure), query complexity (the running time of the query algorithm, given two points), and stretch guarantee (the maximum ratio between the estimated distance returned by the distance oracle and the actual distance).
In this talk we will consider a more refined local stretch guarantee first suggested by Abraham, Bartal and Neiman [STOC 07]. Informally, we wish to obtain better stretch guarantees for nearby pairs. We would like the stretch bound to gradually improve as we query closer pairs of points.
We consider two notions of local stretch for distance oracles:
1. Strong local stretch provides stretch guarantees for any pair of nodes with better stretch guarantees for nearby pairs.
2. Weak local stretch provides stretch guarantees only between pair of nodes u and v, such that v is in the r-neighborhood of u (v is one of the rââ¬â¢th closest nodes to u), for some parameter r.
We will discuss these two notions and see efficient constructions for both these notions improving upon previous work.
Based on a joint work with Ittai Abraham
Biography: Shiri Chechik is Postdoctoral Researcher at Microsoft Research Silicon Valley. She recently completed her PhD under the supervision of Prof. David Peleg in the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel.
She is interested in Theoretical Computer Science, with an emphasis on Design and Analysis of Algorithms for network problems.
Home page: http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/people/schechik/.
Host:
Location: Seaver Science Library (SSL) - 150
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Assistant to CS chair
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W.V.T. Rusch Honors Program; Comparison of Renewable Energy Options
Fri, Apr 12, 2013 @ 01:00 PM - 01:50 PM
USC Viterbi School of Engineering, Viterbi School of Engineering Student Affairs
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Dr. Peter J. Schubert, Director, Richard G. Lugar Center for Renewable Energy, Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Indiana University
Talk Title: Comparison of Renewable Energy Options
Host: W.V.T. Rusch Honors Program
Location: Seeley G. Mudd Building (SGM) - 101
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Christine Viterbi Admission & Student Affairs
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Robust Quantum Self-Testing and Binary Nonlocal XOR Games
Fri, Apr 12, 2013 @ 02:00 PM - 03:00 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Carl Miller, University of Michigan
Talk Title: Robust Quantum Self-Testing and Binary Nonlocal XOR Games
Abstract: A quantum input-output device is "self-testing" if the internal behavior of the device (i.e., its initial state and measurements) can be verified based only on the correlation between its classical inputs and outputs. Results on self-testing, which began with the work of D. Mayers and A. Yao in 1998, are crucial building blocks in proofs of security for quantum cryptography. Past results have shown that certain nonlocal games, such as the Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger game, can serve as self-tests for quantum devices. The work discussed in this talk (arXiv:1207.1819) attempts to begin a systematic classification of quantum self-tests. We prove a necessary and sufficient criterion for self-testing within the class of binary nonlocal XOR games. Our methods invite generalization to larger classes of games. This is joint work with Yaoyun Shi.
Biography: Carl Miller is a research fellow in the University of Michigan Electrical Engineering & Computer Science department. His primary research is on the theory of quantum computation and communication. He previously worked as a postdoc in the math department at Michigan (2007-2010), where he taught courses in math and theoretical computer science. He was a member of the American team to the International Math Olympiad in 1996, and he received a Ph.D. in mathematics from Berkeley in 2007.
Host: Host: Ben Reichardt, x0-7229, ben.reichardt@usc.edu
Location: Seaver Science Library (SSL) - 150
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Gerrielyn Ramos
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Integrated Systems Seminar Series
Fri, Apr 12, 2013 @ 02:30 PM - 03:30 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Ken Poulton, Agilent Research Laboratories
Talk Title: ADC for RF Instruments: Performance and Perils
Abstract: Our group at Agilent Technologies recently published a 2.5 GSa/s, 14-bit ADC.This uses both analog and digital techniques to get world's best performance in several dimensions, including 78 dB SFDR up to 1 GHz input frequency and a metastable error rate of 1e-17.
I'll describe some of the techniques we use, including the use of over two hundred on-chip self-calibration loops. I'll also describe some of the problems that arose in this high-power chip design and how we solved them.
Biography: Ken Poulton received a B.S. in Physics and an M.S. in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University in 1980. He then joined Hewlett-Packard Laboratories in Palo Alto, CA (now Agilent Research Laboratories in Santa Clara, CA) where he has developed chips for data conversion in GaAs MESFET, GaAs HBT, silicon bipolar, BiCMOS and CMOS technologies.
Ken has published papers on eight world's-fastest data converters. He was a member of the ISSCC technical program committee from 1998 to 2003. He holds 10 patents. Ken is an IEEE Fellow.
Host: Prof. Hossein Hashemi and Prof. Mike Chen
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 248
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Hossein Hashemi
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NL Seminar-Hui Zhang: "Beyond Left-to-Right: Multiple Decomposition Structures for SMT"
Fri, Apr 12, 2013 @ 03:00 PM - 04:00 PM
Information Sciences Institute
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Hui Zhang, USC
Talk Title: Beyond Left-to-Right: Multiple Decomposition Structures for SMT
Series: Natural Language Seminar
Abstract: Standard phrase-based translation models do not explicitly model context dependence between translation units. As a result, they rely on large phrase pairs and target language models to recover contextual effects in translation. In this work, we explore language models over Minimal Translation Units (MTUs) to explicitly capture contextual dependencies across phrase boundaries in the channel model. As there is no single best direction in which contextual information should flow, we explore multiple decomposition structures as well as dynamic bidirectional decomposition. The resulting models are evaluated in an intrinsic task of lexical selection for MT as well as a full MT system, through n-best re-ranking. These experiments demonstrate that additional contextual modeling does indeed benefit a phrase-based system(up to 2.8 BLEU score) and that the direction of conditioning is important. Integrating multiple conditioning orders provides consistent benefit, and the most important directions differ by language pair.
Biography: Home Page:
https://sites.google.com/site/zhangh1982
Host: Qing Dou
More Info: http://nlg.isi.edu/nl-seminar/
Location: Information Science Institute (ISI) - Marina Del Rey-11th Flr Conf Rm # 1135
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Peter Zamar
Event Link: http://nlg.isi.edu/nl-seminar/
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CEE Ph.D. Seminar
Fri, Apr 12, 2013 @ 04:00 PM - 05:00 PM
Sonny Astani Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Weixuan Li and Farrokh Jazizadeh, Ph.D. Students
Talk Title: Uncertainty Quantification and Model Calibration for Flow in Porous Media; User Centric Non Intrusive Load Monitoring in Residential Buildings
Abstract:
Second Part: by Farrokh Jazizadeh
Title: User Centric Non Intrusive Load Monitoring in Residential Buildings
Pizza is served after the seminar in KAP 209.
Location: John Stauffer Science Lecture Hall (SLH) - 102
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Evangeline Reyes
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Six Sigma Black Belt
Mon, Apr 15, 2013 @ 09:00 AM - 05:00 PM
Executive Education
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: TBA,
Talk Title: Six Sigma Black Belt
Abstract: Course Overview
This course teaches you the advanced problem-solving skills you'll need in order to measure a process, analyze the results, develop process improvements and quantify the resulting savings. Project assignments between sessions require you to apply what you�ve learned. This course is presented in the classroom in three five-day sessions over a three-month period.
Learn the advanced problem-solving skills you need to implement the principles, practices and techniques of Six Sigma to maximize performance and cost reductions in your organization. During this three-week practitioner course, you will learn how to measure a process, analyze the results, develop process improvements and quantify the resulting savings. You will be required to complete a project demonstrating mastery of appropriate analytical methods and pass an examination to earn IIE�s Six Sigma Black Belt Certificate.This practitioner course for Six Sigma implementation provides extensive coverage of the Six Sigma process as well as intensive exposure to the key analytical tools associated with Six Sigma, including project management, team skills, cost analysis, FMEA, basic statistics, inferential statistics, sampling, goodness of fit testing, regression and correlation analysis, reliability, design of experiments, statistical process control, measurement systems analysis and simulation. Computer applications are emphasized.
NOTE: Participants must bring a laptop computer running Microsoft Office� to the seminar.
Course Topics
* Business process management
* Computer applications
* Design of experiments (DOE)
* Design for Six Sigma (DFSS)
* DMAIIC
* Enterprisewide deployment
* Lean enterprise
* Project management
* Regression and correlation modeling
* Statistical methods and sampling
* Statistical process control
* Team processes
Benefits
Upon completion of this course, you will be able to:
* Analyze process data using comprehensive statistical methods
* Control the process to assure that improvements are used and the benefits verified
* Define an opportunity for improving customer satisfaction
* Implement the recommended improvements
* Improve existing processes by reducing variation
* Measure process characteristics that are critical to quality
Who Should Attend
* VPs, COOs, CEOs
* Employees new to a managerial position
* Employees preparing to make the transition to managerial roles
* Current managers wanting to hone leadership skills
* Anyone interested in implementing Lean or Six Sigma in their organization
Program Fees
On-Campus Participants: $6095
Includes continental breakfasts, lunch and all course materials. The fee does not include hotel accommodations or transportation.
Online Participant with Live Session Interactivity: $6095
Includes attendee access codes for live call-in or chat capabilities during class sessions. Also includes all course and lecture materials available for live stream or download.
Reduced Pricing:
Institute of Industrial Engineers (IIE): Reduced pricing is available for members of IIE. Please contact professional@mapp.usc.edu for further information.
Trojan Family: USC alumni, current students, faculty, and staff receive 10% reduced pricing on registration.
Boeing: Boeing employees receive 20% off registration fees (please use Boeing email address when registering).
Location
Two course delivery options are available for participants, on-campus and online with interactivity:
On-Campus Course is held in state-of-the-art facilities on the University of Southern California campus, located in downtown Los Angeles. Participants attending on-campus will have the option to commute to the course or stay at one of the many hotels located in the area. For travel information, please visit our Travel section.
Overview of on-campus option:
* The ability to interact with faculty and peers in-person.
* Access to hard copy course materials.
* Ability to logon and view archived course information - up to 7 days after the course has been offered. This includes course documents and streaming video of the lectures.
* If there is a conflict during any on-campus course dates, on-campus participants can elect to be an online/interactive student.
* Parking, refreshments and lunch are provided for on-campus participants � unless otherwise specified.
Online (Interactivity) Course delivery is completely online and real-time, enabling interaction with the instructor and fellow participants. Participants have the flexibility of completing the course from a distance utilizing USC's Distance Education Network technology. Students are required to be online for the entirety of each day's session.
Overview of online (interactive):
* Virtually participate in the course live � with the ability to either ask questions or chat questions to the entire class.
* WebEx technologies provide the option to call into the class and view the entire lecture/materials on a personal computer, or to participate on a computer without having to utilize a phone line.
* Ability to logon and view archived course information up to 7 days after the course has been offered. This includes course documents and streaming video of the lectures.
Continuing Education Units
CEUs: 10.5 (CEUs provided by request only)
USC Viterbi School of Engineering Certificate of Participation is awarded to all participants upon successful completion of course.
Upon completion, participants will also receive their Institute of Industrial Engineers certification in SIx Sigma Black Belt.
Host: Corporate and Professional Programs
More Info: http://gapp.usc.edu/professional-programs/short-courses/industrial%26systems/six-sigma-black-belt
Audiences: Registered Attendees
Contact: Viterbi Professional Programs
Event Link: http://gapp.usc.edu/professional-programs/short-courses/industrial%26systems/six-sigma-black-belt
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Seminars in Biomedical Engineering
Mon, Apr 15, 2013 @ 12:30 PM - 01:50 PM
Alfred E. Mann Department of Biomedical Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Jay Lieberman, MD (USC), Professor and chair of the Department of Orthopaedic Surgery, Keck School of Medicine of USC, Orthopaedist-in-Chief at the Keck Medical Center of USC
Talk Title: Tissue Engineering for Bone Repair: Progenitor Cell Response to Bone Graft Substitutes
Location: Olin Hall of Engineering (OHE) - 122
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Mischalgrace Diasanta
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2013 Symposium on Game Theory and Human Behavior
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Tue, Apr 16, 2013
Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Noam Nisan (Computer Science, Hebrew U.) Duncan Watts (Microsoft Research) David Pennock (Microsoft Research) Asu Ozdaglar (EE & CS, MIT) Matthew Elliot (Economics, CalTech) Timothy Ketelaar (Psychology, NMSU) Alan Sanfrey (Psychology, U Arizona),
Talk Title: GTHB Annual Conference
Series: Game Theory and Human Behavior Group
Abstract: Full Event information to be announced closer to the date. Check back soon!
