Events for October 10, 2014
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AI SEMINAR
Fri, Oct 10, 2014 @ 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Information Sciences Institute
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Yolanda Gil, Deputy Director, Intelligent Systems Division
Talk Title: Semantic Challenges in Getting Work Done
Abstract: In the new millennium, work involves an increasing amount of tasks that are knowledge-rich and collaborative. We are investigating how semantics can help on both fronts. Our focus is scientific work, in particular data analysis, where tremendous potential resides in combining the knowledge and resources of a highly fragmented science community. We capture task knowledge in semantic workflows, and use skeletal plan refinement algorithms to assist users when they specify high-level tasks. But the formulation of workflows is in itself a collaborative activity, a kind of meta-workflow composed of tasks such as finding the data needed or designing a new algorithm to handle the data available. We are investigating "organic data science", a new approach to collaboration that allows scientists to formulate and resolve scientific tasks through an open framework that facilitates ad-hoc participation. With a design based on social computing principles, our approach makes scientific processes transparent and incorporates semantic representations of tasks and their properties. The semantic challenges involved in this work are numerous and have great potential to transform the Web to help us do work in more productive and unanticipated ways.
Biography: Yolanda Gil is Director of Knowledge Technologies and Associate Division Director at the Information Sciences Institute of the University of Southern California, and Research Professor in the Computer Science Department. She received her M.S. and Ph. D. degrees in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University. Dr. Gil conducts research on various aspects of Interactive Knowledge Capture, including intelligent user interfaces, knowledge-rich problem solving, and the semantic web. In recent years, her work has focused on collaborative large-scale scientific data analysis through semantic workflows. She initiated and chaired the W3C Provenance Incubator that led to the PROV community standard. She was elected Fellow of the American Association of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) in 2012. Dr. Gil is the current Chair of ACM SIGAI, the Association for Computing Machinery's Special Interest Group on Artificial Intelligence.
Host: Greg VerSteeg
Location: Information Science Institute (ISI) - 11th floor large conference room
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Kary LAU
This event is open to all eligible individuals. USC Viterbi operates all of its activities consistent with the University's Notice of Non-Discrimination. Eligibility is not determined based on race, sex, ethnicity, sexual orientation, or any other prohibited factor. -
NL Seminar- Interplay between Continuous and Discrete Aspects of Brain Image Analysis
Fri, Oct 10, 2014 @ 03:00 PM - 04:00 PM
Information Sciences Institute
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Boris Gutman, USC/ISI
Talk Title: Interplay between Continuous and Discrete Aspects of Brain Image Analysis
Series: Natural Language Seminar
Abstract: Brain MRI offers tremendous opportunity to learn about cortical anatomy, function and connectivity. In this talk I will go over several standard techniques for image understanding used in brain imaging. These include image registration, segmentation, tractography and graph-based connectivity analyses. Among these algorithms, we routinely encounter both continuous and discrete types of analysis. Non-linear image registration, typically formalized as a diffeomorphism on the image domain, is an example of the former: we may ask for instance how much volume change the brain is experiencing locally over time, clearly a continuous measure. In another example, we may trace continuous curves in space that best fit a Diffusion Tensor MR image to approximate fibers in the brainâs white matter. One the other hand, connectivity between distinct units within the nervous system is an example of discrete analysis: for instance, the brainâs functionally distinct regions are thought of as nodes in a graph, whose edges are defined by the connecting fiber models.
After a brief description of the standard methods at hand, I will suggest an approach for combining the two types of analysis. By assuming the continuous paradigm for connectivity, we can push our connectome model from being a discrete graph to being a linear operator. Using some well-known results from operator theory, we can decompose the operator into its resident âeigen-networks,â and apply continuous methods directly. As an example, we can spatially register connectivity matrices with spatially distributed nodes. Finally, I will show two simple examples of continuous analogues for standard graph theory measures, and their potential application for an Alzheimer âs disease study.
Biography: Boris Gutman received his B.S. in Applied Mathematics and PhD in Biomedical Engineering from UCLA before joining USCâs Imaging Genetics Center (IGC). He is currently a post-doctoral scholar at the IGC, under the supervision of Professor Paul M. Thompson.
Host: Aliya Deri and Kevin Knight
More Info: http://nlg.isi.edu/nl-seminar/
Location: Information Science Institute (ISI) - 6th Flr Conf Rm # 689 Marina Del Rey
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Peter Zamar
Event Link: http://nlg.isi.edu/nl-seminar/
This event is open to all eligible individuals. USC Viterbi operates all of its activities consistent with the University's Notice of Non-Discrimination. Eligibility is not determined based on race, sex, ethnicity, sexual orientation, or any other prohibited factor.