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Events for April

  • CS Colloquium: Austin Benson (Stanford) -Tools for higher-order network analysis

    Mon, Apr 03, 2017 @ 11:00 AM - 12:20 PM

    Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Austin Benson , Stanford University

    Talk Title: Tools for higher-order network analysis

    Series: CS Colloquium

    Abstract: This lecture satisfies requirements for CSCI 591: Computer Science Research Colloquium.

    Networks are a fundamental model of complex systems in biology, neuroscience, engineering, and social science. Networks are typically described by lower-order connectivity patterns that are captured at the level of individual nodes and edges. However, higher-order connectivity patterns captured by small subgraphs, or network motifs, describe the fundamental structures that control and mediate the behavior of many complex systems. In this talk, I will discuss several higher-order analyses based on higher-order connectivity patterns that I have developed to gain new insights into network data. Specifically, I will introduce a motif-based clustering methodology, a generalization of the classical network clustering coefficient, and a formalism for temporal motifs to study temporal networks. I will also show applications of higher-order analysis in several domains including ecology, biology, transportation, neuroscience, social networks, and human communication.

    Biography: Austin Benson is a PhD candidate at Stanford University in the Institute for Computational and Mathematical Engineering where he is advised by Professor Jure Leskovec of the Computer Science Department. His research focuses on developing data-driven methods for understanding complex systems and behavior. Broadly, his research spans the areas of network science, applied machine learning, tensor and matrix computations, and computational social science. Before Stanford, he completed undergraduate degrees in Computer Science and Applied Mathematics at the University of California, Berkeley. Outside of the university, he has spent summers interning at Google (four times), Sandia National Laboratories, and HP Labs.



    Host: CS Department

    Location: Ronald Tutor Hall of Engineering (RTH) - 217

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Assistant to CS chair

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  • Seminars in Biomedical Engineering

    Mon, Apr 03, 2017 @ 12:30 PM - 01:50 PM

    Alfred E. Mann Department of Biomedical Engineering

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Song Li, PhD, Chancellor Professor & Dept. Chair, UCLA, Dept. of Bioengineering & Medicine

    Talk Title: Microbiology Application

    Host: Qifa Zhou

    Location: Olin Hall of Engineering (OHE) - 122

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Mischalgrace Diasanta

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  • CS Colloquium: Stephan Mandt (Disney Research) - Next generation variational inference: algorithms, models, and applications

    Mon, Apr 03, 2017 @ 01:00 PM - 02:00 PM

    Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Stephan Mandt, Disney Research

    Talk Title: Next generation variational inference: algorithms, models, and applications

    Series: CS Colloquium

    Abstract: This lecture satisfies requirements for CSCI 591: Computer Science Research Colloquium.

    Probabilistic modeling is a powerful paradigm in machine learning. In this field, we assume a generative process in order to explain our observations, and then use a Bayesian inference algorithm to reason about its parameters. Probabilistic modeling has become scalable due to stochastic variational inference which reduces Bayesian inference to non-convex stochastic optimization. This talk focuses on two new inference algorithms: variational tempering-an algorithm that operates on several artificial temperatures simultaneously to find better local optima, and constant SGD-a scalable inference algorithm with applications to hyperparameter optimization. I will then present several new models that have become tractable due to modern variational inference with applications in text modeling, recommendations, and computer vision. I will show how a probabilistic view on Google's word2vec algorithm allows for extensions to other types of high dimensional data and show new applications: analyzing supermarket shopping data, movie ratings, and tracking semantic changes of individual words over centuries of digitized books. Finally, I will show how factorized variational autoencoders allow us to analyze audience reactions to movies.

    Biography: Stephan Mandt is a research scientist at Disney Research Pittsburgh, where he leads the statistical machine learning group. From 2014 to 2016 he was a postdoctoral researcher with David Blei at Columbia University, and from 2012 to 2014 a PCCM postdoctoral fellow at Princeton University. Stephan did his Ph.D. with Achim Rosch at the Institute for Theoretical Physics at the University of Cologne, supported by a fellowship of the German National Merit Foundation. His research interests include scalable approximate Bayesian inference and machine learning for media analytics.

    Host: Fei Sha

    Location: Kaprielian Hall (KAP) - 140

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Assistant to CS chair

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  • Center for Cyber-Physical Systems and Internet of Things and Ming Hsieh Institute for Electrical Engineering Joint Seminar Series on Cyber-Physical Systems

    Mon, Apr 03, 2017 @ 02:00 PM - 03:30 PM

    Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Oleg Sokolsky, Research Professor, University of Pennsylvania

    Talk Title: Behavior Modeling in Patient-in-the-Loop Medical CPS

    Abstract: Human-in-the-loop cyber-physical systems (CPS) is an active area of research. As the level of autonomy in systems we use every day is rapidly increasing, the problems of human-automation interaction and of trust in technology are becoming more important. In medical CPS, interactions between the human and technology happen both through behavior as well as through patient physiology. This talk motivates the need for modeling and analysis techniques that take both behavioral and physiological interactions into consideration. We present a case study of diabetic patients interacting with smart insulin pumps and consider how behavioral modeling and analysis can impact treatment outcomes.

    Biography: Oleg Sokolsky is a Research Professor of Computer and Information Science at PRECISE Center, University of Pennsylvania. His research interests include applications of formal methods and runtime verification to the design and analysis. He received a Ph.D. in Computer Science from State University of New York at Stony Brook.

    Host: Paul Bogdan and Chao Wang

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

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Estela Lopez

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  • Entrepreneurial Visa Options for International Students and Scholars

    Mon, Apr 03, 2017 @ 05:00 PM - 06:30 PM

    Viterbi School of Engineering Career Connections

    Student Activity


    Students and scholars who would like to found a start-up venture in the U.S. face vexing immigration law challenges. Immigration attorney Tien-Li Loke Walsh, Loke Walsh Immigration Law, will explain issues related to start-up businesses and self-employment for international students and scholars and discuss possible visa options for such entrepreneurial endeavors. Reserve your seat online.
    https://events.r20.constantcontact.com/register/eventReg?oeidk=a07edu8pa5781ee3a27&oseq=&c=&ch=

    Location: Mark Taper Hall Of Humanities (THH) - 101

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: RTH 218 Viterbi Career Connections

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  • Improving Sensitivity and Spatial Coverage of Myocardial Arterial Spin Labeling

    Tue, Apr 04, 2017 @ 03:00 AM - 04:00 PM

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Terrence Jao, University of Southern California

    Talk Title: Improving Sensitivity and Spatial Coverage of Myocardial Arterial Spin Labeling

    Series: Medical Imaging Seminar Series

    Biography: Terrence Jao is a MD/PhD student in the department of biomedical engineering working under Prof. Krishna Nayak at the Magnetic Resonance Engineering Laboratory. His research interests are in pulse sequence development, image reconstruction, and cardiac imaging. He received a B.S. from Johns Hopkins University in 2008.


    Host: Professor Krishna Nayak

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

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Talyia White

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  • USC Stem Cell Seminar: Rafi Kopan, Cincinnati Children's Hospital

    Tue, Apr 04, 2017 @ 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM

    Alfred E. Mann Department of Biomedical Engineering

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Rafi Kopan, Cincinnati Children's Hospital

    Talk Title: TBD

    Series: Eli and Edythe Broad Center for Regenerative Medicine and Stem Cell Research at USC Distinguished Speakers Series

    Host: USC Stem Cell

    More Info: http://stemcell.usc.edu/events

    Webcast: http://keckmedia.usc.edu/stem-cell-seminar

    Location: Eli & Edythe Broad CIRM Center for Regenerative Medicine & Stem Cell Resch. (BCC) - First Floor Conference Room

    WebCast Link: http://keckmedia.usc.edu/stem-cell-seminar

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Cristy Lytal/USC Stem Cell

    Event Link: http://stemcell.usc.edu/events

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  • CS Colloquium: Jelena (Marasevic) Diakonikolas (Boston University ) -From Networked Systems to Theory and Back: Full-Duplex Wireless and Beyond

    Tue, Apr 04, 2017 @ 11:00 AM - 12:20 PM

    Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Jelena (Marasevic) Diakonikolas, Boston University

    Talk Title: From Networked Systems to Theory and Back: Full-Duplex Wireless and Beyond

    Series: CS Colloquium

    Abstract: This lecture satisfies requirements for CSCI 591: Computer Science Research Colloquium.

    As our ambitions to build larger and more complex networked systems are ever increasing, the following three general trends can be observed: (i) wireless data traffic is growing, (ii) the number of devices connecting to the networked systems is surging, and (iii) networks are increasingly used not only for communication, but also for computation. I will present results that are motivated by these trends and that span different aspects of networked systems: from modeling of the system components, over rigorous algorithm design and analysis, to testbed development and performance evaluation.

    The unprecedented growth of the wireless traffic over scarce spectrum resources prompts the development of more spectrum-efficient techniques. On the roadmap to 5G wireless standards, full-duplex has been recognized as one of the key technologies for improving the spectrum efficiency. I will present the results on principled design of full-duplex systems that were obtained as part of a cross-disciplinary project "Full-duplex wireless: From integrated circuits to networks" (FlexICoN), which I co-initiated at Columbia. In particular, I will describe a mathematical model of an integrated full-duplex receiver developed within FlexICoN and present resource allocation algorithms tailored to the realistic receiver models. Then, I will highlight the experimental results obtained in a custom-designed full-duplex wireless testbed, developed for the evaluation of our full-duplex hardware and resource allocation and scheduling algorithms.

    Further, I will highlight how the growing scale of networked systems raises the need for fast fair resource allocation algorithms and describe our novel algorithmic results for addressing these issues. Finally, I will describe some of the challenges in networks involving communication and computation, my ongoing work in this area, and future directions.

    Biography: Jelena (Marasevic) Diakonikolas is a Postdoctoral Associate at Boston University and a Visiting Scholar at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her research focuses on principled design of networked systems. Her research on full-duplex wireless systems was awarded a Qualcomm 2015 Innovation Fellowship, was featured in IEEE Spectrum, and resulted in several invited papers. She was selected as an MIT EECS Rising Star in 2015, and named one of the "10 Women in Networking/Communications That You Should Watch" in 2016. She designed the first cellular networking hands-on lab, winning GENI GREE 2013 Best Educational Paper Award. Jelena completed her Ph.D. and M.S. degrees at Columbia University, with an M.S. Award of Excellence and a Jacob Millman Prize for Excellence in Teaching Assistance. She obtained her Bachelor's degree from University of Belgrade, where she held the two most prestigious government-awarded fellowships.

    Host: CS Department

    More Information: headshot.jpg

    Location: Ronald Tutor Hall of Engineering (RTH) - 217

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Assistant to CS chair

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  • Matthew Gilbert, Nano Science & Technology Seminar Series, Tuesday, April 4 at 2:00pm in EEB 248

    Tue, Apr 04, 2017 @ 02:00 PM - 03:30 PM

    Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Matthew J. Gilbert, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

    Talk Title: Topological Energy Transduction

    Abstract: Within the CMOS architecture, the interconnected devices may either be categorized as an "active" device, which produces energy in the form of a current or a voltage, or a "passive" device, which stores or maintains energy in the form of a current or voltage. The societal demand for smaller sized electronic devices, such as computers and cellular phones, with improved functionality has forced not only the sizes of the constituent components of CMOS information processing technology to rapidly shrink, but for the operational frequencies to increase. While it has been possible to reduce the size of active CMOS devices, passive devices have not seen the same reduction in size. Of the passive devices (e.g. resistors, capacitors and inductors) used in CMOS technologies, the circuit element that consumes the most area on a circuit board while simultaneously finding the least success in miniaturization is the inductor. In this talk, we will present a novel method for energy transduction that utilizes the interplay between magnetism and topology on the surface of a newly discovered materials, referred to as time-reversal invariant topological insulators, to create a paradigmatically different inductor. Using a novel self-consistent simulation that couples AC non-equilibrium Green functions to fully electrodynamic solutions of Maxwell's equations, we demonstrate excellent inductance densities up to terahertz frequencies thereby providing a potential solution to an eminent grand challenge.

    Biography: Matthew J. Gilbert is an Associate Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). He is affiliated with the Micro and Nanotechnology Laboratory, the Department of Physics and the Institute for Condensed Matter Theory at UIUC. His research broadly focuses on theoretically elucidating new phenomena in emergent nanoscale systems with the goal of developing new types of nanoelectronic and nanophotonic devices and functionality for next-generation information processing systems. The majority of his current work revolves around understanding the properties of topological materials, including insulators, semimetals and superconductors, with the goal of understanding their potential role in the post-CMOS device landscape. This research also includes examinations into the appearance and stability of unconventional superconductivity and non-Abelian anyons, such as Majorana and parafermions, in topological systems for the purposes of topological quantum computation. His emerging research interests include: the role of interactions in the classification and properties of topological systems, dissipation and relaxation in non-equilibrium materials and systems, transport properties and phenomena in 2D materials particularly those under strain, energy harvesting using topological materials, and designer layered quantum materials. He has authored more than 70-refereed publications, and has given presentations at over 50 international conferences.

    Host: Wang, Zhou, Cronin, Wu - MHI

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

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Marilyn Poplawski

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  • Epstein Seminar, ISE 651

    Tue, Apr 04, 2017 @ 03:30 PM - 04:50 PM

    Daniel J. Epstein Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Dr. Elizabeth Tseng, Senior Staff Scientist, Pacific Biosciences

    Talk Title: Applying Long Read DNA Sequencing for Genome Assembly and Transcriptome Analysis: Existing Solutions and Open Problems

    Host: Prof. Meisam Razaviyayn

    More Information: April 4, 2017_Tseng.pdf

    Location: Ethel Percy Andrus Gerontology Center (GER) - 206

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Grace Owh

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  • Astani Civil and Environmental Engineering Seminar

    Wed, Apr 05, 2017 @ 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM

    Sonny Astani Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Dr. Monica Kohler, Research Assistant Professor, Department of Mechanical and Civil Engineering, Caltech

    Talk Title: Damage Detection in Buildings Using

    More Information: Kohler Seminar Announcement April 5.pdf

    Location: Kaprielian Hall (KAP) - 140

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Evangeline Reyes

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  • Computer Science General Faculty Meeting

    Wed, Apr 05, 2017 @ 12:00 PM - 02:00 PM

    Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science

    Receptions & Special Events


    Bi-Weekly regular faculty meeting for invited full-time Computer Science faculty only. Event details emailed directly to attendees.

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

    Audiences: Invited Faculty Only

    Contact: Assistant to CS chair

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  • Matthew Gilbert - Nano Science & Technology Seminar Series, Wednesday, April 5th at 2:00pm in KAP 209

    Wed, Apr 05, 2017 @ 02:00 PM - 03:30 PM

    Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Matthew J. Gilbert, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

    Talk Title: Unconventional Superconductivity in Topological Heterostructures

    Abstract: The search for materials and systems that exhibit unconventional superconductivity, or superconductivity beyond the canonical s-wave pairing as predicted in BCS theory, is one of the most active areas within condensed matter physics. This effort has been reinvigorated by the interesting properties inherent to a new class of materials that possess topological phases. A topological phase is unique in that it does not break any of the underlying symmetries of the system and cannot be described by a local order parameter. In other words, the inherent properties of the system cannot be changed by adiabatic shifts in materials parameters unless the system passes a quantum critical point associated with a phase transition. More recently, this search has taken on additional significance due to the fact that systems that possess unconventional superconductivity may enable a new type of fault tolerant quantum information processing that may significantly increase computing power when compared to traditional information processing. In this talk, I will discuss the appearance and signatures of unconventional superconductivity and review some of the most prominent systems that have been predicted to exhibit unconventional superconductivity. In particular, I will focus on heterostructures containing s-wave superconductors and proximity-coupled 3D time-reversal invariant topological insulators. I will explain some of the experimentally relevant conditions that must be satisfied in order to observe the features of unconventional superconductivity and conclude by examining the potential for finding unconventional superconductivity in emergent topological materials such as semimetals and crystalline insulators.

