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Events for the 5th week of April

  • Viterbi Wellness Study Break!

    Viterbi Wellness Study Break!

    Tue, Apr 30, 2019 @ 10:30 AM - 12:00 PM

    USC Viterbi School of Engineering, Viterbi School of Engineering Masters Programs

    Student Activity


    Tuesday, April 30th, join us for some wellness tips and practices.
    From 10:30am-11:30am "paws-a-while" with USC's full-time canine faculty member, Professor Beau.
    At 11:00 am, a yoga session will be led by our certified Ashtanga yoga trainer, Divya Dhoudhary, at the E-Quad Lawn. You will need to bring your own mat for yoga!
    Bring your USC ID so you can swipe in and earn points on your Experience Viterbi App!

    Location: EQuad Lawn

    Audiences: Graduate

    Contact: GAPP Office

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  • Mork Family Department of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science Seminar - Distinguished Lecture Series

    Tue, Apr 30, 2019 @ 04:00 PM - 05:20 PM

    Mork Family Department of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Professor Rishi Raj, Materials Science & Engineering Program - University of Colorado Boulder

    Talk Title: The Physics of Flash Sintering and Related Phenomena

    Abstract: Flash sintering, first discovered in 2010, has three features, a non-linear increase in electrical conductivity, electroluminescence and a massive increase in solid state diffusion. More recently the experiments have expanded into new regimes of physics and materials science. For example powders of elemental oxides sinter and transform into single phase ceramics of complex chemistries in a few seconds at furnace temperature well below 1000 C. The simplicity and frugality of the method is striking. Flash is emerging as an enabling technology for the synthesis of compounds, such as solid-state electrolytes for lithium ion batteries, which are difficult to make by conventional methods

    Host: Dr. Branicio

    Location: John Stauffer Science Lecture Hall (SLH) - 200

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Karen Woo/Mork Family

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  • Repeating EventMeet USC: Admission Presentation, Campus Tour, and Engineering Talk

    Wed, May 01, 2019

    Viterbi School of Engineering Undergraduate Admission

    Workshops & Infosessions


    This half day program is designed for prospective freshmen (HS juniors and younger) and family members. Meet USC includes an information session on the University and the Admission process, a student led walking tour of campus, and a meeting with us in the Viterbi School. During the engineering session we will discuss the curriculum, research opportunities, hands-on projects, entrepreneurial support programs, and other aspects of the engineering school. Meet USC is designed to answer all of your questions about USC, the application process, and financial aid.

    Reservations are required for Meet USC. This program occurs twice, once at 8:30 a.m. and again at 12:30 p.m.

    Please make sure to check availability and register online for the session you wish to attend. Also, remember to list an Engineering major as your "intended major" on the webform!

    RSVP

    Location: Ronald Tutor Campus Center (TCC) - USC Admission Office

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

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    Contact: Viterbi Admission

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  • Repeating EventMeet USC: Admission Presentation, Campus Tour, and Engineering Talk

    Wed, May 01, 2019

    Viterbi School of Engineering Undergraduate Admission

    Workshops & Infosessions


    This half day program is designed for prospective freshmen (HS juniors and younger) and family members. Meet USC includes an information session on the University and the Admission process, a student led walking tour of campus, and a meeting with us in the Viterbi School. During the engineering session we will discuss the curriculum, research opportunities, hands-on projects, entrepreneurial support programs, and other aspects of the engineering school. Meet USC is designed to answer all of your questions about USC, the application process, and financial aid.

    Reservations are required for Meet USC. This program occurs twice, once at 8:30 a.m. and again at 12:30 p.m.

    Please make sure to check availability and register online for the session you wish to attend. Also, remember to list an Engineering major as your "intended major" on the webform!

    RSVP

    Location: Ronald Tutor Campus Center (TCC) - USC Admission Office

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    View All Dates

    Contact: Viterbi Admission

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  • Computer Science General Faculty Meeting

    Wed, May 01, 2019 @ 02:00 PM - 04:00 PM

    Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science

    Receptions & Special Events


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

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

    Audiences: Invited Faculty Only

    Contact: Assistant to CS chair

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  • Astani Civil and Environmental Engineering Seminar

    Thu, May 02, 2019 @ 04:00 PM - 05:00 PM

    Sonny Astani Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Jean Van-Buren, PhD Graduate Student, Uniersity of California, Berkeley

    Talk Title: Unexpected products formed during oxidative water treatment

    Abstract: Hydrogen peroxide and persulfate are employed in the treatment of contaminated soil and groundwater by in situ chemical oxidation (ISCO) as well as in advanced oxidation processes (AOPs) for wastewater treatment and drinking water purification. Activation of the peroxy bonds in these oxidants produces hydroxyl radical and sulfate radical, which can degrade recalcitrant organic contaminants such as aromatic compounds like benzene. Our research on the oxidation of aromatics
    has highlighted a ring-cleavage mechanism that forms low molecular weight aldehydes as well as α,β-unsaturated aldehydes. This is a concern for toxicity as α,β-unsaturated aldehydes are highly reactive with biomolecules. Their detection has implications for hazardous site remediation as well as the use of AOPs for water treatment.


