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Events for May

  • Study Day

    Tue, May 01, 2018

    Viterbi School of Engineering Student Affairs

    University Calendar


    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Sheryl Koutsis

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  • Epstein Institute Seminar, ISE 651

    Epstein Institute Seminar, ISE 651

    Tue, May 01, 2018 @ 03:30 PM - 04:50 PM

    Daniel J. Epstein Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Dr. Brian Denton, Professor, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

    Talk Title: Optimization of Biomarker-Based Screening Strategies for Early Detection of Prostate Cancer

    Host: Dr. Sze-chuan Suen

    More Information: May 1, 2018.pdf

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

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Grace Owh

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  • 2018 Game Industry Careers Night

    2018 Game Industry Careers Night

    Tue, May 01, 2018 @ 07:00 PM - 09:00 PM

    Technology & Applied Computing Program (TAC)

    Workshops & Infosessions


    As you prepare to graduate and start the next level as a working professional in the video game industry, join the Information Technology Program for an exciting night of discussion with game programmers, level designers, producers, and consultants.

    Students in Video Game Design and Management, Video Game Programming, Computer Science (Games), and Interactive Media and Games are all welcome to attend, as are any students who are interested in learning about the transforming video game industry. Refreshments will be provided.

    This is event is organized and moderated by Professor Tom Sloper, who brings his experience at Activision, Sega, Atari, and Yahoo to develop and teach courses in video game design, production, and management at the USC Viterbi School of Engineering.

    Location: Kaprielian Hall (KAP) - 160

    Audiences: Undergrad

    Contact: Tim Gotimer

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  • A Surge-type Pricing in Ridesharing Systems is Stability Optimal

    Thu, May 03, 2018 @ 10:00 AM - 11:00 AM

    Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Costas Courcoubetis, Singapore University of Technology and Design (SUTD)

    Talk Title: A Surge-type Pricing in Ridesharing Systems is Stability Optimal

    Series: Center for Cyber-Physical Systems and Internet of Things

    Abstract: The availability of drivers at a certain location affects the waiting time of passengers that arrive to be served by the platform.We introduce a queueing model for this waiting time and consider the effect on stability of available drivers' mobility pattern, their willingness to accept rides in a given location, and the incentives offered by the platform. For any fixed number of drivers, we characterize the largest set of passenger arrival rates which can result to stable queues under some policy dictating the movement of available drivers and their acceptance of rides. It turns out that any such policy can be enforced by offering appropriate region-dependent rewards to drivers for passenger pick up. Next, we show that dynamic rewards which are proportional to the passenger queue lengths, have the property of stabilizing queues for any arrival rates within the stability region. Seen from the perspective of drivers, such rewards which resemble surge pricing maximize their utilization.

    Biography: Prof. Costas A Courcoubetis was born in Athens, Greece and received his Diploma (1977) from the National Technical University of Athens, Greece, in Electrical and Mechanical Engineering, his MS (1980) and PhD (1982) from the University of California, Berkeley, in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. He was MTS at the Mathematics Research Center, Bell Laboratories, Professor in the Computer Science Department at the University of Crete, Professor in the Department of Informatics at the Athens University of Economics and Business, and Professor in the ESD Pillar, Singapore University of Technology and Design where he heads the Initiative for the Sharing Economy and co-directs the new ST-SUTD Center for Smart Systems. His current research interests are economics and performance analysis of networks and internet technologies, sharing economy, regulation policy, smart grids and energy systems, resource sharing and auctions. Besides leading in the past a large number of research projects in these areas he has also published over 100 papers in scientific journals such as Operations Research, Mathematics of Operations Research, Journal on Applied Probability, ToN, IEEE Transactions in Communications, IEEE JSAC, SIAM Journal on Computing, etc. and in conferences such as FOCS, STOC, LICS, INFOCOM. GLOBCOM, ITC, ACM SIGMETRICS. His work has over 13,000 citations according to the Google Scholar. He is co-author with Richard Weber of "Pricing Communication Networks: Economics, Technology and Modeling" (Wiley, 2003).


    Host: Professor Bhaskar Krishnamachari

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

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Talyia White

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  • : Building Safe and Secure Cyber-Physical Systems Against All Odds

    : Building Safe and Secure Cyber-Physical Systems Against All Odds

    Fri, May 04, 2018 @ 02:00 PM - 03:00 PM

    Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Radoslav Ivanov, University of Pennsylvania

    Talk Title: Building Safe and Secure Cyber-Physical Systems Against All Odds

    Series: Center for Cyber-Physical Systems and Internet of Things

    Abstract: The increased autonomy of modern Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) has exposed our limited understanding of systems of such complexity. Multiple deadly accidents in different domains (e.g., automotive, medical, aircraft) have occurred in the last several years, some due to partially known and changing (physiological) models and some due to malicious attacks that disrupt the system operation. In this talk, I will discuss my work on ensuring the safety and security of modern CPS; in particular, my focus is on providing accurate information with guarantees as a necessary condition to closing the loop. In the Medical CPS domain, I have developed parameter-invariant and context-aware detection and estimation approaches with guaranteed performance regardless of the values of unknown patient-specific physiological parameters (e.g., metabolic rate). We have successfully applied these approaches on real-patient data from the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia for the purpose of monitoring the patient's oxygen content during surgery.

    In the CPS security domain, my work makes use of the inherent sensor redundancy available in modern CPS in order to argue about the system safety and security even when some components might be under attack. In particular, I have proposed attack-resilient sensor fusion techniques that do not require any assumptions about which particular sensors fail or are under attack in order to detect safety-critical states. We have evaluated the benefit of sensor fusion in a number of automotive CPS applications where the system has access to multiple sensors that can be used to estimate the same state (e.g., velocity can be estimated using encoders, cameras, GPS, etc.).

    Biography: Radoslav Ivanov received the B.A. degree in computer science and economics from Colgate University, NY, and the Ph.D. degree in computer and information science from the University of Pennsylvania. He is currently a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Pennsylvania, working with Insup Lee and James Weimer. Radoslav's research interests include the design and control of safe and secure cyber-physical systems, in particular, automotive and medical CPS, and predictive and retrospective analysis of medical patient data.

    Host: Professor Paul Bogdan

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

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Talyia White

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  • NL Seminar-Neural Creative Language Generation PhD Defense Practice Talk

    Fri, May 04, 2018 @ 03:00 PM - 04:00 PM

    Information Sciences Institute

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Marjan Ghazvininejad , USC/ISI

    Talk Title: Neural Creative Language Generation PhD Defense Practice Talk

    Series: Natural Language Seminar

    Abstract: Natural language generation is a well studied and still very challenging field in natural language processing. One of the less studied NLG tasks is the generation of creative texts such as jokes, puns, or poems. Multiple reasons contribute to the difficulty of research in this area. First, no immediate application exists for creative language generation. This has made the research on creative NLG extremely diverse, having different goals, assumptions, and constraints. Second, no quantitative measure exists for creative NLG tasks. Consequently, it is often difficult to tune the parameters of creative generation models and drive improvements to these systems. Lack of a quantitative metric and the absence of a well-defined immediate application makes comparing different methods and finding the state of the art an almost impossible task in this area. Finally, rule-based systems for creative language generation are not yet combined with deep learning methods. Rule based systems are powerful in capturing human knowledge, but it is often too time-consuming to present all the required knowledge in rules. On the other hand, deep learning models can automatically extract knowledge from the data, but they often miss out some essential knowledge that can be easily captured in rule based systems.

