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Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Events for June
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CS Colloquium: William Regli (DARPA) - Defense Sciences Office 101
Tue, Jun 09, 2015 @ 10:30 AM - 11:30 AM
Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: William Regli , DARPA
Talk Title: Defense Sciences Office 101
Series: CS Colloquium
Abstract: The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) was established in 1958 to prevent strategic surprise from negatively impacting U.S. national security and create strategic surprise for U.S. adversaries by maintaining the technological superiority of the U.S. military. To fulfill its mission, the Agency relies on diverse performers to apply multi-disciplinary approaches to both advance knowledge through basic research and create innovative technologies that address current practical problems through applied research. As the DoD's primary innovation engine, DARPA undertakes projects that are finite in duration but that create lasting revolutionary change.
The Defense Sciences Office (DSO) is one of six technical offices at the agency. DSO identifies and pursues high-risk, high-payoff fundamental research initiatives across a broad spectrum of science and engineering disciplines including materials science, computing and autonomy, engineering design and manufacturing, physics, chemistry and pure and applied mathematics.
This presentation will give an overview of DARPA, working with DARPA and the Defense Sciences Office, and description of some of the current activities DSO's program managers are working on.
Biography: Dr. William Regli joined DARPA as the Deputy Director of the Defense Sciences Office in September 2014. Dr. Regli is a computer scientist with a passion for addressing interdisciplinary and use-inspired problems using knowledge representation, physics-based modeling and other computational techniques. Dr. Regli has published more than 250 technical articles, including those in leading venues for research in computer graphics, artificial intelligence, robotics, wireless networking, tissue engineering, and engineering design and manufacturing. His research has spawned two start-up technology companies (one focused on mobile communications for public safety, the other on information management in edge networks) and resulted in five U.S. Patents. Dr. Regli's most recent activities have focused on deploying cyber-infrastructure systems to capture and curate engineering and science data, and ensure the long-term sustainability of data. His current interests include computational tools to exploit the properties of advanced materials, additive manufacturing systems and enabling new paradigms for design and production.
Dr. Regli holds a Doctor of Philosophy degree in Computer Science from the University of Maryland at College Park and Bachelor of Science degree in Mathematics from Saint Joseph's University. He has been on the faculty of Drexel University since 1997, most recently as Professor of Computer and Information Science and Senior Associate Dean for Research and Scholarly Activities for the Drexel College of Computing and Informatics. Dr. Regli's federal service includes a National Research Council Postdoctoral Fellowship at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and an ongoing role as Scientific Adviser to the Defense Programs Office of the U.S. Department of Energy's (DoE) National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) in the areas of information technology and advanced manufacturing.
He is an elected senior member of the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM), the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) and the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI).
Host: Teamcore Research Group
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 248
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Assistant to CS chair
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Fluid-Structure Interactions: From Flow-Induced Vibrations to Bio-Inspired Propulsion
Tue, Jun 09, 2015 @ 02:00 PM - 03:00 PM
Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Francisco Huera-Huarte, Visiting Associate in Aerospace at Caltech; Department of Mechanical Engineering Universitat Rovira i Virgili (URV), Tarragona, Spain
Talk Title: Fluid-Structure Interactions: From Flow-Induced Vibrations to Bio-Inspired Propulsion
Abstract: Francisco Huera-Huarte will be showing some examples of very recent work carried out in his lab, related to glow-induced vibration and bio-inspired propulsion.
Since the 70's there has been an increased interest in the dynamics of offshore structures because of the recent highly demanding industrial applications such as those found in offshore wind energy or in oil exploration and extraction. Part of Huera-Huarte's work deals with the description of the structural and fluid dynamics of highly flexible structures when affected by currents. These flexible structures vibrate at different structural modes as a consequence of very complex fluid-structure interaction phenomena. He will be showing recent experimental work carried out in order to describe the near wake of one of these structures when affected by a current.
The other topic Huera-Huarte will consider is related to bio-inspired propulsion systems. Aquatic locomotion in fish is characterized by complex kinematics, governed not only by passive bony or cartilaginous structures, but also by active ones and tissue such as muscles. There has been a wide interest in the recent years regarding the understanding of the role of stiffness in flapping propulsion because of the implications of this topic, especially in all related to the design of underwater robotic systems. It is now evident that compliance and shape play an important role in propulsion. He will show some results obtained with flexible robotic fins (foils), and discuss the role of flexibility, the effect of the proximity of a wall in the swimming performance of a flexible foil, and ongoing work related to active control of fins to improve their overall thrust.
