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SUNMONTUEWEDTHUFRISAT
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Events for September
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A low-power, portable, microfluidic delivery system
Wed, Sep 01, 2004 @ 03:30 PM - 04:30 PM
Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Eric D. HobbsUniversity of California, BerkeleyFor more information cf. http://ame-www.usc.edu/seminars
Location: John Stauffer Science Lecture Hall (SLH) - 100
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Dennis Plocher
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Cyclic Combinational Circuits
Thu, Sep 09, 2004 @ 02:30 PM - 03:30 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
SPEAKER: Dr. Marc D. Riedel, CalTechABSTRACT: A combinational circuit is one that does not preserve any state information: the outputs are Boolean functions of the current inputs. In contrast, a sequential circuit is one that maintains an internal state: the outputs depend on the sequence of values, past and current, applied to the inputs. The accepted wisdom is that combinational circuits must have acyclic (i.e., loop-free or feed-forward) topologies. In fact, the idea that "combinational" and "acyclic" are synonymous terms is so thoroughly ingrained that many textbooks provide the latter as a definition of the former. And yet simple examples suggest that this is incorrect.In this talk, we advocate the design of cyclic combinational circuits (i.e., circuits with loops or feedback paths). We demonstrate that cycles can be used to optimize designs by reducing the number of gates (the area) and by reducing the length of the signal paths (the delay). On the theoretical front, we discuss lower bounds and we prove that certain cyclic circuits have half the number of gates of the best possible equivalent acyclic implementations. On the practical front, we describe an efficient approach for analyzing cyclic circuits, and we provide a general framework for synthesizing such circuits. On trials with benchmarks and circuits from industry, we obtained significant improvements in area and delay in nearly all cases. Based on these results, we suggest that it is time to re-write the definition: combinational might well mean cyclic.BIO: Marc Riedel is a Post-Doctoral Scholar at the California Institute of Technology. He received his Ph.D. and his M.Sc. in Electrical Engineering at Caltech, and his B.Eng. in Electrical Engineering with a Minor in Mathematics at McGill University. He has held positions at Marconi Canada, CAE Electronics, Toshiba and Fujitsu Research Labs. His paper "The Synthesis of Cyclic Combinational Circuits" received the Best Paper Award at the Design Automation Conference (DAC) in 2003, and his Ph.D. Dissertation received the Charles H. Wilts Prize for the best doctoral research in E.E. at Caltech in 2004.Host: Dr. Keith M. Chugg, x.07294, chugg@usc.edu
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 248
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Mayumi Thrasher
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Electrode Materials for Neural Implants: Progresses and Challenges
Fri, Sep 10, 2004 @ 02:30 PM - 04:00 PM
Mork Family Department of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
By David Zhou, Ph.D
Second Sight Medical Products, Inc
Sylmar, California This talk concentrates on recent developments in electrode materials for neural prostheses, especially Retinal prosthetic devices. Some common electrode materials and promising advanced electrode materials will be reviewed. Electrochemical Techniques for characterizing stimulation electrodes will be presented. The challenges in the development of chronic implantable electrode systems, especially using MEMS technology for the medical implants, will be discussed.