    In this work, we address these challenges for poetry generation, which is one of the main areas of creative language generation. We introduce password poems as a new application for poetry generation. These passwords are highly secure, and we show that they are easier to recall and preferable compared to passwords created by other methods that guarantee the same level of security. Furthermore, we combine finite state machinery with deep learning models in a system for generating poems for any given topic. We introduce a quantitative metric for evaluating the generated poems and build the first interactive poetry generation system that enables users to revise system generated poems by adjusting style configuration settings like alliteration, concreteness and the sentiment of the poem. The system interface also allows users to rate the quality of the poem. We collect users rating for poems with various style settings and use them to automatically tune the system style parameters. In order to improve the coherence of generated poems, we introduce a method to borrow ideas from existing human literature and build a poetry translation system. We study how poetry translation is different from translation of noncreative texts by measuring the language variation added during the translation process. We show that humans translate poems much more freely compared to general texts. Based on this observation, we build a machine translation system specifically for translating poetry which uses language variation in the translation process to generate rhythmic and rhyming translations.

    Biography: Marjan Ghazvininejad is a Ph.D. student at ISI working with Professor Kevin Knight

    Host: Nanyun Peng

    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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  • Repeating EventSix Sigma Green Belt for Process Improvement

    Mon, May 07, 2018

    Executive Education

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Abstract: Learn how to integrate principles of business, statistics, and engineering to achieve tangible results. Master the use of Six Sigma to quantify the critical quality issues in your company. Once the issues have been quantified, statistics can be applied to provide probabilities of success and failure. Six Sigma methods increase productivity and enhance quality.

    More Info: https://viterbiexeced.usc.edu/engineering-program-areas/six-sigma-lean-certification/six-sigma-green-belt-process-improvement/

    Audiences: Registered Attendees

    View All Dates

    Contact: Corporate & Professional Programs

    Event Link: https://viterbiexeced.usc.edu/engineering-program-areas/six-sigma-lean-certification/six-sigma-green-belt-process-improvement/

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  • PhD Defense - Marjan Ghazvininejad

    Mon, May 07, 2018 @ 10:00 AM - 12:00 PM

    Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science

    University Calendar


    PhD Candidate: Marjan Ghazvininejad

    Committee: Kevin Knight (chair), Morteza Dehghani, Jonathan May

    Title: Neural Creative Language Generation

    Time & place: Monday, May 7th, 10 am, GFS 204


    Abstract: Natural language generation (NLG) is a well-studied and still very challenging field in natural language processing. One of the less studied NLG tasks is the generation of creative texts such as jokes, puns, or poems. Multiple reasons contribute to the difficulty of research in this area. First, no immediate application exists for creative language generation. This has made the research on creative NLG extremely diverse, having different goals, assumptions, and constraints. Second, no quantitative measure exists for creative NLG tasks. Consequently, it is often difficult to tune the parameters of creative generation models and drive improvements to these systems. Lack of a quantitative metric and the absence of a well-defined immediate application makes comparing different methods and finding the state of the art an almost impossible task in this area. Finally, rule-based systems for creative language generation are not yet combined with deep learning methods. Rule-based systems are powerful in capturing human knowledge, but it is often too time-consuming to present all the required knowledge in rules. On the other hand, deep learning models can automatically extract knowledge from the data, but they often miss out some essential knowledge that can be easily captured in rule-based systems.
    In this work, we address these challenges for poetry generation, which is one of the main areas of creative language generation. We introduce password poems as a new application for poetry generation. These passwords are highly secure, and we show that they are easier to recall and preferable compared to passwords created by other methods that guarantee the same level of security. Furthermore, we combine finite-state machinery with deep learning models in a system for generating poems for any given topic. We introduce a quantitative metric for evaluating the generated poems and build the first interactive poetry generation system that enables users to revise system generated poems by adjusting style configuration settings like alliteration, concreteness and the sentiment of the poem. The system interface also allows users to rate the quality of the poem. We collect users' rating for poems with various style settings and use them to automatically tune the system style parameters. In order to improve the coherence of generated poems, we introduce a method to borrow ideas from existing human literature and build a poetry translation system. We study how poetry translation is different from translation of non-creative texts by measuring the language variation added during the translation process. We show that humans translate poems much more freely compared to general texts. Based on this observation, we build a machine translation system specifically for translating poetry which uses language variation in the translation process to generate rhythmic and rhyming translations.

    Location: 204

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Lizsl De Leon

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  • PhD Defense - Shuyang Gao

    Mon, May 07, 2018 @ 12:00 PM - 02:00 PM

    Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science

    University Calendar




    Title: Mutual Information Estimation and Its Applications to Machine Learning

    PhD Candidate: Shuyang Gao

    Date: May 7

    Time: 12pm

    Location: SOS B37


    Committee: Aram Galstyan, Greg Verg Steeg, Ilias Diakonikolas, Aiichiro Nakano, Roger Ghanem

    Abstract:
    Mutual information (MI) has been successfully applied to a wide variety of domains due to its remarkable property to measure dependencies between random variables. Despite its popularity and wide spread usage, a common unavoidable problem of mutual information is its estimation. In this thesis, we demonstrate that a popular class of nonparametric MI estimators based on k-nearest-neighbor graphs requires number of samples that scales exponentially with the true MI. Consequently, accurate estimation of MI between strongly dependent variables is possible only for prohibitively large sample size. This important yet overlooked shortcoming of the existing estimators is due to their implicit reliance on local uniformity of the underlying joint distribution. As a result, my thesis proposes two new estimation strategies to address this issue. The new estimators are robust to local non-uniformity, works well with limited data, and is able to capture relationship strengths over many orders of magnitude than the existing k-nearest-neighbor methods.

    Modern data mining and machine learning presents us with problems which may contain thousands of variables and we need to identify only the most promising strong relationships. Therefore, caution must be taken when applying mutual information to such real-world scenarios. By taking these concerns into account, my thesis then demonstrates the practical applicability of mutual information on several tasks, and our contributions include
    i) an information-theoretic framework for measuring stylistic coordination in dialogues. The proposed measure has a simple predictive interpretation and can account for various confounding factors through proper conditioning ii) an new algorithm for mutual information-based feature selection in supervised learning setting iii) an information-theoretic framework for learning disentangled and interpretable representations in unsupervised setting using deep neural networks. For the latter two tasks, we propose to use a variational lower bound for efficient estimation and optimization of mutual information. And for the last task, we have also made a substantial connection of the learning objective with variational auto-encoders (VAE).

