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SUNMONTUEWEDTHUFRISAT
Events for the 3rd week of November
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Biomedical Engineering Speakers
Mon, Nov 14, 2016 @ 03:00 AM - 04:30 PM
Alfred E. Mann Department of Biomedical Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Dr. Shuming Nie, Departments of Biomedical Engineering, Chemistry, Materials Science and Engineering, and Winship Cancer Institute, Emory University and Georgia Institute of Technology
Talk Title: Engineering Unusual Properties on the Nanoscale: from Single-Molecule Raman Spectroscopy to Smart Molecular Imaging Probes
Series: Biomedical Engineering Special Seminar
Abstract: Materials on the nanometer scale such as quantum dots, plasmonic nanostructures, and polymeric nanomicelles have electronic, optical, magnetic, and structural properties that are not available from either discrete molecules or bulk materials. When conjugated with targeting ligands such as monoclonal antibodies, peptides or small molecules, these nanoparticles can be used to target malignant tumor cells and the immune microenvironments with high specificity and affinity. In the "mesoscopic" size range of 1 to 100 nm, nanoparticles also have large surface areas for conjugating to multiple diagnostic and therapeutic agents, opening new possibilities in chemical sensing, molecular imaging, and targeted therapy. Here I will discuss new strategies for engineering unusual and emergent properties that are possible only on the nanometer scale. In particular, we have developed spectrally encoded and biocompatible nanoparticles based on surface-enhanced Raman scattering (SERS) for single-molecule, single-nanoparticle, and single-cell studies under in-vivo physiological conditions. We have also developed a class of activatable or "smart" fluorescent nanoparticles with ultrahigh pH sensitivity for targeting the acidic tumor microenvironments as well as for guiding cancer surgery in real time. (Supported by NIH grants U54CA119338, RC2CA148265, R01CA108468, and R01CA163256).
Biography: Dr. Nie is the Wallace H. Coulter Distinguished Chair Professor of Biomedical Engineering at Emory University and the Georgia Institute of Technology, Director of the Emory-Georgia Tech Cancer Nanotechnology Program, and Founding Dean of the College of Engineering and Applied Sciences of Nanjing University (China). His academic work is primarily in the areas of nanomedicine, biomolecular engineering, stimuli-responsive materials, molecular and cellular imaging, and image-guided surgery. Professor Nie has published over 300 papers, patents, and book chapters, have delivered more than 400 invited lectures around the world, and have trained over 30 doctoral students and postdoctoral fellows who are now making an impact at top academic institutions and biotech companies. His scholarly work has been cited 53,000 times with an h-index of 83 (Google Scholar). Professor Nie received his BS degree from Nankai University (China) in 1983, earned his MS and PhD degrees from Northwestern University (Evanston, Illinois, 1984-1990), and did postdoctoral research at the Georgia Institute of Technology and Stanford University (1990-1994).
Host: Ellis Meng, PhD
Location: Seeley G. Mudd Building (SGM) - 460
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Mischalgrace Diasanta
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CS Colloquium: Hal Daumé III (UMD) - Learning Language through Interaction
Mon, Nov 14, 2016 @ 12:00 PM - 01:00 PM
Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Hal Daumé III, UMD
Talk Title: Learning Language through Interaction
Series: Yahoo! Labs Machine Learning Seminar Series
Abstract: This lecture satisfies requirements for CSCI 591: Computer Science Research Colloquium. Part of Yahoo! Labs Machine Learning Seminar Series.
Machine learning-based natural language processing systems are amazingly effective, when plentiful labeled training data exists for the task/domain of interest. Unfortunately, for broad coverage (both in task and domain) language understanding, we're unlikely to ever have sufficient labeled data, and systems must find some other way to learn. I'll describe a novel algorithm for learning from interactions, and several problems of interest, most notably machine simultaneous interpretation (translation while someone is still speaking). This is all joint work with some amazing (former) students He He, Alvin Grissom II, John Morgan, Mohit Iyyer, Sudha Rao and Leonardo Claudino, as well as colleagues Jordan Boyd-Graber, Kai-Wei Chang, John Langford, Akshay Krishnamurthy, Alekh Agarwal, Stéphane Ross, Alina Beygelzimer and Paul Mineiro.
