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Events for February 12, 2018

  • Repeating EventSix Sigma Black Belt

    Mon, Feb 12, 2018 @ 09:00 AM - 05:00 PM

    Executive Education

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Talk Title: Six Sigma Black Belt

    Abstract: Week 1: February 12-15, 2018
    Week 2: March 12-16, 2018
    Week 3: April 9-13, 2018
    9am - 5pm

    Learn the advanced problem-solving skills you need to implement the principles, practices, and techniques of Six Sigma to maximize performance and cost reductions in your organization. During this three-week practitioner course, you will learn how to measure a process, analyze the results, develop process improvements, and quantify the resulting savings. You will be required to complete a project demonstrating mastery of appropriate analytical methods and pass an examination to earn Six Sigma Black Belt Certificate. This practitioner course for Six Sigma implementation provides extensive coverage of the Six Sigma process, as well as intensive exposure to the key analytical tools associated with Six Sigma, including project management, team skills, cost analysis, FMEA, basic statistics, inferential statistics, sampling, goodness of fit testing, regression and correlation analysis, reliability, design of experiments, statistical process control, measurement systems analysis, and simulation. Computer applications are emphasized.

    NOTE: Participants must provide a windows based computer running Microsoft Office to the seminar.

    Host: USC Viterbi Executive Education

    More Info: https://viterbiexeced.usc.edu/engineering-program-areas/six-sigma-lean-certification/six-sigma-black-belt/

    Audiences: Registered Attendees

    View All Dates

    Contact: Viterbi Professional Programs

    Event Link: https://viterbiexeced.usc.edu/engineering-program-areas/six-sigma-lean-certification/six-sigma-black-belt/

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  • Center for Systems and Control (CSC@USC) and Ming Hsieh Institute for Electrical Engineering

    Center for Systems and Control (CSC@USC) and Ming Hsieh Institute for Electrical Engineering

    Mon, Feb 12, 2018 @ 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM

    Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Richard Murray, California Institute of Technology

    Talk Title: Safety-Critical Autonomous Systems: What is Possible? What is Required?

    Abstract: The last 20 years have seen enormous progress in autonomous vehicles, from planetary rovers, to unmanned aerial vehicles, to the self-driving cars that we are starting to see on the roads around us. An open question is whether we can we make self-driving cars that are safer than human-driven cars, how much safer they need to be, and what advances will be required to bring them to fruition. In this talk, I will discuss some of the approaches used in the aerospace industry, where flight critical subsystems must achieve probability of failure rates of less than 1 failure in 10^9 flight hours (i.e. less than 1 failure per 100,000 years of operation). Systems that achieve this level of reliability are hard to design, hard to verify, and hard to validate, especially if software is involved. I will describe some of the challenges that the aerospace community faces in designing systems with this level of reliability, how they are designed and implemented done today, and what is being done for the next generation of (much more complex, software-driven) aerospace systems. I will also speculate about whether similar approaches are needed in self-driving cars, and whether these levels of safety are achievable.


    Biography: Richard M. Murray received the B.S. degree in Electrical Engineering from California Institute of Technology in 1985 and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1988 and 1991, respectively. He is currently the Thomas E. and Doris Everhart Professor of Control & Dynamical Systems and Bioengineering at Caltech. Murray's research is in the application of feedback and control to networked systems, with applications in biology and autonomy. Current projects include specification, design and synthesis of control protocols for networked control systems and analysis and design of biomolecular feedback systems for synthetic biology.

    Host: Mihailo Jovanovic, mihailo@usc.edu

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

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Gerrielyn Ramos

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  • Biomedical Engineering Seminars

    Mon, Feb 12, 2018 @ 12:30 PM - 01:50 PM

    Alfred E. Mann Department of Biomedical Engineering

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Talk Title: TBA

    Host: Professor Qifa Zhou

    Location: Olin Hall of Engineering (OHE) - 122

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Mischalgrace Diasanta

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  • Biomedical Engineering Department Guest Speaker

    Biomedical Engineering Department Guest Speaker

    Mon, Feb 12, 2018 @ 01:00 PM - 02:00 PM

    Alfred E. Mann Department of Biomedical Engineering

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Samantha Santacruz,

    Talk Title: Pathological Neural Mechanisms and Systems-based Neurotherapies

    Abstract: The brain is a complex system comprised of billions of neurons that work coherently together to control our behavior and general function. The advent of techniques such as multi-electrode recordings, microstimulation and neural imaging has provided powerful tools for modern systems neuroscience to study learning and neural adaptation, and importantly how neural function is compromised in the diseased state. In this talk, I will focus on electrical microstimulation, and how it can be used both as a tool to study brain states and a therapeutic mechanism to treat circuit-wide disorders. The first part of the talk will focus on applications of microstimulation in animal models. In this half, I will demonstrate through modulation of neural signals encoding value using microstimulation in the dorsomedial striatum that I can differentially modulate decision-making processes, which are often compromised in the disease state. I will also present results showing that closed-loop microstimulation of prefrontal areas has anxiolytic effects and modulates autonomic state. In the second part of the talk, I will focus on materials and devices for neurotherapies. When microstimulation is applied, it is advantageous to be able to probe the system and record neural activity simultaneously during stimulation. I will present work on carbon nanotube fiber microelectrodes and discuss how this novel material provides an excellent bidirectional interface with neural tissue. This will be followed with a discussion of a new device for wireless neuromodulation and recording, which utilizes a state-of-the-art ASIC for fast charge-clearing and near-perfect stimulation artifact removal. I will conclude this talk with my future directions in the development of neuroprosthetic devices and new modalities beyond microstimulation.

    Host: Ellis Meng, PhD

    Location: Corwin D. Denney Research Center (DRB) - 145/145A

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Mischalgrace Diasanta

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  • Non traditional resources and improved tools for low resource machine translation

    Mon, Feb 12, 2018 @ 03:00 PM - 04:00 PM

    Information Sciences Institute

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Nima Pourdamghani, USC/ ISI

    Talk Title: NL Seminar-Non-traditional resources and improved tools for low resource machine translation

    Series: Natural Language Seminar

    Abstract: Thanks to massive training data, and powerful machine translation techniques, machine translation quality has reached acceptable levels for a handful of languages. However, for hundreds of other languages, translation quality decreases quickly as the size of the available training data becomes smaller. For languages with a few millions or less tokens of translation data called low resource languages in this dissertation traditional machine translation technologies fail to produce understandable translations into English. In this work, I explore various non-traditional sources for improving low-resource machine translation.



    Biography: Nima Pourdamghani is a phd student at USC ISI working with professor Kevin Knight. Nima's interests are natural language processing, and applications of machine learning in general. His phd thesis is on building tools to improve machine translation for hundreds of low-resource languages.

    Host: Nanyun Peng 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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