Select a calendar:
Filter March Events by Event Type:
Events for the 1st week of March
-
Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering Candidate Series
Mon, Feb 29, 2016 @ 10:00 AM - 11:00 AM
Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Jenni Sidey, Research Assistant, Department of Engineering at the University of Cambridge
Talk Title: Experimental and numerical investigations of flames with gas turbine applications at the University of Cambridge
Abstract: With growing concern over anthropogenic climate change and increasingly stringent emission standards, the development of low-emission combustion technologies is a necessity. This seminar is concerned with the motivation, development, and implementation challenges associated with gas turbine and reciprocating engine pollutant reduction and the tools the combustion community is using to meet them. Of particular interest is the investigation of processes in which hot combustion products are used as a diluent for fresh reactants. The underlying physics of these processes will be discussed with results from laminar flame calculations, droplet autoignition simulations, and fundamental turbulent flame investigations with high speed laser diagnostics, while their application potential will be assessed through the investigation of a novel gas turbine combustor concept.
Biography: Jenni Sidey is a research associate at the University of Cambridge. Her postdoctoral position, funded by the European Commission Joint Clean Sky Initiative, focuses on the investigation of non-premixed, premixed, and spray flame extinction and thermoacoustic oscillations in gas turbine combustors. She completed her PhD in the summer of 2015, investigating heavily preheated and diluted flames. While studying Mechanical Engineering at McGill University, she took part in alternative fuel production and microgravity flame propagation experiments.
Location: Ronald Tutor Hall of Engineering (RTH) - 211
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Valerie Childress
This event is open to all eligible individuals. USC Viterbi operates all of its activities consistent with the University's Notice of Non-Discrimination. Eligibility is not determined based on race, sex, ethnicity, sexual orientation, or any other prohibited factor. -
CS Colloquium: Sameer Singh (University of Washington) - Interactive Machine Learning for Information Extraction
Mon, Feb 29, 2016 @ 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Sameer Singh, University of Washington
Talk Title: Interactive Machine Learning for Information Extraction
Series: CS Colloquium
Abstract: This lecture satisfies requirements for CSCI 591: Computer Science Research Colloquium
Most of the world's knowledge, be it factual news, scholarly research, social communication, subjective opinions, or even fictional content, is now easily accessible as digitized text. Unfortunately, due to the unstructured nature of text, much of the useful content in these documents is hidden. The goal of "information extraction" is to address this problem: extracting meaningful, structured knowledge (such as graphs and databases) from text collections. The biggest challenges when using machine learning for information extraction include the high cost of obtaining annotated data and lack of guidance on how to fix mistakes.
In this talk, I propose interpretable representations that allow users and machine learning models to interact with each other: enabling users to inject domain knowledge into machine learning, and providing explanations for why a machine learning model is making a specific prediction. I study these techniques using relation extraction as the application, an important subtask of information extraction where the goal is to identify the types of relations between entities that are expressed in text. I first describe how symbolic domain knowledge, if provided by the user as first-order logic statements, can be injected into relational embeddings to improve the predictions. In the second part of the talk, I present an approach to "explain" any machine learning prediction using a symbolic representation, which the user may annotate directly for more effective supervision. I present experiments that demonstrate that an interactive interface between a user and machine learning is effective in reducing annotation effort and in quickly training accurate extraction systems.
Biography: Sameer Singh is a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the University of Washington, working on large-scale and interactive machine learning applied to information extraction and natural language processing. He received his PhD from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, during which he also interned at Microsoft Research, Google Research, and Yahoo! Labs on massive-scale machine learning. He was recently selected as a DARPA Riser, won the grand prize in the Yelp dataset challenge, has been awarded the Yahoo! Key Scientific Challenges and the UMass Graduate School fellowships, and was a finalist for the Facebook PhD fellowship.
Host: CS Department
Location: Olin Hall of Engineering (OHE) - 136
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Assistant to CS chair
This event is open to all eligible individuals. USC Viterbi operates all of its activities consistent with the University's Notice of Non-Discrimination. Eligibility is not determined based on race, sex, ethnicity, sexual orientation, or any other prohibited factor. -
Spatial Light Interference Microscopy (SLIM) for Quantitative Biomedicine
Mon, Feb 29, 2016 @ 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Prof. Gabriel Popescu, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Talk Title: Spatial Light Interference Microscopy (SLIM) for Quantitative Biomedicine
Series: Medical Imaging Seminar Series
Abstract: Most living cells do not absorb or scatter light significantly, i.e. they are essentially transparent, or phase objects. Phase contrast microscopy proposed by Zernike in the 1930s represents a major advance in intrinsic contrast imaging, as it reveals inner details of transparent structures without staining or tagging. While phase contrast is sensitive to minute optical path-length changes in the cell, down to the nanoscale, the information retrieved is only qualitative. Quantifying cell-induced shifts in the optical path-lengths permits nanometer scale measurements of structures and motions in a non-contact, non-invasive manner. Thus, quantitative phase imaging (QPI) has recently become an active field of study and various experimental approaches have been proposed.
