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Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Events for September

  • BME 533 Seminar Series (NO CLASS, LABOR DAY BREAK)

    Mon, Sep 03, 2007 @ 12:30 PM - 01:50 PM

    Alfred E. Mann Department of Biomedical Engineering

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Audiences: students registered in BME 533

    Contact: Mischalgrace Diasanta

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  • Fast Optical Disk Drives †Letting Light Do the Walking

    Tue, Sep 04, 2007 @ 11:00 AM - 12:00 AM

    Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    I. (Shelly) Glaser, Ph.D.
    Holon Institute of Technology
    Dept. Electrical and Electronic EngineeringAbstract:
    From the early days of Laser-Discs, there were great hopes for optical disk storage; some claimed it would eventually replace magnetic disk storage. Indeed optical disc storage combines very high capacity with reliable removable media. Nevertheless, with one exception (Steve Jobs' Next computer), all computers still use magnetic hard disk drives. Optical discs are widely used for data and software distribution, data transfer media, and, of course, entertainment, but not as HDD replacement. They are just too slow. Here we shall review two approaches for fast optical disk drives. The first uses parallel access for fast raw data transfer. The other uses optical scanning to obtain very short access times. For the fast access approach we shall discuss design issues and solutions.About the Speaker:
    I. (Shelly) Glaser received his Ph.D. from the Weizmann Institute of Science. He served as an associate professor at the Faculty of Physics of the Weizmann Institute of Science, and the Faculty of Engineering at Tel Aviv University, and as a visiting faculty member at the USC/SIPI. Later he became the Chief Scientist of Holo-Or Ltd., Israel, a technical/scientific consultant to key high-tech companies in Israel and Europe, and the founder and CTO of a start-up company that developed fast-seek optical disc drive technology. He is now with the Holon Institute of Technology. Shelly Glaser's professional interest includes, besides optical storage, 3-D imaging and display, sensing for machine vision, information optics, holography and diffractive optics, medical imaging and non-conventional optical systems.Hosts: Prof. Alexander Sawchuk and Prof. Keith Jenkins

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

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Talyia Veal

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  • Mode-dependent Thin Film Interfacial Property Measurement by Laser Induced Stress Waves

    Wed, Sep 05, 2007 @ 03:30 PM - 04:30 PM

    Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Junlan WangDepartment of Mechanical Engineering,
    University of California, Riverside, CA AbstractThin films are crucial components in a wide range of multilayer microelectronic and optical devices. They are also desirable candidates for micro-actuators in micro-electro-mechanical systems. Due to the dissimilar nature of the constituents, large residual stress can be induced in the film during the fabrication process which leads to the subsequent failure of the thin film devices. Among the many properties, interfacial adhesion between the thin film and substrate is one of the key parameters influencing the overall reliability and durability of the integrated thin film devices. However, due to the critical dimension of thin films, conventional techniques face challenges to reliably evaluate the thin film interfacial properties.
    To address the above challenge, we developed a unique set of laser-induced stress wave techniques to quantitatively investigate the intrinsic strength of a planar thin film/substrate interface. High-amplitude short-duration stress wave pulses generated by laser-pulse absorption are used to delaminate a thin film/substrate interface and the corresponding interfacial stress is calculated from the transient high-speed interferometric displacement measurement using wave mechanics. Depending on the geometry of the substrate, the thin film interfaces can be subjected to a variety of loading modes including tensile, mixed-mode and pure-shear. Systematic studies of similar interfaces failed under different loading conditions reveals that the thin film interfacial failure as well as the adhesion is highly mode-dependent. Significant wrinkling and tearing of the films happens under mixed-mode and pure-shear loading, in great contrast to blister patterns observed in similar films failed under tensile loading. This technique has been further developed to investigate the interfacial adhesion of various thin film/substrate interfaces interesting to semiconductor industry and biomedical applications as well as those under high strain-rate loading for defense applications.
    Biosketch Junlan Wang received her Ph.D. in Theoretical and Applied Mechanics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2002. She joined the faculty in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the University of California, Riverside in 2003 after finishing one year post-doctoral research in the Solid Mechanics and Structures group at Brown University. Her research interest is in the mechanics of thin films and coatings, high strain rate materials behavior, size-dependent mechanical behavior of surface micro and nanostructures, and mechanical reliability of multifunctional nanoporous materials. Her recent awards include the SEM Hetenyi Award in 2004, UC Regents Faculty Fellowship in 2004, Faculty Development Award in 2006, UCR College of Engineering Excellence in Teaching Award in 2007, and ASEE Beer and Johnston, Jr. Outstanding New Mechanics Educator Award in 2007.

