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Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Events for November
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Brain Inspired Technologies - opportunity for cross-boundary translation between engineering and neuroscience - Dr. Yurii Vlasov
Mon, Nov 02, 2015 @ 10:00 AM - 11:00 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Dr. Yurii Vlasov, IBM T.J. Watson Research Center
Talk Title: Brain Inspired Technologies -“ opportunity for cross-boundary translation between engineering and neuroscience
Abstract: For over a decade I led the IBM Silicon Nanophotonics project from its early scientific exploration stage to real-world technology qualified in microelectronics foundry. More recently, with a successful transition of the technology to business, I initiated a new exploratory project that is aimed at developing an alternative approaches to computing that mimic information processing in the mammalian brain. I will discuss neuroscience experiments I conducted being on a year leave at the HHMI Janelia Research Campus, as well as current developments on neuromorphic computing ideas in my department at the IBM Research. The overarching theme is to explore how engineering can contribute to the advancement in the brain science and to development of novel computing architectures.
Biography: Dr. Yurii Vlasov is a Principal Member of Research Staff and a Manager of the Department of Brain-Inspired Technologies at the IBM T.J.Watson Research Center. He has been recognized as the founder and long-term leader of the IBM Silicon Nanophotonics project. He led the project from its early fundamental research stage in 2001-2007 to advanced technology development in 2008-2010. In 2011-2013 Dr. Vlasov led the company-wide effort on transitioning the IBM Silicon Nanophotonics technology to commercial manufacturing aimed at cost-optimized low-power optical transceivers for mega-datacenters and supercomputers.
With successful transition of Silicon Nanophotonics technology to IBM product division, Dr. Vlasov initiated a new exploratory project that is aimed at developing an alternative approaches to computing that mimic information processing in the mammalian brain. Dr. Vlasov spent the year of 2013-2014 on an extended assignment at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, VA investigating the basic science of hierarchical sensory information processing in the neocortex in a rodent in-vivo model. In September 2014 he returned back to IBM Research with a mandate to provide a vision and leadership to this new program. In support of this program Dr. Vlasov has been appointed as a Senior Fellow of HHMI Janelia Research Campus and is running his lab there.
Dr.Vlasov is a Fellow of the OSA, the APS, and the IEEE. He has published over 300 peer-reviewed papers, filed over 100 patents, and delivered over 100 invited, plenary and tutorial talks. He was awarded the IBM Corporate Award, "Best of IBM" Award, as well as was named "Scientist of the Year" by the Scientific American journal.
Prior to IBM, Dr. Vlasov developed semiconductor nanophotonics at the NEC Research Institute in Princeton and at the Strasbourg IPCMS Institute in France. For over a decade, he was also a Research Scientist with the Ioffe Institute of Physics and Technology in St. Petersburg, Russia working on optics of nanostructured semiconductors. He received his MS from the University of St.Petersburg (1988) and PhD from the Ioffe Institute (1994), both in physics. Being an Adjunct Professor at Columbia University's Department of Electrical Engineering Dr. Vlasov taught courses on microelectronics and photonics.
Host: EE-Electrophysics
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 132
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Marilyn Poplawski
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Seminars in Biomedical Engineering
Mon, Nov 02, 2015 @ 12:30 PM - 01:50 PM
Alfred E. Mann Department of Biomedical Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Stephanie Seidlits, Ph.D., Assistant Professor, Bioengineering, University of California, Los Angeles
Talk Title: Probing Cell-Matrix Interactions in the CNS using Engineered Microenvironments
Series: Seminars in Engineering, Neuroscience & Health (ENH)
Abstract: Many pathological conditions in the central nervous system (CNS) are accompanied by dramatic changes to the biochemical and physical landscape of the extracellular matrix (ECM). However, ECM involvement in CNS function and dysfunction remains largely uncharacterized. Limited understanding of how cell-ECM interactions coordinate tissue function and a lack of research tools to study these phenomena have hindered development of effective clinical treatments. To address this need, my laboratory is developing biomaterial platforms that mimic the native, hyaluronic acid (HA)-rich microenvironment in the CNS and can be engineered to present independently varied, user-defined features. Through systematic manipulation of different features embodied by the biomaterial, we aim to identify processes responsible for pathological alterations in cell-ECM interactions and work towards developing new clinical strategies targeting these interactions. I will describe the application of these biomaterial platforms to study two distinct microenvironments: those of CNS tumors and neural stem cell niches. Specifically, HA-rich, 3D culture environments can be used to study the role of ECM in the characteristic resistance to treatment of glioblastoma multiforme (GBM) -“ an extremely aggressive form of brain cancer. In addition, I will present how these culture environments may be tuned to drive lineage-specific differentiation of human neural stem cells.
Biography: Dr. Stephanie Seidlits joined the Department of Bioengineering at UCLA as an Assistant Professor in 2014. She obtained a B.S. (2004) in Bioengineering from Rice University and went on to receive both M.S. (2006) and Ph.D. (2010) degrees in Biomedical Engineering from the University Texas at Austin. Dr. Seidlits then trained as an NIH NRSA post-doctoral fellow in Chemical and Biological Engineering at Northwestern University under the mentorship of Dr. Lonnie Shea and Dr. Aileen Anderson. Dr. Seidlits' research seeks to develop multifaceted therapies for regeneration of the central nervous system that utilize biomaterial platforms to directly alter the pathological microenvironment.
Link to Professor Seidlits' CV: http://seidlitslab.seas.ucla.edu/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/Seidlits_CV_Jan2015_webpage.pdf
Host: Stanley Yamashiro, PhD
Location: Olin Hall of Engineering (OHE) - 122
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Mischalgrace Diasanta
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CS Seminar: Michael J. Carey (UCI) - AsterixDB: A Counter but Intuitive Approach to Big Data Management
Mon, Nov 02, 2015 @ 02:00 PM - 04:00 PM
Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Michael J. Carey, UC Irvine
Talk Title: AsterixDB: A Counter but Intuitive Approach to Big Data Management
Series: CS Seminar Series
Abstract: This lecture satisfies requirements for CSCI 591: Computer Science Research Colloquium
We are living in the Big Data era, and we are witnessing a shift in the role of data management system: Rather than "just" being the systems of record at the heart of traditional enterprises, modern Big Data management systems must model, capture, track, and react to the current state of the world. Doing so requires the ingestion of event data, arriving from a variety of devices, as well as enabling query access to the history of captured data over time. These requirements span a variety of scientific disciplines, including the handling of data produced by a variety sensors in health care, environmental monitoring applications, traffic monitoring, dynamic social network data, and many other domains.
AsterixDB is an open source Big Data Management System (BDMS) with a feature set that's very different than those of other platforms in today's Big Data ecosystem. The system was initially co-developed by UC Irvine and UC Riverside, starting in 2009 and leading eventually to its first beta release in mid-2013. It has recently moved to Apache, where AsterixDB is now an active incubating project. Many of the system's key design decisions relate to the aforementioned shift. This talk will first briefly review AsterixDB's data model, query language, and scale-out architecture. It will then examine a number of counter-cultural aspects of the AsterixDB system, including where its data lives, its runtime architecture, its approach to streaming data, its view of transactions, and its features for handling time-based data.
Biography: Michael J. Carey is a Bren Professor of Information and Computer Sciences at UC Irvine. Before joining UCI in 2008, Carey worked at BEA Systems for seven years and led the development of BEA's AquaLogic Data Services Platform product for virtual data integration. He also spent a dozen years teaching at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, five years at the IBM Almaden Research Center working on object-relational databases, and a year and a half at e-commerce platform startup Propel Software during the infamous 2000-2001 Internet bubble. Carey is an ACM Fellow, a member of the National Academy of Engineering, and a recipient of the ACM SIGMOD E.F. Codd Innovations Award. His current interests all center around data-intensive computing and scalable data management (a.k.a. Big Data). He was also an adjunct faculty member at USC for a few years during his BEA days, but that never earned him the USC season football tickets he'd been hoping for.
Host: Shahram Ghandeharizadeh
Location: Mark Taper Hall Of Humanities (THH) - 202
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Assistant to CS chair
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AI Seminar
Tue, Nov 03, 2015 @ 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Information Sciences Institute
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Ryan James, UC Davis
Talk Title: The Unpredictable, the Predetermined, and the Postdetermined Unfold Together
Abstract: Recently, decomposition of the Shannon entropy rate has been proposed which provided a more nuanced understanding of entropy generation in a variety of systems. One component of this decomposition, the ephemeral information, is the part of the entropy rate which is independent of the future behavior of the system. The other component, the bound information, is that which plays a role in the dynamics going forward. Having derived this decomposition, I will then use it to characterize the effects of generating partition choice on chaotic systems, namely the tent map. Though all generating partitions result in a bijection between map orbits and symbolic sequences, the information-theoretic properties of such symbolic sequences can be very different as exemplified by the ephemeral and bound informations.
Biography: I did my doctoral work with Jim Crutchfield at UC Davis physics department. I then did a postdoc with Liz Bradley at CU Boulder, and am now doing my second postdoc back at Davis with Jim Crutchfield.
