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SUNMONTUEWEDTHUFRISAT
Events for the 1st week of December
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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 28, 2016 @ 02:00 PM - 03:00 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Luca Foschini , Co-founder and Chief Data Scientist, Evidation Health
Talk Title: Learn Health (from Your Wrist)
Abstract: Wearable technologies have seen a tremendous development in recent years: step and calorie counters have long made their way to our phones and watches, and new consumer-grade sensors can now measure a breadth of physiological functions that until recently could only be found in the monitoring equipment of intensive care units. However, despite the undisputed short-term benefits due to the user increased awareness, quantifying the potential value of wearable technologies in improving longer-term health outcomes remains an open question. In this talk we will present evidence that activity tracking data contains a wealth of information that is predictive of metrics directly related to health outcomes, ranging from medication adherence to lifestyle. To this end, we will show how machine learning tools need to be adapted to take full advantage of densely sampled, multi-variate time series of tracker data. Finally, we will reflect on how the predictive power of wearable data can be harnessed to inform behavior change interventions, and how expertise in computer science, clinical medicine, and behavioral psychology will have to join forces to overcome obstacles in adoption, user engagement, and regulations.
Biography: As Co-founder and Chief Data Scientist at Evidation Health, Luca Foschini PhD is responsible for data analytics, computing, research and development. Dr. Foschini has driven research collaborations with machine learning experts at MIT, behavioral economics departments at Harvard Business School and the Wharton School. Prior to his role at Evidation, Dr. Foschini held research positions in industry and academic institutions, including Ask.com, Google, ETH Zurich, and UC Santa Barbara. He has published numerous papers and co-authored several patents on efficient algorithms for partitioning and detecting anomalies in massive networks.Dr. Foschini is an alumnus of the Sant'Anna School of Pisa, Italy.
Host: Pierluigi Nuzzo
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 248
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Estela Lopez
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USC Stem Cell Seminar: Michael Elowitz, California Institute of Technology
Tue, Nov 29, 2016 @ 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Alfred E. Mann Department of Biomedical Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Michael Elowitz, California Institute of Technology
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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Center for Cyber-Physical Systems and Internet of Things and Ming Hsieh Institute for Electrical Engineering Joint Seminar Series on Cyber-Physical Systems
Tue, Nov 29, 2016 @ 02:00 PM - 03:00 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Partha Pratim Pande, Professor, Washington State University
Talk Title: Bringing Cores Closer Together: The Wireless Revolution in On-Chip Communication
Abstract: The continuing progress and integration levels in silicon technologies make complete end-user systems on a single chip possible. This massive level of integration makes modern manycore chips all pervasive in domains ranging from weather forecasting, astronomical data analysis, and biological applications to consumer electronics and smart phones. Network-on-Chips (NoCs) have emerged as communication backbones to enable a high degree of integration in manycore platforms. Despite their advantages, an important performance limitation in traditional NoCs arises from planar metal interconnect-based multi-hop communications, wherein the data transfer between far-apart blocks causes high latency and power consumption. The latency, power consumption, and interconnect routing problems of NoCs can be simultaneously addressed by replacing multi-hop wired paths with high-bandwidth single-hop long-range wireless links. In this talk, we will present design of the millimeter (mm)-wave wireless NoC architectures. We will present detailed performance evaluation and necessary design trade-offs for the small-world network-enabled wireless NoCs with respect to their conventional wireline counterparts in presence of both conventional CMP and emerging big data workloads. We will discuss how Machine Learning can be exploited to design energy efficient Wireless NoC architectures. We will finish this presentation by discussing how the wireless NoC paradigm can enable realization of datacenter-on-chip using heterogeneous processing cores.
Biography: Partha Pratim Pande is a Professor and holder of the Boeing Centennial Chair in computer engineering at the school of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Washington State University, Pullman, USA. His current research interests are novel interconnect architectures for manycore chips, on-chip wireless communication networks, and hardware accelerators for biocomputing. Dr. Pande currently serves as the Editor-in-Chief (EIC) of IEEE Transactions on Multi-Scale Computing Systems (TMSCS) and Associate Editor-in-Chief (A-EIC) of IEEE Design and Test (D&T). He is on the editorial boards of IEEE Transactions on VLSI (TVLSI), ACM Journal of Emerging Technologies in Computing Systems (JETC). He was the technical program committee chair of IEEE/ACM Network-on-Chip Symposium 2015. He also serves in the program committee of many reputed international conferences. He has won the NSF CAREER award in 2009. He is the winner of the Anjan Bose outstanding researcher award from the college of engineering, Washington State University in 2013.
