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Events for the 1st week of October

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

    Mon, Oct 01, 2018

    Viterbi School of Engineering Undergraduate Admission

    University Calendar


    This half day program is designed for prospective freshmen (HS seniors 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: Rebecca Kinnon

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  • Seminars in Biomedical Engineering

    Mon, Oct 01, 2018 @ 12:30 PM - 01:50 PM

    Alfred E. Mann Department of Biomedical Engineering

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: B. Hyle Park, PhD, UC-Riverside, Associate Professor of Bioengineering

    Talk Title: Novel OCT Imaging

    Host: Qifa Zhou

    Location: Olin Hall of Engineering (OHE) - 122

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Mischalgrace Diasanta

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  • Fall 2018 Joint CSC USC/CommNetS-MHI Seminar Series

    Mon, Oct 01, 2018 @ 02:00 PM - 03:00 PM

    Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Vanessa Jonsson, City of Hope Beckman Research Institute

    Talk Title: Adaptive Clinical Trial Design to Address Acquired Resistance and Therapeutic Failure

    Abstract: One of the challenges facing immunotherapy as a durable therapeutic approach in a variety of metastatic cancers is the development of acquired resistance and subsequent therapeutic failure. Widespread clinical applicability of immunotherapy to solid tumors depends on the understanding of response and resistance mechanisms that are mediated by evolving interactions between the immune system and cancer cells. These dynamic interactions are increasingly being identified through longitudinal molecular analysis and immunological profiling and combine to produce an evolving measure of a patient cancer-immune status. However, cancer immune dynamics have yet to be formally quantified and studied as an evolutionary process in the context of immunotherapy clinical trials. To address this, we propose a method to integrate high dimensional, heterogeneous, longitudinal patient-derived cancer and immunological clinical data sets to identify cancer immune dynamics as well as a control theoretic method to preemptively address the onset of resistance through the prediction and synthesis of actionable immunotherapy combination strategies. We apply these methods to genomic and immunological data collected from a patient with recurrent multifocal glioblastoma that elicited a complete response and eventually recurred while enrolled in City of Hope's ongoing IL13R 2-targeting chimeric antigen (CAR) T cell trial for patients with recurrent glioblastoma. We show that dynamic treatment strategies are necessary for the control of tumors with high antigen heterogeneity and propose this as a framework by which to assess the effectiveness of adaptive clinical trial design and patient stratification for combination immunotherapy trials.

    Biography: Vanessa Jonsson is an assistant research professor in the and Department of Hematology and Hematopoietic Cell Transplantation and leader of the Computational Immuno-Oncology group in the T Cell Immunotherapy Program at City of Hope. Her research program in computational biology focusses on the integration, mathematical modeling and analysis of large-scale, longitudinal genomic, transcriptomic and immunological data from clinical studies to inform and address the mechanisms of immune-resistant cancer progression. In 2015, Vanessa completed her PhD at Caltech, where she was advised by Richard Murray and David Baltimore. She is a principal investigator on a Parker Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy award to model the evolution of cancer immunity during immunotherapy trials and co-investigator on a California Institute of Regenerative Medicine (CIRM) award to study response and resistance in a phase I CAR T cell trial targeting malignant glioma. She is the recipient of the NIH and NCI career development award in clinical oncology (K12), with a focus on immuno-oncology.

    Host: Mihailo Jovanovic

    More Info: http://csc.usc.edu/seminars/2018Fall/jonsson.html

    More Information: 18.10.01_Vanessa Jonsson CSCUSC Seminar.pdf

    Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 132

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Brienne Moore

    Event Link: http://csc.usc.edu/seminars/2018Fall/jonsson.html

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  • General Meetings

    Mon, Oct 01, 2018 @ 07:00 PM - 08:00 PM

    Viterbi School of Engineering Student Organizations

    Student Activity


    Learning how to properly vet and evaluate need areas in the healthcare system takes years of trial, error, and experience, but nobody has time for that. Swing by THH 116 this Monday to step through the notorious Stanford Biodesign process, brainstorm like the best of them, and, of course, eat!

    Location: Mark Taper Hall Of Humanities (THH) - 116

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: MEDesign USC

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  • Six Sigma Green Belt for Process Improvement

    Tue, Oct 02, 2018

    Executive Education

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Talk Title: Six Sigma Green Belt for Process Improvement

    Abstract: Abstract: Learn how to integrate principles of business, statistics, and engineering to achieve tangible results. Master the use of Six Sigma to quantify the critical quality issues in your company. Once the issues have been quantified, statistics can be applied to provide probabilities of success and failure. Six Sigma methods increase productivity and enhance quality.