Location: Vivian Hall of Engineering (VHE) - 217
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Petra Pearce
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EE-SYSTEMS DISTINGUISHED LECTURER SERIES-Modeling Spoken Language
Wed, Sep 15, 2004 @ 03:00 PM - 04:00 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
DISTINGUISHED LECTURER SERIES"Modeling Spoken Language"Prof. Mari Ostendorf
Electrical Engineering, University of WashingtonGerontology Auditorium (GER 124)
Wednesday, September 15, 2004
3:00-4:00p.m.Abstract:As storage costs plummet and speech recognition technology progressively improves, it becomes feasible to think of archiving and publishing "spoken documents" that can be accessed as easily as we do online text documents. The range of potentially interesting spoken documents is vast, including records of meetings, committee hearings, news broadcasts, and call center data, as well as multi-media documents that include speech recordings. Language processing technology for spoken documents is even more critical than for text, since it is much more cumbersome to mine audio recordings than text for useful information. A key component of both speech recognition technology and many subsequent language processing technologies is statistical language modeling. Language models are used to characterize word sequences as an information source (a discrete stochastic process) that is to be decoded from noisy observations, such as acoustic features in speech recognition or words in another language in machine translation. Despite the fact that language is known to have long-distance structure, the most widely used language model is a simple n-gram or (n-1)-order Markov process, estimated from word sequence counts in data representative of the target task. In addition, performance gains in language modeling in recent years have been driven as much by data collection as by advances in representation of linguistic structure. As vast text resources are increasingly available via the web, one might argue that this trend will continue. However, spoken language can be quite different from written language, particularly for informal conversational speech, transcripts of which are not as readily available as written text. Human language can vary substantially depending on topic and register, such that the addition of mismatched text to the training set can actually hurt language modeling performance when using simple n-gram models. These observations argue for a decomposition of language at several levels, in terms of factors related to speaking style, topic, syntax and even morphology. This talk will show that leveraging larger data resources in learning models is synergistic with and not simply an alternative to representing structure in language, with examples of success stories in different languages and speech recognition tasks.Bio:Mari Ostendorf received the B.S., M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering from Stanford University. In 1985, she joined in the Speech Signal Processing Group at BBN Laboratories, and then became a member of the faculty of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Boston University in 1987. Since 1999, she has been a Professor of Electrical Engineering at the University of Washington, where she is an Endowed Professor of System Design Met Engineering. Her research interests are primarily in the area of statistical pattern recognition for non-stationary processes, particularly in speech processing applications, and her work has resulted in more than 140 publications. Her early work was in speech coding; more recently she has been involved in projects on both continuous speech recognition and synthesis. She has made contributions in segment-based and higher order acoustic models, data selection and transformation for language modeling, stochastic models of prosody for both recognition and synthesis, and information extraction from speech. Dr. Ostendorf is a former editor of Computer Speech and Language, was Technical Co-Chair of the HLT-NAACL 2003 conference, and has served on numerous speech and language conference boards and technical committees.Host: Prof. Shri Narayanan, x06432 ***A reception will follow the seminar at 4:00p.m.Location: Ethel Percy Andrus Gerontology Center (GER) - ontology Auditorium (GER 124)
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Rosine Sarafian
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Plasma actuators for separation control on stationary and oscillating airfoils
Wed, Sep 15, 2004 @ 03:30 PM - 04:30 PM
Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Martiqua L. PostFor further information go to
http://ame-www.usc.edu/seminarsLocation: John Stauffer Science Lecture Hall (SLH) - 102
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Dennis Plocher
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Resume Workshop
Thu, Sep 16, 2004 @ 05:00 PM - 06:00 PM
Viterbi School of Engineering Career Connections
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
A representative from Engineering Career Services will present information on writing resumes. Come learn how to write one or how to improve yours!
Location: Seeley G. Mudd Building (SGM) - 101
Audiences: Engineering Students
Contact: Engineering Career Services
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Environmental Engineering Seminar
Fri, Sep 17, 2004 @ 01:00 PM - 02:00 PM
Sonny Astani Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
"Direct Observation of Biofouling in Membrane Filtration Processes"By: Dr. Eric M.V. Hoek
Asst. Prof. and Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science Fellow
Civil & Environmental Engineering Department
University of California, Los Angeles
Location: Seeley G. Mudd Bldg., Room 101
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Evangeline Reyes
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Interfacial Reactivity in Geochemical Systems
Fri, Sep 17, 2004 @ 02:30 PM - 04:00 PM
Mork Family Department of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
THE DEPARTMENT OF MATERIALS SCIENCE & ENGINEERING PRESENTS A SEMINARbyProfessor James R. Rustad W.M. Keck Center for Active Visualization in the Earth Sciences University of California - DavisSPEAKING ONInterfacial Reactivity in Geochemical Systems ABSTRACT Acid base reactions occurring on mineral surfaces govern the fate and transport of contaminants in geochemical environments through their influence on sorption, redox, and ligand exchange reactions. During the last decade, geochemists have attempted to understand these reactions using site binding models incorporating crystallographic influences on site heterogeneity. We have used computational methods to explore the influence of site heterogeneity on chemical reactivity at multiple scales.
