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Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Events for December
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Lyman L. Handy Colloquia
Thu, Dec 01, 2016 @ 12:45 PM - 01:50 PM
Mork Family Department of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Dr. Costas D. Maranas , Penn State
Talk Title: Reconstructing, analyzing and redesign metabolism
Series: Lyman Handy Colloquia
Host: Professor Nick Graham
Location: James H. Zumberge Hall Of Science (ZHS) - 159
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Martin Olekszyk
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CS Colloquium and CAIS Seminar: Andy Plumptre - Improving the effectiveness of law enforcement in African Parks
Thu, Dec 01, 2016 @ 02:00 PM - 02:50 PM
Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Andy Plumptre, Tropical Conservation Scientist
Talk Title: Improving the effectiveness of law enforcement in African Parks
Series: Center for AI in Society (CAIS) Seminar Series
Abstract: This lecture satisfies requirements for CSCI 591: Computer Science Research Colloquium.
Investment in law enforcement in protected areas in Africa typically form more than 50% of the budget and often nearer 85-90%. Yet there has been very little research looking at ways that ranger patrolling could be improved and made more efficient and effective. This presentation will present work that has been undertaken in Uganda to improve law enforcement and discuss areas of research that are still needed to better understand how to improve enforcement.
Biography: Andy Plumptre, PhD is a tropical conservation scientist who has been working for the past 25 years in the Albertine Rift Region of Africa, one of the most biodiverse parts of the continent. His work has focused on many different issues related to the conservation of this region including developing new methods for surveying primates in forests, improving ranger patrolling in protected areas, conservation planning for the Albertine Rift, building national capacity to undertake monitoring and research, supporting transboundary conservation, and establishing new protected areas.
Host: Center for AI in Society, USC
Location: Mark Taper Hall Of Humanities (THH) - 301
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Assistant to CS chair
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CS Colloquium: Michael Ernst (University of Washington) - Analyzing the entire program: applying natural language processing to software engineering
Thu, Dec 01, 2016 @ 04:00 PM - 05:00 PM
Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Michael Ernst, University of Washington
Talk Title: Analyzing the entire program: applying natural language processing to software engineering
Series: CS Colloquium
Abstract: This lecture satisfies requirements for CSCI 591: Computer Science Research Colloquium. Part of Yahoo! Labs Machine Learning Seminar Series.
A powerful, but limited, way to view software is as source code alone.
Mathematical techniques, such as abstract interpretation and model checking, can indicate whether the program satisfies a formal specification. But, where does the formal specification come from?
A program consists of much more than a sequence of instructions.
Developers make use of test cases, documentation, variable names, program structure, the version control repository, and more. I argue that it is time to take the blinders off of software analysis tools: tools should use all these artifacts to deduce more powerful and useful information about the program.
Researchers are beginning to make progress towards this vision. In this talk, I will discuss four initial results that find bugs and generate code, by making use of variable names, error messages, procedure documentation, and user questions.
Biography: Michael D. Ernst is a Professor in the Computer Science & Engineering department at the University of Washington.
Ernst's research aims to make software more reliable, more secure, and easier (and more fun!) to produce. His primary technical interests are in software engineering, programming languages, type theory, security, program analysis, bug prediction, testing, and verification. Ernst's research combines strong theoretical foundations with realistic experimentation, with an eye to changing the way that software developers work.
Ernst is an ACM Fellow (2014) and received the inaugural John Backus Award (2009) and the NSF CAREER Award (2002). His research has received an ACM SIGSOFT Impact Paper Award (2013), 8 ACM Distinguished Paper Awards (FSE 2014, ISSTA 2014, ESEC/FSE 2011, ISSTA 2009, ESEC/FSE 2007, ICSE 2007, ICSE 2004, ESEC/FSE 2003), an ECOOP 2011 Best Paper Award, honorable mention in the 2000 ACM doctoral dissertation competition, and other honors. In 2013, Microsoft Academic Search ranked Ernst #2 in the world, in software engineering research contributions over the past 10 years.
Dr. Ernst was previously a tenured professor at MIT, and before that a researcher at Microsoft Research.
More information is available at his homepage: http://homes.cs.washington.edu/~mernst/.
Host: Chao Wang
Location: Henry Salvatori Computer Science Center (SAL) - 101
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Assistant to CS chair
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MHI/EE-Electrophysics Seminar
Fri, Dec 02, 2016 @ 10:00 AM - 11:30 AM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: David Allstot, University of California at Berkeley
Talk Title: Switched-Capacitor Circuits: From Maxwell to the Internet of Things
Abstract: Maxwell introduced the concept of the equivalent switched-capacitor resistance in Vol. 2 of his Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism in 1873. The concept laid dormant for almost a century until it became commercially viable by exploiting the switches, native capacitors, and operational amplifiers of MOS IC technology. CMOS switched-capacitor circuits have been used in high-volume data converters and signal processing ICs for nearly four decades, and are ubiquitous in modern RF transceiver circuits and emerging as a dominant design approach in CMOS bio-medical and internet-of things circuits and systems, etc.
This talk will begin with a brief history of SC circuits as applied to data converters, precision high-order filters, operational amplifiers, etc.
Next, SC circuits are described for body-area-networks (BAN) that integrate multiple sensor nodes in the portable and wearable bio-medical systems that are revolutionizing healthcare. A typical BAN comprises several bio-signal and motion sensors and uses ultra-low-power short-haul radios in conjunction with nearby smart-phones or handheld devices (with GPS capabilities) to communicate via the internet with a doctor or other healthcare professional. Higher energy efficiency is critical to the development of feature-rich, wearable and reliable personal health monitoring systems.
