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Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Events for December
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Seminars in Biomedical Engineering
Mon, Dec 03, 2012 @ 12:30 PM - 01:50 PM
Alfred E. Mann Department of Biomedical Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Sophia Chun, M.D.,
Talk Title: Person-Centered Rehabilitation Technology: A Focus On the Persons with Spinal Cord Injury
Host: Department of Biomedical Engineering
Location: Olin Hall of Engineering (OHE) - 122
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Mischalgrace Diasanta
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Vern Paxson: Reflections on Measurement Research: Crooked Lines, Straight Lines, and Moneyshots
Tue, Dec 04, 2012 @ 03:30 PM - 05:00 PM
Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Vern Paxson, University of California, Berkeley
Talk Title: Reflections on Measurement Research: Crooked Lines, Straight Lines, and Moneyshots
Series: CS Distinguished Lectures
Abstract: In this talk I'll attempt to capture what it is about Internet measurement research that I find stirring and fundamentally compelling, such that I've now spent 20 years pursuing it in various forms. The essence regards the singular moment of discovery. At its best, this process proves uplifting - the concrete appearance of a significant, unintuitive result. But it can instead sometimes simply have its own pleasing aesthetics; or even prove sobering, when empiricism decisively buries a hoped-for result. I will illustrate each of these three types, and try while doing so to illuminate some of the human energy that drives measurement-based research.
Biography: Vern Paxson is a Professor in Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences at the University of California, Berkeley, USA, and also has affiliations with the International Computer Science Institute and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. His research focuses on network measurement and analysis, high-performance monitoring of Internet traffic to detect malicious activity, and addressing the threat of botnets and the underground economy that they fuel. He is an ACM Fellow, and recipient of the 2008 ACM Grace Murray Hopper Award and the 2011 ACM SIGCOMM Award for his work on Internet measurement.
Host: Minlan Yu
Location: SSL 150
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Assistant to CS chair
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Nate Foster (Cornell): Language Abstractions for Software-Defined Networks
Wed, Dec 05, 2012 @ 03:30 PM - 05:00 PM
Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Nate Foster , Cornell
Talk Title: Language Abstractions for Software-Defined Networks
Series: CS Colloquium
Abstract: Modern networks provide a variety of services including routing, traffic monitoring, load balancing, and access control. Unfortunately, the languages used to program today's networks lack modern features -- they are typically defined in terms of hardware-level constructs and lack even rudimentary support for modular programming. As a result, network programs are complicated, hard to reason about, and difficult to maintain.
Frenetic is a new language designed to make it easy to program distributed collections of network routers and switches. It provides a rich collection of declarative constructs that raise the level of abstraction for programmers, allowing them to describe what they want the network to do without specifying how it should be implemented. This talk will describe the design and implementation of the language, focusing especially on support for composition (which allows complicated applications to be decomposed into simple modules) consistent updates (which allow a programmer to gracefully modify the state of the network), as well as a machine-verified compiler (which translates high-level programs down to hardware-level packet processing instructions).
Frenetic (http://www.frenetic-lang.org) is joint work with Arjun Guha (Cornell), Robert Harrison (US Military Academy), Christopher Monsanto (Princeton), Joshua Reich (Princeton), Mark Reitblatt (Cornell), Jennifer Rexford (Princeton), Cole Schlesinger (Princeton), Alec Story (Cornell), and David Walker (Princeton).
Biography: Nate Foster is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Cornell University. His research focuses on developing language abstractions and tools for building reliable systems. He received a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Pennsylvania, an MPhil in History and Philosophy of Science from Cambridge University, and a BA in Computer Science from Williams College, and was a postdoc at Princeton University. His honors include a Sloan Research Fellowship, a Yahoo! Academic Career Enhancement Award, and the Morris and Dorothy Rubinoff Award.
Host: Ethan Katz-Bassett
Location: GFS 106
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Assistant to CS chair
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AME - Department Seminar
Wed, Dec 05, 2012 @ 03:30 PM - 04:30 PM
Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Pier Marzocca, Associate Professor in the Department of Mechanical & Aeronautical Engineering at Clarkson University
Talk Title: Design and Testing of Advanced Wind Turbine Technologies
Abstract: New advanced composite blades design methodologies can significantly impact the performance and reliability of wind turbine technologies. Current approaches employed in designing composite turbine blades, resort to sophisticated multi-physics codes taking into account fluid-structure interaction. When it comes to structural health monitoring and damage progression, the practitioner needs to evaluate the integrity of the composite structure by using in situ real-time techniques, often neglecting the effect of the degradation of structure properties, particularly when addressing complex aeroelastic simulations. The prediction of damage progression in composite wind turbine blades under dynamic aeroelastic conditions is usually a cumbersome multi-step process with significant manual user intervention. The talk with discuss a novel approach where the different components of this process, the dynamical structural analysis under varying aerodynamic and deterministic loads, and damage progression, are integrated into one reduced-order model capable of predicting the occurrence and progression of damage in real time. Severe load cases and the potential for real-time predictions of damage progression will be discussed. Several aspects of current wind turbine projects including modeling and experimental investigations will be discussed.
