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• Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars (19)
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Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Events for October

• Oct

  01

  Fall 2018 Joint CSC USC/CommNetS-MHI Seminar Series

  Mon, Oct 01, 2018 @ 02:00 PM - 03:00 PM

  Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

  Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars

  
  

  Speaker: Vanessa Jonsson, City of Hope Beckman Research Institute
  
  Talk Title: Adaptive Clinical Trial Design to Address Acquired Resistance and Therapeutic Failure
  
  Abstract: One of the challenges facing immunotherapy as a durable therapeutic approach in a variety of metastatic cancers is the development of acquired resistance and subsequent therapeutic failure. Widespread clinical applicability of immunotherapy to solid tumors depends on the understanding of response and resistance mechanisms that are mediated by evolving interactions between the immune system and cancer cells. These dynamic interactions are increasingly being identified through longitudinal molecular analysis and immunological profiling and combine to produce an evolving measure of a patient cancer-immune status. However, cancer immune dynamics have yet to be formally quantified and studied as an evolutionary process in the context of immunotherapy clinical trials. To address this, we propose a method to integrate high dimensional, heterogeneous, longitudinal patient-derived cancer and immunological clinical data sets to identify cancer immune dynamics as well as a control theoretic method to preemptively address the onset of resistance through the prediction and synthesis of actionable immunotherapy combination strategies. We apply these methods to genomic and immunological data collected from a patient with recurrent multifocal glioblastoma that elicited a complete response and eventually recurred while enrolled in City of Hope's ongoing IL13R 2-targeting chimeric antigen (CAR) T cell trial for patients with recurrent glioblastoma. We show that dynamic treatment strategies are necessary for the control of tumors with high antigen heterogeneity and propose this as a framework by which to assess the effectiveness of adaptive clinical trial design and patient stratification for combination immunotherapy trials.
  
  Biography: Vanessa Jonsson is an assistant research professor in the and Department of Hematology and Hematopoietic Cell Transplantation and leader of the Computational Immuno-Oncology group in the T Cell Immunotherapy Program at City of Hope. Her research program in computational biology focusses on the integration, mathematical modeling and analysis of large-scale, longitudinal genomic, transcriptomic and immunological data from clinical studies to inform and address the mechanisms of immune-resistant cancer progression. In 2015, Vanessa completed her PhD at Caltech, where she was advised by Richard Murray and David Baltimore. She is a principal investigator on a Parker Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy award to model the evolution of cancer immunity during immunotherapy trials and co-investigator on a California Institute of Regenerative Medicine (CIRM) award to study response and resistance in a phase I CAR T cell trial targeting malignant glioma. She is the recipient of the NIH and NCI career development award in clinical oncology (K12), with a focus on immuno-oncology.
  
  Host: Mihailo Jovanovic
  
  More Info: http://csc.usc.edu/seminars/2018Fall/jonsson.html
  
  

  More Information: 18.10.01_Vanessa Jonsson CSCUSC Seminar.pdf

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

  Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

  Contact: Brienne Moore

  Event Link: http://csc.usc.edu/seminars/2018Fall/jonsson.html

  

• Oct

  03

  On the Role of Interaction in Future Mobility Systems, from Vehicle-Centric to System-Wide Control

  

  Wed, Oct 03, 2018 @ 12:00 PM - 01:00 PM

  Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

  Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars

  
  

  Speaker: Dr. Marco Pavone, Aeronautics & Astronautics, Stanford University
  
  Talk Title: On the Role of Interaction in Future Mobility Systems, from Vehicle-Centric to System-Wide Control
  
  Series: Center for Cyber-Physical Systems and Internet of Things
  
  Abstract: In this talk I will discuss my work on self-driving vehicles, with an emphasis on accounting for interactions with external counterparts at both the vehicle- and system-levels. Specifically, I will first discuss a decision-making framework that enables a self-driving vehicle to proactively interact with humans to infer their intents, and to use such information for safe and efficient driving. I will then turn the discussion to the operational and economic aspects of autonomous mobility-on-demand (AMoD) systems, with an emphasis on the interaction between AMoD and other infrastructures, such as the electric power and public transit networks.
  
  
  Biography: Dr. Marco Pavone is an Assistant Professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics at Stanford University, where he is the Director of the Autonomous Systems Laboratory and Co-Director of the Center for Automotive Research at Stanford. Before joining Stanford, he was a Research Technologist within the Robotics Section at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory. He received a Ph.D. degree in Aeronautics and Astronautics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2010. His main research interests are in the development of methodologies for the analysis, design, and control of autonomous systems, with an emphasis on self-driving cars, autonomous aerospace vehicles, and future mobility systems. He is a recipient of a Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers, an ONR YIP Award, an NSF CAREER Award, a NASA Early Career Faculty Award, a Hellman Faculty Scholar Award, and was named NASA NIAC Fellow in 2011. He was identified by the American Society for Engineering Education (ASEE) as one of America's 20 most highly promising investigators under the age of 40. His work has been recognized with best paper nominations or awards at the Field and Service Robotics Conference, at the Robotics: Science and Systems Conference, and at NASA symposia. He is currently serving as an Associate Editor for the IEEE Control Systems Magazine.
  