The amount of data transmitted to the smart-phone increases as more sensors are added to the BAN. Because the energy consumed for RF transmission is proportional to the data rate, it is advantageous to compress the bio-signal at the sensor prior to digitization and transmission. This energy-efficient paradigm is possible using compressed sensing-”a sampling theory wherein a compressible signal can be acquired using only a few incoherent measurements. For ECG signals, for example, large compression factors are achievable which means similar reductions in energy consumption.
SC circuits are having a huge impact on wireless communications. A major challenge is the RF power amplifier dissipates a large fraction of the total power of a transceiver because of its low efficiency. Despite more than two decades of extensive research, the challenge of on-chip RF Pas with high efficiency in digital-friendly CMOS technologies has not been met. Switching PA topologies with relatively high efficiency have gained momentum, and relatively high output power is being delivered using power combining techniques. Supply regulation techniques have enabled higher efficiency when amplifying non-constant envelope modulated signals. The switched-capacitor RF power amplifier technique which meets many of the remaining challenges is described and some future directions are presented.
Biography: David J. Allstot received the B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. degrees from the Univ. of Portland, Oregon State Univ., and the Univ. of California, Berkeley.
He has held several industrial and academic positions. He was the Boeing-Egtvedt Chair Professor of Engineering at the Univ. of Washington from 1999 to 2012 and Chair of the Dept. of Electrical Engineering from 2004 to 2007. In 2012 he was a Visiting Professor of Electrical Engineering at Stanford University and from 2013 to 2016, he held a three-year appointment as the MacKay Professor in Residence in the EECS Dept. at UC Berkeley.
Dr. Allstot has advised about 65 M.S. and 40 Ph.D. graduates, published more than 300 papers, and received several awards for outstanding teaching and research including the 1980 IEEE W.R.G. Baker Award, 1995 and 2010 IEEE Circuits and Systems Society (CASS) Darlington Award, 1998 IEEE International Solid-State Circuits Conference (ISSCC) Beatrice Winner Award, 2004 IEEE CASS Charles A. Desoer Technical Achievement Award, 2005 Semiconductor Research Corp. Aristotle Award, 2008 Semiconductor Industries Assoc. University Research Award, 2011 IEEE CASS Mac Van Valkenburg Award, and 2015 IEEE Trans. on Biomedical Circuits and Systems Best Paper Award. He has been very active in service to the IEEE Circuits and Systems and Solid-State Circuits Societies throughout his career.
Host: MHI/EE-Electrophysics
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 132
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Marilyn Poplawski
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CS Colloquium and CAIS Seminar: Andy Plumptre - How much to protect and where? Conservation planning in Africa's biodiversity hotspot
Fri, Dec 02, 2016 @ 11:00 AM - 11:50 AM
Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Andy Plumptre, Tropical Conservation Scientist
Talk Title: How much to protect and where? Conservation planning in Africa's biodiversity hotspot
Series: Center for AI in Society (CAIS) Seminar Series
Abstract: This lecture satisfies requirements for CSCI 591: Computer Science Research Colloquium.
The Albertine Rift is the richest region for vertebrate conservation in Africa. Protected areas have been established here in the past but mainly for large mammal species. This presentation will look at where needs to be conserved in the region to maximize the conservation impacts in terms of species protected whilst at the same time avoiding future mining developments in the region and the impacts of future climate change. Using conservation planning science to demonstrate the uniqueness of sites then led to the creation of new protected areas.
Biography: Andy Plumptre, PhD is a tropical conservation scientist who has been working for the past 25 years in the Albertine Rift Region of Africa, one of the most biodiverse parts of the continent. His work has focused on many different issues related to the conservation of this region including developing new methods for surveying primates in forests, improving ranger patrolling in protected areas, conservation planning for the Albertine Rift, building national capacity to undertake monitoring and research, supporting transboundary conservation, and establishing new protected areas.
Host: Center for AI in Society, USC
Location: Seeley G. Mudd Building (SGM) - 101
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Assistant to CS chair
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AI Seminar
Fri, Dec 02, 2016 @ 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Information Sciences Institute
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Thomas Lemberger, EMBO, Heidelberg, Germany
Talk Title: SourceData: a semantic platform to make published data and figures discoverable
Abstract: In scientific publications, data are visually depicted in figures or tables. The original data behind the figures the source data however are almost never available in a structured format that would make them findable and reusable. To address this issue, SourceData (http://sourcedata.embo.org) has built a suite of tools to capture the structure of published research data and to make published research papers discoverable based solely on their data content. SourceData converts the narrative descriptions provided in figure legends into standardized, machine readable metadata. Each biological component in a figure is consistently identified via links to established public databases of biological terms. The experimental design is furthermore captured in a structured format by classifying the role of each component. Computer assisted manual identification and classification of biological entities is performed with a web-based curation tool. A separate interface allows authors to verify the accuracy of curated information. In a pilot project, the SourceData team has processed over 15,000 experiments from papers across 23 journals. The resulting web of connected data can be browsed through the SmartFigure application (http://smartfigures.net), which displays data in the context of related figures published in other papers and enables users to easily navigate between them. Users can also use the SourceData search engine to directly retrieve data based on the design of an experiment. SourceData searches the structure of the data rather than relying on keyword indexing, thus avoiding potentially subjective interpretation of results provided in the text.