    Host: USC Viterbi Executive Education

    More Info: https://viterbiexeced.usc.edu/engineering-program-areas/six-sigma-lean-certification/six-sigma-green-belt-process-improvement/

    Audiences: Registered Attendees

    Contact: Viterbi Professional Programs

    Event Link: https://viterbiexeced.usc.edu/engineering-program-areas/six-sigma-lean-certification/six-sigma-green-belt-process-improvement/

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  • Viterbi Career Fair

    Tue, Oct 02, 2018 @ 10:00 AM - 03:00 PM

    Viterbi School of Engineering Career Connections

    Receptions & Special Events


    The Viterbi Career Fair is free and open to all students in the USC Viterbi School of Engineering. This casual, yet professional, environment allows students the opportunity to have brief conversations with recruiters about full-time employment, internships, and co-ops. Don't forget your resume!

    Coming soon- Info on New Format!

    Location: Trousdale & Alumni Park

    Audiences: All Viterbi Students

    Contact: RTH 218 Viterbi Career Connections

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  • PhD Defense

    Tue, Oct 02, 2018 @ 01:00 PM - 03:00 PM

    Mork Family Department of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Yuan Jin , Mork Family Department of Chemical Engineering

    Talk Title: Statistical modeling and process data analytics for smart manufacturing

    Abstract: Smart manufacturing has been the focus of many researchers and has been extended to varies areas. With the increased complexity of the manufacturing process and the variety data collected from various aspects throughout the process, process data analytics is thus essential to discover process knowledge and predict the future production. In this dissertation, we introduced two challenges accompanied by smart manufacturing and discussed how we handle the challenges for processes with different manufacturing characters. The two challenges are "complexity" and "variety", the areas of applications are additive manufacturing (AM) and pharmaceutical manufacturing.

    To handle the challenges accompanying with AM, we first study a statistical modeling and optimal compensation approach to predict and improve the shape accuracy of AM printed parts, especially for the out-of-plane deviation. This method is data driven and thus, not blocked by the complicated AM physical mechanism. Moreover, this method is able to deal with low volume sample data and high volume geometric variety. The feasibility and effectiveness of this approach is proved by experimental study.

    To deal with the challenges accompanying with pharmaceutical manufacturing, we proposed a two-stage strategy to study a large-scale cell culture manufacturing process variability. This strategy not only adopts multivariate analysis (MVA) and machine learning (ML) methods on intricate multiple-step bio-processes, but also takes use of multilevel heterogeneous datasets to unveil hidden process characteristics and provide insights into factors affecting process quality. This strategy has been applied to a real antibody pharmaceutical manufacturing, pointing to new cues for domain experts to better understand the process.


    Biography: Yuan Jin is a Ph.D. candidate in Mork Family Department of Chemical Engineering & Materials Science at University of Southern California (USC), Los Angeles, CA. She received her B.E. degree in Electrical Engineering from Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, Zhejiang in 2013. Her research is about statistical modeling and process data analytics for smart manufacturing.

    Host: Dr. Joe Qin

    Location: Hedco Pertroleum and Chemical Engineering Building (HED) - 116

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Karen Woo/Mork Family

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  • Epstein Institute Seminar - ISE 651

    Tue, Oct 02, 2018 @ 03:30 PM - 04:50 PM

    Daniel J. Epstein Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Dr. Ying Cui, Postdoctoral Scholar - Research Associate, USC, Daniel J. Epstein Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering

    Talk Title: Composite Difference-Max Programs for Modern Statistical Estimations

    Host: Professor Jong-Shi Pang

    More Information: October 2, 2018.pdf

    Location: Ethel Percy Andrus Gerontology Center (GER) - 206

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Grace Owh

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  • Mork Family Department of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science Seminar - Lyman L. Handy Colloquia

    Tue, Oct 02, 2018 @ 04:00 PM - 05:20 PM

    Mork Family Department of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Dr. Doraiswami Ramkrishna , H.C.Peffer Distinguished Professor, Davidson School of Chemical Engineering. Purdue University

    Talk Title: Metabolic Complexity. Is there Music Behind it?

    Abstract: The complexity of metabolic networks would appear to fit in more appropriately with a cacophonic scenario than anything remotely musical. However, this talk will attempt to show that a mathematical view can be had of this complex process in which the phenomenon of metabolic regulation can be likened to the conductor of a symphonic orchestra summoning combinations of instruments representing metabolic reactions towards superlative music. It will be the objective of this seminar to let this analogy lead the discussion of a cybernetic theory of cellular metabolism which interprets the diversity of gene expression as a targeted effort to maximize the organism's survival. The applicability of the model to bioprocess engineering is demonstrated.