Host: Aram Galstyan
Webcast: http://webcasterms1.isi.edu/mediasite/Viewer/?peid=58a51e0ee7b1471db839213945ab11b41dLocation: Information Science Institute (ISI) - 11th floor large conference room
WebCast Link: http://webcasterms1.isi.edu/mediasite/Viewer/?peid=58a51e0ee7b1471db839213945ab11b41d
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Kary LAU
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USC Stem Cell Seminar: Sally Temple, Neural Stem Cell Institute
Tue, Nov 03, 2015 @ 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Alfred E. Mann Department of Biomedical Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Sally Temple, Scientific Director/Neural Stem Cell Institute, Regenerative Research Foundation
Talk Title: Neural stem cells, their role in development and therapeutic potential
Series: Eli and Edythe Broad Center for Regenerative Medicine and Stem Cell Research at USC Distinguished Speakers Series
Abstract: The central nervous system is the most complex of tissues, with neural stem and progenitor cells producing numerous types of neurons and glia that connect in intricate circuits. While most neural stem cells are extinguished after development, a few are retained in the adult forebrain where they continually make new neurons, and the decline in neural stem cells with aging and in Alzheimer's disease contributes to memory impairments. Human neural stem cells are being harnessed to replace cells lost to disease or damage, and their environmental regulators offer new therapeutic avenues to stimulate endogenous repair processes.
Host: Wange Lu
More Info: http://stemcell.usc.edu/events/details/?event_id=916778
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Cristy Lytal/USC Stem Cell
Event Link: http://stemcell.usc.edu/events/details/?event_id=916778
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Epstein Institute Seminar - ISE 651
Tue, Nov 03, 2015 @ 03:30 PM - 04:50 PM
Daniel J. Epstein Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Dr. Bianca Maria Colosimo, Professor Department of Mechanical Engineering Politecnico di Milano
Talk Title: Statistical Quality Monitoring of Advanced Manufacturing Processes: Open Challenges and Possible Solutions
Host: Qiang Huang
More Information: November 3, 2015_Bianca Maria Colosimo.pdf
Location: Ethel Percy Andrus Gerontology Center (GER) - 206
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Shelly Lewis
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CS Colloquium: Geoffrey Zweig (Microsoft Research) - High Performance Image Captioning
Tue, Nov 03, 2015 @ 04:00 PM - 05:00 PM
Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Geoffrey Zweig, Microsoft Research
Talk Title: High Performance Image Captioning
Series: CS Colloquium
Abstract: This lecture satisfies requirements for CSCI 591: Computer Science Research Colloquium
The problem of generating text conditioned on some sort of side information arises in many areas including dialog systems, machine translation, speech recognition, and image captioning. In this talk, we present a highly effective method for generating text conditioned on a set of words that should be mentioned. We apply this to the problem of image captioning by linking the generation module to a convolutional neural network that predicts a set of words that are descriptive of an image. The system placed first in the 2015 MSCoco competition on the Turing Test measure, and tied for first place overall.
This event will be available to stream HERE.
Biography: Geoffrey Zweig is a Principal Researcher, and Manager of the Speech and Dialog Group at Microsoft Research. His work centers on developing improved algorithms for speech and language processing. Recent work has focused on applications of side-conditioned recurrent neural network language models, such as image captioning and grapheme to phoneme conversion. Prior to Microsoft, Dr. Zweig managed the Advanced Large Vocabulary Continuous Speech Recognition Group at IBM Research, with a focus on the DARPA EARS and GALE programs. In the course of his career, Dr. Zweig has written several speech recognition trainers and decoders, as well as toolkits for doing speech recognition with segmental conditional random fields, and for maximum entropy language modeling. Dr. Zweig received his PhD from the University of California at Berkeley. He is the author of over 80 papers, numerous patents, is an Associate Editor of Computers Speech and Language, and is a Fellow of the IEEE.
Host: Yan Liu
Webcast: https://bluejeans.com/996018929Location: Henry Salvatori Computer Science Center (SAL) - 101
WebCast Link: https://bluejeans.com/996018929
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Assistant to CS chair
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AI Seminar
Wed, Nov 04, 2015 @ 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Information Sciences Institute
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Yong-Yeol Ahn, Indiana University School of Informatics and Computing
Talk Title: Modularity and Information Spreading in Complex Networks
Abstract: Our life relies on various complex networks,
such as cellular networks, brain networks, and social networks. For instance, a human brain is a network of neurons connected through synapses; our society is a network of people connected through social relationships. Networks exhibit modular structures that
often correspond to functional units of the system and discovering such modular structures and understanding their implications has been a challenging question. I will talk about how communities can fundamentally alter how information flow in real systems
and what can we learn about the systems by examining information spreading.
Biography: Yong-Yeol (YY) Ahn is an assistant professor at Indiana University School of Informatics and Computing and a co-founder
of Janys Analytics. He develops and leverages mathematical and computational methods to study complex systems such as cells, the brain, society, and culture. His recent contribution includes a new framework to identify pervasively overlapping modules in networks, network-based
algorithms to predict viral memes, and a new computational approach to study food culture. He is a recipient of several awards including Microsoft Research Faculty Fellowship. He worked as a postdoctoral research associate at theCenter for Complex Network
Research at Northeastern University and as a visiting researcher at the Center for Cancer Systems Biology at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute for three years after earning his PhD in Statistical Physics from KAIST in 2008.
Host: Emilio Ferrara
More Info: http://webcasterms1.isi.edu/mediasite/Viewer/?peid=5299e2cc0c6e44cbbbceb2cfbfadc71e1d
Location: Information Science Institute (ISI) - 11th floor large conference room
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Kary LAU
Event Link: http://webcasterms1.isi.edu/mediasite/Viewer/?peid=5299e2cc0c6e44cbbbceb2cfbfadc71e1d
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Communications, Networks & Systems (CommNetS) Seminar
Wed, Nov 04, 2015 @ 02:00 PM - 03:00 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Paul Cuff, Princeton University
Talk Title: A Stronger Soft-Covering Lemma that assures Semantic Security in Wiretap Channels
Series: CommNetS
Abstract: In 1975, Wyner published two very different papers that are unexpectedly connected. One introduced the wiretap channel, showing that information-theoretic secrecy is possible without a secret key by taking advantage of channel noise. This is the foundation for much of physical-layer security. The other paper introduced a notion of common information relevant to generating random variables at different terminals. In that work he introduced a soft-covering tool for proving achievability. Coincidently, soft covering has now become the tool of choice for proving strong secrecy in wiretap channels, although Wyner didn't appear to make any connection between the two results. We present a sharpening of the soft-covering tool by showing that the soft-covering phenomenon happens with doubly-exponential certainty with respect to a randomly generated codebook. Through the union bound, this enables security proofs in settings where many security constraints must be satisfied simultaneously. The "type II" wiretap channel is a great example of this, where the eavesdropper can actively influence his observations but security must hold in all cases. We demonstrate the effectiveness of this tool by deriving the secrecy capacity of wiretap channels of type II with a noisy main channel--- previously an open problem. Additionally, this stronger soft covering allows information-theoretic security proofs to be easily upgraded to semantic security, which is the gold standard in cryptography.
Biography: Paul Cuff received the B.S. degree in electrical engineering from Brigham Young University, Provo, UT, in 2004 and the M.S. and Ph. D. degrees in electrical engineering from Stanford University in 2006 and 2009. His Ph.D. research advisor was Thomas Cover. Since 2009 he has been an Assistant Professor of Electrical Engineering at Princeton University. Over the years Dr. Cuff has interacted with industry in both the technology and the financial sectors, spending summers at Google, Microsoft Research, and elsewhere, and giving talks at a number of hedge funds. In 2005, while in graduate school, he co-founded a tech startup called Adaptive Hearing Solutions with Bernard Widrow centered around signal processing technology. This venture began with the winning of the Stanford business plan competition. As a graduate student, Dr. Cuff was awarded the ISIT 2008 Student Paper Award for his work titled "Communication Requirements for Generating Correlated Random Variables." This work has led to fruitful and unexpected avenues of research in secure source coding. As faculty, he received the NSF Career Award in 2014 and the AFOSR Young Investigator Program Award in 2015.
Host: Prof. Urbashi Mitra
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 248
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Annie Yu
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Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering Seminar Series
Wed, Nov 04, 2015 @ 03:30 PM - 04:30 PM
Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Mike Tolley, Assistant Professor of Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering at the University of California at San Diego
Talk Title: Design and Fabrication for Biologically Inspired Robotics
Series: Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering Seminar Series
Abstract: Robotics has the potential to address many of today's pressing problems in fields ranging from healthcare to manufacturing to disaster relief. However, the traditional approaches used on the factory floor do not perform well in unstructured environments. I believe the key to solving many of these challenges will be to explore new, nontraditional designs. Fortunately, nature surrounds us with examples of novel ways to navigate and survive in the real world. Through evolution, biology has already explored myriad solutions to many of the challenges facing robotics. At the UC San Diego Bioinspired Robotics and Design Lab, we seek to borrow the key principles of operation from biological systems, and apply them to engineered solutions. In this talk I will discuss approaches to the design and fabrication of soft robotic systems, as well as systems which achieve self assembly by folding.
Biography: Michael T. Tolley is assistant professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering, and director of the Bioinspired Robotics and Design Lab at the Jacobs School of Engineering, UC San Diego (bioinspired.eng.ucsd.edu). Before joining the mechanical engineering faculty at UCSD in the fall of 2014, he was a postdoctoral fellow and research associate at the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering and the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, Harvard University. He received the Ph.D. and M.S. degrees in mechanical engineering with a minor in computer science from Cornell University in 2009 and 2011, respectively. He received the B. Eng. degree in mechanical engineering from McGill University in Montreal in 2005. His research interests include biologically inspired robotics and design, origami-inspired fabrication, self-assembly, and soft robotics.
