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Events for the 5th week of February

  • Chia Wei Hsu, Monday, February 26th at 12:00pm noon in EEB 132

    Mon, Feb 26, 2018 @ 12:00 PM - 01:30 PM

    Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Chia Wei Hsu, Department of Applied Physics, Yal University

    Talk Title: New Frontiers of Electromagnetic Phenomena at the Nanoscale

    Abstract: Optics and photonics today enjoy unprecedented freedom. The ability to synthesize arbitrary light fields (through wavefront shaping) and the ability to design structures at the subwavelength scale (through nanofabrication) enable us to realize exciting new phenomena that were not accessible in the past. In this talk, I will present several such experiments and related theory.

    It is commonly thought that waves cannot be perfectly confined within the continuum spectrum of an open system. I will describe the first realization of "bound states in the continuum" that defy such conventional textbook wisdom [1] as well as their underlying topological nature [2]. This new way to confine light enables novel lasers, filters, and sensors [3].

    I will show that by tailoring the radiation of optical modes, we can realize non-Hermitian photonic band structures with no counterpart in closed Hermitian systems, such as rings of exceptional points [4] and pairs of exceptional points connected by bulk Fermi arcs [5].

    By designing light fields, we can control wave transport even through unknown disordered structures. I will show that the multiple scattering of light leads to correlations between far-away photons [6] and that using such correlations, we can simultaneously control orders of magnitudes more degrees of freedom than what was previously thought to be possible [7].

    I will conclude with my visions for new opportunities enabled by designed light fields and optical structures, including new paradigms for imaging and optical computing that have the potential to go beyond the current state of the art by orders of magnitude.

    [1] C. W. Hsu*, B. Zhen* et al., Nature 499, 188 (2013).
    [2] B. Zhen*, C. W. Hsu* et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 113, 257401 (2014).
    [3] C. W. Hsu*, B. Zhen* et al., Nature Reviews Materials 1, 16048 (2016).
    [4] B. Zhen*, C. W. Hsu* et al., Nature 525, 354 (2015).
    [5] H. Zhou et al., Science, eaap9859 (2018).
    [6] C. W. Hsu et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 115, 223901 (2015).
    [7] C. W. Hsu et al., Nature Physics 13, 497 (2017).

    Biography: Wade is a postdoc at Yale applied physics. He received his PhD in physics from Harvard in 2015 and BS in physics with high honors from Wesleyan in 2010. His research centers around controlling light in nanoscale structures and complex systems, through a combination of experiment and theory. He is the co-author of 32 peer-reviewed journal articles and the co-inventor of 3 patents, and has delivered over a dozen invited talks internationally. He won the LeRoy Apker Award given by the American Physical Society and was a finalist for the Blavatnik Regional Award for Young Scientists.


    Host: EE-Electrophysics

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

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Marilyn Poplawski

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  • Biomedical Engineering Seminars

    Mon, Feb 26, 2018 @ 12:30 PM - 01:50 PM

    Alfred E. Mann Department of Biomedical Engineering

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Donald Schwartz, MD, President

    Talk Title: TBA

    Host: Professor Qifa Zhou

    Location: Olin Hall of Engineering (OHE) - 122

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Mischalgrace Diasanta

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  • Biomedical Engineering Department Guest Speaker

    Mon, Feb 26, 2018 @ 01:00 PM - 02:00 PM

    Alfred E. Mann Department of Biomedical Engineering

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Lyle Muller, Postdoctoral Fellow, Computational Neurobiology Laboratory, Salk Institute for Biological Studies

    Talk Title: Traveling waves in cortex: spatiotemporal dynamics shape perceptual and cognitive processes

    Abstract: With new multichannel recording technologies, neuroscientists can now record from cortex with high spatial and temporal resolution. Early recordings during anesthesia revealed spontaneous and stimulus-evoked waves traveling across the cortex. While for a long time these waves were thought to disappear in awake animals and during normal sleep, our recent work has revealed traveling waves in these complex activity states. Their overall role in neural computation, however, remains poorly understood.
    In my research, we have introduced new computational methods for detection and quantification of spatiotemporal patterns in noisy multisite recordings. At the scale of a single cortical region, these methods have revealed that small visual stimuli consistently evoke waves traveling from the point of input to primary visual cortex in the awake monkey (Muller et al., Nature Communications 5, 2014). At the whole-brain scale, the 11-15 Hz sleep "spindle", a brain oscillation causally implicated in consolidation of long-term memory, is consistently organized as a rotating wave traveling in a preferred direction (Muller et al., eLife 5, 2016). These results indicate that traveling waves play a role in organizing neural activity during multiple behavioral states. In upcoming work, we aim to address the network-level mechanisms generating traveling waves and complex spatiotemporal patterns, under the general aim of understanding their role in neural computation.
    Hosted by:

