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Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Events for August

  • Guest Speaker Series: "Learning from the Pandemic to Improve Healthcare"

    Thu, Aug 05, 2021 @ 10:00 AM - 12:00 PM

    Daniel J. Epstein Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Nilem Patel, MD, Adventist Health; Jennifer Boozer, MD, Keck School of Medicine; Rashmi Mullur, MD, Chief of Telehealth, VA Greater Los Angeles; Anna Xiao, MD; Talene Keshishian, MD; Tyler Wright, MD, USC Keck School of Medicine, Dept of Psychiatry, Moderated by Rusha Modi, MD, MPH.

    Talk Title: The Crucial Role of Telemedicine.

    Abstract: Considering the impact and effectiveness of telemedicine during and after the pandemic for ambulatory, emergency, and mental health care.

    Host: The Daniel J. Epstein Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering, The Gehr Family Center at the Keck School of Medicine, and the Price School of Public Policy.

    More Info: Follow link to register for event: https://usc.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_F5NCbL-MQiKgP63JghiVsg

    More Information: Learning from the Pandemic to Improve Healthcare.pdf

    Location: Online/Zoom

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Grace Owh

    Event Link: Follow link to register for event: https://usc.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_F5NCbL-MQiKgP63JghiVsg

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  • Guest Speaker Series: "Learning from the Pandemic to Improve Healthcare"

    Thu, Aug 12, 2021 @ 10:00 AM - 12:00 PM

    Daniel J. Epstein Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Andy Lee, MD, LA County Department of Health Services; Mark Graban, MBA, MS, author and consultant; Steve Roey, MD, Sutter Health; Dennis Deas, Vice President, Sutter Health, Moderated by Sonali Saluja, MD, MPH.

    Talk Title: The Role of Performance Improvement.

    Abstract: Health system faced tremendous challenges with improving quality and safety during the pandemic. The lessons learned and revised methods will serve as a resource for future healthcare operations.

    Host: The Daniel J. Epstein Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering, The Gehr Family Center at the Keck School of Medicine, and the Price School of Public Policy.

    More Info: Follow link to register for event: https://usc.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_F5NCbL-MQiKgP63JghiVsg

    More Information: Learning from the Pandemic to Improve Healthcare.pdf

    Location: Online/Zoom

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Grace Owh

    Event Link: Follow link to register for event: https://usc.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_F5NCbL-MQiKgP63JghiVsg

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  • NL Seminar-Fair Comparisons and Fundamental Ideas for Open Vocabulary Generative Language and Translation Models

    Thu, Aug 12, 2021 @ 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM

    Information Sciences Institute

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Sabrina Mielke, Johns Hopkins Univ

    Talk Title: Fair Comparisons and Fundamental Ideas for Open-Vocabulary Generative Language and Translation Models

    Series: NL Seminar

    Abstract: REMINDER Meeting hosts only admit guests that they know to the Zoom meeting. Hence, you're highly encouraged to use your USC account to sign into Zoom. If you're an outside visitor, please inform nlg DASH seminar DASH admin2 AT isi.edu beforehand so we'll be aware of your attendance and let you in.
    ABSTRACT:
    How can we fairly compare the performance of generative language and translation models on multiple languages? We will see how to use probabilistic and information theory based measures, first to evaluate monolingual open vocabulary language models by total bits and then, considering the case of Translationese, pondering the meaning of information and how to use it to compare machine translation models. In both cases, we get a little glimpse at what linguistic and non-linguistic factors might make languages easier or harder for models. The last part of the talk will if time permits propose some somewhat opinionated guidelines for open-vocabulary language modeling, and show work in progress in taxonomizing tokenization methods and the literature around open vocabulary modeling.


    Biography: Sabrina is a PhD student at the Johns Hopkins University and a part-time research intern at HuggingFace, currently researching open vocabulary language modeling for unit discovery in a variety of typologically varying languages. While her pre PhD work focused on formal language theory applied to parsing and translation, during her PhD she published on morphology, fair language model comparison, stochastic romanization at Google AI, and metacognition and calibration for chatbots at Facebook AI Research, co organized workshops and shared tasks around morphology and typology, and is currently involved in the BigScience summer of large language models workshop.

