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Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Events for May
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Epstein Institute Seminar, ISE 651
Tue, May 01, 2018 @ 03:30 PM - 04:50 PM
Daniel J. Epstein Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Dr. Brian Denton, Professor, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
Talk Title: Optimization of Biomarker-Based Screening Strategies for Early Detection of Prostate Cancer
Host: Dr. Sze-chuan Suen
More Information: May 1, 2018.pdf
Location: Ethel Percy Andrus Gerontology Center (GER) - GER 206
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Grace Owh
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A Surge-type Pricing in Ridesharing Systems is Stability Optimal
Thu, May 03, 2018 @ 10:00 AM - 11:00 AM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Costas Courcoubetis, Singapore University of Technology and Design (SUTD)
Talk Title: A Surge-type Pricing in Ridesharing Systems is Stability Optimal
Series: Center for Cyber-Physical Systems and Internet of Things
Abstract: The availability of drivers at a certain location affects the waiting time of passengers that arrive to be served by the platform.We introduce a queueing model for this waiting time and consider the effect on stability of available drivers' mobility pattern, their willingness to accept rides in a given location, and the incentives offered by the platform. For any fixed number of drivers, we characterize the largest set of passenger arrival rates which can result to stable queues under some policy dictating the movement of available drivers and their acceptance of rides. It turns out that any such policy can be enforced by offering appropriate region-dependent rewards to drivers for passenger pick up. Next, we show that dynamic rewards which are proportional to the passenger queue lengths, have the property of stabilizing queues for any arrival rates within the stability region. Seen from the perspective of drivers, such rewards which resemble surge pricing maximize their utilization.
Biography: Prof. Costas A Courcoubetis was born in Athens, Greece and received his Diploma (1977) from the National Technical University of Athens, Greece, in Electrical and Mechanical Engineering, his MS (1980) and PhD (1982) from the University of California, Berkeley, in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. He was MTS at the Mathematics Research Center, Bell Laboratories, Professor in the Computer Science Department at the University of Crete, Professor in the Department of Informatics at the Athens University of Economics and Business, and Professor in the ESD Pillar, Singapore University of Technology and Design where he heads the Initiative for the Sharing Economy and co-directs the new ST-SUTD Center for Smart Systems. His current research interests are economics and performance analysis of networks and internet technologies, sharing economy, regulation policy, smart grids and energy systems, resource sharing and auctions. Besides leading in the past a large number of research projects in these areas he has also published over 100 papers in scientific journals such as Operations Research, Mathematics of Operations Research, Journal on Applied Probability, ToN, IEEE Transactions in Communications, IEEE JSAC, SIAM Journal on Computing, etc. and in conferences such as FOCS, STOC, LICS, INFOCOM. GLOBCOM, ITC, ACM SIGMETRICS. His work has over 13,000 citations according to the Google Scholar. He is co-author with Richard Weber of "Pricing Communication Networks: Economics, Technology and Modeling" (Wiley, 2003).
Host: Professor Bhaskar Krishnamachari
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - EEB 248
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Talyia White
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: Building Safe and Secure Cyber-Physical Systems Against All Odds
Fri, May 04, 2018 @ 02:00 PM - 03:00 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Radoslav Ivanov, University of Pennsylvania
Talk Title: Building Safe and Secure Cyber-Physical Systems Against All Odds
Series: Center for Cyber-Physical Systems and Internet of Things
Abstract: The increased autonomy of modern Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) has exposed our limited understanding of systems of such complexity. Multiple deadly accidents in different domains (e.g., automotive, medical, aircraft) have occurred in the last several years, some due to partially known and changing (physiological) models and some due to malicious attacks that disrupt the system operation. In this talk, I will discuss my work on ensuring the safety and security of modern CPS; in particular, my focus is on providing accurate information with guarantees as a necessary condition to closing the loop. In the Medical CPS domain, I have developed parameter-invariant and context-aware detection and estimation approaches with guaranteed performance regardless of the values of unknown patient-specific physiological parameters (e.g., metabolic rate). We have successfully applied these approaches on real-patient data from the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia for the purpose of monitoring the patient's oxygen content during surgery.