    Host: Francisco Valero-Cuevas, PhD

    Location: Corwin D. Denney Research Center (DRB) - 145/145A

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Mischalgrace Diasanta

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  • Center for Systems and Control (CSC@USC) and Ming Hsieh Institute for Electrical Engineering

    Mon, Feb 26, 2018 @ 02:00 PM - 03:00 PM

    Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Frank Doyle, Harvard University

    Talk Title: Controlling the Artificial Pancreas

    Abstract: Type 1 diabetes mellitus (T1DM) is a chronic autoimmune disease affecting approximately 35 million individuals world-wide, with associated annual healthcare costs in the US estimated to be approximately $15 billion. Current treatment requires either multiple daily insulin injections or continuous subcutaneous (SC) insulin infusion (CSII) delivered via an insulin infusion pump. Both treatment modes necessitate frequent blood glucose measurements to determine the daily insulin requirements for maintaining near-normal blood glucose levels.

    More than 30 years ago, the idea of an artificial endocrine pancreas for patients with type 1 diabetes mellitus (T1DM) was envisioned. The closed-loop concept consisted of an insulin syringe, a blood glucose analyzer, and a transmitter. In the ensuing years, a number of theoretical research studies were performed with numerical simulations to demonstrate the relevance of advanced process control design to the artificial pancreas, with delivery algorithms ranging from simple PID, to fuzzy logic, to H-infinity, to model predictive control. With the advent of continuous glucose sensing, which reports interstitial glucose concentrations approximately every minute, and the development of hardware and algorithms to communicate with and control insulin pumps, the vision of closed-loop control of blood glucose is approaching a reality.

    In the last 15 years, our research group has been working with medical doctors on clinical demonstrations of feedback control algorithms for the artificial pancreas. In this talk, I will outline the difficulties inherent in controlling physiological variables, the challenges with regulatory approval of such devices, and will describe a number of process systems engineering algorithms we have tested in clinical experiments for the artificial pancreas.


    Biography: Frank Doyle is the John A. Paulson Dean of the Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences at Harvard University, where he also is the John A. & Elizabeth S. Armstrong Professor. Prior to that he was the Mellichamp Professor at UC Santa Barbara, where he was the Chair of the Department of Chemical Engineering, the Director of the UCSB/MIT/Caltech Institute for Collaborative Biotechnologies, and the Associate Dean for Research in the College of Engineering. He received a B.S.E. degree from Princeton, C.P.G.S. from Cambridge, and Ph.D. from Caltech, all in Chemical Engineering. He has also held faculty appointments at Purdue University and the University of Delaware, and held visiting positions at DuPont, Weyerhaeuser, and Stuttgart University. He has been recognized as a Fellow of multiple professional organizations including: IEEE, IFAC, AIMBE, and the AAAS. He was the President for the IEEE Control Systems Society in 2015, and is the Vice President of the International Federation of Automatic Control. In 2005, he was awarded the Computing in Chemical Engineering Award from the AIChE for his innovative work in systems biology, and in 2015 received the Control Engineering Practice Award from the American Automatic Control Council for his development of the artificial pancreas. In 2016, he was inducted as a Fellow into the National Academy of Medicine for his work on biomedical control. His research interests are in systems biology, network science, modeling and analysis of circadian rhythms, and drug delivery for diabetes.

