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Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Events for June

  • Towards Smarter Hardware Prediction Mechanisms

    Towards Smarter Hardware Prediction Mechanisms

    Fri, Jun 01, 2018 @ 10:00 AM - 11:00 AM

    Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Akanksha Jain, University of Texas at Austin

    Talk Title: Towards Smarter Hardware Prediction Mechanisms

    Abstract: In today's data-driven world, memory system performance remains critical to the overall performance of many workloads. In this talk, we present recent work in two aspects of hardware caching: (1) The Hawkeye Cache (ISCA 2016), which introduces a novel method of solving the age-old problem of cache replacement, and (2) Harmony, which uncovers a new design space for cache replacement policies in the presence of prefetching (ISCA 2018). We will then briefly discuss ways that machine learning can help us improve upon these ideas, and we conclude by discussing the broader role machine learning can play in advancing memory system research.

    Biography: Akanksha Jain received her PhD in Computer Science from The University of Texas in December 2016. In 2009, she received the B.Tech and M. Tech degrees in Computer Science and Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology Madras. Her research interests are in computer architecture, with a particular focus on the memory system and on using machine learning techniques to improve the design of memory system optimizations.

    Host: Xuehai Qian, x04459, xuehai.qian@usc.edu

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

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Gerrielyn Ramos

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  • Repeating EventEssentials of Composites Manufacturing

    Sat, Jun 02, 2018

    Executive Education

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Abstract: Essentials of Composites Manufacturing provides a high-level overview of manufacturing science and engineering for aerospace composite structures, focusing on prepreg and liquid molding processes, including hands-on laboratory demonstrations.
    Course participants will complete a multiple-choice quiz as a knowledge assessment, available online at the end of the course. When the course and quiz have been successfully completed, participants will receive USC Continuing Education Units.

    More Info: https://viterbiexeced.usc.edu/engineering-program-areas/chemical-engineering-materials-science/essentials-composites-manufacturing/

    Audiences: Registered Attendees

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    Contact: Corporate & Professional Programs

    Event Link: https://viterbiexeced.usc.edu/engineering-program-areas/chemical-engineering-materials-science/essentials-composites-manufacturing/

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  • High-dimensional Magnetic Resonance Imaging of Microstructure

    Mon, Jun 04, 2018 @ 02:00 PM - 03:00 PM

    Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Daeun Kim, Electrical Engineering, University of Southern California

    Talk Title: High-dimensional Magnetic Resonance Imaging of Microsctucture

    Series: Medical Imaging Seminar Series

    Abstract: Microstructure imaging in MRI represents imaging approaches to infer biological tissue properties at the cellular level (i.e., microscopic scale) from a macroscopic imaging voxel. Conventional approaches to microstructure imaging have focused on unmixng sub-voxel compartments that are present within each voxel of MR images acquired with a single MR contrast mechanism such as diffusion or relaxation. However, unambiguously distinguishing between these sub-voxel compartments continues to be challenging with conventional methods due to the ill-posedness of the inverse problem.

    This work aims at developing a novel high-dimensional MRI method to provide substantially improved abilities of resolving microstructural compartments. A main idea of the method is to use high-dimensional contrast encoding with multiple MR contrast mechanisms (e.g., both diffusion and relaxation) combined with spatially-constrained reconstruction to improve the ill-posedness. In the context of the high-dimensional MRI method, we present 1) a novel experiment design scheme, 2) estimation and optimization strategies and 3) validation and application.


    Biography: Daeun Kim is a PhD candidate in Electrical Engineering at University of Southern California, supervised by Professor Justin Haldar. She received her B.S. and M.S. degrees in Electronic and Electrical Engineering at Ewha Womans University, South Korea. Her research focuses on multidimensional signal processing for microstructure imaging in MRI. Her recent work was recognized as one of the most top ten popular abstract at the International Society for Magnetic Resonance in Medicine (ISMRM) in 2016, and won the 1st Place Award for Best Abstract Presentation at the Quantitative MR Study Group of the ISMRM in 2017. She is also a recipient of the USC Alfred E. Mann Innovation in Engineering Doctoral Fellowship and the USC WiSE Merit Award for Current Doctoral Students in 2017.