RSVP to Rishika Agarwal to attend at rishikaa@usc.edu
Speakers include:
Noam Nisan (Computer Science, Hebrew U.)
Duncan Watts (Microsoft Research)
David Pennock (Microsoft Research)
Asu Ozdaglar (EE & CS, MIT)
Matthew Elliot (Economics, CalTech)
Timothy Ketelaar (Psychology, NMSU)
Alan Sanfrey (Psychology, U Arizona)
Host: Milind Tambe
Location: USC University Club at King Stoops Hall
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Assistant to CS chair
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Six Sigma Black Belt
Tue, Apr 16, 2013 @ 09:00 AM - 05:00 PM
Executive Education
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: TBA,
Talk Title: Six Sigma Black Belt
Abstract: Course Overview
This course teaches you the advanced problem-solving skills you'll need in order to measure a process, analyze the results, develop process improvements and quantify the resulting savings. Project assignments between sessions require you to apply what you�ve learned. This course is presented in the classroom in three five-day sessions over a three-month period.
Learn the advanced problem-solving skills you need to implement the principles, practices and techniques of Six Sigma to maximize performance and cost reductions in your organization. During this three-week practitioner course, you will learn how to measure a process, analyze the results, develop process improvements and quantify the resulting savings. You will be required to complete a project demonstrating mastery of appropriate analytical methods and pass an examination to earn IIE�s Six Sigma Black Belt Certificate.This practitioner course for Six Sigma implementation provides extensive coverage of the Six Sigma process as well as intensive exposure to the key analytical tools associated with Six Sigma, including project management, team skills, cost analysis, FMEA, basic statistics, inferential statistics, sampling, goodness of fit testing, regression and correlation analysis, reliability, design of experiments, statistical process control, measurement systems analysis and simulation. Computer applications are emphasized.
NOTE: Participants must bring a laptop computer running Microsoft Office� to the seminar.
Course Topics
* Business process management
* Computer applications
* Design of experiments (DOE)
* Design for Six Sigma (DFSS)
* DMAIIC
* Enterprisewide deployment
* Lean enterprise
* Project management
* Regression and correlation modeling
* Statistical methods and sampling
* Statistical process control
* Team processes
Benefits
Upon completion of this course, you will be able to:
* Analyze process data using comprehensive statistical methods
* Control the process to assure that improvements are used and the benefits verified
* Define an opportunity for improving customer satisfaction
* Implement the recommended improvements
* Improve existing processes by reducing variation
* Measure process characteristics that are critical to quality
Who Should Attend
* VPs, COOs, CEOs
* Employees new to a managerial position
* Employees preparing to make the transition to managerial roles
* Current managers wanting to hone leadership skills
* Anyone interested in implementing Lean or Six Sigma in their organization
Program Fees
On-Campus Participants: $6095
Includes continental breakfasts, lunch and all course materials. The fee does not include hotel accommodations or transportation.
Online Participant with Live Session Interactivity: $6095
Includes attendee access codes for live call-in or chat capabilities during class sessions. Also includes all course and lecture materials available for live stream or download.
Reduced Pricing:
Institute of Industrial Engineers (IIE): Reduced pricing is available for members of IIE. Please contact professional@mapp.usc.edu for further information.
Trojan Family: USC alumni, current students, faculty, and staff receive 10% reduced pricing on registration.
Boeing: Boeing employees receive 20% off registration fees (please use Boeing email address when registering).
Location
Two course delivery options are available for participants, on-campus and online with interactivity:
On-Campus Course is held in state-of-the-art facilities on the University of Southern California campus, located in downtown Los Angeles. Participants attending on-campus will have the option to commute to the course or stay at one of the many hotels located in the area. For travel information, please visit our Travel section.
Overview of on-campus option:
* The ability to interact with faculty and peers in-person.
* Access to hard copy course materials.
* Ability to logon and view archived course information - up to 7 days after the course has been offered. This includes course documents and streaming video of the lectures.
* If there is a conflict during any on-campus course dates, on-campus participants can elect to be an online/interactive student.
* Parking, refreshments and lunch are provided for on-campus participants � unless otherwise specified.
Online (Interactivity) Course delivery is completely online and real-time, enabling interaction with the instructor and fellow participants. Participants have the flexibility of completing the course from a distance utilizing USC's Distance Education Network technology. Students are required to be online for the entirety of each day's session.
Overview of online (interactive):
* Virtually participate in the course live � with the ability to either ask questions or chat questions to the entire class.
* WebEx technologies provide the option to call into the class and view the entire lecture/materials on a personal computer, or to participate on a computer without having to utilize a phone line.
* Ability to logon and view archived course information up to 7 days after the course has been offered. This includes course documents and streaming video of the lectures.
Continuing Education Units
CEUs: 10.5 (CEUs provided by request only)
USC Viterbi School of Engineering Certificate of Participation is awarded to all participants upon successful completion of course.
Upon completion, participants will also receive their Institute of Industrial Engineers certification in SIx Sigma Black Belt.
Host: Corporate and Professional Programs
More Info: http://gapp.usc.edu/professional-programs/short-courses/industrial%26systems/six-sigma-black-belt
Audiences: Registered Attendees
Contact: Viterbi Professional Programs
Event Link: http://gapp.usc.edu/professional-programs/short-courses/industrial%26systems/six-sigma-black-belt
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Nadia Heninger (Princeton): RSA in the real world
Tue, Apr 16, 2013 @ 03:30 PM - 05:00 PM
Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Nadia Heninger, Princeton
Talk Title: RSA in the real world
Series: CS Colloquium
Abstract: I study computer security and applied cryptography using a theoretician's mathematical toolkit. Security vulnerability analysis can often be a painstaking and implementation-specific process. My approach uses cryptographic and algorithmic ideas to reason about the security of deployed systems, to question assumptions underlying the security of these systems, and to understand and model threats.
In this talk, I will use RSA, the world's most widely used public key cryptosystem, as a vehicle to explore the interaction between cryptographic algorithms and real-world usage:
- Discovering widespread catastrophic failures in the random number generators in network devices by computing the greatest common divisors of millions of RSA public keys collected in the wild.
- Reconstructing complete private keys using only a few bits of the private key revealed in the course of a side-channel attack.
In addition to their impact on security, many of the ideas arising in the course of this work have surprising connections across computer science, leading to, for example, new algorithms for decoding families of error-correcting codes, applications within theoretical cryptography, and practical privacy-enhancing technologies.
Biography: Nadia Heninger is a visiting researcher at Microsoft Research New England. Her research focuses on security, applied cryptography, and algorithms. She is best known for her work identifying widespread entropy problems in cryptographic keys on the Internet (2012 Usenix Security best paper award), and developing the "cold boot" attack against disk encryption systems (2008 Usenix Security best student paper award). In 2011-2012, she was an NSF Mathematical Sciences Postdoctoral Fellow at UC San Diego. She received her Ph.D. in computer science in 2011 from Princeton and a B.S. in electrical engineering and computer science in 2004 from UC Berkeley.
Host: Ramesh Govindan
Location: Seaver Science Library (SSL) - 150
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Assistant to CS chair
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Six Sigma Black Belt
Wed, Apr 17, 2013 @ 09:00 AM - 05:00 PM
Executive Education
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: TBA,
Talk Title: Six Sigma Black Belt
Abstract: Course Overview
This course teaches you the advanced problem-solving skills you'll need in order to measure a process, analyze the results, develop process improvements and quantify the resulting savings. Project assignments between sessions require you to apply what you�ve learned. This course is presented in the classroom in three five-day sessions over a three-month period.
Learn the advanced problem-solving skills you need to implement the principles, practices and techniques of Six Sigma to maximize performance and cost reductions in your organization. During this three-week practitioner course, you will learn how to measure a process, analyze the results, develop process improvements and quantify the resulting savings. You will be required to complete a project demonstrating mastery of appropriate analytical methods and pass an examination to earn IIE�s Six Sigma Black Belt Certificate.This practitioner course for Six Sigma implementation provides extensive coverage of the Six Sigma process as well as intensive exposure to the key analytical tools associated with Six Sigma, including project management, team skills, cost analysis, FMEA, basic statistics, inferential statistics, sampling, goodness of fit testing, regression and correlation analysis, reliability, design of experiments, statistical process control, measurement systems analysis and simulation. Computer applications are emphasized.
NOTE: Participants must bring a laptop computer running Microsoft Office� to the seminar.
Course Topics
* Business process management
* Computer applications
* Design of experiments (DOE)
* Design for Six Sigma (DFSS)
* DMAIIC
* Enterprisewide deployment
* Lean enterprise
* Project management
* Regression and correlation modeling
* Statistical methods and sampling
* Statistical process control
* Team processes
Benefits
Upon completion of this course, you will be able to:
* Analyze process data using comprehensive statistical methods
* Control the process to assure that improvements are used and the benefits verified
* Define an opportunity for improving customer satisfaction
* Implement the recommended improvements
* Improve existing processes by reducing variation
* Measure process characteristics that are critical to quality
Who Should Attend
* VPs, COOs, CEOs
* Employees new to a managerial position
* Employees preparing to make the transition to managerial roles
* Current managers wanting to hone leadership skills
* Anyone interested in implementing Lean or Six Sigma in their organization
Program Fees
On-Campus Participants: $6095
Includes continental breakfasts, lunch and all course materials. The fee does not include hotel accommodations or transportation.
Online Participant with Live Session Interactivity: $6095
Includes attendee access codes for live call-in or chat capabilities during class sessions. Also includes all course and lecture materials available for live stream or download.
Reduced Pricing:
Institute of Industrial Engineers (IIE): Reduced pricing is available for members of IIE. Please contact professional@mapp.usc.edu for further information.
Trojan Family: USC alumni, current students, faculty, and staff receive 10% reduced pricing on registration.
Boeing: Boeing employees receive 20% off registration fees (please use Boeing email address when registering).
Location
Two course delivery options are available for participants, on-campus and online with interactivity:
On-Campus Course is held in state-of-the-art facilities on the University of Southern California campus, located in downtown Los Angeles. Participants attending on-campus will have the option to commute to the course or stay at one of the many hotels located in the area. For travel information, please visit our Travel section.
Overview of on-campus option:
* The ability to interact with faculty and peers in-person.
* Access to hard copy course materials.
* Ability to logon and view archived course information - up to 7 days after the course has been offered. This includes course documents and streaming video of the lectures.
* If there is a conflict during any on-campus course dates, on-campus participants can elect to be an online/interactive student.
* Parking, refreshments and lunch are provided for on-campus participants � unless otherwise specified.
Online (Interactivity) Course delivery is completely online and real-time, enabling interaction with the instructor and fellow participants. Participants have the flexibility of completing the course from a distance utilizing USC's Distance Education Network technology. Students are required to be online for the entirety of each day's session.
Overview of online (interactive):
* Virtually participate in the course live � with the ability to either ask questions or chat questions to the entire class.
* WebEx technologies provide the option to call into the class and view the entire lecture/materials on a personal computer, or to participate on a computer without having to utilize a phone line.
* Ability to logon and view archived course information up to 7 days after the course has been offered. This includes course documents and streaming video of the lectures.
Continuing Education Units
CEUs: 10.5 (CEUs provided by request only)
USC Viterbi School of Engineering Certificate of Participation is awarded to all participants upon successful completion of course.
Upon completion, participants will also receive their Institute of Industrial Engineers certification in SIx Sigma Black Belt.