Recently, we have developed Spatial Light Interference microscopy (SLIM) as a highly sensitive QPI method. Due to its nanometer pathlength sensitivity, SLIM enables interesting structure and dynamics studies over broad spatial (nanometers-centimeters) and temporal (milliseconds-weeks) scales. I will review our recent results on applying SLIM to basic cell studies, such as intracellular transport, cell growth, and single cell tomography. Recently, we have demonstrated that SLIM is a valuable tool for cancer diagnosis and prognosis in unlabeled biopsies. This capability is particularly valuable in prostate pathology.
Biography: Gabriel Popescu is an Associate Professor in Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He received the B.S. and M.S. in Physics from University of Bucharest, in 1995 and 1996, respectively, obtained his M.S. in Optics in 1999 and the Ph.D. in Optics in 2002 from the School of Optics/ CREOL (now the College of Optics and Photonics), University of Central Florida. Dr. Popescu continued his training with the G. R. Harrison Spectroscopy Laboratory at M.I.T., working as a postdoctoral associate. He joined Illinois in August 2007 where he directs the Quantitative Light Imaging Laboratory (QLI Lab) at the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology. Dr. Popescu is an Associate Editor of Optics Express and Biomedical Optics Express, and Editorial Board Member for Journal of Biomedical Optics and Scientific Reports. He authored a book, edited another book, authored 118 journal publications, 175 conference presentations, 32 patents, gave 150 invited talks. Dr. Popescu founded Phi Optics, Inc., a start-up company that commercializes quantitative phase imaging technology. He is OSA Fellow and SPIE Fellow.
Host: Professor Justin Haldar
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 132
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Talyia Veal
This event is open to all eligible individuals. USC Viterbi operates all of its activities consistent with the University's Notice of Non-Discrimination. Eligibility is not determined based on race, sex, ethnicity, sexual orientation, or any other prohibited factor. -
Seminars in Biomedical Engineering
Mon, Feb 29, 2016 @ 12:30 PM - 01:49 PM
Alfred E. Mann Department of Biomedical Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Dr. Stuart Ibsen, Postdoctoral fellow, Salk Institute
Talk Title: TBA
Biography: Stuart Ibsen received his undergraduate degree in Biomedical Engineering at Johns Hopkins University. He went on to earn a Ph.D. in Zoology from the University of Hawaii and a Ph.D. in Biomedical Engineering from the University of California, San Diego. Stuart has 10 years of experience designing and building scientific instrumentation to use ultrasound to understand bioacoustic echolocation sonar sensory systems in dolphins and to explore biological phenomena in C. elegans and in cancer cell research. Stuart is also designing new drug delivery vehicles for chemotherapy applications
Host: K. Kirk Shung, PhD
Location: Olin Hall of Engineering (OHE) - 122
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Mischalgrace Diasanta
This event is open to all eligible individuals. USC Viterbi operates all of its activities consistent with the University's Notice of Non-Discrimination. Eligibility is not determined based on race, sex, ethnicity, sexual orientation, or any other prohibited factor. -
EE-EP Seminar - Hui Fang, Monday, February 29th at 2:00pm in EEB 132
Mon, Feb 29, 2016 @ 02:00 PM - 03:30 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Hui Fang, University of Illinois
Talk Title: Advanced Electronic Materials for Next-Generation Biomedical Implants and Bio tools
Abstract: Innovating electronic materials and related process technologies are critical in building next generation large scale, bio-electronic interface for biomedical implants and bio-tools.
In this talk, the influence of materials and process innovation will be discussed in the context of achieving two essential properties at the bio-electronic interface, bio conformality and bio stability. First, to reconcile the mechanic properties mismatch between soft, curvilinear organ surface and conventional rigid, planar electronics, Si nanomembrane enables bio conformal electronics from top down approach and advanced micro/nano fabrication on flexible substrates. In the second part of the talk, I will discuss how to achieve long term bio-stability at the bio-electronic interface through an ultrathin hermetic thermal silicon dioxide layer from a special device fabrication process. A capacitively coupled, bio-conformal sensing electronics with over 1,000 channels demonstrate the robustness of this encapsulation strategy. Together, these results form a realistic pathway towards bio compatible, bio conformal and bio stable electronic implants, with potential for broad utility, such as brain/heart activity mapping, brain-machine interface, and pharmaceutical screening. At the end of my talk, I will show how we can leverage recent advancements in nano electronics into building next generation bio electronics and solve big problems in biology, especially in brain activity mapping.
Biography: Dr. Hui Fang received his B.S. degree (2009) from Tsinghua University, and Ph.D. degree (2014) from the University of California, Berkeley, both in Materials Science and Engineering. At Berkeley he worked under the supervision of Prof. Ali Javey. Currently Dr. Fang is a postdoctoral research associate in Professor John A. Rogers' group at the University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign. Dr. Fang's research interests include developing novel materials, devices and related process technologies for bio-integrated electronics and nano electronics, as well as exploring new materials/device physics at the nanoscale. Dr. Fang is a recipient of the 2013 Chinese Government Award for Outstanding Self-financed Students Abroad. His publication record can be found online at http://publish.illinois.edu/huifangnano/.