Biography: Hal Daume III is an associate professor in Computer Science at the University of Maryland, College Park. He holds joint appointments in UMIACS and Linguistics. He was previously an assistant professor in the School of Computing at the University of Utah. His primary research interest is in developing new learning algorithms for prototypical problems that arise in the context of language processing and artificial intelligence. This includes topics like structured prediction, domain adaptation and unsupervised learning; as well as multilingual modeling and affect analysis. He associates himself most with conferences like ACL, ICML, NIPS and EMNLP. He earned his PhD at the University of Southern California with a thesis on structured prediction for language (his advisor was Daniel Marcu). He spent the summer of 2003 working with Eric Brill in the machine learning and applied statistics group at Microsoft Research. Prior to that, he studied math (mostly logic) at Carnegie Mellon University.
Host: Yan Liu
Location: Seeley G. Mudd Building (SGM) - 123
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Assistant to CS chair
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Seminars in Biomedical Engineering
Mon, Nov 14, 2016 @ 12:30 PM - 01:50 PM
Alfred E. Mann Department of Biomedical Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Jesse Yen, PhD, USC BME Faculty
Talk Title: Ultrasound Imaging
Location: Olin Hall of Engineering (OHE) - 122
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Mischalgrace Diasanta
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Center for Cyber-Physical Systems and Internet of Things and Ming Hsieh Institute for Electrical Engineering Joint Seminar Series on Cyber-Physical Systems
Mon, Nov 14, 2016 @ 02:00 PM - 03:00 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Jyotirmoy V. Deshmukh, Principal Research Engineer , Toyota Technical Center
Talk Title: Formal Reasoning for the Cyber-Physical Systems of Tomorrow
Abstract: As cyberphysical systems (CPS) researchers, we are in the process of shaping human societies of tomorrow. Smart transportation infrastructures, autonomous driving cars, medical devices, avionics systems, unmanned aerial vehicles, smart agriculture are just a few examples of technologies that will have a major impact on how we will lead our lives. CPS is not just a buzzword: it truly represents a convergence of a number of separate streams of science and engineering. Today, building a smart CPS requires a deep understanding of the physical aspects of the system being controlled in addition to being able to program intelligence into the controlling software. Increasingly, such software combines sophisticated algorithms from control theory with machine learning and AI algorithms. Often, system designers also have to model the underlying communication between the physical and the cyber worlds. The result is that even the simplest closed-loop model of a CPS is very complex and typically not amenable to reasoning in a formal sense. The burning question is: how do we increase our confidence in the correctness of system-designs with such complexities when even their models are not amenable to rigorous mathematical reasoning? This talk gives some directions to tackle this problem in the setting of model-based development of CPS designs.
Correctness of engineered systems is typically judged in an application-specific and manual fashion; a key step before we can formally reason about system correctness is to have a formalism to express correctness of the CPS being designed. We will discuss the use of logical formalisms based on real-time temporal logics as a possible requirement language for the CPS domain. The other main challenge is to automate the process of testing and finding undesirable behavior with respect to a given set of requirements. We will look at how the use of logical formalisms can greatly aid test automation and in some specific cases give formal guarantees. We will conclude by considering the data deluge problem for CPS; we will suggest techniques to learn logical patterns from time-series data to aid our understanding of the system under study.
Biography: Jyotirmoy Deshmukh is a Principal Research Engineer at Toyota Technical Center in Gardena, California. His research interests are in requirement engineering, temporal logic, formal testing, verification, automatic synthesis and repair of systems, with special focus on cyberphysical system models. Previously, Jyotirmoy got his Ph.D. from the University of Texas at Austin, on the topic of verification of sequential and concurrent software libraries using techniques such as the theory of tree automata and static program analysis. After his Ph.D., he worked as a post-doctoral researcher as part of the Computing Innovation Fellows program at the University of Pennsylvania. His current research interest is in techniques for improving reliability of embedded control software used in cyber-physical systems.