Host: Paul Bogdan
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 248
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Estela Lopez
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Epstein Institute Seminar
Tue, Nov 29, 2016 @ 03:30 PM - 04:50 PM
Daniel J. Epstein Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Dr. Benjamin F. Hobbs, John Hopkins University
Talk Title: How Can We Use Optimization to Design Electric Power Markets to Support Socially Optimal Decisions
Host: Dr. Jong-shi Pang
More Information: November 29, 2016_Hobbs.pdf
Location: Ethel Percy Andrus Gerontology Center (GER) - 206
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Michele ISE
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CS Colloquium: Richard Samworth (University of Cambridge) - High-dimensional changepoint estimation via sparse projection
Tue, Nov 29, 2016 @ 04:00 PM - 05:00 PM
Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Richard Samworth, University of Cambridge
Talk Title: High-dimensional changepoint estimation via sparse projection
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.
Changepoints are a very common feature of Big Data that arrive in the form of a data stream. We study high-dimensional time series in which, at certain time points, the mean structure changes in a sparse subset of the coordinates. The challenge is to borrow strength across the coordinates in order to detect smaller changes than could be observed in any individual component series. We propose a two-stage procedure called 'inspect' for estimation of the changepoints: first, we argue that a good projection direction can be obtained as the leading left singular vector of the matrix that solves a convex optimisation problem derived from the CUSUM transformation of the time series. We then apply an existing univariate changepoint detection algorithm to the projected series. Our theory provides strong guarantees on both the number of estimated changepoints and the rates of convergence of their locations, and our numerical studies validate its highly competitive empirical performance for a wide range of data generating mechanisms.
Biography: I am a Professor of Statistics in the Statistical Laboratory, a sub-department of the Department of Pure Mathematics and Mathematical Statistics. This is part of the Faculty of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge. I am also a Teaching Fellow at St John's College, and run the Statistics Clinic for members of the university.
I currently hold a five-year EPSRC Early Career Fellowship, which began on 1 December 2012. I am also an Alan Turing Institute Faculty Fellow.
Host: Yan Liu
Location: Henry Salvatori Computer Science Center (SAL) - 101
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Assistant to CS chair
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MHI CommNetS Seminar
Wed, Nov 30, 2016 @ 02:00 AM - 03:00 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Mohammad Rasouli, University of Michigan
Talk Title: Capacity and Energy Markets for Stable Renewable Economy
Series: CommNetS
Abstract: Existing supportive mechanisms for investment on renewable energies are not sustainable with higher penetration level of renewables. Rather, these mechanism should be replaced by market mechanisms. On the other hand, spot markets in place for conventional energies already suffer from underinvestment problem and there is an ongoing debate on the use of capacity markets for motivating sufficient investment.
In this talk we discuss the economical origins of underinvestment in conventional economies, and how renewables will change the situation. We propose a block investment market mechanism with forward moving approach that has the following features. (F1) The expansion and production allocations corresponding to the unique Nash Equilibrium (NE) of the game induced by the mechanism are the same as those that maximize the sum of utilities of the producers and the demand. (F2) It is budget balanced. (F3) It is individually rational. (F4) It is price efficient that is, the price for electricity at equilibrium is equal to the marginal utility of the demand and to the marginal cost of production by producers with free capacity.
Biography: Mohammad Rasouli is a PhD student in EECS: Systems joint with MSc in Economics at University of Michigan. He has received his Bachelor in EE from Sharif University of Technology. He uses stochastic control, game theory and mechanism design to study emerging cyber-physical systems including energy systems and cyber-security.
Host: Prof. Ashutosh Nayyar
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 248
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Annie Yu
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PhD Defense - Greg Harris
Wed, Nov 30, 2016 @ 10:30 AM - 12:30 PM
Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science
University Calendar
Customized Data Mining Objective Functions
Ph.D. candidate: Greg Harris
Wednesday, Nov. 30, 2016
10:30 AM, EEB 110
Abstract:
Interpretable machine learning models, such as classification rule lists, enable knowledge discovery and model vetting by domain experts. Their transparency, however, often comes at the cost of accuracy, when compared to more complex models. Our research seeks to improve the accuracy of such models while retaining their interpretable rule-based form. Our strategy is to generate domain-dependent objective functions that specify heuristic trade-offs tailored for individual datasets.
Our first contribution is FrontierMiner, a new rule-based algorithm for predicting a target class with high precision. It learns a non-parametric objective function directly from the data. We show that FrontierMiner finds higher-precision rules more often than competing rule induction systems in a study involving 1,000 synthetic datasets and 138 real-world classification tasks. Our second contribution is PRIMER, a new algorithm for maximizing event impact on time series. It has an objective function that adapts to the level of noise in the data. It also incorporates user-provided input on the expected response pattern as a heuristic that helps prevent over-fitting. We show PRIMER is competitive with state-of-the-art regression techniques in a large financial event study, yet has improved model interpretability. Our third contribution is a method of learning an objective function from user feedback in the form of pairwise rankings. With this feedback, we use learning-to-rank algorithms to combine existing measures into an overall objective function that more closely matches the user's preference. We conclude the presentation with directions for future research.
