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Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Events for May

  • Astani Civil and Environmental Engineering Seminar

    Thu, May 02, 2019 @ 04:00 PM - 05:00 PM

    Sonny Astani Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Jean Van-Buren, PhD Graduate Student, Uniersity of California, Berkeley

    Talk Title: Unexpected products formed during oxidative water treatment

    Abstract: Hydrogen peroxide and persulfate are employed in the treatment of contaminated soil and groundwater by in situ chemical oxidation (ISCO) as well as in advanced oxidation processes (AOPs) for wastewater treatment and drinking water purification. Activation of the peroxy bonds in these oxidants produces hydroxyl radical and sulfate radical, which can degrade recalcitrant organic contaminants such as aromatic compounds like benzene. Our research on the oxidation of aromatics
    has highlighted a ring-cleavage mechanism that forms low molecular weight aldehydes as well as α,β-unsaturated aldehydes. This is a concern for toxicity as α,β-unsaturated aldehydes are highly reactive with biomolecules. Their detection has implications for hazardous site remediation as well as the use of AOPs for water treatment.


    Biography: Jean Van Buren is a UC Berkeley Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Chemistry working with David Sedlak at the Berkeley Water Center. She received her B.A. from Cornell University in Chemistry. Her research interests include environmental chemistry, water remediation, and transformation products. Outside of the lab, she is a professional equestrian.

    Location: Ray R. Irani Hall (RRI) - 101

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Evangeline Reyes

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  • Astani Civil and Environmental Engineering Seminar

    Thu, May 02, 2019 @ 04:00 PM - 05:00 PM

    Sonny Astani Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Jean Van Buren, University of California, Berkeley

    Talk Title: Unexpected products formed during oxidative water treatment

    Abstract: See attached

    Host: Dr. Daniel McCurry

    More Information: Van_Buren_Announcement.pdf

    Location: Ray R. Irani Hall (RRI) - 101

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Evangeline Reyes

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  • System and Architecture Design for Safe And Reliable Autonomous Robotic Applications

    Mon, May 06, 2019 @ 10:30 AM - 12:00 PM

    Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Jishen Zhao, University of California, San Diego

    Talk Title: System and Architecture Design for Safe And Reliable Autonomous Robotic Applications

    Abstract: The rapid development of smart technology in edge computing systems has paved the way for us to embrace the technology movement of self-driving cars and autonomous service robots. To enable the wide adoption of these autonomous robotic applications, reliability is one of fundamental goals of computing system and architecture design. In this talk, I will present our recent exploration of safe and reliable system and architecture design for autonomous robotic applications. I will start by presenting an architecture design of supporting fast system recovery with persistent memory at low performance cost. To evaluate and guide our system design, I will introduce our safety model and architecture design strategies for self-driving cars, based on our field study of running real industrial Level-4 autonomous driving fleets. Finally, I will describe a Linux-container-based resource management framework design to improve reliability and safety of self-driving cars and service robots.

    Biography: Jishen Zhao is an Assistant Professor in the Computer Science and Engineering Department at University of California, San Diego. Her research spans and stretches the boundary between computer architecture and system software, with a particular emphasis on memory and storage systems, domain-specific acceleration, and system reliability. Her research is driven by both emerging technologies (e.g., nonvolatile memories, 3D-stacked memory) and modern applications (e.g., smart home and autonomous robotic systems, deep learning, and big-data analytics). Before joining UCSD, she was an Assistant Professor at UCSC, and a research scientist at HP Labs before joining UCSC. She is a recipient of NSF CAREER award and a MICRO best paper honorable mention award.

    Host: Xuehai Qian, xuehai.qian@usc.edu

    More Information: 19.05.06 Jishen Zhao_CENG Seminar.pdf

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

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Brienne Moore

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  • Franco Nori - Physics Colloquium, Monday, May 6th at 4:15pm in SSL 150

    Mon, May 06, 2019 @ 04:15 PM - 05:30 PM

    Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Franco Nori, Riken, Saitama, Japan, University of Michigan

    Talk Title: Nano-Electronics Using Quantum Circuits as Artificial Atoms on a Chip

    Abstract: Recent technological advances have made it possible to implement atomic-physics and quantum-optics experiments on a chip using artificial atoms. These artificial atoms can be made from either semiconductor quantum dots and, more often, from superconducting circuits. Superconducting circuits based on Josephson junctions exhibit macroscopic quantum coherence and can behave like artificial atoms. Novel electronic devices are being explored with these type of superconducting (low-power-consumption) electronics. This talk presents a pedagogical (and, hopefully, entertaining) brief introduction to this rapidly advancing field. The references [1-17] provide a few overviews on various aspects of this subject and related topics.