    Host: Professor Theo Tsotsis

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

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Karen Woo/Mork Family

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  • Cypress Semiconductor Info Session

    Tue, Oct 02, 2018 @ 05:10 PM - 06:40 PM

    Viterbi School of Engineering Career Connections

    Workshops & Infosessions


    Come hang out with us for an hour to learn how you can kick off your career with Cypress. We'll be sharing a few things we know you'll want to hear, from our values to our culture and different opportunities within our global organization. You'll walk away from this session with more insight into our company, our products and will have the opportunity to ask questions and discover more on how you can join our team of industry-leading problem solvers.

    Location: Seeley G. Mudd Building (SGM) - 101

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: RTH 218 Viterbi Career Connections

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

    Wed, Oct 03, 2018

    Viterbi School of Engineering Undergraduate Admission

    University Calendar


    This half day program is designed for prospective freshmen (HS seniors 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: Rebecca Kinnon

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  • Six Sigma Green Belt for Process Improvement

    Wed, Oct 03, 2018

    Executive Education

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Talk Title: Six Sigma Green Belt for Process Improvement

    Abstract: Abstract: Learn how to integrate principles of business, statistics, and engineering to achieve tangible results. Master the use of Six Sigma to quantify the critical quality issues in your company. Once the issues have been quantified, statistics can be applied to provide probabilities of success and failure. Six Sigma methods increase productivity and enhance quality



    Host: USC Viterbi Executive Education

    More Info: https://viterbiexeced.usc.edu/engineering-program-areas/six-sigma-lean-certification/six-sigma-green-belt-process-improvement/

    Audiences: Registered Attendees

    Contact: Viterbi Professional Programs

    Event Link: https://viterbiexeced.usc.edu/engineering-program-areas/six-sigma-lean-certification/six-sigma-green-belt-process-improvement/

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  • SERC Talks

    Wed, Oct 03, 2018 @ 10:00 AM - 11:00 AM

    Systems Architecting and Engineering, USC Viterbi School of Engineering

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Dr. Bill Curtis, Senior VP and Chief Scientist, CAST Software; Head of CAST Research Labs; Executive Director, Consortium for IT Software Quality (CISQ)

    Talk Title: How Can We Advance Structural Quality Analysis with Standards and Machine Learning?

    Series: Systems and Software Qualities Tradespace Analysis

    Abstract: The C-suite is fed up with software disasters putting the quarterly statement at risk as they digitize the business. They will demand more accountability and force improvements in software processes that may clash with agile culture. Business critical applications have become so complex and demand for functionality so immediate that human-based quality practices are no longer sufficient. Developer capabilities must be enhanced by system-level analysis of structural weaknesses and operational risks enabled by structural quality technology and measurement standards supported in DevOps toolchains. Empirical results will be reported from research on how some of the most severe Security and Reliability flaws are distributed in business applications. Recent results from machine learning research in structural quality will be discussed along with some caveats about what to expect. International standards for measuring the structural quality of software developed by the Consortium for IT Software Quality (CISQ) that supplement ISO 25023 will be reviewed. The talk concludes with organizational requirements for successfully adopting these advances.

    This talk is broadcast on WebEx. Visit the registration link at the event link to join the broadcast. Alternatively, join using

    Event number: 667 578 255
    Registration ID: 543308
    Event password: SERC

    Biography: Dr. Bill Curtis is the Executive Director of the Consortium for IT Software Quality (CISQ), an industry consortium chartered with building international standards for automating the measurement of size and structural quality from source code. He is also Senior Vice President and Chief Scientist at CAST Software, where he heads CAST Research Labs. He led development of the Capability Maturity Model (CMM) while at the Software Engineering Institute. He has worked at the University of Washington, GE Space Division, the ITT Programming Technology Center, Microelectronics and Computer Technology Corporation (MCC), the SEI, TeraQuest Metrics which he co-founded, Borland Software Company, and CAST. He has published 4 books, over 150 papers, and is an IEEE Fellow for his contributions to software process improvement and measurement.

    Host: Prof. Barry Boehm

    More Info: https://sercuarc.org/event/serc-talks-how-can-we-advance-structural-quality-analysis-with-standards-and-machine-learning/

    Webcast: https://sercuarc.org/event/serc-talks-how-can-we-advance-structural-quality-analysis-with-standards-and-machine-learning/

    Location: This talk is broadcast on WebEx.