    Location: Staufer Science Lecture (SLH) Rm 102

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: April Mundy

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  • Community College Counselor Conference (Transfer Admission)

    Fri, Sep 07, 2007 @ 09:00 AM - 04:00 PM

    Viterbi School of Engineering Undergraduate Admission

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Community College Counselors are invited to spend the day at USC learning about our admission policies, academic programs, and student services. If counselors are interested in learning more about transferring into engineering at USC, there will be a one-hour presentation on the Viterbi School, transfer requirements, and the admission process.Please call Julie Samere at (213) 740-4530 for more details.

    Location: USC University Park Campus

    Audiences: CA Community College Counselors

    Contact: Admission & Student Affairs Division

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  • Honors Colloquium: The International Geophysical Year-- Igniting a Revolution in American Science

    Fri, Sep 07, 2007 @ 01:00 PM - 01:50 PM

    Viterbi School of Engineering Student Affairs

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Lecture offered by Dr. Erik Conway, JPL Historian for the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

    Location: Olin Hall of Engineering (OHE) - 122

    Audiences: Honors Program Students and all Faculty and Staff are invited to attend

    Contact: Erika Chua

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  • Application on Biopolymers on Mercury Waste Treatment:....

    Fri, Sep 07, 2007 @ 01:00 PM - 02:00 PM

    Sonny Astani Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Adsorption of Chitosan Hydrogel Granule with Heavy MetalsSpeaker:
    Prof. Chang-Chin Kwan
    Providence University, TaiwanAbstract:
    Heavy metal pollution in aquatic systems is a pervasive and extremely serious problem. The high cost for cleanup tends to increase. A selective, high-capacity adsorbent process is developed to recover the heavy metals, thus minimizing fouling. Biopolymers such as chitosan and sodium polyglucosamine can be used separately or together for the adsorption studies. A practical example is that at pH 5, the maximum capacity for mercury is 0.4% to 7mg of sodium polyglucosamine per gram of beach sand. Furthermore, a capsule delivering system using chitosan and tripolyphosphate was made. The microcapsules were prepared by emulsification/internal gelification method. The release behavior of Vitamin E from these microcapsules was investigated in phosphate buffered saline (PBS) and hydrophobic medium. Results indicated that the release of Vitamin E is slow but with higher concentrations of chitosan and TPP solutions, a convenient method to encapsulate active ingredients in microcapsules for 10 hours in aqueous PBS solution or 7 hours in the lipo-system can be developed.

    Location: Kaprielian Hall (KAP) - 156

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Evangeline Reyes

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  • Exploring Delay Tolerant Applications

    Fri, Sep 07, 2007 @ 03:00 PM - 04:00 PM

    Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    SPEAKER: Prof. Mehul Motani, National University of SingaporeABSTRACT: Handheld devices such as mobile phones and PDAs have evolved into multi-functional platforms with significant computational, storage and networking capabilities. Device manufacturers are also embedding tiny sensors into these devices for environmental and personal health monitoring. The natural question in this context is how to share the data stored on these devices. In delay tolerant applications, query propagation and information access is via opportunistic exchange of information amongst mobile devices in proximity of one another.In this talk, we will explore the design space of delay tolerant applications. Understanding user interactions is essential to designing efficient algorithms and enhancing user experience. We will describe experiments carried out on campus to glean human contact patterns and the lessons learned. To effect information exchange, mobile devices need to become aware of other devices in their environment. This device discovery process is energy intensive and motivates the need for energy efficient contact probing mechanisms. We will discuss recent results on the design of algorithms which offer a favorable trade-off between energy and performance.BIO:
    Mehul Motani is an Assistant Professor in Electrical and Computer Engineering at the National University of Singapore. He graduated with a PhD from Cornell University. Prior to that, he was a member of technical staff at Lockheed Martin in Syracuse, New York for over four years. Recently he has been working on research problems which sit at the boundary of information theory, communications and networking, including the design of wireless ad-hoc and sensor network systems. He was awarded the Intel Foundation Fellowship for work related to his PhD in 2000, won the Telecom Italia prize at Simagine 2003 and advanced to the Semifinals at Startup@Singapore 2005. He has been on the organizing committees for ISIT 2006 & 2007 and the technical program committees of MobiCom 2007, Infocom 2008, SECON 2008 and other conferences. He participates actively in IEEE & ACM/Sigmobile and has served as the secretary of the IEEE Information Theory Society Board of Governors.Host: Urbashi Mitra, ubli@usc.edu