Biography:
Greg Harris is currently a PhD candidate in the Computer Science Department at the University of Southern California. His research interests include data mining, pattern recognition, and machine learning. He also holds a Master of Financial Mathematics degree from the University of Minnesota and a Bachelor of Science degree in Applied Physics from Brigham Young University.
Defense Committee: Viktor Prasanna (chair), Cauligi Raghavendra, Ellis Horowitz
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 110
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Lizsl De Leon
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Astani Civil and Environmental Engineering Seminar
Wed, Nov 30, 2016 @ 12:00 PM - 01:00 PM
Sonny Astani Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Mari Winkler, Ph.D., University of Washington
Talk Title: Do More in Less: Intensifying Wastewater Treatment Plants with Aerobic Granular Sludge Technology
Abstract: See Attachment
More Information: Environmental Engineering Seminar.docx
Location: John Stauffer Science Lecture Hall (SLH) - 100
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Evangeline Reyes
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MHI/EE-Electrophysics Seminar, Wednesday, November 30th at 2PM in EEB 132
Wed, Nov 30, 2016 @ 02:00 PM - 03:30 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: David Allstot, University of California at Berkeley
Talk Title: Switched-Capacitor Circuits Research in Wireless Networks and Ultra-low-power Sensor Interfaces
Abstract: Emerging wireless standards aggregate information by selecting combinations of contiguous or non-contiguous channels, thereby enabling wider transmission bandwidths, and hence, higher data rates. Frequency-interleaved analog-to-digital conversion (FI-ADC) is an attractive emerging technique for carrier aggregation receivers because it facilitates an efficient way to dynamically vary the receiver bandwidth in order to address the many possible channel combinations. Compared to their time-interleaved counterparts, the specifications of the samplers in each parallel channel in FI-ADCs are significantly relaxed, thereby resulting in lower overall power consumption in the receiver. This work extends the FI-ADC idea to the quadrature frequency-interleaved oversampled data converter (QFI-ADC) to achieve greater aggregate data rates. Previously, digital-to-analog converter (DAC) and other inter-channel mismatches have limited the performance of QFI-ADCs. We propose a low-complexity element rotation algorithm (ERA) to mitigate DAC mismatches. The ERA is synthesized from the corresponding mismatch transfer function using a rigorous mathematical procedure which is shown to be generally applicable to low-pass, high-pass, band-pass and quadrature ERA's. Simulations confirm that the resulting low-complexity quadrature ERAs have advantages over previously proposed approaches in terms of both performance and hardware complexity. An additional gain calibration technique alleviates image folding due to mismatches between the quadrature DAC elements, which yields higher SNDR.
The original switched-capacitor power amplifier is a polar power amplifier, amplifying a non-constant envelope modulation by linear combination of the amplitude modulation and phase modulation. It has since been extended to operate across multiple supply domains and to operate using quadrature and multiphase signals. The proposed research will be important to extend the SCPA architecture for future applications. For instance, the SCPA can be used as an enabling technology for massive MIMO, where moderate power, highly efficient, versatile transmitter cores with moderate die area are needed. In massive MIMO, hundreds of transmitter chains drive hundreds of antenna elements to form communications beams that enhance data service to multiple individual users. In addition to massive MIMO, the SCPA offers high efficiency for low-power, high order modulation schemes that are being deployed for wireless sensor systems prevalent in the internet of things. Additionally the SCPA can offer enhanced out-of-band rejection by implementing digital filtering directly in the RF front-end circuitry of a transmitter. This can be by means of weighted summation of an array of small SCPAs. Finally the frequency range of the SCPA can be extended.
Finally, research on the use of CMOS ring amplifier circuits in bio-medical and other ultra-low-power sensor networks is discussed. An analog compressed sensing front-end is used to motivate further investigations.
Biography: David J. Allstot received the B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. degrees from the Univ. of Portland, Oregon State Univ., and the Univ. of California, Berkeley.
He has held several industrial and academic positions. He was the Boeing-Egtvedt Chair Professor of Engineering at the Univ. of Washington from 1999 to 2012 and Chair of the Dept. of Electrical Engineering from 2004 to 2007. In 2012 he was a Visiting Professor of Electrical Engineering at Stanford University and from 2013 to 2016, he held a three-year appointment as the MacKay Professor in Residence in the EECS Dept. at UC Berkeley.
Dr. Allstot has advised about 65 M.S. and 40 Ph.D. graduates, published more than 300 papers, and received several awards for outstanding teaching and research including the 1980 IEEE W.R.G. Baker Award, 1995 and 2010 IEEE Circuits and Systems Society (CASS) Darlington Award, 1998 IEEE International Solid-State Circuits Conference (ISSCC) Beatrice Winner Award, 2004 IEEE CASS Charles A. Desoer Technical Achievement Award, 2005 Semiconductor Research Corp. Aristotle Award, 2008 Semiconductor Industries Assoc. University Research Award, 2011 IEEE CASS Mac Van Valkenburg Award, and 2015 IEEE Trans. on Biomedical Circuits and Systems Best Paper Award. He has been very active in service to the IEEE Circuits and Systems and Solid-State Circuits Societies throughout his career.
