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Events for the 4th week of October

  • Discover USC - Atlanta

    Sun, Oct 21, 2018 @ 02:00 PM - 04:00 PM

    Viterbi School of Engineering Undergraduate Admission

    Receptions & Special Events


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

    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: Grand Hyatt Atlanta in Buckhead

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Viterbi Admission

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  • Discover USC - Chicago

    Sun, Oct 21, 2018 @ 02:00 PM - 04:00 PM

    Viterbi School of Engineering Undergraduate Admission

    Receptions & Special Events


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

    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: Sunday, October 21st at 2pm Renaissance Chicago Downtown Hotel

    Audiences: Prospective Freshmen & Family Members

    Contact: Viterbi Admission

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

    Mon, Oct 22, 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

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    Contact: Rebecca Kinnon

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  • Seminars in Biomedical Engineering

    Mon, Oct 22, 2018 @ 12:30 PM - 01:50 PM

    Alfred E. Mann Department of Biomedical Engineering

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Xuejun Qian, USC Biomedical Engineering, PhD Candidate

    Talk Title: High resolution vessel and elastograph imading

    Host: Qifa Zhou

    Location: Olin Hall of Engineering (OHE) - 122

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Mischalgrace Diasanta

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  • Internship/Job Search Open Forum

    Mon, Oct 22, 2018 @ 02:00 PM - 03:00 PM

    Viterbi School of Engineering Career Connections

    Workshops & Infosessions


    Increase your career and internship knowledge of the internship/job search by attending this professional development Q&A moderated by Viterbi Career Connections staff or Viterbi employer partners.

    For more information about Labs & Open Forums, please visit viterbicareers.usc.edu/workshops.

    Location: Ronald Tutor Hall of Engineering (RTH) - 211

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: RTH 218 Viterbi Career Connections

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  • PhD Defense

    Tue, Oct 23, 2018 @ 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM

    Mork Family Department of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Mr. Anyi Zhang , PhD Student, CHE

    Talk Title: 'Nanostructure Design of Sulfur Cathodes and Lithium Metal Anodes for Lithium Ion Batteries

    Abstract: Lithium ion batteries (LIBs) have been successfully used in portable electronics and electric vehicles for many years. Although the demand for high energy density keeps increasing, the existing commercial LIB systems are getting close to their theoretical capacity limits. In order to push the energy density to an even higher level, lithium sulfur (Li-S) batteries attract a lot of attention due to their high energy density and low cost. In this thesis, I will discuss the current challenges we are facing in Li-S battery development and our proposed solutions to address those issues using nanostructure design.

    I will first present our accomplishment to enhance the S cathode performance. We have developed a scalable and inexpensive design for S cathode by capping a flexible gel polymer / carbon nanofiber (CNF) composite membrane onto a free-standing and binder-free CNF + Li2S6 cathode, thus forming a three-dimensional (3D) structural design. While the CNF network was used as the current collector and S holder to overcome the insulating nature and volume expansion of S, the composite membrane composed of a gel polymer poly(vinylidene fluoride-co-hexafluoropropylene) (PVDF-HFP) and CNF additive was used as an interlayer to trap polysulfides and recycle remaining S species, leading to high specific capacity and long cycle life.

    Next, I will talk about our achievement for stable Li metal anodes. We have demonstrated a distinctive design for dendrite-free deposition of Li by modifying the Cu current collector with a 3D CNF network. Due to the large surface area and high conductivity of the CNF network, Li metal can insert into and deposit onto CNF directly and no dendritic Li metal was observed, leaving a flat Li metal surface. The scalable preparation method and impressive results achieved here demonstrated the potential of applying our design in the development of dendrite-free Li metal anodes in future.

    In addition, I will also present my research to further improve the performance of Li metal anodes. We have proposed a novel design of 3D interconnected graphene (IG) framework synthesized with the help of nickel (Ni) microspheres for stable Li metal anodes. The as-prepared IG framework consisted of multiple stacks of two-dimensional (2D) graphene layers and plenty of hollow graphene microspheres in between, and thus provided protective layers on the top to suppress lithium dendrites, sufficient surface area to reduce the effective current density, as well as ion channels for fast Li transport. This strategy of vertically stacking 2D materials provides a novel approach towards dendrite-free Li metal anodes for the next-generation energy storage systems.



