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SUNMONTUEWEDTHUFRISAT
Events for September 06, 2013
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Meet USC: Admission Presentation, Campus Tour, & Engineering Talk
Fri, Sep 06, 2013
Viterbi School of Engineering Undergraduate Admission
Receptions & Special Events
This half day program is designed for prospective freshmen and family members. Meet USC includes an information session on the University and the Admission process; a student led walking tour of campus and a meeting with us in the Viterbi School. Meet USC is designed to answer all of your questions about USC, the application process and financial aid. Reservations are required for Meet USC. This program occurs twice, once at 8:30 a.m. and again at 12:30 p.m. Please visit https://esdweb.esd.usc.edu/unresrsvp/MeetUSC.aspx to check availability and make an appointment. Be sure to list an Engineering major as your "intended major" on the webform!
Location: Ronald Tutor Campus Center (TCC) - USC Admission Office
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Viterbi Admission
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2013 Welcome Luncheon
Fri, Sep 06, 2013 @ 11:00 AM - 01:30 PM
Mork Family Department of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science
Receptions & Special Events
WATCH IT LIVE! 2013 MFD Welcome.
Here is the link for Friday:
http://geromedia.usc.edu/Gerontology/Play/1f9440ad418c4dd3865928e1d2be42991dMore Information: 2013flyer.pdf
Location: Gerontology Auditorium
WebCast Link: http://geromedia.usc.edu/Gerontology/Play/1f9440ad418c4dd3865928e1d2be42991d
Audiences: Department Only
Contact: Ryan Choi
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AI Seminar
Fri, Sep 06, 2013 @ 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Information Sciences Institute
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Liang Huang, City University of New York (CUNY)
Talk Title: Scalable Training for Machine Translation Made Successful for the First Time
Abstract: While large-scale discriminative training has triumphed in many NLP problems, its definite success on machine translation has been largely elusive. Most recent efforts along this line are not scalable: they only train on the small dev set with an impoverished set of rather ââ¬Ådenseââ¬Â features. We instead present a very simple yet theoretically motivated approach by extending my recent framework of ââ¬Åviolation-fixing perceptronââ¬Â to the latent variable setting, and use forced decoding to compute the target derivations. Our method allows structured learning to scale, for the first time, to a large portion of the training data, which enables a rich set of sparse, lexicalized, and non-local features. Extensive experiments show very significant gains in BLEU (by at least +2.0) over MERT and PRO baselines with the help of over 20M sparse features.
Biography: Liang Huang is currently an Assistant Professor at the City University of New York (CUNY). He graduated in 2008 from Penn and has worked as a Research Scientist at Google and a Research Assistant Professor at USC/ISI. His work is mainly on the theoretical aspects (algorithms and formalisms) of computational linguistics, and related theoretical problems in machine learning. He has received a Best Paper Award at ACL 2008, several best paper nominations (ACL 2007, EMNLP 2008, and ACL 2010), two Google Faculty Research Awards (2010 and 2013), and a University Graduate Teaching Prize at Penn (2005).
Host: David Chiang
Location: Information Science Institute (ISI) - 6th floor conference room
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Kary LAU
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W.V.T. Rusch Engineering Honors Colloquium
Fri, Sep 06, 2013 @ 01:00 PM - 01:50 PM
USC Viterbi School of Engineering, Viterbi School of Engineering Student Affairs
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Peter MacLaggan, Project manager for the Carlsbad Desalination Project, Poseidon Water
Talk Title: The Carlsbad Desalination Project
Host: W.V.T. Rusch Engineering Honors Program
Location: Seeley G. Mudd Building (SGM) - 101
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Christine Viterbi Admission & Student Affairs
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Viterbi Student Affairs Open House
Fri, Sep 06, 2013 @ 01:00 PM - 03:00 PM
Viterbi School of Engineering Student Affairs
Receptions & Special Events
Come learn about the many resources Viterbi offers for students, including the VARC, CED, WIE, VCS, PDP, and more! Don't know what those acronyms mean? Then you should definitely stop by!
All Viterbi Student Affairs offices will have their doors wide open so you can check out where their offices are and ask any questions you might have.
Come to the RTH lobby to pick up your Viterbi Scavenger Hunt and a ticket for some 21 Choices frozen yogurt (for the first 200 students). Complete your scavenger hunt for a chance to win some free Viterbi Swag and visit every Viterbi office for frozen yogurt toppings!