Biography: Thomas Lemberger is Deputy Head of Scientific Publications at EMBO (embo.org) in Heidelberg, Germany, Chief Editor of the open access journal Molecular Systems Biology (msb.embopress.org) and Project Leader of the SourceData project (sourcedata.embo.org). Trained as a molecular biologist, Thomas earned his PhD at the University of Lausanne, Switzerland, where he studied hormonal regulation of gene expression by nuclear receptors. For his postdoctoral research, he moved to Heidelberg, Germany, where his research focused on the regulation of transcription in the brain. He joined EMBO as scientific editor in 2005 and assumed the editorial oversight of Molecular Systems Biology since launch of the journal. He has recently initiated the SourceData project to build an open platform that makes scientific publications discoverable based on their data content.
Host: Gully Burns
Location: 11th floor large conference room
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Kary LAU
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CS Colloquium: Ariel Felner (Ben-Gurion University) - Search for Optimal Solutions: the Heart of Heuristic Search is Still Beating
Fri, Dec 02, 2016 @ 12:00 PM - 01:00 PM
Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Ariel Felner, Ben-Gurion University
Talk Title: Search for Optimal Solutions: the Heart of Heuristic Search is Still Beating
Series: CS Colloquium
Abstract: The field of heuristic search has spawned large number of subfields such as finding good heuristics, abstracting state-spaces, finding solutions of different qualities or that meet different requirements or constraints. However, a major research direction within the field of heuristic search is that of finding optimal solutions.
While the A* algorithm was proved to be optimally effective there exists a large number of algorithms and research directions that enhance the A* family of algorithms and improve their performance. In this talk I'll cover a number of such recent algorithms. These algorithms assume a fixed heuristic function but exploit various algorithmic directions to improve upon A* in many ways along the following lines: better memory usage, improved generations of nodes, interleaving depth-first searches into A*, enhanced calculations of the heuristic and recent developments of optimal bidirectional search.
Biography: Ariel Felner received his Ph.D in 2002 from Bar-Ilan University, Israel, and is now an associate professor at Ben-Gurion University, Israel. He is the chair of the Israeli Association for Artificial intelligence (IAAI) and a council member of SoCS. He is interested in all aspects of heuristic search and has performed research in various areas within the field of heuristic search. He pays specific attention to pedagogical and historical aspects of teaching concepts in this field.
Host: Sven Koenig
Location: Hedco Neurosciences Building (HNB) - 15
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Assistant to CS chair
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2, 3, 4D Radiology Imaging Research: Can we find more with what we already have?
Fri, Dec 02, 2016 @ 02:00 PM - 04:00 PM
Alfred E. Mann Department of Biomedical Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Darryl Hwang, PhD, Assistant Professor of Research Radiology
Talk Title: TBA
Series: Seminars in BME (Lab Rotations)
Abstract: The 4D Quantitative Imaging Lab is devoted to medical image post-processing research in multiple dimensions. Our radiomics work looks at applying image processing algorithms to extract quantifiable measures from our 2D and 3D grayscale medical images looking at shape, texture, and enhancement. We create 3D models for quantification and visualization. How these volumes change with time is the fourth D. An overview of the software used (Synapse 3D, Matlab, Blender) and various imaging processing algorithms will be covered. In addition, we examine how to streamline the workflow and explore how to integrate our research into the clinical world.
Biography: http://keck.usc.edu/faculty/darryl-hwa-hwang/
Host: Brent Liu, PhD
Location: Olin Hall of Engineering (OHE) - DRB 146
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Mischalgrace Diasanta
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Ming Hsieh Institute Seminar Series on Integrated Systems
Fri, Dec 02, 2016 @ 02:00 PM - 04:00 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Dr. Walid Ali-Ahmad, VP Technology, Qualcomm Inc.
Talk Title: RF Front-Ends and Transceiver Systems Issues for Carrier Aggregation based 4G User Equipment
Host: Prof. Hossein Hashemi, Prof. Mike Chen, and Prof. Mahta Moghaddam
More Information: MHI Seminar Series IS - Walid_Ali-Ahmad.pdf
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 132
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Jenny Lin
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Astani Civil and Environmental Engineering Ph.D. Seminar
Fri, Dec 02, 2016 @ 03:00 PM - 04:00 PM
Sonny Astani Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Vassilios Skanavis and Siming Chen, Astani CEE Graduate Students
Talk Title: Tsunami Generated by Landslide on October 17th 2015 and Mitigation of Fugitive Methane Emissions from Anaerobic Treatment Processes
Abstract: See attached
More Information: Tsunami Generated by Landslide on October 17th 2015.docx
Location: John Stauffer Science Lecture Hall (SLH) - 102
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Evangeline Reyes
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NL Seminar PROCEDURAL LANGUAGE AND KNOWLEDGE
Fri, Dec 02, 2016 @ 03:00 PM - 04:00 PM
Information Sciences Institute
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Yejin Choi, University of Washington
Talk Title: PROCEDURAL LANGUAGE AND KNOWLEDGE
Series: Natural Language Seminar
Abstract: Various types of how to knowledge are encoded in natural language instructions: from setting up a tent, to preparing a dish for dinner, and to executing biology lab experiments. These types of instructions are based on procedural language, which poses unique challenges. For example, verbal arguments are commonly elided when they can be inferred from context, e.g.,bake for 30 minutes, not specifying bake what and where. Entities frequently merge and split, e.g.,vinegar and oil merging into dressing, creating challenges to reference resolution. And disambiguation often requires world knowledge, e.g., the implicit location argument of stir frying is on stove. In this talk, I will present our recent approaches to interpreting and composing cooking recipes that aim to address these challenges. In the first part of the talk, I will present an unsupervised approach to interpreting recipes as action graphs, which define what actions should be performed on which objects and in what order. Our work demonstrates that it is possible to recover action graphs without having access to gold labels, virtual environments or simulations. The key insight is to rely on the redundancy across different variations of similar instructions that provides the learning bias to infer various types of background knowledge, such as the typical sequence of actions applied to an ingredient, or how a combination of ingredients e.g., flour, milk, eggs becomes a new entity e.g, wet mixture . In the second part of the talk, I will present an approach to composing new recipes given a target dish name and a set of ingredients. The key challenge is to maintain global coherence while generating a goal-oriented text. We propose a Neural Checklist Model that attains global coherence by storing and updating a checklist of the agenda e.g., an ingredient list with paired attention mechanisms for tracking what has been already mentioned and what needs to be yet introduced. This model also achieves strong performance on dialogue system response generation. I will conclude the talk by discussing the challenges in modeling procedural language and acquiring the necessary background knowledge, pointing to avenues for future research.
