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Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Events for October

  • Seminars in Biomedical Engineering

    Mon, Oct 03, 2016 @ 12:30 PM - 01:50 PM

    Alfred E. Mann Department of Biomedical Engineering

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Qifa Zhou, PhD,

    Talk Title: Photoacoustic Imaging

    Location: Olin Hall of Engineering (OHE) - 122

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Mischalgrace Diasanta

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  • EE 598 Cyber-Physical Systems Seminar Series

    Mon, Oct 03, 2016 @ 02:00 PM - 03:00 PM

    Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Laith Shalalfeh, PhD Candidate, University of Southern California

    Talk Title: Early-Warning Signals to Power System Blackouts

    Abstract: The rapid deployment of Phasor Measurement Units (PMUs) can keep the smart grid in a secure and reliable state. The large amount of data collected from the power grid by PMUs requires new algorithms to detect abnormal and potentially catastrophic events. In this presentation, we introduce a novel method to assess the distance to blackout or other instability of the smart grid. Based on the existence of long-range correlation in the PMU data, we exhibit an increase in the frequency Hurst exponent before the blackout. The increase in the Hurst exponent is quantified by Kendall rank correlation coefficient, which is known as Kendall's tau. High Kendall's tau of the frequency Hurst exponent is proposed as an early-warning signal for power system blackout.

    Biography: Laith Shalalfeh is a PhD candidate in Electrical Engineering department at the University of Southern California. He received a B.S. degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Jordan in 2009, and an M.S. degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Southern California in 2012. His research interests include electric vehicles, load modeling, voltage collapse, smart grid, and phasor measurement units.

    Host: Paul Bogdan

    Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 248

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Estela Lopez

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  • USC Stem Cell Seminar: Fabio Rossi, University of British Columbia

    Tue, Oct 04, 2016 @ 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM

    Alfred E. Mann Department of Biomedical Engineering

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Fabio Rossi, University of British Columbia

    Talk Title: TBD

    Series: Eli and Edythe Broad Center for Regenerative Medicine and Stem Cell Research at USC Distinguished Speakers Series

    Host: USC Stem Cell

    More Info: http://stemcell.usc.edu/events

    Webcast: http://keckmedia.usc.edu/Mediasite/Catalog/catalogs/StemCellSeminar

    Location: Eli & Edythe Broad CIRM Center for Regenerative Medicine & Stem Cell Resch. (BCC) - First Floor Conference Room

    WebCast Link: http://keckmedia.usc.edu/Mediasite/Catalog/catalogs/StemCellSeminar

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Cristy Lytal/USC Stem Cell

    Event Link: http://stemcell.usc.edu/events

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  • Epstein Institute Seminar - ISE 651

    Tue, Oct 04, 2016 @ 03:30 PM - 04:50 PM

    Daniel J. Epstein Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Anton Kleywegt, Ph.D., Associate Professor Georgia Tech

    Talk Title: Distributionally Robust Stochastic Optimization Using Wasserstein Distance

    Abstract: Distributionally robust stochastic optimization is an approach to optimization under uncertainty in which one hedges against a set of probability distributions, possibly taking into account available data. The talk considers a distributionally robust stochastic optimization problem that hedges against all probability distributions that are within a specified Wasserstein distance of a nominal distribution, for example, an empirical distribution obtained with data. We obtain a strong duality result, and we use it to derive a simple characterization of worst-case distributions in the Wasserstein ball. We use the results to study problems, including an on/off stochastic control problem, that would not make sense if one hedged against only an empirical distribution, but for which distributionally robust stochastic optimization formulations result in reasonable solutions.

    Biography: Anton Kleywegt is an associate professor in the Stewart School of Industrial & Systems Engineering at Georgia Tech. Dr. Kleywegt conducts research in optimization and stochastic modeling with applications in transportation, distribution, and logistics, especially in the following areas: vehicle routing and scheduling, inventory routing, distribution operations, fleet assignment, vendor managed inventory, distribution network design, yield management, terminal design and operations, logistics planning and control, multi-modal transportation, and intelligent transportation systems. He has also worked with Praxair, Columbian Chemicals Company, Delta Air Lines, Manhattan Associates, and The Home Depot on SCL projects in addressing logistics research in vendor managed inventory, fleet sizing and allocation, revenue management, scheduling of order picking, and distribution planning. Dr. Kleywegt received a Ph.D. from the School of Industrial Engineering at Purdue University in 1996 and joined the ISyE faculty this same year as an assistant professor.

    Host: Dr. John Gunnar Carlsson

    Location: Ethel Percy Andrus Gerontology Center (GER) - 206

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Angela Reneau

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  • Repeating EventBiotechnology Lecture Series

    Thu, Oct 06, 2016 @ 10:30 AM - 12:00 PM

    Alfred E. Mann Department of Biomedical Engineering

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Various, Amgen

    Talk Title: R&D Insights from Lab Bench to Patient Bedside

    Abstract: USC researchers have the opportunity to gain research and development insights with a new biotechnology lecture series sponsored by Amgen and the Eli and Edythe Broad Center for Regenerative Medicine and Stem Cell Research at USC.

    The weekly lecture series, "R&D Insights from Lab Bench to Patient Bedside" takes place Thursdays at 10:30AM-12:00PM at USC's Health Sciences Campus from September 1, 2016 through November 10, 2016.

    The talks will feature Amgen scientists speaking about:

    Identifying a possible therapeutic target and its role in disease
    Increasing therapeutic efficacy and safety
    Process development, devices and manufacturing
    Case studies from bench to clinic

    Lectures will take place at the BCC First Floor Seminar Room or ZNI Herklotz Seminar Room.

    RSVP at http://www.usc.edu/esvp (use code: amgenlecture). Space is limited. Preference will be given to SCRM master's students, PhDs, and postdocs, and attending all lectures is mandatory.

    Please contact qliumich@usc.edu or karenw03@amgen.com for further details.

    Host: USC Stem Cell/Amgen

    More Info: https://calendar.usc.edu/event/biotechnology_lecture_series_rd_insights_from_lab_bench_to_patient_bedside?utm_campaign=widget&utm_medium=widget&utm_source=USC+Event+Calendar#.V8dKNLX8vW4

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    View All Dates

    Contact: Cristy Lytal/USC Stem Cell

    Event Link: https://calendar.usc.edu/event/biotechnology_lecture_series_rd_insights_from_lab_bench_to_patient_bedside?utm_campaign=widget&utm_medium=widget&utm_source=USC+Event+Calendar#.V8dKNLX8vW4

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  • Annual Cornelius Pings Lecture

    Thu, Oct 06, 2016 @ 02:00 PM - 03:00 PM

    Mork Family Department of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Professor Rachel Segalman, University of California, Santa Barbara

    Talk Title: Functional Materials from Polymerized Ionic Liquids

    Host: Mork Family Department of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science

    Location: Seeley G. Mudd Building (SGM) - 123

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Aleessa Atienza

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  • CS Colloquium: Rong Ge (Duke University) - Avoid Spurious Local Optima: Homotopy Method for Tensor PCA

    Thu, Oct 06, 2016 @ 04:00 PM - 05:00 PM

    Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Rong Ge, Duke University

    Talk Title: Avoid Spurious Local Optima: Homotopy Method for Tensor PCA

    Series: Yahoo! Labs Machine Learning Seminar Series

    Abstract: This lecture satisfies requirements for CSCI 591: Computer Science Research Colloquium. Part of Yahoo! Labs Machine Learning Seminar Series.

    Recently, several non-convex problems such as tensor decomposition, phase retrieval and matrix completion are shown to have no spurious local minima, which allows them to be solved by very simple local search algorithms. However, more complicated non-convex problems such as the Tensor PCA do have local optima that are not global, and previous results rely on techniques inspired by Sum-of-Squares hierarchy. In this work we show the commonly applied homotopy method, which tries to solve the optimization problem by considering different levels of "smoothing", can be applied to tensor PCA and achieve similar guarantees as the best known Sum-of-Squares algorithms. This is one of the first settings where local search algorithms are guaranteed to avoid spurious local optima even in high dimensions.

    This is based on joint work with Yuan Deng (Duke University).

    Biography: Rong Ge is an assistant professor at Duke computer science department. He got his Ph.D. in Princeton University and was a post-doc at Microsoft Research New England before joining Duke. Rong Ge is broadly interested in theoretical computer science and machine learning. His research focuses on designing algorithms with provable guarantees for machine learning problems, with applications to topic models, sparse coding and computational biology.

    Host: Yan Liu

    Location: Henry Salvatori Computer Science Center (SAL) - 101

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Assistant to CS chair

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  • EE 598 Computer Engineering Seminar

    Thu, Oct 06, 2016 @ 04:00 PM - 05:00 PM

    Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Vivek Sarkar, Professor, Rice University

    Talk Title: Software Challenges for Extreme Scale Systems, or how to play the End-Game for Moore's Law

    Abstract: It is widely recognized that a major disruption is under way in computer hardware as processors strive to extend the end-game of Moore's Law by an increased reliance on parallelism and heterogeneity, leading to systems with thousands/millions/billions of processor cores at the node/rack/data-center levels. Unlike previous generations of hardware evolution, these "extreme scale" systems will have a profound impact on future software.

    In this talk, we summarize experiences gained in the Habanero Extreme Scale Software Research Laboratory at Rice University in addressing the software challenges for extreme scale systems. Our overall approach is based on introducing a set of unified primitives for structured parallelism, which can be used to enable new advances in programming models, compilers, and runtime systems for future hardware. Some of these primitives have already influenced industry standards for parallelism including the doacross construct in OpenMP 4.5, the task blocks library for C++, and Java's Phaser library, as well as the open source Open Community Runtime (OCR) system project.


    Biography: Vivek Sarkar is Professor and Chair of Computer Science at Rice University. He currently leads the Habanero Extreme Scale Software Research Laboratory at Rice University, and is PI of the DARPA-funded Pliny project on "big code" analytics. Prior to joining Rice in July 2007, Vivek was Senior Manager of Programming Technologies at IBM Research. His research projects at IBM included the X10 programming language, the Jikes Research Virtual Machine for the Java language, the ASTI optimizer used in IBM's XL Fortran product compilers, and the PTRAN automatic parallelization system. Vivek became a member of the IBM Academy of Technology in 1995, the E.D. Butcher Chair in Engineering at Rice University in 2007, and was inducted as an ACM

    Fellow in 2008. Vivek has been serving as a member of the US Department of Energy's Advanced Scientific Computing Advisory Committee (ASCAC) since 2009, and on CRA's Board of Directors since 2015.


    Host: Xuehai Qian

    Location: OHE 100D

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Estela Lopez

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  • 10th Annual USC Stevens Student Innovator Showcase

    Fri, Oct 07, 2016 @ 09:00 AM - 03:00 PM

    Alfred E. Mann Department of Biomedical Engineering

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Honored Guest and Keynote Speaker Mark Stevens, USC Stevens Center for Innovation

    Talk Title: 10th Annual USC Stevens Student Innovator Showcase

    Abstract: The USC Stevens Student Innovator Showcase is a USC student business competition promoting young entrepreneurs and their cutting-edge business ideas in all disciplines ranging from the arts and social sciences to engineering and medicine. During the daylong event, USC student teams present and pitch their startup ideas and prototypes to expert judges from the entrepreneur and investment communities as well as Trojan Family Weekend attendees to compete for thousands in USC-sponsored awards that can help to develop their ideas further. The most promising innovative student teams are selected as finalists to participate in an afternoon fast pitch round featuring 3-minute business pitches by each team to a panel of esteemed judges, and an awards ceremony for the winners.

