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Events for October 16, 2009
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Hawaii High School Counselor Breakfast
Fri, Oct 16, 2009 @ 08:00 AM - 10:00 AM
Viterbi School of Engineering Undergraduate Admission
Receptions & Special Events
Coordinated by the USC Office of Admission, the breakfast aims to give High School Counselors more information relative to their students about applying to USC and the admission process.
Location: Halekulani<br>2199 Kalia Road<br> Honolulu, HI 96815
Audiences: High School Counselors
Contact: Viterbi Admission
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LEGO Mindstorms VGSA Robotics Competition
Fri, Oct 16, 2009 @ 09:00 AM - 05:00 PM
Viterbi School of Engineering Student Organizations
Student Activity
This VGSA Robotics Competition Sponsored by Northrop Grumman will give you a chance to build a robot of your own and compete with other engineer's robot designs. Kits are supplied to each team. Free food will be provided for the competitors.The top 3 teams take home their Robots and get added prizes! All teams will get Participation Prizes!Event Schedule (October 16-18th): Friday - LAST CHANCE TO FORM TEAMS & REGISTER! 1 hour introduction session. Saturday - Building Day! Sunday - Competition DaySpace is limited. Only 12 teams of 4 people will compete. Sign up now at http://viterbistudents.usc.edu/vgsa/events/2009_roboticscompetition.htmFirst come first serve! Preference will be given to teams with members from at least 2 different engineering departments.In case you do not have a team and would like to join the competition, show up on Oct. 16, GFS 106 at 4pm and meet people to form a team with and register.(Note: Teams must be comprised of Engineering grad students, but everyone is welcomed to spectate.)For more information, please go to
http://viterbistudents.usc.edu/vgsa/events/2009_roboticscompetition.htm
or email to Nadav Ivzan vgsafin@gmail.comLocation: Kaprielian Hall (KAP) - (Kaprielian Hall), GFS(Grace Ford Salvatori Hall)
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: VGSA
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USC Transfer Day: Engineering & Admission Talk, Financial Aid Presentation, Tour and Advisement
Fri, Oct 16, 2009 @ 09:00 AM - 04:00 PM
Viterbi School of Engineering Undergraduate Admission
Workshops & Infosessions
Transfer Day is a full day program that features a Viterbi School of Engineering workshop. The program also includes a campus tour and special presentations for transfer students about admission, financial aid, and transfer credit. In addition, Viterbi transfer counselors will be available for individual coursework advisement on a first-come, first-serve basis in the afternoon following the program (transcripts required for advisement). Reservations required. Please call (213) 740-6616 for more information and to make a reservation.
Location: USC University Park Campus
Audiences: Prospective transfer students and families
Contact: Viterbi Admission
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CS Colloq: Dr. Alex Slivkins
Fri, Oct 16, 2009 @ 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Title:
"Learning in a Pay-per-Click Auction:
Characterizing Truthful Multi-Armed Bandit Mechanisms"Speaker: Dr. Alex Slivkins (Microsoft Research SVC)Host: Prof. David KempeABSTRACT: We consider a multi-round auction setting motivated by pay-per-click auctions for Internet advertising. In each round the auctioneer selects an advertiser and shows her ad, which is then either clicked or not. An advertiser derives value from clicks; the value of a click is her private information. Initially, neither the auctioneer nor the advertisers have any information about the likelihood of clicks on the advertisements. The auctioneer's goal is to design a (dominant strategies) truthful mechanism that
(approximately) maximizes the social welfare.If the advertisers bid their true private values, our problem is equivalent to the "multi-armed bandit problem", and thus can be viewed as a strategic version of the latter. In particular, for both problems the quality of an algorithm can be characterized by "regret", the difference in social welfare between the algorithm and the benchmark which always selects the same "best" advertisement. We investigate how the design of multi-armed bandit algorithms is affected by the restriction that the resulting mechanism must be truthful. We find that truthful mechanisms have certain strong structural properties -- essentially, they must separate exploration from exploitation -- *and* they incur much higher regret than the optimal multi-armed bandit algorithms. Moreover, we provide a truthful mechanism which
(essentially) matches our lower bound on regret.Joint work with Moshe Babaioff (Microsoft Research SVC) and Yogi Sharma (Cornell), published in ACM EC, 2009.BIO:
Dr. Alex Slivkins is a researcher at Microsoft Research, Silicon Valley Center. He received his PhD from Cornell University's CS department, advised by Jon Kleinberg, and then was a Postdoc at Brown University, working with Eli Upfal.
His research area is the design and analysis of algorithms. Specific topics of interest include large networks, metric embeddings, online learning, and mechanism design.
Location: Charles Lee Powell Hall (PHE) - 333
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: CS Front Desk
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W.V.T. Rusch Engineering Honors Colloquium; Using Light in Biology
Fri, Oct 16, 2009 @ 01:00 PM - 01:50 PM
Viterbi School of Engineering Student Affairs
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Dr. Andrea M. Armani, Assistant Professor in the Mork Family Department of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science at the University of Southern California, will present "Using Light in Biology" as part of the W.V.T. Rusch Engineering Honors Colloquium.
Location: Seeley G. Mudd Building (SGM) - 101
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Viterbi Admissions & Student Affairs
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Swapping Generators Assets: Market Salvation or Wishful Thinking
Fri, Oct 16, 2009 @ 03:00 PM - 04:00 PM
Daniel J. Epstein Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering
University Calendar
DANIEL J. EPSTEIN DEPARTMENT OF INDUSTRIAL AND SYSTEMS ENGINEERING SEMINAR:Title: "Swapping Generators' Assets: Market Salvation or Wishful Thinking" (Joint work with Tony Downward and David Young)Speaker: Golbon Zakeri, Co-Director of Electric Power Optimization Centre, University of Auckland, Auckland, New Zealand, Currently Visiting Scholar at the IEOR Department, UC BerkeleyABSTRACT: In April this year the New Zealand Commerce Commission released a review of the New Zealand Electricity Market (NZEM). This review, commonly referred to as the Wolak report, concluded that there was evidence of exercise of market power in the NZEM and was followed by a ministerial review of the NZEM. Both the Wolak report and the market review suggested a number of structural improvements for the NZEM. The likeliest structural change, suggest by both reviews, is a number of asset swap and divestiture option.I will present a review of the NZEM and the optimization and economic problems arising from it. I will talk briefly about the Wolak report and the background to the suggested structural changes from his report. I will then examine these suggestions in the frame work of simple Cournot models in presence of changing costs and line constraints. I will demonstrate that for our simple examples, these structural changes will achieve the opposite of what was intended!FRIDAY, OCTOBER 16, 2009, ANDRUS GERONTOLOGY (GER) 309, 3:00 – 4:00 PM
Location: Ethel Percy Andrus Gerontology Center (GER) - 309
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Georgia Lum
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H-1B Informational Workshop
Fri, Oct 16, 2009 @ 04:00 PM - 06:00 PM
Viterbi School of Engineering Student Affairs
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Interested in learning more about the H-1B employment visa? Immigration attorney Adam Green from the Law Offices of Adam Green will be presenting on the topic and address student concerns after the presentation.
Location: Leavy Library Auditorium
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Tracy Charles