Biography: Yejin Choi is an assistant professor at the Computer Science & Engineering Department of University of Washington. Her recent research focuses on language grounding, integrating language and vision, and modeling nonliteral meaning in text. She was among the IEEEs AI Top 10 to Watch in 2015 and a co-recipient of the Marr Prize at ICCV 2013. Her work on detecting deceptive reviews, predicting the literary success, and learning to interpret connotation has been featured by numerous media outlets including NBC News for New York, NPR Radio, New York Times, and Bloomberg Business Week. She received her Ph.D. in Computer Science at Cornell University.
Host: Xing Shi and Kevin Knight
More Info: http://nlg.isi.edu/nl-seminar/
Location: 11th Flr Conf Rm # 1135, Marina Del Rey
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Peter Zamar
Event Link: http://nlg.isi.edu/nl-seminar/
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EE 598 Computer Engineering Seminar
Fri, Dec 02, 2016 @ 04:00 PM - 05:00 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Lorenzo Alvisi , Professor, Cornell University/University of Texas, Austin
Talk Title: The Pit and the Pendulum
Abstract: Since the elegant foundations of transaction processing were established in the mid 70's with the notion of serializability and the codification of the ACID (Atomicity, Consistency, Isolation, Durability) paradigm, performance has not been considered one of ACID's strong suits, especially for distributed data stores. Indeed, the NoSQL/BASE movement of the last decade was born out of frustration with the limited scalability of traditional ACID solutions, only to become itself a source of frustration once the challenges of programming applications in this new paradigm began to sink in. But how fundamental is this dichotomy between performance and ease of programming? In this talk, I will share what my students and I have recently learned while trying to overcome the traditional terms of this classic tradeoff.
Biography: Lorenzo Alvisi is a University Distinguished Teaching Professor at the University of Texas at Austin, where he holds an Endowed Professorship in Computer Science. He is spending 2016-17 as a visiting scholar in the Computer Science Department at Cornell University, where he received his Ph.D. after earning a Laurea degree Summa cum Laude in Physics from the University of Bologna, Italy. His research interests are in the theory and practice of distributed computing, with a particular focus on dependability. He is a Fellow of the ACM and IEEE, an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Fellow, and the recipient of a Humboldt Research Award, an NSF Career Award, and several teaching awards. He serves on the editorial boards of ACM TOCS and Springer's Distributed Computing and is a council member of the CRA's Computing Community Consortium. In addition to distributed computing, he is passionate about western classical music and red Italian motorcycles
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 248
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Estela Lopez
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USC Stem Cell Seminar: Hesham Sadek, University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center
Tue, Dec 06, 2016 @ 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Alfred E. Mann Department of Biomedical Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Hesham Sadek, University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center
Talk Title: TBD
Series: Eli and Edythe Broad Center for Regenerative Medicine and Stem Cell Research at USC Distinguished Speakers Series
Host: USC Stem Cell
More Info: http://stemcell.usc.edu/events
Webcast: http://keckmedia.usc.edu/Mediasite/Catalog/catalogs/StemCellSeminarWebCast Link: http://keckmedia.usc.edu/Mediasite/Catalog/catalogs/StemCellSeminar
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Cristy Lytal/USC Stem Cell
Event Link: http://stemcell.usc.edu/events
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CS Colloquium: Martin Rinard (MIT) - Automatically Patching Errors in Software Systems
Tue, Dec 06, 2016 @ 04:00 PM - 05:00 PM
Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Martin Rinard , MIT
Talk Title: Automatically Patching Errors in Software Systems
Series: CS Colloquium
Abstract: This lecture satisfies requirements for CSCI 591: Computer Science Research Colloquium.
Patching defects is a central activity in essentially all software development activities. Current practice relies almost exclusively on human developers to manually locate and patch each defect.
I will present two techniques for automatically patching software defects. Both leverage the enormous amount of software and software revision histories produced by open-source software development efforts.
The first technique locates and transfers correct code from a donor application into a recipient application to eliminate defects in the recipient. The second technique generates and searches a space of potential patches, using a model of correct code learned from previous successful patches to guide the search. The experimental results highlight the potential of these two techniques to automate the elimination of many defects.
Biography: Martin Rinard is a Professor in the Department of EECS at MIT and a member of the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL). His research interests include programming languages, computer security, program analysis, program verification, software engineering, and distributed and parallel computing.
Prominent results include automatic techniques that enable applications to survive otherwise fatal errors and security attacks, and techniques that trade off accuracy of end-to-end results in return for increased performance and resilience.
