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SUNMONTUEWEDTHUFRISAT
Events for the 2nd week of December
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Study Days
Mon, Dec 05, 2016 @ 11:00 AM - 04:00 PM
Viterbi School of Engineering Student Affairs
Workshops & Infosessions
Viterbi Study Days is an opportunity for undergraduate students to receive free peer tutoring before finals. All undergraduate students are welcome to drop-in for tutoring between 11am-4pm. Check the Viterbi Connect blog for a calendar of courses.
This event is co-sponsored by the Viterbi Academic Resource Center (VARC) and the Center for Engineering Diversity (CED).Location: Ronald Tutor Hall of Engineering (RTH) - 105, 109 and 115
Audiences: Undergrad
Contact: Christine Viterbi Admission & Student Affairs
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USC Stem Cell Seminar: Hesham Sadek, University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center
Tue, Dec 06, 2016 @ 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Alfred E. Mann Department of Biomedical Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Hesham Sadek, University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center
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: Martin Rinard (MIT) - Automatically Patching Errors in Software Systems
Tue, Dec 06, 2016 @ 04:00 PM - 05:00 PM
Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Martin Rinard , MIT
Talk Title: Automatically Patching Errors in Software Systems
Series: CS Colloquium
Abstract: This lecture satisfies requirements for CSCI 591: Computer Science Research Colloquium.
Patching defects is a central activity in essentially all software development activities. Current practice relies almost exclusively on human developers to manually locate and patch each defect.
I will present two techniques for automatically patching software defects. Both leverage the enormous amount of software and software revision histories produced by open-source software development efforts.
The first technique locates and transfers correct code from a donor application into a recipient application to eliminate defects in the recipient. The second technique generates and searches a space of potential patches, using a model of correct code learned from previous successful patches to guide the search. The experimental results highlight the potential of these two techniques to automate the elimination of many defects.
Biography: Martin Rinard is a Professor in the Department of EECS at MIT and a member of the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL). His research interests include programming languages, computer security, program analysis, program verification, software engineering, and distributed and parallel computing.
Prominent results include automatic techniques that enable applications to survive otherwise fatal errors and security attacks, and techniques that trade off accuracy of end-to-end results in return for increased performance and resilience.
He holds a PhD in Computer Science from Stanford University. He is an ACM Fellow, and has received many awards including the Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship and numerous Distinguished and Best Paper awards from top venues of his field.
Homepgae: http://people.csail.mit.edu/rinard/
Host: Chao Wang
Location: Henry Salvatori Computer Science Center (SAL) - 101
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Assistant to CS chair
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Distinguished Stanford Lecturer: Big Data and Human Behavior
Wed, Dec 07, 2016 @ 12:00 PM - 02:00 PM
Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Justin Grimmer, Associate Professor of Political Science and Computer Science, Stanford University
Talk Title: Exploratory and Confirmatory Causal Inference for High Dimensional Interventions
Host: USC Dornsife College
Location: Cammilleri Hall, Brain and Creativity Institute (BCI)
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: USC Computer Science
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Greening a Top-20 Economy: Energy-Efficient Timely Transportation of Heavy-Duty Trucks
Wed, Dec 07, 2016 @ 02:00 PM - 03:00 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Minghua Chen, Chinese University of Hong Kong
Talk Title: Greening a Top-20 Economy: Energy-Efficient Timely Transportation of Heavy-Duty Trucks
Abstract: In 2015, the US trucking industry hauls 70.1% of all freight tonnage and collects $726.4 billion in gross freight revenues. This impressive number corresponds to 2.3x of Hong Kong GDP and would rank 19 worldwide if measured against countries. Meanwhile, only 4% of total vehicle population, heavy-duty trucks consume 17.6% of energy in transportation sector (including cars, trucks, airplanes, pipelines, and railways). This alerting observation, together with that fuel cost is the largest operating cost (34%) for truck operators, makes it critical to reduce fuel consumption for cost-effective and environment-friendly heavy-duty truck operation.
In this work, we consider a key yet under-explored problem in heavy-duty truck operation: timely transportation, where a heavy-duty truck travels between two locations across the national highway system subject to a hard deadline constraint. The objective is to minimize the total fuel consumption of the truck, by optimizing both route planning and speed planning. The problem is important for cost-effective and environment-friendly truck operation, and it is uniquely challenging due to its combinatorial nature as well as the need of considering hard deadline constraint. We first show that the problem is NP-Complete; thus exact solution is computational prohibited unless P=NP. We then design a fully polynomial time approximation scheme (FPTAS) that attains an approximation ratio of 1+ \epsilon with a network-size induced complexity of O(mn^2/\epsilon^2), where m and n are the numbers of nodes and edges, respectively. While achieving highly-preferred theoretical performance guarantee, the proposed FPTAS still suffers from long running time when applying to national-wide highway systems with tens of thousands of nodes and edges. Leveraging elegant insights from studying the dual of the original problem, we design a fast subgradient-like solution with O(m+ n log n) complexity. The proposed heuristic allows us to tackle the energy-efficient timely transportation problem on large-scale national highway systems. We further characterize a condition under which our heuristic generates an optimal solution; we also provide performance gap when the condition is not satisfied. We observe that the condition holds in most of the practical instances in numerical experiments, justifying the superior empirical performance of our heuristic. We carry out extensive numerical experiments using real-world truck data over the actual U.S. highway network. The results show that our proposed solutions achieve 17% (resp. 14%) fuel consumption reduction, as compared to a fastest path (resp. shortest path) algorithm adapted from common practice.
