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Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Events for August
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NL Seminar-UNDERSTANDING THE WORLD'S COMPOSITIONAL CONCEPTS
Fri, Aug 07, 2015 @ 03:00 PM - 04:00 PM
Information Sciences Institute
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Marius Pasca, Google
Talk Title: UNDERSTANDING THE WORLD'S COMPOSITIONAL CONCEPTS
Series: Natural Language Seminar
Abstract: Compositional topics ("Swiss passport", "German grammar") of interest to Web users may be available as entries within structured knowledge resources. But such topics are not necessarily connected to, let alone represented in relation to, entries of the constituent topics ("Switzerland" and "Passport", or "German language" and "Grammar") from which their approximate meaning could be aggregated. Web documents - more precisely, encyclopedic articles - and Web search queries are shown to be useful in complementary tasks relevant to understanding compositional topics. The tasks are the decomposition of potentially compositional topics into zero, one or more constituent topics; and the interpretation of the role ("issued by", "of") played by constituents ("Swiss", "German") within ambiguous compositional phrases that might refer to compositional topics.
Biography: Marius Pasca is a research scientist at Google in Mountain View, California. Current research interests include factual information extraction from unstructured text within documents and queries, and its applications to Web search.
Host: Nima Pourdamghani and Kevin Knight
More Info: http://nlg.isi.edu/nl-seminar/
Location: Information Science Institute (ISI) - 11th Flr Conf Rms1135 & 1137 Marina Del Rey
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Peter Zamar
Event Link: http://nlg.isi.edu/nl-seminar/
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AI Seminar-Going West: From Mansoura to LA via College Park
Tue, Aug 11, 2015 @ 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Information Sciences Institute
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Wael AbdAlmageed, USC/ISI
Talk Title: Going West: From Mansoura to LA via College Park
Series: Artificial Intelligence Seminar
Abstract: Over the last few years, three key research areas have captured my scientific interest: machine learning, bioinformatics and computer vision. In this talk, I will be giving an overview of all three. For machine learning, I will present work on using locality-preserving indexing techniques to accelerate various, widely used machine learning methods, in addition to more recent work on supervised feature selection using optimal design of experiments. Moving on to bioinformatics, I will share recent work on discovering subgroups of hepatocellular carcinoma patients by jointly analyzing miRNA and mRNA data using graph mining and graphical modeling techniques. In the area of computer vision, I will discuss recent research results on large-scale and partial signature matching, exploiting locality-sensitive hashing and graphical models. Last, but of equal importance, I will present an overview of ISI's GLAIVE project for large-scale face recognition in the wild.
Biography: Dr. Wael AbdAlmageed is a senior computer scientist with the University of Southern California's Viterbi School of Engineering Information Sciences Institute (USC/ISI). His research focus is machine learning (ML) and applying ML methods to computer vision, bioinformatics and other data analysis problems. His research interests also include implementing machine learning and computer vision algorithms on modern distributed and high-performance computing platforms, such as MapReduce and GPUs. Prior to joining ISI, from 2004 to 2013, Wael was a research scientist with the University of Maryland at College Park, where he led research and development efforts for various programs such as DARPA's MADCAT, VIVID, VIRAT and PerSEAS, IARPA's VACE, and ARL's RCTA. Wael obtained his Ph.D. with distinction from the University of New Mexico in 2003, where he also received the Outstanding Graduate Student award. He has two patents and over 50 publications in top machine learning, computer vision and high-performance computing conferences and journals. Wael currently leads ISI's face recognition research and development efforts under IARPA's JANUS program.