Host: Paul Bogdan
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 248
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Estela Lopez
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USC Stem Cell Seminar: Nicholas Baker, Albert Einstein College of Medicine
Tue, Nov 15, 2016 @ 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Alfred E. Mann Department of Biomedical Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Nicholas Baker, Albert Einstein College of Medicine
Talk Title: TBD
Series: Eli and Edythe Broad Center for Regenerative Medicine and Stem Cell Research at USC Distinguished Speakers Series
Host: USC Stem Cell
More Info: http://stemcell.usc.edu/events
Webcast: http://keckmedia.usc.edu/Mediasite/Catalog/catalogs/StemCellSeminarWebCast Link: http://keckmedia.usc.edu/Mediasite/Catalog/catalogs/StemCellSeminar
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Cristy Lytal/USC Stem Cell
Event Link: http://stemcell.usc.edu/events
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CS Colloquium and RASC Seminar: Subramanian Ramamoorthy (University of Edinburgh) -Representations and Models for Collaboratively Intelligent Robots
Tue, Nov 15, 2016 @ 03:30 PM - 05:00 PM
Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Subramanian Ramamoorthy, University of Edinburgh
Talk Title: Representations and Models for Collaboratively Intelligent Robots
Series: RASC Seminar Series
Abstract: This lecture satisfies requirements for CSCI 591: Computer Science Research Colloquium.
We are motivated by the problem of building autonomous robots that are able to work collaboratively with other agents, such as human co-workers. One key attribute of such an autonomous system is the ability to make predictions about the actions and intentions of other agents in a dynamic environment - both to interpret the activity context as it is being played out and to adapt actions in response to that contextual information.
Drawing on examples from robotic systems we have developed in my lab, including mobile robots that can navigate effectively in crowded spaces and humanoid robots that can cooperate in assembly tasks, I will present recent results addressing the questions of how to efficiently capture the hierarchical nature of activities, and how to rapidly estimate latent factors, such as hidden goals and intent.
Firstly, I will describe a procedure for topological trajectory classification, using the concept of persistent homology, which enables unsupervised extraction of certain kinds of relational concepts in motion data. One use of this representation is in devising a multi-scale version of Bayesian recursive estimation, which is a step towards reliably grounding human instructions in the realized activity.
Finally, I will describe work with a human-robot interface based on the combined use of vision and mobile 3D eye tracking as a signal for inference about fixation programs. Formulating this in terms of a probabilistic generative model, we estimate fixation locations within a 3D scene, which in turn allows us to associate symbols in a higher level plan with the actual appearance of novel objects that the symbols refer to.
Biography: Dr. Subramanian Ramamoorthy is a Reader (Associate Professor) in the School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh, where he has been on the faculty since 2007. He is a Coordinator of the EPSRC Robotarium Research Facility in the School of Informatics, and Executive Committee Member for Edinburgh Centre for Robotics. He received his PhD in Electrical and Computer Engineering from The University of Texas at Austin in 2007. He is an elected Member of the Young Academy of Scotland at the Royal Society of Edinburgh, and has held Visiting Professor positions at the Precourt Institute for Energy at Stanford University and at the University of Rome "La Sapienza".
His research focus has been on robot learning and decision-making under uncertainty, with emphasis on problems involving human-robot and multi-robot collaborative activities. These problems are solved using a combination machine learning techniques with emphasis on issues of transfer, online and reinforcement learning as well as new representations and analysis techniques based on geometric/topological abstractions.
His work has been recognised by nominations for Best Paper Awards at major international conferences - ICRA 2008, IROS 2010, ICDL 2012 and EACL 2014. He serves in editorial and programme committee roles for conferences and journals in the areas of AI and Robotics. He leads Team Edinferno, the first UK entry in the Standard Platform League at the RoboCup International Competition. This work has received media coverage, including by BBC News and The Telegraph, and has resulted in many public engagement activities, such as at the Royal Society Summer Science Exhibition, Edinburgh International Science festival and Edinburgh Festival Fringe.
Before joining the School of Informatics, he was a Staff Engineer with National Instruments Corp., where he contributed to five products in the areas of motion control, computer vision and dynamic simulation. This work resulted in seven US patents and numerous industry awards for product innovation.
Host: Gaurav Sukhatme
Location: Henry Salvatori Computer Science Center (SAL) - 101
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Assistant to CS chair
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Computer Science General Faculty Meeting
Wed, Nov 16, 2016 @ 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: Henry Salvatori Computer Science Center (SAL) - 101
Audiences: Invited Faculty Only
Contact: Assistant to CS chair
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Information Session in London, U.K.
Wed, Nov 16, 2016 @ 03:00 PM - 05:00 PM
Viterbi School of Engineering Graduate Admission
Workshops & Infosessions
Interested in graduate studies in engineering or computer science?
Candidates with a strong academic background and a Bachelor's degree in engineering, computer science, applied mathematics, or physical science (such as physics, biology, or chemistry) are welcome to attend an information session to learn more about applying to graduate engineering programs at the University of Southern California.