Biography: Pier Marzocca has been a faculty member in the Mechanical and Aeronautical Engineering Department at Clarkson since 2003. He received his doctoral degree in Aerospace Engineering from Politecnico di Torino, Italy, and worked as a Postdoctoral Researcher and Visiting Assistant Professor in Engineering Science and Mechanics at Virginia Tech before joining Clarkson University. Professor Marzocca has been working in the field of aerospace engineering since 1996 and specializes in multi-physics modeling and characterization of advanced materials and structures, dealing with the interactions among advanced structures and fluids, magnetic, electric, and thermal fields. His research interests reside in structural dynamics and controls of advanced aerospace systems, including active flow and aeroelastic controls of flexible structures. Dr. Marzocca has received several awards including the Ralph R. Teetor Educational Award from the SAE. He is currently an Associate Fellow of AIAA, the Chair of the SAE Unmanned Aircraft System Technical Committee, Deputy Editor-in-Chief of the International Journal of Aeronautical and Space Sciences, and Associate Editor of the ASCE Journal of Aerospace Engineering and the Journal of Thermal Stresses.
Host: Professor Udwadia
More Info: http://ae-www.usc.edu/seminars/12-5-12-marzocca.shtml
Location: Seaver Science Library (SSL) - Room 150
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: April Mundy
Event Link: http://ae-www.usc.edu/seminars/12-5-12-marzocca.shtml
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Nanostructured Black Silicon for Photovoltaics and Photoelectrochemistry
Thu, Dec 06, 2012 @ 12:45 PM - 02:00 PM
Mork Family Department of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Howard Branz, National Renewable Energy Laboratory
Series: Distinguished Lectures Series
Location: James H. Zumberge Hall Of Science (ZHS) - 159
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Ryan Choi
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Multi-modal Sensing and Analysis of Poster Conversations toward Smart Posterboard
Thu, Dec 06, 2012 @ 03:00 PM - 04:30 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Professor Tatsuya Kawahara, Kyoto University
Talk Title: Multi-modal Sensing and Analysis of Poster Conversations toward Smart Posterboard
Abstract: Conversations in poster sessions in academic events, referred to as poster conversations, pose interesting and challenging topics on multi-modal analysis of multi-party dialogue. This article gives an overview of our project on multi-modal sensing, analysis and ``understanding'' of poster conversations. We focus on the audience's feedback behaviors such as non-lexical backchannels (reactive tokens) and noddings as well as joint eye-gaze events by the presenter and the audience. We investigate whether we can predict when and who will ask what kind of questions and also interest level of the audience. Based on these analyses, we design a smart posterboard which can sense human behaviors and annotate interactions and interest level during poster sessions.
Biography: Tatsuya Kawahara received his B.E. in 1987, M.E. in 1989, and Ph.D. in 1995, all in information science, from Kyoto University, Kyoto, Japan. In 1990, he became a Research Associate in the Department of Information Science, Kyoto University. From 1995 to 1996, he was a Visiting Researcher at Bell Laboratories, Murray Hill, NJ, USA. Currently, he is a Professor in the Academic Center for Computing and Media Studies and an Affiliated Professor in the School of Informatics, Kyoto University. He has also been an Invited Researcher at ATR and NICT. He has published more than 250 technical papers on speech recognition, spoken language processing, and spoken dialogue systems. He has been conducting several speech-related projects in Japan including free large vocabulary continuous speech recognition software (http://julius.sourceforge.jp/) and the automatic transcription system for the Japanese Parliament (Diet). From 2003 to 2006, he was a member of IEEE SPS Speech Technical Committee. From 2011, he is a secretary of IEEE SPS Japan Chapter. He was a general chair of IEEE Automatic Speech Recognition & Understanding workshop (ASRU 2007). He also served as a Tutorial Chair of INTERSPEECH 2010 and a Local Arrangement Chair of IEEE ICASSP 2012. He is an editorial board member of Elsevier Journal of Computer Speech and Language, ACM Transactions on Speech and Language Processing, and APSIPA Transactions on Signal and Information.
