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Events for the 4th week of March
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CS Colloquium: Andrew Gordon Wilson (CMU) -Scalable Gaussian Processes for Scientific Discovery
Mon, Mar 21, 2016 @ 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Andrew Gordon Wilson, CMU
Talk Title: Scalable Gaussian Processes for Scientific Discovery
Series: CS Colloquium
Abstract: This lecture satisfies requirements for CSCI 591: Computer Science Research Colloquium
Every minute of the day, users share hundreds of thousands of pictures, videos, tweets, reviews, and blog posts. More than ever before, we have access to massive datasets in almost every area of science and engineering, including genomics, robotics, and astronomy. These datasets provide unprecedented opportunities to automatically discover rich statistical structure, from which we can derive new scientific discoveries. Gaussian processes are flexible distributions over functions, which can learn interpretable structure through covariance kernels. In this talk, I introduce a Gaussian process framework which is capable of learning expressive kernel functions on massive datasets. I will show how this framework generalizes a wide family of scalable machine learning approaches, leverages the inductive biases of deep learning architectures, and allows one to exploit existing model structure for significant further gains in scalability and accuracy, without requiring severe assumptions. I will then discuss how we can use this framework for reverse engineering human learning biases, crime prediction using point processes, image inpainting, video extrapolation, modelling change points and the impacts of vaccine introduction, and discovering the structure and evolution of stars.
Biography: Andrew Gordon Wilson is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Machine Learning Department at Carnegie Mellon University working with Eric Xing and Alexander Smola. Andrew received his PhD in machine learning from the University of Cambridge in 2014, supervised by Zoubin Ghahramani. Andrew's research interests include probabilistic machine learning, scalable inference, Gaussian processes, kernel methods, Bayesian modelling, nonparametrics, and deep learning. Andrew's work has received several awards, including the G-Research Outstanding Dissertation Award in 2014 and the Best Student Paper Award at the Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence in 2011.
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. -
Seminars in Biomedical Engineering
Mon, Mar 21, 2016 @ 12:30 PM - 01:49 PM
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Bryan Smith, Ph.D., Instructor, Department of Radiology Stanford University, Stanford, California
Talk Title: Nanoparticle imaging: Shifting paradigms to transform nanomedical diagnosis and therap
Biography: After receiving his Bachelors degree in Physics, Mathematics, and Biomedical Engineering at Tufts University, Bryan Smith completed his Ph.D. in Biomedical Engineering as an NSF Fellow at The Ohio State University working in cancer nanotechnology. He moved to Stanford University for his post-doctoral work, where he was awarded a Stanford Molecular Imaging Scholar NIH Fellowship as well as a Stanford Dean's Fellowship. He was granted a K99/R00 NIH Pathway to Independence award for his work in nanomedical imaging
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. -
Addressing Spectrum Scarcity through Optical Wireless Communications
Mon, Mar 21, 2016 @ 02:00 PM - 03:00 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Mohamed-Slim Alouini, King Abdullah University of Science and Technology
Talk Title: Addressing Spectrum Scarcity through Optical Wireless Communications
Abstract: Rapid increase in the use of wireless services over the last two decades has lead the problem of the radio-frequency (RF) spectrum exhaustion. More specifically, due to this RF spectrum scarcity, additional RF bandwidth allocation, as utilized in the recent past, is not anymore a viable solution to fulfill the demand for more wireless applications and higher data rates. The talk goes first over the potential offered by optical wireless communications to relieve spectrum scarcity. It then summarizes some of the challenges that need to be surpassed before such kind of systems can be massively deployed. Finally the talk offers an overview of some of the recent results for the determination of the capacity of optical wireless channels.
Biography: Mohamed-Slim Alouini (S'94, M'98, SM'03, F'09) was born in Tunis, Tunisia. He received the Ph.D. degree in Electrical Engineering from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), Pasadena, CA, USA, in 1998. He served as a faculty member in the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN, USA, then in the Texas A&M University at Qatar, Education City, Doha, Qatar before joining King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST), Thuwal, Makkah Province, Saudi Arabia as a Professor of Electrical Engineering in 2009. His current research interests include the modeling, design, and performance analysis of wireless communication systems.
Host: Andreas Molisch, molisch@usc.edu EEB 530, x04670
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 539
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Gerrielyn Ramos
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 598 Cyber-Physical Systems Seminar Series
Mon, Mar 21, 2016 @ 02:00 PM - 03:00 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Marilyn Wolf, Georgia Institute of Technology
Talk Title: Service-oriented Architectures for Cyber-physical Systems
Abstract: Service-oriented architectures are widely used in information processing and Web technologies to provide scalable access to resources in distributed systems and extensible applications. However, many traditional service-oriented architectures are designed for transaction processing. In contrast, cyber-physical systems used for real-time control require quality-of-service constraints and graceful handling of failures to provide requested services. Our group is developing extended service-oriented models for use in smart energy grids and other applications. We will describe our work in service-oriented architectures, including model-based design and simulation.
