Logo: University of Southern California

Events Calendar



Select a calendar:



Filter November Events by Event Type:



Events for November 29, 2018

  • Ming Hsieh Institite: Emerging Trends Seminar Series

    Thu, Nov 29, 2018 @ 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM

    Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: C.-C. Jay Kuo, Distinguished Professor of Electrical Engineering-Systems and Computer Science, Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical Engineering

    Talk Title: Interpretable Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) via Feedforward Design

    Series: Emerging Trends

    Abstract: Given a convolutional neural network (CNN) architecture, its network parameters are determined by backpropagation (BP). In contrast with the BP design, we propose a feedforward (FF) and interpretable design with the LeNet-5 as an illustrative example. The FF design is a data-centric approach that derives network parameters based on training data statistics layer by layer in one pass. To build the convolutional layers, we develop a new signal transform, called the Saab (Subspace approximation with adjusted bias) transform. The bias in filter weights is chosen to annihilate nonlinearity of the activation function. To build the fully-connected (FC) layers, we adopt a label-guided linear least squared regression (LSR) method. The FF design is more computationally efficient and robust against adversarial attacks than the traditional BP design. The classification performances of BP-designed and FF-designed CNNs on the MNIST and the CIFAR-10 datasets are compared. Finally, we comment on the relationship between BP and FF designs by examining their cross-entropy values at nodes of intermediate layers.

    Biography: Dr. C.-C. Jay Kuo received his Ph.D. degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1987. He is now with the University of Southern California (USC) as Director of the Media Communications Laboratory and Distinguished Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. His research interests are in the areas of media processing, compression and understanding. Dr. Kuo was the Editor-in-Chief for the IEEE Trans. on Information Forensics and Security in 2012-2014. Dr. Kuo received the 1992 National Science Foundation Young Investigator (NYI) Award, the 1993 National Science Foundation Presidential Faculty Fellow (PFF) Award, the 2010 Electronic Imaging Scientist of the Year Award, the 2010-11 Fulbright-Nokia Distinguished Chair in Information and Communications Technologies, the 2011 Pan Wen-Yuan Outstanding Research Award, the 2014 USC Northrop Grumman Excellence in Teaching Award, the 2016 USC Associates Award for Excellence in Teaching, the 2016 IEEE Computer Society Taylor L. Booth Education Award, the 2016 IEEE Circuits and Systems Society John Choma Education Award, the 2016 IS&T Raymond C. Bowman Award, and the 2017 IEEE Leon K. Kirchmayer Graduate Teaching Award. Dr. Kuo is a Fellow of AAAS, IEEE and SPIE. He has guided 147 students to their Ph.D. degrees and supervised 27 postdoctoral research fellows. Dr. Kuo is a co-author of 275 journal papers, 900 conference papers and 14 books.

    Host: MHI

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

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Benjamin Paul

    Add to Google CalendarDownload ICS File for OutlookDownload iCal File
  • MHI Research & Technology Seminar

    Thu, Nov 29, 2018 @ 01:00 PM - 02:30 PM

    Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Ruirui Huang, Senior Staff Architect/Director of Cloud Architecture at Alibaba Cloud

    Talk Title: Security Architectural Design and Challenges in the Cloud

    Series: MHI Research & Technology Seminar

    Abstract: I will introduce the multi-layered security architectural design of Alibaba Cloud. Specifically, several technologies and mechanisms in each layer will be highlighted and discussed in terms of their importance and the security purposes which they serve. Additionally, I will raise several security challenges in today's cloud computing domain, and discuss how one might address them today and if there is a better solution in the future.

    Biography: Dr. Ruirui Huang is a Senior Staff Architect/Director of Cloud Architecture at Alibaba Cloud (US office, based in Seattle, WA). He is responsible for overseeing and developing the Alibaba Cloud Platform Architecture, with a focus on the secure cloud computing architecture. He is also the author of Alibaba Cloud Security White-paper which was published earlier in 2018. Prior joining Alibaba Cloud, he was a Senior Security Architect at Intel, responsible for multiple Server/PC/Mobile SoCs security architectural designs.