    Biography: Matthew J. Gilbert is an Associate Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). He is affiliated with the Micro and Nanotechnology Laboratory, the Department of Physics and the Institute for Condensed Matter Theory at UIUC. His research broadly focuses on theoretically elucidating new phenomena in emergent nanoscale systems with the goal of developing new types of nanoelectronic and nanophotonic devices and functionality for next-generation information processing systems. The majority of his current work revolves around understanding the properties of topological materials, including insulators, semimetals and superconductors, with the goal of understanding their potential role in the post-CMOS device landscape. This research also includes examinations into the appearance and stability of unconventional superconductivity and non-Abelian anyons, such as Majorana and parafermions, in topological systems for the purposes of topological quantum computation. His emerging research interests include: the role of interactions in the classification and properties of topological systems, dissipation and relaxation in non-equilibrium materials and systems, transport properties and phenomena in 2D materials particularly those under strain, energy harvesting using topological materials, and designer layered quantum materials. He has authored more than 70-refereed publications, and has given presentations at over 50 international conferences.

    Host: Wang, Zhou, Cronin, Wu - MHI

    Location: Kaprielian Hall (KAP) - 209

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Marilyn Poplawski

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  • MHI CommNetS seminar

    Wed, Apr 05, 2017 @ 02:00 PM - 03:00 PM

    Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Hamidreza Tavafoghi, University of Michigan

    Talk Title: Dynamic Market Mechanisms for Wind Energy

    Series: CommNetS

    Abstract: We investigate the problem of market mechanism design for wind energy integration into the power grid. We show that the current static two-settlement market structure is not efficient for the integration of wind energy, and does not provide appropriate information for scheduling of flexible loads/reserves. We consider a dynamic two-step model with strategic seller(s) with wind generation and one buyer, who trade energy through a mechanism determined by a designer (ISO). The seller has private information about his technology and wind condition, which he learns dynamically over time. We consider the existing (static) forward and real-time mechanisms that take place at times T = 1 and T = 2, respectively. We propose a dynamic mechanism that provides a coupling between the outcomes of the forward and real-time markets, and show that the dynamic mechanism outperforms the forward and real-time mechanisms for a general objective of the designer. We demonstrate that the advantages of our proposed dynamic mechanism come from the designer's ability to price discriminate and the seller's exposure to penalty risk. Moreover, our proposed mechanism reveals (probabilistic) information about wind generation in advance so as to schedule flexible loads/reserves efficiently. We further analyze variants of the dynamic mechanism that guarantee no penalty risk for sellers, and/or monitor the wind condition.

    Biography: Hamidreza Tavafoghi is a Ph.D. candidate in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science department at the University of Michigan working with Prof. Demosthenis Teneketzis, where he also pursues a M.A. in Economics. His research interests lie in stochastic control, game theory, mechanism design, and strategic learning. Currently, he is working on the design and analysis of informational and monetary incentive mechanisms for cyber-physical systems with applications to power systems, transportation networks, and security. Hamidreza received his B.Sc. in Electrical Engineering from Sharif University of Technology, Tehran, Iran, 2011, and his M.Sc. in Electrical Engineering: Systems from the University of Michigan, 2013. He was awarded the Dow Sustainability Fellowship in 2015. He is a Silver medalist of 37th International Physics Olympiad, Singapore, 2006, and a Gold medalist of 18th National Physics Olympiad, Iran, 2005.

    Host: Prof. Ashutosh Nayyar

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

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Annie Yu

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  • Aerospace & Mechanical Engineering Seminar

    Wed, Apr 05, 2017 @ 03:30 PM - 04:30 PM

    Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Michael W. Plesniak, Professor, Department of Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering, The George Washington University

    Talk Title: Fluid Dynamics of Phonation

    Abstract: Speech production involves unsteady pulsatile flow and turbulent structures that affect the aeroacoustics and fluid-tissue interaction. The goal of our human phonation research program is to investigate the dynamics of flow past the vocal folds (VF) and the aerodynamic interaction with the VF. Over the course of the program we have studied static, driven and self-oscillating models of the VF system. Silicone-based, self-oscillating synthetic vocal fold (VF) models are fabricated with material properties representative of the different layers of human VFs and then evaluated experimentally in a life-size vocal tract simulator to replicate physiological conditions. Our experimental investigations utilize high-speed imaging, particle image velocimetry (PIV), pressure transducers and microphones, and the clinical Rothenberg mask. Studies are performed under both normal and pathological conditions of speech. In particular, recent attention has been focused on understanding the role of polyps (growths on the VF) in altering voice quality. This has led to very fundamental studies of 3D flow separation in pulsatile flows. We have also collaborated with colleagues in the Department of Speech and Hearing Sciences to better understand the effects of ageing on voice. Our overarching motivation for studying flow associated with phonation is to facilitate evaluation and design of treatment interventions and for surgical planning, i.e. to enable physicians to assess the outcomes of surgical procedures by using faithful computer simulations. Such simulations are on the horizon with the advent of increasingly more powerful high performance computing and cyberinfrastructure, but they still lack many of the necessary physical models. We also seek to inform non-surgical clinical treatment strategies of voice disorders.

    Biography: Michael W. Plesniak is Professor and Chair of the Department of Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering at The George Washington University, with a secondary appointment in the Department of Biomedical Engineering. He was formerly Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Purdue University and Eugene Kleiner Professor for Innovation in Mechanical Engineering at Polytechnic University in Brooklyn, NY. He served as the Director of the Fluid Dynamics & Hydraulics program at the National Science Foundation from 2002-2006. Prof. Plesniak earned his Ph.D. degree from Stanford University, and his M.S. and B.S degrees from the Illinois Institute of Technology; all in Mechanical Engineering. Dr. Plesniak is a Fellow of AIAA, ASME, the American Physical Society (APS), the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering (AIMBE) and the Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). He has authored over two hundred fifty refereed archival publications, conference papers and presentations. He has presented numerous invited seminars and keynote addresses. His research group is currently studying the physics of phonation and cardiovascular flows. Dr. Plesniak is the Director of GW's Center for Biomimetics and Bioinspired Engineering. Prof. Plesniak was a recipient of the 2017 ASME Fluids Engineering Award, the 2011 NASA DC Space Grant Consortium's Outstanding STEM Faculty Award, awarded to faculty that make an outstanding contribution to STEM that goes above and beyond the classroom. Dr. Plesniak was also named the American Institute for Aeronautics and Astronautics, National Capital Section Engineer of the Year 2010-2011.

    Host: Department of Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering

    More Info: https://ame.usc.edu/about/seminars/

    Location: Seaver Science Library (SSL) - 150

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Ashleen Knutsen

    Event Link: https://ame.usc.edu/about/seminars/

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  • Riot Games Talk and LoL

    Wed, Apr 05, 2017 @ 07:00 PM - 10:00 PM

    Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science

    Workshops & Infosessions


    Riot Games Talk and LoL
    Wednesday 4/5, 7PM // MHP B7B
    An Evening with Riot

    As you're coming back from spring break, we have some exciting events coming up!

    We will be hosting a talk with Riot Games on Wednesday, April 5th at 7pm (location MHP B7B). Rioters will be coming in to speak about the game - primarily champion ideation and design, from a programming, design, and graphics perspective. They will also go over the company, what it's like to work there, and what it takes to work there.

    After the talk, there will be a mini League of Legends tournament of sorts, where you'll get to join a game of LoL with the Rioters! Make sure to sign up below if you would like a chance to play. (We will be selecting players by lottery leading up to the event). Sign ups will close on Sunday, April 2nd at 11:59pm.


    Event RSVP: https://www.facebook.com/events/270662613390090/

    LoL Tournament Sign up: https://docs.google.com/a/usc.edu/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSc3c4w1TFdh9amefCBveNSjpnGXfHMI5JOYsd8gMQ2hftaHkg/viewform?c=0&w=1

    Location: Seeley Wintersmith Mudd Memorial Hall (of Philosophy) (MHP) - B7B

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Ryan Rozan

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  • Spring 2017 Academic Career Mentoring Panel

    Thu, Apr 06, 2017 @ 11:30 AM - 03:00 PM

    Viterbi School of Engineering Doctoral Programs

    Workshops & Infosessions


    The Viterbi School of Engineering initiated an Academic Career Mentoring Panel Series to encourage Ph.D. students and postdocs to pursue a rewarding career in academia and research. Distinguished faculty will discuss their academic paths and offer strategic advice and answer your questions. Engineering Ph.D. students and postdocs from all areas and departments are strongly encouraged to attend.

    The Spring 2017 Academic Career Mentoring Panel, "What Surprised Me About Work as a Faculty Member, and What Should I have Done Differently" will be held on Thursday, April 6, 2017, from 11:30am-3:00pm in THH 210.

    RSVP:

    https://uscviterbi.qualtrics.com/SE/?SID=SV_1L0qKdkf1J9pYQl&Q_JFE=0

    Location: Mark Taper Hall Of Humanities (THH) - 210

    Audiences: Ph.D. and Postdoctoral

    Contact: Tracy Charles

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  • Lyman Handy Colloquia

    Thu, Apr 06, 2017 @ 12:45 PM - 01:45 PM

    Mork Family Department of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Professor Tobias A. Schaedler, Senior Research Scientist, HRL Laboratories, LLC, Malibu, CA

    Talk Title: Additive Manufacturing of Polymer-Derived Ceramics

    Host: Dr. Andrea Hodge

    Location: James H. Zumberge Hall Of Science (ZHS) - 159

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Aleessa Atienza

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  • Civil/ENE Viterbi Alumni & Industry Spotlight-Networking Reception

    Thu, Apr 06, 2017 @ 06:30 PM - 08:00 PM

    Viterbi School of Engineering Career Connections

    Workshops & Infosessions


    Students will hear from alumni panelists regarding their academic/professional experiences AND network with companies that hire Civil/Environmental engineering students.
    Food Provided!

    Location: Ronald Tutor Hall of Engineering (RTH) - 211

    Audiences: Undergrad

    Contact: RTH 218 Viterbi Career Connections

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  • USC Viterbi Robotics Open House

    Fri, Apr 07, 2017 @ 09:00 AM - 05:00 PM

    USC Viterbi School of Engineering, Viterbi School of Engineering K-12 STEM Center

    University Calendar


    The annual Robotics Open House will be on Friday, April 7, 2017, from 9 a.m. - 5 p.m., with all the robotics research labs open for school groups, families, and individuals to view interactive demonstrations to learn about how the next generation of robots will help society in health, manufacturing, education, environmental protection, communication, and homeland security. Demonstrations include research on how swarms of drones communicate to one another autonomously, how underwater robots help protect the oceans, how brain circuitry gives researchers insights into building and programming robots, and how difficult but useful it is to make robots walk instead of roll. There will also be a premiere of the short film, When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth, about how a child with autism breaks out of his imaginary worlds thanks to a friendship with a robot.
    https://viterbipk12.usc.edu/research/robotics-openhouse/

    More Information: USC Robotics Open House 2017.pdf

    Location: Ronald Tutor Hall of Engineering (RTH) - Check in for maps at courtyard between RTH & EEB (3710 McClintock Ave.)

    Audiences: free event, pre-registration required!

    Contact: Katie Mills

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  • AI Seminar

    Fri, Apr 07, 2017 @ 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM

    Information Sciences Institute

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Marijn ten Thij, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam

    Talk Title: Beyond tracking: modelling human behavior through social media

    Abstract: In this talk, I present my ongoing work in modeling human behavior
    using data from online platforms. I will discuss three of my projects
    that focus on two online platforms Wikipedia and Twitter. First, I
    will illustrate how I model the effect of promoting content on the
    page view activity on Wikipedia by using the page view logs provided
    by WikiMedia. I will then discuss the random graph model I designed
    based on data from Twitter, which may be used to mimic the progression
    of a trend through the network of Twitter. Finally, I will talk about
    my current project, where we aim to capture business value from a
    social feed for the Horticulture Industry.



    Biography: Marijn ten Thij is a PhD student in Mathematics at Vrije Universiteit
    Amsterdam, who graduated in Applied Mathematics at the Stochastic
    Operations Research group at the University of Twente. His research
    interest lies in the fields of Complex Science, Network Science and
    Big Data. In 2014, Marijn was a member of the Dutch National
    ThinkTank, where he worked on the question Can Big Data be used to
    make the Netherlands more mobile, more social, and more healthy?
    Marijn lives in Amsterdam and enjoys playing American pool billiards
    in his spare time.

    Host: Emilio Ferrara

    More Info: http://webcastermshd.isi.edu/Mediasite/Play/d5714d851721421a857168a930b571e81d

    Location: 11th floor large conference room

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Kary LAU

    Event Link: http://webcastermshd.isi.edu/Mediasite/Play/d5714d851721421a857168a930b571e81d

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  • W.V.T. Rusch Engineering Honors Program Colloquium

    Fri, Apr 07, 2017 @ 01:00 PM - 01:50 PM

    USC Viterbi School of Engineering, Viterbi School of Engineering Student Affairs

    University Calendar


    Join us for a presentation by Dr. Daniel Oppenheimer, Professor of Marketing and Psychology at the UCLA Anderson School of Management, titled "A Dozen (or More) Studies on the Psychology of Decision Making."

    Location: Henry Salvatori Computer Science Center (SAL) - 101

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Ramon Borunda/Academic Services

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  • Seminars in Biomedical Engineering

    Fri, Apr 07, 2017 @ 02:30 PM - 04:30 PM

    Alfred E. Mann Department of Biomedical Engineering

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Raymond Goldsworthy, PhD, Associate Professor of Clinical Otolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery

    Talk Title: TBA

    Series: Seminars in BME (Lab Rotations)

    Biography: http://keck.usc.edu/faculty/raymond-l-goldsworthy/

    Host: Brent Liu, PhD

    Location: Corwin D. Denney Research Center (DRB) - 146

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Mischalgrace Diasanta

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  • Ming Hsieh Institute Seminar Series on Integrated Systems

    Fri, Apr 07, 2017 @ 02:30 PM - 04:30 PM

    Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Dr. Hua Wang, Assistant Professor, Georgia Institute of Technology

    Talk Title: Pushing the Envelope of RF mmWave Power Generation by Relearning Ohms Law

    Host: Profs. Hossein Hashemi, Mike Chen, Dina El-Damak, and Mahta Moghaddam

    More Information: MHI Seminar Series IS - Hua Wang.pdf

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

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Jenny Lin

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  • Astani Civil and Environmental Engineering Ph.D. Seminar

    Fri, Apr 07, 2017 @ 03:00 PM - 04:00 PM

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Allyson McGaughey and Joao , TBA

    Talk Title: TBA

    Location: John Stauffer Science Lecture Hall (SLH) - 102

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Evangeline Reyes

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  • NL Seminar - ConversAtion level Syntax SImilarity Metric CASSIM)

    Fri, Apr 07, 2017 @ 03:00 PM - 04:00 PM

    Information Sciences Institute

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Reihane Boghrati , (USC)

    Talk Title: ConversAtion level Syntax SImilarity Metric CASSIM

    Series: Natural Language Seminar

    Abstract: Abstract: The syntax and semantics of human language can illuminate many individual psychological differences and important dimensions of social interaction. Thus, analysis of language provides important insights into the underlying psychological properties of individuals and groups. Accordingly, psychological and psycholinguistic research has begun incorporating sophisticated representations of semantic content to better understand the connection between word choice and psychological processes. While the majority of language analysis work in psychology has focused on semantics, psychological information is encoded not just in what people say, but how they say it. We introduce ConversAtion level Syntax SImilarity Metric (CASSIM), a novel method for calculating conversation-level syntax similarity. CASSIM estimates the syntax similarity between conversations by automatically generating syntactical representations of the sentences in conversations, estimating the structural differences between them, and calculating an optimized estimate of the conversation-level syntax similarity. Also, we conduct a series of analyses with CASSIM to investigate syntax accommodation in social media discourse. Further, building off of CASSIM, we propose ConversAtion level Syntax SImilarity Metric-Group Representations CASSIM GR. This extension builds generalized representations of syntactic structures of documents, thus allowing researchers to distinguish between people and groups based on syntactic differences.


    Biography: Reihane is a forth year Ph.D student at USC, working with Morteza Dehghani in Computational Social Science Laboratory. She is interested in introducing new methods and computational models to psychology, and more broadly to social sciences. Her work spans the boundary between natural language processing and psychology, as does her intellectual curiosity.