Biography: Marilyn Wolf is Rhesa S. "Ray" Farmer Distinguished Chair in Embedded Computing Systems and Georgia Research Alliance Eminent Scholar at the Georgia Institute of Technology. She received her BS, MS, and PhD in electrical engineering from Stanford University in 1980, 1981, and 1984, respectively. She was with AT&T Bell Laboratories from 1984 to 1989. She was on the faculty of Princeton University from 1989 to 2007. Her research interests include cyber-physical systems, embedded computing, embedded video and computer vision, and VLSI systems. She has received the ASEE Terman Award and IEEE Circuits and Systems Society Education Award. She is a Fellow of the IEEE and ACM and an IEEE Computer Society Golden Core member.
Host: Paul Bogdan
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 248
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Estela Lopez
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 - Dion Khodagholy, Monday, March 21st at 2:00pm in EEB 132
Mon, Mar 21, 2016 @ 02:00 PM - 03:30 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Dion Khodagholy, New York University Langone Medical Center
Talk Title: Large-Scale Organic Neural Interface Devices
Abstract: Recording from neural networks at the temporal resolution of action potentials is critical for understanding how information is processed in the brain. We developed an organic, conformable, biocompatible and scalable neural interface electrode and transistor arrays that can record both Local Field Potential (LFP) and extracellular action potentials without penetrating the brain surface. We recorded spiking activity in both rodent experiments and intra-operatively in patients undergoing epilepsy surgery using a large-scale surface probe designed to enable localization of fine LFP activity and the underlying neuronal entrainment. Large-scale, chronically recorded data generated by these devices has broad applicability to the understanding of physiologic and pathologic network activity, control of brain-machine interfaces, and therapeutic closed-loop devices.
Biography: Dion Khodagholy is a fellow at the Simon's Society of Fellows and a postdoctoral research associate in Prof. GyoÌrgy BuzsaÌki's laboratory at New York University Langone Medical Center (NYULMC). He received his Masters degree from University of Birmingham (UK) in Electronic and Communication Engineering. This was followed by a second Masters degree in Microelectronics at Ecole des Mines (France) combined with industry experience at Microelectronic Center of Provence. He attained his Ph.D. degree in Microelectronics at the Department of Bioelectronics (BEL) of Ecole des Mines with Prof. George Malliaras. At BEL, he focused on understanding organic semiconductor device physics and developing organic-based devices to interface with biology. His postdoctoral research at NYULMC is focused on three main domains: (i) design and development of large-scale, organic material-based neural interface devices; (ii) analysis of neural data acquired by these devices to understand large-scale neural network function; (iii) translation of these advancements to neural data acquisition systems in patients with epilepsy. His research explores the interface of electronics and the brain in the context of both applied and discovery sciences, with the ultimate goal of innovating in device engineering and neuroscience methods to improve diagnosis and treatment of neuropsychiatric disease.
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. -
CANCELLED — USC Stem Cell Seminar: Craig Jordan, University of Colorado Denver
Tue, Mar 22, 2016 @ 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Alfred E. Mann Department of Biomedical Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Craig Jordan, University of Colorado Denver
Talk Title: Metabolic properties of human leukemia stem cells
Series: Eli and Edythe Broad Center for Regenerative Medicine and Stem Cell Research at USC Distinguished Speakers Series
Abstract: This seminar will be rescheduled.
Host: Rong Lu
Webcast: http://keckmedia.usc.edu/stem-cell-seminarWebCast Link: http://keckmedia.usc.edu/stem-cell-seminar
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Cristy Lytal/USC Stem Cell
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. -
Network Approaches to Data-Driven Problems: Fundamental Limits, Scalable Algorithms, and Applications
Tue, Mar 22, 2016 @ 02:30 PM - 03:30 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Soheil Feizi, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Talk Title: Network Approaches to Data-Driven Problems: Fundamental Limits, Scalable Algorithms, and Applications
Abstract: In large-scale data-driven problems, network modeling provides a unifying framework to succinctly represent data, reveal underlying data structures, and facilitate experiment design. In practice, however, size, uncertainty and complexity of the underlying associations render these applications challenging. In this talk, I will illustrate the use of spectral, combinatorial, and statistical inference techniques in learning the network topology and subsequent network analysis.
First, we introduce Network Maximal Correlation (NMC), a multivariate measure of nonlinear association suitable for large datasets. NMC infers transformations of variables to reveal underlying nonlinear dependencies among them. We characterize NMC using geometric properties of Hilbert spaces and illustrate its application in learning graphical models when variables have unknown nonlinear dependencies. Next, we discuss the problem of network alignment that aims to find a bijective mapping across two graphs so that, if two nodes are connected in one graph, their images are also connected in the other graph. This problem has a broad range of applications for comparative network analysis in systems biology, social sciences and engineering areas. To solve this combinatorial problem, we present a new scalable spectral algorithm, and establish its efficiency, theoretically and experimentally, over several synthetic and real networks.
