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Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Events for April
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Six Sigma Black BeltTue, Apr 01, 2014 @ 09:00 AM - 05:00 PM
Executive Education
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: TBA,
Talk Title: Six Sigma Black Belt
Abstract: Course Overview
This course teaches you the advanced problem-solving skills you'll need in order to measure a process, analyze the results, develop process improvements and quantify the resulting savings. Project assignments between sessions require you to apply what you've learned. This course is presented in the classroom in three five-day sessions over a three-month period.
Learn the advanced problem-solving skills you need to implement the principles, practices and techniques of Six Sigma to maximize performance and cost reductions in your organization. During this three-week practitioner course, you will learn how to measure a process, analyze the results, develop process improvements and quantify the resulting savings. You will be required to complete a project demonstrating mastery of appropriate analytical methods and pass an examination to earn IIE's Six Sigma Black Belt Certificate.This practitioner course for Six Sigma implementation provides extensive coverage of the Six Sigma process as well as intensive exposure to the key analytical tools associated with Six Sigma, including project management, team skills, cost analysis, FMEA, basic statistics, inferential statistics, sampling, goodness of fit testing, regression and correlation analysis, reliability, design of experiments, statistical process control, measurement systems analysis and simulation. Computer applications are emphasized.
NOTE: Participants must bring a laptop computer running Microsoft Office to the seminar.
Course Topics
* Business process management
* Computer applications
* Design of experiments (DOE)
* Design for Six Sigma (DFSS)
* DMAIIC
* Enterprisewide deployment
* Lean enterprise
* Project management
* Regression and correlation modeling
* Statistical methods and sampling
* Statistical process control
* Team processes
Benefits
Upon completion of this course, you will be able to:
* Analyze process data using comprehensive statistical methods
* Control the process to assure that improvements are used and the benefits verified
* Define an opportunity for improving customer satisfaction
* Implement the recommended improvements
* Improve existing processes by reducing variation
* Measure process characteristics that are critical to quality
Who Should Attend
* VPs, COOs, CEOs
* Employees new to a managerial position
* Employees preparing to make the transition to managerial roles
* Current managers wanting to hone leadership skills
* Anyone interested in implementing Lean or Six Sigma in their organization
Program Fees
On-Campus Participants: $7,245
Includes continental breakfasts, lunch and all course materials. The fee does not include hotel accommodations or transportation.
Online Participant with Live Session Interactivity: $7,245
Includes attendee access codes for live call-in or chat capabilities during class sessions. Also includes all course and lecture materials available for live stream or download.
Reduced Pricing:
Institute of Industrial Engineers (IIE): Reduced pricing is available for members of IIE. Please contact professional@gapp.usc.edu for further information.
Trojan Family: USC alumni, current students, faculty, and staff receive 10% reduced pricing on registration.
Boeing: Boeing employees receive 20% off registration fees (please use Boeing email address when registering).
Location
Two course delivery options are available for participants, on-campus and online with interactivity:
On-Campus Course is held in state-of-the-art facilities on the University of Southern California campus, located in downtown Los Angeles. Participants attending on-campus will have the option to commute to the course or stay at one of the many hotels located in the area. For travel information, please visit our Travel section.
Overview of on-campus option:
* The ability to interact with faculty and peers in-person.
* Access to hard copy course materials.
* Ability to logon and view archived course information - up to 7 days after the course has been offered. This includes course documents and streaming video of the lectures.
* If there is a conflict during any on-campus course dates, on-campus participants can elect to be an online/interactive student.
* Parking, refreshments and lunch are provided for on-campus participants unless otherwise specified.
Online (Interactivity) Course delivery is completely online and real-time, enabling interaction with the instructor and fellow participants. Participants have the flexibility of completing the course from a distance utilizing USC's Distance Education Network technology. Students are required to be online for the entirety of each day's session.
Overview of online (interactive):
* Virtually participate in the course live with the ability to either ask questions or chat questions to the entire class.
* WebEx technologies provide the option to call into the class and view the entire lecture/materials on a personal computer, or to participate on a computer without having to utilize a phone line.
* Ability to logon and view archived course information up to 7 days after the course has been offered. This includes course documents and streaming video of the lectures.
Continuing Education Units
CEUs: 10.5 (CEUs provided by request only)
USC Viterbi School of Engineering Certificate of Participation is awarded to all participants upon successful completion of course.
Upon completion, participants will also receive their Institute of Industrial Engineers certification in Six Sigma Black Belt.
Host: Corporate and Professional Programs
More Info: http://gapp.usc.edu/professional-programs/short-courses/industrial%26systems/six-sigma-black-belt
Audiences: Registered Attendees
Contact: Viterbi Professional Programs
Event Link: http://gapp.usc.edu/professional-programs/short-courses/industrial%26systems/six-sigma-black-belt
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Astani CEE Department Seminar
Tue, Apr 01, 2014 @ 10:00 AM - 11:00 AM
Sonny Astani Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Elia Psillakis , Technical University of Crete
Talk Title: Emerging and Persistent Organic Pollutants in Aquatic Environment: Mega-sized concerns from a nano-sized world
Abstract: Water quality protection remains a major environmental and policy challenge faced by many industrial as well as developing nations. In particular, the occurrence and fate of trace amounts of a wide range of anthropogenic organic contaminants in water continues to escalate concerns over their potential for ecological and human health effects. Besides the well-known ââ¬Åpersistentââ¬Â organic pollutants, such as PCBs, a range of ââ¬Åemergingââ¬Â organic contaminants and their transformation products attract considerable attention. These pollutants result from changes in manufactured chemicals, advances in analytical techniques or perhaps because of more detailed monitoring.
I will summarize several of our investigations over the past few years, which aim at the detection, and the identification of the fate of both emerging and persistent organic pollutants in water. I will first discuss on the fundamental concepts of the analytical tools used, so as to explain the scientific basis behind this type of water-quality investigations. Through case studies, I will discuss the overarching issues and challenges we face because of the concurrent presence of different classes of contaminants, such as personal care products, perfluorinated compounds, flame retardants and nanoparticles in aquatic environments. Last, I will try to imagineer the future of this rapidly evolving interdisciplinary research field.
Biography: Dr. Elia Psillakis is an Associate Professor at the School of Environmental Engineering, Technical University of Crete, Greece. She received her degree in Chemistry from the Universitè Montpellier II Sciences et Techniques du Languedoc in France in 1994 and her PhD from the University of Bristol, U.K., in 1997. In 2007, she was awarded a Fulbright research scholarship and spent it at Caltech. Her work focuses on monitoring and studying emerging and persistent hydrophobic organic contaminants in natural and engineered aquatic environments. To date her investigations have resulted into one patent and 68 publications in ISI Journals with more than 3200 citations, an ISI h-index=32, and three ââ¬ÅTop cited article awards.ââ¬Â
Host: Astani CEE Department
Location: Kaprielian Hall (KAP) - 209
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Cassie Cremeans
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EE-Systems Seminar
Tue, Apr 01, 2014 @ 10:30 AM - 12:00 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Nam Sung Kim , Associate Professor, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Talk Title: Performance-Power Trade-off without DVFS: An Architecture and Runtime Joint Approach
Abstract: Providing a sufficient voltage/frequency (V/F) scaling range is critical for effective power management. However, it has been fraught with decreasing nominal operating voltage and increasing process variability that makes it harder to scale the minimum operating voltage (VMIN). Facing such a challenge, we first propose to jointly scale (i) the resources of cores (e.g., the size of on-chip memories, the number of execution units, etc.) and (ii) the number of operating cores to maximize performance of multi-core processors under the maximum power constraint; scaling (i) is adopted as a mean to compensate for a lack of V/F scaling range while scaling (ii) is to exploit the effect of spreading threads over more or fewer cores and scaling shared resources on performance. Under the power constraint, disabling resources of each core allows us to increase the number of operating cores, and vice versa (dubbed resource and core scaling (RCS)). We demonstrate that the best RCS configuration for a given application can improve performance by 21%. Second, we propose a runtime system that predicts the best RCS configuration for a given application and adapts the processor accordingly at runtime. The runtime system only needs to examine a small fraction of runtime to predict the optimal RCS configuration with accuracy well over 90%, whereas the runtime overhead of prediction and adaptation is small.
Finally, we demonstrate that selectively scaling the re-sources in RCS (sRCS) considering on application's characteristics can offer higher performance than uniformly scaling them (i.e., RCS). sRCS can provide 6% higher performance than RCS.
Biography: Nam Sung Kim is an Associate Professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He has been conducting interdisciplinary research that cuts across device, circuit, architecture, and runtime system for power-efficient computing. His research has been supported by National Science Foundation (NSF), Semiconductor Research Corporation (SRC), Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA), BAE Systems, AMD, IBM, Samsung, and Microsoft; the total funding amount provided/pledged by these agencies is nearly 3.5 million dollars to date. Prior to joining the University of Wisconsin-Madison, he was a senior research scientist at Intel from 2004 to 2008, where he conducted research in power-efficient digital circuit and processor architecture.
Nam Sung Kim has published more than 100 refereed articles to highly-selective conferences and journals in the field of digital circuit, processor architecture, and computer-aided design. The top five most frequently cited papers have more than 2500 combined citations and the total number of combined citations of all his papers exceeds 4000 according to Google Scholar. He also has served several prominent international conferences as a technical program committee member. He was a recipient of IEEE Design Automation Conference (DAC) Student Design Contest Award in 2001, Intel Fellowship in 2002, and IEEE International Conference on Microarchitecture (MICRO) Best Paper Award in 2003, NSF CAREER Award in 2010, and IBM Faculty Award in 2011 and 2012, and he was early-tenured in 2013. His current research interest is designing robust and power-efficient computing systems. He is an IEEE senior member and holds a Ph.D. degree in Computer Science and Engineering from the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor, and both M.S. and B.S. degrees in Electrical Engineering from Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology.
Host: Prof. Murali Annavaram
More Information: print_Kim.pdf
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 248
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Estela Lopez
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SEMINAR CANCELED - Epstein Institute / ISE 651 Seminar Series
Tue, Apr 01, 2014 @ 03:30 PM - 04:50 PM
Daniel J. Epstein Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Francisco Facchinei, Dipartimento di Ingegneria Informatica, Automatica e Gestionale, University of Rome, La Sapienza, Italy
Talk Title: "A Game-Theoretic Approach to Computation Offloading in Mobile Cloud Computing"
Abstract: We consider a three-tier architecture for mobile and pervasive computing scenarios, consisting of a local tier of mobile nodes, a middle tier (cloudlets) of nearby computing nodes, typically located at the mobile nodes access points but characterized by a limited amount of resources, and a remote tier of distant cloud servers, which have practically infinite resources. This architecture has been proposed to get the benefits of computation offloading from mobile nodes to external servers while limiting the use of distant servers whose higher latency could negatively impact the user experience. For this architecture, we consider a usage scenario where no central authority exists and multiple non-cooperative mobile users share the limited computing resources of a close-by cloudlet and can selfishly decide to send their computations to any of the three tiers. We define a model to capture the users interaction and to investigate the effects of computation offloading on the users' perceived performance. We formulate the problem as a generalized Nash equilibrium problem and show existence of an equilibrium and present a distributed algorithm for the computation of an equilibrium which is tailored to the problem structure and is based on an in-depth analysis of the underlying equilibrium problem. Through numerical examples, we illustrate the practical behavior of the algorithm and the characteristics of the achieved equilibria.
TUESDAY, APRIL 1, 2014
VON KLEINSMID CENTER (VKC) ROOM 100
3:30 - 4:50 PM
Biography: Francisco Facchinei received a Ph.D. degree in system engineering from the University of Rome, ââ¬ÅLa Sapienza,ââ¬Â Rome, Italy. He is full professor of Operations Research, Engineering Faculty, University of Rome, La Sapienza. His research interests focus on theoretical and algorithmic issues related to nonlinear optimization, variational inequalities, complementarity problems, equilibrium programming, and computational game theory.
Host: Daniel J. Epstein Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering
More Information: Seminar-Facchinei.doc
Location: Von Kleinsmid Center For International & Public Affairs (VKC) - Room 100
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Georgia Lum
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Six Sigma Black Belt
Wed, Apr 02, 2014 @ 09:00 AM - 05:00 PM
Executive Education
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: TBA,
Talk Title: Six Sigma Black Belt
Abstract: Course Overview
This course teaches you the advanced problem-solving skills you'll need in order to measure a process, analyze the results, develop process improvements and quantify the resulting savings. Project assignments between sessions require you to apply what you've learned. This course is presented in the classroom in three five-day sessions over a three-month period.
Learn the advanced problem-solving skills you need to implement the principles, practices and techniques of Six Sigma to maximize performance and cost reductions in your organization. During this three-week practitioner course, you will learn how to measure a process, analyze the results, develop process improvements and quantify the resulting savings. You will be required to complete a project demonstrating mastery of appropriate analytical methods and pass an examination to earn IIE's Six Sigma Black Belt Certificate.This practitioner course for Six Sigma implementation provides extensive coverage of the Six Sigma process as well as intensive exposure to the key analytical tools associated with Six Sigma, including project management, team skills, cost analysis, FMEA, basic statistics, inferential statistics, sampling, goodness of fit testing, regression and correlation analysis, reliability, design of experiments, statistical process control, measurement systems analysis and simulation. Computer applications are emphasized.
NOTE: Participants must bring a laptop computer running Microsoft Office to the seminar.
Course Topics
* Business process management
* Computer applications
* Design of experiments (DOE)
* Design for Six Sigma (DFSS)
* DMAIIC
* Enterprisewide deployment
* Lean enterprise
* Project management
* Regression and correlation modeling
* Statistical methods and sampling
* Statistical process control
* Team processes
Benefits
Upon completion of this course, you will be able to:
* Analyze process data using comprehensive statistical methods
* Control the process to assure that improvements are used and the benefits verified
* Define an opportunity for improving customer satisfaction
* Implement the recommended improvements
* Improve existing processes by reducing variation
* Measure process characteristics that are critical to quality
Who Should Attend
* VPs, COOs, CEOs
* Employees new to a managerial position
* Employees preparing to make the transition to managerial roles
* Current managers wanting to hone leadership skills
* Anyone interested in implementing Lean or Six Sigma in their organization
Program Fees
On-Campus Participants: $7,245
Includes continental breakfasts, lunch and all course materials. The fee does not include hotel accommodations or transportation.
Online Participant with Live Session Interactivity: $7,245
Includes attendee access codes for live call-in or chat capabilities during class sessions. Also includes all course and lecture materials available for live stream or download.
Reduced Pricing:
Institute of Industrial Engineers (IIE): Reduced pricing is available for members of IIE. Please contact professional@gapp.usc.edu for further information.
Trojan Family: USC alumni, current students, faculty, and staff receive 10% reduced pricing on registration.
Boeing: Boeing employees receive 20% off registration fees (please use Boeing email address when registering).
Location
Two course delivery options are available for participants, on-campus and online with interactivity:
On-Campus Course is held in state-of-the-art facilities on the University of Southern California campus, located in downtown Los Angeles. Participants attending on-campus will have the option to commute to the course or stay at one of the many hotels located in the area. For travel information, please visit our Travel section.
Overview of on-campus option:
* The ability to interact with faculty and peers in-person.
* Access to hard copy course materials.
* Ability to logon and view archived course information - up to 7 days after the course has been offered. This includes course documents and streaming video of the lectures.
* If there is a conflict during any on-campus course dates, on-campus participants can elect to be an online/interactive student.
* Parking, refreshments and lunch are provided for on-campus participants unless otherwise specified.
Online (Interactivity) Course delivery is completely online and real-time, enabling interaction with the instructor and fellow participants. Participants have the flexibility of completing the course from a distance utilizing USC's Distance Education Network technology. Students are required to be online for the entirety of each day's session.
Overview of online (interactive):
* Virtually participate in the course live with the ability to either ask questions or chat questions to the entire class.
