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Events for September 26, 2014
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AI SEMINAR - Query-driven approach to entity resolution
Fri, Sep 26, 2014 @ 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Information Sciences Institute
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Dmitri V. Kalashnikov , UCI
Talk Title: Query-driven approach to entity resolution
Series: AISeminar
Abstract: The significance of data quality research is motivated by the observation that the effectiveness of data-driven technologies such as decision support tools, data exploration, analysis, and scientific discovery tools is closely tied to the *quality of data* to which such techniques are applied. It is well recognized that the outcome of the analysis is only as good as the data on which the analysis is performed. That is why today organizations spend a substantial percentage of their budgets on cleaning tasks such as removing duplicates, correcting errors, and filling missing values, to improve data quality prior to pushing data through the analysis pipeline.
Given the critical importance of the problem, many efforts, in both industry and academia, have explored systematic approaches to addressing the cleaning challenges. This talk focuses primarily on the *entity resolution* challenge that arises because objects in the real world are referred to using references or descriptions that are not always unique identifiers of the objects, leading to ambiguity.
Traditionally, data cleaning is performed as a preprocessing step when creating a data warehouse prior to making it available to analysis -- an approach that works well under standard settings. Cleaning the entire data warehouse, however, can require a considerable amount of time and significant computing resources. Hence, this approach is often suboptimal for many modern query-driven and Big Data applications that need to analyze only small portions of the entire dataset and produce answers "on-the-fly" and in real-time.
To address these new cleaning challenges, we have developed a *Query-Driven Approach (QDA)* to data cleaning. QDA exploits the specificity and semantics of the given SQL selection query to significantly reduce the cleaning overhead by resolving only those records that may influence the answer of the query. It computes answers that are equivalent to those obtained by first using a regular cleaning algorithm, and then querying on top of the cleaned data. However, in many cases QDA can compute these answers much more efficiently.
A key concept driving the QDA approach is that of *vestigiality*. A cleaning step (i.e., call to the resolve function for a pair of records) is called vestigial (redundant) if QDA can guarantee that it can still compute correct final answer without knowing the outcome of this resolve. We formalize the concept of vestigiality in the context of a large class of SQL selection queries and develop techniques to identify vestigial cleaning steps. Technical challenges arise since vestigiality, as we will show, depends on several factors, including the specifics of the cleaning function (e.g., the merge function used if two objects are indeed duplicate entities), the predicate associated with the query, and the query answer semantics of what the user expects as the result of the query. We show that determining vestigiality is NP-hard and propose an effective approximate solution to test for vestigiality that performs very well in practice.
The comprehensive empirical evaluation of the proposed approach demonstrates its significant advantage in terms of efficiency over traditional techniques for query-driven applications.
Biography: http://www.ics.uci.edu/~dvk/CV/dvk_bio.txt
Dmitri V. Kalashnikov is an Associate Adjunct Professor of Computer Science at the University of California, Irvine. He received his PhD degree in Computer Science from Purdue University in 2003. He received his diploma in Applied Mathematics and Computer Science from Moscow State University, Russia in 1999, graduating summa cum laude.
His general research interests include databases and data mining. Currently, he specializes in the areas of entity resolution & data quality, and real-time situational awareness. In the past, he has also contributed to the areas of spatial, moving-object, and probabilistic databases.
He has received several scholarships, awards, and honors, including an Intel Fellowship and Intel Scholarship. His work is supported by the NSF, DH&S, and DARPA.
Host: Greg Ver Steeg
Webcast: http://webcasterms1.isi.edu/mediasite/Viewer/?peid=dd8c0e0eef1749fdb4bc581af408d8561dLocation: Information Science Institute (ISI) - 1135
WebCast Link: http://webcasterms1.isi.edu/mediasite/Viewer/?peid=dd8c0e0eef1749fdb4bc581af408d8561d
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Alma Nava / Information Sciences Institute
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W.V.T. Rusch Engineering Honors Colloquium
Fri, Sep 26, 2014 @ 01:00 PM - 02:00 PM
USC Viterbi School of Engineering, Viterbi School of Engineering Student Affairs
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Robert Powell, Retired Chemical Engineer/Industrial Hygienist, ExxonMobil Biomedical Sciences
Talk Title: Industrial Hygiene Engineering Controls for Petrochemical Plants
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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Women in Engineering Ice Cream Social
Fri, Sep 26, 2014 @ 02:00 PM - 04:00 PM
Viterbi School of Engineering Student Organizations
University Calendar
The Women in Engineering organizations wanted to take a minute to give out a huge welcome to the incoming women of Viterbi, a welcome back to those returning, and a delicious study break for all!
RSVP here: https://www.facebook.com/events/454062601398567/?ref=br_tf
The participating organizations include:
The Society of Women Engineers (SWE)
The Society of Hispanic Professional Engineers (SHPE)
Women in Computing (WIC)
Girls in Tech (GIT)
Alpha Omega Epsilon (AOE)
National Society of Black Engineers (NSBE)Location: Grace Ford Salvatori Hall Of Letters, Arts & Sciences (GFS) - 106
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Society of Women Engineers
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NL Seminar-Semantic Parsing at Google
Fri, Sep 26, 2014 @ 03:00 PM - 04:00 PM
Information Sciences Institute
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Bill MacCartney, (Google/Stanford)
Talk Title: Semantic Parsing at Google
Series: Natural Language Seminar
Abstract: With the shift from desktop to mobile, and the rise of voice-driven UIs, a growing proportion of the Google query stream is not well-served by conventional keyword-based information retrieval. More and more queries use natural language ("when does walgreens close"), seek answers not found on any web page ("how do i get to work from here"), or demand action rather than information ("text my wife i'm 10 minutes late"). Satisfying such queries requires semantic parsing, that is, mapping the query into a structured, machine-readable representation of meaning. In this talk, I will give an overview of the techniques Google has developed to address the problem of semantic parsing, and discuss some of the challenges that remain. I'll also highlight differences between academia and industry in how the problem is conceived.