Biography: Soheil Feizi is a Ph.D. candidate in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) Department at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), co-supervised by Prof. Muriel Médard and Prof. Manolis Kellis. His research focuses on complex network analysis using tools and concepts from optimization, machine learning, statistical inference and information theory. Previously, he completed a M.Sc. in Electrical Engineering at MIT, where he received the Jacobs Presidential Fellowship and EECS Great Educators Fellowship, as well as an Ernst Guillemin Award for his Master of Science Thesis. He also received the best student award in Electrical Engineering at Sharif University of Technology from where he holds his B.Sc.
Host: Salman Avestimehr
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 248
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Suzanne Wong
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. -
Exponent Information Session
Tue, Mar 22, 2016 @ 05:30 PM - 07:30 PM
Viterbi School of Engineering Career Connections
Workshops & Infosessions
Exponent -“ Engineering and Scientific Consulting
This presentation will provide an introduction of Exponent as a company present and history, examples of types of problems addressed by Exponent consultants, and finally conclude with description of careers and openings / needs.More Information: Exponent Info Session.pdf
Location: Seeley G. Mudd Building (SGM) - 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. -
USC WIC: Grace Hopper Conference Info Session
Tue, Mar 22, 2016 @ 06:00 PM - 07:00 PM
Viterbi School of Engineering Student Organizations
University Calendar
Want to go to Houston to be a part of the largest gathering of women in technology for free?? Find out more about the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing (GHC) and scholarship opportunities. If you already have a partial outside scholarships, it would increase your chances of getting a USC scholarship for GHC. Women in Computing will be hosting Lizsl De Leon from the CS department to provide you with more information about this amazing opportunity.
GHC seeks to inspire women in computing by bringing them together to share their ideas and experiences. The conference offers a number of talks by corporate leaders, engineers, and researchers. There's also a career fair where students get interviews and job offers on the spot! Find out more at their website: http://ghc.anitaborg.org/
Apply here for GHC16 scholarships
More Info
Chick-Fil-A salad, nuggets, and sandwiches will be provided at the event.Location: Von Kleinsmid Center For International & Public Affairs (VKC) - 261
Audiences: Women engineers
Contact: Sanskriti
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: Olga Russakovsky (CMU) - The Human Side of Computer Vision
Wed, Mar 23, 2016 @ 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Olga Russakovsky, Carnegie Mellon University
Talk Title: The Human Side of Computer Vision
Series: CS Colloquium
Abstract: This lecture satisfies requirements for CSCI 591: Computer Science Research Colloquium
Intelligent agents acting in the real world need advanced vision capabilities to perceive, learn from, reason about and interact with their environment. In this talk, I will explore the role that humans play in the design and deployment of computer vision systems. Large-scale manually labeled datasets have proven instrumental for scaling up visual recognition, but they come at a substantial human cost. I will first briefly talk about strategies for making optimal use of human annotation effort for computer vision progress. However, no dataset can foresee all the visual scenarios that a real-world system might encounter. I will argue that seamlessly integrating human expertise at runtime will become increasingly important for open-world computer vision. I will introduce, and demonstrate the effectiveness of, a rigorous mathematical framework for human-machine collaboration. Looking ahead, in order for such collaborations to become practical, the computer vision algorithms we design will need to be both efficient and interpretable. I will conclude by presenting a new deep reinforcement learning model for human action detection in videos that is efficient, interpretable and more accurate than prior art, opening up new avenues for practical human-in-the-loop exploration.
Biography: Olga Russakovsky recently completed her PhD in computer science at Stanford and is now a postdoctoral fellow at Carnegie Mellon University. Her research is in computer vision, closely integrated with machine learning and human-computer interaction. Her work was featured in the New York Times and MIT Technology Review. She served as a Senior Program Committee member for WACV'16, led the ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge effort for two years, and organized multiple workshops and tutorials on large-scale recognition at premier computer vision conferences ICCV'13, ECCV'14, CVPR'15, ICCV'15 and CVPR'16. In addition, she founded and directs the Stanford AI Laboratory's outreach camp SAILORS (featured in Wired and published in SIGCSE'16) designed to expose high school students in underrepresented populations to the field of AI.
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. -
2016 John Laufer Lecture
Wed, Mar 23, 2016 @ 01:00 PM - 03:00 PM
Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Mory Gharib, Hans W. Liepmann Professor of Aeronautics and Professor of Bioinspired Engineering, Division of Engineering and Applied Science at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, CA
Talk Title: On the Generation of Toroidal Micro-Plasmas in the Flow Field of Impinging Water-Jets
Abstract: There is a renewed interest in atmospheric pressure plasma (APP), also known as atmospheric pressure corona, for its broad scientific and industrial applications. As a weakly ionized non-equilibrium plasma, APP has no defined shape or volume and, in general, is unstable and non-uniform. Therefore, it is desirable to have a source of stable and uniform APP with defined morphologies for scientific investigations that could take advantage of the highly collisional state of the plasma medium. Here, we report an approach to produce atmospheric pressure micro-plasmas in which the plasma cloud presents a stable, and topologically-connected and self-confined toroidal shape. We show that this unique toroidal APP morphology can be uniquely generated when a high-speed laminar micro-jet of de-ionized water impinges on a di-electric solid surface. This toroidal micro-plasma shows a unique and previously unreported plasma resonance mode characterized by a strong and discrete radio frequency emission.
