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Events for April 29, 2022
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PhD Defense - Aida Mostafazadeh Davani
Fri, Apr 29, 2022 @ 03:00 AM - 04:30 PM
Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science
University Calendar
PhD Candidate: Aida Mostafazadeh Davani
Time:
Friday, April 29th, 3pm, SGM 911.
Committee: Morteza Dehghani, Bistra Dilkina, Xiang Ren, and Stephen Read
Title:
Integrating Annotator Biases into Modeling Subjective Language Classification Tasks
Abstract:
Subjective annotation tasks are inherently nuanced due to annotators' individual differences in understanding of language. Training Natural Language Processing (NLP) models for making predictions in subjective tasks based on human-annotated datasets is also marked by challenges; model decisions are rarely generalizable to judgements of unseen annotators. Therefore, modeling an acceptable interpretation of subjective tasks requires integrating psychological dimensions that capture individual differences in perceiving language for each specific task. This thesis provides an alternative approach for modeling subjective NLP tasks by tailoring representations based on annotators' varying perceptions of language. First, NLP datasets for subjective tasks are investigated to demonstrate how aggregating annotation into single ground truth labels impacts the representation of different perspectives in language resources. Then, the impacts of annotators' social biases are explored to demonstrate sources for human-like biases in annotated datasets and language classifiers. And lastly, alternative approaches for incorporating annotators' individual differences into modeling their annotation behaviors are presented.Location: Seeley G. Mudd Building (SGM) - 911
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Lizsl De Leon
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DEN@Viterbi: How to Apply Virtual Info Session
Fri, Apr 29, 2022 @ 09:00 AM - 10:00 AM
DEN@Viterbi, Viterbi School of Engineering Graduate Admission
Workshops & Infosessions
Join USC Viterbi representatives for a step-by-step guide and tips for how to apply for formal admission into a Master's degree or Graduate Certificate program. The session is intended for individuals who wish to pursue a graduate degree program completely online via USC Viterbi's flexible online DEN@Viterbi delivery method.
Attendees will have the opportunity to connect directly with USC Viterbi representatives and ask questions about the admission process throughout the session.
Register Now!WebCast Link: https://uscviterbi.webex.com/uscviterbi/onstage/g.php?MTID=edfcddaf07b411d6e817e2199614b1670
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Corporate & Professional Programs
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Career & Internship Bootcamp: What Recruiters Look for in Your Resume
Fri, Apr 29, 2022 @ 10:00 AM - 10:30 AM
Viterbi School of Engineering Career Connections
Workshops & Infosessions
Want to secure an internship or job? Participate in Career & Internship Bootcamp to learn how to increase your chances of getting contacted for an interview, how to excel at interviews, and how to negotiate a higher salary.
Session description: Review strategies to showcase your experiences and highlight your skills on your resume to impress recruiters and land interviews.
Location: In-Person, RTH 211 & Online via Zoom
Register on Viterbi Career Gateway > Workshops
https://viterbi-usc-csm.symplicity.com/Location: Hybrid
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: RTH 218 Viterbi Career Connections
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Career & Internship Bootcamp: Find Your Dream Job or Internship (Job search strategies)
Fri, Apr 29, 2022 @ 11:00 AM - 11:30 AM
Viterbi School of Engineering Career Connections
Workshops & Infosessions
Spring 2022 Career & Internship Bootcamp
Want to secure an internship or job? Participate in Career & Internship Bootcamp on April 29th to learn how to increase your chances of getting contacted for an interview, how to excel at interviews, and how to negotiate a higher salary.
Session description: Focus your job search to find the right opportunities for you.
Location: In-Person, RTH 211 & Online via Zoom
Register on Viterbi Career Gateway > Workshop
https://viterbi-usc-csm.symplicity.com/
Location: HYBRID
Audiences: All Viterbi
Contact: RTH 218 Viterbi Career Connections
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Viterbi Undergraduate Symposium
Fri, Apr 29, 2022 @ 11:00 AM - 04:00 PM
Viterbi School of Engineering Student Affairs
Receptions & Special Events
The Viterbi Undergraduate Symposium provides Viterbi undergraduate students the opportunity to showcase their research and significant works to faculty, staff, students, and industry partners. Presented works may come from senior design capstone courses, honors thesis/projects, student design teams, and research conducted under faculty supervision (e.g. CURVE). Students will present their projects in person throughout the day.
