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Events for the 4th week of April
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Mork Family Department Graduate Seminar
Mon, Apr 17, 2017 @ 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Mork Family Department of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Kedar Hippalgaonkar, Institute of Materials Research and Engineering, Agency for Science Technology and Research
Talk Title: Electron and Phonon Transport in 1D and 2D Materials Towards Applications in Thermoelectrics
Host: Dr. Jayakanth Ravichandran
Location: Hedco Pertroleum and Chemical Engineering Building (HED) - 116
Audiences: Department Only
Contact: Aleessa Atienza
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Crafting an Elevator Pitch That Will Leave a Lasting Impression
Mon, Apr 17, 2017 @ 12:00 PM - 01:30 PM
Viterbi School of Engineering Career Connections
Workshops & Infosessions
It can be tough to feel comfortable promoting yourself to others, but in the U.S. job market, it is a necessity. In this workshop with American Language Institute Senior Lecturer Kimberley Briesch Sumner, you will learn how to craft your own pitch, practice it with others, and prepare yourself to tell potential employers what makes YOU the right candidate for the job.
Click here to RSVP
Location: Mark Taper Hall Of Humanities (THH) - 201
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Lilian Barajas
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Seminars in Biomedical Engineering
Mon, Apr 17, 2017 @ 12:30 PM - 01:50 PM
Alfred E. Mann Department of Biomedical Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Rich Roberts, PhD, Dept. Chair, USC Chemical Engineering & Materials Science
Talk Title: 20 years of mRNA Display for Peptide and Protein Design
Host: Qifa Zhou
Location: Olin Hall of Engineering (OHE) - 122
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Mischalgrace Diasanta
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PTE Seminar
Mon, Apr 17, 2017 @ 12:50 PM - 01:50 PM
Mork Family Department of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Rafael Moraes, Reservoir Simulation Engineer, Petrobras Research & Development Center
Talk Title: Improving the Computational Efficiency of Approximate Gradients Using a MultiScale Reservoir Simulation Framework
Host: Dr. Behnam Jafarpour
Location: Thomas & Dorothy Leavey Library (LVL) - 17
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Aleessa Atienza
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Professional Licensure Presentation: More on the FE & PE Exams
Mon, Apr 17, 2017 @ 06:30 PM - 07:30 PM
Viterbi School of Engineering Career Connections
Workshops & Infosessions
Are you interested in learning more about Professional Licensure. Do you have questions about the FE or PE exams? Then attend this session to learn more! Michael Incledon, PE, PLS, LEED AP, from the Speakers Link Program from the National Council of Examiners for Engineering and Surveying will be presenting.
Location: Ronald Tutor Hall of Engineering (RTH) - 211
Audiences: All Viterbi Students
Contact: RTH 218 Viterbi Career Connections
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Scope USC: Demo Night 2017
Mon, Apr 17, 2017 @ 07:30 PM - 11:00 PM
Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science
Student Activity
After a productive spring learning full-stack web dev, the Scope squad is wrapping up the semester with Demo Night. Come at 7:30pm on Monday, April 17 to demo web applications Scope members have built to make your life better. Join CEOs and CTOs of local LA startups, who have had their eyes on Scope since we started last fall, in meeting the members behind the code that will change how you experience USC. Rumor has it that there will be -cookies and refreshments- so find out for yourself at 7:30PM on Monday, April 17 in ACC 310!
RSVP: https://goo.gl/2tzhwX
http://scopeusc.com/
https://www.facebook.com/scopeusc/
https://www.instagram.com/scope_usc/
Location: Elaine & Kenneth Leventhal School Of Accounting (ACC) - 310
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Ryan Rozan
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PhD Defense - Rongqi Qiu
Tue, Apr 18, 2017 @ 10:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science
University Calendar
PhD Candidate: Rongqi Qiu
Committee: Ulrich Neumann (CS, chair), Panayiotis Georgiou (EE), Aiichiro Nakano (CS)
Title: Geometric Modeling and Shape Analysis of 3D Point Clouds
Time: April 18 (Tuesday) 10-12pm
Room: SAL 322
Abstract:
Automatic reconstruction of large-scale scenes from 3D point clouds has been a complex problem. It can be decomposed into two sub-problems, namely, primitives and parts. While primitives are regular geometric shapes, parts are relatively irregular and isolated objects.