Biography: Professor Mory Gharib is the Hans W. Liepmann Professor of Aeronautics and Professor of Bioinspired Engineering, and is also Vice Provost for Research at Caltech, where in 2014 he was made Director of the Linde Institute for Economics and Management Sciences. He has been a professor at the Graduate Aeronautical Labs at Caltech since 1993, and before that was Professor of Fluid Mechanics in the Department of Applied Mechanics and Engineering Sciences at the University of California, San Diego.
Professor Gharib is a member of the National Academy of Arts and Sciences, and of the National Academy of Engineering. He is a Charter Fellow of the National Academy of Inventors, and a Fellow of: the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the American Physical Society (APS), the International Academy of Medical and Biological Engineering (IAMBE), the American Society of Mechanical Engineering (ASME), the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering (AIMBE), and the Institute of Physics (IP). He has more than 200 publications in refereed journals and 83 US patents.
More Information: photo3.jpg
Location: Ronald Tutor Campus Center (TCC) - Ballroom A
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. -
Communications, Networks & Systems (CommNetS) Seminar
Wed, Mar 23, 2016 @ 02:00 PM - 03:00 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Dr. Farzad Farnoud, Caltech
Talk Title: Stochastic and Information-theoretic Approaches to Analysis of Biological Data
Series: CommNetS
Abstract: The significant growth in the volume and variety of biological data over the past two decades has created plenty of opportunities for data analytics, with essential applications to biology and medicine. In this talk, I will present our work on aspects of analysis and fusion of biological data, leveraging tools from information theory, machine learning, and stochastic modeling. First, I will present an estimation framework for studying the rates of DNA tandem duplication and substitution mutations by analyzing DNA tandem repeat regions. These regions form about 3% of the human genome and are known to cause several diseases. The proposed method, obtained through a stochastic approximation framework, has smaller estimation error compared to previous work and enables the study of various factors affecting mutation rates through the study of a single genome. Second, I will describe HyDRA, a data fusion tool for gene prioritization, which is the task of computationally identifying genes that are most likely to cause a certain disease. HyDRA relies on novel distances between rankings and rank aggregation methods to combine data from various biological datasets. We show that it achieves better accuracy in identifying disease genes while being more scalable compared to the state-of-the-art methods.
Biography: Farzad Farnoud is a postdoctoral scholar at the California Institute of Technology. He received his MS degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Toronto in 2008. From the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, he received his MS degree in mathematics and his PhD in Electrical and Computer Engineering in 2012 and 2013, respectively. His research interests include the information-theoretic and probabilistic analysis of genomic evolutionary processes; rank aggregation and gene prioritization; and coding for flash memory and DNA storage. He is the recipient of the 2013 Robert T. Chien Memorial Award from the University of Illinois for demonstrating excellence in research in electrical engineering and the recipient of the 2014 IEEE Data Storage Best Student Paper Award.
Host: Dr. Salman Avestimehr
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. -
CS Colloquium: Linh Thi Xuan Phan (U. of Pennsylvania) - Timing Guarantees for Cyber-Physical Systems
Wed, Mar 23, 2016 @ 04:00 PM - 05:00 PM
Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Linh Thi Xuan Phan, U. of Pennsylvania
Talk Title: Timing Guarantees for Cyber-Physical Systems
Series: CS Colloquium
Abstract: This lecture satisfies requirements for CSCI 591: Computer Science Research Colloquium
Cyber-physical systems -- such as cars, pacemakers, and power plants -- need to interact with the physical world in a timely manner to ensure safety. It is important to have a way to analyze these systems and to prove that they can meet their timing requirements. However, modern cyber-physical systems are increasingly complex: they can involve thousands of tasks running on dozens of processors, many of which can have multiple cores or shared caches. Existing techniques for ensuring timing guarantees cannot handle this level of complexity. In this talk, I will present some of my recent work that can help to bridge this gap, such as overhead-aware compositional scheduling/analysis and multicore cache management. I will also discuss some potential applications, such as real-time cloud platforms and intrusion-resistant cyber-physical systems.