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

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Mayumi Thrasher

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  • BME 533 Seminar: BME Faculty Research Overview Presentations

    Mon, Sep 10, 2007 @ 12:30 PM - 01:50 PM

    Alfred E. Mann Department of Biomedical Engineering

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    BME Faculty Research Overview Presentations – G. Loeb, A. Madhukar, E. Meng, F. Valero-Cuevas

    Location: Olin Hall of Engineering (OHE) - 132

    Audiences: students registered in BME 533

    Contact: Mischalgrace Diasanta

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  • Multiscale Fluid Flow Studies with Molecular Tagging Diagnostics

    Wed, Sep 12, 2007 @ 03:30 PM - 04:30 PM

    Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Manoochehr Koochesfahani ProfessorDepartment of Mechanical Engineering Michigan State University East Lansing, MI A brief overview of molecular tagging diagnostics will be presented, along with results from studies in three different flow fields. Molecular tagging methods take advantage of molecules that can be turned into long lifetime tracers upon excitation by photons of an appropriate wavelength. Typically a pulsed laser is used to "tag" the regions of interest, and those tagged regions are interrogated at successive times within the lifetime of the tracer. This approach has been utilized for the measurement of velocity and temperature fields. The first study presented here considers unsteady flow separation from a pitching airfoil. Boundary-layer resolved measurements of this phenomenon and comparison with complementary computations will be discussed. The second study involves in-cylinder measurements in a motored IC engine. Results from flow mapping of cycle-to-cycle variation in late compression will be presented. Preliminary observations on the possibility of flow control will be discussed. The final study addresses the flow inside a microchannel driven by either a pressure differential or electroosmosis. In-situ measurements of wall friction factor in pressure-driven flow will be compared with theoretical predictions in order to assess the large discrepancies that have been previously reported. Electroosmotically-driven flows involve additional complications, e.g. presence of an electric field and a time-varying temperature field caused by Joule heating. Results will be shown from simultaneous measurements of velocity and temperature within a microchannel for different applied potentials.

    Location: Staufer Science Lecture Hall, Rm 102 (SLH)

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: April Mundy

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  • Lyman Handy Colloquium Series:

    Thu, Sep 13, 2007 @ 12:30 PM - 01:50 PM

    Mork Family Department of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Steven Bryant, UT Austin
    http://www.ices.utexas.edu/~sbryant/Old Dogs and New Tricks:
    Will Biotechnology Actually Revolutionize the Oil Industry This Time Around?The idea of using microbes to increase recovery from oil reservoirs is more than fifty years old. Proponents of microbial enhanced oil recovery (MEOR) have long championed its advantages, but field applications have never lived up to the promise implied by those claims. In the current era of sustained high oil prices and increasing demand for hydrocarbons, operators have renewed their interest in all forms of EOR. Meanwhile, techniques for genomic engineering, metabolic engineering and biotechnology in general have developed rapidly. Can the potential of MEOR – in essence, the possibility of implementing EOR for the same price as a waterflood – be realized this time around?To answer that question, it is instructive to review the reasons for the failure of MEOR in the past. An important lesson from that review is that a multidisciplinary perspective is absolutely necessary for this application. We then consider an example of MEOR that works and has yielded an economic success in the field. Here the lesson is a common one in engineering: simpler processes are more robust. However, efforts to establish a mechanistic understanding of the successful process raise more questions than they answer. These questions turn out to relate to a much broader theme: how life forms have managed to adapt to an extraordinary range of conditions on this planet. Recognizing these issues provides insight into what is feasible and what is improbable for oilfield applications of biotechnology.