    Host: Department of Physics and Astronomy, ECE-EP

    Location: Seaver Science Library (SSL) - 150

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Marilyn Poplawski

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  • Center for Cyber-Physical Systems and Internet of Things and Ming Hsieh Institute Distinguished Seminar

    Wed, May 08, 2019 @ 03:00 PM - 04:00 PM

    Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Professor John A. Stankovic, BP America Professor in the Computer Science Department, University of Virginia and Director of the Link Lab

    Talk Title: Research Challenges and Solutions for IOTT/CPS

    Series: Center for Cyber-Physical Systems and Internet of Things

    Abstract: As the Internet of Things (IOT) matures and supports increasingly sophisticated applications, the research needs for IOT also expand considerably. This talk discusses several major research challenges for the future IOT where trillions of devices are connected to the Internet; call it the Internet of Trillions of Things (IOTT). Research topics covered include new systems of systems problems, the impact of massive scaling, and IOTT for healthcare. Smart cities are used to present examples of new system of system research issues and their solutions. Scaling and long time maintenance problems give rise to the need for runtime validation. Why this is important and how to accomplish this is presented. We use the Internet of Healthcare Things to identify the realisms that must be addressed in real home deployments. We also discuss the problems and solutions for using speech as a major sensing modality for smart healthcare based on an emo2vec (an extension to word2vec) and LSTMs. The list of topics is not meant to be comprehensive, but does address some of the main research issues in IOTT/CPS.

    Biography: Professor John A. Stankovic is the BP America Professor in the Computer Science Department at the University of Virginia and Director of the Link Lab. He served as Chair of the department for 8 years. He is a Fellow of both the IEEE and the ACM. He has been awarded an Honorary Doctorate from the University of York for his work on real-time systems. He won the IEEE Real-Time Systems Technical Committee's Award for Outstanding Technical Contributions and Leadership. He also received the IEEE Technical Committee on Distributed Processing's Distinguished Achievement Award (inaugural winner). He has seven Best Paper awards, including one for ACM SenSys 2006. Stankovic has an h-index of 115 and over 58,000 citations. In 2015 he was awarded the Univ. of Virginia Distinguished Scientist Award, and in 2010 the School of Engineering's Distinguished Faculty Award. He also received a Distinguished Faculty Award from the University of Massachusetts. He has given more than 40 Keynote talks at conferences and many Distinguished Lectures at major Universities. He also served on the National Academy's Computer Science Telecommunications Board. He was the Editor-in-Chief for the IEEE Transactions on Distributed and Parallel Systems and was founder and co-editor-in-chief for the Real-Time Systems Journal. His research interests are in real-time systems, wireless sensor networks, smart and connected health, cyber physical systems, and the Internet of Things. Prof. Stankovic received his PhD from Brown University.

    Host: Jyotirmoy Deshmukh

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

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Talyia White

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  • AI Seminar-Natural Language Understanding with Incidental Supervision

    Wed, May 15, 2019 @ 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM

    Information Sciences Institute

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Dan Roth, University of Pennsylvania

    Talk Title: Natural Language Understanding with Incidental Supervision

    Series: Artificial Intelligence Seminar

    Abstract: The fundamental issue underlying natural language understanding is that of semantics there is a need to move toward understanding natural language at an appropriate level of abstraction, beyond the word level, in order to support knowledge extraction, natural language understanding, and communication.

    Machine Learning and Inference methods have become ubiquitous in our attempt to induce semantic representations of natural language and support decisions that depend on it. However, learning models that support high level tasks is difficult, partly since most they are very sparse and generating supervision signals for it does not scale. Consequently, making natural language understanding decisions, which typically depend on multiple, interdependent, models, becomes even more challenging.

    I will describe some of our research on developing machine learning and inference methods in pursue of understanding natural language text. My focus will be on identifying and using incidental supervision signals in pursuing a range of semantics tasks, and I will point to some of the key challenges as well some possible directions for studying this problem from a principled perspective.



    Biography: Dan Roth is the Eduardo D. Glandt Distinguished Professor at the Department of Computer and Information Science, University of Pennsylvania, and a Fellow of the AAAS, the ACM, AAAI, and the ACL.

    In 2017 Roth was awarded the John McCarthy Award, the highest award the AI community gives to mid-career AI researchers. Roth was recognized for major conceptual and theoretical advances in the modeling of natural language understanding, machine learning, and reasoning.

    Roth has published broadly in machine learning, natural language processing, knowledge representation and reasoning, and learning theory, and has developed advanced machine learning based tools for natural language applications that are being used widely. Until February 2017 Roth was the Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research JAIR.

    Prof. Roth received his B.A Summa cum laude in Mathematics from the Technion, Israel, and his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Harvard University in 1995.

    Host: Nanyun Peng

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

    Webcast: https://bluejeans.com/s/1v5oL/

    Location: Information Science Institute (ISI) - Conf Rms #1135-1137

    WebCast Link: https://bluejeans.com/s/1v5oL/

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Peter Zamar

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

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  • NL Seminar-THE BLOCKS WORLD REDUX

    Thu, May 16, 2019 @ 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM

    Information Sciences Institute

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Martha Palmer , Univ of Colorado

    Talk Title: THE BLOCKS WORLD REDUX

    Series: Natural Language Seminar

    Abstract: This talk will discuss some of the challenges arising from the Blocks World scenario in the DARPA Communicating with Computers program. The actions are very simple and concrete, such as Add a block to the tower. However, even in this restricted world, getting the appropriate contextual interpretation of a sentence can be challenging, especially with respect to spatial relations. The talk will review the progress we have made so far on collecting useful data and attempting to achieve the goal of contextual interpretation. To do this we bring to bear many resources, ranging from AMR parsing to Jerry Hobbs's axiomatization of object and action definitions, to our recent merger of James Pustejovsky's Generative Lexicon GL, and VerbNet VN, i.e., GL VN. A main focus of the talk will be the ways in which we are expanding AMR annotation to encompass spatial relations and also the recovery of implicit arguments. Both expansions play into the task of maintaining a discourse structure. The talk will conclude with both short term and long term goals for our collaborations on CwC, with respect to both AMR and GL-VN.



