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Events for November 24, 2008

  • Meet USC

    Mon, Nov 24, 2008

    Viterbi School of Engineering Undergraduate Admission

    Workshops & Infosessions


    This half day program is designed for prospective freshmen and family members. Meet USC includes an information session on the University and the Admission process; a student led walking tour of campus and a meeting with us in the Viterbi School. Meet USC is designed to answer all of your questions about USC, the application process and financial aid.Reservations are required for Meet USC. This program occurs twice, once at 9:00 a.m. and again at 1:00 p.m. Please visit http://www.usc.edu/admission/undergraduate/visit/meet_usc.html to check availability and make an appointment. Be sure to list an Engineering major as your "intended major" on the webform!

    Location: USC Admission Center

    Audiences: Prospective Freshmen and Family Members - RESERVATIONS REQUIRED

    Contact: VSoE Undergraduate Admission

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  • BME 533 Seminar Series: Constantinos Sioutas, ScD

    Mon, Nov 24, 2008 @ 12:30 PM - 01:50 PM

    Alfred E. Mann Department of Biomedical Engineering

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Constantinos Sioutas, ScD, Fred Champion Professor & Co-Director of the Southern California Particle Center, Dept. of Civil and Environmental Engineering, USC:
    "Physical, Chemical and Toxicological Characteristics of Particulate Matter from Mobile Sources
    Summary of Research by the Southern California Particle Center"

    Location: Olin Hall of Engineering (OHE) - 132

    Audiences: Graduate/Department/Sponsors only

    Contact: Mischalgrace Diasanta

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  • Stochastic Local Search for Propositional Satisfiability

    Mon, Nov 24, 2008 @ 02:00 PM

    Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Prof. Abdul Sattar, Griffith University, Australia
    Host: Prof. Milind TambeAbstract:
    The problem of finding a consistent truth assignment to all propositional variables in a formula, known as SAT problem, has been an interesting and difficult challenge. Indeed, SAT is at the heart of all computationally intractable problems. Many real world problems could be encoded as SAT problems. Thus finding an efficient solution for SAT has far reaching impact on computationally hard problems. This talk will begin with an overview of the main approaches for solving SAT problems. We will then focus on stochastic local search based methods. These methods have been shown to be highly effective for large size problems. We will present our recent results on clause weighting based local search, including an influential method that automatically learns about the structure of the problem, and efficiently exploit those structures to solve some of the difficult challenge problems in the field.Biography:
    Prof Sattar is founding Director of the Institute for Integrated and Intelligent Systems (IIIS), a research centre of excellence at Griffith University established in 2003. He is a Research Leader at NICTA Queensland Laboratory since June 2005, and also held the Associate Director of Education portfolio at the Queensland Laboratory from October 2006-June 2008. He has been an academic staff member at Griffith University since February 1992 as a lecturer (1992-95), senior lecturer (1996-99), and professor (2000-present) within the School of Information and Communication Technology. Prior to his career at Griffith University, he was a lecturer in Physics in Rajasthan, India (1980-82), research scholar at Jawaharlal Nehru University, India (1982-85), the University of Waterloo, Canada (1985-87), and the University of Alberta, Canada (1987-1991).He holds a BSc (Physics, Chemistry and Mathematics) and an MSc (Physics) from the University of Rajasthan, India, an MPhil in Computer and Systems Sciences from the Jawaharlal Nehru University, India, and an MMath in Computer Science from the University of Waterloo, Canada, and a PhD in Computer Science (with specialization in Artificial Intelligence) from the University of Alberta, Canada. His current research interests include knowledge representation and reasoning, constraint satisfaction, rational agents, propositional satisfiability, temporal reasoning, temporal databases, and bioinformatics. He has supervised 17 successful completions of PhD graduates, and published over 100 technical papers in refereed conferences and journals in the field. His research team has won three major international awards in recent years (the gold medals for the SAT 2005 and SAT 2007 competitions in the random satisfiable category and an IJCAI 2007 distinguished paper award).

    Location: Kaprielian Hall (KAP) - 144

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: CS Colloquia

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  • Applications of Feedback System EngineeringPrinciples to the Design of Brain-Machine Interfaces

    Mon, Nov 24, 2008 @ 04:00 PM

    Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Refreshments will be served 3-4 PM.ABSTRACT: Although it is well-known that every brain machine interface (BMI) depends critically on the use of feedback, many of the algorithms in place for designing (BMIs) do not completely exploit this implication. In this talk we discuss how novel exploitation of feedback delivered to the user can result in significant improved performance. Our approach comes from stochastic control, recursive estimation, and feedback information theory; it is independent of the specific neural sensing modality, the device to be controlled, and the specific neural delivery mechanism of feedback. In effect, we interpret the user and the prosthetic as engaging in a dialogue about user intent, and we consider feedback delivery strategies that not only give the user information about the state of the prosthetic, but also information about the interface's belief about user intent. We will discuss some EEG-based BMI applications and develop an approach that espouses principles from stochastic control and feedback information theory coding. We illustrate significant performance improvement and lowcomplexity implementation. Lastly, we conclude with a discussion of future directions we plan to pursue with this methodology. Joint Collaboration with Timothy Bretl (UIUC) and Ed Maclin (UIUC) BIO:Todd P. Coleman received the B.S. degrees in electrical engineering (summa cum laude), as well as computer engineering (summa cum laude) from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, in 2000, along with the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Cambridge, in 2002, and 2005. During the 2005-2006 academic year, he was a postdoctoral scholar at MIT and Massachusetts General Hospital in computational neuroscience. Since the fall of 2006, he has been on the faculty in the ECE Department and Neuroscience Program at UIUC. His research interests include information theory, operations research, and computational neuroscience. Dr. Coleman, a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship recipient, was awarded the University of Michigan College of Engineering's Hugh Rumler Senior Class Prize in 1999 and was awarded the MIT EECS Department's Morris J. Levin Award for Best Masterworks Oral Thesis Presentation in 2002. http://www.ifp.uiuc.edu/~colemant/index_files/bio.htm

    Location: Hedco Neurosciences Building (HNB) - 100

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Mary Francis

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  • The Promise, the Limits, and the Beauty of Software (Distinguished Lecture)

    Mon, Nov 24, 2008 @ 04:00 PM

    Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Dr. Grady Booch, IBM Research
    Host: Prof. Barry BoehmAbstract:
    Within this generation, software has changed the way that individuals collaborate, organizations do business, economies operate, and cultures interact. Software-intensive systems can amplify human intelligence, but they cannot replace human judgment; software-intensive systems can fuse, coordinate, classify, and analyze information, but they cannot create knowledge.Although software offers seemingly limitless promise, there are some very real limits to what software can do. Not everything we want to build can be built: there exist pragmatic theoretical and technical limits that make software development hard, if not in some cases impossible.Furthermore, not everything we want to build should be built: there exist moral, economic, social, and political limits that govern human industry.Software-intensive systems are perhaps the most intellectually complex artifacts created by humans, and while the majority of individuals in the civilized world rely on software in their daily lives, few of them understand the essential complexity therein, the labour required to create such artifacts, and the beautiful and elegant chaos of their architecture.In this presentation, we will examine the promise, the limits, and the beauty of software, as well as offer some conclusions that can be drawn from the last 60 years of software and some expectations and cautions for the next generation.Biography:
    http://www.handbookofsoftwarearchitecture.com/index.jsp?page=Contact

    Location: Olin Hall of Engineering (OHE) - 132

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: CS Colloquia

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