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SUNMONTUEWEDTHUFRISAT
Events for July
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NL Seminar
Thu, Jul 01, 2021 @ 09:00 AM - 10:00 AM
Information Sciences Institute
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Kalpesh Krishna , (U Mass, Amherst)
Talk Title: Advances in Text Generation and the Perils of its Automatic Evaluation
Series: NL Seminar
Abstract: Meeting hosts only admit guests that they know to the Zoom meeting. Hence, you're highly encouraged to use your USC account to sign into Zoom. If you're an outside visitor, please inform us at nlg-seminar-admin2 at isi dot edu beforehand so we'll be aware of your attendance and let you in.
Recent advances in large scale language modeling have significantly improved the capability of natural language generation NLG systems, opening up several new applications. Unfortunately, evaluating NLG systems remains challenging, making it hard to measure meaningful progress. In this talk I will present our recent efforts in building and evaluating NLG systems for 1. unsupervised sentence-level style transfer 2. paragraph-length abstractive question answering with the ELI5 dataset. We build NLG systems using large language models with paraphrase generation and retrieval respectively, that significantly outperform prior state of the art using standard automatic metrics. Unfortunately, we discover several issues with the current evaluation setups, including trivial baselines like input copying which can game these standard metrics, even outperforming real systems. Along the way I will discuss our efforts towards rectifying these issues, and conclude with a brief mention of other projects working towards more robust NLG evaluation.
Biography: Kalpesh is a third year PhD student at UMass Amherst, advised by Prof. Mohit Iyyer. He is primarily interested in natural language generation and the security of NLP systems. Before coming to UMass, he completed a bachelors' degree at IIT Bombay, advised by Prof. Preethi Jyothi. He has also spent time interning at Google, TTI-Chicago and Mozilla. His research is supported by a Google PhD Fellowship, which was awarded in 2021.
Host: Jon May and Mozhdeh Gheini
More Info: https://nlg.isi.edu/nl-seminar/
Webcast: https://youtu.be/bv95xMBZO_ULocation: Information Science Institute (ISI) - Virtual Only
WebCast Link: https://youtu.be/bv95xMBZO_U
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Petet Zamar
Event Link: https://nlg.isi.edu/nl-seminar/
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Virtual First-Year Admission Information SessionThu, Jul 01, 2021 @ 04:00 PM - 05:00 PM
Viterbi School of Engineering Undergraduate Admission
Workshops & Infosessions
Our virtual information session is a live presentation from a USC Viterbi admission counselor designed for high school students and their family members to learn more about the USC Viterbi undergraduate experience. Our session will cover an overview of our undergraduate engineering programs, the application process, and more on student life. Guests will be able to ask questions and engage in further discussion toward the end of the session.
Please Register Here!Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Viterbi Admission
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Viterbi Jukebox Café, Round 2
Fri, Jul 02, 2021 @ 07:00 PM - 08:00 PM
Viterbi School of Engineering Masters Programs
University Calendar
Share your favorite songs with the Viterbi community,
invite your friends to enjoy the music! Songs in different languages are welcome!Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Juli Legat
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Virtual First-Year Admission Information Session
Tue, Jul 06, 2021 @ 04:00 PM - 05:00 PM
Viterbi School of Engineering Undergraduate Admission
Workshops & Infosessions
Our virtual information session is a live presentation from a USC Viterbi admission counselor designed for high school students and their family members to learn more about the USC Viterbi undergraduate experience. Our session will cover an overview of our undergraduate engineering programs, the application process, and more on student life. Guests will be able to ask questions and engage in further discussion toward the end of the session.
Register here!
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Viterbi Admission
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Charades!
Wed, Jul 07, 2021 @ 07:00 PM - 08:00 PM
Viterbi School of Engineering Masters Programs
University Calendar
Enjoy the fun word guessing social game on zoom with Viterbi community! It's the chance to draw out your acting potential!