We find important influences persist up to length scales of 10's of
nanometers, making it almost impossible to predict the behavior of an interfacial system through knowledge of, for example, its crystal structure and crystal habit alone. Examples are drawn from experiment and theory on ligand exchange, redox and acid base reactions.**ALL FIRST-YEAR MATERIALS SCIENCE GRADUATE STUDENTS ARE REQUIRED TO ATTEND**
Location: Vivian Hall of Engineering (VHE) - 217
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Petra Pearce
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Deployment of Hybrid Sensor Networks
Mon, Sep 20, 2004 @ 02:30 PM - 04:00 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Chun Tung ChouSchool of Computer Science and Engineering, University of New South Wales, Australia http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~ctchou/ABSTRACT:This talk will present the problem of network deployment in hybrid sensor networks, consisting of both resource-rich and resource-impoverished sensor devices. The resource-rich devices, called microservers, are more expensive but have significantly greater bandwidth and energy capabilities compared to the low-cost, low-powered sensors. Such hybrid sensor networks have the potential to support the higher bandwidth communications of broadband sensor networking applications, as well as the finegrained sensing that is made possible by smaller sensor devices. We propose several techniques to investigate some fundamental questions on hybrid sensor network deployment — for a given number of microservers, what is the maximum lifetime of a sensor network and the optimal microserver placement? What benefit can additional microservers add to the network, and how financially costeffective is it to introduce these microservers? In order to answer these questions, we formulate an integer programming model for hybrid sensor network deployment. Our studies show that network life time can be extended by more than 100% by adding an extra microserver to the network; the network life time of optimized microservers' placement can be nine times longer than the worst case life time. Scalability analysis shows that the cost-effectiveness of hybrid sensor networks improves with the size of the network.HOST: Bhaskar Krishnamachari ** bkrishna@usc.edu
Location: Hedco Pertroleum and Chemical Engineering Building (HED) - CO AUDITORIUM
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Irina Strelnik
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Nonlinear Signal Processing in Feedback Loops for Single Frequency Tracking
Tue, Sep 21, 2004 @ 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Dr. Kandeepan Sithamparanathan, National ICT AustraliaAbstract: The problem of single-frequency carrier synchronisation is a well treated issue in the literature over the past several decades. Here, we revisit the problem, to enhance the performance of the synchronisation system, given the requirements, on an application specific basis. A typical example is, synchronising the beacon mode signal received from a LEO (Low Earth Orbital) satellite, transmitting at Ka-band (20Ghz/30Ghz) with heavy Doppler (+/- 600kHz) and very low transmitted EIRP (Effective Isotropically Radiated Power). Carrier synchronisation system requirements for such need to have wider acquisition range with a very low jitter-performance threshold in the order of -5dB of SNR. In order to address the above problems some nonlinear signal processing techniques are adopted to achieve wider acquisition ranges and extended jitter-threshold point in feedback loops. The loops are analysed both in its acquisition and tracking modes and signal processing solutions are proposed to enhance the performances. Another example of such application specific problem is to perform synchronisation for signals received with non-Gaussian additive noise such as impulsive noise. Linear analysis of feedback loops for the above two problems are no longer valid with the presence of the nonlinear elements within the loop, especially at very low signal to noise ratio levels. We use statistical analysis to study the dynamics of the loop and identify the limitations on it prior to addressing the problems on a specific manner to improve the performance.Bio: Kandeepan is with the Wireless Signal Processing group at the National ICT Australia in Canberra. He completed his undergraduate level of studies in Communications and Control systems engineering in Colombo, furthering with a masters in Telecommunications and a PhD in Electrical Engineering, in 1999 and 2003 respectively, at the University of Technology, Sydney (Australia). Prior to joining the National ICT Australia, he has worked with the Australian Cooperative Research Centre for Satellite Systems on the Fedsat project as a researcher and a DSP Engineer. Kandeepan was also involved with teaching and course development at the University of Technology, Sydney in the Telecommunications Engineering group and had developed technical materials for Nokia on 3G wireless systems. His main research interests are synchronisation, parameter estimation, statistical signal processing, and communication theory. Currently he is working on synchronisation techniques for Ultra Wide Band and MIMO based communication systems.Host: Dr. Urbashi Mitra, ubli@usc.edu
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - -539
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Mayumi Thrasher
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Resume Workshop
Wed, Sep 22, 2004 @ 05:00 PM - 06:00 PM
Viterbi School of Engineering Career Connections
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
A representative from Engineering Career Services will present information on writing resumes. Come learn how to write one or how to improve yours!
