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Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Events for September
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Department of Biomedical Engineering Systems Cellular-Molecular Bioengineering Distinguished Speaker Series
Fri, Sep 01, 2017 @ 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Alfred E. Mann Department of Biomedical Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Steven C. George, M.D., Ph.D., Professor, Department of Biomedical Engineering, University of California, Davis
Talk Title: "Organ-on-a-Chip" Technologies: Basic and Translational Studies in Cancer and Cardiovascular Biology
Series: Department of Biomedical Engineering Systems Cellular-Molecular Bioengineering Distinguished Speaker Series
Host: Keyue Shen, PhD
More Information: Steven George - flyer.pdf
Location: 145
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Mischalgrace Diasanta
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W.V.T. RUSCH ENGINEERING HONORS COLLOQUIUM
Fri, Sep 01, 2017 @ 01:00 PM - 02:00 PM
USC Viterbi School of Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: C. L. "Max" Nikias, President, University of Southern California
Talk Title: Lessons of Leadership from the Classics
Location: Henry Salvatori Computer Science Center (SAL) - 101
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Su Stevens
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Seminars in Biomedical Engineering
Mon, Sep 04, 2017 @ 12:30 PM - 01:50 PM
Alfred E. Mann Department of Biomedical Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: NO CLASS--LABOR DAY HOLIDAY, NO CLASS--LABOR DAY HOLIDAY
Talk Title: NO CLASS--LABOR DAY HOLIDAY
Host: Stacey Finley, PhD
Location: Olin Hall of Engineering (OHE) - 122
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Mischalgrace Diasanta
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CS Colloquium: Ian Goodfellow (Google) - Generative Adversarial Networks
Tue, Sep 05, 2017 @ 03:30 PM - 04:50 PM
Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Ian Goodfellow, Google
Talk Title: Generative Adversarial Networks
Series: NVIDIA Distinguished Lecture Series in Machine Learning
Abstract: This lecture satisfies requirements for CSCI 591: Computer Science Research Colloquium.
Generative adversarial networks (GANs) are machine learning models that are able to imagine new data, such as images, given a set of training data. They solve difficult approximate probabilistic computations using game theory. A generator network competes to fool a discriminator network in a game whose Nash equilibrium corresponds to recovering the probability distribution that generated the training data. GANs open many possibilities for machine learning algorithms.
Rather than associating input values in the training set with specific output values, GANs are able to learn to evaluate whether a particular output was one of many potential acceptable outputs or not.
Part of NVIDIA Distinguished Lecture Series in Machine Learning.
Biography: Ian Goodfellow (PhD in machine learning, University of Montreal, 2014) is a research scientist at Google. His research interests include most deep learning topics, especially generative models and machine learning security and privacy. He invented generative adversarial networks, was an influential early researcher studying adversarial examples, and is the lead author of the MIT Press textbook Deep Learning (www.deeplearningbook.org). He runs the Self-Organizing Conference on Machine Learning, which was founded at OpenAI in 2016.
Host: Yan Liu
Location: Henry Salvatori Computer Science Center (SAL) - 101
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Computer Science Department
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Epstein Institute Seminar, ISE 651
Tue, Sep 05, 2017 @ 03:30 PM - 04:50 PM
Daniel J. Epstein Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Dr. Lijuan Xu, Sr. Quantitative Analyst, Google
Talk Title: Being a Data Scientist in Tech
Host: Prof. Qiang Huang
More Information: September 5, 2017.pdf
Location: Ethel Percy Andrus Gerontology Center (GER) - GER 206
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Grace Owh
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Towards Accelerator-Rich Architectures and Systems
Thu, Sep 07, 2017 @ 02:00 PM - 03:15 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Zhenman Fang, UCLA
Talk Title: Towards Accelerator-Rich Architectures and Systems
Abstract: With Intel's $16.7B acquisition of Altera and the deployment of FPGAs in major cloud service providers including Microsoft and Amazon, we are entering a new era of customized computing. In future architectures and systems, it is anticipated that there will be a sea of heterogeneous accelerators customized for important application domains, such as machine learning and personalized healthcare, to provide better performance and energy-efficiency. Many research problems are still open, such as how to efficiently integrate accelerators into future chips and commodity datacenters, and how to program such accelerator-rich architectures and systems.
In this talk, I will first briefly explain how customized accelerators can achieve orders-of-magnitude performance improvement, based on our open-source simulator PARADE [ICCAD 2015, tutorials at ISCA 2015 & MICRO 2016]. Second, I will present our initial work on CPU-accelerator co-design, where we provide efficient and unified address translation support between CPU cores and accelerators [HPCA 2017 Best Paper Nominee]. It shows that a simple two-level TLB design for accelerators plus the host core MMU for accelerator page walking can be very efficient. On average, it achieves 7.6x speedup over the naïve IOMMU and there is only 6.4% performance gap to the ideal address translation. Finally, I will present the open-source Blaze system that provides programming and runtime support to enable easy and efficient FPGA accelerator deployment in datacenters [HotCloud 2016, ACM SOCC 2016]. Blaze abstracts accelerators-as-a-service, and bridges the gap between big data applications (e.g., Apache Spark programs) and emerging accelerators (e.g., FPGAs). By plugging a PCIe-based FPGA board into each CPU server, it can improve the system throughput by several folds for a range of applications.
Biography: Dr. Zhenman Fang is a postdoc in the Computer Science Department, UCLA, working with Prof. Jason Cong and Prof. Glenn Reinman. He is a member of the NSF/Intel funded multi-university Center for Domain-Specific Computing (CDSC) and the SRC/DARPA funded multi-university Center for Future Architectures Research (C-FAR). Zhenman received his PhD in June 2014 from Fudan University, China and spent the last 15 months of his PhD program visiting University of Minnesota at Twin Cities. Zhenman's research lies at the boundary of heterogeneous and energy-efficient computer architectures, big data workloads and systems, and system-level design automation. He has published 10+ papers in top venues that span across computer architecture (HPCA, TACO, ICS), design automation (DAC, ICCAD, FCCM, IEEE Design & Test), and cloud computing (ACM SOCC). He received several awards, including a postdoc fellowship from UCLA Institute of Digital Research and Education, a best paper nominee of HPCA 2017, a best demo award at the C-FAR center annual review. More details can be found in his personal website: https://sites.google.com/site/fangzhenman/.
Host: Xuehai Qian, x04459, xuehai.qian@usc.edu
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 132
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Gerrielyn Ramos
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The 2017 Albert Dorman Lecture Series
Thu, Sep 07, 2017 @ 03:30 PM - 05:00 PM
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: C. D. Mote, Jr., President of the National Academy of Engineering
Talk Title: Understanding and Executing Leadership
Biography:
Host: Lucio Soibelman
More Information: Mote Poster.pdf
Location: 526
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Kaela Berry
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CAIS Seminar: Drs. Milind Tambe & Eric Rice (University of Southern California) - AI for Social Good
Thu, Sep 07, 2017 @ 04:00 PM - 05:00 PM
Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Dr. Milind Tambe & Dr. Eric Rice, University of Southern California
Talk Title: AI for Social Good
Series: Center for AI in Society (CAIS) Seminar Series
Abstract: This lecture satisfies requirements for CSCI 591: Research Colloquium
How can AI be used for social good? Artificial intelligence has received an enormous amount of attention in the popular press over the past few years. Much of this press is negative, focusing on job loss due to automation or fears of weaponized AI. In this lecture, Drs. Tambe and Rice will share their vision for how AI and social work can come together in the 21st century to tackle some of the world's most vexing social issues. They will discuss how they created the USC Center for Artificial Intelligence in Society and its mission; and will share some of CAIS main areas of research, including homelessness, suicide prevention, substance abuse prevention, gang violence prevention, wildlife conservation, and counter-terrorism.
Biography: Drs. Milind Tambe and Eric Rice are the co-directors and co-founders of USC CAIS. Dr. Tambe is the Helen N. and Emmett H. Jones Professor in Viterbi School of Engineering and Dr. Rice is an associate professor in the Suzanne Dworak-Peck School of Social Work.
Host: Milind Tambe
Location: Seeley Wintersmith Mudd Memorial Hall (of Philosophy) (MHP) - 101
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Computer Science Department
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W.V.T. RUSCH ENGINEERING HONORS COLLOQUIUM
Fri, Sep 08, 2017 @ 01:00 PM - 02:00 PM
USC Viterbi School of Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Ellen Feldman, Fall 2013 Colloquium Moderator and PhD Candidate, California Institute of Technology
Talk Title: Treating Spinal Cord Injury via Electrical Spinal Cord Stimulation
Location: Henry Salvatori Computer Science Center (SAL) - 101
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Su Stevens
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Astani Civil and Environmental Engineering Seminar
Fri, Sep 08, 2017 @ 03:00 PM - 04:00 PM
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Professor Amir AghaKouchak, University of California, Irvine
Talk Title: Compound and Concurrent Climate Extremes: Detection, Modeling and Risk Analysis
More Information: AghaKouchak announcement.pdf
Location: Waite Phillips Hall Of Education (WPH) - B27
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Evangeline Reyes
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NL Seminar-1. IMPROVING LOW RESOURCE NEURAL MACHINE TRANSLATION 2. LANGUAGE-INDEPENDENT TRANSLATION OF OUT OF VOCABULARY WORDS
Fri, Sep 08, 2017 @ 03:00 PM - 04:00 PM
Information Sciences Institute
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Nelson Liu and Leon Cheung, USC/ISI
Talk Title: 1. IMPROVING LOW RESOURCE NEURAL MACHINE TRANSLATION 2. LANGUAGE-INDEPENDENT TRANSLATION OF OUT OF VOCABULARY WORDS
Series: Natural Language Seminar
Abstract: 1. Statistical models have outperformed neural models in machine translation, until recently, with the introduction of the sequence to sequence neural model. However, this model's performance suffers greatly when starved of bilingual parallel data. This talk will discuss several strategies that try to overcome this low resource challenge, including modifications to the sequence to sequence model, transfer learning, data augmentation, and the use of monolingual data.
2. Neural machine translation is effective for language pairs with large datasets, but falls short to traditional methods e.g. phrase or syntax-based machine translation in the low resource setting. However, these classic approaches struggle to translate out of vocabulary tokens, a limitation that is amplified when there is little training data. In this work, we augment a syntax-based machine translation system with a module that provides translations of out of vocabulary tokens. We present several language-independent strategies for translation of unknown tokens, and benchmark their accuracy on an intrinsic out of vocabulary translation task across a typologically diverse dataset of sixteen languages. Lastly, we explore the effects of using the module to add rules to a syntax-based machine translation system on overall translation quality.
Biography: Leon Cheung is a second year undergraduate from UC San Diego. This summer he has been working with Jon May and Kevin Knight to improve neural machine translation for low resource languages.
Nelson Liu is an undergraduate at the University of Washington, where he works with Professor Noah Smith. His research interests lie at the intersection of machine learning and natural language processing. Previously, he worked at the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence on machine comprehension. He is currently a summer intern at ISI working with Professors Kevin Knight and Jonathan May.
Host: Marjan Ghazvininejad and Kevin Knight
More Info: http://nlg.isi.edu/nl-seminar/
Location: Information Science Institute (ISI) - 11th Flr Conf Rm # 1135, Marina Del Rey
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Peter Zamar
Event Link: http://nlg.isi.edu/nl-seminar/
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Seminars in Biomedical Engineering
Mon, Sep 11, 2017 @ 12:30 PM - 01:50 PM
Alfred E. Mann Department of Biomedical Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: George Tolomiczenko, Ph.D., Health, Technology & Engineering Program (HTE@USC), Assistant Professor of Clinical Neurology, University of Southern California
Talk Title: Research Presentation & Career Path
Host: Stacey Finley, PhD
Location: Olin Hall of Engineering (OHE) - 122
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Mischalgrace Diasanta
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Center for Systems and Control (CSC@USC) and Ming Hsieh Institute for Electrical Engineering
Mon, Sep 11, 2017 @ 02:00 PM - 03:00 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Ramtin Pedarsani, University of California, Santa Barbara
Talk Title: Robust Scheduling for Flexible Stochastic Networks
Abstract: Modern large-scale stochastic systems face much demand and processing variability, and a key challenge is the design of efficient control and scheduling policies that are robust to these uncertainties. In this talk, I will present several robust scheduling policies for stochastic models with applications to emerging sectors such as data centers and intelligent transportation systems. In the first part, I present a robust scheduling policy with performance guarantee, for a novel stochastic model of job scheduling in data centers, where jobs are represented as directed acyclic graphs (DAG). I will then visit the long-standing open problem on the stability of of the longest-queue-first scheduling policy for multiclass open queueing networks, and resolve this problem for an important special case. In the second part of the talk, I focus on transportation networks. I develop the first exact analysis of fixed-time control for urban networks, and briefly mention a few opportunities and challenges in exploiting autonomous vehicles for enhancing network's performance.
Biography: Ramtin Pedarsani is an assistant professor in the ECE department at UCSB. He obtained his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences from UC Berkeley in 2015. He received his M.Sc. degree at EPFL in 2011 and his B.Sc. degree at the University of Tehran in 2009. His research interests include stochastic networks, information and coding theory, and transportation systems. He is the recipient of the best paper award in the IEEE International Conference on Communications (ICC) in 2014.