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Juli Legat
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Webinar for U.S. Active Duty Military & Veteran Prospective Graduate Engineering Students
Thu, Jul 08, 2021 @ 12:00 PM - 01:00 PM
DEN@Viterbi, Viterbi School of Engineering Graduate Admission
Workshops & Infosessions
Join USC Viterbi to learn about the funding and support provided to U.S. active duty military and veterans who are interested in pursuing a graduate degree in engineering or computer science. This virtual information session via WebEx will discuss how USC Viterbi's flexible online DEN@Viterbi delivery enables active duty military and veterans to pursue their degree from anywhere in the world.
The session will discuss military funding and scholarships available, student support, enrollment options, FAQs, and more! Attendees will have the opportunity to connect directly with a representative from Viterbi Admission & Student Engagement.
Register Now!WebCast Link: https://uscviterbi.webex.com/uscviterbi/onstage/g.php?MTID=edc0d4b8e87f90918d7e5c0b7c6ca7b34
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Corporate & Professional Programs
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Virtual First-Year Admission Information Session
Thu, Jul 08, 2021 @ 04:00 PM - 05:00 PM
Viterbi School of Engineering Undergraduate Admission
Workshops & Infosessions
Our virtual information session is a live presentation from a USC Viterbi admission counselor designed for high school students and their family members to learn more about the USC Viterbi undergraduate experience. Our session will cover an overview of our undergraduate engineering programs, the application process, and more on student life. Guests will be able to ask questions and engage in further discussion toward the end of the session.
Register here!
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Viterbi Admission
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PhD Defense - Mingxuan Yue
Mon, Jul 12, 2021 @ 04:00 PM - 06:00 PM
Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science
University Calendar
PhD Candidate: Mingxuan Yue
Title: Inferring Mobility Behaviors from Trajectory Datasets
time: July 12 2021 4pm -6pm
Committee: Haipeng Luo, Craig Knoblock, Mahdi Soltanolkotabi, Tianshu Sun (external) and Cyrus Shahabi (advisor)
zoom link: https://usc.zoom.us/j/96196937726?pwd=Z2JvNkhueHZHUzF5dk8ySGp2elpaZz09
Abstract:
Identifying people's mobility behaviors (e.g., work commute, shopping) in rich trajectory data is of great economic and social interest to various applications, including location/trip recommendations, geo-targeting/advertisements, urban planning, anomaly detection, epidemiology.Inferring the mobility behaviors is challenging as it requires a robust unsupervised clustering technique and effective mobility-related features to cluster trajectories of various spatial and temporal scales into groups, each of which follows the same mobility behavior. Specifically, my thesis tackles the following three challenges.
First, it is difficult to infer the mobility behavior directly from a trajectory since the raw coordinates do not provide useful information about the surrounding environment of the visited locations. Existing trajectory clustering approaches usually rely on pre-defined distance measurement and usually group trajectories with similar shapes and spatial (and temporal) scales together rather than group the trajectories with the same mobility behavior. In this case, trajectories in different groups may still belong to the same mobility behavior, e.g., the school commutes may occur at different locations by different transportation modes and are assigned to different groups by these approaches. To overcome this challenge, we propose DETECT, which extracts salient points in the trajectories and augments them with auxiliary geographical features retrieved from the Point of Interest data. In this way, each trajectory is transformed into a context sequence, i.e., an ordered list of real-value feature vectors, each describing the ``context'' of a visited location (e.g., sports, shopping, or dining venues) in the trajectory. Rather than using pre-defined distance measurements, DETECT is data-driven by employing a two-phase deep learning procedure that first learns fixed-size embeddings of variant-length trajectories and then optimizes a clustering objective for a better separation of clusters.