http://www.ar.media.kyoto-u.ac.jp/members/kawahara/mybib/Biography_e.html
Host: Professor Shrikanth Narayanan
Location: Ronald Tutor Hall of Engineering (RTH) - 320
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Mary Francis
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Multi-view Learning of Speech Features Using Articulatory Measurements
Fri, Dec 07, 2012 @ 10:30 AM - 12:00 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Karen Livescu, Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago
Talk Title: Multi-view Learning of Speech Features Using Articulatory Measurements
Abstract: Articulatory information has been used in automatic speech recognition in a number of ways. For example, phonetic recognition can be improved if articulatory measurements are available at test time. However, it is usually not feasible to measure articulation at test time, due to the expense and inconvenience of the machinery involved. In this work, we ask whether it is possible to use articulatory measurements that are available only at training time to help learn which aspects of the acoustic feature vector are useful. We apply ideas from multi-view learning, in which multiple âviewsâ of the data are available for training but possibly not for prediction (testing). In our case, the views are acoustics on the one hand and articulatory measurements on the other. In particular, we use canonical correlation analysis (CCA) and kernel CCA (KCCA), which find projections of vectors in each view that are maximally correlated with projections of vectors in the other view.
A typical approach to acoustic feature vector generation in speech recognition is to first construct a very high-dimensional feature vector by concatenating multiple consecutive frames of raw features (MFCCs, PLPs, etc.), and then to reduce dimensionality using either an unsupervised transformation such as principal components analysis, a linear supervised transformation such as linear discriminant analysis and its extensions, or a nonlinear supervised transformation (e.g. using neural networks). Our approach here is unsupervised transformation learning, but using the second view (the articulatory measurements) as a form of âsoft supervisionâ. The approach we take, using CCA and KCCA, avoids some of the disadvantages of other unsupervised approaches, such as PCA, which are sensitive to noise and data scaling, and possibly of supervised approaches, which are more task-specific.
This talk will cover the basic techniques, as well as several issues that come up in their application, such as large-scale data issues, speaker-independence, and combination of the learned features with standard ones. The talk will include our results to date, showing that the approach can be used to improve performance on tasks such as phonetic classification and recognition.
Joint work with Raman Arora (TTIC), Sujeeth Bharadwaj (UIUC), and Mark Hasegawa-Johnson (UIUC)
Biography: Karen Livescu is an Assistant Professor at the Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago (TTIC). She completed her PhD in 2005 at MIT and spent the next two years as a post-doctoral lecturer in the MIT EECS department. Karen's interests are in speech and language processing, with a slant toward combining machine learning with knowledge from linguistics and speech science. Her recent work has been on articulatory models, multi-view learning, nearest-neighbor approaches, and automatic sign language recognition.
Host: Kartik Audhkhasi, Prof. Shrikanth Narayanan
Location: Ronald Tutor Hall of Engineering (RTH) - 320
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Mary Francis
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Recent Work at National Taiwan University on Spoken Content Retrieval and Computer-Assisted Language Learning
Fri, Dec 07, 2012 @ 02:00 PM - 03:30 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Prof. Lin-shan Lee, National Taiwan University
Talk Title: Recent Work at National Taiwan University on Spoken Content Retrieval and Computer-Assisted Language Learning
Abstract: In this talk some recent work on speech processing research at National Taiwan University (NTU) will be summarized. The first part of the talk will be on retrieval of spoken content semantically related to the query but not necessarily including the query terms. This problem has been widely studied in text information retrieval. In this talk we will show how text-based techniques can be translated into approaches for spoken content. The second part of the talk will be on a dialogue game framework for computer-assisted language learning. This work extends our previous work of NTU Chinese, a Chinese pronunciation evaluation software tool, to develop a dialogue game. We use reinforcement learning to train the dialogue manager with a goal to offer learning materials adapted to the learning progress of each individual learner.
Biography: Lin-shan Lee has been a professor of National Taiwan University since 1982. He developed several early versions of Chinese spoken language systems (text-to-speech synthesis, large vocabulary continuous speech recognition, etc.) in the world, and was elected as an IEEE Fellow in 1992. His recent work is more focused on speech recognition fundamentals (features, models, robustness, etc.) and network environment problems (e.g. retrieval, semantic analysis and educational issues of spoken content). He served as the Distinguished Lecturer of IEEE Signal Processing Society (SPS) (2007-08), a member of the Overview Paper Editorial Board of IEEE SPS (since 2009), and the general chair of ICASSP 2009 at Taipei. He also served as a Board member of the International Speech Communication Association (ISCA) (2001-09), in which he initiated and coordinated (2006-09) the ISCA Distinguished Lecturers Program. He was elected as an ISCA Fellow in 2010.