    Host: Mihailo Jovanovic, mihailo@usc.edu

    More Information: Doyle.png

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

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Gerrielyn Ramos

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  • CS Colloquium: Satish Kumar Thittamaranahalli (USC) – The Constraint Composite Graph and Its Applications

    Tue, Feb 27, 2018 @ 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM

    Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Satish Kumar Thittamaranahalli, USC Information Sciences Institute

    Talk Title: The Constraint Composite Graph and Its Applications

    Series: Computer Science Colloquium

    Abstract: The weighted constraint satisfaction problem (WCSP) is a fundamental combinatorial problem with applications in such diverse areas as artificial intelligence, statistical physics, computer vision, and information theory. In this talk, I will present new methods for efficiently solving the WCSP. Central to these methods is the idea of the constraint composite graph (CCG). The CCG provides a unifying computational framework for simultaneously exploiting the structure of the variable-interactions in a given WCSP as well as the structure of the weighted constraints in it. I will present some important applications of the idea of the CCG in kernelization of combinatorial problems, the revival of message passing algorithms, and in other domains (if time permits).

    This lecture satisfies requirements for CSCI 591: Research Colloquium. Please note, due to limited capacity in OHE 100D, seats will be first come first serve.


    Biography: Dr. Satish Kumar Thittamaranahalli (T. K. Satish Kumar) leads the Collaboratory for Algorithmic Techniques and Artificial Intelligence at the Information Sciences Institute of the University of Southern California. He has published extensively on numerous topics in Artificial Intelligence spanning such diverse areas as Constraint Reasoning, Planning and Scheduling, Probabilistic Reasoning, Robotics, Combinatorial Optimization, Approximation and Randomization, Heuristic Search, Model-Based Reasoning, Knowledge Representation and Spatio-Temporal Reasoning. He has served on the Program Committees of many international conferences in Artificial Intelligence and is a winner of the 2016 Best Robotics Paper Award and the 2005 Best Student Paper Award from the International Conference on Automated Planning and Scheduling. Dr. Kumar received his PhD in Computer Science from Stanford University in March 2005. In the past, he has also been a Visiting Student at the NASA Ames Research Center, a Postdoctoral Research Scholar at the University of California, Berkeley, a Research Scientist at the Institute for Human and Machine Cognition, a Visiting Assistant Professor at the University of West Florida, and a Senior Research and Development Scientist at Mission Critical Technologies.


    Host: Computer Science Department

    Location: Olin Hall of Engineering (OHE) - 100D

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Computer Science Department

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  • Lunch and Learn: Doctoral Seminar Series

    Tue, Feb 27, 2018 @ 12:00 PM - 01:30 PM

    Viterbi School of Engineering Doctoral Programs

    Workshops & Infosessions


    This monthly series provides PhD students with a forum to improve communication skills and discuss scientific topics of societal significance in a friendly, peer-to-peer manner. Each month, one student will introduce a new topic and lead the group discussion over lunch. Come hungry and ready to engage others! Lunch is provided.

    Tuesday, February 27, 2018 at 12:00 PM

    Topic: AI/Machine Learning

    For more details on speaking or attending Lunch and Learn, please contact Prof. Mojarad (mojarad@usc.edu). One-on-one presentation coaching is offered to all students who lead lunch discussions.

    More Information: Lunch and Learn_February 2018.pdf

    Audiences: PhD Students only.

    Contact: Jennifer Gerson

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  • Epstein Institute Seminar, ISE 651

    Tue, Feb 27, 2018 @ 03:30 PM - 04:50 PM

    Daniel J. Epstein Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Dr. John R. Birge, Distinguished Service Professor, University of Chicago, Booth School of Business

    Talk Title: MCMC Methods for Dynamic Stochastic Optimization

    Host: Prof. Suvrajeet Sen

    More Information: February 27, 2018.pdf

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

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Grace Owh

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  • George A. Bekey Distinguished Lecture with Professor Stefan Savage (UCSD)

    Tue, Feb 27, 2018 @ 04:00 PM - 05:20 PM

    Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Stefan Savage, University of California, San Diego

    Talk Title: Modern Automotive Vulnerabilities: Problems, Causes and Outcomes

    Series: Computer Science Keynote Series

    Abstract: Over the last six years, a range of research has transformed our understanding of automobiles. What we traditionally envisioned as mere mechanical conveyances are now more widely appreciated as complex distributed systems 'with wheels'. A car purchased today has virtually all aspects of its physical behavior mediated through dozens of microprocessors, themselves networked internally, and connected to a range of external digital channels. As a result, software vulnerabilities in automotive firmware potentially allow an adversary to obtain arbitrary control over the vehicle. Indeed, multiple research groups have been able to demonstrate such remote control of unmodified automobiles from a variety of manufacturers. In this talk, I'll highlight how our understanding of automotive security vulnerabilities has changed over time, how unique challenges in the automotive sector give rise to these problems and create non-intuitive constraints on their solutions and the key role played by the research community driving industry and government response.