    Location: Olin Hall of Engineering (OHE) - 122

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Petra Pearce

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  • Honors Colloquium: Array Antenna Analysis and Optimization Using Parallel Computing

    Fri, Sep 14, 2007 @ 01:00 PM - 01:50 PM

    Viterbi School of Engineering Student Affairs

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Lecture offered by Dr. Frank Villegas of The Aerospace Corporation.

    Location: Olin Hall of Engineering (OHE) - 122

    Audiences: Honors Program Students and all Faculty and Staff are invited to attend

    Contact: Erika Chua

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  • Geotechnical Program to Database the Collection of Sewer Information in ...

    Fri, Sep 14, 2007 @ 01:00 PM - 02:00 PM

    Sonny Astani Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Got SMART©TM ?
    Geotechnical Program to Database the Collection of Sewer Information in City of Los Angeles, in Terms of Sewer Renewal Program Speaker:
    Derek Kim, Ph.D.,
    Civil Engineer (consultant)
    City of Los Angeles,Department of Public Works
    Bureau of Engineering, Wastewater Conveyance Engineering DivisionAbstractThe City of Los Angeles has a mission to rehabilitate the old sewer system where leaking and non-functioning pipes are widespread. Can't these sewers deserve being repaired for the next generations? City engineers are finding the best option to shoot the trouble that occurred in this underground system. The conventional way of collecting the subsurface information was somewhat laborious, inconvenient, and time-consuming. In order to overcome this difficult task, city engineers developed a new way of data system, SMART©TM (Sewer Management Automated Renewal Tracking System). With this innovative and streamlined design approach, the tremendous amount of subsurface information including maps and drawings, and new design input can be collected and organized. Now, SMART program is the key component of tools to meet the goal of City's SSRP (Secondary Sewer Renewal Program), where 60 miles of sewer pipes should have to be rehabilitated with methods of lining or R&R (Remove & Replace).

    Location: Kaprielian Hall (KAP) - 209

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Evangeline Reyes

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  • BME 533 Seminar: BME Faculty Research Overview Presentations

    Mon, Sep 17, 2007 @ 12:30 PM - 01:50 PM

    Alfred E. Mann Department of Biomedical Engineering

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    BME Faculty Research Overview Presentations – J. Maarek, M. Singh, D. Huang, C. Lu

    Location: Olin Hall of Engineering (OHE) - 132

    Audiences: students registered in BME 533

    Contact: Mischalgrace Diasanta

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  • Image Reconstruction and Lesion Detection Using PET

    Mon, Sep 17, 2007 @ 02:00 PM - 03:00 PM

    Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Image Reconstruction and Lesion Detection Using PETQuanzheng Li
    Research Associate, University of Southern CaliforniaHost: Krishna NayakAbstract:
    
Due to the tremendous success of the human genome project, human 
health care has emerged into an era of molecular and personal medicine, in
 which molecular imaging plays a key role. Among all the molecular imaging 
modalities, Positron Emission Tomography (PET) has a prominent position 
because of its flexibility and sensitivity. In this talk I will present our
 work on developing fast and accurate 3D and 4D image reconstruction methods
 for PET. After briefly summarize our work on static reconstruction, I will 
focus on dynamic reconstruction and introduce a fast globally convergent
fully 4D incremental gradient algorithm to estimate the continuous-time
 tracer density from list mode PET data. In the second part of the talk, I
 will describe a matched subspace detection method that uses the time
 activity curve (TAC) to distinguish tumors from background in dynamic FDG
PET, and then propose a Gaussian Random Filed (GRF) method with a given
 family wise error rate (FWER) to threshold the matched subspace detection
 statistic map. 

Biography:
    Dr. Li is a Research Associate in Electrical Engineering at the University
 of Southern California. He received his BS from Zhejiang University, China
in 1997, his MS from Tsinghua University, China in 2000, and his PhD in 
Electrical Engineering from University of Southern California in 2005. His
 current research interests lie in applying signal and image processing
 theory to solve computational problems in molecular imaging.