    Location: Social Sciences Building (SOS) - B37

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Lizsl De Leon

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  • PhD Defense - Kuan Liu

    Mon, May 07, 2018 @ 01:00 PM - 03:00 PM

    Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science

    University Calendar



    PhD Candidate: Kuan Liu

    Title: Scalable machine learning algorithms for implicit feedback based recommendation

    Committee: Prem Natarajan, Kevin Knight, Shri Narayanan (outside member)


    SAL 322
    May 7
    1-3pm


    Abstract:

    Whether in e-commerce, social networks, online music and TV, and many other modern online services, item recommendation stands out to be one of the most important algorithmic components. It recommends items to users that are useful and relevant. It makes huge economic values and is an important information filtering tool.

    The primary goal of this thesis research is to provide machine learning solutions to item recommendation in large scale. The ever-increasing data volume and rich data formats have created a big gap between the requirements of modern recommender systems and our algorithm ability to handle large scale tasks. We work towards efficient personalized ranking algorithms to handle large data volume and advance content-based approaches to incorporate rich side information.

    The thesis work mainly focuses on the following aspects towards this goal: (1) Novel ranking algorithms to deal with large itemsets (2) Deep learning methods to model sequential properties of user feedback (3) To incorporate heterogeneous attributes (4) To fuse signals from multiple modalities. In this talk, I will provide a brief overview of item recommendation history and our contributions. I will discuss our recent work on batch-based ranking algorithms for recommendation from large itemsets and our new methods to fuse signals from multiple modalities.

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

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Lizsl De Leon

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  • Repeating EventSix Sigma Green Belt for Process Improvement

    Tue, May 08, 2018

    Executive Education

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Abstract: Learn how to integrate principles of business, statistics, and engineering to achieve tangible results. Master the use of Six Sigma to quantify the critical quality issues in your company. Once the issues have been quantified, statistics can be applied to provide probabilities of success and failure. Six Sigma methods increase productivity and enhance quality.

    More Info: https://viterbiexeced.usc.edu/engineering-program-areas/six-sigma-lean-certification/six-sigma-green-belt-process-improvement/

    Audiences: Registered Attendees

    View All Dates

    Contact: Corporate & Professional Programs

    Event Link: https://viterbiexeced.usc.edu/engineering-program-areas/six-sigma-lean-certification/six-sigma-green-belt-process-improvement/

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  • PhD Defense - Xing Shi

    Tue, May 08, 2018 @ 10:00 AM - 12:00 PM

    Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science

    University Calendar


    PhD Candidate: Xing Shi

    Date: May 8, 10am at SAL 322

    Committee: Kevin Knight (chair), Jonathan May and Shri Narayanan

    Abstract:

    Recurrent neural networks (RNN) have been successfully applied to various Natural Language Processing tasks, including language modeling, machine translation, text generation, etc. However, several obstacles still stand in the way: First, due to the RNN's distributional nature, few interpretations of its internal mechanism are obtained, and it remains a black box. Second, because of the large vocabulary sets involved, the text generation is very time-consuming. Third, there is no flexible way to constrain the generation of the sequence model with external knowledge. Last, huge training data must be collected to guarantee the performance of these neural models, whereas annotated data such as parallel data used in machine translation are expensive to obtain. This work aims to address the four challenges mentioned above.

    To further understand the internal mechanism of the RNN, we choose neural machine translation (NMT) systems as a testbed. We first investigate how NMT outputs target strings of appropriate lengths, locating a collection of hidden units that learns to explicitly implement this functionality. Then we investigate whether NMT systems learn source language syntax as a by-product of training on string pairs. We find that both local and global syntactic information about source sentences is captured by the encoder. Different types of syntax are stored in different layers, with different concentration degrees.

    To speed up text generation, we propose two novel GPU-based algorithms: 1) Utilize the source/target words alignment information to shrink the target side run-time vocabulary; 2) Apply locality sensitive hashing to find nearest word embeddings. Both methods lead to a 2-3x speedup on four translation tasks without hurting machine translation accuracy as measured by BLEU. Furthermore, we integrate a finite state acceptor into the neural sequence model during generation, providing a flexible way to constrain the output, and we successfully apply this to poem generation, in order to control the meter and rhyme.

    To improve NMT performance on low-resource language pairs, we re-examine multiple technologies that are used in high resource language NMT and other NLP tasks, explore their variations and result in a strong NMT system for low resource languages. Experiments on Uygher-English shows a 10+ BLEU score improvement over the vanilla NMT system.

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

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Lizsl De Leon

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  • PhD Defense- Soravit (Beer) Changpinyo

    Tue, May 08, 2018 @ 12:00 PM - 02:00 PM

    Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science

    University Calendar


    PhD Candidate: Soravit (Beer) Changpinyo
    Committee: Fei Sha (chair), Kevin Knight, C.-C. Jay Kuo (outside member)

    Title: Modeling, Learning, and Leveraging Similarity
    Time & Place: Tuesday, May 8th, 12-2pm, SAL 213
    Abstract:
    Measuring similarity between any two entities is an essential component in most machine learning tasks. In this defense, I will describe my research work that provides a set of techniques revolving around the notion of similarity.
    The first part involves "modeling and learning" similarity. We introduce Similarity Component Analysis (SCA), a Bayesian network for modeling instance-level similarity that does not observe the triangle inequality. Such a modeling choice avoids the transitivity bias in most existing similarity models, making SCA intuitively more aligned with the human perception of similarity.
    The second part involves "learning and leveraging" similarity for effective learning with limited data, with applications in computer vision and natural language processing. We first leverage incomplete and noisy similarity graphs in different modalities to aid the learning of object recognition models. In particular, we propose two novel zero-shot learning algorithms that utilize class-level semantic similarities as a building block, establishing state-of-the-art performance on the large-scale benchmark with more than 20,000 categories. As for natural language processing, we employ multi-task learning (MTL) to leverage unknown similarities between sequence tagging tasks. This study leads to insights regarding the benefit of going to beyond pairwise MTL, task selection strategies, as well as the nature of the relationships between those tasks.