Host: Insoon Yang, x.02351, insoonya@usc.edu
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 248
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Gerrielyn Ramos
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SAE 549 Systems Architecting Guest Lecture
Mon, Sep 11, 2017 @ 03:30 PM - 06:30 PM
Systems Architecting and Engineering, USC Viterbi School of Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Terry Bahill, Emeritus Professor of Systems Engineering and Biomedical Engineering, University of Arizona
Talk Title: Part A The Science of Baseball, A Modeling Perspective; Part B Tradeoff Studies
Series: SAE Distinguished Speaker Series
Abstract: The first part of the talk is on the science of baseball and the complex models needed to analyze bat and ball collisions. Collisions between baseballs, softballs and bats are complex and therefore their models are complex. The purpose of the first talk is to show how complex these collisions can be, while still being modeled using only Newton's principles and the conservation laws of physics. This talk presents models for the speed and spin of balls and bats. These models and equations for bat and ball collisions are intended for use by high school and college physics students, engineering students, the baseball analytics community and, most importantly, students of the science of baseball. These models use only simple Newtonian principles and the conservation laws to explain simple bat and ball collision configurations. These models are used to show the necessary sixteen tasks in the modeling process.
The second part of the talk is on tradeoff studies. Tradeoff studies are a part of decision analysis and resolution (DAR). When the decision is one of selecting the preferred alternatives from amongst many alternatives, and the alternatives are to be examined in parallel, then the problem is amenable to a tradeoff study. Tradeoff studies address a range of problems from selecting high level system architecture to selecting commercial off the shelf hardware or software. Tradeoff studies are the typical outputs of formal evaluation processes. Nevertheless, even if the mathematics and utility curves are done correctly, care still needs to be exercised in doing a tradeoff study, because it is difficult to overcome mental mistakes. This talk will discuss mental mistakes in tradeoff studies and offer suggestions for ameliorating their occurrence.
Biography: Terry Bahill is an Emeritus Professor of Systems Engineering and of Biomedical Engineering at the University of Arizona in Tucson. He served as a Lieutenant in the United States Navy. He received his Ph.D. in electrical engineering and computer science from the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of eight engineering books and over two hundred and fifty papers, over one hundred of them in peer reviewed scientific journals. Bahill has worked with dozens of high tech companies presenting seminars on Systems Engineering, working on system development teams and helping them to describe their Systems Engineering processes. He holds a U.S. patent for the Bat Chooser, a system that computes the Ideal Bat Weight for individual baseball and softball batters. He was elected to the Omega Alpha Association, the systems engineering honor society. He received the Sandia National Laboratories Gold President's Quality Award. He is a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), of Raytheon Missile Systems, of the International Council on Systems Engineering (INCOSE) and of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). He is the Founding Chair Emeritus of the INCOSE Fellows Committee. His picture is in the Baseball Hall of Fame exhibition Baseball as America. You can view this picture at http://sysengr.engr.arizona.edu/ .
Host: Prof. Azad Madni, Executive Director, Systems Architecting and Engineering Program
Location: Ronald Tutor Hall of Engineering (RTH) - 217
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: James Moore II
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Systems Engineering Leadership Series
Tue, Sep 12, 2017 @ 12:00 PM - 02:00 PM
Systems Architecting and Engineering, USC Viterbi School of Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Dr. Garud Iyengar , Department Chair and Professor, Department of Industrial Engineering and Operations Research, Columbia University
Talk Title: Modeling Systemic Risk
Series: SERC Talks
Abstract: Systemic risk refers to the risk of collapse of an entire complex system as a result of the actions taken by the individual component entities or agents that comprise the system. Systemic risk is an issue of great concern in modern financial markets as well as, more broadly, in the management of complex business and engineering systems. In this talk, we will survey our work on modeling systemic risk. We will present an axiomatic framework for analysis of outcomes across agents in the system and over scenarios of nature, a structural model for systemic risk that introduces dynamics into the analysis, and a signed directed graphs (SDG) model for systemic risk that is inspired by work in process systems engineering.
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The Systems Leadership Series is a series of interactive conversations with leading systems thinkers who explore and examine the nature and complexity of systems that modern society depends upon. The series is an unparalleled learning opportunity as prominent speakers come to share cutting-edge ideas, leadership styles and personal philosophies with students and faculty members.
Biography: Garud Iyengar is a Professor in the Industrial Engineering and Operations Research Department in the School of Engineering and Applied Science at Columbia University. He received his B. Tech. in Electrical Engineering from IIT Kanpur, and an M.S. and Ph.D. in electrical engineering from Stanford University. His research interests are broadly in information theory, control and optimization. His published works span a diverse range of fields, including information theory, applied mathematics, computer science, operations research, economics and financing engineering. His current projects focus on the areas of large scale portfolio selection, systemic risk management, quantitative marketing, smart grids, public health and systems biology.
Host: System Engineering Research Center
More Info: https://www.stevens.edu/events/modeling-systemic-risk
Webcast: https://stevensinstitute-events.webex.com/mw3100/mywebex/default.do?nomenu=true&siteurl=stevensinstitute-events&service=6&rnd=0.06171461554157853&main_url=https%3A%2F%2Fstevensinstitute-events.webex.com%2Fec3100%2Feventcenter%2Fevent%2FeventAction.do%3FthLocation: • Online via WebEX
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: James Moore II
Event Link: https://www.stevens.edu/events/modeling-systemic-risk
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Epstein Institute Seminar, ISE 651
Tue, Sep 12, 2017 @ 03:30 PM - 04:50 PM
Daniel J. Epstein Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Dr. Shan Liu, Assistant Professor, University of Washington
Talk Title: Operations Research in Medical Decision Making: Models and Insights for Depression Care Management
Host: Prof. Sze-chuan Suen
More Information: September 12, 2017.pdf
Location: Ethel Percy Andrus Gerontology Center (GER) - GER 206
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Grace Owh
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The Connected Vehicle Revolution
Tue, Sep 12, 2017 @ 05:30 PM - 07:30 PM
Systems Architecting and Engineering, USC Viterbi School of Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Kay Das, GPS Program Manager and Technical Director at LinQuest Corporation in Los Angeles (retired)
Talk Title: The Connected Vehicle Revolution
Abstract: A light-hearted but critical look at the Connected Vehicle revolution. There is currently much on-going activity in the research and design of systems to enhance the safety of vehicular traffic on roads and highways. These include vehicle-to-vehicle based and vehicle-to-infrastructure based electronics systems with extension to personal devices. These systems need to work collaboratively in an intelligent and reconfigurable network environment characterized by multiple localized and dynamically changing motion control loops which include each individual vehicle driver (and pedestrian). Systems will comprise a mix of existing and new technologies such as laser, imaging, computer vision, radar, cellular, WiFi, GPS, millimetric Waves, and others. System complexity is very high in order to deliver and sustain the required levels of reliability. A range of products and systems will compete for market entry from diverse developers and nations. Compliance with a safety culture within product development, such as directed by the ISO 26262 cocoon, is desireable. Safety needs to be regarded as an integral and critical element in system, software, hardware, and device/sensor design. A significant challenge also exists in validating prototypes and final systems productized for market entry. The cost of failure is high as human life is in the loop. This presentation reviews some of the challenges and offers some directions for this burgeoning industry propelled by developments ranging from Shannon's Law and Moore's Law to the evolving Internet of Things and 5G cellular communications. Management of systems research and development with frugality, without over-design, and with a holistic approach on a scale probably never demanded before, is required.
Please RSVP at the event link by noon September 5th to facilitate event registration and planning, foreign nationals by August 29th.
DIRECTIONS TO THE AEROSPACE CORPORATION
From the 105 Freeway traveling WEST:
1. Take the exit towards 405 South
2. Before getting onto the 405 Freeway, take the El Segundo Blvd exit
3. At the bottom of the ramp, turn left (west)
4. Turn right on Aviation Blvd.
5. Bldg. D8 will be on the third building on the Right, just past the discount bakery.
The facility is the third building from the corner of Aviation and El Segundo, just north of the discount bakery outlet. The facility has 4 gates, but only the southern-most gate is open. Identify yourself to the security guard as attending the INCOSE meeting. You can park where Security directs and enter through the lobby at the center of the building where the flag poles are. Knock on the first of the double doors, and someone will open the door for you. The handicap ramp is on the north side and can be reached by driving all the way around the back of the building. Inform the security guard if you plan to use that ramp.
Biography: Kay Das was GPS Program Manager and Technical Director at LinQuest Corporation in Los Angeles from 2007 to 2013 where he additionally led new business development thrusts in the commercial and automotive safety markets. He has previously held responsibilities as R&D Director for STMicroelectronics' Asia Pacific region. He is a winner of a Singapore Government National Award for "The Initiation and Expansion of High-value R&D and Promotion of Partnerships." He has built and led teams in different parts of the world and managed the development of diverse silicon-based signal processing systems over 40 years in industry. His current pursuits are the application of communication (such as 5G/ DSRC) and location technologies (such as GPS/ GNSS) to the Connected Vehicle revolution. He holds a MS in Electronics Systems from the Cranfield Institute of Technology, UK. His pursuits in retirement other than Connected Vehicle include amateur astronomy, Internet radio, and he is a professional musician. He is an IEEE Life Member and a member of several societies.
Host: The Aerospace Corporation (Venue); INCOSE-Los Angeles (Event)
More Info: http://events.constantcontact.com/register/event?llr=l4ihvgeab&oeidk=a07ee505f1dd3856d34
Location: The Aerospace Corporation, Building D8/1010, 200 N. Aviation, El Segundo, CA
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Michael Do
Event Link: http://events.constantcontact.com/register/event?llr=l4ihvgeab&oeidk=a07ee505f1dd3856d34
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Epstein Department, Guest Speaker Event
Wed, Sep 13, 2017 @ 01:00 PM - 02:00 PM
Daniel J. Epstein Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Dr. Ricardo Valerdi, SpaceX and Associate Professor, University of Arizona
Talk Title: Cost Estimation for Systems Engineering
Host: Dr. Julie Higle
More Information: Valerdi_flyer.pdf
Location: Ethel Percy Andrus Gerontology Center (GER) - GER 206
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Grace Owh
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Center for Cyber-Physical Systems and Internet of Things and Ming Hsieh Institute for Electrical Engineering Joint Seminar Series on Cyber-Physical Systems
Wed, Sep 13, 2017 @ 02:00 PM - 03:00 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Nikos Arechiga, Toyota Research Institute
Talk Title: Scalable Automatic Reasoning in Model-Based Development
Abstract: Recent progress in vehicle autonomy and robotics has increased the importance of system assurance, ranging from safety to security concerns. These assurances require systems that are able to reason about large and complex system designs, often containing large lookup tables as well as AI components.
This talk presents a general-purpose technique that leverages machine learning to automatically learn logical antecedents and consequents to simplify a complex formal verification task.
We also describe a specialization of this technique that has been used within Toyota to reason about software with large lookup tables, including a public benchmark.
Finally, we look to the future and describe emerging research directions in automatic reasoning.
Biography: Dr. Nikos Arechiga graduated with a Ph. D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering at Carnegie Mellon working with Professor Bruce Krogh. His graduate work touched on automatic inference of barrier certificates to simplify proofs of safety as well as techniques for provably-correct controller synthesis.
He has been working at Toyota for two years, and has been involved with developing scalable reasoning techniques to address complex models with lookup tables, and is recently considering the problem of reasoning about AI components.
Host: Paul Bogdan
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 248
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Estela Lopez
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Aerospace & Mechanical Engineering Seminar
Wed, Sep 13, 2017 @ 03:30 PM - 04:30 PM
Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Birendra Jha, Assistant Professor/USC Viterbi School of Engineering
Talk Title: Coupled Flow and Geomechanics of Petroleum Reservoirs, Aquifers, and Faults
Abstract: Can we inject and produce fluids out of subsurface reservoirs without causing damaging earthquakes? Can we design and control hydraulic fracturing or "fracking" of rocks to maximize productivity but minimize risks? Will underground sequestration of CO2 lead to induced seismicity and eventually CO2 leakage along faults? Did Indian monsoon rainfall have something to do with the Nepal earthquake? These are some of the questions facing the petroleum industry, geothermal industry, environmental scientists, and the geoscience community-at-large. One way to approach these questions, and the approach that we follow, is physics-based modeling of the underlying processes of fluid flow, rock deformation, and faulting or fracturing. We specialize in computational modeling and simulation of continuum scale coupled flow, transport and geomechanical processes. We develop mathematically rigorous and computationally efficient numerical frameworks and conduct lab experiments to understand, forecast and eventually control these processes in nature. I will present some of the salient features of our computational framework that includes a finite element-finite volume method to solve the flow and deformation problems sequentially. Then I will show results from a few studies that attempt to answer the questions posed in the beginning.
Biography: Birendra Jha is an Assistant Professor of Petroleum Engineering in the Mork Family Department of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science at USC. He received his masters in Petroleum Engineering from Stanford University and PhD in Civil and Environmental Engineering from MIT. He has several years of experience in the petroleum industry in India and US. In the Geosystems Engineering and Multiphysics Lab (gemlab.usc.edu) at USC, Birendra's group conducts research in computational and experimental geomechanics funded by the Department of Energy and the Rose Hills Foundation.