Host: Corporate and Professional Programs
More Info: http://gapp.usc.edu/professional-programs/short-courses/industrial%26systems/six-sigma-black-belt
Audiences: Registered Attendees
Contact: Viterbi Professional Programs
Event Link: http://gapp.usc.edu/professional-programs/short-courses/industrial%26systems/six-sigma-black-belt
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Sequential Decoding Of General Quantum Communication Channels
Wed, Apr 17, 2013 @ 02:00 PM - 03:00 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Mark M. Wilde, McGill University
Talk Title: Sequential Decoding Of General Quantum Communication Channels
Abstract: Despite the fact that a quantum measurement generally disturbs the state of a quantum system, recent work of Seth Lloyd and collaborators demonstrates that a sender and receiver can communicate at the Holevo rate even when the receiver performs a large number of sequential measurements to determine the message of the sender. The present work contributes to this direction, by addressing three questions that have arisen from the work on sequential decoding. First, we show that Pranab Sen's non-commutative union bound applies for a sequence of general measurements (not merely projective ones). Next, we use this result to prove that sequential decoding works well even in the "one-shot" regime, where we are given a single instance of a channel and wish to determine the maximal number of bits that can be communicated up to a small failure probability. Finally, we demonstrate two ways in which a receiver can recover a state close to the original state after it has been decoded by a sequence of measurements that each succeed with high probability. The second of these methods will be useful in realizing an efficient decoder for fully quantum polar codes, should a method ever be found to realize an efficient decoder for classical-quantum polar codes. This work is available as arXiv:1303.0808.
Biography: Mark M. Wilde received the Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering from the University of Southern California, Los Angeles, California, in 2008. Until recently, he has been a Postdoctoral Fellow at the School of Computer Science, McGill University, and he will start in August 2013 as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy and the Center for Computation and Technology at Louisiana State University. He is the author of the text "Quantum Information Theory" which will soon be published by Cambridge University Press. His current research interests are in quantum Shannon theory, quantum optical communication, quantum computational complexity theory, and quantum error correction.
Host: Todd Brun, x03503, tbrun@usc.edu
Location: Frank R. Seaver Science Center (SSC) - 319
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Gerrielyn Ramos
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AME - Department Seminar
Wed, Apr 17, 2013 @ 03:30 PM - 04:30 PM
Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Eric R. Homer, Assistant Professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at Brigham Young University
Talk Title: Computational Modeling of Amorphous and Crystalline Materials
Abstract: While the atomic-level processes regarding material behavior are often known, translating this knowledge to understand and predict material behavior at the macroscale can be a significant challenge. As such, computational materials modeling has emerged as a particularly useful tool to aid in the advancement of engineering materials. The work to be presented includes efforts to elucidate the phenomena controlling the mechanical behavior of amorphous metals as well as a method to simulate coupled compositional-microstructural evolution in crystalline materials.
Amorphous metals exhibit mechanical properties superior to their crystalline counterparts in many cases, but suffer from an inherent lack of ductility. This work provides new understanding of the shear localization process that ultimately leads to catastrophic failure. The insight is achieved through a through a new mesoscale model of amorphous metals that is capable of accessing experimentally relevant timescales. Additionally, a new Potts-Phase Field model for coupled composition-microstructure evolution is presented. The coupled model provides simultaneous evolution of grain structure and composition in a computationally efficient manner and promises to provide new insight into nuclear fuels research.
Biography: Eric R. Homer is an assistant professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at Brigham Young University. He received B.S. and M.S. degrees in Mechanical Engineering from Brigham Young University in 2006 and a Ph.D. in Materials Science & Engineering from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2010. Prof. Homer then spent one year as a postdoctoral appointee in the Computational Materials Science & Engineering at Sandia National Laboratories, Albuquerque, NM. He has 13 publications in the areas of the mechanical behavior of amorphous metals, microstructure characterization, atomic simulations and microstructural modeling.
Host: Dr. Oliver Franke
More Info: http://ae-www.usc.edu/seminars/4-17-13-Homer.shtml
Location: Seaver Science Library (SSL) - Room 150
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Kristi Villegas
Event Link: http://ae-www.usc.edu/seminars/4-17-13-Homer.shtml
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Six Sigma Black Belt
Thu, Apr 18, 2013 @ 09:00 AM - 05:00 PM
Executive Education
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: TBA,
Talk Title: Six Sigma Black Belt
Abstract: Course Overview
This course teaches you the advanced problem-solving skills you'll need in order to measure a process, analyze the results, develop process improvements and quantify the resulting savings. Project assignments between sessions require you to apply what you�ve learned. This course is presented in the classroom in three five-day sessions over a three-month period.
Learn the advanced problem-solving skills you need to implement the principles, practices and techniques of Six Sigma to maximize performance and cost reductions in your organization. During this three-week practitioner course, you will learn how to measure a process, analyze the results, develop process improvements and quantify the resulting savings. You will be required to complete a project demonstrating mastery of appropriate analytical methods and pass an examination to earn IIE�s Six Sigma Black Belt Certificate.This practitioner course for Six Sigma implementation provides extensive coverage of the Six Sigma process as well as intensive exposure to the key analytical tools associated with Six Sigma, including project management, team skills, cost analysis, FMEA, basic statistics, inferential statistics, sampling, goodness of fit testing, regression and correlation analysis, reliability, design of experiments, statistical process control, measurement systems analysis and simulation. Computer applications are emphasized.
NOTE: Participants must bring a laptop computer running Microsoft Office� to the seminar.
Course Topics
* Business process management
* Computer applications
* Design of experiments (DOE)
* Design for Six Sigma (DFSS)
* DMAIIC
* Enterprisewide deployment
* Lean enterprise
* Project management
* Regression and correlation modeling
* Statistical methods and sampling
* Statistical process control
* Team processes
Benefits
Upon completion of this course, you will be able to:
* Analyze process data using comprehensive statistical methods
* Control the process to assure that improvements are used and the benefits verified
* Define an opportunity for improving customer satisfaction
* Implement the recommended improvements
* Improve existing processes by reducing variation
* Measure process characteristics that are critical to quality
Who Should Attend
* VPs, COOs, CEOs
* Employees new to a managerial position
* Employees preparing to make the transition to managerial roles
* Current managers wanting to hone leadership skills
* Anyone interested in implementing Lean or Six Sigma in their organization
Program Fees
On-Campus Participants: $6095
Includes continental breakfasts, lunch and all course materials. The fee does not include hotel accommodations or transportation.
Online Participant with Live Session Interactivity: $6095
Includes attendee access codes for live call-in or chat capabilities during class sessions. Also includes all course and lecture materials available for live stream or download.
Reduced Pricing:
Institute of Industrial Engineers (IIE): Reduced pricing is available for members of IIE. Please contact professional@mapp.usc.edu for further information.
Trojan Family: USC alumni, current students, faculty, and staff receive 10% reduced pricing on registration.
Boeing: Boeing employees receive 20% off registration fees (please use Boeing email address when registering).
Location
Two course delivery options are available for participants, on-campus and online with interactivity:
On-Campus Course is held in state-of-the-art facilities on the University of Southern California campus, located in downtown Los Angeles. Participants attending on-campus will have the option to commute to the course or stay at one of the many hotels located in the area. For travel information, please visit our Travel section.
Overview of on-campus option:
* The ability to interact with faculty and peers in-person.
* Access to hard copy course materials.
* Ability to logon and view archived course information - up to 7 days after the course has been offered. This includes course documents and streaming video of the lectures.
* If there is a conflict during any on-campus course dates, on-campus participants can elect to be an online/interactive student.
* Parking, refreshments and lunch are provided for on-campus participants � unless otherwise specified.
Online (Interactivity) Course delivery is completely online and real-time, enabling interaction with the instructor and fellow participants. Participants have the flexibility of completing the course from a distance utilizing USC's Distance Education Network technology. Students are required to be online for the entirety of each day's session.
Overview of online (interactive):
* Virtually participate in the course live � with the ability to either ask questions or chat questions to the entire class.
* WebEx technologies provide the option to call into the class and view the entire lecture/materials on a personal computer, or to participate on a computer without having to utilize a phone line.
* Ability to logon and view archived course information up to 7 days after the course has been offered. This includes course documents and streaming video of the lectures.
Continuing Education Units
CEUs: 10.5 (CEUs provided by request only)
USC Viterbi School of Engineering Certificate of Participation is awarded to all participants upon successful completion of course.
Upon completion, participants will also receive their Institute of Industrial Engineers certification in SIx Sigma Black Belt.
Host: Corporate and Professional Programs
More Info: http://gapp.usc.edu/professional-programs/short-courses/industrial%26systems/six-sigma-black-belt
Audiences: Registered Attendees
Contact: Viterbi Professional Programs
Event Link: http://gapp.usc.edu/professional-programs/short-courses/industrial%26systems/six-sigma-black-belt
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Perspectives on Building a Career in Research
Thu, Apr 18, 2013 @ 12:30 PM - 01:50 PM
Mork Family Department of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Professor Noah Malmstadt, Dr. Deniz Armani,
Talk Title: Perspectives on Building a Career in Research
Series: Mork Family Department of Chemical Engineering and Material Science Graduate Students Practical Seminar
Abstract: This practical seminar is designed to introduce the graduate students, in particular Ph.D. students, in the department to research career path in academia and industry. A panel consisting of a faculty member, Professor Noah Malmstadt, and an industry participant, Dr. Deniz Armani, will be presenting their perspectives on research careers and the opportunities and challenges that come with developing a career in research. The panel provides a good opportunity for graduate students to gain some insight into what is involved in a research career path and to ask any questions they may have about this career choice.
Location: James H. Zumberge Hall Of Science (ZHS) - 159
Audiences: Graduate
Contact: Ryan Choi
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Human Motion Analysis in the Interplay of Multimodality, Representation and Learning
Thu, Apr 18, 2013 @ 01:30 PM - 03:00 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Ferda Ofli, University of California - Berkeley
Talk Title: Human Motion Analysis in the Interplay of Multimodality, Representation and Learning
Abstract: Human motion analysis is one of the most challenging research areas in computer vision in which one can seek to perform better by fusing information from multi-sensory data, by proposing richer feature representations, and by developing more efficient learning algorithms. In this talk, I will first describe the Berkeley MHAD, recently released comprehensive multimodal human action database, and present action recognition results for individual modalities as well as combinations of different modalities using state-of-the-art feature representations together with kernel-based methods. Then, I will introduce a new skeletal representation of human actions based on orderings of the most informative joints and demonstrate on multiple datasets that the new representation is discriminative for human action recognition and performs better than state-of-the-art feature representations. Finally, I will talk about a multimodal analysis framework for learning and synthesis of human body motions in the context of dance performances.
Biography: Ferda Ofli received B.Sc. degrees both in Electrical and Electronics Engineering and Computer Engineering, and the Ph.D. degree in Electrical Engineering from Koc University, Istanbul, Turkey, in 2005 and 2010, respectively. He is currently a postdoctoral researcher in the Teleimmersion Lab at the University of California at Berkeley, Berkeley, CA. His research interests span the areas of multimedia signal processing, computer vision, pattern recognition and machine learning. He received Graduate Studies Excellence award in 2010 for outstanding academic achievement at Koc University. http://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/~fofli/
Host: Prof. Shrikanth Narayanan
Location: Ronald Tutor Hall of Engineering (RTH) - 320
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Mary Francis
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Focused on parallel and distributed computing
Thu, Apr 18, 2013 @ 02:00 PM - 03:00 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: TBA, TBA
Talk Title: TBA
Series: EE598 Seminar Course
Abstract: Weekly seminars given by researchers in academia and industry including senior doctoral students in EE, CS and ISI covering current research related to parallel and distributed computation including parallel algorithms, high performance computing, scientific computation, application specific architectures, multi-core and many-core architectures and algorithms, application acceleration, reconfigurable computing systems, data intensive systems, Big Data and cloud computing.
Biography: Prerequisite: Students are expected to be familiar with basic concepts at the level of graduate level courses in Computer Engineering and Computer Science in some of these topic areas above. Ph.D. students in Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering and Computer Science can automatically enroll. M.S. students can enroll only with permission of the instructor. To request permission send a brief mail to the instructor in text format with the subject field ââ¬ÅEE 598ââ¬Â. The body of the mail (in text format) should include name, degree objective, courses taken at USC and grades obtained, prior educational background, and relevant research background, if any.