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 132
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Marilyn Poplawski
This event is open to all eligible individuals. USC Viterbi operates all of its activities consistent with the University's Notice of Non-Discrimination. Eligibility is not determined based on race, sex, ethnicity, sexual orientation, or any other prohibited factor. -
Schlumberger Information Session
Mon, Feb 29, 2016 @ 06:00 PM - 08:00 PM
Viterbi School of Engineering Career Connections
Workshops & Infosessions
We invite you to meet with us for an inside look at our Field Engineer positions. You will have an opportunity to talk one on one with Schlumberger representatives and learn more about who we are and what we do as an Oilfield Services Company. Food and Beverages will be provided!
Location: Seeley G. Mudd Building (SGM) - 101
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: RTH 218 Viterbi Career Connections
This event is open to all eligible individuals. USC Viterbi operates all of its activities consistent with the University's Notice of Non-Discrimination. Eligibility is not determined based on race, sex, ethnicity, sexual orientation, or any other prohibited factor. -
CS Colloquium: Manu Sridharan (Samsung Research) - Analysis Tools for Reliable Software Everywhere
Tue, Mar 01, 2016 @ 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Manu Sridharan, Samsung Research America
Talk Title: Analysis Tools for Reliable Software Everywhere
Series: CS Colloquium
Abstract: This lecture satisfies requirements for CSCI 591: Computer Science Research Colloquium
Software is becoming ubiquitous in everyday life, from today's
smartphones and servers to tomorrow's self-driving cars, drones, and Internet of Things devices. However, the distributed, always-on nature of this software poses significant new challenges for reliability, security, and programmer productivity. Better programming tools are needed to enable next-generation applications to achieve their full transformative potential. I have helped design and develop several such tools in my recent research based on novel techniques in program analysis.
This talk will focus on EventRacer, the first tool for discovering and debugging non-determinism errors in event-driven programs. Event-driven programming has recently achieved a meteoric rise in popularity, as it is well-suited to the needs of modern interactive, client-server applications. However, event-driven programs often suffer from timing-based data races that can be fiendishly difficult to reproduce and debug. EventRacer adapts the notion of a "happens-before relation" from concurrent and distributed systems to give a clean definition of data races for event-driven programs. It also incorporates multiple novel techniques to achieve scalability and usability for real-world applications. With EventRacer, we found many errors in deployed Fortune 100 web sites, and its techniques have since been applied in a variety of other emerging domains.
Biography: Manu Sridharan is a senior researcher at Samsung Research America in the area of programming languages and software engineering. He received his PhD from the University of California, Berkeley in 2007, and he worked as a research staff member at IBM Research from 2008-2013. His research has drawn on, and contributed to, techniques in static analysis, dynamic analysis, and program synthesis, with applications to security, software quality, code refactoring, and software performance. His work has been incorporated into multiple commercial products, including IBM's commercial security analysis tool and Samsung's developer toolkit for the Tizen operating system. For further details, see http://manu.sridharan.net.
Host: CS Department
Location: Olin Hall of Engineering (OHE) - 136
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Assistant to CS chair
This event is open to all eligible individuals. USC Viterbi operates all of its activities consistent with the University's Notice of Non-Discrimination. Eligibility is not determined based on race, sex, ethnicity, sexual orientation, or any other prohibited factor. -
Epstein Institute Seminar - ISE 651
Tue, Mar 01, 2016 @ 03:30 PM - 04:50 PM
Daniel J. Epstein Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Eric Horvitz, Technical Fellow & Managing Director - Microsoft Research Lab
Talk Title: Data, Predictions, and Decisions in Support of People and Society
Host: Ali Abbas
More Information: March 1, 2016 Horvitz.pdf
Location: Ethel Percy Andrus Gerontology Center (GER) - 206
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Michele ISE
This event is open to all eligible individuals. USC Viterbi operates all of its activities consistent with the University's Notice of Non-Discrimination. Eligibility is not determined based on race, sex, ethnicity, sexual orientation, or any other prohibited factor. -
CS Colloquium: Iolanda Leite (Disney Research) - Long-term Human-Robot Interaction in the Real-World
Tue, Mar 01, 2016 @ 04:00 PM - 05:00 PM
Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Iolanda Leite, Disney Research
Talk Title: Long-term Human-Robot Interaction in the Real-World
Series: CS Colloquium
Abstract: This lecture satisfies requirements for CSCI 591: Computer Science Research Colloquium
Most social robots and virtual characters are still unable to keep users engaged over repeated interactions because they lack social and adaptive capabilities that facilitate the interaction once the novelty effect fades away. In this seminar, I will present my past and current research on mechanisms that allow autonomous robots to be deployed in real-world social environments over weeks and months. These mechanisms include computational models of empathy, turn-taking and engagement. I will present evidence on the positive effects of implementing these models in robots and virtual characters interacting with people in several application domains, and discuss limitations of the current state of the art in robotic technology suitable for realistic social environments. An improved understanding of how robots should perceive and act depending on their surrounding social context can lead to more natural, enjoyable and useful long-term human-robot interactions.