Host: Dogan Can and Prof. Shrikanth Narayanan
Location: RTH 320
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Mary Francis
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Integrated Systems Seminar Series
Fri, Dec 07, 2012 @ 03:00 PM - 04:30 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Ali Afsahi, Broadcom
Talk Title: Integrated CMOS Power Amplifier for WLAN Applications
Abstract: Consumer demand for WiFi-enabled products has increased over the last several years, and analyst reports conclude that the sales momentum is expected to continue for the next several years. From laptops to cell phones to television sets, our desire to share
broadband information is making wireless connectivity a must-have feature for a range of devices. In order to keep the cost down and have smaller form-factor especially for embedded applications, the transceiver has been integrated with the baseband PHY and MAC as an SoC solution in a pure CMOS process. One of the main contributors to the cost and size of the solution is the external power amplifier (PA). Recently, there has
been a significant amount of effort to implement PAs in CMOS technology. However, the low supply voltage, lossy substrate and lower breakdown voltage make the design of a linear, high power and reliable PA quite challenging in CMOS technology. In addition, the advanced modulation schemes such as OFDM, possesses a very high peak-to-average ratio (PAR) and requires a very linear power amplifier to preserve the integrity of the
signal. This talk will go over the design of a fully integrated, reliable, linear and efficient CMOS power amplifier for Wireless LAN applications while meeting the stringent requirements of WLAN standards. In addition, several linearization and power combining
techniques will be discussed to boost the output power efficiently for watt-level applications.
Biography: Ali Afsahi received the B.S. degree in electrical engineering from the University of Tehran, Tehran, Iran, in 1998, and the M.S.E. degree in RF/analog IC design from Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ, in 2006. He is currently pursuing the Ph.D. degree part-time at the University of California at San Diego. He joined Broadcom Corporation in 2004 as an RFIC designer. Since then, he has been involved in the design of various blocks for wireless LAN transceivers. He is currently a manager, IC design engineering, leading the transmitter and CMOS power amplifier designs for all of the Broadcomâs WLAN products. He has more than 30 issued and pending patents. He is on his fourth year serving as a member of RFIC Technical Program Committee. Mr. Afsahi was the recipient of the 2009 Analog Devices Outstanding Designer Award for his work on CMOS power amplifiers.
Host: Prof. Hossein Hashemi, Prof. Mahta Moghaddam, Prof. Mike Chen
More Info: http://mhi.usc.edu/activities/integrated-systems/
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 248
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Hossein Hashemi
Event Link: http://mhi.usc.edu/activities/integrated-systems/
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Machine Learning for Speech and Language Processing
Fri, Dec 07, 2012 @ 03:30 PM - 05:00 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Professor Jen-Tzung Chien, National Chiao Tung University, Hsinchu
Talk Title: Machine Learning for Speech and Language Processing
Abstract: In this lecture, I will present a series of machine learning approaches to various applications relevant to speech and language processing including acoustic modelling, language modelling, blind source separation and document summarization. In general, speech and language processing involves extensive knowledge of statistical models which are learnt from observation data. However, in the real world, observation data are inevitably acquired from heterogeneous environments in the presence of mislabeled, misaligned, mismatched and ill-posed conditions. The estimated models suffer from large complexity, ambiguity and uncertainty. Model regularization becomes a crucial issue when constructing the speech and text models for different information systems. In statistical machine learning, the uncertainty and sparse coding algorithms provide attractive and effective solution to model regularization. This lecture will address recent works on Bayesian and sparse learning. In particular, I will present Bayesian sensing hidden Markov models and Dirichlet class language models for speech recognition, online Gaussian process for blind source separation, and Bayesian nonparametrics for document summarization. In these works, robust models are established against improper model assumption, over-determined model complexity, ambient noise interference, and nonstationary environment variations. Finally, I will point out some potential topics on machine learning for speech and language processing.
Biography: Jen-Tzung Chien received his Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering from National Tsing Hua University, Hsinchu, Taiwan, in 1997. During 1997-2012, he was with the National Cheng Kung University, Tainan, Taiwan. Since 2012, he has been with the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, National Chiao Tung University, Hsinchu, where he is currently a Distinguished Professor. He held the Visiting Researcher positions at the Panasonic Technologies Inc., Santa Barbara, CA, the Tokyo Institute of Technology, Tokyo, Japan, the Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA, the Microsoft Research Asia, Beijing, China, and the IBM T. J. Watson Research Center, Yorktown Heights, NY. His research interests include machine learning, speech recognition and blind source separation.
Dr. Chien served as the associate editor of the IEEE Signal Processing Letters, in 2008-2011, and the tutorial speaker of the ICASSP, in 2012. He is appointed as the APSIPA Distinguished Lecturer for 2012-2013. He was a co-recipient of the Best Paper Award of the IEEE Automatic Speech Recognition and Understanding Workshop in 2011. He received the Distinguished Research Awards from the National Science Council, Taiwan, in 2006 and 2010.