    This year's event will feature Honored Guest and Keynote Speaker Mark Stevens. Mr. Stevens is one of Silicon Valley's top venture capitalists and benefactor to the USC Stevens Center for Innovation. All USC students, faculty, and staff are invited to join for Mr. Stevens' Keynote Speech at 12pm during the Showcase on Friday, October 7, 2016 on the lawn of the Allan Hancock Foundation Building (AHF).

    All Trojan Family Weekend attendees (USC students, parents, faculty, staff) are welcome to attend this free event.
    More information about the USC Stevens Student Innovator Showcase can be found at: http://stevens.usc.edu/events/student-innovator-showcase. Questions can be directed to Peijean Tsai at peijeant@usc.edu.


    Host: USC Stevens Center for Innovation

    More Info: http://stevens.usc.edu/events/student-innovator-showcase

    Location: Allan Hancock Foundation (AHF) -

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Cristy Lytal/USC Stem Cell

    Event Link: http://stevens.usc.edu/events/student-innovator-showcase

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  • AI Seminar-The Future is on Your Wrist: Challenges and Opportunities of Wearable Technologies

    Fri, Oct 07, 2016 @ 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM

    Information Sciences Institute

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Luca Foschini, Evidation Health

    Talk Title: The Future is on Your Wrist: Challenges and Opportunities of Wearable Technologies

    Series: Artificial Intelligence Seminar

    Abstract: Wearable technologies have seen a tremendous development in recent years: step and calorie counters have long made their way to our phones and watches, and new consumer-grade sensors can now measure a breadth of physiological functions that until recently could only be found in the monitoring equipment of intensive care units. However, despite the undisputed short-term benefits due to the user increased awareness, quantifying the potential value of wearable technologies in improving longer-term health outcomes remains an open question. In this talk we will present evidence that activity tracking data contains a wealth of information that is predictive of metrics directly related to health outcomes, ranging from medication adherence to lifestyle. To this end, we will show how machine learning tools need to be adapted to take full advantage of densely sampled, multi-variate time series of tracker data. Finally, we will reflect on how the predictive power of wearable data can be harnessed to inform behavior change interventions, and how expertise in computer science, clinical medicine, and behavioral psychology will have to join forces to overcome obstacles in adoption, user engagement, and regulations.

    Biography: As Co founder and Head of Data Science at Evidation Health, Luca Foschini PhD is responsible for data analytics, computing, research and development. Dr. Foschini has driven research collaborations with machine learning experts at NYU, behavioral economics departments at Harvard Business School and the Wharton School. Prior to this role, Dr. Foschini worked as R&D at Ask.com and was a visiting scholar at Google Research and ETH Zurich where he developed efficient algorithms for mining spatial data, partitioning large graphs, and detecting traffic anomalies in computer networks. He earned a PhD in Computer Science from UC Santa Barbara focusing on traffic analysis in computer and road networks. He has published numerous papers in the broader area of computer science and he co-authored several patents in information clustering and behavior phenotyping. Dr. Foschini is an alumnus of the Sant'Anna School of Pisa, Italy

    Host: Emilio Ferrara

    Location: Information Science Institute (ISI) - 11th Flr Conf Rm # 1135, Marina Del Rey

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Peter Zamar

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  • Techniques for Analysis of Folding Development in the Cerebral Cortex

    Fri, Oct 07, 2016 @ 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM

    Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Rosita Shishegar, University of Melbourne

    Talk Title: Techniques for Analysis of Folding Development in the Cerebral Cortex

    Series: Medical Imaging Seminar Series

    Abstract: Gyrification describes the series of events through which the immature cortex develops from a smooth surface to a folded sheet. While there is considerable speculation about the biological mechanisms that underpin the formation of gyri and sulci, little known about the events that directly lead to folding. In this talk, Rosita Shishegar will introduce the open problems in understanding cortical gyrification and provide an overview of a research program aimed at expanding knowledge in this area through the longitudinal study of brain development in the fetal sheep. In particular, she will focus on tools for morphometric analysis of the structural and diffusion-weighted MRI data, and present a new gyrification index derived from Laplace Beltrami eigenfunction level sets that combines the strengths of surface-based and curvature-based gyrification metrics.

    Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - B18

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Talyia White

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  • Biomedical Engineering Speakers

    Fri, Oct 07, 2016 @ 02:00 PM - 04:00 PM

    Alfred E. Mann Department of Biomedical Engineering

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: TBA, TBA

    Talk Title: TBA

    Host: Brent Liu, PhD

    Location: Corwin D. Denney Research Center (DRB) - 146

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Mischalgrace Diasanta

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  • Ming Hsieh Institute Seminar Series on Integrated Systems

    Fri, Oct 07, 2016 @ 02:00 PM - 04:00 PM

    Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Prof. Sebastian Hoyos, Texas A&M University

    Talk Title: Equalization Architectures for High Speed ADC-Based Serial I/O Receivers

    Host: Prof. Hossein Hashemi, Prof. Mike Chen, and Prof. Mahta Moghaddam

    More Information: MHI Seminar Series IS - Sebastian_Hoyos_Flyer.pdf

    Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 132

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Jenny Lin

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  • Ming Hsieh Institute CommNetS seminar

    Fri, Oct 07, 2016 @ 02:00 PM - 03:00 PM

    Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Mauro Da Lio, University of Trento

    Talk Title: From vehicle dynamics to human-robot interactions

    Series: CommNetS

    Abstract: This seminar will provide a panorama of the main ideas of my main research line. I will start with the original problem of assessing the maneuverability of unstable vehicles - such as motorcycles - which was solved by imagining that these vehicles were driven "optimally". I will then introduce the (not surprising) discovery that minimum time optimal control of motorcycles matches the way trained race drivers actually drive. I will then shift to the problem of modeling which optimality criterion holds for ordinary drivers, introducing some theories about optimality of human control (in particular minimum jerk).
    I will show the use of Optimal Control to model ideal ordinary drivers and its application to produce "reference maneuvers" used as gold standard in Advanced Driver Assistance Systems, showing, in particular, the application of these ideas in the PReVENT project. I will then touch the problem of modelling human driver behavior when multiple choices are possible, reviewing the Simulation Hypothesis of Cognition and its implication for the inference of intentions of drivers (a process that in natural cognition is called mirroring - from mirror neuron theory - and which can also be considered as a "mother nature" version of model-based state estimation). I will show, in particular, the application of this mechanism in the EU InteractIVe project. I will review the notions of subsumption and layered control architecture and, in particular, the role of action selection, and finally introduce the notion of artificial (co)driver agents showing the current status of such an agent for the EU AdaptIVe project. In the conclusions I will introduce the Dreamn4Cars project and the related idea of using dream-like mechanisms to train the sensory-motor architecture of an artificial driver for rare situations developed as variations of real world (near miss) events.

    Biography: I am professor of mechanical systems with the University of Trento, Italy. My initial research activity was focused on modeling and simulation of mechanical multibody systems, and on methods for generating the equations of motions symbolically. In particular, I developed symbolic models for vehicle and spacecraft dynamics and - exploiting the availability of symbolic equations - I worked on model-based control, and in particular Optimal Control. This was initially used to study the maneuverability and handling of motorcycles (which are unstable vehicles that cannot be studied otherwise in open loop) and later extended to the modeling of "optimal" drivers. More recently my focus shifted to the modeling of human sensory-motor control, in particular drivers and motor impaired people. In this framework, optimal control motor primitives are part of layered control architectures that can reproduce (to some extent) complex cognition and action-selection processes of humans. According to recent theories this in turn enables several possibilities for human-robot interactions.
    Prior of academic carrier I worked for an off-shore oil research company in underwater robotics (an EU EUREKA project). I have been involved in several EU framework programme 6 and 7 projects (PReVENT, SAFERIDER, interactIVe, VERITAS, adaptIVe, No-Tremor) in the domains of Intelligent Vehicles and Virtual Physiological Humans. I am currently the coordinator of the EU Horizon 2020 Dreams4Cars Research and Innovation Action: a 4.3M Euro collaborative project in the Robotics domain which aims at increasing the cognition abilities of artificial driving agents by means of an offline simulation mechanism broadly inspired to the dream states.

    Host: Prof. Petros Ioannou

    More Info: http://ee.usc.edu/~ashutosn/CommNetS2016/dokuwiki/doku.php?id=start

    Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 248

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Annie Yu

    Event Link: http://ee.usc.edu/~ashutosn/CommNetS2016/dokuwiki/doku.php?id=start

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  • Seminars in Biomedical Engineering

    Mon, Oct 10, 2016 @ 12:30 PM - 01:50 PM

    Alfred E. Mann Department of Biomedical Engineering

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Fikret Kirkbir, PhD, USC Alfred Mann Institute

    Talk Title: Protecting Intellectual Property

    Location: Olin Hall of Engineering (OHE) - 122

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Mischalgrace Diasanta

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  • EE 598 Cyber-Physical Systems Seminar Series

    Mon, Oct 10, 2016 @ 02:00 PM - 03:00 PM

    Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Ajay Jayant Joshi, Associate Professor, Boston University

    Talk Title: Designing Energy-efficient and Secure Accelerators for Machine Learning Applications

    Abstract: Today's mobile applications like activity tracking, photo/document sorting, fingerprint matching, search suggestions, etc. are increasingly data driven and commonly use Machine Learning (ML) algorithms. Executing these ML algorithms locally on the mobile system is sometimes preferable/necessary, but this local execution can be very energy intensive. At the same time, keeping these ML algorithm secure is becoming increasingly critical for application vendors as the use of the right ML algorithm can provide significant competitive (and in turn financial) advantage in the market. Hence, there is a need to execute these ML algorithms in an energy-efficient and secure manner. This talk focuses on the design of energy-efficient and secure hardware accelerators for ML-based applications. In the first half of my talk I'll present an adaptive classifier design that leverages the wide variability in data complexity to enable energy-efficient data classification operations. This adaptive classifier takes advantage of varying classification 'hardness' across data to dynamically allocate an appropriate classifier and improve energy efficiency. In the second half of my talk, I'll present a backside imaging approach that can be used to detect any insertion of Hardware Trojans during the fabrication phase. In particular, we engineer the fill cells in a standard cell library to be highly reflective at near-IR wavelengths so that they can be readily observed in an optical image taken through the backside of the chip. The pattern produced by their locations produces an easily measured watermark of the circuit layout. Any replacement, modification or re-arrangement of the fill cells to add a Hardware Trojan can therefore be detected through rapid post-fabrication backside imaging.

    Biography: Ajay Joshi received his Ph.D. degree from the ECE Department at Georgia Tech in 2006. He then worked as a postdoctoral researcher in the EECS Department at MIT. In 2009, he joined the ECE department at Boston University, where he is currently an Associate Professor. His research interests span across various aspects of VLSI design including circuits and architectures for communication and computation. He received the NSF CAREER Award in 2012 and Boston University ECE Department's Award for Excellence in Teaching in 2014.

    Host: Paul Bogdan

    Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 248

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Estela Lopez

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  • CANCELLED—USC Stem Cell Seminar: Andrew Brack, University of California, San Francisco

    Tue, Oct 11, 2016 @ 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM

    Alfred E. Mann Department of Biomedical Engineering

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Andrew Brack, University of California, San Francisco

    Talk Title: TBD

    Series: Eli and Edythe Broad Center for Regenerative Medicine and Stem Cell Research at USC Distinguished Speakers Series

    Abstract: Please note: This seminar has been cancelled.