    Host: Dr. Chongwu Zhou

    Location: Ronald Tutor Hall of Engineering (RTH) - 306

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Karen Woo/Mork Family

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  • Resume Lab - Bring your Laptop!

    Tue, Oct 23, 2018 @ 01:00 PM - 02:00 PM

    Viterbi School of Engineering Career Connections

    Workshops & Infosessions


    Labs are an activity where you can work on your resume in the presence of a career advisor to get tips on the spot.

    Bring your Laptop!

    For more information about Labs & Open Forums, please visit viterbicareers.usc.edu/workshops.

    Location: Ronald Tutor Hall of Engineering (RTH) - 211

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: RTH 218 Viterbi Career Connections

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  • Epstein Institute Seminar - ISE 651

    Tue, Oct 23, 2018 @ 03:30 PM - 04:50 PM

    Daniel J. Epstein Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Dr. Julie Swann, Professor and Dept. Chair, North Carolina State University

    Talk Title: Engineering Modeling to Assist in Eradication of Guinea Worm

    Host: Dr. Sze-chuan Suen

    More Information: October 23, 2018.pdf

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

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Grace Owh

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  • CS Colloquium: Ioannis Mitliagkas (University of Montréal) - Negative Momentum for Improved Game Dynamics

    Tue, Oct 23, 2018 @ 03:30 PM - 04:50 PM

    Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Ioannis Mitliagkas, University of Montréal

    Talk Title: Negative Momentum for Improved Game Dynamics

    Series: Computer Science Colloquium

    Abstract: Games generalize the single-objective optimization paradigm by introducing different objective functions for different players. Differentiable games often proceed by simultaneous or alternating gradient updates. In machine learning, games are gaining new importance through formulations like generative adversarial networks (GANs) and actor-critic systems. However, compared to single-objective optimization, game dynamics are more complex and less understood. In this talk, I will present recent research on the momentum dynamics of differentiable games. We will see an analysis of a simple differentiable game, which suggests that a negative momentum term can sometimes improve convergence. Then we will see empirical results that alternating gradient updates with a negative momentum term achieves convergence on the notoriously difficult to train saturating GANs.

    This lecture satisfies requirements for CSCI 591: Research Colloquium.


    Biography: Ioannis Mitliagkas is an assistant professor in the department of Computer Science and Operations Research (DIRO) at the University of Montréal, and member of MILA. Before that, he was a Postdoctoral Scholar with the departments of Statistics and Computer Science at Stanford University. He obtained his Ph.D. from the department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at The University of Texas at Austin. His research includes topics in statistical learning and inference, focusing on optimization, efficient large-scale and distributed algorithms, statistical learning theory and MCMC methods. His recent work includes methods for efficient and adaptive optimization, studying the interaction between optimization and the dynamics of large-scale learning systems as well as understanding and improving the performance of Gibbs samplers. In the past he has worked on high-dimensional streaming problems and fast algorithms and computation for large graph problems.


    Host: Fei Sha

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

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Computer Science Department

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  • Deepcurrent Hands-on Machine Learning Series Lesson #2

    Tue, Oct 23, 2018 @ 07:30 PM - 08:30 PM

    Viterbi School of Engineering Student Organizations

    Workshops & Infosessions


    RSVP: https://goo.gl/forms/stHImLYaTPvWdEl22

    In Lesson #2, we will continue to delve deeper into the problem of predicting taxi fares in NYC. If you haven't already, you can download the lesson notebooks from this GitHub repo.

    *This series is in high demand, so we encourage you to RSVP as soon as possible.