    WebCast Link: https://sercuarc.org/event/serc-talks-how-can-we-advance-structural-quality-analysis-with-standards-and-machine-learning/

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Ms. Mimi Marcus

    Event Link: https://sercuarc.org/event/serc-talks-how-can-we-advance-structural-quality-analysis-with-standards-and-machine-learning/

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  • CS Colloquium: Ardalan Amiri Sani (UC Irvine) - Dealing with Vulnerabilities in Device Drivers

    Wed, Oct 03, 2018 @ 11:00 AM - 12:20 PM

    Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Ardalan Amiri Sani, UC Irvine

    Talk Title: Dealing with Vulnerabilities in Device Drivers

    Series: Computer Science Colloquium

    Abstract: Vulnerabilities in the device drivers of today's commodity operating systems (e.g., Android) remain a security concern due to the monolithic structure of the kernel. In this talk, we investigate three methods to mitigate this concern, with a focus on mobile devices. These approaches include a novel tool to find and fix these vulnerabilities, an efficient vetting layer to make exploits harder, and a device driver design possible for I/O devices with virtualization support.

    This lecture satisfies requirements for CSCI 591: Research Colloquium. Please note, due to limited capacity, seats will be first come first serve.


    Biography: Ardalan Amiri Sani is an Assistant Professor in the Computer Science department at UC Irvine. His research is at the intersection of mobile computing, security, and operating systems. His work has appeared in various top-tier conferences such as MobiSys (including a best paper award), USENIX Security, CCS, and ASPLOS. Ardalan received his Ph.D. from Rice University in 2015.


    Host: Ramesh Govindan

    Location: Olin Hall of Engineering (OHE) - 100D

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Computer Science Department

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  • On the Role of Interaction in Future Mobility Systems, from Vehicle-Centric to System-Wide Control

    Wed, Oct 03, 2018 @ 12:00 PM - 01:00 PM

    Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Dr. Marco Pavone, Aeronautics & Astronautics, Stanford University

    Talk Title: On the Role of Interaction in Future Mobility Systems, from Vehicle-Centric to System-Wide Control

    Series: Center for Cyber-Physical Systems and Internet of Things

    Abstract: In this talk I will discuss my work on self-driving vehicles, with an emphasis on accounting for interactions with external counterparts at both the vehicle- and system-levels. Specifically, I will first discuss a decision-making framework that enables a self-driving vehicle to proactively interact with humans to infer their intents, and to use such information for safe and efficient driving. I will then turn the discussion to the operational and economic aspects of autonomous mobility-on-demand (AMoD) systems, with an emphasis on the interaction between AMoD and other infrastructures, such as the electric power and public transit networks.


    Biography: Dr. Marco Pavone is an Assistant Professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics at Stanford University, where he is the Director of the Autonomous Systems Laboratory and Co-Director of the Center for Automotive Research at Stanford. Before joining Stanford, he was a Research Technologist within the Robotics Section at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory. He received a Ph.D. degree in Aeronautics and Astronautics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2010. His main research interests are in the development of methodologies for the analysis, design, and control of autonomous systems, with an emphasis on self-driving cars, autonomous aerospace vehicles, and future mobility systems. He is a recipient of a Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers, an ONR YIP Award, an NSF CAREER Award, a NASA Early Career Faculty Award, a Hellman Faculty Scholar Award, and was named NASA NIAC Fellow in 2011. He was identified by the American Society for Engineering Education (ASEE) as one of America's 20 most highly promising investigators under the age of 40. His work has been recognized with best paper nominations or awards at the Field and Service Robotics Conference, at the Robotics: Science and Systems Conference, and at NASA symposia. He is currently serving as an Associate Editor for the IEEE Control Systems Magazine.

    Host: Professor Paul Bogdan

    Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 132

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Talyia White

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  • Oath (formerly Yahoo) Information Session

    Wed, Oct 03, 2018 @ 05:30 PM - 07:30 PM

    Viterbi School of Engineering Career Connections

    Workshops & Infosessions


    Join company representatives to network and learn about available internship and job opportunities.

    Location: Seeley G. Mudd Building (SGM) - 101

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: RTH 218 Viterbi Career Connections

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  • Six Sigma Green Belt for Process Improvement

    Thu, Oct 04, 2018

    Executive Education

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Talk Title: Six Sigma Green Belt for Process Improvement

    Abstract: Abstract: Learn how to integrate principles of business, statistics, and engineering to achieve tangible results. Master the use of Six Sigma to quantify the critical quality issues in your company. Once the issues have been quantified, statistics can be applied to provide probabilities of success and failure. Six Sigma methods increase productivity and enhance quality.