In primitive reconstruction, two systems under different scenarios are presented. The first one reconstructs pipe-runs from industrial site point clouds. The key idea is that by adopting statistical analysis over point normals, global similarities are discovered from raw data to guide primitive fitting, thus increasing robustness. The second system extracts pole-like objects from urban point clouds and posed multi-view images. The presented method takes advantage of the complementary information from 3D point clouds and 2D posed images to recover these objects.
In part reconstruction, a modeling-by-recognition strategy is followed. Instead of directly meshing on a noisy scan, a similar object is retrieved from a pre-defined CAD model library. Then, geometric analysis is applied on the query and template point cloud to accomplish two tasks. The first one is to compute dense correspondences between query and template objects, thus making it possible to transfer real-world color to template models. The method segments both point clouds into parts consistently and then computes part-level correspondences. The dense mapping allows color or other parameter transfers. The second task is to segment an object into functional parts using a small set of pre-segmented template objects as examples. The main idea is to seek partial matches and transfer segmentation labels from examples to the input object. The resulting segmentation is a key step towards shape understanding.
Location: Henry Salvatori Computer Science Center (SAL) - 322
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Lizsl De Leon
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USC Stem Cell Seminar: Catriona Jamieson, University of California, San Diego
Tue, Apr 18, 2017 @ 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Alfred E. Mann Department of Biomedical Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Catriona Jamieson, University of California, San Diego
Talk Title: TBD
Series: Eli and Edythe Broad Center for Regenerative Medicine and Stem Cell Research at USC Distinguished Speakers Series
Host: USC Stem Cell
More Info: http://stemcell.usc.edu/events
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
Event Link: http://stemcell.usc.edu/events
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PhD Defense - Xinran He
Tue, Apr 18, 2017 @ 01:00 PM - 03:00 PM
Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science
University Calendar
Phd Candidate: Xinran He
Committee:
Yan Liu (chair)
David Kempe
Kristina Lerman
Thomas Valente
Date/Time: April 18th 1-3pm
Room: PHE 223
Title Understanding Diffusion Processes: Inference and Theory
Abstract:
Nowadays online social networks have become a ubiquitous tool for people's social communications. Analyzing these social networks offers great potential to shed light on the human social structure, and create better channels to enable social communications and collaborations. While most social analysis tasks begin with extracting or learning the social network and the associated parameters, it remains a very challenging task due to the amorphous nature of social ties and the noise and incompleteness in the observations. As a result, the inferred social network is likely to be of low accuracy and high level of noise which impacts the performance of analysis and applications depending on the inferred parameters.
In this thesis, we study the following important questions with a special focus on analyzing diffusion behaviors in social networks to achieve real practicality: (1) How to utilize special properties of social networks to improve the accuracy of the extracted network under noisy and missing data? (2) How to characterize the impact of noise in the inferred network and carry out robust analysis and optimization?
To address the first challenge towards accurate network inference, we tackle the issue of mitigating the impact of incomplete observations with a focus on learning influence function from incomplete observations. To address the challenge of data scarcity in inferring diffusion networks, we propose a hierarchical graphical model to jointly infer multiple diffusion networks accurately. To utilize the rich content information in cascades, we propose the HawkesTopic model to analyze text-based cascades by combining temporal and content information.
To address the second challenge towards designing robust Influence Maximization algorithms, we first propose a framework to measure the stability of Influence Maximization with the Perturbation Interval Model to characterize the noise in the inferred diffusion network. We then design an efficient algorithm for Robust Influence Maximization to find influential users robust in multiple diffusion settings.
Location: Charles Lee Powell Hall (PHE) - 223
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Lizsl De Leon
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Best Dissertation Symposium
Tue, Apr 18, 2017 @ 03:00 PM - 04:30 PM
Viterbi School of Engineering Doctoral Programs
Receptions & Special Events
Each year, the Viterbi School of Engineering's academic departments awards PhD candidates who submitted exceptional research dissertations the honor of Best Dissertation. Each PhD student who receives the Best Dissertation award will also be nominated to compete for the William F. Ballhaus, Jr. Prize for Excellence in Graduate Engineering Research. A faculty committee will review the dissertations, then narrow down the nominees to three finalists. The finalists will be invited to present their research at the Best Dissertation Symposium on April 18, 2017. From these nominees, a final winner will be selected.