Host: Kartik Audhkhasi, Dr. Maarten Van Segbroeck, Prof. Shrikanth Narayanan
Location: Ronald Tutor Hall of Engineering (RTH) - 320
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Mary Francis
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On Positioning Algorithms that are Robust Against Non-Line-of-Sight Measurements
Mon, Dec 10, 2012 @ 01:30 PM - 02:30 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Erik Strom, Chalmers University
Talk Title: On Positioning Algorithms that are Robust Against Non-Line-of-Sight Measurements
Abstract: In this talk, we will discuss distance-based positioning, i.e., given a number of noisy distance measurements from nodes at fixed and known positions (anchor nodes), determine the position of one or several other nodes (target nodes). GPS and other global satellite navigation systems solve these type of problems. However, in non-line-of-sight conditions, distance measurements tend to suffer from large positive biases, which cause large position errors if not properly compensated for. We will present a number of positioning algorithms, based on Projection Onto Convex Sets (POCS), which are very robust against positive errors. In fact, if there are a few measurements with small errors, POCS-based algorithms can handle arbitrary large positive errors in arbitrarily many other measurements. The price to pay is less accuracy compared to conventional algorithms, such as nonlinear least squares, when there are no large positive errors.
Biography: Erik G. Ström (https://sites.google.com/site/erikgstrom/) received the M.S. degree from the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH), Stockholm, Sweden, in 1990, and the Ph.D. degree from the University of Florida, Gainesville, in 1994, both in electrical engineering. He accepted a postdoctoral position at the Department of Signals, Sensors, and Systems at KTH in 1995. In February 1996, he was appointed Assistant Professor at KTH, and in June 1996 he joined Chalmers University of Technology, Gothenburg, Sweden, where he is now a Professor in Communication Systems since June 2003. Dr. Ström currently heads the Division for Communications Systems, Information Theory, and Antennas at the Department of Signals and Systems at Chalmers and leads the competence area Sensors and Communications at the traffic safety center SAFER, which is hosted by Chalmers. His research interests include signal processing and communication theory in general, and constellation labelings, channel estimation, synchronization, multiple access, medium acccess, multiuser detection, wireless positioning, and vehicular communications in particular. Since 1990, he has acted as a consultant for the Educational Group for Individual Development, Stockholm, Sweden. He is a contributing author and associate editor for Roy. Admiralty Publishers FesGas-series, and was a co-guest editor for the Proceedings of the IEEE special issue on Vehicular Communications (2011) and the IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications special issues on Signal Synchronization in Digital Transmission Systems (2001) and on Multiuser Detection for Advanced Communication Systems and Networks (2008). Dr. Ström was a member of the board of the IEEE VT/COM Swedish Chapter 2000--2006. He received the Chalmers Pedagogical Prize in 1998 and the Chalmers Ph.D. Supervisor of the Year award in 2009.
Host: Urbashi Mitra, x04667, ubli@usc.edu
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 539
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Gerrielyn Ramos
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Block Copolymers - Designer Soft Materials
Tue, Dec 11, 2012 @ 02:00 PM - 04:00 PM
Mork Family Department of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Frank S. Bates , University of Minnesota Department of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science
Talk Title: Block Copolymers - Designer Soft Materials
Series: Cornelius Pings Lecture
Abstract: Soft materials constitute a familiar class of condensed matter. Representative examples include all types of polymers, colloidal dispersions, foams, and biological tissue such as collagen and spider silk. Block copolymers are a versatile form of macromolecules that provide unparalleled mateiral design opportunities through the coupling of distinct polymer blocks that incorporate different physical properties. Modern synthetic chemical methods afford access to an unlimited number of architectural variations that begin with simple diblocks and progress through a dizzying array of graft and branched geometries. This lecture will focus on relatively simple molecular designs â linear macromolecules that contain two or three different block types strategically sequenced to create useful multiblock molecular architectures. A rich array of nanostructured phases resulting in tailored rheological and mechanical properties have been achieved in these materials. Block copolymers present unique characterization challenges while offering a plethora of technical applications. Examples that illustrate the synergistic use of self-consistent field theory along with transmission electron microscopy, small-angle x-ray and neutron scattering, dynamic mechanical spectroscopy and tensile testing will be discussed in the context of research that has led to commercial products.
