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Events for May 05, 2016
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AI Seminar-Charting Collections of Connections in Social Media: Creating Maps and Measures with NodeXL
Thu, May 05, 2016 @ 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Information Sciences Institute
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Marc Smith, Social Media Research Foundation
Talk Title: Charting Collections of Connections in Social Media: Creating Maps and Measures with NodeXL
Series: Artificial Intelligence Seminar
Abstract: Networks are a data structure commonly found in any social media service that allows populations to author collections of connections. The Social Media Research Foundation's NodeXL project makes analysis of social media networks accessible to most users of the Excel spreadsheet application. With NodeXL, network charts become as easy to create as pie charts. Recent research created by applying the tool to a range of social media networks has already revealed the variations in network structures present in online social spaces. A review of the tool and images of Twitter, flickr, YouTube, Facebook and email networks will be presented.
Description: We now live in a sea of tweets, posts, blogs, and updates coming from a significant fraction of the people in the connected world. Our personal and professional relationships are now made up as much of texts, emails, phone calls, photos, videos, documents, slides, and game play as by face-to-face interactions. Social media can be a bewildering stream of comments, a daunting fire hose of content. With better tools and a few key concepts from the social sciences, the social media swarm of favorites, comments, tags, likes, ratings, updates and links can be brought into clearer focus to reveal key people, topics and sub-communities. As more social interactions move through machine-readable data sets new insights and illustrations of human relationships and organizations become possible. But new forms of data require new tools to collect, analyze, and communicate insights.
The Social Media Research Foundation (http://www.smrfoundation.org), formed in 2010 to develop open tools and open data sets, and to foster open scholarship related to social media. The Foundation's current focus is on creating and publishing tools that enable social media network analysis and visualization from widely used services like email, Twitter, Facebook, flickr, YouTube and the WWW. The Foundation has released the NodeXL project (http://nodexl.codeplex.com/), a spreadsheet add-in that supports "network overview discovery and exploration". The tool fits inside your existing copy of Excel in Office 2007, 2010 and 2013 and makes creating a social network map similar to the process of making a pie chart.
Using NodeXL, users can easily make a map of public social media conversations around topics that matter to them. Maps of the connections among the people who recently said the name of a product, brand or event can reveal key positions and clusters in the crowd. Some people who talk about a topic are more in the "center" of the graph, they may be key influential members in the population. NodeXL makes it a simple task to sort people in a population by their network location to find key people in core or bridge positions. NodeXL supports the exploration of social media with import features that pull data from personal email indexes on the desktop, Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, Facebook, Wikis, blogs and WWW hyper-links. The tool allows non-programmers to quickly generate useful network statistics and metrics and create visualizations of network graphs.
A book Analyzing Social Media Networks with NodeXL: Insights from a connected world is available from Morgan-Kaufmann. The book provides an introduction to the history and core concepts of social network analysis along with a series of step-by-step instructions that illustrate the use of the key features of NodeXL. The second half of the book is dedicated to chapters by a number of leading social media researchers that each focus on a single social media service and the networks it contains. Chapters on Twitter, email, YouTube, flickr, Facebook, Wikis, and the World Wide Web illustrate the network data structures that are common to all social media services.
A recent report co-authored with the Pew Research Center's Internet Project documents the discovery of the six basic forms of social media network structures present in social media platforms like Twitter. The report, "Mapping Twitter Topic Networks: From Polarized Crowds to Community Clusters" provides a step by step guide to analyzing social media networks.
Biography: Marc Smith is a sociologist specializing in the social organization of online communities and computer mediated interaction. Smith leads the Connected Action consulting group and lives and works in Silicon Valley, California. Smith co-founded and directs the Social Media Research Foundation (http://www.smrfoundation.org/), a non-profit devoted to open tools, data, and scholarship related to social media research.