These events will be hosted by Kelly Goulis, Senior Associate Dean for Graduate Recruitment at the USC Viterbi School of Engineering.
The session will include information on the following topics:
- Master's & Ph.D. programs in engineering and computer science
- How to Apply
- Scholarships and funding
- Student life at USC and in Los Angeles
There will also be sufficient time for questions.
Please contact us at viterbi.gradprograms@usc.edu if you have any inquiries about the event.
REGISTER NOWLocation: St. Ermin's Hotel, London, U.K.
Audiences: Prospective students with a background in engineering, math or hard science
Contact: Mary Kae/Graduate and Professional Programs
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Modeling Speech Production: From MRI Data to Articulatory Gestures
Thu, Nov 17, 2016 @ 01:00 PM - 02:00 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Dr. Asterios Toutios, Research Associate/USC
Talk Title: Modeling Speech Production: From MRI Data to Articulatory Gestures
Abstract: Novel technologies for imaging the vocal tract, such as real-time MRI, offer extraordinary opportunities for moving speech production research forward. A long-term goal of my research is to develop a modular architecture for synthesizing personalized, highly intelligible and natural-sounding speech, by combining vocal-tract imaging with mathematical modeling and linguistic knowledge. My approach is to model direct observations of the time-varying changes in vocal-tract shaping, in order to derive functional mappings from linguistic structures to synthesized vocal-tract dynamics, which will then drive a realistic simulation of the formation of speech acoustics by the dynamically changing vocal tract. Such an effort may have important technological impact, and validate ample scientific knowledge on the mechanisms of human speech production. In this talk, I will discuss a framework for deriving from real-time MRI data the spatiotemporal deployment of articulatory gestures (which may be viewed as linguistic, cognitive, or motor control targets) in fluent speech and in a speaker-specific manner. The framework includes: automatic segmentation of articulators in real-time MRI videos; the derivation of a guided factor analysis model of the vocal-tract geometry; a locally-linear mapping between deformations of articulators and vocal-tract constrictions; and the application of a novel convolutive non-negative matrix factorization algorithm.
Biography: Asterios Toutios is a research associate with the Signal Analysis and Interpretation Laboratory (SAIL) at USC, where he leads and coordinates the Speech Production and Articulation kNowledge (SPAN) group. His main research interest is modeling human speech production on the basis of direct observations of the vocal-tract dynamic configuration, with a view to informing and enhancing speech technologies like synthesis, recognition, and speaker identification. He received his academic degrees in Thessaloniki, Greece: Diploma/MEng in Electrical and Computer Engineering (1999, Aristotle University); MSc in Information Systems (2002, University of Macedonia); PhD in Applied Informatics (2007, University of Macedonia). Next, he occupied postdoctoral research positions in France, at LORIA and TELECOM ParisTech, before moving to Southern California in June 2012. He has authored or co-authored more than 40 peer-reviewed publications in journals and international conferences. He has also translated from English to Greek a book on mathematical finance, published a few poems, and sung for a little-known alternative rock band.
Host: Dr. Sandeep K. Gupta
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 248
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Mayumi Thrasher
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MHI CommNetS seminar
Thu, Nov 17, 2016 @ 02:00 PM - 03:00 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Dr. G.P.Papavassilopoulos, National Technical University of Athens
Talk Title: University-Students Game
Series: CommNetS
Abstract: The purpose of this paper is to formulate and study a game where there is a player who is involved for a long time interval and several small players who stay in the game for short time intervals. Examples of such games abound in practice. For example a Bank is a long term player who stays in business for a very long time whereas most of its customers are affiliated with the Bank for relatively short time periods. A University and its Students provide another example and it is this model that we use here for motivating and posing the questions. The University is considered to have an infinite time horizon and the Students are considered as players who stay in the game for a fixed period of five years (indicative number). A class of Students who start their studies at a certain year is considered as one player /Student who is involved for five years. This player overlaps in action with the other students who entered at different years and with the University. We study this game in a Linear Quadratic, Deterministic, Discrete and Continuous Time setups, where the players use Linear Feedback Strategies and are in Nash or Stackelberg equilibrium, and where the Students have the same cost structure independently of the year they started their studies. An important feature of the solutions derived is that they lead to Riccati type equations for calculating the gains, which are interlaced in time i.e. their evolution depends on present and past values of the gains. In the continuous time setup this corresponds to integrodifferential equations.