Second, the robustness of the clustering approaches on the context sequences could be further improved to have a more accurate and stable inference of mobility behaviors. Existing deep-learning-based clustering approaches (including DETECT) usually employ a two-phase procedure and are sensitive to a lossy initialization. Therefore, we propose a variational clustering method called VAMBC which can simultaneously learn the fixed-size embeddings and the cluster assignments in a single phase and produce robust clustering results. In addition, unlike other variation approaches that could collapse to trivial solutions, VAMBC separates the information of individual trajectories and common patterns of clusters in the embedding space and encourages sufficient involvement of the cluster membership in creating the embeddings to avoid producing poor clustering results.
Third, effective mobility-related features are of great importance in this problem, but one can not assume the auxiliary geographical data is always available for generating these features. Hence, we also investigate approaches to learn region representations from trajectories without using any auxiliary data like the Point of Interests. We first propose DeepMARK for learning a representation of regions to support delivery time estimation. Then, we study to learn a representation for broader applications, including the mobility behavior inference and next location prediction. In this study, we propose a framework based on a heterogeneous graph neural network, in which we exploit rich mobility-related attributes and relationships of regions, users, and temporal periods involved in trajectories. Within this framework, we design a mobility-related objective via customized random walks and learn effective region embeddings by encoding information from neighboring nodes in the graph. We demonstrate the advance of the learned region representation over various baseline approaches in three downstream tasks using a real-world dataset.
WebCast Link: https://usc.zoom.us/j/96196937726?pwd=Z2JvNkhueHZHUzF5dk8ySGp2elpaZz09
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Lizsl De Leon
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DEN@Viterbi - Online Graduate Engineering Virtual Information Session
Tue, Jul 13, 2021 @ 09:00 AM - 10:00 AM
DEN@Viterbi, Viterbi School of Engineering Graduate Admission
Workshops & Infosessions
Join USC Viterbi School of Engineering for a virtual information session via WebEx, providing an introduction to DEN@Viterbi, our top ranked online delivery system. Discover the 40+ graduate engineering and computer science programs available entirely online.
Attendees will have the opportunity to connect directly with USC Viterbi representatives during the session to discuss the admission process, program details and the benefits of online delivery.
Register Today!WebCast Link: https://uscviterbi.webex.com/uscviterbi/onstage/g.php?MTID=ebcdfd69711f4665b36c8828d1f5bea57
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Corporate & Professional Programs
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Virtual First-Year Admission Information Session
Tue, Jul 13, 2021 @ 04:00 PM - 05:00 PM
Viterbi School of Engineering Undergraduate Admission
Workshops & Infosessions
Our virtual information session is a live presentation from a USC Viterbi admission counselor designed for high school students and their family members to learn more about the USC Viterbi undergraduate experience. Our session will cover an overview of our undergraduate engineering programs, the application process, and more on student life. Guests will be able to ask questions and engage in further discussion toward the end of the session.
Register here!
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Viterbi Admission
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Viterbi Craftistic Art
Wed, Jul 14, 2021 @ 06:00 PM - 07:30 PM
Viterbi School of Engineering Masters Programs
Student Activity
Get ready to find the artist in you this summer, learn about crafts and express yourself through art. Join us with you and your friends at Viterbi for a fun event on July 14.
Further instructions on what material to keep ready for the event will be emailed to all participants.RSVP nowAudiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Juli Legat
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Virtual First-Year Admission Information Session
Thu, Jul 15, 2021 @ 04:00 PM - 05:00 PM
Viterbi School of Engineering Undergraduate Admission
Workshops & Infosessions
Our virtual information session is a live presentation from a USC Viterbi admission counselor designed for high school students and their family members to learn more about the USC Viterbi undergraduate experience. Our session will cover an overview of our undergraduate engineering programs, the application process, and more on student life. Guests will be able to ask questions and engage in further discussion toward the end of the session.
Register here!
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Viterbi Admission
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Virtual First-Year Admission Information Session
Tue, Jul 20, 2021 @ 04:00 PM - 05:00 PM
Viterbi School of Engineering Undergraduate Admission
Workshops & Infosessions
Our virtual information session is a live presentation from a USC Viterbi admission counselor designed for high school students and their family members to learn more about the USC Viterbi undergraduate experience. Our session will cover an overview of our undergraduate engineering programs, the application process, and more on student life. Guests will be able to ask questions and engage in further discussion toward the end of the session.