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

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Lizsl De Leon

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  • PhD Defense - Sayan Ghosh

    Tue, May 08, 2018 @ 02:00 PM - 04:00 PM

    Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science

    University Calendar


    Title : Multimodal Representation Learning of Affective Behavior

    PhD Candidate: Sayan Ghosh

    Date : 8th May , 2 PM PST
    Venue: PHE 223
    Committee : Prof. Stefan Scherer (Chair), Prof. Louis-Philippe Morency, Prof. Kevin Knight, Prof. Panayiotis Georgiou (EE)

    Abstract:
    With the ever increasing abundance of multimedia data available on the Internet and crowd-sourced datasets/repositories, there has been a renewed interest in machine learning approaches for solving real-life perception problems. However, such techniques have only recently made inroads into research problems relevant to the study of human emotion and behavior understanding. The primary research challenges addressed in this defense talk pertain to unimodal and multimodal representation learning, and the fusion of emotional and non-verbal cues for language modeling . There are three primary contributions of this dissertation -
    (1) Unimodal Representation Learning: In the visual modality a novel multi-label CNN (Convolutional Neural Network) is proposed for learning AU (Action Unit) occurrences in facial images. The multi-label CNN learns a joint representation for AU occurrences, obtaining competitive detection results; and is also robust across different datasets. For the acoustic modality, denoising autoencoders and RNNs (Recurrent Neural Networks) are trained on temporal frames from speech spectrograms, and it is observed that representation learning from the glottal flow signal (the component of the speech signal with vocal tract influence removed) can be applied to speech emotion recognition.
    (2) Multimodal Representation Learning: An importance-based multimodal autoencoder (IMA) model is introduced which can learn joint multimodal representations as well as importance weights for each modality. The IMA model achieves performance improvement relative to baseline approaches for the tasks of digit recognition and emotion understanding from spoken utterances.
    (3) Non-verbal and Affective Language Models: This dissertation studies deep multimodal fusion in the context of neural language modeling by introducing two novel approaches - Affect-LM and Speech-LM. These models obtain perplexity reductions over a baseline language model by integrating verbal affective and non-verbal acoustic cues with the linguistic context for predicting the next word. Affect-LM also generates text in different emotions at various levels of intensity. The generated sentences are emotionally expressive while maintaining grammatical correctness as evaluated through a crowd-sourced perception study.

    Location: Charles Lee Powell Hall (PHE) - 223

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Lizsl De Leon

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  • INCOSE-LA Speaker Meeting

    INCOSE-LA Speaker Meeting

    Tue, May 08, 2018 @ 05:15 PM - 07:30 PM

    Systems Architecting and Engineering, USC Viterbi School of Engineering

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Kay Das, INCOSE - Los Angeles

    Talk Title: The Connected Vehicle Revolution - Continued

    Series: INCOSE-LA Speaker Series

    Abstract: The second installment of our light-hearted but critical look at the Connected Vehicle revolution. There is currently much ongoing activity in the research and design of systems to enhance the safety of vehicular traffic on roads and highways. These include vehicle-to-vehicle based and vehicle-to-infrastructure based electronics systems with extension to personal devices. These systems need to work collaboratively in an intelligent and reconfigurable network environment characterized by multiple localized and dynamically changing motion control loops which include each individual vehicle driver (and pedestrian). Systems will comprise a mix of existing and new technologies such as laser, imaging, computer vision, radar, cellular, WiFi, GPS, millimetric Waves, and others. System complexity is very high to deliver and sustain the required levels of reliability. A range of products and systems will compete for market entry from diverse developers and nations. Compliance with a safety culture within product development, such as directed by the ISO 26262 cocoon, is desirable. Safety needs to be regarded as an integral and critical element in system, software, hardware, and device and sensor design. A significant challenge also exists in validating prototypes and final systems productized for market entry. The cost of failure is high as human life is in the loop. This presentation reviews some of the challenges and offers some directions for this burgeoning industry propelled by developments ranging from Shannons Law and Moores Law to the evolving Internet of Things and 5G cellular communications. Management of systems research and development with frugality, without over-design, and with a holistic approach on a scale probably never demanded before, is required.

    RSVP: Required, see the event link below.

    WHERE: Rockwell Collins - Irvine
    1733 Alton Pkwy,
    Irvine, CA 92606
    Host: Andrew Murrell
    Phone: 714-929-3503

    When you arrive please wait in the Rockwell Collins Lobby in Building 18 (A Rockwell Collins sign will be on the building) and check in with Security, you will need to present identification and a visitor badge will be issued. A Rockwell Employee will then escort you to the Conference room.

    COST: INCOSE Members: FREE. Non-members: $10 (refreshments provided)

    SCHEDULE:
    5:15-5:30 Sign-in and Registration
    5:30-6:00 Networking and Refreshments
    6:10-6:20 Introduction
    6:20-6:30 WG Presentation (TBD)
    6:30-7:30 Guest Speaker Presentation

    Biography: Kay Das was GPS Program Manager and Technical Director at LinQuest Corporation in Los Angeles from 2007 to 2013 where he additionally led new business development thrusts in the commercial and automotive safety markets. He has previously held responsibilities as R&D Director for STMicroelectronics Asia Pacific region. He is a winner of a Singapore Government National Award for The Initiation and Expansion of High-value R&D and Promotion of Partnerships. He has built and led teams in different parts of the world and managed the development of diverse silicon-based signal processing systems over 40 years in industry. His current pursuits are the application of communication (such as 5G-DSRC) and location technologies (such as GPS-GNSS) to the Connected Vehicle revolution. He holds an MS in Electronics Systems from the Cranfield Institute of Technology, UK. His pursuits in retirement other than Connected Vehicle include amateur astronomy, Internet radio, and he is a professional musician. He is an IEEE Life Member and a member of several societies.

    Host: International Council on Systems Engineering (INCOSE)

    More Info: http://events.r20.constantcontact.com/register/event?llr=l4ihvgeab&oeidk=a07ef7zwisr1ddb5ba8

    Location: Rockwell Collins - Irvine

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Deborah A. Cannon

    Event Link: http://events.r20.constantcontact.com/register/event?llr=l4ihvgeab&oeidk=a07ef7zwisr1ddb5ba8

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  • Repeating EventSix Sigma Green Belt for Process Improvement

    Wed, May 09, 2018

    Executive Education

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Abstract: Learn how to integrate principles of business, statistics, and engineering to achieve tangible results. Master the use of Six Sigma to quantify the critical quality issues in your company. Once the issues have been quantified, statistics can be applied to provide probabilities of success and failure. Six Sigma methods increase productivity and enhance quality.

    More Info: https://viterbiexeced.usc.edu/engineering-program-areas/six-sigma-lean-certification/six-sigma-green-belt-process-improvement/

    Audiences: Registered Attendees

    View All Dates

    Contact: Corporate & Professional Programs

    Event Link: https://viterbiexeced.usc.edu/engineering-program-areas/six-sigma-lean-certification/six-sigma-green-belt-process-improvement/

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  • PhD Defense- Haifeng Xu

    Wed, May 09, 2018 @ 10:00 AM - 12:00 PM

    Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science

    University Calendar


    Title: Information as A Double-Edged Sword in Strategic Interactions

    PhD Candidate: Haifeng Xu

    Committee:
    Shaddin Dughmi (Chair), Milind Tambe (Chair), David Kempe, Detlof von Winterfeldt, Vincent Conitzer, Odilon Camara.

