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Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Events for May

  • Astani CEE Dept. Seminar

    Wed, May 01, 2013 @ 03:30 AM - 04:30 PM

    Sonny Astani Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Dr. Philip L-F. Liu , Class of 1912 Professor in Engineering, School of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Cornell University

    Talk Title: Some Recent Advancement in Tsunami Research

    Abstract: Dr. Liu plans to give a brief progress report on two on-going research projects, related to coastal effects of tsunamis.

    The first problem concerns the effects of coastal forest on wave propagation and dissipation. A mathematical model for wave propagation in a lattice-like array of vertical cylinders is developed, where the macro-scale variation of waves is derived from the dynamics in the micro-scale cells. Assuming infinitesimal waves, periodic lattice configuration and strong contrast between the lattice spacing and the typical wavelength, the perturbation theory of homogenization (multiple scales) is used to derive the effective equations governing the macro-scale wave dynamics. The constitutive coefficients are computed from the solution of micro-scale boundary value problem for a finite number of unit cells. Eddy viscosity in a unit cell is determined by balancing the time averaged rate of dissipation and the rate of work done by wave force on the forest at a finite number of macro stations. While the spirit is similar to RANS scheme, less computational effort is needed. Using one fitting parameter, the theory is used to simulate three existing experiments with encouraging results. Limitations of the present theory are also pointed out.

    The second research topic aims to establish the correlations among bed shear stress, the near-bed velocity and the surface elevation of a leading tsunami wave form during the run-up and down-rush. To this end, a new shear plate device is designed and constructed, consists of a small shear plate attached to the housing via vertical supports that provide a restoring force. The plate is subject to fluid shear and pressure forces and these can be measured via the displacement of the plate and pressure tapings. The average shear stress on the plate can then be calculated. Experiments have been conducted using this device on a sloping ‘beach’ at Oregon State University’s Hinsdale Wave Research Laboratory in the Long Wave Flume and in a constant depth at Cornell’s DeFrees Laboratory in the Small Wave Flume. The laminar bed shear stress measurements under a solitary wave agree well with the theory and existing PIV data. Bed shear stress measurements for a breaking solitary wave on a slope are collected in the surf zone and swash zone. Temporal and spatial variations of bed shear stress are correlated to the near-bed velocity and water depth.


    Biography: Dr. Liu earned his bachelor’s degree in civil engineering from National Taiwan University, his master’s degree in civil engineering from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and his doctoral degree in hydrodynamics from MIT. Dr. Liu is the Director of the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Cornell University, where he has served as professor for his entire career. Dr. Liu has made major research contributions in developing water wave theories and modeling methodologies for tsunami dynamics. His research has yielded practical results including those obtained by his COMCOT (Cornell Multi-grid Coupled Tsunami) and COBRAS (Cornell Breaking Waves and Structures) models and from the field data from multiple post-tsunami field surveys, including Sri Lanka. Among his many awards, Dr. Liu received ASCE’s Walter L. Huber Civil Engineering Research Prize in 1978, ASCE’s John G. Moffatt-Frank E. Nichol Harbor and Coastal Engineering Award in 1997, and ASCE’s International Coastal Engineering Award in 2004. He also received a fellowship from the J.S. Guggenheim Foundation in 1980 and an Alexander von Humboldt Research Award in 2009. Dr. Liu was elected fellow of the American Geophysical Union in 2006 and is an elected ASCE distinguished member.

    Host: Astani CEE Dept.

    Location: Kaprielian Hall (KAP) - 209

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Cassie Cremeans

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  • Repeating EventFocused on parallel and distributed computing

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

    Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: TBA, TBA

    Talk Title: TBA

    Series: EE598 Seminar Course

    Abstract: Weekly seminars given by researchers in academia and industry including senior doctoral students in EE, CS and ISI covering current research related to parallel and distributed computation including parallel algorithms, high performance computing, scientific computation, application specific architectures, multi-core and many-core architectures and algorithms, application acceleration, reconfigurable computing systems, data intensive systems, Big Data and cloud computing.

    Biography: Prerequisite: Students are expected to be familiar with basic concepts at the level of graduate level courses in Computer Engineering and Computer Science in some of these topic areas above. Ph.D. students in Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering and Computer Science can automatically enroll. M.S. students can enroll only with permission of the instructor. To request permission send a brief mail to the instructor in text format with the subject field “EE 598”. The body of the mail (in text format) should include name, degree objective, courses taken at USC and grades obtained, prior educational background, and relevant research background, if any.

    Requirements for CR:
    1. Attending at least 10 seminars during the semester
    There will be a sign-in sheet and a sign-out sheet at every seminar. All students must sign-in (before 2:00pm) and sign-out (after 3:00pm). The sign-in sheet will not be available after 2:00pm, and the sign-out sheet will not be available before 3:00pm.

    2. Submitting a written report for at least 5 seminars
    The written report for each seminar must be 1-page single line spaced format with font size of 12 (Times) or 11 (Arial) without any figures, tables, or graphs. The report must be submitted no later than 1 week after the corresponding seminar, and must be handed only to the instructor either on the seminar times or during office hours. Late reports will not be considered.
    The report must summarize student’s own understanding of the seminar, and should contain the following:
    - Your name and submission date [1 line]
    - Title of the seminar, name of the speaker, and seminar date [1 line]
    - Background of the work (e.g., applications, prior research, etc.) [1 paragraph]
    - Highlights of the approaches presented in the seminar [1-2 paragraphs]
    - Main results presented in the seminar [1-2 paragraphs]
    - Conclusion (your own conclusion and not what was given by the speaker) [1 paragraph]
    Reviewing papers related to the topic of the seminar, and incorporating relevant findings in the
    reports (e.g., in the conclusion section) is encouraged. In such cases, make sure to clearly indicate
    the reference(s) used to derive these conclusions.

    Host: Professor Viktor K. Prasanna

    More Information: Course Announcement_EE598_Focused on parallel and distributed computing_(Spring 2013).pdf

    Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) -

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    View All Dates

    Contact: Janice Thompson

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  • Astani CEE Dept. Seminar

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

    Sonny Astani Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Christine Shoemaker, Joseph P. Ripley Professor, School of Civil and Environmental Engineering &Cornell University

    Talk Title: Optimization of Computationally Expensive Environmental Models Including Application to Monitoring Multi-Phase Subsurface flow from Carbon Sequestration

    Abstract: This talk will first give an overview of my research on optimization and uncertainty quantification and its application to a range of environmental topics. Our new algorithms (available as open source software) are very efficient for these applications and other multi-modal, computationally expensive simulation models because the algorithms are designed to reduce significantly the number of simulations required for finding the global optimal solution to a problem with multiple local minima. Our approach is to iteratively approximate the objective function or likelihood function f(x) with Radial Basis Functions (RBF) based on all previous simulations to guide the selection of the next expensive function evaluation. The applications incorporate issues related to monitoring, forecasting, uncertainty quantification, and risk analysis as well parameter estimation and design.

    Estimation of sequestered CO2 and pressure plumes is very important for risk analysis but difficult because the multiphase PDE model is very nonlinear and computationally expensive, monitoring data is very sparse, and the inverse optimization problem has multiple local minima. Each objective function evaluation requires expensive forward simulation of 3-D, highly nonlinear, multi-phase, multi-constituent set of PDEs (which can take hours per simulation). I’ll present results using TOUGH2 that give good current estimates and forecasts of plumes with our global optimization algorithm Stochastic RBF with a small number of original model simulations, and I’ll use our SOARS algorithm to assess uncertainty.


    Biography: Prof. Shoemaker received a PhD in Mathematics from USC supervised by Richard Bellman on dynamic programming and control. She is interested in surface and subsurface contaminant transport applications as well as in developing new computationally efficient distributed (HPC) optimization and control methods. Environmental topics she has worked on include watershed contaminant transport, groundwater remediation, global climate models (CLM4.5) and optimization of stochastic hydropower systems (BPA). . She is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and a Distinguished Member in ASCE. She is also a Fellow in INFORMS (Operations Research) and in AGU (hydrology).

