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Events for April 15, 2010
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Planning and Learning in Information Space
Thu, Apr 15, 2010
Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Time: 12:00 PMRoom: EEB 248Talk Title: Planning and Learning in Information SpaceSpeaker: Professor Nicholas Roy Host: Professor Gaurav SukhatmeAbstract:Decision making with imperfect knowledge is an essential capability for unmanned vehicles operating in populated, dynamic domains. For example, a UAV flying autonomously indoors will not be able to rely on GPS for position estimation, but instead use on-board sensors to track its position and map the obstacles in its environment. The planned trajectories for such a vehicle must therefore incorporate sensor limitations to avoid collisions and to ensure accurate state estimation for stable flight -- that is, the planner must be be able to predict and avoid uncertainty in the state, in the dynamics and in the model of the world. Incorporating uncertainty requires planning in information space, which leads to substantial computational cost but allows our unmanned vehicles to plan deliberate sensing actions that can not only improve the state estimate, but even improve the vehicle's model of the world and how people interact with the vehicle.I will discuss recent results from my group in planning in information space; our algorithms allow robots to generate plans that are robust to state and model uncertainty, while planning to learn more about the world. I will describe the navigation system for a quadrotor helicopter flying autonomously without GPS using laser range-finding, and will show how these results extend to autonomous mapping, general tasks with imperfect information, and human-robot interaction.Bio:Nicholas Roy is an Associate Professor in the Department of Aeronautics & Astronautics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a member of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) at MIT. He received his Ph. D. in Robotics from Carnegie Mellon University in 2003. His research interests include autonomous systems, mobile robotics, human-computer interaction, decision-making under uncertainty and machine learning.
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 248
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: CS Front Desk
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USC Robotics Open House
Thu, Apr 15, 2010 @ 10:00 AM - 06:00 PM
USC Viterbi School of Engineering
Receptions & Special Events
The week of April 12th is the newly instituted National Robotics Week. Robotics research universities across the country are having special events that week, and the Robotics Caucus is doing presentations in Washington DC as well. USC is a leading robotics research university; it will present a one-day Robotics Open House, aimed at both the USC community and the general public, including especially children. The USC Robotics Club will also participate by having a display in the lobby of the 4th floor of RTH.http://robotics.usc.edu/open_house_2010
Location: 4th Floor, Ronald Tutor Hall
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Eric Mankin
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[Photonics Seminar] Plasmonic Super Resolution Imaging
Thu, Apr 15, 2010 @ 01:00 PM - 02:00 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Prof. Zhaowei Liu, UCSDAbstract:
The imaging resolution of conventional optical lens system is limited by the diffraction to a few hundreds of nanometers. Emerging artificially engineered plasmonic metamaterials offer a new possibility to build superlenses that overcome such a limit. In this talk I will review some of our work on the far-field superlens (FSL) and optical hyperlens that are able to transfer super resolution image to the far field. Other plasmonic based techniques such as plasmonic structured illumination microscopy (PSIM), plasmonic dark field (PDF) microscopy will also be discussed.Bio:
Zhaowei Liu is an Assistant Professor in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at UCSD. He received his Ph.D. in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering (MEMS/Nanotechnology) from UCLA in 2006, and was subsequently a postdoctoral researcher in NSF Nanoscale Science & Engineering Center (NSEC) and Mechanical Engineering at UC Berkeley. In 2008 he joined the faculty at UCSD. His research is primarily in the fields of nanophotonics, super-resolution imaging and sensing, metamaterials, plasmonics, and micro/nanofabrication. He is a recipient of the 2010 SME Outstanding Young Manufacturing Engineer Award.Host: Prof. Michelle Povinelli
Location: EE 248
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Jing Ma
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The Hydrogeochemistry of Pond and Rice Field Recharge:
Thu, Apr 15, 2010 @ 01:00 PM - 02:00 PM
Sonny Astani Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
..Implications for the Arsenic Contaminated Aquifers in Bangladesh Speakers: Rebecca B. Neumann, Ph.D., NOAA Climate and Global Change Postdoctoral Fellow at Harvard University Abstract: Researchers have puzzled over the origin of dissolved arsenic in the aquifers of the
Ganges Delta since widespread arsenic poisoning from groundwater was publicized two
decades ago. Previous work has concluded that biological oxidation of organic carbon
drives geochemical transformations that mobilize arsenic from sediments; however, the
source of the organic carbon that fuels these processes remains controversial. A
combined hydrologic and biogeochemical analysis of a typical site in Bangladesh, where
constructed ponds and groundwater-irrigated rice fields are the main sources of recharge,
shows that only recharge through pond sediments provides the biologically degradable
organic carbon that can drive arsenic mobilization. Chemical and isotopic indicators
suggest that contaminated groundwater originates from excavated ponds and that water
originating from rice fields is low in arsenic. In fact, rice fields act as an arsenic sink.
