Select a calendar:
Filter April Events by Event Type:
SUNMONTUEWEDTHUFRISAT
Events for April 08, 2019
-
Spring Explore USCMon, Apr 08, 2019
Viterbi School of Engineering Undergraduate Admission
University Calendar
Spring Explore is a full-day program running from 8:30am-5pm. The day includes a presentation from the Office of Admission, a USC Campus Tour, and visit with us in the Viterbi School of Engineering. During your time with us you will learn what your life will be like as an engineering student at USC, meet some of our current engineering students, see facilities and labs, and get your questions answered about the enrollment process, housing, and your "next steps".
Once admitted, students can find the RSVP link in their USC Applicant Portal.Audiences: Spring Admits & Family Members
Contact: Viterbi Admission
-
CS Colloquium: Yuke Zhu (Stanford University) - Closing the Perception-Action Loop
Mon, Apr 08, 2019 @ 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Yuke Zhu, Stanford University
Talk Title: Closing the Perception-Action Loop
Series: CS Colloquium
Abstract: Robots and autonomous systems have been playing a significant role in the modern economy. Custom-built robots have remarkably improved productivity, operational safety, and product quality. However, these robots are usually programmed for specific tasks in well-controlled environments, unable to perform diverse tasks in the real world. In this talk, I will present my work on building more effective and generalizable robot intelligence by closing the perception-action loop. I will discuss my research that establishes a tighter coupling between perception and action at three levels of abstraction: 1) learning primitive motor skills from raw sensory data, 2) sharing knowledge between sequential tasks in visual environments, and 3) learning hierarchical task structures from video demonstrations.
This lecture satisfies requirements for CSCI 591: Research Colloquium
Biography: Yuke Zhu is a final year Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Computer Science at Stanford University, advised by Prof. Fei-Fei Li and Prof. Silvio Savarese. His research interests lie at the intersection of robotics, computer vision, and machine learning. His work builds machine learning and perception algorithms for general-purpose robots. He received a Master's degree from Stanford University and dual Bachelor's degrees from Zhejiang University and Simon Fraser University. He also collaborated with research labs including Snap Research, Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, and DeepMind.
Host: Joseph Lim
Location: Ronald Tutor Hall of Engineering (RTH) - 115
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Assistant to CS chair
-
ECE Seminar: A Real-Time Algorithmic Framework for Robust and Risk-Sensitive Planning and Decision-Making
Mon, Apr 08, 2019 @ 11:00 AM - 12:15 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Sumeet Singh, PhD Candidate, Dept of Aeronautics & Astronautics, Stanford University
Talk Title: A Real-Time Algorithmic Framework for Robust and Risk-Sensitive Planning and Decision-Making
Abstract: Integrating autonomous robots into safety-critical settings requires reasoning about uncertainty at all levels of the autonomy stack. In this talk, I will present novel algorithmic tools leveraging Lyapunov-based analysis, convex optimization, and risk measures to address robustness in robotic motion planning and decision-making under uncertainty. In the first part of the talk, by harnessing the theories of incremental stability and contraction, I will describe a unified framework for synthesizing robust trajectory tracking controllers for complex underactuated nonlinear systems with analytical bounded-input-bounded-output disturbance rejection guarantees. These results will be combined with computational tools drawn from semi-infinite convex programming to design real-time motion planning algorithms with certifiable safety guarantees. In addition, I will illustrate how to leverage these tools for sample-efficient model-based reinforcement learning with control-theoretic guarantees. In the second part of the talk, I will describe a framework for lifting notions of robustness from low-level motion planning to higher-level sequential decision-making using the theory of risk measures. Specifically, by leveraging a specific class of risk measures with favorable axiomatic foundations, I will demonstrate how to design decision-making algorithms with tuneable robustness properties. I will then discuss a novel application of this framework to inverse reinforcement learning for humans in safety-critical scenarios. The domains of aerial robotics and autonomous cars will be used throughout the talk as running examples.
Biography: Sumeet Singh is a Ph.D. candidate in the Autonomous Systems Lab in the Aeronautics and Astronautics Department at Stanford University. He received a B.Eng. in Mechanical Engineering and a Diploma of Music (Performance) from University of Melbourne in 2012, and a M.Sc. in Aeronautics and Astronautics from Stanford University in 2015. Prior to joining Stanford, Sumeet worked in the Berkeley Micromechanical Analysis and Design lab at the University of California, Berkeley in 2011 and the Aeromechanics Branch at NASA Ames in 2013. Sumeet's research interests include (1) Robust motion planning for constrained nonlinear systems, (2) Risk-sensitive inference and decision-making with humans in-the-loop, and (3) Design of verifiable learning architectures for safety-critical applications. Sumeet is the recipient of the Stanford Graduate Fellowship (2013-2016), the most prestigious Stanford fellowship awarded to incoming graduate students, and the Qualcomm Innovation Fellowship (2018).
Host: Professor Massoud Pedram, pedram@usc.edu
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 248
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Mayumi Thrasher
-
Fall 2018 Joint CSC@USC/CommNetS-MHI Seminar Series
Mon, Apr 08, 2019 @ 02:00 PM - 03:00 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Jason Marden, University of California, Santa Barbara
Talk Title: If agents could talk, what should they say?