Biography: Frank S. Bates is a Regents Professor and Head of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science at the University of Minnesota. He received a B.S. in Mathematics from SUNY Albany in 1976, and M.S. and Sc.D. degrees in Chemical Engineering from MIT in 1979 and 1982. Between 1982 and 1989 Bates was a member of the technical staff at AT&T Bell Laboratories then joined the University of Minnesota as an Associate Professor. He was promoted to Professor in 1991, named a Distinguished McKnight University Professor in 1996, appointed Department Head in 1999, and became a Regents Professor in 2007. Professor Bates conducts research on a range of topics related to polymers, with a particular focus on the thermodynamics and dynamics of block copolymers and blends. In 1988 Bates was named a Distinguished Member of the Technical Staff at Bell Labs, in 1989 he received the John H. Dillon Medal and in 1997 the Polymer Physics Prize, both from the American Physical Society where he is a Fellow. He won the 2004 David Turnbull Lectureship Award from the Materials Research Society, shared the ACS Cooperative Research Award in 2008, was awarded the 2008 Sustained Research Prize by the Neutron Scattering Society of America and he is the 2012 Institute Lecturer of the AIChE. Bates was elected to the US National Academy of Engineering in 2002. In 2005 he was named a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and in 2010 was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Science.
More Info: http://chems.usc.edu/academics/12-13/cping2012.htm
Location: Gerontology Auditorium
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Ryan Choi
Event Link: http://chems.usc.edu/academics/12-13/cping2012.htm
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EE-Electrophysics Seminar
Fri, Dec 14, 2012 @ 09:30 AM - 10:30 AM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Mina Rais-Zadeh, University of Michigan
Talk Title: Integrated Microsystems for Communication and Sensing Applications
Abstract: In the recent past, there has been growing interest in reconfigurable or software defined radios. One of the critical requirements of a software defined radio is to have the ability to reconfigure the RF front-end. RF MEMS capacitors, inductors, and tunable filters serve this need and can offer a wide tuning range while consuming very small power. In the first part of this talk, I will present the design and characterization of some high-performance reconfigurable RF modules and explain the challenges with implementing tunable components, specifically at the UHF range. In the second part of the talk, I will go over the design of acoustic filters, resonators and resonant sensors, and discuss the application of these devices and systems in timing and navigation units, night vision, and infrared sensing. I will explain the need for high-Q devices and discuss the physical phenomena that limit the performance and scaling of RF MEMS.
Biography: Professor Mina Rais-Zadeh received the B.S. degree in Electrical Engineering from Sharif University of Technology and M.S. and Ph.D. degrees both in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, in 2005 and 2008, respectively. From August 2008 to 2009, she was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow with the Integrated MEMS Group, Georgia Institute of Technology. Since January 2009, she has been with the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, where she is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. Mina is the recipient of NASA Early Career Faculty Award (2012), NSF CAREER Award (2011), IEEE Electron Device Society Early Career Award (2011), and the finalist in student paper competitions at the SiRF (2007) and IMS (2011) conferences. She is a senior member of IEEE and serves as a member of the technical program committee of IEEE IEDM, IEEE Sensors, and Hilton Head workshop. She is the leader of the âHigh Frequency MEMSâ Thrust of the Center on Wireless Integrated MicroSensing and Systems (WIMS2) at the University of Michigan.
Host: EE-Electrophysics
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 248
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Marilyn Poplawski
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USC Physical Sciences in Oncology Center Monthly Seminar Series
Fri, Dec 14, 2012 @ 11:45 AM - 01:00 PM
Alfred E. Mann Department of Biomedical Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Hermann Frieboes, Ph.D., Assistant Professor, Department of Bioengineering and James Graham Brown Cancer Center, University of Louisville
Talk Title: Integrative Biocomputational/Experimental Modeling to Predict Tumor Growth and Treatment Response
Abstract: Cancer behavior at the system level is complex, involving multifaceted interactions of multiple cell and tissue types within a diverse environment. Many factors contribute to this complexity, including tissue micro-structure, inter- and intra-cellular signaling, angiogenesis, vascularization, and the immune response, all of which have effects across a wide range of time and length scales. Models that focus on processes at individual scales from basic science to patient bedside while neglecting to address this multiscale complexity have often proven inadequate for cancer treatment and prognosis, leading to therapies with sub-optimal results. To address this issue, we employ a multidisciplinary methodology that integrates biocomputational modeling with laboratory and clinical data to quantitatively study the effects of cellular and microenvironmental processes on cancers at the system level. This integrative process has led to progressively more accurate and biology-predictive 3D cancer models capable of representing tumor growth through the stages of avascular growth, vascularization, and tissue invasion, and that can be used to interrogate changes in the system dynamics including those related to therapeutic strategies. Our work suggests that tumor-scale growth, invasion, and drug response are predictable processes regulated by heterogeneity in the underlying interactions between genotypic, phenotypic, and microenvironmental parameters. Based on these studies, we conclude that applying a biocomputational approach can provide deeper insight into cancer behavior and treatment response, e.g., chemotherapeutic and anti-angiogenic, as well as nanotherapy. Incorporation of patient-specific data into this biocomputational modeling could enhance treatment prognosis as well as the design of more effective therapies.