He holds a PhD in Computer Science from Stanford University. He is an ACM Fellow, and has received many awards including the Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship and numerous Distinguished and Best Paper awards from top venues of his field.
Homepgae: http://people.csail.mit.edu/rinard/
Host: Chao Wang
Location: Henry Salvatori Computer Science Center (SAL) - 101
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Assistant to CS chair
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Distinguished Stanford Lecturer: Big Data and Human Behavior
Wed, Dec 07, 2016 @ 12:00 PM - 02:00 PM
Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Justin Grimmer, Associate Professor of Political Science and Computer Science, Stanford University
Talk Title: Exploratory and Confirmatory Causal Inference for High Dimensional Interventions
Host: USC Dornsife College
Location: Cammilleri Hall, Brain and Creativity Institute (BCI)
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: USC Computer Science
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Greening a Top-20 Economy: Energy-Efficient Timely Transportation of Heavy-Duty Trucks
Wed, Dec 07, 2016 @ 02:00 PM - 03:00 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Minghua Chen, Chinese University of Hong Kong
Talk Title: Greening a Top-20 Economy: Energy-Efficient Timely Transportation of Heavy-Duty Trucks
Abstract: In 2015, the US trucking industry hauls 70.1% of all freight tonnage and collects $726.4 billion in gross freight revenues. This impressive number corresponds to 2.3x of Hong Kong GDP and would rank 19 worldwide if measured against countries. Meanwhile, only 4% of total vehicle population, heavy-duty trucks consume 17.6% of energy in transportation sector (including cars, trucks, airplanes, pipelines, and railways). This alerting observation, together with that fuel cost is the largest operating cost (34%) for truck operators, makes it critical to reduce fuel consumption for cost-effective and environment-friendly heavy-duty truck operation.
In this work, we consider a key yet under-explored problem in heavy-duty truck operation: timely transportation, where a heavy-duty truck travels between two locations across the national highway system subject to a hard deadline constraint. The objective is to minimize the total fuel consumption of the truck, by optimizing both route planning and speed planning. The problem is important for cost-effective and environment-friendly truck operation, and it is uniquely challenging due to its combinatorial nature as well as the need of considering hard deadline constraint. We first show that the problem is NP-Complete; thus exact solution is computational prohibited unless P=NP. We then design a fully polynomial time approximation scheme (FPTAS) that attains an approximation ratio of 1+ \epsilon with a network-size induced complexity of O(mn^2/\epsilon^2), where m and n are the numbers of nodes and edges, respectively. While achieving highly-preferred theoretical performance guarantee, the proposed FPTAS still suffers from long running time when applying to national-wide highway systems with tens of thousands of nodes and edges. Leveraging elegant insights from studying the dual of the original problem, we design a fast subgradient-like solution with O(m+ n log n) complexity. The proposed heuristic allows us to tackle the energy-efficient timely transportation problem on large-scale national highway systems. We further characterize a condition under which our heuristic generates an optimal solution; we also provide performance gap when the condition is not satisfied. We observe that the condition holds in most of the practical instances in numerical experiments, justifying the superior empirical performance of our heuristic. We carry out extensive numerical experiments using real-world truck data over the actual U.S. highway network. The results show that our proposed solutions achieve 17% (resp. 14%) fuel consumption reduction, as compared to a fastest path (resp. shortest path) algorithm adapted from common practice.
Overall, we believe that de-carbonizing heavy-duty truck operation is important for the sustainable development of the trucking industry. Our work serves as a call for participation.
This is a joint work with Lei Deng and Mohammad Hajiesmaili in CUHK and Haibo Zeng in Virginia Tech.
Biography: Minghua Chen received his B.Eng. and M.S. degrees from the Department of Electronic Engineering at Tsinghua University in 1999 and 2001, respectively. He received his Ph.D. degree from the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences at University of California at Berkeley in 2006. He spent one year visiting Microsoft Research Redmond as a Postdoc Researcher. He joined the Department of Information Engineering, the Chinese University of Hong Kong, in 2007, where he currently is an Associate Professor. He is also currently an Adjunct Associate Professor in Tsinghua University, Institute of Interdisciplinary Information Sciences. He received the Eli Jury award from UC Berkeley in 2007 (presented to a graduate student or recent alumnus for outstanding achievement in the area of Systems, Communications, Control, or Signal Processing) and The Chinese University of Hong Kong Young Researcher Award in 2013. He also received several best paper awards, including the IEEE ICME Best Paper Award in 2009, the IEEE Transactions on Multimedia Prize Paper Award in 2009, and the ACM Multimedia Best Paper Award in 2012. He serves as TPC Co-Chair of ACM e-Energy 2016 and General Chair of ACM e-Energy 2017. He is currently an Associate Editor of the IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking. His recent research interests include energy systems (e.g., smart power grids and energy-efficient data centers), intelligent transportation, distributed optimization, multimedia networking, wireless networking, network coding, and delay-constrained network information flow.