The meeting will be available to stream HERE. Please open in new tab for best results.
Biography: Iolanda Leite is an Associate Research Scientist at Disney Research, Pittsburgh. She received her Ph.D in Information Systems and Computer Engineering from Instituto Superior Técnico, University of Lisbon, in 2013. From 2013 to 2015, she was a Postdoctoral Associate at the Yale Social Robotics Lab. Her doctoral dissertation, "Long-term Interactions with Empathic Social Robots", received an honorable mention in the IFAAMAS-13 Victor Lesser Distinguished Dissertation Award. Iolanda has published over 40 conference and journal in the areas of human-robot interaction, artificial intelligence and affective computing.
Host: CS Department
Location: Henry Salvatori Computer Science Center (SAL) - 101
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Assistant to CS chair
This event is open to all eligible individuals. USC Viterbi operates all of its activities consistent with the University's Notice of Non-Discrimination. Eligibility is not determined based on race, sex, ethnicity, sexual orientation, or any other prohibited factor. -
MHI Distinguished Visitor Talk
Wed, Mar 02, 2016 @ 10:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Prof. K.J. Ray Liu, University of Maryland
Talk Title: Why Time-Reversal for Future 5G Wireless?
Abstract: Time reversal is a fundamental physical phenomenon that takes advantage of unavoidable but rich multi-paths in radio propagation to create the spatial-temporal resonance effect, the so-called focusing effect. One can image that the larger the transmission power, the more observable multipaths. When the power is fixed, so does the maximum number of observable multipaths. Since radio waves travel at the speed of light, for one to see the multipath profile in detail, it needs high resolution in time, which implies very broad bandwidth in frequency. The larger the bandwidth, the better the time resolution, and therefore the more multipaths can be revealed. In essence, multipaths are naturally existing 'degrees of freedom' ready to be harvested via power and bandwidth. In a real environment, especially indoors, depending on the structure of the buildings, the number of observable multipaths can one observe is around 15-30 significant multipaths with 150 MHz bandwidth - the entire ISM band at 5.8 GHz. Such a large number of degrees of freedom, existing in nature, can be harvested to enable engineering applications. In this talk, we will argue that time-reversal is an ideal platform for future 5G wireless because it realizes the massive multipath effect by using a single antenna and has low complexity as the environment is serving as the computer. It is highly secure and energy efficient, scalable for extreme network densification, and ideal for cloud-based radio networks. It also offers very simply but high resolution for indoor positioning systems, an essential property for Internet of Things applications. Time-reversal meets all the demands one can envision for future 5G wireless!
Biography: Dr. K. J. Ray Liu was named a Distinguished Scholar-Teacher of University of Maryland, College Park, in 2007, where he is Christine Kim Eminent Professor of Information Technology. He leads the Maryland Signals and Information Group conducting research encompassing broad areas of information and communications technology with recent focus on future wireless technologies, network science, and information forensics and security. Dr. Liu was a recipient of the 2016 IEEE Leon K. Kirchmayer Technical Field Award on graduate teaching and mentoring, IEEE Signal Processing Society 2014 Society Award, IEEE Signal Processing Society 2009 Technical Achievement Award, and various best paper awards. Recognized by Thomson Reuters as a Highly Cited Researcher, he is a Fellow of IEEE and AAAS. Dr. Liu is a member of IEEE Board of Director. He was President of IEEE Signal Processing Society, where he has served as Vice President -“ Publications and the Editor-in-Chief of IEEE Signal Processing Magazine. He also received teaching and research recognitions from University of Maryland including university-level Invention of the Year Award (three times); and college-level Poole and Kent Senior Faculty Teaching Award, Outstanding Faculty Research Award, and Outstanding Faculty Service Award, all from A. James Clark School of Engineering (one award each per year from the entire college).
Host: Prof. Shrikanth Narayanan & Prof. C.-C. Jay Kuo
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 132
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Tanya Acevedo-Lam/EE-Systems
This event is open to all eligible individuals. USC Viterbi operates all of its activities consistent with the University's Notice of Non-Discrimination. Eligibility is not determined based on race, sex, ethnicity, sexual orientation, or any other prohibited factor. -
CS Colloquium: Philipp Kraehenbuehl (UC Berkeley) - The many ways to understand the pixels, and how to teach computers to do so
Wed, Mar 02, 2016 @ 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Philipp Krahenbuhl , UC Berkeley
Talk Title: The many ways to understand the pixels, and how to teach computers to do so
Series: CS Colloquium
Abstract: This lecture satisfies requirements for CSCI 591: Computer Science Research Colloquium
The field of computer vision is arguably seeing one of its most transformative changes in recent history. Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have revolutionized the field, reaching super-human performance on some long-standing computer vision tasks, such as image classification. The success of these networks is fueled by massive amounts of human-labeled data. However this paradigm does not scale to a deeper and more detailed understanding of images, as it is simply too hard to collect enough human-labeled data. The issue is not that we humans don't understand the image, but we often struggle to convey enough information to successfully supervise a vision system.
