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Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Events for May

  • A Trojan Webinar

    Fri, May 01, 2020 @ 02:30 AM - 03:30 AM

    Viterbi School of Engineering Alumni

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Gautam Trivdes, Priyanka Mittal, and Sandeep Tandon, Guest Speakers

    Talk Title: Challenges and Opportunities in a Post-Covid World

    Abstract: For more information on this webinar, please email USCIndia@usc.edu.

    Host: USC Viterbi India and USC Alumni Club of Delhi | North India

    More Information: Trojan Webinar.jpg

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Kristy Ly

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  • The Mathematics of Epidemics: A Century-Long Saga

    Thu, May 07, 2020 @ 12:00 PM - 01:00 PM

    Viterbi School of Engineering Alumni

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Dr. Andrew Viterbi, Alumnus and Namesake of the USC Viterbi School of Engineering

    Talk Title: The Mathematics of Epidemics: A Century-Long Saga

    Biography: Dr. Andrew Viterbi earned one of the first doctorates in electrical engineering ever granted at USC. The "Viterbi Algorithm", a mathematical formula to eliminate signal interference, paved the way for the widespread use of cellular technology, and catapulted Viterbi into the limelight of wireless communications worldwide. Today, the Viterbi Algorithm is used in all four international standards for digital cellular telephones, as well as in data terminals, digital satellite broadcast receivers and deep space telemetry. Viterbi is also the co-developer of CDMA -- Code Division Multiple Access -- the most widely used cell phone technology in the U.S.

    Host: Dean Yannis Yortsos

    More Info: https://tinyurl.com/viterbiwebinar

    More Information: Viterbi Webinar.jpg

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Kristy Ly

    Event Link: https://tinyurl.com/viterbiwebinar

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  • Viterbi Live: The Race for the COVID-19 Vaccine

    Thu, May 14, 2020 @ 12:00 PM - 01:00 PM

    Viterbi School of Engineering Alumni

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Dr. Pin Wang, USC Professor

    Talk Title: Viterbi Live: The Race for the COVID-19 Vaccine

    Abstract: As the global pandemic of the COVID-19 virus continues, USC Viterbi professor Dr. Pin Wang is leading a team in the development of a new vaccine.

    Their research isolates the human antibodies that can successfully fight the viral infection in order to create treatments that improve recovery times for COVID-19 patients.

    Join us for a live discussion as Dr. Wang presents his findings and challenges ahead. Dr. Stacey Finley, USC Viterbi Associate Professor of Biomedical Engineering and Biological Sciences, will host and moderate the session.

    Please register here: https://viterbi-live-wang-finley.eventbrite.com

    This session will be hosted on Zoom. Links and passwords will be sent to all registered participants the morning of May 14th.

    For any questions, please email us at engalums@usc.edu.

    Biography: Dr. Wang is the Zohrab A. Kaprielian Fellow in Engineering and Professor of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science and Biomedical Engineering. His lab specializes in the emerging field of immunobioengineering, which uses engineering tools to better understand the immune system and to develop novel molecular and cellular immunotherapies.

    Dr. Finley is the holder of the Gordon S. Marshall Early Career Chair and the Director of the Center for Computational Modeling of Cancer. She has a joint appointment in the Mork Family Department of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science and the Department of Biological Sciences.

    Host: Stacey Finley & Viterbi Advancement

    More Info: https://viterbi-live-wang-finley.eventbrite.com

    More Information: Viterbi Live - Wang & Finley.jpg

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Kristy Ly

    Event Link: https://viterbi-live-wang-finley.eventbrite.com

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  • NL Seminar-Fighting COVID 19 using Linear Time Algorithms from Computational Linguistics

    Thu, May 21, 2020 @ 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM

    Information Sciences Institute

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Liang Huang, Baidu Oregon State University

    Talk Title: Fighting COVID 19 using Linear Time Algorithms from Computational Linguistics

    Abstract: To defeat the current COVID 19 pandemic, which has already claimed 250,000 deaths as of early May, a messenger RNA mRNA vaccine has emerged as a promising approach thanks to its rapid and scalable production and non infectious and non integrating properties. However, designing an mRNA sequence to achieve high stability and protein yield remains a challenging problem due to the exponentially large search space e.g., there are 10 632 possible mRNA sequence candidates for the spike protein of SARS CoV 2.

    We describe two on going efforts at solving this problem, both using linear time algorithms from my group inspired by my earlier work in parsing. On one hand, the Eterna Open Vaccine project from Stanford Medical School takes a crowd sourcing approach to let game players all over the world design stable sequences. To evaluate sequence stability in terms of free energy, they use Linear Fold from my group 2019 since its the only linear time RNA folding algorithm available which makes it the only one fast enough for COVID scale genomes. On the other hand, we take a computational approach to directly search for the optimal sequence in this exponentially large space via dynamic programming. It turns out this problem can be reduced to a classical problem in formal language theory and computational linguistics intersection between CFG and DFA , which can be solved in O n 3 time, just like lattice parsing for speech. In the end, we can design the optimal mRNA vaccine candidate for SARS CoV 2 spike protein in 1 hour with exact search, or just 11 minutes with a beam of 1000 at the cost of only 0.6 percent loss in energy.

    Biography: Liang Huang is currently an Assistant Professor of EECS at Oregon State University and Distinguished Scientist part time at Baidu Research USA. Before that he was Assistant Professor for three years at the City University of New York CUNY and a part-time Research Scientist with IBM's Watson Group. He graduated in 2008 from Penn and has worked as a Research Scientist at Google and a Research Assistant Professor at USC ISI. Most of his work develops fast algorithms and provable theory to speedup large-scale natural language processing, structured machine learning, and computational structural biology. He has received a Best Paper Award at ACL 2008 sole author, a Best Paper Honorable Mention at EMNLP 2016, several best paper nominations ACL 2007, EMNLP 2008, and ACL 2010, two Google Faculty Research Awards 2010 and 2013, a Yahoo! Faculty Research Award 2015, and a University Teaching Prize at Penn 2005. He was a keynote speaker at ACL 2019. His recent interest is to apply computational linguistics to computational biology, where he works on RNA folding & design using his earlier work on incremental parsing.

    Host: Emily Sheng

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

    Webcast: https://usc.zoom.us/j/94526753732

    Location: Virtual Only

    WebCast Link: https://usc.zoom.us/j/94526753732

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Petet Zamar

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

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