    Location: Montgomery Ross Fisher Building (school Of Social Work) (MRF) - 340

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: AAAI at USC

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

    Wed, Oct 24, 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

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    Contact: Rebecca Kinnon

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  • Computer Science General Faculty Meeting

    Wed, Oct 24, 2018 @ 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: Michelson 101

    Audiences: Invited Faculty Only

    Contact: Assistant to CS chair

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  • Integrating Security in Cyber-physical Systems

    Wed, Oct 24, 2018 @ 12:00 PM - 01:00 PM

    Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Miroslav Pajic, Duke University

    Talk Title: : Integrating Security in Cyber-physical Systems

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

    Abstract: Modern embedded control architectures have moved from isolated systems to open architectures, such as new automotive systems with services that include remote diagnostics, code updates, and vehicle-to-vehicle communication. However, this increasing set of functionalities, network interoperability, and system design complexity have also introduced security vulnerabilities that are easily exploitable, since current embedded and cyber-physical systems have not been built with security in mind. Furthermore, the tight interaction between information technology and physical world makes these systems vulnerable to malicious attacks beyond the standard cyber-attacks, while relying exclusively on conventional security techniques may be unfeasible due to resource-constraints and long system lifetime.

    Consequently, there is a need to change the way we reason about security in cyber-physical systems, and start designing platform-aware attack-resilient components and architectures capable of dealing with various attacks on the systems and its environment. In this talk, I will present our recent efforts in this domain, starting from cyber-physical security techniques that (a) capture effects of attacks on system performance, (b) introduce attack resilience into control algorithms and facilitate attack detection, and (c) enable mapping of the desired Quality-of-Control (QoC) under attack guarantees into real-time performance requirements on the underlying OS and networks. In addition, I will introduce a physics-aware design framework for securing resource-constrained CPS, that supports design-time tradeoffs between QoC in the presence of attacks and system resources used by the deployed security mechanisms, such as message authentication. This design framework has been used to add strong security guarantees in several existing automotive system. Finally, for systems with varying levels of autonomy and human interaction, I will show how we can exploit human power of inductive reasoning and the ability to provide context, to improve the overall security guarantees


    Biography: Miroslav Pajic is the Nortel Networks Assistant Professor in Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Duke University, with a secondary appointment in the Computer Science Department. He received the Dipl. Ing. and M.S. degrees from the University of Belgrade, Serbia, in 2003 and 2007, as well as the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, in 2010 and 2012, respectively. His research interests focus on design and analysis of cyber-physical systems (CPS) and in particular on model-based design of CPS, real-time and embedded systems, high-assurance distributed and networked control systems, and high-confidence medical devices and systems.

    Miroslav received various awards including the NSF CAREER Award, ONR Young Investigator Program Award, ACM SIGBED Frank Anger Memorial Award, the Joseph and Rosaline Wolf Dissertation Award from Penn Engineering, as well as six Best Paper and Runner-up Awards at the main CPS venues, including the Best Paper Awards at the 2017 ACM SIGBED International Conference on Embedded Software (EMSOFT) and 2014 ACM/IEEE International Conference on Cyber-Physical Systems (ICCPS), and the Best Student Paper award at the 2012 IEEE Real-Time and Embedded Technology and Applications Symposium (RTAS).


    Host: Professor Paul Bogdan

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

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Talyia White

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  • Internship/Job Search Open Forum

    Wed, Oct 24, 2018 @ 01:00 PM - 02:00 PM

    Viterbi School of Engineering Career Connections

    Workshops & Infosessions


    Increase your career and internship knowledge of the internship/job search by attending this professional development Q&A moderated by Viterbi Career Connections staff or Viterbi employer partners.

    For more information about Labs & Open Forums, please visit viterbicareers.usc.edu/workshops.