Biography: Linh Thi Xuan Phan is an Assistant Research Professor in the Department of Computer and Information Science at the University of Pennsylvania. Her interests include real-time systems, embedded systems, cyber-physical systems, and cloud computing. Her research develops theoretical foundations and practical tools for building complex systems with provable safety and timing guarantees. She is especially interested in techniques that integrate theory, systems, and application aspects. Recently, she has been working on methods for defending cyber-physical systems against malicious attacks, as well as on real-time cloud infrastructures for safety critical and mission-critical systems. Linh holds a Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from the National University of Singapore (NUS); she received the Graduate Research Excellence Award from NUS for her dissertation work.
Host: CS Department
More Info: https://bluejeans.com/333182321
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 248
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Assistant to CS chair
Event Link: https://bluejeans.com/333182321
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 Defense - Leandro Marcolino
Thu, Mar 24, 2016 @ 10:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science
University Calendar
Title: Three Fundamental Pillars of Decision-Centered Teamwork
Location: RTH 526
Date: March 24th
Time: 10am.
Phd Candidate: Leandro Marcolino
Committee members:
Prof. Milind Tambe (Chair)
Prof. Gaurav Sukhatme
Prof. William Swartout
Prof. Craig Knoblock
Prof. Nicholas Weller
Abstract:
This thesis introduces a novel paradigm in artificial intelligence: decision-centered teamwork. Decision-centered teamwork is the analysis of agent teams that iteratively take joint decisions into solving complex problems. Although teams of agents have been used to take decisions in many important domains, such as: machine learning, crowdsourcing, forecasting systems, and even board games; a study of a general framework for decision-centered teamwork has never been presented in the literature before.
I divide decision-centered teamwork in three fundamental challenges: (i) Agent Selection, which consists of selecting a set of agents from an exponential universe of possible teams; (ii) Aggregation of Opinions, which consists of designing methods to aggregate the opinions of different agents into taking joint team decisions; (iii) Team Assessment, which consists of designing methods to identify whether a team is failing, allowing a "coordinator" to take remedial procedures.
In this thesis, I handle all these challenges. For Agent Selection, I introduce novel models of diversity for teams of voting agents. My models rigorously show that teams made of the best agents are not necessarily optimal, and also clarify in which situations diverse teams should be preferred. In particular, I show that diverse teams get stronger as the number of actions increases, by analyzing how the agents' probability distribution function over actions changes. This has never been presented before in the ensemble systems literature. I also show that diverse teams have a great applicability for design problems, where the objective is to maximize the number of optimal solutions for human selection, combining for the first time social choice with number theory. All of these theoretical models and predictions are verified in real systems, such as Computer Go and architectural design. In particular, for architectural design I optimize the design of buildings with agent teams not only for cost and project requirements, but also for energy-efficiency, being thus an essential domain for sustainability.
Concerning Aggregation of Opinions, I evaluate classical ranked voting rules from social choice in Computer Go, only to discover that plurality leads to the best results. This happens because real agents tend to have very noisy rankings. Hence, I create a ranking by sampling extraction technique, leading to significantly better results with the Borda voting rule. A similar study is also performed in the social networks domain, in the context of influence maximization. Additionally, I study a novel problem in social networks: I assume only a subgraph of the network is initially known, and we must spread influence and learn the graph simultaneously. I analyze a linear combination of two greedy algorithms, outperforming both of them. This domain has a great potential for health, as I run experiments in four real-life social networks from the homeless population of Los Angeles, aiming at spreading HIV prevention information.
Finally, with regards to Team Assessment, I develop a domain independent team assessment methodology for teams of voting agents. My method is within a machine learning framework, and learns a prediction model over the voting patterns of a team, instead of learning over the possible states of the problem. The methodology is tested and verified in Computer Go and Ensemble Learning.
Location: Ronald Tutor Hall of Engineering (RTH) - 526
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Lizsl De Leon
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. -
Efficient Redundancy Techniques to Reduce Delay in Cloud Systems
Thu, Mar 24, 2016 @ 10:30 AM - 11:30 AM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Gauri Joshi, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Talk Title: Efficient Redundancy Techniques to Reduce Delay in Cloud Systems
Abstract: Ensuring fast and seamless service to users is critical for today's cloud services. However, guaranteeing fast response can be challenging due to random service delays that are common in today's data centers. In this talk I explore the use the redundancy to combat such service variability. For example, replicating a computing task at multiple servers and then waiting for the earliest copy saves service time. But the redundant tasks can cost more computing resources and also delay subsequent tasks. I present a queuing-theoretic framework to answer fundamental questions such as:
1) How many replicas to launch?
2) Which queues to join?
3) When to issue and cancel the replicas?
This framework reveals surprising regimes where replication reduces both delay as well as resource cost. The task replication idea can also be generalized to analyze latency in content download from erasure coded storage. More broadly, this work lays the theoretical foundation for studying queues with redundancy, uncovering many interesting future directions in cloud infrastructure, crowdsourcing and beyond.