Irrigation moves arsenic-rich groundwater from the aquifers and deposits it on the rice
fields. Most of the deposited arsenic does not return to the aquifers; it is sorbed by the
field's surface soil and bunds, and is swept away in the monsoon floods. The findings
indicate that patterns of arsenic contamination in the shallow aquifer are due to rechargesource
variation and complex three-dimensional flow.Location: Kaprielian Hall (KAP) - 209 (Available by Webex upon request)
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Evangeline Reyes
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4th Annual Eberhardt Rechtin Keynote Lecture
Thu, Apr 15, 2010 @ 03:30 PM - 06:00 PM
Daniel J. Epstein Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering
University Calendar
DANIEL J. EPSTEIN DEPARTMENT OF INDUSTRIAL & SYSTEMS ENGINEERING - 4th ANNUAL EBERHARDT RECHTIN KEYNOTE LECTURETitle: "International Collaboration -- A Reflection on the Creation of the Association of Pacific Rim Universities by Steven Sample"Date: Thursday, April 15, 2010Reception: 3:30-4:30 PM // Andrus Gerontology CourtyardKeynote Lecture: 4:30-6:00 PM // Andrus Gerontology AuditoriumGuest Speaker: Henry T. Yang, Chancellor, University of California Santa BarbaraHenry T. Yang joined UC Santa Barbara as chancellor and professor of mechanical engineering in 1994. He teaches an undergraduate engineering course every year, and is currently guiding four Ph.D. students with support from National Science Foundation grants. He was formerly the Neil A. Armstrong Distinguished Professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics at Purdue University, where he also served as the dean of engineering for ten years, and as director of the Computer Integrated Design, Manufacturing, and Automation Center.Dr. Yang has authored or co-authored more than 170 articles for scientific journals, guided 52 Ph.D. theses, and received 13 outstanding undergraduate teaching awards, including an honorary distinguished teaching award from UCSB's Academic Senate. His book Finite Element Structural Analysis, published by Prentice-Hall, has been adopted by many universities and has also been published in Japanese and Chinese editions.He has served on scientific advisory boards for various government agencies. He is currently serving as the chair of the Association of American Universities and the vice chair of the Association of Pacific Rim Universities. He is also a member of the National Academy of Engineering's Aerospace Engineering Peer Committee, the Kavli Foundation Board, and the Millennium Technology Prize Selection Committee, and is chairman of the board for the Thirty Meter Telescope project. In 2009 he was appointed to the President's Committee for the National Medal of Science.Dr. Yang has received a number of recognitions for his research, teaching, and public service, including the Benjamin Garver Lamme gold medal and five honorary doctorates. In 2008, he was awarded the AIAA Structures, Structural Dynamics, and Materials Award. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and a Fellow of AIAA,
ASEE, and ASME.
Location: Ethel Percy Andrus Gerontology Center (GER) - Courtyard and Auditorium
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Georgia Lum
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CS Colloq: Niv Buchbinder - CANCELLED
Thu, Apr 15, 2010 @ 03:30 PM - 05:00 PM
Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Talk Title: Randomized k-Server Conjecture (Online Algorithms meet Linear Programming)
Speaker: Dr. Niv Buchbinder
Host: Prof. David KempeTALK CANCELLEDAbstract:
The k-server problem is one of the most central and well studied problems in competitive analysis and is considered by many to be the "holy grail" problem in the field. In the k-server problem, there is a distance function d defined over an n-point metric space and k servers located at the points of the metric space. At each time step, an online algorithm is given a request at one of the points of the metric space, and it is served by moving a server to the requested point. The goal of an online algorithm is to minimize the total sum of the distances traveled by the servers so as to serve a given sequence of requests. The k-server problem captures many online scenarios, and in particular the widely studied paging problem.A twenty year old conjecture states that there exists a k-competitive online algorithm for any metric space. The randomized k-server conjecture states that there exists a randomized O(log k)-competitive algorithm for any metric space. While major progress was made in the past 20 years on the deterministic conjecture, only little is known about the randomized conjecture.We present a very promising primal-dual approach for the design and analysis of online algorithms. We survey recent progress towards settling the k-server conjecture achieved using this new framework.Bio:
Niv Buchbinder is a post-doctoral researcher at Microsoft Research, New England at Cambridge, MA.