Host: MHI/EE-Electrophysics
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 132
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Marilyn Poplawski
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MHI CommNetS Seminar
Wed, Nov 30, 2016 @ 02:00 PM - 03:00 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Mohammad Rasouli, University of Michigan
Talk Title: Capacity and Energy Markets for Stable Renewable Economy
Series: CommNetS
Abstract: Existing supportive mechanisms for investment on renewable energies are not sustainable with higher penetration level of renewables. Rather, these mechanism should be replaced by market mechanisms. On the other hand, spot markets in place for conventional energies already suffer from underinvestment problem and there is an ongoing debate on the use of capacity markets for motivating sufficient investment.
In this talk we discuss the economical origins of underinvestment in conventional economies, and how renewables will change the situation. We propose a block investment market mechanism with forward moving approach that has the following features. (F1) The expansion and production allocations corresponding to the unique Nash Equilibrium (NE) of the game induced by the mechanism are the same as those that maximize the sum of utilities of the producers and the demand. (F2) It is budget balanced. (F3) It is individually rational. (F4) It is price efï¬cient that is, the price for electricity at equilibrium is equal to the marginal utility of the demand and to the marginal cost of production by producers with free capacity.
Biography: Mohammad Rasouli is a PhD student in EECS: Systems joint with MSc in Economics at University of Michigan. He has received his Bachelor in EE from Sharif University of Technology. He uses stochastic control, game theory and mechanism design to study emerging cyber-physical systems including energy systems and cyber-security.
Host: Prof. Ashutosh Nayyar
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 248
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Annie Yu
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CS Colloquium: Grace Hui Yang (Georgetown University) - Statistical Modeling of Information Seeking
Wed, Nov 30, 2016 @ 02:30 PM - 03:30 PM
Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Grace Hui Yang , Georgetown University
Talk Title: Statistical Modeling of Information Seeking
Series: CS Colloquium
Abstract: Many modern IR systems and data exhibit new characteristics which are largely ignored by conventional techniques. What is missing is an ability for the model to change over time and be responsive to stimulus. Documents, relevance, users and tasks all exhibit dynamic behavior that is captured in big data sets (typically collected over long time spans) and models need to respond to these changes. This talk provides an up-to-date introduction to statistical modeling of information seeking. In particular, I will talk about how we model information seeking as a partially observable Markov decision process and achieve high accuracy in the TREC Session Tracks. I will also talk about evaluation in dynamic information retrieval modeling and the TREC Dynamic Domain Track.
Biography: Grace Hui Yang is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Georgetown University. Grace obtained her Ph.D. from the Language Technologies Institute, Carnegie Mellon University in 2011. Grace's current research interests include dynamic search, search engine evaluation, privacy-preserving information retrieval, and information organization. Prior to this, she conducted research on question answering, ontology construction, near-duplicate detection, multimedia information retrieval and opinion and sentiment detection. Grace is a recipient of the National Science Foundation (NSF) Faculty Early Career Development Program (CAREER) Award. Grace co-chaired the SIGIR 2013-2014 Doctoral Consortium, SIGIR 2017 Workshop, and WSDM 2017 Workshop. She served as an area chair for SIGIR 2014-2017 and ACL 2016. Grace also co-organized the TREC Dynamic Domain Track since 2015.
Host: Cyrus Shahabi
Location: Olin Hall of Engineering (OHE) - 100C
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Assistant to CS chair
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Lyman L. Handy Colloquia
Thu, Dec 01, 2016 @ 12:45 PM - 01:50 PM
Mork Family Department of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Dr. Costas D. Maranas , Penn State
Talk Title: Reconstructing, analyzing and redesign metabolism
Series: Lyman Handy Colloquia
Host: Professor Nick Graham
Location: James H. Zumberge Hall Of Science (ZHS) - 159
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Martin Olekszyk
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CS Colloquium and CAIS Seminar: Andy Plumptre - Improving the effectiveness of law enforcement in African Parks
Thu, Dec 01, 2016 @ 02:00 PM - 02:50 PM
Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Andy Plumptre, Tropical Conservation Scientist
Talk Title: Improving the effectiveness of law enforcement in African Parks
Series: Center for AI in Society (CAIS) Seminar Series
Abstract: This lecture satisfies requirements for CSCI 591: Computer Science Research Colloquium.
Investment in law enforcement in protected areas in Africa typically form more than 50% of the budget and often nearer 85-90%. Yet there has been very little research looking at ways that ranger patrolling could be improved and made more efficient and effective. This presentation will present work that has been undertaken in Uganda to improve law enforcement and discuss areas of research that are still needed to better understand how to improve enforcement.