Smith is the co-editor with Peter Kollock of Communities in Cyberspace (Routledge), a collection of essays exploring the ways identity; interaction and social order develop in online groups. Along with Derek Hansen and Ben Shneiderman, he is the co-author and editor of Analyzing Social Media Networks with NodeXL: Insights from a connected world, from Morgan-Kaufmann which is a guide to mapping connections created through computer-mediated interactions.
Smith's research focuses on computer-mediated collective action: the ways group dynamics change when they take place in and through social cyberspaces. Many "groups" in cyberspace produce public goods and organize themselves in the form of a commons (for related papers see: http://www.connectedaction.net/marc-smith/). Smith's goal is to visualize these social cyberspaces, mapping and measuring their structure, dynamics and life cycles. While at Microsoft Research, he founded the Community Technologies Group and led the development of the "Netscan" web application and data mining engine that allowed researchers studying Usenet newsgroups and related repositories of threaded conversations to get reports on the rates of posting, posters, crossposting, thread length and frequency distributions of activity. He contributes to the NodeXL project (http://nodexl.codeplex.com/) that adds social network analysis features to the familiar Excel spreadsheet. NodeXL enables social network analysis of email, Twitter, Flickr, WWW, Facebook and other network data sets.
The Connected Action consulting group (http://www.connectedaction.net) applies social science methods in general and social network analysis techniques in particular to enterprise and internet social media usage. SNA analysis of data from message boards, blogs, wikis, friend networks, and shared file systems can reveal insights into organizations and processes. Community managers can gain actionable insights into the volumes of community content created in their social media repositories. Mobile social software applications can visualize patterns of association that are otherwise invisible.
Smith received a B.S. in International Area Studies from Drexel University in Philadelphia in 1988, an M.Phil. in social theory from Cambridge University in 1990, and a Ph.D. in Sociology from UCLA in 2001. He is an adjunct lecturer at the College of Information Studies at the University of Maryland. Smith is also a Distinguished Visiting Scholar at the Media-X Program at Stanford University.
Host: Emilio Ferrara
Webcast: http://webcasterms1.isi.edu/mediasite/Viewer/?peid=2abc878bdcdd43c1bbba80cdc09562c41dLocation: Information Science Institute (ISI) - 11th Flr Conf Rm # 1135, Marina Del Rey
WebCast Link: http://webcasterms1.isi.edu/mediasite/Viewer/?peid=2abc878bdcdd43c1bbba80cdc09562c41d
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Peter Zamar
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Fog: A new architecture for network distributed computation, communication, control and storage
Thu, May 05, 2016 @ 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Mung Chiang, Princeton University
Talk Title: Fog: A new architecture for network distributed computation, communication, control and storage
Abstract: Fog architecture distributes computation, communication, control and storage closer to end users along the cloud-to-things continuum, promising the potential benefits in cognition, efficiency, agility and latency, and possibly enabling applications in 5G, IoT and big data. This talk overviews the opportunities and challenges in this research area and discusses the emergent industry momentum in fog.
Biography: Mung Chiang is the Arthur LeGrand Doty Professor of Electrical Engineering at Princeton University. His research on networking received the 2013 Alan T. Waterman Award, the highest honor to US young scientists and engineers. His textbook "Networks: Friends, Money and Bytes" and online course reached 250,000 students since 2012. He founded the Princeton EDGE Lab in 2009, which bridges the theory-practice gap in edge networking research by spanning from proofs to prototypes. He co-founded a few startups in mobile, IoT and big data areas and co-founded the Open Fog Consortium. Chiang is the Director of Keller Center for Innovations in Engineering Education at Princeton University and the inaugural Chairman of Princeton Entrepreneurship Council.