    Host: USC Stem Cell

    More Info: http://stemcell.usc.edu/events

    Webcast: http://keckmedia.usc.edu/Mediasite/Catalog/catalogs/StemCellSeminar

    Location: Eli & Edythe Broad CIRM Center for Regenerative Medicine & Stem Cell Resch. (BCC) - First Floor Conference Room

    WebCast Link: http://keckmedia.usc.edu/Mediasite/Catalog/catalogs/StemCellSeminar

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Cristy Lytal/USC Stem Cell

    Event Link: http://stemcell.usc.edu/events

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  • Tensor Decomposition Techniques for analysing time-varying networks

    Tue, Oct 11, 2016 @ 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM

    Information Sciences Institute

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Anna Sapienza, PhD in Applied Mathematics at the Polytechnic Univ. of Turin, working in the Data Science Lab at ISI Foundation, Turin, Italy

    Series: Recruitng Seminar

    Abstract: The increasing availability of high-dimensional data calls for new methods to extract meaningful information, such as groups of data correlations (i.e. communities, clusters) or unusual and unexpected data records (i.e. anomalies, outliers). Time-varying networks are particularly suitable objects to summarize a large amount of data into interpretable representations and are used to describe a great variety of complex systems. A fundamental challenge is to define models and tools that are able to capture and disentangle the structural and temporal properties from the time-varying networks and reproduce the observed features on dynamical processes occurring over the network, such as information diffusion, event cascades or disease spreading. Thus, the purpose of my Ph.D work is twofold: to extract the structural and temporal properties of time-varying networks to face problems as pattern detection and missing data recovery, and to analyze the interplay between these characteristics and dynamical processes.

    Biography: Anna Sapienza is currently a Ph.D candidate at the Polytechnic University of Turin, she is completing the third year of her Ph.D studies. Her work was developed in the Data Science group at the I.S.I. Foundation of Turin under the supervision of Dr. Ciro Cattuto and Dr. Laetitia Gauvin. Her research interests stay at the intersection between computational social science, machine learning, and network analysis. Recently her work focused on the development of mathematical frameworks and tools for tensor factorization techniques and their applications for studying high-dimensional data.


    Host: Emilio Ferrara and Kristina Lerman

    Webcast: http://webcastermshd.isi.edu/Mediasite/Play/e7f614b9cffc415db4015dd86999db5f1d

    Location: Information Science Institute (ISI) - 1135 - 11th fl Large CR

    WebCast Link: http://webcastermshd.isi.edu/Mediasite/Play/e7f614b9cffc415db4015dd86999db5f1d

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Alma Nava / Information Sciences Institute

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  • Learning to Live with Errors: The Challenges and Solutions for Memory Reliability in the Sub-20nm Regime

    Wed, Oct 12, 2016 @ 10:00 AM - 11:30 AM

    Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Prashant J. Nair, Ph.D. Candidate, Georgia Institute of Technology

    Talk Title: Learning to Live with Errors: The Challenges and Solutions for Memory Reliability in the Sub-20nm Regime

    Abstract: Technology scaling, the prime driver for high-capacity memory systems, continues to be critical for current applications and acts as a key enabler for future applications. Unfortunately, scaling DRAM below sub-20nm is already becoming a challenge due to small feature sizes and flaky cells. Designers are also investigating alternative technologies such as die-stacking and Non-Volatile Memories (NVM), which makes the memory system susceptible to new failure modes (such as TSV failures). At these high error rates and failure modes, memory reliability challenges pose a serious threat to scaling. Furthermore, the cost of mitigating these failures with traditional solutions becomes impractically high. The goal of my thesis is to investigate architectural techniques to enable reliable and scalable memory systems at negligible overheads. In this talk, I will discuss three low-cost techniques to mitigate memory failures.

    First, I will advocate a cross-layer approach to tolerating memory failures, whereby the scaling faults are exposed to the architecture level and a simple error-correction code is used to tolerate scaling failures. Such a scheme can tolerate error rates as high as 100 parts per million with a negligible storage overhead. Second, I will discuss the challenges of TSV-failures for die-stacked memory systems and present techniques that can mitigate TSV and other large failures at runtime using a RAID-based technique. Finally, I will discuss a scheme called XED that can obtain Chipkill-level reliability by using 2x fewer chips for memory systems with On-Die ECC. XED mitigates the performance and power overheads of Chipkill without requiring any changes to the memory interface and transparently exposing the error detection information from each chip to the memory controller. Overall, this talk aims to showcase techniques that will enable dense, efficient and reliable memories that are robust to the pitfalls of technology scaling and die-stacking.


    Biography: Prashant J. Nair is a Ph.D. candidate in Georgia Institute of Technology where he is advised by Professor Moinuddin Qureshi. He received his MS (2011-2013) from Georgia Institute of Technology and his BE in Electronics Engineering (2005-2009) from University of Mumbai. His research interests include reliability, performance, power and refresh optimizations for current and upcoming memory systems. In these areas, he has authored and co-authored 9 papers in top-tier venues such as ISCA, MICRO, HPCA, ASPLOS and DSN. Prashant organized the "Memory Reliability Forum" (co-located with HPCA 2016) to highlight the importance of memory reliability to the wider architecture community. He served as the Submission's Co-chair of MICRO 2015 and in the ERC of ISCA 2016. During his Ph.D., he interned at several leading industrial labs including AMD, Samsung, Intel and IBM.


    Host: Murali Annavaram

    Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 248

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Estela Lopez

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  • MHI CommNetS Seminar

    Wed, Oct 12, 2016 @ 02:00 PM - 03:00 PM

    Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Dr. Athina Petropulu, Rutgers University

    Talk Title: Optimal Co-Design for Co-existence of MIMO Radars and MIMO Communication Systems

    Series: CommNetS

    Abstract: Spectrum congestion in commercial wireless communications is a growing problem as high-data-rate applications become prevalent. In an effort to relieve the problem, US federal agencies intend to make available spectrum in the 3.5 GHz band, which was primarily used by federal radar systems for surveillance and air defense, to be shared by both radar and communication applications. Even before the new spectrum is released, high UHF radars overlap with GSM communication systems, and S-band radars partially overlap with Long Term Evolution (LTE) and WiMax systems. When communication and radar systems overlap in the frequency domain, they exert interference to each other. Spectrum sharing is a new line of work that targets at enabling radar and communication systems to share the spectrum efficiently by minimizing interference effects. The current literature on spectrum sharing includes approaches which either use large physical separation between radar and communication systems, or optimally schedule dynamic access to the spectrum by using OFDM signals, or allow radar and communication system to co-exist in time and frequency via use of multiple antennas at both the radar and communication systems. The latter approach greatly improves spectral efficiency as compared to the other approaches. This talk presents our recent work on the latter approach. In particular, we discuss optimal co-design of MIMO radars and MIMO communication system signaling schemes, so that the effective interference power to the radar receiver is minimized, while a desirable level of communication rate and transmit power are maintained.

    Biography: Athina Petropulu received her undergraduate degree from the National Technical University of Athens, Greece, and the M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees from Northeastern University, Boston MA, all in Electrical and Computer Engineering. Since 2010, she is Professor of the Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) Department at Rutgers, having served as chair of the department during 2010-2016. Before that she was faculty at Drexel University. Dr. Petropulu's research interests span the area of statistical signal processing, wireless communications, signal processing in networking, physical layer security, and radar signal processing. Her research has been funded by various government industry sponsors including the National Science Foundation, the Office of Naval research, the US Army, the National Institute of Health, the Whitaker Foundation, Lockheed Martin and Raytheon.
    Dr. Petropulu is Fellow of IEEE and recipient of the 1995 Presidential Faculty Fellow Award given by NSF and the White House. She has served as Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing (2009-2011), IEEE Signal Processing Society Vice President-Conferences (2006-2008), and member-at-large of the IEEE Signal Processing Board of Governors. She was the General Chair of the 2005 International Conference on Acoustics Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP-05), Philadelphia PA. In 2005 she received the IEEE Signal Processing Magazine Best Paper Award, and in 2012 the IEEE Signal Processing Society Meritorious Service Award for "exemplary service in technical leadership capacities". She was selected as IEEE Distinguished Lecturer for the Signal Processing Society for 2017-2018.
    More info on her work can be found at www.ece.rutgers.edu/~cspl

    Host: Dr. Ashutosh Nayyar

    More Info: http://ee.usc.edu/~ashutosn/CommNetS2016/dokuwiki/doku.php?id=start

    Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 248

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Annie Yu

    Event Link: http://ee.usc.edu/~ashutosn/CommNetS2016/dokuwiki/doku.php?id=start

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  • EE 598 Computer Engineering Seminar

    Thu, Oct 13, 2016 @ 04:00 AM - 05:00 PM

    Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Josep Torrellas, Professor, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

    Talk Title: Toward Extreme-Scale Manycore Architectures

    Abstract: As transistor sizes continue to scale, we are about to witness stunning levels of chip integration, with 1,000 (simple) core on a single die, and increasing levels of die stacking. Transistors may not be much faster, but there will be many more of them. In these architectures, energy and power will be the main constraint, efficient communication and synchronization a major challenge, and programmability an unknown.

    In this context, this talk presents some of the technologies that we will need to deploy to exploit these architectures. Cores need to flexibly operate at a range of voltages, and techniques for efficient energy use such as power gating and voltage speculation need to be widespread. To enable data sharing, we need to rethink synchronization and fence hardware for scalability. Hardware extensions to ease programming will provide a competitive edge. A combination of all of these techniques-and additional disruptive technologies-are needed.


    Biography: Josep Torrellas is the Saburo Muroga Professor of Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He leads the Center for Programmable Extreme-Scale Computing, a center focused on architectures for extreme energy and power efficiency. He has been the director of the Intel-Illinois Parallelism Center (I2PC), a center created by Intel to advance parallel computing. He has made contributions to parallel computer architecture in the areas of shared memory multiprocessor organizations, cache hierarchies and coherence protocols, thread-level speculation, and hardware and software reliability. He is a Fellow of IEEE and ACM. He received the 2015 IEEE CS Technical Achievement Award.

    Host: Xuehai Qian

    Location: Olin Hall of Engineering (OHE) - OHE 100D

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Estela Lopez

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  • Repeating EventBiotechnology Lecture Series

    Thu, Oct 13, 2016 @ 10:30 AM - 12:00 PM

    Alfred E. Mann Department of Biomedical Engineering

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Various, Amgen

    Talk Title: R&D Insights from Lab Bench to Patient Bedside

    Abstract: USC researchers have the opportunity to gain research and development insights with a new biotechnology lecture series sponsored by Amgen and the Eli and Edythe Broad Center for Regenerative Medicine and Stem Cell Research at USC.

    The weekly lecture series, "R&D Insights from Lab Bench to Patient Bedside" takes place Thursdays at 10:30AM-12:00PM at USC's Health Sciences Campus from September 1, 2016 through November 10, 2016.

    The talks will feature Amgen scientists speaking about:

    Identifying a possible therapeutic target and its role in disease
    Increasing therapeutic efficacy and safety
    Process development, devices and manufacturing
    Case studies from bench to clinic

    Lectures will take place at the BCC First Floor Seminar Room or ZNI Herklotz Seminar Room.

    RSVP at http://www.usc.edu/esvp (use code: amgenlecture). Space is limited. Preference will be given to SCRM master's students, PhDs, and postdocs, and attending all lectures is mandatory.

    Please contact qliumich@usc.edu or karenw03@amgen.com for further details.