Requirements for CR:
1. Attending at least 10 seminars during the semester
There will be a sign-in sheet and a sign-out sheet at every seminar. All students must sign-in (before 2:00pm) and sign-out (after 3:00pm). The sign-in sheet will not be available after 2:00pm, and the sign-out sheet will not be available before 3:00pm.
2. Submitting a written report for at least 5 seminars
The written report for each seminar must be 1-page single line spaced format with font size of 12 (Times) or 11 (Arial) without any figures, tables, or graphs. The report must be submitted no later than 1 week after the corresponding seminar, and must be handed only to the instructor either on the seminar times or during office hours. Late reports will not be considered.
The report must summarize studentââ¬â¢s own understanding of the seminar, and should contain the following:
- Your name and submission date [1 line]
- Title of the seminar, name of the speaker, and seminar date [1 line]
- Background of the work (e.g., applications, prior research, etc.) [1 paragraph]
- Highlights of the approaches presented in the seminar [1-2 paragraphs]
- Main results presented in the seminar [1-2 paragraphs]
- Conclusion (your own conclusion and not what was given by the speaker) [1 paragraph]
Reviewing papers related to the topic of the seminar, and incorporating relevant findings in the
reports (e.g., in the conclusion section) is encouraged. In such cases, make sure to clearly indicate
the reference(s) used to derive these conclusions.
Host: Professor Viktor K. Prasanna
More Information: Course Announcement_EE598_Focused on parallel and distributed computing_(Spring 2013).pdf
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) -
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Janice Thompson
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Astani CEE. Dept Seminar
Thu, Apr 18, 2013 @ 02:00 PM - 03:00 PM
Sonny Astani Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Sarah C. Taylor-Lange , The University of Texas at Austin
Talk Title: Advancements in concrete materials sustainability: Supplementary cementitious material development and pollutant interaction
Abstract: Concrete, on a volume basis, is the most widely used, man-made material in the world. Cement is an essential component of concrete and is responsible for over 5% of the global anthropogenic CO2 emissions. This seminar focuses on the development and use of supplementary cementitious materials (SCMs) for enhancing the sustainability of concrete, taking into consideration the reduction in CO2 emissions from manufacturing, changes in the cement chemistry and mechanical properties, as well as uptake and release of airborne pollutants. First, the sustainability attributes of SCMs will be introduced focusing on the development of impure clay minerals as competitive, locally available, partial cement substitutes. The results demonstrate select clay minerals are energetically and structurally favorable SCMs proving to be a competitive, sustainable alternative for use in concrete. In addition, this research provides an understanding of the interactions between building material selection and our living environment. Numerical and experimental studies on the interaction of indoor/outdoor pollutants including radon, ozone, and carbon dioxide with SCMs in concretes and renders will be presented. The results suggest a high potential for SCMs to reduce indoor radon exposure from concrete, contingent upon SCM constituent radionucleotide content and emanation fraction. In addition, studies demonstrate opportunities for optimizing render binder composition for passive pollutant removal. The results from this work collectively contribute toward the broader goal of modernizing and advancing the construction industry toward best sustainable practices and highlighting the importance of an integrated approach which simultaneously considers the mechanical performance, cost, energy requirements, emission signatures, as well as environmental and health impacts.
Host: Astani CEE Dept.
Location: Kaprielian Hall (KAP) - 209
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Cassie Cremeans
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EE 598: ELECTRICAL ENGINEERING RESEARCH SEMINAR COURSE #13
Thu, Apr 18, 2013 @ 02:00 PM - 03:00 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Farnoush Banaei-Kashani, PhD, Computer Science, USC Viterbi School of Engineering
Talk Title: Indexes for Efficient Spatial Query Processing on Cloud
Series: EE598 Seminar Course
Abstract: With exclusive access to geospatial data and the hardware platform to develop and serve data-rich geospatial applications, large IT companies have created a monopoly on development of these applications; hence, hindering healthy competition and economic growth. We argue that introduction of cloud computing has recently opened the door to break this monopoly by providing open access to both data and hardware platform, and consequently, enabled any interested entity to develop cloud-based geospatial services and applications. Accordingly as a means to facilitate this transition, we investigate, design and develop Geo-SaaS (short for Geospatial Software-as-a-Service), a framework for geospatial service/SaaS development on cloud platforms. Geo-SaaS provides the programming environment and the query re-writing toolset required for porting the existing geospatial queries and access methods to the parallel platform of cloud. Practitioners (e.g., various businesses) can use the geospatial services developed based on GeoSaaS to implement their cloud-based geospatial applications, and academics can extend the toolsets provided by GeoSaaS by developing their own geospatial services. In this talk, I start by further motivating Geo-SaaS, and then review sample results from our prior work as well as our ongoing work.
Biography: Farnoush Banaei-Kashani is a Research Associate and Associate Director of Research at NSF's Integrated Media Systems Center (IMSC) at the University of Southern California. He received his B.S. in Computer Engineering from Sharif University of Technology in 1996, and his M.S. and Ph.D. Degrees in Computer Networks and Computer Science from the University of Southern California in 2002 and 2006, respectively. His research is focused on fundamental and applied data management with special interest in Data-driven Decision-making Systems (DDSs), i.e., systems that automate the process of decision-making based on data. Toward this end, his research objective is to introduce novel solutions for all components of the DDS data management cycle (namely, data collection, transfer, preprocessing, storage for querying, analysis and mining, visualization, and actuation) under various combinations of the Big Data V3 challenges relevant for the desired DDS applications. Dr. Banaei-Kashani has authored more than forty research articles in the areas of Sensor and Peer-to-Peer Databases, Distributed Databases, and Spatial Databases, Data Streams, Cloud Computing, and Social Network Analysis. He regularly serves on the program committee of various database conferences.
Host: Professor Viktor K. Prasanna
More Information: Course Announcement_EE598_Focused on parallel and distributed computing_(Spring 2013) 2.pdf
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 248
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Janice Thompson
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CS Distinguished Lecture: Gail Kaiser (Columbia): Testing 1... 2... 3...
Thu, Apr 18, 2013 @ 03:30 PM - 05:00 PM
Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Gail Kaiser, Columbia
Talk Title: Testing 1... 2... 3...
Series: CS Distinguished Lectures
Abstract: Testing software systems is hard. Conventional software testing checks whether each output is correct for the set of test inputs. But for some software, it is not known what the correct output should be for some inputs. How can we construct and execute test cases that will find coding errors even when we do not know whether the output is correct? And for most software, the development-lab testing process can not cover all inputs and/or internal states that can arise after deployment. How can we construct and execute test cases that operate in the states that occur during user operation to continue to find coding errors without impacting the user? Finally, for some (most?) software, even with rigorous pre and post deployment testing, users will inevitably notice errors that were not detected by the developer's test cases. How can we construct and execute new test cases that reproduce these errors? This talk will present an overview of my lab's past decade and ongoing research on these hard testing problems.
Biography: Gail E. Kaiser is a Professor of Computer Science and the Director of the Programming Systems Laboratory in the Computer Science Department at Columbia University. She was named an NSF Presidential Young Investigator in Software Engineering and Software Systems in 1988, and has published over 150 refereed papers in a range of software areas. Prof. Kaiser's research interests include social software engineering, collaborative work, privacy and security, software reliability, self-managing systems, parallel and distributed systems, Web technologies, information management, and software development environments and tools. She has consulted or worked summers for courseware authoring, software process and networking startups, several defense contractors, the Software Engineering Institute, Bell Labs, IBM, Siemens, Sun and Telcordia. Her lab has been funded by NSF, NIH, DARPA, ONR, NASA, NYS Science & Technology Foundation, and numerous companies. Prof. Kaiser served on the editorial board of IEEE Internet Computing for many years, was a founding associate editor of ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology, chaired an ACM SIGSOFT Symposium on Foundations of Software Engineering, vice chaired three of the IEEE International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems, and serves frequently on conference program committees. She also served on the Committee of Examiners for the Educational Testing Service's Computer Science Advanced Test (the GRE CS test) for three years, and has chaired her department's doctoral program since 1997. Prof. Kaiser received her PhD and MS from CMU and her ScB from MIT.
Host: William GJ Halfond
Location: Seaver Science Library (SSL) - 150
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Assistant to CS chair
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Six Sigma Black Belt
Fri, Apr 19, 2013 @ 09:00 AM - 05:00 PM
Executive Education
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: TBA,
Talk Title: Six Sigma Black Belt
Abstract: Course Overview
This course teaches you the advanced problem-solving skills you'll need in order to measure a process, analyze the results, develop process improvements and quantify the resulting savings. Project assignments between sessions require you to apply what you�ve learned. This course is presented in the classroom in three five-day sessions over a three-month period.
Learn the advanced problem-solving skills you need to implement the principles, practices and techniques of Six Sigma to maximize performance and cost reductions in your organization. During this three-week practitioner course, you will learn how to measure a process, analyze the results, develop process improvements and quantify the resulting savings. You will be required to complete a project demonstrating mastery of appropriate analytical methods and pass an examination to earn IIE�s Six Sigma Black Belt Certificate.This practitioner course for Six Sigma implementation provides extensive coverage of the Six Sigma process as well as intensive exposure to the key analytical tools associated with Six Sigma, including project management, team skills, cost analysis, FMEA, basic statistics, inferential statistics, sampling, goodness of fit testing, regression and correlation analysis, reliability, design of experiments, statistical process control, measurement systems analysis and simulation. Computer applications are emphasized.
NOTE: Participants must bring a laptop computer running Microsoft Office� to the seminar.
Course Topics
* Business process management
* Computer applications
* Design of experiments (DOE)
* Design for Six Sigma (DFSS)
* DMAIIC
* Enterprisewide deployment
* Lean enterprise
* Project management
* Regression and correlation modeling
* Statistical methods and sampling
* Statistical process control
* Team processes
Benefits
Upon completion of this course, you will be able to:
* Analyze process data using comprehensive statistical methods
* Control the process to assure that improvements are used and the benefits verified
* Define an opportunity for improving customer satisfaction
* Implement the recommended improvements
* Improve existing processes by reducing variation
* Measure process characteristics that are critical to quality
Who Should Attend
* VPs, COOs, CEOs
* Employees new to a managerial position
* Employees preparing to make the transition to managerial roles
* Current managers wanting to hone leadership skills
* Anyone interested in implementing Lean or Six Sigma in their organization
Program Fees
On-Campus Participants: $6095
Includes continental breakfasts, lunch and all course materials. The fee does not include hotel accommodations or transportation.
Online Participant with Live Session Interactivity: $6095
Includes attendee access codes for live call-in or chat capabilities during class sessions. Also includes all course and lecture materials available for live stream or download.
Reduced Pricing:
Institute of Industrial Engineers (IIE): Reduced pricing is available for members of IIE. Please contact professional@mapp.usc.edu for further information.
Trojan Family: USC alumni, current students, faculty, and staff receive 10% reduced pricing on registration.
Boeing: Boeing employees receive 20% off registration fees (please use Boeing email address when registering).
Location
Two course delivery options are available for participants, on-campus and online with interactivity:
On-Campus Course is held in state-of-the-art facilities on the University of Southern California campus, located in downtown Los Angeles. Participants attending on-campus will have the option to commute to the course or stay at one of the many hotels located in the area. For travel information, please visit our Travel section.
Overview of on-campus option:
* The ability to interact with faculty and peers in-person.
* Access to hard copy course materials.
* Ability to logon and view archived course information - up to 7 days after the course has been offered. This includes course documents and streaming video of the lectures.
* If there is a conflict during any on-campus course dates, on-campus participants can elect to be an online/interactive student.
* Parking, refreshments and lunch are provided for on-campus participants � unless otherwise specified.
Online (Interactivity) Course delivery is completely online and real-time, enabling interaction with the instructor and fellow participants. Participants have the flexibility of completing the course from a distance utilizing USC's Distance Education Network technology. Students are required to be online for the entirety of each day's session.
Overview of online (interactive):
* Virtually participate in the course live � with the ability to either ask questions or chat questions to the entire class.
* WebEx technologies provide the option to call into the class and view the entire lecture/materials on a personal computer, or to participate on a computer without having to utilize a phone line.