Biography: G. P. Papavassilopoulos received the Diploma in Mechanical and Electrical Engineering from the National Technical University of Athens in 1975 and the MSc and PhD degrees in Electrical Engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign in 1977 and 1979 respectively. In 1979 he joined the Dept. of Electrical Engineering-Systems of the University of Southern California as an Assistant Professor and was later promoted to Associate and Full Professor with tenure. In 2000 he joined the Dept. of Electrical and Computer Engineering of the National Technical University of Athens as Full Professor where he is also the director of the Control and Decision Laboratory. His basic areas of interest are Controls, Optimization, and Dynamic Games. A considerable part of his research is in the area of Dynamic Stochastic Games. He has also conducted research in Decentralized Adaptive Control, Robotics, Optimization Algorithms, Target Interception, Jamming, Stochastic Learning Automata, Linear Complementarity Problems and Bilinear Matrix Inequalities for Robust Control, Computational Complexity, Markovian Learning, Parallel Algorithms for Nonconvex Problems, Genetic Algorithms, and Nonlinear Filtering. He is also interested in applications to Biomedical Engineering, Economics, Organizational Structures, Energy and Telecommunication Policy, and Environmental Problems. (For more information: http://www.control.ece.ntua.gr/)
Host: Prof. Petros Ioannou
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 248
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Annie Yu
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CS Colloquium: Arindam Banerjee (University of Minnesota, Twin Cities) - Learning with Low Samples in High-Dimensions: Estimators, Geometry, and Applications
Thu, Nov 17, 2016 @ 04:00 PM - 05:00 PM
Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Arindam Banerjee, University of Minnesota, Twin Cities
Talk Title: Learning with Low Samples in High-Dimensions: Estimators, Geometry, and Applications
Series: Yahoo! Labs Machine Learning Seminar Series
Abstract: This lecture satisfies requirements for CSCI 591: Computer Science Research Colloquium. Part of Yahoo! Labs Machine Learning Seminar Series.
Many machine learning problems, especially scientific problems in areas such as ecology, climate science, and brain sciences, operate in the so-called `low samples, high dimensions' regime. Such problems typically have numerous possible predictors or features, but the number of training examples is small, often much smaller than the number of features. In this talk, we will discuss recent advances in general formulations and estimators for such problems. These formulations generalize prior work such as the Lasso and the Dantzig selector. We will discuss the geometry underlying such formulations, and how the geometry helps in establishing finite sample properties of the estimators. We will also discuss applications of such results in structure learning in probabilistic graphical models, along with real world applications in ecology and climate science.
This is joint work with Soumyadeep Chatterjee, Sheng Chen, Farideh Fazayeli, Andre Goncalves, Jens Kattge, Igor Melnyk, Peter Reich, Franziska Schrodt, Hanhuai Shan, and Vidyashankar Sivakumar.
Biography: Arindam Banerjee is an Associate Professor at the Department of Computer & Engineering and a Resident Fellow at the Institute on the Environment at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. His research interests are in statistical machine learning and data mining, and applications in complex real-world problems including climate science, ecology, recommendation systems, text analysis, brain sciences, finance, and aviation safety. He has won several awards, including the Adobe Research Award (2016), the IBM Faculty Award (2013), the NSF CAREER award (2010), and six Best Paper awards in top-tier conferences.
Host: Yan Liu
Location: Henry Salvatori Computer Science Center (SAL) - 101
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Assistant to CS chair
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EE 598 Computer Engineering Seminar
Thu, Nov 17, 2016 @ 04:00 PM - 05:00 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Nickolai Zeldovich, Associate Professor, MIT
Talk Title: Certifying a Crash-Safe File System
Abstract: Users and applications rely on file systems to store their data, but file systems themselves can have bugs that lead to data loss, especially after a system crashes and restarts.
This talk will describe our work on FSCQ, the first file system that (1) comes with a precise specification of its behavior, including what can occur after a crash, and that (2) provides a machine-checked proof that its implementation meets this precise specification, using the Coq proof assistant. FSCQ's proofs avoid crash-safety bugs that have plagued file systems, such as forgetting to insert a disk write barrier between writing the data to the log and writing the log's commit block. FSCQ's specification also allows applications to prove their own crash safety, avoiding application-level bugs such as forgetting to invoke fsync on both the file and the containing directory. As a result, applications on FSCQ can provide strong guarantees: they will not lose data under any sequence of crashes.