Overall, we believe that de-carbonizing heavy-duty truck operation is important for the sustainable development of the trucking industry. Our work serves as a call for participation.
This is a joint work with Lei Deng and Mohammad Hajiesmaili in CUHK and Haibo Zeng in Virginia Tech.
Biography: Minghua Chen received his B.Eng. and M.S. degrees from the Department of Electronic Engineering at Tsinghua University in 1999 and 2001, respectively. He received his Ph.D. degree from the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences at University of California at Berkeley in 2006. He spent one year visiting Microsoft Research Redmond as a Postdoc Researcher. He joined the Department of Information Engineering, the Chinese University of Hong Kong, in 2007, where he currently is an Associate Professor. He is also currently an Adjunct Associate Professor in Tsinghua University, Institute of Interdisciplinary Information Sciences. He received the Eli Jury award from UC Berkeley in 2007 (presented to a graduate student or recent alumnus for outstanding achievement in the area of Systems, Communications, Control, or Signal Processing) and The Chinese University of Hong Kong Young Researcher Award in 2013. He also received several best paper awards, including the IEEE ICME Best Paper Award in 2009, the IEEE Transactions on Multimedia Prize Paper Award in 2009, and the ACM Multimedia Best Paper Award in 2012. He serves as TPC Co-Chair of ACM e-Energy 2016 and General Chair of ACM e-Energy 2017. He is currently an Associate Editor of the IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking. His recent research interests include energy systems (e.g., smart power grids and energy-efficient data centers), intelligent transportation, distributed optimization, multimedia networking, wireless networking, network coding, and delay-constrained network information flow.
Host: Michael Neely, EEB 520, x03505
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 248
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Gerrielyn Ramos
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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
Thu, Dec 08, 2016 @ 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Saman Zonouz, Assistant Professor, Rutgers University
Talk Title: Trustworthy Critical Infrastructures via Physics-Aware Just-Ahead-Of-Time Verification
Abstract: Critical cyber-physical infrastructures, such as the power grid, integrate networks of computational and physical processes to provide the people across the globe with essential functionalities and services. Protecting these critical infrastructures is a vital necessity because the failure of these systems would have a debilitating impact on economic security and public health and safety. Our research and development projects aim at provision of real-world solutions to facilitate the secure and reliable operation of next-generation critical infrastructures and require interdisciplinary research efforts across adaptive systems and network security, cyber-physical systems, and trustworthy real-time detection and response mechanisms. In this talk, I will focus on real past and potential future threats against critical infrastructures and embedded devices, and discuss the challenges in design, implementation, and analysis of security solutions to protect cyber-physical platforms. I will introduce novel classes of working systems that we have developed to overcome these challenges in practice, and finally conclude with several concrete directions for future research. Additionally, I will briefly go over our other projects on x86 malware/memory analysis and embedded systems security solutions to support access control applications in cyber-physical settings.
Biography: Saman Zonouz is an Assistant Professor in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at Rutgers University since September 2014 and the Director of the 4N6 Cyber Security and Forensics Laboratory. His research has been awarded NSF CAREER Award in 2015, Google Security Award in 2015, Top-3 Demo at IEEE SmartGridComm 2015, the Faculty Fellowship Award by AFOSR in 2013, the Best Student Paper Award at IEEE SmartGridComm 2013, the University EARLY CAREER Research award in 2012 as well as the Provost Research Award in 2011. The 4N6 research supporters include National Science Foundation (NSF), Department of Homeland Security (DHS), Office of Naval Research (ONR), Department of Energy (DOE), Advanced Research Projects Agency Energy (ARPA-E), Department of Education (DOE), Siemens Research Labs, WinRiver, GrammaTech, Google, ETAP, and Fortinet Corporation. In addition to research publications, Saman's research efforts have resulted in several tech-to-market transition initiatives such as the founded Kaedago Inc. startup company (as the result of the ARPAE project), and the Siemens-funded project to adopt his developed controller program analysis algorithms (originally supported by NSF CPS program) for programmable logic controllers (PLCs). Saman's current research focuses on systems security and privacy, trustworthy cyber-physical critical infrastructures and embedded platforms, binary/malware analysis and reverse engineering, as well as adaptive intrusion tolerance architectures. Saman has served as the chair, program committee member, guest editor and a reviewer for top international conferences and journals. Saman serves on Editorial Board for IEEE Transactions on Smart Grid. He obtained his Ph.D. in Computer Science, specifically, intrusion tolerance architectures for the cyber-physical infrastructures, from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2011.