RSVP requested via https://gapp.usc.edu/events/best-dissertation-symposium by April 17, 2017.
More information can be found at https://gapp.usc.edu/students/doctoral-students/awards/best-dissertation-symposium
Location: Ronald Tutor Hall of Engineering (RTH) - 526
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Jennifer Gerson
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Epstein Seminar, ISE 651
Tue, Apr 18, 2017 @ 03:30 PM - 04:50 PM
Daniel J. Epstein Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Dr. Mark Brown, Professor, Columbia University
Talk Title: Taylor's Law via Ratios, for Some Distributions with Infinite Mean
Host: Prof. Sheldon Ross
More Information: April 18, 2017_Brown.pdf
Location: Ethel Percy Andrus Gerontology Center (GER) - 206
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Grace Owh
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Professional Licensure Presentation: More on the FE & PE Exams
Tue, Apr 18, 2017 @ 05:00 PM - 06:00 PM
Viterbi School of Engineering Career Connections
Workshops & Infosessions
Are you interested in learning more about Professional Licensure. Do you have questions about the FE or PE exams? Then attend this session to learn more! Mike Donelson, PE, and Susan Christ, PE, both Senior Registrars for Engineering from the Board for Professional Engineers, Land Surveyors and Geologists will be presenting.
More Information: ProfLicensurePresBrochure.pdf
Location: Ronald Tutor Hall of Engineering (RTH) - 211
Audiences: All Viterbi
Contact: RTH 218 Viterbi Career Connections
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PhD Defense- Koki Nagano
Wed, Apr 19, 2017 @ 10:30 AM - 12:30 PM
Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science
University Calendar
PhD Candidate: Koki Nagano
Committee: Paul Debevec (CS, chair), Hao Li (CS), Jernej Barbic (CS), Aiichiro Nakano (CS), Michelle Povinelli (EE)
Title: Multi-scale Dynamic Capture for High Quality Digital Humans
Time: April 19 (Wednesday) 10:30-12:30pm
Room: KAP 164
Abstract:
Digitally creating a virtual human indistinguishable from a real human has been one of the central goals of Computer Graphics, Human-Computer Interaction, and Artificial Intelligence. Such digital characters are not only the primary creative vessel for immersive storytellers and filmmakers, but also a key technology to understand the process of how humans think, see, and communicate in the social environment. In order for digital character creation techniques to be valuable in simulating and understanding humans, the hardest challenge is for them to appear believably realistic from any point of view in any environment, and to behave and interact in a convincing manner.
Creating a photorealistic rendering of a digital avatar is increasingly more accessible due to rapid advancement in sensing technologies and rendering techniques. However, generating realistic movement and dynamic details that are compatible with such a photorealistic appearance still relies on manual work from experts, which hinders the potential impact of digital avatar technologies in real world applications. Generating dynamic details is especially important for facial animation, as humans are extremely tuned to sense people's intentions from facial expressions.
In this dissertation, we propose systems and approaches for capturing the appearance and motion to reproduce high fidelity digital avatars that are rich in subtle motion and appearance details. We aim for a framework which can generate consistent dynamic detail and motion at the resolution of skin pores and fine wrinkles, and can provide extremely high resolution microstructure deformation for use in cinematic storytelling or immersive virtual reality environments.
This thesis presents three principal techniques for achieving multi-scale dynamic capture for digital humans. The first is a multi-view capture system and a stereo reconstruction technique which directly produces a complete high-fidelity head model with consistent facial mesh topology. Our method jointly solves for stereo constraints and consistent mesh parameterization from static scans or a dynamic performance, producing dense correspondences on an artist quality template. Additionally, we propose a technique to add dynamic per-frame high and middle frequency details from the flat-lit performance video. Second, we propose a technique to estimate high fidelity 3D scene flow from multiview video. The motion estimation fully respects high quality data from multiview input, and can be incorporated to any facial performance capture pipeline to improve the fidelity of the facial motion. Since the motion can be estimated without relying on any domain-specific priors or regularization, our method scales well to modern systems with many high-resolution cameras. Third, we present a technique to synthesize dynamic skin microstructure details to produce convincing facial animation. We measure and quantify how skin microstructure deformation contributes to dynamic skin appearance, and present an efficient way to simulate dynamic skin microstructure. When combined with the state-of-the art performance capture and face scanning techniques, it can significantly improve the realism of animated faces for virtual reality, video games, and visual effects.
