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Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Events for December
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CS Colloq: Dr. Vazirani
Tue, Dec 01, 2009 @ 04:00 PM - 05:50 PM
Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Prof. Vijay V. Vazirani, Georgia Tech
Host: Prof. Shanghua Teng, Prof. David Kempe
Title: Can Complexity Theory Ratify the "Invisible Hand of the Market"?Abstract:
"It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard for their own interest."
Each participant in a competitive economy is "led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention." Adam Smith, 1776.With his treatise, The Wealth of Nations, 1776, Adam Smith initiated the field of economics, and his famous quote provided this field with its central guiding principle. The pioneering work of Walras (1874) gave a mathematical formulation for this statement, using his notion of market equilibrium, and opened up the possibility of a formal ratification.Mathematical ratification came with the celebrated Arrow-Debreu Theorem (1954), which established existence of equilibrium in a very general model of the economy; however, an efficient mechanism for finding an equilibrium has remained elusive.The question of algorithmic ratification was taken up in the earnest within theoretical computer science a decade ago, and attention soon gravitated on markets under piecewise-linear, concave utility functions.
As it turned out, the recent resolution of this open problem did not yield the hoped-for mechanism; however, it did mark the end of the road for the current approach. It is now time to step back and plan a fresh attack, using the powerful tools of modern complexity theory and algorithms.After providing a summary of key developments through the ages and a gist of the recent results, we will discuss some ways of moving forward.(Based in part on recent work with Mihalis Yannakakis.)Speaker Bio:
Vijay Vazirani got his Bachelor's degree from MIT in 1979, his Ph.D. from U.C. Berkeley in 1983, and is currently Professor of Computer Science at Georgia Tech.
His research career has been centered around the design of algorithms, together with work on complexity theory, cryptography, coding theory, and game theory.He is best known for his work on efficient algorithms for the classical maximum matching problem (1980's), fundamental complexity-theoretic results obtained using randomization (1980's), approximation algorithms for basic NP-hard optimization problems (1990's), and efficient algorithms for computing market equilibria (current).In 2001 he published what is widely viewed as the definitive book on approximation algorithms.
This book has been translated into Japanese, French and Polish, and Persian and Chinese translations are forthcoming. In 2005 he initiated work on a comprehensive volume on algorithmic game theory; the co-edited volume appeared in 2007.
Location: Seaver Science Library (SSL) - 150
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: CS Front Desk
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OpenFlow Switching Technology for Programmable Network
Wed, Dec 02, 2009 @ 10:30 AM - 11:30 AM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Refreshments will be served at 10:00amAbstract:
Future Internet technologies have been discussed in USA, EU and Japan. Among many activities, OpenFlow Switching begins to attract researchers recently.In this seminar, I will talk about NEC's stance and activities around OpenFlow Switching. We first discuss the background & our motivation followed by OpenFlow-based cloud architecture. We then discuss NEC's OpenFlow switch prototype and OpenFlow controller research prototype.Biography:
Motoo Nishihara, Senior Manager of NEC System IP Core Research Laboratories, Experienced in research and development of commercial products such as ATM communication systems, Multi-Media Multiplexing System for telecom carriers, IP routers, IP over ATM systems, Security Appliances (Spam Mail Filter, IDS).Recently, focused on research of OpenFlow Switching for data center, parallel processing, IT&NW integrated systems. 1985 BS, Univ. of Tokyo, 1994 MS-ECE, Carnegie Mellon Univ.Hosted by Prof. Viktor K. PrasannaLocation: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - -248
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Janice Thompson
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Bayesian Network for Seismic Risk Assessment and Management Infrastructure Systems
Wed, Dec 02, 2009 @ 02:00 PM - 03:00 PM
Sonny Astani Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Armen Der Kiureghian, Taisei Professor of Civil Engineering,University of California, BerkeleyABSTRACT:A Bayesian network (BN) is a directed acyclic probabilistic graph encoding the interdependence between a set of random variables. In application to seismic risk assessment of infrastructure systems, the variables may represent uncertain demands or capacities, or the states of the system and its components. Upon entering evidence (observations) on one or more variables, this information propagates throughout the BN, thus providing an up-to-date probabilistic characterization of the system state as the available information evolves. The BN can be augmented with utility and decision nodes to provide a tool for optimal decision making under uncertain and evolving information. This talk will demonstrate the usefulness of the BN methodology for risk assessment and management of infrastructure systems that are subject to earthquake hazard. An application to the proposed California High Speed Rail system will be presented.