Our experimental evaluation shows that the FSCQ prototype achieves reasonable I/O performance, on par with Linux ext4, and that, empirically, the theorems appear to work: FSCQ can recover from all possible crashes for small test programs, and FSCQ passes a variety of stress tests. One limitation of the FSCQ prototype is its high CPU overhead, owing to its use of Haskell for generating executable code.
Biography: Nickolai Zeldovich is an Associate Professor at MIT's department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, and a member of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. His research interests are in building practical secure systems, from operating systems and hardware to programming languages and security analysis tools. He received his PhD from Stanford University in 2008, where he developed HiStar, an operating system designed to minimize the amount of trusted code by controlling information flow. In 2005, he co-founded MokaFive, a company focused on improving desktop management and mobility using x86 virtualization.
Host: Xuehai Qian
Location: Olin Hall of Engineering (OHE) - OHE 100D
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Estela Lopez
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Information Session in Birmingham, U.K.
Thu, Nov 17, 2016 @ 07:00 PM - 09:00 PM
Viterbi School of Engineering Graduate Admission
Workshops & Infosessions
Interested in graduate studies in engineering or computer science?
Candidates with a strong academic background and a Bachelor's degree in engineering, computer science, applied mathematics, or physical science (such as physics, biology, or chemistry) are welcome to attend an information session to learn more about applying to graduate engineering programs at the University of Southern California.
These events will be hosted by Kelly Goulis, Senior Associate Dean for Graduate Recruitment at the USC Viterbi School of Engineering.
The session will include information on the following topics:
- Master's & Ph.D. programs in engineering and computer science
- How to Apply
- Scholarships and funding
- Student life at USC and in Los Angeles
There will also be sufficient time for questions.
Please contact us at viterbi.gradprograms@usc.edu if you have any inquiries about the event.
REGISTER NOWLocation: Hotel La Tour, Birmingham, U.K.
Audiences: Prospective students with a background in engineering, math or hard science
Contact: Mary Kae/Graduate and Professional Programs
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Facebook Panel at USC
Thu, Nov 17, 2016 @ 07:00 PM - 09:00 PM
Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science
Workshops & Infosessions
As the semester is coming to a close, Facebook would like to invite you to take a break from your homework and projects and join us for a couple hours of free food, free swag, and (free) mingling with full-time Facebook engineers.
If you're curious about engineering opportunities at Facebook, whether it be for an internship or full-time job, this is the event for you! There will be a panel-style Q&A session, followed by catered snacks, so bring both your questions and your appetite. Undergrad and grad students welcome.
Brought to you by the USC Facebook Campus AmbassadorsLocation: Mark Taper Hall Of Humanities (THH) - 201
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Ryan Rozan
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7th Annual Electrical Engineering Research Festival
Fri, Nov 18, 2016
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Receptions & Special Events
The research festival is a day-long event that showcases EE Ph.D. research through posters, demos and oral presentations. Open to the entire Viterbi community, alumni, and industry professionals, attendees will have the opportunity to see outstanding research and network with peers.
More Information: 7RF Save the Date.pdf
Location: Stever Courtyard
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Benjamin Paul
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AI SEMINAR
Fri, Nov 18, 2016 @ 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Information Sciences Institute
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Pablo Barberá, School of International Relations at USC
Talk Title: Less is more? How demographic sample weights can improve public opinion estimates based on Twitter data
Abstract: Twitter data is widely acknowledged to hold great promise for the study of political behavior and public opinion. However, a key limitation in previous studies is the lack of information about the sociodemographic characteristics of individual users, which raises concerns about the validity of inferences based on this source of data. This paper addresses this challenge by employing supervised machine learning methods to estimate the age, gender, race, party affiliation, propensity to vote, and income of any Twitter user in the U.S. The training dataset for these classifiers was obtained by matching a large dataset of 1 billion geolocated Twitter messages with voting registration records and estimates of home values across 15 different states, resulting in a sample of nearly 250,000 Twitter users whose sociodemographic traits are known. To illustrate the value of this approach, I offer three applications that use information about the predicted demographic composition of a random sample of 500,000 U.S. Twitter users. First, I explore how attention to politics varies across demographics groups. Then, I apply multilevel regression and postratification methods to recover valid estimate of presidential and candidate approval that can serve as early indicators of public opinion changes and thus complement traditional surveys. Finally, I demonstrate the value of Twitter data to study questions that may suffer from social desirability bias.
