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Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Events for May
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Rate Regions for Multiple Access Relay Channels with Relay-Source Feedback
Wed, May 05, 2010 @ 03:00 PM - 04:00 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Jie Hou,
Institute for Communications Engineering,
Technical University of MunichAbstract: For the multiple-access relay channel with relay-source feedback,
we derive an outer bound on the capacity region. We also derive an
achievable rate region which is in general larger than the capacity region
without feedback. The presence of the
feedback enables the sources to understand each other¹s messages, which in
turn allows the sources to cooperate to resolve the residual uncertainty at
the receiver in an efficient way. At the same time, independent fresh
information from the sources is superimposed upon the resolution
information.Biography: Jie Hou received the Dipl.-Ing. degree in electrical engineering
from the Technical University of Munich in 2008. He is currently working
towards his Ph.D. degree at the Institute for Communications Engineering at
the Technical University of Munich. His research interests are multiuser
information theory and practical code design.Host: Prof. Gerhard Kramer,gkramer@usc.eduLocation: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 539
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Gerrielyn Ramos
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CS COlloq: Prof. Lin Zhong
Thu, May 06, 2010 @ 11:00 AM - 12:30 PM
Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Talk Title: From users to energy-efficient mobile InternetSpeaker: Prof. Lin ZhongHost: Prof. Ramesh GovindanAbstract:Recent years have seen an explosive growth of Internet-ready mobile devices such as smartphones, netbooks, and e-Book readers. Not only has the growth challenged the network capacity, but also Internet access is among the most power-hungry usage on mobile devices.In this talk, we examine the fundamental inefficiency in the design of mobile wireless systems and its impact on both network capacity and device efficiency. In particular, we show the conventional assumption of omni directional transmission from mobile devices is a bottleneck and focus on our recent results in realizing directional transmission for them. We first analyze how mobile devices rotate during real wireless usage and how rotation impacts the quality of directional
transmission. Leveraging these findings, we provide two realizations of directional transmission based on directional antennas and energy-efficient beamsteering that are intended for immediate and long-term deployments, respectively. Using both experimental measurement and simulation, we show that directional transmission offers improved capacity-efficiency tradeoffs for mobile wireless access.Throughout this talk, we emphasize a user-centered approach toward energy-efficient mobile system design to reveal design problems, discover new opportunities, and evaluate solutions.Bio: Lin Zhong received his B.S. and M.S. from Tsinghua University in 1998 and 2000, respectively. He received his Ph.D. from Princeton University in September, 2005. He worked with NEC Labs, America, for the summer of 2003 and with Microsoft Research for the summers of 2004 and 2005. Since September, 2005, he has been with the Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering, Rice University, as an assistant professor. He received the AT&T Asian-Pacific Leadership Award in 2001
and the Harold W. Dodds Princeton University Honorific Fellowship for 2004-2005. He and his students received the best paper awards from ACM MobileHCI 2007 and IEEE PerCom 2009.
A paper he co-authored was identified as one of the 30 most
influential papers in the first 10 years of Design, Automation & Test in Europe conferences by the conference. His research interests include mobile & embedded system design, human-computer interaction, and nanoelectronics. His research has been funded by National Science Foundation, Motorola Labs, Microsoft Research, Nokia, and Texas Instruments.
Location: Seaver Science Library (SSL) - 150
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: CS Front Desk
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CS Colloq: Dr. Pradeep Varakantham
Fri, May 07, 2010 @ 12:00 PM - 01:30 PM
Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Talk Title: Risk sensitive planning and scheduling in uncertain environmentsSpeaker: Dr. Pradeep VarakanthamHost: Prof. Milind TambeAbstract: In risk sensitive reasoning, the key goal is to maximize expected utility of a user as opposed to maximizing an expected value. Such reasoning is imperative in domains like financial planning, rescue scenarios and project scheduling problems, where users are involved and there is uncertainty associated with decisions. In this talk, I will motivate, present algorithms and show experimental results for risk sensitive reasoning in two different settings:
(a) Planning in partially observable domains with non-deterministic outcomes to actions: In this research, we consider different risk attitudes of users, which are modeled as non-linear utility functions (mapping from current wealth to the utility) and provide efficient mechanisms to compute policies that account for such risk attitudes;and
(b) Scheduling in resource constrained project scheduling problems with durational uncertainty: Here, we develop a fitness function that is based on a risk parameter set by users to guide search for robust schedules.Bio:Dr. Pradeep Varakantham is an assistant professor at Singapore Management University. Previously, he was a post doctoral fellow with Steve Smith in the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. He received his PhD in Computer Science from University of Southern California under the guidance of Milind Tambe. His research interests include reasoning with uncertainty, multi agent systems, reinforcement/inverse learning and distributed constraint reasoning. He is co-author on a paper that was nominated for Jay Modi best student paper award at AAMAS 2009. He was the Outstanding Research Assistant in the Computer Science Department at University of Southern California for the year 2005. He has papers in some of the top Artificial Intelligence conferences including IJCAI, AAAI, AAMAS, and ICAPS.