In this talk I show how computer vision can go beyond massive human supervision. This involves designing better models that deal with fewer labels, exploiting easier and more intuitive annotations, or coming up with novel optimizations to train deep architectures with far fewer human annotations, or even without any at all. I'll focus on three long standing computer vision problems: semantic segmentation, intrinsic image decomposition and dense semantic correspondences.
Biography: Philipp Krahenbuhl is a postdoctoral researcher at UC Berkeley. He received a B.S. in Computer Science from ETH Zurich in 2009, and a PhD in Computer Science from Stanford University in 2014. Philipp's research interests lie in Computer vision, Machine learning and Computer Graphics. He is particularly interested in deep learning, efficient optimization techniques, and structured output prediction.
Host: CS Department
Location: Olin Hall of Engineering (OHE) - 136
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Assistant to CS chair
This event is open to all eligible individuals. USC Viterbi operates all of its activities consistent with the University's Notice of Non-Discrimination. Eligibility is not determined based on race, sex, ethnicity, sexual orientation, or any other prohibited factor. -
Communications, Networks & Systems (CommNetS) Seminar
Wed, Mar 02, 2016 @ 02:00 PM - 03:00 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Dr. Gregory Valiant, Stanford University
Talk Title: When your big data seems too small: accurate inferences beyond the empirical distribution
Series: CommNetS
Abstract: We discuss two problems related to the general challenge of making accurate inferences about a complex distribution, in the regime in which the amount of data (i.e the sample size) is too small for the empirical distribution of the samples to be an accurate representation of the underlying distribution. The first problem is the basic task of learning a discrete distribution, given access to independent draws. We show that one can accurately recover the unlabelled vector of probabilities of all domain elements whose true probability is greater than 1/(n log n). Stated differently, one can learn-“up to relabelling-“the portion of the distribution consisting of elements with probability greater than 1/(n log n). This result has several curious implications, including leading to an optimal algorithm for "de-noising" the empirical distribution of the samples, and implying that one can accurately estimate the number of new domain elements that would be seen given a new larger sample, of size up to n * log n. (Extrapolation beyond this sample size is provable information theoretically impossible, without additional assumptions on the distribution.) While these results are applicable generally, we highlight an adaptation of this general approach to some problems in genomics (e.g. quantifying the number of unobserved protein coding variants).
The second problem we consider is the task of accurately estimating the eigenvalues of the covariance matrix of a (high dimensional real-valued) distribution-“the "population spectrum". (These eigenvalues contain basic information about the distribution, including the presence or lack of low-dimensional structure in the distribution and the applicability of many higher-level machine learning and multivariate statistical tools.) As we show, even in the regime where the sample size is linear or sublinear in the dimensionality of the distribution, and hence the eigenvalues and eigenvectors of the empirical covariance matrix are misleading, accurate approximations to the true population spectrum are possible.
This talk is based on three papers, which are joint works with Paul Valiant, with Paul Valiant and James Zou, and with Weihao Kong.
Biography: Greg Valiant joined the Computer Science Department at Stanford as an Assistant Professor in Fall 2013, after completing a postdoc at Microsoft Research, New England. His main research interests are in algorithms, learning, applied probability and statistics; he is also interested in game theory, and has enjoyed working on problems in database theory. Valiant graduated from Harvard with a BA in Math and an MS in Computer Science, and obtained his PhD in Computer Science from UC Berkeley in 2012.
Host: Dr. Mahdi Soltanolkotabi
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 248
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Annie Yu
This event is open to all eligible individuals. USC Viterbi operates all of its activities consistent with the University's Notice of Non-Discrimination. Eligibility is not determined based on race, sex, ethnicity, sexual orientation, or any other prohibited factor. -
Computer Science General Faculty Meeting
Wed, Mar 02, 2016 @ 02:00 PM - 04:00 PM
Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science
Receptions & Special Events
Faculty meeting for invited full-time Computer Science faculty only. Event details emailed directly to attendees.
Location: Ronald Tutor Hall of Engineering (RTH) - 217
Audiences: Invited Faculty Only
Contact: Assistant to CS chair
This event is open to all eligible individuals. USC Viterbi operates all of its activities consistent with the University's Notice of Non-Discrimination. Eligibility is not determined based on race, sex, ethnicity, sexual orientation, or any other prohibited factor. -
ASBME GM 8: Tissue Engineering
Wed, Mar 02, 2016 @ 07:00 PM - 08:00 PM
Viterbi School of Engineering Student Organizations
Student Activity
From 3D-printing tissues to creating organs-on-chips, tissue engineering is an up-and-coming field as well as a growing department at USC. If you are interested in learning more, come out to ASBME's 8th general meeting to hear Dr. Megan McCain speak about the recent advances in tissue engineering, what her research seeks to accomplish and what makes this field so exciting to be a part of. As always, food will be provided to members!
Make sure to also check out the Facebook event!