Register here!
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Viterbi Admission
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NL SEMINAR Predictor Guided Controlled Generation
Thu, Jul 22, 2021 @ 11:10 AM - 12:10 PM
Information Sciences Institute
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Kevin Yang, UC Berkeley
Talk Title: Predictor Guided Controlled Generation
Abstract: REMINDER Meeting hosts only admit guests that they know to the Zoom meeting. Hence, you're highly encouraged to use your USC account to sign into Zoom. If you're an outside visitor, please inform nlg DASH seminar DASH admin2 AT isi.edu beforehand so we'll be aware of your attendance and let you in.
ABSTRACT:
I will present two works on controlled generation, with a shared theme of using predictors to guide a generator. Future Discriminators for Generation FUDGE is a flexible and modular method for controlled text generation, which learns an attribute predictor operating on a partial sequence, and uses this predictor's outputs to adjust a base generator's original probabilities with no need for re-training or fine-tuning. Switching domains, I will also present Improving Molecular Design by Stochastic Iterative Target Augmentation, a self-training approach for using a strong attribute predictor to guide the training of a generator in a semi-supervised manner. Overall, we find that these predictor-guided approaches to controlled generation substantially outperform prior methods in several text generation tasks, as well as in molecular design and program synthesis.
Biography: Kevin Yang is a rising third-year PhD student at UC Berkeley advised by Dan Klein within Berkeley NLP and BAIR. He is broadly interested in AI in the context of language and game-playing, particularly in designing more modular and/or language-controllable agents. He is also interested in neural architectures for structured domains such as chemistry. Previously, Kevin worked with Regina Barzilay during his undergrad and M.Eng. at MIT, on natural language processing and chemistry applications of deep learning, especially graph convolutional networks.
Host: Jon May and Mozhdeh Gheini
More Info: https://nlg.isi.edu/nl-seminar/
Webcast: https://youtu.be/3aT3dNLyzecLocation: Information Science Institute (ISI) - Virtual Only
WebCast Link: https://youtu.be/3aT3dNLyzec
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Petet Zamar
Event Link: https://nlg.isi.edu/nl-seminar/
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Virtual First-Year Admission Information Session
Thu, Jul 22, 2021 @ 04:00 PM - 05:00 PM
Viterbi School of Engineering Undergraduate Admission
Workshops & Infosessions
Our virtual information session is a live presentation from a USC Viterbi admission counselor designed for high school students and their family members to learn more about the USC Viterbi undergraduate experience. Our session will cover an overview of our undergraduate engineering programs, the application process, and more on student life. Guests will be able to ask questions and engage in further discussion toward the end of the session.
Register here!
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Viterbi Admission
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DEN@Viterbi - 'Limited Status: How to Get Started' Virtual Info Session
Thu, Jul 22, 2021 @ 06:00 PM - 07:00 PM
DEN@Viterbi, Viterbi School of Engineering Graduate Admission
Workshops & Infosessions
Join USC Viterbi for our upcoming Limited Status: How to Get Started Virtual Information Session via WebEx to learn about the Limited Status enrollment option. The Limited Status enrollment option allows individuals with an undergraduate degree in engineering or related field, with a 3.0 GPA or above to take courses before applying for formal admission into a Viterbi graduate degree program.
USC Viterbi representatives will provide a step-by-step guide for how to get started as a Limited Status student and enroll in courses online via DEN@Viterbi as early as the Fall 2021 semester.