    Host: Marjan Ghazvininejad and Kevin Knight

    More Info: http://nlg.isi.edu/nl-seminar/

    Location: Information Science Institute (ISI) - 11th Flr Conf Rm # 1135, Marina Del Rey

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Peter Zamar

    Event Link: http://nlg.isi.edu/nl-seminar/

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  • HackForHealth - Cancer Hackathon

    Fri, Apr 07, 2017 @ 05:00 PM - 12:00 AM

    Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science

    Workshops & Infosessions


    Dear Trojan Family,

    In the spirit of the National Cancer Moonshot, The Kuhn Lab at USC is calling upon all Trojans to join to HackForHealth. Together we will spend a weekend building meaningful solutions to the problems that cancer patients and researchers face everyday. All are welcome, regardless of medical background or technical expertise.
    HackForHealth is a cancer-focused hackathon organized by the diverse team of researchers, physicians, students, and patients behind CancerBase -- a digital tool for cancer patients to securely track and share their medical data, powering research into the progression and treatment of cancer. We hope that you can join us from April 7-9 to interact with members of the cancer community and hack together solutions to help them, whether it be an app, website, gadget, or sketch. Projects will be judged by representatives from the National Cancer Institute. The prizes include cash and internship opportunities.

    Register today and let-'s beat cancer together!

    www.hackforhealth.co

    To learn more about HackForHealth, please attended one of our information sessions:

    UPC: March 8th, 2017 - 6pm at THH 202
    HSC: March 15th, 2017 - 6pm at NRT LG 503

    More Information: H4Hposter final.pdf

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Ryan Rozan

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  • HackForHealth - Cancer Hackathon

    Sat, Apr 08, 2017 @ 12:00 AM - 12:00 AM

    Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science

    Workshops & Infosessions


    Dear Trojan Family,

    In the spirit of the National Cancer Moonshot, The Kuhn Lab at USC is calling upon all Trojans to join to HackForHealth. Together we will spend a weekend building meaningful solutions to the problems that cancer patients and researchers face everyday. All are welcome, regardless of medical background or technical expertise.
    HackForHealth is a cancer-focused hackathon organized by the diverse team of researchers, physicians, students, and patients behind CancerBase - a digital tool for cancer patients to securely track and share their medical data, powering research into the progression and treatment of cancer. We hope that you can join us from April 7-9 to interact with members of the cancer community and hack together solutions to help them, whether it be an app, website, gadget, or sketch. Projects will be judged by representatives from the National Cancer Institute. The prizes include cash and internship opportunities.

    Register today and let's beat cancer together!

    www.hackforhealth.co

    To learn more about HackForHealth, please attended one of our information sessions:

    UPC: March 8th, 2017 - 6pm at THH 202
    HSC: March 15th, 2017 - 6pm at NRT LG 503

    More Information: H4Hposter final.pdf

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Ryan Rozan

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  • HackForHealth - Cancer Hackathon

    Sun, Apr 09, 2017 @ 12:00 AM - 05:00 PM

    Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science

    Workshops & Infosessions


    Dear Trojan Family,

    In the spirit of the National Cancer Moonshot, The Kuhn Lab at USC is calling upon all Trojans to join to HackForHealth. Together we will spend a weekend building meaningful solutions to the problems that cancer patients and researchers face everyday. All are welcome, regardless of medical background or technical expertise.
    HackForHealth is a cancer-focused hackathon organized by the diverse team of researchers, physicians, students, and patients behind CancerBase - a digital tool for cancer patients to securely track and share their medical data, powering research into the progression and treatment of cancer. We hope that you can join us from April 7-9 to interact with members of the cancer community and hack together solutions to help them, whether it be an app, website, gadget, or sketch. Projects will be judged by representatives from the National Cancer Institute. The prizes include cash and internship opportunities.

    Register today and let's beat cancer together!

    www.hackforhealth.co

    To learn more about HackForHealth, please attended one of our information sessions:

    UPC: March 8th, 2017 - 6pm at THH 202
    HSC: March 15th, 2017 - 6pm at NRT LG 503

    More Information: H4Hposter final.pdf

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Ryan Rozan

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  • Seminars in Biomedical Engineering

    Mon, Apr 10, 2017 @ 12:30 PM - 01:50 PM

    Alfred E. Mann Department of Biomedical Engineering

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Xiaoping Hu, PhD, UC Riverside

    Talk Title: MRI with PET Imaging

    Host: Qifa Zhou

    Location: Olin Hall of Engineering (OHE) - 122

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Mischalgrace Diasanta

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  • Emerging Trends Seminar Series

    Mon, Apr 10, 2017 @ 02:00 PM - 03:30 PM

    Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: C.C. Jay Kuo, Dean's Professor of Electrical Engineering, Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical Engineering

    Talk Title: CNN as Guided Multi-layer RECOS Transform

    Series: Emerging Trends

    Abstract: There is a resurging interest in developing a neural network based solution to supervised machine learning in the last 5 years. In this talk, I will provide a theoretical foundation to the working principle of the convolutional neural network (CNN) from a signal processing viewpoint. To begin with, the RECOS transform is introduced as a basic building block for CNNs.

    The term RECOS is an acronym for REctified-COrrelations on a Sphere. It consists of two main concepts: data clustering on a sphere and rectification. Then, a CNN is interpreted as a network that implements the guided multilayer RECOS transform. Along this line, we first compare the traditional single-layer and modern multilayer signal analysis approaches. Then, we discuss how guidance is provided by data labels through back propagation in the training with an attempt to offer a smooth transition from weakly to heavily supervised learning. Finally, we show that a trained network can be greatly simplified in the testing stage, which demands only one bit representation for both filter weights and inputs. Several future research directions are pointed out at the end.

    Biography: Dr. C.C. Jay Kuo received his Ph.D. degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1987. He is now with the University of Southern California (USC) as Director of the Media Communications Laboratory and Dean's Professor in Electrical Engineering, Systems. His research interests are in the areas of digital media processing, compression, communication and networking technologies. Dr. Kuo was the Editor in Chief for the IEEE Trans. on Information Forensics and Security from 2012 through 2014. He was the Editor in Chief for the Journal of Visual Communication and Image Representation from 1997 through 2011, and served as Editor for 10 other international journals.

    Dr. Kuo received the 1992 National Science Foundation Young Investigator (NYI) Award, the 1993 National Science Foundation Presidential Faculty Fellow (PFF) Award, the 2010 Electronic Imaging Scientist of the Year Award, the 2010-11 Fulbright-Nokia Distinguished Chair in Information and Communications Technologies, the 2011 Pan Wen Yuan Outstanding Research Award, the 2014 USC Northrop Grumman Excellence in Teaching Award, the 2016 USC Associates Award for Excellence in Teaching, the 2016 IEEE Computer Society Taylor L. Booth Education Award, the 2016 IEEE Circuits and Systems Society John Choma Education Award, the 2016 IS&T Raymond C. Bowman Award, and the 2017 IEEE Leon K. Kirchmayer Graduate Teaching Award. Dr. Kuo is a Fellow of AAAS, IEEE and SPIE. He has guided 140 students to their Ph.D. degrees and supervised 25 postdoctoral research fellows. Dr. Kuo is a co author of about 250 journal papers, 900 conference papers, 14 books and 30 patents.

    Host: Ming Hsieh Institute

    More Info: https://www.facebook.com/events/1444859602200671/

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

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Cathy Huang

    Event Link: https://www.facebook.com/events/1444859602200671/

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  • Center for Cyber-Physical Systems and Internet of Things and Ming Hsieh Institute for Electrical Engineering Joint Seminar Series on Cyber-Physical Systems

    Mon, Apr 10, 2017 @ 03:00 PM - 04:00 PM

    Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Natalie Cheung , Intel

    Talk Title: Utilizing Drones to Create a New Nighttime Entertainment

    Abstract: Come learn how Intel is utilizing drones in a different way -“ to light up the sky in a choreographed aerial performance with the Intel Drone Light Show. You'll learn about the Intel Shooting Star Drone, the technology behind the show, and more.

    Biography: Natalie Cheung is the General Manager for the Drone Light Show in the UAV Group at Intel Corporation. She is responsible for establishing the drone light show business and growing the new segment. Cheung has led drone light show collaborations with customers that created activations across the globe - from the US, Germany, Mexico, Australia, and more.

    Prior to her current role, Cheung was the Drone Marketing Director. She was responsible for product launches, conferences and events, and building awareness within the drone segment. Cheung has also served as Drone Product Manager, Research Analyst for Intel CEO Brian Krzanich. Cheung joined Intel in 2011. She earned a bachelor's and master's degree in electrical engineering and computer science from Massachusetts Institute of Technology.


    Host: Paul Bogdan

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

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Estela Lopez

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  • FBI Information Session

    Mon, Apr 10, 2017 @ 06:30 PM - 08:00 PM

    Viterbi School of Engineering Career Connections

    Workshops & Infosessions


    Join this information session to learn about upcoming internships and career opportunities in the FBI!

    Location: Seeley G. Mudd Building (SGM) - 101

    Audiences: All Viterbi

    Contact: RTH 218 Viterbi Career Connections

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  • USC Stem Cell Seminar: Ellen Rothenberg, California Institute of Technology

    Tue, Apr 11, 2017 @ 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM

    Alfred E. Mann Department of Biomedical Engineering

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Ellen Rothenberg, California Institute of Technology

    Talk Title: TBD

    Series: Eli and Edythe Broad Center for Regenerative Medicine and Stem Cell Research at USC Distinguished Speakers Series

    Host: USC Stem Cell

    More Info: http://stemcell.usc.edu/events

    Webcast: http://keckmedia.usc.edu/stem-cell-seminar

    Location: Eli & Edythe Broad CIRM Center for Regenerative Medicine & Stem Cell Resch. (BCC) - First Floor Conference Room

    WebCast Link: http://keckmedia.usc.edu/stem-cell-seminar

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Cristy Lytal/USC Stem Cell

    Event Link: http://stemcell.usc.edu/events

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  • Epstein Seminar, ISE 651

    Tue, Apr 11, 2017 @ 03:30 PM - 04:50 PM

    Daniel J. Epstein Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Dr. Ran Jin, Assistant Professor, Virginia Tech

    Talk Title: Smart Manufacturing Modeling with Functional Data

    Host: Prof. Qiang Huang

    More Information: April 11, 2017_Jin.pdf

    Location: Ethel Percy Andrus Gerontology Center (GER) - 206

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Grace Owh

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  • Big Data & Human Behavior Seminar Series: Justin Grimmer (Stanford University) - Exploratory and Confirmatory Causal Inference for High Dimensional Interventions

    Wed, Apr 12, 2017 @ 12:00 PM - 01:00 PM

    Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Justin Grimmer, Associate Professor of Political Science and Computer Science, Stanford University

    Talk Title: Exploratory and Confirmatory Causal Inference for High Dimensional Interventions

    Series: Big Data & Human Behavior Seminar Series

    Abstract: An extensive literature in computational social science examines how features of messages, advertisements, and other corpora affect individuals' decisions, but these analyses must specify the relevant features of the text before the experiment. Automated text analysis methods are able to discover features of text, but these methods cannot be used to obtain the estimates of causal effects-”the quantity of interest for applied researchers. We introduce a new experimental design and statistical model to simultaneously discover treatments in a corpora and estimate causal effects for these discovered treatments. We prove the conditions to identify the treatment effects of texts and introduce the supervised Indian Buffet process to discover those treatments. Our method enables us to discover treatments in a training set using a collection of texts and individuals' responses to those texts, and then estimate the effects of these interventions in a test set of new texts and survey respondents. We apply the model to an experiment about candidate biographies, recovering intuitive features of voters' decisions and revealing a penalty for lawyers and a bonus for military service.

    Biography: Justin Grimmer's research examines how representation occurs in American politics using new statistical methods. His first book Representational Style in Congress: What Legislators Say and Why It Matters (Cambridge University Press, 2013) shows how senators define the type of representation they provide constituents and how this affects constituents' evaluations and won the Fenno Prize from the legislative studies section. His second book The Impression of Influence: How Legislator Communication and Government Spending Cultivate a Personal Vote (Princeton University Press, with Sean J. Westwood and Solomon Messing) demonstrates how legislators ensure they receive credit for government actions. His work has appeared in the American Political Science Review, American Journal of Political Science, Journal of Politics, Political Analysis, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Regulation and Governance, and other journals.

    Host: Morteza Dehghani

    Location: BCI

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Assistant to CS chair

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  • MHI CommNetS Seminar

    Wed, Apr 12, 2017 @ 02:00 PM - 03:00 PM

    Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Dr. Ian M. Mitchell, University of British Columbia

    Talk Title: Using model checking verifications online: Handling runtime state uncertainty, human-in-the-loop shared control and sampled data feedback

    Series: CommNetS

    Abstract: Recent advances in model checking algorithms for continuous state systems allow us to demonstrate the existence of safe control policies robust to model error for cyber-physical systems (CPS) of practical interest, such as shared control drones or wheelchairs, or automated delivery of anesthesia. However, these verification results are only relevant if we can implement those policies. In this talk I will discuss investigations into three challenges that arise when it comes time to synthesize a feedback control signal that will keep the system safe: Online state uncertainty, human-in-the-loop shared control for older adults with cognitive impairment, and the sampled data nature of that feedback control in typical cyber-physical systems.

    Biography: Ian M. Mitchell completed his doctoral work in engineering at Stanford University in 2002, spent a year as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California at Berkeley, and is now an Associate Professor of Computer Science at the University of British Columbia. He is the author of the Toolbox of Level Set Methods, the first publicly available high accuracy implementation of solvers for dynamic implicit surfaces and the time dependent Hamilton-Jacobi equation that works in arbitrary dimension. His research interests include development of algorithms and software for nonlinear differential equations, formal verification, control and planning in cyber-physical and robotic systems, assistive technology and reproducible research.

    Host: Prof. Insoon Yang

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

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Annie Yu

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  • Aerospace & Mechanical Engineering Seminar

    Wed, Apr 12, 2017 @ 03:30 PM - 04:30 PM

    Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Jeff Eldredge, Professor, Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering Department, University of California at Los Angeles

    Talk Title: Low-Order Modeling of Agile Flight

    Abstract: The highly agile flight exhibited by many flying creatures has, for many years, been the promise for the next generation of flight vehicles. However, the reality still falls short, in part because such agility requires flight control strategies that work robustly in the regime of separated flows. This regime, generally avoided by human-engineered vehicles, is often exploited by airborne creatures in order to make rapid maneuvers or maintain tolerance to gusts. Recent control strategies based on flapping wings or managed separation over fixed wings have shown promise, but are limited to slow maneuvers because they rely on linearized and/or quasi-steady models of the aerodynamics, only effective at low frequencies or averaged over many flapping cycles. In this presentation, I will report on our recent progress in developing unsteady non-linear (vortex-based) models of separated flows. The premise is to construct a low-degree-of-freedom template model, with the simplest description of the flow that still contains the non-linear vortex-vortex and vortex-wing interactions. The model is then closed with empirical data from sensors. I will demonstrate progress on several canonical problems in two dimensions, and discuss our extensions to fully three-dimensional flows. I will also highlight some future directions of the work.

    Biography: Jeff Eldredge is a Professor in the Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering Department at UCLA. His research interests are in computational and theoretical studies of problems in fluid dynamics, including those in unsteady aerodynamics, bio-inspired locomotion, micro-particle manipulation, and biomedical and physiological flows. He has received the NSF CAREER Award and is an Associate Fellow of AIAA. Prior to starting at UCLA, Prof. Eldredge was a research associate at the University of Cambridge. He received his M.S and Ph.D. at Caltech and his B.S. at Cornell, all in mechanical engineering.

    Host: Department of Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering

    More Info: https://ame.usc.edu/about/seminars/

    Location: Seaver Science Library (SSL) - 150

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Ashleen Knutsen

    Event Link: https://ame.usc.edu/about/seminars/

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  • 2017 Eberhardt Rechtin Lecture Keynote Event

    Thu, Apr 13, 2017 @ 03:30 PM - 06:00 PM

    Daniel J. Epstein Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering

    Receptions & Special Events


    Invention, Innovation, Entrepreneurship, 3D Printing
    Presented by Mr. Charles Hull, Co Founder and CTO, 3D Systems

    More Information: Rechtin Lecture 2017 flyer.pdf

    Location: USC Radisson Hotel, Center Ballroom

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Grace Owh

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  • Careers in the Gaming Industry Panel: Working at Global Companies

    Thu, Apr 13, 2017 @ 05:30 PM - 07:00 PM

    Viterbi School of Engineering Career Connections

    Workshops & Infosessions


    The panel is an opportunity for students to ask employers from global companies Blizzard, DICE, and Zynga about the gaming industry, the skills needed to pursue a career in gaming, opportunities for engineers in the field and best practices when internship/job searching.