Location: Kaprielian Hall (KAP) - 164
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Lizsl De Leon
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Computer Science General Faculty Meeting
Wed, Apr 19, 2017 @ 12:00 PM - 02:00 PM
Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science
Receptions & Special Events
Bi-Weekly regular faculty meeting for invited full-time Computer Science faculty only. Event details emailed directly to attendees.
Location TBD.Audiences: Invited Faculty Only
Contact: Assistant to CS chair
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Aerospace & Mechanical Engineering Seminar
Wed, Apr 19, 2017 @ 03:30 PM - 04:30 PM
Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Ilenia Battiato, Assistant Professor of Energy Resources Engineering at Stanford University
Talk Title: Transport Phenomena over Patterned Surfaces
Abstract: Coupled flows over patterned surfaces occur in a variety of natural phenomena, biological systems and industrial processes. Some example includes bioreactors, micro- and nano-patterned water filtration membranes, superhydrophobic ridges surfaces, and submerged vegetation, just to mention a few. Designing and optimizing the topology of the structure to achieve target performance at the system-scale (or macroscale) is still an open question since fully resolved numerical simulations are too prohibitive when a great disparity of scales between the pattern and the device exists. By treating the patterned surface as a permeable layer, we formulate a system of coupled Navier-Stokes/Brinkman equations, which is amenable of analytical solution for the mean filtration velocity inside the pattern, and allows one to uncover and quantify the relationship between microstructure and macroscopic response. We employ this effective-medium framework to model a number of physical systems including channel turbulent flows over arrays of carbon nanotubes, superhydrophobic ridged surfaces, and submerged vegetation. We finally investigate the appropriateness of treating the pattern as a porous medium by conducting experiments in microfluidic channels with controlled microtexture.
Biography: Dr. Battiato received her MSc. In Engineering Physics in 2008 and a Ph.D. in Engineering Science with a specialization in Computational Sciences from the Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering department at the University of California San Diego in 2010. She did her postdoctoral training in Theoretical Physics at the Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organization in Goettingen, Germany. In 2012 she joined the Mechanical Engineering Department at Clemson University as assistant professor and then in 2014 the Mechanical Engineering Department at SDSU. In 2016, she moved to the department of Energy Resources Engineering at Stanford University. Her research interests lie in theoretical/computational fluid mechanics and transport processes in porous media, multiscale and hybrid computational methods, effective medium theories, and multiphase flows. In 2015 she was awarded of the Department of Energy Young Investigator award in Basic Energy Sciences for her work on multiscale models of reactive transport in the subsurface.
Host: Department of Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering
More Info: https://ame.usc.edu/about/seminars/
Location: Seaver Science Library (SSL) - 150
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Ashleen Knutsen
Event Link: https://ame.usc.edu/about/seminars/
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CS Colloquium: Satish Chandra (Facebook) - Formula-Based Software Debugging
Thu, Apr 20, 2017 @ 11:00 AM - 12:20 PM
Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Satish Chandra , Facebook
Talk Title: Formula-Based Software Debugging
Series: CS Colloquium
Abstract: This lecture satisfies requirements for CSCI 591: Computer Science Research Colloquium.
Software often ships with known defects because fixing bugs requires expensive developer time. With the availability of virtually unlimited compute power, an interesting question is whether the burden of fixing bugs can be shifted, at least in part, from the human to the machine. This question has, of late, attracted significant activity in the software engineering and programming language communities. In this talk, I will discuss recent techniques that have been proposed towards this goal. My main focus will be on techniques that draw on the power of SMT (satisfiability modulo theories) solvers, i.e. engines that crunch first-order logic formulae.
Time permitting, I will also talk about my experiences with tech transfer at industrial research labs.
Biography: Satish Chandra obtained a PhD from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1997, and a B.Tech from the Indian Institute of Technology-Kanpur in 1991, both in computer science. From 1997 to 2002, he was a member of technical staff at Bell Laboratories, where his research focused on program analysis, domain-specific languages, and data-communication protocols. From 2002 to 2013, he was a research staff member at IBM Research, where his research focused on bug finding and verification, software synthesis, and test automation.