Host: Prof. Nestor Perez-Arancibia
Location: Seaver Science Library (SSL) - 150
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Valerie Childress
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Computer Engineering Seminar
Fri, Nov 06, 2015 @ 10:30 AM - 11:30 AM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Dr. Yusuke Sakumoto and Dr. Ittetsu Taniguchi, Osaka University
Talk Title: System Level Design Approach of Autonomous Decentralized Energy Network
Abstract: Effective utilization of the renewable energy is a big motivation for the renovation of the conventional power systems. This seminar focuses on the design of autonomous decentralized energy network supporting energy interchanges among the nodes, and fundamental mechanisms to support effective energy interchanges. This seminar has two talks:
In the first talk, Prof. Taniguchi explains the project overview, and introduces the experimental study of DC microgrid systems.
In the second talk, Prof. Sakumoto explains an autonomous decentralized mechanism (ADM) for energy interchange in large-scale microgrids. Each node using this ADM autonomously performs energy interchange to adjacent nodes to realize energy supply appropriately for energy demand. He also explains an advanced method of his ADM toward resilient microgrids, and shows simulation experiment considering energy shortage and emergency situations.
Biography: Yusuke Sakumoto received M.E. and Ph.D. degrees in the Information and Computer Sciences from Osaka University in 2008 and 2010, respectively. He is currently an assistant professor at Graduate School of System Design, Tokyo Metropolitan University, Japan. His research interests are microgrid, communication network, and social network.
Ittetsu Taniguchi received M.E. and Ph.D. degrees in the Information and Computer Sciences from Osaka University in 2006 and 2009, respectively. He is currently a lecturer at Graduate School of Science and Technology, Ritsumeikan University, Japan.
From 2007 till 2008, he was a Ph.D. researcher at IMEC, Belgium.
His research interests are system level design methodology of CPS, and combinatorial optimization problems.
Host: Prof. Massoud Pedram
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 248
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Annie Yu
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NL Seminar- TEXT GENERATION FROM ABDUCTIVE INTERPRETATIONS
Fri, Nov 06, 2015 @ 03:00 PM - 04:00 PM
Information Sciences Institute
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Fabrizio Morbini, USC/ICT
Talk Title: Text generation from abductive interpretations
Series: Natural Language Seminar
Abstract: Abduction is an inference method often used to formalize what the process of interpretation is. In this talk i'll describe a system that generates a textual description of an abductive proof and its evaluation when applied to the interpretations generated for a set of 100 movies from the Heider-Simmel Interactive Theater project. The goal of the system is to generate text that explains the system's interpretation fluently without having to read or understand a proof graph and first order logic.
Biography: http://nld.ict.usc.edu/group/people/fabrizio-morbini
Host: Nima Pourdamghani and Kevin Knight
More Info: http://nlg.isi.edu/nl-seminar/
Location: Information Science Institute (ISI) - 6th Flr Conf Rm # 689, 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, Nov 06, 2015 @ 03:00 PM - 04:00 PM
Sonny Astani Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Nima Jabbari and Qin Ba, Astani CEE Ph.D. Students
Talk Title: Groundwater contamination potential from well-casing failure during a hydraulic fracturing operation
Abstract: By: Nima Jabbari
Title: Groundwater contamination potential from well-casing failure during a hydraulic fracturing operation
Abstract:
The introduction of hydraulic fracturing as a new technology for hydrocarbon production from low-permeability geologic formations has revitalized natural gas as an abundant, economic, and cleaner source of energy. Despite the benefits, hydraulic fracturing has raised several environmental concerns, from air pollution and water contamination to potential seismic activities induced by the subsurface fluid injection. Incidents and accidents attributed to this technology could be mitigated by setting more stringent regulations and adding more precautions to the operation steps. This research is aimed to investigate one of the potential risk-pathways of the chemicals used in fracturing slurry toward shallow groundwater. Well-casing failure and leakage near the bottom of fresh aquifer during the high-pressure injection process is selected as the hypothetical scenario of concern. A framework is proposed to characterize the human health risk from ingestion of contaminated water. In this model, hydrogeological and operational parameters are altered stochastically in a way to cover a range of possible worst-case scenarios. The results show that if the well integrity is compromised, high risks to human health are achievable. This work can help the site-managers make appropriate decisions once an underground leakage is detected.
Presenter: Qin Ba
Title: Robustness and optimal control of power grid
Abstract:
For infrastructural network systems (e.g. transportation networks, power grid, water networks, and data networks) small fraction of link failure can cascade and lead to system failure. We study the influence of cascading failure and try to develop decentralized control policies to improve the robustness of power grid. Due to the different underlying physics, cascading failures have different effects on power grid and transportation systems. Firstly, while failure always decreases the throughput of transportation networks, it can increase the performance of power grid. This motivates an optimal control problem in which load shedding is considered as the control action to stop cascading failure in power grid. An finite horizon dynamic program formulation is hence proposed. Secondly, while decentralized control policy can never render maximal robustness of transportation system, it can be maximally robust in certain power grids. For this, we consider control on susceptance of links to maximize robustness of power grid, where the the margin of robustness for a given control policy is defined as maximal perturbations under which the link flows can be asymptotically contained within their specified limits. We proposed decentralized control policies to achieve the maximal robustness of a class of networks with simple topologies. The optimality is proved and shown through simulation results based on a benchmark IEEE network.
Location: Grace Ford Salvatori Hall Of Letters, Arts & Sciences (GFS) - 106
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Evangeline Reyes
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Seminars in Biomedical Engineering
Mon, Nov 09, 2015 @ 12:30 PM - 01:50 PM
Alfred E. Mann Department of Biomedical Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Yossi Chait, PhD , Professor, University of Massachusetts-Amherst
Talk Title: BME Faculty Research Areas
Series: Seminars in Engineering, Neuroscience & Health (ENH)
Biography: Yossi Chait is a Professor in the department of Mechanical & Industrial Engineering at the University of Massachusetts. He graduated from the Ohio State University with BS (1982), Michigan State University with MS (1984), and PhD (1988) degrees in mechanical engineering. His research activities have been funded by the National Science Foundation covering diverse topics including the Quantitative Feedback Theory (QFT), robust multivariable control, reset control, Internet congestion control, modeling of the mammalian master clock, and dynamics of the human thyroid. Prof. Chait has consulted internationally in the area of robust control, and is a co-author of the QFT Control Design MATLAB Toolbox. He has held visiting professor positions at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Switzerland; the Technion, Israel, and Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands. He is a fellow of ASME.
His recent research focus lies at the interface of engineering, mathematics, and medicine, with a particular interest in chronic kidney disease. He is collaborating with clinicians at Western New England Renal Transplant Associates, Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard medical school, the University of Louisville medical school, and New York Blood Center. His recent work has been supported by the National Institute of Health and the pharmaceutical industry.
Host: Stanley Yamashiro, PhD
Location: Olin Hall of Engineering (OHE) - 122
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Mischalgrace Diasanta
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Engineering Neuroscience & Heatlh
Mon, Nov 09, 2015 @ 03:49 PM - 05:00 PM
Alfred E. Mann Department of Biomedical Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Dr. Philip Holmes, Eugene Higgins Professor of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Professor of Applied and Computational Mathematics Associated Faculty in Mathematics and Neuroscience Institute, Princeton University
Talk Title: Moving Fast and Slow*: Feedforward and feedback control in insect locomotion
Series: Engineering, Neuroscience & Health (ENH Seminars)
Abstract: All faculty and students are cordially invited to
The Seminar Series on
Engineering Neuroscience & Health
At the University of Southern California
Monday, November 9th 2015
3:50 p.m.
Presenting:
Dr. Phil Holmes
Eugene Higgins Professor of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering
Professor of Applied and Computational Mathematics
Associated Faculty in Mathematics and Neuroscience Institute, Princeton University
Moving Fast and Slow*: Feedforward and feedback control in insect locomotion
Seminar is simultaneously presented
UPC: RTH 217 - Live ** Location to be confirmed**
UPC Campus Map/Directions: http://www.usc.edu/about/visit/upc/
HSC: CHP 147 - Video Conference
Center for the Health Professional
HSC Campus Map/Directions: http://www.usc.edu/about/visit/hsc/
Abstract: I will describe mathematical models for running insects, from an energy-conserving biped, through a muscle-actuated hexapod driven by a neural central pattern generator, to reduced phase-oscillator models that capture the dynamics of noisy gaits and external perturbations, and provide estimates of coupling strengths between legs. I will argue that both simple models and large simulations are necessary to understand biological systems, and end by describing some current experiments on fruit flies that cry out for new and improved models.
*Apologies to D. Kahneman "Thinking Fast and Slow"
Hosted by
Prof. Francisco Valero-Cuevas
Complete schedule of speakers and information about all prior seminars can be found at
http://bbdl.usc.edu/ENH
Biography: http://www.princeton.edu/mae/people/faculty/holmes/
Host: Professor Francisco Valero-Cuevas
Location: Ronald Tutor Hall of Engineering (RTH) - 217
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Mischalgrace Diasanta
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USC Stem Cell Seminar: Gerd Blobel, Children's Hospital of Philadelphia and University of Pennsylvania
Tue, Nov 10, 2015 @ 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Alfred E. Mann Department of Biomedical Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Talk Title: Propagating transcriptional patterns through mitosis
Series: Eli and Edythe Broad Center for Regenerative Medicine and Stem Cell Research at USC Distinguished Speakers Series
Abstract: During mitosis, the metazoan nucleus is disassembled and transcription ceases globally. Upon mitotic exit, how are transcriptional patterns faithfully re-established to maintain cell identity and differentiation state? I will discuss our work aimed at understanding mechanisms of mitotic "bookmarking" and re-initiation of transcription during G1 entry.
