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Events for September 12, 2016

  • Seminars in Biomedical Engineering

    Mon, Sep 12, 2016 @ 12:30 PM - 01:50 PM

    Alfred E. Mann Department of Biomedical Engineering

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Terry Sanger, MD, USC BME, Neurology, Biokinesiology Faculty, Dir Pediatric Movement Disorders Center

    Talk Title: TBA

    Location: Olin Hall of Engineering (OHE) - 122

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Mischalgrace Diasanta

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  • EE 598 Cyber-Physical Systems Seminar Series

    Mon, Sep 12, 2016 @ 02:00 PM - 03:00 PM

    Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Yasser Shoukry, Postdoctoral Scholar, UCLA/UC Berkeley /UPenn

    Talk Title: Secure State Estimation For Cyber Physical Systems Under Sensor Attacks: A Satisfiability Modulo Theory Approach

    Abstract: Motivated by the need to secure critical infrastructure against sensor attacks, in this talk I will focus on a problem known as "secure state estimation". It consists of estimating the state of a dynamical system when a subset of its sensors is arbitrarily corrupted by an adversary. Although of critical importance, this problem is combinatorial in nature since the subset of attacked sensors in unknown. Previous work in this area can be classified into two broad categories. The first category is based on numerical optimization techniques. These techniques are well suited to handle the continuous part of the problem, estimating the real-valued variable describing the state, if the combinatorial part of the problem has been solved. The second category is based on Boolean reasoning, which is well suited to handle the combinatorial part of the problem, if the continuous part of the problem has been solved. However, since we need to simultaneously solve the combinatorial and the continuous part of the secure state estimation problem, the existing approaches result in algorithms with worst case exponential time complexity.

    In this talk, I will present a novel and efficient algorithm for the secure state estimation problem that uses the lazy SMT approach in order to combine the power of both SAT solving as well as convex optimization. While SAT solving is used to perform the combinatorial search, convex optimization techniques are used to reason more efficiently about the real-valued state of the system and/or generating theory lemmas explaining conflicts in the combinatorial search. We show that by splitting the reasoning between the two domains (Booleans and Reals) and intermixing a powerful tool from each domain, we obtain a new suite of tools that scales more favorably compared to the previous techniques. I will start by discussing the simplest case when the underlying dynamics are linear, sensors are perfect (noiseless), and only data collected over a finite window is considered. I will then move forward by showing several extensions to handle noisy measurements, recursive implementations (data over infinite windows) and nonlinear dynamics.


    Biography: Yasser Shoukry is a Postdoctoral Scholar at the EECS Department at UC Berkeley, the EE Department at UCLA and the ESE Department at UPenn. He received the Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from UCLA in 2015 where he was affiliated with both the Cyber-Physical Systems Lab as well as the Networked and Embedded Systems Lab. Before joining UCLA, he spent four years as an R&D engineer in the industry of automotive embedded systems. His research interests include the design and implementation of secure- and privacy- aware cyber-physical systems by drawing on tools from embedded systems, control and optimization theory, and formal methods.

    Dr. Shoukry is the recipient of the Best Paper Award from the International Conference on Cyber-Physical Systems (ICCPS) in 2016. He is also the recipient of the UCLA EE Distinguished PhD Dissertation Award in 2016, the UCLA Chancellor's prize in 2011 and 2012, UCLA EE Graduate Division Fellowship in 2011 and 2012, and the UCLA EE Preliminary Exam Fellowship in 2012. In 2015, Dr. Shoukry led the UCLA/Caltech/CMU team to win the first place in the NSF Early Career Investigators (NSF-ECI) research challenge. His team represented the NSF-ECI in the NIST Global Cities Technology Challenge, an initiative designed to advance the deployment of Internet of Things (IoT) technologies within a smart city.


    Host: Paul Bogdan

    Location: 248

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Estela Lopez

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  • Professor Emeritus Michael Arbib: A Remarkable Trajectory - 55 Years of Brains, Machines and Mathematics

    Mon, Sep 12, 2016 @ 03:00 PM - 05:30 PM

    Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Professor Emeritus Michael Arbib, USC

    Talk Title: A Remarkable Trajectory - 55 Years of Brains, Machines and Mathematics

    Series: CS Keynote Series

    Abstract: In honor and celebration of his retirement and 30 years of service at USC, the Viterbi School of Engineering invites Michael A. Arbib to be the inaugural speaker in this series, to share the trajectory of his remarkable career.

    To attend, please RSVP by September 5th online at USC.EDU/ESVP (code: arbib). For questions, please contact Cristina Fong, Computer Science Department: 13.821.2981 - cristinf@usc.edu

    Biography: The thrust of Michael Arbib's work is expressed in the title of his first book, Brains, Machines and Mathematics (McGraw-Hill, 1964). The brain is not a computer in the current technological sense, but he has based his career on the argument that we can learn much about machines from studying brains, and much about brains from studying machines. He has thus always worked for an interdisciplinary environment in which computer scientists and engineers can talk to neuroscientists and cognitive scientists.

    His primary research focus is on the coordination of perception and action. This is tackled at two levels: via schema theory, which is applicable both in top-down analyses of brain function and human cognition as well as in studies of machine vision and robotics; and through the detailed analysis of neural networks, working closely with the experimental findings of neuroscientists on humans and monkeys. He is also engaged in research on the evolution of brain mechanisms for human language, pursuing the Mirror System Hypothesis that links language parity (the fact that what the speaker intends is roughly what the hearer understands) to the properties of the mirror system for grasping -- neurons active for both the execution and observation of actions -- to explain (amongst many other things) why human brains can acquire sign language as readily as speech.

    A new interest is working with architects to better understand the neuroscience of the architectural experience and to develop a new field of neuromorphic architecture, "brains for buildings".

    The author or editor of almost 40 books, Arbib has most recently edited "Who Needs Emotions? The Brain Meets the Robot" (with Jean-Marc Fellous, Oxford University Press, 2005) and "From Action to Language via the Mirror System" (Cambridge University Press, 2006).

    Host: CS Department

    Location: Ronald Tutor Hall of Engineering (RTH) - 526

    Audiences: Registration Required

    Contact: Assistant to CS chair

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  • Boeing Info Session

    Mon, Sep 12, 2016 @ 06:00 PM - 08:00 PM

    Viterbi School of Engineering Career Connections

    Workshops & Infosessions


    More information to come

    Location: Seeley G. Mudd Building (SGM) - 101

    Audiences: All Viterbi

    Contact: RTH 218 Viterbi Career Connections

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