In the CPS security domain, my work makes use of the inherent sensor redundancy available in modern CPS in order to argue about the system safety and security even when some components might be under attack. In particular, I have proposed attack-resilient sensor fusion techniques that do not require any assumptions about which particular sensors fail or are under attack in order to detect safety-critical states. We have evaluated the benefit of sensor fusion in a number of automotive CPS applications where the system has access to multiple sensors that can be used to estimate the same state (e.g., velocity can be estimated using encoders, cameras, GPS, etc.).
Biography: Radoslav Ivanov received the B.A. degree in computer science and economics from Colgate University, NY, and the Ph.D. degree in computer and information science from the University of Pennsylvania. He is currently a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Pennsylvania, working with Insup Lee and James Weimer. Radoslav's research interests include the design and control of safe and secure cyber-physical systems, in particular, automotive and medical CPS, and predictive and retrospective analysis of medical patient data.
Host: Professor Paul Bogdan
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 248
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Talyia White
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NL Seminar-Neural Creative Language Generation PhD Defense Practice Talk
Fri, May 04, 2018 @ 03:00 PM - 04:00 PM
Information Sciences Institute
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Marjan Ghazvininejad , USC/ISI
Talk Title: Neural Creative Language Generation PhD Defense Practice Talk
Series: Natural Language Seminar
Abstract: Natural language generation is a well studied and still very challenging field in natural language processing. One of the less studied NLG tasks is the generation of creative texts such as jokes, puns, or poems. Multiple reasons contribute to the difficulty of research in this area. First, no immediate application exists for creative language generation. This has made the research on creative NLG extremely diverse, having different goals, assumptions, and constraints. Second, no quantitative measure exists for creative NLG tasks. Consequently, it is often difficult to tune the parameters of creative generation models and drive improvements to these systems. Lack of a quantitative metric and the absence of a well-defined immediate application makes comparing different methods and finding the state of the art an almost impossible task in this area. Finally, rule-based systems for creative language generation are not yet combined with deep learning methods. Rule based systems are powerful in capturing human knowledge, but it is often too time-consuming to present all the required knowledge in rules. On the other hand, deep learning models can automatically extract knowledge from the data, but they often miss out some essential knowledge that can be easily captured in rule based systems.
In this work, we address these challenges for poetry generation, which is one of the main areas of creative language generation. We introduce password poems as a new application for poetry generation. These passwords are highly secure, and we show that they are easier to recall and preferable compared to passwords created by other methods that guarantee the same level of security. Furthermore, we combine finite state machinery with deep learning models in a system for generating poems for any given topic. We introduce a quantitative metric for evaluating the generated poems and build the first interactive poetry generation system that enables users to revise system generated poems by adjusting style configuration settings like alliteration, concreteness and the sentiment of the poem. The system interface also allows users to rate the quality of the poem. We collect users rating for poems with various style settings and use them to automatically tune the system style parameters. In order to improve the coherence of generated poems, we introduce a method to borrow ideas from existing human literature and build a poetry translation system. We study how poetry translation is different from translation of noncreative texts by measuring the language variation added during the translation process. We show that humans translate poems much more freely compared to general texts. Based on this observation, we build a machine translation system specifically for translating poetry which uses language variation in the translation process to generate rhythmic and rhyming translations.
Biography: Marjan Ghazvininejad is a Ph.D. student at ISI working with Professor Kevin Knight
Host: Nanyun Peng
More Info: http://nlg.isi.edu/nl-seminar/
Location: Information Science Institute (ISI) - 11th Flr Conf Rm # 1135, Marina Del Rey
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Peter Zamar
Event Link: http://nlg.isi.edu/nl-seminar/
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Six Sigma Green Belt for Process ImprovementMon, May 07, 2018
Executive Education
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
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.
More Info: https://viterbiexeced.usc.edu/engineering-program-areas/six-sigma-lean-certification/six-sigma-green-belt-process-improvement/
Audiences: Registered Attendees
Contact: Corporate & Professional Programs
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Six Sigma Green Belt for Process Improvement
Tue, May 08, 2018
Executive Education
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
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.