More Information: Viterbi Undergraduate Symposium Flyer.pdf
Location: Epstein Family Engineering Plaza
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Andy Jones-Liang
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BCG Walk & Talks
Fri, Apr 29, 2022 @ 12:00 PM - 12:45 PM
Viterbi School of Engineering Career Connections
Workshops & Infosessions
Our purpose is to provide a variety of opportunities for students to have their questions answered, learn more about BCG and our recruiting process.
Designed for the students to listen in podcast style and hear from BCG Associates about why we think BCG is a great place to launch your career!
Friday, April 29th 12pm-12:45pm: BCG Culture & Community- Click Here to Register: https://talent.bcg.com/Events?folderId=10047272&source=Event
External employer-hosted events and activities are not affiliated with the USC Viterbi Career Connections Office. They are posted on Viterbi Career Connections because they may be of interest to members of the Viterbi community. Inclusion of any activity does not indicate USC sponsorship or endorsement of that activity or event. It is the participant's responsibility to apply due diligence, exercise caution when participating, and report concerns to vcareers@usc.eduLocation: Virtual
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: RTH 218 Viterbi Career Connections
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Career Connections Lunch and Learn (with Pizza!)
Fri, Apr 29, 2022 @ 12:00 PM - 01:30 PM
Viterbi School of Engineering Career Connections
Workshops & Infosessions
Spring 2022 Career & Internship Bootcamp
Want to secure an internship or job? Participate in Career & Internship Bootcamp on April 29th to learn how to increase your chances of getting contacted for an interview, how to excel at interviews, and how to negotiate a higher salary.
Session description: Enjoy FREE pizza and drinks while sharing what you want to see from Viterbi Career Connections.
Location: In-Person, RTH 211 & Online via Zoom
Register on Viterbi Career Gateway > Workshop
https://viterbi-usc-csm.symplicity.com/
Location: HYBRID
Audiences: All Viterbi
Contact: RTH 218 Viterbi Career Connections
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PhD Defense - Ritesh Ahuja
Fri, Apr 29, 2022 @ 12:00 PM - 02:00 PM
Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science
University Calendar
PhD Candidate: Ritesh Ahuja
Dissertation Committee: Cyrus Shahabi, Bhaskar Krishnamachari, Aleksandra Korolova
Venue: Online at 12 pm -2 pm
Zoom: https://usc.zoom.us/j/7125668882
Thesis title: Differentially Private Learned Models for Location Services
Abstract:
The emergence of mobile apps (e.g., location-based services, geosocial networks, ride-sharing) led to the collection of vast amounts of location data. Publishing aggregate information about user's movements benefits research on traffic optimization, context-aware notifications and public health (e.g., disease spread). While the benefits provided by location data are indisputable, preserving location privacy is essential, since even aggregate statistics (e.g., in the form of population density maps) can leak details about individual whereabouts. To protect against privacy risks, the data curator may publish a noisy version of the dataset, transformed according to Differential Privacy (DP), the de-facto standard for releasing statistical data.
The goal of a DP mechanism is to ensure privacy while keeping the query answers as accurate as possible. Conventional approaches build DP-compliant representation of a spatial dataset by partitioning the data domain into bins, and then publishing a histogram with the noisy count of points that fall within each bin. These solutions fall short of properly capturing skewness inherent to sparse location datasets, and as a result yield poor accuracy. Instead, in this work, we propose a paradigm shift towards learned representations of data. We learn powerful machine learning (ML) models that exploit patterns within location datasets to provide more accurate location services. We focus on key location queries that are the building blocks of many processing tasks.
For population-density maps that support range count queries on snapshot releases, where each individual contributes a single location report, we design a neural database system called Spatial Neural Histograms (SNH). We model spatial data such that density features are preserved, even when DP-compliant noise is added. As such, learning can be used to also combat data modelling errors, present in DP setting. SNH employs a set of neural networks that learn from diverse regions of the dataset and at varying granularities, leading to superior accuracy. More often however, spatio-temporal density information is required for utility (e.g., in modeling COVID hotspots). As a result, the released statistics must continually capture population counts in small areas for short time periods.
When releasing multiple snapshots, individuals may contribute multiple reports to the same dataset. The ability of an adversary to breach privacy increases significantly, and a shift to user-level privacy is necessitated. We employ the pattern recognition power of neural networks, specifically Variational Auto-Encoders (VAE), to reduce the noise introduced by DP mechanisms such that accuracy is increased, while the privacy requirement is still satisfied. The system called VAE based Data Release (VDR) enables longitudinal release of location data. In addition, by limiting the number of location reports from any single user, we reduce the noise needed by DP mechanisms, while ensuring data utility is not compromised. As a post-processing step we propose statistical estimators to adjust density information to account for the fact that they are calculated on a subset of the actual data.