    Host: USC Viterbi Executive Education

    More Info: https://viterbiexeced.usc.edu/engineering-program-areas/six-sigma-lean-certification/six-sigma-green-belt-process-improvement/

    Audiences: Registered Attendees

    Contact: Viterbi Professional Programs

    Event Link: https://viterbiexeced.usc.edu/engineering-program-areas/six-sigma-lean-certification/six-sigma-green-belt-process-improvement/

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  • CS Colloquium: Mohammad Soleymani (USC-ICT) - What Do Machines Learn in Emotion Recognition from EEG Signals?

    Thu, Oct 04, 2018 @ 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM

    Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Mohammed Soleymani, USC-ICT

    Talk Title: What Do Machines Learn in Emotion Recognition from EEG Signals?

    Series: CS Colloquium

    Abstract: Machines that are able to read our emotions and cognitive states make better companions. Emotions are often sensed by their external manifestations such as facial and vocal expressions. Additionally, studies in affective neuroscience have identified a set of emotional neural activities that can be captured by eletroencephalogram (EEG) signals, including asymmetric frontal brain activity and increase in information transfer. Motivated by these findings, a growing number of studies report developing EEG-based emotion recognition systems with promising results. In this talk, I first present my work on recognizing emotions of people watching videos. I then present a follow up study in which we aimed to better understand what machine learns in such scenarios. In the follow up work, we recorded a dataset which includes spontaneous emotions and posed expressions. Our analysis on the data collected in the follow up study demonstrates that the performance of existing EEG-based emotion recognition methods significantly decreases when evaluated across different corpora. We also found that models trained on spontaneous emotions perform well on recognizing mimicked expressions. Our results provide evidence that stimuli-related sensory information and facial electromyogram activities are the main components learned by machine learning models for emotion recognition using EEG signals.



    This lecture satisfies requirements for CSCI 591: Research Colloquium. Please note, due to limited capacity, seats will be first come first serve.

    Biography: Mohammed Soleymani is a research scientist with the USC Institute of Creative Technologies. He received his PhD in computer science from the University of Geneva in 2011. From 2012 to 2014, he was a Marie Curie fellow at Imperial College London. Prior to joining ICT, he was a research scientist at the Swiss Center for Affective Sciences, University of Geneva. His main line of research involves developing automatic emotion recognition and behavior understanding methods using physiological signals and facial expressions. He is also interested in understanding subjective attributes in multimedia content, e.g, predicting whether an image is interesting from its pixels or automatic recognition of music mood from acoustic content. He is a recipient of the Swiss National Science Foundation Ambizione grant and the EU Marie Curie fellowship. He has served on multiple conference organization committees and editorial roles, most notably as associate editor for the IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing and technical program chair for ACM ICMI 2018 and ACII 2017. He is one of the founding organizers of the MediaEval multimedia retrieval benchmarking campaign and the president elect for the Association for Advancement of Affective Computing (AAAC).

    Host: David Traum

    Location: Ronald Tutor Hall of Engineering (RTH) - 115

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Assistant to CS chair

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  • NL Seminar- CoQA, A Conversational Question Answering Challenge

    Thu, Oct 04, 2018 @ 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM

    Information Sciences Institute

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Siva Reddy , Stanford University

    Talk Title: CoQA: A Conversational Question Answering Challenge

    Series: Natural Language Seminar

    Abstract: Humans gather information by engaging in conversations involving a series of interconnected questions and answers. For machines to assist in information gathering, it is therefore essential to enable them to answer conversational questions. In this talk, I will present our work on CoQA, a novel dataset for building Conversational Question Answering systems. CoQA contains 127k questions with answers, obtained from 8k conversations about text passages from seven diverse domains. The questions are conversational, and the answers are free-form text with their corresponding evidence highlighted in the passage. We analyze CoQA in depth and show that conversational questions have challenging phenomena not present in existing reading comprehension datasets, e.g., coreference and pragmatic reasoning. We evaluate strong conversational and reading comprehension models on CoQA. The best system obtains an F1 score of 65.1%, which is 23.7 points behind human performance 88.8 percent, indicating there is ample room for improvement. We launch CoQA as a challenge to the community. See link below.