    Host: USC Stem Cell/Amgen

    More Info: https://calendar.usc.edu/event/biotechnology_lecture_series_rd_insights_from_lab_bench_to_patient_bedside?utm_campaign=widget&utm_medium=widget&utm_source=USC+Event+Calendar#.V8dKNLX8vW4

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    View All Dates

    Contact: Cristy Lytal/USC Stem Cell

    Event Link: https://calendar.usc.edu/event/biotechnology_lecture_series_rd_insights_from_lab_bench_to_patient_bedside?utm_campaign=widget&utm_medium=widget&utm_source=USC+Event+Calendar#.V8dKNLX8vW4

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  • Distinguished Lecture Series

    Thu, Oct 13, 2016 @ 12:45 PM - 01:50 PM

    Mork Family Department of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Dr. Tae-Joon Jeon, Inha University

    Talk Title: Investigation of Ion Channel Activities in the Presence of Ionic Liquids Using Model Cell Membranes

    Series: Distinguished Lecture

    Host: Professor Noah Malmstadt

    Location: James H. Zumberge Hall Of Science (ZHS) - 159

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Martin Olekszyk

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  • Computer Engineering Seminar

    Thu, Oct 13, 2016 @ 02:00 PM - 03:00 PM

    Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Dr. Simon Su, US Army Research Laboratory

    Talk Title: Scientific Visualization Research at ARL

    Abstract: A typical scientific visualization process involves the use of a favorite visualization toolkit to read the simulation data stored on a file system. Once the data is loaded, computational scientists will use the data analysis capabilities provided by the visualization toolkit to analyze the data, in an attempt to understand the output of a simulation. The scientists will then use the visualization toolkit to generate images and movies from the data to further understanding of the data. In most cases, a high performance computing center will have visualization staff members that can help the scientists to create a more elaborate movies for presentations. In an attempt to provide the computational scientists with alternative visualization technologies, the visualization team at ARL has extended ParaView to support 3D immersive and interactive visualization running on the zSpace virtual reality display. Furthermore, for large scale simulation datasets, we have also extended ParaView to include the capability for high-resolution interactive visualization.

    Biography: Simon Su is a Computer Scientist at the US Army Research Lab. He received his PhD from the Department of Computer Science, at the University of Houston in 2001. He has 14 years of experience in virtual reality and scientific visualization research and development. He is currently working on using large scale high-resolution and virtual reality technologies to support data visualization to enable scientific discovery and exploration of large scale scientific data. His research interests include interactive information visualization to support data analysis, and applying 3D immersive and interactive technologies to enable research in other interdisciplinary field including education, and journalism.

    Host: Prof. Viktor Prasanna

    Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 248

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Annie Yu

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  • AI Seminar-Matrix Completion, Saddlepoints, and Gradient Descent

    Fri, Oct 14, 2016 @ 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM

    Information Sciences Institute

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Jason Lee , USC

    Talk Title: Matrix Completion, Saddlepoints, and Gradient Descent

    Series: Artificial Intelligence Seminar

    Abstract: Matrix completion is a fundamental machine learning problem with wide applications in collaborative filtering and recommender systems. Typically, matrix completion are solved by non-convex optimization procedures, which are empirically extremely successful. We prove that the symmetric matrix completion problem has no spurious local minima, meaning all local minima are also global. Thus the matrix completion objective has only saddlepoints an global minima.

    Next, we show that saddlepoints are easy to avoid for even Gradient Descent -- arguably the simplest optimization procedure. We prove that with probability 1, randomly initialized Gradient Descent converges to a local minimizer.


    Biography: Jason Lee is an assistant professor in Data Sciences and Operations at the University of Southern California. Prior to that, he was a postdoctoral researcher at UC Berkeley working with Michael Jordan. Jason received his PhD at Stanford University advised by Trevor Hastie and Jonathan Taylor. His research interests are in statistics, machine learning, and optimization. Lately, he has worked on high dimensional statistical inference, analysis of non-convex optimization algorithms, and theory for deep learning.

    Host: Emilio Ferrara

    Location: Information Science Institute (ISI) - 6th Floor -CR # 689; ISI-Marina del Rey

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Peter Zamar

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  • Biomedical Engineering Speakers

    Fri, Oct 14, 2016 @ 02:00 PM - 04:00 PM

    Alfred E. Mann Department of Biomedical Engineering

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Danny J. Wang, PhD, Professor of Neurology, USC Institute for Neuroimaging & Informatics

    Talk Title: Noncontrast Perfusion MRI and Dynamic MR Angiography

    Series: Department of Biomedical Engineering: Systems Cellular-Molecular Bioengineering Distinguished Speaker Series

    Abstract: Arterial spin labeling (ASL) is an emerging noninvasive MRI technique to measure cerebral blood flow (CBF) by utilizing magnetically labeled arterial blood water as an endogenous tracer. While in the past ASL has been limited by the low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), recent technical development at high and ultrahigh magnetic fields, array receive coils and more efficient spin labeling and image acquisition methods has brought ASL to the frontier of both basic and clinical neuroscience. In this talk I will review the latest technical development of ASL and representative clinical applications in neurologic disorders such as stroke and arteriovenous malformation (AVM). Another new ASL technique is 4D non-contrast dynamic MR angiography (dMRA) that is able to visualize and quantify the dynamic flow pattern of labeled blood through the cerebrovasculature with millisecond temporal resolution and millimeter spatial resolution. I will showcase representative clinical applications of 4D dMRA, and discuss a novel method for assessing cerebral vascular compliance or arterial stiffness.

    Host: Brent Liu, PhD

    Location: Olin Hall of Engineering (OHE) - 100B

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Mischalgrace Diasanta

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  • Ming Hsieh Institute Seminar Series on Integrated Systems

    Fri, Oct 14, 2016 @ 02:00 PM - 04:00 PM

    Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Stacy Ho, Deputy Director, Analog Circuit Design, MediaTek, Inc.

    Talk Title: Recent Advances in ADCs for Mobile Applications: 4G to 5G

    Host: Prof. Hossein Hashemi, Prof. Mike Chen, and Prof. Mahta Moghaddam

    More Information: MHI Seminar Series IS - Stacy_Ho_Flyer.pdf

    Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 248

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Jenny Lin

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  • Astani Civil and Environmental Engineering Ph.D. Seminar

    Fri, Oct 14, 2016 @ 03:00 PM - 04:00 PM

    Sonny Astani Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Christopher Morrow and Ryan Gustafson, Astani CEE Ph.D. Candidates

    Talk Title: See Attachment

    Location: John Stauffer Science Lecture Hall (SLH) - 102

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Evangeline Reyes

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  • Astani Civil and Environmental Engineering Ph.D. Seminar

    Fri, Oct 14, 2016 @ 03:00 PM - 04:00 PM

    Sonny Astani Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Christopher Morrow and Ryan Gustafson, Astani CEE Ph.D. Candidates

    Abstract: Towards Sustainable Wastewater Reuse: Salinity Control in Osmotic Membrane Bioreactors

    By: Christopher Morrow


    Alongside climate change comes an increase in drought duration and severity. In response, low energy wastewater recycling methods are becoming increasingly attractive. Our group has developed an osmotic membrane bioreactor system (OMBR) with a low energy Membrane Distillation (MD) re-concentration step driven by waste heat for potable wastewater reuse applications. A membrane bioreactor with a submerged forward osmosis (FO) module subsystem has been tested for high-strength domestic wastewater treatment. In the FO process, relatively pure water is transported from the mixed liquor into the draw solution; the mixed liquor suspended solids become concentrated and the draw solution becomes diluted. At the same time, a small amount of salt from the draw solution diffuses across the membrane from the draw solution into the mixed liquor. Consequently, bioreactor salinity increases. This reverse salt diffusion (RSD) can affect biological processes, particularly at higher concentrations. In this presentation, RSD from two membrane configurations will be evaluated; the first is a membrane cassette submerged in the bioreactor and the second is a side-stream process external to the bioreactor. In the submerged configuration, the draw solution is recirculated through a frame skinned with FO membrane and in the external configuration, both the feed and draw solutions have crossflow along the membrane selective and structural layers, respectively. Two advantages of external operation are: 1) crossflow on the feed side scours foulants away from the membrane, and 2) increasing crossflow velocity (CFV) on the draw side reduces dilutive concentration polarization. These result in increased water flux, but may also change RSD, which alters the composition of the foulant layer and/or the bioreactor salinity. Bench-scale FO experiments to determine the specific reverse salt flux (SRSF) with each configuration were carried out. The bench-scale results were used as inputs to initialize a model and predict the steady-state salt concentration of the pilot-scale bioreactor. Further analysis was carried out to examine the affect of changing the solids retention time (SRT), membrane area, and reactor volume to optimize system performance and maintain low salinity OMBRs.


    TITLE: Waste-heat-driven membrane distillation (MD) and long-term hydrophobicity of MD membranes

    By: Ryan Gustafson

    Abstract:
    Global concern regarding water scarcity, climate change, and environmental health have resulted in increased interest in new water treatment technologies, particularly technologies for water reuse and desalination applications with low electrical energy requirements. Increased interest in water reuse and environmental health have resulted in more stringent regulatory requirements for producers of industrial and municipal wastewaters. One technology poised to address these concerns is MD. MD is a thermally driven separation process that is used to distill water from an impaired feed water source using a hydrophobic membrane. Maintaining the hydrophobicity of the MD membrane is vital to maintaining the characteristic high rejection of non-volatile contaminants that is key to the application of MD to water treatment. It is though that long-term exposure of MD membranes to flowing water at high temperature and high salinity will result in reduced membrane hydrophobicity over time, but this has not been proven. Another key aspect of MD technology for its application to water treatment is its ability to be driven by low-grade waste-heat. While most MD researchers assume that low-grade waste-heat will be available and easily transferrable to the MD module, few have demonstrated successful operation of waste-heat-driven MD systems. Further, the small amount of research available on these systems lacks detailed analysis of the impacts of waste heat source variability on water production. Finally, an analysis of system-wide heat transfer behavior and the impact of different system configurations on water production in WHD-MD systems is not available in existing studies. In my presentation, I will discuss


    Location: John Stauffer Science Lecture Hall (SLH) - 102

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Evangeline Reyes

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  • EMNLP PRACTICE TALK: UNDERSTANDING NEURAL MACHINE TRANSLATION: LENGTH CONTROL AND SYNTACTIC STRUCTURE

    Fri, Oct 14, 2016 @ 03:00 PM - 04:00 PM

    Information Sciences Institute

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Xing Shi, USC/ISI

    Talk Title: EMNLP PRACTICE TALK: UNDERSTANDING NEURAL MACHINE TRANSLATION: LENGTH CONTROL AND SYNTACTIC STRUCTURE

    Series: Natural Language Seminar

    Abstract: Neural Machine Translation is powerful but we know little about the black box. We conduct the following two investigations to gain a better understanding: First, we investigate how neural, encoder-decoder translation systems output target strings of appropriate lengths, finding that a collection of hidden units learns to explicitly implement this functionality. Second, we investigate whether a neural, encoderdecoder translation system learns syntactic information on the source side as a by-product of training. We propose two methods to detect whether the encoder has learned local and global source syntax. A fine-grained analysis of the syntactic structure learned by the encoder reveals which kinds of syntax are learned and which are missing.





    Biography: Xing Shi is a PhD student at ISI working with Prof. Kevin Knight.

    Host: Kevin Knight

    More Info: http://nlg.isi.edu/nl-seminar/

    Location: Information Science Institute (ISI) - 6th Floor -CR # 689; ISI-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, Oct 17, 2016 @ 12:30 PM - 01:50 PM

    Alfred E. Mann Department of Biomedical Engineering

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Paul Meadows, MS, USC BME, VP of Engineering, CTO-ImThera Medical, CEO Int Functional Electrical Stim Soc (IFESS)

    Talk Title: TBA

    Location: Olin Hall of Engineering (OHE) - 122

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Mischalgrace Diasanta

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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

    Mon, Oct 17, 2016 @ 02:00 PM - 03:00 PM

    Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Yuanzhang Xiao, Northwestern University, Postdoctoral Fellow

    Talk Title: Towards Efficient Electricity Markets For Smart Grid

    Abstract: Electricity markets, as the major instrument in balancing supply and demand, have been crucial for the stability of current power systems. However, it is increasingly challenging for electricity markets to remain efficient as the power systems are transitioning into "smart grid", which is featured by a large number of distributed (renewable) energy sources. The challenges are faced by both the market designer (i.e., the independent system operator) and the market participants (i.e., energy suppliers). For the market designer, the challenge is to design market mechanisms that induce efficient outcomes without having to monitoring a large number of market participants. For the market participants, the challenge is to maximize their profits under incomplete knowledge about their opponents and uncertainty of their own renewable energy generation. Using tools from game theory, optimization, and reinforcement learning, we will present some of our works towards addressing these challenges.