Lastly, recommending a user the next-location to visit is fundamentally more challenging. When considering trajectories exhibiting short and non-repetitive spatial and temporal regularity, capturing user-user correlations requires learning sophisticated ML models that have high dimensionality in the intermediate layers of the neural networks. We propose a technique called Private Location Prediction (PLP). Central to our approach is the use of the skip-gram model, and its negative sampling technique. Our work is the first to propose differentially-private learning with skip-grams. In addition, we devise data grouping techniques within the skip-gram framework that pool together trajectories from multiple users in order to accelerate learning and improve model accuracy.
Extensive experimental results on real datasets with heterogeneous characteristics show that our proposed approaches---SNH, VDR and PLP--- significantly outperform the state of the art.WebCast Link: https://usc.zoom.us/j/7125668882
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Lizsl De Leon
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Career Internship Bootcamp: Get Connected - Tapping into the Hidden Job Market
Fri, Apr 29, 2022 @ 02:00 PM - 02:30 PM
Viterbi School of Engineering Career Connections
Workshops & Infosessions
Spring 2022 Career & Internship Bootcamp
Want to secure an internship or job? Participate in Career & Internship Bootcamp on April 29th to learn how to increase your chances of getting contacted for an interview, how to excel at interviews, and how to negotiate a higher salary.
Session description: Learn how to build a professional network that increases your access to employment opportunities.
Location: In-Person, RTH 211 & Online via Zoom
Register on Viterbi Career Gateway > Workshop
https://viterbi-usc-csm.symplicity.com/Location: HYBRID
Audiences: All Viterbi
Contact: RTH 218 Viterbi Career Connections
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Career and Internship Bootcamp: Interview Tips to Help You Secure the Job
Fri, Apr 29, 2022 @ 03:00 PM - 03:30 PM
Viterbi School of Engineering Career Connections
Workshops & Infosessions
Spring 2022 Career & Internship Bootcamp
Want to secure an internship or job? Participate in Career & Internship Bootcamp on April 29th to learn how to increase your chances of getting contacted for an interview, how to excel at interviews, and how to negotiate a higher salary.
Session description: Your resume will get you an interview, but your interview will land you the job.
Location: In-Person, RTH 211 & Online via Zoom
Register on Viterbi Career Gateway > Workshop
https://viterbi-usc-csm.symplicity.com/Location: HYBRID
Audiences: All Viterbi
Contact: RTH 218 Viterbi Career Connections
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Career and Internship Bootcamp: Increase Your Salary - Negotiating Your Job Offer
Fri, Apr 29, 2022 @ 04:00 PM - 04:30 PM
Viterbi School of Engineering Career Connections
Workshops & Infosessions
Spring 2022 Career & Internship Bootcamp
Want to secure an internship or job? Participate in Career & Internship Bootcamp on April 29th to learn how to increase your chances of getting contacted for an interview, how to excel at interviews, and how to negotiate a higher salary.
Session description: Learn the ins and outs of an offer, what is up for negotiation, and how to get the most out of your offer.
Location: In-Person, RTH 211 & Online via Zoom
Register on Viterbi Career Gateway > Workshop
https://viterbi-usc-csm.symplicity.com/Location: HYBRID
Audiences: All Viterbi
Contact: RTH 218 Viterbi Career Connections
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USC Makers Spring Show Case
Fri, Apr 29, 2022 @ 05:30 PM - 07:30 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Student Activity
On behalf of USC Makers, we would love to extend an invitation to our Spring 2022 Showcase, which will be taking place on Friday, April 29, at 5:30 PM PST. Showcase will be hybrid, taking place on campus at USC, but also filmed and posted to a Zoom stream. We encourage you to attend in-person, but if you aren't able to make it, feel free to hop onto the Zoom!
Physical Location:
Zumberge Hall of Science (Room 159)
Virtual link:
https://usc.zoom.us/j/95203533368
We have 11 awesome projects that will be presenting their final products, including a self-playing drum set, robotic cooking arm, and a chord-based piano game. We will also have catered food for all attendees.
We hope to see you there!More Information: Makers Showcase Inivitation.pdf
Location: James H. Zumberge Hall Of Science (ZHS) - 159
WebCast Link: https://usc.zoom.us/j/95203533368
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: USC Makers