Biography: Bill MacCartney is a Senior Research Scientist at Google, working primarily on semantic parsing. He is also a Consulting Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Stanford. For more info: http://nlp.stanford.edu/~wcmac/
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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Integrated Seminar Series
Fri, Sep 26, 2014 @ 03:00 PM - 04:30 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Prof. Payam Heydari, UC Irvine
Talk Title: Terahertz and Millimeter-Wave Frequency Generation and Synthesis in Silicon
Abstract: Terahertz (THz) and millimeter-wave (mm-wave) imaging and sensing is considered to be one of the emerging and disruptive technologies over the next decade. THz (including the W-band) waves pass through non-conducting materials such as clothes, paper, wood and brick and so cameras sensitive to them can peer inside envelopes, into living rooms and "frisk" people at distance. THz/mm-wave imaging/sensing systems, therefore, will be key enabling components in applications such as security surveillance (to find concealed weapons and explosives), non-destructive testing, biology, radio astronomy, multi-gigabit wireless connectivity, and medical imaging. One of the most critical and daunting tasks in a THz/mm-wave system is signal generation and frequency synthesis. This lecture presents a comprehensive overview and comparative study of research efforts which have explored several circuit techniques and architectures leading to highly efficient frequency synthesis and signal generation in silicon at mm-wave and terahertz frequencies.
Biography: Payam Heydari received his B.S. and M.S. degrees (Honors) in Electrical Engineering from Sharif University of Technology in 1992 and 1995, respectively. He received his Ph.D. degree from the University of Southern California in 2001. He is currently a Professor of Electrical Engineering at the University of California, Irvine. He has received many awards and recognitions and published more than 110 journal and conference papers
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=910778
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=910778
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Astani CEE Ph.D. Seminar
Fri, Sep 26, 2014 @ 03:00 PM - 04:00 PM
Sonny Astani Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Bita Analui, Ph.D., , Institute of Statistics and Operations Research, University of Vienna, Austria
Talk Title: Multistage Stochastic Optimization Problems under Model Uncertainty
Abstract:
Multistage Stochastic Optimization is a well-established framework where uncertainty is involved and decisions have to
be taken in a sequential manner only based on the available information at the time of decision making. These two
characteristics are enough to tie multistage stochastic optimization into almost all decision problems in the real life.
However, in addition to parametersâ uncertainty, in the class of real world problems, the true probability model, which describes these parameters, is itself subject to uncertainty that should not be ignored. Acknowledging the incomplete information about the underlying probability model in multistage stochastic optimization problems, leads to the following questions:
• How can we account for model uncertainty when solving a multistage stochastic program?
• What are the associated theoretical and algorithmic complexities?
In this talk a new theoretical foundation and a non-parametric approach provide answers to these questions and can be
used in a wide range of applications. In this regard, the model uncertainty problem is formulated in a minimax form and a
setup is given for studying saddle point properties of the multistage stochastic minimax problems. Moreover, an
algorithmic approach for finding the minimax decisions at least asymptotically is presented. In addition, by considering
the objective as a function of robustness, the distributionally robust frontier is drawn and costs and rewards of robustness around this frontier is quantified. Finally, this approach for a short term hydro electricity production problem with weekly ordering under weather and market risk is implemented. The worst model is found within the corresponding ambiguity neighborhood and a solution which is robust with respect to the model uncertainty is determined.
Biography: Bita Analui received her MS from University of Sheffield in 2009, with research focus on statistics and her
PhD from University of Vienna in 2014, where she won a scholarship to conduct research at Computational Optimization
Doctoral College. Her primary research focus is algorithms and applications of Multistage Stochastic Optimization (MSO)
problems. Simultaneously, she worked with Siemens Austria in designing and implementing solution algorithms and
performing sensitivity analysis in the field of âStochastic optimization in power systemsâ.
Location: Seeley G. Mudd Building (SGM) - 101
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Evangeline Reyes
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USC Engineering in Beijing, China - Information Session
Fri, Sep 26, 2014 @ 07:00 PM - 09:00 PM
Viterbi School of Engineering Graduate Admission
Workshops & Infosessions
You are cordially invited to join us for an upcoming graduate engineering information session in Beijing, China. This event will be hosted by Viterbi School representatives Ray Xu, Director of the USC China office for the Viterbi School of Engineering. Special guest, Assosiate Professor and Civil and Environmental Engineering Associate Chair Erik Johnson, will also join the session.
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:
Crowne Plaza Beijing Zhongguancun
No.106 Zhi Chun Road
Hai Dian District, Beijing 100086, China
REGISTER NOWAudiences: Students with an undergraduate backrgound in engineering, math or science
Contact: William Schwerin