    Host: Jon May and Mozhdeh Gheini

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

    Webcast: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zIP8XMCtHuM

    Location: Information Science Institute (ISI) - Virtual Only

    WebCast Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zIP8XMCtHuM

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Pete Zamar

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

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  • Guest Speaker Series: "Learning from the Pandemic to Improve Healthcare"

    Thu, Aug 19, 2021 @ 10:00 AM - 12:00 PM

    Daniel J. Epstein Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Motz Feinberg, VP Supply Chain, Cedars-Sinai Medical Center; Christopher Gopal, PhD, Strategic Solutions Advisor, OCX Cognition; Jeff Smith, MD, JD, MMM, EVP, Hospital Operations & COO, Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, CEO, Cedars-Sinai Marina del Rey, Moderated by David Belson, PhD.

    Talk Title: Supply Chains and How the Pandemic Improved Healthcare.

    Abstract: Supply chains and distribution systems were overwhelmed during the pandemic. New and better engineered systems developed for all type of healthcare providers will hopefully replace traditional practices.

    Host: The Daniel J. Epstein Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering, The Gehr Family Center at the Keck School of Medicine, and the Price School of Public Policy.

    More Info: Follow link to register for event: https://usc.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_F5NCbL-MQiKgP63JghiVsg

    More Information: Learning from the Pandemic to Improve Healthcare.pdf

    Location: Online/Zoom

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Grace Owh

    Event Link: Follow link to register for event: https://usc.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_F5NCbL-MQiKgP63JghiVsg

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  • NL Seminar-1.Leveraging Abstract Meaning Representations to Amplify the Semantic Information Captured in Transformer Models 2. Improving Multilingual Encoder With Contrastive Objective and Luna

    Thu, Aug 19, 2021 @ 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM

    Information Sciences Institute

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: 1.Shira Wein 2. Leo Zeyu Liu, ISI Interns

    Talk Title: 1.Leveraging Abstract Meaning Representations to Amplify the Semantic Information Captured in Transformer Models 2. Improving Multilingual Encoder With Contrastive Objective and Luna

    Series: NL Seminar

    Abstract: REMINDER Meeting hosts only admit guests that they know to the Zoom meeting. Hence, you're highly encouraged to use your USC account to sign into Zoom. If you're an outside visitor, please inform nlg DASH seminar DASH admin2 AT isi.edu beforehand so we'll be aware of your attendance and let you in.

    SHIRA WEIN
    Though state of the art language models perform well on a variety of natural language processing tasks, these models are not exposed to explicit semantic information. We propose that language models ability to capture semantic information can be improved through the inclusion of explicit semantic information in the form of meaning representations, thus improving performance on select downstream tasks. We discuss potential ways to incorporate meaning representations and present our preliminary results.

    LEO ZEYU LIU
    Transformers has been successfully adapted to multilingual pretraining. With only token level losses like masked language model, transformer encoder could produce good token and sentence representations. We propose to explicitly impose sentence level objectives using contrastive learning to further improve multilingual encoder. Furthermore, we also propose to merge this modification with what a new transformer architecture, Luna, could offer disentanglement between token and sentence representations. We will also discuss ways to evaluate the models and present our experimental progress.


    Biography: Shira Wein is an intern at ISI and a third year Ph.D. student at Georgetown University, working on semantic representations and multilingual cross lingual applications. Her previous work centers around L2 corpora, Abstract Meaning Representations, and information extraction from design documents, which she published on while interning at the Jet Propulsion Lab. Prior to starting her Ph.D., Shira was an undergraduate at Lafayette College, where she received a B.S. in Computer Science and B.A. in Spanish.


    Leo Zeyu Liu is a Master student in Computer Science at the University of Washington, advised by Noah A. Smith and Shane Steinert Threlkeld. His research aims at interpretability, pretraining, and intersection between NLP and Linguistics. He completed his bachelor in Computer Science at the University of Washington.

    Host: Jon May and Mozhdeh Gheini

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

    Webcast: https://usc.zoom.us/j/93331739032

    Location: Information Science Institute (ISI) - Virtual

    WebCast Link: https://usc.zoom.us/j/93331739032

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Pete Zamar

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

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  • Repeating EventISE 651 - Epstein Seminar

    Tue, Aug 24, 2021 @ 03:30 PM - 04:50 PM

    Daniel J. Epstein Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: TBD,

    Talk Title: TBD

    Location: Kaprielian Hall (KAP) - 148

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    View All Dates

    Contact: Grace Owh

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  • AME Seminar

    Wed, Aug 25, 2021 @ 03:30 PM - 04:30 PM

    Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Amartya Banerjee, UCLA

    Talk Title: Symmetry, Deformations and the Search for Unprecedented Materials from First Principles