Host:
Location: Robert Glen Rapp Engineering Research Building (RRB) - Laufer Library
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Valerie Childress
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NL Seminar- Group Anomaly Detection in Social Media Analysis
Fri, Jun 12, 2015 @ 03:00 PM - 04:00 PM
Information Sciences Institute
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Yan Liu , USC Melady
Talk Title: Group Anomaly Detection in Social Media Analysis
Series: Natural Language Seminar
Abstract: Traditional anomaly detection on social media mostly focuses on individual point anomalies while anomalous phenomena usually occur in groups. Therefore it is valuable to study the collective behavior of individuals and detect group anomalies. Existing group anomaly detection approaches rely on the assumption that the groups are known, which can hardly be true in real world social media applications. In this paper, we take a generative approach by proposing a hierarchical Bayes model: Group Latent Anomaly Detection (GLAD) model. GLAD takes both pair-wise and point-wise data as input, automatically infers the groups and detects group anomalies simultaneously. To account for the dynamic properties of the social media data, we further generalize GLAD to its dynamic extension d-GLAD. We conduct extensive experiments to evaluate our models on both synthetic and real world datasets. The empirical results demonstrate that our approach is effective and robust in discovering latent groups and detecting group anomalies.
Biography: Yan Liu is an assistant professor in Computer Science Department at University of Southern California from 2010. Before that, she was a Research Staff Member at IBM Research. She received her M.Sc and Ph.D. degree from Carnegie Mellon University in 2004 and 2007. Her research interest includes developing scalable machine learning and data mining algorithms with applications to social media analysis, computational biology, climate modeling and healthcare analytics. She has received several awards, including NSF CAREER Award, Okawa Foundation Research Award, ACM Dissertation Award Honorable Mention, Best Paper Award in SIAM Data Mining Conference, Yahoo! Faculty Award and the winner of several data mining competitions, such as KDD Cup and INFORMS data mining competition.
Host: Nima Pourdamghani and Kevin Knight
More Info: http://nlg.isi.edu/nl-seminar/
Location: Information Science Institute (ISI) - 6th Flr Conf Rm # 689, Marina Del Rey
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Peter Zamar
Event Link: http://nlg.isi.edu/nl-seminar/
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Mork Family Department Graduate Seminar
Thu, Jun 18, 2015 @ 01:00 PM - 02:00 PM
Mork Family Department of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Prof. Alexander V. Neimark, Rutgers University
Talk Title: Studies of Nanoparticle Adhesion to Soft Interfaces and Membranes by using Dissipative Particle Dynamics
Host: Prof. Tsotsis
More Information: NeimarkAb.pdf
Location: Hedco Pertroleum and Chemical Engineering Building (HED) - 116
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Jason Ordonez
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AI SEMINAR
Fri, Jun 19, 2015 @ 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Information Sciences Institute
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Maryam Shanechi, Assistant Professor and Viterbi Early Career Chair
Talk Title: Closed Loop Brain Machine Interface Architecures
Abstract: A brain-machine-interface (BMI) is a system that interacts with the brain either to allow the brain to control an external device or to control the brain's state. While these two BMI types are for different applications, they can both be viewed as closed-loop control systems. In this talk I present our work on developing both these types of BMIs, specifically motor BMIs for restoring movement in paralyzed patients, a BMI for control of the brain state under anesthesia, and finally a new BMI for control of the brains neuropsychiatric state. Motor BMIs have largely used standard signal processing techniques. However, devising novel algorithmic solutions that are tailored to the neural system can significantly improve the performance of these BMIs. Here, I develop a novel BMI paradigm for restoration of motor function that incorporates an optimal feedback-control model of the brain and directly processes the spiking activity using point process modeling. I show that this paradigm significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art in closed-loop primate experiments. In addition to motor BMIs, I construct a new BMI that controls the state of the brain under anesthesia. This is done by designing stochastic controllers that infer the brain's anesthetic state from non-invasive observations of neural activity and control the real-time rate of drug administration to achieve a target brain state. I show the reliable performance of this BMI in rodent experiments. Finally, I show some of our recent results on the development of a BMI for closed-loop electrical stimulation to treat neuropsychiatric disorders in human patients.