* Ability to logon and view archived course information up to 7 days after the course has been offered. This includes course documents and streaming video of the lectures.
Continuing Education Units
CEUs: 10.5 (CEUs provided by request only)
USC Viterbi School of Engineering Certificate of Participation is awarded to all participants upon successful completion of course.
Upon completion, participants will also receive their Institute of Industrial Engineers certification in SIx Sigma Black Belt.
Host: Corporate and Professional Programs
More Info: http://gapp.usc.edu/professional-programs/short-courses/industrial%26systems/six-sigma-black-belt
Audiences: Registered Attendees
Contact: Viterbi Professional Programs
Event Link: http://gapp.usc.edu/professional-programs/short-courses/industrial%26systems/six-sigma-black-belt
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Backscatter, MIMO, Ultra-Wideband: Three Independent Worlds?
Fri, Apr 19, 2013 @ 10:30 AM - 11:30 AM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Daniel Arnitz, Duke University
Talk Title: Backscatter, MIMO, Ultra-Wideband: Three Independent Worlds?
Abstract: Three systems have independently revolutionized the physical layer of wireless communications in the past decade: backscatter communications, multi-input-multi-output systems, and ultra-wideband signaling. Yet, are these concepts as independent and incompatible as they initially appear, or can these fields learn from each other? The talk will span topics from backscatter tag localization (i.e. secondary radar), ultra-wideband backscatter propagation channels, and MIMO wireless power transfer, to a potential new application of these technologies: real-time ultra-wideband channel modeling.
Biography: Daniel Arnitz is a PostDoc at Duke University (NC, USA), working on backscatter channel modeling and prediction, MIMO wireless power transfer, and RFID localization. He received his Master degree Dipl.-Ing.(FH) in electrical engineering from the University of Applied Sciences FH Joanneum Kapfenberg, Austria, in 2005, and a Ph.D. (Dr. techn.) degree from Graz University of Technology, Austria, in 2011 (both degrees with honors). His Ph.D. thesis covers the field of tag localization in passive UHF RFID and his diploma thesis focused on a feasibility study of (burst) error correcting codes for long-range RFID systems. Daniel is TPC Chair of IEEE RFID 2012 and 2013 and maintainer of the PARIS simulation framework, an open-source simulation engine intended for researching (ultra-)wideband backscatter systems.
Host: Andreas Molisch, x04670, molisch@usc.edu
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 248
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Gerrielyn Ramos
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W.V.T. Rusch Honors Program; Cellular Networks: Big Problems Ahead
Fri, Apr 19, 2013 @ 01:00 PM - 01:50 PM
USC Viterbi School of Engineering, Viterbi School of Engineering Student Affairs
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Randy Battat, President and CEO, Airvana
Talk Title: Cellular Networks: Big Problems Ahead
Host: W.V.T. Rusch Honors Program
Location: Seeley G. Mudd Building (SGM) - 101
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Christine Viterbi Admission & Student Affairs
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Integrated Systems Seminar Series
Fri, Apr 19, 2013 @ 02:30 PM - 03:30 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Prof. Donhee Ham, Harvard University
Talk Title: Solid-state and Biological Systems Interface
Abstract: The complexity, programmability, small size, and low cost of solid-state devices in direct contact with living organisms or their in vitro or ex vivo subsystems can open up new exciting vistas in biology and biotechnology. In this talk, I would like to review some recent developments along this direction, especially, some past and on-going works in my own research group at Harvard. These will include spin-resonance based radio-frequency (RF) biomolecular sensors, and a variety of silicon + electrochemistry interfaces aimed at analyzing proteins, DNA, and population cellular dynamics for personalized medicine, genetics, and neurotechnology.
Biography: Donhee Ham, from Busan, South Korea, and a 2011, 2012, and 2013 Harvard Yearbook Favorite Professor, is Gordon McKay Professor of Applied Physics and EE at Harvard University. He earned a B.S. degree in physics from Seoul National University where he graduated summa cum laude with the Presidential Prize, ranked top 1st across the College of Natural Sciences, and also with the Physics Gold Medal (sole winner). Following a 1.5 years of mandatory military service in the Republic of Korea Army, he went to Caltech for graduate training in physics. There he worked on general relativity and gravitational astrophysics under Professor Barry Barish, and later obtained a Ph.D. in EE winning the Charles Wilts Prize awarded for the best thesis in EE. His doctoral work examined the statistical physics of electrical circuits. He was the recipient of the IBM Doctoral Fellowship, Li Ming Scholarship, IBM Faculty Partnership Award, IBM Research Design Challenge Award, the KFAS fellowship,the Hoopes prize (/w William Andress), and the recognition by MIT Technology Review as among the world's top 35 young innovators in 2008 (TR35). Ham was one of 8 Harvard Thinks Big speakers in 2012 (8 Harvard faculty chosen by college-wide votes). He is an IEEE Distinguished Lecturer. Donhee Ham's work experiences include Caltech-MIT Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory (LIGO), IBM T. J. Watson Research, Consulting Visiting Professorship at POSTECH, IEEE conference technical program committees, advisory board, or associated/guest editorships in, for example, the IEEE ISSCC, IEEE ASSCC, IEEE ISCAS, IEEE T-Biocas, and IEEE JSSC, and various US, Korea, and Japan industry, government, & academic technical advisory positions. The current intellectual focus efforts of his group are in: 1) solid-state and biological systems interface; 2) nanoscale and/or low-dimensional plasmonics, spintronics, and quantum devices; 3) analog, RF/microwave, and mixed-signal integrated circuits.
Host: Prof. Hossein Hashemi and Prof. Mike Chen
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 248
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Hossein Hashemi
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CEE Ph.D. Seminar
Fri, Apr 19, 2013 @ 04:00 PM - 05:00 PM
Sonny Astani Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Prof. Xavier -Sanchez-Vila , Technical University of Catalonia - BarcelonaTech (UPC)
Talk Title: Providing simple solutions for evaluating reaction rates in complex multispecies reactive transport problems
Abstract:
Mixing of waters in perfect chemical equilibrium with a given mineral leads indefectibly to local disequilibrium. A reaction takes place then in order to re-equilibrate the system. This reaction can be either precipitation or dissolution (in this latter case limited by mineral availability. Both reactions can lead eventually to changes in porosity and permeability at the local scale. The fate of solutes in natural systems, such as rivers and aquifers, are thus controlled by mixing, which in groundwater is a consequence of local diffusion/dispersion. The presentation will discuss a new methodology for computing exactly reaction rates on complex multicomponent reactive transport problems involving precipitation-dissolution of minerals. We start from the simple problem of the evaluation of reaction rates at the local scale when reactions are in equilibrium. Then we move to the problem of kinetic reactions on one hand, and to upscaling reaction rates on the other. All the soluti ons are exemplified by means of relatively simple flow set-ups, which allow obtaining analytical solutions even for quite complex geochemical set-ups. These solutions provide some insight to multispecies reactive problems, and more, can be used for benchmarking.
Pizza is served at 5:00pm in KAP 209
Host: Dr. Felipe de Barros
Location: John Stauffer Science Lecture Hall (SLH) - 102
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Evangeline Reyes
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Astani CEE. Dept Seminar
Mon, Apr 22, 2013 @ 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Sonny Astani Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Mohammad Ebtehaj , University of Minnesota
Talk Title: Hydro-meteorological Inverse Problems via Sparse Regularization
Abstract: The past decades have witnessed a remarkable emergence of new sources of multi-scale multi-sensor geophysical data such as precipitation, evapotranspiration, soil moisture, and vegetation. These data provide a unique opportunity to better understand land surface hydro-meteorological processes and to improve our environmental forecast skills. For precipitation, these data typically include global spaceborne active and passive sensors and regional ground-based radars. Focusing on the non-Gaussian and heavy tailed statistical structure of precipitation data, new frameworks are presented that address optimal retrieval, fusion and resolution enhancement of multi-sensor rainfall data. These frameworks rely on recent advancements in computational methods for sparse solutions of inverse problems. Compared to the existing classic methodologies, the results of the proposed approaches promise improved posterior estimates of precipitation fluxes to be used for more accurate prediction of extreme land surface hydro-geomorphic events, such as floods and landslides. Future extension of the proposed approaches to data assimilation problems and other land surface applications are also discussed.
Biography: Mohammad Ebtehaj is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Civil Engineering and the Saint Anthony Falls Laboratory at the University of Minnesota. He will complete his degree in June 2013 with a double major -- PhD in civil engineering and M.Sc. in mathematics. He is currently a NASA Earth and Space Science Fellow (NESSF) and a University of Minnesota Doctoral Dissertation Fellow (DDF). He received his B.Sc. in civil engineering from Iran University of Science and Technology (IUST) in 1999, where he also received two M.Sc. degrees in environmental and earthquake engineering in 2001 and 2007, respectively. He has worked in industry for almost seven years as a design civil engineer in his country. His research interests are in computational geophysics, focusing on remote sensing hydro-meteorological inverse problems, specifically statistical and mathematical characterization of precipitation images from ground and space sensors. His work ââ¬ÅAdaptive Fusion and Sparse Estimation of Multi-sensor Precipitationââ¬Â received the 2011 outstanding student paper award of the American Geophysical Union.
Host: Astani CEE Dept.
Location: Kaprielian Hall (KAP) - 209
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Cassie Cremeans
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Biomedical Engineering Seminars (BME 533)
Mon, Apr 22, 2013 @ 12:30 PM - 01:50 PM
Alfred E. Mann Department of Biomedical Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Heidi Gensler, BME, Graduate Research Assistant, Biomedical Microsystems Laboratory , Advisor: Ellis Meng; Winner of BME's highest award for PhD students, the Grodins Graduate Award (2013)
Talk Title: A Wireless Implantable MEMS Micropump System for Site-specific Anti-cancer Drug Delivery
Host: David D'Argenio
Location: Olin Hall of Engineering (OHE) - 122
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Mischalgrace Diasanta
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Magneto-electric Nanoparticles for Enabling Personalized NanoMedicine
Mon, Apr 22, 2013 @ 02:00 PM - 03:00 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Sakhrat Khizroev, Florida International University
Talk Title: Magneto-electric Nanoparticles for Enabling Personalized NanoMedicine
Abstract: The use of nanoparticles is often considered as an enabling force of personalized nanomedicine (PNM). Using nanoparticles to precisely navigate a drug through the patient’s body and control its dosage and composition as well as to detect even minute disease-caused changes in the surrounding cellular microenvironment can make personalized treatment a reality. However, the fundamental physics that underlies the nanoparticles’ characteristics in the perspective of the intrinsic interaction with the patient’s body in the aforementioned applications is poorly exploited. Our recent discovery of the unprecedented capabilities of magneto-electric nanoparticles (MENs) helps fill this gap. MENs could be used as energy-efficient and dissipation-free field-controlled nano-vehicles for targeted delivery and on-demand release of anti-Cancer and anti-HIV drugs as well as nano-stimulators for field-controlled non-invasive treatment of patients with central nervous system (CNS) disorders. Further, the intrinsic coupling between electric and magnetic forces within MENs enables molecular specificity that provides an entirely new dimension even to conventional state-of-the-art diagnostic methods such as MRI, PET-CT, the emerging diagnostic technique of magnetic nanoparticle imaging (MNI), and others. The talk will present the MEN applications developed in the Khizroev laboratory to treat and diagnose Cancer, HIV, Parkinsons Diseases and other dementia.