Biography: Pablo Barberá joined the School of International Relations at USC as an Assistant Professor in 2016, after receiving his PhD in political science from New York University and spending a year as a Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Center for Data Science in New York University. His research interests include computational methods in the social sciences, automated text analysis, and social network analysis. He applies these methods to the study of social media and politics, comparative electoral behavior and collective action, and political representation. His work has been published in Political Analysis, PLOS ONE, Psychological Science, the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, Social Media + Society, and Social Science Computer Review. His current research agenda focuses on the role of social media platforms in the growth of social protests, the measurement of public opinion and political behavior using digital trace data, and how exposure to political violence and governments' counter-messages on social media affects ideological extremism and support for terrorist groups.
Host: Emilio Ferrara
Location: Information Science Institute (ISI) - 11th floor large conference room
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Kary LAU
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CS Colloquium and CAIS Seminar: Nicole Immorlica (Microsoft Research) - Maximizing the Social Good: Markets without Money
Fri, Nov 18, 2016 @ 12:00 PM - 01:00 PM
Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Nicole Immorlica, Microsoft Research
Talk Title: Maximizing the Social Good: Markets without Money
Series: Center for AI in Society (CAIS) Seminar Series
Abstract: This lecture satisfies requirements for CSCI 591: Computer Science Research Colloquium.
To create a truly sustainable world, we need to both generate ample amounts of resources and allocate them appropriately to those that value them highly. In traditional economics, these goals are achieved using money. People are paid to produce valuable resources. Resources are sold at an appropriately high price, guaranteeing that the buyers had high value for them. However, in many settings of particular social significance, monetary transactions are infeasible. Sometimes this is because society has deemed it immoral to sell certain things, like seats at public schools or organs for transplantation. Other times it is because of technological constraints, like when the environment is electronic and there are no banks linked to user accounts.
In this talk, we will discuss two alternatives to money -- risk and social status -- and apply them to school choice and user-generated content websites. Risk is useful to help determine a person's value for a resource: the more someone is willing to risk for something, the more they value it. Using this insight, we propose an algorithm to allocate seats at public schools to students who value them the most. Social status is useful to motivate people to contribute to a public project. Using this insight, we design badges and leaderboards to maximize contributions to user-generated content websites like citizen science projects, question-and-answering sites, or review sites.
Host: CS Department
Location: Seeley G. Mudd Building (SGM) - 123
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Assistant to CS chair
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W.V.T. Rusch Engineering Honors Program Colloquium
Fri, Nov 18, 2016 @ 01:00 PM - 01:50 PM
USC Viterbi School of Engineering
University Calendar
Join us for a presentation by Professor Gregg Hallinan, Professor of Astronomy at Caltech, titled "Extrasolar Space Weather."
Location: Henry Salvatori Computer Science Center (SAL) - 101
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Julie Phaneuf
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Seminars in Biomedical Engineering
Fri, Nov 18, 2016 @ 02:00 PM - 03:00 PM
Alfred E. Mann Department of Biomedical Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Elliot Botvinick, PhD, Associate Professor, Departments of Biomedical Engineering and Surgery, Beckman Laser Institute, Edwards Lifesciences Center for Advanced Cardiovascular Technology, University of California, Irvine
Talk Title: Feeling Pericellular Mechanical Heterogeneities
Series: Distinguished Speaker Series, Dept. of Biomedical Engineering
Abstract: While there is strong evidence for roles of bulk stromal stiffness in cell regulation, roles for the pericellular mechanical microenvironment are less clear, in large part due to the difficulty of measurement. My group implements automated Active Microrheology (aAMR), an optical tweezers technology, to probe extracellular stiffness and map it in the volume surrounding cells. Our aAMR applies sinusoidal optical forces onto microbeads embedded within natural extracellular matrices (ECMs), including those comprised of fibrin and type 1 collagen. As in the case of passive microrheology, aAMR reports the complex material response function of the ECM just surrounding each microbead. Different from passive methods, aAMR is valid for systems not in thermal equilibrium, as is typical for regions of the ECM near to contractile cells. Our aAMR microscope can probe many beads surrounding each cell to map the mechanical landscape, allowing us to seek correlations between local stiffness distributions and cell properties such as contractility, signaling, and differentiation. I will present specific examples for which the distribution of pericellular stiffness correlates with cell phenotype including MT1-MMP deficient primary mesenchymal stem cells and endothelial cell branching morphogenesis. Lastly, I will touch on the implications of the remarkably steep local gradients in stiffness, particularly how it relates to the challenges of testing mechanical hypothesis in 3D hydrogel systems.