    This lecture satisfies requirements for CSCI 591: Research Colloquium.


    Biography: Stefan Savage is a professor of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of California, San Diego. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science and Engineering from the University of Washington and a B.S. in Applied History from Carnegie Mellon University. Savage is a full-time empiricist, whose research interests lie at the intersection of computer security, distributed systems and networking. He currently serves as co-director of UCSD's Center for Network Systems (CNS) and for the Center for Evidence based Security Research (CESR). Savage is a MacArthur Fellow, a Sloan Fellow, an ACM Fellow, and is a recipient of the ACM Prize in Computing and the ACM SIGOPS Weiser Award. He currently holds the Irwin and Joan Jacobs Chair in Information and Computer Science, but is a fairly down-to-earth guy and only writes about himself in the third person when asked.


    Host: Computer Science Department

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

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Computer Science Department

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  • CS Colloquium: Yinzhi Cao (Lehigh University) – Testing and Repairing Machine Learning Systems in Adversarial Environment

    Wed, Feb 28, 2018 @ 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM

    Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Yinzhi Cao, Lehigh University

    Talk Title: Testing and Repairing Machine Learning Systems in Adversarial Environment

    Series: Computer Science Colloquium

    Abstract: Machine learning (ML) systems are increasingly deployed in safety- and security-critical domains such as self-driving cars and malware detection, where the system correctness for corner case inputs are crucial. Existing testing of ML system correctness depends heavily on manually labeled data and therefore often fails to expose erroneous behaviors for rare inputs.

    In this talk, I will present the first framework to test and repair ML systems, especially in an adversarial environment. In the first part, I will introduce DeepXplore, a whitebox testing framework of real-world deep learning (DL) systems. Our evaluation shows that DeepXplore can successfully find thousands of erroneous corner case behaviors, e.g., self-driving cars crashing into guard rails and malware masquerading as benign software. In the second part, I will introduce machine unlearning, a general, efficient approach to repair an ML system exhibiting erroneous behaviors. Our evaluation, on four diverse learning systems and real-world workloads, shows that machine unlearning is general, effective, fast, and easy to use.


    This lecture satisfies requirements for CSCI 591: Research Colloquium. Please note, due to limited capacity in RTH 115, seats will be first come first serve.



    Biography: Yinzhi Cao is an assistant professor at Lehigh University. He earned his Ph.D. in Computer Science at Northwestern University and worked at Columbia University as a postdoc. Before that, he obtained his B.E. degree in Electronics Engineering at Tsinghua University in China. His research mainly focuses on the security and privacy of the Web, smartphones, and machine learning. He has published many papers at various security and system conferences, such as IEEE S&P (Oakland), NDSS, CCS, and SOSP. His JShield system has been adopted by Huawei, the world's largest telecommunication company. His past work was widely featured by over 30 media outlets, such as NSF Science Now (Episode 38), CCTV News, IEEE Spectrum, Yahoo! News and ScienceDaily. He received two best paper awards at SOSP'17 and IEEE CNS'15 respectively.


    Host: Muhammad Naveed

    Location: Ronald Tutor Hall of Engineering (RTH) - 115

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Computer Science Department

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  • Computer Science General Faculty Meeting

    Wed, Feb 28, 2018 @ 12:00 PM - 02:00 PM

    Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science

    Receptions & Special Events


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

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

    Audiences: Invited Faculty Only

    Contact: Assistant to CS chair

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  • Center for Systems and Control (CSC@USC) and Ming Hsieh Institute for Electrical Engineering

    Wed, Feb 28, 2018 @ 02:00 PM - 03:00 PM

    Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Magnus Egerstedt, Georgia Institute of Technology

    Talk Title: Long-range autonomy and constraint-based coordination of multi-robot systems

    Abstract: By now, we have a fairly good understanding of how to design coordinated control strategies for making teams of mobile robots achieve geometric objectives in a distributed manner, such as assembling shapes or covering areas. But, the mapping from high-level tasks to geometric objectives is not particularly well understood. In this talk, we investigate this topic in the context of long-range autonomy, i.e., we consider teams of robots, deployed in an environment over a sustained period of time, that can be recruited to perform a number of different tasks in a distributed, safe, and provably correct manner. This development will involve the composition of multiple barrier certificates for encoding the tasks and safety constraints, as well as a detour into ecology as a way of understanding how persistent environmental monitoring, as a special instantiation of the long-range autonomy concept, can be achieved by studying animals with low-energy life-styles, such as the three-toed sloth.