    Location & Time: SSL 150, 10 - 12 pm May 9th.

    Abstract:

    Strategic interactions among self-interested agents (a.k.a., games) are ubiquitous, ranging from economic activity in daily life and the Internet to defender-adversary interactions in national security. A key variable influencing agents' strategic decision making is the information they have available about their environment as well as the preferences and actions of others. In this talk, I will describe my work on computational questions pertaining to the role of information in games. In particular, I will illustrate the double-edged role of information through two threads of my research: (1) how to utilize information to one's own advantage in strategic interactions; (2) how to mitigate losses resulting from information leakage to an adversary. In each part, I will demonstrate how the study of fundamental theoretical questions sheds light on executable solutions to real-world problems in security applications including, e.g., delivered software to the Federal Air Marshal Service for improving the scheduling of US federal air marshals.

    Location: 150

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Lizsl De Leon

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  • PhD Defense- Sean Mason

    Wed, May 09, 2018 @ 10:00 AM - 12:00 PM

    Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science

    University Calendar



    Title: Optimization Based Whole-Body Control and Reactive Planning for a Torque Controlled Humanoid Robot

    PhD Candidate: Sean Mason

    Date and Time: Wednesday May 9, 2018 at 10:00 AM in RTH 406

    Committee: Stefan Schaal (Chair), Gaurav Sukatme, James Finley, Ludovic Righetti

    Abstract:
    Humanoid robots are expected to both locomote and interact with objects within unstructured environments. As robot hardware technologies have advanced, high-bandwidth, torque-controlled robots have become more widely-available as research platforms. In this work, I explore optimization-based methods for planning and control of a humanoid robot. I focus on the importance of controlling contact interactions with the environment for the tasks of balancing and walking of a bipedal system. This work is driven by and centered on the challenge of real robot implementations, and thus addresses the questions that come along with designing control algorithms for real systems. I will present lightweight control algorithms for whole-body balance, a model-predictive control approach to walking while using hands, and show extensive experiments on a humanoid robot.

    Location: Ronald Tutor Hall of Engineering (RTH) - 406

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Lizsl De Leon

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  • PhD Defense - Kyriakos Zarifis

    Wed, May 09, 2018 @ 01:00 PM - 03:00 PM

    Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science

    University Calendar


    Title: Making Web Transfers More Efficient

    PhD Candidate: Kyriakos Zarifis

    Date: 05-09-18
    1pm
    SAL 322

    Committee:
    Ethan Katz-Bassett (Chair)
    Ramesh Govindan
    Konstantinos Psounis (Outside)

    Abstract:
    Delays in web applications have been repeatedly shown to negatively impact business revenues. In this dissertation we perform studies related to Web transfer delays specific to propagation delay due to inflated paths, and delays in transferring data between servers and clients due to inefficient use of the communication channels.
    Previous research has shown that the shortest path between a client and a server is not always selected, due to routing protocol policy-based decisions. We develop a methodology identify root causes of path inflation, specifically focusing on mobile traffic directed to Google servers, in order to understand the evolution of the infrastructure of mobile carrier networks and how it can affect user experience.
    Once a connection has been established, information is exchanged between the two hosts according to rules defined by HTTP, the application layer protocol used for today's Web transfers. In this work we develop a model of the new version of HTTP/2 and pass through it a large dataset of HTTP/1 traces, in order to understand the performance implications of deploying the new version of the protocol in the wild. Our study exposes several opportunities for improvements, specifically using a new feature that allows a server to send to the client an object without the client requesting it. Generalizing from that observation, we design, develop and evaluate a system that allows CDNs to utilize idle network time around page downloads to send to the client content that the client is expected to request in the current or next page navigation. We show that if implemented correctly, speculative content prepositioning on the client can achieve a performance improvement comparable to having a page loaded on the client cache.

    Location: 322

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Lizsl De Leon

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  • Viterbi School of Engineering PhD Hooding and Awards Ceremony

    Thu, May 10, 2018 @ 08:30 AM - 11:00 AM

    Viterbi School of Engineering Doctoral Programs

    Receptions & Special Events


    The Viterbi PhD Hooding and Awards Ceremony will take place on Thursday, May 10, 2018, from 8:30-11:00am in Bovard Auditorium. Tickets are required.

    The ceremony will be followed by a reception in Associates Park.

    Location: George Finley Bovard Administration Building (ADM) -

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Jennifer Gerson

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  • NL Seminar Towards Flexible but Controllable Language Generation

    Fri, May 11, 2018 @ 03:00 PM - 04:00 PM

    Information Sciences Institute

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Yulia Tsvetkov , CMU

    Talk Title: Towards Flexible but Controllable Language Generation

    Series: Natural Language Seminar

    Abstract: To enable naturalistic, context aware language generation, the underlying models must be flexible but controllable. They must be flexible enough to account for the rich linguistic diversity of data that the model generates and conditions on. On the other hand, generation must be controlled, to lexicalize the same meaning differently, depending upon the social and the situational context. I will present model based approaches to multilingual language modeling and open vocabulary machine translation, aiming at making language generation more flexible by relaxing the unreasonable but prevalent in the literature assumption that a models vocabulary is constrained to a particular set of most frequent words in a particular language. Then, I will present an approach to controllable text generation that modulates social variables in generated text. I will conclude with an overview of ongoing research projects.

    Biography: Yulia Tsvetkov is an assistant professor in the Language Technologies Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. Her research interests lie at or near the intersection of natural language processing, machine learning, linguistics, and social science. Her current research projects focus on multilinguality e.g., open vocabulary machine translation, polyglot models, entrainment in code switching, controllable text generation, automated negotiation, and NLP for social good e.g., identification of microaggressions and dehumanization in online interactions, identification of misinformation and agenda setting in news, predicting scientific misconduct. Prior to joining LTI, Yulia was a postdoc in the department of Computer Science at Stanford University she received her PhD from Carnegie Mellon University.

    Host: Nanyun Peng

    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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  • Repeating EventMeet USC: Admission Presentation, Campus Tour, and Engineering Talk

    Mon, May 14, 2018

    Viterbi School of Engineering Undergraduate Admission

    Workshops & Infosessions


    This half day program is designed for prospective first-year students (High School juniors and younger) and family members. Meet USC includes an information session on the University and the Admission process, a student led walking tour of campus, and a meeting with us in the Viterbi School. During the engineering session we will discuss the curriculum, research opportunities, hands-on projects, entrepreneurial support programs, and other aspects of the engineering school. Meet USC is designed to answer all of your questions about USC, the application process, and financial aid.

    Reservations are required for Meet USC. This program occurs twice, once at 8:30 a.m. and again at 12:30 p.m.