    Biography: Yuanzhang Xiao is a postdoctoral fellow in Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at Northwestern University. He is broadly interested in game theory, optimization, and learning, and their applications in designing cyber-physical systems. His recent focus has been smart grid. He received his PhD in Electrical Engineering from UCLA in 2014, and B.S. and M.S. degrees from Tsinghua University in 2006 and 2009.

    Host: Paul Bogdan

    Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 248

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Estela Lopez

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  • USC Stem Cell Seminar: Victor Corces, Emory University

    Tue, Oct 18, 2016 @ 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM

    Alfred E. Mann Department of Biomedical Engineering

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Victor Corces, Emory University

    Talk Title: TBD

    Series: Eli and Edythe Broad Center for Regenerative Medicine and Stem Cell Research at USC Distinguished Speakers Series

    Host: USC Stem Cell

    More Info: http://stemcell.usc.edu/events

    Webcast: http://keckmedia.usc.edu/Mediasite/Catalog/catalogs/StemCellSeminar

    Location: Eli & Edythe Broad CIRM Center for Regenerative Medicine & Stem Cell Resch. (BCC) - First Floor Conference Room

    WebCast Link: http://keckmedia.usc.edu/Mediasite/Catalog/catalogs/StemCellSeminar

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Cristy Lytal/USC Stem Cell

    Event Link: http://stemcell.usc.edu/events

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  • ISE 651 Epstein Institute Seminar

    Tue, Oct 18, 2016 @ 03:30 PM - 04:50 PM

    Daniel J. Epstein Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Dr. Matthew Plumlee, Assistant Professor - University of Michigan

    Talk Title: Bayesian calibration of complex systems: methods, applications, and lingering issues

    Abstract: -“ Bayesian calibration is used to combine collected
    experimental or observational data with existing
    understanding. The popularity of this method is tied to several
    features: it can incorporate unknown parameters, it can function
    when the model is imperfect, and it offers both future prediction
    and uncertainty quantification. This seminar will discuss the
    general methods and some applications of Bayesian calibration
    while challenging the current state-of-the-art science on the
    topic. Chiefly, this talk will discuss a modeling framework that is
    widely adopted but leaves the posterior of the parameter often
    sub-optimally broad. There has been no generally accepted
    alternatives to date. This presentation will illustrate how using
    Bayesian calibration where the prior distribution on the bias
    (potential model incorrectness) is orthogonal to the gradient of the
    computer model. Problems associated with Bayesian calibration
    are shown to be mitigated through analytic results in addition to example.

    Biography: Matthew Plumlee received his Ph.D. degree in Industrial and Systems Engineering from the
    Georgia Institute of Technology. He is currently an Assistant Professor in the department Industrial and
    Operations Engineering at the University of Michigan. His research interests include statistical learning with
    special emphasis on model calibration and uncertainty quantification. He received the Georgia Tech Sigma Xi
    Best Dissertation Award and the Quality, Reliability and Statisitistic Best Student Paper Award from INFORMS.
    His work has appeared in the Journal of the American Statistical Association and Technometrics.

    Host: Dr. Jong-Shi Pang & Dr. Qiang Huang

    Location: Ethel Percy Andrus Gerontology Center (GER) - 206

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Angela Reneau

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  • CS Colloquium: Keshav Pingali (UT Austin) - Parallel Programming Needs Data-centric Foundations

    Tue, Oct 18, 2016 @ 04:00 PM - 05:00 PM

    Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Keshav Pingali , UT Austin

    Talk Title: Parallel Programming Needs Data-centric Foundations

    Series: CS Colloquium

    Abstract: This lecture satisfies requirements for CSCI 591: Computer Science Research Colloquium.

    Multicore and manycore processors are now ubiquitous, but
    parallel programming remains as difficult as it was 30-40 years ago. During this time, our community has explored many promising approaches including functional and dataflow languages, logic programming, and automatic parallelization using program analysis and restructuring, but none of these approaches has succeeded except in a few niche application areas.

    In this talk, I will argue that these problems arise largely from the computation-centric foundations and abstractions that we currently use to think about parallelism. In their place, I will propose a novel data-centric foundation for parallel programming called the operator formulation in which algorithms are described in terms of actions on data. The operator formulation shows that a generalized form of data-parallelism called amorphous data-parallelism is ubiquitous even in complex, irregular applications such as mesh generation/refinement/partitioning and SAT solvers. Regular algorithms emerge as a special case of irregular ones,
    and many application-specific optimization techniques can be generalized to a broader context. The operator formulation also leads to a structural analysis of algorithms called TAO-analysis that provides implementation guidelines for exploiting parallelism efficiently. Finally, I will describe a system called Galois based on these ideas for exploiting amorphous data-parallelism on multicores and GPUs.

    Biography: Keshav Pingali is a Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Texas at Austin, and he holds the W.A."Tex" Moncrief Chair of Computing in the Institute for Computational Engineering and Sciences (ICES) at UT Austin. He was on the faculty of the Department of Computer Science at Cornell University from 1986 to 2006, where he held the India Chair of Computer Science.

    Pingali is a Fellow of the IEEE, ACM and the AAAS. He was the co-Editor-in-chief of the ACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems, and currently serves on the editorial boards of the ACM Transactions on Parallel Computing, International Journal of Parallel Programming and Distributed Computing. He has also served on the NSF CISE Advisory Committee.

    Host: Chao Wang

    Location: Henry Salvatori Computer Science Center (SAL) - 101

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Assistant to CS chair

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  • MHI CommNetS Seminar

    Wed, Oct 19, 2016 @ 02:00 PM - 03:00 PM

    Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Dr. Amir Salimi, N/A

    Talk Title: Generalized cut-set bounds and Symmetrical Projections of Entropy region

    Series: CommNetS

    Abstract: In this talk, we show two combinatorial optimization problems, which arise from network information theory. Many multi-terminal communication networks, content delivery networks, cache networks and distributed storage systems, can be modeled as a broadcast network. An explicit characterization of the capacity region of the general network coding problem is one of the best known open problems in network information theory. A simple set of bounds that are often used in the literature to show that certain rate tuples are infeasible are based on the graph-theoretic notion of cut. The standard cut-set bounds, however, are known to be loose in general when there are multiple messages to be communicated in the network. A new set of explicit network coding bounds, which combine different simple cuts of the network via a variety of set operations (not just the union), are established via their connections to extremal inequalities for submodular functions.

    Moreover, it is known that there is a direct relationship between network coding solution and characterization of entropy region. We talk about the symmetric structures in network coding problems and their relation with symmetrical projections of entropy region and introduce new aspects of entropy inequalities. First, inequalities relating average joint entropies rather than entropies over individual subsets are studied. Second, the existence of non-Shannon type inequalities under partial symmetry is studied using the concepts of Shannon and non-Shannon groups.

    Host: Prof. Ashutosh Nayyar

    Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 248

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Annie Yu

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  • CAIS Seminar: Stefano Ermon (Stanford) - Measuring Progress towards Sustainable Development Goals with Machine Learning

    Wed, Oct 19, 2016 @ 04:00 PM - 05:00 PM

    Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Stefano Ermon, Stanford University

    Talk Title: Measuring Progress towards Sustainable Development Goals with Machine Learning

    Series: Center for AI in Society (CAIS) Seminar Series

    Abstract: This lecture satisfies requirements for CSCI 591: Computer Science Research Colloquium.

    Recent technological developments are creating new spatio-temporal data streams that contain a wealth of information relevant to sustainable development goals. Modern AI techniques have the potential to yield accurate, inexpensive, and highly scalable models to inform research and policy. As a first example, I will present a machine learning method we developed to predict and map poverty in developing countries. Our method can reliably predict economic well-being using only high-resolution satellite imagery. Because images are passively collected in every corner of the world, our method can provide timely and accurate measurements in a very scalable end economic way, and could revolutionize efforts towards global poverty eradication. As a second example, I will present some ongoing work on monitoring agricultural and food security outcomes from space.

    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 and the Woods Institute for the Environment. He completed his PhD in computer science at Cornell in 2015. His research interests include techniques for scalable and accurate inference in graphical models, statistical modeling of data, 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 has won several awards, including two Best Student Paper Awards, one Runner-Up Prize, and a McMullen Fellowship.

    Host: Milind Tambe

    Location: Mark Taper Hall Of Humanities (THH) - 101

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Assistant to CS chair

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  • Repeating EventBiotechnology Lecture Series

    Thu, Oct 20, 2016 @ 10:30 AM - 12:00 PM

    Alfred E. Mann Department of Biomedical Engineering

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Various, Amgen

    Talk Title: R&D Insights from Lab Bench to Patient Bedside

    Abstract: USC researchers have the opportunity to gain research and development insights with a new biotechnology lecture series sponsored by Amgen and the Eli and Edythe Broad Center for Regenerative Medicine and Stem Cell Research at USC.

    The weekly lecture series, "R&D Insights from Lab Bench to Patient Bedside" takes place Thursdays at 10:30AM-12:00PM at USC's Health Sciences Campus from September 1, 2016 through November 10, 2016.

    The talks will feature Amgen scientists speaking about:

    Identifying a possible therapeutic target and its role in disease
    Increasing therapeutic efficacy and safety
    Process development, devices and manufacturing
    Case studies from bench to clinic

    Lectures will take place at the BCC First Floor Seminar Room or ZNI Herklotz Seminar Room.

    RSVP at http://www.usc.edu/esvp (use code: amgenlecture). Space is limited. Preference will be given to SCRM master's students, PhDs, and postdocs, and attending all lectures is mandatory.

    Please contact qliumich@usc.edu or karenw03@amgen.com for further details.

    Host: USC Stem Cell/Amgen

    More Info: https://calendar.usc.edu/event/biotechnology_lecture_series_rd_insights_from_lab_bench_to_patient_bedside?utm_campaign=widget&utm_medium=widget&utm_source=USC+Event+Calendar#.V8dKNLX8vW4

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    View All Dates

    Contact: Cristy Lytal/USC Stem Cell

    Event Link: https://calendar.usc.edu/event/biotechnology_lecture_series_rd_insights_from_lab_bench_to_patient_bedside?utm_campaign=widget&utm_medium=widget&utm_source=USC+Event+Calendar#.V8dKNLX8vW4

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  • CS Colloquium and RASC seminar: Ali Agha (Caltech, JPL) - Quantifiably safe robot motion planning under motion and sensing uncertainty

    Thu, Oct 20, 2016 @ 03:30 PM - 05:00 PM

    Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Ali Agha, Caltech, JPL

    Talk Title: Quantifiably safe robot motion planning under motion and sensing uncertainty

    Series: RASC Seminar Series

    Abstract: This lecture satisfies requirements for CSCI 591: Computer Science Research Colloquium.

    Planning robot motions amidst obstacles, while actively enhancing localization, is a key component for true autonomy. With a growing number of autonomous robots and safety-critical applications, it is of paramount importance to design planners with the ability to guarantee and quantify the system's safety. In this talk, we explore planning methods that reason about the acquisition of future perceptual knowledge and incorporate this knowledge in planning to accurately quantify the success probability and safety of the plan. In particular, I present a planning framework under motion and sensing uncertainty, called Feedback-based Information RoadMap (FIRM). FIRM is a multi-query graph in belief space (space of probability distributions), which can be viewed as the belief space variant of the celebrated PRM (probabilistic roadmap). Each node of FIRM is a belief. Each edge (belief-to-belief transition) is realized via composition of closed-loop controllers that behave like funnels in belief space. We also discuss the feedback nature and scalability of the generated plan. We will demonstrate this approach in the context of robot navigation in indoor GPS-denied environments.