    More Information: careeringaming.pdf

    Location: Seeley G. Mudd Building (SGM) - 101

    Audiences: CSCI, CECS, CSGames, CSBA

    Contact: RTH 218 Viterbi Career Connections

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  • W.V.T. Rusch Engineering Honors Program Colloquium

    Fri, Apr 14, 2017 @ 01:00 AM - 01:50 PM

    USC Viterbi School of Engineering, Viterbi School of Engineering Student Affairs

    University Calendar


    Join us for a presentation by , Prof. Malancha Gupta, Associate Professor, Mork Family Department of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science at the University of Southern California, titled "Functional Polymer Films."

    Location: Henry Salvatori Computer Science Center (SAL) - 101

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Ramon Borunda/Academic Services

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  • Mork Family Department Graduate Seminar

    Fri, Apr 14, 2017 @ 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM

    Mork Family Department of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Dr. Morgan Trassin, Department of Materials, ETH Zurich, Switzerland.

    Talk Title: Monitoring the emergence of polarization in ferroelectric oxide heterostructures

    Host: Dr. Jayakanth Ravichandran

    Location: Hedco Pertroleum and Chemical Engineering Building (HED) - 116

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Aleessa Atienza

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  • AI Seminar

    Fri, Apr 14, 2017 @ 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM

    Information Sciences Institute

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Wei Wang, UCLA

    Talk Title: Big Data Analytics in Science

    Abstract: Big data analytics is the process of examining large amounts of data of a variety of types (big data) to uncover hidden patterns, unknown correlations, and other useful information. Its revolutionary potential is now universally recognized. Data complexity, heterogeneity, scale, and timeliness make data analysis a clear bottleneck in many biomedical applications, due to the complexity of the patterns and lack of scalability of the underlying algorithms. Advanced machine learning and data mining algorithms are being developed to address one or more challenges listed above. It is typical that the complexity of potential patterns may grow exponentially with respect to the data complexity, and so is the size of the pattern space. To avoid an exhaustive search through the pattern space, machine learning and data mining algorithms usually employ a greedy approach to search for a local optimum in the solution space or use a branch-and-bound approach to seeking optimal solutions, and consequently, are often implemented as iterative or recursive procedures. To improve efficiency, these algorithms often exploit the dependencies between potential patterns to maximize in-memory computation and/or leverage special hardware for acceleration. These lead to strong data dependency, operation dependency, and hardware dependency, and sometimes ad hoc solutions that cannot be generalized to a broader scope. In this talk, I will present some open challenges faced by data scientist in biomedical fields and the current approaches taken to tackle these challenges.

    Biography: California, Los Angeles and the director of the Scalable Analytics Institute (ScAi). She received her Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from the University of California, Los Angeles in 1999. She was a professor in Computer Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill from 2002 to 2012 and was a research staff member at the IBM T. J. Watson Research Center between 1999 and 2002. Dr. Wang's research interests include big data analytics, data mining, bioinformatics and computational biology, and databases. She has filed seven patents and has published one monograph and more than one hundred seventy research papers in international journals and major peer-reviewed conference proceedings.
    Dr. Wang received the IBM Invention Achievement Awards in 2000 and 2001. She was the recipient of an NSF Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Award in 2005. She was named a Microsoft Research New Faculty Fellow in 2005. She was honored with the 2007 Phillip and Ruth Hettleman Prize for Artistic and Scholarly Achievement at UNC. She was recognized with an IEEE ICDM Outstanding Service Award in 2012, an Okawa Foundation Research Award in 2013, and an ACM SIGKDD Service Award in 2016. Dr. Wang has been an associate editor of the IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering, IEEE Transactions on Big Data, ACM Transactions on Knowledge Discovery in Data, Journal of Knowledge and Information Systems, Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery, and International Journal of Knowledge Discovery in Bioinformatics. She serves on the organization and program committees of international conferences including ACM SIGMOD, ACM SIGKDD, ACM BCB, VLDB, ICDE, EDBT, ACM CIKM, IEEE ICDM, SIAM DM, SSDBM, RECOMB, BIBM. She was elected to the Board of Directors of the ACM Special Interest Group on Bioinformatics, Computational Biology, and Biomedical Informatics (SIGBio) in 2015.


    Host: Mayank Kejriwal

    More Info: http://webcastermshd.isi.edu/Mediasite/Play/6660ae1a19c74378b4e0db116f3413291d

    Location: Information Science Institute (ISI) - 11th floor large conference room

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Kary LAU

    Event Link: http://webcastermshd.isi.edu/Mediasite/Play/6660ae1a19c74378b4e0db116f3413291d

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  • Jelena Vuckovic - Munushian Seminar, Friday, April 14th at 2:00pm in EEB 132

    Fri, Apr 14, 2017 @ 02:00 PM - 03:30 PM

    Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Jelena Vuckovic, Stanford University

    Talk Title: Quantum Nanophotonics

    Abstract: Nanophotonic structures that localize photons in sub-wavelength volumes are possible today thanks to modern nanofabrication and optical design techniques. Such structures enable studies of new regimes of light-matter interaction, quantum and nonlinear optics, and new applications in computing, communications, and sensing. While the traditional quantum nanophotonics platform is based on quantum dots inside photonic crystal cavities, recently a lot of progress has been made on systems consisting of color centers in diamond and silicon carbide, which could potentially bring these experiments to room temperature and facilitate scaling to large networks of resonators and emitters. Moreover, the use of inverse nanophotonic design methods, that can efficiently perform physics-guided search through the full parameter space, leads to optical devices with properties superior to state of the art, including smaller footprints, better field localization, and novel functionalities.

    Biography: Jelena Vuckovic (PhD Caltech 2002) has been a faculty at Stanford since 2003, where she is currently a Professor of Electrical Engineering and by courtesy of Applied Physics, and where she leads the Nanoscale and Quantum Photonics Lab. She has also held visiting positions at the Humboldt University in Berlin, Germany, and the Technical University in Munich, Germany. Vuckovic is a recipient of numerous awards, including the Humboldt Prize, the Hans Fischer Senior Fellowship, and the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE). She is a Fellow of the American Physical Society (APS) and of the Optical Society of America (OSA), and a member of the scientific advisory board of the Max Planck Institute for Quantum Optics (MPQ) in Munich, Germany.

    Host: EE-Electrophysics

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

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Marilyn Poplawski

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  • Seminars in Biomedical Engineering

    Fri, Apr 14, 2017 @ 02:30 PM - 04:30 PM

    Alfred E. Mann Department of Biomedical Engineering

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: NO SEMINAR DUE TO GRODINS SYMPOSIUM, NO SEMINAR DUE TO GRODINS SYMPOSIUM

    Talk Title: NO SEMINAR DUE TO GRODINS SYMPOSIUM

    Series: Seminars in BME (Lab Rotations)

    Host: Brent Liu, PhD

    Location: Corwin D. Denney Research Center (DRB) - 146

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Mischalgrace Diasanta

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  • NL Seminar- Why is it harder to build a tic tac toe playing robot than a tic tac toe playing program?

    Fri, Apr 14, 2017 @ 03:00 PM - 04:00 PM

    Information Sciences Institute

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Kevin Knight, USC/ISI

    Talk Title: Why is it harder to build a tic tac toe playing robot than a tic tac toe playing program?

    Series: Natural Language Seminar

    Abstract: I wanted to understand why it's so hard to build working robots, so I programmed one to play tic tac toe. Now I understand a lot better! I thought I'd relate my experience right now, just in case I later become more knowledgeable and impossible to understand.



    Biography: Kevin Knight is a Research Director at the Information Sciences Institute ISI of the University of Southern California USC, and a Professor in the USC Computer Science Department. He received a PhD in computer science from Carnegie Mellon University and a bachelors degree from Harvard University. Dr. Knights research interests include statistical machine translation, natural language generation, automata theory, and decipherment of historical manuscripts.

    Host: Marjan Ghazvininejad

    More Info: http://nlg.isi.edu/nl-seminar/

    Location: Information Science Institute (ISI) - 11th Flr Conf Rm # 1135, Marina Del Rey

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Peter Zamar

    Event Link: http://nlg.isi.edu/nl-seminar/

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  • Astani Civil and Environmental Engineering Ph.D. Seminar

    Fri, Apr 14, 2017 @ 03:00 PM - 04:00 PM

    Sonny Astani Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Yamrot Amha and Qian Feng, Astani CEE Graduate Students

    Talk Title: Elucidating Microbial Community Adaptation to Anaerobic Co-digestion of Fats, Oils, and Grease and Food Waste and Optimal Clipped Linear Strategies for Controllable Damping

    Location: John Stauffer Science Lecture Hall (SLH) - 102

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Evangeline Reyes

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  • Mork Family Department Graduate Seminar

    Mon, Apr 17, 2017 @ 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM

    Mork Family Department of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Kedar Hippalgaonkar, Institute of Materials Research and Engineering, Agency for Science Technology and Research

    Talk Title: Electron and Phonon Transport in 1D and 2D Materials Towards Applications in Thermoelectrics

    Host: Dr. Jayakanth Ravichandran

    Location: Hedco Pertroleum and Chemical Engineering Building (HED) - 116

    Audiences: Department Only

    Contact: Aleessa Atienza

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  • Crafting an Elevator Pitch That Will Leave a Lasting Impression

    Mon, Apr 17, 2017 @ 12:00 PM - 01:30 PM

    Viterbi School of Engineering Career Connections

    Workshops & Infosessions


    It can be tough to feel comfortable promoting yourself to others, but in the U.S. job market, it is a necessity. In this workshop with American Language Institute Senior Lecturer Kimberley Briesch Sumner, you will learn how to craft your own pitch, practice it with others, and prepare yourself to tell potential employers what makes YOU the right candidate for the job.

    Click here to RSVP

    Location: Mark Taper Hall Of Humanities (THH) - 201

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Lilian Barajas

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  • Seminars in Biomedical Engineering

    Mon, Apr 17, 2017 @ 12:30 PM - 01:50 PM

    Alfred E. Mann Department of Biomedical Engineering

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Rich Roberts, PhD, Dept. Chair, USC Chemical Engineering & Materials Science

    Talk Title: 20 years of mRNA Display for Peptide and Protein Design

    Host: Qifa Zhou

    Location: Olin Hall of Engineering (OHE) - 122

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Mischalgrace Diasanta

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  • PTE Seminar

    Mon, Apr 17, 2017 @ 12:50 PM - 01:50 PM

    Mork Family Department of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Rafael Moraes, Reservoir Simulation Engineer, Petrobras Research & Development Center

    Talk Title: Improving the Computational Efficiency of Approximate Gradients Using a MultiScale Reservoir Simulation Framework

    Host: Dr. Behnam Jafarpour

    Location: Thomas & Dorothy Leavey Library (LVL) - 17

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Aleessa Atienza

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  • Professional Licensure Presentation: More on the FE & PE Exams

    Mon, Apr 17, 2017 @ 06:30 PM - 07:30 PM

    Viterbi School of Engineering Career Connections

    Workshops & Infosessions


    Are you interested in learning more about Professional Licensure. Do you have questions about the FE or PE exams? Then attend this session to learn more! Michael Incledon, PE, PLS, LEED AP, from the Speakers Link Program from the National Council of Examiners for Engineering and Surveying will be presenting.

    Location: Ronald Tutor Hall of Engineering (RTH) - 211

    Audiences: All Viterbi Students

    Contact: RTH 218 Viterbi Career Connections

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  • Scope USC: Demo Night 2017

    Mon, Apr 17, 2017 @ 07:30 PM - 11:00 PM

    Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science

    Student Activity


    After a productive spring learning full-stack web dev, the Scope squad is wrapping up the semester with Demo Night. Come at 7:30pm on Monday, April 17 to demo web applications Scope members have built to make your life better. Join CEOs and CTOs of local LA startups, who have had their eyes on Scope since we started last fall, in meeting the members behind the code that will change how you experience USC. Rumor has it that there will be -cookies and refreshments- so find out for yourself at 7:30PM on Monday, April 17 in ACC 310!

    RSVP: https://goo.gl/2tzhwX

    http://scopeusc.com/
    https://www.facebook.com/scopeusc/
    https://www.instagram.com/scope_usc/

    Location: Elaine & Kenneth Leventhal School Of Accounting (ACC) - 310

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Ryan Rozan

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  • PhD Defense - Rongqi Qiu

    Tue, Apr 18, 2017 @ 10:00 AM - 12:00 PM

    Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science

    University Calendar


    PhD Candidate: Rongqi Qiu

    Committee: Ulrich Neumann (CS, chair), Panayiotis Georgiou (EE), Aiichiro Nakano (CS)

    Title: Geometric Modeling and Shape Analysis of 3D Point Clouds

    Time: April 18 (Tuesday) 10-12pm

    Room: SAL 322

    Abstract:

    Automatic reconstruction of large-scale scenes from 3D point clouds has been a complex problem. It can be decomposed into two sub-problems, namely, primitives and parts. While primitives are regular geometric shapes, parts are relatively irregular and isolated objects.

    In primitive reconstruction, two systems under different scenarios are presented. The first one reconstructs pipe-runs from industrial site point clouds. The key idea is that by adopting statistical analysis over point normals, global similarities are discovered from raw data to guide primitive fitting, thus increasing robustness. The second system extracts pole-like objects from urban point clouds and posed multi-view images. The presented method takes advantage of the complementary information from 3D point clouds and 2D posed images to recover these objects.

    In part reconstruction, a modeling-by-recognition strategy is followed. Instead of directly meshing on a noisy scan, a similar object is retrieved from a pre-defined CAD model library. Then, geometric analysis is applied on the query and template point cloud to accomplish two tasks. The first one is to compute dense correspondences between query and template objects, thus making it possible to transfer real-world color to template models. The method segments both point clouds into parts consistently and then computes part-level correspondences. The dense mapping allows color or other parameter transfers. The second task is to segment an object into functional parts using a small set of pre-segmented template objects as examples. The main idea is to seek partial matches and transfer segmentation labels from examples to the input object. The resulting segmentation is a key step towards shape understanding.

    Location: Henry Salvatori Computer Science Center (SAL) - 322

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Lizsl De Leon

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  • USC Stem Cell Seminar: Catriona Jamieson, University of California, San Diego

    Tue, Apr 18, 2017 @ 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM

    Alfred E. Mann Department of Biomedical Engineering

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Catriona Jamieson, University of California, San Diego

    Talk Title: TBD

    Series: Eli and Edythe Broad Center for Regenerative Medicine and Stem Cell Research at USC Distinguished Speakers Series

    Host: USC Stem Cell

    More Info: http://stemcell.usc.edu/events

    Webcast: http://keckmedia.usc.edu/stem-cell-seminar

    Location: Eli & Edythe Broad CIRM Center for Regenerative Medicine & Stem Cell Resch. (BCC) - First Floor Conference Room

    WebCast Link: http://keckmedia.usc.edu/stem-cell-seminar

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Cristy Lytal/USC Stem Cell

    Event Link: http://stemcell.usc.edu/events

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  • PhD Defense - Xinran He

    Tue, Apr 18, 2017 @ 01:00 PM - 03:00 PM

    Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science

    University Calendar


    Phd Candidate: Xinran He

    Committee:
    Yan Liu (chair)
    David Kempe
    Kristina Lerman
    Thomas Valente

    Date/Time: April 18th 1-3pm

    Room: PHE 223

    Title Understanding Diffusion Processes: Inference and Theory

    Abstract:

    Nowadays online social networks have become a ubiquitous tool for people's social communications. Analyzing these social networks offers great potential to shed light on the human social structure, and create better channels to enable social communications and collaborations. While most social analysis tasks begin with extracting or learning the social network and the associated parameters, it remains a very challenging task due to the amorphous nature of social ties and the noise and incompleteness in the observations. As a result, the inferred social network is likely to be of low accuracy and high level of noise which impacts the performance of analysis and applications depending on the inferred parameters.

    In this thesis, we study the following important questions with a special focus on analyzing diffusion behaviors in social networks to achieve real practicality: (1) How to utilize special properties of social networks to improve the accuracy of the extracted network under noisy and missing data? (2) How to characterize the impact of noise in the inferred network and carry out robust analysis and optimization?

    To address the first challenge towards accurate network inference, we tackle the issue of mitigating the impact of incomplete observations with a focus on learning influence function from incomplete observations. To address the challenge of data scarcity in inferring diffusion networks, we propose a hierarchical graphical model to jointly infer multiple diffusion networks accurately. To utilize the rich content information in cascades, we propose the HawkesTopic model to analyze text-based cascades by combining temporal and content information.