Biography: Sakhrat Khizroev is an inventor with an expertise in nanomagnetic/spintronic devices with a current research focus on nanotechnology applications in Personalized Nanomedicine and Information Processing. He is a tenured Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering and a Professor and Vice Chair at the Department of Immunology of Herbert Wertheim College of Medicine at FIU. He is also the founding Director of Center for Personalized NanoMedicine at the Institute of Neuro-Immune Pharmacology. From 2006 to 2010, Dr. Khizroev was a tenured Professor at the Department of Electrical Engineering, University of California, Riverside (UCR), where his group conducted several groundbreaking demonstrations in the area of nanoelectronics and nanodiagnostics. Perpendicular magnetic recording (PMR), three-dimensional (3-D) magnetic memory and Nanolasers for 5-nm diagnostics, low-damping spin-oscillator devices are among the pioneering and patented technologies which emerged under the supervision of Professor Khizroev. Prior to his academic career, Prof. Khizroev spent almost four years as a Research Staff Member with Seagate Research (1999-2003) and one year as a Doctoral Intern with IBM Almaden Research Center (1997-1998). He holds over 30 granted US patents and many international patents. He has authored over 120 refereed papers, 1 book and many book chapters in the broad area of nanomagnetic/spintronic devices. He is a Fellow of National Academy of Inventors (NAI). He has acted as a guest science and technology commentator on television and radio programs across the globe. He has served as an Editor for IEEE Transactions on Nanotechnology, Nanotechnology, and IEEE Transactions on Magnetics and sits on editorial boards of several Science and Technology journals. Khizroev received a BS in Quantum Electronics and Applied Physics from Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology, a MS in Physics from the University of Miami, and a PhD in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Carnegie Mellon University in 1992, 1994, and 1999, respectively.
Host: Mary Eshaghian-Wilner, Alice C. Parker
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 248
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Annie Yu
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CS Distinguished Lecture: Lise Getoor (University of Maryland College Park): Statistical Relational Learning and Graph Identification
Mon, Apr 22, 2013 @ 03:30 PM - 05:00 PM
Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Lise Getoor, University of Maryland College Park
Talk Title: Statistical Relational Learning and Graph Identification
Series: CS Distinguished Lectures
Abstract: Within the machine learning and data mining communities, there is a growing interest in learning structured models from input data that is itself structured, an area often referred to as statistical relational learning (SRL). In this talk, Iââ¬â¢ll give a brief overview of SRL, discuss its relation to graph analysis, extraction, and alignment, and its importance in the context of big data analytics. Iââ¬â¢ll then describe our recent work on "graph identification", the process of inferring a graph or network from observational data. Graph identification requires a combination of entity resolution (determining when two references refer to the same underlying entity), link prediction (inferring missing relationships in the data), and collective classification (inferring attribute values of the entities). This form of structured prediction allows us to infer missing information and correct mistakes -- a vital first step before further network analysis is performed. I will overview two approaches to graph identification: 1) coupled conditional classifiers (C^3), and 2) probabilistic soft logic (PSL). I will describe their mathematical foundations, learning and inference algorithms, and empirical evaluation, showing their power in terms of both accuracy and scalability. These methods support emerging information extraction and database techniques to realize the promise of extracting actionable knowledge from large-scale data in the wild. I will conclude by highlighting connections to privacy in social network data and other big data challenges.
Biography: Lise Getoor is an Associate Professor in the Computer Science Department at the University of Maryland, College Park and University of Maryland Institute for Advanced Computer Studies. Her research areas include machine learning, and reasoning under uncertainty; in addition she works in data management, visual analytics and social network analysis. She is a board member of the International Machine Learning Society, a former Machine Learning Journal Action Editor, Associate Editor for the ACM Transactions of Knowledge Discovery from Data, JAIR Associate Editor, and she has served on the AAAI Council. She was conference co-chair for ICML 2011, and has served on the PC of many conferences including the senior PC for AAAI, ICML, KDD, UAI and the PC of SIGMOD, VLDB, and WWW. She is a recipient of an NSF Career Award and was awarded a National Physical Sciences Consortium Fellowship. Her work has been funded by ARO, DARPA, IARPA, Google, IBM, LLNL, Microsoft, NGA, NSF, Yahoo! and others. She received her PhD from Stanford University, her Masterââ¬â¢s degree from University of California, Berkeley, and her undergraduate degree from University of California, Santa Barbara.
Host: Leana Golubchik
Location: Seaver Science Library (SSL) - 150
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Assistant to CS chair
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Lean Green Belt
Tue, Apr 23, 2013 @ 09:00 AM - 05:00 PM
Executive Education
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: TBA,
Talk Title: Lean Green Belt
Abstract: Course Overview
This three-day course provides an in-depth understanding of lean enterprise principles and how to apply them within your organization. Your lean journey begins with a series of interactive simulations that demonstrate how each lean concept is applied and its impact on the process. Mapping the process flow and identifying the activities that add value from the customer's perspective is the cornerstone of this class. The class is then given a scenario and the students simulate the conversion from traditional to lean in a practical hands-on environment. The course also provides a structure for how to manage a lean process for continuous improvement. Participants will learn how to structure their organizations to support and continuously improve a lean process. Participants will also fully understand how to implement 5S within their plants and how to begin reducing setup time using the SMED process.
Course Topics
5S and muda
Point of use
Pull
SMED
Value-added
Value stream mapping
SMED
7 Wastes
Visual Workplace
Benefits
Upon completion of this course, you will be able to:
Create and improve a lean process
Implement 5S to develop a safe, clean working environment
Map the process flow and identify activities that add value
Reduce setup time using the SMED process
Who Should Attend
Engineers new to a managerial position
Engineers preparing to make the transition to managerial roles
Current managers wanting to hone leadership skills
Program Fees
On-Campus Participant: $1,545
Includes continental breakfasts, lunch and all course materials. The fee does not include hotel accommodations or transportation.
Online Participant with Live Session Interactivity: $1,200
Includes attendee access codes for live call-in or chat capabilities during class sessions. Also includes all course and lecture materials available for live stream or download.
Reduced Pricing:
Institute of Industrial Engineers (IIE): Reduced pricing is available for members of IIE. Please contact professional@gapp.usc.edu for further information.
Trojan Family: USC alumni, faculty, and staff receive a 10% discount on registration.
Location [back to top]
Two course delivery options are available for participants: on campus and online with interactivity:
On-Campus: Course is held in state-of-the-art facilities on the University of Southern California campus, located in downtown Los Angeles. Participants attending on campus will have the option to commute to the course or stay at one of the many hotels located in the area.
Overview of on-campus option:
The ability to interact with faculty and peers in person.
Access to hard copy course materials.
Ability to logon and view archived course information - up to 7 days after the course has been offered. This includes course documents and streaming video of the lectures.
If there is a conflict during any on-campus course dates, on-campus participants can elect to be an online/interactive student.
Parking, refreshments and lunch are provided for on-campus participants â⬓ unless otherwise specified.
Online with Interactivity: Course delivery is completely online and real-time, enabling interaction with the instructor and fellow participants. Participants have the flexibility of completing the course from a distance utilizing USC's Distance Education Network technology. Students are required to be online for the entirety of each day's session.
Overview of online (interactive):
Virtually participate in the course live â⬓ with the ability to either ask questions by phone or type questions via the ââ¬Åchatââ¬Â function to the entire class.
WebEx technologies provide the option to call into the class and view the entire lecture/materials on a personal computer, or to participate on a computer without having to utilize a phone line.
Ability to logon and view archived course information up to 7 days after the course has been offered. This includes course documents and streaming video of the lectures.
Continuing Education Units
CEUs: 2.1 (CEUs provided by request only)
The USC Viterbi School of Engineering Certificate of Participation is awarded to all participants upon successful completion of the course.
The USC Viterbi School of Engineering Certificate of Completion and the Institute of Industrial Engineering certification in Lean Green Belt will be awarded to those participants that pass the assessment on the final day of the course.
Host: Corporate and Professional Programs
More Info: http://gapp.usc.edu/professional-programs/short-courses/industrial%26systems/lean-green-belt
Location: Olin Hall of Engineering (OHE) -
Audiences: Registered Attendees
Contact: Viterbi Professional Programs
Event Link: http://gapp.usc.edu/professional-programs/short-courses/industrial%26systems/lean-green-belt
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Viterbi-School of Social Work Retreat
Tue, Apr 23, 2013 @ 11:30 AM - 04:00 PM
USC Viterbi School of Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: ,
Talk Title:
Abstract: Interested faculty should contact Vice Dean Mataric as soon as possible.
Host: Maja Mataric
Location: Ronald Tutor Hall of Engineering (RTH) - 526
Audiences: See details
Contact: Maja Mataric
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CEE Oral Dissertation Defense
Tue, Apr 23, 2013 @ 01:29 PM - 03:30 PM
Sonny Astani Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Chanin Chuen-Im, Ph.D. Candidate, USC-Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering
Talk Title: A Coastal Development Idea for Gulf of Thailand to Improve Global Trades
Abstract: For a long time since ancient history international trade was used to exchange capital, goods, and service. There are several modes of transportation but people have been using marine transport as a main transportation mode for certain types of good and commodities in global trades. The pioneers of marine transports in Greek, Roman, and China used sea routes to sell and buy goods for their respective kingdoms. Until now more than 80 percent of transporting goods around the world is still by sea even though the speed of sea transportation is much slower compared to air or ground transportation. Since the most disadvantage of marine transport is its slow speed, what can be done to decrease the time of transportation by sea.
Suez Canal connecting the Mediterranean Sea and the Red Sea, and the Panama Canal connecting Caribbean Ocean and the Pacific Ocean are the best examples of the man-made canals that show the necessity and the importance of what the alternative sea routes could do. This dissertation study presents a new route of Man-made canals that could make the shipping faster and more effective for Asian Region (between Pacific Ocean and Indian Ocean).
At the present time, transportation between Pacific Ocean and Indian Ocean are mainly from the existing three routes : Malacca Route, Sundra Route, and Lombok Route. By introducing a man-made canal herein called ââ¬ÅSiam Canalââ¬Â which will be located in Thailand. Siam Canal which connects the Andaman Sea and Gulf of Thailand can shorten the travel distance between Pacific Ocean and Indian Ocean up to 3,500 kilometers or 7 days of travel time.
This dissertation research presents preliminary study of Siam Canal which will include the proposal of Siam Canal, the potential benefits using Siam Canal, the initial design of the proposed Siam Canal, environmental problems, and the economic and engineering feasibility study of the proposed Siam Canal. Environmental impacts due to the construction of the ââ¬ÅSiam Canalââ¬Â are addressed. The wave and tide condition, before and after the construction of the ââ¬ÅSiam Canalââ¬Â are simulated by a finite element numerical model for the Gulf of Thailand region.
Adviser: Prof. Jiin Jin Lee
Location: Kaprielian Hall (KAP) - 209
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Evangeline Reyes
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Epstein Institute / ISE 651 Seminar Series
Tue, Apr 23, 2013 @ 03:45 PM - 05:00 PM
Daniel J. Epstein Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Brian Denton, Associate Professor, Department of Industrial and Operations Engineering, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI
Talk Title: "Optimization of On-line Appointment Scheduling"
Series: Epstein Institute Seminar Series
Abstract: Many service systems provide appointments to customers in advance of their arrival. However, because service times are uncertain, the amount of time to allot to customers, and the amount of daily capacity to allocate for services are challenging decisions. In many service systems, appointment scheduling is further complicated by the fact that the exact number of customers to be scheduled is not known in advance. Instead, customers request appointments sequentially over time, and appointments are quoted on-line. Therefore it is necessary to make these on-line scheduling decisions in such a way that schedules are adaptable to variation in customer demand over time. In health care delivery systems, achieving this balance is particularly important because of the high cost of resources, including human and physical resources. In this context, uncertainty in demand arises due to the inherently uncertain nature of urgent care and the potential for patient no-shows. In this presentation we describe how stochastic programming models can be used for dynamic sequencing and scheduling of appointments. We describe several types of appointment scheduling problems and relevant models. In each case we discuss properties of the optimal solutions and ways to exploit model structure to improve the computational efficiency of decomposition-based solution methods. Numerical experiments based on empirical data from outpatient procedure centers are used to draw insights into optimal sequencing and scheduling decisions, as well as the performance of the solution methods. Finally, this talk will conclude with a discussion of future research directions related to planning and scheduling of health service systems.