    Biography: Magnus Egerstedt is the Executive Director for the Institute for Robotics and Intelligent Machines at the Georgia Institute of Technology and a Professor and the Julian T. Hightower Chair in Systems and Controls in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering. He received the M.S. degree in Engineering Physics and the Ph.D. degree in Applied Mathematics from the Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden, the B.A. degree in Philosophy from Stockholm University, and was a Postdoctoral Scholar at Harvard University. Dr. Egerstedt is a Fellow of the IEEE and a recipient of a number of research and teaching awards, including the Ragazzini Award from the American Automatic Control Council.

    Host: Mihailo Jovanovic, mihailo@usc.edu

    More Information: egerstedt.jpg (JPEG Image, 623 × 779 pixels).pdf

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

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Gerrielyn Ramos

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  • CAIS Seminar: Dr. Henry Kautz (University of Rochester) – Mining Social Media to Improve Public Health

    Wed, Feb 28, 2018 @ 04:00 PM - 05:00 PM

    Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Dr. Henry Kautz, University of Rochester

    Talk Title: Mining Social Media to Improve Public Health

    Series: USC Center for Artificial Intelligence in Society (CAIS) Seminar Series

    Abstract: People posting to social media on smartphones can be viewed as an organic sensor network for public health data, picking up information about the spread of disease, lifestyle factors that influence health, and pinpointing sources of disease. We show how a faint but actionable signal can be detected in vast amounts of social media data using statistical natural language and social network models. We present case studies of predicting influenza transmission and per-city rates, discovering patterns of alcohol consumption in different neighborhoods, and tracking down the sources of foodborne illness.

    This lecture satisfies requirements for CSCI 591: Research Colloquium


    Biography: Dr. Henry Kautz is the Robin & Tim Wentworth Director of the Goergen Institute for Data Science and Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Rochester. He has served as department head at AT&T Bell Labs in Murray Hill, NJ, and as a full professor at the University of Washington, Seattle. In 2010 he was elected President of the Association for Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, and in 2016 was elected Chair of the AAAS Section on Information, Computing, and Communication. His research in artificial intelligence, pervasive computing, and healthcare applications has led him to be honored as a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery, and Fellow of the AAAI.


    Host: Milind Tambe

    Location: Seeley Wintersmith Mudd Memorial Hall (of Philosophy) (MHP) - 101

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Computer Science Department

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  • STEM Spotlight on Electrical Engineering

    Thu, Mar 01, 2018 @ 09:00 AM - 01:30 PM

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

    University Calendar


    The STEM Spotlight on the Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical Engineering opens up the research labs and various activities to the students of Bud Carson Middle School in Hawthorne. The Spotlight series focus on introducing K-12 students to cutting-edge faculty engineering research and interactions with USC Viterbi students to help build diversity in STEM college and career pathways. Learn more here: https://viterbipk12.usc.edu/research/stem-spotlight/

    Location: Charles Lee Powell Hall (PHE) - lawn by PHE and SAL

    Audiences: K-12 Schools pre-registered

    Contact: Katie Mills

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  • Taylor Berg-Kirkpatrick (Carnegie Mellon University) – Balancing Constraint and Flexibility in Unsupervised Models for Language Analysis

    Thu, Mar 01, 2018 @ 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM

    Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Taylor Berg-Kirkpatrick, Carnegie Mellon University

    Talk Title: Balancing Constraint and Flexibility in Unsupervised Models for Language Analysis

    Series: Computer Science Colloquium

    Abstract: Without careful consideration of the relationship between input and output, unsupervised learning problems can be under-constrained. This talk will discuss approaches for making unsupervised problems feasible by incorporating different types of inductive bias. First, we focus on a set of raw data analysis tasks related to the digital humanities, including historical document recognition, music transcription, and compositor attribution. For each of these tasks, strong prior knowledge about the causal process behind the data can be encoded into the model. We show how to leverage this casual knowledge as a helpful source of constraint, yielding systems that in some cases outperform their supervised counterparts. Next, we investigate several linguistic analysis tasks where causal structure is more difficult to encode. Here, we develop a new unsupervised model class that combines structured and continuous representations by leveraging the flexibility of neural networks. We show that incorporating a volume-preserving constraint on the neural component of our model makes learning well-behaved. Using this approach, we demonstrate start-of-the-art results on two standard unsupervised NLP tasks: part-of-speech induction and unsupervised dependency parsing.