Location: Kaprielian Hall (KAP) - rielian Hall 209
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Evangeline Reyes
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Multivalent approaches to the design of bioactive materials
Thu, Dec 03, 2009
Mork Family Department of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Kristi KiickUniversity of DelawareAbstract:TBA
Location: John Stauffer Science Lecture Hall (SLH) - 100
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Petra Pearce Sapir
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Integrated Modeling and Simulation of Transportation Systems
Thu, Dec 03, 2009 @ 12:00 PM - 01:30 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
ABSTRACT: The state-of-the-art method for studying transportation systems is simulation based modeling which affords the opportunity to evaluate control and design strategies without committing expensive resources to implement alternate strategies in the field. Major efforts have been invested in developing traffic simulation systems during the past several decades. The usefulness of these tools will be significantly enhanced if they can be used in an integrated manner to investigate scenarios involving domain
aspects modeled by different tools.We begin the talk with a brief review of current traffic simulation integration systems. We will then discuss limitations of these systems. To address these limitations, an extensible semantic integration framework for transportation modeling and simulation is presented. We conclude the talk with some ongoing and future work regarding semantic web and workflow based methodologies in this area. Lunch will be served, so please note that you must RSVP to: Joey Pulford, via pulford@usc.edu by 12 noon on Wednesday, Dec. 2nd if you would like a meal. Please also arrive at Noon in order to guarantee yourself enough time to eat, because the Seminar will start promptly at 12:30pm. See you there!Viktor K. Prasanna (ceng.usc.edu/~prasanna) is the Charles Lee Powell Chair in Engineering in the Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical Engineering and Professor of Computer Science at the University of Southern California. He is the executive director of the USC-Infosys Center for Advanced Software Technologies (CAST). He is also a member of the USC-Chevron Center of Excellence for Research and Academic Training on Interactive Smart Oilfield Technologies. His research interests include parallel and distributed systems including networked sensor systems, embedded systems, configurable architectures and high performance computing. He has served on the editorial boards of the Journal of Parallel and Distributed Computing, Proceedings of the IEEE, IEEE Transactions on VLSI Systems, and IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems. He served as the Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Transactions on Computers during 2003-06. Prasanna was the founding Chair of the IEEE Computer Society Technical Committee on Parallel Processing. He is the steering chair of the IEEE International Conference on High Performance Computing (www.hipc.org). He is a Fellow of the IEEE and the ACM. He is a recipient of 2009 Outstanding Engineering Alumnus Award from the Pennsylvania State University.Location: Hedco Neurosciences Building (HNB) - -100
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Janice Thompson
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CS Colloq: Dr. Liang Huang
Thu, Dec 03, 2009 @ 04:00 PM - 05:50 PM
Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Talk Title: Packed Forest for Parsing and Translation Speaker: Dr. Liang Huang Host: Prof. Paul Rosenbloom Abstract: A major challenge in natural language research is how to deal with ambiguity. This is because ambiguity grows *exponentially* with sentence length (for example, consider the number of interpretations of a 60-word long sentence). This suggests that the common practice of a k-best list largely under-represents the whole search space. So is there a better way to efficiently represent and exploit the vast amount of ambiguities in human languages? The answer is "packed forest", a polynomial-space data-structure for representing exponentially many trees in a compact form by sharing common substructures. In this talk, I will apply this forest idea to both machine translation and syntactic parsing. In both tasks, we show that working with a forest encoding millions of trees improves the state-of-the-art accuracies by considering many more alternatives. This results in the best parsing performance reported on the Penn Treebank. More interestingly, translating a forest of 10 millions
trees is even faster than translating 30 individual trees, thanks to dynamic programming. (This talk is intended for a general CS audience.)