Biography: USC was selected to establish a $16 million cancer research center as part of a new strategy against the disease by the U.S. National Institutes of Health and its National Cancer Institute. The new center is one of 12 in the nation to receive the designation. During the five-year initiative, the Physical Sciences-Oncology Centers will take new, nontraditional approaches to cancer research by studying the physical laws and principles of cancer; evolution and the evolutionary theory of cancer; information coding, decoding, transfer and translation in cancer; and ways to de-convolute cancer's complexity. As part of the outreach component of this grant, the Center for Applied Molecular Medicine is hosting a monthly seminar series.
Host: USC Physical Sciences in Oncology Center
Location: CSC #250
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Kristina Gerber
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CEE Ph.D. Seminar
Fri, Dec 14, 2012 @ 04:00 PM - 05:00 PM
Sonny Astani Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Winnie Kam, ENE Ph. D. and Mehran Rahmani, CE Ph.D. Candidate,
Talk Title: Particulate Matter (PM) Exposure for Commuters in Los Angeles: Chemical Characterization and Implications to Public Health
Abstract: Particulate matter (PM) is a major airborne pollutant in urban areas and contributes to adverse health outcomes as well as environmental effects such as visibility. Sources of PM include both anthropogenic (vehicular emissions, industrial activity) and natural causes (crustal materials, sea salt). The composition of PM is highly complex and varies depending on local sources, source strength, and atmospheric processes such regional transport and gas-to-particle partitioning. This talk focuses on the exposure assessment size-fractionated PM for three private commute microenvironments in Los Angeles: a freeway with high drayage truck fraction (I-710), a freeway with the low drayage truck fraction (I-110), and major surface streets (Wilshire and Sunset Boulevards). A major sampling campaign was conducted to collect time-integrated PM for the purpose of a comprehensive chemical analysis including major PM components (organic carbon and elemental carbon), inorganic ions, metals and trace elements, and organic species. Depending on the mode of commute, commuters may be exposed to PM of various species and concentration levels. Thus, understanding the chemical composition of PM for various commute microenvironments is essential in assessing passenger exposure.
Advisor: Prof. Constantinos Sioutas
Second Speaker:
Mehran Rahmani, CE Ph.D.Candidate
Title: Recent Advances in Wave Travel Time Based Methodology for Structural Health Monitoring and Early Earthquake Damage Detection in Buildings
Abstract:
Recent advances in the development of a wave travel time methodology for earthquake damage detection in buildings, for use in rapid assessment of structural health following an earthquake, are reviewed. Its main advantages over the modal methods are the insensitivity to the effects of soil-structure interaction, local nature, and robustness when applied to real structures and strong earthquake response. Three algorithms are reviewed, which identify wave velocity profiles of vertically propagating shear and torsional waves through the building by fitting a layered shear beam/torsional shaft model in observed building earthquake response, and a selection of results of their application to three buildings: Los Angeles 54-story office building (steel), Millikan Library in Pasadena (RC), and Sherman Oaks 12-story office building (RC), damaged by the San Fernando earthquake of 1971. The appropriateness of the model for different types of buildings, and the accuracy of the identification are discussed.
Advisor Prof. Maria Todorovska
Biography:
Location: SLH 102
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Evangeline Reyes
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Advances in Sign Language Recognition and Morphological Systems
Mon, Dec 17, 2012 @ 11:00 AM - 12:15 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Professor Petros Maragos, School of E.C.E., National Technical University of Athens, Greece, and Athena â Research and Innovation Center
Talk Title: Advances in Sign Language Recognition and Morphological Systems
Abstract: This talk presents an overview of some advances in two broad research areas in image analysis and computer vision and in related nonlinear systems. The first area deals with some major problems in sign language recognition including efficient algorithms for visual processing and the development of multimodal subunits, data-driven or phonetically-based, that provide a temporal sequential structure and allow for both temporal segmentation as well as automatic recognition and signer adaptation in continuous sign language videos. The talk will address several topics in multimodality such as motion-position cues, handshapes, and facial events. The second area deals with the nonlinear geometric approach to image analysis based on morphological operators and a new lattice-theoretic generalization which has a rich algebraic structure. The talk will summarize results on the variational formulation of some morphological operators, their extensions on graphs, and some applications in image simplification and segmentation as well as in nonlinear dynamical systems on lattices.
