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Events for March 31, 2017

  • W.V.T. Rusch Engineering Honors Program Colloquium

    Fri, Mar 31, 2017 @ 01:00 PM - 01:50 PM

    USC Viterbi School of Engineering, Viterbi School of Engineering Student Affairs

    University Calendar


    Join us for a presentation by Prof. Neil G. Siegel, IBM Professor of Engineering Management, Daniel J. Epstein Dept. of Industrial and Systems Engineering, titled "An Engineering Career in Private Industry."

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

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Ramon Borunda/Academic Services

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  • Munushian Speaker - Mark Horowitz, Friday, March 31st at 2:00pm in EEB 132

    Fri, Mar 31, 2017 @ 02:00 PM - 03:30 PM

    Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Mark Horowitz, Yahoo! Founders Professor at Stanford University

    Talk Title: Innovation in a Post-Moore's Law World

    Abstract: For the past half century the world has enjoyed the benefits of many innovations enabled by Moore's Law scaling of silicon technology. While Intel claims that scaling is still healthy, most other organization see issues today, and many more issues ahead. Regardless of whether it has started to happen already, it will eventually stop, and that point is that that far away.

    This talk will quickly review the basics behind silicon scaling, the current power problem, and current approaches to continue Moore's Law after scaling slows (think 3-D and new technologies). I will then describe why I am not optimistic about any of the new technologies rescuing Moore's Law (though there has been some interesting progress on the quantum side), and why I think that computing will be CMOS based for the foreseeable future. The net effect, which already exists today, is that the value of electronic technology has moved from being technology driven to be application driven. In an application driven world, successful products include many "cupholders", small low cost additions that improve the user experience, so enabling them is essential.

    The rest of the talk is my view of how the design process and the industry must adapt if it wants to continue to create high-value products. In application driven value scenarios, the technologies that win are those that have low development costs, since most ideas fail. This has profound ramifications for both how we design chips, and how we design systems using chips. In both areas we need to enable people to try to create new innovative hardware solutions and to do that requires create enough design scaffolding to enable the equivalents of Apple's IStore/Google Play for hardware design.


    Biography: Mark Horowitz is the Yahoo! Founders Professor at Stanford University and was chair of the Electrical Engineering Department from 2008 to 2012. He co-founded Rambus, Inc. in 1990 and is a fellow of the IEEE and the ACM and a member of the National Academy of Engineering and the American Academy of Arts and Science. Dr. Horowitz's research interests are quite broad and span using EE and CS analysis methods to problems in molecular biology to creating new design methodologies for analog and digital VLSI circuits.

    Host: EE-Electrophysics

    More Info: minghsiehee.usc.edu/about/lectures

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

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Marilyn Poplawski

    Event Link: minghsiehee.usc.edu/about/lectures

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  • Seminars in Biomedical Engineering

    Seminars in Biomedical Engineering

    Fri, Mar 31, 2017 @ 02:30 PM - 04:30 PM

    Alfred E. Mann Department of Biomedical Engineering

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Shankar Subramaniam, PhD, Professor, Departments of Bioengineering, Chemistry and Biochemistry, Cellular and Molecular Medicine, and Nano Engineering University of California, San Diego

    Talk Title: TBA

    Series: Seminars in BME (Lab Rotations)

    Biography: Shankar Subramaniam is a Professor of Bioengineering, Chemistry and Biochemistry, Cellular and Molecular Medicine and Nano Engineering. He is currently the Chair of the Bioengineering Department at the University of California at San Diego. He holds the inaugural Joan and Irwin Jacobs Endowed Chair in Bioengineering and Systems Biology. He was the Founding Director of the Bioinformatics Graduate Program at the University of California at San Diego. He also has adjunct Professorships at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies and the San Diego Supercomputer Center. He is also a Guest Professor at the Center for Molecular Biology and Neuroscience at the University of Oslo in Norway and Professor at the Center for Cardiovascular Bioinformatics and Modeling at Johns Hopkins University. Prior to moving to UC San Diego, Dr. Subramaniam was a Professor of Biophysics, Biochemistry, Molecular and Integrative Physiology, Chemical Engineering and Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). He was the Director of the Bioinformatics and Computational Biology Program at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications and the Co-Director of the W.M. Keck Center for Comparative and Functional Genomics at UIUC. He is a fellow of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering (AIMBE) and is a recipient of Smithsonian Foundation and Association of Laboratory Automation Awards and his research work is described below. In 2002 he received the Genome Technology All Star Award. In 2008 he was awarded the Faculty Excellence in Research Award at the University of California at San Diego. His research spans several areas of bioinformatics and systems biology.
    Dr. Subramaniam has played a key role in raising national awareness for training and research in bioinformatics. He served as a member of the National Institute for Health (NIH) Director's Advisory Committee on Bioinformatics, which resulted in the Biomedical Information Science and Technology Initiative (BISTI) report. The report recognized the dire need for trained professionals in Bioinformatics and recommended the launching of a strong NIH funding initiative. Dr. Subramaniam served as the Chair of a NIH BISTI Study Section. Dr. Subramaniam has also served on Bioinformatics and Biotechnology Advisory Councils for Virginia Tech, the University of Illinois at Chicago, and on the Scientific Advisory Board of several Biotech and Bioinformatics Companies. Dr. Subramaniam has served as a member of the State of Illinois Governor's initiative in Biotechnology and an advisor and reviewer of the State of North Carolina initiative in Biotechnology. He is currently an overseas advisor for the Department of Biotechnology of the Government of India, and a member of a European Science Foundation Panel.