Biography: Andy Plumptre, PhD is a tropical conservation scientist who has been working for the past 25 years in the Albertine Rift Region of Africa, one of the most biodiverse parts of the continent. His work has focused on many different issues related to the conservation of this region including developing new methods for surveying primates in forests, improving ranger patrolling in protected areas, conservation planning for the Albertine Rift, building national capacity to undertake monitoring and research, supporting transboundary conservation, and establishing new protected areas.
Host: Center for AI in Society, USC
Location: Mark Taper Hall Of Humanities (THH) - 301
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Assistant to CS chair
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CS Colloquium: Michael Ernst (University of Washington) - Analyzing the entire program: applying natural language processing to software engineering
Thu, Dec 01, 2016 @ 04:00 PM - 05:00 PM
Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Michael Ernst, University of Washington
Talk Title: Analyzing the entire program: applying natural language processing to software engineering
Series: CS Colloquium
Abstract: This lecture satisfies requirements for CSCI 591: Computer Science Research Colloquium. Part of Yahoo! Labs Machine Learning Seminar Series.
A powerful, but limited, way to view software is as source code alone.
Mathematical techniques, such as abstract interpretation and model checking, can indicate whether the program satisfies a formal specification. But, where does the formal specification come from?
A program consists of much more than a sequence of instructions.
Developers make use of test cases, documentation, variable names, program structure, the version control repository, and more. I argue that it is time to take the blinders off of software analysis tools: tools should use all these artifacts to deduce more powerful and useful information about the program.
Researchers are beginning to make progress towards this vision. In this talk, I will discuss four initial results that find bugs and generate code, by making use of variable names, error messages, procedure documentation, and user questions.
Biography: Michael D. Ernst is a Professor in the Computer Science & Engineering department at the University of Washington.
Ernst's research aims to make software more reliable, more secure, and easier (and more fun!) to produce. His primary technical interests are in software engineering, programming languages, type theory, security, program analysis, bug prediction, testing, and verification. Ernst's research combines strong theoretical foundations with realistic experimentation, with an eye to changing the way that software developers work.
Ernst is an ACM Fellow (2014) and received the inaugural John Backus Award (2009) and the NSF CAREER Award (2002). His research has received an ACM SIGSOFT Impact Paper Award (2013), 8 ACM Distinguished Paper Awards (FSE 2014, ISSTA 2014, ESEC/FSE 2011, ISSTA 2009, ESEC/FSE 2007, ICSE 2007, ICSE 2004, ESEC/FSE 2003), an ECOOP 2011 Best Paper Award, honorable mention in the 2000 ACM doctoral dissertation competition, and other honors. In 2013, Microsoft Academic Search ranked Ernst #2 in the world, in software engineering research contributions over the past 10 years.
Dr. Ernst was previously a tenured professor at MIT, and before that a researcher at Microsoft Research.
More information is available at his homepage: http://homes.cs.washington.edu/~mernst/.
Host: Chao Wang
Location: Henry Salvatori Computer Science Center (SAL) - 101
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Assistant to CS chair
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Annual Preview Day for Prospective Graduate Students
Fri, Dec 02, 2016 @ 09:00 AM - 03:00 PM
Viterbi School of Engineering Graduate Admission, Viterbi School of Engineering Student Affairs
Workshops & Infosessions
Preview Day is the Viterbi School's annual visitation day for students interested in pursuing an advanced degree at one of the top-ranked graduate engineering institutions in the nation.
For registration and more info: gapp.usc.edu/mspreview2Location: Ronald Tutor Campus Center (TCC) - 352
Audiences: Prospective students with a background in engineering, math or hard science
Contact: Mary Kae/Graduate and Professional Programs
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MHI/EE-Electrophysics Seminar
Fri, Dec 02, 2016 @ 10:00 AM - 11:30 AM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: David Allstot, University of California at Berkeley
Talk Title: Switched-Capacitor Circuits: From Maxwell to the Internet of Things
Abstract: Maxwell introduced the concept of the equivalent switched-capacitor resistance in Vol. 2 of his Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism in 1873. The concept laid dormant for almost a century until it became commercially viable by exploiting the switches, native capacitors, and operational amplifiers of MOS IC technology. CMOS switched-capacitor circuits have been used in high-volume data converters and signal processing ICs for nearly four decades, and are ubiquitous in modern RF transceiver circuits and emerging as a dominant design approach in CMOS bio-medical and internet-of things circuits and systems, etc.
This talk will begin with a brief history of SC circuits as applied to data converters, precision high-order filters, operational amplifiers, etc.
Next, SC circuits are described for body-area-networks (BAN) that integrate multiple sensor nodes in the portable and wearable bio-medical systems that are revolutionizing healthcare. A typical BAN comprises several bio-signal and motion sensors and uses ultra-low-power short-haul radios in conjunction with nearby smart-phones or handheld devices (with GPS capabilities) to communicate via the internet with a doctor or other healthcare professional. Higher energy efficiency is critical to the development of feature-rich, wearable and reliable personal health monitoring systems.