Host: Department of Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering
Location: Seaver Science Library (SSL) - 150
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Ashleen Knutsen
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High-Level Program Optimizations for Data Analytics
Thu, Sep 14, 2017 @ 02:00 PM - 03:15 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Yufei Ding, University of California at Santa Barbara
Talk Title: High-Level Program Optimizations for Data Analytics
Abstract: Many modern applications, especially those data analytics, often spend a large number of cycles on unnecessary computations. To find a document most similar to a query document, for instance, these applications typically would need to examine hundreds of thousands of other documents (that are not the most similar ones) in the dataset. Such redundant computations have been hidden in the useful instructions of the applications and are elusive for traditional compiler-based code optimizations. My work harnesses these hidden but significant optimization opportunities by raising the level of program optimizations from implementations to algorithms, and from instructions to formulas.
Biography:
Yufei Ding will soon join the department of Computer Science, University of California at Santa Barbara as an assistant professor. She received her Ph.D. in the Computer Science from North Carolina State University, and B.S. and M.S. in Physics from University of Science and Technology of China and The College of William and Mary respectively. In 2012, she started her Ph.D. study in Computer Science. Her research interest resides at the intersection of Compiler Technology and (Big) Data Analytics, with a focus on enabling HighI-Level Program Optimizations for data analytics and other data-intensive applications. Yufei has been actively publishing in major venues in both computer systems and data analytics areas, such as ASPLOS, PLDI, OOPSLA, VLDB, ICDE, and ICML. She was the receipt of NCSU Computer Science Outstanding Research Award in 2016.
Host: Xuehai Qian, x04459, xuehai.qian@usc.edu
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 132
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Gerrielyn Ramos
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CAIS Seminar: Dr. David Traum (University of Southern California) - Conversations with History: The New Dimensions in Testimony Project
Thu, Sep 14, 2017 @ 04:00 PM - 05:00 PM
Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Dr. David Traum, University of Southern California
Talk Title: Conversations with History: The New Dimensions in Testimony Project
Series: Center for AI in Society (CAIS) Seminar Series
Abstract: This lecture satisfies requirements for CSCI 591: Research Colloquium
One of the best and most engaging methods of learning about history, and particularly implications for future behavior, is direct conversation with those who can give a first person account. The USC Institute for Creative Technologies (ICT) has developed "time-offset interaction" technology to allow interactive conversations with recordings of an eyewitness to history, so that much of this experience can be had without the synchronous participation of the subject. I will describe and demo the use of this technology in the New Dimensions in Testimony project - a collaboration with the USC Shoah Foundation and Conscience Display, in which people can interact with Holocaust survivors in this manner. Time permitting, I will also present its use in a similar project to increase awareness of the consequences of sexual assault in the military.
Biography: David Traum is the Director for Natural Language Research at the USC Institute for Creative Technologies and a research faculty member of the Department of Computer Science at USC. He leads the Natural Language Dialogue Group at ICT; his research focus is on interactive dialogue between humans and machines.
Host: Milind Tambe
Location: Seeley Wintersmith Mudd Memorial Hall (of Philosophy) (MHP) - 101
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Computer Science Department
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Internet of Skills-Enabled by 5G Decoupled Uplink & Downlink
Fri, Sep 15, 2017 @ 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Mischa Dohler, King's College London, UK
Talk Title: Internet of Skills-Enabled by 5G Decoupled Uplink & Downlink
Abstract: With the emergence of an ultra-responsive and reliable 5G 'Tactile Internet,' advanced techniques in robotics and artificial intelligence, we advocate for the emergence of an 'Internet of Skills' which allows the "transmission of labor" globally. It will invoke an important shift from content-delivery to skillset-delivery networks, where engineers would service cars or surgeons performing critical operations anywhere on the planet. For this to work, however, we require some fundamental changes to wireless communications systems. This presentation will look at the disruptive technology approaches in wireless 5G, notably the impact of decoupling up and downlinks; as well as the impact it has on different industry verticals.
Biography: Mischa Dohler is full Professor in Wireless Communications at King's College London, driving cross-disciplinary research and innovation in technology, sciences and arts. He is the Director of the Centre for Telecommunications Research, co-founder of the pioneering smart city company Worldsensing, Fellow of the IEEE, the Royal Academy of Engineering and the Royal Society of Arts (RSA), and a Distinguished Member of Harvard Square Leaders Excellence.
He is a frequent keynote, panel and tutorial speaker, and has received numerous awards. He has pioneered several research fields, contributed to numerous wireless broadband, IoT/M2M and cyber security standards, holds a dozen patents, organized and chaired numerous conferences, was the Editor-in-Chief of two journals, has more than 200 highly-cited publications, and authored several books.
He acts as policy, technology and entrepreneurship adviser, examples being Richard Branson's Carbon War Room, former Minister David Willetts' 8 Great Technology Fund, UK Regulator Ofcom, UK Ministries, No 10, EPSRC ICT Strategy Advisory Team, European Commission, Tech London Advocate, ISO Smart City working group, and various start-ups.
He is also an entrepreneur; composer & pianist with 5 albums on iTunes and an artist-verified Spotify account; as well as fluent in 6 languages. He has talked twice at TEDx. He had coverage by national and international TV & radio, and his contributions have featured on the BBC, the Wall Street Journal and many others.
Host: Urbashi Mitra, ubli@usc.edu, EEB 536, x04667
Location: 248
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Gerrielyn Ramos
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W.V.T. RUSCH ENGINEERING HONORS COLLOQUIUM
Fri, Sep 15, 2017 @ 01:00 PM - 02:00 PM
USC Viterbi School of Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Mike Lopez,, Project Manager, Cianna Medical, Inc.
Talk Title: Engineering Medical Devices
Location: Henry Salvatori Computer Science Center (SAL) - 101
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Su Stevens
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Ming Hsieh Institute Seminar Series on Integrated Systems
Fri, Sep 15, 2017 @ 01:30 PM - 03:30 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Dr. Vesna Radisic, Principle Scientist, Northrop Grumman
Talk Title: Engineered and Full 3D RF Materials
Host: Profs. Hossein Hashemi, Mike Chen, Mahta Moghaddam, and Dina El-Damak
More Information: MHI Seminar Series IS -Vesna Radisic.pdf
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 132
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Jenny Lin
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Astani Civil and Environmental Engineering Seminar
Fri, Sep 15, 2017 @ 03:00 PM - 04:00 PM
Sonny Astani Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Dr. James Tsai, Georgia Tech, Civil and Environmental Engineering
Talk Title: Smart Cities Transportation Asset Health Condition Assessment and Management Using Emerging 3D Technologies and Artificial Intelligence
More Information: Tsai Announcement.pdf
Location: Waite Phillips Hall Of Education (WPH) - B27
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Evangeline Reyes
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Seminars in Biomedical Engineering
Mon, Sep 18, 2017 @ 12:30 PM - 01:50 PM
Alfred E. Mann Department of Biomedical Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Noah Malmstadt, Ph.D., Founder, ReoLab, Professor, University of Southern California
Talk Title: Research Presentation & Career Path
Host: Stacey Finley, PhD
Location: Olin Hall of Engineering (OHE) - 122
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Mischalgrace Diasanta
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Center for Systems and Control (CSC@USC) and Ming Hsieh Institute for Electrical Engineering
Mon, Sep 18, 2017 @ 02:00 PM - 03:00 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Andrzej Banaszuk, Andrew Sparks, and Fu Lin, United Technologies Research Center
Talk Title: Systems and Control Research at United Technologies Research Center
Abstract: This presentation will give a broad overview of research at UTRC's Systems Department, with particular focus on the areas of autonomous and intelligent systems, robotics, and control of complex systems. The research is conducted by a diverse team of researchers in dynamical systems, advanced control, applied mathematics, and human factors. Autonomous and intelligent systems research for aerial and ground robotics includes intelligent system architecture, human-machine systems, perception, collaborative motion planning with dynamic collision avoidance, manipulation, and formal verification. Research for large-scale, complex, and interconnected systems includes systematic methods to functionally decompose complex, interconnected systems to inform control architecture as well as approaches to sparse and distributed control. The presentation will conclude with a discussion of existing and future career and internship opportunities in the broad area of autonomous and intelligent systems, controls, and robotics.
Biography: http://csc.usc.edu/seminars/2017Fall/banaszuk_sparks_lin.html
Host: Mihailo Jovanovic, mihailo@usc.edu
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 132
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Gerrielyn Ramos
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CS Colloquium: Julian McAuley (UCSD) - Structured Output Models of Recommendations, Activities, and Behavior
Tue, Sep 19, 2017 @ 03:30 PM - 04:50 PM
Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Julian McAuley, University of California, San Diego
Talk Title: Structured Output Models of Recommendations, Activities, and Behavior
Series: Visa Research Machine Learning Seminar Series hosted by USC Machine Learning Center
Abstract: This lecture satisfies requirements for CSCI 591: Computer Science Research Colloquium.
Predictive models of human behavior--and in particular recommender systems--learn patterns from large volumes of historical activity data, in order to make personalized predictions that adapt to the needs, nuances, and preferences of individuals. Models may take incredibly complex data as *input*, ranging from text, images, social networks, or sequence data. However, the *outputs* they are trained to predict--clicks, purchases, transactions, etc.--are typically simple, numerical quantities, in order for the problem to be cast in terms of traditional supervised learning frameworks.
In this talk, we discuss possible extensions to such personalized, predictive models of human behavior so that they are capable of predicting complex structured *outputs*. For example, rather than training a model to predict what content a user might interact with, we could predict how they would react to unseen content, in the form of text they might write. Or, rather than predicting whether a user would purchase an existing product, we could predict the characteristics or attributes of the types of products that *should* be created.
Biography: Julian McAuley has been an Assistant Professor in the Computer Science Department at the University of California, San Diego since 2014. Previously he was a postdoctoral scholar at Stanford University after receiving his PhD from the Australian National University in 2011. His research is concerned with developing predictive models of human behavior using large volumes of online activity data.
Host: Yan Liu
Location: Henry Salvatori Computer Science Center (SAL) - 101
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Computer Science Department
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Epstein Institute Seminar, ISE 651
Tue, Sep 19, 2017 @ 03:30 PM - 04:50 PM
Daniel J. Epstein Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Dr. Tuo Zhao, Assistant Professor, Georgia Institute of Technology
Talk Title: Compute Faster and Learn Better: Machine Learning via Nonconvex Model-based Optimization
Host: Prof. Meisam Razaviyayn
More Information: September 19, 2017.pdf
Location: Ethel Percy Andrus Gerontology Center (GER) - GER 206
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Grace Owh
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INCOSE Webinar
Wed, Sep 20, 2017 @ 08:00 AM - 09:00 PM
Systems Architecting and Engineering, USC Viterbi School of Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Rick Dove, CEO, Paradigm Shift International
Talk Title: Agile Systems & Processes -- Risk Management and Mitigation
Series: INCOSE Speaker Series
Abstract: To be effective, systems/processes have to mate well with their operational environments. Operational environments are not static, they react to disturbances and evolve with opportunity and risk. Inserting a system into an environment is a disturbance. Sustaining a system in a dynamic environment requires compatible evolution. The environment is the problem space the system will occupy. Understanding the requirements for a compatible-to-the-space solution is best done before system functional requirements shape an incompatible path. Given enough understanding about the problem, effective solution requirements and features becomes (almost) obvious. The problem shapes and constrains effective solution. But how do we characterize the environment as a dynamic problem space and develop solution-response requirements; and then, how do we structure a solution for risk-mitigating agility? This webinar introduces methods for dynamic problem-space characterization, and reviews companion methods for risk-mitigating solution-space agility.
Note that the webinar is a combination of PowerPoint slides and audio. You need to set your browser to the url listed below to see the slides and also dial into the phone number below to hear the audio. We are using Webex for this webinar. Please note that you can now access the webinar using mobile devices. There are 300 virtual seats available for the webinar. They are available on a first-come, first-served basis.
Event number: 595 766 920
Event password: INCOSE104
Primary Access Telephone Number:
USA/Canada: 1-719-325-2630 (toll) 1-855-747-8824 (toll free)
Guest Pass Code: 434 812 4177
Webex can be used to record meetings. By participating in this meeting, you agree that your communications may be monitored or recorded at any time during the meeting.
Biography: Rick Dove is a leading researcher, practitioner, and educator of fundamental principles for agile enterprise, agile systems, and agile development processes. In 1991 he initiated the global interest in agility as co-PI on the seminal 21st Century Manufacturing Enterprise Strategy project at Lehigh University. Subsequently he organized and led collaborative research at the DARPA-funded Agility Forum, involving 250 organizations and 1,000 participants in workshop discovery of fundamental enabling principles for agile systems and processes. He is CEO of Paradigm Shift International, specializing in agile systems research, engineering, and education; and is an adjunct professor at Stevens Institute of Technology teaching graduate courses in agile and self-organizing systems. He chairs the INCOSE working groups for Agile Systems and Systems Engineering, and for Systems Security Engineering, and is the leader of the current INCOSE Agile Systems Engineering Life Cycle Model Discovery Project. He is an INCOSE Fellow, and the author of Response Ability - the Language, Structure, and Culture of the Agile Enterprise.
