Select a calendar:
Filter April Events by Event Type:
SUNMONTUEWEDTHUFRISAT
University Calendar
Events for April
-
VSi2 Talk with Loren Bendele (CEO of Savings.com)
Wed, Apr 01, 2015 @ 01:00 PM - 05:00 PM
USC Viterbi School of Engineering
University Calendar
RSVP HERE
Loren is the co-founder, President and CEO of Savings.com. He has experience starting, running and scaling high-growth businesses. Loren co-founded Savings.com in 2007 and sold the company to Cox Target Media in 2012. Loren remains on as President of Savings.com.
Loren is a powerhouse Executive Manager who knows how to build a team and make things happen. He will share his knowledge, expertise, and experiences on how to build a great company.
We hope to see you all there!Location: Kerckhoff Hall (KER) -
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Ethan Gromet Viterbi Student Innovation Institute
-
Big Data and Data Science: Some Hype but Real Opportunities
Thu, Apr 02, 2015 @ 05:00 PM - 06:00 PM
Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science
University Calendar
Big Data and Data Science: Some Hype but Real Opportunities
IMSC Seminar – Host: Cyrus Shahabi
April 2 - 5:00-6:00pm
SAL-101
Speaker: Michael Franklin, UC Berkeley Computer Science
Abstract
Data is all the rage across industry and across campuses. While it may be temping to dismiss the buzz as just another spin of the hype cycle, there are substantial shifts and realignments underway that are fundamentally changing how Computer Science, Statistics and virtually all subject areas will be taught, researched, and perceived as disciplines. In this talk I will give my personal perspectives on this new landscape based on experiences organizing a large, industry-engaged academic Computer Science research project (the AMPLab), in helping to establish a campus-wide Data Science research initiative (the Berkeley Institute for Data Science), and my participation on a campus task force charged with mapping out Data Science Education for all undergraduates at Berkeley. I will make the case that there are real opportunities across campus in both education and research, and that Data Science should be viewed as an emerging discipline in its own right.
Bio
Michael Franklin is the Thomas M. Siebel Professor of Computer Science and Chair of the Computer Science Division at the University of California, Berkeley. Prof. Franklin is also the Director of the Algorithms, Machines, and People Laboratory (AMPLab) at UC Berkeley. The AMPLab currently works with 27 industrial sponsors including founding sponsors Amazon Web Services, Google, and SAP. AMPLab is well-known for creating a number of popular systems in the Open Source Big Data ecosystem including Spark, Mesos, GraphX and MLlib, all parts of the Berkeley Data Analytics Stack (BDAS). Prof. Franklin is a co-PI and Executive Committee member for the Berkeley Institute for Data Science, part of a multi-campus initiative to advance Data Science Environments. He is an ACM Fellow, a two-time winner of the ACM SIGMOD "Test of Time" award, has several "Best Paper" awards and two CACM Research Highlights selections, and is recipient of the outstanding Advisor Award from the Computer Science Graduate Student Association at Berkeley.
Location: Henry Salvatori Computer Science Center (SAL) - 101
WebCast Link: https://bluejeans.com/952662854
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Lizsl De Leon
-
PhD Defense - Zhuoliang Kang
Fri, Apr 03, 2015 @ 10:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science
University Calendar
Ph.D candidate: Zhuoliang Kang
Title: Accurate 3D Model Acquisition from Imagery Data
Date: Friday, April 3, 10:00 AM
Location: EEB 131A
Committee:
Prof. Gerard Medioni (chair)
Prof. Hao Li
Prof. Alexander Sawchuk (outside member)
Abstract:
Acquisition of 3D models from 2D imagery has been essential for various applications. In particular, this dissertation investigates two important application scenarios: city-scale 3D reconstruction from aerial imagery and general 3D model acquisition with a commodity camera.
The first part of this dissertation explores an online solution to the problem. We propose an approach to solve camera pose estimation and dense reconstruction from Wide Area Aerial Surveillance (WAAS) videos captured by an airborne platform. Our approach solves them in an online fashion: it incrementally updates a sparse 3D map and estimates the camera pose as each new frame arrives; depth maps of selected key frames are computed using a variational method and integrated to produce a full 3D model via volumetric reconstruction. In practice, WAAS videos are usually captured using a multi-camera system. We parallelize our approach on multiple GPUs to efficiently handle the multi-camera imagery. The approach is also extended for progressive 3D scanning with a hand-held camera.