Biography: Petros Maragos received the Diploma in E.E. from the National Technical University of Athens (NTUA) in 1980 and the M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees from Georgia Tech, Atlanta, in 1982 and 1985. In 1985, he joined the faculty of the Division of Applied Sciences at Harvard University, where he worked for eight years as professor of electrical engineering affiliated with the Harvard Robotics Lab. In 1993, he joined the faculty of the School of ECE at Georgia Tech. During periods of 1996-98 he had a joint appointment as director of research at the Institute of Language and Speech Processing in Athens. Since 1998, he has been working as a professor at the NTUA School of ECE. His research and teaching interests include signal processing, systems theory, pattern recognition, and their applications to image processing and computer vision, audio, speech and language processing, cognitive systems, and robotics. He has served as Associate Editor for the IEEE Trans. on ASSP, IEEE Trans. on PAMI, and editorial board member and guest editor for several journals on signal processing, image analysis and vision; co-organizer of several conferences and workshops, including VCIP'92, ISMM'96, VLBV'01, MMSP'07, ECCV'10, EUSIPCO'12; and member of the IEEE committees on DSP, IMDSP and MMSP.
He is the recipient or co-recipient of several awards, including a 1983 Sigma Xi best thesis award, a 1987-1992 National Science Foundation Presidential Young Investigator Award, the 1988 IEEE SPS Young Author Best Paper Award for the paper `Morphological Filters',Âthe 1994 IEEE SPS Senior Best Paper Award and the 1995 IEEE W.R.G. Baker Prize Award for the paper `Energy Separation in Signal Modulations with Application to Speech Analysis', the 1996 Pattern Recognition Society's Honorable Mention Award for the paper `Min-Max Classifiers', the EURASIP 2007 Technical Achievement Award for contributions to nonlinear signal, image and speech processing, and the Best Paper Award of the IEEE CVPR-2011 Gesture Recognition Workshop. He was elected a Fellow of IEEE in 1995 and of EURASIP in 2010 for his research contributions. http://cvsp.cs.ntua.gr/maragos
Host: Prof. Shrikanth Narayanan
Location: Ronald Tutor Hall of Engineering (RTH) - 320
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Mary Francis
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An Optical Turing Machine
Mon, Dec 17, 2012 @ 02:00 PM - 03:00 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Joseph Touch, USC/ISI
Talk Title: An Optical Turing Machine
Abstract: The Optical Turing Machine (OTM) is our effort to design and implement a digital device that processes network data in an optical multibit/symbol modulation format. Its goal is to support high-speed computation using an encoding capable of high-speed, long-distance transmission. OTM explores the unification of communication and computation, and investigates the nature of Turing-equivalent computation. This talk introduces the OTM approach and discusses its key challenges. We discuss our current OTM projects, including the extension of our earlier all-optical packet hopcount decrement to multibit encoding, and the design and implementation of the world's first all-optical Internet checksum.
The OTM project is supported by grants from USC/ISI's New Research Initiatives (NRI) and the NSF Center for Integrated Access Networks (CIAN).
For those of you that are unable to attend in person, please use the following webcast link to view:
http://webcasterms1.isi.edu/mediasite/Viewer/?peid=83c9a7910ac34185b9e2c61eacff55ec1d
Host: John Wroclawski
Webcast: http://webcasterms1.isi.edu/mediasite/Viewer/?peid=83c9a7910ac34185b9e2c61eacff55ec1dLocation: 11th Floor Large Conference Room
WebCast Link: http://webcasterms1.isi.edu/mediasite/Viewer/?peid=83c9a7910ac34185b9e2c61eacff55ec1d
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Gerrielyn Ramos
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Joe Touch: An Optical Turing Machine
Mon, Dec 17, 2012 @ 02:00 PM - 04:00 PM
Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Joe Touch, USC / ISI
Talk Title: An Optical Turing Machine
Abstract: The Optical Turing Machine (OTM) is our effort to design and implement a digital device that processes network data in an optical multibit/symbol modulation format. Its goal is to support high-speed computation using an encoding capable of high-speed, long-distance transmission. OTM explores the unification of communication and computation, and investigates the nature of Turing-equivalent computation. This talk introduces the OTM approach and discusses its key challenges. We discuss our current OTM projects, including the extension of our earlier all-optical packet hopcount decrement to multibit encoding, and the design and implementation of the world's first all-optical Internet checksum.
The OTM project is supported by grants from USC/ISI's New Research Initiatives (NRI) and the NSF Center for Integrated Access Networks (CIAN).
For those of you that are unable to attend in person, please use the following webcast link to view:
http://webcasterms1.isi.edu/mediasite/Viewer/?peid=83c9a7910ac34185b9e2c61eacff55ec1d
Host: John Wroclawski
Webcast: http://webcasterms1.isi.edu/mediasite/Viewer/?peid=83c9a7910ac34185b9e2c61eacff55ec1dLocation: ISI 11th Floor Large Conference Room
WebCast Link: http://webcasterms1.isi.edu/mediasite/Viewer/?peid=83c9a7910ac34185b9e2c61eacff55ec1d
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Assistant to CS chair