Host: Andy Pickard, INCOSE Corporate Advisory Board
More Info: http://www.incose.org/docs/default-source/events-documents/Webinars/incose-webinar-104-invitationdacbed8472db67488e78ff000036190a.pdf?sfvrsn=0
Webcast: https://incoseevents.webex.com/incoseevents/onstage/g.php?MTID=eb39bd106d4bcd7731509d2bdecf9646dLocation: Online via WebEX
WebCast Link: https://incoseevents.webex.com/incoseevents/onstage/g.php?MTID=eb39bd106d4bcd7731509d2bdecf9646d
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: James Moore II
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Center for Cyber-Physical Systems and Internet of Things and Ming Hsieh Institute for Electrical Engineering Joint Seminar Series on Cyber-Physical Systems
Wed, Sep 20, 2017 @ 02:00 PM - 03:00 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: BaekGyu Kim, Toyota InfoTechnology Center
Talk Title: Test Specification and Generation for Connected and Autonomous Vehicle in Virtual Road Environment
Abstract: The trend of connected / autonomous features adds significant complexity to the traditional automotive systems. In order to improve driving safety and comfort, vehicles are expected to drive autonomously and/or to communicate with each other and infrastructures. Such complexity makes engineers harder to test correctness, performance or effectiveness of those driving features in the physical environment. In this talk, we introduce a virtual test framework that utilizes existing visualization engines (e.g., Unity3D, Unreal Engine or Prescan). In this test framework, a system component is integrated with a virtual vehicle that can be tested under a wide range of virtual road environments to overcome the limitation of the physical testing. In order to build such test environments, we introduce a formal way to specify geometric and behavioral aspects of the road environments using SMT constraints (Satisfiability Modulo Theories) and timed automata. We also introduce a systematic way to generate those road environments from the formal specification based on several test criteria. Finally, we show the applicability of the proposed road environment generation method using adaptive cruise control (an example of autonomous features) and right-turn pedestrian warning system (an example of connected features).
Biography: BaekGyu Kim earned B.S. and M.S. from Kyungpook National University in South Korea in 2007 and 2009, and earned Ph.D. in computer science from University of Pennsylvania in 2015. His research interest is applying various formal techniques to build safety-critical real-time embedded systems according to the model-based development paradigm. His doctoral dissertation topic was to design model-based implementation framework to assure the safety of infusion pump systems (medical device) as a part of Generic Infusion Pump project. After joining Toyota InfoTechnology Center, he started applying those techniques to analyze correctness and effectiveness of automotive systems.
Host: Paul Bogdan
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 248
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Estela Lopez
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Aerospace & Mechanical Engineering Seminar
Wed, Sep 20, 2017 @ 03:30 PM - 04:30 PM
Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: J. Michael McCarthy, Professor/UC Irvine
Talk Title: Design of Linkage Systems to Draw Specified Curves
Abstract: Kinematic synthesis is a set of mathematical techniques to calculate the dimensions of a mechanism or robot to achieve a desired task. Since the time of James Watt, whose "parallel motion generator" made the double-acting steam engine practical, engineers and mathematicians have studied curve-drawing linkages for practical as well as theoretical purposes. Recent mathematical results prove that such linkages exist for every algebraic curve, and this talk presents an overview of a variety of techniques to design these linkages. One interesting result is that the equations for kinematic synthesis rapidly expand beyond the ability of current computers to solve completely. On the other hand, because Bezier curves can be written as parameterized trigonometric curves, there is a way to design relatively simple linkage systems that draw Bezier approximations to arbitrary curves.
Biography: Michael McCarthy is the Director of UCI's Performance Engineering Program, having completed a eight year term as the Henry Samueli Professor and Director of the Center for Engineering Science in Design at the University of California, Irvine, which supports the design and execution of team engineering projects across the School of Engineering. He received his Ph.D. at Stanford University, and has taught at Loyola Marymount University and the University of Pennsylvania before joining UCI in 1986.
He has over 200 publications and five books including The Geometric Design of Linkages (Springer 2000, 2nd Ed. 2010). He has served as the Editor-in-Chief of the ASME Journal of Mechanical Design (2002-2007) and is the founding Editor-in-Chief of the ASME Journal of Mechanisms and Robotics (2007-2014). His research team is responsible for the Sphinx, Synthetica and MecGen software packages, which extend computer-aided design to spherical and spatial linkage systems and integrate this process with geometric modeling. He has organized and presented tutorials on the design of linkages and robotic systems at ASME and IEEE conferences, including the NSF sponsored 2012 Workshop on 21st Century Kinematics.
He is a Fellow of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME), and has received the 2009 ASME Machine Design Award, the 2011 ASME Mechanisms and Robotics Award, and the 2013 Robert E. Abbott Lifetime Service Award from the Design Engineering Division of ASME International. At the 2015 Mechanisms and Robotics Conference, he and his co-author received the A.T. Yang Memorial Award in Theoretical Kinematics for their paper on the design of a linkage system that reproduces the flapping motion of a bird in flight.
Host: Department of Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering
Location: Seaver Science Library (SSL) - 150
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Ashleen Knutsen
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Dramatic Improvements in Pre-silicon and Post-silicon Validation of Digital Systems with Quick Error Detection and Formal Methods
Thu, Sep 21, 2017 @ 02:00 PM - 03:00 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Clark Barrett, Stanford University
Talk Title: Dramatic Improvements in Pre-silicon and Post-silicon Validation of Digital Systems with Quick Error Detection and Formal Methods
Abstract: Ensuring the correctness of integrated circuits (ICs) is essential for ensuring the correctness, safety and security of the many electronic systems we rely on. However, the effort required to validate ICs continues to be a major bottleneck in modern system design. To make matters worse, difficult bugs still escape into post-silicon and even production systems. I will present a set of results based on Quick Error Detection (QED). The standard QED technique is a testing technique which drastically reduces error detection latency, the time elapsed between the occurrence of an error caused by a bug and its manifestation as an observable failure. I will then present two new techniques, Symbolic QED and Electrical QED which use formal methods to dramatically extend the reach of QED: to automatically detect and localize both logic and electrical bugs during both pre- and post-silicon validation. Experimental results collected from several commercial designs as well as hardware platforms demonstrate the effectiveness and practicality of these methods. For example, for a 500 million transistor multi-core IC, Symbolic QED automatically detected and localized difficult logic design bugs (the kind that could escape traditional simulation-based pre-silicon verification) in only a few hours (~ 8 hours on average). This research was performed at Stanford University in collaboration with Prof. Subhasish Mitra, several graduate students, and several industrial collaborators.
Biography: Clark Barrett is an associate professor (research) of computer science at Stanford University, with expertise in constraint solving and its applications to verification. His PhD dissertation introduced a novel approach to constraint solving now known as satisfiability modulo theories (SMT). His subsequent work on SMT has been recognized with a best paper award at DAC, an IBM Software Quality Innovation award, the Haifa Verification Conference award, and first-place honors at the SMT, CASC, and SyGuS competitions. He was also an early pioneer in the development of formal hardware verification: at Intel, he collaborated on a novel theorem prover used to verify key microprocessor properties; and at 0-in Design Automation (now part of Mentor Graphics), he helped build one of the first industrially successful assertion-based verification tool-sets for hardware.
Host: Pierluigi Nuzzo, x09079, nuzzo@usc.edu
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 132
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Gerrielyn Ramos
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Center for Cyber-Physical Systems and Internet of Things and Ming Hsieh Institute for Electrical Engineering Joint Seminar Series on Cyber-Physical Systems
Thu, Sep 21, 2017 @ 02:00 PM - 03:00 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Hong-Linh Truong, Priv.Doz and an Assistant Professor, TU Wien (Vienna University of Technology), Austria
Talk Title: Managing and Testing Ensembles of IoT, Network functions, and Clouds
Abstract: By leveraging virtualization and pay-per-use models, we believe that eventually applications will easily acquire IoT, network functions, and cloud services together to establish a virtual, unified resource ensemble across various subsystems from different IoT, network and cloud providers. But this will require us to research and develop various programming and management utilities. In this talk, we will first discuss the necessity and feasibility of application-level resource slice provisioning. We will overview our SINC - Slicing IoT, Network functions, and Clouds - as an approach for provisioning resource slices of end-to-end IoT, network functions, and cloud capabilities for novel requirements from a wide range of IoT/CPS applications. We will present several works on service engineering analytics for SINC, including harmonizing IoT, network functions, and cloud resources, supporting end-to-end monitoring and analytics, and testing uncertainties.
Some links to related tools:
http://rdsea.github.io/
http://sincconcept.github.io/
http://sincconcept.github.io/HINC/
https://github.com/tuwiendsg/COMOT4U/
http://tuwiendsg.github.io/iCOMOT/
Biography: Hong-Linh Truong is currently a Priv.Doz and an assistant professor for Service Engineering Analytics at TU Wien (Vienna University of Technology), Austria. He received an engineer degree from the Bach Khoa University (HoChiMinh City University of Technology), Vietnam, in 1998, a PhD degree, in 2005, and a Habilitation, in 2013, both from TU Wien, Austria; all in computer science and engineering. His main research interest focuses Systems, Software, Data and Service Engineering Analytics by developing novel techniques and tools for monitoring, analyzing, and optimizing functions, performance, data quality, elasticity, and uncertainties associated with systems, software, data and services. His research has been applied to: Monitoring, Analysis and Optimization Techniques for Programs, Data and Systems; Parallel, Grid and Cloud Computing, and IoT; Data Service Models and Analytics; Socio-technical Services Engineering; and Elastic Computing. Furthermore, he is interested in (free) ICT solutions for (under) developing countries. He had delivered several invited talks and he published more than 180 refereed papers in books, conferences/workshops and journals. He (co)receives an outstanding paper award, seven best paper awards, one best paper run-up award, and one best poster award. Contact him at truong@dsg.tuwien.ac.at (http://dsg.tuwien.ac.at/staff/truong).
Host: Bhaskar Krishnamachari and Paul Bogdan
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 248
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Estela Lopez
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CS Colloquium: Dr. Kris Zacny (Honeybee Robotics) - Honeybee Robotics
Thu, Sep 21, 2017 @ 03:30 PM - 04:50 PM
Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Dr. Kris Zacny, PhD, Honeybee Robotics Spacecraft Mechanisms Corporation
Talk Title: Honeybee Robotics
Series: CS Colloquium
Abstract: This lecture satisfies requirements for CSCI 591: Research Colloquium.
Honeybee Robotics, based in Pasadena, develops cutting edge robotic systems for solar system destinations such as the Moon, Mars, Venus, and comets. We are currently operating our hardware on the surface of Mars. Our technologies are also used for Oil & Gas, mining, and U.S. Special Forces.
The presentation will initially provide some background to space exploration and then introduce several exciting missions in the works. These include Lunar Resource Prospector with a goal of identifying volatiles at the lunar South Pole, Mars2020 mission with a goal of returning samples from Mars, Europa deep drill mission with a purpose of penetrating through >10 km thick ice crust and reaching subglacial ice, as well as Planetary Volatiles Extractor with a goal of mining the Moon and Mars.
We will also discuss various ways USC faculty and students could collaborate with Honeybee Robotics. Our company currently employs several USC alumni as well as interns, and works with USC professors on space technologies.
Biography: Dr. Kris Zacny is Vice President and Director of Exploration Technology Group at Honeybee Robotics in Pasadena. His expertise includes terrestrial and extraterrestrial robotic drilling, excavation, sample handling and processing, geotechnical systems, and sensors.
In his previous capacity as an engineer in the South African mining industry, Dr. Zacny managed numerous underground mining projects. Dr. Zacny received his PhD at UC Berkeley in Geotechnical Engineering with an emphasis on Mars drilling, and his ME at UC Berkeley in Petroleum Engineering with emphasis on Drilling and Materials Science. He received his BSc cum laude in Mechanical Engineering at U. Cape Town.
He has participated in several Arctic, Antarctic, Atacama, and Greenland expeditions. Dr. Zacny has over 200 publications related to extreme drilling and excavation and has managed over 100 technology projects. He has over 40 NASA New Technology Records and four NASA Group Achievement Awards.
Host: Computer Science Department
Location: Henry Salvatori Computer Science Center (SAL) - 101
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Computer Science Department
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CAIS Seminar: Dr. Ece Kamar (Microsoft Research) - Directions in Hybrid Intelligence: Discovering Blind Spots of AI
Thu, Sep 21, 2017 @ 04:00 PM - 05:00 PM
Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Dr. Ece Kamar, Microsoft Research
Talk Title: Directions in Hybrid Intelligence: Discovering Blind Spots of AI
Series: Center for AI in Society (CAIS) Seminar Series
Abstract: Despite advances in AI, machines still have limitations in accomplishing tasks that come naturally to humans. When AI systems are fielded in the open world, these limitations cause concerns around reliability, biases and trust. In this talk, Dr. Kamar will argue that hybrid systems that combine the strengths of machine and human intelligence is key to overcoming the limitations of AI algorithms and developing reliable systems. She will provide an overview of multiple projects, which investigate how to integrate human intelligence into the training, execution and troubleshooting of AI systems.
Biography: Dr. Ece Kamar is a Senior Researcher in the Adaptive Systems and Interaction Group at Microsoft Research. She received her Ph.D. in computer science from Harvard University. Her work spans several subfields of AI, including planning, machine learning, multi-agent systems and human-computer teamwork and is inspired by real-world applications.