    Location: Ronald Tutor Hall of Engineering (RTH) - 211

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: RTH 218 Viterbi Career Connections

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  • CAIS Seminar: Dr. Xiang Ren (USC) - Learning Text Structures with Weak Supervision

    Wed, Oct 24, 2018 @ 04:00 PM - 05:00 PM

    Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Dr. Xiang Ren, USC

    Talk Title: Learning Text Structures with Weak Supervision

    Series: USC Center for Artificial Intelligence in Society (CAIS) Seminar Series

    Abstract: The real-world data, though massive, are hard for machines to resolve as they are largely unstructured and in the form of natural-language text. One of the grand challenges is to turn such massive corpora into machine-actionable structures. Yet, most existing systems have heavy reliance on human effort in the process of structuring various corpora, slowing down the development of downstream applications. In this talk, I will introduce an effort-light framework that extracts structured facts from massive corpora without task-specific human labeling effort. I will briefly introduce several interesting learning frameworks for structure extraction, and will share some directions towards mining corpus-specific structured networks for knowledge discovery.

    This lecture satisfies requirements for CSCI 591: Research Colloquium


    Biography: Xiang Ren is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at USC affiliated with USC ISI. Xiang was a visiting researcher at Stanford University and received his PhD in CS at UIUC. He is interested in computational methods and systems that extract machine-actionable knowledge from massive unstructured text data, and is particularly excited about problems in the space of modeling sequence and graph data under weak supervision (learning with partial/noisy labels, and semi-supervised learning) and indirect supervision (multi-task learning, transfer learning, and reinforcement learning).


    Location: Mark Taper Hall Of Humanities (THH) - 301

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Computer Science Department

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  • GRAMMAR WORKSHOP FOR WRIT340E STUDENTS

    Wed, Oct 24, 2018 @ 05:30 PM - 07:30 PM

    Viterbi School of Engineering Student Affairs

    Workshops & Infosessions


    WRIT 340E Professors Choi and Schroeder will be providing grammar lessons and individualized assistance to students currently taking WRIT 340 - Advanced Writing for Engineers.

    Students should bring their WRIT 340E assignments so that they can apply the lessons and also receive detailed feedback on grammar.

    This is the third of four workshops this semester. Each workshop will focus on a different area of grammar, and all will include individualized assistance on WRIT 340E assignments.

    Food will be served.

    Please be advised that attendance is not related to your grades in your WRIT 340E course.

    More Information: Workshop Flyer.pdf

    Location: Thomas & Dorothy Leavey Library (LVL) - 16

    Audiences: Currently enrolled WRIT340E students

    Contact: Helen Choi

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  • The IEEE GRSS Chapter and University of Southern California Special Lecture Event, Wednesday, Oct. 24th at 6pm in EEB 132

    Wed, Oct 24, 2018 @ 06:00 PM - 07:30 PM

    Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Dr. Jeff Puschell,, Principal Engineering Fellow and Chief Scientist Space Systems at Raytheon Space and Airborne Systems in El Segundo

    Talk Title: ATLIS: Advanced Technology Land Imaging Spectroradiometer: a Next Generation Sustainable Land Imager

    Abstract: The Advanced Technology Land Imaging Spectroradiometer (ATLIS) is a small (0.04 m3), multispectral pushbroom imager to provide visible through shortwave (VSWIR) calibrated imagery for the Sustainable Land Imaging-Technology (SLI-T) reference mission architecture (RMA).
    ATLIS is designed to provide imaging spectroradiometry that meets SLI-T RMA key parameters with an instrument that is much smaller and much less massive than previous land imaging systems.
    This presentation describes a NASA ESTO funded project to design, build and test a six spectral band prototype ATLIS called ATLIS-P that will establish whether this compact, low mass design approach with wide field of view (WFOV), free form reflective telescope, large format, small detector digital FPA and on-chip processing meets SLI-T RMA VSWIR requirements. ATLIS is supported by NASA ESTO through grant NNX16AP64G.