Host: Yigal Arens
Webcast: http://webcasterms1.isi.edu/mediasite/Viewer/?peid=f02ab403689f40a3b2996589bc729b441dLocation: Information Science Institute (ISI) - 11th Flr Conf Rm # 1135, Marina Del Rey
WebCast Link: http://webcasterms1.isi.edu/mediasite/Viewer/?peid=f02ab403689f40a3b2996589bc729b441d
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Peter Zamar
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Accelerated Dynamic MRI using Sparse, Low-Rank, and Manifold Models
Thu, Aug 13, 2015 @ 10:30 AM - 11:30 AM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Prof. Mathews Jacob, University of Iowa
Talk Title: Accelerated Dynamic MRI using Sparse, Low-Rank, and Manifold Models
Series: Medical Imaging Seminar Series
Abstract: The acquisition of dynamically evolving objects plays a central role in several MRI applications. The slow nature of MR image acquisition often makes it challenging to acquire the datasets with high spatio-temporal resolution and coverage. In this talk, efficient low-rank and blind compressed sensing algorithms to recover the datasets from highly under sampled measurements will be introduced. These methods learn the representation from the data itself, thus offering improved image representations; algorithms that rely on these adaptive representations will translate to better reconstructions. Image and patch manifold algorithms, which enables implicit motion resolved and motion compensated reconstructions will also be introduced for free breathing dynamic MRI applications
Biography: Mathews Jacob is an associate professor at the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and is heading the Computational Biomedical Imaging Group (CBIG) at the University of Iowa. His research interests include image reconstruction, image analysis and quantification in the context of magnetic resonance imaging.
He obtained his B.Tech in Electronics and Communication Engineering from National Institute of Technology, Calicut, Kerala and M.E in signal processing from the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore. He received his Ph.D degree from the Biomedical Imaging Group at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology.
He was a Beckman postdoctoral fellow at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign. He is the recipient of the CAREER award from the National Science Foundation and the Research Scholar Award from American Cancer Society. He is currently the associate editor of the IEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging.
Host: Professor Krishna Nayak
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 132
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Talyia White
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AI SEMINAR
Thu, Aug 13, 2015 @ 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Information Sciences Institute
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Paul Groth, Disruptive Tech Director, Elsevier Labs
Talk Title: Provenance for Data Munging Environments
Series: AI Seminar
Abstract: Data munging is a crucial task across domains ranging from drug discovery and policy studies to data science. Indeed, it has been reported that data munging accounts for 60% of the time spent in data analysis. Because data munging involves a wide variety of tasks using data from multiple sources, it often becomes difficult to understand how a cleaned dataset was actually produced (i.e. its provenance). In this talk, I discuss our recent work on tracking data provenance within desktop systems, which addresses problems of efficient and fine grained capture. I also describe our work on scalable provence tracking within a triple store/graph database that supports messy web data. Finally, I briefly touch on whether we will move from adhoc data munging approaches to more declarative knowledge representation languages such as Probabilistic Soft Logic.
Biography: Paul Groth (pgroth.com) is Disruptive Technology Director at Elsevier Labs. He holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Southampton (2007) and has done research at the University of Southern California (ISI!) and the VU University Amsterdam. His research focuses on dealing with large amounts of diverse contextualized knowledge with a particular focus on the web and science applications. This includes research in data provenance, data science, data integration and knowledge sharing. Paul was co-chair of the W3C Provenance Working Group that created a standard for provenance interchange. He is co-author of Provenance: an Introduction to PROV and The Semantic Web Primer: 3rd Edition as well as numerous academic articles. He blogs at http://thinklinks.wordpress.com. You can find him on twitter: @pgroth .
Host: Ashish Vaswani
Webcast: http://webcasterms1.isi.edu/mediasite/Viewer/?peid=b46b31a4e04f4f83a6da32bf8dd040271dLocation: Information Science Institute (ISI) - 6th fl Large CR (689)
WebCast Link: http://webcasterms1.isi.edu/mediasite/Viewer/?peid=b46b31a4e04f4f83a6da32bf8dd040271d
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Alma Nava / Information Sciences Institute
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NL Seminar-Beyond Parallel Data - A Decipherment Approach for Better Quality Machine Translation
Fri, Aug 14, 2015 @ 03:00 PM - 04:00 PM
Information Sciences Institute
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Qing Dou, USC/ISI
Talk Title: A Decipherment Approach for Better Quality Machine Translation
Series: Natural Language Seminar
Abstract: Thanks to the availability of parallel data and advances in machine learning techniques, we have seen tremendous improvement in the field of machine translation over the past 20 years. However, due to lack of parallel data, the quality of machine translation is still far from satisfying for many language pairs and domains. In general, it is easier to obtain non-parallel data, and much work has tried to learn translations from non-parallel data. Nonetheless, improvements to machine translation have been limited. In this work, I follow a decipherment approach to learn translations from non parallel data and achieve significant gains in machine translation.