Host: Milind Tambe
Location: Seeley Wintersmith Mudd Memorial Hall (of Philosophy) (MHP) - 101
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Computer Science Department
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A Model-Based Iterative Reconstruction Approach to Tunable Diode Laser Absorption Tomograph
Fri, Sep 22, 2017 @ 10:00 AM - 11:00 AM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Zeeshan Nadir, Electrical and Computer Engineering, Purdue University
Talk Title: A Model-Based Iterative Reconstruction Approach to Tunable Diode Laser Absorption Tomography
Abstract: Many imaging and sensing problems in the fields of medical imaging, computer vision, machine learning, communications and signal processing etc. can be posed as inverse problems. Broadly, an inverse problem consists of recovering some underlying signal of interest that leads to a directly observable measurement dataset where the measurement dataset may be corrupted by noise. In the presence of sufficient quantity of good quality measurement dataset, the inversion problem can often be solved by direct methods often involving closed form inverse formulas like filtered back projection. However, when the measurement data contains noise or is extremely sparse, then such conventional techniques do not work. Tunable Diode Laser Absorption Tomography (TDLAT) is such an ill-posed nonlinear inverse problem where 2D concentration and temperature images are required to be reconstructed from a handful of projection measurements.
Bayesian methods are a probabilistic approach to reconstruct signals by incorporating prior information about the signals in the form of a prior probability distribution. Typical 2D prior models like Markov Random Field enforce local smoothness on the images by penalizing differences between neighboring pixels. However, the major limitation of such prior models is that they cannot express non-homogeneous and non-Gaussian characteristics of the images and therefore cannot model the long-range correlations between image pixels. In this presentation, I shall present a Gaussian Mixture Model as a prior distribution which can be trained with a few training examples. In order to show the utility of this approach, I shall apply it to Tunable Diode Laser Absorption Tomography problem. I shall formulate the reconstruction problem as a Maximum-aposteriori estimation problem. I shall present an efficient multigrid algorithm to perform the resulting optimization. The results using simulated datasets show that the proposed approach can reduce reconstruction error while also resulting in a computationally efficient algorithm.
Biography: Zeeshan Nadir is a Ph.D. candidate in the school of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN. In Summer 2016, he was an intern at MathWorks, Inc., Natick, MA, where he worked on MATLAB coder package. He developed a new functionality in MATLAB Coder which has been incorporated in MATLAB R2017a release. His research interests include statistical signal processing, inverse problems, computational imaging, machine learning and computer vision.
Host: Hosted by Prof. Richard Leahy
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 248
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Talyia White
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Department of Biomedical Engineering Systems Cellular-Molecular Bioengineering Distinguished Speaker Series
Fri, Sep 22, 2017 @ 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Alfred E. Mann Department of Biomedical Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Ravi Iyengar, Professor, Pharmacological Sciences Director, Institute for Systems Biomedicine Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai
Talk Title: Information from cell shape controls cellular responses
Series: Department of Biomedical Engineering Systems Cellular-Molecular Bioengineering Distinguished Speaker Series
Biography: Dr. Iyengar is a Dorothy H. and Lewis Rosenstiel Professor in the Department of Pharmacologyand Systems Therapeutics. He is the Director and Principal Investigator of the NIGMS funded SystemsBiology Center New York. Dr. Iyengar completed his undergraduate and masters degrees at Bombay University in India. He then moved to the University of Houston and completed his Ph.D. training in Biophysical Sciences. He was a postdoctoral fellow at the Baylor College of Medicine before starting an academic career at Mt. Sinai in 1980.
The Iyengar lab is interested in understanding cellular regulatory networks at a systems level and in using this understanding to develop therapeutic strategies and phenotypic signatures for complex diseases. Dr. Iyengar is especially interested in the role of cell shape and its relationship to extracellular spaces within tissue in information processing, and he uses a combination of experimental, theoretical and computational approaches to study these questions. Dr. Iyengar has authored more than 120 research papers, written 112 invited review articles, and edited six books. He received the NIH New Investigator Award in 1980, received the Established Investigator Award from the American Heart Association, and is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).
Host: Stacey Finley, PhD
More Information: Iyengar Ravi_flyer_September 22.pdf
Location: Corwin D. Denney Research Center (DRB) - 145
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Mischalgrace Diasanta
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W.V.T. RUSCH ENGINEERING HONORS COLLOQUIUM
Fri, Sep 22, 2017 @ 01:00 PM - 02:00 PM
USC Viterbi School of Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Doug Heckmann, Investment Manager at LH Ventures
Talk Title: Entrepreneurial Ventures
Location: Henry Salvatori Computer Science Center (SAL) - 101
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Su Stevens
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Astani Civil and Environmental Engineering Ph.D. Seminar
Fri, Sep 22, 2017 @ 03:00 PM - 04:00 PM
Sonny Astani Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Ali Kazemian and Mohammad Motie Share , Astani CEE Graduate Students
Talk Title: A Performance-based Framework for Laboratory Testing of Cementitious Materials for Construction-Scale 3D Printing and A Vacation Queue Approach to Queue Size Computation for a Signalized Traffic Intersection
Abstract: During recent decades,construction industry has been criticized for limited use of innovative methods and slow adoption of cutting edge technologies. However,it seems that a transformation is about to happen and construction industry is getting ready for some revolutionary changes. Employing and scaling up additive manufacturing techniques for automated construction of whole buildings is a novel idea which has been topic of discussion for several years. A review of related projects and research works reveals that Portland cement concrete is the most viable option as the material to be used in automated construction processes in near future. However,the performance requirements for a cementitious printing mixture have not been clearly defined.
In this presentation,a framework for performance based laboratory testing of cementitious mixtures for construction scale 3D printing in fresh state will be discussed,in which workability of a fresh printing mixture is described in terms of print quality, shape stability, and printability window. In order to elaborate on the proposed framework and suggested test methods, an experimental program was carried out using four different mixtures. The results of several conventional test methods, as well as proposed tests, will also be presented and performance of different mixtures will be compared. Finally, ongoing research related to real-time quality monitoring of cementitious materials during the concrete 3D printing process will be discussed.
Abstract by Mohammad Motie Share
Analyzing queues of vehicles at signalized intersections reveals useful insight about the performance of arterial networks. Typically, the average evolution of these queues is studied under deterministic conditions, fixed time policies, and simplifying assumptions. We propose an approach to probabilistically characterize the dynamics of these queues by incorporating the uncertain and dynamic nature of traffic streams and intersection management policy. We consider a vacation queue model for a signalized traffic intersection to elucidate intra-cycle queue size variations. In particular, we study two one-way single-lane streets interacting at a signalized intersection. Vehicles arrive at the intersection according to two independent Poisson processes with different intensities. We approximate queues of vehicles on each intersection leg by simple queuing systems that their server becomes unavailable during red phases. Motivated by vacation queues, an embedded Markov chain corresponding to queue sizes at the end of cycles is considered, whose transition probabilities are computed from analytical transient solutions of vacation queues.
Location: Waite Phillips Hall Of Education (WPH) - B27
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Evangeline Reyes
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Probability and Statistics Seminar: Ilya Mironov (Google Brain) - Differential Privacy: From Principled Foundations to Your Browser
Fri, Sep 22, 2017 @ 03:20 PM - 04:30 PM
Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Ilya Mironov, Google Brain
Talk Title: Differential Privacy: From Principled Foundations to Your Browser
Series: Probability and Statistics Seminar
Abstract: We survey progress in understanding of privacy in statistical databases over the last 10+ years, starting with early negative results followed by emergence of the notion of differential privacy and its variants. In the second half of the talk we cover uses of differential privacy in the Chrome browser, and its recent applications in machine learning tasks such as text and image recognition.
Biography: Ilya Mironov is a Staff Research Scientist in Google Brain. After completing his PhD at Stanford in 2003, he joined Microsoft Research Silicon Valley, where he worked on cryptography, cryptanalysis, and privacy until 2014.
Host: Stanislav Minsker
Location: Kaprielian Hall (KAP) - 414
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Computer Science Department
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MHI Pioneer Series
Mon, Sep 25, 2017 @ 03:00 AM - 05:00 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Andrew Viterbi, University of Southern California Trustee, Presidential Chair, and Professor of Electrical Engineering
Talk Title: "It was the worst of times, it was the best of times." (with apologies to Mr. Dickens)
Series: MHI Pioneer Series
Abstract: The last two thirds of the 20th Century was a period of tremendous upheaval and progress, social, political and especially technological. This was the period during which I pursued two careers which were tightly intertwined. Curiously both were also influenced by our nation's most threatening competitor, Russia.
The first was my academic career and the second my entrepreneurial career, both of which covered over thirty years, with considerable overlap. Though unrecognized at the time, my academic research had roots in the work of the Russian mathematician Andrei Markov, while with full recognition, my entrepreneurial career was launched and initially supported by our Defense research efforts to counter the Soviet threat.
From 1957, when I arrived at Caltech's JPL just before the launch of Sputnik, until 2000 when I retired from Qualcomm, I was involved in furthering the knowledge, understanding and implementation of wireless digital communication, first for space and ultimately for cellular networks. My academic achievements, which have given me the most satisfaction, were primarily in the fields of synchronization and of error-suppressing coding. My entrepreneurial efforts were in support of the founding of two digital communication companies, Linkabit and Qualcomm, whose technologists achieved important breakthroughs through the practical realization of communication theory principles. Among these were the first Viterbi decoder now ubiquitous in digital wireless handsets, the first fully digitally implemented satellite modem, the first mobile satellite terrestrial network and the first spread spectrum digital cellular networks, which enabled the rise of a myriad of applications.
In the new millennium, to prevent boredom and counter aging, my time has been devoted partly to activities on corporate boards of startup companies in digital communication, data storage and their numerous applications. My Memoir, "Reflections of an Educator, Researcher and Entrepreneur," was published recently.
Host: Ming Hsieh Institute
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 132
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Cathy Huang
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Center for Systems and Control (CSC@USC) and Ming Hsieh Institute for Electrical Engineering
Mon, Sep 25, 2017 @ 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Angelia Nedich, Arizona State University
Talk Title: Fast Distributed Algorithms for Optimization and Resource Sharing in Networks
Abstract: We will discuss the problems of distributed optimization over graphs. For the case of undirected graphs, we introduce a distributed algorithm, referred to as DIGing, which is a combination of a distributed inexact gradient method and a gradient-tracking mechanism. The DIGing algorithm uses doubly stochastic mixing matrices and employs fixed step-sizes and, yet, drives all agents' iterates to a common global minimizer. When the graphs are directed, in which case the implementation of doubly stochastic mixing matrices is unrealistic, we construct an algorithm that incorporates the push-sum protocol into the DIGing structure, thus obtaining Push-DIGing algorithm. Under the strong convexity assumption for the objective function, we prove that both algorithms converge at R-linear (geometric) rates, as long as the step-sizes do not exceed some upper bounds. We establish explicit convergence rate estimates for the convergence rates. When the graph is undirected, we show that the convergence rate of DIGing scales polynomially in the number of agents. We also provide some numerical experiments to demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed algorithms and to validate our theoretical findings. We then discuss the variants of these algorithms for resource allocation problems in graphs.
Biography: Angelia Nedich holds a Ph.D. from Moscow State University, Moscow, Russia, in Computational Mathematics and Mathematical Physics (1994), and a Ph.D. from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, USA in Electrical and Computer Science Engineering (2002). She has worked as a senior engineer in BAE Systems North America, Advanced Information Technology Division at Burlington, MA. She is the recipient of an NSF CAREER Award 2007 in Operations Research for her work in distributed multi-agent optimization. She is a recipient (jointly with her co-authors) of the Best Paper Award at the Winter Simulation Conference 2013 and the Best Paper Award at the International Symposium on Modeling and Optimization in Mobile, Ad Hoc and Wireless Networks (WiOpt) 2015 (with co-authors). She has served as Associate Editor for IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control and Transactions of Control of Network Systems. She is currently serving on Editorial Board of SIAM Journal on Optimization and for INFORMS Operations Research. Her current interest is in large-scale optimization, games, control and information processing in networks.
Host: Mihailo Jovanovic, mihailo@usc.edu
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 248
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Gerrielyn Ramos
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Seminars in Biomedical Engineering
Mon, Sep 25, 2017 @ 12:30 PM - 01:50 PM
Alfred E. Mann Department of Biomedical Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Nitin Mehta (alumnus, USC BME M.S. program), Cardiac Implant and Catheter Expert, TUV SUD America
Talk Title: Research Presentation & Career Path
Host: Stacey Finley, PhD
Location: Olin Hall of Engineering (OHE) - 122
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Mischalgrace Diasanta
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Center for Systems and Control (CSC@USC) and Ming Hsieh Institute for Electrical Engineering
Tue, Sep 26, 2017 @ 02:00 PM - 03:00 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Evangelos Theodorou, Georgia Institute of Technology
Talk Title: The Science of Autonomy: a "Happy" Symbiosis Among Learning, Control, and Physics
Series: Fall 2017 Joint CSC@USC/CommNetS-MHI Seminar Series
Abstract: In this talk, I will present an information theoretic approach to stochastic optimal control that has advantages over classical methodologies and theories for decision making under uncertainty. The main idea is that there are certain connections between optimality principles in control and information theoretic inequalities in statistical physics that allow us to solve hard decision making problems in robotics, autonomous systems and beyond. There are essentially two different points of view of the same "thing" and these two different points of view overlap for a fairly general class of dynamical systems that undergo stochastic effects. The information theoretic approach can also be used in a game theoretic setting for teams of robots performing cooperative or non-cooperative tasks. I will also present a holistic view to autonomy that collapses planning, perception and control into one computational engine, and ask questions related to how organization and structure relates to functionality and performance in "engineered" organisms. The last part of my talk includes computational frameworks for uncertainty representation and suggests ways to incorporate these representations within decision making and control.
