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Events for April 11, 2014
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AI SEMINAR
Fri, Apr 11, 2014 @ 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Information Sciences Institute
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Shaddin Dughmi, USC Computer Science
Talk Title: On the hardness of signaling
Series: AISeminar
Abstract: There has been a recent surge of interest in algorithmic questions relating to information revelation in games and auctions. Given that equilibrium outcomes of a game are intimately related to the beliefs of its participants, how should a "market maker" with access to additional information, and equipped with a specified objective, inform players in the game? We consider the computational complexity of two of the simplest instantiations of this question: (1) A Bayesian zero-sum game in which the principal must choose an information structure maximizing the equilibrium payoff of one ofthe players; (2) A single-item auction in which the seller possesses additional information regarding the item for sale, and must release, subject to a communication constraint, information regarding the item so as to maximize the resulting welfare at equilibrium. In both cases, we show that optimal signaling is computationally intractable, and in fact hard to approximate, assuming that it is hard to recover a planted dense subgraph in a random undirected graph.
Biography: Shaddin Dughmi is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at USC, where he is a member of the Theory Group. He received a B.S. in computer science, summa cum laude, from Cornell University in 2004, and a PhD in computer science from Stanford University in 2011. He is a recipient of the NSF CAREER award, the Arthur L. Samuel best doctoral thesis award, and the ACM EC best student paper award.
Host: Greg Ver Steeg
More Info: PER SPEAKER'S REQUEST, THIS WILL NOT BE WEBCASTED
Webcast: PER SPEAKER'S REQUEST, THIS WILL NOT BE WEBCASTEDLocation: Information Science Institute (ISI) - 1135
WebCast Link: PER SPEAKER'S REQUEST, THIS WILL NOT BE WEBCASTED
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Alma Nava / Information Sciences Institute
Event Link: PER SPEAKER'S REQUEST, THIS WILL NOT BE WEBCASTED
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The W.V.T. Rusch Engineering Honors Colloquim
Fri, Apr 11, 2014 @ 01:00 PM - 01:50 PM
USC Viterbi School of Engineering, Viterbi School of Engineering Student Affairs
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Eyal Aronoff, Co-founder, Quest Software; Co-founder, Fuel Freedom Foundation
Talk Title: A Road-Map to Start-Up Success
Host: W.V.T. Rusch Engineering Honors Program
Location: Seeley G. Mudd Building (SGM) - 101
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Christine Viterbi Admission & Student Affairs
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NL Seminar- Farshad Kooti:Network Weirdness: Exploring the Origins of Network Paradoxes
Fri, Apr 11, 2014 @ 03:00 PM - 04:00 PM
Information Sciences Institute
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Farshad Kooti, USC/ ISI
Talk Title: Network Weirdness: Exploring the Origins of Network Paradoxes
Series: Natural Language Seminar
Abstract: Social networks have many counter-intuitive properties, including the ââ¬Åfriendship paradoxââ¬Â that states, on average, your friends have more friends than you do. Recently, a variety of other paradoxes were demonstrated in online social networks. This paper explores the origins of these network paradoxes. Specifically, we ask whether they arise from mathematical properties of the networks or whether they have a behavioral origin. We show that sampling from fat-tailed distributions always gives rise to a paradox in the mean, but not the median. We propose a strong form of network paradoxes, based on utilizing the median, and validate it empirically using data from two online social networks. Specifically, we show that for any user the majority of userââ¬â¢s friends and followers have more friends, followers, etc. than the user, and that this cannot be explained by statistical properties of sampling. Next, we explore the behavioral origins of the paradoxes by using the shuffle test to remove correlations between node degrees and attributes. We find that paradoxes for the mean persist in the shuffled network, but not for the median. We demonstrate that strong paradoxes arise due to the assortativity of user attributes, including degree, and correlation between degree and attribute.
Biography: Home Page:
http://www-scf.usc.edu/~kooti/
Host: Kevin Knight & Yang Gao
More Info: http://nlg.isi.edu/nl-seminar/
Location: 11th Flr Conf Rm # 1135, Marina Del Rey @ ISI-Info Sciences Inst.