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

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Alma Hernandez

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  • The Optimality of Two Prices: Maximizing Revenue in a Stochastic Network

    Tue, Sep 18, 2007 @ 03:30 PM - 04:30 PM

    Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    SPEAKER: Mr. Longbo Huang, PhD Candidate, USCABSTRACT: This paper considers the problem of pricing and transmission scheduling for an Access Point (AP) in a wireless mesh network, where the AP provides services to a set of mobile users. The goal of the AP is to maximize its own time-average profit. We first obtain the optimum time-average profit of
    the AP and prove the "Optimality of Two Prices" Theorem. We then develop an online scheme that jointly solves the pricing and transmission scheduling problem in a dynamic environment. The scheme uses an admission price and a business decision as tools to regulate the incoming traffic and to maximize revenue. We show the scheme can achieve any average profit that is arbitrarily close to the optimum, with a tradeoff in average delay. This holds for general Markovian dynamics for channel and user state variation, and does not require a-priori knowledge of the Markov model.BIO: Longbo Huang received his B.E. and M.S. degree in Electrical Engineering from Sun Yet-sen University, China, in 2003 and Columbia University in 2004, respectively. He is currently working toward his Ph.D. degree at USC. His research interests are in the areas of queueing theory and stochastic network optimization.Host: Prof. Michael Neely

    Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 539

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Mayumi Thrasher

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  • Homogeneous Microcombustion Studies: Progress and Observations

    Wed, Sep 19, 2007 @ 03:30 PM - 04:30 PM

    Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Mark A. Shannon James W. Bayne Professor of Mechanical Engineering Department of Mechanical Science and Engineering University of Illinois at Urbana-Champagne Urbana IL, 61801-2906 ABSTRACT:In the past few years, there has been an intense interest in building very small engines, power plants, and high temperature microchemical reactors, all running on the combustion of hydrocarbon fuels (due to their high inherent energy densities). While most systems employ catalytic and heterogeneous combustion processes, we wished to create and study high-temperature flames confined within burners with the smallest gap below 1 mm in length. The problem we immediately confronted is that flames either could not be created within narrow confined structures, or quenched quickly, similar to that which occurs in flame arrestors. We hypothesized that if we could have hot enough walls with low enough radical recombination probabilities, we could create and sustain homogeneous combustion in burners with sub-millimeter gaps. Therefore, we investigated a number of different wall materials and burner configurations, and found that flames of hydrogen, methane, propane, butane, and acetylene mixed with oxygen can be sustained in cavities as small as 100 microns, provided that the walls are sufficiently "quenchless." In addition, we have observed unusual flame structures at this scale, and flame dynamics that strongly vary with changes in temperature profiles. Homogeneously burning hydrocarbons in air at this scale has proved to be more difficult, requiring even higher wall temperatures and better thermal management. In this talk, I will present the experiments that we have conducted towards developing microcombustion-based systems, some of the observations I find interesting, what we now know is happening within the structures, and the many open questions that remain to be answered (hopefully!) by many of the excellent researchers working in combustion studies throughout the U.S. and world.

    Location: Stauffer Science Lecture Hall, Rm 102

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: April Mundy

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  • Honors Colloquium: Designing USCs Galen Center

    Fri, Sep 21, 2007 @ 01:00 PM - 01:50 PM

    Viterbi School of Engineering Student Affairs

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Lecture offered by Mr. Joseph Diesko, AIA, of HNTB Architecture.

    Location: Olin Hall of Engineering (OHE) - 122

    Audiences: Honors Program Students and all Faculty and Staff are invited to attend

    Contact: Erika Chua

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  • Sharing Lesson Learnt

    Fri, Sep 21, 2007 @ 01:00 PM - 02:00 PM

    Sonny Astani Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker:
    Pei-Chin Low, P.E.
    MWH Americas, Inc.Abstract:Every project, be it an equipment replacement design project or pilot testing of a cutting-edge technology, has its own lessons to be learnt. Every project has its own challenges, warranting different technical and management approaches. There is no one-size-fits-all solution and there is so much to learn and experiment, which is probably why it is actually fun to work! This presentation will discuss the lessons learnt from various projects, including design and study of water and wastewater treatment plants, pump stations, and pilot-testing of ozone feasibility study, with different clients including but not limited to the City of Los Angeles, County Sanitation Districts of Los Angeles County, and Orange County Sanitation District and Antelope Valley-East Kern Water District. With so much experience and lessons to learn and also to avoid re-inventing the wheels, it is important to build a network of fellow professionals for knowledge and experience sharing. The presenter will also share her personal experience on network building.