    Abstract: The mathematical framework of Objective Structures generalizes ideas associated with crystals to atomic/molecular configurations with non-periodic symmetries. Some of the most widely studied structures in materials science, biology and nano-technology can be described as objective structures. The list of objective structures includes nano-tubes, nano-ribbons, buckyballs, tail sheaths and capsids of viruses, many common proteins, graphene and phosphorene sheets as well as molecular bilayers. The presence of high degrees of symmetry in objective structures makes them likely to be associated with remarkable material properties (particularly, collective material properties such as ferromagnetism, ferroelectricity and superconductivity) and their departure from the bulk phase makes them likely to demonstrate such properties in manners that are otherwise unavailable in crystalline systems.

    A systematic study of objective structures is likely to lead to the discovery of unprecedented materials. At the same time, formulation and implementation of theoretical and computational methods specifically designed for studying objective structures, is likely to lead to the development of new simulation methodologies in nano-mechanics and materials science.

    Following these lines of thought, we have been developing Objective Density Functional Theory (Objective DFT) -“ a suite of rigorously formulated quantum mechanical theories and numerical algorithms for carrying out ab initio simulation studies of objective structures. Objective DFT is intended to be a natural extension of the traditional Periodic Density Functional Theory method for studying crystalline systems, just as objective structures are a natural generalization of periodic structures. In this talk, I will describe some of the principal mathematical ideas and algorithmic techniques behind Objective DFT, as well as some of the key features and capabilities of this novel computational tool. Additionally, I will highlight how Objective DFT allows the non-periodic symmetries associated with objective structures to be exploited, to investigate non-uniform deformation modes in various nano-materials, from first principles.

    Finally, I will discuss some of the many applications that have sprouted from the development of Objective DFT. These include (but are not limited to) the use of the computational packages developed in this work to study the mechanical stability and optical properties of nano-clusters, nano-ribbons and nano-tubes (with potential applications to energy materials and nano-structured meta-materials), ab initio studies of the mechanical and electronic properties of nano-beams, nano-tubes and various 2D materials, as well as the investigation of functional nano-materials with strongly correlated electronic states (with potential applications to the development of novel sensors and quantum hardware materials).

    Biography: Amartya Banerjee leads the Ab Initio Simulations Laboratory at UCLA, and is an Assistant Professor of Materials Science & Engineering. His research interests include first principles calculations, simulations of energy, quantum and biological materials, mechanics of materials and structures, applications of symmetry principles, multi-scale methods, numerical analysis and scientific computation. Dr. Banerjee obtained his Ph.D. in Aerospace Engineering & Mechanics from the University of Minnesota in 2013. He also holds M.S. degrees in Mathematics, and Aerospace Engineering & Mechanics from the University of Minnesota. He received his undergraduate degree in Aerospace Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, India in 2007. Prior to joining UCLA in 2019, he held postdoctoral appointments at the Computational Research Division of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and at the University of Minnesota.

    Dr. Banerjee has held visitor positions at the Hausdorff Research Institute for Mathematics, University of Bonn, Germany and the Institute of Mathematics and its Applications, Minneapolis, USA. He has received several awards and travel grants (including the John A. & Jane Dunning Copper Fellowship from the University of Minnesota and the US Junior Oberwolfach Fellowship), and has delivered invited presentations at numerous prestigious research laboratories and universities.

    Host: AME Department

    More Info: https://usc.zoom.us/j/97427241653?pwd=UGd2aXY2b3dsQkxMdzdvcnNBMjRJZz09

    Location: Seaver Science Library (SSL) - 202

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Tessa Yao

    Event Link: https://usc.zoom.us/j/97427241653?pwd=UGd2aXY2b3dsQkxMdzdvcnNBMjRJZz09

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  • Astani Civil and Environmental Engineering Seminar

    Thu, Aug 26, 2021 @ 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM

    Sonny Astani Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Dr. Birendra Jha, Viterbi School, Department of Petroleum Engineering

    Talk Title: Characterization of Transport in Stress-sensitive Aquifers

    Abstract: Push-pull tracer tests are often used in groundwater engineering to characterize properties and processes in aquifers, e.g., using the tracer residence time information to quantify the number and geometry of fractures present in the aquifer, which is important for estimating hydraulic conductivity of the aquifer. Tracer transport through aquifers is typically modeled assuming the medium is rigid. However, many applications exist where the medium is mechanically deforming or evolving at some scale, e.g., due to the presence of fractures, soft rock, or chemical reactions. Characterization of transport in those aquifers requires understanding how geomechanical processes affect transport signals e.g., solute breakthrough time and degree of mixing, and how transport processes affect geomechanical signals e.g., stress changes and fracture activation. We test these hypotheses in a numerical model of push-pull testing in a fractured aquifer for which we develop a multiphysics modeling framework to solve the problem of fluid flow, tracer transport, poroelasticity, and fracture mechanics. We use the model to answer practical questions such as how much change in the tracer breakthrough time and degree of mixing corresponds to a given change in the average volumetric stress during aquifer pumping.



