Select a calendar:
Filter April Events by Event Type:
SUNMONTUEWEDTHUFRISAT
University Calendar
Events for April
-
ASBME Goes to Relay For Life
Sat, Apr 06, 2013 @ 12:00 PM - 12:00 AM
Viterbi School of Engineering Student Organizations
University Calendar
Help ASBME fight cancer! Join our Relay For Life team for 24 hours of celebrating, remembering, and fighting back! Sign Up at relayforlife.org/uscca! Our first team filled up, so please join our second team: "You Also Wish You Could B ME"
Location: Cromwell Field
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Associated Students of Biomedical Engineering
-
Nam Ma (USC), PhD Defense
Tue, Apr 09, 2013 @ 10:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science
University Calendar
Committee:
Aiichiro Nakano
Viktor K. Prasanna (Chairman)
Cauligi S. Raghavendra
Title: Scalable Exact Inference in Probabilistic Graphical Models on Multi-core Platforms
Abstract:
The recent switch to multi-core computing and the emergence of machine learning applications offer many opportunities for parallelization. A fundamental challenge is how to achieve scalability with the increasing number of cores. It is especially challenging for machine learning problems that have graph computational structure.
This thesis explores parallelism for exact inference in probabilistic graphical models to achieve scalable performance on multi-core platforms. Exact inference is widely used in probabilistic reasoning and machine learning. It also represents a large class of graph computations that have sophisticated computational patterns with large data sets. We propose parallel techniques to extract and exploit parallelism efficiently at multiple levels in the input graph.
• We first exploit parallelism available from the input graph using multithreading and task scheduling. At the node level, we explore data parallelism for the computational operations within a node. Data layout and data parallel algorithms are proposed for such node level computations. At the graph level, task parallelism is explored using directed acyclic graph (DAG) model. DAG scheduling is employed to efficiently map the tasks in the DAG to the hardware cores.
• In many cases, the input graph provides insufficient parallelism. To expose more parallelism, we study a relationship called 'weak dependency' between the tasks in a DAG. A novel DAG scheduling scheme is developed to exploit weak dependency for parallelism. In addition, pointer jumping technique is employed for exact inference when the input graph offers very limited parallelism due to its chain-like structure. With such explorations, a given fixed-size problem can still achieve high scalability with the increasing number of cores.
• In order to avoid the implementation complexity of many parallel techniques, we study the use of MapReduce as a high level programming model for exact inference. Our MapReduce-based algorithms for exact inference can also be applied for a class of graph computations with data dependency.
We implement and evaluate our techniques on state-of-the-art multi-core systems and demonstrate their scalability for a variety of input graphs.Location: Ronald Tutor Hall of Engineering (RTH) - 324
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Assistant to CS chair
-
ASBME's Pre-Health Event
Wed, Apr 10, 2013 @ 07:15 PM - 08:15 PM
Viterbi School of Engineering Student Organizations
University Calendar
Thinking of becoming a pre-health or pre-medical student? Come join ASBME for an information session specifically geared for BMEs heading towards professional schools. A USC representative will be going through the application process and revealing the key aspects to becoming a competitive applicant. Whether you've already declared your 'Pre-Med' status or are still considering that path, come out to learn more and meet other BMEs! See you there!
Location: Ronald Tutor Campus Center (TCC) - 227
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Associated Students of Biomedical Engineering
-
ASBME's Alumni Panel
Thu, Apr 18, 2013 @ 07:15 PM - 08:15 PM
Viterbi School of Engineering Student Organizations
University Calendar
Interested in what to do after undergrad? Not sure what options to explore? Not sure of what BME really is? Come to our panel where BME alumni who have gone on to a variety of different career fields will talk to you about how their undergraduate BME experience was like at USC. From finance to industry to grad school to medical school we will be opening up the floor for you to ask our panelists practically anything you would like to know about BME. This is a fantastic time to see successful BME alumni talk about their undergraduate experience and what exactly they got from it. Good and fulfilling food will be provided to members!
Location: TBD
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Associated Students of Biomedical Engineering
-
Student Seminar Series - Chuan Wang (UC, Berkeley)
Tue, Apr 23, 2013 @ 12:00 PM - 01:30 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
University Calendar
Speaker: Chuan Wang, Postdoctoral Scholar, University of California, Berkeley and 2010-11 MHI Ph.D. Scholar
Title: Carbon Nanotube Macroelectronics: Applications in User-Interactive Electronic Skin
Abstract:In this talk, I will discuss the recent advancements in solution-based processing of high-purity semiconducting carbon nanotube networks, which has led to macro-scale fabrication of thin-film transistors (TFTs) with excellent yield, high performance, small device-to-device variation, and extreme bendability on mechanically flexible substrates. The superior mobility, room-temperature processing, and long term air-stability show the immense promise of the solution-processed carbon nanotubes as a competitive TFT technology platform for low-cost high-performance flexible electronics. A wide range of electronic components including digital logic circuits, radio-frequency transistors, and active-matrix backplane have been demonstrated using the carbon nanotube TFTs. Going further, I will present the heterogeneous integration of three distinct electronic components (TFTs, large-area sensor networks, and organic light-emitting diodes) on a single piece of skin-like substrate for a fully functional electronic system. The system functions as a user-interactive electronic skin (e-skin) that is capable of spatial and temporal mapping of a wide range of stimuli and provides instantaneous response through a seamlessly integrated AMOLED display. The enabled interactive e-skin represents a new class of smart macro-scale electronics which can be laminated on virtually any object while providing sophisticated human-surface interfacing at an unprecedented level. The presented platform could find a wide range of applications in robotics, interactive input devices, automotive control panels, smart wallpapers, and medical and health monitoring devices.