Previously, he was a Ph.D. student in Computer Science at Technion, Israel Institute of Technology under the supervision of Prof Seffi Naor.
His main research interests are algorithms for combinatorial problems in offline and online settings. He is also interested in algorithmic game theory problems.
Location: Seaver Science Library (SSL) - 150
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: CS Front Desk
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CS Colloq: Jesse Davis
Thu, Apr 15, 2010 @ 03:30 PM - 05:00 PM
Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Talk Title: Predicate Invention and Transfer LearningSpeaker: Jesse DavisHost: Prof. Gaurav Sukhatme and Prof. Craig KnoblockAbstract: Machine learning has become an essential tool for analyzing biological and clinical data, but significant technical hurdles prevent it from fulfilling its promise. Standard algorithms make three key assumptions: the training data consist of independent examples, each example is described by a pre-defined set of attributes, and the training and test instances come from the same distribution. Biomedical domains consist of complex, inter-related, structured data, such as patient clinical histories, molecular structures and protein-protein interaction information. The representation chosen to store the data often does not explicitly encode all the necessary features and relations for building an accurate model. For example, when analyzing a mammogram, a radiologist records many properties of each abnormality, but does not explicitly encode how quickly a mass grows, which is a crucial indicator of malignancy. In the first part of this talk, I will focus on the concrete task of predicting whether an abnormality on a mammogram is malignant. I will describe an approach I developed for automatically discovering unseen features and relations from data, which has advanced the state-of-the-art for machine classification of abnormalities on a mammogram. It achieves superior performance compared to both previous machine learning approaches and radiologists.In the second part of this talk, I will address the problem of generalizing across different domains. Unlike machines, humans are able take knowledge learned in one domain and apply it to an entirely different one. Computationally, the missing link is the ability to discover structural regularities that apply to many different domains, irrespective of their superficial descriptions. This is arguably the biggest gap between current learning systems and humans. I will describe an approach based on a form of second-order Markov logic, which discovers structural regularities in the source domain in the form of Markov logic formulas with predicate variables, and instantiates these formulas with predicates from the target domain. This approach has successfully transferred learned knowledge between a molecular biology domain and a Web one. The discovered patterns include broadly useful properties of predicates, like symmetry and transitivity, and relations among predicates, like various forms of homophily.Bio: Jesse Davis is a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Washington. He received his Ph.D in computer science at the University of Wisconsin – Madison in 2007 and a B.A. in computer science from Williams College in 2002. His research interests include machine learning, statistical relational learning, transfer learning, inductive logic programming and data mining for biomedical domains.
Location: Seaver Science Library (SSL) - 150
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: CS Front Desk
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Algae BioFuel & The Future of Energy, Dr. Anthony Michaels
Thu, Apr 15, 2010 @ 08:00 PM - 10:00 PM
USC Viterbi School of Engineering
Student Activity
Currently the world's power consumption is 508 quadrillion BTU's annually, and is expected to grow by 44% over the next 20 years far exceeding fossil fuel energy capacity, showing a large need for renewable energy sources. Dr. Anthony Michaels is Founder of Phycosystems Algae BioFuel & Proteus Environmental Technologies. Phycosystem's approach produces cheaper energy and an array of energy products (electricity, liquid biofuel, hydrogen, etc.) from algae while producing income to subsidize the energy production, yielding economical and sustainable energy. Similarly, Proteus Environmental Technologies maintains an array of projects researching the latest in alternative energy.Algae are the ultimate renewable fuel. They are the fastest growing plants on earth, using sunlight, carbon dioxide and nutrients to store energy in their biomass. They hold the promise of fulfilling a large part of the global requirements for liquid fuels and energy on an area of land equal to only 1-5% of the world's arable land. PhycoSystems brings together a unique technical and business team around a strategy for cost-effective production of algae based energy products.More Info & RSVP: http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=115344918477183
Location: Hoffman Hall HOH1 (Basement Classroom)
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Yannis Peyret