    Biography: Dr. Jeff Puschell is Principal Engineering Fellow and Chief Scientist, Space Systems at Raytheon Space and Airborne Systems in El Segundo, California. He is an internationally recognized expert in the system engineering of space-based imaging and remote sensing systems. His 30+ years of experience is broadly based and includes leading and making major contributions to development of visible-infrared instruments for space-based research and operational environmental imaging and remote sensing, development and field testing of laser-based communication and remote sensing systems and building and using millimeter, infrared, visible and ultraviolet wavelength instrumentation for ground-based astronomy. Dr. Puschell has been Principal Investigator, Technical Director, Chief Engineer, Chief Scientist or Project Manager on more than 15 projects in space-based remote sensing and laser communication. He has authored or co- authored 130+ papers on a variety of topics in space-based imaging and remote sensing, optical communication and astrophysics. Dr. Puschell is co-editor and co-author for the leading reference book Space Mission Engineering: The New SMAD. He is a Fellow of the AIAA and SPIE.

    Host: USC Viterbi School

    More Info: http://sites.ieee.org/metrola-grss/

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

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Marilyn Poplawski

    Event Link: http://sites.ieee.org/metrola-grss/

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  • ASBME GM 4: 3D Printing Workshop

    Wed, Oct 24, 2018 @ 07:00 PM - 08:00 PM

    Viterbi School of Engineering Student Organizations

    Student Activity


    Are you looking for more skills to put on your resume? Come out to our technical workshop to learn how to 3D print! Our 3D printing workshop will teach you the basics of how to use ASBME's Prusa 3D printer. Once trained on the printer, ASBME members will be able to use the 3D printer for personal projects! We will have free dinner too!

    Location: Ronald Tutor Campus Center (TCC) - 227

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Associated Students of Biomedical Engineering

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  • NL Seminar-Conversational Question Answering

    Thu, Oct 25, 2018 @ 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM

    Information Sciences Institute

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Scott Yih, AI2

    Talk Title: Conversational Question Answering

    Series: Natural Language Seminar

    Abstract: Humans seek information in a conversational manner, by asking follow-up questions for additional information based on what they have already learned. In this talk, I will first introduce the task of sequential question answering 1. which aims to fulfill user's information need by answering a series of simple, but interdependent questions regarding a given table. Treating this task as a semantic parsing problem, we developed a policy shaping mechanism that incorporates prior knowledge and an update equation that generalizes three different families of learning algorithms 2. After that, I will then talk briefly about QuAC, a new dataset for Question Answering in Context. QuAC targets the scenario where the information source is unstructured text 3. and thus can be viewed as a conversational machine comprehension task. New, unpublished model ideas will also be discussed.

    Biography: Scott Wen-tau Yih is a Principal Research Scientist at Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence AI2. His research interests include natural language processing, machine learning and information retrieval. Yih received his Ph.D. in computer science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His work on joint inference using integer linear programming ILP has been widely adopted in the NLP community for numerous structured prediction problems. Prior to joining AI2, Yih has spent 12 years at Microsoft Research, working on a variety of projects including email spam filtering, keyword extraction and search & ad relevance. His recent work focuses on continuous representations and neural network models, with applications in knowledge base embedding, semantic parsing and question answering. Yih received the best paper award from CoNLL-2011, an outstanding paper award from ACL-2015 and has served as area co-chairs HLT-NAACL-12, ACL-14, EMNLP-16,17,18, program co-chairs CEAS-09, CoNLL-14 and action associated editors TACL, JAIR in recent years. He is also a co-presenter for several tutorials on topics including Semantic Role Labeling NAACL-HLT-06, AAAI-07, Deep Learning for NLP SLT-14, NAACL-HLT-15, IJCAI-16, NLP for Precision Medicine ACL-17, AAAI-18.

    Host: Xusen Yin

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

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

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

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

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Peter Zamar

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

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  • Sender Decomposition of Cache-Aided Communications and Distributed Computing

    Thu, Oct 25, 2018 @ 01:00 PM - 02:00 PM

    Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Petros Elia, Communication Systems Department, EURECOM, Sophia Antipolis, France

    Talk Title: Sender Decomposition of Cache-Aided Communications and Distributed Computing

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

    Abstract: Recent results have shown that the data-redundancy that can exist in cache-aided communication networks as well as in (coded) distributed computing, can allow for substantial reductions in communication delays. These approaches though face various fundamental challenges that severely reduce the theoretically unbounded gains to much smaller gains. The work here shows a simple way without any additional data exchange between the communicating/computing nodes to decompose the problems of coded caching and coded distributed computing, into problems of smaller dimensionality with much better overall performance. Different manifestations of this "decomposition" phenomenon are explored, each revealing interesting boosts in performance and a direct amelioration of different bottlenecks like the "uneven category bottleneck", the "straggler bottleneck" and the "finite data-set bottleneck".