* WebEx technologies provide the option to call into the class and view the entire lecture/materials on a personal computer, or to participate on a computer without having to utilize a phone line.
* Ability to logon and view archived course information up to 7 days after the course has been offered. This includes course documents and streaming video of the lectures.
Continuing Education Units
CEUs: 10.5 (CEUs provided by request only)
USC Viterbi School of Engineering Certificate of Participation is awarded to all participants upon successful completion of course.
Upon completion, participants will also receive their Institute of Industrial Engineers certification in Six Sigma Black Belt.
Host: Corporate and Professional Programs
More Info: http://gapp.usc.edu/professional-programs/short-courses/industrial%26systems/six-sigma-black-belt
Audiences: Registered Attendees
Contact: Viterbi Professional Programs
Event Link: http://gapp.usc.edu/professional-programs/short-courses/industrial%26systems/six-sigma-black-belt
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Emerging Nonvolatile Memory Technologies: Design Space Exploration and Applications in Conventional and Neuromorphic Computing
Wed, Apr 02, 2014 @ 10:30 AM - 12:00 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Yiran Chen, University of Pittsburgh
Talk Title: Emerging Nonvolatile Memory Technologies: Design Space Exploration and Applications in Conventional and Neuromorphic Computing
Abstract: The severe scaling challenges of mainstream memories motivated recent active research on emerging nonvolatile memory (eNVM) technologies. Some promising candidates, i.e., phase change memory, spintronic memory, and resistive memory (memristor), have been well studied, demonstrating attractive properties in integration density, power efficiency, reliability, and scalability. In this talk, I will first examine the expectations of modern computing systems on memory hierarchy and then introduce three examples in eNVM design and applications in GPGPU and neuromorphic computing systems. Finally, we will give our prospects on the future hotspots in eNVM research.
Biography: Dr. Yiran Chen received B.S and M.S. (both with honor) from Tsinghua University and Ph.D. from Purdue University in 2005. After five years in industry, he joined University of Pittsburgh in 2010 as Assistant Professor in Electrical and Computer Engineering Department. His research interests include low-power design, emerging circuit and computing technologies, and embedded systems. Dr. Chen has published 1 book, a few book chapters, and 160+ journal and conference publications. He has been granted 83 US and international patents with other 17 pending applications. He is the associate editor of IEEE TCAD, ACM JETC, ACM SIGDA E-news and served on the technical and organization committees of about 30 conferences. He received 3 best paper awards from ISQED’08, ISLPED’10 and GLSVLS’13 and other 7 nominations in DAC, DATE, ASPDAC etc. Dr. Chen received NSF CAREER award in 2013 and was the invited participant of 2013 U.S. Frontiers of Engineering Symposium of NAE.
Host: Massoud Pedram
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 248
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Annie Yu
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Six Sigma Black Belt
Thu, Apr 03, 2014 @ 09:00 AM - 05:00 PM
Executive Education
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: TBA,
Talk Title: Six Sigma Black Belt
Abstract: Course Overview
This course teaches you the advanced problem-solving skills you'll need in order to measure a process, analyze the results, develop process improvements and quantify the resulting savings. Project assignments between sessions require you to apply what you've learned. This course is presented in the classroom in three five-day sessions over a three-month period.
Learn the advanced problem-solving skills you need to implement the principles, practices and techniques of Six Sigma to maximize performance and cost reductions in your organization. During this three-week practitioner course, you will learn how to measure a process, analyze the results, develop process improvements and quantify the resulting savings. You will be required to complete a project demonstrating mastery of appropriate analytical methods and pass an examination to earn IIE's Six Sigma Black Belt Certificate.This practitioner course for Six Sigma implementation provides extensive coverage of the Six Sigma process as well as intensive exposure to the key analytical tools associated with Six Sigma, including project management, team skills, cost analysis, FMEA, basic statistics, inferential statistics, sampling, goodness of fit testing, regression and correlation analysis, reliability, design of experiments, statistical process control, measurement systems analysis and simulation. Computer applications are emphasized.
NOTE: Participants must bring a laptop computer running Microsoft Office to the seminar.
Course Topics
* Business process management
* Computer applications
* Design of experiments (DOE)
* Design for Six Sigma (DFSS)
* DMAIIC
* Enterprisewide deployment
* Lean enterprise
* Project management
* Regression and correlation modeling
* Statistical methods and sampling
* Statistical process control
* Team processes
Benefits
Upon completion of this course, you will be able to:
* Analyze process data using comprehensive statistical methods
* Control the process to assure that improvements are used and the benefits verified
* Define an opportunity for improving customer satisfaction
* Implement the recommended improvements
* Improve existing processes by reducing variation
* Measure process characteristics that are critical to quality
Who Should Attend
* VPs, COOs, CEOs
* Employees new to a managerial position
* Employees preparing to make the transition to managerial roles
* Current managers wanting to hone leadership skills
* Anyone interested in implementing Lean or Six Sigma in their organization
Program Fees
On-Campus Participants: $7,245
Includes continental breakfasts, lunch and all course materials. The fee does not include hotel accommodations or transportation.
Online Participant with Live Session Interactivity: $7,245
Includes attendee access codes for live call-in or chat capabilities during class sessions. Also includes all course and lecture materials available for live stream or download.
Reduced Pricing:
Institute of Industrial Engineers (IIE): Reduced pricing is available for members of IIE. Please contact professional@gapp.usc.edu for further information.
Trojan Family: USC alumni, current students, faculty, and staff receive 10% reduced pricing on registration.
Boeing: Boeing employees receive 20% off registration fees (please use Boeing email address when registering).
Location
Two course delivery options are available for participants, on-campus and online with interactivity:
On-Campus Course is held in state-of-the-art facilities on the University of Southern California campus, located in downtown Los Angeles. Participants attending on-campus will have the option to commute to the course or stay at one of the many hotels located in the area. For travel information, please visit our Travel section.
Overview of on-campus option:
* The ability to interact with faculty and peers in-person.
* Access to hard copy course materials.
* Ability to logon and view archived course information - up to 7 days after the course has been offered. This includes course documents and streaming video of the lectures.
* If there is a conflict during any on-campus course dates, on-campus participants can elect to be an online/interactive student.
* Parking, refreshments and lunch are provided for on-campus participants unless otherwise specified.
Online (Interactivity) Course delivery is completely online and real-time, enabling interaction with the instructor and fellow participants. Participants have the flexibility of completing the course from a distance utilizing USC's Distance Education Network technology. Students are required to be online for the entirety of each day's session.
Overview of online (interactive):
* Virtually participate in the course live with the ability to either ask questions or chat questions to the entire class.
* WebEx technologies provide the option to call into the class and view the entire lecture/materials on a personal computer, or to participate on a computer without having to utilize a phone line.
* Ability to logon and view archived course information up to 7 days after the course has been offered. This includes course documents and streaming video of the lectures.
Continuing Education Units
CEUs: 10.5 (CEUs provided by request only)
USC Viterbi School of Engineering Certificate of Participation is awarded to all participants upon successful completion of course.
Upon completion, participants will also receive their Institute of Industrial Engineers certification in Six Sigma Black Belt.
Host: Corporate and Professional Programs
More Info: http://gapp.usc.edu/professional-programs/short-courses/industrial%26systems/six-sigma-black-belt
Audiences: Registered Attendees
Contact: Viterbi Professional Programs
Event Link: http://gapp.usc.edu/professional-programs/short-courses/industrial%26systems/six-sigma-black-belt
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Astani CEE Department Seminar
Thu, Apr 03, 2014 @ 10:00 AM - 11:00 PM
Sonny Astani Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Tom Hennebel , University of California, Berkeley
Talk Title: Biogenic nanoparticles: the Holy Grail in wastewater treatment?
Abstract: During the last decades there has been a considerable expansion in the use of precious metals in medicine, electronics, and catalysis. Among the precious metals, platinum group metals (PGMs) have demonstrated their ability to serve as highly efficient catalysts and are currently being widely applied in the fields aforementioned. Their limited supply, however, has caused extreme price volatility ($ 26,000 per kg Pd in January 2014). Therefore, recovery of PGMs from waste streams is highly desired and presents an interesting opportunity to convert waste into valuable products. One of the options to reclaim precious metals from wastewaters, e.g. originating from the mining or refining industries, is the application of bio-metallurgical processes. New biological inspired methods were recently developed to recover precious metals from waste streams while concomitantly producing biogenic nanoparticles. The first part of the presentation aims to give an overview of the bacterial mechanisms responsible for these bioreductive depositions. Furthermore, the applicability and efficiency of these biogenically created nanoparticles will be compared as alternatives to currently applied (physico-)chemical techniques.
The subsequent part of the presentation will focus on the application side of these nanoparticles. The effective performance of biogenic nanoparticles as catalysts in dehalogenation reactions, as well as in hydrogenation and reduction reactions, will be discussed. Dehalogenation of environmental water contaminants represents a promising market for application of biogenic Pd nanoparticles (bio-Pd), therefore, several treatment technologies based on bio-Pd are considered for various environmental disciples. Finally, the perspectives for implementation of the bio-Pd technology and innovative applications, such as C-C coupling reactions and direct hydrogen peroxide production, are set forward.
Biography: Dr. Tom Hennebel is a current postdoctoral researcher working for David Sedlak at the University of California, Berkeley. He obtained his Bachelor's degree in bio-engineering at the University of Antwerp, Belgium followed by his Master's degree and Doctorate in bio-engineering at Ghent University, Belgium under the supervision of Willy Verstraete. Subsequently, he began his postdoctoral research on bio-electrochemical systems with Korneel Rabaey before joining David Sedlak's research group at Berkeley.
His research interests include 1) removal and recovery of metals from waste streams using bio-metallurgy 2) wastewater treatment using biogenic nanoparticles as catalysts and 3) microbial electrochemical technology for metal recovery and contaminant removal.
Host: Astani CEE Department
Location: Kaprielian Hall (KAP) - 209
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Cassie Cremeans
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EE Seminar: Robust System Design
Thu, Apr 03, 2014 @ 10:30 AM - 12:00 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Dr. Yanjing Li, Research Scientist, Intel Labs
Talk Title: Robust System Design
Abstract: Malfunctions in electronic systems can have major consequences ranging from loss of data and services, to financial
and productivity losses, or even loss of human life. Such impacts continue to increase as systems become more
complex, interconnected, and pervasive. Hardware failures are especially a growing concern because:
1. Existing test and validation methods barely cope with today’s complexity. New techniques will be essential to
minimize the effects of defects and design flaws.
2. For coming generations of silicon technologies, several failure mechanisms that were largely benign in the
past are now becoming visible at the system level. A large class of future systems will require tolerance of hardware
errors during their operation.
Robust system design is required to ensure that future electronic systems, from supercomputers all the way to
embedded systems, perform correctly despite rising levels of complexity and disturbances. Traditional fault‐tolerant
computing techniques are generally very expensive, and often inadequate, for this purpose. I will present two
techniques that are essential for robust system design:
1. A new online self‐test and diagnostics technique, called CASP, which enables a system to test itself thoroughly
during normal operation to quickly detect and localize hardware failures. CASP is very thorough with respect to a
wide variety of test coverage metrics (96‐99.5%) while incurring only 1% area and power costs, and 3% performance
cost. In contrast, existing techniques suffer from low coverage (e.g., 70%), high area costs (e.g., 20%), or significant
performance penalties (e.g., 30%) including possible system unresponsiveness.
2. A new self‐repair technique to keep the system functioning correctly even in the presence of hardware failures.
Unlike naïve redundancy with very high (20%) area costs, this technique enables thorough self‐repair with only 7.5%
area impact, 3% power impact, and 0‐5% performance impact.
A key aspect of the approach to these techniques is the orchestration across multiple abstraction layers: physical
design, architecture, and system software. I will demonstrate the effectiveness and practicality of these techniques
using results from the industrial OpenSPARC T2 multi‐core design and the Intel Core i7 hardware platform. I will also
share recent experiences in implementing these techniques in the latest Intel designs.
Biography: Yanjing Li is a research scientist at Intel Labs and a visiting scholar at Stanford University. She received her Ph.D. in
Electrical Engineering from Stanford University. Her research interests include robust system design, energy‐efficient
systems, system validation and test, computer architecture, and system software. Dr. Li received the European Design
and Automation Association Outstanding Dissertation Award, the IEEE International Test Conference Best Student
Paper Award, and the IEEE VLSI Test Symposium Best Paper Award for novel research on robust system design, and
two Intel Divisional Recognition Awards for mobile processor designs that are being adopted by product groups at
Intel.
Host: Professor Murali Annavaram
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 248
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Janice Thompson
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Lyman L. Handy Colloquia: The Design of Nanoscale Therapeutics and Nanostructured Materials
Thu, Apr 03, 2014 @ 12:45 PM - 01:50 PM
Mork Family Department of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Ravi Kane,
Talk Title: The Design of Nanoscale Therapeutics and Nanostructured Materials
Series: Lyman L. Handy Colloquia
Host: Prof. Gupta
Location: James H. Zumberge Hall Of Science (ZHS) - 159
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Ryan Choi
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EE-EP Seminar - Sam Emaminejad
Thu, Apr 03, 2014 @ 02:00 PM - 03:30 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Sam Emaminejad, Stanford University
Talk Title: Detection and Actuation at Micro- and Nanoscales: Emerging Biomarker Sensors for Personalized Medicine
Abstract: Personalized medicine is transforming the field of clinical diagnosis. Unlike traditional diagnostic methods that have been reactive and dependent on patient’s apparent symptoms, personalized medicine relies on biomarkers to provide predictive and preemptive care with customized and more effective drug and therapy selection. Informative biomarkers include genes, proteins, and cells whose abundance in human samples are indicative of patient health. Detection of such micro- and nanoscale biomarkers requires biosensors that are equipped with actuation and sensing capabilities at length scales comparable to the size of these bioparticles. To this end, we exploit advanced micro- and nanofabrication techniques and combine high throughput microfluidic and electronic technologies to develop low-cost integrated biosensors geared toward point-of-care diagnostic applications.
In this talk, I will discuss parameters such as multiplexing, sensitivity, and specificity that govern the performance of biosensors. In relation to these parameters, I will present three platforms in which we have demonstrated actuation and sensing of bioparticles on both the micro- and nanoscales, using novel electronic solutions that enable point-of-care diagnosis. The first platform is a multiplexed protein detection system that is realized through enhancing dielectrophoresis force by two orders of magnitude to overcome protein-protein interactions. Next, we will demonstrate a novel contactless impedance sensing scheme to perform low-cost cytometry in whole blood. In the third platform, we will present a sample preparation system for delivery of proteins, with controlled orientation, purified from a complex biological sample to the surface of a quantum tunneling-based biosensor. I will conclude my talk with a discussion of future research directions which prelude my long term vision of developing wearable diagnostic devices for real-time biomarker monitoring.
Biography: Sam Emaminejad received his BASc (2009) and MS (2011) degrees in Electrical Engineering from the University of Waterloo and Stanford University, respectively. He is currently pursuing his PhD in Electrical Engineering at Stanford University, where he is working toward his thesis at the Stanford Genome Technology Center and Stanford School of Medicine. His research is focused on exploiting micro- and nanotechnologies to develop low-cost and integrated biosensing and bioeletronics platforms for personalized medicine applications. Sam has previously worked as an ASIC and Analog Designer in semiconductor companies such as STMicroelectronics and Analog Devices. Sam was awarded Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC) scholarship and was the recipient of Best Paper Award at the IEEE Sensors conference in 2013.
Host: EE-Electrophysics
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 132
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Marilyn Poplawski
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CS Student Colloquium: Zhenzhen Gao - City-Scale Aerial LiDAR Point Cloud Visualization
Thu, Apr 03, 2014 @ 04:00 PM - 05:00 PM
Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Zhenzhen Gao, USC
Talk Title: City-Scale Aerial LiDAR Point Cloud Visualization
Series: Student Seminar Series
Abstract: Aerial LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) is cost-effective in acquiring terrain and urban information by mounting a downward-scanning laser on a low-flying aircraft. It produces huge volumes of unconnected 3D points. This thesis focuses on the interactive visualization of aerial LiDAR point clouds of cities, which is applicable to a number of areas including virtual tourism, security, land management and urban planning.