Host: Urbashi Mitra, ubli@usc.edu, EEB 536, x04667
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 539
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Gerrielyn Ramos
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PhD Defense - Guan Pang
Thu, May 05, 2016 @ 12:00 PM - 02:00 PM
Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science
University Calendar
Title: 3D Object Detection in Industrial Site Point Clouds
Location: SAL 322
Time: 12:00pm - 2:00pm, May 5th, 2016
PhD Candidate: Guan Pang
Committee members:
Prof. Ulrich Neumann (Chair)
Prof. Aiichiro Nakano
Prof. C.-C. Jay Kuo (Outside Member)
Abstract:
Detection of three dimensional (3D) objects in point clouds is a challenging problem. Existing methods either focus on a specific type of object or scene, or require prior segmentation, both of which are usually inapplicable on real-world industrial applications.
This thesis describe three methods to tackle the problem, with gradually improving performance and efficiency. The first is a general purpose 3D object detection method that combines Adaboost with 3D local features, without requirement for prior object segmentation. Experiments demonstrated competitive accuracy and robustness to occlusion, but this method suffers from limited rotation invariance. As an improvement, another method is presented with a multi-view detection approach that projects the 3D point clouds into several 2D depth images from multiple viewpoints, transforming the 3D problem into a series of 2D problems, which reduces complexity, stabilizes performance, and achieves rotation invariance. The problem is the huge amount of projected views and rotations that need to be individually detected, limiting the complexity and performance of 2D algorithm choice. Thus the third method is proposed to solve this with the introduction of convolutional neural network, because it can handle all viewpoints and rotations for the same class of object together, as well as predicting multiple classes of objects with the same network, without the need for individual detector for each object class. The detection efficiency is further improved by concatenating two extra levels of early rejection networks with binary outputs before the multi-class detection network.
3D object detection in point clouds is crucial for 3D industrial point cloud modeling. Prior efforts focus on primitive geometry, street structures or indoor objects, but industrial data has rarely been pursued. We integrate several algorithm components into an automatic 3D modeling system for industrial site point clouds, including modules for pipe modeling, plane classification and object detection, and solves the technology gaps revealed during the integration. The integrated system is able to produce classified models of large and complex industrial scenes with a quality that outperforms leading commercial software and comparable to professional hand-made models.
This thesis also describes an earlier work in multi-modal image matching which inspires later research in 3D object detection by 2D projections. Most existing 2D descriptors only work well on images of a single modality with similar texture. This proposal presents a novel basic descriptor unit called a Gixel, which uses an additive scoring method to sample surrounding edge information. Several Gixels in a circular array create the Gixel Array Descriptor, excelling in multi-modal image matching with dominant line features.
Location: Henry Salvatori Computer Science Center (SAL) - 322
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Lizsl De Leon
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USC Viterbi V.I.P. Event in San Diego: Water Sustainability In Coastal Regions
Thu, May 05, 2016 @ 05:30 PM - 07:30 PM
Sonny Astani Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, USC Viterbi School of Engineering, Viterbi School of Engineering Alumni
Receptions & Special Events
Join us on Thursday, May 5 for a presentation on Water Sustainability in Coastal Regions: Integrated Systems of Wastewater Re-use and Desalination by Amy Childress, PhD, Professor in the the Sonny Astani Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering Department.
As you may know, California is facing a historic drought and challenging issues related to water use. How does the research at USC Viterbi School of Engineering impact these issues and lead to breakthroughs and advances? How are we preparing to provide water to our growing communities?
Thursday, May 5, 2016 at 5:30 PM
Hosted by Debra Reed, BS '78, Chairman and CEO, Sempra Energy
Location: Sempra Energy, 488 8th Avenue, San Diego, CA 92101
Admission for USC alumni, USC parents, and guests is $10 per person and features a reception. All are welcome, but space is limited.
If you have any questions or would like to order over the phone please contact Maita Schuster at mrschust@usc.edu or 213.740.4880.
WHAT IS VITERBI INNOVATION PARTNERS (V.I.P.)?
V.I.P. is a yearly giving, engagement, and recognition program where alumni, parents and
friends come together in support of our engineering students and the advancement of
engineering here at USC Viterbi. For more information, please visit: http://viterbigiving.usc.edu/vip/Audiences: USC Alumni
Contact: James Morse