Register Now!WebCast Link: https://uscviterbi.webex.com/uscviterbi/onstage/g.php?MTID=e0eaaff02dee119ea2fc381f61382c674
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Corporate & Professional Programs
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Virtual First-Year Admission Information Session
Tue, Jul 27, 2021 @ 04:00 PM - 05:00 PM
Viterbi School of Engineering Undergraduate Admission
Workshops & Infosessions
Our virtual information session is a live presentation from a USC Viterbi admission counselor designed for high school students and their family members to learn more about the USC Viterbi undergraduate experience. Our session will cover an overview of our undergraduate engineering programs, the application process, and more on student life. Guests will be able to ask questions and engage in further discussion toward the end of the session.
Register here!
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Viterbi Admission
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NL Seminar-Should PTLMs go to school?
Wed, Jul 28, 2021 @ 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Information Sciences Institute
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Manuel Ciosici, ISI Boston Waltham
Talk Title: Should PTLMs go to school?
Series: NL Seminar
Abstract: REMINDER Meeting hosts only admit guests that they know to the Zoom meeting. Hence, you're highly encouraged to use your USC account to sign into Zoom. If you're an outside visitor, please inform nlg DASH seminar DASH admin2 AT isi.edu beforehand so we'll be aware of your attendance and let you in.
I will present a couple of research vignettes of the working knowledge inside large pre trained language models. I will use the vignettes to argue for a new task to measure modern language models knowledge and ability to learn from textbooks. Unlike machines, humans do not need to read, for example, all of Wikipedia, to learn.
For humans, reading a textbook or a manual is often enough to provide working knowledge on the books topic. We propose LEFT, a new task to measure a machines capacity to learn from the same textbooks that college graduates use to learn about society and history. The task reveals surprising results for current state of the art language models like T5 and GPT Neo.
Biography: Manuel Ciosici is a postdoc at ISI Boston (Waltham), working with Ralph Weischedel and Marjorie Friedman on understanding the knowledge inside large language models and putting it to use, for example, in filling in sequences of events. He is also interested in Natural Language Processing for languages other than English and has recently released a large corpus of Danish to support training large language models. Before joining ISI, Manuel received his Ph.D. from Aarhus University in Denmark and was a postdoc at the IT University in Copenhagen.
Host: Jon May and Mozhdeh Gheini
More Info: https://nlg.isi.edu/nl-seminar/
Webcast: https://youtu.be/ZtM7b0ggfvsLocation: Information Science Institute (ISI) - Virtual Only
WebCast Link: https://youtu.be/ZtM7b0ggfvs
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Pete Zamar
Event Link: https://nlg.isi.edu/nl-seminar/
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Guest Speaker Series: "Learning from the Pandemic to Improve Healthcare"
Thu, Jul 29, 2021 @ 10:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Daniel J. Epstein Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Professor Randy Hall, Epstein ISE Dept./Director of CREATE; Hal Yee, Jr, MD, PhD, Chief Deputy Director, Clinical Affairs, and Chief Medical Officer, Los Angeles County, Moderated by Michael Cousineau, DrPH
Talk Title: How the Pandemic Changed the Healthcare System.
Abstract: Understanding Pandemic Driven Demand for Optimizing Patient Flow.
Host: The Daniel J. Epstein Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering, The Gehr Family Center at the Keck School of Medicine, and the Price School of Public Policy.
More Info: Follow link to register for event: https://usc.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_F5NCbL-MQiKgP63JghiVsg
More Information: Learning from the Pandemic to Improve Healthcare.pdf
Location: Online/Zoom
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Grace Owh
Event Link: Follow link to register for event: https://usc.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_F5NCbL-MQiKgP63JghiVsg
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NL Seminar- Fantastic Continuous-valued Sentence Representations and How to Find Them
Thu, Jul 29, 2021 @ 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Information Sciences Institute
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Nishant Subramani, Allen NLP
Talk Title: Fantastic Continuous-valued Sentence Representations and How to Find Them
Series: NL Seminar
Abstract: REMINDER Meeting hosts only admit guests that they know to the Zoom meeting. Hence, you're highly encouraged to use your USC account to sign into Zoom. If you're an outside visitor, please inform nlg DASH seminar DASH admin2 AT isi.edu beforehand so we'll be aware of your attendance and let you in.
