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Events for May 03, 2013

  • Repeating EventMeet USC: Admission Presentation, Campus Tour, & Engineering Talk

    Fri, May 03, 2013

    Viterbi School of Engineering Undergraduate Admission

    Receptions & Special Events


    This half day program is designed for prospective freshmen and family members. Meet USC includes an information session on the University and the Admission process; a student led walking tour of campus and a meeting with us in the Viterbi School. Meet USC is designed to answer all of your questions about USC, the application process and financial aid. Reservations are required for Meet USC. This program occurs twice, once at 8:30 a.m. and again at 12:30 p.m. Please visit https://esdweb.esd.usc.edu/unresrsvp/MeetUSC.aspx to check availability and make an appointment. Be sure to list an Engineering major as your "intended major" on the webform!

    Location: Ronald Tutor Campus Center (TCC) - USC Admission Office

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    View All Dates

    Contact: Viterbi Admission

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  • AI Seminar-Rudi Studer:

    Fri, May 03, 2013 @ 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM

    Information Sciences Institute

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Rudi Studer, Institutes AIFB/KSRI, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology & FZI Research Center for Information Technology, Karlsruhe, Germany

    Talk Title: A Declarative Language for Interoperation between Web Data and Services

    Abstract: In recent years the amount of data that have been published according to Linked Data principles as well as the number of Web APIs that expose data in various formats has been growing rapidly. In order to integrate these two worlds the notion of Linked APIs will be presented that combines principles from Linked Data and Representational State Transfer (REST). The combination provides a uniform resource-centric abstraction, which includes the RDF data format and manipulation mechanisms for the data.

    For declaratively specifying interactions with web resources in the context of Linked APIs, Data-Fu is introduced. Data-Fu is a lightweight declarative rule language with state transition systems as formal grounding. An execution engine that supports the parallel execution of the declarative Data-Fu programs is outlined as well. Application examples show the advantages of the developed approach.




    Biography: Rudi Studer is Full Professor in Applied Informatics at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), Institute AIFB. In addition, he is director at the Karlsruhe Service Research Institute (KSRI) as well as at the FZI Research Center for Information Technology. His research interests include knowledge management, semantic web technologies and applications, data and text mining, big data and services.

    He obtained a Diploma in Computer Science at the University of Stuttgart in 1975. In 1982 he was awarded a Doctor's degree in Mathematics and Informatics at the University of Stuttgart, and in 1985 he obtained his Habilitation in Informatics at the University of Stuttgart. From 1985 to 1989 he was project leader and manager at the Scientific Center of IBM Germany.

    He is involved in various national and international cooperation projects, among others the DFG Graduate School Information Management and Market Engineering (IME), the EU Network of Excellence on Large-Scale Data Management (PlanetData) as well as the EU projects XLike (Cross-lingual Knowledge Extraction) and Render (Reflecting Knowledge Diversity). He is former president of the Semantic Web Science Association (SWSA) and former Editor-in-chief of the Journal Web Semantics: Science, Services, and Agents on the World Wide Web.


    Host: Craig Knoblock, USC/ISI

    Webcast: http://webcasterms1.isi.edu/mediasite/Viewer/?peid=02b81710252d4e6cb0ac2fe9726e525b1d

    Location: Information Science Institute (ISI) - Marina del Rey

    WebCast Link: http://webcasterms1.isi.edu/mediasite/Viewer/?peid=02b81710252d4e6cb0ac2fe9726e525b1d

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Alma Nava / Information Sciences Institute

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  • VGSA CS Photo Scavenger Hunt

    VGSA CS Photo Scavenger Hunt

    Fri, May 03, 2013 @ 11:45 AM - 02:00 PM

    Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science

    Student Activity


    Please come and join us for a fun study break, the Photo Scavenger Hunt on Friday, May 4, brought to you by VGSA.

    Please fill out this form and let us know if you are interested in coming! The game will be played in a team setting. If you want to stick together with your friends, get 3 more people and form your own team! If you want to meet some new people, just put in your info and we will team you up! We will meet around 11:45 am, in front of Traditions (the entrance in the back of tutor center).

    The form link is : http://bit.ly/15W7SaJ

    Here are the steps in case you aren't sure:
    1) Log out of you gmail account or Use incognito mode.
    2) Open this link given above.
    3) It will open USCnet Login page.
    4) Enter your USC user id. Example if its ttrojan@usc.edu, just enter ttrojan
    5) Enter your USC password.
    6) Click Login
    7) It will display the form.
    8) Fill the form and submit.

    A lunch with live music will be served after the game at Traditions so please indicate your meal preference as well.

    If you have any questions, feel free to contact Celia Chen: qianqiac@usc.edu.

    Looking forward to seeing you all!

    Best,
    VGSA-CS Senators

    Location: Ronald Tutor Campus Center (TCC) - Outside Traditions

    Audiences: Graduate

    Contact: Celia Chen

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  • Senior Design Expo

    Fri, May 03, 2013 @ 02:00 PM - 04:00 PM

    Viterbi School of Engineering Student Affairs

    Receptions & Special Events


    The Senior Design Expo gives seniors a chance to show off what they’ve done in their capstone classes. Seniors present their projects to a judging panel of faculty, staff, and industry partners, with winners receiving cash prizes. Freshmen, sophomores, and juniors can learn what types of projects they will work on and vote for their favorite, as well as see how their current classes can be applied to future engineering projects.

