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Events for April 02, 2024
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The Good Life Discussion Series
Tue, Apr 02, 2024
Engineering in Society Program
Receptions & Special Events
The new Good Life Discussion Series allows USC Viterbi students to ask such big questions in a safe, supportive setting. This is an invitation-only event.
Audiences: This event is invitation only
Contact: Martha Townsend
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CS Colloquium: Jane E. - Artistic Vision: Interactive Computational Guidance for Developing Expertise
Tue, Apr 02, 2024 @ 10:00 AM - 11:00 AM
Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Jane E., UC San Diego
Talk Title: Artistic Vision: Interactive Computational Guidance for Developing Expertise
Series: Computer Science Colloquium
Abstract: Computer scientists have long worked towards the vision of human-AI collaboration for augmenting human capabilities and intellect. My work contributes to this vision by asking: How can computational tools not only help a user complete a task, but also help them develop their own domain expertise while doing so?
I investigate this question by designing new interactive tools for domains of artistic creativity. My work is inspired by the fact that expert artists have trained their eyes to “see” in ways that embed their expert domain knowledge—in this case, core artistic concepts. As instructors, experts have also designed approaches to intentionally communicate their vision to their students. My work designs creativity tools that leverage these expert structures to help novices develop this expert-like "artistic vision"—specifically through providing guidance to scaffold their design processes. In this talk, I will demonstrate my approach for designing tools that embed such guidance for photography and visual design that embed the underlying design principles. I will show that these tools are able to scaffold novices’ to be more aware of these artistic concepts during their creative process.
This lecture satisfies requirements for CSCI 591: Research Colloquium
Biography: Jane E is Postdoctoral Fellow at The Design Lab at UCSD under the guidance of mentors Steven Dow and Haijun Xia. She earned her PhD in Computer Science from Stanford University, where she was co-advised by James Landay and Pat Hanrahan. Her research lies at the intersection of human-computer interaction and computer graphics with a focus on designing computational guidance to support novices in developing their own creative expertise. Her work takes inspiration from cognitive science and education theory to design computational tools that scaffold novices’ creative processes. Jane is grateful to have been selected as a Rising Star in EECS and to have been supported by a Microsoft Research Dissertation Grant, Hasso Plattner Institute’s Design Thinking Research Program, Brown Institute for Media Innovation, and UCSD CSE’s Postdoctoral Fellowship Program. She previously worked on the Microsoft Photos app as a software engineer after receiving her BSE from Princeton University. For more information, see her website: ejane.me
Host: Souti Chattopadhyay
Location: Olin Hall of Engineering (OHE) - 136
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: CS Faculty Affairs
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ECE-S Seminar - Francisco Romero
Tue, Apr 02, 2024 @ 10:00 AM - 11:00 AM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Dr. Francisco Romero, PhD, Electrical Engineering | Stanford University
Talk Title: General Purpose and Interactive Video Analytics
Abstract: The availability of vast video datasets and the increasing accuracy of machine learning models have made exploration of video data an exciting opportunity. Asking complex questions like “Find cases where a car takes a left turn while a pedestrian is crossing the road on a rainy night” over terabytes of videos should be possible. Recent video analytics research expects users will manually reason about their query, combine optimizations, and occasionally train models to meet their performance and accuracy goals. This is a long way from the experience users have when exploring structured data. In this talk, I will present the design of a general purpose and interactive video analytics system. First, I will present how to automatically optimize multi-model, multi-predicate video queries with the VIVA video analytics system. VIVA allows users to express domain knowledge about model relationships. VIVA uses this knowledge to automate complex query optimization by deciding how and when it should be applied. Second, I will present how to efficiently execute video queries across heterogeneous hardware resources with INFaaS. INFaaS exposes a "model-less" interface that enables users to simply specify the performance and accuracy requirements for their applications without needing to specify a specific model-variant for each query. INFaaS efficiently navigates the large trade-off space of model-variants on behalf of users to meet application-specific objectives: (a) for each query, it selects a model, hardware architecture, and model optimizations, (b) it combines VM-level horizontal autoscaling with model-level autoscaling to reduce cost as query load varies. I will also briefly discuss how I extended INFaaS across DAGs of machine learning models with Llama: a serverless video processing framework. I will close by outlining future directions in multi-modal data analysis across heterogeneous hardware resources.
Biography: Francisco Romero works at the intersection of computer systems and architecture, databases, and machine learning, where his goal is to design systems that automatically make decisions on users’ behalf to optimize for their goals like cost, performance, accuracy, and resource efficiency. He recently received his PhD in Electrical Engineering at Stanford University, where his research spanned general machine learning inference, serverless computing, data systems, and datacenter scheduling. He has several publications in top-tier conferences, including a best paper at USENIX ATC 2021. His work has been deployed in production Microsoft Azure Functions and is being used for automated video analysis at a stealth company.
Host: Dr. Murali Annavaram, annavara@usc.edu
Webcast: https://usc.zoom.us/j/92881411147?pwd=SXNBdm9oa3ljYi9sdTNsR2puWmRrQT09More Information: 2024.04.02 ECE Seminar - Francisco Romero.pdf
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - EEB 248
WebCast Link: https://usc.zoom.us/j/92881411147?pwd=SXNBdm9oa3ljYi9sdTNsR2puWmRrQT09
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Miki Arlen
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Increase Your Salary: Negotiating Your Job/Internship Offer
Tue, Apr 02, 2024 @ 12:00 PM - 01:00 PM
Viterbi School of Engineering Career Connections
Workshops & Infosessions
THIS EVENT WILL BE HOSTED HYBRID: IN-PERSON & ONLINE SIMULTANEOUSLY
Zoom link: https://usc.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJctc-ivqTMuE9xJ_E6gU4YU9ZrGjVYGixoc
Increase your knowledge on the job/internship search by attending this professional development Q&A moderated by Viterbi Career Connections staff or Viterbi employer partners.