Location: Kaprielian Hall (KAP) - 156
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Associated Students of Biomedical Engineering
This event is open to all eligible individuals. USC Viterbi operates all of its activities consistent with the University's Notice of Non-Discrimination. Eligibility is not determined based on race, sex, ethnicity, sexual orientation, or any other prohibited factor. -
PhD Visit Day, 2016
Thu, Mar 03, 2016
Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science
Receptions & Special Events
Event details will be distributed closer to the date.
Audiences: Registration Required
Contact: Assistant to CS chair
This event is open to all eligible individuals. USC Viterbi operates all of its activities consistent with the University's Notice of Non-Discrimination. Eligibility is not determined based on race, sex, ethnicity, sexual orientation, or any other prohibited factor. -
MHI Distinguished Visitor Talk
Thu, Mar 03, 2016 @ 10:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Prof. K.J. Ray Liu, University of Maryland
Talk Title: Learning with Strategic Decision Making in Social Media
Abstract: With the increasing ubiquity and power of mobile devices, as well as the prevalence of social media, more and more activities in our daily life are being recorded, tracked, and shared, creating the notion of 'social media'. Such abundant and still growing real life data, known as 'big data', provide a tremendous research opportunity in many fields. To analyze, learn and understand such user generated big data, machine learning has been an important tool and various machine learning algorithms have been developed. However, since the user generated big data is the outcome of users decisions, actions and their socio economic interactions, which are highly dynamic, without considering users local behaviors and interests, existing learning approaches tend to focus on optimizing a global objective function at the macroeconomic level, while totally ignore users local decisions at the microeconomic level. As such there is a growing need in bridging machine/social learning with strategic decision making, which are two traditionally distinct research disciplines, to be able to jointly consider both global phenomenon and local effects to understand/model/analyze better the newly arising issues in the emerging social media. In this talk, we present the notion of 'decision learning that can involve users behaviors and interactions by combining learning with strategic decision making. We will discuss some examples from social media with real data to show how decision learning can be used to better analyze users optimal decision from a user perspective as well as design a mechanism from the system designers perspective to achieve a desirable outcome.
Biography: Dr. K. J. Ray Liu was named a Distinguished Scholar-Teacher of University of Maryland, College Park, in 2007, where he is Christine Kim Eminent Professor of Information Technology. He leads the Maryland Signals and Information Group conducting research encompassing broad areas of information and communications technology with recent focus on future wireless technologies, network science, and information forensics and security. Dr. Liu was a recipient of the 2016 IEEE Leon K. Kirchmayer Technical Field Award on graduate teaching and mentoring, IEEE Signal Processing Society 2014 Society Award, IEEE Signal Processing Society 2009 Technical Achievement Award, and various best paper awards. Recognized by Thomson Reuters as a Highly Cited Researcher, he is a Fellow of IEEE and AAAS. Dr. Liu is a member of IEEE Board of Director. He was President of IEEE Signal Processing Society, where he has served as Vice President -“ Publications and Board of Governor. He was the Editor-in-Chief of IEEE Signal Processing Magazine. He also received teaching and research recognitions from University of Maryland including university-level Invention of the Year Award; and college-level Poole and Kent Senior Faculty Teaching Award, Outstanding Faculty Research Award, and Outstanding Faculty Service Award, all from A. James Clark School of Engineering.
Host: Prof. Shrikanth Narayanan & Prof. C.-C. Jay Kuo
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 132
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Tanya Acevedo-Lam/EE-Systems
This event is open to all eligible individuals. USC Viterbi operates all of its activities consistent with the University's Notice of Non-Discrimination. Eligibility is not determined based on race, sex, ethnicity, sexual orientation, or any other prohibited factor. -
Less Talking, More Learning: Avoiding Coordination In Parallel Machine Learning Algorithms
Thu, Mar 03, 2016 @ 01:30 PM - 02:30 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Dr. Dimitris Papailiopoulos, Postdoctoral Researcher/UC Berkeley
Talk Title: Less Talking, More Learning: Avoiding Coordination In Parallel Machine Learning Algorithms
Abstract: The recent success of machine learning (ML) in both science and industry has generated an increasing demand to support ML algorithms at scale. In this talk, I will discuss strategies to gracefully scale machine learning on modern parallel computational platforms. A common approach to such scaling is coordination-free parallel algorithms, where individual processors run independently without communication, thus maximizing the time they compute. However, analyzing the performance of these algorithms can be challenging, as they often introduce race conditions and synchronization problems.
In this talk, I will introduce a general methodology for analyzing asynchronous parallel algorithms. The key idea is to model the effects of core asynchrony as noise in the algorithmic input. This allows us to understand the performance of several popular asynchronous machine learning approaches, and to determine when asynchrony effects might overwhelm them. To overcome these effects, I will propose a new framework for parallelizing ML algorithms, where all memory conflicts and race conditions can be completely avoided. I will discuss the implementation of these ideas in practice, and demonstrate that they outperform the state-of-the-art across a large number of machine learning tasks.
