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SUNMONTUEWEDTHUFRISAT
Events for September 19, 2014
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Meet USC: Admission Presentation, Campus Tour, & Engineering Talk
Fri, Sep 19, 2014
Viterbi School of Engineering Undergraduate Admission
Receptions & Special Events
This half day program is designed for prospective freshmen and family members. Meet USC includes an information session on the University and the Admission process; a student led walking tour of campus and a meeting with us in the Viterbi School. Meet USC is designed to answer all of your questions about USC, the application process and financial aid. Reservations are required for Meet USC. This program occurs twice, once at 8:30 a.m. and again at 12:30 p.m. Please visit http://www.usc.edu/admission/undergraduate/firstyear/prospective/meetusc_sw.html to check availability and make an appointment. Be sure to list an Engineering major as your "intended major" on the webform!
Location: Ronald Tutor Campus Center (TCC) - USC Admission Office
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Viterbi Admission
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AI SEMINAR - Incentivizing Exploration [joint work with Peter Frazier, Jon Kleinberg, Robert Kleinberg]
Fri, Sep 19, 2014 @ 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Information Sciences Institute
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: David Kempe, USC CS Dept. Associate Professor and Associate Chair for Undergraduate Programs
Talk Title: Incentivizing Exploration [joint work with Peter Frazier, Jon Kleinberg, Robert Kleinberg]
Series: AISeminar
Abstract: We study a Bayesian multi-armed bandit (MAB) setting in which a principal seeks to maximize the sum of expected time-discounted rewards obtained by pulling arms, when the arms are actually pulled by selfish and myopic individuals. Since such individuals pull the arm with highest expected posterior reward (i.e., they always exploit and never explore), the principal must incentivize them to explore by offering suitable payments. Among others, this setting models crowdsourced information discovery and funding agencies incentivizing scientists to perform high-risk, high-reward research.
We explore the tradeoff between the principal's total expected time-discounted incentive payments, and the total time-discounted rewards realized. Specifically, with a time-discount factor gamma in (0,1), let OPT denote the total expected time-discounted reward achievable by a principal who pulls arms directly without having to incentivize selfish agents, in a MAB problem. We call a (payment, reward) combination (b,rho) in [0,1]^2 achievable if for every MAB instance, using expected time-discounted payments of at most b*OPT, the principal can guarantee an expected time-discounted reward of at least rho*OPT. Our main result is a complete characterization of achievable (payment, reward) pairs: (b,rho) is achievable if and only if sqrt(b) + sqrt(1-rho) >= sqrt(gamma).
In proving this characterization, we analyze so-called time-expanded policies, which in each step let the agents choose myopically with some probability p, and incentivize them to choose "optimally" with probability 1-p. The analysis of time-expanded policies leads to a question that may be of independent interest: If the same MAB instance (without selfish agents) is considered under two different time-discount rates gamma, eta, how small can the ratio of OPT(eta) to OPT(gamma) be? We give a complete answer to this question, showing that OPT(eta) >= ((1-gamma)^2/(1-eta)^2) OPT(gamma), and that this bound is tight.
Biography: David Kempe received his Ph.D. from Cornell University in 2003, and has been on the faculty in the computer science department at USC since the Fall of 2004, where he is currently an Associate Professor and Associate Chair for Undergraduate Programs.
His primary research interests are in computer science theory and the design and analysis of algorithms, with a particular emphasis on social networks, algorithms for feature selection, and game-theoretic and pricing questions. He is a recipient of the NSF CAREER award, the VSoE Junior Research Award, the ONR Young Investigator Award, a Sloan Fellowship, and an Okawa Fellowship, in addition to several USC mentoring awards.
***Upon Speakers request there will be no Live Webcast viewing; It will be recorded for internal viewing only***
Host: Greg Ver Steeg
Location: Information Science Institute (ISI) - 1135
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Alma Nava / Information Sciences Institute
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W.V.T. Rusch Engineering Honors Colloquium
Fri, Sep 19, 2014 @ 01:00 PM - 02:00 PM
USC Viterbi School of Engineering, Viterbi School of Engineering Student Affairs
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Alex Lee, Aerodynamics Engineer and USC Deputy Focal, The Boeing Company
Talk Title: The Business of Engineering Ethics: Tackle Real-World Challenges
Host: W.V.T. Rusch Engineering Honors Program
Location: Seeley G. Mudd Building (SGM) - 101
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Jeffrey Teng
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Integrated Seminar Series
Fri, Sep 19, 2014 @ 03:00 PM - 04:30 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Dr. Mark Straayer, Maxim Integrated Products
Talk Title: Data Converters
Abstract: The role that analog-to-digital converters (ADC) play in most electronic systems is growing, and this can be attributed to the two factors. First, it is well known that the reduced power, area, and cost of the digital in advanced process technologies is a motivating factor to integrate more signal processing functions in the digital domain. Second, the ADC performance trajectory of lower power consumption, higher speed, and higher precision resulting from architectural and process advances has been allowing for applications to sample the signal of interest with minimal analog signal processing at the front-end.