    Biography: Ali-Akbar Agha-Mohammadi is a Robotics Research Technologist at NASA JPL/California Institute of Technology. Previously, he was a research engineer at Qualcomm Research and a post-doctoral researcher at LIDS/ACL at MIT. He has received his Ph.D. in Computer Science and Engineering from Texas A&M. He also holds B.S. and M.S. degrees in Electrical Engineering (Control Systems). His research interests include robotics, stochastic systems, control systems, estimation, and filtering theory.


    Host: CS Department

    Location: Henry Salvatori Computer Science Center (SAL) - 101

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Assistant to CS chair

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  • EE 598 Computer Engineering Seminar

    Thu, Oct 20, 2016 @ 04:00 PM - 05:00 PM

    Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Subhasish Mitra, Professor, Stanford University

    Talk Title: Robust Systems: From Today to the N3XT 1,000X

    Abstract: Today's mainstream electronic systems typically assume that transistors and interconnects operate correctly over their useful lifetime. With enormous complexity and significantly increased vulnerability to failures compared to the past, future system designs cannot rely on such assumptions. At the same time, there is explosive growth in our dependency on such systems.

    Robust system design is essential to ensure that future systems perform correctly despite rising complexity and increasing disturbances. For coming generations of silicon technologies, several causes of hardware failures, largely benign in the past, are becoming significant at the system-level. Furthermore, emerging nanotechnologies such as carbon nanotubes are inherently highly subject to imperfections. Such Nano-Engineered Computing Systems Technologies (N3XT) are key to building transformative nanosystems since future computing demands far exceed the capabilities of today's electronics.
    This talk will address the following major robust system design goals:
    • New approaches to thorough test and validation that scale with tremendous growth in complexity.
    • Cost-effective tolerance and prediction of failures in hardware during system operation.
    • A practical way to build nanosystems that can overcome substantial inherent imperfections in emerging nanotechnologies and deliver three orders of magnitude energy efficiency improvements for future data-intensive applications.
    Significant recent progress in robust system design impacts almost every aspect of future systems, from ultra-large-scale networked systems all the way to their nanoscale components.


    Biography: Professor Subhasish Mitra directs the Robust Systems Group in the Department of Electrical Engineering and the Department of Computer Science of Stanford University, where he is the Chambers Faculty Scholar of Engineering. Before joining Stanford, he was a Principal Engineer at Intel.
    Prof. Mitra's research interests include robust systems, VLSI design, CAD, validation and test, nanosystems, and neurosciences. His X-Compact technique for test compression has been key to cost-effective manufacturing and high-quality testing of a vast majority of electronic systems, including numerous Intel products. X-Compact and its derivatives have been implemented in widely-used commercial Electronic Design Automation tools. He, jointly with his students and collaborators, demonstrated the first carbon nanotube computer, and it was featured on the cover of NATURE. The US NSF presented this work as a Research Highlight to the US Congress, and it also was highlighted as "an important, scientific breakthrough" by the BBC, Economist, EE Times, IEEE Spectrum, MIT Technology Review, National Public Radio, New York Times, Scientific American, Time, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, and numerous others worldwide.

    Prof. Mitra's honors include the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers from the White House, the highest US honor for early-career outstanding scientists and engineers, the ACM SIGDA/IEEE CEDA A. Richard Newton Technical Impact Award in Electronic Design Automation, "a test of time honor" for an outstanding technical contribution, the Semiconductor Research Corporation's Technical Excellence Award, and the Intel Achievement Award, Intel's highest corporate honor. He and his students published several award-winning papers at major venues: IEEE/ACM Design Automation Conference, IEEE International Solid-State Circuits Conference, IEEE International Test Conference, IEEE Transactions on CAD, IEEE VLSI Test Symposium, Intel Design and Test Technology Conference, and the Symposium on VLSI Technology. At Stanford, he has been honored several times by graduating seniors "for being important to them during their time at Stanford."

    Prof. Mitra has served on numerous conference committees and journal editorial boards. He served on DARPA's Information Science and Technology Board as an invited member. He is a Fellow of the ACM and the IEEE.


    Host: Xuehai Qian

    Location: OHE 100D

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Estela Lopez

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  • Biomedical Engineering Speakers

    Fri, Oct 21, 2016 @ 02:00 PM - 04:00 PM

    Alfred E. Mann Department of Biomedical Engineering

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Pak Kin Wong, PhD, Professor, Penn State, Dept. of Biomedical Engineering

    Talk Title: A Systems Bioengineering Framework for Probing Collective Cell Migration

    Series: Distinguished Speaker Series, Dept. of Biomedical Engineering

    Abstract: Collective cell migration is a fundamental multicellular activity that plays essential roles in numerous physiological and pathological processes, such as tissue development, regeneration, and cancer metastasis. Proper coordination of cells, for instance, is required to repair damaged tissues in which cells crawl collectively atop exposed extracellular matrix following injury. The collective migration mechanisms responsible for tissue development are also utilized in the invasion and metastasis of malignant tumors. Despite its significance, the fundamental processes that drive collective cell migration, such as leader cell formation and multicellular cooperativity, remain poorly understood. To elucidate the molecular and cellular mechanisms governing collective cell migration, my laboratory is developing a single molecule biosensor for dynamic multigene analysis in complex tissue environments. By integrating the single molecule biosensor with microengineered 3D tissue models, single cell photothermal ablation, biomechanical analysis, and agent-based computational modeling, we establish a systems bioengineering framework for probing collective cell migration. Using the systems bioengineering framework, we reveal that the formation of leader cells during collective migration is dynamically regulated by Dll4 signaling through both Notch1 and intercellular tension. Our finding provides a molecular basis for the stochastic emergence of leader cells, which may enable novel approaches in regenerative medicine, wound healing and anti-metastasis therapy in the future.

    Biography: Pak Kin Wong is a Professor of Biomedical Engineering, Mechanical Engineering and Surgery at the Pennsylvania State University. Prior to Penn State, Dr. Wong was an Associate Professor in the Departments of Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering and Biomedical Engineering and a member of the Southwest Environmental Health Sciences Center at the University of Arizona. He received his Ph.D. from the University of California, Los Angeles in 2005. He is an editor of Scientific Reports, IEEE Transaction on Nanotechnology, IEEE Nanotechnology Magazine, and Journal of Laboratory Automation. He organizes numerous international conferences, including serving as the General Co-Chair of IEEE NEMS 2017 in Los Angeles CA. His current research interest focuses on collective cell migration and clinical diagnostics. He has published 90 peer-reviewed journal articles in the area of nanotechnology and biomedical engineering, and is an inventor of two patents. Among other honors, Dr. Wong was awarded the NIH Director's New Innovator Award in 2010, Arizona Engineering Faculty Fellow in 2011, AAFSAA outstanding Faculty Award in 2013, and JALA 10 -“ A Top 10 Breakthrough in Innovation in 2015.

    Host: Keyue Shen, PhD

    More Information: Pak Kin Wong - flyer (2).pdf

    Location: Corwin D. Denney Research Center (DRB) - 146

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Mischalgrace Diasanta

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  • Ming Hsieh Institute Seminar Series on Integrated Systems

    Fri, Oct 21, 2016 @ 02:00 PM - 04:00 PM

    Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Dr. Brian Ginsburg, RF Design Manager, Texas Instruments

    Talk Title: Compact mm-Wave Imaging and Sensing

    Host: Prof. Hossein Hashemi, Prof. Mike Chen, and Prof. Mahta Moghaddam

    More Information: MHI Seminar Series IS - Brian_Ginsburg_Flyer.pdf

    Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 132

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Jenny Lin

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  • NL Seminar

    Fri, Oct 21, 2016 @ 03:00 PM - 04:00 PM

    Information Sciences Institute

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Marjan Ghazvininejad, USC/ISI

    Talk Title: EMNLP PRACTICE TALK. 1. GENERATING TOPICAL POETRY And 2. UNSUPERVISED NEURAL HIDDEN MARKOV MODELS

    Series: Natural Language Seminar

    Abstract: 1. In this talk I describe Hafez, a program that generates any number of distinct poems on a user-supplied topic. Poems obey rhythmic and rhyme constraints. I describe the poetry-generation algorithm, give experimental data concerning its parameters, and show its generality with respect to language and poetic form. 2. In this work, we present the first results for neuralizing an Unsupervised Hidden Markov Model. We evaluate our approach on tag induction. Our approach outperforms existing generative models and is competitive with the state-of-the-art though with a simpler model easily extended to include additional context.





    Biography: Marjan Ghazvininejad is a PhD student at ISI working with Prof. Kevin Knight. Yonatan Bisk is a Postdoc at ISI working with Prof. Daniel Marcu.

    Host: Xing Shi and Kevin Knight

    More Info: http://nlg.isi.edu/nl-seminar/

    Location: Information Science Institute (ISI) - 6th Floor -CR # 689; ISI-Marina del Rey

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Peter Zamar

    Event Link: http://nlg.isi.edu/nl-seminar/

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  • Astani Civil and Environmental Engineering Ph.D. Seminar

    Fri, Oct 21, 2016 @ 03:00 PM - 04:00 PM

    Sonny Astani Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: JiachenZhang and Adam Keen , Astani CEE Ph.D. Candidates

    Talk Title: Revisiting the climate impacts of cool roofs around the globe using an Earth system model, and Fragility of Floating Docks for Small Craft Marinas

    Abstract: See attached

    Revisiting the climate impacts of cool roofs around the globe using an Earth system model

    AND

    Fragility of Floating Docks for Small Craft Marinas



    More Information: October 21 CEE-PhD Seminar.pdf

    Location: John Stauffer Science Lecture Hall (SLH) - 102

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Evangeline Reyes

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  • Seminars in Biomedical Engineering

    Mon, Oct 24, 2016 @ 12:30 PM - 01:50 PM

    Alfred E. Mann Department of Biomedical Engineering

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Frances Richmond, PhD, USC Faculty Pharmacy, Dir Int Center for Regulatory Science

    Talk Title: Regulatory and quality challenges for new product commercialization

    Location: Olin Hall of Engineering (OHE) - 122

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Mischalgrace Diasanta

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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

    Mon, Oct 24, 2016 @ 02:00 PM - 03:00 PM

    Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Mihailo Jovanovic, Professor, University of Minnesota

    Talk Title: Controller Architectures: Tradeoffs between Performance and Complexity

    Abstract: This talk describes the design of controller architectures that achieve a desired tradeoff between performance of cyber-physical systems and controller complexity. Our methodology consists of two steps. First, we design controller architecture by incorporating regularization functions into the optimal control problem and, second, we optimize the controller over the identified architecture. For large-scale networks of dynamical systems, the desired structural property is captured by limited information exchange between physical and cyber layers and the regularization term penalizes the number of communication links. In the first step, the controller architecture is designed using a customized proximal augmented Lagrangian algorithm. This method exploits separability of the sparsity-promoting regularization terms and transforms the augmented Lagrangian into a form that is continuously differentiable and can be efficiently minimized using a variety of methods. Although structured optimal control problems are, in general, nonconvex, we identify classes of convex problems that arise in the design of symmetric systems, undirected consensus and synchronization networks, optimal selection of sensors and actuators, and decentralized control of positive systems. Examples are provided to demonstrate the effectiveness of the framework.