Location: Grace Ford Salvatori Hall Of Letters, Arts & Sciences (GFS) - 118
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: CS Front Desk
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Two Directions on Next Generation Video Coding Standard
Fri, May 07, 2010 @ 03:00 PM - 04:00 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Professor Wen Gao,
Peking UniversityAbstract:Video coding is one of the important technological advancements that have made a great difference to our lives. In the past decades, the development of efficient coding techniques has made a big contributes to industry, such as digital video, wireless or internet video, 3D video and so on, many techniques have been developed and evolved through several generations of video coding standards, e.g., MPEG-1/2/4, H.26x, VC-1, and AVS. The movement of developing next-generation video coding standard is just becoming hot, which provides the challenges and opportunities equally to all researchers in this field. There are two key activities for the next generation of video coding standard, one is based on high performance, another one based on IP consideration. In this talk, the state of art of technologies for two directions will be reviewed, and future steps will be discussed.Biography: Wen Gao received his Ph.D. degree in electronics engineering from the University of Tokyo in 1991. He joined with the Harbin Institute of Technology from 1991 to 1995, as professor, chairman of department of computer science. He joined with Institute of Computing Technology (ICT), Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), as professor from 1996 to 2005. During his career at CAS, he served as the managing director of ICT from 1998 to 1999, the vice president of Graduate School of Chinese Academy of Sciences from 2000 to 2004, the vice president of University of Science and Technology China from 2000 to 2003. He is joining with the Peking University as professor since 2006. Dr. Gao is working at the areas of image and video processing, in particular at video coding and video analysis. He is the leader of Chinese National Body for MPEG standard, as well as the funder of AVS standard. He is an IEEE fellow.Hosted by Professor C.-C.Jay Kuo
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 248
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Talyia Veal
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Fully-passive wireless MEMS neural recorder
Mon, May 10, 2010 @ 11:30 PM - 12:30 AM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Junseok Chae, Arizona State UniversityAbstract:
Current wireless neuro-recording microsystems employ multi-component packages comprised of sophisticated circuitry located between the scalp and skull, which is then wired to micromachined electrode arrays implanted into the cortex of the brain. In order to remove these interconnects and improve signal acquisition quality some have monolithically integrated the circuits onto the electrodes and/or fabricated die-level post-CMOS electrodes on-chip. These advancements make it possible to monitor in-vivo potentials with extremely high spatial and temporal resolution. Nevertheless, challenges remain due to the complexity of wireless telemetry.
In this talk, we present an alternative, significantly less complex microsystem for passive and wireless neuro-recording consisting of only two varactors, three MIM capacitors, and an on-chip planar antenna. The wireless microsystem consists of an implantable circuit or "tag" to backscatter data to an external interrogator that supplies the fundamental carrier. The backscattering circuit relies solely on its nonlinear components, varactor diodes, which mix and backscatter neuro-potentials with the supplied carrier. The wireless microsystem was demonstrated using emulated and in-vivo neuro-potentials as low as 500 ìVP-P and up to 3 kHz.Biography:
Junseok Chae received the B.S. degree in metallurgical engineering from the Korea University, Seoul, Korea, in 1998, and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in EECS (Electrical Engineering and Computer Science) from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, in 2000 and 2003, respectively. After a couple of years of being research fellow at Michigan, he is now at Arizona State University as an assistant professor in electrical engineering. His areas of interest are MEMS for biomedical applications.
He received the 1st place prize and the best paper award in DAC (Design Automation Conference) student design contest in 2001. He has published over 75 journal and conference articles, one book, two book chapters, and holds two US patents. He received NSF CAREER award on MEMS protein sensor array.