Biography: Dr. Brian Denton is an Associate Professor in the Department of Industrial and Operations Engineering at University of Michigan. Previously he has been a Professor at North Carolina State University in the Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering, a Senior Associate Consultant at the Mayo Clinic in the College of Medicine, and a Senior Engineer at IBM. He is currently a Fellow at the Cecil Sheps Center for Health Services Research at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. His primary research interests are in optimization under uncertainty as it relates to applications in health care delivery and medical decision making. He has won the Institute for Operations Research and Management Science (INFORMS) Service Section Best Paper Award (2010), the National Science Foundation (NSF) Career Award (2008), the INFORMS Daniel H. Wagner Prize (2005), the Institute of Industrial Engineers (IIE) Outstanding Publication Award (2005), and the Canadian Operations Research Society (CORS) Best Paper Award (2000). He is a Past President of the INFORMS Health Applications Section (2009) and he is currently serving as Secretary of INFORMS (2012-2013). He has co-authored more than thirty scientific articles and holds over twenty patents with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. He completed his doctorate in Management Science at McMaster University, his M.Sc. in Physics at York University, and his B.Sc. in Chemistry and Physics at McMaster University in, Ontario, Canada.
More Information: Seminar-Denton.doc
Location: Von Kleinsmid Center For International & Public Affairs (VKC) - Room 100
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Georgia Lum
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Lean Green Belt
Wed, Apr 24, 2013 @ 09:00 AM - 05:00 PM
Executive Education
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: TBA,
Talk Title: Lean Green Belt
Abstract: Course Overview
This three-day course provides an in-depth understanding of lean enterprise principles and how to apply them within your organization. Your lean journey begins with a series of interactive simulations that demonstrate how each lean concept is applied and its impact on the process. Mapping the process flow and identifying the activities that add value from the customer's perspective is the cornerstone of this class. The class is then given a scenario and the students simulate the conversion from traditional to lean in a practical hands-on environment. The course also provides a structure for how to manage a lean process for continuous improvement. Participants will learn how to structure their organizations to support and continuously improve a lean process. Participants will also fully understand how to implement 5S within their plants and how to begin reducing setup time using the SMED process.
Course Topics
5S and muda
Point of use
Pull
SMED
Value-added
Value stream mapping
SMED
7 Wastes
Visual Workplace
Benefits
Upon completion of this course, you will be able to:
Create and improve a lean process
Implement 5S to develop a safe, clean working environment
Map the process flow and identify activities that add value
Reduce setup time using the SMED process
Who Should Attend
Engineers new to a managerial position
Engineers preparing to make the transition to managerial roles
Current managers wanting to hone leadership skills
Program Fees
On-Campus Participant: $1,545
Includes continental breakfasts, lunch and all course materials. The fee does not include hotel accommodations or transportation.
Online Participant with Live Session Interactivity: $1,200
Includes attendee access codes for live call-in or chat capabilities during class sessions. Also includes all course and lecture materials available for live stream or download.
Reduced Pricing:
Institute of Industrial Engineers (IIE): Reduced pricing is available for members of IIE. Please contact professional@gapp.usc.edu for further information.
Trojan Family: USC alumni, faculty, and staff receive a 10% discount on registration.
Location [back to top]
Two course delivery options are available for participants: on campus and online with interactivity:
On-Campus: Course is held in state-of-the-art facilities on the University of Southern California campus, located in downtown Los Angeles. Participants attending on campus will have the option to commute to the course or stay at one of the many hotels located in the area.
Overview of on-campus option:
The ability to interact with faculty and peers in person.
Access to hard copy course materials.
Ability to logon and view archived course information - up to 7 days after the course has been offered. This includes course documents and streaming video of the lectures.
If there is a conflict during any on-campus course dates, on-campus participants can elect to be an online/interactive student.
Parking, refreshments and lunch are provided for on-campus participants â⬓ unless otherwise specified.
Online with Interactivity: Course delivery is completely online and real-time, enabling interaction with the instructor and fellow participants. Participants have the flexibility of completing the course from a distance utilizing USC's Distance Education Network technology. Students are required to be online for the entirety of each day's session.
Overview of online (interactive):
Virtually participate in the course live â⬓ with the ability to either ask questions by phone or type questions via the ââ¬Åchatââ¬Â function to the entire class.
WebEx technologies provide the option to call into the class and view the entire lecture/materials on a personal computer, or to participate on a computer without having to utilize a phone line.
Ability to logon and view archived course information up to 7 days after the course has been offered. This includes course documents and streaming video of the lectures.
Continuing Education Units
CEUs: 2.1 (CEUs provided by request only)
The USC Viterbi School of Engineering Certificate of Participation is awarded to all participants upon successful completion of the course.
The USC Viterbi School of Engineering Certificate of Completion and the Institute of Industrial Engineering certification in Lean Green Belt will be awarded to those participants that pass the assessment on the final day of the course.
Host: Corporate and Professional Programs
More Info: http://gapp.usc.edu/professional-programs/short-courses/industrial%26systems/lean-green-belt
Location: Olin Hall of Engineering (OHE) -
Audiences: Registered Attendees
Contact: Viterbi Professional Programs
Event Link: http://gapp.usc.edu/professional-programs/short-courses/industrial%26systems/lean-green-belt
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Multi-Core and Heterogeneous High Performance Cloud Computing
Wed, Apr 24, 2013 @ 10:30 AM - 11:30 AM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Dr. Stephen P. Crago, Director, Adaptive Parallel Execution Division, ISI
Talk Title: Multi-Core and Heterogeneous High Performance Cloud Computing
Abstract: Cloud computing has become the dominant paradigm for making computing available at scale while reducing the cost of providing that computing and allowing for dynamic provisioning. Software as a Service (SaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) all provide compute and storage capabilities to users at different levels of the software stack. IaaS provides infrastructure to users at the level of a virtual machine and boot image that can include an operating system and a base software stack, which can be specified by the user. Compute services are typically provided on commodity servers based on the x86 processor architecture that hide hardware architecture details by design. At the same time, data centers (including computing providers) are becoming limited by power and general-purpose single-core processor performance has leveled off and is even decreasing. Applications that require additional computational performance will increasingly rely on exploiting parallelism, compute accelerators (e.g. GPUs), and heterogeneous architectures.
In this talk, I will discuss research that we are performing to make heterogeneous, high-performance computing available in the cloud, and a research agenda based on introspective systems that will enable users and applications to manage parallelism and heterogeneity in increasingly complex and dynamic environments.
Biography: Stephen Crago leads the Adaptive Parallel Execution (APEX) group, which seeks novel ways to automate parallel computing. Such automation is becoming crucial as parallelism gains rapidly outpace manual programming abilities. The team includes experts in computer architecture, parallel programming, cloud computing, reconfigurable computing, wireless communication, and tool development.
Crago’s interests include computer architecture, multiprocessors, high-performance, heterogeneous cloud computing, embedded processing, performance analysis and optimization. He also works in intelligent control of computing resources, and optimizations for processing time, throughput, efficiency and scalability and in algorithm implementation and hardware prototyping for novel computing architectures.
Crago joined ISI in 1997 and has led many projects, large and small, across the range of his research interests. He received his Ph.D. in computer engineering from the University of Southern California.
Host: Dr. Sandeep Gupta
More Information: Crago Seminar Announcement.pdf
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 248
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Mayumi Thrasher
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Lean Green Belt
Thu, Apr 25, 2013 @ 09:00 AM - 05:00 PM
Executive Education
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: TBA,
Talk Title: Lean Green Belt
Abstract: Course Overview
This three-day course provides an in-depth understanding of lean enterprise principles and how to apply them within your organization. Your lean journey begins with a series of interactive simulations that demonstrate how each lean concept is applied and its impact on the process. Mapping the process flow and identifying the activities that add value from the customer's perspective is the cornerstone of this class. The class is then given a scenario and the students simulate the conversion from traditional to lean in a practical hands-on environment. The course also provides a structure for how to manage a lean process for continuous improvement. Participants will learn how to structure their organizations to support and continuously improve a lean process. Participants will also fully understand how to implement 5S within their plants and how to begin reducing setup time using the SMED process.
Course Topics
5S and muda
Point of use
Pull
SMED
Value-added
Value stream mapping
SMED
7 Wastes
Visual Workplace
Benefits
Upon completion of this course, you will be able to:
Create and improve a lean process
Implement 5S to develop a safe, clean working environment
Map the process flow and identify activities that add value
Reduce setup time using the SMED process
Who Should Attend
Engineers new to a managerial position
Engineers preparing to make the transition to managerial roles
Current managers wanting to hone leadership skills
Program Fees
On-Campus Participant: $1,545
Includes continental breakfasts, lunch and all course materials. The fee does not include hotel accommodations or transportation.
Online Participant with Live Session Interactivity: $1,200
Includes attendee access codes for live call-in or chat capabilities during class sessions. Also includes all course and lecture materials available for live stream or download.
Reduced Pricing:
Institute of Industrial Engineers (IIE): Reduced pricing is available for members of IIE. Please contact professional@gapp.usc.edu for further information.
Trojan Family: USC alumni, faculty, and staff receive a 10% discount on registration.
Location [back to top]
Two course delivery options are available for participants: on campus and online with interactivity:
On-Campus: Course is held in state-of-the-art facilities on the University of Southern California campus, located in downtown Los Angeles. Participants attending on campus will have the option to commute to the course or stay at one of the many hotels located in the area.
Overview of on-campus option:
The ability to interact with faculty and peers in person.
Access to hard copy course materials.
Ability to logon and view archived course information - up to 7 days after the course has been offered. This includes course documents and streaming video of the lectures.
If there is a conflict during any on-campus course dates, on-campus participants can elect to be an online/interactive student.
Parking, refreshments and lunch are provided for on-campus participants â⬓ unless otherwise specified.
Online with Interactivity: Course delivery is completely online and real-time, enabling interaction with the instructor and fellow participants. Participants have the flexibility of completing the course from a distance utilizing USC's Distance Education Network technology. Students are required to be online for the entirety of each day's session.
Overview of online (interactive):
Virtually participate in the course live â⬓ with the ability to either ask questions by phone or type questions via the ââ¬Åchatââ¬Â function to the entire class.
WebEx technologies provide the option to call into the class and view the entire lecture/materials on a personal computer, or to participate on a computer without having to utilize a phone line.
Ability to logon and view archived course information up to 7 days after the course has been offered. This includes course documents and streaming video of the lectures.
Continuing Education Units
CEUs: 2.1 (CEUs provided by request only)
The USC Viterbi School of Engineering Certificate of Participation is awarded to all participants upon successful completion of the course.
The USC Viterbi School of Engineering Certificate of Completion and the Institute of Industrial Engineering certification in Lean Green Belt will be awarded to those participants that pass the assessment on the final day of the course.
Host: Corporate and Professional Programs
More Info: http://gapp.usc.edu/professional-programs/short-courses/industrial%26systems/lean-green-belt
Location: Olin Hall of Engineering (OHE) -
Audiences: Registered Attendees
Contact: Viterbi Professional Programs
Event Link: http://gapp.usc.edu/professional-programs/short-courses/industrial%26systems/lean-green-belt
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Focused on parallel and distributed computing
Thu, Apr 25, 2013 @ 02:00 PM - 03:00 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: TBA, TBA
Talk Title: TBA
Series: EE598 Seminar Course
Abstract: Weekly seminars given by researchers in academia and industry including senior doctoral students in EE, CS and ISI covering current research related to parallel and distributed computation including parallel algorithms, high performance computing, scientific computation, application specific architectures, multi-core and many-core architectures and algorithms, application acceleration, reconfigurable computing systems, data intensive systems, Big Data and cloud computing.
Biography: Prerequisite: Students are expected to be familiar with basic concepts at the level of graduate level courses in Computer Engineering and Computer Science in some of these topic areas above. Ph.D. students in Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering and Computer Science can automatically enroll. M.S. students can enroll only with permission of the instructor. To request permission send a brief mail to the instructor in text format with the subject field ââ¬ÅEE 598ââ¬Â. The body of the mail (in text format) should include name, degree objective, courses taken at USC and grades obtained, prior educational background, and relevant research background, if any.
Requirements for CR:
1. Attending at least 10 seminars during the semester
There will be a sign-in sheet and a sign-out sheet at every seminar. All students must sign-in (before 2:00pm) and sign-out (after 3:00pm). The sign-in sheet will not be available after 2:00pm, and the sign-out sheet will not be available before 3:00pm.