    Biography: Siva Reddy is a postdoc in Computer Science at Stanford University working with Prof. Christopher Manning. His research focuses on enabling natural communication between humans and machines. Prior to the postdoc, he was a Google PhD Fellow at the University of Edinburgh under the supervision of Prof. Mirella Lapata and Prof. Mark Steedman.

    Host: Xusen Yin

    More Info: https://stanfordnlp.github.io/coqa/

    Webcast: https://bluejeans.com/s/iHu_F/

    Location: Information Science Institute (ISI) - 6th Floor Conf Rm-CR# 689

    WebCast Link: https://bluejeans.com/s/iHu_F/

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Peter Zamar

    Event Link: https://stanfordnlp.github.io/coqa/

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  • CENG Seminar Series

    Thu, Oct 04, 2018 @ 02:00 PM - 03:00 PM

    Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Yu Hua, Huazhong University of Science and Technology

    Talk Title: Encrypted Non-volatile Main Memory Systems

    Abstract: Non-volatile memory (NVM) technologies are considered as promising candidates of the next-generation main memory. However, the non-volatility of NVMs leads to new security vulnerabilities. Memory encryption can be employed to mitigate the security vulnerabilities, but it increases the number of bits written to NVMs due to the diffusion property and thereby aggravates the NVM wear-out induced by writes. To address these security and endurance challenges, we propose DeWrite, a secure and deduplication-aware scheme to enhance the performance and endurance of encrypted NVMs based on a new in-line deduplication technique and the synergistic integrations of deduplication and memory encryption. Specifically, it performs low-latency in-line deduplication to exploit the abundant cache-line-level duplications leveraging the intrinsic read/write asymmetry of NVMs and light-weight hashing. It also opportunistically parallelizes the operations of deduplication and encryption and allows them to co-locate the metadata for high efficiency. DeWrite was implemented on the gem5 with NVMain.

    Biography: Dr. Yu Hua is a professor in Huazhong University of Science and Technology. He was Postdoc Research Associate in McGill University in 2009, and Postdoc Research Fellow in University of Nebraska-Lincoln in 2010-2011. He obtained his B.E and Ph.D degrees from Wuhan University respectively in 2001 and 2005. His research interests include file systems, cloud storage systems, non-volatile memory, big data analytics, etc. He publishes multiple papers in conferences and journals, including OSDI, MICRO, FAST, USENIX ATC, ACM SoCC, SC, HPDC, etc. He serves for multiple international conferences, including USENIX ATC, ASPLOS (ERC), SC, ACM SoCC, RTSS, ICDCS, ICCD, INFOCOM, IPDPS, etc. He is the distinguished member of CCF, senior member of ACM and IEEE, and the member of USENIX. He has been appointed as the Distinguished Speaker of ACM and CCF. His homepage is at: https://csyhua.github.io

    Host: Xuehai Qian, xuehai.qian@usc.edu

    More Information: 18.10.04_Yu Hua_CENG Seminar.pdf

    Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 248

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Brienne Moore

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  • CS Tech Talk: Parisa Mansourifard (Facebook) - Infrastructure Data Science Team at Facebook

    Thu, Oct 04, 2018 @ 03:30 PM - 04:50 PM

    Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Parisa Mansourifard, Facebook

    Talk Title: Infrastructure Data Science Team at Facebook

    Series: Computer Science Colloquium

    Abstract: In this talk, I will present what my team does at Facebook and what problems we aim to solve. Infrastructure Data Science partners with engineering teams to develop data-driven solutions for significant infrastructure challenges such as app and site performance, systems efficiency and reliability, resource allocation and long-term capacity forecasts. Infra Data Scientists use a range of tools, from A/B testing to machine learning, to help Facebook make decisions about operations and system design. The team contributes to all parts of a project's lifecycle, including scoping, data discovery, research, methodological design, code implementation, and reporting and interpreting final results. The teams' work varies, in line with the complex and diverse challenges of maintaining one of the largest and most advanced enterprise infrastructures in the world. We look for candidates with a wide range of backgrounds to join our team and help with this work.

    This lecture satisfies requirements for CSCI 591: Research Colloquium.


    Biography: Parisa Mansourifard is currently a data scientist at Infrastructure data science team at Facebook. Before joining Facebook, she was a data scientist at SupplyFrame Inc. and a part-time lecturer at CS department of University of Southern California teaching machine learning. She received the B.S. and M.S. in electrical engineering from Sharif university of technology, Tehran, Iran, in 2008 and 2010 respectively. She also got a M.S. in computer science and Ph.D. in electrical engineering from University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA, USA, in 2015 and 2017, respectively. During her Ph.D. she held Viterbi Dean fellowships in 2011-2014 and AAUW dissertation completion fellowship in 2015-2016. She also got a best paper award for the operations research track at EU IEOM conference in Paris 2018.