Host: Michael Neely, EEB 520, x03505
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 248
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Gerrielyn Ramos
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Center for Cyber-Physical Systems and Internet of Things and Ming Hsieh Institute for Electrical Engineering Joint Seminar Series on Cyber-Physical Systems
Thu, Dec 08, 2016 @ 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Saman Zonouz, Assistant Professor, Rutgers University
Talk Title: Trustworthy Critical Infrastructures via Physics-Aware Just-Ahead-Of-Time Verification
Abstract: Critical cyber-physical infrastructures, such as the power grid, integrate networks of computational and physical processes to provide the people across the globe with essential functionalities and services. Protecting these critical infrastructures is a vital necessity because the failure of these systems would have a debilitating impact on economic security and public health and safety. Our research and development projects aim at provision of real-world solutions to facilitate the secure and reliable operation of next-generation critical infrastructures and require interdisciplinary research efforts across adaptive systems and network security, cyber-physical systems, and trustworthy real-time detection and response mechanisms. In this talk, I will focus on real past and potential future threats against critical infrastructures and embedded devices, and discuss the challenges in design, implementation, and analysis of security solutions to protect cyber-physical platforms. I will introduce novel classes of working systems that we have developed to overcome these challenges in practice, and finally conclude with several concrete directions for future research. Additionally, I will briefly go over our other projects on x86 malware/memory analysis and embedded systems security solutions to support access control applications in cyber-physical settings.
Biography: Saman Zonouz is an Assistant Professor in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at Rutgers University since September 2014 and the Director of the 4N6 Cyber Security and Forensics Laboratory. His research has been awarded NSF CAREER Award in 2015, Google Security Award in 2015, Top-3 Demo at IEEE SmartGridComm 2015, the Faculty Fellowship Award by AFOSR in 2013, the Best Student Paper Award at IEEE SmartGridComm 2013, the University EARLY CAREER Research award in 2012 as well as the Provost Research Award in 2011. The 4N6 research supporters include National Science Foundation (NSF), Department of Homeland Security (DHS), Office of Naval Research (ONR), Department of Energy (DOE), Advanced Research Projects Agency Energy (ARPA-E), Department of Education (DOE), Siemens Research Labs, WinRiver, GrammaTech, Google, ETAP, and Fortinet Corporation. In addition to research publications, Saman's research efforts have resulted in several tech-to-market transition initiatives such as the founded Kaedago Inc. startup company (as the result of the ARPAE project), and the Siemens-funded project to adopt his developed controller program analysis algorithms (originally supported by NSF CPS program) for programmable logic controllers (PLCs). Saman's current research focuses on systems security and privacy, trustworthy cyber-physical critical infrastructures and embedded platforms, binary/malware analysis and reverse engineering, as well as adaptive intrusion tolerance architectures. Saman has served as the chair, program committee member, guest editor and a reviewer for top international conferences and journals. Saman serves on Editorial Board for IEEE Transactions on Smart Grid. He obtained his Ph.D. in Computer Science, specifically, intrusion tolerance architectures for the cyber-physical infrastructures, from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2011.
Host: Paul Bogdan
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 132
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Estela Lopez
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Hardware Transactional Memory and Beyond
Thu, Dec 08, 2016 @ 04:00 PM - 05:00 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Maurice Herlihy, Professor, Brown University
Talk Title: Hardware Transactional Memory and Beyond
Abstract: A new generation of processor architectures provides hardware transactional memory (HTM), a synchronization mechanism for fast in-memory transactions. This talk will argue that HTM is not just a faster way of doing the same old latches and monitors. Instead, it could bring about a fundamental positive change in the way we program multicores (and eventually perhaps even databases) by allowing us to rethink basic synchronization structures such as locks, memory management, and a variety of concurrent data structures.
Biography: Maurice Herlihy has an A.B. in Mathematics from Harvard University, and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from M.I.T. He has served on the faculty of Carnegie Mellon University, on the staff of DEC Cambridge Research Lab, and is currently the An Wang Professor in the Computer Science Department at Brown University. He is the recipient of the 2003 Dijkstra Prize in Distributed Computing, the 2004 G?del Prize in theoretical computer science, the 2008 ISCA influential paper award, the 2012 Edsger W. Dijkstra Prize, and the 2013 Wallace McDowell award. He received a 2012 Fulbright Distinguished Chair in the Natural Sciences and Engineering Lecturing Fellowship, and he is fellow of the ACM, a fellow of the National Academy of Inventors, and a member of the National Academy of Engineering and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Host: Xuehai Qian
Location: Olin Hall of Engineering (OHE) - OHE 100D
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Estela Lopez
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NL Seminar-Multimodal Machine Comprehension: Tasks and Approaches
Fri, Dec 09, 2016 @ 03:00 PM - 04:00 PM
Information Sciences Institute
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Radi Soricut, Google
Talk Title: Multimodal Machine Comprehension: Tasks and Approaches
Series: Natural Language Seminar
Abstract: The ability of computer models to achieve genuine understanding of information as presented to humans (text, images, etc) is a long-standing goal of Artificial Intelligence. Along the way towards this goal, the research community has proposed solving tasks such as machine reading comprehension and computer image understanding. In this talk, we introduce two new tasks that can help us move closer to the goal. First, we present a multi-choice reading comprehension task, for which the goal is to understand a text passage and choose the correct summarizing sentence from among several options. Second, we present a multi-modal understanding task, posed as a combined vision-language comprehension challenge: identifying the most suitable text describing a visual scene, given several similar options. We present several baseline and competitive learning approaches based on neural network architectures, illustrating the utility of the proposed tasks in advancing both image and language comprehension. We also present human evaluation results, which inform a performance upper-bound on these tasks, and quantify the remaining gap between computer systems and human performance (spoiler alert: we are not there yet).