    Please make sure to check availability and register online for the session you wish to attend. Reservations are required for the Meet USC program.

    Also, remember to list an Engineering major as your "intended major" on the webform!

    >> Register for a Meet USC Session

    Location: Ronald Tutor Campus Center (TCC) - USC Admission Center

    Audiences: Prospective Undergrads and Families

    View All Dates

    Contact: Viterbi Admission

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  • PhD Defense - Aaron Schlenker

    Mon, May 14, 2018 @ 10:00 AM - 12:00 PM

    Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science

    University Calendar


    Title: Game Theoretic Deception and Threat Screening for Cyber Security

    PhD Candidate: Aaron Schlenker

    May 14th
    10am
    SSL 150

    Committee:
    Milind Tambe (Chair)
    Jelena Mirkovic
    Jonathan Gratch
    Muhammed Naveed
    Richard John


    Abstract:

    Protecting an organization's cyber assets from intrusions and breaches due to attacks by malicious actors is an increasingly challenging and complex problem. Companies and organizations who operate enterprise networks deploy various software and tools to protect from these attacks, such as anti-virus software and Intrusion and Detection Systems (IDS), along with dedicated teams of cyber analysts tasked with the general protection of an organization's cyber assets. In order to compromise a network, an adversary must complete the Cyber Kill Chain which is a series of steps outlining the components of a successful cyber breach. During the Cyber Kill Chain, there are numerous opportunities for the network administrator (defender) to intercept the adversary and thwart an attack. In this talk, I will describe how computational game theory can be used to capture the interaction between the adversary and network administrator in cyber security along with two potential applications of game theory to problems faced by the network administrator to optimize the use of their limited security resources. The first application proposes a framework for deceiving cyber adversaries during the reconnaissance phase of an attack and I will describe a model that provides deceptive strategies to the defender that lead to hackers attacking non-critical systems in the defender's network. The Second application corresponds to the prioritization of alerts generated from Intrusion Detection and Prevention systems throughout a network and I will describe a model that accounts for various salient features in cybersecurity alert allocation when determining the best strategies for the network administrator.

    Location: Seaver Science Library (SSL) - 150

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Lizsl De Leon

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  • Repeating EventMeet USC: Admission Presentation, Campus Tour, and Engineering Talk

    Wed, May 16, 2018

    Viterbi School of Engineering Undergraduate Admission

    Workshops & Infosessions


    This half day program is designed for prospective first-year students (High School juniors and younger) and family members. Meet USC includes an information session on the University and the Admission process, a student led walking tour of campus, and a meeting with us in the Viterbi School. During the engineering session we will discuss the curriculum, research opportunities, hands-on projects, entrepreneurial support programs, and other aspects of the engineering school. Meet USC is designed to answer all of your questions about USC, the application process, and financial aid.

    Reservations are required for Meet USC. This program occurs twice, once at 8:30 a.m. and again at 12:30 p.m.

    Please make sure to check availability and register online for the session you wish to attend. Reservations are required for the Meet USC program.

    Also, remember to list an Engineering major as your "intended major" on the webform!

    >> Register for a Meet USC Session

    Location: Ronald Tutor Campus Center (TCC) - USC Admission Center

    Audiences: Prospective Undergrads and Families

    View All Dates

    Contact: Viterbi Admission

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  • PhD Defense - Arman Shahbazian

    Thu, May 17, 2018 @ 11:00 AM - 01:00 PM

    Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science

    University Calendar


    PhD Candidate: Arman Shahbazian

    Committee: Nenad Medvidovic (chair), Chao Wang, Sandeep Gupta (outside member)

    Title: Techniques for Methodically Exploring Software Development Alternatives

    Date and Time: Thursday, May 17th, 11:00am-1:00pm

    Location: VKC 210

    Abstract:

    Designing and maintaining a software system's architecture typically involve making numerous design decisions, each potentially affecting the system's functional and nonfunctional properties. Understanding these design decisions can help inform future decisions and implementation choices, and can avoid introducing architectural inefficiencies later. Despite their importance, the support for engineers to make these decisions is generally lacking. There is a relative shortage of techniques, tools, and empirical studies pertaining to architectural design decisions. Moreover, design decisions are rarely well documented and are typically a lost artifact of the architecture creation and maintenance process. The loss of this information can thus hurt development. To address these shortcomings, we develop a set of techniques to enable methodical exploration of such decisions and their effects. We develop a technique, named RecovAr, for automatically recovering design decisions from the project's readily available history artifacts, such as an issue tracker and version control repository. Building on RecovAr, we create PredictAr that aims to prevent the consequences of inadvertent architectural change. The result of such changes is accumulation of technical debt and deterioration of software quality. In this dissertation we take a step toward addressing that scarcity by using the information in the issue and code repositories of open-source software systems to investigate the cause and frequency of such architectural design decisions. We develop a predictive model that is able to identify the architectural significance of newly submitted issues, thereby helping engineers to prevent the adverse effects of architectural decay. We close the loop by helping engineers to not only predict and recover architectural design decisions, but also make new design decisions that are informed and well-considered. To that end, we present eQual, a novel model-driven technique for simulation-based assessment of architectural designs that helps architects understand and explore the effects of their decisions.

    Location: 210

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Lizsl De Leon

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  • Repeating EventMeet USC: Admission Presentation, Campus Tour, and Engineering Talk

    Fri, May 18, 2018

    Viterbi School of Engineering Undergraduate Admission

    Workshops & Infosessions


    This half day program is designed for prospective first-year students (High School juniors and younger) and family members. Meet USC includes an information session on the University and the Admission process, a student led walking tour of campus, and a meeting with us in the Viterbi School. During the engineering session we will discuss the curriculum, research opportunities, hands-on projects, entrepreneurial support programs, and other aspects of the engineering school. Meet USC is designed to answer all of your questions about USC, the application process, and financial aid.

    Reservations are required for Meet USC. This program occurs twice, once at 8:30 a.m. and again at 12:30 p.m.

    Please make sure to check availability and register online for the session you wish to attend. Reservations are required for the Meet USC program.

    Also, remember to list an Engineering major as your "intended major" on the webform!

    >> Register for a Meet USC Session

    Location: Ronald Tutor Campus Center (TCC) - USC Admission Center

    Audiences: Prospective Undergrads and Families

    View All Dates

    Contact: Viterbi Admission

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  • Repeating EventMeet USC: Admission Presentation, Campus Tour, and Engineering Talk

    Mon, May 21, 2018

    Viterbi School of Engineering Undergraduate Admission

    Workshops & Infosessions


    This half day program is designed for prospective first-year students (High School juniors and younger) and family members. Meet USC includes an information session on the University and the Admission process, a student led walking tour of campus, and a meeting with us in the Viterbi School. During the engineering session we will discuss the curriculum, research opportunities, hands-on projects, entrepreneurial support programs, and other aspects of the engineering school. Meet USC is designed to answer all of your questions about USC, the application process, and financial aid.