Biography: Dimitris Papailiopoulos is a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences at UC Berkeley and a member of the AMPLab. His research interests span machine learning, coding theory, and parallel and distributed algorithms, with a current focus on coordination-free parallel machine learning, large-scale data and graph analytics, and the use of codes to speed up distributed computation. Dimitris completed his Ph.D. in electrical and computer engineering at UT Austin in 2014. At Austin he worked under the supervision of Alex Dimakis. In 2015, he received the IEEE Signal Processing Society, Young Author Best Paper Award.
Host: Professor Keith Chugg, chugg@usc.edu
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 132
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Mayumi Thrasher
This event is open to all eligible individuals. USC Viterbi operates all of its activities consistent with the University's Notice of Non-Discrimination. Eligibility is not determined based on race, sex, ethnicity, sexual orientation, or any other prohibited factor. -
PhD Visit Day, 2016
Fri, Mar 04, 2016
Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science
Receptions & Special Events
Event details will be distributed closer to the date.
Audiences: Registration Required
Contact: Assistant to CS chair
This event is open to all eligible individuals. USC Viterbi operates all of its activities consistent with the University's Notice of Non-Discrimination. Eligibility is not determined based on race, sex, ethnicity, sexual orientation, or any other prohibited factor. -
W.V.T. Rusch Engineering Honors Program Colloquium
Fri, Mar 04, 2016 @ 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM
USC Viterbi School of Engineering, Viterbi School of Engineering Student Affairs
University Calendar
Join us for a presentation by Kent Kellog, from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, titled, "NASA's Soil Moisture Active Passive Mission."
Location: Seeley G. Mudd Building (SGM) - 123
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Ramon Borunda/Academic Services
This event is open to all eligible individuals. USC Viterbi operates all of its activities consistent with the University's Notice of Non-Discrimination. Eligibility is not determined based on race, sex, ethnicity, sexual orientation, or any other prohibited factor. -
EE-EP Seminar - Jun-Chau Chien, Friday, March 4th in EEB 132 at 2:00pm
Fri, Mar 04, 2016 @ 02:00 PM - 03:30 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Jun-Chau Chien, University of California, Berkeley
Talk Title: mm-Wave Lab-on-CMOS: Electromagnetic Sensing from Micro-to Nano-scales
Abstract: Lab-on-CMOS is an emerging platform for Point-of-Care diagnostics and precision medicine. By directly integrating active CMOS electronics into passive Lab-on-Chip devices, the new System-on-Chip not only offers ultimate device miniaturization but also enables highly integrated multiphysics biosensing and actuation. This research addresses the challenges in such a hybrid system while embracing the opportunities in system co-design to achieve improved sensing performance that leads to new scientific findings.
In this talk, I will present my research on a Lab-on-CMOS dielectric spectrometer for single-cell analysis using near-field sensing at millimeter-wave (mm-Wave) frequencies. The aim is to understand the wideband electromagnetic signatures at cellular and molecular levels and to open its way for real-time and label-free medical diagnostics and biological studies. I will focus on innovations in circuits, systems, microfluidics, and calibration techniques to enable a capacitance equivalent sensitivity limit of sub-aF, suitable for large-scale characterization of single-cell dielectric spectroscopy (6.5 ~ 30 GHz) in the setting of high-throughput flow cytometry. The capability of cell sorting based on frequency dispersion is demonstrated with the measurements of human breast cancer cells. In addition to electromagnetic sensing, I will introduce multiphysics actuation techniques to quantify the mechanical property of the cells. Specifically, the system measures the deformation of cells using hydrodynamic stretching. I will also discuss the challenges in sensing toward nano-scales and sub-THz frequencies and present an on-chip single-element electronic calibration (E-Cal) technique for nano-device measurements. In the end, I will conclude my talk with Lab-on-CMOS technology for new applications in sensing, imaging, and communication.
Biography: Jun-Chau Chien received the B.S. and M.S. degrees in Electrical Engineering from National Taiwan University in 2004 and 2006, respectively, and the Ph.D. degree in Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences from University of California, Berkeley, in 2015. He is currently a post-doctoral research associate at University of California, Berkeley. He has held industrial positions at InvenSense, Xilinx, and HMicro working on mixed-signal integrated circuits for inertial sensors and wireline/wireless transceivers. He is broadly interested in innovative biotechnology for point-of-care diagnostics and medical imaging with emphasis on silicon-based approaches.
Dr. Chien is the recipient of the 2006 Annual Best Thesis Award from Graduate Institute of Electronics Engineering, National Taiwan University, the 2007 International Solid-State Circuit Conference (ISSCC) Silkroad Award, the co-recipient of 2010 IEEE Jack Kilby Award for ISSCC Outstanding Student Paper, the 2014 Analog Devices Outstanding Design Award, the 2014 Microwave Theory and Techniques Society (MTT-S) Graduate Fellowship for Medical Applications, the 2014 Solid-State Circuit Society (SSCS) Predoctoral Achievement Award, and the 2014 UC Berkeley Outstanding Graduate Student Instructor Award.