The amount of data transmitted to the smart-phone increases as more sensors are added to the BAN. Because the energy consumed for RF transmission is proportional to the data rate, it is advantageous to compress the bio-signal at the sensor prior to digitization and transmission. This energy-efficient paradigm is possible using compressed sensing-”a sampling theory wherein a compressible signal can be acquired using only a few incoherent measurements. For ECG signals, for example, large compression factors are achievable which means similar reductions in energy consumption.
SC circuits are having a huge impact on wireless communications. A major challenge is the RF power amplifier dissipates a large fraction of the total power of a transceiver because of its low efficiency. Despite more than two decades of extensive research, the challenge of on-chip RF Pas with high efficiency in digital-friendly CMOS technologies has not been met. Switching PA topologies with relatively high efficiency have gained momentum, and relatively high output power is being delivered using power combining techniques. Supply regulation techniques have enabled higher efficiency when amplifying non-constant envelope modulated signals. The switched-capacitor RF power amplifier technique which meets many of the remaining challenges is described and some future directions are presented.
Biography: David J. Allstot received the B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. degrees from the Univ. of Portland, Oregon State Univ., and the Univ. of California, Berkeley.
He has held several industrial and academic positions. He was the Boeing-Egtvedt Chair Professor of Engineering at the Univ. of Washington from 1999 to 2012 and Chair of the Dept. of Electrical Engineering from 2004 to 2007. In 2012 he was a Visiting Professor of Electrical Engineering at Stanford University and from 2013 to 2016, he held a three-year appointment as the MacKay Professor in Residence in the EECS Dept. at UC Berkeley.
Dr. Allstot has advised about 65 M.S. and 40 Ph.D. graduates, published more than 300 papers, and received several awards for outstanding teaching and research including the 1980 IEEE W.R.G. Baker Award, 1995 and 2010 IEEE Circuits and Systems Society (CASS) Darlington Award, 1998 IEEE International Solid-State Circuits Conference (ISSCC) Beatrice Winner Award, 2004 IEEE CASS Charles A. Desoer Technical Achievement Award, 2005 Semiconductor Research Corp. Aristotle Award, 2008 Semiconductor Industries Assoc. University Research Award, 2011 IEEE CASS Mac Van Valkenburg Award, and 2015 IEEE Trans. on Biomedical Circuits and Systems Best Paper Award. He has been very active in service to the IEEE Circuits and Systems and Solid-State Circuits Societies throughout his career.
Host: MHI/EE-Electrophysics
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 132
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Marilyn Poplawski
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CS Colloquium and CAIS Seminar: Andy Plumptre - How much to protect and where? Conservation planning in Africa's biodiversity hotspot
Fri, Dec 02, 2016 @ 11:00 AM - 11:50 AM
Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Andy Plumptre, Tropical Conservation Scientist
Talk Title: How much to protect and where? Conservation planning in Africa's biodiversity hotspot
Series: Center for AI in Society (CAIS) Seminar Series
Abstract: This lecture satisfies requirements for CSCI 591: Computer Science Research Colloquium.
The Albertine Rift is the richest region for vertebrate conservation in Africa. Protected areas have been established here in the past but mainly for large mammal species. This presentation will look at where needs to be conserved in the region to maximize the conservation impacts in terms of species protected whilst at the same time avoiding future mining developments in the region and the impacts of future climate change. Using conservation planning science to demonstrate the uniqueness of sites then led to the creation of new protected areas.
Biography: Andy Plumptre, PhD is a tropical conservation scientist who has been working for the past 25 years in the Albertine Rift Region of Africa, one of the most biodiverse parts of the continent. His work has focused on many different issues related to the conservation of this region including developing new methods for surveying primates in forests, improving ranger patrolling in protected areas, conservation planning for the Albertine Rift, building national capacity to undertake monitoring and research, supporting transboundary conservation, and establishing new protected areas.
Host: Center for AI in Society, USC
Location: Seeley G. Mudd Building (SGM) - 101
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Assistant to CS chair
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AI Seminar
Fri, Dec 02, 2016 @ 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Information Sciences Institute
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Thomas Lemberger, EMBO, Heidelberg, Germany
Talk Title: SourceData: a semantic platform to make published data and figures discoverable
Abstract: In scientific publications, data are visually depicted in figures or tables. The original data behind the figures the source data however are almost never available in a structured format that would make them findable and reusable. To address this issue, SourceData (http://sourcedata.embo.org) has built a suite of tools to capture the structure of published research data and to make published research papers discoverable based solely on their data content. SourceData converts the narrative descriptions provided in figure legends into standardized, machine readable metadata. Each biological component in a figure is consistently identified via links to established public databases of biological terms. The experimental design is furthermore captured in a structured format by classifying the role of each component. Computer assisted manual identification and classification of biological entities is performed with a web-based curation tool. A separate interface allows authors to verify the accuracy of curated information. In a pilot project, the SourceData team has processed over 15,000 experiments from papers across 23 journals. The resulting web of connected data can be browsed through the SmartFigure application (http://smartfigures.net), which displays data in the context of related figures published in other papers and enables users to easily navigate between them. Users can also use the SourceData search engine to directly retrieve data based on the design of an experiment. SourceData searches the structure of the data rather than relying on keyword indexing, thus avoiding potentially subjective interpretation of results provided in the text.