Biography: Radu Soricut is a Staff Research Scientist in the Research and Machine Intelligence group at Google. Radu has a PhD in Computer Science from University of Southern California, and has been with Google since 2012. His main areas of interest are natural language understanding, multilingual processing, natural language generation (from multimodal inputs), and general machine learning techniques for solving these problems. Radu has published extensively in these areas in top-tier peer-reviewed conferences and journals, and has won the Best Paper Award at the North American Association for Computational Linguistics Conference (NAACL) in 2015. Radu's current project looks at bridging natural language understanding and generation using neural techniques, in the context of Google's focus on making natural language an effective way of interacting with the world and the technology around us.
Host: Xing Shi and Kevin Knight
More Info: http://nlg.isi.edu/nl-seminar/
Location: Information Science Institute (ISI) - 11th Flr Conf Rm # 1135, Marina Del Rey
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Peter Zamar
Event Link: http://nlg.isi.edu/nl-seminar/
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Center for Cyber-Physical Systems and Internet of Things and Ming Hsieh Institute for Electrical Engineering Joint Seminar Series on Cyber-Physical Systems
Mon, Dec 12, 2016 @ 10:00 AM - 11:00 AM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Jiong Jin, Lecturer, Swinburne University of Technology, Melbourne, Australia
Talk Title: Wireless Networked Robotics
Abstract: With the advancement of communications and microelectronics, it is now technologically feasible and economically viable to develop mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) with sensing and communication capabilities. Meanwhile, in the robotics community, multiple robots with embedded communications functionality have also been studied, leading to the development of multi-robot systems (MRSs). Although extensive research has been conducted separately in the respective WANETs and MRSs domain, little work has been carried out into the combination of these two technologies. The emerging research field of wireless networked robotics is thus introduced by providing complementary support to each technology. It brings together communications, control, mobility and cooperation to allow physical control of robots, and also enables mission objectives and task division to be performed in a closed loop operation with communications and networking. In this talk, wireless networked robotics that is capable of addressing more complex and time-critical tasks will be introduced. In particular, wireless robotic networks and cloud networked robotics will be presented in details, with applications in both smart city and Internet of things domains.
Biography: Dr. Jiong Jin is currently a lecturer (to be senior lecturer from 1 Jan 2017) in the School of Software and Electrical Engineering, Swinburne University of Technology, Melbourne, Australia. He received the B.E. degree with First Class Honours in Computer Engineering from Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, in 2006, and Ph.D. degree from The University of Melbourne, Australia, in 2011. Prior to joining Swinburne, he was a Research Fellow in Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, The University of Melbourne from 2011 to 2013. His research interests include network design and optimization, nonlinear systems and sliding mode control, networked robotics, wireless sensor networks and Internet of things, cyber-physical systems and applications in smart grids and smart cities.
Host: Bhaskar Krishnamachari
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 132
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Estela Lopez
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USC Stem Cell Seminar: Ethan Bier, University of California, San Diego
Tue, Dec 13, 2016 @ 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Alfred E. Mann Department of Biomedical Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Ethan Bier, University of California, San Diego
Talk Title: TBD
Series: Eli and Edythe Broad Center for Regenerative Medicine and Stem Cell Research at USC Distinguished Speakers Series
Host: USC Stem Cell
More Info: http://stemcell.usc.edu/events
Webcast: http://keckmedia.usc.edu/Mediasite/Catalog/catalogs/StemCellSeminarWebCast Link: http://keckmedia.usc.edu/Mediasite/Catalog/catalogs/StemCellSeminar
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Cristy Lytal/USC Stem Cell
Event Link: http://stemcell.usc.edu/events
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CS Colloquium: Zhenhui (Jessie) Li (Penn State) - Toward Semantic Understanding of Spatial Trajectories
Tue, Dec 13, 2016 @ 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Zhenhui (Jessie) Li , Penn State
Talk Title: Toward Semantic Understanding of Spatial Trajectories
Series: Yahoo! Labs Machine Learning Seminar Series
Abstract: How could we harness the increasingly available big data to understand our dynamic ecosystem? For example, why people or animals move in the space in certain ways and how do their movements respond to surrounding environments? Why are crimes more frequent in certain regions and can we explain it using heterogeneous urban data? Is shale gas development contaminating our environment and how to mine the correlations between environment and all potential factors?
Our research aims to develop data mining techniques for geospatial data collected from different sources to semantically understand trajectories, urban dynamics, and environment, by closely collaborating with domain experts. In this talk, I will focus on data mining techniques to understand spatial trajectories. I will first discuss why existing methods often make trivial discoveries when contexts are not considered. I will then present our recent results in semantic understanding of trajectories with rich spatial-temporal contexts. I will also show that using cross-domain big data is critical to understand crimes and environment. Throughout the talk, I would like to share my experiences in exciting interdisciplinary collaborations.
Part of Yahoo! Labs Machine Learning Seminar Series
Biography: Dr. Zhenhui (Jessie) Li is Assistant Professor of Information Sciences and Technology at the Pennsylvania State University. Prior to joining Penn State, she received her PhD degree in Computer Science from University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in 2012, where she was a member of data mining research group. Her research has been focused on mining heterogeneous and large-scale geospatial data with applications in ecology, environment, social science, urban computing, and transportation. She is a passionate interdisciplinary researcher and closely collaborates with social scientists, animal scientists, criminologists, and geoscientists. To learn more, please visit her homepage: https://faculty.ist.psu.edu/jessieli
Host: Yan Liu
Location: Hedco Neurosciences Building (HNB) - 100
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Assistant to CS chair
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AI SEMINAR
Fri, Dec 16, 2016 @ 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Information Sciences Institute
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Mason Porter, UCLA
Talk Title: Multilayer Networks
Series: AI Seminar
Abstract: Networks arise pervasively in biology, physics, technology, social science, and myriad other areas. Traditionally, a network is modeled as a graph and consists of a time-independent collection of entities (the nodes) that interact with each other via a single type of edge. However, most networks include multiple types of connections (which could represent, for example, different modes of transportation), multiple subsystems, and nodes and/or edges that change in time. The study of "multilayer networks", which is perhaps the most popular area of
network science, allows one to investigate networks with such complexities. In this talk, I'll give an introduction to multilayer networks and their applications.