From 2013 to 2016, he worked at Samsung Research America, where he led the advanced programming tools research team. In 2016, he started working at Facebook. He is an ACM Distinguished Scientist.
Host: CS Department
Location: Ronald Tutor Hall of Engineering (RTH) - 217
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Assistant to CS chair
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PhD Defense- Hongyi Xu
Thu, Apr 20, 2017 @ 12:00 PM - 02:00 PM
Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science
University Calendar
PhD Candidate: Hongyi Xu
Title: Interactive Material and Damping Design.
Date: 04/20/17
Time: 12-2pm
Location: SAL 213
Committee:
Jernej Barbic (Chair)
Hao Li
Yong Chen (Outside)
Abstract:
Finite Element Method (FEM) has been widely used for simulations of three-dimensional deformable objects. To produce compelling and artist-controllable FEM dynamics, the choices of material elasticity and damping properties are critically important. This thesis presents an intuitive and interactive design method to explore the high-dimensional space of material and damping for use in FEM simulations in computer graphics, animation and related fields.
This thesis first demonstrates how to intuitively explore the space of isotropic and anisotropic nonlinear materials, for design of FEM animations. Previous applications of nonlinear solid elasticity employed materials from a few standard families such as linear corotational, nonlinear St.Venant-Kirchhoff and Neo-Hookean material. However, the spaces of all nonlinear isotropic and anisotropic materials are infinite-dimensional and much broader than these standard materials. We simplify this infinite-dimensional material space with the Valansis-Landel hypothesis and demonstrate how to easily design arbitrary isotropic and anisotropic nonlinear elasticity with local control, using a spline interface. Our materials accelerate simulation design and enable visual effects that are difficult or impossible to achieve with standard nonlinear materials.
Material properties may vary across the volume of the object, producing heterogeneous deformable behaviors. My thesis presents an interactive inverse method to design heterogeneous material distributions, which conform to prescribed displacements and internal elastic forces at a few selected positions. However, this optimization problem is high-dimensional and solving it in the full space is not practical for interactive design. We demonstrate scalability to complex examples using a novel model reduction of the material space, which accelerates the optimization by two orders of magnitude and makes the convergence much more robust.
FEM dynamics is largely affected also by the damping properties, in addition to elasticity. This thesis gives a damping design method and interface whereby the user can set the damping properties so that motion aligned with each of a few chosen example deformations is damped by an independent user-prescribed amount, achieving anisotropic damping effects. Similar to our spline-based elasticity, we also achieve nonlinear damping that depends on the example deformation magnitudes, by editing a single spline curve for each example. The nonlinear damping curves can also be automatically inferred from high-level user inputs, such as the amount of amplitude loss in one oscillation cycle. Our method enables an artist-directable and intuitive approach to controlling nonlinear and anisotropic damping, which can generate effects not possible with previous methods and better capture real-world damping dynamics
Location: Henry Salvatori Computer Science Center (SAL) - 213
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Lizsl De Leon
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IISE Spring Banquet
Thu, Apr 20, 2017 @ 05:00 PM - 08:00 PM
Daniel J. Epstein Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering
Receptions & Special Events
The Industrial and Systems Engineering Annual Banquet will take place on Thursday, April 20th from 5-8pm.
The banquet will feature keynote speaker Dr. Carol Peden, a professor of Anesthesiology and Executive Director of the USC Center for Health System Innovation. Dr. Peden has led numerous quality improvement projects internationally and continues to show commitment to augmenting efficiency in healthcare systems.
To RSVP and submit $20 for admission, please contact Grace Owh in GER 240 by Friday, April 14th.