    Biography: Birendra Jha is an assistant professor of petroleum engineering at the University of Southern California, where his lab gemlab.usc.edu conducts research in fluid flow and mechanical deformation processes to better forecast the performance and hazards of subsurface engineering operations such CO2 sequestration and groundwater remediation in stress-sensitive rocks. His research has been funded by the US Department of Energy, National Science Foundation, American Chemical Society, and energy companies. Birendra received his masters and PhD from Stanford University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology, respectively.




    Location: Michelson Center for Convergent Bioscience (MCB) - 102

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Evangeline Reyes

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  • NL Seminar-FROM CONSTRAINED EVENT SEQUENCES GENERATION TO TEXT GENERATION

    Thu, Aug 26, 2021 @ 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM

    Information Sciences Institute

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Shanxiu He, ISI Intern

    Talk Title: FROM CONSTRAINED EVENT SEQUENCES GENERATION TO TEXT GENERATION

    Abstract: REMINDER: Meeting hosts only admit guests that they know to the Zoom meeting. Hence, you're highly encouraged to use your USC account to sign into Zoom. If you're an outside visitor, please inform nlg DASH seminar DASH admin2 AT isi.edu beforehand so we'll be aware of your attendance and let you in.

    Understanding events is a critical component of natural language understanding NLU. A key challenge lies in the fact that events can be described in different granularities. A coarse grained event e.g., publishing a paper can often be disseminated into a fine grained process of events e.g., writing the paper, passing the peer review, and presenting at the conference. In this work, we tackle the problem of goal oriented event process generation, where a task goal event, a process that completes this goal is automatically generated. We tackle this task with a constrained generation approach, inferring unobserved event chains based on existing sequences. To leverage prior knowledge to facilitate commonsense reasoning, we employ pre trained LMs to generate event sequences and to retrieve original stories.

    Biography: Shanxiu He is an undergraduate at UCLA and a member of UCLANLP lab. Prior to the internship, her research interest focuses on pre rained Vision and Language models such as VisualBERT and ClipBert and their applications to various structural learning tasks. During this internship, she researches on event centric knowledge representation and specifically event sequences generations.

    Host: Jon May and Mozhdeh Gheini

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

    Webcast: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ZG9d51emsI

    Location: Information Science Institute (ISI) - Virtual Only

    WebCast Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ZG9d51emsI

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Pete Zamar

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

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  • Ming Hsieh Institute Seminar Series on Integrated Systems

    Fri, Aug 27, 2021 @ 02:00 PM - 03:30 PM

    Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Danielle Griffith, Texas Instruments

    Talk Title: Precision BAW Oscillators for Low Power High Performance Applications

    Host: Mike Chen, Hossein Hashemi, Manuel Monge, Constantine Sideris

    More Information: MHI Seminar Series IS - Danielle Griffith_Flyer.pdf

    Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 132

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Jenny Lin

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  • ***CANCELLED*** ISE 651 - Epstein Seminar

    Tue, Aug 31, 2021 @ 03:30 PM - 04:50 PM

    Daniel J. Epstein Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Dr. Amelia Regan, Professor, Dept. of Computer Science and Transportation Systems Engineering, University of California, Irvine

    Talk Title: Warehouse Automation and Optimization: Motivating Advances in Large Scale Integer Programming

    Host: Dr. Jim Moore

    More Information: August 31, 2021.pdf

    Location: Online/Zoom

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Grace Owh

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  • *CANCELLED*: Epstein Seminar: Amelia Regan (University of California, Irvine) - Warehouse Automation and Optimization: Motivating Advances in Large Scale Integer Programming

    Tue, Aug 31, 2021 @ 03:30 PM - 04:50 PM

    Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Dr. Amelia Regan, University of California, Irvine

    Talk Title: Warehouse Automation and Optimization: Motivating Advances in Large Scale Integer Programming

    Location: Online Zoom Only

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Computer Science Department

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