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Events for the 4th week of May

  • Virtual First-Year Admission Information Session

    Tue, May 19, 2020 @ 02:00 PM - 03:00 PM

    Viterbi School of Engineering Undergraduate Admission

    Workshops & Infosessions


    Our virtual information session is a live presentation from a USC Viterbi admission counselor designed for high school students and their family members to learn more about the USC Viterbi undergraduate experience.Our session will cover an overview of our undergraduate engineering programs, the application process, and more on student life.Guests will be able to ask questions and engage in further discussion toward the end of the session.

    Please register here!

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Viterbi Admission

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  • PhD Defense - Zhiyun Lu

    Wed, May 20, 2020 @ 12:00 PM - 02:00 PM

    Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science

    University Calendar


    Ph.D. Candidate: Zhiyun Lu
    Date: Wednesday, May 20, 2020
    Time: 12:00 PM - 2:00 PM
    Committee: Fei Sha (Chair), Haipeng Luo, C.-C. Jay Kuo

    Title: Leveraging Training Information for Efficient and Robust Deep Learning

    Abstract: Deep neural nets have exhibited great success on a wide range of machine learning problems across various domains, such as speech, image, and text. Despite decent prediction performances, there are rising concerns for the `in-the-lab' machine learning models to be vastly deployed in the wild. In this thesis, we study two of the main challenges in deep learning: efficiency, computational as well as statistical, and robustness. We describe a set of techniques to solve the challenges by utilizing information from the training process intelligently. The solutions go beyond the common recipe of a single point estimate of the optimal model.

    The first part of the thesis studies the efficiency challenge. We propose a budgeted hyper-parameter tuning algorithm to improve the computation efficiency of hyper-parameter tuning in deep learning. It can estimate and utilize the trend of training curves to adaptively allocate resources for tuning, which demonstrates improved efficiency over state-of-the-art tuning algorithms. Then we study the statistical efficiency on tasks with limited labeled data. Specifically we focus on the task of speech sentiment analysis. We apply pre-training using automatic speech recognition data, and solve sentiment analysis as a downstream task, which greatly improves the data efficiency of sentiment labels.



    The second part of the thesis studies the robustness challenge. Motivated by the resampling method in statistics, we study the uncertainty estimate of neural networks by local perturbative approximations. We propose to sample replicas of the model parameters from a Gaussian distribution to form a pseudo-ensemble. The ensemble predictions are used to estimate the uncertainty of the original model, which improves its robustness against invalid inputs.


    Meeting links:


    Zoom: https://usc.zoom.us/j/96089712182 (Meeting ID: 960 8971 2182)


    Google Meet (backup): meet.google.com/nxz-eybf-urw

    WebCast Link: https://usc.zoom.us/j/96089712182

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Lizsl De Leon

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  • NL Seminar-Fighting COVID 19 using Linear Time Algorithms from Computational Linguistics

    Thu, May 21, 2020 @ 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM

    Information Sciences Institute

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Liang Huang, Baidu Oregon State University

    Talk Title: Fighting COVID 19 using Linear Time Algorithms from Computational Linguistics

    Abstract: To defeat the current COVID 19 pandemic, which has already claimed 250,000 deaths as of early May, a messenger RNA mRNA vaccine has emerged as a promising approach thanks to its rapid and scalable production and non infectious and non integrating properties. However, designing an mRNA sequence to achieve high stability and protein yield remains a challenging problem due to the exponentially large search space e.g., there are 10 632 possible mRNA sequence candidates for the spike protein of SARS CoV 2.

    We describe two on going efforts at solving this problem, both using linear time algorithms from my group inspired by my earlier work in parsing. On one hand, the Eterna Open Vaccine project from Stanford Medical School takes a crowd sourcing approach to let game players all over the world design stable sequences. To evaluate sequence stability in terms of free energy, they use Linear Fold from my group 2019 since its the only linear time RNA folding algorithm available which makes it the only one fast enough for COVID scale genomes. On the other hand, we take a computational approach to directly search for the optimal sequence in this exponentially large space via dynamic programming. It turns out this problem can be reduced to a classical problem in formal language theory and computational linguistics intersection between CFG and DFA , which can be solved in O n 3 time, just like lattice parsing for speech. In the end, we can design the optimal mRNA vaccine candidate for SARS CoV 2 spike protein in 1 hour with exact search, or just 11 minutes with a beam of 1000 at the cost of only 0.6 percent loss in energy.

    Biography: Liang Huang is currently an Assistant Professor of EECS at Oregon State University and Distinguished Scientist part time at Baidu Research USA. Before that he was Assistant Professor for three years at the City University of New York CUNY and a part-time Research Scientist with IBM's Watson Group. He graduated in 2008 from Penn and has worked as a Research Scientist at Google and a Research Assistant Professor at USC ISI. Most of his work develops fast algorithms and provable theory to speedup large-scale natural language processing, structured machine learning, and computational structural biology. He has received a Best Paper Award at ACL 2008 sole author, a Best Paper Honorable Mention at EMNLP 2016, several best paper nominations ACL 2007, EMNLP 2008, and ACL 2010, two Google Faculty Research Awards 2010 and 2013, a Yahoo! Faculty Research Award 2015, and a University Teaching Prize at Penn 2005. He was a keynote speaker at ACL 2019. His recent interest is to apply computational linguistics to computational biology, where he works on RNA folding & design using his earlier work on incremental parsing.

