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Events for the 5th week of November

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

    Mon, Nov 26, 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, Nov 26, 2018 @ 12:30 PM - 01:50 PM

    Alfred E. Mann Department of Biomedical Engineering

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Kimberly Gokoffski, USC Keck School of Medicine, Assistant Professor of Clinical Ophthalmology

    Talk Title: Retina cell growth along with electrical field stimulation

    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, Nov 26, 2018 @ 02:00 PM - 03:00 PM

    Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Geir Dullerud, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

    Talk Title: Automata-switched systems, decentralized control, and team games

    Abstract: This seminar is inspired from a practical perspective by recent advances in computing, sensing and networking hardware that make reconfigurable multiagent systems both technologically and economically feasible on a widespread scale. Switching is a common feature in systems that are comprised of interacting software and physical processes, and in this talk we will focus on a special type of hybrid model called an automaton-switched linear system. These models are closely related to Markovian jump linear systems, and contain both discrete and continuous states, where discrete states evolve according to automata, or more general transition systems, and continuous states evolve according to linear dynamics influenced by the discrete states. We will discuss how such systems can be automatically analyzed using ideas from control theory and semidefinite programming, and will provide solutions to several synthesis problems in this framework, including for instance the long-studied moving horizon problem, and the decentralized control problem for systems with nested structure. We will also present results on a particular class of team games in which players have incomplete model knowledge individually, but jointly know the global system dynamics. The HoTDeC multi-vehicle testbed will also be presented, along with implementations of the above results on indoor UAVs.

    Biography: Geir E. Dullerud is the W. Grafton and Lillian B. Wilkins Professor in Mechanical Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. There he is also a member of the Coordinated Science Laboratory, where he is Director of the Decision and Control Laboratory (21 faculty); he is an Affiliate Professor of both Computer Science, and Electrical and Computer Engineering. He has held visiting positions in Electrical Engineering KTH, Stockholm (2013), and Aeronautics and Astronautics, Stanford University (2005-2006). Earlier he was on faculty in Applied Mathematics at the University of Waterloo (1996-1998), after being a Research Fellow at the California Institute of Technology (1994- 1995), in the Control and Dynamical Systems Department. He holds a PhD in Engineering from Cambridge University. He has published two books: A Course in Robust Control Theory, Texts in Applied Mathematics, Springer, 2000, and Control of Uncertain Sampled-data Systems, Birkhauser 1996. His areas of current research interest include convex optimization in control, cyber-physical system security, cooperative robotics, stochastic simulation, and hybrid dynamical systems. In 1999 he received the CAREER Award from the National Science Foundation, and in 2005 the Xerox Faculty Research Award at UIUC. He is a Fellow of both IEEE (2008) and ASME (2011). He is the General Chair of the upcoming IFAC workshop Distributed Estimation and Control in Networked Systems (NECSYS) to be held in Chicago in 2019.

    Host: Mihailo Jovanovic, mihailo@usc.edu

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

    More Information: 18.11.26_Geir Dullerud 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/dullerud.html

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  • Epstein Institute Seminar - ISE 651

    Tue, Nov 27, 2018 @ 03:30 PM - 04:50 PM

    Daniel J. Epstein Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Talk Title: Last Class Session

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

    Audiences: Department Only

    Contact: Grace Owh

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  • MASCLE Machine Learning Seminar: William Wang (UCSB) – Learning to Generate Language and Actions with Structured Agents

    Tue, Nov 27, 2018 @ 03:30 PM - 04:50 PM

    Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: William Wang, University of California, Santa Barbara

    Talk Title: Learning to Generate Language and Actions with Structured Agents

    Series: Machine Learning Seminar Series

    Abstract: A major challenge in Natural Language Processing is to teach machines to generate natural language and actions. However, existing deep learning approaches to language generation do not impose structural constraints in the generation process, often producing low-quality results. In this context, we will introduce our attempt of imposing structural constraints for video captioning via hierarchical reinforcement learning. Moreover, we observe that most of the automated metrics for generation could be gamed, and therefore, we propose an adversarial reward learning method to automatically learn the reward via inverse reinforcement learning. Furthermore, I will discuss our recent attempts in connecting language and vision to actions via a language grounding task for robot navigation, and introduce new algorithms on scheduled policy optimization and combining model-free and model-based reinforcement learning. I will conclude by introducing other exciting research projects at UCSB's NLP Group.