    To address the second challenge towards designing robust Influence Maximization algorithms, we first propose a framework to measure the stability of Influence Maximization with the Perturbation Interval Model to characterize the noise in the inferred diffusion network. We then design an efficient algorithm for Robust Influence Maximization to find influential users robust in multiple diffusion settings.

    Location: Charles Lee Powell Hall (PHE) - 223

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Lizsl De Leon

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  • Best Dissertation Symposium

    Tue, Apr 18, 2017 @ 03:00 PM - 04:30 PM

    Viterbi School of Engineering Doctoral Programs

    Receptions & Special Events


    Each year, the Viterbi School of Engineering's academic departments awards PhD candidates who submitted exceptional research dissertations the honor of Best Dissertation. Each PhD student who receives the Best Dissertation award will also be nominated to compete for the William F. Ballhaus, Jr. Prize for Excellence in Graduate Engineering Research. A faculty committee will review the dissertations, then narrow down the nominees to three finalists. The finalists will be invited to present their research at the Best Dissertation Symposium on April 18, 2017. From these nominees, a final winner will be selected.

    RSVP requested via https://gapp.usc.edu/events/best-dissertation-symposium by April 17, 2017.

    More information can be found at https://gapp.usc.edu/students/doctoral-students/awards/best-dissertation-symposium

    Location: Ronald Tutor Hall of Engineering (RTH) - 526

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Jennifer Gerson

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  • Epstein Seminar, ISE 651

    Tue, Apr 18, 2017 @ 03:30 PM - 04:50 PM

    Daniel J. Epstein Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Dr. Mark Brown, Professor, Columbia University

    Talk Title: Taylor's Law via Ratios, for Some Distributions with Infinite Mean

    Host: Prof. Sheldon Ross

    More Information: April 18, 2017_Brown.pdf

    Location: Ethel Percy Andrus Gerontology Center (GER) - 206

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Grace Owh

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  • Professional Licensure Presentation: More on the FE & PE Exams

    Tue, Apr 18, 2017 @ 05:00 PM - 06:00 PM

    Viterbi School of Engineering Career Connections

    Workshops & Infosessions


    Are you interested in learning more about Professional Licensure. Do you have questions about the FE or PE exams? Then attend this session to learn more! Mike Donelson, PE, and Susan Christ, PE, both Senior Registrars for Engineering from the Board for Professional Engineers, Land Surveyors and Geologists will be presenting.

    More Information: ProfLicensurePresBrochure.pdf

    Location: Ronald Tutor Hall of Engineering (RTH) - 211

    Audiences: All Viterbi

    Contact: RTH 218 Viterbi Career Connections

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  • PhD Defense- Koki Nagano

    Wed, Apr 19, 2017 @ 10:30 AM - 12:30 PM

    Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science

    University Calendar


    PhD Candidate: Koki Nagano

    Committee: Paul Debevec (CS, chair), Hao Li (CS), Jernej Barbic (CS), Aiichiro Nakano (CS), Michelle Povinelli (EE)

    Title: Multi-scale Dynamic Capture for High Quality Digital Humans

    Time: April 19 (Wednesday) 10:30-12:30pm

    Room: KAP 164

    Abstract:

    Digitally creating a virtual human indistinguishable from a real human has been one of the central goals of Computer Graphics, Human-Computer Interaction, and Artificial Intelligence. Such digital characters are not only the primary creative vessel for immersive storytellers and filmmakers, but also a key technology to understand the process of how humans think, see, and communicate in the social environment. In order for digital character creation techniques to be valuable in simulating and understanding humans, the hardest challenge is for them to appear believably realistic from any point of view in any environment, and to behave and interact in a convincing manner.

    Creating a photorealistic rendering of a digital avatar is increasingly more accessible due to rapid advancement in sensing technologies and rendering techniques. However, generating realistic movement and dynamic details that are compatible with such a photorealistic appearance still relies on manual work from experts, which hinders the potential impact of digital avatar technologies in real world applications. Generating dynamic details is especially important for facial animation, as humans are extremely tuned to sense people's intentions from facial expressions.

    In this dissertation, we propose systems and approaches for capturing the appearance and motion to reproduce high fidelity digital avatars that are rich in subtle motion and appearance details. We aim for a framework which can generate consistent dynamic detail and motion at the resolution of skin pores and fine wrinkles, and can provide extremely high resolution microstructure deformation for use in cinematic storytelling or immersive virtual reality environments.

    This thesis presents three principal techniques for achieving multi-scale dynamic capture for digital humans. The first is a multi-view capture system and a stereo reconstruction technique which directly produces a complete high-fidelity head model with consistent facial mesh topology. Our method jointly solves for stereo constraints and consistent mesh parameterization from static scans or a dynamic performance, producing dense correspondences on an artist quality template. Additionally, we propose a technique to add dynamic per-frame high and middle frequency details from the flat-lit performance video. Second, we propose a technique to estimate high fidelity 3D scene flow from multiview video. The motion estimation fully respects high quality data from multiview input, and can be incorporated to any facial performance capture pipeline to improve the fidelity of the facial motion. Since the motion can be estimated without relying on any domain-specific priors or regularization, our method scales well to modern systems with many high-resolution cameras. Third, we present a technique to synthesize dynamic skin microstructure details to produce convincing facial animation. We measure and quantify how skin microstructure deformation contributes to dynamic skin appearance, and present an efficient way to simulate dynamic skin microstructure. When combined with the state-of-the art performance capture and face scanning techniques, it can significantly improve the realism of animated faces for virtual reality, video games, and visual effects.

    Location: Kaprielian Hall (KAP) - 164

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Lizsl De Leon

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  • Computer Science General Faculty Meeting

    Wed, Apr 19, 2017 @ 12:00 PM - 02:00 PM

    Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science

    Receptions & Special Events


    Bi-Weekly regular faculty meeting for invited full-time Computer Science faculty only. Event details emailed directly to attendees.

    Location TBD.

    Audiences: Invited Faculty Only

    Contact: Assistant to CS chair

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  • Aerospace & Mechanical Engineering Seminar

    Wed, Apr 19, 2017 @ 03:30 PM - 04:30 PM

    Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Ilenia Battiato, Assistant Professor of Energy Resources Engineering at Stanford University

    Talk Title: Transport Phenomena over Patterned Surfaces

    Abstract: Coupled flows over patterned surfaces occur in a variety of natural phenomena, biological systems and industrial processes. Some example includes bioreactors, micro- and nano-patterned water filtration membranes, superhydrophobic ridges surfaces, and submerged vegetation, just to mention a few. Designing and optimizing the topology of the structure to achieve target performance at the system-scale (or macroscale) is still an open question since fully resolved numerical simulations are too prohibitive when a great disparity of scales between the pattern and the device exists. By treating the patterned surface as a permeable layer, we formulate a system of coupled Navier-Stokes/Brinkman equations, which is amenable of analytical solution for the mean filtration velocity inside the pattern, and allows one to uncover and quantify the relationship between microstructure and macroscopic response. We employ this effective-medium framework to model a number of physical systems including channel turbulent flows over arrays of carbon nanotubes, superhydrophobic ridged surfaces, and submerged vegetation. We finally investigate the appropriateness of treating the pattern as a porous medium by conducting experiments in microfluidic channels with controlled microtexture.

    Biography: Dr. Battiato received her MSc. In Engineering Physics in 2008 and a Ph.D. in Engineering Science with a specialization in Computational Sciences from the Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering department at the University of California San Diego in 2010. She did her postdoctoral training in Theoretical Physics at the Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organization in Goettingen, Germany. In 2012 she joined the Mechanical Engineering Department at Clemson University as assistant professor and then in 2014 the Mechanical Engineering Department at SDSU. In 2016, she moved to the department of Energy Resources Engineering at Stanford University. Her research interests lie in theoretical/computational fluid mechanics and transport processes in porous media, multiscale and hybrid computational methods, effective medium theories, and multiphase flows. In 2015 she was awarded of the Department of Energy Young Investigator award in Basic Energy Sciences for her work on multiscale models of reactive transport in the subsurface.

    Host: Department of Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering

    More Info: https://ame.usc.edu/about/seminars/

    Location: Seaver Science Library (SSL) - 150

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Ashleen Knutsen

    Event Link: https://ame.usc.edu/about/seminars/

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  • CS Colloquium: Satish Chandra (Facebook) - Formula-Based Software Debugging

    Thu, Apr 20, 2017 @ 11:00 AM - 12:20 PM

    Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Satish Chandra , Facebook

    Talk Title: Formula-Based Software Debugging

    Series: CS Colloquium

    Abstract: This lecture satisfies requirements for CSCI 591: Computer Science Research Colloquium.

    Software often ships with known defects because fixing bugs requires expensive developer time. With the availability of virtually unlimited compute power, an interesting question is whether the burden of fixing bugs can be shifted, at least in part, from the human to the machine. This question has, of late, attracted significant activity in the software engineering and programming language communities. In this talk, I will discuss recent techniques that have been proposed towards this goal. My main focus will be on techniques that draw on the power of SMT (satisfiability modulo theories) solvers, i.e. engines that crunch first-order logic formulae.

    Time permitting, I will also talk about my experiences with tech transfer at industrial research labs.

    Biography: Satish Chandra obtained a PhD from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1997, and a B.Tech from the Indian Institute of Technology-Kanpur in 1991, both in computer science. From 1997 to 2002, he was a member of technical staff at Bell Laboratories, where his research focused on program analysis, domain-specific languages, and data-communication protocols. From 2002 to 2013, he was a research staff member at IBM Research, where his research focused on bug finding and verification, software synthesis, and test automation.
    From 2013 to 2016, he worked at Samsung Research America, where he led the advanced programming tools research team. In 2016, he started working at Facebook. He is an ACM Distinguished Scientist.

    Host: CS Department

    Location: Ronald Tutor Hall of Engineering (RTH) - 217

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Assistant to CS chair

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  • PhD Defense- Hongyi Xu

    Thu, Apr 20, 2017 @ 12:00 PM - 02:00 PM

    Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science

    University Calendar


    PhD Candidate: Hongyi Xu

    Title: Interactive Material and Damping Design.

    Date: 04/20/17
    Time: 12-2pm
    Location: SAL 213

    Committee:

    Jernej Barbic (Chair)
    Hao Li
    Yong Chen (Outside)

    Abstract:

    Finite Element Method (FEM) has been widely used for simulations of three-dimensional deformable objects. To produce compelling and artist-controllable FEM dynamics, the choices of material elasticity and damping properties are critically important. This thesis presents an intuitive and interactive design method to explore the high-dimensional space of material and damping for use in FEM simulations in computer graphics, animation and related fields.

    This thesis first demonstrates how to intuitively explore the space of isotropic and anisotropic nonlinear materials, for design of FEM animations. Previous applications of nonlinear solid elasticity employed materials from a few standard families such as linear corotational, nonlinear St.Venant-Kirchhoff and Neo-Hookean material. However, the spaces of all nonlinear isotropic and anisotropic materials are infinite-dimensional and much broader than these standard materials. We simplify this infinite-dimensional material space with the Valansis-Landel hypothesis and demonstrate how to easily design arbitrary isotropic and anisotropic nonlinear elasticity with local control, using a spline interface. Our materials accelerate simulation design and enable visual effects that are difficult or impossible to achieve with standard nonlinear materials.

    Material properties may vary across the volume of the object, producing heterogeneous deformable behaviors. My thesis presents an interactive inverse method to design heterogeneous material distributions, which conform to prescribed displacements and internal elastic forces at a few selected positions. However, this optimization problem is high-dimensional and solving it in the full space is not practical for interactive design. We demonstrate scalability to complex examples using a novel model reduction of the material space, which accelerates the optimization by two orders of magnitude and makes the convergence much more robust.

    FEM dynamics is largely affected also by the damping properties, in addition to elasticity. This thesis gives a damping design method and interface whereby the user can set the damping properties so that motion aligned with each of a few chosen example deformations is damped by an independent user-prescribed amount, achieving anisotropic damping effects. Similar to our spline-based elasticity, we also achieve nonlinear damping that depends on the example deformation magnitudes, by editing a single spline curve for each example. The nonlinear damping curves can also be automatically inferred from high-level user inputs, such as the amount of amplitude loss in one oscillation cycle. Our method enables an artist-directable and intuitive approach to controlling nonlinear and anisotropic damping, which can generate effects not possible with previous methods and better capture real-world damping dynamics


    Location: Henry Salvatori Computer Science Center (SAL) - 213

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Lizsl De Leon

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  • IISE Spring Banquet

    Thu, Apr 20, 2017 @ 05:00 PM - 08:00 PM

    Daniel J. Epstein Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering

    Receptions & Special Events


    The Industrial and Systems Engineering Annual Banquet will take place on Thursday, April 20th from 5-8pm.

    The banquet will feature keynote speaker Dr. Carol Peden, a professor of Anesthesiology and Executive Director of the USC Center for Health System Innovation. Dr. Peden has led numerous quality improvement projects internationally and continues to show commitment to augmenting efficiency in healthcare systems.

    To RSVP and submit $20 for admission, please contact Grace Owh in GER 240 by Friday, April 14th.

    More Information: ISE Banquet 2017 flyer.pdf

    Location: Town & Gown (TGF) -

    Audiences: By RSVP

    Contact: Grace Owh

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  • AI Seminar

    Fri, Apr 21, 2017 @ 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM

    Information Sciences Institute

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Homa Hosseinmardi , Danaher Corporation

    Talk Title: Multimodal Labeling and Characterization of Social Network Data for Detection/Prediction of Cyberbullying

    Abstract: One of the most pressing problems in high schools is bullying. However, with todays online and mobile technologies, bullying is moving beyond the schoolyards via cell phones, social networks, online text, videos, and images. As bad as fighting and bullying were before the internet age, the recording and posting of hurtful content online have magnified the harmful reach of bullying, enabling it 24 7. Cyberbullying is a growing problem and incidents of cyberbullying with extreme consequences such as suicide are routinely reported in popular press now. This talk provides insights into the problem of cyberbullying in social networks by investigating profanity usage, ground truth labeling of cyberbullying, and characterization of relationships between cyberbullying and a variety of factors, including linguistic content, social graph features, temporal commenting behavior, and multimedia modality. It also looks at the propagation of cyberbullying behavior in a social network, and prediction of victims of such behavior.



    Biography: Homa Hosseinmardi holds PhD in Computer Science from the University of Colorado Boulder. She joined Danaher Corporation in 2015 as Data Scientist at Danaher Labs. She also contributes as a researcher at the CU CyberSafety Research Center. Hosseinmardis interests lie in the area of computational social science and data mining. She is particularly interested in the use of large scale datasets and machine learning techniques to study problems with internet safety, misbehavior and cyberbullying. Her recent work has focused on studying triggers of cyberaggressive behaviors. Her past work also addressed various questions toward understanding cyberbullying in online social networks.

    Host: Emilio Ferrara

    Location: 11th floor large conference room

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Kary LAU

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  • Saviynt Drop In Hours- Tech Task

    Fri, Apr 21, 2017 @ 12:00 PM - 04:00 PM

    Viterbi School of Engineering Career Connections

    Workshops & Infosessions


    Open to Undergraduate and Graduate Students

    Please bring a hard copy of your resume and your laptop. A brief tech task will be given during your drop in to assess your coding experience. Successful students may be asked to schedule an interview for one of the 5 open positions in Los Angeles and/or 5 open positions in Atlanta.

    Saviynt is next-generation company in the IT Security domain specializing in Identity and Access Governance. An innovative company that has and is disrupting the current solution space, which has been stagnant for a decade, with forward looking concepts encompassing enterprise, Cloud and collaboration platform security.

    A company where career is not tenure based, cherishes innovation, drive and ownership of our employees; a culture that nurtures and instills responsibility and rewards performance with rapid career progression. If you have what it takes to be part of this dynamic organization please join our company information session.