I apply slice sampling to Bayesian decipherment. Compared with the state- of-the-art algorithm, the new approach is highly scalable and accurate, making it possible to decipher billions of tokens with hundreds of thousands of word types at high accuracy for the first time. When it comes to deciphering foreign languages, I introduce dependency relations to address the problems of word reordering, insertion, and deletion. Experiments show that dependency relations help improve Spanish/English deciphering accuracy by over 5-fold. Moreover, this accuracy is further doubled when word embeddings are used to incorporate more contextual information.
Moreover, I decipher large amounts of monolingual data to improve the state- of-the-art machine translation systems in the scenario of domain adaptation and low density languages. Through experiments, I show that decipherment find high quality translations for out-of-vocabulary words in the task of domain adaptation, and help improve word alignment when the amount of parallel data is limited. I observe up to 3.8 point and 1.9 point BlEU gain in Spanish/French and Malagasy/English machine translation experiments respectively.
Biography: Qing is a PhD candidate at USC. His research interests focus on application of machine learning techniques to help computer better understand human languages. He is working with Kevin Knight on various problems related to Machine Translation and Decipherment. Prior to that, he has worked on computational phonology, including stress prediction and transliteration. He is interested in continuing his research in industrial settings to solve exciting large scale problems.
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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Seeing Sleep: Real-Time MRI Methods for the Evaluation of Sleep Apnea
Mon, Aug 17, 2015 @ 10:00 AM - 11:00 AM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Ziyue Brian Wu, Electrical Engineering Department, University of Southern California
Talk Title: Seeing Sleep: Real-Time MRI Methods for the Evaluation of Sleep Apnea
Abstract: Sleep apnea is a largely neglected disease, which can lead to serous consequences. Current gold standard of diagnosing sleep apnea is an overnight polysomnography, from which an apnea-hypopnea index (AHI) is derived to indicate the severity of apnea. However, lack of direct anatomical information often limits the value of such sleep studies. MRI is a great imaging tool to provide such information but also has its own challenges, namely acquisition speed, acoustic noise and cost. This talk will cover some recent developments to address these issues. Both technical improvements and clinical findings will be discussed.
Biography: Ziyue "Brian" Wu joined the Magnetic Resonance Engineering Lab at USC as a PhD student in 2011. Brian has been working on imaging sleep apnea using MRI since then under Dr. Krishna Nayak. His research focus is fast real-time MRI including novel pulse sequence design and image reconstruction. Brian is also the recipient of 2015 Grodins Graduate Award, Wallace H. Coulter Award (USC) and ISMRM summa cum laude Award.
Host: Prof. Krishna Nayak
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 248
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Talyia Veal
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Seminars in Biomedical Engineering
Mon, Aug 24, 2015 @ 12:30 PM - 01:50 PM
Alfred E. Mann Department of Biomedical Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: J. Andrew Mackay, PhD., Assistant Professor, Pharmacology and Pharmaceutical Sciences & BME
Talk Title: BME Faculty Research Areas
Biography: https://pharmacyschool.usc.edu/faculty/profile/?id=249
Host: Stanley Yamashiro, PhD
Location: Olin Hall of Engineering (OHE) - 122
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Mischalgrace Diasanta
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Seminars in Biomedical EngineeringMon, Aug 24, 2015 @ 12:30 PM - 01:15 PM
Alfred E. Mann Department of Biomedical Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: J. Andrew Mackay, PhD., Assistant Professor, Pharmacology and Pharmaceutical Sciences & BME
Talk Title: BME Faculty Research Areas
Series: Seminars in Engineering, Neuroscience & Health (ENH)
Biography: https://pharmacyschool.usc.edu/faculty/profile/?id=249
Host: Stanley Yamashiro, PhD
Location: Olin Hall of Engineering (OHE) - 122
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Mischalgrace Diasanta
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CS Colloquium: Jonathan May (ISI) - The Machine Learning of Machine Translation
Mon, Aug 24, 2015 @ 02:00 PM - 03:00 PM
Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Jonathan May, ISI
Talk Title: The Machine Learning of Machine Translation
Series: CS Colloquium
Abstract: Automatic language translation was one of the earliest applications proposed for computers but, despite over 60 years of research, quality has only risen to the level of everyday usefulness within the last decade. The recent successes of machine translation have been fueled by the availability of large amounts of data, the ever-increasing performance of computing hardware, and developments in learning methodologies and evaluation metrics. In this lecture I will give an overview of modern statistical machine translation systems with particular focus on algorithms and metrics, including my own work on the development of a ranking-based approach to parameter optimization.