    Host: Emily Sheng

    More Info: https://nlg.isi.edu/nl-seminar/

    Webcast: https://usc.zoom.us/j/94526753732

    Location: Virtual Only

    WebCast Link: https://usc.zoom.us/j/94526753732

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Petet Zamar

    Event Link: https://nlg.isi.edu/nl-seminar/

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  • Prospective Students: Chat with a USC Rep

    Thu, May 21, 2020 @ 12:00 PM - 01:00 PM

    Viterbi School of Engineering Graduate Admission

    Workshops & Infosessions


    Interested in Master's or PhD programs in engineering or computer science?

    Students who have earned or are in the process of earning a Bachelor's degree in engineering, computer science, mathematics, or a hard science (such as physics, biology, or chemistry) are welcome to attend to learn more about applying to our graduate programs.

    The session will include information on the following topics:

    - Master's & PhD programs in engineering and computer science
    - How to Apply
    - Scholarships and funding
    - Student life at USC and in Los Angeles
    - DEN@Viterbi, our online delivery platform
    - Our newly extended deadline for Fall 2020 applicants!

    There will also be sufficient time for questions.

    We look forward to seeing you there.
    Register here: https://uscviterbi.webex.com/uscviterbi/onstage/g.php?MTID=e89f435616667127c05cbea819f9bbf74
    Event Password: Fighton1

    Location: Webex

    WebCast Link: https://uscviterbi.webex.com/uscviterbi/onstage/g.php?MTID=e89f435616667127c05cbea819f9bbf74

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: camila tabar

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  • Virtual First-Year Admission Information Session

    Thu, May 21, 2020 @ 02:00 PM - 03:00 PM

    Viterbi School of Engineering Undergraduate Admission

    Workshops & Infosessions


    Our virtual information session is a live presentation from a USC Viterbi admission counselor designed for high school students and their family members to learn more about the USC Viterbi undergraduate experience. Our session will cover an overview of our undergraduate engineering programs, the application process, and more on student life.Guests will be able to ask questions and engage in further discussion toward the end of the session.

    Please register here!

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Viterbi Admission

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  • The Balance Between Privacy & Keeping Communities Safe

    The Balance Between Privacy & Keeping Communities Safe

    Thu, May 21, 2020 @ 04:00 PM - 05:00 PM

    Viterbi School of Engineering Alumni

    Workshops & Infosessions


    As we face the COVID-19 pandemic companies, universities, retail stores and hospitals are facing the need to keep employees and customers safe, while at the same time respect individual privacy. Around the world, a diverse and growing chorus is calling for the use of smartphone proximity technology and computer vision AI to identify infected individuals and prevent them from infecting others. In this webinar we will discuss the different point of views on this topic and challenge each other on achieving a balance between privacy and community health.

    More Information: VIP Bay Area Event.png

    WebCast Link: https://usc.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_kF0P15h7S1KwzbtThp1q2w

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Kristy Ly

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  • Fighting COVID-19 with APIs and Big Data hosted by Bit Project of UC-Davis (RSVP in Advance)

    Fighting COVID-19 with APIs and Big Data hosted by Bit Project of UC-Davis (RSVP in Advance)

    Thu, May 21, 2020 @ 06:00 PM - 07:30 PM

    Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science

    Workshops & Infosessions


    Fighting COVID-19 with APIs and Big Data hosted by Bit Project of UC-Davis.

    Bit Project would like to invite students from University of Southern California to participate in our webinar about applying the power of APIs and Big Data to combat COVID-19. Utilizing data provided by Johns Hopkins University, we will be guiding students through Postman to exhibit how code can influence issues faced at a global scale. In addition, we have speakers from reputable organizations, such as Microsoft and Postman, that will explain the role of distinct computing features in the age of COVID-19.

    By the end of the webinar, attendees will have experience with:
    1. Finding and accessing public APIs
    2. Importing, cleaning, and processing geospatial data
    3. Using Jupyter Notebook
    4. Using Facebook's Prophet Library to forecast the spread of the disease.

    While this webinar is centered around APIs and Big Data, we will also have speaker(s) from the front-lines of COVID-19 to conceptually understand the potential magnitude technologists may have on this pandemic.

    We will be hosting the webinar on Thursday, May 21st at 6:00 p.m.

    To sign-up for the webinar, please RSVP via the following link:
    https://www.eventbrite.com/e/fighting-covid19-with-apis-and-big-data-tickets-104366926286

    Location: Online

    WebCast Link: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/fighting-covid19-with-apis-and-big-data-tickets-104366926286

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Ryan Rozan

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  • Digital Technologies for COVID-19

    Fri, May 22, 2020 @ 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM

    Viterbi School of Engineering Alumni

    Workshops & Infosessions


    Digital contact-tracing, along with testing, is pretty much the only solution offered to gradually relax stay-at-home orders, allowing us to get back to work and normal life. A recent effort by Apple and Google to collect co-location data, which would enable large-scale contact-tracing and in real-time using Bluetooth-based proximity detection, is a step at the right direction. However, in order to really stop the pandemic in its tracks, we need a nuanced risk assessment that takes many factors into consideration, including people's mobility patterns.

    Register Here: https://usc.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_SnVYd9ONQgyYeLWiI8qtMA

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Kristy Ly

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  • Virtual Transfer Information Session

    Fri, May 22, 2020 @ 02:00 PM - 03:00 PM

    Viterbi School of Engineering Undergraduate Admission

    Workshops & Infosessions


    Our virtual information session is a live presentation from a USC Viterbi admission counselor designed for prospective transfer students and their family members to learn more about the USC Viterbi undergraduate experience. Our session will cover an overview of our undergraduate engineering programs, the application process, and more on student life. Guests will be able to ask questions and engage in further discussion toward the end of the session.

    Register Here

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Viterbi Admission

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