In many scenarios, online approach is not a necessity and accuracy has higher priority over efficiency. In the second part, we present two offline solutions. The first work generates dense 3D model based on depth map fusion, which combines variational multi-scale depth map estimation with volumetric reconstruction. We also present MeshRecon, a mesh-based offline system composed of three modules: a dense point cloud is generated using multi-resolution plane sweep method; an initial mesh model is extracted from the point cloud via global optimization considering visibility information of all images; the mesh model is then iteratively refined to capture structural details by optimizing the photometric consistency and spatial regularization. The major processes are also parallelized on GPU for efficiency. We validate its performance on real-world objects of different types at different scales in both indoor and outdoor environments. For aerial imagery case, we evaluate the approach on several real-world aerial imagery datasets each covering an urban scenario of several square kilometers. Quantitative result shows that the reconstructed model is highly accurate with mean error smaller than 1 meter over the entire city. Based on city 3D models generated at different times, we present a system for city-scale geometric change detection by performing comparisons at the 3D geometry level. Our system is able to detect geometric changes at different scales, ranging from a building cluster to vegetation changes, with high accuracy.
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 131A
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Lizsl De Leon
-
Ming Hsieh Electrical Engineering Seminar
Fri, Apr 03, 2015 @ 04:00 PM - 05:00 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
University Calendar
The Live Simulation Environment
Friday April 3rd 4 pm – 5 pm EEB248
Dr. Jose Renau of U.C. Santa Cruz
Short bio:
Jose Renau (http://www.soe.ucsc.edu/~renau) is an associate professor of computer engineering at the University of California, Santa Cruz. His research focuses on computer architecture, including design effort metrics and models, infrared thermal measurements, low-power and thermal-aware designs, process variability, thread level speculation, and FPGA/ASIC design. Renau has a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Short Abstract:
Professor Renau will talk about the still not published Live Simulation environment being developed University of California, Santa Cruz. The Live Simulation Environment is a collaborative environment with statistical sampling for very fast
computer architecture simulations. The talk will present the philosophy and a live demo of the setup. The setup can run SPEC benchmarks in few seconds with accurate sampling.
Unlike other statistical simulation simulators, the user does not specify sampling parameters. The user just sets the acceptable simulation error, a set of benchmarks, and the architecture configuration. The Live environment is able to automatically adjust the sampling parameters guaranteeing that the error is within the requested confidence interval.
By adapting the sample parameters per application, benchmark, and core automatically it is possible to accurately run SPEC 2006 in a few seconds.
This is a link of a video showing the "goal"
http://masc.soe.ucsc.edu/livedemo/livedemo.mp4
Host: Dr. Timothy Pinkston
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 248
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Shane Goodoff
-
The Live Simulation Environment
Fri, Apr 03, 2015 @ 04:00 PM - 05:00 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
University Calendar
The Live Simulation Environment
Friday April 3rd 4 pm – 5 pm EEB248
Dr. Jose Renau of U.C. Santa Cruz
Short bio:
Jose Renau (http://www.soe.ucsc.edu/~renau) is an associate professor of computer engineering at the University of California, Santa Cruz. His research focuses on computer architecture, including design effort metrics and models, infrared thermal measurements, low-power and thermal-aware designs, process variability, thread level speculation, and FPGA/ASIC design. Renau has a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Short Abstract:
Professor Renau will talk about the still not published Live Simulation environment being developed University of California, Santa Cruz. The Live Simulation Environment is a collaborative environment with statistical sampling for very fast
computer architecture simulations. The talk will present the philosophy and a live demo of the setup. The setup can run SPEC benchmarks in few seconds with accurate sampling.
Unlike other statistical simulation simulators, the user does not specify sampling parameters. The user just sets the acceptable simulation error, a set of benchmarks, and the architecture configuration. The Live environment is able to automatically adjust the sampling parameters guaranteeing that the error is within the requested confidence interval.
By adapting the sample parameters per application, benchmark, and core automatically it is possible to accurately run SPEC 2006 in a few seconds.
This is a link of a video showing the "goal"
http://masc.soe.ucsc.edu/livedemo/livedemo.mp4
Host: Dr. Timothy Pinkston
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 248 Conference Room
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Shane Goodoff
-
Emerging Opportunties for Startups in Computer Networking
Wed, Apr 08, 2015 @ 06:00 PM - 08:30 PM
USC Viterbi School of Engineering
University Calendar
RSVP Here
Speaker Murali Venkat.