Bio: Liang Huang is currently a Research Scientist at ISI. He received his PhD from the University of Pennsylvania in 2008, and worked as a Research Scientist at Google before moving back to ISI where he had two internships. He is mainly interested in the theoretical aspects of computational linguistics, in particular, efficient algorithms in parsing and machine translation, generic dynamic programming, and formal properties of synchronous grammars. His work received an Outstanding Paper Award at ACL 2008, and Best Paper Nominations at ACL 2007 and EMNLP 2008. He also loves teaching, and won a University
Teaching Award at Penn in 2005. He is currently teaching CS 562, Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing. http://www.isi.edu/~lhuang
http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~lhuang3
Location: Seaver Science Library (SSL) - 150
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: CS Front Desk
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SWE/WSA 6th General Meeting - Gingerbread House Making
Thu, Dec 03, 2009 @ 06:00 PM - 07:30 PM
Viterbi School of Engineering Student Organizations
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Location: TBA
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Society of Women Engineers
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TMDL Development and Trash TMDLs
Fri, Dec 04, 2009 @ 12:45 PM - 01:45 PM
Sonny Astani Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Eric Wu, Ph.D., P.E., Unit Chief, Total Maximum Daily Load (TMDL) Unit,
Los Angeles Regional Water Quality Control BoardAbstract:The Clean Water Act (CWA) requires USEPA and States to identify waters that do not meet water quality standards, and to develop total maximum daily loads (TMDLs) for each impaired waterbody. The development of a TMDL is a regulatory procedure to amend the Los Angeles Region Water Quality Control Plan (Basin Plan). The required documents include a Staff Report, Resolution, Basin Plan Amendment, and a Substitute Environmental Document (SED). A TMDL becomes effective after the USEPA approves it. Up to date, approximately 35 TMDLs were developed to address pollutants such as bacteria, metals, pesticides, nutrients, toxicity and trash in multiple watersheds.Location: Kaprielian Hall (KAP) - 209
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Evangeline Reyes
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Attitude Control and Fuel Slosh: Implications for NASAâ€s Constellation Program
Fri, Dec 04, 2009 @ 02:00 PM - 03:00 PM
Astronautical Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Attitude dynamics is the modeling of spacecraft orientation based on the conservation of angular momentum, accounting for external torques. This investigation considers the effect of the sloshing motion in liquid fuel tanks, the corresponding torque it imparts on space vehicles, and the subsequent effect on spacecraft attitude. Depending on the mission, this liquid motion can impose significant vehicle design constraints. For NASA's Constellation Program, the baseline propellant budget for the Altair Lunar Lander includes a significant mass allocation to compensate for slosh disturbances. In this investigation, in order to alleviate these guidance and navigation design constraints, we consider methods to minimize this fluid motion by altering fluid properties. A two pronged approach is initiated. First, we will perform a series of experiments using an existing test bed at the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) in San Antonio, TX. SwRI is internationally recognized for its fuel slosh expertise; their experiments and analysis have been used to validate launch vehicle and spacecraft designs.Second, we will create a computational test bed. Two essential components will be developed separately, using commercial software packages. A computational fluid dynamics problem solver (Fluent) will model surface disturbances and internal fluid motion in a partially filled liquid tank and compute the corresponding hydrodynamic forces exerted by the fluid on the interior of the tank surface. A separate program (Matlab Simulink) will simulate spacecraft attitude, implementing spacecraft control algorithms. Disturbance torques as characterized by the Fluent model will be an input to Matlab, providing a direct correlation between liquid motion and spacecraft attitude.
Location: Robert Glen Rapp Engineering Research Building (RRB) - 227
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Dan Erwin
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Aircraft Accident Investigation - Dec.7-18, 2009
Mon, Dec 07, 2009
Aviation Safety and Security Program
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
AAI 10-2
For more information and to register for Aviation Safety and Security Program courses, please visit http://viterbi.usc.edu/aviation.Audiences: Registered Audiences Only
Contact: Viterbi Professional Programs
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21st Century Port Development : An Industrial Case Study on the ..
Thu, Dec 10, 2009 @ 02:00 PM - 03:00 PM
Sonny Astani Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
..Balancing Act Between Capital Development with Environmental Protection.Speaker: Dr. Geraldine Knatz, Executive Director, The Port of Los Angeles.Women in Science & Engineering Seminar Speaker in Celebration of the WiSE 10th AnniversaryAbstract:From its early beginning as a merchant port serving the needs of Spanish traders, to what it is now – America's premier gateway for goods and services – the Port of Los Angeles has changed in many ways. Certainly, one of the major challenges is the precarious balancing act between expansion and environment. As the Port grew over the decades, so did its pollution. Lawsuits ensued, regulations changed and -- coupled with California's every-stringent criteria regarding coastal development of any kind -- the Port of Los Angeles was at an impasse between profits and pollution.Which would ultimately win? Under the leadership of Executive Director Dr. Geraldine Knatz, the answer is both. With her background in biology and environmental studies, coupled with a pragmatic view of how the world works financially, Dr. Knatz is leading the way to create a new era in major port operations where the needs of commerce go hand-in-hand with the needs of the environment. The result is a series of operational breakthroughs that are not only improving the regional environment, but are setting new standards for port operators the world over. Dr. Knatz will discuss these "green growth" challenges first hand and detail the specific initiatives that are making the Port of Los Angeles a true success story.