Plus, all the First Year Excellence Advisors will be on hand! Stop by your First Year Exellence Advisor’s table for a BONUS entry into the swag give away.Location: Ronald Tutor Hall of Engineering (RTH) - RTH Lobby
Audiences: Undergrad
Contact: Steve Wolfsohn
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CENT Distinguished Speaker Series
Fri, Sep 06, 2013 @ 02:00 PM - 03:30 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Jerry M. Woodall, Distinguished Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of California, Davis
Talk Title: High Impact Alternative R&D at a University
Abstract: This presentation is about game changing alternative energy R&D at a university. This is not an easy career path, because if you have a great idea that will likely be a game changer, but not on some agency’s roadmap, you most likely won’t get funded. This is why most tenure track and mid-career professors chose to chase the money in-stead. This situation is particularly onerous for those working in the alternative energy fields such as photovoltaics (PVs), energy storage, and energy conversion. And because agencies fund “roadmaps” rather than fund track record and great practical ideas that could lead to “products” and not just mostly unread Ph.D theses, the US will not be among those nations who reap the economic benefits of the alternative energy industries. In spite of this situation I have chosen to work on high impact alternative energy projects. My presentation will cover the highlights of my self-defined alternative energy programs, which, if successful, will lead to new alternative energy products. These include a solar power conversion project and a project that uses bulk aluminum rich alloys for large scale and safe energy storage, which splits water to make hydrogen on-demand. My presentation will include a discussion of why, in my opinion, the government funding agencies are not supporting the academic community in performing high risk but high impact R&D so desperately needed by the US technology based economy.
Biography: Jerry M. Woodall, a National Medal of Technology Laureate, and Distinguished Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at UC Davis, received a B.S. in metallurgy in 1960 from MIT. In 1982, he was awarded a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Cornell University. He pioneered and patented the development of GaAs high efficiency IR LEDs, used in remote control and data link applications such as TV sets and IR LAN. This was followed by the invention and seminal work on gallium aluminum arsenide (GaAlAs) and GaAlAs/GaAs heterojunctions used in super-bright red LEDs and lasers found in, for example, CD players and short link optical fiber communications. He also pioneered and patented the GaAlAs/GaAs heterojunction bipolar transistor used in, for example, cellular phones. Also, using GaAs/InGaAs strained, non-lattice-matched heterostructures, he pioneered the “pseudomorphic” high electron mobility transistor (HEMT), a state-of-the-art high speed device widely used in cellular phones. He is cur-rently developing a high speed, high power HBT fabricated with merged III-V and III-N materials, small scale photo thermal solar energy converters, and developing a new company to market ultra high purity hydrogen and UHP alumina by splitting water with aluminum-gallium alloys.
Host: Center for Energy Nanoscience and Technology
More Information: Woodall.pdf
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 248
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Eliza Aceves
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Phd Defense - Arvind Antonio de Menezes Pereira
Fri, Sep 06, 2013 @ 02:00 PM - 04:00 PM
Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science
University Calendar
Title: Risk-aware path planning for autonomous underwater vehicles
PhD Candidate: Arvind Antonio de Menezes Pereira
Committee members:
Gaurav S. Sukhatme (Chair, Computer Science)
Stefan Schaal (Member, Computer Science)
David A. Caron (Outside member, Biological Sciences)
Date: Sept 6, 2013
Time: 2 pm
Location: RTH 406
Path planning is the process of generating an optimal sequence of waypoints from a start configuration to a desired goal configuration under constraints (e.g., avoiding obstacles, respecting time/energy budgets). In this thesis, we study the problem of risk-aware planning. Specifically, we design, develop, and experimentally validate optimal paths for Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs) in the open ocean in the presence of navigational hazards such as ships and other obstacles. A novel aspect of this work is the introduction of ocean current predictions to optimize planning in such settings. This is challenging because current predictions are typically available at non-uniform spatial resolution, noisy, and time-delayed. We designed three risk-aware planners that reason probabilistically about the uncertainty in ocean currents predictions. The minimum expected risk planner ensures that the AUV always reaches the goal, while minimizing risk along the way, Risk-aware Markov Decision Process-based planning uses stationary models over a short horizon, and trades off between goal-directed behavior and reducing risk. This is susceptible to finding sub-optimal policies due to stationarity. The non-stationary, risk-aware MDP makes use of variability in the currents where possible to overcome high-risk sections of paths on the way to the goal. In addition to these planners, we develop a taxonomy for risk-aware planning in dynamic settings. Finally, the planners described in this dissertation have been field tested at unprecedented levels to validate their practical utility (~2000 hours of testing at sea).