    Reservations are required for Meet USC. This program occurs twice, once at 8:30 a.m. and again at 12:30 p.m.

    Please make sure to check availability and register online for the session you wish to attend. Reservations are required for the Meet USC program.

    Also, remember to list an Engineering major as your "intended major" on the webform!

    >> Register for a Meet USC Session

    Location: Ronald Tutor Campus Center (TCC) - USC Admission Center

    Audiences: Prospective Undergrads and Families

    View All Dates

    Contact: Viterbi Admission

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  • A Case for Domain-Specific Architectures and its Application to Energy-Efficient Speech Recognition

    A Case for Domain-Specific Architectures  and its Application to Energy-Efficient Speech Recognition

    Mon, May 21, 2018 @ 10:30 AM - 11:30 AM

    Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Antonio González, Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, Barcelona, Spain

    Talk Title: A Case for Domain-Specific Architectures and its Application to Energy-Efficient Speech Recognition

    Abstract: Improvements in energy-efficiency is a main requirement to keep providing innovations in computing systems. The main driving forces in the past for improving energy-efficiency were based on process technology and general-purpose architectures. However, both of them are reaching a point of diminishing returns. On the other hand, domain-specific architectures offer great potential to keep delivering dramatic improvements in energy-efficient, and we believe they will become a key ingredient of future computing systems. In this talk, we will use speech recognition as a case study to illustrate this potential.

    Automatic speech recognition (ASR) has become a key feature for many computing systems, and in particular for mobile devices such as smartphones, tablets, home devices and wearables. For instance, ASR technology is at the heart of popular applications with voice-based user interfaces for mobile devices such as Google Now, Apple Siri, Microsoft Cortana or Amazon Alexa. These systems require support for real-time, large-vocabulary, speaker-independent, highly-accurate, continuous speech recognition. Unfortunately, supporting fast and accurate speech recognition requires a huge computational power, which is specially challenging to attain in devices with very tight constraints in energy consumption.

    In this talk, we will first review the main trends in computing and the state-of-the-art approaches for ASR and then, we will present a novel domain-specific architecture that provides dramatic improvements in terms of energy-efficiency for ASR.


    Biography: Antonio Gonzalez received his Ph.D. degree from the Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya (UPC), in Barcelona, Spain, in 1989. He joined the faculty of the Computer Architecture Department of UPC in 1986 and became a Full Professor in 2002. He was the founding director of the Intel Barcelona Research Center from 2002 to 2014.

    His research has focused on computer architecture. In this area, Antonio holds 46 patents, has published over 350 research papers and has given over 100 invited talks. He has also made multiple contributions to the design of the architecture of several Intel processors.

    Antonio has been program chair for ICS 2003, ISPASS 2003, MICRO 2004, HPCA 2008 and ISCA 2011, and general chair for MICRO 2008 and HPCA 2016 among other symposia. He has served on the program committees for over 100 international symposia in the field of computer architecture, and has been Associate Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Computers, IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems, IEEE Computer Architecture Letters, ACM Transactions on Architecture and Code Optimization, ACM Transactions on Parallel Computing, and Journal of Embedded Computing.

    Antonio's awards include the award to the best student in computer engineering in Spain graduating in 1986, the 2001 Rosina Ribalta award as the advisor of the best PhD project in Information Technology and Communications, the 2008 Duran Farrell award for research in technology, the 2009 Aritmel National Award of Informatics to the Computer Engineer of the Year, the 2013 King James I award for his contributions in research on new technologies, and the 2014 ICREA Academia Award. He is an IEEE Fellow.


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

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

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Gerrielyn Ramos

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  • The Connected Hospital: Preparing for 21st Century Healthcare and Community Engagement

    Mon, May 21, 2018 @ 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM

    Alfred E. Mann Department of Biomedical Engineering

    University Calendar


    Today-�s fundraising, marketing and patient engagement environment for healthcare institutions is more complex than ever. Prospective donors, grateful patients and their families, new patients, and health and wellness advocates demand a personalized, omni-channel relationship. How can we give that to them cost affordably and efficiently? We want to help!

    Join healthcare data, innovation & technology, and marketing & branding experts, Michael Johnston from hjc, Russ Cobb from Blackbaud, and Dr.George Tolomiczenko, PhD from USC for a half day workshop to advance your team's shift to a more digitally connected, omni-channel and supporter/patient-centric future.

    You'll hear from Dr. George Tolomiczenko, Administrative Director of The Health, Technology & Engineering Program (HTE@USC) at University of Southern California. He-�ll outline how technology and innovation will play a key role for hospitals and their foundations now and in the future. And to emphasize his point, he-�s invited a cutting-edge health technology start up Stasis Labs to share how their hardware and software solution is poised to impact healthcare here and around the world. We think it-�s a wonderful, intimate look inside innovation in our sector.

    Contact: Nadine Afari
    nafari@usc.edu to receive RSVP link

    Location: The USC Norris Comprehensive Cancer Center, Room: NRT LG 503

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Nadine Afari

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  • Repeating EventMeet USC: Admission Presentation, Campus Tour, and Engineering Talk

    Wed, May 23, 2018

    Viterbi School of Engineering Undergraduate Admission

    Workshops & Infosessions


    This half day program is designed for prospective first-year students (High School juniors and younger) and family members. Meet USC includes an information session on the University and the Admission process, a student led walking tour of campus, and a meeting with us in the Viterbi School. During the engineering session we will discuss the curriculum, research opportunities, hands-on projects, entrepreneurial support programs, and other aspects of the engineering school. Meet USC is designed to answer all of your questions about USC, the application process, and financial aid.

    Reservations are required for Meet USC. This program occurs twice, once at 8:30 a.m. and again at 12:30 p.m.

    Please make sure to check availability and register online for the session you wish to attend. Reservations are required for the Meet USC program.

    Also, remember to list an Engineering major as your "intended major" on the webform!

    >> Register for a Meet USC Session

    Location: Ronald Tutor Campus Center (TCC) - USC Admission Center

    Audiences: Prospective Undergrads and Families

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    Contact: Viterbi Admission

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  • Joint CSC@USC/CommNetS-MHI Seminar Series

    Joint CSC@USC/CommNetS-MHI Seminar Series

    Thu, May 24, 2018 @ 02:00 PM - 03:00 PM

    Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Mohamadreza Ahmadi, University of Texas at Austin

    Talk Title: Addressing Challenges in Autonomy: Lessons from Information and Control Theories

    Series: Joint CSC@USC/CommNetS-MHI Seminar Series

    Abstract: We live in the prolific age of artificial intelligence and machine learning. These automation technologies underlie real systems (e.g. robots, and self-driving vehicles), and virtual systems (e.g. financial, and inventory management). The problem is many of these autonomous systems have become so intricate and black-box that we hit a complexity roadblock. For example, it can be difficult to tell why a classifier or a recommendation engine based on machine learning works. Moreover, when the algorithms work, how can we quantify their limitations, safety, privacy and performance with guarantees. In this talk, I borrow notions from control and information theories to address two challenges in autonomy. The first one is motivated by the Mars 2020 project and is concerned with navigation of an autonomous agent in an uncertain environment (modeled by a Markov decision process) subject to communication and sensing limitations (in terms of transfer entropy), and high-level mission specification (characterized by linear temporal logic formulae). The second one is concerned with belief verification in autonomous systems (represented by a partially observable Markov decision process) with applications in privacy verification of autonomous systems (e.g. a robot) operating on shared infrastructure, and machine teaching.