    Location: Kaprielian Hall (KAP) - rielian Hall 209

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Evangeline Reyes

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  • Deterministic and Probabilistic Tsunami Studies in ....

    Fri, Sep 21, 2007 @ 03:30 PM - 05:00 PM

    Sonny Astani Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Deterministic and Probabilistic Tsunami Studies in California from near and Farfield SourcesBy: Burak Uslu
    Ph. D. Candidate
    Oral DefenseAbstract:The state California is vulnerable to tsunamis from both local and distant sources. While there is awareness of the threat, tsunamis are infrequent and few communities have a good understanding of vulnerability. To evaluate the tsunami threat, deterministic and probabilistic methods are used to compute inundation and runup heights. For the numerical modeling of tsunamis, a two dimensional finite difference propagation and runup model is used. All known near and farfield sources of relevance to California are considered. For the farfield, the Pacific Rim is subdivided into small segments where unit ruptures are assumed. The historical records from the 1952 Kamchatka, 1960 Great Chile, 1964 Great Alaska, and 1994 and 2006 Kuril Islands Earthquakes are compared to the modeled results. A sensitivity analysis is performed on each subduction zone segment to determine the effect of the source location on wave heights off the California Coast.Earlier studies employed a time-dependent method based on a Richter and Gutenberg type relationship, and assigned probabilities on each subduction zone depending on previous surveys. Time-dependent and time-independent methods are used in this study. In the latter, the slip rates are obtained from GPS measurements of the tectonic plates and used as a basis to get the return period of each possible earthquake. The return periods of the tsunamis resulting from these events are combined with the wave height exceedance from the numerical results to provide a total probability of exceedance, for ports and harbors in California. The Cascadia Subduction Zone, a portion of which is located in the boundaries of California and is capable of producing mega-thrust earthquake rupture between Gorda and North American plate, may cause large damage north of Cape Mendocino. Northern California is likely to have the biggest damage from a Cascadia rupture. The sensitivity analysis suggests that San Francisco Bay and Central California exhibits the largest impact from the Alaska and Aleutians Subduction Zone (AASZ). An earthquake with a magnitude comparable to the 1964 Great Alaska Earthquake on central AASZ could result in twice the damage as experienced by SF Bay in the 1964 event.The probabilistic approach shows that Central California and San Francisco Bay have more frequent tsunamis, as they are oriented towards the AASZ; while Southern California can be impacted from tsunamis generated on Chile and Central American Subduction Zone as well as the AASZ.

    Location: Kaprielian Hall (KAP) - rielian Hall 209

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Evangeline Reyes

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  • BME 533 Seminar: BME Faculty Research Overview Presentations

    Mon, Sep 24, 2007 @ 12:30 PM - 01:50 PM

    Alfred E. Mann Department of Biomedical Engineering

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    BME Faculty Research Overview Presentations – M. Arbib, M. Baudry, B. Liu

    Location: Olin Hall of Engineering (OHE) - 132

    Audiences: students registered in BME 533

    Contact: Mischalgrace Diasanta

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  • Image Processing in the Block DCT space