Location: Kaprielian Hall (KAP) - rielian Hall, 146 - On Webex. Call department for more info
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Evangeline Reyes
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CS Colloq: Geoffrey Hollinger
Thu, Dec 10, 2009 @ 04:00 PM - 06:00 PM
Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Talk Title: Efficient, Guaranteed Search with Multiple Robots
Speaker: Geoffrey A. Hollinger
Host: Prof. Gaurav SukhatmeAbstract:
Consider the problem of coordinating a team of robots to locate a target in an environment or to authoritatively say that one does not exist. Such a scenario may occur in urban search and rescue, military operation, and even aged care. The search must be robust (deal with robot failures), decentralized (reduce computational and communication bottlenecks), and reactive (make use of any pertinent information that becomes available during search). Prior methods in the literature would force you to make one of two assumptions in this scenario. Do you make the worst-case assumption and choose to treat the target as adversarial? The robots could then utilize graph search algorithms to guarantee finding the target, but the search might take an unnecessarily long time. Or do you decide to trust some non-adversarial model of the target? The robots could then optimize the search with respect to that model, but this approach would eliminate guarantees if the model is inaccurate. In this case, the target may avoid the robots entirely. However, it is possible to do better; how can we strike a balance between risky average-case search and conservative worst-case search?In our recent work we have developed a method that combines the two search paradigms described above to generate plans that clear an environment of a worst-case adversarial target and have good average-case performance considering a non-adversarial motion model.
Our proposed algorithm takes advantage of spanning tree traversal methods along with receding horizon planning to generate a number of candidate search schedules. The resulting architecture is decentralized, scalable, and yields theoretically bounded average-case performance. We validate our algorithm through a number of experiments in simulation and on a team of robot and human searchers in an office building. In addition, I will discuss ongoing work on incorporating communication and connectivity constraints into the search schedules.Bio:
Geoffrey Hollinger is a Ph.D. Candidate at Carnegie Mellon University in the Robotics Institute. He is currently interested in designing scalable and distributed algorithms for estimation and multi-robot coordination in the physical world. He has worked on personal robotics at Intel Research Pittsburgh, multi-robot active estimation at the University of Pennsylvania's GRASP Laboratory, and miniature inspection robots for the Space Shuttle at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center. He received his M.S. in Robotics from Carnegie Mellon University in 2007 and his B.S. in General Engineering along with his B.A. in Philosophy from Swarthmore College in 2005.Location: Ronald Tutor Hall of Engineering (RTH) - 406
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: CS Front Desk
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Development of Regional Earthquake Early Warning...
Fri, Dec 11, 2009 @ 02:00 PM - 03:00 PM
Sonny Astani Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
...Structural Health Monitoring System and Real-Time Ground Motion Prediction using Front-Site Waveform DataSpeaker: Professor Masato Motosaka, Earthquake Disaster Research Laboratory and Director, Disaster Control Research Center; Graduate School of Engineering, Tohoku University, Sendai 980-8579, Japan; URL:http://www.disaster.archi.tohoku.ac.jpAbstract:
The author presents firstly, the development of an integrated regional earthquake early warning (EEW) system having on-line structural health monitoring (SHM) function, in Miyagi prefecture, Japan [1]. The system makes it possible to provide more accurate, reliable and immediate earthquake information for society by combining the national (JMA/NIED) EEW system, based on advanced real-time communication technology. The system has been implemented in two buildings; one is in Sendai, a million city, and the other in Oshika, a front site on the Pacific Ocean coast for the approaching Miyagi-ken Oki earthquake. The building in Sendai is a 9-story SRC building completed in 1969 and experienced 1978 Miyagi-ken Oki earthquake and retrofit work was performed in 2000. The building in Oshika is a public building which adjoins one of the K-NET sites. The utilization of the integrated EEW/SHM system is addressed together with future perspectives. The obtained data are also described including the amplitude depending dynamic characteristics of the building in Sendai before, during, and after the 2008/6/14 Iwate-Miyagi Nairiku Earthquake [2], together with the historical change of dynamic characteristics for 40 years [3].
Secondary, the author presents an advanced methodology based on Artificial Neural Network (ANN) for forward forecasting of ground motion parameters, not only PGA, PGV, but also Spectral information before S-wave arrival using initial part of P-waveform at a front site [4]. The estimated ground motion information can be used as warning alarm for earthquake damage reduction. The Fourier Amplitude Spectra (FAS) estimated before strong shaking with high accuracy can be used for advanced engineering applications, e.g. feed-forward structural control of a building of interest. The validity and applicability of the method have been verified by using observation data sets of the K-NET sites of 39 earthquakes occurred in Miyagi Oki area [5].Location: Kaprielian Hall (KAP) - 209 - On Webex. Call departmnet formore information.
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Evangeline Reyes