Biography: Thomas Lemberger is Deputy Head of Scientific Publications at EMBO (embo.org) in Heidelberg, Germany, Chief Editor of the open access journal Molecular Systems Biology (msb.embopress.org) and Project Leader of the SourceData project (sourcedata.embo.org). Trained as a molecular biologist, Thomas earned his PhD at the University of Lausanne, Switzerland, where he studied hormonal regulation of gene expression by nuclear receptors. For his postdoctoral research, he moved to Heidelberg, Germany, where his research focused on the regulation of transcription in the brain. He joined EMBO as scientific editor in 2005 and assumed the editorial oversight of Molecular Systems Biology since launch of the journal. He has recently initiated the SourceData project to build an open platform that makes scientific publications discoverable based on their data content.
Host: Gully Burns
Location: 11th floor large conference room
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Kary LAU
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CS Colloquium: Ariel Felner (Ben-Gurion University) - Search for Optimal Solutions: the Heart of Heuristic Search is Still Beating
Fri, Dec 02, 2016 @ 12:00 PM - 01:00 PM
Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Ariel Felner, Ben-Gurion University
Talk Title: Search for Optimal Solutions: the Heart of Heuristic Search is Still Beating
Series: CS Colloquium
Abstract: The field of heuristic search has spawned large number of subfields such as finding good heuristics, abstracting state-spaces, finding solutions of different qualities or that meet different requirements or constraints. However, a major research direction within the field of heuristic search is that of finding optimal solutions.
While the A* algorithm was proved to be optimally effective there exists a large number of algorithms and research directions that enhance the A* family of algorithms and improve their performance. In this talk I'll cover a number of such recent algorithms. These algorithms assume a fixed heuristic function but exploit various algorithmic directions to improve upon A* in many ways along the following lines: better memory usage, improved generations of nodes, interleaving depth-first searches into A*, enhanced calculations of the heuristic and recent developments of optimal bidirectional search.
Biography: Ariel Felner received his Ph.D in 2002 from Bar-Ilan University, Israel, and is now an associate professor at Ben-Gurion University, Israel. He is the chair of the Israeli Association for Artificial intelligence (IAAI) and a council member of SoCS. He is interested in all aspects of heuristic search and has performed research in various areas within the field of heuristic search. He pays specific attention to pedagogical and historical aspects of teaching concepts in this field.
Host: Sven Koenig
Location: Hedco Neurosciences Building (HNB) - 15
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Assistant to CS chair
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2, 3, 4D Radiology Imaging Research: Can we find more with what we already have?
Fri, Dec 02, 2016 @ 02:00 PM - 04:00 PM
Alfred E. Mann Department of Biomedical Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Darryl Hwang, PhD, Assistant Professor of Research Radiology
Talk Title: TBA
Series: Seminars in BME (Lab Rotations)
Abstract: The 4D Quantitative Imaging Lab is devoted to medical image post-processing research in multiple dimensions. Our radiomics work looks at applying image processing algorithms to extract quantifiable measures from our 2D and 3D grayscale medical images looking at shape, texture, and enhancement. We create 3D models for quantification and visualization. How these volumes change with time is the fourth D. An overview of the software used (Synapse 3D, Matlab, Blender) and various imaging processing algorithms will be covered. In addition, we examine how to streamline the workflow and explore how to integrate our research into the clinical world.
Biography: http://keck.usc.edu/faculty/darryl-hwa-hwang/
Host: Brent Liu, PhD
Location: Olin Hall of Engineering (OHE) - DRB 146
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Mischalgrace Diasanta
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Ming Hsieh Institute Seminar Series on Integrated Systems
Fri, Dec 02, 2016 @ 02:00 PM - 04:00 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Dr. Walid Ali-Ahmad, VP Technology, Qualcomm Inc.