    Location: Ronald Tutor Hall of Engineering (RTH) - 109

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Lilian Barajas

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  • Ming Hsieh Institute Seminar Series on Integrated Systems

    Fri, Apr 21, 2017 @ 02:00 PM - 04:00 PM

    Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Dr. Aaron Buchwald, Senior Technical Director at InPhi Corporation

    Talk Title: Challenges of Time-Interleaved ADCs

    Host: Profs. Hossein Hashemi, Mike Chen, Dina El-Damak, and Mahta Moghaddam

    More Information: MHI Seminar Series IS - Aaron Buchwald.pdf

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

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Jenny Lin

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  • Seminars in Biomedical Engineering

    Fri, Apr 21, 2017 @ 02:30 PM - 04:30 PM

    Alfred E. Mann Department of Biomedical Engineering

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Leonard Morsut, PhD, Assistant Professor, Broad CIRM Center and Dept. of Stem Cell Biology and Regenerative Medicine University of Southern California Keck School of Medicine

    Talk Title: Programming cells to build tissues with synthetic biology molecular tools: a new pathway towards engineering development and regeneration

    Series: Seminars in BME (Lab Rotations)

    Abstract: During embryonic development, complex multicellular tissues form based on genetically encoded algorithms that specify how cells will behave both individually and collectively.

    In the Tissue Development Engineering Laboratory we develop synthetic biology approaches to implement in cells such self-organization programs and understand their overall logic, both for basic understanding and applications in regenerative medicine.

    We have recently engineered and characterized a family of orthogonal cell-cell communication pathways, inspired by the mechanism of an endogenous communication system called Notch, which allows a cell to detect molecular signals from its neighbors and, in response, to induce user-specified transcriptional programs. These synthetic Notch pathways do not crosstalk with native pathways or with each other, thus providing multiple novel channels for engineering cell-cell communication. I will show how we used these synthetic pathways to flexibly construct basic routines for multi-cellular patterning and morphogenesis in mammalian cellular systems, e.g. localized differentiation, spatial patterning and Boolean decisions. Then, using the synthetic pathways in combination with adhesion molecules we designed a series of synthetic morphogenetic programs in 3D spheroids that deterministically drive spatial reorganization and symmetry breaking in a dynamic, self-organized fashion; we show that these trajectories are robust to perturbations and capable of self-regeneration. I will discuss possible applications of these technologies for developmental biology and regenerative medicine research and applications, especially in combination with tissue engineering tools and approaches. With the increasingly sophisticated synthetic biology components available today and the developments of tissue engineering we are going towards the possibility of designing the development of functional tissues in a dish with user-defined high level properties like shape, resistance to injury, regeneration, for the next generation of regenerative medicine applications.


    Biography: http://morsutlab.usc.edu/

    Host: Brent Liu, PhD

    Location: Corwin D. Denney Research Center (DRB) - 146

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Mischalgrace Diasanta

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  • NL Seminar - REINFORCEMENT LEARNING OF NEGOTIATION DIALOGUE POLICIES

    Fri, Apr 21, 2017 @ 03:00 PM - 04:00 PM

    Information Sciences Institute

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Kallirroi Georgila , USC/ICT

    Talk Title: REINFORCEMENT LEARNING OF NEGOTIATION DIALOGUE POLICIES

    Series: Natural Language Seminar

    Abstract: The dialogue policy of a dialogue system decides on what dialogue move also called action, the system should make given the dialogue context also called dialogue state. Building hand crafted dialogue policies is a hard task, and there is no guarantee that the resulting policies will be optimal. This issue has motivated the dialogue community to use statistical methods for automatically learning dialogue policies, the most popular of which is reinforcement learning RL. However, to date, RL has mainly been used to learn dialogue policies in slot filling applications e.g. restaurant recommendation, flight reservation, etc. largely ignoring other more complex genres of dialogue such as negotiation. This talk presents challenges in reinforcement learning of negotiation dialogue policies. The first part of the talk focuses on applying RL to a two party multi issue negotiation domain. Here the main challenges are the very large state and action space, and learning negotiation dialogue policies that can perform well for a variety of negotiation settings, including against interlocutors whose behavior has not been observed before. Good negotiators try to adapt their behaviors based on their interlocutors' behaviors. However, current approaches to using RL for dialogue management assume that the users behavior does not change over time. In the second part of the talk, I will present an experiment that deals with this problem in a resource allocation negotiation scenario.

    Biography: Kallirroi Georgila is a Research Assistant Professor at the Institute for Creative Technologies ICT at the University of Southern California US and at USCs Computer Science Department. Before joining USC ICT in 2009 she was a Research Scientist at the Educational Testing Service ETS and before that a Research Fellow at the School of Informatics at the University of Edinburgh. Her research interests include all aspects of spoken dialogue processing with a focus on reinforcement learning of dialogue policies, expressive conversational speech synthesis, and speech recognition. She has served on the organizing, senior, and program committees of many conferences and workshops. Her research work is funded by the National Science Foundation and the Army Research Office.

    Host: Marjan Ghazvininejad and Kevin Knight

    More Info: http://nlg.isi.edu/nl-seminar/

    Location: Information Science Institute (ISI) - 11th Flr Conf Rm # 1135, Marina Del Rey

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Peter Zamar

    Event Link: http://nlg.isi.edu/nl-seminar/

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  • Lost City: Songs from a Changing Sea

    Fri, Apr 21, 2017 @ 08:00 PM - 11:00 PM

    Sonny Astani Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering

    Receptions & Special Events


    Rabbit Rabbit Radio will present a newly created song cycle inspired by the ocean and the changes it is undergoing due to climate change, overfishing, and pollution.

    A free diver transcends her terrestrial ties and, through song, brings you on a tour of our oceans. Carried by the currents that connect us all, she encounters billions of bioluminescent creatures, the endlessly inventive structures of coral reefs on their annual night of spawning, fields of human detritus, and abandoned nets still fishing for no one. What she finds is at once awe-inspiring and devastating.

    Crafted by veterans of rock, classical, and pop music, and using the most powerful aspects of each, Lost City is a set of songs that navigates a visceral tour through the worlds waterways. Each song frames an aspect of our evolving understanding of the ocean and our relationship to it. Created with the cooperation of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, it is an abstract odyssey that reminds us of both the emotional and ecological significance the sea.

    Conceived of by George Ban-Weiss, and composed by Carla Kihlstedt, Matthias Bossi, and Jeremy Flower. These four are joined in performance by Michael Abraham, Kristin Slipp, and Ariel Parkington.

    Location: Tommy's Place

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Kaela Berry

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  • Seminars in Biomedical Engineering

    Mon, Apr 24, 2017 @ 12:30 PM - 01:50 PM

    Alfred E. Mann Department of Biomedical Engineering

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Arman Nadershahi, AMI, Sr. Director Corporate and Intellectual Property Counsel

    Talk Title: Microbiology with Therapy

    Biography: Mr. Nadershahi serves as Senior Director, Corporate and Intellectual Property Counsel. His expertise includes patent, trademark, and trade-secret protection and licensing; mergers and acquisitions; corporate law; raising capital for start-up companies; FDA regulatory affairs; quality assurance; competitive strategy and planning; product development; technology valuation and commercialization; and leadership.

    Prior to joining AMI-USC, Mr. Nadershahi practiced intellectual property law at Knobbe, Martens, Olson & Bear, LLP, where he focused on patent prosecution, licensing, and intellectual property litigation in the fields of biotechnology, pharmaceuticals, and medical devices. Arman is also a co-founder and the CEO of Proa Medical, Inc., a spinout company from AMI-USC that commercializes medical devices for women's health.

    Mr. Nadershahi is a member of the State Bar of California, is registered to practice before the United States Patent and Trademark Office, has earned US and EU Regulatory Affairs Certification (RAC-US & RAC-EU), is an ASQ Certified Biomedical Auditor (CBA), and is an ASQ Certified Manager of Quality/Organization Excellence (CMQ/OE).

    Mr. Nadershahi graduated with distinction from the University of Wisconsin-Madison with a Bachelor of Arts degree in Zoology and English Literature. He received a Juris Doctor from the University of Minnesota Law School, a Master of Science degree in Biological Science from the University of Minnesota, a Master of Science degree in Regulatory Science from the University of Southern California (USC) School of Pharmacy, and a Master of Business Administration degree from the Marshall School of Business at USC.

    Mr. Nadershahi may be contacted at nadersha AT usc DOT edu.

    Host: Qifa Zhou

    Location: Olin Hall of Engineering (OHE) - 122

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Mischalgrace Diasanta

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  • Center for Cyber-Physical Systems and Internet of Things and Ming Hsieh Institute for Electrical Engineering Joint Seminar Series on Cyber-Physical Systems

    Mon, Apr 24, 2017 @ 02:00 PM - 03:00 PM

    Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Dennice F. Gayme, Assistant Professor, Johns Hopkins University

    Talk Title: Quantifying efficiency and robustness in large-scale networks

    Abstract: Dynamical systems coupled over graphs arise in a number of applications from power grids to vehicle networks. These systems are most often characterized in terms of their stability. However, the performance of these networks is also of great importance as it often corresponds to system efficiency and robustness. In this talk, we discuss a broad class of performance measures for first and second order systems whose outputs are defined so that particular performance metrics can be quantified through the input-output H2 norm of the system. We first present results for systems with the same physical interconnection and communication graph structures. We discuss the effect of graph size and interconnection structure for two applications; characterizing transient real power losses in power grids and evaluating long range disorder in vehicular platoons with both relative and absolute velocity feedback. We then extend our results to vehicular networks with arbitrary physical arrangements and communication structures to demonstrate that our proposed suite of performance measures can be adapted to determine the minimum disturbance energy that is required to cause a collision between any two vehicles. Finally, we further explore the effect of graph structure by considering systems with directed communication graphs.

    Biography: Dennice F. Gayme is an Assistant Professor and the Carol Croft Linde Faculty Scholar in Mechanical Engineering at the Johns Hopkins University. She earned her B. Eng. & Society from McMaster University in 1997 and an M.S. from the University of California at Berkeley in 1998, both in Mechanical Engineering. She received her Ph.D. in Control and Dynamical Systems in 2010 from the California Institute of Technology, where she was a recipient of the P.E.O. scholar award in 2007 and the James Irvine Foundation Graduate Fellowship in 2003. Her research interests are in modeling, analysis and control for spatially distributed and large-scale networked systems in applications such as wall-bounded turbulent flows, wind farms, power grids and vehicular networks. She was a recipient of the JHU Catalyst Award in 2015, a 2017 ONR Young Investigator award, and an NSF CAREER award in 2017.

    Host: Paul Bogdan

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

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Estela Lopez

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  • CS Colloquium Event: Facebook Tech Talk - Query Understanding and Semantic Search

    Mon, Apr 24, 2017 @ 04:00 PM - 05:00 PM

    Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Haixun Wang, Facebook

    Talk Title: Facebook Tech Talk - Query Understanding and Semantic Search

    Series: CS Colloquium

    Abstract: This lecture satisfies requirements for CSCI 591: Research Colloquium.
    Understanding short texts is crucial to many applications, but challenges abound. First, queries do not always observe the syntax of a written language. As a result, traditional natural language processing methods cannot be easily applied. Second, queries usually do not contact in sufficient statistical signals to support many state-of-the-art approaches for text processing such as topic modeling. Third, queries are usually more ambiguous. We argue that knowledge is needed in order to better understand short texts. In this talk, I describe how to use lexical semantic knowledge provided by a well-known semantic network for short text understanding. Our knowledge-intensive approach disrupts traditional methods for tasks such as text segmentation, part-of-speech tagging, and concept labeling, in the sense that we focus on semantics in all the set tasks. We conduct a comprehensive performance evaluation on real-life data. The results show that knowledge is indispensable for short text understanding, and our knowledge-intensive approaches are effective in harvesting semantics of short texts.

    Biography: Haixun Wang is a Research Scientist at Facebook and he manages the Query and Document Understanding team. Before Facebook, he was with Google Research, working on natural language processing. From 2009 to 2013, he led research in semantic search, graph data processing systems, and distributed query processing at Microsoft Research Asia. He had been a research staff member at IBM T. J. Watson Research Center from 2000 -“ 2009. He was Technical Assistant to Stuart Feldman (Vice President of Computer Science of IBM Research) from 2006 to 2007, and Technical Assistant to Mark Wegman (Head of Computer Science of IBM Research) from 2007 to 2009. He received the Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from the University of California, Los Angeles in 2000. He has published more than 150 research papers in referred international journals and conference proceedings. He served PC Chair of conferences such as CIKM'12, and he is on the editorial board of journals such as IEEE Transactions of Knowledge and Data Engineering (TKDE) and Journal of Computer Science and Technology (JCST). He won the best paper award in ICDE 2015, 10 year best paper award in ICDM 2013, and best paper award of ER 2009.

    Host: CS Department

    Location: Mark Taper Hall Of Humanities (THH) - 101

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Assistant to CS chair

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  • LavaLab Demo Night

    Mon, Apr 24, 2017 @ 07:00 PM - 09:00 PM

    Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science

    Student Activity


    LavaLab, the University of Southern California's product incubator, admits the top design, business, and engineering minds to create innovative products over the course of a semester.

    On April 24, the ideas, innovation, and hard work of our seven teams will culminate into product demonstrations at the forefront of student development. Each team comprises of design, business, and engineering students focused on building productive solutions to problems of all kinds. Each has spent the entire semester working with industry experts and customers, refining their products from ideation, to wireframing and prototyping, to implementation.

    Join an audience of tech experts, avid students, and bright minds at LavaLab Demo Night.

    https://www.facebook.com/events/281058385680365/

    Doors open at 6:30pm, pitches begin at 7pm. Light refreshments will be served. Demo time starts at 8pm.

    We're located in the basement of TCC or SKS, in Tommy's Place

    Location: Ronald Tutor Campus Center (TCC) - Tommy's Place

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Ryan Rozan

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  • USC Stem Cell Seminar: Maurizio Pacifici, The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia

    Tue, Apr 25, 2017 @ 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM

    Alfred E. Mann Department of Biomedical Engineering

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Maurizio Pacifici, The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia

    Talk Title: TBD

    Series: Eli and Edythe Broad Center for Regenerative Medicine and Stem Cell Research at USC Distinguished Speakers Series

    Host: USC Stem Cell

    More Info: http://stemcell.usc.edu/events

    Webcast: http://keckmedia.usc.edu/stem-cell-seminar

    Location: Eli & Edythe Broad CIRM Center for Regenerative Medicine & Stem Cell Resch. (BCC) - First Floor Conference Room

    WebCast Link: http://keckmedia.usc.edu/stem-cell-seminar

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Cristy Lytal/USC Stem Cell

    Event Link: http://stemcell.usc.edu/events

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  • CommNetS seminar

    Tue, Apr 25, 2017 @ 02:00 PM - 03:00 PM

    Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Dr. Christian Grussler, Lund University

    Talk Title: Low-Rank Inducing Norms with Optimality Interpretations

    Series: CommNetS

    Abstract: This talk is on optimization problems which are convex apart from a sparsity/rank constraint. These problems are often found in the context of compressed sensing, linear regression, matrix completion, low-rank approximation and many more. Today, one of the most widely used methods for solving these problems is so-called nuclear norm regularization. Despite the nice probabilistic guarantees of this method, this approach often fails for problems with structural constraints.
    In this talk, we will present an alternative by introducing the family of so-called low-rank inducing norms as convexifiers. Each norm is the convex envelope of a unitarily invariant norm plus a rank constraint. Therefore, they have several interesting properties, which will be discussed throughout the talk. They:
    i) Give a simple deterministic test if the solution to the convexified problem is a solution to a specific non-convex problem.
    ii) Often finds solutions where the nuclear norm fails to give low-rank solutions.
    iii) Allow us to analyze the convergence of non-convex proximal splitting algorithms with convex analysis tools.
    iv) Provide a more efficient regularization than the traditional scalar multiplication of the nuclear norm.
    v) Leads to a different interpretation of the nuclear norm than the one that is traditionally presented.
    vi) In particular, all the results can be generalized to so-called atomic norms.


    Biography: Christian Grussler is a postdoc at the Department of Automatic Control at Lund University, Sweden. His current research interests include positive systems, model reduction, system identification and low-rank/sparse optimization. He received a Dipl.-Math. techn. degree (Industrial Mathematics) from TU Kaiserslautern, Germany and an M.Sc. degree (Engineering Mathematics) from Lund University in 2011. In 2017, he received a Ph.D. degree from Lund University under the guidance of Anders Rantzer and Pontus Giselsson.

