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Events for March 01, 2018

  • STEM Spotlight on Electrical Engineering

    Thu, Mar 01, 2018 @ 09:00 AM - 01:30 PM

    USC Viterbi School of Engineering, Viterbi School of Engineering K-12 STEM Center

    University Calendar


    The STEM Spotlight on the Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical Engineering opens up the research labs and various activities to the students of Bud Carson Middle School in Hawthorne. The Spotlight series focus on introducing K-12 students to cutting-edge faculty engineering research and interactions with USC Viterbi students to help build diversity in STEM college and career pathways. Learn more here: https://viterbipk12.usc.edu/research/stem-spotlight/

    Location: Charles Lee Powell Hall (PHE) - lawn by PHE and SAL

    Audiences: K-12 Schools pre-registered

    Contact: Katie Mills

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  • Taylor Berg-Kirkpatrick (Carnegie Mellon University) – Balancing Constraint and Flexibility in Unsupervised Models for Language Analysis

    Thu, Mar 01, 2018 @ 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM

    Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Taylor Berg-Kirkpatrick, Carnegie Mellon University

    Talk Title: Balancing Constraint and Flexibility in Unsupervised Models for Language Analysis

    Series: Computer Science Colloquium

    Abstract: Without careful consideration of the relationship between input and output, unsupervised learning problems can be under-constrained. This talk will discuss approaches for making unsupervised problems feasible by incorporating different types of inductive bias. First, we focus on a set of raw data analysis tasks related to the digital humanities, including historical document recognition, music transcription, and compositor attribution. For each of these tasks, strong prior knowledge about the causal process behind the data can be encoded into the model. We show how to leverage this casual knowledge as a helpful source of constraint, yielding systems that in some cases outperform their supervised counterparts. Next, we investigate several linguistic analysis tasks where causal structure is more difficult to encode. Here, we develop a new unsupervised model class that combines structured and continuous representations by leveraging the flexibility of neural networks. We show that incorporating a volume-preserving constraint on the neural component of our model makes learning well-behaved. Using this approach, we demonstrate start-of-the-art results on two standard unsupervised NLP tasks: part-of-speech induction and unsupervised dependency parsing.

    This lecture satisfies requirements for CSCI 591: Research Colloquium. Please note, due to limited capacity in OHE 100D, seats will be first come first serve.


    Biography: Taylor Berg-Kirkpatrick joined the Language Technologies Institute at Carnegie Mellon University as an Assistant Professor in Fall 2016. Previously, he was a Research Scientist at Semantic Machines Inc. and, before that, completed his Ph.D. in computer science at the University of California, Berkeley. Taylor's research focuses on using machine learning to understand structured human data, including language but also sources like music, document images, and other complex artifacts.

    Host: Computer Science Department

    Location: Olin Hall of Engineering (OHE) - 100D

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Computer Science Department

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  • ADP Information Session

    Thu, Mar 01, 2018 @ 06:00 PM - 07:30 PM

    Viterbi School of Engineering Career Connections

    Workshops & Infosessions


    Tech Talk held by ADP's Product Management Team.

    Location: Seeley G. Mudd Building (SGM) - 101

    Audiences: All Viterbi

    Contact: RTH 218 Viterbi Career Connections

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