    Host: Astani CEE Dept.

    Location: Kaprielian Hall (KAP) - 209

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Cassie Cremeans

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  • EE 598: ELECTRICAL ENGINEERING RESEARCH SEMINAR COURSE #14

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

    Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Charalampos Chelmis, PhD Candidate, Computer Science, USC Viterbi School of Engineering

    Talk Title: Computational Models of Technology Adoption at the Workplace

    Series: EE598 Seminar Course

    Abstract: Despite numerous studies in Online Social Networks, little is known about network dynamics and information diffusion processes at the workplace, where professional relationships are formed not because of similarity but instead due to a formal, imposed structure. In an enterprise, understanding how information flows within and between organizational levels and business units is of great importance. In this talk, we emphasize the impact of organizational hierarchy on adoption of new technologies in the enterprise. We present two intuitive, realistic agent-based computational models that capture the dynamics of adoption at both microscopic and macroscopic levels in a real-world dataset we collected from a multinational Fortune 500 company.

    Biography: Charalampos Chelmis is a PhD candidate in Computer Science working with Prof. Viktor K. Prasanna in the Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical Engineering at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles. His research focuses on modeling complex networks, their properties, hidden structures and dimensional interdependencies, mining large-scale, real-world social networks, and designing efficient, scalable algorithms by combining Graph Theory and Semantic Web Technologies, Big Data Analytics and Machine Learning, sociometric features and measures. His research has been published at top venues, including SocialCom, ASONAM, TOIS and SNAM. He received his Master of Science in Computer Science from the University of Southern California in 2010 and his Bachelor in Computer Engineering & Informatics from the University of Patras, Greece in 2007.

    Host: Professor Viktor K. Prasanna

    More Information: Course Announcement_EE598_Focused on parallel and distributed computing_(Spring 2013) 2.pdf

    Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 248

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Janice Thompson

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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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  • 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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  • Cognitive Motivations for Non-negative Matrix Factorizations

    Mon, May 06, 2013 @ 10:30 AM - 12:00 PM

    Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Professor Hugo Van hamme, Dept. of Electrical Engineering (ESAT), Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium

    Talk Title: Cognitive Motivations for Non-negative Matrix Factorizations

    Abstract: Non-negative Matrix Factorization (NMF) and related latent variable methods such as Latent Dirichlet Allocation have been applied in many fields of engineering such as speech, text, and image processing to discover relations with great success. Its core capability is to decompose wholes (scenes) into parts represented in the matrix factors. In their 1999 Nature paper, Lee and Seung point out some resemblances between non-negative matrix factorization and the brain. For one, like neural firing rates, NMF assumes non-negative quantities, which lead to sparse representations. In this talk, additional similarities will be discussed:
    - NMF can be viewed as a neural network with an intrinsic lateral inhibition mechanism,
    - the matrix factors can be obtained using operations that can be implemented in neurons,
    - NMF can learn with, without, or with weak cross-modal supervision,
    - learning can be made incremental,
    - NMF can explain time perception with integrate-and-fire neurons.
    Latent variable methods should hence not be seen purely as statistical inference problems, but can be motivated from a cognitive perspective.

    Biography: Prof. Hugo Van hamme received the masters degree in electomechanical engineering from Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium in 1987, the masters degree in controls systems from Imperial College, U.K. in 1988 and the Ph.D. in electrical engineering from Vrije Universiteit Brussel in 1992. In 1993, he joined Lernout & Hauspie n.v. and held positions of senior researcher, team leader, director, and senior director of research. In 2001, he joined ScanSoft as senior director of research and engineering for automotive and embedded products. In 2002, he was appointed professor at the Department of Electrical Engineering of KU Leuven where he teaches courses in speech processing and algebra. His current research interests are robust automatic speech recognition, vocabulary learning, technology for speech therapy, and audio analysis. He is the author of over 150 publications.

    Host: Dr. Maarten Van Segbroeck and Professor Shrikanth Narayanan

    Location: Ronald Tutor Hall of Engineering (RTH) - 320

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Mary Francis

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  • Mor Harchol-Balter: Dynamic Power Management in Data Centers: Theory & Practice

    Mon, May 06, 2013 @ 03:30 PM - 05:00 PM

    Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Mor Harchol-Balter, Carnegie Mellon University

    Talk Title: Dynamic Power Management in Data Centers: Theory & Practice

    Series: CS Colloquium

    Abstract: Energy costs for data centers continue to rise, already exceeding ten billion dollars yearly. Sadly much of this power is wasted. Server are only busy 10-30% of the time, but they are often left on, while idle, utilizing 60% of more of peak power while in the idle state. The obvious solution is dynamic power management: turning servers off, or re-purposing them, when idle. The drawback is a prohibitive "setup cost" to get servers back "on." The purpose of this talk is to understand the effect of the "setup cost" and whether dynamic power management makes sense.

    We first turn to theory and study the effect of setup cost in an M/M/k queue. We present the first analysis of the M/M/k/setup queueing system. We do this by introducing a new technique for analyzing infinite, repeating, continuous-time Markov chains, which we call Recursive Renewal Reward (RRR).

    We then turn to implementation, where we implement and evaluate
    dynamic power management in a multi-tier data center with key-value store workload, reminiscent of Facebook or Amazon. We propose a new dynamic algorithm, AutoScale, which is ideally suited to the case of unpredictable, time-varying load, and we show that AutoScale dramatically reduces power in data centers.

    Joint work with: Anshul Gandhi, Alan Scheller-Wolf, and Mike Kozuch.

    Biography: Mor Harchol-Balter is an Associate Professor in Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University. From 2008-2011, she served as the
    Associate Department Head for Computer Science. She received her
    doctorate in Computer Science at U.C. Berkeley under the direction of Manuel Blum. She is a recipient of the McCandless Chair, the NSF CAREER award, the NSF Postdoctoral Fellowship in the Mathematical Sciences, multiple best paper awards, and several teaching awards, including the Herbert A. Simon Award for Teaching Excellence. She is heavily involved in the ACM SIGMETRICS performance research community, where she served as Technical Program Chair for Sigmetrics 2007 and is General Chair for Sigmetrics 2013.

    Host: Leana Golubchik

    Location: Seaver Science Library (SSL) - 150

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Assistant to CS chair

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  • Six Sigma Green Belt for Process Improvement

    Tue, May 07, 2013 @ 09:00 AM - 05:00 PM

    Executive Education

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: TBA, Viterbi School of Engineering

    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: Corporate and Professional Programs

    More Info: http://gapp.usc.edu/professional-programs/short-courses/industrial%2526systems/six-sigma-green-belt-process-improvement

    Location: Olin Hall of Engineering (OHE) -

    Audiences: Registered Attendees

    Contact: Viterbi Professional Programs

    Event Link: http://gapp.usc.edu/professional-programs/short-courses/industrial%2526systems/six-sigma-green-belt-process-improvement

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  • Six Sigma Green Belt for Process Improvement

    Wed, May 08, 2013 @ 09:00 AM - 05:00 PM

    Executive Education

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: TBA, Viterbi School of Engineering

    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: Corporate and Professional Programs

    More Info: http://gapp.usc.edu/professional-programs/short-courses/industrial%2526systems/six-sigma-green-belt-process-improvement

    Location: Olin Hall of Engineering (OHE) -

    Audiences: Registered Attendees

    Contact: Viterbi Professional Programs

    Event Link: http://gapp.usc.edu/professional-programs/short-courses/industrial%2526systems/six-sigma-green-belt-process-improvement

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  • Six Sigma Green Belt for Process Improvement

    Thu, May 09, 2013 @ 09:00 AM - 05:00 PM

    Executive Education

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: TBA, Viterbi School of Engineering

    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: Corporate and Professional Programs

    More Info: http://gapp.usc.edu/professional-programs/short-courses/industrial%2526systems/six-sigma-green-belt-process-improvement