More Information: ISE Banquet 2017 flyer.pdf
Location: Town & Gown (TGF) -
Audiences: By RSVP
Contact: Grace Owh
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AI Seminar
Fri, Apr 21, 2017 @ 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Information Sciences Institute
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Homa Hosseinmardi , Danaher Corporation
Talk Title: Multimodal Labeling and Characterization of Social Network Data for Detection/Prediction of Cyberbullying
Abstract: One of the most pressing problems in high schools is bullying. However, with todays online and mobile technologies, bullying is moving beyond the schoolyards via cell phones, social networks, online text, videos, and images. As bad as fighting and bullying were before the internet age, the recording and posting of hurtful content online have magnified the harmful reach of bullying, enabling it 24 7. Cyberbullying is a growing problem and incidents of cyberbullying with extreme consequences such as suicide are routinely reported in popular press now. This talk provides insights into the problem of cyberbullying in social networks by investigating profanity usage, ground truth labeling of cyberbullying, and characterization of relationships between cyberbullying and a variety of factors, including linguistic content, social graph features, temporal commenting behavior, and multimedia modality. It also looks at the propagation of cyberbullying behavior in a social network, and prediction of victims of such behavior.
Biography: Homa Hosseinmardi holds PhD in Computer Science from the University of Colorado Boulder. She joined Danaher Corporation in 2015 as Data Scientist at Danaher Labs. She also contributes as a researcher at the CU CyberSafety Research Center. Hosseinmardis interests lie in the area of computational social science and data mining. She is particularly interested in the use of large scale datasets and machine learning techniques to study problems with internet safety, misbehavior and cyberbullying. Her recent work has focused on studying triggers of cyberaggressive behaviors. Her past work also addressed various questions toward understanding cyberbullying in online social networks.
Host: Emilio Ferrara
Location: 11th floor large conference room
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Kary LAU
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Saviynt Drop In Hours- Tech Task
Fri, Apr 21, 2017 @ 12:00 PM - 04:00 PM
Viterbi School of Engineering Career Connections
Workshops & Infosessions
Open to Undergraduate and Graduate Students
Please bring a hard copy of your resume and your laptop. A brief tech task will be given during your drop in to assess your coding experience. Successful students may be asked to schedule an interview for one of the 5 open positions in Los Angeles and/or 5 open positions in Atlanta.
Saviynt is next-generation company in the IT Security domain specializing in Identity and Access Governance. An innovative company that has and is disrupting the current solution space, which has been stagnant for a decade, with forward looking concepts encompassing enterprise, Cloud and collaboration platform security.
A company where career is not tenure based, cherishes innovation, drive and ownership of our employees; a culture that nurtures and instills responsibility and rewards performance with rapid career progression. If you have what it takes to be part of this dynamic organization please join our company information session.
Location: Ronald Tutor Hall of Engineering (RTH) - 109
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Lilian Barajas
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Ming Hsieh Institute Seminar Series on Integrated Systems
Fri, Apr 21, 2017 @ 02:00 PM - 04:00 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Dr. Aaron Buchwald, Senior Technical Director at InPhi Corporation
Talk Title: Challenges of Time-Interleaved ADCs
Host: Profs. Hossein Hashemi, Mike Chen, Dina El-Damak, and Mahta Moghaddam
More Information: MHI Seminar Series IS - Aaron Buchwald.pdf
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 132
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Jenny Lin
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Seminars in Biomedical Engineering
Fri, Apr 21, 2017 @ 02:30 PM - 04:30 PM
Alfred E. Mann Department of Biomedical Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Leonard Morsut, PhD, Assistant Professor, Broad CIRM Center and Dept. of Stem Cell Biology and Regenerative Medicine University of Southern California Keck School of Medicine
Talk Title: Programming cells to build tissues with synthetic biology molecular tools: a new pathway towards engineering development and regeneration
Series: Seminars in BME (Lab Rotations)
Abstract: During embryonic development, complex multicellular tissues form based on genetically encoded algorithms that specify how cells will behave both individually and collectively.
In the Tissue Development Engineering Laboratory we develop synthetic biology approaches to implement in cells such self-organization programs and understand their overall logic, both for basic understanding and applications in regenerative medicine.