Host: CS Department
Location: Henry Salvatori Computer Science Center (SAL) - 213
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Assistant to CS chair
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NL Seminar- Using HyTER networks for short-answer scoring
Tue, Aug 25, 2015 @ 03:00 PM - 04:00 PM
Information Sciences Institute
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Wenduan Xu, (Cambridge / ISI Intern)
Talk Title: Using HyTER networks for short-answer scoring
Series: Natural Language Seminar
Abstract: This talk summarizes my work so far on investigating the usefulness of HyTER networks for short-answer scoring. I will first introduce the task and the approach we take in this project. And finally I will show some initial results we have.
Biography: Wenduan Xu is a graduate student in Cambridge advised by Stephen Clark, working on CCG parsing.
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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Communications, Networks & Systems (CommNetS) Seminar
Wed, Aug 26, 2015 @ 02:00 PM - 03:00 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Dr. Aditya Mahajan, McGill University
Talk Title: Mean Field Teams
Series: CommNetS
Abstract: In many decentralized control systems, in particular, those arising in smart grids and communication networks, the dynamics of an agent are influenced by the state of the others only through the mean-field of the population.
We investigate team optimal control of such systems. By exploiting the exchageability of the agents, we identify an information state and use it to obtain a dynamic programming decomposition of the system. Our solution provides team optimal solution for systems with arbitrary number of agents. The complexity of the solution increases exponentially with the number of agents that allows us solve systems with moderate (100s to 1000s) number of agents.
Joint work with Jalal Arabneydi
Biography: Aditya Mahajan is Assistant Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at McGill University, Montreal, QC, Canada. He is a member of the McGill Center of Intelligent Machines (CIM) and Groupe d'tudes et de recherche en analyse des dcisions (GERAD). From 2008 to 2010, he was a Postdoctoral Researcher in the Department of Electrical Engineering, Yale University, New Haven, CT, USA. His principal research interests include decentralized stochastic control, team theory, multi-armed bandits, real-time communication, information theory, and discrete event systems.
Host: Dr. Ashutosh Nayyar
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 248
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Annie Yu
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CS Colloquium: Ning Wang (ICT) - Modeling Socially Intelligent Behavior for Virtual Humans and Robots
Thu, Aug 27, 2015 @ 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Ning Wang, ICT
Talk Title: Modeling Socially Intelligent Behavior for Virtual Humans and Robots
Series: CS Colloquium
Abstract: Reeves and Nass' Media Equation states that people tend to treat computers and other media as if they are real humans. When a computer asks a user about itself, the user will give a more positive response than when a different computer asks the same question. The Media Equation has had profound implications on the design of human-computer interactions, particularly on embodied virtual agents, who in most cases are created to fulfill functions that human social actors try to fulfill, e.g. tutor, therapist, soldier, etc. My research explores how the Media Equation applies to the design of virtual humans and human-robot interactions. In my talk, I will discuss how to model conversational tactics and nonverbal behaviors for virtual agents and robots who fulfill the role of tutors, conversational partners and teammates, and how these socially intelligent behaviors facilitate learning, develop rapport and build trust in human-agent and human-robot interactions.