    Location: Olin Hall of Engineering (OHE) -

    Audiences: Registered Attendees

    Contact: Viterbi Professional Programs

    Event Link: http://gapp.usc.edu/professional-programs/short-courses/industrial%2526systems/six-sigma-green-belt-process-improvement

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  • Smart Monitoring for Power Grid Reliability and Security

    Thu, May 09, 2013 @ 10:00 AM - 11:00 AM

    Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Yue Zhao , Princeton University

    Talk Title: Smart Monitoring for Power Grid Reliability and Security

    Abstract: Great challenges for operating power systems reliably are posed by the increasing energy demand, renewable penetration, and extreme weather due to climate change. As information technology and networks play major roles in transforming how power grid is operated, security issues from cyber-physical intrusion also become critical. In this talk, we focus on the role of monitoring systems in ensuring reliability and security of power grids. Firstly, we discuss outage detection in large-scale power distribution networks. A system that combines optimally deployed real-time power flow sensors and non-real-time load forecasts is proposed. Next, we study the joint problem of outage detection and state estimation. We provide a simple closed form expression for the joint posterior, which enables fast computation for optimal joint detectors and estimators. Finally, we discuss the fundamental limits of monitoring systems in detecting cyber-physical attacks. An open problem of finding sparsest unobservable attacks is solved.

    Biography: Yue Zhao is a postdoctoral scholar with the Department of Electrical Engineering at Princeton University and that at Stanford University. He obtained his PhD from the Department of Electrical Engineering at University of California, Los Angeles. His research is in enhancing situational awareness and cyber-physical security of power systems, as well as designing incentives for energy saving behavior.

    Host: Urbashi Mitra, x04667, ubli@usc.edu

    Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 539

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Gerrielyn Ramos

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  • Repeating EventFocused on parallel and distributed computing

    Thu, May 09, 2013 @ 02:00 PM - 03:00 PM

    Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: TBA, TBA

    Talk Title: TBA

    Series: EE598 Seminar Course

    Abstract: Weekly seminars given by researchers in academia and industry including senior doctoral students in EE, CS and ISI covering current research related to parallel and distributed computation including parallel algorithms, high performance computing, scientific computation, application specific architectures, multi-core and many-core architectures and algorithms, application acceleration, reconfigurable computing systems, data intensive systems, Big Data and cloud computing.

    Biography: Prerequisite: Students are expected to be familiar with basic concepts at the level of graduate level courses in Computer Engineering and Computer Science in some of these topic areas above. Ph.D. students in Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering and Computer Science can automatically enroll. M.S. students can enroll only with permission of the instructor. To request permission send a brief mail to the instructor in text format with the subject field “EE 598”. The body of the mail (in text format) should include name, degree objective, courses taken at USC and grades obtained, prior educational background, and relevant research background, if any.

    Requirements for CR:
    1. Attending at least 10 seminars during the semester
    There will be a sign-in sheet and a sign-out sheet at every seminar. All students must sign-in (before 2:00pm) and sign-out (after 3:00pm). The sign-in sheet will not be available after 2:00pm, and the sign-out sheet will not be available before 3:00pm.

    2. Submitting a written report for at least 5 seminars
    The written report for each seminar must be 1-page single line spaced format with font size of 12 (Times) or 11 (Arial) without any figures, tables, or graphs. The report must be submitted no later than 1 week after the corresponding seminar, and must be handed only to the instructor either on the seminar times or during office hours. Late reports will not be considered.
    The report must summarize student’s own understanding of the seminar, and should contain the following:
    - Your name and submission date [1 line]
    - Title of the seminar, name of the speaker, and seminar date [1 line]
    - Background of the work (e.g., applications, prior research, etc.) [1 paragraph]
    - Highlights of the approaches presented in the seminar [1-2 paragraphs]
    - Main results presented in the seminar [1-2 paragraphs]
    - Conclusion (your own conclusion and not what was given by the speaker) [1 paragraph]
    Reviewing papers related to the topic of the seminar, and incorporating relevant findings in the
    reports (e.g., in the conclusion section) is encouraged. In such cases, make sure to clearly indicate
    the reference(s) used to derive these conclusions.

    Host: Professor Viktor K. Prasanna

    More Information: Course Announcement_EE598_Focused on parallel and distributed computing_(Spring 2013).pdf

    Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) -

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    View All Dates

    Contact: Janice Thompson

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  • CEE Ph.D. Seminar

    Fri, May 10, 2013 @ 04:00 PM - 05:00 PM

    Sonny Astani Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Dr. Leon Alkalai, , Jet Propulsion Laboratory

    Talk Title: “Solar Systems Exploration - Mission Formulation Systems Engineering” by Leon Alkalai, JPL

    Abstract: TBA

    Biography: Dr. Leon Alkalai received his MSc and PhD degrees from the UCLA Computer Science Department in 1986 and 1989 respectively and has since then been working at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology.
    He is currently a program manager at JPL responsible for the next NASA Discovery and New Frontiers program mission portfolios as part of JPL’s Solar System Exploration Program Directorate.
    For the first 14 years of his career at JPL, Leon worked on technology development of advanced micro-avionics and micro-systems technologies for deep-space exploration.
    For the past 10 years, Leon has been in the forefront of mission formulation activities at JPL.
    From 2005 – 2007 he was the JPL Capture Lead for the Gravity Recovery And Interior Laboratory (GRAIL) mission proposal which won the NASA Discovery-11 competition and successfully launched in September 2011 to the Moon.
    In 2012, Leon was the Capture Lead for the InSight mission to Mars, which won the NASA Discovery-12 competition and is scheduled to launch in 2016.
    Last year, NASA awarded Dr. Leon Alkalai the Individual Distinguished Achievement Medal for the successful formulation of GRAIL and for winning the Discovery-11 competition.
    Leon Alkalai is an active Full Member of the International Academy of Astronautics (IAA).




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

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Evangeline Reyes

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  • AI Seminar

    Fri, May 17, 2013 @ 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM

    Information Sciences Institute

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Gully Burns, Project Leader. ISI

    Talk Title: Introducing paradigms as a viable structural guide for biomedical knowledge engineering

    Abstract: Following Thomas Kuhn's seminal 1962 book in which he introduced the notion of scientific paradigms, we here describe a computational methodology that leverages that concept in a concrete formulation. I describe this approach partially as a methodology for framing and scoping the knowledge representation and analysis work necessary to build tools to serve a specific community. However this approach also has technical implications that are relevant to semantic web representations, the use of workflows and reasoning and the way that we derive content from existing scientific artefacts. We will explore this viewpoint in the context of a well defined domain problem (Biomarker studies of neurodegenerative diseases) with the strategic intent of developing a practical, scoped view of biomarker data that could serve as the basis of corollary work within AI computer science groups.

    Biography: Gully Burns develops pragmatic biomedical knowledge engineering systems for scientists that (a) provide directly useful functionality in their everyday use and (b) is based on innovative, cutting edge computer science that subtlely transforms our ability to use knowledge. He was originally trained as a physicist at Imperial College in London before switching to do a Ph.D. in neuroscience at Oxford. He came to work at USC in 1997, developing the 'NeuroScholar' project in Larry Swanson's lab before joining the Information Sciences Institute in 2006. He is now works as project leader in ISI's Information Integration Group, as well as a Research Assistant Professor of neurobiology at USC’s College of Letters, Arts and Sciences. He maintains a personal blog called 'Ars-Veritatis, the art of truth', and is very interested in seeing how his research in developing systems for scientists could translate to helping and supporting understanding and our use of knowledge in everyday life.