    This lecture satisfies requirements for CSCI 591: Research Colloquium.


    Biography: William Wang is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He received his PhD from School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University in 2016. He has broad interests in machine learning approaches to data science, including natural language processing, statistical relational learning, information extraction, computational social science, dialogue, and vision. He directs UCSB's NLP Group (nlp.cs.ucsb.edu): in two years, UCSB advanced in the NLP area from an undefined ranking position to top 3 in 2018 according CSRankings.org. He has published more than 60 papers at leading NLP/AI/ML conferences and journals, and received best paper awards (or nominations) at ASRU 2013, CIKM 2013, and EMNLP 2015, a DARPA Young Faculty Award (Class of 2018), two IBM Faculty Awards in 2017 and 2018, a Facebook Research Award in 2018, an Adobe Research Award in 2018, and the Richard King Mellon Presidential Fellowship in 2011. He served as an Area Chair for NAACL, ACL, EMNLP, and AAAI. He is an alumnus of Columbia University, Yahoo! Labs, Microsoft Research Redmond, and University of Southern California. In addition to research, William enjoys writing scientific articles that impact the broader online community: his microblog @王威廉 has 110,000+ followers and more than 2,000,000 views each month. His work and opinions appear at major international tech media outlets such as Wired, VICE, Fast Company, NASDAQ, The Next Web, Law.com, and Mental Floss.


    Host: Yan Liu, USC Machine Learning Center

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

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Computer Science Department

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  • CS Colloquium: Chad Jenkins (University of Michigan) - Semantic Robot Programming... and Making the World a Better Place Too

    Tue, Nov 27, 2018 @ 04:00 PM - 05:00 PM

    Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Chad Jenkins, University of Michigan

    Talk Title: Semantic Robot Programming...and Making the World a Better Place Too

    Series: CS Colloquium

    Abstract: The visions of interconnected heterogeneous autonomous robots in widespread use are a coming reality that will reshape our world. Similar to "app stores" for modern computing, people at varying levels of technical background will contribute to "robot app stores" as designers and developers. However, current paradigms to program robots beyond simple cases remains inaccessible to all but the most sophisticated of developers and researchers. In order for people to fluently program autonomous robots, a robot must be able to interpret user instructions that accord with that user's model of the world. The challenge is that many aspects of such a model are difficult or impossible for the robot to sense directly. We posit a critical missing component is the grounding of semantic symbols in a manner that addresses both uncertainty in low-level robot perception and intentionality in high-level reasoning. Such a grounding will enable robots to fluidly work with human collaborators to perform tasks that require extended goal-directed autonomy.

    I will present our efforts towards accessible and general methods of robot programming from the demonstrations of human users. Our recent work has focused on Semantic Robot Programming (SRP), a declarative paradigm for robot programming by demonstration that builds on semantic mapping. In contrast to procedural methods for motion imitation in configuration space, SRP is suited to generalize user demonstrations of goal scenes in workspace, such as for manipulation in cluttered environments. SRP extends our efforts to crowdsource robot learning from demonstration at scale through messaging protocols suited to web/cloud robotics. With such scaling or robotics in mind, prospects for cultivating both equal opportunity and technological excellence will be discussed in the context of broadening and strengthening Title IX.



    Biography: Odest Chadwicke Jenkins, Ph.D., is an Associate Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Michigan. Prof. Jenkins earned his B.S. in Computer Science and Mathematics at Alma College (1996), M.S. in Computer Science at Georgia Tech (1998), and Ph.D. in Computer Science at the University of Southern California (2003). He previously served on the faculty of Brown University in Computer Science (2004-15). His research addresses problems in interactive robotics and human-robot interaction, primarily focused on mobile manipulation, robot perception, and robot learning from demonstration. He is a founder of the Robot Web Tools open-source robotics organization. Prof. Jenkins' work has been recognized by a Sloan Research Fellow, a Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE), and Young Investigator awards from the Office of Naval Research, the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, and the National Science Foundation. Prof. Jenkins is currently serving as the Editor-in-Chief for the ACM Transactions on Human-Robot Interaction

