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Events for April 11, 2019

  • Repeating EventExplore USC - Admitted Student Day

    Thu, Apr 11, 2019

    Viterbi School of Engineering Undergraduate Admission

    University Calendar


    Explore USC is the most comprehensive campus visit program for admitted students. It is a full-day program that allows you to interact with dozens of our current students, tour the campus, learn more about financial aid, gives you opportunities to sit in on classes, and start the morning with the Viterbi School of Engineering.

    Your time with us in the Viterbi School will take you through an informative session on our academic programs. We will arrange a meeting with faculty from the major you are interested in as well as engineering facility tours of that same area. For lunch we will have you hanging out with some of our engineering students for a few hours, eating in the dinning facilities, seeing the residence halls, but most importantly experiencing the full USC atmosphere.

    Once admitted, students can find the RSVP link in their USC Applicant Portal.

    Audiences: Admitted Students & Family Members

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    Contact: Viterbi Admission

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  • CS Colloquium: Tyler Sorensen (Princeton University) - Reasoning About Heterogenous Computing

    Thu, Apr 11, 2019 @ 09:30 AM - 10:30 AM

    Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Tyler Sorensen, Princeton University

    Talk Title: Reasoning About Heterogenous Computing

    Series: CS Colloquium

    Abstract: Heterogeneous system designs have allowed computing efficiency to scale past fundamental constraints of transistors. Such systems are now the computation workhorses behind everyday technology, from speech recognition trained on clusters of GPUs, to efficient SoC designs in mobile phones. However, programming for these systems presents many challenges, specifically in orchestrating synchronization. Examining general purpose GPU (GPGPU) programming is a pragmatic start towards general heterogeneous reasoning, as GPGPU programming models expose hardware specialization and heterogeneous-aware constructs. In this talk, I discuss my work in this area, which has identified important areas of under-specification in GPGPU programming and laid the foundations for specification repairs.

    First, I will present work on testing memory consistency models, i.e. the rules governing fine-grained communication, for GPGPUs. This work exposed wide-spread confusion in the GPGPU community, including identifying programming errors in two Nvidia-endorsed textbooks. Second, I will present work on GPGPU forward progress models, which defines a progress abstraction that allows cross-vendor GPGPU global barrier synchronization. This can then be used in an optimization for GPGPU graph traversal applications, achieving over a 10x speedup on Intel and AMD GPUs. The talk concludes by showing that GPGPU reasoning is a natural foundation for future work targeting general heterogeneous programming.

    This lecture satisfies requirements for CSCI 591: Research Colloquium


    Biography: Tyler Sorensen is a PostDoc at Princeton University in Professor Margaret Martonosi's architecture group working on designing new heterogeneous systems. He received his PhD from Imperial College London under the supervision of Dr. Alastair Donaldson. His thesis work involved rigorous reasoning about GPGPU programming, with an emphasis on fine-grained synchronization idioms. This work has been published widely (including two distinguished paper awards at PLDI'18 and
    FSE'17) and presented to major GPU vendors, including Nvidia, AMD and ARM. Tyler received his MS/BS from University of Utah, where he received the 2014 Outstanding Senior Award. He has done internships at both Microsoft Research and Nvidia.


    Host: Jyotirmoy Deshmukh

    Location: Ronald Tutor Hall of Engineering (RTH) - 109

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Assistant to CS chair

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  • CS Colloquium: Motahhare Eslami (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) - Participating and Designing around Algorithmic Sociotechnical Systems

    Thu, Apr 11, 2019 @ 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM

    Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Motahhare Eslami, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

    Talk Title: Participating and Designing around Algorithmic Sociotechnical Systems

    Series: CS Colloquium

    Abstract: Algorithms play a vital role in curating online information in socio-technical systems, however, they are usually housed in black-boxes that limit users' understanding of how an algorithmic decision is made. While this opacity partly stems from protecting intellectual property and preventing malicious users from gaming the system, it is also designed to provide users with seamless, effortless system interactions. However, this opacity can result in misinformed behavior among users, particularly when there is no clear feedback mechanism for users to understand the effects of their own actions on an algorithmic system. The increasing prevalence and power of these opaque algorithms coupled with their sometimes biased and discriminatory decisions raise questions about how knowledgeable users are and should be about the existence, operation and possible impacts of these algorithms. In this talk, I will address these questions by exploring ways to investigate users' behavior around opaque algorithmic systems. I will then present new design techniques that communicate opaque algorithmic processes to users and provide them with a more informed, satisfying, and engaging interaction. In doing so, I will add new angles to the old idea of understanding the interaction between users and automation by designing around algorithm sensemaking and transparency.

    This lecture satisfies requirements for CSCI 591: Research Colloquium


    Biography: Motahhare Eslami is a Ph.D. Candidate in Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where she is advised by Karrie Karahalios. Motahhare's research develops new communication techniques between users and opaque algorithmic socio-technical systems to provide users a more informed, satisfying, and engaging interaction. Her work has been recognized with a Google PhD Fellowship, Best Paper Award at ACM CHI, and has been covered in mainstream media such as Time, The Washington Post, Huffington Post, the BBC, Fortune, and Quartz. Motahhare is also a Facebook and Adobe PhD fellowship finalist, and a recipient of C.W. Gear Outstanding Graduate Student Award, Saburo Muroga Endowed Fellowship, Feng Chen Memorial Award, Young Researcher in Heidelberg Laureate Forum and Rising Stars in EECS.


    Host: Heather Culbertson

    Location: Olin Hall of Engineering (OHE) - 132

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Assistant to CS chair

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  • Mercedes-Benz Trojan Talk

    Thu, Apr 11, 2019 @ 06:30 PM - 08:00 PM

    Viterbi School of Engineering Career Connections

    Workshops & Infosessions


    Mercedes-Benz Research and Development

    Location: Seeley G. Mudd Building (SGM) - 101

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: RTH 218 Viterbi Career Connections

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  • Social Night with AAAI@USC

    Thu, Apr 11, 2019 @ 07:00 PM - 08:30 PM

    Viterbi School of Engineering Student Organizations

    Student Activity


    Join AAAI for a night of fun AI games, free food and drinks, and interesting conversations about the world of Artificial Intelligence with fellow Trojans and professors involved in the field of AI at USC!

    Students from all backgrounds are encouraged to come!

    Attractions include:

    - Reinforcement Learning Games designed by our team member and AI project manager Shaily Parikh
    - Cookie Decorating Contest (throw some cookies on the table, connect the cookie nodes with some icing, slap on some weights and biases)
    - Coloring Book Station
    - FREE FOOD AND DRINKS!!

    Details:
    7:00pm, Thursday April 11th @VKC156

    RSVP: https://forms.gle/DJfJApe7xmeDufcFA

    Location: Von Kleinsmid Center For International & Public Affairs (VKC) - 156

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: AAAI@USC

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