Murali Venkat is an Architect & Technical Leader @ Cisco, in the Cloud & Virtualization Group. Murali is a seasoned hands-on engineer, with expertise in all things Networking having worked on Enterprise and Service Provider products at Cisco and Novell. He was an early engineer at GreenField Networks, a Sequoia funded ASIC startup that was acquired by Cisco. Murali has been granted multiple US patents, and is actively engaged with the USC Viterbi Engineering Board, and Cisco University Research. Murali earned his MS CS @ USC/ISI in the 90s.Location: Kerckhoff Hall (KER) -
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Viterbi Student Innovation Institute
-
PhD Defense - Tung Sing Leung
Thu, Apr 09, 2015 @ 09:30 AM - 11:30 AM
Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science
University Calendar
Date: Thursday April 9th, 9.30am
Location: SAL 213
Title: Outdoor Visual Navigation Aid For The Blind In Dynamic Environments
PhD Candidate: Tung-Sing Leung
Committee:
Prof. Gerard G Medioni (Chair)
Prof. Laurent Itti
Prof. James D. Weiland (outside member)
Abstract:
This thesis proposes a visual navigation aid for the blind. Our goal is to develop a wearable system to help the visually impaired navigate in highly dynamic outdoor environments. The proposed solution uses both visual sensing and existing map available online. Our work focus on two parts : visual odometry (VO) and localization. We propose different methods to compute the visual odometry even in clutter environments using either wearable stereo camera or smartphone. For the case of stereo camera, instead of computing egomotion from 3D point correspondences in consecutive frames, we propose to find the ground plane, then decompose the 6-DoF egomotion into a motion of the ground plane, and a planar motion on the ground plane. The ground plane is estimated at each frame either by analysis of the disparity array or approximated from the Inertial measurement unit (IMU) reading. We have extended our visual odometry to monocular system so that the proposed framework is applicable to smartphone which is more accessible than the stereo camera. To further improve the accuracy of the visual odometry and correct the drift caused by dead reckoning during long navigation, we combine visual odometry with the semantic information available in map to estimate the global coordinates of the walking user. The motion estimation results are fed into a Monte Carlo Localization framework which localizes the user by matching the local motion trajectory with the shape of the street network found in the map. We validated our system on real scenario of hours of walking around in both open terrain and urban environment. Experimental results show that our method not only corrects the cumulative drifting error but also manages to recover from temporary loss.
Location: Henry Salvatori Computer Science Center (SAL) - 213
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Lizsl De Leon
-
VSi2: Negotiation Skills for Startup Founders, Led by one of the Founders of Expedia
Wed, Apr 15, 2015 @ 06:00 PM - 08:00 PM
USC Viterbi School of Engineering
University Calendar
RSVP Here
Russ Sachs is a senior leader in all aspects of corporate strategies, deal management, corporate acquisitions, financial analysis, and executive coaching / mentoring.
He has over 10 years in highly complex corporate software, M and A and IP licensing deals.
Deep financial acumen and the ability to determine viability of acquisitions, investments and corporate strategies.
Created over $3 billion in share holder value and managed explosive organizational growth through negotiation, acquisitions and corporate partnerships.
Highly involved Board member of various companies and organizations - offering strategic consulting, financial analysis and business insights that have greatly impacted focus and direction.
Serve as Coach and Mentor to CEOs on an on-going basis, with a focus on being a sounding board and offering business guidance. This function is critical as many leaders have few options when it comes to confidential unbiased non-judgmental advisors.Location: Kerckhoff Hall (KER) -
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Viterbi Student Innovation Institute
-
ASME Talks with Raytheon VP
.jpg)
Fri, Apr 17, 2015 @ 12:30 PM - 02:00 PM
Viterbi School of Engineering Student Organizations
University Calendar
Come join ASME for a casual Q&A discussion with Jerry Charlow. Mr. Charlow is Vice President of Program Management Excellence at Raytheon Missile Systems and also a USC alumnus.
This is a unique opportunity for you to lead the conversation with an esteemed industry professional from Raytheon in a relaxed setting.
Food will also be provided!
To attend, make sure to fill out the following form: http://tinyurl.com/lead-the-conversation
The room will fill up quickly, so make sure to sign up ASAP! We look forward to seeing you there!Location: James H. Zumberge Hall Of Science (ZHS) - 252
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME)
-
PhD Defense - Randolph Voorhies
Wed, Apr 22, 2015 @ 02:00 PM - 04:00 PM
Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science
University Calendar
PhD Candidate: Randolph Voorhies
Date: 4/22
Time: 2-4pm
Location: HNB 100
Committee:
Laurent Itti (Chair)
Gaurav Sukhatme
James Weiland
Title:
Efficient SLAM For Scanning LiDAR Sensors Using Combined Plane and Point Features
Abstract:
This work presents a novel SLAM algorithm for scanning (Velodyne style) LiDAR sensors. A Hough transform algorithm is first derived which exploits the unique geometry of these sensors to detect planar features, and it is then shown how these features can be matched over a sequence of scans to reconstruct the path of the sensor. A mathematical framework is then developed to track how well constrained these sequential alignment problems are, and to detect when they become under-constrained. A method is then presented which determines a minimal set of non-planar features to be extracted from scenes to achieve full constraint within this framework. Finally, all of these tools are combined into an online SLAM system which is able to close the loop on a variety of indoor and outdoor datasets without the use of odometry, GPS, or an IMU. Both the frame to frame alignment as well as the SLAM algorithms are compared to state of the art methods and superior performance is shown for both.Location: Hedco Neurosciences Building (HNB) - 100
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Lizsl De Leon
-
VSi2: Learn About Challenges and Opportunities in Financial Tech.