Talk Title: RF Front-Ends and Transceiver Systems Issues for Carrier Aggregation based 4G User Equipment
Host: Prof. Hossein Hashemi, Prof. Mike Chen, and Prof. Mahta Moghaddam
More Information: MHI Seminar Series IS - Walid_Ali-Ahmad.pdf
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 132
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Jenny Lin
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Astani Civil and Environmental Engineering Ph.D. Seminar
Fri, Dec 02, 2016 @ 03:00 PM - 04:00 PM
Sonny Astani Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Vassilios Skanavis and Siming Chen, Astani CEE Graduate Students
Talk Title: Tsunami Generated by Landslide on October 17th 2015 and Mitigation of Fugitive Methane Emissions from Anaerobic Treatment Processes
Abstract: See attached
More Information: Tsunami Generated by Landslide on October 17th 2015.docx
Location: John Stauffer Science Lecture Hall (SLH) - 102
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Evangeline Reyes
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NL Seminar PROCEDURAL LANGUAGE AND KNOWLEDGE
Fri, Dec 02, 2016 @ 03:00 PM - 04:00 PM
Information Sciences Institute
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Yejin Choi, University of Washington
Talk Title: PROCEDURAL LANGUAGE AND KNOWLEDGE
Series: Natural Language Seminar
Abstract: Various types of how to knowledge are encoded in natural language instructions: from setting up a tent, to preparing a dish for dinner, and to executing biology lab experiments. These types of instructions are based on procedural language, which poses unique challenges. For example, verbal arguments are commonly elided when they can be inferred from context, e.g.,bake for 30 minutes, not specifying bake what and where. Entities frequently merge and split, e.g.,vinegar and oil merging into dressing, creating challenges to reference resolution. And disambiguation often requires world knowledge, e.g., the implicit location argument of stir frying is on stove. In this talk, I will present our recent approaches to interpreting and composing cooking recipes that aim to address these challenges. In the first part of the talk, I will present an unsupervised approach to interpreting recipes as action graphs, which define what actions should be performed on which objects and in what order. Our work demonstrates that it is possible to recover action graphs without having access to gold labels, virtual environments or simulations. The key insight is to rely on the redundancy across different variations of similar instructions that provides the learning bias to infer various types of background knowledge, such as the typical sequence of actions applied to an ingredient, or how a combination of ingredients e.g., flour, milk, eggs becomes a new entity e.g, wet mixture . In the second part of the talk, I will present an approach to composing new recipes given a target dish name and a set of ingredients. The key challenge is to maintain global coherence while generating a goal-oriented text. We propose a Neural Checklist Model that attains global coherence by storing and updating a checklist of the agenda e.g., an ingredient list with paired attention mechanisms for tracking what has been already mentioned and what needs to be yet introduced. This model also achieves strong performance on dialogue system response generation. I will conclude the talk by discussing the challenges in modeling procedural language and acquiring the necessary background knowledge, pointing to avenues for future research.
Biography: Yejin Choi is an assistant professor at the Computer Science & Engineering Department of University of Washington. Her recent research focuses on language grounding, integrating language and vision, and modeling nonliteral meaning in text. She was among the IEEEs AI Top 10 to Watch in 2015 and a co-recipient of the Marr Prize at ICCV 2013. Her work on detecting deceptive reviews, predicting the literary success, and learning to interpret connotation has been featured by numerous media outlets including NBC News for New York, NPR Radio, New York Times, and Bloomberg Business Week. She received her Ph.D. in Computer Science at Cornell University.
Host: Xing Shi and Kevin Knight
More Info: http://nlg.isi.edu/nl-seminar/
Location: 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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EE 598 Computer Engineering Seminar
Fri, Dec 02, 2016 @ 04:00 PM - 05:00 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Lorenzo Alvisi , Professor, Cornell University/University of Texas, Austin
Talk Title: The Pit and the Pendulum
Abstract: Since the elegant foundations of transaction processing were established in the mid 70's with the notion of serializability and the codification of the ACID (Atomicity, Consistency, Isolation, Durability) paradigm, performance has not been considered one of ACID's strong suits, especially for distributed data stores. Indeed, the NoSQL/BASE movement of the last decade was born out of frustration with the limited scalability of traditional ACID solutions, only to become itself a source of frustration once the challenges of programming applications in this new paradigm began to sink in. But how fundamental is this dichotomy between performance and ease of programming? In this talk, I will share what my students and I have recently learned while trying to overcome the traditional terms of this classic tradeoff.
Biography: Lorenzo Alvisi is a University Distinguished Teaching Professor at the University of Texas at Austin, where he holds an Endowed Professorship in Computer Science. He is spending 2016-17 as a visiting scholar in the Computer Science Department at Cornell University, where he received his Ph.D. after earning a Laurea degree Summa cum Laude in Physics from the University of Bologna, Italy. His research interests are in the theory and practice of distributed computing, with a particular focus on dependability. He is a Fellow of the ACM and IEEE, an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Fellow, and the recipient of a Humboldt Research Award, an NSF Career Award, and several teaching awards. He serves on the editorial boards of ACM TOCS and Springer's Distributed Computing and is a council member of the CRA's Computing Community Consortium. In addition to distributed computing, he is passionate about western classical music and red Italian motorcycles
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 248
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Estela Lopez