2. Submitting a written report for at least 5 seminars
The written report for each seminar must be 1-page single line spaced format with font size of 12 (Times) or 11 (Arial) without any figures, tables, or graphs. The report must be submitted no later than 1 week after the corresponding seminar, and must be handed only to the instructor either on the seminar times or during office hours. Late reports will not be considered.
The report must summarize studentââ¬â¢s own understanding of the seminar, and should contain the following:
- Your name and submission date [1 line]
- Title of the seminar, name of the speaker, and seminar date [1 line]
- Background of the work (e.g., applications, prior research, etc.) [1 paragraph]
- Highlights of the approaches presented in the seminar [1-2 paragraphs]
- Main results presented in the seminar [1-2 paragraphs]
- Conclusion (your own conclusion and not what was given by the speaker) [1 paragraph]
Reviewing papers related to the topic of the seminar, and incorporating relevant findings in the
reports (e.g., in the conclusion section) is encouraged. In such cases, make sure to clearly indicate
the reference(s) used to derive these conclusions.
Host: Professor Viktor K. Prasanna
More Information: Course Announcement_EE598_Focused on parallel and distributed computing_(Spring 2013).pdf
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) -
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Janice Thompson
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USC Physical Sciences in Oncology Seminar
Fri, Apr 26, 2013 @ 11:45 AM - 01:00 PM
Alfred E. Mann Department of Biomedical Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: DEAN FELSHER M.D., PH.D. , Professor of Medicine-Oncology, Pathology and Molecular Imaging, Department of Medicine, Stanford University
Talk Title: Modeling and Predicting Oncogene Addiction
Abstract: Cancers are largely caused by the activation of oncogenes. We have developed an experimental system to model and predict the therapeutic efficacy of targeted therapy of oncogenes. Using the Tet system, we can conditionally regulate oncogene expression in vivo in a temporally controlled and tissue specific manner. We have shown that many oncogenes (MYC, RAS, BCR-ABL) induce tumorigenesis that is completely reversible upon their inactivation. We have described this phenomena as oncogene addiction. Oncogene addiction is associated with proliferative arrest, apoptosis, differentiation, cellular senescence and the shutdown of angiogenesis. The specific consequences of oncogene inactivation depend both on the genetic and cellular context. In some cases, even brief inactivation of an oncogene can result in sustained tumor regression. In other cases, oncogene inactivation is associated with tumor dormancy. Tumor cell intrinsic and host-dependent cell autonomous mechanisms are involved. Tumor cell intrinsic mechanisms appear to involve mechanisms that are dependent upon DNA repair processes, the regulation of protein synthesis and of cellular metabolism. Host-dependent mechanisms include the regulation of angiogenesis and immune cell elimination. In addition, tumor cells secrete autocrine factors critical to oncogene addiction. We have uncovered that oncogene addiction is not cell autonomous and requires an intact host immune system. Specifically, CD4+ T-cells are required for MYC or BCR-ABL inactivation to induce sustained tumor regression. We have found that in the absence of an immune system, oncogene inactivation failed to both induce cellular senescence in tumor cells as well as to shut down angiogenesis in the host. Finally, our experimental model system can be used to model Oncogene Addiction. We have shown that we can use simple mathematical model to predict the therapeutic consequences of oncogene inactivation.
Biography: USC was selected to establish a $16 million cancer research center as part of a new strategy against the disease by the U.S. National Institutes of Health and its National Cancer Institute. The new center is one of 12 in the nation to receive the designation. During the five-year initiative, the Physical Sciences-Oncology Centers will take new, nontraditional approaches to cancer research by studying the physical laws and principles of cancer; evolution and the evolutionary theory of cancer; information coding, decoding, transfer and translation in cancer; and ways to de-convolute cancer's complexity. As part of the outreach component of this grant, the Center for Applied Molecular Medicine is hosting a monthly seminar series.
Host: USC Physical Sciences in Oncology Center
Location: Clinical Science Center (CSC) - #250
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Kristina Gerber
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W.V.T. Rusch Honors Program; Hunting for the Dark Matter of the Universe
Fri, Apr 26, 2013 @ 01:00 PM - 01:50 PM
USC Viterbi School of Engineering, Viterbi School of Engineering Student Affairs
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Dr. Rene A. Ong, Department of Physics and Astronomy, UCLA
Talk Title: Hunting for the Dark Matter of the Universe
Host: W.V.T. Rusch Honors Program
Location: Seeley G. Mudd Building (SGM) - 101
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Christine Viterbi Admission & Student Affairs
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Integrated Systems Seminar Series
Fri, Apr 26, 2013 @ 02:30 PM - 03:30 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Dr. Timothy M. Hancock, MIT Lincoln Laboratory
Talk Title: Hardware Phenomenological Effects on Co-channel Full-Duplex MIMO Relay Performance
Abstract: This presentation will discuss the performance of co-channel full-duplex multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) nodes is considered in the context of models for realistic hardware characteristics. Here, co-channel full-duplex relay indicates a node that transmits and receives simultaneously in the same frequency band. It is assumed that transmit and receive phase centers are physically distinct, enabling adaptive spatial transmit and receive processing to mitigate self-interference. The use of MIMO indicates a self-interference channel with spatially diverse inputs and outputs, although multiple modes are not explored in this analysis. Rather, the focus will be on rank-1 transmit covariance matrices. In practice, the limiting issue for co-channel full-duplex nodes is the ability to mitigate self-interference. While theoretically a system with infinite dynamic range and exact channel estimation can mitigate the self-interference perfectly, in practice, transmitter and receiver dynamic range, nonlinearities, and noise, as well as channel dynamics, limit the practical performance. This presentation will investigate the self-interference mitigation limitations in the context of eigenvalue spread of spatial transmit and receive covariance matrices caused by realistic hardware models.
Biography: Timothy M. Hancock received the B.S. degree in electrical engineering from the Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering from the University of Michigan where he was involved with the development of SiGe integrated microwave circuits from 6 to 77 GHz. In the past he has worked for Conexant Systems on a single chip GPS receiver and at M/A-COM on a Silicon Germanium 24 GHz automotive radar solution. For 6 years he was a staff member in the RF & Quantum Systems Technology Group at MIT Lincoln Laboratory, where he was involved with the development of low-power, small form-factor wireless devices, reconfigurable and multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) communication systems where his work focused on integrated circuit design and wireless system design. Since 2011 he has been the Assistant Leader of the same group where he continues to develop programs in the area of MIMO communications and small form-factor wireless devices as well as technology development for RADAR and ELINT systems. He is a senior member of the IEEE and the 2010 inaugural recipient of the MIT Lincoln Laboratory Early Career Technical Achievement Award.
Host: Prof. Hossein Hashemi and Prof. Mike Chen
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 248
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Hossein Hashemi
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CEE Ph.D. Seminar
Fri, Apr 26, 2013 @ 04:00 PM - 05:00 PM
Sonny Astani Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Daniel Amiri and Iman Yadegaran, USC Astani Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering Graduate Students
Talk Title: Low-Cycle Fatigue Effects in RBS Moment Connections
Abstract: TBA
Second Presentor:
Iman Iman Yadegaran - "Data-based modeling and enriched-finite-elements"
Location: John Stauffer Science Lecture Hall (SLH) - 102
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Evangeline Reyes
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CiSoft Seminar
Mon, Apr 29, 2013 @ 12:00 PM - 01:30 PM
Mork Family Department of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Robello Samuel, Halliburton fellow
Talk Title: Stretching the Space: Accelerating Drilling Innovation
Abstract: The recent years have witnessed the explosion of the number of horizontal wells that are being drilled around the world. The drilling of horizontal wells presents challenges for the operators, as well as for the well planners and petroleum engineers. The framework of questions to be addressed include ââ¬ÅWhat are the present challenges associated with drilling horizontal wells?ââ¬Â and ââ¬ÅWhat are the advancements in technologies needed to meet the challenges?ââ¬Â Although several challenges are inherently present, the presentation will particularly ponder the following primary drilling challenges: Drillstring integrity, Hydraulics management, Zonal isolation, Wellbore integrity, Well placement and Data Analytics.
Although the technology development has positively responded to the needs of horizontal drilling, its future advancement will include areas such as telemetry, sensors and data handling, and analytics.
Biography: Dr.Robello Samuel is a Halliburton Technology Fellow at Halliburton with over 25 years of industry experience. He started his career working on rigs as a field drilling engineer. An acknowledged lecturer in drilling engineering worldwide, he has served as an adjunct professor at the University of Houston and Texas Tech University for the past nine years. He has published more than 90 technical papers and four books. He is currently serving in several committees including education acredtion committee. Among his recent honor, Samuel has been named SPE Distinguished Lecturer for 2013-2014. His unique blend of skills as a field engineer, researcher, and professor helped him to author five drilling books including the forthcoming book ââ¬ËDrilling Engineering Optimizationââ¬â¢.
Robello earned his bachelorââ¬â¢s degree in mechanical engineering from the University of Madurai and his masterââ¬â¢s degree in mechanical engineering from the College of Engineering, Guindy. He also earned his masterââ¬â¢s degree and doctorate in petroleum engineering from the University of Tulsa.
Host: CiSoft
Location: Von Kleinsmid Center For International & Public Affairs (VKC) - 156
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Juli Legat
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Biomedical Engineering Seminars (BME 533)
Mon, Apr 29, 2013 @ 12:30 PM - 01:30 PM
Alfred E. Mann Department of Biomedical Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Samantha Holdsworth, Bammer Group Manager, Center for Quantitative Neuroimaging Research Associate, Lucas MRS/I Center Department of Radiology, School of Medicine, Stanford University
Talk Title: High Resolution Neuroimaging
Host: Biomedical Engineering
Location: Olin Hall of Engineering (OHE) - 122
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Mischalgrace Diasanta
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Epstein Institute / ISE 651 Seminar Series
Tue, Apr 30, 2013 @ 03:45 PM - 05:00 PM
Daniel J. Epstein Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Dan A. Iancu, Assistant Professor, Graduate School of Business, Stanford University
Talk Title: "Pareto Efficiency in Robust Optimization"
Series: Epstein Institute Seminar Series
Abstract: In this talk, we formalize and adapt the well-known concept of Pareto efficiency in the context of the popular robust optimization (RO) methodology. We argue that the classical RO paradigm need not produce solutions that possess the associated property of Pareto optimality, and illustrate via examples how this could lead to inefficiencies and sub-optimal performance in practice. We provide a basic theoretical characterization of Pareto robustly optimal (PRO) solutions, and extend the RO framework by proposing practical methods that verify Pareto optimality, and generate solutions that are PRO. Critically important, our methodology involves solving optimization problems that are of the same complexity as the underlying robust problems, hence the potential improvements from our framework come at essentially no computational cost. We perform numerical experiments drawn from three different application areas (portfolio optimization, inventory management, and project management), which demonstrate that PRO solutions have a significant upside compared with solutions obtained via classical RO methods, at no extra cost or downside. (Joint work with Nikolaos Trichakis from HBS)
Biography: Dan Iancu is an Assistant Professor of Operations, Information and Technology at Stanford Universityââ¬â¢s Graduate School of Business. Prior to joining the faculty at the Graduate School of Business, he spent one year as a Goldstine Fellow in the Risk Analytics Group at the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center. A native of Romania, Professor Iancu holds a BS degree in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from Yale University (2004), an SM in Engineering Sciences from Harvard University (2006), and a PhD in Operations Research from the Sloan School of Management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (2010). He was the recipient of the Best Student Paper Prize of the INFORMS Optimization Society (2009), and of two teaching prizes, at Harvard and at MIT Sloan.
Professor Iancu's research is focused on problems at the interface of finance and operations that typically involve taking actions in rapidly changing environments, under high degrees of risk and uncertainty. His work deals with both the development of innovative algorithms and analytical support tools, as well as with understanding how these interact with business decision making. Specific applications include multiaccount portfolio optimization, strategic and tactical supply chain management, and dynamic pricing.
Host: Daniel J. Epstein Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering
More Information: Seminar-Iancu.doc
Location: Von Kleinsmid Center For International & Public Affairs (VKC) - Room 100
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Georgia Lum
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