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Events for December 18, 2013
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Meet USC: Admission Presentation, Campus Tour, & Engineering TalkWed, Dec 18, 2013
Viterbi School of Engineering Undergraduate Admission
Receptions & Special Events
This half day program is designed for prospective freshmen and family members. Meet USC includes an information session on the University and the Admission process; a student led walking tour of campus and a meeting with us in the Viterbi School. Meet USC is designed to answer all of your questions about USC, the application process and financial aid. Reservations are required for Meet USC. This program occurs twice, once at 8:30 a.m. and again at 12:30 p.m. Please visit https://esdweb.esd.usc.edu/unresrsvp/MeetUSC.aspx to check availability and make an appointment. Be sure to list an Engineering major as your "intended major" on the webform!
Location: Ronald Tutor Campus Center (TCC) - USC Admission Office
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Viterbi Admission
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PhD Defense - Peter Pastor
Wed, Dec 18, 2013 @ 10:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science
University Calendar
Title: A Data-Driven Approach to Autonomous Manipulation
Candidate: Peter Pastor
Committee members:
Stefan Schaal (chair)
Gaurav S. Sukhatme
Nicolas Schweighofer (outside member)
Time: December 18, 2013, 10am
Place: Ronald Tutor Hall (RTH), room 422
Abstract:
The problem of an aging society is real and will affect everyone. There will be too few young people that can ensure adequate living conditions for the elderly. Personal robots have the potential to assist in day-to-day tasks whenever there are too few humans to cope with societal needs. However, for personal robots to become useful they need to be able to skillful manipulate objects in their environment. Unfortunately, the problem of autonomous manipulation is very complex and progress towards creating autonomous behaviors seems to have reached a plateau.
In this thesis, we will present a novel way of thinking about movement generation. We argue that movement generation (motor output) and perceptual processing (sensor input) are inseparably intertwined and that the ability to predict sensor information is essential for skillful manipulation. Movement generation without sensor expectations defaults to open-loop execution which is prone to failure in dynamic and unstructured environments. However, predicting sensor information for an increasing number of sensor modalities including force/torque and tactile feedback through physics based modelling is challenging given the variety of objects, the diversity of possible manipulation behaviors, and the uncertainty in the real world. Instead, our approach leverages from a key insight: Movement generation can dictate expected sensor feedback. Similar manipulation movements will give rise to sensory events that are similar to previous ones. Thus, stereotypical movements facilitate to associate and accumulate sensor information from past trials and use these sensor experiences to predict sensor feedback in future trials.
We will call such movements augmented with associated sensor information Associative Skill Memories (ASMs). We will present a coherent data-driven framework for manipulation that implements this paradigm. First, we will introduce a modular movement representation suitable to encode movements along with associated sensor experiences. Second, we will show how stereotypical movements can be learned from demonstrations and refined using trial-and-error learning. Third, we will show how ASMs can be used to monitor task progress, to realize contact reactive manipulation, and to purposefully choose subsequent movements. Finally, we will present a method that can learn forward models for these stereotypical movements.
Location: Ronald Tutor Hall of Engineering (RTH) - 422
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Lizsl De Leon
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Analyzing Brain Images, Connectomes, & Genomes from 26,000 People: The ENIGMA Consortium
Wed, Dec 18, 2013 @ 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Paul Thompson, University of Southern California
Talk Title: Analyzing Brain Images, Connectomes, & Genomes from 26,000 People: The ENIGMA Consortium
Abstract: Our ENIGMA Consortium unites 125 brain imaging and genetics centers worldwide in a global effort to discover factors that help or harm the human brain. In the largest brain imaging studies ever performed, ENIGMA is screening the genomes and MRI scans of 26,000 people to discover single-letter variants in our DNA that affect our brain integrity and connectivity. First we explain how imaging is normally used to map disease effects on the brain, and how we extend this to gigantic computational searches of genomes, connectomes and images. Next we explain new mathematical methods to analyze images, connectomes and genomes. We relate ENIGMA's worldwide efforts to new directions in cooperative and asynchronous machine learning, and private distributed computation. We show how to adaptively measure brain connectivity to better diagnose disease, using concepts such as Genji symbols, Bell's number, and the Partition Problem in mathematics. This is joint work with my research group at our USC Imaging Genetics Center (http://igc.ini.usc.edu) at the ISI facility in Marina del Rey.
Host: Prof. Richard Leahy
Location: Seaver Science Library (SSL) - 150
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Talyia Veal
