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Events for April 12, 2013
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PhD Screening Meeting - Computer Science
Fri, Apr 12, 2013 @ 09:00 AM - 01:00 PM
Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science
Workshops & Infosessions
Details emailed to attendees.
Location: Ronald Tutor Hall of Engineering (RTH) - 526
Audiences: Invited Faculty Only
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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Solar Decathlon's FLUXHOME kick-off event
Fri, Apr 12, 2013 @ 10:00 AM - 11:30 AM
Viterbi School of Engineering Student Organizations
Receptions & Special Events
The USC School of Architecture and Team USC Solar Decathlon invite you to a celebration to kick-off FLUXHOME, our 2013 entry into the Solar Decathlon competition.
All are invited. Come by to learn more about the project and help us celebrate the beginning of construction for FLUXHOME!
Please RSVP to NCONNER@USC.EDUMore Information: SDkick-offInvite_Final.pdf
Location: Build Site - South Lawn behind Watt Hall
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Team USC Solar Decathlon Club
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IEEE Discover Lab Day
Fri, Apr 12, 2013 @ 10:00 AM - 02:00 PM
Viterbi School of Engineering Student Organizations
Student Activity
Discover Lab Day!
Date: April 12, 2013
Time: 10-2
Place: SSL Lobby
Discover Lab Day! On April 12, 50 students from 32nd Street Margaret Middle School will visit our student-run engineering labs on campus, including Rocket Propulsion Lab, SC Racing, and USC Robotics. During the day, the lab members will show the kids what happen in their labs and after the tour the kids will have interactive activities with lab members.While our goal is to inspire the students' interests in engineering and sciences, it is also a great chance for USC students to hang out with those middle school students. Sign up to be a volunteer and enjoy the day with our amazing labs and cute kids! Lunch will be provided.
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1dZwhkaXba2zqDbXpJ8B-0EjdUsFalDh9ws3Ncv-BUcs/viewformLocation: Seaver Science Library (SSL) -
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers
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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
