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Events for December 12, 2005

  • Meet USC (AM session)

    Mon, Dec 12, 2005 @ 09:00 AM - 12:00 PM

    Viterbi School of Engineering Undergraduate Admission

    Workshops & Infosessions


    This half day program is designed for prospective freshmen and family members. Meet USC includes an information session on the University and the Admission process; a student led walking tour of campus and a meeting with us in the Viterbi School. Meet USC is designed to answer all of your questions about USC, the application process and financial aid.Reservations are required for Meet USC. Please call the USC Admission Center at (213) 740-6616 to check availability and to make an appointment. Be sure to tell them you are interested in Engineering!

    Location: USC Admission Center

    Audiences: Prospective Freshman and Family Members - RESERVATIONS REQUIRED

    Contact: Viterbi Admission

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  • Graduate Seminar

    Mon, Dec 12, 2005 @ 01:00 PM

    Mork Family Department of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Hydrogen Economy: Status of Science &
    Technology and R&D Opportunities*Dr. U. (Balu) Balachandran
    Argonne National Laboratory
    Argonne, IL AbstractHydrogen is considered the fuel of choice for both the electric power and transportation industries because of concerns over global climate change. Dependence on depleting oil reserves found in politically unstable regions of the world is forcing many nations to look into the so-called hydrogen economy – a solution that holds the potential to provide sustainable clean, secure, affordable, and reliable energy. At present, petroleum refining and the production of ammonia and methanol collectively consume ≈95% of all deliberately produced hydrogen in the U.S. Most of the demands for hydrogen are currently met by fossil-based technologies such as steam reforming of methane, naphtha reforming, and coal gasification. New cost-efficient production pathways will be needed as we move into the hydrogen-based transportation system. Present needs include economically viable and environmentally benign sources for hydrogen, safe and efficient storage, infrastructure for delivery, and utilization technologies. Also needed are establishment of safety codes and standards, and public training/acceptance. Materials science will play a major role in addressing the challenges of the hydrogen economy. The current status of the hydrogen production, storage, distribution, and utilization technologies will be reviewed. Topics addressed will include membranes for hydrogen production/separation, thermo-chemical water splitting, and technical barriers/research opportunities.*Work supported by the U.S. Department of Energy. Monday, December 12, 2005Seminar at 1:00 p.m. HED 116The Scientific Community is Cordially Invited

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

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Petra Pearce

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  • Meet USC (PM session)

    Mon, Dec 12, 2005 @ 01:00 PM - 04:00 PM

    Viterbi School of Engineering Undergraduate Admission

    Workshops & Infosessions


    This half day program is designed for prospective freshmen and family members. Meet USC includes an information session on the University and the Admission process; a student led walking tour of campus and a meeting with us in the Viterbi School. Meet USC is designed to answer all of your questions about USC, the application process and financial aid.Reservations are required for Meet USC. Please call the USC Admission Center at (213) 740-6616 to check availability and to make an appointment. Be sure to tell them you are interested in Engineering!

    Location: USC Admission Center

    Audiences: Prospective Freshman and Family Members - RESERVATIONS REQUIRED

    Contact: Viterbi Admission

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  • Opportunistic Decoding: Maximizing rate and reliability in channels with feedback

    Mon, Dec 12, 2005 @ 02:00 PM - 03:00 PM

    Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Dr. Stark Draper, University of California, BerkeleyAbstract: Feedback plays the central role in control theory, enabling systems to react to unpredictable control and disturbance signals. In contrast, many coding systems are designed to operate open-loop. In part this stems from Shannon's result that feedback does not increase the capacity of a stationary discrete memoryless channel. However, in modern communication systems, channels are not always stationary, and can have service demands that are much easier to satisfy when feedback is available. In this talk we describe how to use feedback to "opportunistically" select our decoding time to adapt to unpredictable or unfortunate channel behaviors.We first discuss how feedback can be used to adapt the rate of communication to unpredictable time-varying channel conditions. Such channel variations might result from fading or from dynamic interference environments such as would occur in a cognitive radio network. Incremental redundancy or "fountain" codes find a natural application in this setting. We demonstrate how these codes can be considered as an instance of an adaptive coding strategy for a class of arbitrarily varying channels with feedback.We then describe how feedback can be used to better meet tight application-layer service demands such as hard delay constraints that require short block lengths. Such constraints might arise in the context of streaming media or control-over-network applications. It is well known that, in comparison with feedback-free codes, with feedback we can achieve a target reliability (error probability) in a much reduced average transmission time. In this talk we examine how much feedback is required to realize such improvements. We propose a novel joint channel-code and hash-function design that allows us to tradeoff feedback rate and reliability; transitioning smoothly from the "Forney" reliability at zero-rate (but not zero) feedback to the best-possible "Burnashev" reliability at a higher rate.We will also comment on how opportunistic decoding ideas find application in the context of distributed source coding.Bio: Stark Draper received the Ph.D. and M.S. degrees in electrical engineering and computer science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He received the B.S. and B.A. degrees in electrical engineering and history, respectively, from Stanford University.He is a research fellow in the Wireless Foundations Lab in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences, University of California, Berkeley. Prior to that he held the Information Processing Laboratory Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Toronto, where he was also an instructor.Host: Professor Giuseppe Caire, caire@usc.edu, x.04683

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

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Mayumi Thrasher

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