Biography: Gauri Joshi is a Ph.D candidate at MIT EECS where she completed an S.M. in 2012. Her research interests include probabilistic modeling, coding theory and statistical inference. Before coming to MIT, she completed a B.Tech and M. Tech in Electrical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Bombay in 2010. She has held summer internships at Google, Bell Labs and Qualcomm. Gauri's awards and honors include the Best Thesis Prize in Computer science at MIT (2012), Institute Gold Medal of IIT Bombay (2010), Claude Shannon Research Assistantship (2015-16), and Schlumberger Faculty for the Future fellowship (2011-2015).
Host: Viktor Prasanna
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 248
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Suzanne Wong
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: Joseph Lim (MIT) - Toward Visual Understanding of the Physical World for Interaction
Thu, Mar 24, 2016 @ 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Joseph Lim, MIT
Talk Title: Toward Visual Understanding of the Physical World for Interaction
Series: CS Colloquium
Abstract: This lecture satisfies requirements for CSCI 591: Computer Science Research Colloquium
Recently, the computer vision community has made impressive progress on object recognition with deep learning approaches. However, for any visual system to interact with objects, it needs to understand much more than simply recognizing where the objects are. The goal of my research is to explore and solve physical understanding tasks for interaction -- finding an object's pose in 3D, interpreting its physical interactions, and understanding its various states and transformations. Unfortunately, obtaining extensive annotated data for such tasks is often intractable, yet required by recent popular learning techniques.
In this talk, I take a step away from expensive, manually labeled datasets. Instead, I develop learning algorithms that are supervised through physical constraints combined with structured priors. I will first talk about how to build learning algorithms, including a deep learning framework (e.g., convolutional neural networks), that can utilize geometric information from 3D CAD models in combination with real-world statistics from photographs. Then, I will show how to use differentiable physics simulators to learn object properties simply by watching videos.
Biography: Joseph Lim is a postdoctoral researcher at Stanford University. He received a PhD in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he was advised by Professor Antonio Torralba. His research interests are in computer vision and machine learning. He is particularly interested in deep learning, structure learning, and multi-domain data. Joseph graduated with BA in Computer Science from UC Berkeley, where he worked under Professor Jitendra Malik.
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. -
AI Seminar
Thu, Mar 24, 2016 @ 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Information Sciences Institute
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Johan Bollen, Univeristy of Indiana
Talk Title: Social factors in the quantification of online happiness
Abstract: More than 1/7th of the worlds population is actively using social media to establish and maintain social relations across linguistics, geographic, and economic boundaries. The introduction of social media has however had contradictory effects. Whereas as a social species we require social relations for our well-being, recent results indicate that widespread social media use leads to increased feelings of dissatisfaction and reduced happiness. The key to this paradox may lie in the unequal distribution of social relations in social networks and their interaction with collective and individual subjective well-being. In this talk I will highlight two results of our investigations of how subjective well-being interacts with, and is shaped by, the structural properties of large-scale social networks. Our research provides a framework for understanding how online social networking may have contradictory effects on collective happiness and well-being, and how to mitigate these effects
Biography: Johan Bollen is associate professor at the Indiana University School of Informatics and Computing. He was formerly a staff scientist at the Los Alamos National Laboratory and an Assistant Professor at the Department of Computer Science of Old Dominion University. He obtained his PhD in Experimental Psychology from the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB) in 2001. He has published more than 75 articles on computational social science, social media analytics, informetrics, and digital libraries. His research has been funded by the NSF, IARPA, and Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Johan lives inBloomington, Indiana with his wife and daughter. In his free time he enjoys P90x and DJing in the local Bloomington clubs as DJ Angst.
Host: Emilio Ferrara
Location: 11th floor large conference room
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Kary LAU
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. -
The Business of Oil and Gas
Thu, Mar 24, 2016 @ 01:00 PM - 02:00 PM
Mork Family Department of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Mr. Adel Heiba,
Talk Title: Real Options in Shale Plays: Opportunities for Data Science
Series: USC Energy Institute Seminar Series
Host: USC Energy Institute
Location: Ronald Tutor Hall of Engineering (RTH) - 324
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Juli Legat
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. -
Astani Civil and Environmental Engineering Seminar
Thu, Mar 24, 2016 @ 02:00 PM - 03:00 PM
Sonny Astani Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Dr. Roland Cusick, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Talk Title: Elucidating the potential of capacitive energy storage technologies for brackish water desalination
Abstract: See attachment
Host: Dr. Adam Smith
More Information: Cusick Announcement.pdf
Location: Thomas & Dorothy Leavey Library (LVL) - 17
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Evangeline Reyes
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: Jason Polakis (Columbia U.) -Protecting Users in the Age of the Social Web
Thu, Mar 24, 2016 @ 04:00 PM - 05:00 PM
Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Jason Polakis, Columbia University
Talk Title: Protecting Users in the Age of the Social Web
Series: CS Colloquium
Abstract: This lecture satisfies requirements for CSCI 591: Computer Science Research Colloquium
In this talk I will focus on my research efforts to better understand and protect against such loss. I will start with a focused review on the importance of online privacy, and highlight the privacy risks of location proximity, which has been adopted by major web services and mobile apps. This work demonstrated novel threats that can neutralize existing countermeasures used by the industry and pinpoint a user's location with high accuracy within seconds. To protect users, I developed a practical defense in the form of privacy-preserving proximity that obfuscates the user's location, which has been adopted by Facebook and Foursquare. I will demonstrate how user privacy also affects security mechanisms, and present my analysis of the threat surface of Facebook's social authentication system. I will then present a novel social authentication system that is robust against advanced targeted attacks and prevents adversaries from compromising user accounts, and conclude by sharing my thoughts for future directions.