A framework needs to address several challenges in order to deliver useful visualizations of aerial LiDAR cities. Firstly, the data is 2.5D, in that the sensor is only able to capture dense details of the surfaces facing it, leaving few samples on vertical building walls. Secondly, the data often suffers from noise and under-sampling. Finally, the large size of the data can easily exceed the memory capacity of a computer system.
This thesis first introduces a visually-complete rendering framework for aerial LiDAR cities. By inferring classification information, building walls and occluded ground areas under tree canopies are completed either through pre-processing point cloud augmentation or through online procedural geometry generation. A multi-resolution out-of-core strategy and GPU-accelerated rendering enable interactive visualization of virtually unlimited size data. With adding only a slight overhead to existing point-based approaches, the framework provides comparable quality to visualizations of off-line pre-computation of 3D polygonal models.
The thesis then presents a scalable out-of-core algorithm for mapping colors from aerial oblique imagery to city-scale aerial LiDAR points. Without intensive processing of points, colors are mapped via a modified visibility pass of GPU splatting, and a weighting scheme leveraging image resolution and surface orientation.
To alleviate visual artifacts caused by noise and under-sampling, the thesis shows an off-line point cloud refinement algorithm. By explicitly regularizing building boundary points, the algorithm can effectively remove noise, fill gaps, and preserve and enhance both normal and position discontinuous features for piece-wise smoothing buildings with arbitrary shape and complexity.
Finally, the thesis introduces a new multi-resolution rendering framework that supports real-time refinement of aerial LiDAR cities. Without complex computation and without user interference, simply based on curvature analysis of points of uniform sized spatial partitions, hierarchical hybrid structures are constructed indicating whether to represent a partition as point or polygon. With the help of such structures, both rendering and refinement are dynamically adaptive to views and curvatures. Compared to visually-complete rendering, the new framework is able to deliver comparable visual quality with less than 8\% increase in pre-processing time and 2-5 times higher rendering frame-rates. Experiments on several cities show that the refinement improves rendering quality for large magnification under real-time constraint.
Host: CS PHD Committee
Location: Henry Salvatori Computer Science Center (SAL) - 101
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Assistant to CS chair
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An Evening with Aimee Bender
Thu, Apr 03, 2014 @ 07:30 PM - 09:30 PM
USC Viterbi School of Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Aimee Bender, Acclaimed Author and Professor of English at USC
Talk Title: An Evening with Aimee Bender
Series: The Provost's Writers Series
Abstract: RSVP TO: http://web-app.usc.edu/ws/eo2/calendar/113/event/903818
The Provostââ¬â¢s Writers Series highlights the extraordinary talents of USC authors. Throughout the year, Provost Elizabeth Garrett will host four evenings featuring USC faculty, who will read from and discuss their recent publications. The series will provide opportunities for students and the community to engage with USC authors, learn about the incredible diversity of their work and celebrate the written word.
Aimee Bender is a professor of English at USC. Her surreal, playful stories read like modern fairy tales. Bender finds the mythic in the mundane, illuminating contemporary life from unexpected angles. Her stories ââ¬Åintroduce the world to honest, inspiring, brutal and beautiful peopleââ¬Â (MSNBC). In a magical evening, Bender will read from her work and engage in a conversation with Brighde Mullins, director of the Master of Professional Writing Program at USC.
Bender is the author of several books, including the best-selling novel The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake and the New York Times Notable Book The Girl in the Flammable Skirt. Benderââ¬â¢s latest book, The Color Master, is a collection of short stories. Her short fiction has been published in Granta, Harperââ¬â¢s, The Paris Review, McSweeneyââ¬â¢s, Tin House and other publications, as well as heard on NPRââ¬â¢s This American Life.
Host: Provost Elizabeth Garrett
More Info: http://web-app.usc.edu/ws/eo2/calendar/113/event/903818
Location: Edward L. Doheny Jr. Memorial Library (DML) - Friends of the USC Libraries Lecture Hall
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Visions and Voices
Event Link: http://web-app.usc.edu/ws/eo2/calendar/113/event/903818
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Six Sigma Black Belt
Fri, Apr 04, 2014 @ 09:00 AM - 05:00 PM
Executive Education
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: TBA,
Talk Title: Six Sigma Black Belt
Abstract: Course Overview
This course teaches you the advanced problem-solving skills you'll need in order to measure a process, analyze the results, develop process improvements and quantify the resulting savings. Project assignments between sessions require you to apply what you've learned. This course is presented in the classroom in three five-day sessions over a three-month period.
Learn the advanced problem-solving skills you need to implement the principles, practices and techniques of Six Sigma to maximize performance and cost reductions in your organization. During this three-week practitioner course, you will learn how to measure a process, analyze the results, develop process improvements and quantify the resulting savings. You will be required to complete a project demonstrating mastery of appropriate analytical methods and pass an examination to earn IIE's Six Sigma Black Belt Certificate.This practitioner course for Six Sigma implementation provides extensive coverage of the Six Sigma process as well as intensive exposure to the key analytical tools associated with Six Sigma, including project management, team skills, cost analysis, FMEA, basic statistics, inferential statistics, sampling, goodness of fit testing, regression and correlation analysis, reliability, design of experiments, statistical process control, measurement systems analysis and simulation. Computer applications are emphasized.
NOTE: Participants must bring a laptop computer running Microsoft Office to the seminar.
Course Topics
* Business process management
* Computer applications
* Design of experiments (DOE)
* Design for Six Sigma (DFSS)
* DMAIIC
* Enterprisewide deployment
* Lean enterprise
* Project management
* Regression and correlation modeling
* Statistical methods and sampling
* Statistical process control
* Team processes
Benefits
Upon completion of this course, you will be able to:
* Analyze process data using comprehensive statistical methods
* Control the process to assure that improvements are used and the benefits verified
* Define an opportunity for improving customer satisfaction
* Implement the recommended improvements
* Improve existing processes by reducing variation
* Measure process characteristics that are critical to quality
Who Should Attend
* VPs, COOs, CEOs
* Employees new to a managerial position
* Employees preparing to make the transition to managerial roles
* Current managers wanting to hone leadership skills
* Anyone interested in implementing Lean or Six Sigma in their organization
Program Fees
On-Campus Participants: $7,245
Includes continental breakfasts, lunch and all course materials. The fee does not include hotel accommodations or transportation.
Online Participant with Live Session Interactivity: $7,245
Includes attendee access codes for live call-in or chat capabilities during class sessions. Also includes all course and lecture materials available for live stream or download.
Reduced Pricing:
Institute of Industrial Engineers (IIE): Reduced pricing is available for members of IIE. Please contact professional@gapp.usc.edu for further information.
Trojan Family: USC alumni, current students, faculty, and staff receive 10% reduced pricing on registration.
Boeing: Boeing employees receive 20% off registration fees (please use Boeing email address when registering).
Location
Two course delivery options are available for participants, on-campus and online with interactivity:
On-Campus Course is held in state-of-the-art facilities on the University of Southern California campus, located in downtown Los Angeles. Participants attending on-campus will have the option to commute to the course or stay at one of the many hotels located in the area. For travel information, please visit our Travel section.
Overview of on-campus option:
* The ability to interact with faculty and peers in-person.
* Access to hard copy course materials.
* Ability to logon and view archived course information - up to 7 days after the course has been offered. This includes course documents and streaming video of the lectures.
* If there is a conflict during any on-campus course dates, on-campus participants can elect to be an online/interactive student.
* Parking, refreshments and lunch are provided for on-campus participants unless otherwise specified.
Online (Interactivity) Course delivery is completely online and real-time, enabling interaction with the instructor and fellow participants. Participants have the flexibility of completing the course from a distance utilizing USC's Distance Education Network technology. Students are required to be online for the entirety of each day's session.
Overview of online (interactive):
* Virtually participate in the course live with the ability to either ask questions or chat questions to the entire class.
* WebEx technologies provide the option to call into the class and view the entire lecture/materials on a personal computer, or to participate on a computer without having to utilize a phone line.
* Ability to logon and view archived course information up to 7 days after the course has been offered. This includes course documents and streaming video of the lectures.
Continuing Education Units
CEUs: 10.5 (CEUs provided by request only)
USC Viterbi School of Engineering Certificate of Participation is awarded to all participants upon successful completion of course.
Upon completion, participants will also receive their Institute of Industrial Engineers certification in Six Sigma Black Belt.
Host: Corporate and Professional Programs
More Info: http://gapp.usc.edu/professional-programs/short-courses/industrial%26systems/six-sigma-black-belt
Audiences: Registered Attendees
Contact: Viterbi Professional Programs
Event Link: http://gapp.usc.edu/professional-programs/short-courses/industrial%26systems/six-sigma-black-belt
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Manifold Constrained Acoustic Modeling for Automatic Speech Recognition
Fri, Apr 04, 2014 @ 10:00 AM - 11:00 AM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Richard Rose, McGill University
Talk Title: Manifold Constrained Acoustic Modeling for Automatic Speech Recognition
Abstract: This presentation investigates the application of manifold learning approaches to automatic speech recognition (ASR). All of the approaches considered rely on very high dimensional feature representations for speech while at the same time assuming that speech features are constrained to lie on a low dimensional embedded manifold. Discriminative manifold based linear projections are investigated as dimensionality reducing feature space transformations. These techniques attempt to preserve local within-class relationships along a nonlinear manifold while maximizing separability between classes. The ASR word error rates obtained from these techniques are compared to those obtained using more well known discriminative dimensionality reducing linear transformations on multiple speech in noise tasks. The high computational complexity associated with computing the Laplacian matrices for these techniques is reduced by an order of magnitude through the use of locality sensitive hashing (LSH) algorithms. As time permits, a discussion of additional applications of manifold based constraints to speech processing will be presented. These include manifold based constraints for regularizing training for speaker adaptation transformations, regularized least squares classifiers for spoken term detection, and manifold regularization for training deep neural networks.
Biography: Richard Rose is an Associate Professor and Graduate Program Director of Electrical and Computer Engineering at McGill University in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. His major area of research is in speech and language processing. His recent research contributions have been in acoustic modeling for speech recognition, computer aided human language translation, and computer aided speech therapy. Over his career, he has published over 130 articles in refereed international journals and conference proceedings. He has served as Adjunct Research Scientist at the Human Language Technology Center of Excellence in Baltimore and as Adjunct Professor of ECE at Johns Hopkins University. Prof. Rose is an IEEE Fellow. Before coming to McGill in 2004, Prof. Rose was a senior member of technical staff at AT&T Labs Research where he contributed to AT&T's speech enabled services and was inventor or co-inventor on twelve patents. His professional service has included General Chair of the IEEE Automatic Speech Recognition and Understanding Workshop, membership in the IEEE Speech Technical Committee, elected membership on the IEEE Signal Processing Society Board of Governors, associate editor of the IEEE Transactions on Speech and Audio Processing, associate editor of the IEEE Transactions on Audio, Speech, and Language Processing, and founding editor of the IEEE Speech Technical Committee Newsletter. Prof. Rose is a member of Tau Beta Pi, Eta Kappa Nu,
and Phi Kappa Phi.
Host: Prof. Shrikanth Narayanan & Alexandros Potamianos
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 132
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Talyia Veal
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AI SEMINAR
Fri, Apr 04, 2014 @ 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Information Sciences Institute
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Laila Sakr , University of Southern Californiaââ¬â¢s School of Cinematic Arts
Talk Title: /sentiment analysis_fail
Series: AISeminar
Abstract: Abstract:This presentation traces the evolution of a digital archive to a machine learning, knowledge management system. R-Shief.org houses four data collections, current search engine (Kal3a), Arab Smart Engine, interactive visualizers, and index. In this talk, I will discuss the challenges to normalize uneven data inputs into one system or database. This requires building a network where each data point has its position and function in relation to all the other data points. When the size, speed, and variety of the data reaches a threshold, new, creative methods are developed to keep all the pieces working together. It is in the relationality of the data to each other where machine learning can take place and programs can be built to be ââ¬Åsmart.ââ¬Â By 2014, I would say that the methodological shift to using big data in textual analysis in the humanities has meant a shift from big data to smart data--or big, smart data. will provide a vision of a body of work at the intersection of technology, media arts, and politics. The data visualizations, social media analytics, interactive media, VJ performances, and computational art showcased are poised between multiple worlds (art/science, culture/technology, east/west, macro/micro, history/real-time, theory/practice, scholarship/activism).
Biography: Bio: Laila Shereen Sakr is VJ Um Amel online. She is a PhD candidate in Media Arts + Practice at the University of Southern Californiaââ¬â¢s School of Cinematic Arts and founder of the digital lab, R-Shief, Inc. With a background in poetry and graphic design, her current practices include digital media arts, visualization, and performance. Her work archives and maps the recent Arab uprisings and Occupy movements through semantic analysis of social media feeds in Arabic, Persian, French, English, Spanish, German. As a VJ, she uses data visualization and live cinema performance to demonstrate how embodied habits of communication are expressed virtually, and to understand how communities use technology to design their own narratives and worlds. She has exhibited at the San Francisco MoMA, National Gallery of Art in Jordan, Camera Austria, Cultura Digital in Brazil, DC Fridge Art Gallery, among other venues. Her work has also been published in Middle East Critique, Parsonââ¬â¢s Journal for Information Mapping, ThoughtMesh, Jadaliyya, and in an edited volume on Mediating the Arab Uprisings. She holds an M.F.A. in Digital Arts and New Media from University of California, Santa Cruz and an M.A. in Arab Studies from Georgetown University. Recent reviews appear in The Wall Street Journal, Science, Art Territories, Fast Company, Digital Media and Learning, Egypt Independent, and The Creators Project. http://vjumamel.com
Caption for image: Tweet World: A 3D Game in Unity transforms a 2D data visualization of 500,000 tweets on #Syria into a 3D immersive environment
Host: Greg Ver Steeg
Webcast: http://webcasterms1.isi.edu/mediasite/SilverlightPlayer/Default.aspx?peid=be33305d8976432d85f08102899de2ca1dLocation: Information Science Institute (ISI) - 1135
WebCast Link: http://webcasterms1.isi.edu/mediasite/SilverlightPlayer/Default.aspx?peid=be33305d8976432d85f08102899de2ca1d
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Alma Nava / Information Sciences Institute
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The W.V.T. Rusch Engineering Honors Colloquim
Fri, Apr 04, 2014 @ 01:00 PM - 01:50 PM
USC Viterbi School of Engineering, Viterbi School of Engineering Student Affairs
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Jonathan Grinblat, Systems Engineer, Jet Propulsion Laboratory
Talk Title: Designing the Curiosity Rover: Challenges, Lessons, and Science
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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Integrated Systems Seminar Series - Spring 2014
Fri, Apr 04, 2014 @ 03:30 PM - 05:00 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Mircea Stan, University of Virginia
Talk Title: Breaking 3D Power Delivery Walls Using Voltage Stacking
Series: Integrated Systems Seminar Series
Abstract: The power delivery walls include: power density (power consumption density increases beyond the heat dissipation capabilities of the technology), power and ground power delivery pins (chip power consumption requires increasing numbers of pins), 3DIC power density (physical stacking in the third dimension exacerbates the two dimensional explosion), on chip power regulation efficiency (relatively poor efficiencies achievable with on chip regulators limit the effectiveness of many low power schemes). In this talk we demonstrate how voltage stacking is a comprehensive method for addressing the power delivery walls above, with special emphasis on 3DIC.