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

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Christine D'Arcy

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  • The Conditional Entropy Power Inequality for Gaussian Quantum States

    Fri, May 03, 2013 @ 02:00 PM - 03:00 PM

    Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Robert Koenig, University of Waterloo

    Talk Title: The Conditional Entropy Power Inequality for Gaussian Quantum States

    Abstract: The classical entropy power inequality, originally proposed by Shannon, is a powerful tool in multi-user information theory. We have recently found a quantum generalization which lower bounds the output entropy as two independent signals combine at a beamsplitter. This yields upper bounds on the capacity of additive bosonic noise channels.

    In this talk, I summarize these results and propose a generalization of the quantum entropy power inequality involving conditional entropies. I discuss some implications for entanglement-assisted classical communication over additive bosonic noise channels. For the special case of Gaussian states, a proof can be given based on perturbation theory for symplectic spectra.

    This is based on joint work with Graeme Smith.


    Sponsored by the Ming Hsieh Institute

    Biography: Robert Koenig received his diploma in theoretical physics from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) Zurich in 2003. He subsequently worked as a research and teaching assistant at the department of theoretical computer science at ETH before moving to Cambridge, UK. After completing his PhD in 2007, he was a postdoctoral scholar at the Institute for Quantum Information, Caltech until 2011. Last fall, he joined the Institute for Quantum Computing and the Department of Applied Mathematics at the University of Waterloo after spending a year at IBM Watson research. He is interested in all mathematical, physical and computer-science related aspects of quantum information.

    Host: Ben Reichardt, x07229, ben.reichardt@usc.edu

    Location: Seaver Science Library (SSL) - 150

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Gerrielyn Ramos

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  • NL Seminar- Dirk Hovy: "Learning Semantic Types and Relations from Text" (Defense Practice Talk)

    Fri, May 03, 2013 @ 03:00 PM - 04:00 PM

    Information Sciences Institute

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Dirk Hovy, USC/ISI

    Talk Title: Learning Semantic Types and Relations from Text (Defense Practice Talk)

    Series: Natural Language Seminar

    Abstract: NLP applications such as Question Answering (QA), Information Extraction (IE), or Machine Translation (MT) are incorporating increasing amounts of semantic information. A fundamental building block of semantic information is the relation between a predicate and its arguments, e.g. eat(John,burger). In order to reason at higher levels of abstraction, it is useful to group relation instances according to the types of their predicates and the types of their arguments. For example, while eat(Mary,burger) and devour(John,tofu) are two distinct relation instances, they share the underlying predicate and argument types INGEST(PERSON,FOOD).

    A central question is: where do the types and relations come from?

    The subfield of NLP concerned with this is relation extraction, which comprises two main tasks: 1. identifying and extracting relation instances from text 2. determining the types of their predicates and arguments The first task is difficult for several reasons. Relations can express their predicate explicitly or implicitly. Furthermore, their elements can be far part, with unrelated words intervening. In this thesis, we restrict ourselves to relations that are explicitly expressed between syntactically related words. We harvest the relation instances from dependency parses. The second task is the central focus of this thesis. Specifically, we will address these three problems: 1) determining argument types 2) determining predicate types 3) determining argument and predicate types. For each task, we model predicate and argument types as latent variables in a hidden Markov models. Depending on the type system available for each of these tasks, our approaches range from unsupervised to semi-supervised to fully supervised training methods.

    The central contributions of this thesis are as follows: 1. Learning argument types (unsupervised): We present a novel approach that learns the type system along with the relation candidates when neither is given. In contrast to previous work on unsupervised relation extraction, it produces human-interpretable types rather than clusters. We also investigate its applicability to downstream tasks such as knowledge base population and construction of ontological structures. An auxiliary contribution, born from the necessity to evaluate the quality of human subjects, is MACE (Multi-Annotator Competence Estimation), a tool that helps estimate both annotator competence and the most likely answer. 2. Learning predicate types (unsupervised and supervised): Relations are ubiquitous in language, and many problems can be modeled as relation problems. We demonstrate this on a common NLP task, word sense disambiguation (WSD) for prepositions (PSD). We use selectional constraints between the preposition and its argument in order to determine the sense of the preposition. In contrast, previous approaches to PSD used n-gram context windows that do not capture the relation structure. We improve supervised state-of-the-art for two type systems. 3. Argument types and predicates types (semi-supervised): Previously, there was no work in jointly learning argument and predicate types because (as with many joint learning tasks) there is no jointly annotated data available. Instead, we have two partially annotated data sets, using two disjoint type systems: one with type annotations for the predicates, and one with type annotations for the arguments. We present a semisupervised approach to jointly learn argument types and predicate types, and demonstrate it for jointly solving PSD and supersense-tagging of their arguments. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to address this joint learning task. Our work opens up interesting avenues for both the typing of existing large collections of triple stores, using all available information, and for WSD of various word classes.

    Biography: Home Page:
    http://www.dirkhovy.com/

    Host: Qing Dou

    More Info: http://nlg.isi.edu/nl-seminar/

    Location: Information Science Institute (ISI) - Marina Del Rey-11th Flr Conf Rm # 1135

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Peter Zamar

    Event Link: http://nlg.isi.edu/nl-seminar/

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  • CEE Ph.D. Seminar

    Fri, May 03, 2013 @ 04:00 PM - 05:00 PM

    Sonny Astani Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Nan Li and Mahmoud Kamalzare, USC Astani Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering Graduate Students

    Talk Title: A Radio Frequency Based Indoor Localization Framework for Supporting Building Emergency Response Operations

    Abstract:
    Second Presenter:

    Mahmoud Kamalzare –

    Ttile: “Computationally Efficient Design of Optimal Strategies for Semiactive Damping Devices”

    Pizza is served at 5:00pm in KAP 209

    Location: John Stauffer Science Lecture Hall (SLH) - 102

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Evangeline Reyes

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