    Biography: Petros Elia received the B.Sc. degree from the Illinois Institute of Technology, and the M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering from the University of Southern California in 2001 and 2006 respectively. He is a professor with the Department of Communication Systems at EURECOM, in Sophia Antipolis, France. His latest research deals with information-theoretic aspects of caching, as well with different problems in the area of complexity-constrained communications, coding theory, and surveillance networks. He is a Fulbright scholar, the co-recipient of the NEWCOM++ distinguished achievement award 2008-2011 for a sequence of publications on the topic of complexity in wireless communications, and the recipient of the ERC Consolidator Grant 2017-2022 on cache-aided wireless communications.

    Host: Paul Bogdan

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

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Talyia White

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  • Internship/Job Search Open Forum

    Thu, Oct 25, 2018 @ 04:00 PM - 05:00 PM

    Viterbi School of Engineering Career Connections

    Workshops & Infosessions


    Increase your career and internship knowledge of the internship/job search by attending this professional development Q&A moderated by Viterbi Career Connections staff or Viterbi employer partners.

    For more information about Labs & Open Forums, please visit viterbicareers.usc.edu/workshops.

    Location: Ronald Tutor Hall of Engineering (RTH) - 211

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: RTH 218 Viterbi Career Connections

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  • MathWorks Day Seminar

    Thu, Oct 25, 2018 @ 04:00 PM - 06:00 PM

    USC Viterbi School of Engineering

    Workshops & Infosessions


    Join MathWorks engineers as they provide insight into the latest features of the MATLAB and Simulink product families.

    Demystifying deep learning: A practical approach in MATLAB

    -Manage extremely large sets of images
    -Visualize networks and gain insight into the black box nature of deep networks
    -Perform classification and pixel-level semantic segmentation on images
    -Import training data sets from networks such as GoogLeNet and ResNet
    -Import and use pre-trained models from TensorFlow and Caffe
    -Speed up network training with parallel computing on a cluster
    -Automate manual effort required to label ground truth
    -Automatically convert a model to CUDA to run on GPUs


    To register in advance: www.mathworks.com/USC2018


    More Information: USC Poster.pdf

    Location: Grace Ford Salvatori Hall Of Letters, Arts & Sciences (GFS) - 106

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Michael Goay

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  • Transfer Day - Morning Session

    Fri, Oct 26, 2018 @ 09:00 AM - 01:00 PM

    Viterbi School of Engineering Undergraduate Admission

    Receptions & Special Events


    TRANSFER DAY FEATURES: A presentation from Viterbi Admission, Campus Tours, Academic Department Visits, and more!

    If you have questions about engineering and the transfer process then Transfer Day is for you. Transfer Day is a half-day comprehensive program designed to give you the most in-depth look at the transfer process and academic life at USC. Specifically, the program includes presentations on the admission process, transfer credit policy, academics, financial aid. You will also have the opportunity to visit an academic department or take a campus tour. Reservations are required.

    Location: USC Admission Office

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Viterbi Admission

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  • CS Colloquium: Barna Saha (University of Massachusetts Amherst) - Efficient Fine-Grained Algorithms

    Fri, Oct 26, 2018 @ 10:00 AM - 11:20 AM

    Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Barna Saha, University of Massachusetts Amherst

    Talk Title: Efficient Fine-Grained Algorithms

    Series: Computer Science Colloquium

    Abstract: One of the greatest successes of computational complexity theory is the classification of countless fundamental computational problems into polynomial-time and NP-hard ones, two classes that are often referred to as tractable and intractable, respectively. However, this crude distinction of algorithmic efficiency is clearly insufficient when handling today's large scale of data. We need a finer-grained design and analysis of algorithms that pinpoints the exact exponent of polynomial running time, and a better understanding of when a speed-up is not possible. Over the years, many polynomial-time approximation algorithms were devised as an approach to bypass the NP-hardness obstacle of many discrete optimization problems. This area has developed into a rich field producing many algorithmic ideas and has lead to major advances in computational complexity. So far, however, a similar theory for high polynomial time problems to understand the trade-off between quality and running time is vastly lacking.