    Host: Professor Justin Haldar

    Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 248

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Talyia White

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  • Repeating EventLean Green Belt

    Tue, Jun 05, 2018

    Executive Education

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Abstract: This three-day course provides an in-depth understanding of Lean enterprise principles and how to apply them within your organization.

    More Info: https://viterbiexeced.usc.edu/engineering-program-areas/industrial-systems-engineering/lean-green-belt/

    Audiences: Registered Attendees

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    Contact: Corporate & Professional Programs

    Event Link: https://viterbiexeced.usc.edu/engineering-program-areas/industrial-systems-engineering/lean-green-belt/

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  • Repeating EventLean Green Belt

    Wed, Jun 06, 2018

    Executive Education

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Abstract: This three-day course provides an in-depth understanding of Lean enterprise principles and how to apply them within your organization.

    More Info: https://viterbiexeced.usc.edu/engineering-program-areas/industrial-systems-engineering/lean-green-belt/

    Audiences: Registered Attendees

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    Contact: Corporate & Professional Programs

    Event Link: https://viterbiexeced.usc.edu/engineering-program-areas/industrial-systems-engineering/lean-green-belt/

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  • System Engineering Research Center (SERC) Talks

    System Engineering Research Center (SERC) Talks

    Wed, Jun 06, 2018 @ 10:00 AM - 12:11 AM

    Systems Architecting and Engineering, USC Viterbi School of Engineering

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Phyllis Marbach, INCOSE LA Chapter President and Senior Software Engineer at Boeing, Retired

    Talk Title: How To Use Agile Methods on Highly-Critical Systems that Require Earned Value Management

    Series: Successfully Applying Agile Methods for High-Criticality Systems

    Abstract: Projects using agile practices should have an identified period of performance. During that period of performance releases are defined that have specific features or capabilities. This is called a Roadmap. Each release is planned during a release planning meeting where dependencies, critical path and float are defined. Each of the features in the Roadmap should be planned into the integrated management schedule as a work package. The detailed tasks of each feature are defined during the release planning and baselined when the work package is opened. Percent complete reporting of that feature, the high value work product in development, can be used for the EVM measures. So, even if a project is using agile practices they can apply EVM in reporting progress against their plans.

    Although, you may have heard that projects developed using agile cannot also use earned value management (EVM), this presentation will show how it can be done.

    Event Password: SERC
    NOTE: All Talks will be broadcast on WebEx. If you encounter any problems, please visit http://www.sercuarc.org/serc-talks/serc-talks-troubleshooting-guide/ .



    Biography: Phyllis Marbach retired from The Boeing Company Defense Space and Security Division as a senior software engineer in 2016. Phyllis has over 35 years of experience in aerospace programs including satellite ground stations, chemical lasers, the International Space Station, and various propulsion systems. Phyllis was a Boeing Designated Expert in agile software development, software engineering and systems engineering. The past eight years in her role as an Agile Coach for Boeing, she coached commercial airplane, unmanned air systems, radio, avionics, and research programs. Currently she is a Scaled Agile Framework 4 Program Consultant and Immediate Past President of the International Council on Systems Engineering, Los Angeles chapter, the second largest chapter in the United States. Phyllis has a Master of Science degree in engineering from the University of California -“ Los Angeles.

    Phyllis Marbach was involved in establishing how projects using agile methods plan, measure and report their earned value at Boeing. During the course of that work she acquired data from two projects and assisted the Government Accounting Office with agile updates to the Scheduling and Cost Guides in 2015.

