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Events for April 11, 2016
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Meaning and Memory Retrieval: Evidence from Semantic Priming and Sentence Memory
Mon, Apr 11, 2016 @ 10:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Peter Gordon, University of Northern Carolina, Chapel Hill
Talk Title: Meaning and Memory Retrieval: Evidence from Semantic Priming and Sentence Memory
Abstract: Semantic priming, where the processing of a word is facilitated when it is preceded by a related word, has generally been taken as evidence of spreading activation, the idea that accessing the meaning of the prime word facilitates recognition of the target word by pre-activating its meaning before it is presented. The idea that pre-activation of meaning by a prime word (or other stimulus) increases the accessibility of words (or other psychological constructs) has spread from cognitive psychology to many other areas including cognitive neuroscience, social influence, psychopathology and the effects of aging. This idea is challenged by a series of studies in my lab that analyzed response-time distributions from newly-developed ocular-response tasks that are performed more quickly than tasks with manual or vocal responses and for that reason give a more direct view of lexical processing; the results show that the semantic relation between the prime and target influences processing only after the target has been seen. The findings are inconsistent with spreading-activation models and instead support alternative models in which the process of retrieving lexical information from the target word is facilitated by the consistent contextual information provided by the prime word. Additional studies on how meaning influences sentence reading and recall demonstrate that explanations based on memory retrieval play a necessary role in explanations of human language processing and that they eliminate the need for expectation-based explanations.
Biography: Dr. Peter C. Gordon received his B.S. in Psychology from Georgetown University in 1975 and his Ph.D. in Experimental Psychology from the University of Michigan in 1984. He was Assistant and Associate Professor in the Psychology Department at Harvard University from 1984 through 1993, and subsequently joined the faculty at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill where he is Professor of Psychology and Faculty Fellow at the Frank Porter Graham Child Development Center. He is a Fellow of the Association for Psychological Science and a superannuated member of the Psychological Round Table. He has served as a reviewer for multiple NSF programs (Cognition & Perception, Information & Intelligent Systems and Linguistics) and as a member of the Language and Communication panel at NIH. He served a four-year term as Associate Editor at Psychological Science, has been on the editorial boards of major journals (Cognitive Psychology, JEP:LMC) and is a Consulting Editor at Psychological Review. His awards include appointment as John and Ruth Hazel Associate Professor at Harvard University, a W.N. Reynolds Leave from the University of North Carolina and a James McKeen Cattell Fund Sabbatical Award that is supporting his visit to USC this semester.
Dr. Gordon's program of research focuses on uncovering the psychological basis of language comprehension and production, with a particular focus on the nature of discourse coherence and on the interaction of discourse-level processing and lower-level processes such as word recognition. His research on the processing of written and spoken language has been highly interdisciplinary, including long-term collaborations with researchers trained in computer science, linguistics and neuroscience, as well as researchers with clinical specializations. His recent research has involved coordinated use of behavioral and neural methods for studying how language processing is coordinated with perception, attention, memory and motor control, and has additionally involved development of eye-tracking and computational-linguistic methods for studying cognitive and interpersonal processes in normal and impaired populations.
Host: Shrikanth Narayanan
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 132
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Tanya Acevedo-Lam/EE-Systems
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Security and Privacy of Non-Volatile Memories- Vunerabilities, Attack Models and Preventions
Mon, Apr 11, 2016 @ 10:30 AM - 11:30 AM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Swaroop Ghosh, Professor, University of South Florida
Talk Title: Security and Privacy of Non-Volatile Memories- Vulnerabilities, Attack Models and Preventions
Abstract: Non-volatile memories (NVM) such as Spin-Transfer Torque RAM (STTRAM), Resistive RAM and Domain Wall Memory have drawn significant attention due to complete elimination of bitcell leakage. In addition to plethora of benefits such as density, non-volatility, low-power and high-speed, majority of NVMs are also compatible with CMOS technology enabling easy integration. NVMs are particularly interesting for a class of Internet-of-Things (IoT) that are normally OFF but require instant ON experience. Although promising, I will show that NVMs bring new security and privacy challenges that were absent in their conventional volatile memory counterparts. Assuring data integrity and privacy against malicious attacks is particularly critical on deployed systems that are hard to maintain and enforce physical security. I will present two aspects to NVM security in Last Level Cache (LLC) using STTRAM as test case:
(i) Data integrity which pertains to data corruption by malicious attack with the intention to launch denial-of-service. Such attacks exploit the fact that NVMs are fundamentally susceptible to ambient parameters such as magnetic field and temperature. I will describe these vulnerabilities and attack models, and, propose two micro-architectural techniques to assure data integrity under attack namely, cache bypassing and checkpointing. These techniques allow seamless computation in presence of attack at minimal design overhead.
(ii) Data privacy which pertains to sensitive data such as keys and passwords being compromised. Storage such as Hard Disk Drive (HDD) has been the non-volatile part of memory system traditionally protected by encryption. Although effective, the latency associated with encryption makes it non-trivial for application in higher levels of memory stack such as LLC. I will present the vulnerabilities and attack models, and, propose two low-overhead techniques to maintain data privacy namely, Semi Non-Volatile Memory which is similar to NVM but with very low retention time so that the data vanishes after power is turned OFF, and, irreversible erasure of data at power down using residual charge from power rail.