Biography: Mircea R. Stan received the Ph.D. and M.S. degrees in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and the Diploma in Electronics and Communications from "Politechnica" University in Bucharest, Romania. Since 1996 he has been with the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Virginia, where he is now a professor. Prof. Stan is teaching and doing research in the areas of high performance, low power VLSI, temperature aware
circuits and architecture, embedded systems, and nanoelectronics. He has more than 8 years of industrial experience and 16 years of academic experience, has been a visiting faculty at UC Berkeley in 2004-2005, at IBM in 2000, and at Intel in 2002 and 1999. He has received the NSF CAREER award in 1997 and was a coauthor on best paper awards at ISQED 2008, GLSVLSI 2006, ISCA 2003 and SHAMAN
2002. He was the chair of the VLSI Systems and Applications Technical Committee (VSATC) of IEEE CAS in 2005-2007, general chair for ISLPED 2006 and GLSVLSI 2004, TPC chair for NanoNets 2007 and ISLPED 2005 and a Distinguished Lecturer for IEEE SSCS in 2007-2008, and for IEEE CAS in 2004-2005.
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 04, 2014 @ 04:00 PM - 05:00 PM
Sonny Astani Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Preetham Aghalaya Manjunatha & Miguel Hernandez Garcia, Astani CEE Ph.D. Students
Talk Title: Analytical and Experimental Studies into Robots Assisted Condition Assessment/ Development of Data-based Probabilistic Model of Nonlinear Joints
Abstract:
Location: John Stauffer Science Lecture Hall (SLH) - 102
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Evangeline Reyes
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Seminars in Biomedical Engineering
Mon, Apr 07, 2014 @ 12:30 PM - 01:50 PM
Alfred E. Mann Department of Biomedical Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Eikenberry, Steffen, BME PhD Candidate & Grodins Graduate Research Award Winner
Talk Title: A hierarchy of mathematical models for the immune response in sepsis
Host: David D'Argenio
Location: Olin Hall of Engineering (OHE) - 132
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Mischalgrace Diasanta
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Engineering, Neuroscience & Health (ENR)
Mon, Apr 07, 2014 @ 04:00 PM - 05:00 PM
Alfred E. Mann Department of Biomedical Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Jonas Buchli, ETH, Zurich, Switzerland
Talk Title: TBA
Series: Engineering, Neuroscience & Health (ENH Seminars)
Biography: http://www.adrl.ethz.ch/doku.php
Host: Francisco Valero-Cuevas
More Info: Refreshments will be served from 3.30 to 4 pm.
Webcast: http://capture.usc.edu/Mediasite/Catalog/Full/946350f1ca8440e7b867e16adba01e4e21/?state=xJE9EJIqlAdw4AAliKfpLocation: Hedco Neurosciences Building (HNB) - 100
WebCast Link: http://capture.usc.edu/Mediasite/Catalog/Full/946350f1ca8440e7b867e16adba01e4e21/?state=xJE9EJIqlAdw4AAliKfp
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Mischalgrace Diasanta
Event Link: Refreshments will be served from 3.30 to 4 pm.
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Epstein Institute / ISE 651 Seminar Series
Tue, Apr 08, 2014 @ 03:30 PM - 04:50 PM
Daniel J. Epstein Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Mengdi Wang, Department of Operations Research and Financial Engineering, Princeton University
Talk Title: "Stochastic Methods for Convex Optimization with 'Difficult' Constraints"
Abstract: Convex optimization problems involving large-scale data or expected values are challenging, especially when these difficulties are associated with the constraint set. We propose random algorithms for such problems, and focus on special structures that lend themselves to sampling, such as when the constraint is the intersection of many simpler sets, involves a system of inequalities, or involves expected values, and/or the objective function is an expected value, etc. We propose a class of new methods that combine elements of successive projection, stochastic gradient descent and proximal point algorithm. This class of methods also contain as special cases many known algorithms. We use a unified analytic framework to prove their almost sure convergence and the rate of convergence. Our framework allows the random algorithms to be applied with various sampling schemes (i.i.d, Markov, sequential, etc), which are suitable for applications involving distributed implementation, large data set, computing equilibriums, or statistical learning.
TUESDAY, APRIL 8, 2014
VON KLEINSMID CENTER (VKC) ROOM 100
3:30 - 4:50 PM
Biography: Mengdi Wang is currently an assistant professor at the Department of Operations Research and Financial Engineering, Princeton University. She received her PhD in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from MIT in 2013. Her research interests include: large scale optimization, stochastic optimization algorithms, stochastic decision making, approximate dynamic programming, applications in statistical learning and finance, etc.
Host: Daniel J. Epstein Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering
More Information: Seminar-Wang_Mengdi.doc
Location: Von Kleinsmid Center For International & Public Affairs (VKC) - Room 100
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Georgia Lum
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CS Colloquium: Abhishek Jain (MIT CSAIL): Computing on Private Data
Tue, Apr 08, 2014 @ 04:00 PM - 05:30 PM
Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Abhishek Jain, MIT CSAIL
Talk Title: Computing on Private Data
Series: CS Colloquium
Abstract: THIS TALK WILL BE BROADCAST / STREAMING VIA THE FOLLOWING LINK. (Right click-open link in new tab or window.)
Today, end users generate large volumes of private data, some of which may be stored on the cloud in an encrypted form. The need to perform computation on this data to extract meaningful information has become ubiquitous.
The following fundamental questions arise in this setting: Can the cloud compute on the encrypted data of multiple users without knowing their secret keys? What functions can be computed in this manner? What if the users are mutually distrustful?
My research provides the first positive resolution of these questions. In this talk I will describe these new results and my other interests.
Biography: Abhishek Jain is currently a postdoctoral researcher in the Cryptography and Information Security Group at MIT CSAIL and Boston University. He received his PhD in Computer Science from UCLA in 2012 where he was the recipient of the Symantec Outstanding Graduate Student Research award. Abhishek's research interests are in cryptography and security, and related areas of theoretical computer science.
Host: Ming-Deh Huang
Location: Henry Salvatori Computer Science Center (SAL) - 101
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Assistant to CS chair
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Astani CEE Department Seminar
Wed, Apr 09, 2014 @ 10:00 AM - 11:00 AM
Sonny Astani Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Adam Smith, University of Michigan
Talk Title: Low-Temperature Anaerobic Membrane Bioreactor for Energy Recovery from Domestic Wastewater
Abstract: Resource recovery from used water or wastewater is a key strategy to improve the sustainability of water management. Anaerobic biotechnologies such as anaerobic membrane bioreactors (AnMBRs) are emerging as one option to recover energy during domestic wastewater treatment. In comparison to conventional treatment, AnMBR treatment generates biogas directly from wastewater, does not require energy intensive aeration, and produces a fraction of the residuals. However, AnMBR technology is still in development and widespread implementation requires improvements in treatment performance at low temperatures, low-energy membrane fouling control, and recovery of effluent dissolved methane. This presentation will show how AnMBR treatment at low temperatures can be improved through promotion of a biologically active membrane biofilm. The presentation will further demonstrate that life cycle evaluation of AnMBRs with consideration for fouling control energy demands and global warming potential associated with effluent dissolved methane can be used to set future design and operational targets for implementation of AnMBRs in domestic wastewater treatment.
Biography: Adam Smith is a Ph.D. candidate co-advised by Lutgarde Raskin and Steven Skerlos in Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Michigan. He received his M.S.E. from the University of Michigan and B.S. from Marquette University. His research interests include resource recovery during wastewater treatment, microbial syntrophy in anaerobic systems, and implications of low-temperatures on anaerobic microbial communities. Adamââ¬â¢s research efforts at the University of Michigan have incorporated process engineering, microbial ecology, and sustainability assessment to study the performance of anaerobic membrane bioreactors for domestic wastewater treatment at psychrophilic temperatures.
Host: Astani CEE Department
Location: Kaprielian Hall (KAP) - 209
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Cassie Cremeans
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2014 Spring Ph.D. Mentoring Panel
Wed, Apr 09, 2014 @ 12:00 PM - 02:03 PM
Viterbi School of Engineering Doctoral Programs
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Panel, USC Viterbi Faculty
Talk Title: "Establishing and Building Professional Networks"
Abstract: Explore the roles of conferences and professional societies. In addition to creating a strong network within your university. A mentoring panel series to encourage PhD students and Postdocs to pursue a rewarding career, in academics and research. Distinguished faculty will discuss their academic paths and those of their PhD students successfully placed in university positions in the US and abroad.
Dr. James Moore will moderate a panel of faculty experts who will discuss effective ways to build and maintain a professional network to assist and enrich your academic or professional career.
Lunch will be served. Must RSVP. Please see event website.
Host: Dr. James Moore
More Info: https://gapp.usc.edu/spring-2014-phd-mentoring-panel
Location: Seeley Wintersmith Mudd Memorial Hall (of Philosophy) (MHP) - 101
Audiences: Ph.D. and Postdoctoral
Contact: Tracy Charles
Event Link: https://gapp.usc.edu/spring-2014-phd-mentoring-panel
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Examples of Visual Computing Research at Disney Research Zurich
Wed, Apr 09, 2014 @ 03:30 PM - 04:30 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Dr. Aljoà ¡a SmoliÃâ¡ , Disney Research, Zurich
Talk Title: Examples of Visual Computing Research at Disney Research Zurich
Abstract: Abstract: Disney Research Zurich is a research lab of The Walt Disney Company closely associated with the Computer Graphics Lab of ETH Zurich. It performs applied research on highest scientific level. Visual computing is one of the key research areas in this context, which will be highlighted in this talk by example projects from the past 5 years. Stereoscopic 3D and beyond was traditionally a strong focus from capture to display, including projects on computational stereo camera systems, disparity mapping, 2D-to-3D conversion, image domain warping, warp coding, and stereo-to-multiview conversion. Then approaches for video volume processing for optical flow, disparity estimation, video colorization, or in general, spatio-temporal data diffusion in video will be presented. And extension of these concepts will be spatio-temporal video compositing on video volumes. Finally, an approach for automated image aesthetics will close the talk.
Biography: Dr. Aljoà ¡a SmoliÃâ¡ joined Disney Research Zurich, Switzerland in 2009, as Senior Research Scientist and Head of the ââ¬ÅAdvanced Video Technologyââ¬Â group. Before he was Scientific Project Manager at the Fraunhofer Institute for Telecommunications, Heinrich-Hertz-Institut (HHI), Berlin, also heading a research group. He has been involved in several national and international research projects, where he conducted research in various fields of video processing and visual computing, and published more than 100 referred papers in these fields. He received the Dipl.-Ing. Degree in Electrical Engineering from the Technical University of Berlin, Germany in 1996, and the Dr.-Ing. Degree in Electrical Engineering and Information Technology from Aachen University of Technology (RWTH), Germany, in 2001. Dr. Smolic received the ââ¬ÅRudolf-Urtlel-Awardââ¬Â of the German Society for Technology in TV and Cinema (FKTG) for his dissertation in 2002. He is Area Editor for Signal Processing: Image Communication and served as Guest Editor for the Proceedings of the IEEE, IEEE Transactions on CSVT, IEEE Signal Processing Magazine, and other scientific journals. He chaired the MPEG ad hoc group on 3DAV pioneering standards for 3D video. In this context he also served as one of the Editors of the Multi-view Video Coding (MVC) standard. Since many years he is teaching full lecture courses on Multimedia Communications and other topics, now at ETH Zurich
Host: Prof. Antonio Ortega
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - EEB 248
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Talyia Veal
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Sensor Networks for Sustainable Infrastructures
Thu, Apr 10, 2014 @ 10:00 AM - 11:00 AM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Anna Scaglione, UC Davis
Talk Title: Sensor Networks for Sustainable Infrastructures
Abstract: Infrastructures for energy, transportation, water are serving a growing population, increasingly clustering around urban centers. Information systems made for utilizing more efficiently these infrastructure are crucial to allow a more sustainable future. The challenge is moving from legacy systems and operations that are robust, but slow and inflexible, to systems that are controlled based on real time data analytics which allow to maximize the social benefit earned from their usage. Communication, computation and database storage needs will grow and it is essential to engineer these systems to scale, be secure and resilient. This talk considers models for information sharing, computation and scheduling tasks that can support this vision of pervasive information and intelligent automation. We will discuss progress made on basic decentralizing inference primitives via mull-agent learning algorithms for state estimation and subspace tracking, that can be used to build the distributed intelligence needed for monitoring these infrastructure in a resilient and scalable fashion. We will then discuss how to control anonymously large populations of appliances, to have flexible electricity consumption with scalable information and computation models.
Biography: Anna Scaglione is a Professor in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at UC Davis, and held Associate and Assistant Professor positions before at Cornell University (2001-2008) and at the University of New Mexico (2000-2001). She is a Fellow of the IEEE, and co-recipient of the 2000 IEEE Signal Processing Transactions Best Paper Award, Ellersick Best Paper Award (MILCOM 2005), the 2013 IEEE Donald G. Fink Prize Paper Award and the 2013 IEEE Signal Processing Society Young Author best paper award, with her student. She held several editorial and technical chair positions, including that of Editor in Chief of the IEEE Signal Processing Letters from 2012-2013. She is currently in the Board of Governor of the Signal Processing Society. Her expertise is in the broad area of signal processing for communication systems, networks and, more recently, power systems. Her current research focuses on studying and enabling decentralized learning and signal processing in networks of sensors and on sensor systems and networking models for demand side management and sustainable energy delivery.
Host: Urbashi Mitra, ubli@usc.edu, EEB 540, x04667
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 132
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Gerrielyn Ramos
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CS Colloquium: Nitin Agrawal (NEC Labs Princeton ) - Rethinking Data Abstractions for Mobile Apps
Thu, Apr 10, 2014 @ 11:00 AM - 12:20 PM
Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Nitin Agrawal, NEC Labs Princeton
Talk Title: Rethinking Data Abstractions for Mobile Apps
Series: CS Colloquium
Abstract: Mobile apps have radically changed the ways in which users store, interact, and share data. A crucial component, for building high-quality mobile apps, nowadays is the infrastructure for managing data â both locally on mobile devices and remotely through cloud-based services. In building such “data-centric” mobile apps, developers benefit from several abstractions available for local and remote I/O. In this talk, I will present evidence as to why existing data abstractions, for local storage, are counter-productive for performance, and for cloud sync, are insufficient for consistency, efficiency, and programmability. As part of our work we are rethinking the data abstractions that will empower app developers to write and deploy such apps with ease. I will present a novel data-management platform, Simba, which provides a powerful yet easy-to-use API for mobile data storage and sync. Using Simba, apps take significantly less effort to write, compared to commercially-available sync services like Dropbox, while being more efficient.
Biography: Nitin Agrawal works as a Researcher in the Storage Systems group at NEC Labs Princeton after graduating with a PhD from Wisconsin in 2009. His interests lie in distributed and mobile systems, operating systems, applied machine learning, and storage systems, and his recent research focuses on cloud infrastructure for data-centric mobile services. He has received Best Paper Awards at FAST 2009, FAST 2011, FAST 2012, and a top paper selection at FAST 2007. More details can be found at http://www.nec-labs.com/~nitin/
Host: Ramesh Govindan
Location: Henry Salvatori Computer Science Center (SAL) - 322
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Assistant to CS chair
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All Programmable SOC FPGA for Networking and Computing in Big Data Infrastructure
Thu, Apr 10, 2014 @ 03:00 PM - 04:00 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Dr. Ivo Bolsens, Xilinx
Talk Title: All Programmable SOC FPGA for Networking and Computing in Big Data Infrastructure
Abstract: Today's FPGAs have become 'All Programmable SOC Platforms' that integrate in one single device multi-core CPU's, programmable DSP functions, programmable IO and programmable logic, all immersed in a rich and configurable interconnect network. These programmable platform FPGA's allow for the implementation of heterogeneous multi-core architectures that combine traditional CPU's with application-specific processing cores and dedicated data transfer and storage functions. This is enabled by tools that guide designers during the partitioning and mapping of high-level specifications onto a combination of software running on embedded processors and hardware implemented in programmable logic. FPGAs are well placed to continue to benefit from Moore's law. Advances in process scaling will be augmented with new circuit and architectural improvements along with innovations in system-in-package technology to solve IO challenges and integrate heterogeneous technologies. These innovations will allow designers to build higher performance and lower power systems that optimally exploit the programmable FGPA architecture. As FPGA platforms continue to deliver more performance at lower cost and lower power, they are becoming the heart of embedded applications such as complex packet processing for networks with line rates of 400+ Gbps; high performance digital signal processing in novel wireless baseband and radio functions; and high flexibility to enable programmable networking and data storage functions in cloud infrastructure.