    Biography: Mihailo Jovanovic (www.umn.edu/~mihailo) received the PhD degree from UC Santa Barbara, in 2004. He is a professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Minnesota and has held visiting positions with Stanford University and the Institute for Mathematics and its Applications. His current research focuses on design of controller architectures, dynamics and control of fluid flows, and fundamental limitations in the control of large networks of dynamical systems. He serves as an Associate Editor of the SIAM Journal on Control and Optimization, Vice Chair of the APS External Affairs Committee, and had served as an Associate Editor of the IEEE Control Systems Society Conference Editorial Board from July 2006 until December 2010. Prof. Jovanovic received a CAREER Award from the National Science Foundation in 2007, the George S. Axelby Outstanding Paper Award from the IEEE Control Systems Society in 2013, and the Distinguished Alumni Award from UC Santa Barbara in 2014.

    Host: Paul Bogdan

    Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 248

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Estela Lopez

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  • Graduate Seminar

    Tue, Oct 25, 2016 @ 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM

    Mork Family Department of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Professor Austin J. Minnich, California Institute of Technology

    Talk Title: Heat under the microscope: Uncovering the microscopic processes that govern thermal transport

    Series: Graduate Seminar

    Host: Professor Jayakanth Ravichandran

    Location: Hedco Pertroleum and Chemical Engineering Building (HED) - 116

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Martin Olekszyk

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  • USC Stem Cell Seminar: Jan Nolta, University of California, Davis

    Tue, Oct 25, 2016 @ 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM

    Alfred E. Mann Department of Biomedical Engineering

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Jan Nolta, University of California, Davis

    Talk Title: TBD

    Series: Eli and Edythe Broad Center for Regenerative Medicine and Stem Cell Research at USC Distinguished Speakers Series

    Host: USC Stem Cell

    More Info: http://stemcell.usc.edu/events

    Webcast: http://keckmedia.usc.edu/Mediasite/Catalog/catalogs/StemCellSeminar

    Location: Eli & Edythe Broad CIRM Center for Regenerative Medicine & Stem Cell Resch. (BCC) - First Floor Conference Room

    WebCast Link: http://keckmedia.usc.edu/Mediasite/Catalog/catalogs/StemCellSeminar

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Cristy Lytal/USC Stem Cell

    Event Link: http://stemcell.usc.edu/events

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  • EE-EP Seminar

    Tue, Oct 25, 2016 @ 02:30 PM - 04:00 PM

    Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Prasad Gogineni, University of Kansas

    Talk Title: Ultrawideband (UWB) Radars for Remote Sensing of Snow, Soil Moisture and Ice

    Abstract: Ultra-wideband (UWB) radars operating over the frequency range from about 100 MHz to 94 GHz and integrated into small Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS) can support scientific and operational research on snow, soil moisture, and ice. Two major impacts of climate change are related to fresh water resources and sea level rise. We need more information on snow water equivalent (SWE) and soil moisture to manage water resources in the future. Soil moisture is a key variable in scientific research and operational applications, including the forecasting of floods and agriculture. Also, soil moisture controls evaporation of land surfaces and is an input variable in predictions of summer rainfall over the continents. UWB radars operating over the frequency range of 150-600 MHz and UWB microwave radars operating over the frequency range of 2-18 GHz integrated into small and medium-scale UASs can provide valuable information on soil moisture and SWE. Also, we need accurate information on the bed topography, basal conditions, and snow accumulation of large ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica to generate accurate estimates of sea level increase over the century. UWB radars can also provide much-needed data for improving ice sheet models used to generate sea level rise projections.
    In this talk, I will discuss the need for remote sensing of snow, soil moisture, and ice, as well as present preliminary results from UWB measurements on these targets. I will also discuss advances required to develop medium and small UAS integrated with UWB radars to support scientific and operational applications.


    Biography: Dr. Gogineni is the Deane E. Ackers Distinguished Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of Kansas with more than two decades of research and teaching experience in radar remote sensing of the Earth, including polar ice sheets. He has successfully led several multi-disciplinary research projects funded by NASA and NSF. Dr. Gogineni served as the Director of the Radar Systems and Remote Sensing Laboratory at the University of Kansas before serving as Manager of NASA's Polar Research Programs during 1997-1999. He is currently the Director of the Center for Remote Sensing of Ice Sheets, where he continues to manage a center that connects science and engineering in polar research. Dr. Gogineni and his colleagues at CReSIS have successfully demonstrated SAR imaging of the ice-bed interface and generated fine-resolution 3-D topography of an ice-bed covered in over 3 km of ice. The Center has also succeeded in sounding and imaging the ice bed of three important glaciers in Greenland.
    He received a Ph.D. in electrical engineering from the University of Kansas, Lawrence, Kansas, in 1984. He has authored or co-authored over 125 archival journal publications and more than 240 technical reports and conference presentations. His research interests include the application of radars to the remote sensing of the polar ice sheets, sea ice, ocean, atmosphere, and land. He developed several radar systems currently being used at the University of Kansas for sounding and imaging of polar ice sheets, and has also participated in field experiments in the Arctic and Antarctica.


    Host: Mahta Moghaddam - AWARE

    Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 132

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Marilyn Poplawski

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  • CS PhD Colloquium: Om Prasad Patri (USC) - Shape Mining for Multisensor Event Recognition

    Tue, Oct 25, 2016 @ 03:30 PM - 05:00 PM

    Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Om Prasad Patri, USC

    Talk Title: Shape Mining for Multisensor Event Recognition

    Series: CS Colloquium

    Abstract: This lecture satisfies requirements for CSCI 591: Computer Science Research Colloquium.

    CS PhD Colloquium Lecture Event.
    The ubiquitous rise of sensors in our daily lives, as well in industrial and engineering equipment, have led to emerging challenges in pattern analysis of large amounts of multisensor data to identify critical events automatically. This talk presents our recent work on framing this event recognition problem in the context of time series classification by automatically finding discriminative shapes or patterns (called shapelets) within sensor data. These unconventional shape mining approaches show potential for real-world sensor datasets, such as equipment monitoring data from an oil field or a manufacturing plant, as they don't make assumptions about the nature and structure of the input sensor data and provide visual intuition in the form of the extracted shapes for further analysis by domain experts, instead of being a black-box machine learning approach.

    These approaches also perform fast classification as they focus on throwing away most of the data after finding the discriminative shapelets. By combining shape extraction and feature selection, this temporal pattern mining paradigm can be extended for processing data from multiple sensors. This talk describes algorithmic strategies for performing this combination, and presents results and motivational examples from modern industrial systems where our approaches are applicable. An interesting application of the proposed approach using shape mining for identifying malware from Windows portable executable files is also discussed.

    Biography: Om P. Patri is a PhD candidate in Computer Science at USC, advised by Prof. Viktor K. Prasanna. His interests are broadly in the areas of data science, AI, cybersecurity and event-based systems, and his dissertation research is on modeling and recognition of events from multisensor time series data. At USC, he has been a part of the Center for Smart Interactive Oil Field Technologies (CiSoft) and the USC Data Science Lab. During his graduate studies at USC, he has worked with NEC Labs America and Cylance Inc. Before coming to USC, he obtained a Bachelors in Computer Science from the Indian Institute of Technology Guwahati.

    Host: CS Department

    Location: Henry Salvatori Computer Science Center (SAL) - 101

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Assistant to CS chair

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  • Epstein Institute Seminar

    Tue, Oct 25, 2016 @ 03:30 PM - 04:50 PM

    Daniel J. Epstein Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Dr. Jack Zhou, Drexel University

    Talk Title: 4D Printing with Photoactive Shape-Changing Polymer

    Host: Dr. Yong Chen

    More Information: October 25, 2016_Zhou.pdf

    Location: Ethel Percy Andrus Gerontology Center (GER) - 206

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Michele ISE

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  • Amgen Seminar: Sasha Kamb

    Wed, Oct 26, 2016 @ 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM

    Alfred E. Mann Department of Biomedical Engineering

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Sasha Kamb, Amgen

    Talk Title: TBD

    Series: USC/Amgen Seminar Series

    Host: USC/Amgen

    More Info: http://stemcell.usc.edu/events

    Location: Eli & Edythe Broad CIRM Center for Regenerative Medicine & Stem Cell Resch. (BCC) - First Floor Conference Room

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Cristy Lytal/USC Stem Cell

    Event Link: http://stemcell.usc.edu/events

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  • Astani Civil and Environmental Engineering Seminar

    Wed, Oct 26, 2016 @ 12:00 PM - 01:00 PM

    Sonny Astani Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Dr. Andrea Polidori, Quality Assurance Manager for Science & Technology Advancement at SCAQMD

    Talk Title: Advanced Technologies For Monitoring Air Pollution

    Abstract:
    See Attachment

    More Information: Astani CEE Seminar_Dr. Andrea Polidori.pdf

    Location: John Stauffer Science Lecture Hall (SLH) - 100

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Evangeline Reyes

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  • Repeating EventBiotechnology Lecture Series

    Thu, Oct 27, 2016 @ 10:30 AM - 12:00 PM

    Alfred E. Mann Department of Biomedical Engineering

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Various, Amgen

    Talk Title: R&D Insights from Lab Bench to Patient Bedside

    Abstract: USC researchers have the opportunity to gain research and development insights with a new biotechnology lecture series sponsored by Amgen and the Eli and Edythe Broad Center for Regenerative Medicine and Stem Cell Research at USC.

    The weekly lecture series, "R&D Insights from Lab Bench to Patient Bedside" takes place Thursdays at 10:30AM-12:00PM at USC's Health Sciences Campus from September 1, 2016 through November 10, 2016.

    The talks will feature Amgen scientists speaking about:

    Identifying a possible therapeutic target and its role in disease
    Increasing therapeutic efficacy and safety
    Process development, devices and manufacturing
    Case studies from bench to clinic

    Lectures will take place at the BCC First Floor Seminar Room or ZNI Herklotz Seminar Room.

    RSVP at http://www.usc.edu/esvp (use code: amgenlecture). Space is limited. Preference will be given to SCRM master's students, PhDs, and postdocs, and attending all lectures is mandatory.

    Please contact qliumich@usc.edu or karenw03@amgen.com for further details.

    Host: USC Stem Cell/Amgen

    More Info: https://calendar.usc.edu/event/biotechnology_lecture_series_rd_insights_from_lab_bench_to_patient_bedside?utm_campaign=widget&utm_medium=widget&utm_source=USC+Event+Calendar#.V8dKNLX8vW4

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    View All Dates

    Contact: Cristy Lytal/USC Stem Cell

    Event Link: https://calendar.usc.edu/event/biotechnology_lecture_series_rd_insights_from_lab_bench_to_patient_bedside?utm_campaign=widget&utm_medium=widget&utm_source=USC+Event+Calendar#.V8dKNLX8vW4

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  • Machine Learning Center and Ming Hsieh Institute Series on Mathematical Foundations of Learning from Data and Signals Joint Seminar

    Thu, Oct 27, 2016 @ 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM

    Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Sewoong Oh, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

    Talk Title: Fundamental Limits and Efficient Algorithms in Adaptive Crowdsourcing

    Series: MHI

    Abstract: Adaptive schemes, where tasks are assigned based on the data collected thus far, are widely used in practical crowdsourcing systems to efficiently allocate the budget. However, existing theoretical analyses of crowdsourcing systems suggest that the gain of adaptive task assignments is minimal. To bridge this gap, we propose a new model for representing practical crowdsourcing systems, which strictly generalizes the popular Dawid-Skense model, and characterize the fundamental trade-off between budget and accuracy. We introduce a novel adaptive scheme that matches this fundamental limit. We introduce new techniques to analyze the spectral analyses of non-back-tracking operators, using density evolution techniques from coding theory.

    Biography: Sewing Oh is an Assistant Professor of Industrial and Enterprise Systems Engineering at UIUC. He received his PhD from the department of Electrical Engineering at Stanford University. Following his PhD, he worked as a postdoctoral researcher at Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems (LIDS) at MIT. He was co-awarded the Kenneth C. Sevcik outstanding student paper award at the Sigmetrics 2010, the best paper award at the SIGMETRICS 2015, and NSF CAREER award in 2016.