This lecture will be available to stream HERE.
Biography: Jason Polakis is a postdoctoral research scientist at Columbia University. He earned his PhD in 2014 from the Computer Science Department of the University of Crete, Greece, where he was supported by the Foundation of Research and Technology Hellas (FORTH). He is broadly interested in identifying the security and privacy limitations of Internet technologies, designing robust defenses and privacy-preserving techniques, and enhancing our understanding of the online ecosystem and its threats. His research has revealed significant flaws in popular services, and major vendors such as Google, Facebook and Foursquare have deployed his proposed defenses. His work has been published in top tier security conferences (Security and Privacy, CCS, and NDSS) as well as other top tier computer science conferences (WWW).
Host: CS Department
More Info: https://bluejeans.com/313531059
Location: Henry Salvatori Computer Science Center (SAL) - 101
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Assistant to CS chair
Event Link: https://bluejeans.com/313531059
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. -
The Claro Group Info Session
Thu, Mar 24, 2016 @ 05:30 PM - 06:30 PM
Viterbi School of Engineering Student Organizations
Workshops & Infosessions
The Claro Group is a financial advisory and management consulting firm. Come out to network with USC Alumni and hear about internship/job opportunities with The Claro Group! Dress Casually. Resume optional.
Location: Von Kleinsmid Center For International & Public Affairs (VKC) - 158
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: USC Institute of Industrial Engineers
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. -
AI Seminar-The Structure of Sequences Mining and Interpreting Networks from Event Log Data
Fri, Mar 25, 2016 @ 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Information Sciences Institute
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Brian Keegan, Harvard University
Talk Title: The Structure of Sequences Mining and Interpreting Networks from Event Log Data
Series: Artificial Intelligence Seminar
Abstract: Network science provides a rich set of theories and methods to understand the structure and dynamics of complex social, information, and biological systems. These approaches traditionally demand data with explicitly declared dyadic relationships or interactions such as friendship or affiliation. However, socio-technical systems like Wikipedia, Github, or Twitter often encode latent relationships within event logs and other databases. Temporal adjacencies in these event logs reveal sequences of actions that have complex and non-random properties that illuminate hidden structures within peer production systems. Using several case studies, I describe how complex networks can be extracted from event logs to understand the behavior of both users and artifacts within these systems. These networks encode a variety of rich structural and dynamic data distinct from traditional network approaches and illustrate user social roles within distributed collaboration as well as context and shifting interests of users based on their contributions. This approach has rich implications for mixed-methods research as it allows researchers to collapse large-scale event log data into more parsimonious network representations that can motivate qualitative analysis, visualization, and statistical modeling of complex behavior in socio-technical systems.
Biography: Brian Keegan is a research associate and data scientist for the Harvard Business School Hbx online learning platform. He received his PhD from the Northwestern University School of Communication in 2012 and was a post-doctoral research fellow in network and computational social science at Northeastern University until 2014. His research analyzes the structure and dynamics of online knowledge collaborations such as Wikipedia, Twitter, and online education under high-tempo and bursty conditions.
Host: Emilio Ferrara
Webcast: http://webcasterms1.isi.edu/mediasite/Viewer/?peid=0b39bdb4046d4835af24d94a23ddf6061dLocation: Information Science Institute (ISI) - 11th Flr Conf Rm # 1135, Marina Del Rey
WebCast Link: http://webcasterms1.isi.edu/mediasite/Viewer/?peid=0b39bdb4046d4835af24d94a23ddf6061d
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Peter Zamar
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 25, 2016 @ 01:00 PM - 01:50 PM
USC Viterbi School of Engineering, Viterbi School of Engineering Student Affairs
University Calendar
Join us for a presentation by Dr. Theodore W. Berger, from the University of Southern California, titled "Engineering Memories: A Brain Prosthesis for Human Memory Function."