Wed, Apr 22, 2015 @ 05:00 PM - 08:00 PM
USC Viterbi School of Engineering
University Calendar
RSVP Here
Ryan joined Bank of America Merrill Lynch in 2010 as Senior Vice President of the Technology Partnership Development. In his role, Ryan is responsible for leveraging the technology organization's expertise, insights and relationships for client business development efforts with Investment Banking and Institutional Equities. In addition, Ryan focuses on strategic partnerships with technology companies and the venture capital community.
Prior to joining Bank of America, Ryan spent eleven years working in the technology sector – first as a sell-side software analyst at Morgan Stanley, then in corporate strategy and marketing roles at Oracle and SAP. As a research analyst at Morgan Stanley, Ryan was part of the number-one ranked enterprise software research team in Institutional Investor’s All-America rankings from 1999 to 2003. Following Morgan Stanley, Ryan was Vice President of Business Strategy at Oracle Corporation, where he reported directly to President Charles Phillips and was responsible for strategic research that supported the Executive Committee and the Board of Directors. In 2007, Ryan retuned to Morgan Stanley where he was a Vice President in the Institutional Equities Division. Most recently, Ryan was Head of Planning and Strategy for the Global Field Marketing organization at SAP.Location: Kerckhoff Hall (KER) -
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Viterbi Student Innovation Institute
-
Phd Defense - Weijun Wang
Thu, Apr 23, 2015 @ 02:00 PM - 03:30 PM
Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science
University Calendar
PhD defense: Weijun Wang
Title: Tracking Multiple Articulating Humans from a Single Camera
Time: 2:00PM -3:30PM
Location: Powell Hall of Engineering(PHE) 631
Dissertation Committee:
Chair: Professor Ram Nevatia
Suya You
C.-C.Jay Kuo
Abstract:
-----------------------------------------------------
Monocular multi-target tracking aims at locating multiple targets, maintaining their identities across frames and estimating their motion trajectories from a single camera view, which is an important problem with many applications such as automatic surveillance and video retrieval. In particular, humans are often the most concerned targets as daily activities and events in real scenes usually involve human participants. Even though some fairly significant advances have been made on pedestrian tracking in recent years, the problem of tracking multiple humans towards higher-level reasoning is still far from solved. For example , humans might move in groups in real scenes and important social context features have not been effectively explored by the usual simplification that targets' trajectories are independent. Most importantly, unlike well-studied pedestrian detection, articulated human detection remains a challenging task which makes the existing pedestrian tracking approaches less effective on videos with multiple articulating humans. In this work, we focus on exploring important online learned appearance and social context cues to improve tracking performance on pedestrians as well as articulated humans.
As pedestrian tracking is the foundation of the proposed approach, we first propose to improve its performance by considering social context. We propose a general quadratic formulation to incorporate social dependency into a global optimization problem to improve multi-target tracking accuracy. To ensure the tracking efficiency, we show an approach to convert the new binary quadratic programming formulation to a semidefinite programming problem under convex relaxation, which can be efficiently solved by off-the-shelf methods. With the new formulation, we propose to consider a few simple common trajectory dependency factors, which can be efficiently inferred online to improve tracking performance, especially in semi-crowded scenarios. In scenarios where no trajectory dependency can be explored, our solution is the same and as efficient as those classic linear optimization formulations. Experimental results on standard datasets show the advantages of our approach over state-of-the-art. Moreover, this new formulation provides a general framework to consider various useful high order information to improve multi-target tracking.
To address the problem of tracking multiple articulating humans from a single camera, we propose a hybrid framework. Our method incorporates offline learned category-level detector with online learned instance-specific detector as a hybrid system. To deal with humans in large pose articulation, which can not be reliably detected by off-line trained detectors, we propose an online learned instance-specific patch-based detector, consisting of layered patch classifiers. With extrapolated tracklets by online learned detectors, we use the discriminative color filters learned online to compute the appearance affinity score for further global association.
Experimental evaluation on both standard pedestrian datasets and articulated human datasets shows significant improvement compared to state-of-the-art multi-human tracking methods.
Location: Charles Lee Powell Hall (PHE) - 631
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Lizsl De Leon
.jpg)