ABSTRACT:
Recently, large pretrained language models have seen tremendous success in few-shot and zero shot learning settings when given appropriate prompting. For these models to excel in this few shot paradigm, the provided prompts must condition the language model to produce the desired output sequence. We investigate a more general property of this idea: does there exist a continuous, fixed length vector that can prompt a pretrained and frozen language model to generate any output sentence of interest? To answer this, we develop a language model agnostic sentence representation discovery algorithm, which learns a continuous-valued, fixed-length vector for a sequence by adding the vector at various locations in the language model and optimizing it to maximize the likelihood of the sequence. Experiments reveal that for nearly all English sentences, greater than 98 percent from different genres and corpora, we can find a vector that recovers our sentence of interest exactly without fine tuning the underlying language model. In addition, we find that our representations can be learned in real-time and are robust to initialization; convergence requires less than 20 iterations on average using stochastic gradient descent with Adam.
Biography: Nishant is a predoctoral young investigator on the AllenNLP team at AI2 working with Matt Peters and part of the Masakhane community. He is broadly interested in sentence representation, ML for social good, and out-of-distribution generalization research. Previously, Nishant has spent time in industry working on document analysis, OCR, fake speech detection, and audio-driven facial animation. He also has worked with Kyunghyun Cho, Sam Bowman, and Doug Downey during his time at NYU and Northwestern on NLP and causality research.
Host: Jon May and Mozhdeh Gheini
More Info: https://nlg.isi.edu/nl-seminar/
Webcast: https://youtu.be/pCKBSPDenpcLocation: Information Science Institute (ISI) - Virtual Only
WebCast Link: https://youtu.be/pCKBSPDenpc
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Petet Zamar
Event Link: https://nlg.isi.edu/nl-seminar/
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Virtual First-Year Admission Information Session
Thu, Jul 29, 2021 @ 04:00 PM - 05:00 PM
Viterbi School of Engineering Undergraduate Admission
Workshops & Infosessions
Our virtual information session is a live presentation from a USC Viterbi admission counselor designed for high school students and their family members to learn more about the USC Viterbi undergraduate experience. Our session will cover an overview of our undergraduate engineering programs, the application process, and more on student life. Guests will be able to ask questions and engage in further discussion toward the end of the session.
Register here!
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Viterbi Admission
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DEN@Viterbi - 'Limited Status: How to Get Started' Virtual Info Session
Fri, Jul 30, 2021 @ 10:00 AM - 11:00 AM
DEN@Viterbi, Viterbi School of Engineering Graduate Admission
Workshops & Infosessions
Join USC Viterbi for our upcoming Limited Status: How to Get Started Virtual Information Session via WebEx to learn about the Limited Status enrollment option. The Limited Status enrollment option allows individuals with an undergraduate degree in engineering or related field, with a 3.0 GPA or above to take courses before applying for formal admission into a Viterbi graduate degree program.
USC Viterbi representatives will provide a step-by-step guide for how to get started as a Limited Status student and enroll in courses online via DEN@Viterbi as early as the Fall 2021 semester.
Register Now!WebCast Link: https://uscviterbi.webex.com/uscviterbi/onstage/g.php?MTID=efcbf0479555e74f183a0e66b1fd8d45b
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Corporate & Professional Programs
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Deadline to Apply for the Town & Gown USC Computer Scholarship
Sat, Jul 31, 2021 @ 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Technology & Applied Computing Program (TAC)
University Calendar
The Town & Gown of USC Computer Scholarship supports new USC freshmen and incoming transfer students from Southern California by providing funding to assist with the purchase of a laptop or desktop computer.
Eligibility:
To be eligible for this scholarship, students must:
- Be new USC freshmen or incoming transfer students
- Have financial need
- Be permanent residents of Southern California
To apply, please submit an application by JULY 31st here.Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Eric Perez