Biography: Ivo Bolsens is senior vice president and chief technology officer (CTO), with responsibility for advanced technology development, Xilinx research laboratories (XRL) and Xilinx university program (XUP). Bolsens came to Xilinx in June 2001 from the Belgium-based research center IMEC, where he was vice president of information and communication systems. His research included the development of knowledge-based verification for VLSI circuits, design of digital signal processing applications, and wireless communication terminals. He also headed the research on design technology for high-level synthesis of DSP hardware, HW/SW co-design and system-on-chip design. Bolsens holds a PhD in applied science and an MSEE from the Catholic University of Leuven in Belgium.
Host: Prof. Viktor Prasanna
More Info: https://bluejeans.com/710795997/browser
Webcast: https://bluejeans.com/710795997/browserLocation: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 132
WebCast Link: https://bluejeans.com/710795997/browser
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Annie Yu
Event Link: https://bluejeans.com/710795997/browser
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CS Colloquium: Aleksandra Korolova (Google) - Scalable Algorithms for Protecting User Privacy
Thu, Apr 10, 2014 @ 04:00 PM - 05:30 PM
Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Aleksandra Korolova, Google
Talk Title: Scalable Algorithms for Protecting User Privacy
Series: CS Colloquium
Abstract: THIS TALK WILL BE BROADCAST / STREAMING VIA THE FOLLOWING LINK. (Right click-open link in new tab or window.)
Ubiquitous use of the Internet and mobile technologies combined with dropping data storage and processing costs have enabled new forms of communications and data-driven innovations. However, they have also created unprecedented challenges for privacy, with companies, policy makers, and individuals struggling in their search for approaches that could enable innovation while avoiding privacy harms.
In this talk, I will present algorithmic and data-mining research that demonstrates how these seemingly conflicting goals may be achieved, even when the data being collected about individuals is constantly changing and expanding. I will first demonstrate that merely restricting data sharing is insufficient to protect privacy via a novel attack exploiting Facebook's ad targeting system to reveal users’ secrets. I will then present algorithms that enable useful search data releases and social advertising computations while provably protecting privacy. Finally, I will show how data mining techniques used to improve web search and advertising quality can be effectively applied towards improving privacy policies and building tools for safer user experiences.
Biography: Aleksandra Korolova is a research scientist at Google, where she works on developing and implementing approaches for privacy-preserving data mining and for data-driven understanding of user privacy preferences. Aleksandra received her Ph.D. in Computer Science from Stanford, where she was a Cisco Systems Stanford Graduate Fellow. Aleksandra's thesis, "Protecting Privacy when Mining and Sharing User Data", was awarded the Arthur L. Samuel Award for the best 2011-2012 CS Ph.D. thesis at Stanford, and her work on "Privacy Violations Using Microtargeted Ads" was a co-winner of the 2011 PET Award for Outstanding Research in Privacy Enhancing Technologies. Prior to joining Google, Aleksandra has interned at PARC, Facebook, Microsoft, and Yahoo! Research. She graduated Phi Beta Kappa from MIT with a B.S. degree in Mathematics with Computer Science.
Host: Shanghua Teng
Location: Henry Salvatori Computer Science Center (SAL) - 101
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Assistant to CS chair
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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
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Seminars in Biomedical Engineering
Mon, Apr 14, 2014 @ 11:30 PM - 01:50 PM
Alfred E. Mann Department of Biomedical Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Tejal Desai, Professor, Department Bioengineering and Therapeutic Sciences UCSF School of Pharmacy
Talk Title: Hierarchical Interfaces for Enhanced Therapeutic Delivery
Abstract: Efficient drug delivery remains an important challenge in medicine. Control of the temporal, spatial, and kinetic profile of drug delivery as well as improved ease of administration leading to increased patient compliance are some of the unmet needs of current drug administration. Advancements in the microelectronics industry have led to the creation of new micro and nanofabrication methods which can be readily applied to biocompatible materials. These developments lay the groundwork for novel design possibilities that can be used for creating drug delivery devices with a high level of control at the cellular and molecular scale. In this talk, I will discuss how the combination of modular components and hierarchical length scales onto a single device can be useful for therapeutic delivery. Examples include nanoporous thin films to deliver protein therapeutics and nanostructured devices for epithelial drug delivery. By creating discrete micro and nanoscale features, one can begin to interact with cell and tissue surfaces in a manner previously unattainable. These subtle interactions can modulate properties such as tight junction permeability and fibrosis. By gaining a better understanding of how small scale topographies can influence the biological microenvironment, these structures can be harnessed directly for therapeutic use. Micro and nanostructured materials can add functionality to current drug delivery platforms while becoming an enabling technology leading to new basic discoveries in the pharmaceutical and biological sciences.
Host: David D'Argenio
Location: Olin Hall of Engineering (OHE) - 132
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Mischalgrace Diasanta
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Six Sigma Green Belt for Process Improvement
Tue, Apr 15, 2014
Executive Education
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Talk Title: Six Sigma Green Belt for Process Improvement
Abstract: Learn how to integrate principles of business, statistics and engineering to achieve tangible results. Master the use of Six Sigma to quantify the critical quality issues in your company. Once the issues have been quantified, statistics can be applied to provide probabilities of success and failure. Six Sigma methods increase productivity and enhance quality. As a Six Sigma green belt, you will be equipped to support and champion a Six Sigma implementation in your organization. To earn the Six Sigma Green Belt Certificate, you will be required to pass the Institute of Industrial Engineer's green belt exam (administered on the final day of the course).
During this course you will have the opportunity to apply what you have learned to an actual issue you face in your organization. Prior seminar participants have reported significant savings from implementing their projects.
*A financial services organization saw $128,000 in cost savings per quarter when they reduced transaction processing rework
*A state agency reduced project cost over-runs by 28 percent
*A transportation company saved more than $875,000 per year in turnover costs by improving the employee communications process
*Reduced errors in a painting operation led to increased first pass acceptance and more than $197,000 in annual savings
*A Web developer increased annual profits by 10 percent by cutting cycle time
*A wave solder operation saw defects reduced by half and costs reduced by $60,000 per year
Host: Professional Programs
More Info: http://gapp.usc.edu/professional-programs/short-courses/industrial%2526systems/six-sigma-green-belt-process-improvement
Audiences: Registered Attendees
Contact: Viterbi Professional Programs
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Second USC/VSoE Symposium on the Futures of Robotics
Tue, Apr 15, 2014 @ 09:00 AM - 05:00 PM
Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Multiple, Multiple
Talk Title: Second USC / VSoE Symposium on the Futures of Robotics
Series: CS Symposium Series
Abstract: The second USC Symposium on the Futures of Robotics will be held on the USC campus (Davidson Conference Center [DCC] Club Suite AB) on April 15, 2014. The academic community is cordially invited. No registration is necessary.
The symposium is a day long set of talks by young- to mid-career roboticists breaking new ground in emerging areas in robotics and related fields.
This event will be held on:
Tuesday, April 15, 2014
9:00am - 5:00pm
Agenda
08:30 - 09:00 Breakfast and Greetings
09:00 - 09:10 Gaurav Sukhatme, Maja Matarić, Stefan Schaal, Nora Ayanian - Welcoming remarks
09:15 - 09:50 Andrea Thomaz, Georgia Institute of Technology
- "Social Robot Learning"
09:55 - 10:30 Julie Shah, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
- "Integrating Robots into Team-Oriented Environments"
10:35 - 10:50 Break
10:55 - 11:30 Stephanie Gil, CSAIL, MIT
- "Adaptive Communication Networks for Heterogeneous Teams of Robots"
11:35 - 12:10 M. Ani Hsieh, Drexel University
- "Control and Coordination of Robot Teams in Geophysical Flows: Exploiting the Environment for Prolonged Autonomy"
12:15 - 13:30 Lunch - University Club [By Invitation Only]
13:35 - 14:10 Cynthia Sung, CSAIL, MIT
- "Geometric Design of Print-and-Fold Robots via Composition"
14:15 - 14:50 Sonia Chernova, Worcester Polytechnic Institute
- "Crowds and Robots: Enabling Robots to Learn from Everyday People"
14:55 - 15:10 Break
15:15 - 15:55 Brenna Argall, Northwestern University
- "Turning Assistive Machines into Assistive Robots"
15:55 - 16:30 Anca Dragan, Carnegie Mellon University
- "A Mathematical Formalism for Legible Robot Motion"
16:35 - 16:40 Walk to labs
16:40 - 18:00 USC Robotics labs tours [Ronald Tutor Hall, 4th Floor]
18:00 - 18:30 Travel to dinner
18:30 - 22:00 Dinner (by Invitation only)
Perch [448 S Hill St, Los Angeles, CA, 90013, 213-802-1770]
Event Location
The Davidson Continuing Education Conference Center
University of Southern California, 3415 South Figueroa Street
Los Angeles, CA 90089-0871
Contact Us
Jacob Beal
Event Coordinator
jbeal@usc.edu
213-740-4498
Biography: More details, lecture abstracts and biographies can be found at the dedicated page here.
Host: Gaurav Sukhatme
More Info: http://www.cs.usc.edu/research/2nd-usc-symposium-futures-of-robotics.htm
More Information: ROBOTICS_Fullsheet.jpg
Location: Charlotte S. & Davre R. Davidson Continuing Education Conference Center (DCC) - Club AB
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Assistant to CS chair
Event Link: http://www.cs.usc.edu/research/2nd-usc-symposium-futures-of-robotics.htm
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CS Student Colloquium: Benjamin Ford - Adaptive Resource Allocation for Wildlife Protection against Illegal Poachers & Thanh H. Nguyen - Stop the Compartmentalization: Unified Robust Algorithms for Handling Uncertainties in Security Games
Tue, Apr 15, 2014 @ 04:00 PM - 05:30 PM
Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Benjamin Ford, Thanh H. Nguyen, USC CS
Talk Title: Benjamin Ford - Adaptive Resource Allocation for Wildlife Protection against Illegal Poachers & Thanh H. Nguyen - Stop the Compartmentalization: Unified Robust Algorithms for Handling Uncertainties in Security Games
Series: Student Seminar Series
Abstract: Benjamin Ford - Adaptive Resource Allocation for Wildlife Protection against Illegal Poachers
Abstract: Illegal poaching is an international problem that leads to the extinction of species and the destruction of ecosystems. As evidenced by dangerously dwindling populations of endangered species, existing anti-poaching mechanisms are insufficient. This paper introduces the Protection Assistant for Wildlife Security (PAWS) application - a joint deployment effort done with researchers at Uganda’s Queen Elizabeth National Park (QENP) with the goal of improving wildlife ranger patrols. While previous works have deployed applications with a game-theoretic approach (specifically Stackelberg Games) for counter-terrorism, wildlife crime is an important domain that promotes a wide range of new deployments. Additionally, this domain presents new research challenges and opportunities related to learning behavioral models from collected poaching data. In addressing these challenges, our first contribution is a behavioral model extension that captures the heterogeneity of poachers’ decision making processes. Second, we provide a novel framework, PAWS-Learn, that incrementally improves the behavioral model of the poacher population with more data. Third, we develop a new algorithm, PAWS-Adapt, that adaptively improves the resource allocation strategy against the learned model of poachers. Fourth, we demonstrate PAWS’s potential effectiveness when applied to patrols in QENP, where PAWS will be deployed.
Thanh H. Nguyen - Stop the Compartmentalization: Unified Robust Algorithms for Handling Uncertainties in Security Games
Given the real-world applications of Stackelberg security games (SSGs), addressing uncertainties in these games is a major challenge. Unfortunately, we lack any unified computational framework for handling uncertainties in SSGs. Current state-of-the-art has provided only compartmentalized robust algorithms that handle uncertainty exclusively either in the defender’s strategy or in adversary’s payoff or in the adversary’s rationality, leading to potential failures in real-world scenarios where a defender often faces multiple types of uncertainties. Furthermore, insights for improving performance are not leveraged across the compartments, leading to significant losses in quality or efficiency. In this paper, we provide the following main contributions: 1) we present the first unified framework for handling the uncertainties explored in SSGs; 2) based on this unified framework, we propose the first set of “unified” robust algorithms to address combinations of these uncertainties; 3) we introduce approximate scalable robust algorithms for handling these uncertainties that leverage insights across compartments; 4) we present experiments demonstrating solution quality and runtime advantages of our algorithms.
Host: CS PHD Committee
Location: 101
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Assistant to CS chair
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Six Sigma Green Belt for Process Improvement
Wed, Apr 16, 2014
Executive Education
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Talk Title: Six Sigma Green Belt for Process Improvement
Abstract: This seminar, an introductory course in Six Sigma, will give you a thorough understanding of Six Sigma and its focus on eliminating defects through fundamental process knowledge. Topics covered in addition to DMAIIC and Six Sigma philosophy include basic statistics, statistical process control, process capability, financial implications and root cause analysis. This seminar is offered both in the classroom and online.
Host: Professional Programs
More Info: http://gapp.usc.edu/professional-programs/short-courses/industrial%2526systems/six-sigma-green-belt-process-improvement
Audiences: Registered Attendees
Contact: Viterbi Professional Programs
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Six Sigma Green Belt for Process Improvement
Thu, Apr 17, 2014
Executive Education
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Talk Title: Six Sigma Green Belt for Process Improvement
Abstract: This seminar, an introductory course in Six Sigma, will give you a thorough understanding of Six Sigma and its focus on eliminating defects through fundamental process knowledge. Topics covered in addition to DMAIIC and Six Sigma philosophy include basic statistics, statistical process control, process capability, financial implications and root cause analysis. This seminar is offered both in the classroom and online.
Host: Professional Programs
More Info: http://gapp.usc.edu/professional-programs/short-courses/industrial%2526systems/six-sigma-green-belt-process-improvement
Audiences: Registered Attendees
Contact: Viterbi Professional Programs
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EE-Systems Seminar
Thu, Apr 17, 2014 @ 10:30 AM - 12:00 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Wonsun Ahn , Postdoctoral Research Scientist, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Talk Title: High-Performance JIT-Compiled Frameworks: Hardware/Compiler Co-Optimization
Abstract: JIT-compiled frameworks are gaining increasing use for their cross-platform portability, performance portability, and runtime adaptability. In particular, scripting languages such as JavaScript, Python, and R are gaining wide acceptance. In these emerging frameworks, there is great opportunity for performance improvement through hardware/compiler co-optimization. In this talk, I present a few novel techniques that I have developed to improve performance.
First, I show how the compiler can use Hardware Transactional Memory (HTM) support to enforce high-performance Sequential Consistency (SC) for programmability and security. The idea is to wrap large sections of code inside a transaction, and then optimize the code inside each transaction without concern for memory-consistency-model restrictions. The optimizations speculate that any violation of the memory model will not be seen by other threads; otherwise, the transaction is aborted. Using this approach, the compiler can even outperform current compilers by a significant margin by allowing optimization across synchronization boundaries.
Next, I also show how the compiler can use the same HTM support to perform alias speculation. The approach consists of performing optimizations assuming the alias relationships that are true most of the time, and using the hardware to detect when such relationships are found not to hold through runtime checks. If the assumptions are correct, the code experiences good speedups; otherwise, the transaction is aborted.