This talk will explore a number of topics in this area, highlighting application examples that have seen this trend and diving into technical approaches that make it possible. We will discuss one approach that Maxim has leveraged to achieve state-of-the-art performance with significant power reduction, zero-crossing based converters. In addition, we will explore other technical approaches for ADC designs, including SAR converters, sigma-delta converters, and the VCO-based converters in the context of the expanding role for ADC previously mentioned.
Biography: Dr. Matt Straayer received the B.S. and M.S. degrees in Electrical Engineering from the University of Michigan, and the Ph.D. degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is currently the Director of IC Design for the Advanced IP Solutions Group at Maxim Integrated.
From 2001-2003 he worked at Integrated Sensing Systems, Inc., Ypsilanti, MI, designing custom CMOS IC for capacitive and resonant MEMS sensors in industrial and medical wireless telemetry applications. From 2003-2008 he was a member of the technical staff at MIT Lincoln Laboratory, Lexington, MA, developing mixed-signal circuits for high-speed and RF applications in a variety of process technologies, especially in the area of high-performance and low-power frequency synthesizers.
In 2008 he helped to co-found Cambridge Analog Technologies (CAT), where as Vice President of Product Development he led the technical development of zero-crossing circuits for high performance analog-to-digital converters, taking the technology from MIT research to robust high volume products. In 2011 CAT was acquired by Maxim Integrated Products, and he has continued to lead the design team in establishing circuit architectures and roadmaps, effective project management, and recruiting technical talent.
Dr. Straayer is the author of numerous publications and patents, and currently serves on the ISSCC data converter technical program committee.
Hosted by Prof. Hossein Hashemi, Prof. Mike Chen and Prof. Mahta Moghaddam
Organized and hosted by Masashi Yamagata
For questions or additional details, please email myamagat@usc.edu
Host: Hosted by Prof. Hossein Hashemi, Prof. Mike Chen, Prof. Mahta Moghaddam, and Masashi Yamagata
More Info: http://mhi.usc.edu/events/event-details/?event_id=910777
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 132
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Elise Herrera-Green
Event Link: http://mhi.usc.edu/events/event-details/?event_id=910777
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NL Seminar- An open-source toolkit for the representation, manipulation and optimization of weighted hypergraphs
Fri, Sep 19, 2014 @ 03:00 PM - 04:00 PM
Information Sciences Institute
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Markus Dreyer, SDL
Talk Title: An open-source toolkit for the representation, manipulation and optimization of weighted hypergraphs
Series: Natural Language Seminar
Abstract: Weighted hypergraphs arise naturally in parsing, syntax-based machine translation and other tree-based NLP models, as well as in weighted logic programming.
We present an open-source toolkit for the representation and manipulation of weighted hypergraphs. It provides hypergraph data structures and algorithms, such as the shortest path and inside-outside algorithms, composition, projection, and more. In addition, it provides functionality to optimize hypergraph feature weights from training data. We model finite-state machines as a special case. We give a tutorial on hypergraphs and the hypergraph toolkit and explain how you can use these tools in your research.
This is joint work with Jonathan Graehl.
Biography: Markus Dreyer is a Senior Research Scientist at SDL Language Weaver. His research focuses on algorithms and machine learning techniques for large-scale machine translation and NLP. He received his PhD in Computer Science from Johns Hopkins University, advised by Jason Eisner. For more information, see http://goo.gl/d6mHUi.
Host: Aliya Deri 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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USC Engineering in Taipei, Taiwan - Information Session
Fri, Sep 19, 2014 @ 07:00 PM - 09:00 PM
Viterbi School of Engineering Graduate Admission
Workshops & Infosessions
September 19, 2014 - 7:00pm to 9:00pm
You are cordially invited to join us for an upcoming graduate engineering information session in Taipei, Taiwan. This event will be hosted by Viterbi School representatives Ray Xu, Director of the USC China office for the Viterbi School of Engineering.
Students who have earned or are in the progress of earning a Bachelor's degree in engineering, math, or a hard science (such as physics, biology, or chemistry) are welcome to attend to learn more about applying to our graduate programs.
Attendees will also have the chance to ask questions and receive official brochures and handout information from USC.
Location:
Grand Hyatt Taipei
2, SongShou Road
Taipei, Taiwan, 11051
REGISTER NOWAudiences: Students with an undergraduate backrgound in engineering, math or science
Contact: William Schwerin