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. -
Imaging Seminar - Junjie Yao, Friday, March 25th at 2:00pm in EEB 132
Fri, Mar 25, 2016 @ 02:00 PM - 03:30 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Junjie Yao, Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri
Talk Title: Photoacoustic Imaging beyond Traditional Limits
Abstract: By physically combining electromagnetic and ultrasonic waves, photoacoustic imaging (PAI) has proven powerful for multi-scale anatomical, functional, and molecular imaging. In PAI, a short-pulsed laser beam illuminates the biological tissue to generate a small but rapid temperature rise, which leads to emission of ultrasonic waves due to thermoelastic expansion. The high-frequency ultrasonic waves are detected outside the tissue by an ultrasonic transducer to form an image that maps the original optical energy deposition in the tissue. PAI seamlessly combines the rich optical absorption contrast of biological tissue with the high optically- or acoustically-determined spatial resolutions.
My talk will focus on three recent advances of PAI on exciting new fronts. First, PAI has broken the optical-diffraction limit and achieved super-resolution (~80 nm) imaging by using non-linear photobleaching or photo-switching dynamics, extending its applications into sub-cellular nano-dimensions. Second, by using a novel pulse-width-based single-wavelength method, ultra-fast photoacoustic microscopy has achieved a 1D oxygenation imaging rate of 100 kHz, allowing label-free imaging of mouse brain activity with high spatial-temporal resolution. Third, taking advantage of the newly developed near-infrared non-fluorescent phytochrome BphP1, which can be reversibly switched on and off, PAI has achieved more than 200 times enhancement in detection sensitivity in reporter gene imaging, allowing early-stage cancer imaging at ~10 mm in tissue with a detection sensitivity of ~20 cancer cells.
Biography: Dr. Junjie Yao received his B.E. and M.E. degrees in Biomedical Engineering from Tsinghua University, Beijing, in 2006 and 2008, respectively. He received his Ph.D. degree in Biomedical Engineering at Washington University, St. Louis (WUSTL), in 2013. He is currently a postdoctoral research associate at WUSTL.
Dr. Junjie Yao's research interest is in photoacoustic imaging technologies in life sciences, especially in functional brain imaging and early cancer detection. Dr. Yao has published more than 60 articles in peer-reviewed journals such as Nature Methods, Nature Medicine, PNAS, and PRL. These publications have received more than 1650 world-wide citations in the last five years. He (co-)invented photoacoustic Doppler-bandwidth flowmetry, photoacoustic oxygen metabolic microscopy, photo-imprint super-resolution photoacoustic microscopy, and reversibly-switchable photoacoustic tomography. Dr. Yao's future research will center on developing novel photoacoustic technologies and translating the laboratory imaging advances into diagnostic and therapeutic applications for a broad range of diseases, especially brain disorders and cancers.
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. -
The Underpinning of the Industrial Internet of Things
Fri, Mar 25, 2016 @ 02:00 PM - 03:30 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Jan Van Bruaene, VP of Engineering Real-Time Innovations
Talk Title: The Underpinning of the Industrial Internet of Things
Abstract: In this presentation, you will learn about the industrial internet of things and how it differs from the consumer internet of things. We'll also cover why building a connectivity platform for the industrial internet of thing is hard. We'll dig deeper into the underlying technology: Data Distribution Service (DDS). We'll cover data centricity, different communication patterns, and quality of service.
Finally, you will also learn about research and career opportunities at RTI.
Biography: Jan joined RTI in 2006 and has over 19 years of experience in technical and customer-facing leadership roles at companies such as Sun Microsystems and VLSI Technology. He has led professional services, support, and engineering organizations and has experience in middleware, and infrastructure software, operating system s and network chip development.
Jan came to RTI as a senior application engineer and was responsible for developing a new support organization which achieved a record-setting 98 percent customer satisfaction rate. Jan led a team of application services engineers delivering system design and custom implementations using RTI Connext technology and middleware. For the past four years, Jan has managed RTI's R&D organization.
Jan graduated with a MS equivalent degree in Electronics, Digital Communications (Summa Cum Laude) from KIHK in Geel, Belgium.
Host: Bhaskar Krishnamachari
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 248
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Shane Goodoff
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-Capturing More Linguistic Structure with Graph-Structured Parsing
Fri, Mar 25, 2016 @ 03:00 PM - 04:00 PM
Information Sciences Institute
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Jonathan Kummerfeld, Univ. of Berkeley
Talk Title: Capturing More Linguistic Structure with Graph-Structured Parsing
Series: Natural Language Seminar
Abstract: The correct interpretation of any sentence is obscured by a vast array of alternatives. Previous work on disambiguating meaning has focused on representations of syntax using tree structures. Simplifying syntax in this way often means leaving out long-distance relations between words, providing less information to downstream tasks such as dialog and question answering. We propose a new algorithm that is able to efficiently search over graph structures, fully capturing argument structures as a directed acyclic graph. Our dynamic program uniquely decomposes structures, and is sound and complete with respect to the class of one-endpoint crossing graphs.
Biography: Jonathan is a Ph.D. candidate at UC Berkeley working on natural language processing with Dan Klein. His research focuses on new algorithms for interpreting text and analyzing system behavior. In particular, he has built search-based error analysis tools for syntactic parsing and coreference resolution, and a graph-based syntactic parser.
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.