    Host: Prof. Mihailo Jovanovic

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

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Annie Yu

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  • Epstein Seminar, ISE 651

    Tue, Apr 25, 2017 @ 03:00 PM - 04:50 PM

    Daniel J. Epstein Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Dr. Alper Atamturk, Professor, UC Berkeley

    Talk Title: Combinatorial Optimization with a Probabilistic Objective

    Host: Prof. Suvrajeet Sen

    More Information: April 25, 2017_Atamturk.pdf

    Location: Ethel Percy Andrus Gerontology Center (GER) - 206

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Grace Owh

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  • MHI Emerging Trends Seminar Series

    Wed, Apr 26, 2017 @ 10:00 AM - 11:30 PM

    Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Kai Hwang, Professor, Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical Engineering

    Talk Title: Big-Data Analytics for Cloud Computing in Cognitive Applications

    Series: Emerging Trends

    Abstract: In this talk, Dr. Hwang will address the effective use of big-data analytics on smart clouds, social networks, intelligent robots, and IoT platforms. He will assess machine/deep learning models and available software tools to advance the cognitive service industry represented by Google, Microsoft, Apple, Facebook, Baidu, IBM, Huawei, etc. The ultimate goal is to achieve enhanced agility, mobility, security, and scalability of public clouds, IoT platforms, and social-media networks.

    His talk will assess current AI programs and brain projects pursued by high-tech companies, including Google X-Lab, TensorFlow, DeepMind AlphaGo, Nvidia Digits 5 for using GPU in deep learning, IBM neuromorphic computer, and CAS/ICT Camericon project, etc. Some hidden R/D opportunities are revealed for building smart machines,delivery drones, self-driving cars, blockchains, AR/VR gears, etc. Extended cognitive applications will be discussed for 5G health-care, desease detection, emotion control, and social media community services.

    Biography: Kai Hwang is a Professor of EE/CS at the Univ. of Southern California. He received the Ph.D. from UC Berkeley. He has published extensively in computer architecture, parallel processing, cloud computing, and network security. His latest two books are entitled: Cloud Computing for Machine Learning and Cognitive Applications (The MIT Press, April 2017) and Big Data Analytics for Cloud/IoT and Cognitive Computing (Wiley, U.K, May 2017).

    An IEEE Life Fellow, he received the very-first CFC Outstanding Achievement Award in 2004 and the Lifetime Achievement Award from IEEE Cloud2012 for his pioneering work in parallel computing and distributed systems. Four of his graduated Ph.D. students were elected as IEEE Fellows and one an IBM Fellow. He has delivered four dozens of keynote or distinguished lectures in international Conferences or Research Centers. Dr. Hwang has performed consulting work with IBM, MIT Lincoln Lab, Chinese Academy of Sciences, and INRIA in France. He can be reached via his Email at USC: kaihwang@usc.edu.

    Host: Shri Narayanan

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

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Cathy Huang

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  • MHI Emerging Trends Seminar Series

    Wed, Apr 26, 2017 @ 10:00 AM - 11:30 PM

    Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Kai Hwang, Professor, Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical Engineering

    Talk Title: Big-Data Analytics for Cloud Computing in Cognitive Applications

    Series: Emerging Trends

    Abstract: In this talk, Dr. Hwang will address the effective use of big-data analytics on smart clouds, social networks, intelligent robots, and IoT platforms. He will assess machine/deep learning models and available software tools to advance the cognitive service industry represented by Google, Microsoft, Apple, Facebook, Baidu, IBM, Huawei, etc. The ultimate goal is to achieve enhanced agility, mobility, security, and scalability of public clouds, IoT platforms, and social-media networks.

    His talk will assess current AI programs and brain projects pursued by high-tech companies, including Google X-Lab, TensorFlow, DeepMind AlphaGo, Nvidia Digits 5 for using GPU in deep learning, IBM neuromorphic computer, and CAS/ICT Camericon project, etc. Some hidden R/D opportunities are revealed for building smart machines, delivery drones, self-driving cars, blockchains, AR/VR gears, etc. Extended cognitive applications will be discussed for 5G health-care, disease detection, emotion control, and social media community services.

    Biography: Kai Hwang is a Professor of EE/CS at the Univ. of Southern California. He received his Ph.D. from UC Berkeley. He has published extensively in computer architecture, parallel processing, cloud computing, and network security. His latest two books are entitled: Cloud Computing for Machine Learning and Cognitive Applications (The MIT Press, April 2017) and Big Data Analytics for Cloud/IoT and Cognitive Computing (Wiley, U.K, May 2017).

    An IEEE Life Fellow, he received the very first CFC Outstanding Achievement Award in 2004 and the Lifetime Achievement Award from IEEE Cloud2012 for his pioneering work in parallel computing and distributed systems. Four of his graduated Ph.D. students were elected as IEEE Fellows and one an IBM Fellow. He has delivered dozens of keynote or distinguished lectures in international Conferences or Research Centers. Dr. Hwang has performed consulting work with IBM, MIT Lincoln Lab, the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and INRIA in France. He can be reached via his Email at USC: kaihwang@usc.edu

    Host: Shri Narayanan

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

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Cathy Huang

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  • Computer Science General Faculty Meeting

    Wed, Apr 26, 2017 @ 12:00 PM - 02:00 PM

    Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science

    Receptions & Special Events


    Bi-Weekly regular faculty meeting for invited full-time Computer Science faculty only. Event details emailed directly to attendees.

    Location: Ronald Tutor Hall of Engineering (RTH) - 526

    Audiences: Invited Faculty Only

    Contact: Assistant to CS chair

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  • Aerospace & Mechanical Engineering Laufer Lecture

    Wed, Apr 26, 2017 @ 12:00 PM - 02:00 PM

    Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Clarence W. Rowley, Professor, Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, Princeton University

    Talk Title: Structure, Stability, and Simplicity in Complex Fluid Flows

    Series: John Laufer Keynote Lecture Series

    Abstract: Fluid flows can be extraordinarily complex, and even turbulent, yet often there is structure lying within the apparent complexity. Understanding this structure can help explain observed physical phenomena, and can help with the design of control strategies in situations where one would like to change the natural state of a flow. This talk addresses techniques for obtaining simple, approximate models for fluid flows, using data from simulations or experiments. We discuss a number of methods, including balanced truncation, linear stability theory, and dynamic mode decomposition, and apply them to several flows with complex behavior, including a transitional channel flow, a jet in crossflow, and a T-junction in a pipe.

    Biography: Clancy Rowley is a Professor in the Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering department at Princeton University. He received his undergraduate degree from Princeton in 1995, and his doctoral degree from Caltech in 2001, both in Mechanical Engineering. He returned to Princeton in 2001 as an Assistant Professor and was appointed Associate Professor in 2007, and Full Professor in 2012. He has received several awards, including an NSF CAREER Award and an AFOSR Young Investigator Award. His research interests lie at the intersection of dynamical systems, control theory, and fluid mechanics, and focus on reduced-order models suitable for analysis and control design.

    Host: Department of Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering

    More Info: https://ame.usc.edu/about/seminars/

    Location: Ronald Tutor Campus Center (TCC) - Trojan Ballroom A

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Ashleen Knutsen

    Event Link: https://ame.usc.edu/about/seminars/

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  • MHI CommNetS seminar

    Wed, Apr 26, 2017 @ 02:00 PM - 03:00 PM

    Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Dr. Adam Wierman, Caltech

    Talk Title: Platforms & Networked Markets: Transparency & Market Power

    Series: CommNetS

    Abstract: Platforms have emerged as a powerful economic force, driving both traditional markets, like the electricity market, and emerging markets, like the sharing economy. The power of platforms comes from their ability to tame the complexities of networked marketplaces -- marketplaces where there is not a single centralized market, but instead a network of interconnected markets loosely defined by a graph of feasible exchanges. Despite the power and prominence of platforms, the workings of platforms are often guarded secrets, e.g., we know little about how amazon matches buyers and seller and how uber matches drivers and riders. Further, many competing platforms make very different design choices, but little is understood about the impact of these differing choices. In this talk, I will overview recent work that focuses on reverse engineering the design of platforms and understanding the consequences of design choices underlying modern platforms. I will use electricity markets and ridesharing services as motivating examples throughout the talk.

    Biography: Adam Wierman is a Professor in the Department of Computing and Mathematical Sciences at the California Institute of Technology, where he currently serves as Executive Officer. He is also the director of the Information Science and Technology (IST) initiative at Caltech. He is the founding director of the Rigorous Systems Research Group (RSRG) and co-Director of the Social and Information Sciences Laboratory (SISL). His research interests center around resource allocation and scheduling decisions in computer systems and services. He received the 2011 ACM SIGMETRICS Rising Star award, the 2014 IEEE Communications Society William R. Bennett Prize, and has been coauthor on papers that received of best paper awards at ACM SIGMETRICS, IEEE INFOCOM, IFIP Performance (twice), IEEE Green Computing Conference, IEEE Power & Energy Society General Meeting, and ACM GREENMETRICS. Additionally, he maintains a popular blog called Rigor + Relevance.

    Host: Prof. Insoon Yang

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

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Annie Yu

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  • PhD Defense - Chien-Chun Hung

    Thu, Apr 27, 2017 @ 02:15 AM - 04:15 PM

    Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science

    University Calendar


    PhD Candidate:
    Chien-Chun Hung

    Title:
    Resource Scheduling in Geo-distributed Computing

    Date & Time:
    April 27th, Thursday; 2:15-4:15pm

    Room:
    SAL 322

    Committee:
    Professor Leana Golubchik (advisor)
    Professor Bhaskar Krishnamachari (external member)
    Professor Wyatt Lloyd
    Professor Minlan Yu
    Doctor Ganesh Ananthanarayanan (Microsoft Research)

    Abstract:
    Due to the growing needs in computing and the increasing volume of data, cloud service providers deploy multiple datacenters around the world in order to provide fast computing response. Many applications utilizing such geo-distributed deployment include web search, user behavior analysis, machine learning applications and live camera feeds processing. Depending on the characteristics of the applications, their data may be generated, stored, and processed across the geo-distributed sites. Hence, how to efficiently process the data across the geo-distributed sites has become critical for the applications' performance.

    Existing solutions first aggregate all the required data to one location and execute the computation within the site. Such solutions incur a large amount of data transfer across the WAN and lead to prolonged response time for the applications due to the significant network delay. An emerging trend is to instead distribute the computation across the sites based on data distribution, and aggregate only the results afterward. Recent works have shown such new approach results in an improvement of 3-19X in response time, or 250X in the reduction of WAN bandwidth usage.

    Despite the preliminary gains, the performance of the geo-distributed jobs highly depends on how the resources are scheduled, which raises new challenges as the trivial extensions of state-of-the-art scheduling solutions lead to sub-optimal performance.

    In this thesis, we first take an initiative step for improving the performance of geo-distributed jobs from the perspective of computation resource. We provide the insights into how conventional Shortest Remaining Processing Time (SRPT) falls short due to the lack of scheduling coordination among the sites, and propose a light-weight heuristic that significantly improves the jobs' response time. We also design a new job scheduling heuristic that coordinates the workload demands and the resource availability among the sites, and greedily schedule for the job that can quickly finish.
    The trace-driven simulation studies show that our proposed scheduling heuristics effectively reduce the response time for the geo-distributed jobs by up to 50%.

    Next, we take a step further by addressing the geo-distributed jobs' performance from the perspectives of both the computation and the network resources. Specifically, we address the scheduling challenge of the heterogeneity of the resources availability across the sites and the mismatch of the data distribution across the geo-distributed sites. We formulate the task placement decisions into Linear Programming optimization, and allocate the resources to the job that can finish quickly. In addition to the response time, our design can also nicely incorporate other performance goals, e.g., fairness and WAN usage, with simple control knobs. The EC2-based deployment of our prototype and the large-scale trace-driven simulations showed that our solutions can improve the response time of the baseline in-place scheduling approach by up to 77%, and improve the state-of-the-art geo-distributed analytics solution by up to 55%.

    Finally, we expand to a more general setting in which each job has multiple configuration options, and its quality depends on the configuration it utilizes. We motivate this problem by the scenario of processing live camera feeds across hierarchical clusters. In this setting, we focus on the scheduling problem of jointly deciding job configuration and placement for concurrent jobs, and design efficient heuristic to maximize the overall quality with available resources across the geo-distributed sites. Our evaluation based on the Azure deployment of our prototype showed that the proposed solution outperforms the stat-of-the-art video analytics scheduler by up to $2.3X$, and outperforms the widely deployed Fair Scheduler by up to $15.7X$, in terms of the average quality of the concurrent jobs.


    Location: Henry Salvatori Computer Science Center (SAL) - 322

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Lizsl De Leon

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  • CS Colloquium and RASC seminar: Steven Waslander (University of Waterloo) - Gimballed multi-camera localization and mapping for aerial vehicles

    Thu, Apr 27, 2017 @ 11:00 AM - 12:20 PM

    Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Steven Waslander, University of Waterloo

    Talk Title: Gimballed multi-camera localization and mapping for aerial vehicles

    Series: RASC Seminar Series

    Abstract: This lecture satisfies requirements for CSCI 591: Computer Science Research Colloquium.

    Multi-camera clusters used for visual SLAM assume a fixed calibration between the cameras, which places many limitations on its performance, and directly excludes all configurations where a camera in the cluster is mounted to a moving component. We present a calibration method and SLAM solution for dynamic multi-camera clusters, where one or more of the cluster cameras is mounted to an actuated mechanism, such as a gimbal or robotic manipulator. Our approach parametrizes the actuated mechanism using the Denavit-Hartenberg convention, then determines the calibration parameters which allow for the estimation of the time varying extrinsic transformations between camera frames. We rely on joint encoder data or camera-attached IMU to identify the extrinsic transformations during operation, and are developing active calibration methods to automate the process in the field. We validate our calibration approach using a dynamic camera cluster consisting of a static camera and a camera mounted to a pan-tilt unit as well as on a four-camera system with a single three-axis gimballed unit on a hexacopter aerial vehicle, and demonstrate that dynamic camera clusters can be provide accurate pose tracking when used to perform SLAM.

    Biography: Prof. Steven Waslander is an Associate Professor in the Department of Mechanical and Mechatronics Engineering at the University of Waterloo in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada and director of the Waterloo Autonomous Vehicles Laboratory (WAVELab, http://wavelab.uwaterloo.ca). He received his B.Sc.E.in 1998 from Queen's University, his M.S. in 2002 and his Ph.D. in 2007, both from Stanford University in Aeronautics and Astronautics. He is the Program Co-Chair for the CIPPRS Computer and Robot Vision Conference, the Competition Chair for the IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems and the former General Chair of the International Autonomous Robot Racing competition. His research interests lie in the areas of autonomous aerial and ground vehicles, autonomous driving, simultaneous localization and mapping, quadrotor vehicles, and machine learning. Prof. Waslander currently collaborates with numerous industrial partners, including Aeryon Labs, Clearpath Robotics, Nuvation Engineering, Denso, Renesas Electronics Corp, Qnx, and Applanix, and is a member of the NSERC Canadian Field Robotics Network. He also acts as the academic advisor to the University of Waterloo Robotics Team, which compete in multiple competitions, including the NASA Sample Return Robot Challenge, the Intelligent Ground Vehicle Competition and the University Rover Challenge.

    Host: Gaurav Sukhatme

    Location: Ronald Tutor Hall of Engineering (RTH) - 217

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Assistant to CS chair

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  • Measurement and Analysis of Mobile and Social Networks

    Thu, Apr 27, 2017 @ 11:00 AM - 12:15 PM

    Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Athina Markopoulou, Professor/UC Irvine

    Talk Title: Measurement and Analysis of Mobile and Social Networks

    Abstract: The majority of Internet traffic today is through mobile devices and social media. Large-scale measurement and analysis of these systems is necessary in order to understand underlying patterns and enable engineering optimizations and new applications. In this talk, I will present highlights of our research in this area.

    First, I will discuss online social networks. I will present our "2K+" framework for generating synthetic graphs that resemble online social networks, in terms of joint degree distribution and additional characteristics, such as clustering and node attributes [INFOCOM'13, INFOCOM'15]. This problem was motivated by our prior work on graph sampling [JSAC'11, SIGMETRICS'11, INFOCOM'10] and by popular demand to make the Facebook datasets we collected publicly available.

    Second, I will discuss cellular networks. I will present our work on analyzing Call Detail Records (CDRs) in order to characterize human activity in urban environments, with applications to urban ecology [MOBIHOC'15] and ride-sharing [UBICOMP'14, SIGSPATIAL'15-16].

    Third, I will present our ongoing work on AntMonitor - a system for monitoring network traffic on mobile devices [SIGCOMM C2BID'15], with applications to privacy leaks detection [MOBICOM Demo'15], crowdsourcing of network performance measurements, and improved wireless access.