Host: Neil Segil
More Info: http://stemcell.usc.edu/events/details/?event_id=916779
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Cristy Lytal/USC Stem Cell
Event Link: http://stemcell.usc.edu/events/details/?event_id=916779
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Epstein Institute Seminar - ISE 651
Tue, Nov 10, 2015 @ 03:30 PM - 04:50 PM
Daniel J. Epstein Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Dr. Darinka Dentcheva, Stevens Institute of Technology
Talk Title: Optimization Problems with Stochastic Order Constraints
Host: Suvrajeet Sen
More Information: November 10, 2015_Darinka Dentcheva.pdf
Location: Ethel Percy Andrus Gerontology Center (GER) - 206
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Shelly Lewis
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CS Student Colloquium: Chen Sun (USC) - Towards Large-scale Video Understanding
Tue, Nov 10, 2015 @ 04:00 PM - 05:15 PM
Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Chen Sun, USC
Talk Title: Towards Large-scale Video Understanding
Series: CS Colloquium
Abstract: This lecture satisfies requirements for CSCI 591: Computer Science Research Colloquium
The ever-increasing popularity of video capturing devices and video sharing websites creates great opportunities for researchers to utilize the rich information encoded by consumer videos. Yet understanding videos on a large scale remains challenging: the video qualities usually vary in resolution, lighting condition and camera movement; spatiotemporal annotation of the videos could be expensive and time-consuming. As videos can be naturally represented by a hierarchy of events, activities and objects, it is essential to build a pool of mid-level concepts for semantic video interpretation. In light of these challenges, my research towards video understanding focuses on utilizing weak video-level annotations effectively, and building a stronger connection between language and vision. In this talk, I will show how Internet images can be used to localize fine-grained actions in videos without using temporal video annotations. I will then describe my approach to connect language and vision via visual concepts, and demonstrate how to automatically discover the visual concepts from parallel text and visual corpora.
Biography: Chen Sun is a Ph.D. candidate in the Computer Vision group at University of Southern California, advised by Prof. Ram Nevatia. His research interest includes Computer Vision and Machine Learning, with a focus on large-scale video understanding. Chen got his bachelor degree in Computer Science at Tsinghua University, Beijing. He has collaborated with researchers at Google Research and Facebook AI Research over the summers.
Host: USC CS
Location: Henry Salvatori Computer Science Center (SAL) - 101
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Assistant to CS chair
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USC Stem Cell Seminar: Bruno Peault, UCLA and MRC Center for Regenerative Medicine
Wed, Nov 11, 2015 @ 12:00 PM - 01:00 PM
Alfred E. Mann Department of Biomedical Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Bruno Peault, Professor/UCLA and MRC Center for Regenerative Medicine
Talk Title: What is a mesenchymal stem cell, and why does it matter?
Series: Eli and Edythe Broad Center for Regenerative Medicine and Stem Cell Research at USC Distinguished Speakers Series
Abstract: Mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs) have been the most commonly used cells for tissue repair and engineering, and the focus of over 500 clinical trials. Paradoxically, MSCs have also been the least characterized regenerative cells in terms of native identity, innate tissue distribution and natural function, owing to their exclusive derivation in long-term culture. We have recently prospectively identified and clinically validated innate MSCs as ubiquitous perivascular cells. We will present the phenotype and multiple potentials deployed by native MSCs to mediate tissue regeneration, and discuss the rationale for using purified perivascular cells in place of conventional culture derived MSCs for cell therapies.
Host: Denis Evseenko
More Info: http://stemcell.usc.edu/events/details/?event_id=918521
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Cristy Lytal/USC Stem Cell
Event Link: http://stemcell.usc.edu/events/details/?event_id=918521
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WANTED: Industrial Engineers in Healthcare
Wed, Nov 11, 2015 @ 02:00 PM - 03:00 PM
Daniel J. Epstein Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: David Belson, Ph.D. & Michelle Taveras Ponce Ph.D., USC-ISE Department
Talk Title: WANTED: Industrial Engineers in Healthcare
Host: Epstein Dept of Industrial & Systems Engineering
More Information: Healthcare Seminar 11.11.2015.pdf
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 132
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Michele ISE
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Communications, Networks & Systems (CommNetS) Seminar
Wed, Nov 11, 2015 @ 02:00 PM - 03:00 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Saurabh Amin, MIT
Talk Title: Resilient Monitoring and Control of Distribution Networks
Series: CommNetS
Abstract: This talk will focus on the analysis of attacker-defender interactions on distribution networks (DNs) using game-theoretic tools. Two attack models will be considered: (i) manipulation of distributed generation (DG) nodes in electricity distribution networks to induce sudden supply-demand mismatch; (ii) strategic disruption of network links in urban water networks to increase non-technical losses. In the first model, the defender responds to the adversary's action by imposing both DG control and partial load control at the uncompromised nodes under nonlinear power flow constraints. In the second model, the defender strategically chooses an optimal network sensing strategy to maximize detection performance under the sensors' constraints on the range of detection. Full characterization of equilibrium strategies will be presented for each model of attacker-defender interaction. The equilibrium strategies provide practical recommendations for improving the resilience of network monitoring and control tools in the face of strategic attacks.
Biography: Saurabh Amin is Robert N. Noyce Career Development Assistant Professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). His research focuses on the design and implementation of high confidence network control algorithms for infrastructure systems. He works on robust diagnostics and control problems that involve using networked systems to facilitate the monitoring and control of large-scale critical infrastructures, including transportation, water, and energy distribution systems. He also studies the effect of security attacks and random faults on the survivability of networked systems, and designs incentive-compatible control mechanisms to reduce network risks. Dr. Amin received his Ph.D. in Systems Engineering from the University of California, Berkeley in 2011. He is a recipient of NSF CAREER award, and Google Faculty Research award.
Host: Prof. Ashutosh Nayyar
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 248
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Annie Yu
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Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering Seminar Series
Wed, Nov 11, 2015 @ 03:30 PM - 04:30 PM
Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Ahmed Ghoniem, Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Talk Title: Combustion for Clean Energy: From Low Emissions to Low CO2
Series: Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering Seminar Series
Abstract: The World's energy consumption is growing rapidly. Hydrocarbons will remain the major primary energy source for many decades, prompting concerns over CO2 and its climate impact. Near-term strategies, including higher conversion and utilization efficiency, CO2 capture and expanding renewables should be pursued vigorously. Combustion research must contribute aggressively towards these goals, including work on gas-phase oxy-combustion, membrane-supported thermochemistry and chemical looping combustion. The latter options reduce the energy penalty in oxygen production, but need special catalytic surfaces, device design and system integration. I will review some of our recent work addressing these challenges. Premixed oxy-fuel combustion offers significant advantages, including retrofit, but experiences similar dynamics and instabilities to air combustion. I will cover our recent experimental and numerical work on the subject, some of the fundamental similarities and difference between the two processes and how progress in turbulent combustion and kinetics will enable better implementation of this promising technology.
Biography: Ahmed F. Ghoniem is the Ronald C Crane Professor of Mechanical Engineering at MIT, and the director of the Center for Energy and Propulsion Research and the Reacting Gas Dynamics Laboratory. He received his B.Sc. and M.Sc. degrees from Cairo University, and Ph.D. at the University of California, Berkeley. His research interests include computational engineering; combustion and thermochemistry; CO2 capture and reuse (oxy-combustion, membrane separation and chemical looping) and fuel production from renewable sources. He has supervised more than 100 post-doctors and graduate students; published more than 330 refereed articles in leading journals and international conferences; and lectured extensively around the World. He is Fellow of ASME and associate fellow of AIAA.
Host: Prof. Fokion Egolfopoulos
Location: Seaver Science Library (SSL) - 150
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Valerie Childress
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Massive MIMO --- Tutorial and Research Highlights
Thu, Nov 12, 2015 @ 10:00 AM - 11:00 AM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Erik G. Larsson, Linköping University
Talk Title: Massive MIMO --- Tutorial and Research Highlights
Abstract: The exponential growth rate in wireless traffic will continue and perhaps even accelerate, due to new applications such as augmented reality and internet-of-things. Massive MIMO is a key technology for providing orders of magnitude more data traffic. It works by equipping base stations with large numbers of antennas, simultaneously serving many tens of low-complexity terminals in the same time frequency resource via closed-loop spatial multiplexing (MIMO precoding). Channel estimates are formed on the uplink through operation in time-division duplexing (TDD) and relying on reciprocity of propagation, which makes the operation scalable with respect to the number of antennas and leaves the channel coherence as the only limiting factor. In this talk we will review the basic operation principles of Massive MIMO, and discuss some highlights from recent research.
Biography: Erik G. Larsson is Professor at Linköping University in Sweden. He has previously held positions at the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) in Stockholm, the University of Florida, the George Washington University (USA), and Ericsson Research (Stockholm). In the spring of 2015 he was a Visiting Fellow at Princeton University, USA, for four months. His main professional interests are within the areas of wireless communications and signal processing. He has published some 100 journal papers on these topics, he is co-author of the textbook Space-Time Block Coding for Wireless Communications (Cambridge Univ. Press, 2003) and he holds many patents on wireless technology. He has been Associate Editor for several IEEE journals, he serves as chair of the IEEE SPS SPCOM technical committee in 2015, as chair of the steering committee for the IEEE Wireless Communications Letters in 2014-“2015, and as General Chair of the Asilomar SSC Conference 2015. He received the IEEE Signal Processing Magazine Best Column Award twice, in 2012 and 2014, and the IEEE ComSoc Stephen O. Rice Prize in Communications Theory in 2015.