    More Info: http://www.sercuarc.org/events/serc-talks-how-do-you-use-agile-methods-on-highly-critical-systems-that-require-earned-value-management/

    Webcast: https://stevensinstitute-events.webex.com/mw3100/mywebex/default.do?nomenu=true&siteurl=stevensinstitute-events&service=6&rnd=0.5525946034517247&main_url=https%3A%2F%2Fstevensinstitute-events.webex.com%2Fec3100%2Feventcenter%2Fevent%2FeventAction.do%3Fthe

    Location: Online via WebEX

    WebCast Link: https://stevensinstitute-events.webex.com/mw3100/mywebex/default.do?nomenu=true&siteurl=stevensinstitute-events&service=6&rnd=0.5525946034517247&main_url=https%3A%2F%2Fstevensinstitute-events.webex.com%2Fec3100%2Feventcenter%2Fevent%2FeventAction.do%3Fthe

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: James Moore II

    Event Link: http://www.sercuarc.org/events/serc-talks-how-do-you-use-agile-methods-on-highly-critical-systems-that-require-earned-value-management/

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  • Repeating EventLean Green Belt

    Thu, Jun 07, 2018

    Executive Education

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Abstract: This three-day course provides an in-depth understanding of Lean enterprise principles and how to apply them within your organization.

    More Info: https://viterbiexeced.usc.edu/engineering-program-areas/industrial-systems-engineering/lean-green-belt/

    Audiences: Registered Attendees

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    Contact: Corporate & Professional Programs

    Event Link: https://viterbiexeced.usc.edu/engineering-program-areas/industrial-systems-engineering/lean-green-belt/

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  • IJCAI 2018 John McCarthy Award Practice Presentation

    Thu, Jun 07, 2018 @ 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM

    Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Dr. Milind Tambe, University of Southern California

    Talk Title: Multiagent Systems Research for Social Good

    Abstract: With the maturing of AI and multiagent systems research, we have a tremendous opportunity to direct these advances towards addressing complex societal problems. One key multiagent systems challenge that cuts across multiple of these problem areas is that of effectively deploying limited intervention resources. I will highlight our research advances rooted in computational game theory in addressing this challenge across three key problem areas. First, I will focus on public safety and security, and outline our contribution in introducing and using the Stackelberg security games framework for effectively allocating limited security resources. This security games work has been used by agencies such as the US Coast Guard, the US Federal Air Marshals Service and others to assist in the protection of ports, airports, flights and other critical infrastructure. Second, I will focus on conservation and illustrate the use of green security games to allocate limited resources in protecting endangered wildlife. Advances in adversary modeling in these games have helped removal of snares and arrests of poachers in national parks in Uganda, potentially saving endangered animals. Third, for public health, I will outline challenges of using limited resources for spreading health information in low resource communities, and algorithms based on games against nature. Our new algorithms for influence maximization, piloted in homeless shelters in Los Angeles, show significant improvements over traditional methods in harnessing social networks to spread HIV-related information among homeless youth. I will also point to directions for future work, illustrating the significant potential of AI for social good.


    Biography: Milind Tambe is Helen N. and Emmett H. Jones Professor in Engineering at the University of Southern California (USC) and the Founding Co-Director of CAIS, the USC Center for Artificial Intelligence in Society, where his research focuses on advancing AI and multiagent systems research for Social Good. He is a fellow of AAAI and ACM, as well as recipient of the IJCAI John McCarthy Award, ACM/SIGAI Autonomous Agents Research Award, Christopher Columbus Fellowship Foundation Homeland security award, INFORMS Wagner prize in Operations Research, Rist Prize of the Military Operations Research Society, IBM Faculty Award, Okawa foundation award, RoboCup scientific challenge award, and other awards including the Orange County Engineering Council Outstanding Project Achievement Award, USC Associates award for creativity in research and USC Viterbi use-inspired research award.


    Host: USC Center for Artificial Intelligence in Society (CAIS)

    Location: Seaver Science Library (SSL) - 150

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Computer Science Department

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  • Repeating EventEssentials of Composites Manufacturing

    Sat, Jun 09, 2018

    Executive Education

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Abstract: Essentials of Composites Manufacturing provides a high-level overview of manufacturing science and engineering for aerospace composite structures, focusing on prepreg and liquid molding processes, including hands-on laboratory demonstrations.
    Course participants will complete a multiple-choice quiz as a knowledge assessment, available online at the end of the course. When the course and quiz have been successfully completed, participants will receive USC Continuing Education Units.