We have recently engineered and characterized a family of orthogonal cell-cell communication pathways, inspired by the mechanism of an endogenous communication system called Notch, which allows a cell to detect molecular signals from its neighbors and, in response, to induce user-specified transcriptional programs. These synthetic Notch pathways do not crosstalk with native pathways or with each other, thus providing multiple novel channels for engineering cell-cell communication. I will show how we used these synthetic pathways to flexibly construct basic routines for multi-cellular patterning and morphogenesis in mammalian cellular systems, e.g. localized differentiation, spatial patterning and Boolean decisions. Then, using the synthetic pathways in combination with adhesion molecules we designed a series of synthetic morphogenetic programs in 3D spheroids that deterministically drive spatial reorganization and symmetry breaking in a dynamic, self-organized fashion; we show that these trajectories are robust to perturbations and capable of self-regeneration. I will discuss possible applications of these technologies for developmental biology and regenerative medicine research and applications, especially in combination with tissue engineering tools and approaches. With the increasingly sophisticated synthetic biology components available today and the developments of tissue engineering we are going towards the possibility of designing the development of functional tissues in a dish with user-defined high level properties like shape, resistance to injury, regeneration, for the next generation of regenerative medicine applications.
Biography: http://morsutlab.usc.edu/
Host: Brent Liu, PhD
Location: Corwin D. Denney Research Center (DRB) - 146
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Mischalgrace Diasanta
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NL Seminar - REINFORCEMENT LEARNING OF NEGOTIATION DIALOGUE POLICIES
Fri, Apr 21, 2017 @ 03:00 PM - 04:00 PM
Information Sciences Institute
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Kallirroi Georgila , USC/ICT
Talk Title: REINFORCEMENT LEARNING OF NEGOTIATION DIALOGUE POLICIES
Series: Natural Language Seminar
Abstract: The dialogue policy of a dialogue system decides on what dialogue move also called action, the system should make given the dialogue context also called dialogue state. Building hand crafted dialogue policies is a hard task, and there is no guarantee that the resulting policies will be optimal. This issue has motivated the dialogue community to use statistical methods for automatically learning dialogue policies, the most popular of which is reinforcement learning RL. However, to date, RL has mainly been used to learn dialogue policies in slot filling applications e.g. restaurant recommendation, flight reservation, etc. largely ignoring other more complex genres of dialogue such as negotiation. This talk presents challenges in reinforcement learning of negotiation dialogue policies. The first part of the talk focuses on applying RL to a two party multi issue negotiation domain. Here the main challenges are the very large state and action space, and learning negotiation dialogue policies that can perform well for a variety of negotiation settings, including against interlocutors whose behavior has not been observed before. Good negotiators try to adapt their behaviors based on their interlocutors' behaviors. However, current approaches to using RL for dialogue management assume that the users behavior does not change over time. In the second part of the talk, I will present an experiment that deals with this problem in a resource allocation negotiation scenario.
Biography: Kallirroi Georgila is a Research Assistant Professor at the Institute for Creative Technologies ICT at the University of Southern California US and at USCs Computer Science Department. Before joining USC ICT in 2009 she was a Research Scientist at the Educational Testing Service ETS and before that a Research Fellow at the School of Informatics at the University of Edinburgh. Her research interests include all aspects of spoken dialogue processing with a focus on reinforcement learning of dialogue policies, expressive conversational speech synthesis, and speech recognition. She has served on the organizing, senior, and program committees of many conferences and workshops. Her research work is funded by the National Science Foundation and the Army Research Office.
Host: Marjan Ghazvininejad 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/
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Lost City: Songs from a Changing Sea
Fri, Apr 21, 2017 @ 08:00 PM - 11:00 PM
Sonny Astani Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering
Receptions & Special Events
Rabbit Rabbit Radio will present a newly created song cycle inspired by the ocean and the changes it is undergoing due to climate change, overfishing, and pollution.
A free diver transcends her terrestrial ties and, through song, brings you on a tour of our oceans. Carried by the currents that connect us all, she encounters billions of bioluminescent creatures, the endlessly inventive structures of coral reefs on their annual night of spawning, fields of human detritus, and abandoned nets still fishing for no one. What she finds is at once awe-inspiring and devastating.
Crafted by veterans of rock, classical, and pop music, and using the most powerful aspects of each, Lost City is a set of songs that navigates a visceral tour through the worlds waterways. Each song frames an aspect of our evolving understanding of the ocean and our relationship to it. Created with the cooperation of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, it is an abstract odyssey that reminds us of both the emotional and ecological significance the sea.
Conceived of by George Ban-Weiss, and composed by Carla Kihlstedt, Matthias Bossi, and Jeremy Flower. These four are joined in performance by Michael Abraham, Kristin Slipp, and Ariel Parkington.
Location: Tommy's Place
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Kaela Berry