    Tue, Sep 25, 2007 @ 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM

    Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Jayanta Mukherjee, Ph.D.
    IIT Kharagpur
    Dept. of Electronics and Electrical
    Communication EngineeringAbstract:
    In many applications, images in the compressed domain are used for the purpose of storage and communication. Typically, DCT based JPEG compression is mostly popular in such cases. For processing such images using conventional spatial domain techniques, one would require to decompress them and apply those techniques. Further, the processed images are required to be compressed again for their storage or communication. To avoid this overhead of decompression and compression, many algorithms are being developed for computing directly in the block DCT space. In this talk, some of these algorithms outlining their design principles will be discussed. Their applications towards image resizing, filtering and transcoding will also be presented. About the Speaker:
    Dr. Jayanta Mukhopadhyay (Mukherjee) has done his PhD. in the year 1990 from IIT, Kharagpur from the Dept. of Electronics and Electrical Communication Engineering in the field of Image processing. He has also done his M.Tech and B.tech from IIT, kharagpur in 1987 and 1985 respectively from the same department. His fields of interest include Image Processing, Pattern Recognition, Computer Graphics and Multimedia Systems. He served in various technical programme committees of national and international conferences. He visited University of California, Santa Barbara, USA in the summers of 2000, 2001, 2003 and 2004. He also visited the Institute for Man Machine and Communication, Technical University of Munich (TUM), Germany, for one year in 2002 as a Humboldt research fellow. He served as the head of the Computer and Informatics Center, IIT, Kharagpur from September, 2004 to July, 2007. He is a professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, IIT Kharagpur. Presently, he is visiting USC under the USC-IIT Kharagpur exchange programme.Host: Prof. C-C Jay Kuo

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

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Talyia Veal

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  • Numerical Simulation and Modeling of Complex Turbulent Flows

    Wed, Sep 26, 2007 @ 03:30 PM - 04:30 PM

    Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Professor Kyle D. SquiresMechanical and Aerospace Engineering DepartmentArizona State UniversityTempe, AZ 85287 USAAbstract:Numerical simulation and modeling of the turbulent flows encountered in aerodynamics applications are challenging for several reasons, including the fact that the Reynolds numbers are usually large and the flows often exhibit significant effects of separation. These and other features challenge simulation strategies and have constrained the application of Computational Fluid Dynamics as a tool for analysis and design.
    Simulation strategies have typically relied on Reynolds-averaged Navier-Stokes (RANS) approaches that are computationally feasible and often sufficient in attached flows though are unable to accurately account for the complex effects characteristic of flow separation.
    Large Eddy Simulation (LES) is a technique that offers greater fidelity and is a powerful approach away from solid surfaces. Near the wall, however, the computational cost of LES is prohibitive, a fact that will constrain its widespread at high Reynolds numbers for the foreseeable future. These and other considerations have motivated development of
    hybrid methods, the most popular of these approaches being Detached-Eddy Simulation (DES). DES combines the most favorable elements of RANS and LES models in a single simulation. In this seminar, development and applications of the method aimed at advancing DES will be reviewed. In natural applications of the technique, attached boundary layers are treated by RANS, exploiting the computational efficiency and relative accuracy of RANS models in attached shear layers. The method becomes an
    LES in regions away from the wall provided the grid density is sufficient. The range of DES applications to date include an array of ``building block'' test cases such as the flow over a cylinder, sphere, aircraft forebody, and missile base. In addition, the technique has
    been applied to complex geometries, including the flows around fighter aircraft. The developing experience base is encouraging expansion of the method beyond the originally intended class of massively separated flows and a brief description of some of the challenges and recent advances will be presented. These include improvements to the method that modify the DES length scale to overcome errors that can arise from the interface between the RANS and LES regions and development of strategies for seeding turbulent fluctuations in boundary layers.

    Location: Stauffer Science Lecture Hall, Rm 102

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: April Mundy

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  • The Beyond-ASCII Internet

    Thu, Sep 27, 2007 @ 10:30 AM - 11:30 AM

    Information Sciences Institute

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Note: this seminar will be given twice: at ISI in the morning
    and on campus at SSL 150 at 4 p.m.For much of its history the Internet has been based on the Latin alphabet and its ASCII digital representation. Tina Dam of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) will explain an ongoing effort aimed expanding this universe by creating new Internet realms, or top level domains, that use non-Latin/ASCII writing systems and open significant possibilities for communities worldwide to express themselves in their own languageLast month, the ICANN Board of Directors approved representing the word 'test' translated into: Arabic, Persian, Chinese (simplified and traditional), Russian, Hindi, Greek, Korean, Yiddish, Japanese and Tamil. The technical evaluations of these "internationalized domain name top level domains" (ISD TLD) and their usability in various applications will proceed following their delegation. If the evaluation is successful, the introduction will pave the way for the launch of new TLDs in 2008. Dam's presentation will explore the effort, and show how commonly used browsers (Internet Explorer, Firefox and Opera) function in these environments. Tina Dam was appointed Director for ICANN's IDN Program in 2006. In this capacity she develops and manages all IDN related projects at ICANN focused at the deployment of internationalized top level domains.