Location: Ronald Tutor Hall of Engineering (RTH) - 211
Audiences: All Viterbi
Contact: RTH 218 Viterbi Career Connections
Event Link: https://usc.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJctc-ivqTMuE9xJ_E6gU4YU9ZrGjVYGixoc
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Photonics Seminar - A. Douglas Stone, Tuesday, April 2nd at 2pm in EEB 248
Tue, Apr 02, 2024 @ 02:00 PM - 03:30 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: A. Douglas Stone, Yale University
Talk Title: Time-reversing a laser: What it means and why it's important.
Series: Photonics Seminar Series
Abstract: Over a decade ago an overlooked symmetry of Maxwell's equations coupled to matter was recognized, a relationship between a laser at threshold and a perfectly absorbing resonator. The threshold condition for lasing is the point at which gain balances loss, and the system self-organizes to oscillate coherently at a specific frequency in the highest Q electromagnetic mode. At this special point the system supports a purely outgoing solution of the Maxwell wave equation at a real frequency but with negligible amplitude, heralding the turn-on of a steady-state source of coherent radiation. Time-reversing this threshold lasing equation maps the laser system to another physical realizable electromagnetic system, one in which the time-reflected lasing mode is incident on an identical resonator, except that absorption loss replaces gain, and the purely incoming wave is perfectly trapped by interference and eventually absorbed without scattering. This mapping implies that under very general conditions, any complex structure can be made to absorb perfectly at a specific frequency, if a specific adapted input wavefront is imposed and the loss is appropriately tuned, a phenomenon now known as Coherent Perfect Absorption (CPA). While CPA was proposed for classical electromagnetic waves, the effect occurs for all of the linear classical wave equations of physics, and has nonlinear generalizations as well. Moreover, while CPA describes perfect capture and transduction of waves, the theory pointed the way to an even more general theory of reflectionless scattering of appropriate adapted wavefronts ("reflectionless scattering modes", RSMs). This theory applies to quantum waves as well, and provides a new framework to explore the control and routing of waves via interference in guided and even open geometries. I will review a few dramatic experimental and technologically interesting applications of CPA and RSM.
Biography: A. Douglas Stone is Carl A. Morse Professor of Applied Physics, and Professor of Physics at Yale University, where he joined the faculty in 1986. Since becoming a full professor in 1990, he has served as Chair of Applied Physics (1997-2003, 2009-2015), Director of Yale's Division of Physical Sciences (2004-2009), and Deputy Director of the Yale Quantum Institute (2015-present).Stone is a theoretical physicist with research interests in condensed matter and optical physics. He has co-authored over 165 research publications, which have been cited over 28,000 times, with an h-index of 74 and holds four patents for optical devices. He was a pioneer in the field of mesoscopic physics, describing systems intermediate between bulk solids and individual atoms or molecules, where novel quantum effects appear. Subsequently he worked on problems relating to the effects of chaos in quantum and electromagnetic systems, and was the first to introduce and study lasers with ray-chaotic resonators. His current work continues to focus on lasers, and other photonic systems with complex geometry and gain and loss. He is a recipient of the McMillan Award of the University of Illinois at Urbana for "outstanding contributions to condensed matter physics" for his research demonstrating "universal conductance fluctuations" in mesoscopic conductors. He was awarded the 2015 Willis Lamb Medal for Laser Science for his work on random and chaotic lasers, in collaboration with his colleague Hui Cao. His group developed Steady-state Ab initio Laser Theory (SALT), which is the first general formulation of laser theory set up to deal with arbitrary spatial complexity in a lasing structure efficiently, assuming steady-state operation. In 2010 he pioneered the concept of the Coherent Perfect Absorber (the time-reversed or "anti-laser"), and has recently generalized this framework to encompass a general theory reflectionless scattering of all linear waves. He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society and of the Optical Society of America, and is an Honorary General Member of the Aspen Center for Physics. Stone earned his BA from Harvard in 1976, an MA from Balliol College, Oxford in 1978 (where he was a Rhodes Scholar), and a PhD from MIT in 1983 under the supervision of John Joannopoulos. He was a postdoc at IBM before coming to Yale.
Host: Mercedeh Khajavikhan, Michelle Povinelli, Constantine Sideris; Hossein Hashemi; Wade Hsu; Mengjie Yu; Wei Wu; Tony Levi; Alan E. Willner; Andrea Martin Armani
More Information: Douglas Stone Seminar Flyer.pdf
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 248
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Marilyn Poplawski
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Epstein Institute, ISE 651 Seminar Class
Tue, Apr 02, 2024 @ 03:30 PM - 04:50 PM
Daniel J. Epstein Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Dr. Reha Uzsoy, Program Director, Division of Civil, Mechanical and Manufacturing Innovation, National Science Foundation
Talk Title: Funding Perspectives from the National Science Foundation
Host: Prof. Qiang Huang
More Information: April 2, 2024.pdf
Location: Social Sciences Building (SOS) - SOS Building, B2
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Grace Owh