Abstract: The goal in networked control of multiagent systems is to derive desirable collective behavior through the design of local control algorithms. The information available to the individual agents, either through sensing or communication, invariably defines the space of admissible control laws. Hence, informational restrictions impose constraints on the achievable performance guarantees. The first part of this talk will provide one such constraint with regards to the efficiency of the resulting stable solutions for a class of distributed submodular optimization problems. Further, we will also discuss how strategic information exchange can help mitigate these degradations. The second part of this talk will focus on how agents should utilize available information to optimize the efficiency of the emergent collective behavior. In particular, we will discuss a methodology for optimizing the efficiency guarantees (i.e., price of anarchy) in distributed resource allocation problems through the design of local agent objective functions. Lastly, we will highlight some unintended consequences associated with these optimal designed agent objective functions -“ optimizing the performance of the worst-case equilibria (i.e., price of anarchy) often comes at the expense of the best-case equilibria (i.e., price of stability).
Biography: Jason R. Marden is an Associate Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer, Engineering at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Jason received a BS in Mechanical Engineering in 2001 from UCLA, and a PhD in Mechanical Engineering in 2007, also from UCLA, under the supervision of Jeff S. Shamma, where he was awarded the Outstanding Graduating PhD Student in Mechanical Engineering. After graduating from UCLA, he served as a junior fellow in the Social and Information Sciences Laboratory at the California Institute of Technology until 2010 when he joined the University of Colorado. In 2015, Jason joined the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Jason is a recipient of the ONR Young Investigator Award (2015), NSF Career Award (2014), the AFOSR Young Investigator Award (2012), the American Automatic Control Council Donald P. Eckman Award (2012), and the SIAM/SGT Best Sicon Paper Award (2015). Furthermore, Jason is also an advisor for the students selected as finalists for the best student paper award at the IEEE Conference on Decision and Control (2011, 2016, 2017). Jason's research interests focus on game theoretic methods for the control of distributed multiagent systems.
Host: Ketan Savla, ksavla@usc.edu
More Info: http://csc.usc.edu/seminars/2019Spring/marden.html
More Information: 190408 Jason Marden CSCUSC Seminar.pdf
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 132
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Brienne Moore
Event Link: http://csc.usc.edu/seminars/2019Spring/marden.html
-
AME Seminar
Mon, Apr 08, 2019 @ 03:30 PM - 04:30 PM
Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Cunjiang Yu, University of Houston
Talk Title: Manufacturing and Device Innovations of Rubbery and Curvy Electronics: Toward a Seamless Integration with Humans
Abstract: While human tissues and organs are mostly soft and curvy; conventional electronics are hard and planar. Seamlessly merging electronics with human is of imminent importance in addressing grant societal challenges in health and joy of living. However, the main challenge lies in the huge mechanical mismatch between the current form of rigid electronics and the soft curvy nature of biology.
In this talk, I will first describe a new form of electronics, namely rubbery electronics, with skin-like softness and stretchability, which is constructed based upon elastic rubbery electronic materials. As the core basis of rubbery electronics, rubbery semiconductor has been developed through composite engineering based on commercial available materials and manufactured in a scalable and reliable manner. These manufacturing and device innovations set a foundation to realize fully rubbery electronics, circuits and sensors. In particular, rubbery transistors, logic gates, integrated electronics, sensors, smart skins, implants, neuro devices, and integrated function systems will be demonstrated. In the second part of the talk, I will introduce the invention and development of conformal additive stamp (CAS) printing, a novel, reliable and versatile manufacturing technology for developing 3D curvy electronics. Electronics with 3D curvilinear layouts, especially in the size range from millimeter to centimeter with accuracy of microns, are technically very challenge to build. The major hurdle lies in the lack of a proper manufacturing technology. CAS printing has therefore been developed to solve this long-standing manufacturing challenge. Systematic understanding and extensive employment of CAS printing for various curvy electronics will be presented to illustrate its manufacturing fidelity. Devices such as smart contact lens with integrated sensors and electronics for multiple diagnostic functions will be demonstrated. Soft and curvy electronics have open a new paradigm for personal healthcare, medical diagnosis, biological studies, human-machine interfaces, soft machines, etc.
Cunjiang Yu is currently the Bill D. Cook Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Houston, with joint appointments in Electrical and Computer Engineering, Materials Science and Engineering, and Biomedical Engineering. He completed his Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering within three years at Arizona State University in 2010 and was trained as a postdoc at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign before joining University of Houston in 2013. Dr. Yu was a recipient of NSF CAREER Award, ONR Young Investigator Award, MIT Technology Review 35 Top Innovators under the age of 35 -“ TR35 China, Society of Manufacturing Engineers Outstanding Young Manufacturing Engineer Award, Young Investigator Awards from American Vacuum Society and American Chemical Society, 3M Non-Tenured Faculty Award, and a few research and teaching awards at University of Houston. His recent research has been reported or highlighted by many media outlets, such as Time, Discovery, BBC News, NBC News, Science News, USA Today, etc.
Monday, April 8, 2019
3:30 PM
Laufer Library (RRB 208)
Refreshments will be served at 3:15 pm.
Host: AME Department
Location: Robert Glen Rapp Engineering Research Building (RRB) - 208 (Laufer Library)
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Tessa Yao