    Location: 11th Floor Conference Room, ISI

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: eric mankin

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  • Dynamical Order and Complexity in Rhythmic Chemical Systems

    Thu, Sep 27, 2007 @ 12:45 PM

    Mork Family Department of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    John L. Hudson
    Chemical Engineering
    University of Virginia
    Charlottesville, Virginia, USA The interaction and synchronization of populations of rhythmic processes is important in a variety of fields ranging including chemistry (influence on overall rate of reaction), biology (circadian rhythm of suprachiasmatic nuclei, essential tremors), and engineering (lasers and microwave systems). A feature of such systems is that the overall, or collective, behavior can be significantly different from the dynamics of the individual components. We introduce the subject of complexity and order with a brief discussion of two examples: the sudden transition to pitting corrosion through the cooperative behavior of metastable pits and patterns of synchrony associated with epileptic seizures.
    The focus of the presentation is then on experiments with arrays of electrochemical oscillators. The experiments serve as a platform with which the effects of coupling, external forcing, and feedback can be studied since rates of reaction on each electrode can be obtained and elements of the array are individually addressable. Even very weak coupling among sites can produce significant changes in the collective behavior of the system including a phase transition at a critical coupling point at which the onset of synchronization occurs. We show that mutual entrainment in interacting oscillators can be characterized using phase models developed from direct experiments with a single oscillator and sets of oscillators. We show how such phase models can be used to describe and tune complex dynamic structures to desired states; weak, non-destructive signals are employed to alter interactions among nonlinear rhythmic elements. Application is made to the generation of sequentially-visited dynamic cluster patterns similar to reproducible sequences seen in biological systems and to the design of a nonlinear anti-pacemaker for the destruction of pathological synchronization of a population of interacting oscillators.Selected publications: Kiss, Zhai, Hudson, Science 296, 1676 (2002)
    Kiss and Hudson, AIChEJ 49, 2234 (2003).
    Mikhailov, Zanette, Zhai, Kiss, Hudson, PNAS 101 (30), 10890 (2004).
    Punckt, Bölscher,Rotermund,Mikhailov,Organ,Budiansky,Scully, and Hudson, Science 305, 1133 (2004).
    Kiss, Rusin, Kori, and Hudson, Science 316, 1886 (2007).

    Location: Olin Hall of Engineering (OHE) - 122

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Petra Pearce Sapir

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  • Honors Colloquium: Faculty Advisor Reception (tentative)

    Fri, Sep 28, 2007 @ 01:00 PM - 01:50 PM

    Viterbi School of Engineering Student Affairs

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Location: Olin Hall of Engineering (OHE) - 122

    Audiences: Honors Program Students and all Faculty and Staff are invited to attend

    Contact: Erika Chua

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  • Superfund/CERCLA Cleanup Process Review and Project Experience

    Fri, Sep 28, 2007 @ 01:00 PM - 02:00 PM

    Sonny Astani Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars



    Speaker:Hsien W. Chen, Ph.D., P.E.
    Senior Project Director,
    Earth Tech, Inc.
    Lake Forest, CaliforniaAbstractThe Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act (CERCLA) a.k.a. Superfund program as it relates to site investigation, feasibility study, cleanup and site closure is introduced. Application of the CERCLA process to different sites including those listed as National Priority List (NPL), Base Realignment and Closure (BRAC) and the State Superfund sites is discussed. The current status of conducting human health and ecological risk assessments as the scientific basis for defining the risks and cleanup goals as well as regulatory agency oversight and public involvements are discussed. Specific project experience of the presenter is also used to augment the Superfund process evaluation.

    Location: Kaprielian Hall (KAP) - rielian Hall 209

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Evangeline Reyes

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  • MESA MPTI Followup

    Sat, Sep 29, 2007 @ 08:30 AM - 03:00 PM

    Viterbi School of Engineering Student Affairs

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Additional math and physics activities/lessons for high school and middle school teachers.

    Location: Von Kleinsmid Center For International & Public Affairs (VKC) - 152

    Audiences: MESA Summer MPTI Teacher Participants

    Contact: Larry Lim

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