    Biography: Mohamadreza Ahmadi joined the Institute for Computational Engineering and Sciences (ICES) at the University of Texas at Austin as a postdoctoral scholar in fall 2016, where he is currently a Research Associate. He received his DPhil (Ph.D.) in Engineering (Aeronautics) from the University of Oxford in fall 2016 as a Clarendon Scholar. From fall 2014 to spring 2016, he was a lecturer in engineering at Worcester College, University of Oxford. His current research is on applying tools from control theory to design autonomous systems with privacy, safety, and performance guarantees.

    Host: Mihailo Jovanovic, mihailo@usc.edu

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

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Gerrielyn Ramos

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  • Repeating EventMeet USC: Admission Presentation, Campus Tour, and Engineering Talk

    Fri, May 25, 2018

    Viterbi School of Engineering Undergraduate Admission

    Workshops & Infosessions


    This half day program is designed for prospective first-year students (High School juniors and younger) and family members. Meet USC includes an information session on the University and the Admission process, a student led walking tour of campus, and a meeting with us in the Viterbi School. During the engineering session we will discuss the curriculum, research opportunities, hands-on projects, entrepreneurial support programs, and other aspects of the engineering school. Meet USC is designed to answer all of your questions about USC, the application process, and financial aid.

    Reservations are required for Meet USC. This program occurs twice, once at 8:30 a.m. and again at 12:30 p.m.

    Please make sure to check availability and register online for the session you wish to attend. Reservations are required for the Meet USC program.

    Also, remember to list an Engineering major as your "intended major" on the webform!

    >> Register for a Meet USC Session

    Location: Ronald Tutor Campus Center (TCC) - USC Admission Center

    Audiences: Prospective Undergrads and Families

    View All Dates

    Contact: Viterbi Admission

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  • Repeating EventMeet USC: Admission Presentation, Campus Tour, and Engineering Talk

    Mon, May 28, 2018

    Viterbi School of Engineering Undergraduate Admission

    Workshops & Infosessions


    This half day program is designed for prospective first-year students (High School juniors and younger) and family members. Meet USC includes an information session on the University and the Admission process, a student led walking tour of campus, and a meeting with us in the Viterbi School. During the engineering session we will discuss the curriculum, research opportunities, hands-on projects, entrepreneurial support programs, and other aspects of the engineering school. Meet USC is designed to answer all of your questions about USC, the application process, and financial aid.

    Reservations are required for Meet USC. This program occurs twice, once at 8:30 a.m. and again at 12:30 p.m.

    Please make sure to check availability and register online for the session you wish to attend. Reservations are required for the Meet USC program.

    Also, remember to list an Engineering major as your "intended major" on the webform!

    >> Register for a Meet USC Session

    Location: Ronald Tutor Campus Center (TCC) - USC Admission Center

    Audiences: Prospective Undergrads and Families

    View All Dates

    Contact: Viterbi Admission

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  • Theoretically Efficient Parallel Graph Algorithms Can Be Fast and Scalable

    Theoretically Efficient Parallel Graph Algorithms Can Be Fast and Scalable

    Tue, May 29, 2018 @ 10:30 AM - 11:30 AM

    Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Julian Shun, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

    Talk Title: Theoretically Efficient Parallel Graph Algorithms Can Be Fast and Scalable

    Abstract: There has been significant interest in parallel graph processing recently due to the need to quickly analyze the large graphs available today. Many graph codes have been designed for distributed memory or external memory. However, today even the largest publicly-available real-world graph (the Hyperlink Web graph with over 3.5 billion vertices and 128 billion edges) can fit in the memory of a single commodity multicore server. Nevertheless, most experimental work in the literature report results on much smaller graphs, and the ones that use the Hyperlink graph are done in distributed or external memory. Therefore it is natural to ask whether we can efficiently solve a broad class of graph problems on this graph in memory.

    With a graph of this size it is important to use theoretically-efficient parallel algorithms as even minor inefficiencies in the work or parallelism of an algorithm can lead to a significant increase in running time. This talk shows that theoretically-efficient parallel graph algorithms can scale to the largest publicly-available graphs using a single machine with a terabyte of RAM, processing them in minutes. We give implementations of theoretically-efficient parallel algorithms for 13 important graph problems. We also present the optimizations and techniques that we used in our implementations, which were crucial in enabling us to process these large graphs quickly. We show that the running times of our implementations outperform existing state-of-the-art implementations on the largest real-world graphs. For many of the problems that we consider, this is the first time they have been solved on graphs at this scale.


    Biography: Julian Shun is an assistant professor in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT. He is interested in the theory and practice of parallel computing, especially parallel graph processing frameworks, algorithms, data structures, and tools for deterministic parallel programming. He has received the ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award, CMU School of Computer Science Doctoral Dissertation Award, Miller Research Fellowship, Facebook Graduate Fellowship, and a best student paper award at the IEEE Data Compression Conference.

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

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

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Gerrielyn Ramos

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  • Repeating EventMeet USC: Admission Presentation, Campus Tour, and Engineering Talk

    Wed, May 30, 2018

    Viterbi School of Engineering Undergraduate Admission

    Workshops & Infosessions


    This half day program is designed for prospective first-year students (High School juniors and younger) and family members. Meet USC includes an information session on the University and the Admission process, a student led walking tour of campus, and a meeting with us in the Viterbi School. During the engineering session we will discuss the curriculum, research opportunities, hands-on projects, entrepreneurial support programs, and other aspects of the engineering school. Meet USC is designed to answer all of your questions about USC, the application process, and financial aid.

    Reservations are required for Meet USC. This program occurs twice, once at 8:30 a.m. and again at 12:30 p.m.

    Please make sure to check availability and register online for the session you wish to attend. Reservations are required for the Meet USC program.

    Also, remember to list an Engineering major as your "intended major" on the webform!

    >> Register for a Meet USC Session

    Location: Ronald Tutor Campus Center (TCC) - USC Admission Center

    Audiences: Prospective Undergrads and Families

    View All Dates

    Contact: Viterbi Admission

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