    Dr. Ruirui Huang graduated with a Ph.D. degree from the ECE department of the Cornell University in 2013, with research works and interests in the field of computer architectural support of security, reliability, and availability in today's computing world.


    Host: MHI

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

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Benjamin Paul

    Add to Google CalendarDownload ICS File for OutlookDownload iCal File
  • CS Tech Talk: DiDi Tech Talk with Dr. Fengmin Gong and Dr. Kevin Knight

    Thu, Nov 29, 2018 @ 03:30 PM - 04:50 PM

    Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Dr. Fengmin Gong and Dr. Kevin Knight, Didi

    Talk Title: Talk 1: AI for Transportation; Talk 2: The Moment When the Future Fell Asleep

    Series: Computer Science Colloquium

    Abstract: We are pleased to announce two talks during this colloquium.

    Talk 1: Taming Technologies and Transforming Transportation
    The world is at the dawn of a Fourth Industrial Revolution fueled by big data, AI, automation, vehicle electrification, and the sharing economy -“ and with this, comes both excitement for the prospect of changing society for the better, and fear of a possible threat to humanity.

    Our mission at DiDi is to build a better journey, and we believe we can tame the revolution by designing and building technologies that meet the needs of people, democratize access and benefits, and are aligned with human values.

    In this talk, we will share how our R&D teams in the Americas and China work side-by-side to provide rideshare experiences that are safe, convenient and affordable. We will also highlight our continuous research and work on advanced initiatives in safety and security, customer support, smart transportation systems, autonomous vehicles, and AI.


    Talk 2: The Moment When the Future Fell Asleep
    Recently, recurrent neural networks (RNNs) have been revolutionizing natural language processing and other fields. Among other things, RNNs can assign probabilities to sequences (such as English sentences) and transform one sequence into another (such as English into French). I will describe some of our work over the past couple of years, addressing four questions: What are neural sequence models learning? How can they learn better? Are there theoretical limits? Can they be creative?


    This lecture satisfies requirements for CSCI 591: Research Colloquium.


    Biography: Talk 1: Fengmin is a well-respected technologist in cybersecurity with more than 30 years experience. He is also a serial entrepreneur and angel investor. Fengmin has been a founder and senior executive in several leading security companies. Among them are Palo Alto Networks, FireEye, McAfee and Cyphort. He is a trusted advisor to many entrepreneurs and venture capitalists. He has 18 awarded patents and over 40 technical publications in security and networking.

    Talk 2: Kevin Knight is Chief Scientist for Natural Language Processing (NLP) at DiDi Chuxing. He leads a DiDi lab in Marina del Rey devoted to NLP research. He is also Dean's Professor of Computer Science at USC (on leave). He received a PhD in computer science from Carnegie Mellon University and a bachelor's degree from Harvard University. Dr. Knight's research interests include human-machine communication, machine translation, language generation, automata theory, and decipherment. He has co-authored over 150 research paper on natural language processing, including best paper/demo awards at AAAI 2000, ACL 2001, NAACL 2009, ACL 2017, ACL 2018, and NAACL 2018. Dr. Knight also co-authored the widely-adopted textbook "Artificial Intelligence" (McGraw-Hill). In 2001, he co-founded Language Weaver, Inc., a machine translation company acquired by SDL plc in 2010. Dr. Knight was a key researcher in programs run by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). He served as President of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) in 2011, as General Chair for the Annual Conference of the ACL in 2005, and as General Chair for the North American ACL conference in 2016. He is a Fellow of the ACL, a Fellow of ISI, and a Fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI).


    Host: Computer Science Department

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

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Computer Science Department

    Add to Google CalendarDownload ICS File for OutlookDownload iCal File