Host: Urbashi Mitra, ubli@usc.edu, EEB 536, x04667
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 248
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Gerrielyn Ramos
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AI Seminar
Thu, Nov 12, 2015 @ 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Information Sciences Institute
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Edwin Kan, Cornell University
Talk Title: Indoor Radio Detection and Ranging: A Phase-Based Continuous Wave Approach
Abstract: Among all of the advances in electronic and information technology, radio frequency technology for indoor precision real time locating system still remains inaccessible for most applications, including 3D human machine interface , biomedical monitoring, prosthetic feedback control and indoor navigation. In addition, Internet of Things will be heavily constrained if the physical location of the thing remains unknown or inaccurately known. Many local area network and body area network breakthroughs can be enabled if an indoor radar like technology can be broadly deployed. The detection and ranging principle of indoor RTLS is similar to outdoor radar, but has many unresolved challenges such as unspecific reflection, path obstruction, and multi path interference.
The continuous wave phase based ranging method for high short range precision is simple and flexible, but vulnerable to phase offsets and interferences. I will present passive broadband harmonic nonlinear transmission line tags to fundamentally rectify previous CW problems. Because phase information is now contained within the second harmonic rather than the fundamental frequency, interferences and phase errors caused by direct reflections of the interrogating signal are greatly reduced. The tag is now the only radiation source in SH within the indoor ambient, which enables many radar techniques like channel coherence, beamforming and synthetic aperture to improve precision, evaluate measurement quality and reduce spectral cost. Multiple but sparse frequencies are employed to resolve the integer ambiguity and to achieve millimeter level precision under phase error tolerance towards total of 180o. Human movement causes distinctive magnitude and phase channel fading, and can be equalized for better tag reading. Furthermore, digital or dumb antenna beamforming can be used for multi path evaluation, while tag movement for synthetic aperture. With the help of known harmonic landmark tags, the tagless objects within the reading range can be further mapped out with redundant angular and frequency diversity, which enables many additional applications. I will show realistic indoor experiments to validate our models and algorithms.
Biography: Edwin C. Kan received the B.S. degree from National Taiwan University, Taipei, Taiwan, in 1984, and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Illinois, Urbana, in 1988 and 1992, respectively, all in electrical engineering. In January 1992, he joined Dawn Technologies as a Principal CAD Engineer developing advanced electronic and optical device simulators and technology CAD framework. He was then with Stanford University, as a Research Associate from 1994 to 1997. From 1997, he was an Assistant Professor with the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, where he is now a Professor. He has spent the summers of 2000 and 2001 at IBM Microelectronics, Yorktown Heights and Fishkill, NY, in the Faculty Partner Program. In 2004 and 2005, he has been a visiting researcher at Intel Research, Santa Clara, CA, and a visiting professor at Stanford University during his sabbatical leave. His main research areas include CMOS technologies, semiconductor device physics, flash memory, CMOS biosensors, ultra low power radio link, and numerical methods for PDE and ODE. Dr. Kan received the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineer in October 2000 from the White House. He also received several teaching awards from Cornell Engineering College for his CMOS and MEMS courses.
Host: Weimin Shen
Webcast: http://webcasterms1.isi.edu/mediasite/Viewer/?peid=b4ce1413f2664d01b4e8d26daa2b99e01dLocation: Information Science Institute (ISI) - 11th Floor conference room
WebCast Link: http://webcasterms1.isi.edu/mediasite/Viewer/?peid=b4ce1413f2664d01b4e8d26daa2b99e01d
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Kary LAU
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MFD - Chemical Engineering and Materials Science Distinguished Lecture: Jian Luo
Thu, Nov 12, 2015 @ 12:45 PM - 02:00 PM
Mork Family Department of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Jian Luo, Univ. of California San Diego
Talk Title: Understanding Interfacial Phase Behaviors to Help Decipher the Materials Genome
Series: MFD Distinguished Lecture
Abstract: A piece of ice melts at 0 C, but a nanometer-thick surface layer of the ice can melt at tens of degrees below zero. This phenomenon of stabilization of nanoscale liquid-like interfacial phases below the normal bulk melting temperatures, known as premelting, was first recognized by the physicist Michael Faraday in 1842. Since then, materials scientists have discovered that the surfaces and interfaces in engineered materials can exhibit more complex phase-like behaviors at high temperatures, which can affect the fabrication and properties of a broad range of metallic alloys and ceramic materials. Specifically, recent studies of 2-D grain-boundary interfacial phases also called complexions shed light on several outstanding scientific problems that have been puzzled the materials science community for decades, including the origins and atomic-level mechanisms of activated sintering, liquid metal embrittlement, and abnormal grain growth. Analogous surface phenomena have also been studied and utilized to improve the performance of batteries, supercapacitors, photocatalysts and oxygen-ion conductors. Since bulk phase diagrams are one of the most useful tools for materials design, it is conceived that interfacial phase diagrams can be developed as a useful materials science tool.
Biography: Jian Luo graduated from Tsinghua University in 1994 with dual Bachelor's degrees, one in Materials Science and Engineering and another in Electronics and Computer Technology. He received a M.S. degree in Materials Science and Engineering in 1999, and a Ph.D. degree in Ceramics in 2001, both from M.I.T. Luo worked in the industry for more than two years with Lucent Technologies and OFS/Fitel from 2001 to 2003, before he joined the Clemson faculty, where he served as an Assistant/Associate/Full Professor of Materials Science and Engineering from 2003 to 2012. In January 2013, he joined UCSD as a Professor of NanoEngineering and Materials Science and Engineering. Luo received a National Science Foundation CAREER award (from the ceramics program) in 2005 and an Air Force Office of Scientific Research Young Investigator award (from the metallic materials program) in 2007. He was named as a National Security Science and Engineering Faculty Fellow (NSSEFF) by the U.S. Department of Defense in 2014.
Host: Prof. Pin Wang
More Information: DLSLuoAb.pdf
Location: James H. Zumberge Hall Of Science (ZHS) - 159
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Jason Ordonez
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Ferumoxytol-Enhanced MRI: A Single Center Experience in Pediatric Congenital Heart Disease & Beyond
Thu, Nov 12, 2015 @ 01:30 PM - 02:30 PM
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Peng Hu, Ph.D, Department of Radiological Sciences David Geffen School of Medicine, UCLA
Talk Title: Ferumoxytol-Enhanced MRI: A Single Center Experience in Pediatric Congenital Heart Disease & Beyond
Series: Medical Imaging Seminar Series
Abstract: Ferumoxytol is an iron oxide particle approved as an intravenous iron supplement for iron deficiency anemia in adult patients with chronic kidney disease. In this talk, I will discuss its off label use as an intravascular contrast agent and our institutional experiences of ferumoxytol enhanced high resolution 3D cine MRI for children with complex congenital heart disease. I will also discuss other potential applications of ferumoxytol enhanced MRI and the safety aspects of this agent.
Biography:
Host: Professor Krishna Nayak
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 132
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Talyia White
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CS Colloquium: Barna Saha (UMass) - Randomization in Data and Design
Thu, Nov 12, 2015 @ 04:00 PM - 05:00 PM
Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Barna Saha, University of Massachusetts Amherst
Talk Title: Randomization in Data and Design
Series: CS Colloquium
Abstract:
This lecture satisfies requirements for CSCI 591: Computer Science Research Colloquium
Use of randomness is ubiquitous in modern computing, and promises to play a major role in today's Big Data era. There are three diverging viewpoints of how randomization impacts our ability to effectively understand and analyze data, (1) the underlying data itself may be stochastic, e.g. for the uncertainty in data acquisition; (2) randomization may appear by design to develop algorithms that are scalable; and (3) randomization can help answer why some simple heuristics are surprisingly effective on real data. In this talk, I will explain these phenomena through some basic tasks such as ranking, clustering and estimating distance or deviation of data from a formal (probabilistic) model.
Biography: Barna Saha is an Assistant Professor in the College of Information and Computer Science at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Maryland College Park, and then spent a couple of years at the AT&T Shannon Labs as a senior researcher before joining UMass Amherst in 2014. Her research interests are in algorithm design and analysis, and large scale data analytics. She particularly likes to work on problems that are tied to core applications but have the potentials to lead to beautiful theory. She is the recipient of Yahoo ACE Award (2015), Simons-Berkeley Research Fellowship (2015), NSF CRII Award (2015), Dean's Dissertation Fellowship (2011), and the best paper award and finalists for best papers at VLDB 2009 and IEEE ICDE 2012 respectively.
Host: David Kempe
Location: Henry Salvatori Computer Science Center (SAL) - 101
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Assistant to CS chair
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On Dimension Reduction and Clustering by Random Projections
Fri, Nov 13, 2015 @ 10:00 AM - 11:00 AM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Teemu Roos, Helsinki Institute for Information Technology
Talk Title: On Dimension Reduction and Clustering by Random Projections
Abstract: I will discuss some interesting problems and promising solutions related to dimension reduction and clustering by random projections. It is well known that in high dimensional settings, random projections onto lower dimensional subspaces tends to retain pair-wise distances faithfully. Random projections are significantly faster that alternative techniques such as principal component analysis while providing comparable results. In the talk, I will present recent and ongoing work related to speeding up random projection-based computations by parallelization, fast approximate nearest neighbor searches using random projection trees, and applications in dimensional reduction and clustering.
Biography: Teemu Roos is an Assistant Professor at the Helsinki Institute for Information Technology HIIT and the Department of Computer Science, University of Helsinki, Finland. He received his MSc and PhD degrees in computer science from the same university in 2001 and 2007 respectively. Prof Roos's research interests include the theory and applications of probabilistic graphical models, information theory, and machine learning.
