Events Calendar

ECE Seminar: Optimizing Distributed Applications in Networked Computing Environments

Speaker: Dr. Carlee Joe-Wong, Robert E. Doherty Associate Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Carnegie Mellon University

Talk Title: Optimizing Distributed Applications in Networked Computing Environments

Abstract: The recent proliferation of Internet-connected devices with computational and data collection capabilities, e.g., in the Internet-of-Things, promises to enable an explosion in new applications and services like artificial intelligence and mixed reality. Realizing these new applications, however, inherently requires device cooperation, whether integrating user data collected across multiple smart homes to train a prediction model for smart home usage, or synthesizing multiple sensors' readings to predict how a wildfire will spread. Such cooperation is inherently limited by constraints on the available compute, storage, or communication resources on Internet-connected devices—and to make matters worse, these devices are often highly heterogeneous and may need to support a range of different applications or services, each with their own unique needs. In this talk, I describe some of our recent work on optimizing device cooperation by learning and exploiting latent similarities across devices and applications. We first consider the general problem of optimally placing components of a distributed application, e.g., for data pre-processing and analysis, within a distributed network of devices. To meet these challenges, we introduce a new reinforcement learning-based problem representation that allows us to learn generalizable policies for dynamic environments. We then consider the specific problems of distributing machine learning applications across devices, demonstrating that we can exploit the structure of the learned data across devices to improve learning performance.

Biography: Carlee Joe-Wong is the Robert E. Doherty Associate Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University. She received her A.B. degree (magna cum laude) in Mathematics, and M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in Applied and Computational Mathematics, from Princeton University in 2011, 2013, and 2016, respectively. Her research interests lie in optimizing various types of networked systems, in particular applications of machine learning and economics to computing and communication networks. From 2013 to 2014, Carlee was the Director of Advanced Research at DataMi, a startup she co-founded from her research on mobile data pricing. Her work has received best paper and poster awards at several conferences, including IEEE INFOCOM, ACM/IEEE IPSN, ACM SIGMETRICS, and IEEE ICDCS. She received the NSF CAREER award in 2018, the Army Young Investigator award in 2019, and the Department of Energy Early Career Research Program Award in 2024.

Host: Dr. Leana Golubchik, leana@usc.edu

Webcast: https://usc.zoom.us/j/95435744209?pwd=XZXbX2oiSTg9AXpAwN3oHsy1g6W37u.1

Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 132

WebCast Link: https://usc.zoom.us/j/95435744209?pwd=XZXbX2oiSTg9AXpAwN3oHsy1g6W37u.1

Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

Contact: Mayumi Thrasher

This event is open to all eligible individuals. USC Viterbi operates all of its activities consistent with the University's Notice of Non-Discrimination. Eligibility is not determined based on race, sex, ethnicity, sexual orientation, or any other prohibited factor.