    This lecture satisfies requirements for CSCI 591: Research Colloquium. Please note, due to limited capacity in OHE 100D, seats will be first come first serve.


    Biography: Taylor Berg-Kirkpatrick joined the Language Technologies Institute at Carnegie Mellon University as an Assistant Professor in Fall 2016. Previously, he was a Research Scientist at Semantic Machines Inc. and, before that, completed his Ph.D. in computer science at the University of California, Berkeley. Taylor's research focuses on using machine learning to understand structured human data, including language but also sources like music, document images, and other complex artifacts.

    Host: Computer Science Department

    Location: Olin Hall of Engineering (OHE) - 100D

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Computer Science Department

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  • ADP Information Session

    Thu, Mar 01, 2018 @ 06:00 PM - 07:30 PM

    Viterbi School of Engineering Career Connections

    Workshops & Infosessions


    Tech Talk held by ADP's Product Management Team.

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

    Audiences: All Viterbi

    Contact: RTH 218 Viterbi Career Connections

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  • Borrowing from Nature to Build Better Computers: DNA Data Storage and Near-Molecule Processing

    Fri, Mar 02, 2018 @ 10:30 AM - 11:30 AM

    Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Luis Ceze, University of Washington

    Talk Title: Borrowing from Nature to Build Better Computers: DNA Data Storage and Near-Molecule Processing

    Abstract: DNA data storage is an attractive option for digital datastorage because of its extreme density, durability and eternal relevance. This is especially attractive when contrasted with the exponential growth in world-wide digital data production. In this talk, we will present our efforts in building an end-to-end system, from the computational component of encoding and decoding to the molecular biology component of random access, sequencing and fluidics automation. We will also discuss some early efforts in building a hybrid electronic/molecular computer system that has the potential to offer more than just data storage.

    Biography: Luis Ceze is a Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Washington. His research focuses on the intersection between computer architecture, programming languages and biology. His current focus is on approximate computing and DNA-based data storage. He has co-authored over 100 papers in these areas, and had several papers selected as IEEE Micro Top Picks and CACM Research Highlights. His research has been featured prominently in the media including NewYork Times, Popular Science, MIT Technology Review, Wall Street Journal, among others. He is a recipient of an NSF CAREER Award, a Sloan Research Fellowship, a Microsoft Research Faculty Fellowship,the IEEE TCCA Young Computer Architect Award and UIUC Distinguished Alumni Award. He is a member of the DARPA ISAT and MEC study groups, and consults for Microsoft.

    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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  • W.V.T. RUSCH ENGINEERING HONORS COLLOQUIUM

    Fri, Mar 02, 2018 @ 01:00 PM - 01:50 PM

    USC Viterbi School of Engineering

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Prof. Andrea Armani, Mork Family Department of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science, USC

    Talk Title: Field Trip to USC Michelson Hall Laboratories

    Host: Dr. Prata & EHP

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

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Su Stevens

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  • EE-EP Faculty Candidate - Deblina Sarkar, Friday, March 2nd at 2pm in EEB 132

    Fri, Mar 02, 2018 @ 02:00 PM - 03:30 PM

    Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Deblina Sarkar, MIT

    Talk Title: Green Electronics to Gray Matter: Ghost Walks, Mind Blowing and Brain Doping

