Select a calendar:
Filter April Events by Event Type:
SUNMONTUEWEDTHUFRISAT
Events for April 02, 2019
-
CS Colloquium: Xinyu Wang (UT Austin) - A unified program synthesis framework for automating end-user programming tasks
Tue, Apr 02, 2019 @ 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Xinyu Wang, UT Austing
Talk Title: A unified program synthesis framework for automating end-user programming tasks
Series: CS Colloquium
Abstract: Programming has started to become an essential skill for an increasing number of people, including novices without formal programming background. As a result, there is an increasing need for technology that can provide basic programming support to such non-expert computer end-users. Program synthesis, as a technique for automatically generating programs from high-level specifications, has been used to automate real-world programming tasks in a number of application domains (such as spreadsheet programming and data science) that non-expert users struggle with. However, developing specialized synthesizers for these domains is notoriously hard.
In this talk, I will describe a unified program synthesis framework that can be applied broadly to automating tasks across different application domains. This framework is also efficient and achieves orders of magnitude improvement in terms of synthesis speed compared to existing techniques. In particular, I have used this framework to build synthesizers for three different application domains and achieved up to 450x speed-up compared to state-of-the-art synthesis techniques.
This lecture satisfies requirements for CSCI 591: Research Colloquium.
Biography: Xinyu Wang is a PhD candidate at UT Austin advised by Isil Dillig. He works at the intersection of programming languages, software engineering and formal methods. He is interested in developing foundational program synthesis techniques that are applicable to automating real-world programming tasks.
Host: Chao Wang
Location: Olin Hall of Engineering (OHE) - 132
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Assistant to CS chair
-
ECE Seminar: Towards Embodied Visual Intelligence
Tue, Apr 02, 2019 @ 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Dinesh Jayaraman, Postdoctoral Scholar/University of California, Berkeley
Talk Title: Towards Embodied Visual Intelligence
Abstract: What would it mean for a machine to see the world? Computer vision has recently made great progress on problems such as finding categories of objects and scenes, and poses of people in images. However, studying such tasks in isolated disembodied contexts, divorced from the physical source of their images, is insufficient to build intelligent visual agents. My research focuses on remarrying vision to action, by asking: how might vision benefit from the ability to act in the world, and vice versa? Could embodied visual agents teach themselves through interaction and experimentation? Are there actions they might perform to improve their visual perception? How might they construct visual plans to achieve long-term action goals? In my talk, I will set up the context for these questions, and cover some strands of my work addressing them, proposing approaches for self-supervised learning through proprioception, visual prediction for decomposing complex control tasks, and active perception. Finally, I will discuss my long-term vision and directions that I hope to work on in the next several years.
Biography: Dinesh Jayaraman is a postdoctoral scholar at UC Berkeley. He received his PhD from UT Austin (2017) and B. Tech from IIT Madras (2011). His research interests are broadly in computer vision, robotics, and machine learning. In the last few years, he has worked on visual prediction, active perception, self-supervised visual learning, visuo-tactile robotic manipulation, semantic visual attributes, and zero-shot categorization. He has received an ACCV Best Application Paper Award (2016), a Samsung PhD Fellowship (2016), a UT Austin Graduate Dean's Fellowship (2016), and a Microelectronics and Computer Development Fellowship Award (2011). He has published in and reviewed for conferences and journals in computer vision, machine learning, and robotics, received a CVPR Outstanding Reviewer Award (2016), is as an Area Chair for NeurIPS (2018 & 2019).
Host: Professor Rahul Jain, rahul.jain@usc.edu
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 248
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Mayumi Thrasher
-
Epstein Institute Seminar - ISE 651
Tue, Apr 02, 2019 @ 03:30 PM - 04:50 PM
Daniel J. Epstein Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Dr. Jian Liu, Associate Professor, University of Arizona
Talk Title: Functional Data Analytics for Detecting Bursts in Water Distribution Systems
Host: Dr. Qiang Huang
More Information: April 2, 2019.pdf
Location: Ethel Percy Andrus Gerontology Center (GER) - 206
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Grace Owh
-
Lecture Series with Dr. Andrew Gordon - Playing Story Creation Games With Logical Abduction
Tue, Apr 02, 2019 @ 07:30 PM - 09:00 PM
Viterbi School of Engineering Student Organizations
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Dr. Andrew S. Gordon, Research Associate Professor of Computer Science and Director of Interactive Narrative Research at USC ICT
Talk Title: Playing Story Creation Games With Logical Abduction
Series: AAAI@USC Lecture Series
Abstract: Story Creation Games, such as Rory's Story Cubes and the Tell Tale card game, require players to invent creative and coherent narratives from a set of unconnected elements assembled by random chance, e.g., the throw of a die or the draw of a card. Often producing comical and entertaining storylines, these games also demonstrate the remarkable human capacity for sense-making, where one's knowledge and experience is used to explain the co-occurrence of novel combinations of observations. In this talk, I describe our recent efforts to build a computer program that could successfully play story creation games. We view this task as an interpretation problem, where the aim is to identify a coherent narrative where each narrative element plays a structural role. Our approach is to solve this interpretation problem using logical abduction, searching for sets of narrative assumptions that logically entail each of the given narrative elements. The search proceeds by backchaining from narrative elements through a knowledge base of narrative and causal axioms expressed as first-order definite clauses, unifying assumptions wherever possible. After finding connected solutions that entail the given set of narrative elements, the structure of the proof graphs are then used to generate the natural language text representation of the interpretation. In this talk, I demonstrate this approach in generating eight creative narratives given the same set of three Tell Tale cards, depicting a train, a baseball player, and the symbol of a heart. These examples demonstrate that logical abduction is well-suited to this task, but also underscore the enormous knowledge bottleneck that must be overcome to play this game with arbitrary cards. I contrast our approach with recent efforts to generate narrative text using deep neural networks trained with narrative corpora, and discuss whether these approaches fundamentally change the nature of this knowledge bottleneck.
RSVP: https://forms.gle/FXMS1nJ8W3oqveYv8
Biography: Andrew S. Gordon is Research Associate Professor of Computer Science and Director of Interactive Narrative Research at the Institute for Creative Technologies at the University of Southern California. His research advances technologies for automatically analyzing and generating narrative interpretations of experiences. A central aim of his research is the large-scale formalization of commonsense knowledge, and reasoning with these formalizations using logical abduction. He is the author of the 2004 book "Strategy Representation: An Analysis of Planning Knowledge," and the 2017 book "A Formal Theory of Commonsense Psychology: How People Think People Think" (with Jerry R. Hobbs). He received his Ph.D. in 1999 from Northwestern University.
Host: AAAI@USC
Location: Seeley G. Mudd Building (SGM) - 124
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: AAAI@USC