    Host: David Chiang

    More Info: http://www.isi.edu/technology_groups/insy/home

    Webcast: TBA

    Location: Information Science Institute (ISI) - 11th floor conference room

    WebCast Link: TBA

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Kary LAU

    Event Link: http://www.isi.edu/technology_groups/insy/home

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  • USC Physical Sciences in Oncology Seminar Series

    USC Physical Sciences in Oncology Seminar Series

    Fri, May 17, 2013 @ 11:45 AM - 01:00 PM

    Alfred E. Mann Department of Biomedical Engineering

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Larry Smarr, Ph.D., University of California, San Diego

    Talk Title: Tracking Immune Biomarkers and the Human Gut Microbiome: Inflammation, Crohn's Disease, and Colon Cancer

    Abstract: Colon Cancer is the most common cancer among Inflammatory Bowel Disease (IBD) patients and IBD is one of the three leading high-risk factors for Colon Cancer. In 2012 it was found, by using genetic sequencing of the gut microbiome, that Fusobacteria sequences were enriched in colorectal carcinomas (CRC). To explore this possible link between inflammation, gut microbes, and colon cancer I have turned my own body into a "genomic observatory." I have been tracking over 100 blood/stool biomarkers in my own body every few months for the last five years, with a focus on immune variables. Using key biomarkers and imaging technologies I diagnosed myself as having late-onset Crohn's Disease, one of the two forms of IBD. Besides obtaining one million SNPs of my human genome, I have collaborated with the J. Craig Venter Institute to metagenomically sequence my gut microbiome at three different times during a period of high inflammation. My microbiome was compared with 50 other subjects, sequenced by the NIH Human Microbiome Project--35 healthy and the remainer with IBD. I discovered that at the height of my inflammation (CRP~30), I had 8% relative abundance of Fusobacteria, 40x healthy subjects. Following antibiotic/corticosteroid therapy the Fusobacteria were reduced 90-fold. The next step is to move to high-throughput integrated personal "omics" to refine the host-microbiome dynamics. With these new tools of computationally-intensive omics, there is a hope that we will gain new insights into the pathogenisis of CRC.

    Biography: USC was selected to establish a $16 million cancer research center as part of a new strategy against the disease by the U.S. National Institutes of Health and its National Cancer Institute. The new center is one of 12 in the nation to receive the designation. During the five-year initiative, the Physical Sciences-Oncology Centers will take new, nontraditional approaches to cancer research by studying the physical laws and principles of cancer; evolution and the evolutionary theory of cancer; information coding, decoding, transfer and translation in cancer; and ways to de-convolute cancer's complexity. As part of the outreach component of this grant, the Center for Applied Molecular Medicine is hosting a monthly seminar series.

    Host: USC PSOC

    More Information: USC-PSOC_MonthlySeminar.pdf

    Location: Elaine Stevely Hoffman Medical Research Center (HMR) - Hastings Auditorium, 1st Floor

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Kristina Gerber

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  • Qing Dou- NL Seminar: "Deciphering Gigaword:"

    Fri, May 17, 2013 @ 03:00 PM - 04:00 PM

    Information Sciences Institute

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Qing Dou, USC/ISI

    Talk Title: Deciphering Gigaword

    Series: Natural Language Seminar

    Abstract: Abstract: State of the art machine translation systems learn translation rules from large amounts of parallel data (pairs of sentences that are translation of each other). Unfortunately, the amount of parallel data is very limited for many languages and domains. In general, it is easier to obtain monolingual data. Is it possible to learn useful translations from large amounts of monolingual data to improve machine translation when the amount of parallel data is limited? In this talk, I will present my ongoing work that applies decipherment techniques to decipher hundreds of millions Spanish news texts into English and learns a translation lexicon from the decipherment to improve a translation model learned from limited parallel data.

    Biography: Home Page:http://www.isi.edu/~qdou/qdou_cv.pdf

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

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

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Peter Zamar

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

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  • SAP TERP 10 Student Certification Academy

    Mon, May 20, 2013 @ 04:00 PM - 04:00 PM

    Executive Education

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Richard Vawter, USC Viterbi School of Engineering, USC Viterbi School of Engineering

    Talk Title: SAP TERP 10 Student Certification Academy

    Abstract: Speaker: Richard Vawter, USC Viterbi School of Engineering

    Talk Title: SAP TERP 10 Student Certification Academy

    Abstract: The University of Southern California, being an active member of SAP's Global University Alliances program since its inception in 1996, has been chosen to offer the TERP10 Academy to its students in early Summer 2012. The TERP10 Academy, and its certification, is a direct response to the global forecast of needed SAP skills in the market, estimated at between 30,000 and 40,000, in the next several years.

    Students completing the TERP10 Academy and passing SAP's certification exam will have the advantage of being equipped with a good understanding of business processes adopted by companies around the world. They will also get insights into best business practices and how SAP can be used to optimize business processes. Students will find that the TERP10 Certification will open internship opportunities as well as full time jobs with consulting firms such as Deloitte, Ernst and Young, KPMG, Hitachi, and other SAP partner companies.

    There will be two offerings of the SAP TERP10 Student Certification Academy in 2012. Both offerings will run for 9 full days, with the the certification examination to be given on the morning of the 10th day.

    Biography: Although Prof. Richard Vawter hasn't flown for over a decade, he's had plenty of experience in the cockpit especially as a college student! His undergraduate degrees at both Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Arizona and UCLA were accomplished by literally flying between classes.

    Upon completing his Engineering degree at UCLA, Richard Vawter started work at Rockwell International analyzing the dynamic loads placed upon the Space Shuttle during the launch and entry phases of a mission. After the Challenger incident, Richard Vawter was chosen to be part of NASA's Crew Egress Team and assigned the task to design a system and method for the crew to escape the shuttle during a controlled emergency descent.

    Following the resumption of the Space Shuttle flights, Prof. Vawter began taking graduate classes at the School of Engineering. After only one graduate class, Prof. Vawter became hooked on USC, completing Masters degrees in both Aerospace Engineering and Business Administration. After two years as a computer consultant, Prof. Vawter returned to USC and worked for the Marshall School of Business as a Computer Systems and Applications Specialist. During that time, he had the opportunity to fill in for a week teaching an ITP class and discovered his teaching talents when the students started clamoring for him to come back. Prof. Vawter began teaching officially at ITP in 1996 and currently focuses on SAP.

    Host: Corporate and Professional Programs

    More Info: http://gapp.usc.edu/professional-programs/short-courses/terp10

    Host: Corporate and Professional Programs

    Audiences: Registered Attendees

    Contact: Viterbi Professional Programs

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  • SAP TERP 10 Student Certification Academy

    Tue, May 21, 2013 @ 08:00 AM - 05:00 PM

    Executive Education

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Richard Vawter, USC Viterbi School of Engineering, USC Viterbi School of Engineering

    Talk Title: SAP TERP 10 Student Certification Academy

    Abstract: Speaker: Richard Vawter, USC Viterbi School of Engineering

    Talk Title: SAP TERP 10 Student Certification Academy

    Abstract: The University of Southern California, being an active member of SAP's Global University Alliances program since its inception in 1996, has been chosen to offer the TERP10 Academy to its students in early Summer 2012. The TERP10 Academy, and its certification, is a direct response to the global forecast of needed SAP skills in the market, estimated at between 30,000 and 40,000, in the next several years.

    Students completing the TERP10 Academy and passing SAP's certification exam will have the advantage of being equipped with a good understanding of business processes adopted by companies around the world. They will also get insights into best business practices and how SAP can be used to optimize business processes. Students will find that the TERP10 Certification will open internship opportunities as well as full time jobs with consulting firms such as Deloitte, Ernst and Young, KPMG, Hitachi, and other SAP partner companies.

    There will be two offerings of the SAP TERP10 Student Certification Academy in 2012. Both offerings will run for 9 full days, with the the certification examination to be given on the morning of the 10th day.

    Biography: Although Prof. Richard Vawter hasn't flown for over a decade, he's had plenty of experience in the cockpit especially as a college student! His undergraduate degrees at both Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Arizona and UCLA were accomplished by literally flying between classes.

    Upon completing his Engineering degree at UCLA, Richard Vawter started work at Rockwell International analyzing the dynamic loads placed upon the Space Shuttle during the launch and entry phases of a mission. After the Challenger incident, Richard Vawter was chosen to be part of NASA's Crew Egress Team and assigned the task to design a system and method for the crew to escape the shuttle during a controlled emergency descent.

