Events Calendar

Optimizing Sensing from Water to the Web

Talk to take place at USC-ISI in Marina del Rey
4676 Admiralty Way
Marina del Rey, CA 90292Title: "Optimizing Sensing from Water to the Web"Speaker: Andreas Krause, California Institute of TechnologyLocation: 11th floor Large Conference Room @ USC/ISIAbstract: Where should we place sensors to quickly detect contamination in drinking water distribution networks? Which blogs should we read to learn about the biggest stories on the web? These problems share a fundamental challenge: How can we obtain the most useful information about the state of the world, at minimum cost?Such sensing problems are typically NP-hard, and were commonly addressed using heuristics without theoretical guarantees about the solution quality. In this talk, I will present algorithms which efficiently find provably near-optimal solutions to large, complex sensing problems. Our algorithms exploit submodularity, an intuitive notion of diminishing returns, common to many sensing problems; the more sensors we have already deployed, the less we learn by placing another sensor. To quantify the uncertainty in our predictions, we use probabilistic models, such as Gaussian Processes. In addition to identifying the most informative sensing locations, our algorithms can handle more challenging settings, where sensors need to be able to reliably communicate over lossy links, where mobile robots are used for collecting data or where solutions need to be robust against adversaries, sensor failures and dynamic environments.I will also present results applying our algorithms to several real-world sensing tasks, including environmental monitoring using robotic sensors, activity recognition using a built sensing chair, deciding which blogs to read on the web, and a sensor placement competition.Bio: Andreas Krause is an assistant professor of Computer Science at the California Institute of Technology. He received his Ph.D. from Carnegie Mellon University in 2008. Krause is a recipient of an NSF CAREER award and the Okawa Foundation Research Grant recognizing top young researchers in telecommunications. His research on sensor placement and optimized information gathering received awards at several premier conferences, as well as the best research paper award of the ASCE Journal of Water Resources Planning and Management.

Location: 11th floor Large Conference Room @ USC/ISI

Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

Contact: CS Front Desk