    In this presentation, I will give you an overview of the newly growing field of fine-grained algorithms and complexity, and my contributions therein. This will include fundamental problems such as edit distance computation, all-pairs shortest paths, parsing and matrix multiplication. They have applications ranging from genomics to statistical natural language processing, machine learning and optimization. I will show how as a natural byproduct of improved time complexity, one may design algorithms that are highly parallel as well as streaming algorithms with sublinear space complexity. Finally, motivated by core machine learning applications, I will discuss alternative measures of efficiency that may be equally relevant as time complexity.

    This lecture satisfies requirements for CSCI 591: Research Colloquium.


    Biography: Barna Saha is currently an Assistant Professor in the College of Information & Computer Science at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She is also a Permanent Member of Center for Discrete Mathematics and Theoretical Computer Science (DIMACS) at Rutgers. Before joining UMass in 2014, she was a Research Scientist at AT&T Shannon Laboratories, New Jersey. She spent four wonderful years (2007-2011) at the University of Maryland College Park from where she received her Ph.D. in Computer Science. In Fall 2015, she was at the University of California Berkeley as a Visiting Scholar and as a fellow of the Simons Institute. Her research interests include Theoretical Computer Science, Probabilistic Method & Randomized Algorithms and Large Scale Data Analytics. She is the recipient of NSF CAREER award (2017), Google Faculty Award (2016), Yahoo Academic Career Enhancement Award (2015), Simons-Berkeley Research Fellowship (2015), NSF CRII Award (2015) and Dean's Dissertation Fellowship (2011). She received the best paper award at the Very Large Data Bases Conference (VLDB) 2009 for her work on Probabilistic Databases and was chosen as finalists for best papers at the IEEE Conference on Data Engineering (ICDE) 2012 for developing new techniques to handle low quality data.


    Host: David Kempe

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

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Computer Science Department

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  • BME seminars

    Fri, Oct 26, 2018 @ 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM

    Alfred E. Mann Department of Biomedical Engineering

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Leo Q. Wan, Ph.D., Associate Professor Department of Biomedical Engineering Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, NY

    Talk Title: Cellular Asymmetry in Development and Disease

    Abstract: Cell Chirality in Development and Disease: Cell chirality (also known as handedness and left-right (LR) asymmetry) is an intrinsic capability of the cell telling left from right. The development of the vertebrate body plan with left-right asymmetry requires the emerging chiral morphogenesis at multicellular levels at specific embryonic stages. Changes in orientation of the LR axis due to genetic or environmental factors can lead to malformations and disease. However, the concept of cell chirality has been recognized, but never studied in detail until the recent development of novel engineering tools. In my lab, we demonstrate that the cultivation of cells on micropatterned 2D surfaces and in 3D graded hydrogels reveals an intrinsic cellular LR asymmetry, which is dependent of cell phenotype and actin cytoskeleton. With these new tools, we examine the role of cell chirality on the development of cardiac LR asymmetry as well as the barrier function of endothelium layers. We find that Protein Kinase C (PKC) activation reverses the inherent chirality from clockwise to counter clockwise in engineering systems. Interestingly, activation of PKC signaling reverses the directional bias of chick cardiac C-looping. Mediating endothelial cell chirality can regulate the permeability of endothelial layers. Overall, our results strongly suggest critical roles of cell chirality in cardiovascular development and disease.