Biography: Mason Porter earned a B.S. in applied mathematics from Caltech in 1998 and a Ph.D. from the Center for Applied Mathematics from Cornell University in 2002. He was a postdoc at Georgia Tech (math), Mathematical Sciences Research Institute, and Caltech (physics) before joining the faculty of the Mathematical Institute at University of Oxford in 2007. He was named Professor of Nonlinear and Complex Systems in 2014. A few months ago, he took up a position as Professor of Mathematics at UCLA. Porter is known for the diversity and interdisciplinarity of his research (and for his sharp wit). In networks and complex systems, Porter has contributed to myriad topics, including community structure in networks, core--periphery structure, social contagions, political networks, granular force networks, multilayer networks, temporal networks, and navigation in transportation systems. Other subjects he has studied include granular crystals, Bose--Einstein condensates, nonlinear optics, numerical evaluation of hypergeometric functions, quantum chaos, and synchronization of cows. Porter's awards include the 2014 Erd\H{o}s--R\'{e}nyi Prize in network science, a Whitehead Prize (London Mathematical Society) in 2015, the Young Scientist Award for Socio- and Econophysics (German Physical Society) in 2016, and teaching awards from University of Oxford in recognition of his lecturing and student mentorship. Porter was named a Fellow of the American Physical Society in October 2016.
Host: Emilio Ferrara
Webcast: http://webcastermshd.isi.edu/Mediasite/Play/ef4957a6864d4e1db06e15cba71b9b021dLocation: Information Science Institute (ISI) - 1135 - 11th fl Large CR
WebCast Link: http://webcastermshd.isi.edu/Mediasite/Play/ef4957a6864d4e1db06e15cba71b9b021d
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Alma Nava / Information Sciences Institute
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USC Stem Cell Seminar: Alysson Muotri, University of California, San Diego
Tue, Dec 20, 2016 @ 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Alfred E. Mann Department of Biomedical Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Alysson Muotri, University of California, San Diego
Talk Title: TBD
Series: Eli and Edythe Broad Center for Regenerative Medicine and Stem Cell Research at USC Distinguished Speakers Series
Host: USC Stem Cell
More Info: http://stemcell.usc.edu/events
Webcast: http://keckmedia.usc.edu/stem-cell-seminarWebCast Link: http://keckmedia.usc.edu/stem-cell-seminar
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Cristy Lytal/USC Stem Cell
Event Link: http://stemcell.usc.edu/events
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AI Seminar-STREAM DATA MINING: A BIG DATA PERSPECTIVE
Tue, Dec 20, 2016 @ 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Information Sciences Institute
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Latifur Khan, University of Texas at Dallas
Talk Title: STREAM DATA MINING: A BIG DATA PERSPECTIVE
Series: Artificial Intelligence Seminar
Abstract: Data streams are continuous flows of data. Examples of data streams include network traffic, sensor data, call center records and so on. Data streams demonstrate several unique properties that together conform to the characteristics of big data (i.e., volume, velocity, variety and veracity) and add challenges to data stream mining. In this talk we will present an organized picture on how to handle various data mining techniques in data streams. Most existing data stream classification techniques ignore one important aspect of stream data: arrival of a novel class. We address this issue and propose a data stream classification technique that integrates a novel class detection mechanism into traditional classifiers, enabling automatic detection of novel classes before the true labels of the novel class instances arrive. Novel class detection problem becomes more challenging in the presence of concept-drift, when the underlying data distributions evolve in streams. In this talk we will show how to make fast and correct classification decisions under this constraint with limited labeled training data and apply them to real benchmark data. In addition, we will present a number of stream classification applications such as adaptive malicious code detection, website fingerprinting, evolving insider threat detection and textual stream classification.
This research was funded in part by NSF, NASA, Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR), IBM and Raytheon.
Biography: Dr. Latifur Khan is currently a full Professor (tenured) in the Computer Science department at the University of Texas at Dallas, USA where he has been teaching and conducting research since September 2000. He received his Ph.D. and M.S. degrees in Computer Science from the University of Southern California in August of 2000, and December of 1996 respectively. Dr. Khan is an ACM Distinguished Scientist. He has received prestigious awards including the IEEE Technical Achievement Award for Intelligence and Security Informatics.
Dr. Khan has published over 200 papers in prestigious journals, and in peer reviewed conference proceedings. Currently, his research area focuses on big data management and analytics, data mining, complex data management including geo-spatial data and multimedia data.
Host: Jose Luis Ambite
More Info: www.utdallas.edu/~lkhan/
Webcast: http://webcastermshd.isi.edu/Mediasite/Play/9ca403ad75674c839ec10e1c0ac9aee71dLocation: Information Science Institute (ISI) - 11th Flr Conf Rm # 1135, Marina Del Rey
WebCast Link: http://webcastermshd.isi.edu/Mediasite/Play/9ca403ad75674c839ec10e1c0ac9aee71d
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Peter Zamar
Event Link: www.utdallas.edu/~lkhan/