    Abstract: Excessive power consumption and dissipation of electronics with technology scaling, is a serious threat to the Information Society as well as to the environment and especially smacks a hard blow to the future of energy-constrained applications such as medical implants and prosthetics. This impending energy crisis has roots in the thermal distribution of carriers, which poses fundamental limitation on energy scalability of the present transistors.
    In this talk, I will demonstrate the quantum mechanical transistor, that I developed, which beats the fundamental thermal limitations of present transistors. I will describe how this can be achieved by unique integration of heterogeneous material technologies including an atomically thin material, to make the electron waves propagate (tunnel) efficiently through an energy barrier (like a ghost walking through a wall). This device is the world's thinnest channel (6 atoms thick) sub-thermal tunnel-transistor. Thus, it has the potential to allow dimensional scalability to beyond Silicon scaling era and thereby to address the long-standing issue of simultaneous dimensional and power scalability.
    Going beyond electronic computation, I will discuss about the biological computer: the brain, which can be thought of as an ultimate example of low power computational system. However, understanding the brain, requires deciphering the dense jungle of biomolecules that it is formed of. I will introduce the next-generation expansion microscopy technology, that I have developed, which helps to decipher the organization of biomolecular building blocks of brain by literally blowing out the brain by up to 100-fold. This technology reveals for the first time, a nanoscale trans-synaptic architecture in brain tissue and structural changes related to neurological diseases.
    I will conclude with my research vision for how extremely powerful technologies can be built by fusing diverse research fields and how seamless integration of nanoelectronics-bio hybrid systems in the brain (brain doping), can create unprecedented possibilities for probing and controlling the biological computer and in future, help us transcend beyond our biological limitations.
    [1] D. Sarkar et. al., Nature, 526 (7571), 91, 2015;
    [2] D. Sarkar et. al., Nano Lett., 15 (5), 2852, 2015;
    [3] D. Sarkar et. al., ACS Nano., 8 (4), 3992, 2014;
    [4] D. Sarkar et. al., Society for Neuroscience, 2016.
    [5] D. Sarkar et. al., International Conference on Nanoscopy, 2018.


    Biography: Deblina Sarkar is currently an MIT Translational Fellow and postdoctoral associate in the Synthetic Neurobiology group, while she had received her M.S. and Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering at UCSB. Her research aims to combine novel materials, nanoelectronics and synthetic biology to create a new paradigm for computational electronics and invent disruptive technologies for life-machine symbiosis.
    Her work has led to more than 40 publications till date (citations: 1927, h-index: 18, i-10 index: 26 according to Google Scholar), several of which have appeared in popular press worldwide. Her PhD dissertation was honored as one of the top 3 dissertations throughout USA and Canada in the field of Mathematics, Physical sciences and all departments of Engineering by the Council of Graduate Schools in the period 2014-2016. She was UCSB's nominee for this nationwide contest, after winning the Lancaster Award for the best PhD Dissertation at UCSB in 2016. She is the recipient of numerous other awards and recognitions, including the U.S. Presidential Fellowship (2008), Outstanding Doctoral Candidate Fellowship (2008), being one of three researchers worldwide to win the prestigious IEEE EDS PhD Fellowship Award (2011), a "Bright Mind" invited speaker at the KAUST-NSF conference (2015), one of three winners of the Falling Walls Lab Young Innovator's Award at San Diego (2015), recipient of "Materials Research Society's Graduate Student Award" (2015), named a "Rising Star" in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (2015), invited speaker at TEDx (2016) and recipient of MIT Translational Fellowship (2017).

    Host: EE-Electrophysics

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

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Marilyn Poplawski

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  • AIAA Student Mini-Conference

    Sat, Mar 03, 2018 @ 09:00 AM - 03:00 PM

    Viterbi School of Engineering Student Organizations

    University Calendar


    The Los Angeles - Las Vegas AIAA Section is hosting a small conference open to all student members on Saturday, March 3rd 2018, 9am - 3pm at the S-Café (Building S - Cafeteria) at the Northrop Grumman Campus located at One Space Park, Redondo Beach, CA 90278.

    This is a great venue to share your research, paper, or project with students, educators, professionals, and aerospace enthusiasts. Learn about what others are working on, get and provide feedback, and expand your network.

    If showcasing a paper or research, the delivery format shall be a presentation of about 15-20 minutes, with 5-10 minutes for questions. If showcasing a project, the delivery format shall be a poster.

    Anyone interested in attending should RSVP here to help us coordinate carpooling!

    Important Note: Feel free to come for the first or second half of this event if you have other stuff going on during the day.

    Presentation Information Attached

    More Information: LA-LV University Branches Mini-Conference.docx

    Location: Northrop Grumman S-Cafe

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics

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