Host: Urbashi Mitra, ubli@usc.edu, EEB 536, x04667
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 248
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Gerrielyn Ramos
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Integrated Systems Seminar Series
Fri, Nov 13, 2015 @ 02:00 PM - 03:30 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Dr. Ichiro Fujimori, IEEE Fellow, Broadcom Corporation
Talk Title: Evolution of Multi-Gigabit Wireline Transceivers in CMOS
Series: Integrated Systems Seminar
Abstract: The Internet Infrastructure is rapidly expanding to meet demands of increasing Internet traffic due to Cloud Computing/Storage. Wireline Transceivers are the data throughput bottleneck for SoCs used in Data Centers, as well as provide the communication backbone for Data Transport Networks. With the Moore's law slowing down, the necessary cost reduction and bandwidth extension with diversified link requirements cannot be achieved by simply taking advantage of a new technology node. As a result, architecture and circuit innovations have become more important than ever for multi-gigabit Wireline Transceivers. Designers will need to explore key questions such as: Analog vs. DSP-based Transceivers, NRZ vs PAM Coding, and Copper vs. Optical Interconnects to come up with the most competitive solution. This talk will provide further insights into these questions, as well as cover the latest advancements in such Wireline Transceivers and Wireline Communications applications.
Biography: Dr. Ichiro Fujimori received the B.S. Degree in Electrical Engineering from the Science University in Tokyo in 1985, and the PhD Degree from the University of Hiroshima in 2003.
In 1985 he joined Asahi-Kasei Microsystems (AKM), Japan, where he was engaged in the design and development of high-resolution Delta-Sigma data converters for Digital-Audio and Communications applications. In 2000, he joined Newport Communications (later acquired by Broadcom). As the Manager of Mixed-Signal Engineering, he led the team to the development of the first CMOS transceiver LSI's for SONET OC-192 applications. He is currently the Vice President of Central Engineering at Broadcom Corporation, responsible for the IP roadmap and development of multi-gigabit SerDes for Networking, transceivers for Optical Communications, Ethernet Copper PHYs, Automotive AFEs, PLLs, and embedded Power Management circuits. He holds 35 U.S. patents.
Dr. Fujimori is an IEEE Fellow, and the recipient of the IEEE Journal of Solid-State Circuits, Best Paper Award in 2000. He has published 35 technical articles, and has conducted various Seminars, Invited talks, and Panels in the field of Data Converters and Wireline Communications. He has served in the Technical Program Committee of VLSI Circuits Symposium from 2009 to 2014, and now in the Executive Committee. He currently serves in the Technical Program Committee of International Solid State Circuits Conference, and as the Associate Editor of the IEEE Journal of Solid-State Circuits.
Host: Hosted by Prof. Hossein Hashemi, Prof. Mike Chen, and Prof. Mahta Moghaddam. Organized and hosted by SungWon Chung.
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 248
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Elise Herrera-Green
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Astani Civil and Environmental Engineering Ph.D. Seminar
Fri, Nov 13, 2015 @ 03:00 PM - 04:00 PM
Sonny Astani Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Prof. Kara Nelson, Civil and Environmental Engineering, University of California, Berkeley
Talk Title: Decentralized Approaches for Wastewater Management, Water Reuse, and
Abstract: See Attachment
Host: Dr. Amy Childress and Dr. Adam Smith
More Information: Nelson Announcement.pdf
Location: Grace Ford Salvatori Hall Of Letters, Arts & Sciences (GFS) - 106
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Evangeline Reyes
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NL SEMINAR
Fri, Nov 13, 2015 @ 03:00 PM - 04:00 PM
Information Sciences Institute
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Satish Kumar Thittamaranahalli , USC/ICT
Talk Title: Notes on the Constraint Composite Graph
Series: NL Seminar
Abstract: In this talk, I will present the idea of the constraint composite graph (CCG) associated with any combinatorial problem modeled as a weighted constraint satisfaction problem (WCSP). The CCG constitutes the first mathematical framework for simultaneously exploiting the numerical structure of the weighted constraints as well as the graphical structure of the variable-interactions in a WCSP. I will discuss a number of important applications of the CCG including its role in: (a) identification of tractable classes of WCSPs; (b) kernelization techniques for combinatorial problems; and (c) understanding the scope of incremental computation for hard combinatorial problems.
Biography: Dr. Satish Kumar Thittamaranahalli (T. K. Satish Kumar) is a Research Scientist at the University of Southern California. He has published extensively on numerous topics in Artificial Intelligence spanning such diverse areas as Constraint Reasoning, Planning and Scheduling, Probabilistic Reasoning, Combinatorial Optimization, Approximation and Randomization, Heuristic Search, Model-Based Reasoning, Knowledge Representation and Spatio-Temporal Reasoning. He has served on the Program Committees of many international conferences in Artificial Intelligence and is a co-winner of the Best Student Paper Award from the 2005 International Conference on Automated Planning and Scheduling. Dr. Kumar received his PhD in Computer Science from Stanford University in March 2005. In the past, he has also been a Visiting Student at the NASA Ames Research Center, a Postdoctoral Research Scholar at the University of California, Berkeley, a Research Scientist at the Institute for Human and Machine Cognition, a Visiting Assistant Professor at the University of West Florida, and a Senior Research and Development Scientist at Mission Critical Technologies.
Host: Nima Pourdamghani
Location: Information Science Institute (ISI) - 6th fl Large CR (689)
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Alma Nava / Information Sciences Institute
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AI Seminar
Mon, Nov 16, 2015 @ 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Information Sciences Institute
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Graham Neubig, Nara Institute of Science and Technology
Talk Title: Simultaneous Speech Translation
Abstract: Speech translation is an application of machine translation that converts utterances from the speakers language into the listeners language. One of the most identifying features of speech translation is the fact that it must be performed in real time while the speaker is speaking, and thus it is necessary to split a constant stream of words into translatable segments before starting the translation process. Simultaneous speech translation is a line of research that investigates how to perform this segmentation and translation with minimal delay, presenting the translation results to the user as soon as possible. However, because this entails potentially starting translation before the speaker has spoken the whole sentence, it is often necessary to translate before receiving a syntactically or semantically complete unit, and methods to maintain translation accuracy in these adversary conditions are necessary.
In this talk, I will present four major threads of work in simultaneous speech translation covering (1) segmentation strategies, which decide when it is appropriate to start translation, (2) prediction methods, which attempt to predict content that the user has not yet spoken, (3) rewording, which changes the standard way of wording output to make it more conducive to low-latency translation, and (4) evaluation, which attempts to make clear just how important speed and accuracy are in the simultaneous speech translation task.
Biography: Graham Neubig received his B.E. from University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, U.S.A, in 2005, and his M.E. and Ph.D. in informatics from Kyoto University, Kyoto, Japan in 2010 and 2012 respectively. He is currently an assistant professor at the Nara Institute of Science an Technology, Nara, Japan. His research interests include natural language and speech processing, with a focus on machine learning approaches for applications such as machine translation, spoken language analysis, spoken dialog, and syntactic/semantic parsing.
Host: Ashish Vaswani
Webcast: http://webcasterms1.isi.edu/mediasite/Viewer/?peid=663b4d4be2624f8ea47f5e906df9215e1dLocation: Information Science Institute (ISI) - 11th floor large conference room
WebCast Link: http://webcasterms1.isi.edu/mediasite/Viewer/?peid=663b4d4be2624f8ea47f5e906df9215e1d
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Kary LAU
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Seminars in Biomedical Engineering
Mon, Nov 16, 2015 @ 12:30 PM - 01:50 PM
Alfred E. Mann Department of Biomedical Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Changhuei Yang, PhD, Professor of Electrical Engineering, Bioengineering and Medical Engineering, Caltech
Talk Title: Deep tissue imaging with optical time-reversal
Series: Seminars in Engineering, Neuroscience & Health (ENH)
Abstract:
Time-Reversal Optical Focusing - We appear opaque because our tissues scatter light very strongly. Interestingly, optical scattering is deterministic and can be time-reversed in much the same way a ricocheting billiard ball can be made to retrace its trajectory if nudged appropriately. I will discuss our recent results in using ultrasound tagging in combination with digital optical phase conjugation to focus light tightly and deeply within biological tissues. I will also report on our experiments using digital optical phase conjugation to tightly focus light on a moving target in a scattering medium. These technologies can potentially enable incisionless laser surgery, targeted optogenetic activation, high-resolution biochemical tissue imaging and more.
Fourier Ptychography - Microscopes are complex and fussy creatures that are capable of delivering limited image information. This is because physical optical lenses are intrinsically imperfect. The perfect lenses we draw in high school ray diagrams simply do not exist. I will discuss our recent work on Fourier Ptychographic Microscopy - a computational microscopy method that enables a standard microscope to push past its physical optical limitations to provide gigapixel imaging ability.
Biography: For more information, visit Professor Yang's lab website at: http://www.biophot.caltech.edu/
Host: Stanley Yamashiro, PhD
Location: Olin Hall of Engineering (OHE) - 122
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Mischalgrace Diasanta
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USC Stem Cell Seminar: Thomas Zwaka, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai
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Tue, Nov 17, 2015 @ 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Alfred E. Mann Department of Biomedical Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Thomas Zwaka, Professor/ Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai
Talk Title: The unreasonable effectiveness of embryogenesis and pluripotency: Mechanism and mechanics
Series: Eli and Edythe Broad Center for Regenerative Medicine and Stem Cell Research at USC Distinguished Speakers Series
Abstract: Cell competition represents a radical departure from the established view that embryonic development is simply a matter of following a preprogrammed set of rules. Instead, it is a highly conserved process that promotes the elimination of less fit, potentially dangerous cells during normal tissue growth and homeostasis, in both the early embryo and the adult. In this lecture, I will talk about how competition among pluripotent epiblast cells may explain how developmental processes are directly intertwined with evolutionary processes.