    Following the resumption of the Space Shuttle flights, Prof. Vawter began taking graduate classes at the School of Engineering. After only one graduate class, Prof. Vawter became hooked on USC, completing Masters degrees in both Aerospace Engineering and Business Administration. After two years as a computer consultant, Prof. Vawter returned to USC and worked for the Marshall School of Business as a Computer Systems and Applications Specialist. During that time, he had the opportunity to fill in for a week teaching an ITP class and discovered his teaching talents when the students started clamoring for him to come back. Prof. Vawter began teaching officially at ITP in 1996 and currently focuses on SAP.

    Host: Corporate and Professional Programs

    More Info: http://gapp.usc.edu/professional-programs/short-courses/terp10

    Host: Corporate and Professional Programs

    Audiences: Registered Attendees

    Contact: Viterbi Professional Programs

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  • CS Distinguished Lecture: Eric Xing (CMU) - Big Data, Big Model, and Big Learning

    CS Distinguished Lecture: Eric Xing (CMU) - Big Data, Big Model, and Big Learning

    Tue, May 21, 2013 @ 03:00 PM - 04:00 PM

    Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Eric Xing, Carnegie Mellon University

    Talk Title: Big Data, Big Model, and Big Learning

    Series: CS Distinguished Lectures

    Abstract: In many modern applications built on massive data, such as societal-scale event detection, social security and privacy, web commerce and marketing, and personalized medicine, one needs to handle extremely large-scale data and models that threaten to exceed the limit of current infrastructures and algorithms. Due to the extremely large volume, high dimensionality, and massive task complexity associated with this applications, many modern advancements in computational and statistical learning have been rendered un-leverageable due to their poor scalability on ultra-dimensional models and inability to extract values from massive data; practitioners are forced to turn to naive alternatives such as KNN or K-means cluster for complex problems purely due to their simplicity and scalability, but not for their model validity and correctness. In this talk, I will present some thoughts and work on big learning problems in web-scale social data mining, computational biology, and computer vision. I will discuss some insights and promising directions toward large data size, large feature dimension, and large concept space, including parallelizable and online Monte Carlo for infinite dynamic topic models, fast 1st-order convex optimization algorithms for learning ultra high-dimensional sparse structured input/output models, and output coding techniques for massive multi-task and transfer learning, and I will discuss the design and issues of low level computer architecture and operating systems supporting large learning, applied to a wide range of problems.

    Biography: Dr. Eric Xing is an associate professor in the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University. His principal research interests lie in the development of machine learning and statistical methodology; especially for solving problems involving automated learning, reasoning, and decision-making in high-dimensional, multimodal, and dynamic possible worlds in social and biological systems. Professor Xing received a Ph.D. in Molecular Biology from Rutgers University, and another Ph.D. in Computer Science from UC Berkeley. His current work involves, 1) foundations of statistical learning, including theory and algorithms for estimating time/space varying-coefficient models, sparse structured input/output models, and nonparametric Bayesian models; 2) computational and statistical analysis of gene regulation, genetic variation, and disease associations; and 3) large-scale information & intelligent system in social networks, computer vision, and natural language processing. Professor Xing has published over 180 peer-reviewed papers, and is an associate editor of the Annals of Applied Statistics (AOAS), the Journal of American Statistical Association (JASA), the IEEE Transaction of Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (PAMI), the PLoS Journal of Computational Biology, and an Action Editor of the Machine Learning Journal (MLJ), the Journal of Machine Learning Research (JMLR). He is a member of the DARPA Information Science and Technology (ISAT) Advisory Group, a recipient of the NSF Career Award, the Sloan Fellowship, the United States Air Force Young Investigator Award, the IBM Open Collaborative Research Award, and best paper awards in a number of premier conferences including UAI, ACL, SDM, and ISMB.

    Host: Gaurav Sukhatme, Michael Waterman

    Location: Seaver Science Library (SSL) - 150

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Assistant to CS chair

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  • SAP TERP 10 Student Certification Academy

    Wed, May 22, 2013 @ 08:30 AM - 05:00 PM

    Executive Education

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Richard Vawter, USC Viterbi School of Engineering, USC Viterbi School of Engineering

    Talk Title: SAP TERP 10 Student Certification Academy

    Abstract: Speaker: Richard Vawter, USC Viterbi School of Engineering

    Talk Title: SAP TERP 10 Student Certification Academy

    Abstract: The University of Southern California, being an active member of SAP's Global University Alliances program since its inception in 1996, has been chosen to offer the TERP10 Academy to its students in early Summer 2012. The TERP10 Academy, and its certification, is a direct response to the global forecast of needed SAP skills in the market, estimated at between 30,000 and 40,000, in the next several years.

    Students completing the TERP10 Academy and passing SAP's certification exam will have the advantage of being equipped with a good understanding of business processes adopted by companies around the world. They will also get insights into best business practices and how SAP can be used to optimize business processes. Students will find that the TERP10 Certification will open internship opportunities as well as full time jobs with consulting firms such as Deloitte, Ernst and Young, KPMG, Hitachi, and other SAP partner companies.

    There will be two offerings of the SAP TERP10 Student Certification Academy in 2012. Both offerings will run for 9 full days, with the the certification examination to be given on the morning of the 10th day.

    Biography: Although Prof. Richard Vawter hasn't flown for over a decade, he's had plenty of experience in the cockpit especially as a college student! His undergraduate degrees at both Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Arizona and UCLA were accomplished by literally flying between classes.

    Upon completing his Engineering degree at UCLA, Richard Vawter started work at Rockwell International analyzing the dynamic loads placed upon the Space Shuttle during the launch and entry phases of a mission. After the Challenger incident, Richard Vawter was chosen to be part of NASA's Crew Egress Team and assigned the task to design a system and method for the crew to escape the shuttle during a controlled emergency descent.

    Following the resumption of the Space Shuttle flights, Prof. Vawter began taking graduate classes at the School of Engineering. After only one graduate class, Prof. Vawter became hooked on USC, completing Masters degrees in both Aerospace Engineering and Business Administration. After two years as a computer consultant, Prof. Vawter returned to USC and worked for the Marshall School of Business as a Computer Systems and Applications Specialist. During that time, he had the opportunity to fill in for a week teaching an ITP class and discovered his teaching talents when the students started clamoring for him to come back. Prof. Vawter began teaching officially at ITP in 1996 and currently focuses on SAP.

    Host: Corporate and Professional Programs

    More Info: http://gapp.usc.edu/professional-programs/short-courses/terp10

    Host: Corporate and Professional Programs

    Audiences: Registered Attendees

    Contact: Viterbi Professional Programs

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  • SAP TERP 10 Student Certification Academy

    Thu, May 23, 2013 @ 08:30 AM - 05:00 PM

    Executive Education

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Richard Vawter, USC Viterbi School of Engineering, USC Viterbi School of Engineering

    Talk Title: SAP TERP 10 Student Certification Academy

    Abstract: Speaker: Richard Vawter, USC Viterbi School of Engineering

    Talk Title: SAP TERP 10 Student Certification Academy

    Abstract: The University of Southern California, being an active member of SAP's Global University Alliances program since its inception in 1996, has been chosen to offer the TERP10 Academy to its students in early Summer 2012. The TERP10 Academy, and its certification, is a direct response to the global forecast of needed SAP skills in the market, estimated at between 30,000 and 40,000, in the next several years.

    Students completing the TERP10 Academy and passing SAP's certification exam will have the advantage of being equipped with a good understanding of business processes adopted by companies around the world. They will also get insights into best business practices and how SAP can be used to optimize business processes. Students will find that the TERP10 Certification will open internship opportunities as well as full time jobs with consulting firms such as Deloitte, Ernst and Young, KPMG, Hitachi, and other SAP partner companies.