    More Info: https://viterbiexeced.usc.edu/engineering-program-areas/chemical-engineering-materials-science/essentials-composites-manufacturing/

    Audiences: Registered Attendees

    View All Dates

    Contact: Corporate & Professional Programs

    Event Link: https://viterbiexeced.usc.edu/engineering-program-areas/chemical-engineering-materials-science/essentials-composites-manufacturing/

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  • EE Seminar: Addressing the privacy and energy efficiency challenges of largescale information systems

    Thu, Jun 14, 2018 @ 10:30 AM - 11:30 AM

    Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Dr. Peter Kairouz, Postdoctoral Research Fellow/Stanford University

    Talk Title: Addressing the privacy and energy efficiency challenges of largescale information systems

    Abstract: The explosive growth in connectivity and information sharing across a multitude of sensory devices has been accelerating the use of machine learning to guide consumers through a myriad of choices and decisions. While this vision is expected to generate many disruptive business and social opportunities, it presents a number of unprecedented challenges. My talk will address two of these challenges: sharing largescale datasets in a privacy-preserving fashion, and enabling a massive number of sporadically active low-energy wireless devices with small payloads to access the spectrum with minimal coordination and channel estimation overheads.

    In the first part of my talk, I will present fundamental (and somewhat surprising) results on sparse group testing, a version of the classical group testing problem with a constraint on the number of tests an item is allowed to participate in. I will also show how these results aid in the design of low-energy random access protocols.

    In the second part of my talk, I will introduce a novel privacy notion called generative adversarial privacy (GAP). GAP leverages recent advancements in adversarial learning to arrive to a unified framework for data-driven privacy that has deep game-theoretic and information-theoretic roots. I will also showcase the performance of GAP on real-life datasets.

    I will conclude my talk by discussing exciting future research directions.


    Biography: Peter Kairouz is a postdoctoral research fellow at Stanford University. He received his Ph.D. in ECE, M.S. in Maths, and M.S. in ECE from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) and his B.E. in ECE from the American University of Beirut (AUB). He interned twice at Qualcomm and more recently at Google where he designed privacy-aware unsupervised learning algorithms. He is the recipient of the 2012 Roberto Padovani Scholarship from Qualcomm's Research Center, the 2015 ACM SIGMETRICS Best Paper Award, and the 2016 Harold L. Olesen Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching from UIUC. His research interests are interdisciplinary and span the areas of data and network sciences, privacy-preserving data analysis, machine learning, and information theory.


    Host: Dr. Keith Chugg, chugg@usc.edu

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

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Mayumi Thrasher

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  • AI Seminar: Scalable Task and Motion Planning for Multi Robot Systems in Obstacle Rich Environments

    Fri, Jun 15, 2018 @ 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM

    Information Sciences Institute

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Wolfgang Hönig, USC

    Talk Title: Scalable Task and Motion Planning for Multi Robot Systems in Obstacle Rich Environments

    Series: Artificial Intelligence Seminar

    Abstract: Motion planning problems have been studied in both the artificial intelligence AI and robotics communities. AI solvers can compute plans for hundreds of simple agents in minutes with suboptimality guarantees, while robotics solutions typically include richer kinodynamic models during planning, but are very slow when many robots and obstacles are taken into account.

    We combine the advantages of the two methods by using a two-step approach. First, we use and extend AI solvers for a simplified coordination problem. The output is a discrete plan that cannot be executed on real robots. Second, we apply a computationally efficient post-processing step that creates a continuous plan, taking kinodynamic constraints into account. We show examples for ground robots in a warehouse domain and quadrotors that are tasked with formation change.