Location: Ronald Tutor Hall of Engineering (RTH) - 406
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Lizsl De Leon
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Engineer Your Study Group
Fri, Sep 06, 2013 @ 03:00 PM - 04:00 PM
Viterbi School of Engineering Student Affairs
Workshops & Infosessions
Come out and meet your Viterbi classmates. Bring your schedule and leave with a study group.
Location: Ronald Tutor Hall of Engineering (RTH) - 211
Audiences: Undergrad
Contact: Center for Engineering Diversity
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NL Seminar-Jeon-Hyung Kang:"LA-CTR: A Limited Attention Collaborative Topic Regression for Social Media"
Fri, Sep 06, 2013 @ 03:00 PM - 04:00 PM
Information Sciences Institute
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Jeon-Hyung Kang, USC/ISI
Talk Title: "LA-CTR: A Limited Attention Collaborative Topic Regression for Social Media"
Series: Natural Language Seminar
Abstract: Abstract: Probabilistic models can learn usersââ¬â¢ preferences from the history of their item adoptions on a social media site, and in turn, recommend new items to users based on learned preferences. However, current models ignore psychological factors that play an important role in shaping online social behavior. One such factor is attention, the mechanism that integrates perceptual and cognitive features to select the items the user will consciously process and may eventually adopt. Recent research has shown that people have finite attention, which constrains their online interactions, and that they divide their limited attention non-uniformly over other people. We propose a collaborative topic regression model that incorporates limited, non-uniformly divided attention. We show that the proposed model is able to learn more accurate user preferences than state-of-art models, which do not take human cognitive factors into account. Specifically we analyze voting on news items on the social news aggregator and show that our model is better able to predict held out votes than alternate models. Our study demonstrates that psycho-socially motivated models are better able to describe and predict observed behavior than models which only consider latent social structure and content.
Biography: Home Page:http://isi.edu/integration/people/kang/
Host: Yang Gao
More Info: http://nlg.isi.edu/nl-seminar/
Location: Information Science Institute (ISI) - 11th 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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Integrated Systems Seminar Series
Fri, Sep 06, 2013 @ 03:30 PM - 05:00 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Dr. Ken Cooper, Jet Propulsion Laboratory
Talk Title: Terahertz Imaging Radar for Personal Screening Applications
Abstract: A summary of the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s 675 GHz imaging radar will be presented, with an emphasis on several key design aspects that enable fast, reliable through-clothes imaging of person-borne concealed objects for standoff ranges out to 40 m. These include a frequency-modulated continuous-wave (FMCW) radar technique with a 30 GHz bandwidth to achieve sub-centimeter range resolution, software to compensate for signal distortion and generate clear imagery, a low-noise microwave chirp generator, and a high-performance 675 GHz transceiver. The radar’s optical design will also be described, which enables fast beam scanning for real-time frame rates of 4 Hz, as well as agile re-focusing over a large fractional range swath. Still faster speeds are on the horizon as multi-beam THz transceivers are developed.
Biography: Ken Cooper received an A.B. degree in physics from Harvard College in 1997, and a Ph.D. degree in physics from the California Institute of Technology in 2003. Following postdoctoral research in superconducting microwave devices, he joined the Jet Propulsion Laboratory as an RF Engineer in 2006. At JPL he has led an effort to develop terahertz imaging radars and transceiver arrays for national security applications. His research interests include submillimeter-wave radar, radiometry, spectroscopy, and device physics.
Host: Hossien Hashemi, Mike Chen, Mahta Moghaddam, Kunal Datta
More Info: http://mhi.usc.edu/activities/integrated-systems/
More Information: Ken Cooper_Flyer.pdf
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - EEB 248
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Danielle Hamra
Event Link: http://mhi.usc.edu/activities/integrated-systems/
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CEE Seminar
Fri, Sep 06, 2013 @ 04:00 PM - 05:00 PM
Sonny Astani Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Drs. Amy Childress and George Ban-Weiss, VSoE- Civil and Environmental Engineering
Talk Title: TBA
Abstract:
TBA
Location: John Stauffer Science Lecture Hall (SLH) - 102
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Evangeline Reyes