Bio: Dr. Chuan Wang is currently a postdoctoral scholar in Prof. Ali Javey's research group at University of California, Berkeley. After receiving his B.S. in Microelectronics from Peking University in 2005, he joined University of Southern California in 2007 working as a research assistant in Prof. Chongwu Zhou’s research group and received his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering in 2011. During his graduate studies, he pioneered in the field of using purified semiconducting carbon nanotubes and CVD-grown horizontally aligned carbon nanotubes for high-performance thin-film transistors, integrated circuits, display electronics, and RF electronics. Dr. Wang's current focus areas of research include flexible electronics, stretchable electronics, roll-to-roll printed electronics, and RF electronics using various types of nanomaterials including carbon nanotubes, graphene, 2D III-V nanomembranes, and layered dichalcogenides. He has authored and co-authored 29 journal papers with 475 citations and a total impact factor of 291 as of 03/05/2013. Most of his papers are published in high impact journals including Nature Communications, Chemical Society Reviews, Nano Letters, and ACS Nano.
Ming Hsieh InstituteMore Information: 4.23 Chuan Wang.pdf
Location: 248
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Danielle Hamra
-
ASBME Presents Making the Most of LinkedIn!
Wed, Apr 24, 2013 @ 07:15 PM - 08:15 PM
Viterbi School of Engineering Student Organizations
University Calendar
Have a LinkedIn but aren't sure how to actually use it? Just want to get your LinkedIn started? David Ginchansky from the USC career center will be presenting on using LinkedIn to your advantage in the job hunt! Event co-hosted by SPD and AOE. Free Dominoââ¬â¢s Pizza will be provided!
Location: Ronald Tutor Campus Center (TCC) - 227
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Associated Students of Biomedical Engineering
-
PhD Defense - Jason Tsai
Tue, Apr 30, 2013 @ 12:00 AM - 02:00 PM
Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science
University Calendar
Date: April 30, 2013
Venue: RTH 526
Time: 12:00pm
PhD Candidate: Jason Tsai
Title: Protecting Networks Against Diffusive Attacks: Game-Theoretic Resource Allocation for Contagion Mitigation
Committee:
Milind Tambe (chair)
Stacy Marsella
Bhaskar Krishnamachari
Sha Yang
Matthew McCubbins (outside member)
Emma Bowring
Abstract:
Many real-world situations involve attempts to spread influence through a social network. For example, viral marketing is when a marketer selects a few people to receive some initial advertisement in the hopes that these `seeds' will spread the news. Even peacekeeping operations in one area have been shown to have a contagious effect on the neighboring vicinity. Each of these domains also features multiple parties seeking to maximize or mitigate a contagious effect by spreading its own influence among a select few seeds, naturally yielding an adversarial resource allocation problem. My work models the interconnected network of people as a graph and develops algorithms to optimize resource allocation in these networked competitive contagion scenarios.
Game-theoretic resource allocation in the past has not considered domains with both a networked structure and contagion effects, rendering them unusable in critical domains such as rumor control, counterinsurgency, and crowd management. Networked domains without contagion effects already present computational challenges due to the large scale of the action space. To address this issue, my first contribution proposed efficient game-theoretic allocation algorithms for the graph-based urban road network domain. This work still provides the only polynomial-time algorithm for allocating vehicle checkpoints through a city, giving law enforcement officers an efficient tool to combat terrorists making their way to potential points of attack. Second, I have provided the first game-theoretic treatment for contagion mitigation in social networks and given practitioners the first principled techniques for such vital concerns as rumor control and counterinsurgency. Finally, I extended my work on game-theoretic contagion mitigation to address uncertainty about the network structure to find that, contrary to what evidence and intuition suggest, heuristic sampling approaches provide near-optimal solutions across a wide range of generative graph models and uncertainty models. Thus, despite extreme practical challenges in attaining accurate social network information, my techniques remain near-optimal across numerous forms of uncertainty in multiple synthetic and real-world graph structures.
Beyond optimization of resource allocation, I have further studied contagion effects to understand the effectiveness of such resources. First, I created an evacuation simulation, ESCAPES, to explore the interaction of pedestrian fear contagion and authority fear mitigation during an evacuation. Second, using this simulator, I have advanced the frontier in contagion modeling by developing empirical evaluation methods for comparing and calibrating computational contagion models that are critical in crowd simulations and evacuation modeling. Finally, I have also conducted an examination of agent-human emotional contagion to inform the rising use of simulations for personnel training in emotionally-charged situations.
Location: Ronald Tutor Hall of Engineering (RTH) - 526
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Lizsl De Leon