    There will be two offerings of the SAP TERP10 Student Certification Academy in 2012. Both offerings will run for 9 full days, with the the certification examination to be given on the morning of the 10th day.

    Biography: Although Prof. Richard Vawter hasn't flown for over a decade, he's had plenty of experience in the cockpit especially as a college student! His undergraduate degrees at both Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Arizona and UCLA were accomplished by literally flying between classes.

    Upon completing his Engineering degree at UCLA, Richard Vawter started work at Rockwell International analyzing the dynamic loads placed upon the Space Shuttle during the launch and entry phases of a mission. After the Challenger incident, Richard Vawter was chosen to be part of NASA's Crew Egress Team and assigned the task to design a system and method for the crew to escape the shuttle during a controlled emergency descent.

    Following the resumption of the Space Shuttle flights, Prof. Vawter began taking graduate classes at the School of Engineering. After only one graduate class, Prof. Vawter became hooked on USC, completing Masters degrees in both Aerospace Engineering and Business Administration. After two years as a computer consultant, Prof. Vawter returned to USC and worked for the Marshall School of Business as a Computer Systems and Applications Specialist. During that time, he had the opportunity to fill in for a week teaching an ITP class and discovered his teaching talents when the students started clamoring for him to come back. Prof. Vawter began teaching officially at ITP in 1996 and currently focuses on SAP.

    Host: Corporate and Professional Programs

    More Info: http://gapp.usc.edu/professional-programs/short-courses/terp10

    Host: Corporate and Professional Programs

    Audiences: Registered Attendees

    Contact: Viterbi Professional Programs

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  • SAP TERP 10 Student Certification Academy

    Fri, May 24, 2013 @ 08:30 AM - 05:00 PM

    Executive Education

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Richard Vawter, USC Viterbi School of Engineering, USC Viterbi School of Engineering

    Talk Title: SAP TERP 10 Student Certification Academy

    Abstract: Speaker: Richard Vawter, USC Viterbi School of Engineering

    Talk Title: SAP TERP 10 Student Certification Academy

    Abstract: The University of Southern California, being an active member of SAP's Global University Alliances program since its inception in 1996, has been chosen to offer the TERP10 Academy to its students in early Summer 2012. The TERP10 Academy, and its certification, is a direct response to the global forecast of needed SAP skills in the market, estimated at between 30,000 and 40,000, in the next several years.

    Students completing the TERP10 Academy and passing SAP's certification exam will have the advantage of being equipped with a good understanding of business processes adopted by companies around the world. They will also get insights into best business practices and how SAP can be used to optimize business processes. Students will find that the TERP10 Certification will open internship opportunities as well as full time jobs with consulting firms such as Deloitte, Ernst and Young, KPMG, Hitachi, and other SAP partner companies.

    There will be two offerings of the SAP TERP10 Student Certification Academy in 2012. Both offerings will run for 9 full days, with the the certification examination to be given on the morning of the 10th day.

    Biography: Although Prof. Richard Vawter hasn't flown for over a decade, he's had plenty of experience in the cockpit especially as a college student! His undergraduate degrees at both Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Arizona and UCLA were accomplished by literally flying between classes.

    Upon completing his Engineering degree at UCLA, Richard Vawter started work at Rockwell International analyzing the dynamic loads placed upon the Space Shuttle during the launch and entry phases of a mission. After the Challenger incident, Richard Vawter was chosen to be part of NASA's Crew Egress Team and assigned the task to design a system and method for the crew to escape the shuttle during a controlled emergency descent.

    Following the resumption of the Space Shuttle flights, Prof. Vawter began taking graduate classes at the School of Engineering. After only one graduate class, Prof. Vawter became hooked on USC, completing Masters degrees in both Aerospace Engineering and Business Administration. After two years as a computer consultant, Prof. Vawter returned to USC and worked for the Marshall School of Business as a Computer Systems and Applications Specialist. During that time, he had the opportunity to fill in for a week teaching an ITP class and discovered his teaching talents when the students started clamoring for him to come back. Prof. Vawter began teaching officially at ITP in 1996 and currently focuses on SAP.

    Host: Corporate and Professional Programs

    More Info: http://gapp.usc.edu/professional-programs/short-courses/terp10

    Host: Corporate and Professional Programs

    Audiences: Registered Attendees

    Contact: Viterbi Professional Programs

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  • SAP TERP 10 Student Certification Academy

    Sat, May 25, 2013 @ 08:30 AM - 05:00 PM

    Executive Education

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Richard Vawter, USC Viterbi School of Engineering, USC Viterbi School of Engineering

    Talk Title: SAP TERP 10 Student Certification Academy

    Abstract: Speaker: Richard Vawter, USC Viterbi School of Engineering

    Talk Title: SAP TERP 10 Student Certification Academy

    Abstract: The University of Southern California, being an active member of SAP's Global University Alliances program since its inception in 1996, has been chosen to offer the TERP10 Academy to its students in early Summer 2012. The TERP10 Academy, and its certification, is a direct response to the global forecast of needed SAP skills in the market, estimated at between 30,000 and 40,000, in the next several years.

    Students completing the TERP10 Academy and passing SAP's certification exam will have the advantage of being equipped with a good understanding of business processes adopted by companies around the world. They will also get insights into best business practices and how SAP can be used to optimize business processes. Students will find that the TERP10 Certification will open internship opportunities as well as full time jobs with consulting firms such as Deloitte, Ernst and Young, KPMG, Hitachi, and other SAP partner companies.

    There will be two offerings of the SAP TERP10 Student Certification Academy in 2012. Both offerings will run for 9 full days, with the the certification examination to be given on the morning of the 10th day.

    Biography: Although Prof. Richard Vawter hasn't flown for over a decade, he's had plenty of experience in the cockpit especially as a college student! His undergraduate degrees at both Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Arizona and UCLA were accomplished by literally flying between classes.

    Upon completing his Engineering degree at UCLA, Richard Vawter started work at Rockwell International analyzing the dynamic loads placed upon the Space Shuttle during the launch and entry phases of a mission. After the Challenger incident, Richard Vawter was chosen to be part of NASA's Crew Egress Team and assigned the task to design a system and method for the crew to escape the shuttle during a controlled emergency descent.

    Following the resumption of the Space Shuttle flights, Prof. Vawter began taking graduate classes at the School of Engineering. After only one graduate class, Prof. Vawter became hooked on USC, completing Masters degrees in both Aerospace Engineering and Business Administration. After two years as a computer consultant, Prof. Vawter returned to USC and worked for the Marshall School of Business as a Computer Systems and Applications Specialist. During that time, he had the opportunity to fill in for a week teaching an ITP class and discovered his teaching talents when the students started clamoring for him to come back. Prof. Vawter began teaching officially at ITP in 1996 and currently focuses on SAP.

    Host: Corporate and Professional Programs

    More Info: http://gapp.usc.edu/professional-programs/short-courses/terp10

    Host: Corporate and Professional Programs

    Audiences: Registered Attendees

    Contact: Viterbi Professional Programs

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  • SAP TERP 10 Student Certification Academy

    Tue, May 28, 2013 @ 08:30 AM - 05:00 PM

    Executive Education

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Richard Vawter, USC Viterbi School of Engineering, USC Viterbi School of Engineering

    Talk Title: SAP TERP 10 Student Certification Academy

    Abstract: Speaker: Richard Vawter, USC Viterbi School of Engineering

    Talk Title: SAP TERP 10 Student Certification Academy

    Abstract: The University of Southern California, being an active member of SAP's Global University Alliances program since its inception in 1996, has been chosen to offer the TERP10 Academy to its students in early Summer 2012. The TERP10 Academy, and its certification, is a direct response to the global forecast of needed SAP skills in the market, estimated at between 30,000 and 40,000, in the next several years.

    Students completing the TERP10 Academy and passing SAP's certification exam will have the advantage of being equipped with a good understanding of business processes adopted by companies around the world. They will also get insights into best business practices and how SAP can be used to optimize business processes. Students will find that the TERP10 Certification will open internship opportunities as well as full time jobs with consulting firms such as Deloitte, Ernst and Young, KPMG, Hitachi, and other SAP partner companies.