Biography: Swaroop Ghosh (S'04, SM'13) received his B.E. (Hons.) from IIT, Roorkee (2000), M.S. from University of Cincinnati (2004) and Ph.D. from Purdue University (2008). He joined USF in Fall 2012. Dr. Ghosh was senior research and development engineer in Advanced Design, Intel Corp from 2008 to 2012 where pioneered 32nm and 22nm SRAM and eDRAM designs. His research interests lie at the intersection of circuits, micro-architecture and hardware security. He is a senior member of IEEE.
Dr. Ghosh is serving as Associate Editor of IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON CIRCUITS AND SYSTEMS-I and Senior Editorial Board member of IEEE JOURNAL ON EMERGING AND SELECTED TOPICS IN CIRCUITS AND SYSTEMS. He has served in the technical program committees of DAC, DATE, ICCAD, ISLPED, HOST, Nanoarch, VLSI Design, ISQED, ASQED, and VLSI-SOC. He is a recipient of DARPA Young Faculty Award (2015), ACM SIGDA Outstanding New Faculty Award (2016), USF Outstanding Research Achievement Award (2015) and USF College of Engineering Outstanding Research Achievement Award (2015).
Host: Professor Murali Annavaram
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 248
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Suzanne Wong
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Seminars in Biomedical Engineering
Mon, Apr 11, 2016 @ 12:30 PM - 01:49 PM
Alfred E. Mann Department of Biomedical Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Dr. Peter Wang, PhD., Associate Professor of Bioengineering, University of California, San Diego (UCSD)
Talk Title: Molecular Engineering for cellular imaging and reprogramming
Biography: Dr. Yingxiao (Peter) Wang obtained his bachelor's and master's degrees in Mechanics and Fluid Mechanics from Peking University, Beijing, P.R. China, in 1992 and 1996, respectively. He received his Ph.D. degree in Bioengineering from the University of California, San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering in 2002 and continued his postdoctoral work at UC San Diego working under Bioengineering Professor Shu Chien and Professor Roger Y. Tsien in the Department of Pharmacology. Before joining the UC San Diego faculty in 2012, he was an associate professor at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), Department of Bioengineering and a full-time faculty member in the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology at the University of Illinois. He was also affiliated with the Department of Molecular and Integrative Physiology, Neuroscience Program, the Center for Biophysics and Computational Biology, and Institute of Genomic Biology at UIUC. Dr. Wang is the recipient of the Wallace H. Coulter Early Career Award (both Phase I and Phase II), the National Science Foundation CAREER Award, and National Institutes of Health Independent Scientist Award. His research is supported by the National Institutes of Health, National Science Foundation, and private foundations. Dr. Wang teaches undergraduate and graduate courses on molecular engineering, live cell imaging, and mechanobiology.
Host: K. Kirk Shung, PhD
Location: Olin Hall of Engineering (OHE) - 122
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Mischalgrace Diasanta
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EE 598 Cyber-Physical Systems Seminar Series
Mon, Apr 11, 2016 @ 02:00 PM - 03:00 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Sudhakar Yalamanchili, Professor, Georgia Institute of Technology
Talk Title: New Rules: Sustaining Performance Scaling in a Physical World
Abstract: As industry moves to increasingly small feature sizes, performance scaling will become increasingly dominated by the physics of the computing environment. Sustaining performance scaling will require understanding, characterizing, and collaboratively managing the multi-physics and multi-scale (nanoseconds to milliseconds) transient interactions between the delivery, dissipation, and removal (cooling) of power and their impact on system level performance. There are fundamental trade-offs to be made in processor design at the microarchitectural level between performance, energy/power, reliability, and packaging. In particular, these tradeoffs become increasingly pronounced with heterogeneity and diversity of application workloads. This talk will describe how interacting physical phenomena, e.g., thermal coupling, i) limits performance scaling, ii) drives application-driven microarchitecture-level tradeoffs, and iii) leads to operational principles for energy-efficient heterogeneous many core architectures. In particular, the talk will cover some exemplar implementations on modern integrated CPU-GPU architectures.
Biography: Sudhakar Yalamanchili earned his Ph.D. degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Texas at Austin. Upon graduation, he joined Honeywell's Systems and Research Center in Minneapolis working on embedded multiprocessor architectures. He joined the ECE faculty at Georgia Tech in 1989 where he is now a Regents Professor and Joseph M. Pettit Professor of Computer Engineering. He is the author of two texts on VHDL-based simulation modeling and synthesis, and co-author with J. Duato and L. Ni, of Interconnection Networks: An Engineering Approach, Morgan Kaufman, 2003. His current research foci lie in addressing the software challenges of heterogeneous architectures and solutions to power and thermal issues in many core architectures and systems. Since 2003 he has been a Co-Director of the NSF Industry University Cooperative Research Center on Experimental Computer Systems at Georgia Tech. Dr. Yalamanchili regularly contributes professionally on editorial boards and program committees in high performance computing and computer architecture. He is a Fellow of the IEEE.