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 248
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Marilyn Poplawski
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Measurement of Bragg-Wavelength Distribution in a Long-Length Fiber Bragg Grating Based on Synthesis
Fri, May 14, 2010 @ 04:00 PM - 04:30 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Koji Kajiwara,
Univ. of Tokyo JapanAbstract: We proposed a scheme for measuring Bragg-wavelength distribution inside a long-length fiber Bragg grating (FBG) using synthesis of optical coherence function. Synthesis of optical coherence function is one of the reflectometry techniques based on an interferometer. By modulating the oscillating frequency of the light source in a sinusoidal waveform, an optical coherence function with periodical delta-function like peaks is synthesized. This peak is swept through the measurement range, a long-length FBG, to know the Bragg wavelength distribution inside a long-length FBG. The center frequency of the light source is additionally swept in a saw-tooth waveform to measure the shape of the local reflection spectra inside the FBG. This technique is applicable to distributed strain and temperature sensor by obtaining the Bragg wavelength distributionHost: Alan Willner, willner@usc.edu, EEB 538, x04664
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 539
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Gerrielyn Ramos
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Construction Management Fundamentals
Mon, May 17, 2010 @ 08:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Executive Education
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Construction Management Fundamentals consists of 4 half-day courses providing construction professionals with the skills needed to understand and execute the broad array of technical and non-technical activities associated with construction management. Topics explored in this course prepare participants to become industrial leaders in the real estate/construction industry.
Location: USC campus or Online
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Viterbi Professional Programs
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Construction Management Fundamentals
Tue, May 18, 2010 @ 08:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Executive Education
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Construction Management Fundamentals consists of 4 half-day courses providing construction professionals with the skills needed to understand and execute the broad array of technical and non-technical activities associated with construction management. Topics explored in this course prepare participants to become industrial leaders in the real estate/construction industry.
Location: USC campus or Online
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Viterbi Professional Programs
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Construction Management Fundamentals
Wed, May 19, 2010 @ 08:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Executive Education
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Construction Management Fundamentals consists of 4 half-day courses providing construction professionals with the skills needed to understand and execute the broad array of technical and non-technical activities associated with construction management. Topics explored in this course prepare participants to become industrial leaders in the real estate/construction industry.
Location: USC campus or Online
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Viterbi Professional Programs
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Construction Management Fundamentals
Thu, May 20, 2010 @ 08:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Executive Education
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Construction Management Fundamentals consists of 4 half-day courses providing construction professionals with the skills needed to understand and execute the broad array of technical and non-technical activities associated with construction management. Topics explored in this course prepare participants to become industrial leaders in the real estate/construction industry.
Location: USC campus or Online
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Viterbi Professional Programs
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Physical Sciences for Optical Molecular Imaging in Oncology - Adventures in the Translational Woods
Fri, May 21, 2010 @ 01:00 PM - 02:30 PM
Alfred E. Mann Department of Biomedical Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
The USC Center for Applied Molecular Medicine, as part of the Physical Sciences in Oncology Center, is proud to present Dr. Daniel L. Farkas, Professor of Surgery and Biomedical Sciences, Director, Minimally Invasive Surgical Technologies Institute, Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, and Research Professor, Biomedical Engineering, USC.ABSTRACT:
In order to see the bench-to-bedside dream for translational research become a reality, we need to develop approaches that, while technologically sophisticated, allow deployment into a clinical setting. Our focus area is where light and patient meet, and improvements that yield better outcomes, by identifying and addressing the obstacles preventing the timely clinical adoption of laboratory-based advances. The unifying themes of our efforts can be summarized as follows: Surgery is still the main treatment for most major diseases, and it is moving rapidly towards minimally invasive intervention, requiring new approaches. Biophotonics represents a major new area of hope and growth for this type of high-tech intervention. The move of useful laboratory-derived knowledge into clinical practice has been hampered by a number of issues, not the least of which is the difficulty of detecting, characterizing and monitoring very small entities (molecules, cells) within the human body, especially quantitatively and dynamically. New tools and strategies are needed, with likely new outcomes. Ours is a multi-level, multimode approach to biomedical optical imaging, optimized for earlier and more reproducible detection of abnormalities and for a tighter spatio-temporal coupling between such diagnosis and intervention. This talk will concentrate on our cancer research work, and will review recent examples (physical sciences-based) optical bioimaging advances yielding a new armamentarium, by biological organization level (cellular; tissue; preclinical; and clinical/human domains, respectively). Results presented will be representative of both translational challenges and their technical solutions, and of some major application areas. The types of cancer highlighted will include breast, lung, bladder, prostate, brain, and melanoma. The methods include spectral reflectance, autofluorescence; optical coherence tomography; hyper-spectral Mie (elastic) scattering imaging for endoscopic guidance; non-linear (multiphoton) and lifetime imaging; design and use of multimode imaging devices, nano(photo)medicine, and photodynamic therapy for chemotherapy and its assessment. A new, technologically heightened operating room design for deploying these translational methods will also be discussed.