    There will be two offerings of the SAP TERP10 Student Certification Academy in 2012. Both offerings will run for 9 full days, with the the certification examination to be given on the morning of the 10th day.

    Biography: Although Prof. Richard Vawter hasn't flown for over a decade, he's had plenty of experience in the cockpit especially as a college student! His undergraduate degrees at both Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Arizona and UCLA were accomplished by literally flying between classes.

    Upon completing his Engineering degree at UCLA, Richard Vawter started work at Rockwell International analyzing the dynamic loads placed upon the Space Shuttle during the launch and entry phases of a mission. After the Challenger incident, Richard Vawter was chosen to be part of NASA's Crew Egress Team and assigned the task to design a system and method for the crew to escape the shuttle during a controlled emergency descent.

    Following the resumption of the Space Shuttle flights, Prof. Vawter began taking graduate classes at the School of Engineering. After only one graduate class, Prof. Vawter became hooked on USC, completing Masters degrees in both Aerospace Engineering and Business Administration. After two years as a computer consultant, Prof. Vawter returned to USC and worked for the Marshall School of Business as a Computer Systems and Applications Specialist. During that time, he had the opportunity to fill in for a week teaching an ITP class and discovered his teaching talents when the students started clamoring for him to come back. Prof. Vawter began teaching officially at ITP in 1996 and currently focuses on SAP.

    Host: Corporate and Professional Programs

    More Info: http://gapp.usc.edu/professional-programs/short-courses/terp10

    Host: Corporate and Professional Programs

    Audiences: Registered Attendees

    Contact: Viterbi Professional Programs

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  • SAP TERP 10 Student Certification Academy

    Wed, May 29, 2013 @ 08:30 AM - 05:00 PM

    Executive Education

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Richard Vawter, USC Viterbi School of Engineering, USC Viterbi School of Engineering

    Talk Title: SAP TERP 10 Student Certification Academy

    Abstract: Speaker: Richard Vawter, USC Viterbi School of Engineering

    Talk Title: SAP TERP 10 Student Certification Academy

    Abstract: The University of Southern California, being an active member of SAP's Global University Alliances program since its inception in 1996, has been chosen to offer the TERP10 Academy to its students in early Summer 2012. The TERP10 Academy, and its certification, is a direct response to the global forecast of needed SAP skills in the market, estimated at between 30,000 and 40,000, in the next several years.

    Students completing the TERP10 Academy and passing SAP's certification exam will have the advantage of being equipped with a good understanding of business processes adopted by companies around the world. They will also get insights into best business practices and how SAP can be used to optimize business processes. Students will find that the TERP10 Certification will open internship opportunities as well as full time jobs with consulting firms such as Deloitte, Ernst and Young, KPMG, Hitachi, and other SAP partner companies.

    There will be two offerings of the SAP TERP10 Student Certification Academy in 2012. Both offerings will run for 9 full days, with the the certification examination to be given on the morning of the 10th day.

    Biography: Although Prof. Richard Vawter hasn't flown for over a decade, he's had plenty of experience in the cockpit especially as a college student! His undergraduate degrees at both Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Arizona and UCLA were accomplished by literally flying between classes.

    Upon completing his Engineering degree at UCLA, Richard Vawter started work at Rockwell International analyzing the dynamic loads placed upon the Space Shuttle during the launch and entry phases of a mission. After the Challenger incident, Richard Vawter was chosen to be part of NASA's Crew Egress Team and assigned the task to design a system and method for the crew to escape the shuttle during a controlled emergency descent.

    Following the resumption of the Space Shuttle flights, Prof. Vawter began taking graduate classes at the School of Engineering. After only one graduate class, Prof. Vawter became hooked on USC, completing Masters degrees in both Aerospace Engineering and Business Administration. After two years as a computer consultant, Prof. Vawter returned to USC and worked for the Marshall School of Business as a Computer Systems and Applications Specialist. During that time, he had the opportunity to fill in for a week teaching an ITP class and discovered his teaching talents when the students started clamoring for him to come back. Prof. Vawter began teaching officially at ITP in 1996 and currently focuses on SAP.

    Host: Corporate and Professional Programs

    More Info: http://gapp.usc.edu/professional-programs/short-courses/terp10

    Host: Corporate and Professional Programs

    Audiences: Registered Attendees

    Contact: Viterbi Professional Programs

    Add to Google CalendarDownload ICS File for OutlookDownload iCal File
  • SAP TERP 10 Student Certification Academy

    Thu, May 30, 2013 @ 08:30 AM - 05:00 PM

    Executive Education

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Richard Vawter, USC Viterbi School of Engineering, USC Viterbi School of Engineering

    Talk Title: SAP TERP 10 Student Certification Academy

    Abstract: Speaker: Richard Vawter, USC Viterbi School of Engineering

    Talk Title: SAP TERP 10 Student Certification Academy

    Abstract: The University of Southern California, being an active member of SAP's Global University Alliances program since its inception in 1996, has been chosen to offer the TERP10 Academy to its students in early Summer 2012. The TERP10 Academy, and its certification, is a direct response to the global forecast of needed SAP skills in the market, estimated at between 30,000 and 40,000, in the next several years.

    Students completing the TERP10 Academy and passing SAP's certification exam will have the advantage of being equipped with a good understanding of business processes adopted by companies around the world. They will also get insights into best business practices and how SAP can be used to optimize business processes. Students will find that the TERP10 Certification will open internship opportunities as well as full time jobs with consulting firms such as Deloitte, Ernst and Young, KPMG, Hitachi, and other SAP partner companies.

    There will be two offerings of the SAP TERP10 Student Certification Academy in 2012. Both offerings will run for 9 full days, with the the certification examination to be given on the morning of the 10th day.

    Biography: Although Prof. Richard Vawter hasn't flown for over a decade, he's had plenty of experience in the cockpit especially as a college student! His undergraduate degrees at both Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Arizona and UCLA were accomplished by literally flying between classes.

    Upon completing his Engineering degree at UCLA, Richard Vawter started work at Rockwell International analyzing the dynamic loads placed upon the Space Shuttle during the launch and entry phases of a mission. After the Challenger incident, Richard Vawter was chosen to be part of NASA's Crew Egress Team and assigned the task to design a system and method for the crew to escape the shuttle during a controlled emergency descent.

    Following the resumption of the Space Shuttle flights, Prof. Vawter began taking graduate classes at the School of Engineering. After only one graduate class, Prof. Vawter became hooked on USC, completing Masters degrees in both Aerospace Engineering and Business Administration. After two years as a computer consultant, Prof. Vawter returned to USC and worked for the Marshall School of Business as a Computer Systems and Applications Specialist. During that time, he had the opportunity to fill in for a week teaching an ITP class and discovered his teaching talents when the students started clamoring for him to come back. Prof. Vawter began teaching officially at ITP in 1996 and currently focuses on SAP.

    Host: Corporate and Professional Programs

    More Info: http://gapp.usc.edu/professional-programs/short-courses/terp10

    Host: Corporate and Professional Programs

    Audiences: Registered Attendees

    Contact: Viterbi Professional Programs

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  • Competitive Energy Generation Scheduling in Microgrids

    Thu, May 30, 2013 @ 10:00 AM - 11:00 PM

    Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Minghua Chen, Chinese University of Hong Kong

    Talk Title: Competitive Energy Generation Scheduling in Microgrids

    Abstract: Microgrids represent an emerging paradigm of future electric power systems that integrate both distributed and centralized generation. Two recent trends in microgrids are the integration of local renewable energy sources (such as wind farms) and the use of co-generation (i.e., to supply both electricity and heat). However, these trends also bring unprecedented challenges to the design of energy generation strategies that are critical for microgrid operation. Traditional generation scheduling paradigms assuming perfect prediction of renewable output and demand are no longer applicable to microgrids with intermittent renewable output and co-generation (that depends on both electricity and heat demand).