Host: EE-Electrophysics
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 132
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Marilyn Poplawski
This event is open to all eligible individuals. USC Viterbi operates all of its activities consistent with the University's Notice of Non-Discrimination. Eligibility is not determined based on race, sex, ethnicity, sexual orientation, or any other prohibited factor. -
NL Seminar-Linguistic Annotation Using Video Games with a Purpose
Fri, Mar 04, 2016 @ 03:00 PM - 04:00 PM
Information Sciences Institute
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: David Jurgens, Stanford University
Talk Title: Linguistic Annotation Using Video Games with a Purpose
Series: Natural Language Seminar
Abstract: Building systems that understand human language often requires access to large amounts of text annotated with all the features and nuances of human communication. However, building these annotated corpora is often prohibitive due to the time, cost, and expertise required to annotate. While crowdsourcing the work can help, untrained workers still incur costs and the workers may not be as motivated to answer correctly. In this talk, I will describe how to solve this annotation bottleneck using video games in which traditional annotation tasks are transformed into core video game mechanics and embedded in the kinds of games you might play on your mobile phone. Our video games are not only fun to play but are capable of annotating a wide variety of linguistic phenomena at costs lower that crowdsourcing and have quality equal to that of experts. Using four games, I will demonstrate how their creation process can be distilled into reusable design patterns to create new games for different types of tasks in linguistics and beyond.
Biography: David Jurgens is postdoctoral scholar in the department of Computer Science at Stanford University. He received his PhD in Computer Science from UCLA in 2014 and has been a visiting researcher at HRL Laboratories, research scientist at Sapienza University of Rome and postdoctoral scholar at McGill University. His research focuses on two areas: natural language processing, where he works on new methods for understanding the meaning of text, and computational social science where he investigates population dynamics through peoples' language and demographics. He is currently a co-chair of the International Workshops on Semantic Evaluation (SemEval) and of the workshop on Natural Language Processing and Computational Social Science. His research has been featured in Forbes, MIT Technology Review, Business Insider, and Schneier on Security.
Host: Xing Shi and Kevin Knight
More Info: http://nlg.isi.edu/nl-seminar/
Location: Information Science Institute (ISI) - 11th Flr Conf Rm # 1135, Marina Del Rey
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Peter Zamar
Event Link: http://nlg.isi.edu/nl-seminar/
This event is open to all eligible individuals. USC Viterbi operates all of its activities consistent with the University's Notice of Non-Discrimination. Eligibility is not determined based on race, sex, ethnicity, sexual orientation, or any other prohibited factor. -
PhD Seminar
Fri, Mar 04, 2016 @ 03:00 PM - 04:00 PM
Sonny Astani Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Rebecca Peer, Environmental Engineering PhD Candidate, University of Southern California
Talk Title: Spatiotemporal analysis of environmental trade-offs in electricity generation
Abstract: The US power sector is a leading contributor of emissions that affect air quality and climate. It also requires a lot of water for cooling thermoelectric power plants. Although these impacts affect ecosystems and human health unevenly in space and time, there has been very little quantification of these environmental trade-offs on decision-relevant scales. This work quantifies hourly water consumption, emissions (i.e. carbon dioxide, nitrogen oxides, and sulfur oxides), and marginal heat rates for 252 electric generation units (EGUs) in the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) region in 2011 using a unit commitment and dispatch model (UC&D). Annual, seasonal and daily variations, as well as spatial variability are assessed. When normalized over the grid, hourly average emissions and water consumption intensities (i.e. output per MWh) are found to be highest when electricity demand is the lowest, as baseload EGUs tend to be the most water and emissions intensive. Results suggest that a large fraction of emissions and water consumption are caused by small number of power plants, mainly baseload coal-fired generators. Replacing 8-10 existing units with modern natural gas combined cycle units would result in reductions of 19-29%, 51-55%, 60-62%, and 13-27% in CO2 emissions, NOx emissions, SOx emissions, and water consumption, respectively, across the ERCOT region for two different conversion scenarios.
Host: Kelly Sander
Location: Seeley G. Mudd Building (SGM) - 101
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Kaela Berry
This event is open to all eligible individuals. USC Viterbi operates all of its activities consistent with the University's Notice of Non-Discrimination. Eligibility is not determined based on race, sex, ethnicity, sexual orientation, or any other prohibited factor. -
MESA Day Preliminaries
Sat, Mar 05, 2016 @ 08:00 AM - 01:00 PM
Viterbi School of Engineering K-12 STEM Center
University Calendar
Volunteer for exciting project-based competitions among local middle and high school students.
Help judge and administer competitions such as glider, bridge, model science, mousetrap car, oral presentation, packaged egg drop and prosthetic arm.
For more information and to sign up, please contact Ben Louie at blouie@usc.Location: Ronald Tutor Hall of Engineering (RTH) -
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Ben Louie/Pre-College Programs
This event is open to all eligible individuals. USC Viterbi operates all of its activities consistent with the University's Notice of Non-Discrimination. Eligibility is not determined based on race, sex, ethnicity, sexual orientation, or any other prohibited factor.