Host: Qi-Long Ying
More Info: http://stemcell.usc.edu/events/details/?event_id=916780
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Cristy Lytal/USC Stem Cell
Event Link: http://stemcell.usc.edu/events/details/?event_id=916780
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Epstein Institute Seminar - ISE 651
Tue, Nov 17, 2015 @ 03:00 PM - 04:50 PM
Daniel J. Epstein Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Dr. Arman Sabbaghi, Purdue University
Talk Title: New Perspectives on Tests for Co-Primary & Secondary Endpoints
Host: Qiang Huang
More Information: November 17, 2015_Arman Sabbaghi.pdf
Location: Ethel Percy Andrus Gerontology Center (GER) - 206
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Shelly Lewis
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Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering Seminar Series
Wed, Nov 18, 2015 @ 03:30 PM - 04:30 PM
Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Jeremy Mason, Postdoctoral Scholar in the Department of Biological Sciences at the University of Southern California
Talk Title: TBA
Series: Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering Seminar Series
Location: Seaver Science Library (SSL) - 150
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Valerie Childress
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AI Seminar
Thu, Nov 19, 2015 @ 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Information Sciences Institute
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Ross King and Larisa Soldatova, University of Manchester and University of London
Talk Title: Automating Chemistry and Biology using Robot Scientists and On the representation of research hypotheses
Abstract: Automating Chemistry and Biology using Robot Scientists
Abstract
A Robot Scientist is a physically implemented robotic system that applies techniques from artificial intelligence to execute cycles of automated scientific experimentation. A Robot Scientist can automatically execute cycles of hypothesis formation, selection of efficient experiments to discriminate between hypotheses, execution of experiments using laboratory automation equipment, and analysis of results. The goal is to better understand science, and to make scientific research more efficient. The Robot Scientist Adam was the first machine to autonomously discover novel scientific knowledge. To describe Adam's research we developed an ontology and logical language. More recently we have developed the Robot Scientist Eve to automate and integrate drug discovery: drug screening, hit conformation, and QSAR development. Our focus has been on neglected tropical disease, and Eve has discovered lead compounds for malaria, Chagas, and African sleeping sickness.
Title: On the representation of research hypotheses
Speaker: Dr Larisa Soldatova
Abstract:
Hypotheses are at the heart of scientific research workflows. Many hypotheses are now being automatically produced on an industrial scale by computers, e.g. the annotation of a genome is essentially a large set of hypotheses generated by sequence similarity programs; Robot Scientists enable the full automation of a scientific investigation, including generation and testing of research hypotheses.
In her talk, Larisa will present a logically defined way for recording automatically generated hypotheses in machine amenable way. The proposed formalism allows the description of complete hypotheses sets as specified input and output for scientific investigations. This formalism can also be applied for the representation of hypotheses formulated by human scientists.
Biography: Ross D. King is Professor of Machine Intelligence at the University of Manchester, UK. His main research interests are in the interface between computer science and biology or chemistry. The research achievement he is most proud of is originating the idea of a Robot Scientist using laboratory robotics to physically implement a closed-loop scientific discovery system. His Robot Scientist Adam was the first machine to hypothesize and experimentally confirm scientific knowledge. His new robot Eve is searching for drugs against neglected tropical diseases. His work on this subject has been published in the top scientific journals, Science and Nature, and has received wide publicity. He is also very interested in NP problems, computational economics, and computational aesthetics.
Bio:
Dr Larisa Soldatova is Senior Lecturer in Computing at Brunel University London. Her main research interests are in the knowledge representation, semantic technologies, and logics. Larisa has been involved in the Robot Scientist project for over 10 years. Now she leads a European project AdaLab that aims to develop a framework enabling robotic and human scientists to work together. The results of her work are published in Science, Nature Biotechnology, J. of the Royal Society Interface.
Host: Gully Burns
Location: 11th floor large conference room
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Kary LAU
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CS Colloquium: Heng-Tze Cheng (Google Research) - Sibyl: Google-Scale Machine Learning
Thu, Nov 19, 2015 @ 04:00 PM - 05:00 PM
Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Heng-Tze Cheng, Google Research
Talk Title: Sibyl: Google-Scale Machine Learning
Series: CS Colloquium
Abstract: This lecture satisfies requirements for CSCI 591: Computer Science Research Colloquium
Sibyl is one of the most widely used machine learning and prediction systems at Google, actively used in production in nearly every product area. Designed for the largest datasets at Google, Sibyl scales up to hundreds of billions of training examples and billions of features. Sibyl is used for various prediction tasks ranging from classification, regression, ranking to recommendations. Beyond core learning algorithms and scalable distributed systems, Sibyl contains a suite of data processing, monitoring, analysis, and serving tools, making it a robust and easy-to-use production system.
This lecture will be available to stream HERE.
Biography: Heng-Tze Cheng is currently a senior software engineer on the Sibyl large-scale machine learning team at Google Research. He has developed new search, ranking, and recommendation systems that are widely used across Google products. Heng-Tze received his Ph.D. from Carnegie Mellon University in 2013 and B.S. from National Taiwan University in 2008. His research interests include machine learning, user behavior modeling, and human activity recognition, with over 20 publications and 3 U.S. patents in the related fields.
Host: Yan Liu
Webcast: https://bluejeans.com/467893187Location: Henry Salvatori Computer Science Center (SAL) - 101
WebCast Link: https://bluejeans.com/467893187
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Assistant to CS chair
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Munushian Seminar - Asad Abidi, UCLA, Single-Chip Radios: The Next Generation
Fri, Nov 20, 2015 @ 02:00 PM - 03:30 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Asad Abidi, UCLA
Talk Title: Single-Chip Radios: The Next Generation
Abstract: The term "integration" in microelectronics has come to mean the rapacious assimilation on to a single piece of silicon CMOS every conceivable function that makes up a complex system, stopping only where the laws of physics draw a hard line. Driven by the wireless revolution that gave us smartphones and wireless LAN which depend increasingly on elaborate uses of the available frequency bands, this is what has happened with radio transceivers. A collection of silicon chips and passive components which only a few years ago characterized a wireless transceiver is now heading towards an antenna that connects to essentially a single-chip radio of unprecedented versatility.
I will describe the unprecedented performance that is being demanded from today's radio-on-a-CMOS chip and how innovations in architecture and circuit design are coping with the pressures of lower supply voltages, poor quality on-chip passives, and the huge dynamic range of radio waveforms that are no longer conditioned by off-chip SAW filters and duplexers. This gives a glimpse into the next generation radios, and how close they are to hard limits on performance.
Biography: Asad Abidi received the BSc degree in Electrical Engineering from Imperial College, London in 1976, and the PhD from the University of California, Berkeley in 1982. He worked at Bell Laboratories, Murray Hill until 1985, and then joined the faculty of the University of California, Los Angeles where he is Distinguished Chancellor's Professor of Electrical Engineering. With his students he has developed many of the radio circuits and architectures that enable today's mobile devices.
Among other awards, Abidi has received the 2008 IEEE Donald O. Pederson Award in Solid-State Circuits and the Best Paper Award from the IEEE Journal of Solid-State Circuits in 2012. The University of California Berkeley's Electrical Engineering Department recognized him as a Distinguished Alumnus in 2015. He is a Fellow of IEEE, and was elected to the US National Academy of Engineering and to TWAS, the world academy of sciences.
Host: EE-Electrophysics
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 132
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Marilyn Poplawski
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Astani Civil and Environmental Engineering Ph.D. Seminar
Fri, Nov 20, 2015 @ 03:00 PM - 04:00 PM
Sonny Astani Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Amir Eftekharian, Astani CEE Graduate Student
Talk Title: Numerical Simulations of Vortex Induced Vibrations of a Circular Cylinder under a Controlled Motion
Abstract:
Vortex induced vibration is the phenomenon of vibrating a structural system due to an asymmetric vortex shedding pattern caused by its interaction with a surrounding fluid flow regime. This vibration can be harmful to structures as it causes excessive motions, fatigue, and rupture in the system. Thus, vortex induced vibration is a design concern in many applications such as bridges, offshore structures, aerospace engineering, and power plants. This study has been focused on numerical simulation of vortex generation behind a circular cylinder in a subcritical flow when it is under a controlled oscillation. For this purpose, finite volume techniques along with different turbulence models have been used in order to solve the Navier Stokes Equations and predict the system response. A series of two and three dimensional simulations have been performed on stationary and oscillating cylinders as an attempt to reproduce the hydrodynamic forces on the cylinder resulted from the experimental studies with considering mesh refinements, time step, and computational costs. The result of this study shows the promising capabilities of numerical tools for a better understanding of complex fluid/structure interactions.
Location: Grace Ford Salvatori Hall Of Letters, Arts & Sciences (GFS) - 106
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Evangeline Reyes
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NL Seminar- Better Bootstraps, Better Translation.