    Biography: Athina Markopoulou is an Associate Professor in EECS at the University of California, Irvine. She received the Diploma degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the National Technical University of Athens, Greece, in 1996, and the Master's and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University, in 1998 and 2003, respectively. She has held short-term/visiting appointments at SprintLabs (2003), Arista Networks (2005), IT University of Copenhagen (2012-2013), and she co-founded Shoelace Wireless (2012). She has received the NSF CAREER Award (2008), the Henry Samueli School of Engineering Faculty Midcareer Award for Research (2014), and the OCEC Educator Award (2017). She has been an Associate Editor for IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking (2013-2015), an Associate Editor for ACM CCR (2016), the General Co-Chair for ACM CoNEXT 2016, and the Director of the Networked Systems program at UCI. Her research interests are in the area of networking including mobile systems and mobile data analytics, network measurement, online social networks, network security and privacy, network coding, and multimedia traffic.

    Host: Professor Konstantinos Psounis, kpsounis@usc.edu

    More Information: Seminar Announcement - Markopoulou 042717.pdf

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

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Mayumi Thrasher

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  • Le Val Lund Lecture with Student Symposium

    Thu, Apr 27, 2017 @ 01:00 PM - 09:00 PM

    Sonny Astani Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Craig Davis, Technical Speaker and Recipient of the 2016 ASCE Le Val Lund Award for Practicing Lifeline Risk Reduction

    Talk Title: Operationalizing Resilience for Lifeline Systems

    Host: ASCE

    More Information: Final_LeVal Lund_Lecture_save_the_date_v4_27April17.pdf

    Location: California Institute of Technology

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Kaela Berry

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  • PhD Defense

    Thu, Apr 27, 2017 @ 01:00 PM - 03:00 PM

    Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Akshay Gadde, University of Southern California

    Talk Title: Sampling and Filtering of Signals on Graphs with Applications to Active Learning and Image Processing

    Abstract: Processing of signals defined over the nodes of a graph has generated a lot of interest recently. This is due to the emergence of modern application domains such as social networks, web information analysis, sensor networks and machine learning, in which graphs provide a natural representation for the data. Traditional data such as images and videos can also be represented as signals on graphs. A frequency domain representation for graph signals can be obtained using the eigenvectors and eigenvalues of operators which measure the variation in signals taking into account the underlying connectivity in the graph. Spectral filtering can then be defined in this frequency domain. Based on this, we develop a sampling theory for graph signals by answering the following questions: 1. When can we uniquely and stably reconstruct a bandlimited graph signal from its samples on a subset of the nodes? 2. What is the best subset of nodes for sampling a signal so that the resulting bandlimited reconstruction is most stable? 3. How to compute a bandlimited reconstruction efficiently from a subset of samples? The algorithms developed for sampling set selection and reconstruction do not require explicit eigenvalue decomposition of the variation operator and admit efficient, localized implementation. Using graph sampling theory, we propose effective graph based active semi-supervised learning techniques. We also give a probabilistic interpretation for the proposed techniques. Based on this interpretation, we generalize the framework of active learning on graphs using Bayesian methods to give an adaptive sampling method. Additionally, we study the application graph spectral filtering in image processing by representing the image as a graph, where the nodes correspond to the pixels and edge weights capture the similarity between them given by the coefficients of the bilateral filter. We show that the bilateral filter is a low pass graph spectral filter with linearly decaying spectral response. We then generalize the bilateral filter by defining filters on the above graph with different spectral responses depending on the application. We also consider the problem of constructing a sparse graph from the given data efficiently, which can be used in graph based learning and fast image adaptive filtering.


    Biography: Akshay Gadde received his Bachelor of Technology degree in Electrical Engineering from Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Kharagpur, India in 2011. He has been working towards a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering at the University of Southern California (USC), Los Angeles since 2011. His work (with Prof. Antonio Ortega and Aamir Anis) won the Best Student Paper Award at ICASSP 2014. His research interests include graph signal processing and machine learning with applications to multimedia data processing and compression.

    Host: Dr. Antonio Ortega

    More Information: Gadde Seminar Announcement.png

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

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Gloria Halfacre

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  • Computer Architectures for Deep Learning Applications

    Thu, Apr 27, 2017 @ 03:30 PM - 05:30 PM

    Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: David Brooks, Harvard University

    Talk Title: Computer Architectures for Deep Learning Applications

    Abstract: Deep learning has been popularized by its recent successes on challenging artificial intelligence problems. One of the reasons for its dominance is also an ongoing challenge: the need for immense amounts of computational power. Hardware architects have responded by proposing a wide array of promising ideas, but to date, the majority of the work has focused on specific algorithms in somewhat narrow application domains. While their specificity does not diminish these approaches, there is a clear need for more flexible solutions. We believe the first step is to examine the characteristics of cutting edge models from across the deep learning community. Consequently, we have assembled Fathom: a collection of eight archetypal deep learning workloads for study. Each of these models comes from a seminal work in the deep learning community, ranging from the familiar deep convolutional neural network of Krizhevsky et al., to the more exotic memory networks from Facebook's AI research group. Fathom has been released online, and this talk describes the fundamental performance characteristics of each model. We use a set of application-level modeling tools built around the TensorFlow deep learning framework in order to analyze the behavior of the Fathom workloads. We present a breakdown of where time is spent, the similarities between the performance profiles of our models, an analysis of behavior in inference and training, and the effects of parallelism on scaling. The talk will then consider novel computer architectures that can improve the performance and efficiency of deep learning workloads.

    Biography: David Brooks is the Haley Family Professor of Computer Science in the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences at Harvard University. Prior to joining Harvard, he was a research staff member at IBM T.J. Watson Research Center. Prof. Brooks received his BS in Electrical Engineering at the University of Southern California and MA and PhD degrees in Electrical Engineering at Princeton University. His research interests include resilient and power-efficient computer hardware and software design for high-performance and embedded systems. Prof. Brooks is a Fellow of the IEEE and has received several honors and awards including the ACM Maurice Wilkes Award, ISCA Influential Paper Award, NSF CAREER award, IBM Faculty Partnership Award, and DARPA Young Faculty Award.

    Host: Xuehai Qian, x04459, xuehai.qian@usc.edu

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

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Gerrielyn Ramos

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  • CS & ML Colloquium: Matus Telgarsky (UIUC) - Representation power of neural networks

    Thu, Apr 27, 2017 @ 04:00 PM - 05:00 PM

    Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Matus Telgarsky, UIUC

    Talk Title: Representation power of neural networks

    Series: Yahoo! Labs Machine Learning Seminar Series

    Abstract: This lecture satisfies requirements for CSCI 591: Computer Science Research Colloquium.

    This talk will present a series of mathematical vignettes on the representation power of neural networks. Amongst old results, the classical universal approximation theorem will be presented, along with Kolmogorov's superposition theorem. Recent results will include depth hierarchies (for any choice of depth, there exists functions which can only be approximated by slightly less deep networks when they have exponential size), connections to polynomials (namely, rational functions and neural networks well-approximate each other), and the power of recurrent networks. Open problems will be sprinkled throughout.

    Biography: Matus Telgarsky is an assistant professor at UIUC. He received his PhD in 2013 at UCSD under Sanjoy Dasgupta. He works in machine learning theory; his current interests are non-convex optimization and neural network representation.

    Host: CS Department

    Location: Henry Salvatori Computer Science Center (SAL) - 101

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Assistant to CS chair

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  • AI Seminar

    Fri, Apr 28, 2017 @ 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM

    Information Sciences Institute

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Avi Pfeffer, Charles River Analytics

    Talk Title: PROGRAMMING: PAST, PRESENT, AND FUTURE

    Abstract: Probabilistic reasoning lets you predict the future, infer past causes of current observations, and learn from experience. It can be hard to implement a probabilistic application because you have to implement the representation, inference, and learning algorithms. Probabilistic programming makes this much easier by providing an expressive language to represent models as well as inference and learning algorithms that automatically apply to models written in the language. In this talk, I will present the past, present, and future of probabilistic programming and our Figaro probabilistic programming system. I will start with the motivation for probabilistic programming and Figaro. After presenting some basic Figaro concepts, I will introduce several applications we have been developing at Charles River Analytics using Figaro. Finally, I will describe our future vision of providing a probabilistic programming tool that domain experts with no machine learning knowledge can use. In particular, I will present a new inference method that is designed to work well on a wide variety of problems with no user configuration. Prior knowledge of machine learning is not required to follow the talk.

    Biography: Dr. Avi Pfeffer is Chief Scientist at Charles River Analytics. Dr. Pfeffer is a leading researcher on a variety of computational intelligence techniques including probabilistic reasoning, machine learning, and computational game theory. Dr. Pfeffer has developed numerous innovative probabilistic representation and reasoning frameworks, such as probabilistic programming, which enables the development of probabilistic models using the full power of programming languages, and statistical relational learning, which provides the ability to combine probabilistic and relational reasoning. He is the lead developer of Charles River Analytics Figaro probabilistic programming language. As an Associate Professor at Harvard, he developed IBAL, the first general-purpose probabilistic programming language. While at Harvard, he also produced systems for representing, reasoning about, and learning the beliefs, preferences, and decision making strategies of people in strategic situations. Prior to joining Harvard, he invented object-oriented Bayesian networks and probabilistic relational models, which form the foundation of the field of statistical relational learning. Dr. Pfeffer serves as Action Editor of the Journal of Machine Learning Research and served as Associate Editor of Artificial Intelligence Journal and as Program Chair of the Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence. He has published many journals and conference articles and is the author of a text on probabilistic programming. Dr. Pfeffer received his Ph.D. in computer science from Stanford University and his B.A. in computer science from the University of California, Berkeley.



    Host: Craig Knoblock

    More Info: http://webcastermshd.isi.edu/Mediasite/Play/9b1644b4150f48cabdccf208f55773a51d

    Location: 11th floor large conference room

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Kary LAU

    Event Link: http://webcastermshd.isi.edu/Mediasite/Play/9b1644b4150f48cabdccf208f55773a51d

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  • Seminars in Biomedical Engineering

    Fri, Apr 28, 2017 @ 02:00 PM - 04:00 PM

    Alfred E. Mann Department of Biomedical Engineering

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Samir Mitragotri , Mellichamp Chair Professor in the Department of Chemical Engineering at UC Santa Barbara

    Talk Title: TBA

    Series: Systems Cellular-Molecular Bioengineering Distinguished Speaker Series

    Abstract: TBA

    Biography: Professor Mitragotri is the Founding Director of Center for BioEngineering (CBE). CBE is a hub for research and teaching at the interface of biology, engineering and physical sciences and enables transition of fundamental scientific discoveries to applications in medicine and biotechnology. Research at the CBE is yielding important advances in the understanding, diagnosis and treatment of common and devastating diseases such as cancer, diabetes, Alzheimer's and macular degeneration.

    Host: Eun Ji Chung, PhD

    Location: Corwin D. Denney Research Center (DRB) - 146

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Mischalgrace Diasanta

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  • Senior Design Expo

    Fri, Apr 28, 2017 @ 02:30 PM - 04:30 PM

    Viterbi School of Engineering Student Affairs

    Receptions & Special Events


    The 9th annual Viterbi Senior Design Expo showcases the design projects that are completed in senior capstone engineering courses. The projects are often presented within the class, but rarely to other students, staff, faculty and industry partners. The Senior Design Expo is an opportunity to celebrate the accomplishments of Viterbi graduating seniors!

    Location: VHE Breezeway

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Jenny Vazquez-Akim

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  • Astani Civil and Environmental Engineering Ph.D. Seminar

    Fri, Apr 28, 2017 @ 03:00 PM - 04:00 PM

    Sonny Astani Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Calogero Benedetto Rizzo and Mohammed Abdelbarr, Astani CEE Graduate Students

    Talk Title: A Systematic Investigation of Hydraulic Connectivity in Heterogeneous Porous Media and its Impact on Transport Dynamics

    Abstract: Defining the level of connectivity of heterogeneous porous media is of key importance to understand subsurface flow and transport dynamics. Several studies show that non-Fickian behavior observed in solute spreading in heterogeneous subsurface formations are strictly related to the presence of preferential channels. The presence of these channels control the trajectory of the solute front leading edge of the plume and it is highly correlated to early arrival times. Nevertheless there are multiple metric and frameworks that allow to determine preferential channels and connectivity properties of a complex heterogeneous permeability field. The aim of this work is to understand connectivity properties by using the concept of least resistance path through the use of an efficient algorithm. We explore differences among a range of fields and analyze the factors that significantly affect the connectivity of the field and its impact on transport. The results help to further understand the impact of hydraulic connectivity on solute transport and to establish a criteria for which heterogeneity and preferential channels cannot be neglected.

    Talk by Mohamed Abdelbarr

    Title: Inexpensive and Contactless Color and Depth Data Fusion for Dynamic Displacement-Field Measurement

    Abstract:

    Quantitative and accurate measurements concerning the time history of the multi-component deformation field of a distributed system undergoing dynamic response is an important and challenging problem in the broad field of structural dynamics. There are only very limited, and relatively quite expensive, methodologies for obtaining multi component deformations of a displacement of a dynamically deformation field. This study presents an extensive analytical and experimental study to assess, implement, and evaluate the feasibility and performance of a class of inexpensive vision based sensors RGB-D sensors to acquire dynamic measurements of the displacement field of a test structure.


    Location: John Stauffer Science Lecture Hall (SLH) - 102

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Evangeline Reyes

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  • NL Seminar-Modeling Dialog using Probabilistic Programs

    Fri, Apr 28, 2017 @ 03:00 PM - 04:00 PM

    Information Sciences Institute

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Andreas Stuhlmuller , Stanford Univ.

    Talk Title: Modeling Dialog Using Probabilistic Programs

    Series: Natural Language Seminar

    Abstract: How can we effectively explore the space of automated dialog systems? In this talk, I introduce WebPPL, a probabilistic programming language that provides a wide range of inference and optimization algorithms out of the box. This language makes it easy to express and combine probabilistic models, including regression and categorization models, highly structured cognitive models, models of agents that make sequential plans, and deep neural nets. I show that this also includes recent sequence to sequence architectures for dialog. I then use this framework to implement *dialog automation using workspaces, a variation on these architectures that is aimed at dialogs that require sufficiently deep reasoning between utterances that it is difficult to learn how to automate them from transcripts alone.



    Biography: Andreas Stuhlmüller is a post-doctoral researcher at Stanford, working in Prof. Noah Goodman's Computation & Cognition lab, and founder of Ought Inc. Previously, he received his Ph.D. in Brain and Cognitive Sciences from MIT, where he was part of Prof. Josh Tenenbaum's Computational Cognitive Science group. He has worked on the design and implementation of probabilistic programming languages, on their application to cognitive modeling, and recently on dialog systems. He is broadly interested in leveraging machine learning to help people think.

    Host: Marjan Ghazvininejad and Kevin Knight

    More Info: http://nlg.isi.edu/nl-seminar/

    Location: Information Science Institute (ISI) - 11th Flr Conf Rm # 1135, Marina Del Rey

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Peter Zamar

    Event Link: http://nlg.isi.edu/nl-seminar/

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  • Chemical Engineering Senior Dinner

    Fri, Apr 28, 2017 @ 06:30 PM - 09:00 PM

    Mork Family Department of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science

    Receptions & Special Events


    Come join us for a night of food and fun with your fellow ChemE family!

    (Open to MFD Faculty and MFD Graduating Seniors only)

    Friday, April 28th
    6:30 - 9 pm

    El Cholo
    1037 S Flower St
    Los Angeles, CA 90015

    Location: El Cholo Restaurant

    Audiences: MFD Faculty and Graduating Seniors

    Contact: Aleessa Atienza

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  • Annual Viterbi Robotics Invitational

    Sat, Apr 29, 2017 @ 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM

    Viterbi School of Engineering K-12 STEM Center

    Receptions & Special Events


    Robotics are increasingly important in our everyday lives. Mathematicians, Engineers and Scientists are developing new technologies to solve many of our current environmental issues. The purpose of the competition is to encourage gracious professionalism that leaves everyone involved feeling valued with a sense of integrity and teamwork. The goal is not just to win, but to participate fairly and to extend gracious professionalism and respect to all teams and students involved.

    Prior year competitions were based on the 'wicked problems' facing our times such as water security, sustainability and climate change, and terrorism; as well as the Grand Engineering Challenges of advanced health informatics, restoring and improving urban infrastructure, providing access to clean water, preventing nuclear terror and engineering the tools of scientific discovery.

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Darin Gray/Viterbi STEM Educational Outreach Programs

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