Lastly, I show a compiler enhancement for JavaScript. A key feature of scripting languages that gives them their flexibility is dynamic typing. However, the absence of declared types makes it very challenging for the compiler to generate efficient code. Advanced compilers cope with it by introducing type systems of their own behind the scenes, and maintaining the type of each object at runtime as metadata. In this work, I focus on the Google Chrome V8 JavaScript compiler, and show that its type system is too brittle. While it works well for applications that display static behavior, it causes type specialization to fail in real website code. I go on to modify V8's type system to match the more dynamic behavior of real websites, and show significant savings in execution time, energy, and memory consumption.
Overall, these three approaches allow JIT compilers to achieve high performance while still maintaining programmability and security.
Biography: Wonsun Ahn is a Postdoctoral Research Scientist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His research interests are parallel computer architecture and compilation systems. He is currently the co-PI of an NSF grant on improving the performance of scripting languages. He received a PhD in Computer Science from the same university in 2012. His PhD work was recognized by an IEEE Micro's Top Picks award publication. He has (co-)authored 12 journal and conference papers that have appeared in top compiler and architecture venues, and has two industry patents. He has served in the program and organizational committees of conferences, and is a member of the Samsung Frontier Membership.
Host: Michel Dubois
More Information: print_Ahn.pdf
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 248
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Estela Lopez
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Distinguished Lectures: Nanoengineering and Integration of Materials with Unique Functionalities Research Findings and Visions
Thu, Apr 17, 2014 @ 12:45 PM - 01:50 PM
Mork Family Department of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Haiyan Wang,
Talk Title: Nanoengineering and Integration of Materials with Unique Functionalities Research Findings and Visions
Series: Distinguished Lectures
Host: Prof. Nutt
Location: James H. Zumberge Hall Of Science (ZHS) - 159
Audiences: Graduate
Contact: Ryan Choi
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Andrew J. Viterbi Distinguished Lecture in Communication
Thu, Apr 17, 2014 @ 04:00 PM - 05:00 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Professor Abbas El Gamal, Stanford University
Talk Title: Common Information
Series: Distinguished Lecturer Series
Abstract: Entropy, introduced by Shannon in 1948, arises naturally as a universal measure of information in single-source compression, randomness extraction, and random number generation. In distributed systems, such as communication networks, multiprocessors, distributed storage, and sensor networks, there are multiple correlated sources to be processed jointly. The information that is common between these sources can be utilized, for example, to reduce the amount of communication needed for compression, computing, simulation, and secret key generation. My talk will focus on the question of how such common information should be measured.
While our understanding of common information is far from complete, I will aim to demonstrate the richness of this question through the lens of network information theory. I will show that, depending on the distributed information processing task considered, there can be several well-motivated measures of common information. Along the way, I will present some of the key models, ideas, and tools of information theory, which invite further investigation into this intriguing subject.
Some parts of this talk are based on recent joint work with Gowtham Kumar and Cheuk Ting Li and on discussions with Young-Han Kim.
Biography: Abbas El Gamal is the Hitachi America Professor in the School of Engineering and Chair of the Department of Electrical Engineering at Stanford University. He received his Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering from Stanford University in 1978. He was an Assistant Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering at the University of Southern California (USC) from 1978 to 1980. His research interests and contributions have spanned the areas of information theory, wireless networks, CMOS imaging sensors and systems, and integrated circuit design and design automation. He has authored or coauthored over 200 papers and 30 patents in these areas. He is coauthor of the book Network Information Theory (Cambridge Press 2011). He has won several honors and awards, including the 2012 Claude E. Shannon Award, and the 2004 Infocom best paper award. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and a Fellow of the IEEE. He has been active in several IEEE societies, including serving on the Board on Governors of the IT society where he is currently its President. He cofounded and/or served in various leadership roles at several semiconductor, EDA, and biotechnology companies.
Host: Professor Sandeep Gupta
Location: Seeley Wintersmith Mudd Memorial Hall (of Philosophy) (MHP) - 101
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Mayumi Thrasher
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EE Seminar
Fri, Apr 18, 2014 @ 10:30 AM - 12:00 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Yuan Xie, Professor, Computer Science and Engineering, Pennsylvania State University
Talk Title: Three-dimensional Integrated Circuits (3D ICs) Design, Architecture, and Applications
Abstract: 3D Integration emerges as an attractive option to sustain Moore's law as well as to enable More-than-Moore. This talk will present an overview of recent research progress in 3D IC designs, including both design tools/VLSI perspective and architecture perspective. It will describe the following research directions for future 3D IC design: Design automation and test techniques and methodologies for 3D designs are imperative to realize 3D integration; Novel architectures and design space exploration at the architectural level are also essential to leverage 3D integration technologies for performance gain; Possible "killer" application for 3D integration (e.g., what application could dramatically benefit from 3D stacking technology or what novel applications are enabled by 3D technology.)
Biography: Yuan Xie is currently a Professor in the Computer Science and Engineering department at the Pennsylvania State University. He received Ph.D. from Princeton University, and was with IBM Microelectronic before joining Penn State. He also helped establish and lead AMD Research China Lab. Prof. Xie is a recipient of the National Science Foundation Early Faculty (CAREER) award, the SRC Inventor Recognition Award, IBM Faculty Award, and several Best Paper Award and Best Paper Award Nominations at IEEE/ACM conferences. His research covers areas of EDA, computer architecture, VLSI circuit designs, and embedded systems. His current research projects include: three-dimensional integrated circuits (3D ICs); emerging memory technologies; low power and thermal-aware design; reliable circuits and architectures; and embedded system synthesis.
Host: Murali Annavaram
More Information: Yuan Xie 04182014.pdf
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 248
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Estela Lopez
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AI Seminar- Virgil Griffith: Quantifying Synergy in Complex Systems
Fri, Apr 18, 2014 @ 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Information Sciences Institute
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Virgil Griffith, PhD from the California Institute of a Technology
Talk Title: Quantifying Synergy in Complex Systems
Abstract: Synergy is a fundamental concept in complex systems that has received much attention in computational biology. One clear application of synergistic information is in computational genetics. It is well understood that most phenotypic traits are influenced not only by single genes but by interactions among genesâ⬔for example, human eye-color is cooperatively specified by more than a dozen genes. The magnitude of this ââ¬Åcooperative specificationââ¬Â is the synergistic information between the set of genes X and a phenotypic trait Y . Another application is neuronal firings where potentially thousands of presynaptic neurons influence the firing rate of a single post-synaptic (target) neuron. Yet another application is discovering the ââ¬Åinformationally synergistic modulesââ¬Â within a complex system.
Biography: Virgil Griffith is a newly minted PhD from the California Institute of a Technology. He is now works in Silicon Valley within the cryptocurrencies space.
Home Page: http://virgil.gr
Host: Greg Ver Steeg
Webcast: http://webcasterms1.isi.edu/mediasite/Viewer/?peid=77c09f802a064f5d8935e818a691815a1dLocation: ISI- Marina Del Rey-Conf Rm # 1135
WebCast Link: http://webcasterms1.isi.edu/mediasite/Viewer/?peid=77c09f802a064f5d8935e818a691815a1d
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Peter Zamar
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The W.V.T. Rusch Engineering Honors Colloquim
Fri, Apr 18, 2014 @ 01:00 PM - 01:50 PM
USC Viterbi School of Engineering, Viterbi School of Engineering Student Affairs
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Dr. Ken Cooper, Jet Propulsion Laboratory
Talk Title: Pat-Down at a Distance: a Terahertz Eye for Personal Screening Applications
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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Integrated Systems Seminar Series - Spring 2014
Fri, Apr 18, 2014 @ 03:30 PM - 05:00 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Matthew Reynolds, University of Washington
Talk Title: Wireless Beyond Wi-Fi
Series: Integrated Systems Seminar Series
Abstract: Wireless communication has already enabled the phenomenal growth of mobile computing. But what other impacts can Maxwell's four humble equations have on the world of computing? In this talk I will show some examples of how advances in the wireless world can change the way we think about computing through innovations in energy, communication, sensing, and imaging.
One example is a tiny wireless backpack that enables neural and EMG telemetry from dragonflies in flight, with a 5 Mbps uplink, 1.2mW total power, and a weight of only 38 mg. The backpack is wirelessly powered and employs a modulated backscatter communication link that achieves an energy cost of only a few pJ/bit, over 100X lower power per bit than Wi-Fi. I will then present results that extend MIMO techniques from communication to wireless power transmission, to enhance long range wireless power delivery to mobile devices, and some results, recently reported in Science, on lensless compressive imaging at millimeter wavelengths.
Biography: Matt Reynolds is an Associate Professor in the Departments of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Washington. He was previously the Nortel Networks Assistant Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Duke University. He is also co-founder of the RFID systems firm ThingMagic Inc (acquired by Trimble Navigation), the energy conservation firm Zensi (acquired by Belkin), and the home sensing company SNUPI Inc.
Matt's research interests include RFID, energy efficiency at the physical layer of wireless communication, and the physics of sensing and actuation. Matt received the Ph.D. from the MIT Media Lab in 2003, where he was a Motorola Fellow, as well as S.B. and M.Eng. degrees in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from MIT. He is a Senior Member of the IEEE, has received five Best Paper awards, and has 13 issued and over 30 pending patents.
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 18, 2014 @ 04:00 PM - 05:00 PM
Sonny Astani Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Dr. Constantinos Sioutas, Professor, Astani CEE Department
Talk Title: Physical, Chemical, And Toxicological Characteristics Of Particulate Matater (Pm) From Primary Sources And Secondary Formation Processes In The Megacity Of Los Angeles
Abstract: Increasing epidemiological and toxicological evidence links cardio-respiratory health effects with exposures to ambient particulate matter (PM), and in particular to ultrafine nanoparticles (diameter < 0.15 õm). Emission inventories suggest that mobile sources may be primary direct contributors of these particles to urban atmospheres. Given the amount of traffic in the Los Angeles Basin, it is important to understand how particles from these sources behave after emission as they are transported away from busy roadways and other major sources, which are also abundant in all other urban areas in which over 50% of the earthââ¬â¢s population resides.
This seminar will present a comprehensive summary of the research undertaken over the past almost decade by the Southern California Particle Center (SCPC) to investigate the sources, formation mechanisms, physical and chemical characteristics, population exposure patterns, and health effects of atmospheric particles with a particular emphasis on PM from mobile sources. This will be an overview of research described in greater detail in over 260 refereed publications, and used by federal (US EPA) and state (CARB) agencies to revise and promulgate new air quality PM standards.
Utilizing mobile particle concentrators and other state-of-the-art technologies developed by the USC Aerosol lab, SCPC researchers set about characterizing the physical and chemical PM characteristics on/near freeways, in source and receptor areas of the Los Angeles Basin, the impact of mobile sources on indoor environments as well as ultrafine PM characteristics and emission factors of light-duty or heavy-duty vehicles. The seminar will present the most extensive physical and chemical characterization of air pollutants in the Los Angeles Basin (LAB) to have ever been conducted. Results from prospective human panel studies as well as mechanistic animal in vivo studies linking these atmospheric particles to a host of inflammatory airway responses, cardiovascular and neurological effects will be presented and discussed. In vitro toxicity evaluations of the relatively potency of these particles compared to manufactured nanoparticles in terms of their ability to induce oxidative stress effects, which lead to cardiovascular health effects, will also be presented.
Location: John Stauffer Science Lecture Hall (SLH) - 102
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Evangeline Reyes
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New Solutions for High-Level Synthesis
Mon, Apr 21, 2014 @ 10:30 AM - 12:00 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Deming Chen, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Talk Title: New Solutions for High-Level Synthesis
Abstract: While technology scaling has presented many new and exciting opportunities, new design challenges have arisen due to increased density and stringent delay and power constraints for VLSI circuits. A significant problem is the growing gap between rapidly increasing silicon capacity and the design productivity that lags behind. High-level synthesis (HLS) has been touted as a solution to this problem, as it can significantly reduce the number of man hours required for a design by raising the level of design abstraction. However, existing HLS solutions have several limitations, and studies show that the design quality of HLS can be noticeably worse than that of manual RTL design. In this talk, I will present several new techniques we developed to drastically improve HLS solutions. These include design entry with parallel languages, smart design space exploration, logic/high-level co-optimization, automatic iterative improvement, and communication optimization across multiple modules, etc. Meanwhile, powerful source-to-source compilation and polyhedral model-based code analysis and transformation are used to enable effective realization of some of these techniques. For example, our code transformation and optimization using polyhedral model can enable data streaming across two communicating hardware modules through HLS, which achieved 30X execution speedup over the baseline on average. At the end of the talk, I will also briefly introduce other on-going research activities in my lab in the areas of GPU computing, nanotechnology, and computational genomics.
Biography: Deming Chen is an Associate Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering of University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from University of California at Los Angeles in 2005. His research interests include system- and high-level synthesis, compilation and programming for heterogeneous platforms, nano-systems design, GPU optimization, and bioinformatics. He is a technical committee member for a series of conferences, including FPGA, ASPDAC, ICCD, ISQED, DAC, ICCAD, DATE, ISLPED, FPL, etc. He is or has been an associated editor for TCAD, TVLSI, TODAES, TCAS-I, JCSC, and JOLPE. He is the program chair and general chair for several conferences. He received five Best Paper Awards, the NSF CAREER Award in 2008, the ACM SIGDA Outstanding New Faculty Award in 2010, and IBM Faculty Award in 2014. He is a senior member of IEEE. He was involved in two startup companies. He implemented his published algorithm on CPLD technology mapping when he was a software engineer in Aplus Design Technologies, Inc. in 2001, and the software was exclusively licensed by Altera. He is one of the inventors of the xPilot high-level synthesis package developed at UCLA, which was licensed to AutoESL Design Technologies, Inc.
Host: Massoud Pedram
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 248
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Annie Yu
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Seminars in Biomedical Engineering
Mon, Apr 21, 2014 @ 12:30 PM - 01:50 PM
Alfred E. Mann Department of Biomedical Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Bo Han, Ph.D., Assistant Professor of Research Departments of Surgery and Biomedical Engineering, University of Southern California
Talk Title: Microenvironment in Tissue Engineering
Host: David D'Argenio
Location: Olin Hall of Engineering (OHE) - 132
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Mischalgrace Diasanta
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A Computational Framework for Diversity in Ensembles of Humans and Machine Systems
Mon, Apr 21, 2014 @ 03:00 PM - 05:00 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Kartik Audhkhasi, University of Southern California
Talk Title: A Computational Framework for Diversity in Ensembles of Humans and Machine Systems
Abstract: My Ph.D. thesis presents a computational framework for diversity in ensembles or collections of humans and machine systems used for signal and information processing. Machine system ensembles have out-performed single systems across many pattern recognition tasks ranging from automatic speech recognition to online recommendation. Likewise, ensembles are central to computing with humans, for example, in crowd sourcing-based data tagging and annotation in human behavioral signal processing. This widespread use of ensembles, albeit largely heuristic, is motivated by their robustness to the ambiguity in production, representation, and processing of real-world information. Diversity or complementarity of the individual humans and machine systems is widely-accepted as a key ingredient in ensemble design. I will present a computational framework for this diversity by addressing three important problems - modeling, analysis, and design.
I will first propose the Globally-Variant Locally-Constant (GVLC) model for the labeling behavior of a diverse ensemble. The GVLC model captures the data-dependent reliability and diverse behavior of an ensemble through a latent state-dependent noisy channel. I will next present the Generalized Ambiguity Decomposition (GAD) theorem that defines ensemble diversity for a broad class of statistical learning loss functions and relates this diversity to ensemble performance. I will show an application of the GAD theorem by theoretically and empirically linking the diversity of an automatic speech recognition system ensemble with the word error rate of the fused hypothesis. The final part of my thesis will present techniques to design a diverse ensemble of machine systems, ranging from maximum entropy models to sequence classifiers. I will also prove that introducing diversity in the training data through careful noise addition speeds-up the maximum likelihood training of Restricted Boltzmann Machines and feed-forward neural networks.