    Host: Maja Mataric

    Location: Ronald Tutor Hall of Engineering (RTH) - 105

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Assistant to CS chair

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

    Wed, Nov 28, 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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  • Computer Science General Faculty Meeting

    Wed, Nov 28, 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: Ronald Tutor Hall of Engineering (RTH) - 526

    Audiences: Invited Faculty Only

    Contact: Assistant to CS chair

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  • Decentralized Signal Processing and Distributed Control for Collaborative Autonomous Sensor Networks

    Wed, Nov 28, 2018 @ 12:00 PM - 01:00 PM

    Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Ryan Alan Goldhahn & Priyadip Ray, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory

    Talk Title: Decentralized Signal Processing and Distributed Control for Collaborative Autonomous Sensor Networks

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

    Abstract: Collaborative autonomous sensor networks have recently been used in many applications including inspection, law enforcement, search and rescue, and national security. They offer scalable, low-cost solutions which are robust to the loss of multiple sensors in hostile or dangerous environments. While often comprised of less capable sensors, the performance of a large network can approach the performance of far more capable and expensive platforms if nodes are effectively coordinating their sensing actions and data processing. This talk will summarize work to date at LLNL on distributed signal processing and decentralized optimization algorithms for collaborative autonomous sensor networks, focusing on ADMM-based solutions for detection/estimation problems and sequential and/or greedy optimization solutions which maximize submodular functions such as mutual information.

    Biography: Ryan Goldhahn holds a Ph.D. in electrical engineering from Duke University with a focus in statistical and model-based signal processing. Ryan joined the NATO Centre for Maritime Research and Experimentation (CMRE) as a researcher in 2010 and later as the project lead for an effort to use multiple unmanned underwater vehicles (UUVs) to detect and track submarines using multi-static active sonar. In this work he developed collaborative autonomous behaviors to optimally reposition UUVs to improve tracking performance without human intervention. He led several experiments at sea with submarines from multiple NATO nations. At LLNL Ryan has continued to work and lead projects in collaborative autonomy and model-based and statistical signal processing in various applications. He has specifically focused on decentralized detection/estimation/tracking and optimization algorithms for autonomous sensor networks.

    Priyadip Ray received a Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering from Syracuse University in 2009. His Ph.D. dissertation received the Syracuse University All-University Doctoral Prize. Prior to joining LLNL, Dr. Ray was an assistant professor at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Kharagpur, India where he supervised a research group of approximately 10 scholars in the areas of statistical signal processing, wireless communications, optimization, machine learning and Bayesian non-parametrics. Prior to this he was a research scientist with the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Duke University. Dr. Ray has published close to 40 research articles in various highly-rated journals and conference proceedings and is also a reviewer for leading journals in the areas of statistical signal processing, wireless communications and data science. At LLNL, Dr. Ray has been the PI/Co-I on multiple LDRDs as well as a DARPA funded research effort in the areas of machine learning for healthcare and collaborative autonomy.

    Host: Paul Bogdan

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

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Talyia White

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  • AME Seminar

    Wed, Nov 28, 2018 @ 03:30 PM - 04:30 PM

    Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Heather Culbertson, USC

    Talk Title: Can You Feel It? Haptics for Realism and Virtual Communication

    Abstract: The haptic (touch) sensations felt when interacting with the physical world create a rich and varied impression of objects and their environment. Humans can a gather significant amount of information through touch with their environment, allowing them to assess object properties and qualities, dexterously handle objects, and communicate social cues and emotions. However, humans are spending significantly more time in the virtual world and are increasingly interacting with people and objects through a digital medium. Unfortunately, digital interactions remain unsatisfying and limited, representing the human as having only two sensory inputs: visual and auditory.

    This talk will focus on the investigation of haptic devices and rendering algorithms to provide humans with touch feedback when communicating through a computer. I will present a background on the sense of touch and illustrate how we can leverage this knowledge to design haptic devices and rendering systems that allow the human to virtually communicate in a natural and intuitive way. I will then discuss our work in creating realistic haptics in virtual reality through both data-driven modeling and novel haptic hardware.

