Events Calendar

ECE Seminar: Safe Autonomous Systems through Neurosymbolic Reasoning

Speaker: Dr. Jyotirmoy V. Deshmukh, Associate Professor, Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science, USC Viterbi School of Engineering

Talk Title: Safe Autonomous Systems through Neurosymbolic Reasoning

Abstract: Huge strides have made in the widespread adoption of autonomous and human-in-the-loop cyber-physical systems (CPS), partly fueled by dramatic improvements in learning-based techniques. An important aspect of many such CPS applications is that they are safety-critical; any undesirable behavior by such systems can cause serious harm to human lives or property. The formal methods community has been an advocate of using logic and automata as specifications for safety-critical CPSs, and the past few decades have seen significant strides in algorithms for their verification, testing, and automated synthesis. A new challenge now is the presence of learning-enabled components (LECs) in CPSs. In this talk, we will review some recent work on using logic and learning-based techniques to provide guarantees for CPS applications using LECs. Such techniques are neurosymbolic in nature; they rely on infusing symbolic knowledge in neural network-based learning algorithms, as well as using symbolic techniques to reason about such neural systems. We will discuss the applicability and scalability of these techniques to real-world systems, discussing some success stories, as well as lay out some of the challenge problems that would need to be solved.

Biography: Jyotirmoy V. Deshmukh (Jyo) is an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Southern California, and the co-Director of the Center for Autonomy and AI. Before joining USC, Jyo worked as a Principal Research Engineer at Toyota R&D. He got his Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Texas at Austin in 2010. He was the 2010-12 Computing Innovation Postdoctoral research Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the recipient of the 2021 NSF Career Award and the 2021 Amazon Research Award.

Host: Dr. Richard M. Leahy, leahy@usc.edu

Webcast: https://usc.zoom.us/j/93509653910?pwd=QjVaQUhPOWVHVHFibXE3VjRkRXN4dz09

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

WebCast Link: https://usc.zoom.us/j/93509653910?pwd=QjVaQUhPOWVHVHFibXE3VjRkRXN4dz09

Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

Contact: Mayumi Thrasher