Biography: Kartik Audhkhasi received the B.Tech. degree in Electrical Engineering and the M.Tech. degree in Information and Communication Technology from the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi. He is currently an Electrical Engineering Ph.D. candidate at the University of Southern California (USC), Los Angeles. His research focuses on a computational framework for diversity in ensembles of humans and machine systems for signal and information processing. He is broadly interested in statistical signal processing, speech processing and recognition, machine learning, and human-centered computing.
He is a recipient of the Annenberg fellowship, the IBM Ph.D. fellowship, and was a 2012 USC Ming Hsieh Institute Ph.D. Scholar. Kartik was part of the USC team that won the Interspeech-2013 Computational Paralinguistics Challenge. He has also received best paper and best teaching assistant awards from the Electrical Engineering Department at USC.
Host: Prof. Shrikanth S. Narayanan
Location: Ronald Tutor Hall of Engineering (RTH) - 320
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Talyia Veal
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Brain MRI Statistical Feature Extraction for Characterizing Neurodegenerative Diseases
Tue, Apr 22, 2014 @ 03:00 PM - 04:00 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Norbert Schuff, Ph.D., Dept. of Radiology and Biomedical Imaging, University of California, San Francisco
Talk Title: Brain MRI Statistical Feature Extraction for Characterizing Neurodegenerative Diseases
Series: Medical Imaging Seminar Series
Abstract: Brain lesions from neurodegenerative diseases, such as Alzheimer's disease and Parkinson's disease, are difficult to detect on MRI with the naked eye. This may explain why MRI is not yet used as a diagnostic tool for these conditions - except for ruling out other major brain diseases. It is therefore important to find effective solutions for the extraction of imaging features that can be used for diagnosing neurodegenerative diseases. I will discuss new approaches mainly anchored in information theory for extracting features from structural as well as functional brain MRI data. In particular, I will show new approaches for quantifying complexity of resting-state fMRI. Lastly, I will present initial results from MRI vascular fingerprinting - an approach for studying brain microvasculature.
Biography: I am a Professor in the Department of Radiology and Biomedical Imaging at the University of California, San Francisco. I am also Co-Director of the Neurodegenerative Diseases Research Interest Group and a researcher at the San Francisco Veterans Affairs Medical Center. I earned my PhD in Physics from the Ruprecht Karls University of Heidelberg in 1983. From 1984 to 1992, I developed NMR & MRI systems first with Bruker GmbH in Karlsruhe/Germany and later with Varian, Palo Alto, California. In 1993, I joined UCSF.
I study neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer and Parkinson using MRI. My interest is to better capture abnormal brain structure and function for improving prediction, diagnosis and monitoring progression of these devastating conditions. I accomplish this by developing new methods for extracting image features using MRI physics as well as modern concepts of probability, statistical learning and information theory.
Host: Prof. Justin Haldar
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 248
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Talyia Veal
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Epstein Institute / ISE 651 Seminar Series
Tue, Apr 22, 2014 @ 03:30 PM - 04:50 PM
Daniel J. Epstein Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Meisam Razaviyayn, Department of Electrical Engineering, University of Minnesota
Talk Title: "Successive Convex Approximation: A Unified Analysis and Applications in Big Data"
Abstract: The (randomized) block coordinate descent (BCD) method is widely used for minimizing a continuous function of several block variables. At each iteration of this method, a single block of variables is optimized, while the remaining variables are held fixed. Unfortunately, the requirement for BCD convergence is often too restrictive for many practical scenarios. In this talk, we study an alternative inexact BCD approach which updates the variable blocks by successively minimizing a sequence of approximations which are either locally tight upper bounds for the objective or strictly convex local approximations. The main contributions of this work include the characterizations of the convergence conditions for a fairly wide class of such methods, especially for the cases where the objective functions are either non-differentiable or nonconvex. Our results unify and extend the existing convergence results for many classical algorithms such as the BCD method, the difference of convex functions (DC) method, the expectation maximization(EM) algorithm, as well as the block forward-backward splitting algorithm, all of which are popular for large scale optimization problems involving big data. At the end of the talk, we will see applications of this framework in tensor decomposition, dictionary learning for image processing, and beamformer design for wireless communications.
TUESDAY, APRIL 22, 2014
VON KLEINSMID CENTER (VKC) ROOM 100
3:30 - 4:50 PM
Biography: Meisam Razaviyayn is a visiting PhD student at Daniel J. Epstein Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering at University of Southern California. He received his undergraduate degree in Electrical Engineering from Isfahan University of Technology in 2008. He obtained his M.S. in Mathematics and Electrical Engineering from University of Minnesota. Now he is in the last year of his PhD, advised by Professor Tom Luo at the university of Minnesota. Meisam received different awards and fellowships such as University of Minnesota Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship, Electrical and Computer Engineering Department Fellowship, Fifth Place in ACM International Programming Regional Contest, and Iran national mathematics Olympiad silver medal. He has also been among the finalist of the best paper prize for young researcher in continuous optimization, ICCOPT 2013, and the finalist for the best student paper award, SPAWC 2010. Meisam's research interests include large scale optimization, machine learning, computational issues in wireless data communication, and statistical signal processing.
Host: Daniel J. Epstein Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering
More Information: Seminar-Razaviyayn.doc
Location: Von Kleinsmid Center For International & Public Affairs (VKC) - Room 100
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Georgia Lum
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CS Colloquium: Amir Houmansadr (UTexas - Austin) - The Cyberspace Battle for Information: Combating Internet Censorship
Tue, Apr 22, 2014 @ 04:00 PM - 05:30 PM
Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Amir Houmansadr, UTexas - Austin
Talk Title: The Cyberspace Battle for Information: Combating Internet Censorship
Series: CS Colloquium
Abstract: The lecture will be available to stream from your browser here.
The Internet has become ubiquitous, bringing many benefits to people across the globe. Unfortunately, Internet users face threats to their security and privacy: repressive regimes deprive them of freedom of speech and open access to information, governments and corporations monitor their online behavior, advertisers collect and sell their private data, and cybercriminals hurt them financially through security breaches.
My research aims to make Internet communications more secure and privacy-preserving. In this talk, I will focus on the design, implementation, and analysis of tools that help users bypass Internet censorship. I will discuss the major challenges in building robust censorship circumvention tools, introduce two novel classes of systems that we have developed to overcome these challenges, and conclude with several directions for future research.
Biography: Amir Houmansadr is a postdoctoral scholar at the University of Texas at Austin. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in August 2012. Amir’s research revolves around various network security and privacy problems, including Internet censorship circumvention, network traffic analysis, and anonymous communications. He has received several awards for his research, including the Best Practical Paper Award at the IEEE Symposium on Security & Privacy (Oakland) 2013.
Host: Ethan Katz-Bassett
Location: Henry Salvatori Computer Science Center (SAL) - 101
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Assistant to CS chair
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CS Colloquium: Amir Houmansadr (UTexas - Austin) - The Cyberspace Battle for Information: Combating Internet Censorship
Tue, Apr 22, 2014 @ 04:00 PM - 05:30 PM
Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Amir Houmansadr, UTexas - Austin
Talk Title: The Cyberspace Battle for Information: Combating Internet Censorship
Series: CS Colloquium
Abstract: The lecture is available to stream from your browser here starting at 4 PM. Please right-click the link to open in a new tab or window for best performance.
The Internet has become ubiquitous, bringing many benefits to people across the globe. Unfortunately, Internet users face threats to their security and privacy: repressive regimes deprive them of freedom of speech and open access to information, governments and corporations monitor their online behavior, advertisers collect and sell their private data, and cybercriminals hurt them financially through security breaches.
My research aims to make Internet communications more secure and privacy-preserving. In this talk, I will focus on the design, implementation, and analysis of tools that help users bypass Internet censorship. I will discuss the major challenges in building robust censorship circumvention tools, introduce two novel classes of systems that we have developed to overcome these challenges, and conclude with several directions for future research.
Biography: Amir Houmansadr is a postdoctoral scholar at the University of Texas at Austin. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in August 2012. Amir’s research revolves around various network security and privacy problems, including Internet censorship circumvention, network traffic analysis, and anonymous communications. He has received several awards for his research, including the Best Practical Paper Award at the IEEE Symposium on Security & Privacy (Oakland) 2013.
Host: Ethan Katz-Bassett
Location: Henry Salvatori Computer Science Center (SAL) - 101
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Assistant to CS chair
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CS RASC Seminar: Steven M. LaValle (Oculus VR) - Virtual Reality, Really!
Thu, Apr 24, 2014 @ 11:00 AM - 12:30 PM
Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Steven M. LaValle, Oculus VR
Talk Title: Virtual Reality, Really!
Series: RASC Seminar Series
Abstract: It has been an exciting adventure as we race to bring the consumer version of the Oculus Rift VR headset into widespread use for games, cinema, therapy, virtual travel, and beyond. Palmer Luckey's 2012 prototype demonstrated that smartphone-based advances in display and sensing technology enable a lightweight, high field-of-view VR experience that is affordable by the masses. This has stimulated widespread interest across many industries, research labs, and potential end users of this technology. This talk will highlight some of the ongoing technical challenges, including game development, user interfaces, perceptual psychology, and accurate head tracking. Although VR has been researched for decades, many new challenges arise because of the ever changing technology and the rising demand for new kinds of VR content.
Biography: Steven M. LaValle is Principal Scientist at Oculus VR, Inc. He is a roboticist and a Professor of Computer Science at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. He is best known for his introduction of rapidly exploring random tree (RRT) algorithms, and his book on Planning Algorithms, one of the most highly cited texts in the field. In 2012, he was one of seven faculty named as a University Scholar at UIUC for 2012-2014.
Host: Nora Ayanian
Location: Kaprielian Hall (KAP) - 156
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Assistant to CS chair
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Distinguished Lectures: Materials Genome as The Last Mile Perspective and Thermodynamics of Computing
Thu, Apr 24, 2014 @ 12:45 PM - 01:50 PM
Mork Family Department of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Sadasivan Shankar,
Talk Title: Materials Genome as The Last Mile Perspective and Thermodynamics of Computing
Series: Distinguished Lectures
Host: Prof. Vashishta
Location: James H. Zumberge Hall Of Science (ZHS) - 159
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Ryan Choi
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Programming Bits and Atoms
Thu, Apr 24, 2014 @ 01:30 PM - 02:30 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Neil Gershenfeld, MIT Center for Bits and Atoms
Talk Title: Programming Bits and Atoms
Abstract: Software is digital, but not physical: it is represented by bits of information that are written without physical units. Hardware is physical, but not digital: it can contain information, but its own construction is continuous. I will present research on aligning
the descriptions of software and hardware, and explore its implications for the future of computation and fabrication.
Biography: Prof. Neil Gershenfeld is the Director of MIT's Center for Bits and Atoms. His unique laboratory is breaking down boundaries between the digital and physical worlds, from creating molecular quantum computers to virtuosic musical instruments. Technology from his lab has been seen and used in settings including New York's Museum of Modern Art and rural Indian villages, the White House and the World Economic Forum, inner-city community centers and automobile safety systems, Las Vegas shows and Sami herds. He is the author of numerous technical publications, patents, and books including Fab, When Things Start To Think, The Nature of Mathematical Modeling, and The Physics of Information
Technology, and has been featured in media such as The New York Times, The Economist, NPR, CNN, and PBS. He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society, has been named one of Scientific American's 50 leaders in science and technology, as one of
40 Modern-Day Leonardos by the Museum of Science and Industry, one of Popular Mechanic's 25 Makers, has been selected as a CNN/Time/Fortune Principal Voice, and by Prospect/Foreign Policy as one of the top 100 public intellectuals. Dr. Gershenfeld has
a BA in Physics with High Honors from Swarthmore College, a Ph.D. in Applied Physics from Cornell University, honorary doctorates from Swarthmore College and Strathclyde
University, was a Junior Fellow of the Harvard University Society of Fellows, and a member of the research staff at Bell Labs.
More Information: Gershefeld.jpg.pdf
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 132
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Estela Lopez
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CS Colloquium: Ariel Feldman (University of Pennsylvania) - Designing Systems for Skeptics
Thu, Apr 24, 2014 @ 04:00 PM - 05:30 PM
Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Ariel Feldman, University of Pennsylvania
Talk Title: Designing Systems for Skeptics
Series: CS Colloquium
Abstract:
In modern distributed systems, users are increasingly being asked to rely on third parties who do not necessarily have their best interests in mind. For example, cloud hosted services offer a myriad of benefits, but they require users to trust the service provider with the confidentiality and integrity of their data and the correctness of the computations performed on it. The recent history of accidental and malicious data disclosures, misuse of users’ data, surreptitious censorship, and warrantless surveillance has shown that this trust is often misplaced. Moreover, non-technical mechanisms, such as laws and market incentives, have proved to be insufficient to mitigate these threats.
In this talk, I will present two implemented systems that enable their users to benefit from cloud deployment, but that are designed “for skeptics:” they provide users with guarantees that hold even if the service provider cannot be trusted. The first system, SPORC, makes it possible to build low-latency collaborative Web applications such as shared text editors, group calendars, and instant messaging applications with an untrusted provider. The provider only sees encrypted data and cannot deviate from correct execution without detection. And if the provider does misbehave, SPORC gives users a means to recover. Pantry, the second system, enables a user to outsource a general purpose computation to a potentially faulty provider and yet verify that the computation was performed correctly. Unlike prior efforts, Pantry allows verifiable computations to operate on remotely-stored data that the user does not possess, opening the way to a wide variety of uses such as MapReduce jobs and database queries.
Biography: Ari Feldman is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Pennsylvania whose research focuses on building systems that provide confidentiality, integrity, and correctness by design rather than solely through non-technical means, drawing on techniques from distributed systems, applied cryptography, and theory. He received his Ph.D. in computer science from Princeton University in 2012 under the supervision of Edward W. Felten and received an A.B. in computer science and in ethics and political philosophy from Brown University.
Host: Minlan Yu
Location: Henry Salvatori Computer Science Center (SAL) - 101
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Assistant to CS chair
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Arts Leadership: A Contemporary Vision Featuring the Kronos Quartet
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Thu, Apr 24, 2014 @ 07:30 PM - 09:30 PM
USC Viterbi School of Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: The Kronos Quartet,
Talk Title: Arts Leadership: A Contemporary Vision Featuring the Kronos Quartet
Abstract: For 40 years, San Franciscoââ¬â¢s Kronos Quartet has continually reimagined the string-quartet experience. One of the worldââ¬â¢s most celebrated and influential ensembles, they have performed thousands of concerts and released more than 50 recordings. The nonprofit Kronos Performing Arts Association (KPAA) manages all aspects of the quartetââ¬â¢s work. Together, the Kronos Quartet and KPAA have set a striking example of arts leadership, creating extraordinary change in the field of classical music through their vision, innovation and commitment to a lifetime of growth and change. In so doing, they have redefined what is possible for hundreds of young musicians. Kronos exemplifies arts leadership at its most transformative. Join Kenneth Foster, director of the newly launched graduate Arts Leadership Program in the USC Thornton School of Music, for an interactive discussion/performance with these remarkable musicians about their history, what inspires them and how they sustain a creative vision of the future for themselves and for their field.
Organized by the USC Thornton School of Music. Co-sponsored by Classical KUSC 91.5.