More Info: https://viterbiexeced.usc.edu/engineering-program-areas/six-sigma-lean-certification/six-sigma-green-belt-process-improvement/
Audiences: Registered Attendees
Contact: Corporate & Professional Programs
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INCOSE-LA Speaker Meeting
Tue, May 08, 2018 @ 05:15 PM - 07:30 PM
Systems Architecting and Engineering, USC Viterbi School of Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Kay Das, INCOSE - Los Angeles
Talk Title: The Connected Vehicle Revolution - Continued
Series: INCOSE-LA Speaker Series
Abstract: The second installment of our light-hearted but critical look at the Connected Vehicle revolution. There is currently much ongoing activity in the research and design of systems to enhance the safety of vehicular traffic on roads and highways. These include vehicle-to-vehicle based and vehicle-to-infrastructure based electronics systems with extension to personal devices. These systems need to work collaboratively in an intelligent and reconfigurable network environment characterized by multiple localized and dynamically changing motion control loops which include each individual vehicle driver (and pedestrian). Systems will comprise a mix of existing and new technologies such as laser, imaging, computer vision, radar, cellular, WiFi, GPS, millimetric Waves, and others. System complexity is very high to deliver and sustain the required levels of reliability. A range of products and systems will compete for market entry from diverse developers and nations. Compliance with a safety culture within product development, such as directed by the ISO 26262 cocoon, is desirable. Safety needs to be regarded as an integral and critical element in system, software, hardware, and device and sensor design. A significant challenge also exists in validating prototypes and final systems productized for market entry. The cost of failure is high as human life is in the loop. This presentation reviews some of the challenges and offers some directions for this burgeoning industry propelled by developments ranging from Shannons Law and Moores Law to the evolving Internet of Things and 5G cellular communications. Management of systems research and development with frugality, without over-design, and with a holistic approach on a scale probably never demanded before, is required.
RSVP: Required, see the event link below.
WHERE: Rockwell Collins - Irvine
1733 Alton Pkwy,
Irvine, CA 92606
Host: Andrew Murrell
Phone: 714-929-3503
When you arrive please wait in the Rockwell Collins Lobby in Building 18 (A Rockwell Collins sign will be on the building) and check in with Security, you will need to present identification and a visitor badge will be issued. A Rockwell Employee will then escort you to the Conference room.
COST: INCOSE Members: FREE. Non-members: $10 (refreshments provided)
SCHEDULE:
5:15-5:30 Sign-in and Registration
5:30-6:00 Networking and Refreshments
6:10-6:20 Introduction
6:20-6:30 WG Presentation (TBD)
6:30-7:30 Guest Speaker Presentation
Biography: Kay Das was GPS Program Manager and Technical Director at LinQuest Corporation in Los Angeles from 2007 to 2013 where he additionally led new business development thrusts in the commercial and automotive safety markets. He has previously held responsibilities as R&D Director for STMicroelectronics Asia Pacific region. He is a winner of a Singapore Government National Award for The Initiation and Expansion of High-value R&D and Promotion of Partnerships. He has built and led teams in different parts of the world and managed the development of diverse silicon-based signal processing systems over 40 years in industry. His current pursuits are the application of communication (such as 5G-DSRC) and location technologies (such as GPS-GNSS) to the Connected Vehicle revolution. He holds an MS in Electronics Systems from the Cranfield Institute of Technology, UK. His pursuits in retirement other than Connected Vehicle include amateur astronomy, Internet radio, and he is a professional musician. He is an IEEE Life Member and a member of several societies.
Host: International Council on Systems Engineering (INCOSE)
More Info: http://events.r20.constantcontact.com/register/event?llr=l4ihvgeab&oeidk=a07ef7zwisr1ddb5ba8
Location: Rockwell Collins - Irvine
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Deborah A. Cannon
Event Link: http://events.r20.constantcontact.com/register/event?llr=l4ihvgeab&oeidk=a07ef7zwisr1ddb5ba8
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Six Sigma Green Belt for Process Improvement
Wed, May 09, 2018
Executive Education
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
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.