    Host: Stacey Finley, PhD

    Location: Corwin D. Denney Research Center (DRB) - 146

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Mischalgrace Diasanta

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  • Astani Civil and Environmental Engineering Ph.D. Seminar

    Fri, Mar 31, 2017 @ 03:00 PM - 04:00 PM

    Sonny Astani Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Dr. Christopher Higgins, Colorado School of Mines

    Talk Title: Passive technologies for treatment of urban stormwater: Biochar-amemnded bioinfiltration systems and biohydrochemically enhanced stream-water treatment

    Abstract: Despite substantial water quality challenges associated with urban stormwater, stormwater managers typically prioritize storm flow reduction rather than pollutant removal. Common stormwater pollutants of concern can vary greatly by region, but often include nutrients, metals, pathogens, and trace organic chemicals. In this seminar, two novel technologies for removal of chemical contaminants from stormwater will be discussed. Bioinfiltration systems have shown potential to afford dual benefits of preventing contamination of urban receiving waters while augmenting urban water storage. The addition of a black carbon sorbent (biochar) to these systems may be especially effective for enhanced removal of traceorganic chemicals (TOrCs). Efforts to calibrate and verify a forward model for intraparticle diffusion-limited TOrC transport will be discussed, as well as the potential for transformation product generation in these systems. Further, a novel approach for treating stormwater while conveying it will be presented. This approach, termed Biohydrochemical Enhancement structures for Streamwater Treatment, BEST, relies on subsurface modifications to streambed hydraulic conductivity to drive efficient hyporheic exchange. When coupled with subsurface geomedia enhancements, BEST modules show significant promise for treating urban stormwater contaminants with minimal impacts to other stream functions. Together, these passive technologies suggest that the enhancement of natural processes in urban water infrastructure may have significant benefits to urban water quality.


    Biography: Dr. Christopher P. Higgins is an Associate Professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the Colorado School of Mines. Dr. Higgins earned his PhD and MS from Stanford in Civil and Environmental Engineering, and his BA from Harvard in Chemistry and Chemical Biology. Before joining the faculty of CSM in 2009, he completed a postdoctoral appointment at Johns Hopkins. His research focuses on the movement of contaminants in the environment. In particular, he studies chemical fate and transport in natural and engineered systems as well as bioaccumulation in plants and animals. Contaminants under study in his laboratory include poly- and perfluoroalkyl substances used in stain-repellent fabrics and firefighting foams, nanoparticles, wastewater-derived pharmaceuticals and personal care products, trace organic chemicals in urban stormwater, and trace metals.

    Host: Dr. Daniel McCurry

    Location: John Stauffer Science Lecture Hall (SLH) - 102

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Evangeline Reyes

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  • NL Seminar Towards the Machine Comprehension of Text

    Fri, Mar 31, 2017 @ 03:00 PM - 04:00 PM

    Information Sciences Institute

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Danqi Chen, Stanford Univ.

    Talk Title: Towards the Machine Comprehension of Text

    Series: Natural Language Seminar

    Abstract: In this talk, I will first present how we advance this line of research. I will show how simple models can achieve nearly state of the art performance on recent benchmarks, including the CNN Daily Mail datasets and the Stanford Question Answering Dataset. I will focus on explaining the logical structure behind these neural architectures and discussing advantage as well as limits of current approaches. Lastly I will talk about our recent work on scaling up machine comprehension systems, which attempt to answer open domain questions at the full Wikipedia scale. We demonstrate the promise of our system, as well as set up new benchmarks by evaluating on multiple existing QA datasets.

    Biography: Danqi Chen is a PhD candidate in Computer Science at Stanford University, advised by Professor Christopher Manning. Her main research interests lie in deep learning for natural language processing and understanding, and she is particularly interested in the intersection between text understanding and knowledge reasoning. She has been working on machine comprehension, question answering, knowledge base population and dependency parsing. She is a recipient of Facebook fellowship and Microsoft Research Womens Fellowship and an outstanding paper award in ACL 16. Prior to Stanford, she received her BS from Tsinghua University.

    Host: Marjan Ghazvininejad 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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