Biography: Evangelos A. Theodorou is an assistant professor with the Guggenheim School of aerospace engineering at Georgia Institute of Technology. He is also affiliated with the Institute of Robotics and Intelligent Machines. Evangelos Theodorou earned his Diploma in Electronic and Computer Engineering from the Technical University of Crete (TUC), Greece in 2001. He has also received a MSc in Production Engineering from TUC in 2003, a MSc in Computer Science and Engineering from University of Minnesota in spring of 2007 and a MSc in Electrical Engineering on dynamics and controls from the University of Southern California (USC) in Spring 2010. In May of 2011 he graduated with his PhD, in Computer Science at USC. After his PhD, he was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow with the department of computer science and engineering, University of Washington, Seattle. Evangelos Theodorou is the recipient of the King-Sun Fu best paper award of the IEEE Transactions on Robotics for the year 2012 and recipient of the best paper award in cognitive robotics in International Conference of Robotics and Automation 2011. He was also the finalist for the best paper award in International Conference of Humanoid Robotics in 2010 and International Conference of Robotics and Automation in 2017. His theoretical research spans the areas of stochastic optimal control theory, machine learning, information theory, and statistical physics. Applications involve learning, planning and control in autonomous, robotics and aerospace systems.
Host: Mihailo Jovanovic, mihailo@usc.edu
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 248
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Gerrielyn Ramos
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Epstein Institute Seminar, ISE 651
Tue, Sep 26, 2017 @ 03:30 PM - 04:50 PM
Daniel J. Epstein Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Dr. Nozer D. Singpurwalla, Emeritus Professor of Statistics and Distinguished Research Professor, George Washington University
Talk Title: The Dinegentropy of Diagnostic and Detection Tests
Host: Prof. Sheldon Ross
More Information: September 26, 2017.pdf
Location: Ethel Percy Andrus Gerontology Center (GER) - GER 206
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Grace Owh
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CS Colloquium: Kai-Wei Chang (UCLA) - Structured Predictions: Practical Advancements and Applications in Natural Language Processing
Tue, Sep 26, 2017 @ 03:30 PM - 04:50 PM
Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Kai-Wei Chang, University of California, Los Angeles
Talk Title: Structured Predictions: Practical Advancements and Applications in Natural Language Processing
Abstract: This lecture satisfies requirements for CSCI 591: Research Colloquium.
Many machine learning problems involve making joint predictions over a set of mutually dependent output variables. The
dependencies between output variables can be represented by a structure, such as a sequence, a tree, a clustering of nodes, or a graph. Structured prediction models have been proposed for problems of this type, and they have been shown to be successful in many application areas, such as natural language processing, computer vision, and bioinformatics. In this talk, I will describe a collection of results that improve several aspects of these approaches. Our results lead to efficient learning algorithms for structured prediction models, which, in turn, support reduction in problem size, improvements in
training and evaluation speed. I will also discuss potential risks and challenges when using structured prediction models.
Related information is at https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=http-3A__www.cs.virginia.edu_-7Ekc2wc_talk_sp.html&d=DwIBaQ&c=clK7kQUTWtAVEOVIgvi0NU5BOUHhpN0H8p7CSfnc_gI&r=LW6zU4yKxktEWcUPnmtKow&m=gw-3C-3UJqv9mPCsdDWaZHFxfXoQ6oXlSMsVWGL1xE0&s=l7eOcCL3YxMMSSFD4dVdUUMKTrGVB5Z8Dm0VD1cHVDM&e=
Biography: Kai-Wei Chang is an assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of California at Los Angeles. He has published broadly in machine learning and natural language processing. His research has mainly focused on designing machine learning methods for handling large and complex data. He has been involved in developing several machine learning libraries, including LIBLINEAR, Vowpal Wabbit, and Illinois-SL. He was an assistant professor at the University of Virginia in 2016-2017. He obtained his Ph.D. from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2015 and was a post-doctoral researcher at Microsoft Research in 2016. Kai-Wei was awarded the KDD Best Paper Award (2010), EMNLP Best Long Paper Award (2017), and the Yahoo! Key Scientific Challenges Award (2011).
Additional information is available at https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=http-3A__kwchang.net&d=DwIBaQ&c=clK7kQUTWtAVEOVIgvi0NU5BOUHhpN0H8p7CSfnc_gI&r=LW6zU4yKxktEWcUPnmtKow&m=gw-3C-3UJqv9mPCsdDWaZHFxfXoQ6oXlSMsVWGL1xE0&s=wik3X8kutwqg-z2gIVP9M7W-uRkf04mPpX4HhWqxCDM&e=.
Host: Fei Sha
Location: Henry Salvatori Computer Science Center (SAL) - 101
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Computer Science Department
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A Book Talk about A MIND AT PLAY: HOW CLAUDE SHANNON INVENTED THE INFORMATION AGE
Wed, Sep 27, 2017 @ 10:00 AM - 11:00 AM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Jimmy Soni, Author
Talk Title: A Book Talk about A MIND AT PLAY: HOW CLAUDE SHANNON INVENTED THE INFORMATION AGE
Abstract: Claude Shannon was a groundbreaking polymath, a brilliant tinkerer, and a digital pioneer. He constructed a fleet of customized unicycles and a flamethrowing trumpet, outfoxed Vegas casinos, and built juggling robots. He also wrote the seminal text of the digital revolution, which has been called "the Magna Carta of the Information Age." His discoveries would lead contemporaries to compare him to Albert Einstein and Isaac Newton. His work anticipated by decades the world we'd be living in today - and gave mathematicians and engineers the tools to bring that world to pass.
In this elegantly written, exhaustively researched biography, Jimmy Soni and Rob Goodman reveal Claude Shannon's full story for the first time. It's the story of a small-town Michigan boy whose career stretched from the era of room-sized computers powered by gears and string to the age of Apple. It's the story of the origins of our digital world in the tunnels of MIT and the "idea factory" of Bell Labs, in the "scientists' war" with Nazi Germany, and in the work of Shannon's collaborators and rivals, thinkers like Alan Turing, John von Neumann, Vannevar Bush, and Norbert Wiener.
And it's the story of Shannon's life as an often reclusive, always playful genius. With access to Shannon's family and friends, A Mind at Play brings this singular innovator and creative genius to life.
Biography: Jimmy Soni was managing editor at The Huffington Post from January 2012-2014. Previously he had worked as a strategy consultant at McKinsey and Company, as well as a speech writer at the office of the Mayor of the District of Columbia. Soni has co-authored several pieces with fellow Duke graduate Rob Goodman; their work has been featured in Politico, The Huffington Post, Business Insider, AdWeek, and The Atlantic, among others.
In 2012, Jimmy, published his first book a biography of Cato the Younger, titled Rome's Last Citizen: The Life and Legacy of Cato, Mortal Enemy of Caesar.
Host: Center for Cyber-Physical Systems and the Internet of Things
More Information: CCI_Shannon_BookTalk_September27_2017.pdf
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 132
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Mayumi Thrasher
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CCI Seminar: Jimmy Soni – A Mind at Play: How Claude Shannon Invented the Information Age
Wed, Sep 27, 2017 @ 10:00 AM - 11:00 AM
Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Jimmy Soni,
Talk Title: A Mind at Play: How Claude Shannon Invented the Information Age
Abstract: Claude Shannon was a groundbreaking polymath, a brilliant tinkerer, and a digital pioneer. He constructed a fleet of customized unicycles and a flamethrowing trumpet, outfoxed Vegas casinos, and built juggling robots. He also wrote the seminal text of the digital revolution, which has been called "the Magna Carta of the Information Age." His discoveries would lead contemporaries to compare him to Albert Einstein and Isaac Newton. His work anticipated by decades the world we'd be living in today-”and gave mathematicians and engineers the tools to bring that world to pass.
In this elegantly written, exhaustively researched biography, Jimmy Soni and Rob Goodman reveal Claude Shannon's full story for the first time. It's the story of a small-town Michigan boy whose career stretched from the era of room-sized computers powered by gears and string to the age of Apple. It's the story of the origins of our digital world in the tunnels of MIT and the "idea factory" of Bell Labs, in the "scientists' war" with Nazi Germany, and in the work of Shannon's collaborators and rivals, thinkers like Alan Turing, John von Neumann, Vannevar Bush, and Norbert Wiener.
And it's the story of Shannon's life as an often reclusive, always playful genius. With access to Shannon's family and friends, A Mind at Play brings this singular innovator and creative genius to life.
Biography: Jimmy Soni was managing editor at The Huffington Post from January 2012-2014. Previously he had worked as a strategy consultant at McKinsey and Company, as well as a speech writer at the office of the Mayor of the District of Columbia. Soni has co-authored several pieces with fellow Duke graduate Rob Goodman; their work has been featured in Politico, The Huffington Post, Business Insider, AdWeek, and The Atlantic, among others.
In 2012, Jimmy, published his first book a biography of Cato the Younger, titled Rome's Last Citizen: The Life and Legacy of Cato, Mortal Enemy of Caesar.
Host: Center for Cyber-Physical Systems and the Internet of Things
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 132
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Computer Science Department
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Amgen Seminar: Bryan Moyer
Wed, Sep 27, 2017 @ 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Alfred E. Mann Department of Biomedical Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Bryan Moyer, Amgen
Talk Title: Nav1.7 drug development for pain
Series: USC/Amgen Seminar Series
Host: USC/Amgen
More Info: http://stemcell.usc.edu/events
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Cristy Lytal/USC Stem Cell
Event Link: http://stemcell.usc.edu/events
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Center for Cyber-Physical Systems and Internet of Things and Ming Hsieh Institute for Electrical Engineering Joint Seminar Series on Cyber-Physical Systems
Wed, Sep 27, 2017 @ 02:00 PM - 03:00 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Eric Feron , Professor, Georgia Institute of Technology
Talk Title: 20 Years of Aerobatic Flight with Autonomous Air Vehicles
Abstract: The past 20 years have seen a remarkable evolution of the drone technology. Back in 1997, academia had to deal with heavy, bulky and expensive machines powered by cranky internal combustion engines. Unmanned vehicles today are a lot cheaper, lighter, and reliable, making them a lot more approachable by students and faculty alike. After tracing our research back to the late 1990s, this talk will introduce an aerobatic drone capable of producing reduced- or zero-gravity conditions at an affordable cost. The platform is still a prototype, but it captures most of the difficulties faced by the larger platform of our dreams. The controller design will be discussed, and a full non-linear maneuver stability analysis will be presented that mixes the concept of transverse dynamics with well-known concepts from robust control. This is joint work with John Hauser (U. Colorado, Boulder) and Pablo Afman (Georgia Tech).
Biography: Eric Feron is a professor at Georgia Tech, where he directs the Decision and Control Laboratory. His basic training is in applied mathematics, computer science, and operations research. His interests include aerospace systems and robotics. Noteworthy achievements include an airport congestion control algorithm now used at many major airports (1999), the first aerobatic autonomous air vehicle (2001), the english translation of Ãtienne Bézout's General Theory of Algebraic Equations (2006), and a course on cyber-physical systems offered by Georgia Tech as part of its Online Master of Science in Computer Science (2017).
Host: Paul Bogdan
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 132
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Estela Lopez
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Aerospace & Mechanical Engineering Seminar
Wed, Sep 27, 2017 @ 03:30 PM - 04:30 PM
Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: James Friend, Professor/UCSD
Talk Title: Acoustic Nanofluidics
Abstract: Acoustic waves have found new utility in microfluidics, providing an enormously powerful ability to manipulate fluids and suspended particles in open and closed fluid systems. In this talk, we cover some fundamental and powerful concepts of acoustic wave generation and propagation often overlooked in the literature, and follow it with exploration of new phenomena observed at the nanoscale. In fact, the usefulness of acoustic waves at the micro-scale is even more compelling at the nano-scale, in ways not predicted by classical theory. Particle deagglomeration, fluid pumping, pattern formation, and other curious physical phenomena will be shown in the context of potentially useful applications. Along the way, the fascinating underlying physics tying together the acoustics, fluid dynamics, and free fluid interface in these systems will be described.