More Info: https://viterbiexeced.usc.edu/engineering-program-areas/six-sigma-lean-certification/six-sigma-green-belt-process-improvement/
Audiences: Registered Attendees
Contact: Corporate & Professional Programs
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NL Seminar Towards Flexible but Controllable Language Generation
Fri, May 11, 2018 @ 03:00 PM - 04:00 PM
Information Sciences Institute
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Yulia Tsvetkov , CMU
Talk Title: Towards Flexible but Controllable Language Generation
Series: Natural Language Seminar
Abstract: To enable naturalistic, context aware language generation, the underlying models must be flexible but controllable. They must be flexible enough to account for the rich linguistic diversity of data that the model generates and conditions on. On the other hand, generation must be controlled, to lexicalize the same meaning differently, depending upon the social and the situational context. I will present model based approaches to multilingual language modeling and open vocabulary machine translation, aiming at making language generation more flexible by relaxing the unreasonable but prevalent in the literature assumption that a models vocabulary is constrained to a particular set of most frequent words in a particular language. Then, I will present an approach to controllable text generation that modulates social variables in generated text. I will conclude with an overview of ongoing research projects.
Biography: Yulia Tsvetkov is an assistant professor in the Language Technologies Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. Her research interests lie at or near the intersection of natural language processing, machine learning, linguistics, and social science. Her current research projects focus on multilinguality e.g., open vocabulary machine translation, polyglot models, entrainment in code switching, controllable text generation, automated negotiation, and NLP for social good e.g., identification of microaggressions and dehumanization in online interactions, identification of misinformation and agenda setting in news, predicting scientific misconduct. Prior to joining LTI, Yulia was a postdoc in the department of Computer Science at Stanford University she received her PhD from Carnegie Mellon University.
Host: Nanyun Peng
More Info: http://nlg.isi.edu/nl-seminar/
Location: Information Science Institute (ISI) - 11th Flr Conf Rm # 1135, Marina Del Rey
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Peter Zamar
Event Link: http://nlg.isi.edu/nl-seminar/
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A Case for Domain-Specific Architectures and its Application to Energy-Efficient Speech Recognition
Mon, May 21, 2018 @ 10:30 AM - 11:30 AM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Antonio González, Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, Barcelona, Spain
Talk Title: A Case for Domain-Specific Architectures and its Application to Energy-Efficient Speech Recognition
Abstract: Improvements in energy-efficiency is a main requirement to keep providing innovations in computing systems. The main driving forces in the past for improving energy-efficiency were based on process technology and general-purpose architectures. However, both of them are reaching a point of diminishing returns. On the other hand, domain-specific architectures offer great potential to keep delivering dramatic improvements in energy-efficient, and we believe they will become a key ingredient of future computing systems. In this talk, we will use speech recognition as a case study to illustrate this potential.
Automatic speech recognition (ASR) has become a key feature for many computing systems, and in particular for mobile devices such as smartphones, tablets, home devices and wearables. For instance, ASR technology is at the heart of popular applications with voice-based user interfaces for mobile devices such as Google Now, Apple Siri, Microsoft Cortana or Amazon Alexa. These systems require support for real-time, large-vocabulary, speaker-independent, highly-accurate, continuous speech recognition. Unfortunately, supporting fast and accurate speech recognition requires a huge computational power, which is specially challenging to attain in devices with very tight constraints in energy consumption.
In this talk, we will first review the main trends in computing and the state-of-the-art approaches for ASR and then, we will present a novel domain-specific architecture that provides dramatic improvements in terms of energy-efficiency for ASR.
Biography: Antonio Gonzalez received his Ph.D. degree from the Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya (UPC), in Barcelona, Spain, in 1989. He joined the faculty of the Computer Architecture Department of UPC in 1986 and became a Full Professor in 2002. He was the founding director of the Intel Barcelona Research Center from 2002 to 2014.
His research has focused on computer architecture. In this area, Antonio holds 46 patents, has published over 350 research papers and has given over 100 invited talks. He has also made multiple contributions to the design of the architecture of several Intel processors.
Antonio has been program chair for ICS 2003, ISPASS 2003, MICRO 2004, HPCA 2008 and ISCA 2011, and general chair for MICRO 2008 and HPCA 2016 among other symposia. He has served on the program committees for over 100 international symposia in the field of computer architecture, and has been Associate Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Computers, IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems, IEEE Computer Architecture Letters, ACM Transactions on Architecture and Code Optimization, ACM Transactions on Parallel Computing, and Journal of Embedded Computing.
Antonio's awards include the award to the best student in computer engineering in Spain graduating in 1986, the 2001 Rosina Ribalta award as the advisor of the best PhD project in Information Technology and Communications, the 2008 Duran Farrell award for research in technology, the 2009 Aritmel National Award of Informatics to the Computer Engineer of the Year, the 2013 King James I award for his contributions in research on new technologies, and the 2014 ICREA Academia Award. He is an IEEE Fellow.