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Peter Zamar
Event Link: http://nlg.isi.edu/nl-seminar/
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Integrated Systems Seminar Series - Spring 2014
Fri, Apr 11, 2014 @ 03:03 PM - 05:00 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Jose Silva-Martinez, Texas A&M University
Talk Title: Recent Advances and Challenges on High Performance Analog-to-Digital Converters
Series: Integrated Systems Seminar Series
Abstract: Recent developments in mobile computing and wireless internet have led to exponential growth in demand for portable computers and smart phones equipped with WLAN operating at different standards. The digital computing required by these gadgets is facilitated by process scaling that follows Moore’s law and is expected to continue down to 10nm physical gate lengths. Applications such as TV receivers require broadband operation (>800MHz) with over 12 bits resolution; the pipeline architecture is the most popular one, but recently SAR topology is emerging as more power efficient solution. On the other hand, various wireless standards have been developed over the last years due to the high demand for faster data rate in portable wireless communications, which has pushed baseband bandwidths up to a few tens of MHz while requiring minimum power consumption. When high-resolution continuous-time lowpass Σ∆ ADC architectures are selected for emerging products because of their efficiency, a wide bandwidth is essential in multi-standard applications to accommodate receiver bandwidth requirements.
In this lecture, the fundamentals of pipeline will be revised and limitations due to unavoidable mismatches and clock jitter are analyzed. Recent advances in achieving high-resolution, >800 MHz bandwidth and low power will be discussed. It will be shown that one of the remaining bottle necks is the lack of an efficient calibration for applications that require ENOB>10bits. An efficient full digital background calibration scheme that requires minimal digital resources will be discussed in this seminar. Limitations in ΔΣ modulators due to clock jitter and the presence of strong blockers will be quantified; technology trends will be highlighted. Significant research efforts have been devoted to find efficient solutions for the remaining issues: better linearity, wider bandwidth, robustness to clock jitter and co-existence with other standards. In particular, the feedback DAC nonlinearity significantly affects the ADC performance because it directly adds error to the filter input signal and it is not noise-shaped. The foundations on ΔΣ modulators will be covered first and then we will elaborate on linearity limitations as well as jitter and blocker tolerance issues. Two case studies experimentally verified are presented to illustrate design issues and to give insights into the possibilities that exist for solving these contemporary challenges with analog hardware and software-based processing techniques.
Biography: Jose Silva-Martinez got his PhD degree from the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium in 1992. He currently holds the rank of Texas Instruments Professor in Analog Engineering at the Department of ECE, Texas A&M University. Dr. Silva-Martinez is an IEEE-Fellow, member of the 2013-2014 CASS Distinguish Lecture Program and 2014-2015 Editor-in-Chief of IEEE TCAS-II. His record of publications show over 105 journals and 160 conferences, 2 books and 12 book chapters and 1 patent. He is co-author of the papers that received the 2011 Best Student Paper Award, IEEE MWCAS, the 2003 Best Student Paper Award, IEEE RF-IC, and recipient of the 1990 Best Paper Award, European Solid-State Circuits Conference (ESSCIRC). He got the 2005 Outstanding Professor Award by the ECE Department, Texas A&M University, 2005; co-advised in Testing techniques the student who was Winner of the 2005 Best Doctoral Thesis Award, presented by the IEEE Test Technology Technical Council (TTTC), IEEE Computer Society.
Host: Hossien Hashemi, Mike Chen, Mahta Moghaddam, Sushil Subramanian
More Info: http://mhi.usc.edu/activities/integrated-systems/
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 248
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Sushil Subramanian
Event Link: http://mhi.usc.edu/activities/integrated-systems/
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Astani CEE Ph.D. Seminar
Fri, Apr 11, 2014 @ 04:00 PM - 05:00 PM
Sonny Astani Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Prasanth Babu Koganti & Mehran Rahmani, Astani CEE Ph.D. Students
Talk Title: A methodology for stable control of nonlinear mechanical systems
Abstract:
In this talk, a general methodology to stably control nonlinear mechanical systems using the fundamental equation of motion and Lyapunov’s theorem will be presented. Lyapunov’s stability theorem is used to generate appropriate constraints on the system. The fundamental equation of motion then provides the exact closed-form control force required to enforce these constraints. A few numerical examples illustrating the methodology are considered. The examples demonstrate the simplicity of the proposed control methodology and its ease of implementation.
Second Presenter: Mehran Rahmani
Location: John Stauffer Science Lecture Hall (SLH) - 102
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Evangeline Reyes