    Host: Mahdi Soltanolkotabi

    More Information: Oh Seminar Announcement.png

    Location: Henry Salvatori Computer Science Center (SAL) - 101

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Gloria Halfacre

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  • CS Colloquium: Sewoong Oh (UIUC) - Fundamental Limits and Efficient Algorithms in Adaptive Crowdsourcing

    Thu, Oct 27, 2016 @ 04:00 PM - 05:00 PM

    Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Sewoong Oh , UIUC

    Talk Title: Fundamental Limits and Efficient Algorithms in Adaptive Crowdsourcing

    Series: Yahoo! Labs Machine Learning Seminar Series

    Abstract: This lecture satisfies requirements for CSCI 591: Computer Science Research Colloquium. Part of Yahoo! Labs Machine Learning Seminar Series.

    Adaptive schemes, where tasks are assigned based on the data collected thus far, are widely used in practical crowdsourcing systems to efficiently allocate the budget. However, existing theoretical analyses of crowdsourcing systems suggest that the gain of adaptive task assignments is minimal. To bridge this gap, we propose a new model for representing practical crowdsourcing systems, which strictly generalizes the popular Dawid-Skene model, and characterize the fundamental trade-off between budget and accuracy. We introduce a novel adaptive scheme that matches this fundamental limit. We introduce new techniques to analyze the spectral analyses of non-back-tracking operators, using density evolution techniques from coding theory.

    Biography: Sewoong Oh is an Assistant Professor of Industrial and Enterprise Systems Engineering at UIUC. He received his PhD from the department of Electrical Engineering at Stanford University. Following his PhD, he worked as a postdoctoral researcher at Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems (LIDS) at MIT. He was co-awarded the Kenneth C. Sevcik outstanding student paper award at the Sigmetrics 2010, the best paper award at the SIGMETRICS 2015, and NSF CAREER award in 2016.

    Host: Yan Liu

    Location: Henry Salvatori Computer Science Center (SAL) - 101

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Assistant to CS chair

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  • Toward Exascale Resilience: Hardware Mechanisms and Containment Domains

    Thu, Oct 27, 2016 @ 04:00 PM - 05:00 PM

    Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Mattan Erez, University of Texas, Austin

    Talk Title: Toward Exascale Resilience: Hardware Mechanisms and Containment Domains

    Series: EE 598 Computer Engineering Seminar Series

    Abstract: In this talk I will present a scalable and efficient resiliency scheme based on the concept of Containment Domains. Containment domains are programming and system constructs that encapsulate and express application resiliency needs and interact with the system to tune and specialize error detection, state preservation and restoration, and recovery schemes. Containment domains have weak transactional semantics and are nested to take advantage of the machine hierarchy and to enable distributed and hierarchical state preservation, restoration, and recovery as an alternative to non-scalable and inefficient checkpoint-restart (and variants). One of the key motivations behind this work is the idea of proportionality, where the resources devoted to a feature are proportional to the application and scenario needs. Proportionality is critical to continued scaling and performance under the increasing constraints of bandwidth, power, and energy. Essentially, one-size-fits-all and worst-case design approaches are no longer sufficient to building reliable and efficient systems. I will also briefly discuss some of the hardware mechanisms necessary for reliability and resilience and the tradeoffs they offer for proportionality.


    Biography: Mattan Erez is an Associate Professor and holder of the Temple Foundation Professor Fellowship (#4) at the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Texas at Austin. His research focuses on improving the performance, efficiency, and scalability of computing systems through advances in hardware architecture, software systems, and programming models. The vision is to increase the cooperation across system layers and develop flexible and adaptive mechanisms for proportional resource usage. Mattan received a B.Sc. in Electrical Engineering and a B.A. in Physics from the Technion, Israel Institute of Technology and his M.S and Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University. He is a recipient of a Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers, an Early Career Research Award from the Department of Energy, and an NSF CAREER Award.


    Host: Xuehai Qian, x04459, xuehai.qian@usc.edu

    Location: Olin Hall of Engineering (OHE) - 100D

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Gerrielyn Ramos

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  • EE 598 Computer Engineering Seminar

    Fri, Oct 28, 2016 @ 10:00 AM - 11:00 AM

    Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Lin Zhong, Professor, Rice University

    Talk Title: The mess at the hardware/software boundary

    Abstract: As computing embraces heterogeneity, an increasing fraction of operating system deals with hardware directly, usually with unsafe languages like C and assembly and a primitive programming model based on registers and interrupts. This leads to a mess at the lowest level of software which is error-prone, difficult to maintain and evolve. This talk presents our recent effort in taming this mess with proper designs. We show that with a little bit hardware support, many of the hardware-facing functions can be moved out of device drivers and made generic, leading to much simplified hardware-specific software.

    Biography: Lin Zhong is Professor of Electrical & Computer Engineering with Rice University. He received his B.S and M.S. from Tsinghua University and Ph.D. from Princeton University. He has been with Rice University since September 2005. At Rice, he leads the Efficient Computing Group to make computing, communication, and interfacing more efficient and effective. He and his students received the best paper awards from ACM MobileHCI, IEEE PerCom, and ACM MobiSys (3), and ACM ASPLOS. He is a recipient of the NSF CAREER Award, the Duncan Award from Rice University, and the RockStar Award from ACM SIGMOBILE. More information about his research can be found at http://www.recg.org.

    Host: Xuehai Qian

    Location: Kaprielian Hall (KAP) - 209

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Estela Lopez

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  • USC Decide Fall Symposium

    Fri, Oct 28, 2016 @ 12:00 PM - 04:00 PM

    Daniel J. Epstein Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Ali Abbas, Yannis Yortsos, DECIDE

    Talk Title: Next Generation Ethics

    Host: Ali Abbas, Stephen Gee

    More Information: Next Gen Ethics Symposium.pdf

    Location: Ronald Tutor Hall of Engineering (RTH) - 526

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Michele ISE

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  • Ming Hsieh Institute Seminar Series on Integrated Systems

    Fri, Oct 28, 2016 @ 01:30 PM - 03:30 PM

    Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Dr. Amin Arbabian, Professor, Stanford University

    Talk Title: Microwave-Ultrasound Hybrid Systems in Imaging and Implantable Medical Devices

    Host: Prof. Hossein Hashemi, Prof. Mike Chen, and Prof. Mahta Moghaddam

    More Information: MHI Seminar Series IS - Amin_Arbabian_Flyer.pdf

    Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 132

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Jenny Lin

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  • Biomedical Engineering Speakers

    Fri, Oct 28, 2016 @ 02:00 PM - 04:00 PM

    Alfred E. Mann Department of Biomedical Engineering

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: TBA, TBA

    Talk Title: TBA

    Series: Department of Biomedical Engineering: Systems Cellular-Molecular Bioengineering Distinguished Speaker Series

    Abstract: tba

    Host: Brent Liu, PhD

    Location: Corwin D. Denney Research Center (DRB) - 146

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Mischalgrace Diasanta

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  • Astani Civil and Environmental Engineering Ph.D. Seminar

    Fri, Oct 28, 2016 @ 03:00 PM - 04:00 PM

    Sonny Astani Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Mo Chen and Mohammad Sowlat, Astani CEE Ph.D. Candidates

    Talk Title: See Attachment

    More Information: Astani CEE Ph.D. Seminar Abstract.pdf

    Location: John Stauffer Science Lecture Hall (SLH) - 102

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Evangeline Reyes

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  • Learning from Zero: Recent Advances in Bootstrapping Semantic Parsers using Crowdsourcing

    Fri, Oct 28, 2016 @ 03:00 PM - 04:00 PM

    Information Sciences Institute

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Yu Su, UCSB

    Talk Title: Learning from Zero: Recent Advances in Bootstrapping Semantic Parsers using Crowdsourcing

    Series: Natural Language Seminar

    Abstract: Semantic parsing, which parses natural language into formal languages, has been applied to a wide range of structured data like relation databases, knowledge bases, and web tables. To learn a semantic parser for a new domain, the first challenge is always how to collect training data. While data collection using crowdsourcing has become a common practice in NLP, it's a particularly challenging and interesting problem when it comes to semantic parsing, and is still in its early stages. Given a domain and a formal language, how can we generate meaningful logical forms in a configurable way? How to design the annotation task so that crowdsourcing workers, who do not understand formal languages, can handle with ease? How can we exploit the compositional nature of formal languages to optimize the crowdsourcing process? In this talk I will introduce some recent advances in this direction, and present some preliminary answers to the above questions. The covered works mainly concern knowledge bases, but we will also cover some ongoing work concerning web APIs.





    Biography: Yu Su is a fifth year PhD candidate in the Computer Science Department at UCSB, advised by Professor Xifeng Yan. Before that, He received a bachelor degree from Tsinghua University in 2012, with a major in Computer Science. He is interested in the interplay between language and formal meaning representations, including problems like semantic parsing, continuous knowledge representation, and natural language generation. He also enjoys applying deep learning on these problems.

    Host: Xing Shi 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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  • Virtualization Security: The Good, The Bad and The Ugly

    Mon, Oct 31, 2016 @ 10:00 AM - 11:00 AM

    Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Haibo Chen, Shanghai Jiao Tong University

    Talk Title: Virtualization Security: The Good, The Bad and The Ugly

    Series: EE 598 Computer Engineering Seminar Series

    Abstract: The resurgence of virtualization has stimulated its wide adoption in desktop, cloud and mobile environments. With virtualization being a new systems software foundation, virtual machine monitors (or hypervisors) are now treated as the security foundation of the system software stack, due to the promise of being small and providing strict security isolation. In this talk, I will first question whether such a promise still holds in commodity hypervisors by reviewing the historical evolution of virtualization. Based on a negative answer, I will discuss a series of efforts to enhancing the security isolation while minimizing the trusted computing based of the virtualization stack, including leveraging a commodity hypervisor to isolate a group of process, using a nested hypervisor to transparently isolate virtual machines and completely offloading isolation functionalities into on-chip CPU. Finally, I will also describe a set of new security innovation enabled by virtualization, such as live updating, security introspection and fine-grained compartmentalization.

    Biography: Haibo Chen is a Professor at the School of Software, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, where he founded and currently leads the Institute of Parallel and Distributed Systems (IPADS) (http://ipads.se.sjtu.edu.cn). Haibo's main research interests are building scalable and dependable systems software, by leveraging cross-layering approaches spanning computer hardware system virtualization and operating systems. He received best paper awards from ICPP, APSys and EuroSys, a bestpaper nominee from HPCA and published intensively on top conferences like SOSP/OSDI/EuroSys/Usenix ATC/ISCA/MICRO/HPCA/FAST/Usenix Security/CCS. He also received the Young Computer Scientist Award from China Computer Federation, the distinguished Ph.D thesis award from China Ministry of Education and National Youth Top-notch Talent Support Program of China, as well as fault research awards/fellowships from NetApp, Google, IBM and MSRA.He is currently the steering committee co-chair of ACM APSys, the general co-chair of SOSP 2017,serves on program committees of ASPLOS 2017, Oakland 2017, EuroSys 2017 and FAST 2017, and is also on the editorial board of ACM Transactions on Storage.

    Host: Xuehai Qian, x04459, xuehai.qian@usc.edu

    Location: 248

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Gerrielyn Ramos

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  • Seminars in Biomedical Engineering

    Mon, Oct 31, 2016 @ 12:30 PM - 01:50 PM

    Alfred E. Mann Department of Biomedical Engineering

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Yaakov Levine,

    Talk Title: TBA

    Host: Stanley Yamashiro

    Location: Olin Hall of Engineering (OHE) - 122

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Mischalgrace Diasanta

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