Fri, Nov 20, 2015 @ 03:00 PM - 04:00 PM
Information Sciences Institute
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Jia Xu , Chinese Academy of Sciences
Talk Title: Better Bootstraps, Better Translation
Series: Natural Language Seminar
Abstract: Bagging Breiman, 96 and its variants is one of the most popular methods in aggregating classifiers and regressors. Its original analysis assumes that the bootstraps are built from an unlimited, independent source of samples. In the real world this analysis fails because there is a limited number of training samples.
We analyze the effect of intersections between bootstraps to train different base predictors, which shows that the real-world bagging behaves very differently than its ideal analog [Breiman, 96]. Most importantly, we provide an alternative subsampling method called design-bagging based on a new construction of combinatorial designs. We prove that this is universally better than bagging. Our analytical results are backed up by experiments on general classification and regression settings, and significantly improved all machine translation systems we used in the NIST-15 C-E competition.
Biography: Jia Xu is an associate professor at ICT/CAS, after being an assistant professor in Tsinghua University and a senior researcher at DFKI lecturing at Saarland University in Germany. She worked at IBM Watson and MSR Redmond during her Ph.D. advised by Hermann Ney at RWTH-Aachen University. Her current research interests are in Machine Learning with a focus towards highly competitive machine translation systems, where she led and participated in teams winning first place in WMT-11, TC-Star -05-07 and NIST-08. In NIST-15 she led one more team that won 4th place, which is the 1st among academic institutions.
Host: Nima Pourdamghani and Kevin Knight
More Info: http://nlg.isi.edu/nl-seminar/
Location: Information Science Institute (ISI) - 6th Flr Conf Rm # 689, Marina Del Rey
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Peter Zamar
Event Link: http://nlg.isi.edu/nl-seminar/
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Censor, Sketch, and Validate for Learning from Large-Scale Data
Mon, Nov 23, 2015 @ 10:30 AM - 11:30 AM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Professor Georgios B. Giannakis, University of Minnesota
Talk Title: Censor, Sketch, and Validate for Learning from Large-Scale Data
Abstract: We live in an era of data deluge. Pervasive sensors collect massive amounts of information on every bit of our lives, churning out enormous streams of raw data in various formats. Mining information from unprecedented volumes of data promises to limit the spread of epidemics and diseases, identify trends in financial markets, learn the dynamics of emergent social-computational systems, and also protect critical infrastructure including the smart grid and the Internet's backbone network. While Big Data can be definitely perceived as a big blessing, big challenges also arise with large-scale datasets. This talk will put forth novel algorithms and present analysis of their performance in extracting computationally affordable yet informative subsets of massive datasets. Extraction will effected through innovative tools, namely adaptive censoring, random subset sampling (a.k.a. sketching), and validation. The impact of these tools will be demonstrated in machine learning tasks as fundamental as (non)linear regression, classification, and clustering of high-dimensional, large-scale, and dynamic datasets.
Biography: Georgios B. Giannakis received his Diploma in Electrical Engr. from the Ntl. Tech. Univ. of Athens, Greece, 1981. From 1982 to 1986 he was with the Univ. of Southern California (USC), where he received his MSc. in Electrical Engineering, 1983, MSc. in Mathematics, 1986, and Ph.D. in Electrical Engr., 1986. Since 1999 he has been a professor with the Univ. of Minnesota, where he now holds an ADC Chair in Wireless Telecommunications in the ECE Department, and serves as director of the Digital Technology Center. His general interests span the areas of communications, networking and statistical signal processing -“ subjects on which he has published more than 380 journal papers, 650 conference papers, 20 book chapters, two edited books and two research monographs (h-index 114). Current research focuses on big data analytics, wireless cognitive radios, network science with applications to social, brain, and power networks with renewables. He is the (co-) inventor of 22 patents issued, and the (co-) recipient of 8 best paper awards from the IEEE Signal Processing (SP) and Communications Societies, including the G. Marconi Prize Paper Award in Wireless Communications. He also received Technical Achievement Awards from the SP Society (2000), from EURASIP (2005), a Young Faculty Teaching Award, the G. W. Taylor Award for Distinguished Research from the U. of Minnesota, and the IEEE Fourier Technical Field Award (2015). He is a Fellow of IEEE and EURASIP, and has served the IEEE in a number of posts including that of a Distinguished Lecturer for the IEEE-SP Society.
Host: Professor Sandeep Gupta, sandeep@usc.edu
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 132
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Mayumi Thrasher
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Seminars in Biomedical Engineering
Mon, Nov 23, 2015 @ 12:30 PM - 01:50 PM
Alfred E. Mann Department of Biomedical Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Guangqiang (Jay) Jiang, Ph.D., Chief Technology Office, Axonics
Talk Title: Current Status and Future Trends of Implantable Neuromodulation Devices
Series: Seminars in Engineering, Neuroscience & Health (ENH)
Biography: http://www.axonicsmodulation.com/about/management-team/
Host: Stanley Yamashiro, PhD
Location: Olin Hall of Engineering (OHE) - 122
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Mischalgrace Diasanta
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NanoTech Seminar Series, Justin Song - Curveball electrons: Valley-based electronics and opto-electronics
Tue, Nov 24, 2015 @ 02:00 PM - 03:30 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Justin Song, California Institute of Technology
Talk Title: Curveball electrons: Valley-based electronics and opto-electronics
Abstract: Charge carriers in materials are often described as particles similar to free electrons but characterized by effective quantities such as an effective mass. However, electrons in topological materials defy this description; they acquire an additional quantum mechanical property - Berry curvature - that radically alters their dynamics.
I will discuss how exploiting Berry curvature in recently discovered two-dimensional heterostructures, such as graphene on hexagonal-boron-nitride (G/h-BN), grants control over the valley index - an internal quantum degree of freedom akin to spin. This strikingly manifests in low-dissipation transverse valley currents that can be decoupled from charge. I will discuss recent measurements of topological valley currents in G/hBN devices, how dissipation can be further suppressed using valley waveguides that allow valley currents to persist even in an insulating bulk. If time permits, I will also discuss how Berry curvature can alter opto-electronic properties such as a chiral flow of plasmons without magnetic field. These provide a new toolbox to engineer electronic and optoelectronic action directly into the electron wave function.
Biography: Justin Song is a Burke fellow and Sherman Fairchild scholar of physics at Caltech. He received a BSc in physics from Imperial College London (2007), an AM in physics from Harvard (2011), and a Ph.D. in applied physics at Harvard (2014).
Justin's research interests lie at the interface between engineering and solid-state physics, and include novel charge/valley/spin/energy transport, opto-electronics, topological materials, and 2D layered heterostructures. He is the recipient of the Caltech prize fellowship in physics, the APS Ovshinsky Award, and a National Science Scholarship.
Host: Han Wang
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 132
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Marilyn Poplawski
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CS Seminar: Dr. Gita Sukthankar (University of Central Florida) - Data-driven Social Informatics
Mon, Nov 30, 2015 @ 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Gita Sukthankar, University of Central Florida
Talk Title: Data-driven Social Informatics
Series: Teamcore Seminar
Abstract: Data-driven social informatics unites models derived from social science with data-driven approaches in order to model and predict population behavior patterns. It can be used to advance our understanding of human behavior, guide public policy decisions, and improve user experience with social media platforms. In this talk, I'll describe work done at UCF's Intelligent Agents Lab (http://ial.eecs.ucf.edu/) in which we use a combination of agent-based modeling, machine learning, and crowdsourcing to model human social systems. The benefits of this approach will be illustrated using three case studies: 1) predicting the influence of social norms on smoking cessation behavior, 2) tracking campus parking usage using crowdsourcing and transportation modeling, 3) learning collaboration patterns from co-authorship networks. We believe that the combination of techniques yields a more nuanced view that relying on data alone.
Biography: Dr. Gita Sukthankar is an Associate Professor and Charles N. Millican Faculty Fellow in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Central Florida, and an affiliate faculty member at UCF's Institute for Simulation and Training. She received her Ph.D. from the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon and an A.B. in psychology from Princeton University. In 2009, Dr. Sukthankar was selected for the Air Force Young Investigator award, the DARPA Computer Science Study Panel, and an NSF CAREER award. Gita Sukthankar's research focuses on multi-agent systems and computational social models. She is the lead editor of the book: Plan, Activity, and Intent Recognition: Theory and Practice and currently serves on DARPA's Information Science and Technology advisory group.
Host: Teamcore Group
Location: 107
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Assistant to CS chair
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Traffic estimation for extreme congestion events
Mon, Nov 30, 2015 @ 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Daniel Work, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Talk Title: Traffic estimation for extreme congestion events
Host: Petros Ioannou
More Information: Work Seminar Announcement.pdf
Location: 132
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Shane Goodoff
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Seminars in Biomedical Engineering
Mon, Nov 30, 2015 @ 12:30 PM - 01:50 PM
Alfred E. Mann Department of Biomedical Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Andrew Hires, PhD, Assistant Professor in Neurobiology, University of Southern California
Talk Title: TBA
Biography: Samuel Andrew Hires, first studied Brain and Cognitive Sciences as an undergrad at MIT. In 2007, he received his Ph.D. in Neurosciences in the lab of Roger Tsien at UCSD where he developed genetically encoded indicators of glutamate and synaptic release. This was followed by a brief post-doc with Loren Looger at Janelia Farm where he developed the popular genetically-encoded calcium indicator G-CaMP3 with Lin Tian. He finished his post-doctoral training with Karel Svoboda studying cortical circuits governing tactile sensory processing in the mouse. In 2014, the Hires Lab opened at the University of Southern California. Link to Hires Lab: http://hireslab.org/
Host: Stanley Yamashiro, PhD
Location: Olin Hall of Engineering (OHE) - 122
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Mischalgrace Diasanta
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