    Biography: Heather Culbertson is a WiSE Gabilan Assistant Professor of Computer Science and Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering at the University of Southern California where she directs the Haptics Robotics and Virtual Interaction (HaRVI) Lab. Previously, she was a research scientist in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at Stanford University. She received her PhD in the Department of Mechanical Engineering and Applied Mechanics (MEAM) at the University of Pennsylvania in 2015, a MS degree in MEAM at the University of Pennsylvania in 2013 and earned a BS degree in mechanical engineering at the University of Nevada, Reno in 2010. She is currently serving as the Vice-Chair for Information Dissemination for the IEEE Technical Committee on Haptics. Her awards include a citation for meritorious service as a reviewer for the IEEE Transactions on Haptics, Best Paper at UIST 2017, and the Best Hands-On Demonstration Award at IEEE World Haptics 2013.

    Host: Julian Domaradzki

    More Info: https://ame.usc.edu/seminars/

    Location: Seaver Science Library (SSL) - 150

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Tessa Yao

    Event Link: https://ame.usc.edu/seminars/

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  • CS Distinguished Lecture: Rodney Allen Brooks (MIT, iRobot, Rethink) - Steps Towards Super Intelligence

    Wed, Nov 28, 2018 @ 05:00 PM - 06:20 PM

    Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Rodney Allen Brooks, MIT, iRobot, Rethink

    Talk Title: Steps Towards Super Intelligence

    Series: CS Distinguished Lectures

    Abstract: In his 1950 paper "Computing Machinery and Intelligence" Alan Turing estimated that sixty people working for fifty years should be able to program a computer (running at 1950 speed) to have human level intelligence. AI researchers have spent orders of magnitude more effort than that and are still not close. Why has AI been so hard and what are the problems that we might work on in order to make real progress to human level intelligence, or even the super intelligence that many pundits believe is just around the corner? This talk will discuss those steps we can take, what aspects we really still do not have much of a clue about, what we might be currently getting completely wrong, and why it all could be centuries away. Importantly the talk will make distinctions between research questions and barriers to technology adoption from research results, with a little speculation on things that might go wrong (spoiler alert: it is the mundane that will have the big consequences, not the Hollywood scenarios that the press and some academics love to talk about).

    This lecture satisfies requirements for CSCI 591: Research Colloquium.

    Biography: Rodney Brooks earned Bachelors and Masters degrees in pure mathematics from Flinders University in South Australia. In 1977 he joined the Artificial Intelligence Lab at Stanford graduating with a PhD in computer science in 1981. After post-docs at Carnegie Mellow and MIT, and a faculty position back at Stanford he joined the MIT faculty at the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory there in 1984. He worked in computer vision, robotics, and artificial life. He became director of the AI Lab in 1997 and in 2003 he founded the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab, CSAIL, which is the largest lab at MIT with over 1,000 members. Along the way he started a software company in silicon valley, a boutique robotics venture capital fund, the company iRobot which has delivered tens of millions of home cleaning robots and many thousand ground robots to the US military, and more recently spent 10 years developing collaborative robots for manufacturing at Rethink Robotics. He retired from MIT In 2010, and currently advises companies large and small, including Toyota and their autonomous driving efforts. He is a member of the NAE and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and of the IEEE, ACM, AAAS, and AAAI. He writes at rodneybrooks.com/blog.

    Host: Maja Mataric

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

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Assistant to CS chair

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  • Ming Hsieh Institite: Emerging Trends Seminar Series

    Thu, Nov 29, 2018 @ 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM

    Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: C.-C. Jay Kuo, Distinguished Professor of Electrical Engineering-Systems and Computer Science, Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical Engineering

    Talk Title: Interpretable Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) via Feedforward Design

    Series: Emerging Trends

    Abstract: Given a convolutional neural network (CNN) architecture, its network parameters are determined by backpropagation (BP). In contrast with the BP design, we propose a feedforward (FF) and interpretable design with the LeNet-5 as an illustrative example. The FF design is a data-centric approach that derives network parameters based on training data statistics layer by layer in one pass. To build the convolutional layers, we develop a new signal transform, called the Saab (Subspace approximation with adjusted bias) transform. The bias in filter weights is chosen to annihilate nonlinearity of the activation function. To build the fully-connected (FC) layers, we adopt a label-guided linear least squared regression (LSR) method. The FF design is more computationally efficient and robust against adversarial attacks than the traditional BP design. The classification performances of BP-designed and FF-designed CNNs on the MNIST and the CIFAR-10 datasets are compared. Finally, we comment on the relationship between BP and FF designs by examining their cross-entropy values at nodes of intermediate layers.