Host: Xuehai Qian, x04459, xuehai.qian@usc.edu
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 132
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Gerrielyn Ramos
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Joint CSC@USC/CommNetS-MHI Seminar Series
Thu, May 24, 2018 @ 02:00 PM - 03:00 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Mohamadreza Ahmadi, University of Texas at Austin
Talk Title: Addressing Challenges in Autonomy: Lessons from Information and Control Theories
Series: Joint CSC@USC/CommNetS-MHI Seminar Series
Abstract: We live in the prolific age of artificial intelligence and machine learning. These automation technologies underlie real systems (e.g. robots, and self-driving vehicles), and virtual systems (e.g. financial, and inventory management). The problem is many of these autonomous systems have become so intricate and black-box that we hit a complexity roadblock. For example, it can be difficult to tell why a classifier or a recommendation engine based on machine learning works. Moreover, when the algorithms work, how can we quantify their limitations, safety, privacy and performance with guarantees. In this talk, I borrow notions from control and information theories to address two challenges in autonomy. The first one is motivated by the Mars 2020 project and is concerned with navigation of an autonomous agent in an uncertain environment (modeled by a Markov decision process) subject to communication and sensing limitations (in terms of transfer entropy), and high-level mission specification (characterized by linear temporal logic formulae). The second one is concerned with belief verification in autonomous systems (represented by a partially observable Markov decision process) with applications in privacy verification of autonomous systems (e.g. a robot) operating on shared infrastructure, and machine teaching.
Biography: Mohamadreza Ahmadi joined the Institute for Computational Engineering and Sciences (ICES) at the University of Texas at Austin as a postdoctoral scholar in fall 2016, where he is currently a Research Associate. He received his DPhil (Ph.D.) in Engineering (Aeronautics) from the University of Oxford in fall 2016 as a Clarendon Scholar. From fall 2014 to spring 2016, he was a lecturer in engineering at Worcester College, University of Oxford. His current research is on applying tools from control theory to design autonomous systems with privacy, safety, and performance guarantees.
Host: Mihailo Jovanovic, mihailo@usc.edu
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 248
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Gerrielyn Ramos
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Theoretically Efficient Parallel Graph Algorithms Can Be Fast and Scalable
Tue, May 29, 2018 @ 10:30 AM - 11:30 AM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Julian Shun, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Talk Title: Theoretically Efficient Parallel Graph Algorithms Can Be Fast and Scalable
Abstract: There has been significant interest in parallel graph processing recently due to the need to quickly analyze the large graphs available today. Many graph codes have been designed for distributed memory or external memory. However, today even the largest publicly-available real-world graph (the Hyperlink Web graph with over 3.5 billion vertices and 128 billion edges) can fit in the memory of a single commodity multicore server. Nevertheless, most experimental work in the literature report results on much smaller graphs, and the ones that use the Hyperlink graph are done in distributed or external memory. Therefore it is natural to ask whether we can efficiently solve a broad class of graph problems on this graph in memory.
With a graph of this size it is important to use theoretically-efficient parallel algorithms as even minor inefficiencies in the work or parallelism of an algorithm can lead to a significant increase in running time. This talk shows that theoretically-efficient parallel graph algorithms can scale to the largest publicly-available graphs using a single machine with a terabyte of RAM, processing them in minutes. We give implementations of theoretically-efficient parallel algorithms for 13 important graph problems. We also present the optimizations and techniques that we used in our implementations, which were crucial in enabling us to process these large graphs quickly. We show that the running times of our implementations outperform existing state-of-the-art implementations on the largest real-world graphs. For many of the problems that we consider, this is the first time they have been solved on graphs at this scale.
Biography: Julian Shun is an assistant professor in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT. He is interested in the theory and practice of parallel computing, especially parallel graph processing frameworks, algorithms, data structures, and tools for deterministic parallel programming. He has received the ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award, CMU School of Computer Science Doctoral Dissertation Award, Miller Research Fellowship, Facebook Graduate Fellowship, and a best student paper award at the IEEE Data Compression Conference.
Host: Xuehai Qian, x04459, xuehai.qian@usc.edu
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 132
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Gerrielyn Ramos
