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Events for October 29, 2018
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Meet USC: Admission Presentation, Campus Tour, and Engineering TalkMon, Oct 29, 2018
Viterbi School of Engineering Undergraduate Admission
University Calendar
This half day program is designed for prospective freshmen (HS seniors and younger) 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. During the engineering session we will discuss the curriculum, research opportunities, hands-on projects, entrepreneurial support programs, and other aspects of the engineering 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 make sure to check availability and register online for the session you wish to attend. Also, remember to list an Engineering major as your "intended major" on the webform!
RSVPLocation: Ronald Tutor Campus Center (TCC) - USC Admission Office
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Rebecca Kinnon
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Seminars in Biomedical Engineering
Mon, Oct 29, 2018 @ 12:30 PM - 01:50 PM
Alfred E. Mann Department of Biomedical Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Joseph Cocozza, PhD, USC, Department of Ophthalmology
Talk Title: New program in biomedical area
Host: Qifa Zhou
Location: Olin Hall of Engineering (OHE) - 122
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Mischalgrace Diasanta
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PhD Defense - Caitlyn Clabaugh
Mon, Oct 29, 2018 @ 01:00 PM - 03:00 PM
Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science
University Calendar
Title: Human-Robot Learning: Computational Personalization For Socially Assistive Robotics
Time: 01:00 PM on Monday, October 29th, 2018
Location: RTH 406
Ph.D. Candidate: Caitlyn Clabaugh
Committee:
Prof. Maja MatariÄ
Prof. Gaurav Sukhatme
Prof. Gisele Ragusa
Abstract:
Socially assistive robotics (SAR) seeks to support human care and development through long-term, socially co-present interaction, supplementing the efforts of clinicians and educators. One primary objective in SAR is the personalization or tailoring of interaction to meet the unique and evolving abilities, preferences, and needs of individuals. This dissertation proposes a theoretical framework for human-robot learning (HRL) to enable computational personalization.
HRL is formalized as a hierarchical decision-making problem, wherein the robot selects actions to maximize an individual's psychosocial state and progress toward some assistive goal. The framework groups SAR actions into abstract categories based on theories from psychology and linguistics. Actions within each category are selected by a local policy or controller. The controllers themselves are activated by a meta-controller, an overarching heuristic or algorithm that controls the flow of the intervention. In this way, the framework hierarchically decomposes the large state-action spaces of SAR into more tractable subspaces for computational personalization.
The proposed framework was instantiated as an individualized SAR intervention for early childhood math. To validate the framework and its instantiation, a short-term study was conducted with typically developing children in a general preschool classroom. The data collected informed iterative design and computational personalization, culminating in a long-term, in-home SAR intervention for children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). In this context, individualization was framed as a reinforcement learning problem, adapting the SAR's instruction and feedback to each child over many interactions.
The fully autonomous SAR system was deployed for month-long interventions in the homes of ten children with ASD. The single-subject study found that the SAR system successfully individualized its instruction and feedback to each child participant over time. Additionally, all participants showed improvement in their mathematics skills and long-term retention of intervention content, demonstrating the quality of the individualization. This research designed, developed, and deployed a novel, fully autonomous, long-term, in-home, individualized SAR intervention for children with diverse needs. As a broader contribution, this dissertation formalizes the problem of HRL and offers a validated, theoretical framework to inform future research at the intersection of artificial intelligence and human-machine interaction.
Location: 406
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Lizsl De Leon
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Fall 2018 Joint CSC@USC/CommNetS-MHI Seminar Series
Mon, Oct 29, 2018 @ 02:00 PM - 03:00 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Amir Rahmani, NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory
Talk Title: Swarm Autonomy and a New Era of Space Exploration
Abstract:
Teams and swarms of autonomous robots and spacecraft hold the promise to change the way some missions are designed and provide new mission opportunities. Monolithic systems can be traded for a swarm of interconnected and coordinating assets. Swarm robotics has reached a level of maturity that can be reliably fielded. NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory has long enjoyed leadership in spacecraft formation flying and swarm robotics. This talk will present an overview of JPL's multi-agent autonomy tasks and technologies, including our multi-mission multi-agent autonomy architecture, as well as a number of multi-robot motion-planning tools developed at JPL.
Biography: Dr. Amir Rahmani has a Ph.D. from University of Washington in aeronautics and astronautics and was an assistant professor of aerospace engineering at the University of Miami prior to joining JPL. He has over a decade research experience in distributed space systems, formation flying, as well as swarm robotics. He is the NASA Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) subtopic manager for coordination and control of swarm of space vehicles.
Host: Mihailo Jovanovic, mihailo@usc.edu
More Info: http://csc.usc.edu/seminars/2018Fall/rahmani.html
More Information: 18.10.29_Amir_Rahmani_NASA_Seminar.pdf
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 132
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Brienne Moore
Event Link: http://csc.usc.edu/seminars/2018Fall/rahmani.html
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The Best of Both Worlds: Social Agents that Leverage Feelings of Rapport and Anonymity
Mon, Oct 29, 2018 @ 05:00 PM - 06:30 PM
Viterbi School of Engineering Student Organizations
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Gale M. Lucas, Research Assistant Professor at USC's ICT
Talk Title: The Best of Both Worlds: Social Agents that Leverage Feelings of Rapport and Anonymity
Series: AAAI@USC Lecture Series
Abstract: This talk presents research comparing social agents to both non-social machines and humans. Social agents have the potential to build rapport like humans (which non-social machines cannot do), but do so while assuring anonymity (which humans cannot do). In this way, they may offer the "best of both worlds" in terms of encouraging users to share personal information and disclose honestly, as well as feel comfortable in situations where they would otherwise be afraid of being negatively evaluated. This has implications for user design and offers possibilities for future research.
Biography: Gale M. Lucas is a Research Assistant Professor at University of Southern California's Institute for Creative Technologies (ICT). After earning her PhD from Northwestern University, she completed her post-doctoral work at ICT, where she established a research program in the areas of Affective Computing and Human-Computer Interaction. Her line of work in affective and personality computing focuses on models predicting mental health, perceptions of trust and emotion in real-world situations. Her work in HCI is centered around understanding how various social factors affect trust in agents and robots.
RSVP: https://goo.gl/forms/uLy23v8sHqz9ZRj72
Host: AAAI at USC
More Info: https://goo.gl/forms/uLy23v8sHqz9ZRj72
Location: John Stauffer Science Lecture Hall (SLH) - 200
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: AAAI at USC
Event Link: https://goo.gl/forms/uLy23v8sHqz9ZRj72