Location: May Ormerod Harris Hall, Quinn Wing & Fisher Gallery (HAR) - kness Auditorium - HSC, CSC -240
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Yvonne Suarez
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A Rate-Distortion Perspective on Multiple Decoding Attempts for Reed-Solomon Codes
Mon, May 24, 2010 @ 02:00 AM - 03:00 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Henry Pfister,
School of Engineering, Texas A&M*Monday*, May 24th, 2010
2:00pm-3:00pm
HED 116Abstract: Recently, a number of authors have proposed decoding schemes for Reed-Solomon (RS) codes based on multiple trials of a simple RS decoding algorithm. In this paper, we design and analyze these multiple-decoding algorithms using tools from rate-distortion (RD) theory. By defining an appropriate distortion measure between (generalized) error patterns and (generalized) erasure patterns, one finds that errors-and-erasures RS decoding succeeds if and only if the distortion is less than a fixed threshold.Finding the best set of (generalized) erasure patterns turns out to be a covering problem which is solved asymptotically by RD theory. The Blahut-Arimoto algorithm is extended to handle independent non-identical sources and used to find the optimal distribution for the erasure-pattern codebook. Simulation results show that this approach outperforms previous approaches for a fixed number of decoding trials.Since this approach is asymptotic in the block length, it does not lead to precise theoretical statements for any particular RS code. An extension, based on the rate-distortion exponent (RDE), allows one to directly minimize the exponential decay rate of the error probability. The RDE method enables rigorous bounds on the error probability for finite-length RS codes and modest performance gains are observed via simulation. In this case, the Arimoto algorithm is modified to handle independent non-identical sources and used to find the optimal codebook distribution.This is joint work with Phong S. Nguyen and Krishna R. Narayanan.Biography: Henry was born in Redondo Beach, CA and enjoyed an unproductive California youth playing volleyball and surfing.He received his Ph.D. in electrical engineering from UCSD in 2003 and he joined the faculty of the School of Engineering at Texas A&M University in 2006. Prior to that he spent two years in R&D at Qualcomm, Inc. and one year as a post-doc at EPFL.He received the NSF Career Award in 2008 and was a coauthor of the 2007 IEEE COMSOC best paper in Signal Processing and Coding for Data Storage.His current research interests include information theory, channel coding, and iterative decoding with applications in wireless communications and data storage.Host: Alex Dimakis, dimakis [at] usc.eduLocation: Hedco Pertroleum and Chemical Engineering Building (HED) - 116
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Gerrielyn Ramos
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Working Multimedia on the Web: A Yahoo Perspective
Wed, May 26, 2010 @ 10:30 AM - 11:30 AM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Abstract:
Without a doubt the Internet has changed the way people consume multimedia data. But it also brings a wealth of data and new opportunities for multimedia-information retrieval services. Our goal is to connect users with their entertainment and information needs.The data is both plentiful and noisy. We have billions of ratings by users about their interests. On one hand, the large amount of data means we can build robust models. On the other hand, the data does come from people, with all their idiosyncratic behaviors and opinions. This wealth of personal data---we have to assume it is all correct---sometimes means what we think it means and other times represents personal behaviors unrelated to anybody else's opinion. Separating out the signal from the noise is the new frontier for web sciences.I will illustrate my talk with several kinds of technologies we find interesting, drawing from successes we have had from all types of multimedia. These approaches impact recommendations, tagging, and search. Our approaches draw heavily from the world of machine learning, often taking novel directions because of the size of our datasets. The frontiers of web science are wonderful.Bio:
Malcolm Slaney is a principal scientist at Yahoo! Research Laboratory. He received his PhD from Purdue University for his work on computed imaging. He is a coauthor, with A. C. Kak, of the IEEE book Principles of Computerized Tomographic Imaging. This book was recently republished by SIAM in their Classics in Applied Mathematics Series. He is coeditor, with Steven Greenberg, of the book Computational Models of Auditory Function. Before Yahoo!, he has worked at Bell Laboratory, Schlumberger Palo Alto Research, Apple Computer, Interval Research, and IBMs Almaden Research Center. He is also a (consulting) Professor at Stanfords CCRMA where he organizes and teaches the Hearing Seminar. His research interests include auditory modeling and perception, multimedia analysis and synthesis, music similarity and audio search, and machine learning. For the last several years he has led the auditory group at the Telluride Neuromorphic Workshop.Malcolm is a Fellow of the IEEE.Hosts: Professor Shrikanth Narayanan, Dr. Kyu Han, and Samuel Kim
Location: Ronald Tutor Hall of Engineering (RTH) - 320
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Mary Francis