    Biography: Wolfgang Honig is a Ph.D. student in the ACT Lab at the University of Southern California. He holds a Diploma in Computer Science from the Technical University Dresden, Germany and an M.S. in Computer Science Intelligent Robotics from USC. His research focuses on enabling large teams of physical robots to collaboratively solve real-world tasks by combining methods from artificial intelligence and robotics

    Host: Satish Kumar Thittamaranahalli

    Location: Information Science Institute (ISI) - 6th Floor Conf Rm-CR# 689

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Peter Zamar

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  • NL Seminar-Recent Advances and Challenges on Human-Computer Conversational Systems

    Fri, Jun 22, 2018 @ 03:00 PM - 04:00 PM

    Information Sciences Institute

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Rui Yan, Peking Univ

    Talk Title: Recent Advances and Challenges on Human-Computer Conversational Systems

    Series: Natural Language Seminar

    Abstract: Automatic human-computer conversational systems have attracted great attention from both industry and academia. Intelligent products such as XiaoIce by Microsoft have been released, while tons of Artificial Intelligence companies have been established. We see that the technology behind the conversational systems is accumulating and now open to the public gradually. With the investigation of researchers, conversational systems are more than scientific fictions: they become real. I would review the recent development of human-computer conversational systems, especially the significant changes brought by deep learning techniques. In the meanwhile, I would share some work conducted by our group.





    Biography: Dr. Rui Yan is an assistant professor at Peking University, an adjunct professor in Central China Normal University and Central University of Finance and Economics, and he was a Senior Researcher at Baidu Inc. He has investigated several open-domain conversational systems and dialog systems in vertical domains. Till now he has published more than 50 highly competitive peer reviewed papers. He serves as a senior program committee member of several top-tier venues such as KDD, SIGIR, ACL, WWW, IJCAI, AAAI, CIKM, EMNLP.

    Host: Nanyun Peng

    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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  • 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, Jun 25, 2018 @ 10:00 AM - 11:00 AM

    Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Ketan Savla, University of Southern California

    Talk Title: Capacity of Societal Cyber-Physical Systems

    Series: CSC@USC Seminar Series

    Abstract: The term capacity has natural connotations about fundamental limits and robustness to disruptions. For engineered systems, a rigorous characterization of capacity also provides insight into algorithms with universal performance guarantees and informs optimal strategic resource allocation. We present analysis and optimization of capacity and related performance metrics for societal cyber-physical systems (including traffic, mobility, and power networks) in canonical settings. At the macroscopic scale, we extend static network flow formulations to several flow dynamics and control settings (including cascading failure). The tractability of the resulting nonlinear analysis and optimization is facilitated by the spatial sparsity of dynamics and invariance of key input-output properties, such as monotonicity, across multiple resolutions in the network. At the microscopic scale, we consider spatial queues with state-dependent service rate; for example, such problems arise in networks of dynamically coupled vehicles. While this dependence is complex in general, we provide tight characterization in limiting cases, for instance large queue length, which leads to tight throughput estimates.

    Biography: Ketan Savla is an associate professor (with tenure) and John and Dorothy Shea Early Career Chair in Civil Engineering at the University of Southern California, with joint appointments in the Sonny Astani Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, the Daniel J. Epstein Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering (courtesy), and the Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical Engineering-Systems (courtesy). Prior to that, he was a research scientist in the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems at MIT. He obtained his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering and M.A. in Applied Mathematics from the University of California at Santa Barbara (UCSB), M.S. in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and B. Tech. in Mechanical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay. His current research interest is in distributed robust and optimal control, dynamical networks, state-dependent queueing systems, and incentive design, with applications in civil infrastructure and autonomous systems. His recognitions include CCDC Best Thesis Award from UCSB, NSF CAREER, an IEEE CSS George S. Axelby Outstanding Paper Award, and AACC Donald P. Eckman Award. He serves/has served as an Associate Editor for the Conference Editorial Board of the IEEE Control Systems Society, the IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems, and the IEEE Control Systems Letters.

    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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