Host: CS Department
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 248
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Assistant to CS chair
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CS Colloquium: Lucas Joppa (Microsoft Research) - What we Know and Dont Know About Earths Biodiversity
Thu, Aug 27, 2015 @ 02:00 PM - 03:00 PM
Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Lucas Joppa, Microsoft Research
Talk Title: What we Know and Dont Know About Earths Biodiversity
Series: CS Colloquium
Abstract: What we know about Earths biodiversity has filled plenty of books, but what we dont know could fill libraries. Closing the gap between what we know and dont know will dictate how successful we are at conserving the ecological systems we all depend upon. I will discuss how statistics, computation, crowd sourcing, and emerging technologies will help us understand questions ranging from how many species there are on earth to how fast they are going extinct, all from a practical conservation point of view.
Biography: Lucas Joppa is a scientist at Microsoft Research, where he leads the a conservation science research programme and facilitates Microsofts partnership with the IUCN Red List. He works across the science, policy, and tools and technology space with a focus on conserving ecological systems. Lucas is an ecologist by background, with a PhD from Duke University, and has broad research interests in predictive environmental modeling, model driven data collection, and using technology to monitor environmental processes. He is a fellow at the University of Kents Durrell Institute of Conservation and Ecology, an Honorary Conservation Fellow at the Zoological Society of London, the Advisor on Science and Innovation to UNEP WCMC and serves in various other advisory roles to international environmental organisations.
Host: Teamcore Group
Location: Ronald Tutor Hall of Engineering (RTH) - 526
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Assistant to CS chair
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NL Seminar-Distant supervision for relation extraction using AMR
Fri, Aug 28, 2015 @ 03:00 PM - 04:00 PM
Information Sciences Institute
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Sudha Rao, Univ of Maryland / USC ISI Intern
Talk Title: Distant supervision for relation extraction using AMR
Series: Natural Language Seminar
Abstract: In this talk I will present the work I did with Prof Daniel Marcu and Prof Kevin Knight at ISI over the summer. In this work, we show how we can improve relation extraction for biomedical text using distant supervision from existing knowledge sources like BioPax. We label the data using heuristics from AMR which obviates the need for expensive manual annotation and allows us to make use of large amounts of data for training. I will also talk about some ongoing work on training a simpler model that exploits linguistic information stored in the path via the least common ancestor in an AMR.
Biography: I am a PhD student from University of Maryland, College Park working under Prof. Hal Daume III and Prof. Philip Resnik. My recent project on "Dialogue focus tracking for zero pronoun resolution" appeared at NAACL 2015. At ISI, I am working with Prof. Daniel Marcu and Prof. Kevin Knight on application of Abstract Meaning Representation (AMR) to biology literature. Specifically we will be developing techniques for constructing text level AMRs from sentence level AMRs and then assess its impact on reading-against-a-model molecular biology tasks. In my spare time, I enjoy singing, dancing and watching movies.
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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Seminars in Biomedical Engineering
Mon, Aug 31, 2015 @ 12:30 PM - 01:50 PM
Alfred E. Mann Department of Biomedical Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Ellis Meng, PhD, Professor & Chair of Biomedical Engineering
Talk Title: BME Faculty Research Areas
Biography: http://bme.usc.edu/directory/faculty/core-faculty/ellis-meng/
Host: Stanley Yamashiro, PhD
Location: Olin Hall of Engineering (OHE) - 122
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Mischalgrace Diasanta
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Seminars in Biomedical Engineering
Mon, Aug 31, 2015 @ 12:30 PM - 01:15 PM
Alfred E. Mann Department of Biomedical Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: J. Andrew Mackay, PhD., Assistant Professor, Pharmacology and Pharmaceutical Sciences & BME
Talk Title: BME Faculty Research Areas
Series: Seminars in Engineering, Neuroscience & Health (ENH)
Biography: https://pharmacyschool.usc.edu/faculty/profile/?id=249
Host: Stanley Yamashiro, PhD
Location: Olin Hall of Engineering (OHE) - 122
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Mischalgrace Diasanta