Biography: James Friend James Friend is a Professor in the Center for Medical Devices and Instrumentation, Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, at the University of California, San Diego, having received his PhD in mechanical engineering from the University of Missouri-Rolla in 1998. His research interests are diverse, but principally lie in exploring and exploiting acoustic and vibration phenomena at small scales. He has over 260 peer-reviewed research publications, including 138 journal papers and eight book chapters, and 27 patents in process or granted, completed 33 postgraduate students and supervised 18 postdoctoral staff, and been awarded over $25 million in competitive grant-based research funding over his career. He has been fortunate to receive an AIAA Jefferson Goblet Student Paper Award and an ASME Best Paper of Conference Award for a single talk at the AIAA/ASME/AHS/ASC/ASCE Structural Dynamics & Mechanics Conference in 1996; excellence in teaching, early career research, and research awards from the Monash Faculty of Engineering in 2006, 2008, and 2011, respectively; a Future Leader award from the Davos Future Summit in 2008; a Top 10 emerging scientific leader of Australia by Microsoft and The Australian newspaper award in 2009; an award as the corresponding author of one of the top 50 papers of the past 50 years of Applied Physics Letters in 2012; and the IEEE Carl Hellmuth Hertz Ultrasonics Award from the IEEE in 2015.
Host: Department of Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering
Location: Seaver Science Library (SSL) - 150
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Ashleen Knutsen
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The biomedical literature captures the most current biomedical knowledge and is a tremendously rich resource for research with over 26 million publications currently indexed in the US National Library of Medicine’s PubMed repository. Large-scale processin
Thu, Sep 28, 2017 @ 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Information Sciences Institute
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Karin Verspoor, University of Melbourne
Talk Title: The scientific literature as a resource for biological prediction and data validation
Abstract: The biomedical literature captures the most current biomedical knowledge and is a tremendously rich resource for research with over 26 million publications currently indexed in the US National Library of Medicines PubMed repository. Large scale processing of the literature enables direct biomedical knowledge discovery. In this presentation, I will introduce the use of text mining techniques for applications in protein function and phenotype prediction. I will also explore a novel alternative use of the literature to support curation of biological database records by cross checking their content with associated literature this work further broadens the value of the literature in bioinformatics applications.
Biography: Karin is a Professor in the School of Computing and Information Systems and Deputy Director of the Health and Biomedical Informatics Centre at the University of Melbourne. Her research focuses on text analytics and machine learning for biomedical applications, to enable knowledge extraction from unstructured data as well as to provide clinical decision support. A current active project is related to enabling precision medicine with machine learning.
Karin was previously the Scientific Director for Health and Life Sciences at NICTA. Prior to arriving in Australia from the United States she held research roles at the University of Colorado School of Medicine and Los Alamos National Laboratory, and spent 5 years developing language technology software in two start up companies.
Host: Gully Burns
Location: Information Science Institute (ISI) - 11th floor large conference room
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Kary LAU
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Scaling Machine Learning Performance with Moore's Law
Thu, Sep 28, 2017 @ 02:00 PM - 03:15 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Kunle Olukotun, Stanford University
Talk Title: Scaling Machine Learning Performance with Moore's Law
Abstract: The computational demands of machine learning (ML) requires energy efficient machine learning specific accelerators. This naturally results in heterogeneous computing platforms composed of CPUs and ML Accelerators. However, the staggering cost (the majority of the cost is for software development) of designing custom integrated circuits for many application domains makes it cost-prohibitive to design these accelerators. This situation calls for a new paradigm for designing accelerators that can provide energy-efficient ML-specific performance and easier software development. The key to this new paradigm is to enable application developers to optimize the underlying hardware to make it specific to their ML application needs. The new design paradigm consists of new application ML-specific programing languages, new machine learning algorithms, new compilation technology to target both existing (FPGAs) and new (Software Defined Hardware) reconfigurable architectures.
Biography: Kunle Olukotun is the Cadence Design Systems Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at Stanford University. Olukotun is well known as a pioneer in multicore processor design and the leader of the Stanford Hydra chip multipocessor (CMP) research project. Olukotun founded Afara Websystems to develop high-throughput, low-power multicore processors for server systems. The Afara multicore processor, called Niagara, was acquired by Sun Microsystems. Niagara derived processors now power all Oracle SPARC-based servers. Olukotun currently directs the Stanford Pervasive Parallelism Lab (PPL), which seeks to proliferate the use of heterogeneous parallelism in all application areas using Domain Specific Languages (DSLs). Olukotun is a member of the Data Analytics for What's Next (DAWN) Lab which is developing infrastructure for usable machine learning. Olukotun is an ACM Fellow and IEEE Fellow for contributions to multiprocessors on a chip and multi-threaded processor design. Olukotun received his Ph.D. in Computer Engineering from The University of Michigan.
Host: Xuehai Qian, x04459, xuehai.qian@usc.edu
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 132
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Gerrielyn Ramos
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CS Colloquium Event: Facebook Tech Talk
Thu, Sep 28, 2017 @ 03:30 PM - 04:50 PM
Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Alex Helm, Catrina Manahan, Charles Kuykendoll, Yuandong Tian, Min Li, Qiachao Que, See Biography
Talk Title: AI in Games: Achievements and Challenges
Abstract: This lecture satisfies requirements for CSCI 591: Research Colloquium.
Recently, substantial progress of AI has been made in applications that require advanced pattern reading, including computer vision, speech recognition and natural language processing. However, it remains an open problem whether AI will make the same level of progress in tasks that require sophisticated reasoning, planning and decision making in complicated game environments similar to the real-world. In this talk, I present the state-of-the-art approaches to build such an AI, our recent contributions in terms of designing more effective algorithms and building extensive and fast general environments, as well as issues and challenges.
Biography: Yuandong Tian is a Research Scientist in Facebook AI Research, working on reasoning with deep learning in games and theoretical analysis of deep non-convex models. He is the leader researcher and engineer for DarkForest (Facebook Computer Go project). Prior to that, he was a Software Engineer/Researcher in Google Self-Driving Car team during 2013-2014. He received Ph.D. in Robotics Institute, Carnegie Mellon University on 2013, Bachelor and Master degree of Computer Science in Shanghai Jiao Tong University. He is the recipient of 2013 ICCV Marr Prize Honorable Mentions for his work on global optimal solution to non-convex optimization in image alignment.
Host: CS Department
Location: Henry Salvatori Computer Science Center (SAL) - 101
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Ryan Rozan
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CAIS Seminar: Dr. Peng Shi (University of Southern California) - Prediction and Optimization in School Choice
Thu, Sep 28, 2017 @ 04:00 PM - 05:00 PM
Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Dr. Peng Shi, University of Southern California
Talk Title: Prediction and Optimization in School Choice
Abstract: In public school choice, students submit preference rankings for a given set of schools to the school board, which takes into account everyone's choices to compute the assignment. An important policy lever is what choice options to offer to each neighborhood, and how to prioritize between students. A key trade-off is between giving students equitable chances to go to the schools they want and controlling the city's school busing costs.
We study the optimization problem of choosing the choice menus and priorities for each neighborhood in order to maximize the sum of utilitarian and max-min welfare, subject to capacity and transportation constraints. The optimization is built on top of a predictive model of how students will choose given new choice menus, which we validate using both out-of-sample testing and a field experiment. Under a large market approximation, the optimization reduces to an assortment planning problem in which the objective is social-welfare rather than revenue. We show how to efficiently solve this sub-problem under various discrete choice models, and use this to produce better menus and priorities for Boston, which we evaluate by discrete simulations.
Biography: Dr. Peng Shi is an Assistant Professor of Data Science and Operations at the USC Marshall School of Business. He is interested in developing quantitative methodologies for the betterment of society. His current research focuses on optimization in matching markets, with applications in school choice, public housing, and online marketplaces. His research on school choice won multiple awards, including the ACM SIGecom Doctoral Dissertation Award, the INFORMS Public Sector Operations Best Paper Competition, and the INFORMS Doing Good with Good OR Student Paper Competition. Prior to joining USC, he completed a PhD in Operations Research at MIT, and was a postdoctoral researcher at Microsoft Research.
Host: Milind Tambe
Location: Seeley Wintersmith Mudd Memorial Hall (of Philosophy) (MHP) - 101
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Computer Science Department
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Ming Hsieh Institute Seminar Series on Integrated Systems
Fri, Sep 29, 2017 @ 10:00 AM - 11:30 AM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Dr. Bodhisatwa Sadhu, Research Staff Member, IBM T.J. Watson Research Center
Talk Title: mmWave Radio Design for 5G Base-stations and Mobile Handsets
Host: Profs. Hossein Hashemi, Mike Chen, Mahta Moghaddam, and Dina El-Damak
More Information: MHI Seminar Series IS -Bodhisatwa Sadhu.pdf
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 132
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Jenny Lin
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AI Seminar
Fri, Sep 29, 2017 @ 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Information Sciences Institute
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Stefano Ermon, Stanford University
Talk Title: Learning with limited supervision
Abstract: Many of the recent successes of machine learning have been characterized by the availability of large quantities of labeled data. Nonetheless, we observe that humans are often able to learn with very few labeled examples or with only high level instructions for how a task should be performed. In this talk, I will present some new approaches for learning useful models in contexts where labeled training data is scarce or not available at all. I will first discuss and formally prove some limitations of existing training criteria used for learning hierarchical generative models. I will then introduce novel architectures and methods to overcome these limitations, allowing us to learn a hierarchy of interpretable features from unlabeled data. Finally, I will discuss ways to use prior knowledge (such as physics laws or simulators) to provide weak forms of supervision, showing how we can learn to solve useful tasks, including object tracking, without any labeled data.
Biography: Stefano Ermon is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Stanford University, where he is affiliated with the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. He completed his PhD in computer science at Cornell in 2015. His research interests include techniques for scalable and accurate inference in graphical models, large-scale combinatorial optimization, and robust decision making under uncertainty, and is motivated by a range of applications, in particular ones in the emerging field of computational sustainability. Stefano's research has won several awards, including three Best Paper Awards, a World Bank Big Data Innovation Challenge, and was selected by Scientific American as one of the 10 World Changing Ideas in 2016. He is a recipient of the Sony Faculty Innovation Award and NSF CAREER Award.
Host: Aram Galstyan
Location: Information Science Institute (ISI) - 11th floor large conference room
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Kary LAU
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W.V.T. RUSCH ENGINEERING HONORS COLLOQUIUM
Fri, Sep 29, 2017 @ 01:00 PM - 02:00 PM
USC Viterbi School of Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Prof. Albert Dato, Department of Engineering, Harvey Mudd College
Talk Title: Fascinating Applications of Graphene
Location: Henry Salvatori Computer Science Center (SAL) - 101
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Su Stevens
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Munushian Seminar - Ming C. Wu, Friday, September 22nd at 2:00pm in EEB 132
Fri, Sep 29, 2017 @ 02:00 PM - 03:30 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Ming C. Wu, University of California, Berkeley
Talk Title: Silicon Photonic MEMS
Abstract: Ming C. Wu is Nortel Distinguished Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences at the University of California, Berkeley. He is also Co-Director of Berkeley Sensor and Actuator Center (BSAC) and Faculty Director of UC Berkeley Marvell Nanolab. Dr. Wu received his M.S. and Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences from the University of California, Berkeley in 1988. He has been with AT&T Bell Laboratories, Murray Hill (1988-1992) and UCLA (1993 to 2004) before joining the faculty at Berkeley. His research interests include optoelectronics, nanophotonics, MEMS, and optofluidics. He has published 8 book chapters, over 500 papers in journals and conferences, and 25 issued U.S. patents.
Prof. Wu is an IEEE Fellow, and a Packard Foundation Fellow (1992 - 1997). He received the 2007 Paul F. Forman Engineering Excellence Award, the 2017 C.E.K. Mees Medal from Optical Society of America, and the 2016 William Streifer Award from IEEE Photonics Society.
Biography: Ming C. Wu is Nortel Distinguished Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences at the University of California, Berkeley. He is also Co-Director of Berkeley Sensor and Actuator Center (BSAC) and Faculty Director of UC Berkeley Marvell Nanolab. Dr. Wu received his M.S. and Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences from the University of California, Berkeley in 1988. He has been with AT&T Bell Laboratories, Murray Hill (1988-1992) and UCLA (1993 to 2004) before joining the faculty at Berkeley. His research interests include optoelectronics, nanophotonics, MEMS, and optofluidics. He has published 8 book chapters, over 500 papers in journals and conferences, and 25 issued U.S. patents.
Prof. Wu is an IEEE Fellow, and a Packard Foundation Fellow (1992 - 1997). He received the 2007 Paul F. Forman Engineering Excellence Award, the 2017 C.E.K. Mees Medal from Optical Society of America, and the 2016 William Streifer Award from IEEE Photonics Society.
Host: EE-Electrophysics
More Info: minghsiehee.usc.edu/about/lectures
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 132
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Marilyn Poplawski
Event Link: minghsiehee.usc.edu/about/lectures
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Powering the Future of Imaging and Signal Processing with Data-Driven Systems
Fri, Sep 29, 2017 @ 02:00 PM - 03:00 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Saiprasad Ravishankar, Electrical Engineering & Computer Science Department, University of Michigan
Talk Title: Powering the Future of Imaging and Signal Processing with Data-Driven Systems
Series: Medical Imaging Seminar Series
Abstract: The data-driven learning of signal models including dictionaries, sparsifying transforms, low-rank models, tensor and manifold models, etc., is of great interest in many applications. In this talk, I will present my research that developed efficient, scalable, and effective data-driven models and methodologies for signal processing and imaging. I will mainly discuss my work on transform learning. Various interesting structures for sparsifying transforms such as well-conditioning, double sparsity, union-of-transforms, incoherence, rotation invariance, etc., can be considered, which enable their efficient and effective learning and usage. Transform learning-driven approaches achieve promising results in applications such as image and video denoising, and X-ray computed tomography or magnetic resonance image (MRI) reconstruction from limited or corrupted data. The convergence properties of the algorithms will be discussed. I will also present recent work on efficient dictionary learning in combination with low-rank models, and demonstrate the usefulness of the resulting LASSI method for dynamic MRI. The efficiency and effectiveness of the methods proposed in my research may benefit a wide range of additional applications in imaging, computer vision, neuroscience, and other areas requiring data-driven parsimonious models. Finally, I will provide a brief overview of recent works on physics-driven deep training of image reconstruction algorithms, light field reconstruction from focal stacks, online data-driven estimation of dynamic data from streaming, limited measurements, etc.