    Host: Computer Science Department

    Location: Henry Salvatori Computer Science Center (SAL) - 101

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Computer Science Department

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  • Pearl Harbor Naval Shipyard and Intermediate Maintenance Facility Info Session

    Thu, Oct 04, 2018 @ 05:30 PM - 06:30 PM

    Viterbi School of Engineering Career Connections

    Workshops & Infosessions


    Pearl Harbor Naval Shipyard and IMF (PHNSY & IMF), the largest industrial employer in the State of Hawaii with over 5500 civilian and military employees, is in the business of repairing and modernizing naval ships and submarines. Our engineers, from a variety of disciplines, are involved in the planning and supervision of the highly challenging work of providing technical guidance through written work procedures and on-the-job direction of the workforce. On a day-to-day basis, our engineers spend their time working onboard submarines or surface ships and working in an office setting. PHNSY & IMF is looking for energetic self-motivated engineers to join the select group of men and women in our various Engineering Departments. We offer competitive pay, generous vacation benefits, paid overtime, excellent retirement system and federal health benefits.

    Location: Seeley G. Mudd Building (SGM) - 101

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: RTH 218 Viterbi Career Connections

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  • CCI presents Blockfinity's "Bringing Cities on to the Blockchain - Los Angeles"

    Thu, Oct 04, 2018 @ 07:00 PM - 09:00 PM

    Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

    Receptions & Special Events


    Blockchain is a fast-growing technology with the intent to decentralize bureaucratic processes, create transparent transactions between multiple parties, and optimize enormous databases. The applications are endless when it comes to government, and municipalities, but our goal is to bring the community together to discuss theory, implementation, and case studies of how cities may work with Blockchain.

    Let's imagine the changes in social, economic and environmental by ridding of bureaucracy in city infrastructure such as piles of papers, giant traffic jams, documentation errors and double transactions. Join our discussion to understand which cities around the world are implementing blockchain and how, what can be improved, and how would this help us here in Los Angeles.

    Please RSVP here:
    Bringing Cities on to the Blockchain - Los Angeles

    Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 132

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Brienne Moore

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  • Last day to drop a course without a mark of W on the transcript *Please drop any course by the end of week three for session 001 (or the 20 percent mark of the session in which the course is offered) to avoid tuition charges.

    Fri, Oct 05, 2018 @ 12:00 AM - 05:00 PM

    Viterbi School of Engineering Student Affairs

    University Calendar


    Last day to drop a course without a mark of W on the transcript

    *Please drop any course by the end of week three for session 001 (or the 20 percent mark of the session in which the course is offered) to avoid tuition charges.

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Viterbi Academic Services

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  • Last day to change a Pass/No Pass course to letter grade

    Fri, Oct 05, 2018 @ 12:00 AM - 05:00 PM

    Viterbi School of Engineering Student Affairs

    University Calendar


    Last day to change a Pass/No Pass course to letter grade

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Viterbi Academic Services

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  • Farewell to Servers: Hardware, Software, and Network Approaches towards Datacenter Resource Disaggregation

    Fri, Oct 05, 2018 @ 10:00 AM - 11:00 AM

    Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Yiying Zhang, Purdue University

    Talk Title: Farewell to Servers: Hardware, Software, and Network Approaches towards Datacenter Resource Disaggregation

    Abstract: Datacenters have been using a "monolithic" server model for decades, where each server has a motherboard that hosts a set of hardware devices such as processors and memory chips. This monolithic architecture is easy to deploy but cannot fully support the growing hardware heterogeneity in datacenters or provide hardware elasticity, failure isolation, and efficient resource utilization. Going forward, we have to rethink the decade-long server-centric model.

    Our answer is to break the monolithic server model into distributed, network-attached hardware components that can each manage its own resources and can fail independently. For the past three years, my lab has been working on such datacenter "resource disaggregation" at system software, networking, and hardware levels. In this talk, I will discuss our various efforts in building a disaggregated datacenter (or "DC-3.0"). Specifically, I will focus on two systems: LegoOS, a new distributed, disseminated OS designed for datacenter resource disaggregation (OSDI'18), and LITE, a Local Indirection TiEr in kernel to virtualize native RDMA into a flexible, high-level, easy-to-use abstraction (SOSP'17).