Location: Seeley G. Mudd Building (SGM) - 101
Audiences: Engineering Students
Contact: Engineering Career Services
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ENERGY OUTLOOK AND FUTURE CHALLENGES
Fri, Sep 24, 2004 @ 01:00 PM - 02:00 PM
Sonny Astani Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
The seminar is presented by Mr. David Ligh, Manager
Government Relations, U.S. Western Region
Exxon Mobil Corporation
Sacramento, CAThis presentation will provide Exxon Mobil's projections for future energy supply, and will identify emerging trends in alternative energy and advanced technology development.Location: Seeley G. Mudd Bldg., Room 101
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Evangeline Reyes
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Tailoring the Properties of Carbon Nanotubes by Filling and Irradiation
Fri, Sep 24, 2004 @ 02:45 PM - 04:00 PM
Mork Family Department of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Presented by:Professor Susan Sinnott, University of FloridaAbstract:Classical molecular dynamics simulations with many-body empirical potentials are used to study the chemical modification of carbon nanotube based materials. Chemical modification of nanotubes is important for tailoring their properties and ultimately controlling their adhesion to polymers in composites. The simulations focus on the effects of filling nanotubes with gases and clusters on their mechanical and thermal properties. Additionally, they show that irradiation of carbon nanotube structures, bundles, and composites with electron or polyatomic ion beams can substantially modify the properties of the systems without destroying their fundamental structure. Thus the simulations show how the inherently desirable properties of carbon nanotubes can be tailored through filling and/or irradiation.Refreshments will be served at 2:30p.m.**ALL FIRST-YEAR MATERIALS SCIENCE GRADUATE STUDENTS ARE REQUIRED TO ATTEND**
Location: Vivian Hall of Engineering (VHE) - 217
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Petra Pearce
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THE ERA OF THREAD-LEVEL PARALLELISM
Wed, Sep 29, 2004 @ 10:30 AM - 11:45 AM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
PROF. KUNLE OLUKOTUN (Stanford University)Abstract:=========As single-thread performance approaches ILP limits and fundamental VLSI constraints, parallel architectures that exploit thread-level parallelism provide a realistic path to improved performance. However, the perennial problem with parallel architectures is the lack of parallel software to run on them. This talk discusses three techniques for generating and exploiting thread-level parallelism. The first technique exploits the inherent thread-level parallelism of server applications to improve throughput performance. The second technique uses thread-level speculation hardware and a Java VM that supports dynamic compilation and dynamic profiling to automatically extract threads from sequential applications. The third technique called Transactional Coherence and Consistency (TCC) is a new parallel programming model that relies on user-defined, light-weight transactions as the basic unit of parallel work, communication, memory coherence, memory consistency, and error recovery. TCC has the potential to simplify parallel software development and parallel hardware implementation. The combination of these three techniques could dramatically increase the amount of parallel software.Bio:====Kunle Olukotun is an Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at Stanford University. Olukotun received his Ph.D. in Computer Science and Engineering in 1991 from The University of Michigan. Olukotun led the Stanford Hydra single-chip multiprocessor research project. Hydra implements a novel architecture for combining multiple processors on a single chip. One of the most innovative aspects of the Hydra architecture is the support for thread-level speculation. In 2000 he founded Afara Websystems to develop commercial server systems with chip multiprocessor and multithreading technology. Afara was acquired in 2002 by Sun Microsystems; the Afara processor technology, now called Niagara, will appear in future Sun products. Olukotun currently leads projects in computer architecture, parallel programming environments and formal hardware verification.Host: Prof. Timothy Pinkston, x04482Refreshments to precede seminar at 10:15AM
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - -248
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Rosine Sarafian
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Neural Prosthetic Reanimation of Paralyzed Limbs
Wed, Sep 29, 2004 @ 03:30 PM - 04:30 PM
Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Gerald E. Loeb, M.D.For more information visit the AME website, http://ame-www.usc.edu/seminars
Location: John Stauffer Science Lecture Hall (SLH) - 102
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Dennis Plocher