Biography: Maryam Shanechi is an assistant professor and the Viterbi Early Career Chair in the Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical Engineering at the University of Southern California (USC). Prior to joining USC, she was an assistant professor in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Cornell University. She received the B.A.Sc. degree in Engineering Science from the University of Toronto in 2004 and the S.M. and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from MIT in 2006 and 2011, respectively. She is the recipient of the NSF CAREER Award and has been named by the MIT Technology Review as one of the worlds top 35 innovators under the age of 35 (TR35) for her work on brain-machine interfaces.
Host: Ashish Vaswani
Webcast: http://webcasterms1.isi.edu/mediasite/SilverlightPlayer/Default.aspx?peid=1bcb9ec6f2d24ea58d7a2237816965c01dLocation: Information Science Institute (ISI) - 1135
WebCast Link: http://webcasterms1.isi.edu/mediasite/SilverlightPlayer/Default.aspx?peid=1bcb9ec6f2d24ea58d7a2237816965c01d
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Alma Nava / Information Sciences Institute
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NL Seminar- Automated Tools For Analyzing Sociophonetic Variation
Tue, Jun 23, 2015 @ 03:00 PM - 04:00 PM
Information Sciences Institute
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Sravana Reddy, Dartmouth College
Talk Title: Automated Tools For Analyzing Sociophonetic Variation
Series: Natural Language Seminar
Abstract: The phenomenal amount of text on social media has recently spawned endeavors on computational methods to study language variation and change. However, we also have access to an unprecedented quantity of speech -- from Youtube video blogs to podcasts to recordings of radio and television shows, spanning several different accents and dialects. This data is a boon to sociophoneticians, who have traditionally relied on small-scale interviews to study systematic variation in speech. At the same time, it presents a challenge: the usual manual speech analysis methods do not scale. I will present ongoing work on an application that allows sociophoneticians to identify dialect features from potentially noisy speech data without the need for manual transcription.
Biography: http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~sravana/
Host: Nima Pourdamghani and Kevin Knight
More Info: http://nlg.isi.edu/nl-seminar/
Location: Information Science Institute (ISI) - 6th Flr Conf Rm # 689, Marina Del Rey
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Peter Zamar
Event Link: http://nlg.isi.edu/nl-seminar/
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NL Seminar-Metonymy resolution with multi-faceted knowledge from Wikipedia
Fri, Jun 26, 2015 @ 03:00 PM - 04:00 PM
Information Sciences Institute
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Vivi Nastase, USC/ISI
Talk Title: Metonymy resolution with multi-faceted knowledge from Wikipedia
Series: Natural Language Seminar
Abstract: Metonymic words stand-in for concepts closely related to the words' literal interpretation. Resolving metonymies would then require identifying potentially metonymic words, finding closely related concepts, and determining which one fits the local (grammatically-related) and global context best. Each of these tasks can be resolved best by using different types of resources: a network of concepts for finding related concepts; a grammatically analyzed corpus (and, ideally, an ontology) for computing selectional preferences for the local context; a large corpus for computing co-occurrence probabilities, to factor in the global context. Within NLP we do have all these types of resources, but because of their different requirements -- e.g. relational models of meaning rely on differentiating word senses, while distributional representations do not (cannot) make such distinctions -- they are separate from one another. By using Wikipedia and exploiting its various structured/semi-structured sources of information, we can build a resource that combines the three types of meaning representations mentioned above. I will discuss the task of metonymy resolution and show how the combination of representations extracted from Wikipedia makes possible an unsupervised approach to this task.
Biography: Vivi Nastase is a researcher at the Fondazione Bruno Kessler in Trento, working mainly on lexical semantics, semantic relations, knowledge acquisition and language evolution. She holds a Ph.D. from the University of Ottawa, Canada, and has previously worked at the Heidelberg Institute of Theoretical Studies (HITS) and the University of Heidelberg.
Host: Nima Pourdamghani and Kevin Knight
More Info: http://nlg.isi.edu/nl-seminar/
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Peter Zamar
Event Link: http://nlg.isi.edu/nl-seminar/