    Biography: Dr. C.-C. Jay Kuo received his Ph.D. degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1987. He is now with the University of Southern California (USC) as Director of the Media Communications Laboratory and Distinguished Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. His research interests are in the areas of media processing, compression and understanding. Dr. Kuo was the Editor-in-Chief for the IEEE Trans. on Information Forensics and Security in 2012-2014. Dr. Kuo received the 1992 National Science Foundation Young Investigator (NYI) Award, the 1993 National Science Foundation Presidential Faculty Fellow (PFF) Award, the 2010 Electronic Imaging Scientist of the Year Award, the 2010-11 Fulbright-Nokia Distinguished Chair in Information and Communications Technologies, the 2011 Pan Wen-Yuan Outstanding Research Award, the 2014 USC Northrop Grumman Excellence in Teaching Award, the 2016 USC Associates Award for Excellence in Teaching, the 2016 IEEE Computer Society Taylor L. Booth Education Award, the 2016 IEEE Circuits and Systems Society John Choma Education Award, the 2016 IS&T Raymond C. Bowman Award, and the 2017 IEEE Leon K. Kirchmayer Graduate Teaching Award. Dr. Kuo is a Fellow of AAAS, IEEE and SPIE. He has guided 147 students to their Ph.D. degrees and supervised 27 postdoctoral research fellows. Dr. Kuo is a co-author of 275 journal papers, 900 conference papers and 14 books.

    Host: MHI

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

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Benjamin Paul

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  • MHI Research & Technology Seminar

    Thu, Nov 29, 2018 @ 01:00 PM - 02:30 PM

    Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Ruirui Huang, Senior Staff Architect/Director of Cloud Architecture at Alibaba Cloud

    Talk Title: Security Architectural Design and Challenges in the Cloud

    Series: MHI Research & Technology Seminar

    Abstract: I will introduce the multi-layered security architectural design of Alibaba Cloud. Specifically, several technologies and mechanisms in each layer will be highlighted and discussed in terms of their importance and the security purposes which they serve. Additionally, I will raise several security challenges in today's cloud computing domain, and discuss how one might address them today and if there is a better solution in the future.

    Biography: Dr. Ruirui Huang is a Senior Staff Architect/Director of Cloud Architecture at Alibaba Cloud (US office, based in Seattle, WA). He is responsible for overseeing and developing the Alibaba Cloud Platform Architecture, with a focus on the secure cloud computing architecture. He is also the author of Alibaba Cloud Security White-paper which was published earlier in 2018. Prior joining Alibaba Cloud, he was a Senior Security Architect at Intel, responsible for multiple Server/PC/Mobile SoCs security architectural designs.

    Dr. Ruirui Huang graduated with a Ph.D. degree from the ECE department of the Cornell University in 2013, with research works and interests in the field of computer architectural support of security, reliability, and availability in today's computing world.


    Host: MHI

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

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Benjamin Paul

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  • CS Tech Talk: DiDi Tech Talk with Dr. Fengmin Gong and Dr. Kevin Knight

    Thu, Nov 29, 2018 @ 03:30 PM - 04:50 PM

    Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Dr. Fengmin Gong and Dr. Kevin Knight, Didi

    Talk Title: Talk 1: AI for Transportation; Talk 2: The Moment When the Future Fell Asleep

    Series: Computer Science Colloquium

    Abstract: We are pleased to announce two talks during this colloquium.

    Talk 1: Taming Technologies and Transforming Transportation
    The world is at the dawn of a Fourth Industrial Revolution fueled by big data, AI, automation, vehicle electrification, and the sharing economy -“ and with this, comes both excitement for the prospect of changing society for the better, and fear of a possible threat to humanity.