    Biography: Yiying Zhang is an assistant professor in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Purdue University. Her research interests span operating systems, distributed systems, datacenter networking, and computer architecture, with a focus on building software, hardware, network systems for next-generation datacenters. Her lab is pioneering in the field of datacenter resource disaggregation and is among the few groups in the world that builds new OSes and full-stack, cross-layer systems. She has published at and served on the program committees of top systems conferences such as SOSP, OSDI, and ASPLOS, and her work has attracted various industry and academia attentions. Yiying received her Ph.D. from the Department of Computer Sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and worked as a postdoctoral scholar at the University of California, San Diego before joining Purdue.

    Host: Xuehai Qian, xuehai.qian@usc.edu

    More Information: 18.10.05_Yiying Zhang .pdf

    Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 248

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Brienne Moore

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  • W.V.T. RUSCH ENGINEERING HONORS COLLOQUIUM

    Fri, Oct 05, 2018 @ 01:00 PM - 01:50 PM

    Viterbi School of Engineering Student Affairs

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Jim Cahill , Developer of Mindfulness-Based Biofeedback Training, Medicine Mind, Inc., Silvergate Medical Center

    Talk Title: Contemplative Science: Empirical Approaches to Understanding the Mind

    Host: EHP and Dr. Prata

    Location: Henry Salvatori Computer Science Center (SAL) - 101

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Amanda McCraven

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  • BME seminars

    Fri, Oct 05, 2018 @ 02:00 PM - 04:00 PM

    Alfred E. Mann Department of Biomedical Engineering

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Steve Kay, PhD, USC Keck School of Medicine, Provost Professor of Neurology, Biomedical Engineering and Biological Sciences, Director of Convergent Bioscience

    Talk Title: Circadian Gene Regulatory Networks in Health and Disease

    Series: Seminars in BME (Lab Rotations)

    Host: Brent Liu, PhD

    Location: Corwin D. Denney Research Center (DRB) - 145a

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Mischalgrace Diasanta

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  • Astani Civil and Environmental Engineering Seminar

    Fri, Oct 05, 2018 @ 03:00 PM - 04:00 PM

    Sonny Astani Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Prof. David Cwiertny, University of Iowa

    Talk Title: Beyond emerging contaminants: bioactive transformation products and what we should do about them

    Abstract: See Attachment

    Host: Dr. Daniel McCurry

    More Information: Cwiertny_Announcement.pdf

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

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Evangeline Reyes

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  • ASBME Fall Networking Night

    Fri, Oct 05, 2018 @ 06:30 PM - 08:30 PM

    Viterbi School of Engineering Student Organizations

    Student Activity


    Join ASBME at our seventh annual Fall Networking Night with representatives from various biomedical companies! This event will offer you a unique opportunity to converse with recruiters over dinner and learn about internship programs and job openings in 2019. Companies attending include Abbott, Edwards Lifesciences, Medtronic, and more! To reserve your seat, please RSVP by filling out this form here AND submitting a $20 deposit to the front desk of DRB 140 by Friday, September 28th. The deposit will be returned to you at check-in for the event. Due to limited room capacity, preference will be given to junior and senior undergraduate students who are MEMBERS of ASBME. However, we suggest that any interested underclassmen should still RSVP as spots may open up. Spot confirmations and additional details will be sent out by Monday, October 1st. Any questions can be directed to Dominie Miyasato at dmiyasat@usc.edu.

    Location: Ronald Tutor Campus Center (TCC) - 450

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Associated Students of Biomedical Engineering

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  • Discover USC - Boston

    Sat, Oct 06, 2018 @ 03:00 PM - 05:00 PM

    Viterbi School of Engineering Undergraduate Admission

    Receptions & Special Events


    Join the USC Admission Office at the Discover USC admission program in Boston.

    This program provides high school seniors and their families with an opportunity to meet admission counselors, alumni, and other prospective students and their parents.

    RSVP for Discover USC

    Location: Boston Marriott Copley Place

    Audiences: Prospective Freshmen & Family Members

    Contact: Viterbi Admission

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  • Discover USC - Phoenix

    Sat, Oct 06, 2018 @ 03:00 PM - 05:00 PM

    Viterbi School of Engineering Undergraduate Admission

    Receptions & Special Events


    Join the USC Admission Office at the Discover USC admission program in Phoenix.

    This program provides high school seniors and their families with an opportunity to meet admission counselors, alumni, and other prospective students and their parents.

    RSVP for Discover USC

    Location: Embassy Suites by Hilton Phoenix Scottsdale

    Audiences: Prospective Freshmen & Family Members

    Contact: Viterbi Admission

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