    Biography: Dr. Leo Q. Wan is an associate professor in the Department of Biomedical Engineering at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, NY. His research interests focus on understanding physical biology in tissue development and regeneration, and include Tissue Morphogenesis, Stem Cell Mechanobiology, and Functional Tissue Engineering. He received his Bachelor and Master degrees in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Science and Technology of China. After completing his PhD in Biomedical Engineering at Columbia University in 2007, he became a postdoctoral scientist in the area of Stem Cells and Tissue Engineering. Leo is a Pew scholar (Class 2013), and a recipient of the NIH Director's New Innovator Award, National Science Foundation Early Career Award, American Heart Association Scientist Development Grant, and the March of Dimes Basil O'Connor Starter Scholar Research Award.

    Host: Keyue Shen, PhD

    More Information: Leo Wan Flier.pdf

    Location: 145a

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Mischalgrace Diasanta

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  • Transfer Day - Afternoon Session

    Fri, Oct 26, 2018 @ 01:00 PM - 05:00 PM

    Viterbi School of Engineering Undergraduate Admission

    Receptions & Special Events


    TRANSFER DAY FEATURES: A presentation from Viterbi Admission, Campus Tours, Academic Department Visits, and more!

    If you have questions about engineering and the transfer process then Transfer Day is for you. Transfer Day is a half-day comprehensive program designed to give you the most in-depth look at the transfer process and academic life at USC. Specifically, the program includes presentations on the admission process, transfer credit policy, academics, financial aid. You will also have the opportunity to visit an academic department or take a campus tour. Reservations are required.

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Viterbi Admission

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  • W.V.T. RUSCH ENGINEERING HONORS COLLOQUIUM

    Fri, Oct 26, 2018 @ 01:00 PM - 01:50 PM

    USC Viterbi School of Engineering

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Prof. Michael H. Dickinson, California Institute of Technology, Division of Biology and Biological Engineering

    Talk Title: Using the Brain of a Modern Fly to Reconstruct the Behaviors of an Ancient Word

    Host: EHP and Dr. Prata

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

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Amanda McCraven

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  • Mork Family Department of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science Seminar - 11th Annual Spitzer Lecture

    Fri, Oct 26, 2018 @ 03:00 PM - 04:00 PM

    Mork Family Department of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Professor Philip Kim, Department of Physics and Applied Physics, Harvard Univer

    Talk Title: Stacking Atomic Layers: Quest for New Materials and Physics

    Abstract: Modern electronics has been heavily relied on the technology to confine electrons in the interface layers of semiconductors. In recent years, scientists discovered that various atomically thin materials including graphene, a single atomic carbon layer, can be isolated. In these atomically thin materials, quantum physics allows electrons to move only in an effective 2-dimensional (2D) space. By stacking these 2D quantum materials, one can also create atomic-scale heterostructures with a wide variety of electronic and optical properties. I will discuss the creation of new heterostructures based on atomically thin materials and emerging new physics with technological implications therein.

    Biography: Professor Philip Kim received his B.S in physics at Seoul National University in 1990 and received his Ph. D. in Applied Physics from Harvard University in 1999. He was Miller Postdoctoral Fellow in Physics from University of California, Berkeley during 1999-2001. In 2002, he joined in Department of Physics at Columbia University as a faculty member. In 2014, he moved to Harvard as Professor of Physics and Professor of Applied Physics. Professor Kim published more than 200 papers in professional journals which are well cited. Many of his papers are published in high impact journals such as Nature, Science and Physical Review Letters. Professor Kim received numerous honors and award including Tomassoni-Chisesi Prizes (2018), Vannevar Bush Faculty Fellowship (2018), Experimental Investigator in Quantum Materials Award, Moore Foundation (2014), Oliver E. Buckley Prize, American Physical Society (2014), IBM Faculty Award (2009), Ho-Am Science Prize (2008); American Physical Society Fellowship (2007), Columbia University Distinguished Faculty Award (2007). In addition, He has given more than 400 invited presentations as keynote speaker, plenary speakers, and invited speakers in international and domestic conferences, colloquiums and department seminars.



    Host: Dr. Jayakanth Ravichandran

    Location: Seeley G. Mudd Building (SGM) - 123

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Karen Woo/Mork Family

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