Biography: Saiprasad Ravishankar received the B.Tech. degree in Electrical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology Madras, in 2008. He received the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical and Computer Engineering, in 2010 and 2014 respectively, from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he was an Adjunct Lecturer in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering during Spring 2015, and a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the Coordinated Science Laboratory until August, 2015. Since then, he has been a Research Fellow in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department at the University of Michigan. His research interests include signal, image and video processing, signal modeling, data science, dictionary learning, biomedical and computational imaging, data-driven methods, inverse problems, compressed sensing, machine learning, and large-scale data processing.He has received multiple awards including the Sri Ramasarma V Kolluri Memorial Prize from IIT Madras and the IEEE Signal Processing Society Young Author Best Paper Award for his paper Learning Sparsifying Transforms published in IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing.
Host: Professor Richard Leahy
Location: Ronald Tutor Hall of Engineering (RTH) - 105
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Talyia White
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Center for Cyber-Physical Systems and Internet of Things and Ming Hsieh Institute for Electrical Engineering Joint Seminar Series on Cyber-Physical Systems
Fri, Sep 29, 2017 @ 02:00 PM - 03:00 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Yanzhi Wang , Syracuse University
Talk Title: Towards the limits of energy efficiency and performance of deep learning systems
Abstract: Deep learning systems have achieved unprecedented progresses in a number of fields such as computer vision, robotics, game playing, unmanned driving and aerial systems, and other AI-related fields. However, the rapidly expanding model size is posing a significant restriction on both the computation and weight storage, for both inference and training, and on both high-performance computing systems and low-power embedded system and IoT applications. In order to overcome these limitations, we propose a holistic framework of incorporating structured matrices into deep learning systems, and could achieve (i) simultaneous reduction on weight storage and computational complexities, (ii) simultaneous speedup of training and inference, and (iii) generality and fundamentality that can be adopted to both software and hardware implementations, different platforms, and different neural network types, sizes, and scalability.
Besides algorithm-level achievements, our framework has (i) a solid theoretical foundation to prove that our approach will converge to the same "effectiveness" as deep learning without compression, and to demonstrate/prove that our approach approach/achieve the theoretical limitation of computation and storage of deep learning systems; (ii) platform-specific implementations and optimizations on smartphones, FPGAs, and ASIC circuits. We demonstrate that our smartphone-based implementation achieves the similar speed of GPU and existing ASIC implementations on the same application. Our FPGA-based implementations for deep learning systems and LSTM networks could achieve 11X+ energy efficiency improvement compared with the best state-of-the-arts, and even higher energy efficiency gain compared with IBM TrueNorth neurosynaptic processor. Our proposed framework can achieve 3.5 TOPS computation performance in FPGAs, and is the first to enable nano-second level recognition speed for image recognition tasks.
Biography: Yanzhi Wang is currently an assistant professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at Syracuse University, from August 2015. He has received his Ph.D. Degree in Computer Engineering from University of Southern California (USC) in 2014, under supervision of Prof. Massoud Pedram, and his B.S. Degree in Electronic Engineering from Tsinghua University in 2009.
Dr. Wang's current research interests are the energy-efficient and high-performance implementations of deep learning and artificial intelligence systems, neuromorphic computing and new computing paradigms, and emerging deep learning algorithms/systems such as Bayesian neural networks, generative adversarial networks (GANs), and deep reinforcement learning. Besides, he works on the application of deep learning and machine intelligence in various mobile and IoT systems, medical systems, and UAVs, as well as the integration of security protection in deep learning systems. He also works on near-threshold computing for IoT devices and energy-efficient cyber-physical systems. His group works on both algorithms and actual implementations (FPGAs, circuit tapeouts, mobile and embedded systems, and UAVs).
His work has been published in top venues in conferences and journals (e.g. ASPLOS, MICRO, ICML, DAC, ICCAD, DATE, ASP-DAC, ISLPED, INFOCOM, ICDCS, TComputer, TCAD, etc.), and has been cited for around 3,000 times according to Google Scholar. He has received four Best Paper or Top Paper Awards from major conferences including IEEE ICASSP (top 3 among all 2,000+ submissions), ISLPED, IEEE CLOUD, and ISVLSI. He has another six Best Paper Nominations and two Popular Papers in IEEE TCAD. His group is sponsored by the NSF, DARPA, IARPA, AFRL/AFOSR, Syracuse CASE Center, and industry sources.
Host: Paul Bogdan
Location: Corwin D. Denney Research Center (DRB) - 146
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Estela Lopez
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Astani Civil and Environmental Engineering Ph.D. Seminar
Fri, Sep 29, 2017 @ 03:00 PM - 04:00 PM
Sonny Astani Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Meida Chen and Sasan Tavakkol, Astani CEE Graduate Students
Talk Title: Point Cloud Meshes Segmentation and Information Extraction of Outdoor Scenes for The Creation of Virtual Environments and Simulation andInteractive and Immersive Coastal Hydrodynamic Simulation
Abstract: By Meida Chen
Be able to segment, classify, and recognize different types of objects and identify and extract associated features in a photogrammetric generated meshes is essential for creating realistic virtual simulations. Rendering different objects in a virtual environment differently and assign actual physical properties to each object will not only enhance the visual quality but also allow various user interaction with a terrain model. For instance, consider the case of training soldiers in a virtual environment with 3D meshes representing the scene. The task is to recognize the shortest path from location A to location B with the minimum exposure to enemy fire. With the artificial intelligence AI searching algorithm, such as A, the shortest path could be computed, and penalties cloud be assigned to a route based on the number of obstructions that are blocking the enemies line of sight. However, realistically speaking, line of sight that is blocked by buildings and trees should be assigned with different penalties when considering a route, since some materials are easy to be destroyed and damaged. Though this example is an oversimplification, it emphasizes the point that without segmented semantic data, realistic virtual simulations could not be achieved. Thus, in this study the authors established a mesh segmentation and information extraction framework that combines both supervised and unsupervised machine learning algorithms to analyze meshes point clouds that are generated with photogrammetric technique. The segmentation process will be first performed on the generated 3D point clouds. Following that, the generated meshes will be segmented accordingly. Object information such as individual tree locations, the dimension of a tree, and building footprints are then extracted separately. The proposed information extraction processes are designed to overcome the data quality issues in photogrammetric generated point clouds data tend to be noisy, and in some cases parts of a wall and the trunk of a tree cannot be captured due to dense canopy.
By Sasan Tavakkol
Recent catastrophic events such as the Tsunami in Japan 2011 and Hurricane Harvey storm surge and winds in the US 2017, have raised the global awareness for an urgent need to understand the response of developed coastal regions to tsunamis and wind waves. We discuss our efforts in developing the first interactive coastal wave simulation and visualization software, called Celeris. This software can significantly help scientists better understand nearshore wave dynamics as it allows them to observe wave interactions in real time, modify the boundary conditions and model parameters as the model is running, and see the effect of changes immediately. Celeris is released under a GNU license and is currently in use by hundreds of coastal researchers and engineering firms over the world. This software uses a hybrid finite volume finite difference method to solve the extended Boussinesq equations on the GPU. We also explore the opportunities in immersive visualization of coastal waves through Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality to help engineers work in an interactive, immersive, and collaborative environment.
Location: Waite Phillips Hall Of Education (WPH) - B27
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Evangeline Reyes
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Systems Security Engineering: Concepts and Overview Tutorial as Presented at 27th INCOSE International Symposium
Sat, Sep 30, 2017 @ 09:00 AM - 02:00 PM
Systems Architecting and Engineering, USC Viterbi School of Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Dr. Mark Winstead, and Dr. Daryl Hild, MITRE Corporation
Talk Title: Systems Security Engineering: Concepts and Overview Tutorial as Presented at 27th INCOSE International Symposium
Series: INCOSE-LA Speaker Series
Abstract: System Security as a Design Problem (from NIST SP 800-160)
"Providing satisfactory security controls in a computer system is in itself a system design problem. A combination of hardware,software, communications, physical, personnel and administrative-procedural safeguards is required for comprehensive security. In particular, software safeguards
alone are not sufficient."
--The Ware Report
Defense Science Board Task Force on Computer Security, 1970.
Systems security engineering, as an integral part of systems engineering, applies scientific, mathematical, engineering, and measurement principles, concepts, and methods to coordinate, orchestrate, and direct the activities of various security engineering specialties and other contributing engineering specialties (e.g. reliability, safety and human factors) for the system of interest. This provides a fully integrated, system-level engineering perspective of system security. This tutorial will discuss an overview of Systems Security Engineering (SSE) as an increasingly critical part of Systems Engineering (SE).
SE is about meeting stakeholder needs. SSE is about meeting and ensuring sufficient protection of those stakeholder needs. The SSE activities include ensuring a system can function under adverse conditions associated with threats, disruptions and hazards (whether natural, e.g. weather, or man-made and whether malicious, misuse, or accidental). The SSE activities to protect stakeholder assets occur in all the life cycle phases (concept, development, production, utilization, support, and retirement). SSE as a discipline, as a role, as a set of activities across the life cycle to produce secure outcomes, and as a body of knowledge provide for meeting stakeholder protection needs. The tutorial will offer a system-oriented framing of the security perspective with connections to the methods and activities employed as part of a systems engineering project to address stakeholder security concerns.
Tutorial objectives:
--SSE as a Discipline: a specialty field and a branch of study in security foundations with open questions for potential research and development initiatives
--SSE as a Role: that is integrated with systems engineering and that leveraging security and other specialties
--SSE as an Activity: to plan, inform and achieve adequately secure outcomes via systems engineering processes as defined within INCOSE Systems Engineering Handbook
--SSE as a Body of Knowledge (BoK): that encompasses the history, vision, key terminology, and key concepts.
Directions:
The building is located on the northeast corner of Aviation and El Segundo Blvd. It is next to Big 5 Sporting Goods on El Segundo Blvd and Bimbo's Bakery on Aviation Blvd. There is plenty of parking assigned to the building. A MITRE host will meet attendees at the front door to let them into the building. If the MITRE host is not at the door upon arrival, they can be contacted at 310-297-8453. NOTE: Non-US Citizens will not be allowed to bring electronic devices due to facility security requirements.
Registration:
http://events.constantcontact.com/register/event?llr=l4ihvgeab&oeidk=a07eejljhycc2dcd102
Biography: Mark Winstead: Mark had over twenty-five years' STEM experience before joining the MITRE Corporation in 2014, including stints as a cryptologic mathematician, software engineer, systems engineer, systems architect and systems engineer in addition to being a systems security engineer. He has worked for several defense contractors, an Environmental Protection Agency contractor, a Facebook-like startup, a fabless semi-conductor manufacturer of commercial security protocol acceleration solutions, and a network performance management solutions company. Mark current works with various MITRE sponsors, helping programs with security engineering as well as teaming with others on integrating SSE into the acquisition systems engineering process. He also works with the MITRE Institute on developing materials for internal training courses for SSE. Mark is a graduate of the University of Virginia (PhD, Mathematics) and Florida State University (BS & MS, Mathematics). He resides in Colorado Springs, CO.
Daryl Hild: Daryl's career spans 3 decades helping warfighters with engineering solutions that span Army tactical communications networks, Army information technology network and systems management, NORAD/NORTHCOM air warning, NORAD/NORTHCOM missile warning, global positioning system, space systems, and cyberspace security. He currently serves as the Department Head for the Systems Security Engineering department within the MITRE Cyber Security Technical Center. Daryl previously served as Associate Department Head for the Combatant Commands and Air Force Space Command Security department. Within the Cyber Security Technical Center, he has collaborated with the MITRE Institute on developing a Systems Security Engineering (SSE) competency model and an SSE Learning Path. As well, Daryl is developing operational concepts and constructs for engineering defensive and offensive cybersecurity capabilities. Prior to MITRE, Daryl was an Army Signal Officer from 1984 to 1990. He received his bachelor degree in Electrical Engineering from Washington University, St. Louis, MO; and his master and doctoral degrees in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ. In the community, Daryl serves as a BSA Venturing advisor enabling youth to develop leadership skills through community service projects and high adventure experiences.
Host: MITRE Corporation and INCOSE Los Angeles
More Information: Presentation1.jpg
Location: The MITRE Corporation, 2401 E. El Segundo BLVD, Suite 460, El Segundo, CA 90245.
Audiences: INCOSE Members $25; Nonmembers $45. Register now, limited to 24 attendees.
Contact: Deborah A. Cannon