    Biography: Jean Van Buren is a UC Berkeley Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Chemistry working with David Sedlak at the Berkeley Water Center. She received her B.A. from Cornell University in Chemistry. Her research interests include environmental chemistry, water remediation, and transformation products. Outside of the lab, she is a professional equestrian.

    Location: Ray R. Irani Hall (RRI) - 101

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Evangeline Reyes

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  • Astani Civil and Environmental Engineering Seminar

    Thu, May 02, 2019 @ 04:00 PM - 05:00 PM

    Sonny Astani Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Jean Van Buren, University of California, Berkeley

    Talk Title: Unexpected products formed during oxidative water treatment

    Abstract: See attached

    Host: Dr. Daniel McCurry

    More Information: Van_Buren_Announcement.pdf

    Location: Ray R. Irani Hall (RRI) - 101

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Evangeline Reyes

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  • Repeating EventMeet USC: Admission Presentation, Campus Tour, and Engineering Talk

    Fri, May 03, 2019

    Viterbi School of Engineering Undergraduate Admission

    Workshops & Infosessions


    This half day program is designed for prospective freshmen (HS juniors and younger) and family members. Meet USC includes an information session on the University and the Admission process, a student led walking tour of campus, and a meeting with us in the Viterbi School. During the engineering session we will discuss the curriculum, research opportunities, hands-on projects, entrepreneurial support programs, and other aspects of the engineering school. Meet USC is designed to answer all of your questions about USC, the application process, and financial aid.

    Reservations are required for Meet USC. This program occurs twice, once at 8:30 a.m. and again at 12:30 p.m.

    Please make sure to check availability and register online for the session you wish to attend. Also, remember to list an Engineering major as your "intended major" on the webform!

    RSVP

    Location: Ronald Tutor Campus Center (TCC) - USC Admission Office

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    View All Dates

    Contact: Viterbi Admission

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  • PhD Defense - Sahil Garg

    Fri, May 03, 2019 @ 03:00 PM - 05:00 PM

    Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science

    University Calendar


    PhD Candidate:
    Sahil Garg

    DateTime: 5/3 from 3pm to 5pm
    Location: GFS 213.

    Committee:
    Aram Galstyan (chair)
    Kevin Knight
    Greg Ver Steeg
    Roger Georges Ghanem
    Irina Rish

    Dissertation Title: Hashcode Representations of Natural Language for Relation Extraction

    This thesis studies the problem of identifying and extracting relationships between biological entities from the text of scientific papers. For the relation extraction task, state-of-the-art performance has been achieved by classification methods based on convolutional kernels which facilitate sophisticated reasoning on natural language text using structural similarities between sentences and/or their parse trees. Despite their success, however, kernel-based methods are difficult to customize and computationally expensive to scale to large datasets. We address the first problem by proposing a nonstationary extension to the conventional convolutional kernels for improved expressiveness and flexibility. For scalability, we propose to employ kernelized locality sensitive hashcodes as explicit representations of natural language structures, which can be used as feature-vector inputs to arbitrary classification methods. We propose a theoretically justified method for optimizing the representations that is based on approximate and efficient maximization of the mutual information between the hashcodes and their class labels. We evaluate the proposed approach on multiple biomedical relation extraction datasets, and observe significant and robust improvements in accuracy over state-of-the-art classifiers, along with drastic orders-of-magnitude speedup compared to conventional kernel methods.
    Finally, we introduce a nearly-unsupervised framework for learning kernel- or neural- hashcode representations. We define an information-theoretic objective which leverages both labeled and unlabeled data points for fine-grained optimization of each hash function, and propose a greedy algorithm for maximizing that objective. This novel learning paradigm is beneficial for building hashcode representations generalizing from a training set to a test set. We conduct a thorough experimental evaluation on the relation extraction datasets, and demonstrate that the proposed extension leads to superior accuracies with respect to state-of-the-art supervised and semi-supervised approaches, such as variational autoencoders and adversarial neural networks. An added benefit of the proposed representation learning technique is that it is easily parallelizable, interpretable, and owing to its generality, applicable to a wide range of NLP problems.

    Location: Grace Ford Salvatori Hall Of Letters, Arts & Sciences (GFS) - 213

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Lizsl De Leon

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