    In this talk, we will first give a brief overview on microgrids and its potentials in addressing major challenges faced by power grids today. We then present a competitive-optimization paradigm for microgrid energy generation scheduling. Our objective is to maximize the microgrid economic benefit (in terms of cost saving) in an online fashion, i.e., without relying on predicting future demand and renewable output. Based on insights from the offline optimal solution that is computed with perfect future knowledge, we propose a class of competitive online algorithms, called CHASE (Competitive Heuristic Algorithm for Scheduling Energy-generation), that track the offline optimal in an online fashion. Under typical settings, we show that CHASE achieves the best competitive ratio of all deterministic online algorithms and the ratio is no larger than 3, i.e., the cost of CHASE is at most 3 times of the offline optimal under arbitrary demand and renewable output. We also extend CHASE to intelligently leverage on limited prediction of the future, such as near-term demand or wind forecast, to further improve its performance. By extensive empirical evaluation using real-world traces, we show that our proposed algorithms can achieve near-offline-optimal performance. In a representative scenario, CHASE leads to around 20% cost savings with no future look-ahead at all, and the cost-savings further increase with limited future look-ahead.

    Biography: Minghua Chen received his B.Eng. and M.S. degrees from the Department of Electronic Engineering at Tsinghua University in 1999 and 2001, respectively. He received his Ph.D. degree from the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences at University of California at Berkeley in 2006. He spent one year visiting Microsoft Research Redmond as a Postdoc Researcher. He joined the Department of Information Engineering, the Chinese University of Hong Kong, in 2007, where he currently is an Assistant Professor. He is also an Adjunct Associate Professor in Peking University Shenzhen Graduate School in 2011-2014. He received the Eli Jury award from UC Berkeley in 2007 (presented to a graduate student or recent alumnus for outstanding achievement in the area of Systems, Communications, Control, or Signal Processing), the IEEE ICME Best Paper Award in 2009, the IEEE Transactions on Multimedia Prize Paper Award in 2009, and the ACM Multimedia Best Paper Award in 2012. His recent research interests include smart (micro) grids, data centers, distributed network optimization, multimedia networking, p2p networking, wireless networking, network coding, and distributed storage systems.

    Host: Michael Neely, x.03505, mjneely@usc.edu

    Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 248

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Gerrielyn Ramos

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  • An Introduction to Rethink Robotics' New Baxter Research Robot (BRR)

    An Introduction to Rethink Robotics' New Baxter Research Robot (BRR)

    Thu, May 30, 2013 @ 01:00 PM - 04:00 PM

    Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: ,

    Talk Title: An Introduction to Rethink Robotics' New Baxter Research Robot (BRR), Including Product Overview Presentation and Baxter Manufacturing Robot(BMR) Live Demo

    Abstract: The Baxter Research Robot leverages the same impressive safety features, ease of use and affordability as the original Baxter robot for manufacturing, while offering several added characteristics that make it an ideal fit for labs. The Baxter Research Robot allows research teams to focus on specific application development goals, including human-robot interaction, collaborative robotics, planning, manipulation, control, and perception. Whether your focus is product testing or developing the next big innovation in robotics, Baxter Research Robot is the ideal platform for your success. Our 30min presentation on the new Baxter Research Robot (BRR) will be followed by a live demo of the Baxter robot for manufacturing, the "sister product" to the BRR and will last approximately 1 to 1.5 hours total.

    Host: Stefan Schaal

    Location: Seaver Science Library (SSL) - 150

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Assistant to CS chair

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  • SAP TERP 10 Student Certification Academy

    Fri, May 31, 2013 @ 08:30 AM - 05:00 PM

    Executive Education

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Richard Vawter, USC Viterbi School of Engineering, USC Viterbi School of Engineering

    Talk Title: SAP TERP 10 Student Certification Academy

    Abstract: Speaker: Richard Vawter, USC Viterbi School of Engineering

    Talk Title: SAP TERP 10 Student Certification Academy

    Abstract: The University of Southern California, being an active member of SAP's Global University Alliances program since its inception in 1996, has been chosen to offer the TERP10 Academy to its students in early Summer 2012. The TERP10 Academy, and its certification, is a direct response to the global forecast of needed SAP skills in the market, estimated at between 30,000 and 40,000, in the next several years.

    Students completing the TERP10 Academy and passing SAP's certification exam will have the advantage of being equipped with a good understanding of business processes adopted by companies around the world. They will also get insights into best business practices and how SAP can be used to optimize business processes. Students will find that the TERP10 Certification will open internship opportunities as well as full time jobs with consulting firms such as Deloitte, Ernst and Young, KPMG, Hitachi, and other SAP partner companies.

    There will be two offerings of the SAP TERP10 Student Certification Academy in 2012. Both offerings will run for 9 full days, with the the certification examination to be given on the morning of the 10th day.

    Biography: Although Prof. Richard Vawter hasn't flown for over a decade, he's had plenty of experience in the cockpit especially as a college student! His undergraduate degrees at both Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Arizona and UCLA were accomplished by literally flying between classes.

    Upon completing his Engineering degree at UCLA, Richard Vawter started work at Rockwell International analyzing the dynamic loads placed upon the Space Shuttle during the launch and entry phases of a mission. After the Challenger incident, Richard Vawter was chosen to be part of NASA's Crew Egress Team and assigned the task to design a system and method for the crew to escape the shuttle during a controlled emergency descent.

    Following the resumption of the Space Shuttle flights, Prof. Vawter began taking graduate classes at the School of Engineering. After only one graduate class, Prof. Vawter became hooked on USC, completing Masters degrees in both Aerospace Engineering and Business Administration. After two years as a computer consultant, Prof. Vawter returned to USC and worked for the Marshall School of Business as a Computer Systems and Applications Specialist. During that time, he had the opportunity to fill in for a week teaching an ITP class and discovered his teaching talents when the students started clamoring for him to come back. Prof. Vawter began teaching officially at ITP in 1996 and currently focuses on SAP.

    Host: Corporate and Professional Programs

    More Info: http://gapp.usc.edu/professional-programs/short-courses/terp10

    Host: Corporate and Professional Programs

    Audiences: Registered Attendees

    Contact: Viterbi Professional Programs

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  • A Return to the Optimal Detection of Quantum Information

    Fri, May 31, 2013 @ 02:00 PM - 03:00 PM

    Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Min-Hsiu Hsieh, University of Technology, Sydney

    Talk Title: A Return to the Optimal Detection of Quantum Information

    Abstract: In 1991, Asher Peres and William Wootters wrote a seminal paper on the nonlocal processing of quantum information [Phys. Rev. Lett. 66 1119 (1991)]. We return to their classic problem and solve it in various contexts. Specifically, for discriminating the “double trine” ensemble with minimum error, we prove that global operations are more powerful than local operations with classical communication (LOCC). Even stronger, there exists a finite gap between the optimalLOCC probability and that obtainable by separable operations (SEP). Additionally we prove that a two-way, adaptive LOCC strategy can always beat a one-way protocol. Our results provide the first known instance of “nonlocality without entanglement” in two qubit pure states. (Joint work with Eric Chitambar.)

    Biography: Min-Hsiu Hsieh received the Ph.D. degree from University of Southern California, Los Angeles, in 2008. From 2008-2010, he was a Researcher at the ERATO-SORST Quantum Computation and Information Project, Japan Science and Technology Agency, Tokyo, Japan. From 2010-2012, he was a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Statistical Laboratory in the Centre for Mathematical Sciences, the University of Cambridge, UK. He is now a Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellow / Lecturer in Centre for Quantum Computation & Intelligent Systems (QCIS), Faculty of Engineering and Information Technology (FEIT), University of Technology, Sydney (UTS).


    Host: Todd Brun, x03503, tbrun@usc.edu

    Location: Seaver Science Library (SSL) - 150

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Gerrielyn Ramos

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