    Biography: Martha Palmer is the Helen & Hubert Croft Endowed Professor of Engineering in the Computer Science Department, and an Arts & Sciences Professor of Distinction in the Linguistics Department, at the University of Colorado, with a split appointment. She is also an Institute of Cognitive Science Faculty Fellow, a co Director of CLEAR and an Association of Computational Linguistics ACL Fellow. She won an Outstanding Graduate Advisor 2014 Award, a Boulder Faculty Assembly 2010 Research Award and was the Director of the 2011 Linguistics Institute in Boulder, CO. Her research is focused on capturing elements of the meanings of words that can comprise automatic representations of complex sentences and documents in English, Chinese, Arabic, Hindi, and Urdu, funded by DARPA and NSF. A more recent focus is the application of these methods to biomedical journal articles and clinical notes, funded by NIH, and the geo and bio sciences, funded by NSF. She co edits LiLT, Linguistic Issues in Language Technology, and has been a co editor of the Journal of Natural Language Engineering and on the CLJ Editorial Board. She is a past President of ACL, past Chair of SIGLEX, was the Founding Chair of SIGHAN, and has well over 250 peer reviewed publications.

    Host: Xusen Yin

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

    Webcast: https://bluejeans.com/s/ny0H5

    Location: Information Science Institute (ISI) - CR #689

    WebCast Link: https://bluejeans.com/s/ny0H5

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Peter Zamar

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

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  • Supercharge Analytics Over Large IoT Data: An OS Approach

    Fri, May 17, 2019 @ 10:30 AM - 12:00 PM

    Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Felix Xiaozhu Lin, Purdue University

    Talk Title: Supercharge Analytics Over Large IoT Data: An OS Approach

    Abstract: This talk overviews our inquiry in systems software for taming large IoT data. I will describe two systems that target two complementary analytics paradigms: a data engine for processing large telemetry streams (hot data); a data store for querying large archival videos (cold data). The two systems exploit emerging hardware (e.g. 3D-stacked DRAM) as well as emerging workloads (e.g. neural networks). Both systems advance the state-of-the-art performance by orders of magnitude.

    Our experiences highlight the significance of designing OSes for specific scenarios, where the OSes play key roles: mapping AI to new hardware, dynamically configuring AI, and trading off among competing objectives.

    Biography: Felix Xiaozhu Lin is an assistant professor of Purdue ECE. He received PhD in CS from Rice and BS/MS from Tsinghua. At Purdue, he leads the Xroads systems exploration lab (XSEL) to accelerate and safeguard important computing scenarios. He and his students measure and build systems software with diverse techniques, including novel OS structures, kernel subsystem design, binary translation, and user-level runtimes. See http://felixlin.org for more information.

    He is a recipient of ASPLOS best paper award (2014), NSF CRII award (2015), Google Faculty Award (2016), and NSF CAREER award (2019).


    Host: Xuehai Qian, xuehai.qian@usc.edu

    More Information: 19.05.17 Felix Xiaozhu Lin_CENG Seminar.pdf

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

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Brienne Moore

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  • NL Seminar-Quantifying the morphosyntactic content of Brown Clusters

    Thu, May 30, 2019 @ 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM

    Information Sciences Institute

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Manuel Ciosici, Aarhus University

    Talk Title: Quantifying the morphosyntactic content of Brown Clusters

    Series: Natural Language Seminar

    Abstract: Brown and Exchange word clusters have long been successfully used as word representations in Natural Language Processing NLP systems. Their success has been attributed to their seeming ability to represent both semantic and syntactic information. Using corpora representing several language families, we test the hypothesis that Brown and Exchange word clusters are highly effective at encoding morphosyntactic information. Our experiments show that word clusters are highly capable of distinguishing Parts of Speech. We show that increases in Average Mutual Information, the clustering algorithms' optimization goal, are highly correlated with improvements in encoding of morphosyntactic information. Our results provide empirical evidence that downstream NLP systems addressing tasks dependent on morphosyntactic information can benefit from word cluster features.


    Biography: Manuel is a soon to graduate Ph.D. student at Aarhus University, Denmark. His research is focused on understanding the kinds of information encoded in word representations and how that information can be used in downstream NLP applications.

    Host: Xusen Yin

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

    Webcast: https://bluejeans.com/s/diiPj/

    Location: Information Science Institute (ISI) - CR #689

    WebCast Link: https://bluejeans.com/s/diiPj/

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Peter Zamar

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

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