Host: Paul Bogdan
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 248
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Estela Lopez
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PhD Defense - Chao Zhang
Mon, Apr 11, 2016 @ 02:00 PM - 04:00 PM
Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science
University Calendar
Title: Opportunistic Crime Security Games: Assisting Police to Control Urban Crime Using Real World Data
Location: THH 119
Time: 2 p.m. April 11th, 2016
PhD Student: Chao Zhang
Committee members:
Prof. Milind Tambe (Chair)
Prof. Cyrus Shahabi
Prof. Kevin Knight
Prof. Najmedin Meshkati
Abstract:
Crime in urban areas plagues every city in all countries. A notable characteristic of urban crime, distinct from organized terrorist attacks, is that most urban crimes are opportunistic in nature, i.e., criminals do not plan their attacks in detail, rather they seek opportunities for committing crime and are agile in their execution of the crime. In order to deter such crimes, police officers conduct patrols with the aim of preventing crime. However, by observing on the spot the actual presence of patrol units, the criminals can adapt their strategy by seeking crime opportunity in less effectively patrolled location. The problem of where and how much to patrol is therefore important.
My thesis focuses on addressing such opportunistic crime by introducing a new game-theoretic framework and algorithms. I first introduce the Opportunistic Security Game (OSG), a computational framework to recommend deployment strategies for defenders to control opportunistic crimes. I propose a new exact algorithm EOSG to optimize defender strategies given our opportunistic adversaries. Then I develop a fast heuristic algorithm to solve large-scale OSG problems, exploiting a compact representation. The next contribution in my thesis is a Dynamic Bayesian Network (DBN) to learn the OSG model from real-world criminal activity. Standard Algorithm such as EM can be applied to learn the parameters. Also, I propose a sequence of modifications that allows for a compact representation of the model resulting in better learning accuracy and increased speed of learning of the EM algorithm. Finally, I propose a game abstraction framework that can handle opportunistic crimes in large-scale urban areas. I propose a planning algorithm that recommends a mixed strategy against opportunistic criminals in this abstraction framework. As part of our collaboration with local police departments, we apply our model in two large scale urban problems: USC campus and the city of Nashville. Our approach provides high prediction accuracy in the real datasets; furthermore, we project significant crime rate reduction using our planning strategy compared to current police strategy.
Location: Mark Taper Hall Of Humanities (THH) - 119
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Lizsl De Leon
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Analytic Reconstructions for MEG and EEG (Lecture I)
Mon, Apr 11, 2016 @ 04:30 PM - 05:50 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Prof. Thanasis Fokas, Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics, University of Cambridge & Department of Electrical Engineering, University of Southern California
Talk Title: Analytic Reconstructions for MEG and EEG (Lecture I)
Series: Three Part Lecture Series
Abstract: Analytical reconstructions as well as appropriate mnumerical implementations for the important imaging techniques of Magneto-encephalography (MEG) and Electro-ecephalography (EEG) will be reviewed. The numerical implementations of MEG and EEG are based on state of the art codes for the numerical evaluation of certain auxiliary functions appearing in the relevant analytical formulae. The effectiveness of reconstructions of the neuronal current using either real EEG or real MEG data will be demonstrated.
Biography: Thanasis Fokas, Chair of Nonlinear mathematical science at the University of Cambridge and Visiting Professor of Electrical Engineering here at USC, will give a series of lectures on Magneto-Electro-Encephalography, which will be introduced by Professor Richard Leahy. The work of Thanasis FOKAS and collaborators has resolved completely the following important question in this area that was open since the fundamental work of Helmohltz: which part of the neuronal current can be computed from the knowledge of either MEG or EEG data?
Next scheduled lectures in this series:
-Lecture II: Wed., April 13, 2016, 4:00 - 5:20PM, EEB 132
-Lecture III: Mon., April 18, 2016, 4:00 - 5:20PM, EEB 132
Host: Prof. Richard Leahy
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 132
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Talyia White
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ANNUAL SPRING BANQUET
Mon, Apr 11, 2016 @ 05:00 PM - 08:00 PM
Daniel J. Epstein Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering
Receptions & Special Events
Daniel J. Epstein Department of Industrial & Systems Engineering presents: The Annual Spring Banquet
Monday, April 11, 2016 at 5:00-8:00pm
Davidson Conference Center - Vineyard Room
Honorary Guest Speaker: Dr. Neil Siegel
5:00-5:45pm: Check-in and Reception (Cash Bar)
6:00-8:00pm: Dinner, Guest Speaker, Recognition and Awards
Admission is $20. RSVP by Tues, April 5th to Angela in GER 240
Payment is due at RSVP and indicate your meal option: Chicken, Beef or Vegetarian during payment.
(NOTE: Only Graduating Seniors and IIE Board members $20 payment will be refunded on April 12th. See Angela in GER 240 for refund)
More Information: ISE Annual Banquet Faculty (Responses).xlsx
Location: DCC Vineyard Room
Audiences: ISE Undergraduates, Masters, Ph.D, Faculty & Staff
Contact: Angela Reneau