    Our mission at DiDi is to build a better journey, and we believe we can tame the revolution by designing and building technologies that meet the needs of people, democratize access and benefits, and are aligned with human values.

    In this talk, we will share how our R&D teams in the Americas and China work side-by-side to provide rideshare experiences that are safe, convenient and affordable. We will also highlight our continuous research and work on advanced initiatives in safety and security, customer support, smart transportation systems, autonomous vehicles, and AI.


    Talk 2: The Moment When the Future Fell Asleep
    Recently, recurrent neural networks (RNNs) have been revolutionizing natural language processing and other fields. Among other things, RNNs can assign probabilities to sequences (such as English sentences) and transform one sequence into another (such as English into French). I will describe some of our work over the past couple of years, addressing four questions: What are neural sequence models learning? How can they learn better? Are there theoretical limits? Can they be creative?


    This lecture satisfies requirements for CSCI 591: Research Colloquium.


    Biography: Talk 1: Fengmin is a well-respected technologist in cybersecurity with more than 30 years experience. He is also a serial entrepreneur and angel investor. Fengmin has been a founder and senior executive in several leading security companies. Among them are Palo Alto Networks, FireEye, McAfee and Cyphort. He is a trusted advisor to many entrepreneurs and venture capitalists. He has 18 awarded patents and over 40 technical publications in security and networking.

    Talk 2: Kevin Knight is Chief Scientist for Natural Language Processing (NLP) at DiDi Chuxing. He leads a DiDi lab in Marina del Rey devoted to NLP research. He is also Dean's Professor of Computer Science at USC (on leave). He received a PhD in computer science from Carnegie Mellon University and a bachelor's degree from Harvard University. Dr. Knight's research interests include human-machine communication, machine translation, language generation, automata theory, and decipherment. He has co-authored over 150 research paper on natural language processing, including best paper/demo awards at AAAI 2000, ACL 2001, NAACL 2009, ACL 2017, ACL 2018, and NAACL 2018. Dr. Knight also co-authored the widely-adopted textbook "Artificial Intelligence" (McGraw-Hill). In 2001, he co-founded Language Weaver, Inc., a machine translation company acquired by SDL plc in 2010. Dr. Knight was a key researcher in programs run by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). He served as President of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) in 2011, as General Chair for the Annual Conference of the ACL in 2005, and as General Chair for the North American ACL conference in 2016. He is a Fellow of the ACL, a Fellow of ISI, and a Fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI).


    Host: Computer Science Department

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

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Computer Science Department

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

    Fri, Nov 30, 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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  • Transfer Day - Morning Session

    Fri, Nov 30, 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.

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Viterbi Admission

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  • PhD Defense- Rama Kovvuri

    Fri, Nov 30, 2018 @ 10:00 AM - 12:00 PM

    Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science

    University Calendar


    PhD Defense- Rama Kovvuri

    Nov. 30, 2018
    EEB 539
    10:00-11:30am

    Title: Semantic-based visual information retrieval for natural language phrases
    Committee: Ramakant Nevatia, Jyotirmoy Deshmukh , Panayiotis Georgiou (external member)

    Abstract:
    Visual information retrieval is an important task in various fields such as Visual Search, Robotics, Autonomous driving and Robotics. Associating visual entities with natural language is a challenging task given the diversity and ambiguity in both language and vision.

    The primary goal of my research is to predict the semantics in visual entities and associate them to natural language phrases. With the advent of deep learning, computer vision systems are able to achieve high accuracy in basic tasks such as image classification and detection. I aim to leverage these advancements to build higher-level vision-language systems that can associate arbitrary queries to visual entities.

    My PhD work mainly focuses on the following three aspects towards this goal: (1) Generate diverse object proposals from visual entities; (2) Learn rich semantics from these generated proposals; (3) Associate natural language phrases to these proposals. In the defense talk, I will introduce my recent work on supervised phrase grounding and weakly-supervise phrase grounding. I will also provide a brief overview of the history and state-of-the-art methods for phrase grounding.

    Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 539

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Lizsl De Leon

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  • Transfer Day - Afternoon Session

    Fri, Nov 30, 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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