Host: Megan McCain, PhD
More Information: botvinick_flyer_11_18_2016.pdf
Location: Corwin D. Denney Research Center (DRB) - 146
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Mischalgrace Diasanta
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NL Seminar-Incremental spoken dialogue system for reference resolution in images
Fri, Nov 18, 2016 @ 03:00 PM - 04:00 PM
Information Sciences Institute
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Ramesh R Manuvinakurike , USC/ICT
Talk Title: Incremental spoken dialogue system for reference resolution in images
Series: Natural Language Seminar
Abstract: In this talk, I will be speaking about our ongoing effort in the development of Eve, state-of-the-art incremental reference resolution in images based spoken dialogue agent. Incrementality is central to developing a naturally conversing spoken dialogue systems. Incrementality makes the conversations more natural and efficient compared to non-incremental alternatives. The performance of the Eve was found to be comparable to human performance and she conveniently outperforms alternative non-incremental architectures. However, building such a system is not trivial. It needs high-performance architectures and dialogue components (ASR, dialogue policies, language understanding etc.). I will also speak about future plans for enhancing Eve's capability. I also take a slight deviation and explore a different word level natural language understanding model for reference resolution in images in a dialogue setting.
Biography: Ramesh Manuvinakurike is a Ph.D. student at USC Institute for Creative Technologies working with Prof. David DeVault and Prof. Kallirroi Georgila. He is interested in developing conversational systems and has developed various such systems. His work with his colleagues on agent Eve won 'Best paper' award at Sigdial 2015.
Host: Xing Shi and Kevin Knight
More Info: http://nlg.isi.edu/nl-seminar/
Location: Information Science Institute (ISI) - 11th Flr Conf Rm # 1135, Marina Del Rey
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Peter Zamar
Event Link: http://nlg.isi.edu/nl-seminar/
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Information Session in Liverpool, U.K.
Fri, Nov 18, 2016 @ 04:00 PM - 06:00 PM
Viterbi School of Engineering Graduate Admission
Workshops & Infosessions
Interested in graduate studies in engineering or computer science?
Candidates with a strong academic background and a Bachelor's degree in engineering, computer science, applied mathematics, or physical science (such as physics, biology, or chemistry) are welcome to attend an information session to learn more about applying to graduate engineering programs at the University of Southern California.
These events will be hosted by Kelly Goulis, Senior Associate Dean for Graduate Recruitment at the USC Viterbi School of Engineering.
The session will include information on the following topics:
- Master's & Ph.D. programs in engineering and computer science
- How to Apply
- Scholarships and funding
- Student life at USC and in Los Angeles
There will also be sufficient time for questions.
Please contact us at viterbi.gradprograms@usc.edu if you have any inquiries about the event.
REGISTER NOWLocation: Holiday Inn Liverpool City Centre, Liverpool, U.K.
Audiences: Prospective students with a background in engineering, math or hard science
Contact: Mary Kae/Graduate and Professional Programs
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Annual Viterbi Ph.D. Movie Night
Fri, Nov 18, 2016 @ 06:45 PM - 10:00 PM
Viterbi School of Engineering Doctoral Programs
Receptions & Special Events
On Friday, November 18, 2016 we will be holding our Annual Ph.D. Movie Night! This year we will feature the hit movie: The Ph.D. Movie Piled Higher and Deeper. This movie is FREE for currently enrolled Ph.D. students! Join us and your fellow Ph.D. students for a night at the movies! Hosted by the Viterbi Office of Graduate and Professional Programs and The Graduate Students of Biomedical Engineering, this event will include snacks and drinks raffle prizes and of course, The Ph.D. Movie!
The event will be indoors, but location will depend on audience size. We will announce the location on November 16, 2016. Please check your email for RSVP link
Ph.D. Movie Night
The Ph.D. Movie Piled Higher and Deeper
Date: Friday, November 18, 2016
Time: 6:45pm-10:00pm
Location: To Be Announced
Audiences: Eligible Ph.D. Students
Contact: Tracy Charles