Host: Paul Bogdan
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 132
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Estela Lopez
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Hardware Transactional Memory and Beyond
Thu, Dec 08, 2016 @ 04:00 PM - 05:00 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Maurice Herlihy, Professor, Brown University
Talk Title: Hardware Transactional Memory and Beyond
Abstract: A new generation of processor architectures provides hardware transactional memory (HTM), a synchronization mechanism for fast in-memory transactions. This talk will argue that HTM is not just a faster way of doing the same old latches and monitors. Instead, it could bring about a fundamental positive change in the way we program multicores (and eventually perhaps even databases) by allowing us to rethink basic synchronization structures such as locks, memory management, and a variety of concurrent data structures.
Biography: Maurice Herlihy has an A.B. in Mathematics from Harvard University, and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from M.I.T. He has served on the faculty of Carnegie Mellon University, on the staff of DEC Cambridge Research Lab, and is currently the An Wang Professor in the Computer Science Department at Brown University. He is the recipient of the 2003 Dijkstra Prize in Distributed Computing, the 2004 G?del Prize in theoretical computer science, the 2008 ISCA influential paper award, the 2012 Edsger W. Dijkstra Prize, and the 2013 Wallace McDowell award. He received a 2012 Fulbright Distinguished Chair in the Natural Sciences and Engineering Lecturing Fellowship, and he is fellow of the ACM, a fellow of the National Academy of Inventors, and a member of the National Academy of Engineering and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Host: Xuehai Qian
Location: Olin Hall of Engineering (OHE) - OHE 100D
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Estela Lopez
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NL Seminar-Multimodal Machine Comprehension: Tasks and Approaches
Fri, Dec 09, 2016 @ 03:00 PM - 04:00 PM
Information Sciences Institute
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Radi Soricut, Google
Talk Title: Multimodal Machine Comprehension: Tasks and Approaches
Series: Natural Language Seminar
Abstract: The ability of computer models to achieve genuine understanding of information as presented to humans (text, images, etc) is a long-standing goal of Artificial Intelligence. Along the way towards this goal, the research community has proposed solving tasks such as machine reading comprehension and computer image understanding. In this talk, we introduce two new tasks that can help us move closer to the goal. First, we present a multi-choice reading comprehension task, for which the goal is to understand a text passage and choose the correct summarizing sentence from among several options. Second, we present a multi-modal understanding task, posed as a combined vision-language comprehension challenge: identifying the most suitable text describing a visual scene, given several similar options. We present several baseline and competitive learning approaches based on neural network architectures, illustrating the utility of the proposed tasks in advancing both image and language comprehension. We also present human evaluation results, which inform a performance upper-bound on these tasks, and quantify the remaining gap between computer systems and human performance (spoiler alert: we are not there yet).
Biography: Radu Soricut is a Staff Research Scientist in the Research and Machine Intelligence group at Google. Radu has a PhD in Computer Science from University of Southern California, and has been with Google since 2012. His main areas of interest are natural language understanding, multilingual processing, natural language generation (from multimodal inputs), and general machine learning techniques for solving these problems. Radu has published extensively in these areas in top-tier peer-reviewed conferences and journals, and has won the Best Paper Award at the North American Association for Computational Linguistics Conference (NAACL) in 2015. Radu's current project looks at bridging natural language understanding and generation using neural techniques, in the context of Google's focus on making natural language an effective way of interacting with the world and the technology around us.
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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USC Viterbi - Axilor Entrepreneurship & Innovation Lecture Series in India
Fri, Dec 09, 2016 @ 04:00 PM - 07:00 PM
USC Viterbi School of Engineering, Viterbi School of Engineering Alumni
Receptions & Special Events
USC VITERBI - AXILOR ENTREPRENEURSHIP & INNOVATION LECTURE SERIES
Topics and Speakers:
Avata Intelligence: A Startup Using AI And Computational Game Theory
Dr. Milind Tambe, Co-Founder Avata Intelligence, Helen N. & Emmett H. Jones Professor in Engineering, USC Viterbi School of Engineering
Frugal Innovation and Entrepreneurship For The 80%
Radha Basu, CEO, iMerit Technologies, Dean's Professor and Director - Frugal Innovation Lab, Santa Clara University
How Indian Teenage Girls Won Over Silicon Valley?
Dr.Tara Chklovski, Founder and CEO, Iridescent and Team
The 10 Big Indian Healthcare Challenges That Deep-Science Can Solve
Dr. Taslimarif Saiyed, Director at Centre for Cellular and Molecular Platforms, NCBS-TIFR
Can Customer-led Innovation Work For Your Product?: The Trooya Case
Dr. Ranjit Nair, CEO Germin8 Solutions
Seating is limited and registration will close when we reach capacity
For more information please write to Sudha Kumar at sudhakumar@gapp.usc.edu
https://www.eventbrite.com/e/usc-viterbi-axilor-entrepreneurship-innovation-lecture-series-registration-29344695775?ref=enivtefor001&invite=MTExMzMyODkvam1vcnNlQHVzYy5lZHUvMA%3D%3D&utm_source=eb_email&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=inviteformalv2&utm_term=eventpage
Location: Magnolia, ITC Sheraton Gardenia #1, Residency Road Bengaluru, 560025 India
Audiences: USC Alumni
Contact: James Morse