More Info: http://web-app.usc.edu/ws/eo2/calendar/113/event/903820
Location: George Finley Bovard Administration Building (ADM) -
Audiences: RSVP Required
Contact: Daria Yudacufski
Event Link: http://web-app.usc.edu/ws/eo2/calendar/113/event/903820
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NL Seminar-Partitioning Networks with Node Attributes by Compressing Information Flow
Fri, Apr 25, 2014 @ 03:00 AM - 04:00 PM
Information Sciences Institute
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Linhong Zhu, USC/ISI
Talk Title: Partitioning Networks with Node Attributes by Compressing Information Flow
Series: Natural Language Seminar
Abstract: Real-world networks are often organized as modules or communities of similar nodes that serve as functional units. These networks are also rich in content, with nodes having distinguishing features or attributes. In order to discover a network's modular structure, it is necessary to take into account not only its links but also node attributes. We describe an information-theoretic method that identifies modules by compressing descriptions of information flow on a network. Our formulation introduces node content into the description of information flow, which we then minimize to discover groups of nodes with similar attributes that also tend to trap the flow of information. The method has several advantages: it is conceptually simple and does not require ad-hoc parameters to specify the number of modules or to control the relative contribution of links and node attributes to network structure. We apply the proposed method to partition real-world networks with known community structure. We demonstrate that adding node attributes helps recover the underlying community structure in content-rich networks more effectively than using links alone. In addition, we show that our method is faster and more accurate than alternative state-of-the-art algorithms.
Biography: Linhong Zhu is currently a Postdoctoral Research Associate at Information Sciences Institute, University of Southern California, under the supervision of Dr. Kristina Lerman and Dr. Aram Galstyan. Before that, she worked as a scientist-I at Institute for Infocomm Research Singapore from Oct 2010 to Jan 2013. She got her B Eng. Degree in Computer Science from University of Science and Technology of China in 2006 (2002-2006) and received her Ph.D. Degree in Computer Engineering from Nanyang Technological University (2006-2011). Her research interests focus on large-scale social network analysis and sentiment analysis.
Home Page:http://www.isi.edu/people/linhong/research
Host: Kevin Knight & Yang Gao
More Info: http://nlg.isi.edu/nl-seminar/
Location: Information Science Institute (ISI) - 11th Flr Conf Rm # 1135, Marina Del Rey
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Peter Zamar
Event Link: http://nlg.isi.edu/nl-seminar/
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ACL2014 Practice Talk: Kneser- Ney Smoothing on Expected Counts
Fri, Apr 25, 2014 @ 10:30 AM - 11:30 AM
Information Sciences Institute
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Hui Zhang, USC/ISI
Talk Title: Kneser- Ney Smoothing on Expected Counts
Abstract: Widely used in speech and language processing, Kneser-Ney (KN) smoothing has consistently been shown to be one of the best-performing smoothing methods. However, KN smoothing assumes integer counts, limiting its potential usesâ⬔for example, inside Expectation-Maximization. In this paper, we propose a generaliza- tion of KN smoothing that operates on fractional counts, or, more precisely, on distributions over counts. We rederive all the steps of KN smoothing to operate on count distributions instead of integral counts, and apply it to two tasks where KN smoothing was not applicable before: one in language model adaptation, and the other in word alignment. In both cases, our method improves performance significantly.
Biography: Hui Zhang is a fourth year PhD student working with Professor David Chiang at the USC Information Sciences Institute. His main research interests are in statistical machine translation and machine learning.
He has focused on domain adaptation and smoothing techniques.
Home Page:
https://sites.google.com/site/zhangh1982/
Host: Yang Gao
More Info: http://nlg.isi.edu/nl-seminar/
Location: Information Science Institute (ISI) - 11th Flr Conf Rm # 1135, Marina Del Rey
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Peter Zamar
Event Link: http://nlg.isi.edu/nl-seminar/
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The W.V.T. Rusch Engineering Honors Colloquim
Fri, Apr 25, 2014 @ 01:00 PM - 01:50 PM
USC Viterbi School of Engineering, Viterbi School of Engineering Student Affairs
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Prof. Eric M.V. Hoek, Department of Civil & Environmental Engineering, UCLA
Talk Title: Water Technology Research, Innovation and Entrepreneurship to Address Global Challenge
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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CS RASC Seminar: Mac Schwager (Boston University) - Controlling Groups of Robots with Unreliable Relative Sensing
Fri, Apr 25, 2014 @ 02:30 PM - 04:00 PM
Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Mac Schwager, Boston University
Talk Title: Controlling Groups of Robots with Unreliable Relative Sensing
Series: RASC Seminar Series
Abstract: Groups of robots working collaboratively have the potential to change the way we sense and interact with our environment at large scales. However, in order to be useful in the real world, multi-robot systems must perform without global information, and they must adapt to faulty sensors. This talk will describe our recent work in controlling groups of robots with unreliable relative sensing measurements. We will treat two basic multi-robot problems: formation control and coverage control. In the first problem, we would like the robots to converge to a desired formation without a shared global reference frame, using only relative distance and bearing measurements. We propose a novel nonlinear control architecture that ensures asymptotic convergence to the desired formation. We also implement this controller on a network of quadrotor aerial robots. The robots use onboard vision, computing relative pose estimates from shared features in their images, in order to execute the formation controller without any global pose information. In the second problem we consider deploying a group of sensing robots to cover an environment with their sensors, however some (a priori unknown) robots have faulty sensors. We propose a decentralized adaptive control approach by which the robots collaboratively determine which robots have faulty sensors, and reposition themselves in order to compensate for the sensor faults. Convergence to a locally optimal sensing configuration is proven using a Lyapunov analysis.
Biography: Mac Schwager is an assistant professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering and the Division of Systems Engineering at Boston University. He obtained his BS degree in 2000 from Stanford University, his MS degree from MIT in 2005, and his PhD degree from MIT in 2009. He was a postdoctoral researcher in the GRASP lab at the University of Pennsylvania from 2010 to 2012. His research interests are in distributed algorithms for control, perception, and learning in groups of robots and animals. He received the NSF CAREER award in 2014.
Host: Nora Ayanian
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 248
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Assistant to CS chair
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Energy Informatics Seminar
Fri, Apr 25, 2014 @ 03:00 PM - 04:00 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Krishna Palem, Rice University
Talk Title: Sensoptimized Systems for “Good enough” Computing: Ultra-efficient Cortical Processors through Melding Neuroscience with Inexact Architectures
Series: Energy Informatics Distinguished Seminar Series
Abstract: Increasingly, information systems such as cellphones, iPods and glassesâmore broadly, embedded systemsâare delivering information to be consumed by our senses. Such information, in the form of speech, graphics, or video, is subject to varying levels of processing by our nervous systems, followed by our higher cognitive functions in the brain. Yet, system designs today do not often take advantage of the compensatory processing done neuro-cognitively by our brain. Rather, the current hardware, software, and industrial design methodologies aim to deliver the best possible quality to maximize the user’s experience. The resulting computing platforms are over-engineered and expensiveâin terms of monetary cost, and the amount of energy (or battery) consumed. For several years now, we have been developing a philosophy and a design methodology to counter this trend aimed at the innovation of digital computing systems which, when interacting with our senses, are optimized to be just “good enough” and thus not over-engineered This is achieved by factoring in the compensatory neuro-cognitive processing done by our sensory pathways, and by trading away the accuracy of the system in return for disproportionately high savings or gains. The resulting sensoptimied systems are meant to be significantly more efficient than those designed conventionally. At their core, our sensoptimized systems are realized using inexact integrated circuits (ICs) and computing architectures, sometimes dubbed probabilistic CMOS (PCMOS)âa technology and design methodology which our group has been developing for over a decade. Looking into the future, inexact circuits and sensoptimization could be the basis for realizing families of cortical processors which meld principles of neuroscience with the design of good-enough computing platforms. Here, the opportunities are many and we will conclude the technical portion of our talk with an overview of a sensoptimized cortical processor we are currently developing for supporting computer-vision at the embedded scale.
Biography: Krishna V. Palem is the Ken and Audrey Kennedy Professor at Rice University with appointments in CS, in ECE, and Statistics, and is a scholar in the Baker Institute for Public Policy. He founded and directed the NTU-Rice Institute on Sustainable and Applied Infodynamics. He was a Moore Distinguished Faculty Fellow at Caltech, and a Schonbrunn Fellow at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where he was recognized for excellence in teaching. His advisee Suren Talla was awarded the Janet Fabri Prize for outstanding dissertation, and his related work on the foundations of architecture assembly for designing reconfigurable embedded SoC architectures, developed at Proceler Inc. which he co-founded as a CTO, was a nominee for the Analysts choice awards as one of the four outstanding technologies. A decade ago, he pioneered a novel technology dubbed Probabilistic CMOS (PCMOS) which resulted in inexact or approximate computing. PCMOS has been recognized by three best-paper awards, as one of the ten technologies 'likely to change the way we live' by MIT's Technology Review, and as one of the seven 'emerging world changing technologies' by IEEE as part of its 125th anniversary celebrations. He is a Fellow of the AAAS, the ACM and the IEEE. In 2012, Forbes (India) ranked him second on the list of eighteen scientists who are “..some of the finest minds of Indian origin.” He is the recipient of the 2008 W. Wallace McDowell Award, IEEE Computer Society's highest technical award and one of computing's most prestigious individual honors.
Host: Viktor Prasanna
More Info: http://cei.usc.edu/news
Location: Seeley G. Mudd Building (SGM) - 101
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Annie Yu
Event Link: http://cei.usc.edu/news
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Integrated Systems Seminar Series - Spring 2014
Fri, Apr 25, 2014 @ 03:30 PM - 05:00 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Waleed Khalil, Ohio State University
Talk Title: Towards the Design of Robust Wide Tuning Range and Low Phase Noise mm-Wave VCOs: Challenges, Solutions and Recent Advances
Series: Integrated Systems Seminar Series
Abstract: Over the past few years, there has a been a growing demand for mm-wave circuits with emerging applications such as Gigabit WLAN and Short Range Radars. More recently, mm-wave technology has been touted for future 5G cellular systems, eclipsing a long era where low GHz systems dominated the field of wireless systems. Moving forward, we expect the mass market adaptation of these technologies to force the shift towards low-cost Si-based processes. However, in to order to succeed in this space, we need to push the Si performance closer to the well-entrenched incumbent III-V technologies. In the VCO domain, major challenges still remain in meeting the tuning range and phase noise specifications while maintaining high yield. In light of these challenges, this seminar will present our current and future research work to build mm-wave VCOs circuits with record benchmarks. Different topologies in both CMOS and SiGe technologies will be covered. Also, a new analytical model that facilitates an efficient optimization of the VCO turning range and phase noise is presented. The model is exploited to analyze the impact of technology scaling on the achievable performance bounds.
Biography: Dr. Khalil received his B.S.E.E. and M.S.E.E degrees from the University of Minnesota in 1992 and 1993, respectively. In 2008, he received his PhD degree in Electrical Engineering from Arizona State University. He is currently serving as an Assistant Professor at the ECE department and the ElectroScience Lab, The Ohio State University. He conducts research in SDRs, digital intensive RF and mm-wave circuits and systems, high performance clocking circuits and GHz A/D and D/A circuits. Prior to joining OSU, Prof. Khalil spent 16 years at Intel Corporation where he held various technical and leadership positions in wireless and wireline communication groups. While at Intel, he was appointed the lead engineer at the advanced wireless communications group, where he played an instrumental role in the development of the industry’s first Analog Front-end IC for third generation radios (3G). He later co-founded a startup group to develop Intel’s first RF front-end IC, as a principle leader of the radio transmitter chain. During his work at Intel, he received the prestigious Intel Quality Award in 2005. Dr. Khalil’s research group has received several paper awards, among them TSMC’s outstanding research award in 2010 and the best paper award in the Wireless Innovation Forum and Phase Array Symposium in 2013. He authored 10 issued and several other pending patents, over 50 journal and conference papers and three books/book chapters. He is a senior member of IEEE and serves in the steering committee for the RFIC Symposium and as a guest faculty at the Air Force Research Laboratory.
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 25, 2014 @ 04:00 PM - 05:00 PM
Sonny Astani Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Judy Zhu , Ph.D. Candidate
Talk Title: Soil Structure Interaction with Vertically Incident Plane P-waves: Rigid Foundation
Abstract: An analytic solution of the interaction of building with the soil for vertical incident plane p-waves is presented. The soil half-space is assumed to be homogeneous, isotropic and elastic; foundation is hemispherical and rigid; and the building is cylindrical with the same radius and center-to-center to the foundation. It is shown that the result is dependent on densities of building, foundation and soil, the ratio of building radius and height, and wave numbers of building and the soil.
Host: Astani CEE Department
Location: John Stauffer Science Lecture Hall (SLH) - 102
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Evangeline Reyes
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Seminars in Biomedical Engineering
Mon, Apr 28, 2014 @ 12:30 PM - 01:50 PM
Alfred E. Mann Department of Biomedical Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Dr. ChrIstian Metallo, Ph.D., Assistant Professor in Bioengineering, University of California,San Diego (UCSD)
Talk Title: Probing cell metabolism to understand and treat disease
Host: David D'Argenio
Location: Olin Hall of Engineering (OHE) - 132
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Mischalgrace Diasanta
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Engineering, Neuroscience & Health (ENR)
Mon, Apr 28, 2014 @ 04:00 PM - 05:00 PM
Alfred E. Mann Department of Biomedical Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Beth Smith, University of Southern California
Talk Title: Full-day in-home infant movement monitoring: Opportunities and challenges
Series: Engineering, Neuroscience & Health (ENH Seminars)
Biography: http://pt.usc.edu/INCLab/
Host: Francisco Valero-Cuevas
More Info: Refreshments will be served from 3.30 to 4 pm.
Webcast: http://capture.usc.edu/Mediasite/Catalog/Full/946350f1ca8440e7b867e16adba01e4e21/?state=xJE9EJIqlAdw4AAliKfpMore Information: SmithENH_Abstract.pdf
Location: Center For Health Professions (CHP) - 147
WebCast Link: http://capture.usc.edu/Mediasite/Catalog/Full/946350f1ca8440e7b867e16adba01e4e21/?state=xJE9EJIqlAdw4AAliKfp
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Mischalgrace Diasanta
Event Link: Refreshments will be served from 3.30 to 4 pm.
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CS Colloquium: Justin Solomon (Stanford) - Embracing Uncertainty in Geometric Data Analysis
Tue, Apr 29, 2014 @ 04:00 AM - 05:30 PM
Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Justin Solomon, Stanford University
Talk Title: Embracing Uncertainty in Geometric Data Analysis
Series: CS Colloquium
Abstract: Many methods dealing with data on geometric domains suffer from noise, nonconvexity, and other challenges because they are forced to make choices among nearly-indistinguishable possibilities. For instance, edge-preserving image filters must assign pixels near the boundary of an object to either its interior or its exterior, inheriting different colors, textures, and other properties depending on the particular outcome. In geometry processing, algorithms for registering scans of three-dimensional objects must break discrete (e.g. left-right) and continuous (e.g. cylindrical or translational) symmetries to settle on a single correspondence.
In this talk, I will present techniques for explicitly acknowledging these and other ambiguities within graphics, imaging, and data processing pipelines. In particular, rather than making arbitrary tie-breaking decisions, these methods maintain distributions over potential outcomes. This “soft” probabilistic framework explicitly acknowledges challenging ambiguities and can be used to design robust techniques for processing and understanding images and shapes. In addition to introducing the relevant theory, I will show how it can be used to derive practical algorithms for photo processing, network analysis, and surface mapping.
Biography: Justin Solomon is a PhD candidate in the Geometric Computing Group at Stanford University. He studies problems in graphics, learning, and imaging combining techniques from mathematical theory and computer science. His work has led to practical applications in geometry processing, computational photography, and medical imaging and is supported by the Hertz Foundation Fellowship, the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship, and the NDSEG Fellowship.
Justin holds bachelors degrees in mathematics and computer science and a masters degree in computer science from Stanford. He is a dedicated instructor and has served as the lecturer for courses in graphics, differential geometry, and numerical methods. His forthcoming textbook entitled Numerical Algorithms focuses on applications of numerical methods to graphics, learning, and vision. Before beginning his graduate studies, Justin was a member of Pixar's Tools Research group. Outside the lab, he is a pianist, cellist, and amateur musicologist with award-winning research on early recordings of the Elgar Cello Concerto.
Host: Fei Sha
Location: Henry Salvatori Computer Science Center (SAL) - 101
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Assistant to CS chair
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