  Host: Professor Paul Bogdan
  
  

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

  Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

  Contact: Talyia White

  

• Oct

  04

  CENG Seminar Series

  Thu, Oct 04, 2018 @ 02:00 PM - 03:00 PM

  Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

  Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars

  
  

  Speaker: Yu Hua, Huazhong University of Science and Technology
  
  Talk Title: Encrypted Non-volatile Main Memory Systems
  
  Abstract: Non-volatile memory (NVM) technologies are considered as promising candidates of the next-generation main memory. However, the non-volatility of NVMs leads to new security vulnerabilities. Memory encryption can be employed to mitigate the security vulnerabilities, but it increases the number of bits written to NVMs due to the diffusion property and thereby aggravates the NVM wear-out induced by writes. To address these security and endurance challenges, we propose DeWrite, a secure and deduplication-aware scheme to enhance the performance and endurance of encrypted NVMs based on a new in-line deduplication technique and the synergistic integrations of deduplication and memory encryption. Specifically, it performs low-latency in-line deduplication to exploit the abundant cache-line-level duplications leveraging the intrinsic read/write asymmetry of NVMs and light-weight hashing. It also opportunistically parallelizes the operations of deduplication and encryption and allows them to co-locate the metadata for high efficiency. DeWrite was implemented on the gem5 with NVMain.
  
  Biography: Dr. Yu Hua is a professor in Huazhong University of Science and Technology. He was Postdoc Research Associate in McGill University in 2009, and Postdoc Research Fellow in University of Nebraska-Lincoln in 2010-2011. He obtained his B.E and Ph.D degrees from Wuhan University respectively in 2001 and 2005. His research interests include file systems, cloud storage systems, non-volatile memory, big data analytics, etc. He publishes multiple papers in conferences and journals, including OSDI, MICRO, FAST, USENIX ATC, ACM SoCC, SC, HPDC, etc. He serves for multiple international conferences, including USENIX ATC, ASPLOS (ERC), SC, ACM SoCC, RTSS, ICDCS, ICCD, INFOCOM, IPDPS, etc. He is the distinguished member of CCF, senior member of ACM and IEEE, and the member of USENIX. He has been appointed as the Distinguished Speaker of ACM and CCF. His homepage is at: https://csyhua.github.io
  
  Host: Xuehai Qian, xuehai.qian@usc.edu
  
  

  More Information: 18.10.04_Yu Hua_CENG Seminar.pdf

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

  Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

  Contact: Brienne Moore

  

• Oct

  05

  Farewell to Servers: Hardware, Software, and Network Approaches towards Datacenter Resource Disaggregation

  Fri, Oct 05, 2018 @ 10:00 AM - 11:00 AM

  Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

  Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars

  
  

  Speaker: Yiying Zhang, Purdue University
  
  Talk Title: Farewell to Servers: Hardware, Software, and Network Approaches towards Datacenter Resource Disaggregation
  
  Abstract: Datacenters have been using a "monolithic" server model for decades, where each server has a motherboard that hosts a set of hardware devices such as processors and memory chips. This monolithic architecture is easy to deploy but cannot fully support the growing hardware heterogeneity in datacenters or provide hardware elasticity, failure isolation, and efficient resource utilization. Going forward, we have to rethink the decade-long server-centric model.
  
  Our answer is to break the monolithic server model into distributed, network-attached hardware components that can each manage its own resources and can fail independently. For the past three years, my lab has been working on such datacenter "resource disaggregation" at system software, networking, and hardware levels. In this talk, I will discuss our various efforts in building a disaggregated datacenter (or "DC-3.0"). Specifically, I will focus on two systems: LegoOS, a new distributed, disseminated OS designed for datacenter resource disaggregation (OSDI'18), and LITE, a Local Indirection TiEr in kernel to virtualize native RDMA into a flexible, high-level, easy-to-use abstraction (SOSP'17).
  
  Biography: Yiying Zhang is an assistant professor in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Purdue University. Her research interests span operating systems, distributed systems, datacenter networking, and computer architecture, with a focus on building software, hardware, network systems for next-generation datacenters. Her lab is pioneering in the field of datacenter resource disaggregation and is among the few groups in the world that builds new OSes and full-stack, cross-layer systems. She has published at and served on the program committees of top systems conferences such as SOSP, OSDI, and ASPLOS, and her work has attracted various industry and academia attentions. Yiying received her Ph.D. from the Department of Computer Sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and worked as a postdoctoral scholar at the University of California, San Diego before joining Purdue.
  
  Host: Xuehai Qian, xuehai.qian@usc.edu
  
  

  More Information: 18.10.05_Yiying Zhang .pdf

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

  Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

  Contact: Brienne Moore

  

• Oct

  08

  Niels Reimers - Keynote Seminar on Entrepreneurship & Innovation, Laboratory to Market: University Technology Licensing, Monday, October 8th at 10:30am in EEB 132

  Mon, Oct 08, 2018 @ 10:30 AM - 12:00 PM

  Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

  Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars

  
  

  Speaker: Niels Reimers, Niels Reimers
  
  Talk Title: Laboratory to Market: University Technology Licensing
  
  Abstract: Abstract: A discussion of today's knowledge society, role of universities, specifics of Stanford's experience, cultural and other impediments to innovation, university policies, and elements of a university technology licensing office.
  
  Biography: Biography: Niels Founded and directed Stanford Office of Technology Licensing, 1968-91. During the 22 years he managed the program at Stanford, he was loaned to Massachusetts Institute of Technology to reform its program, and to the University of California, Berkeley to found its program.
  Cumulative licensing income to Stanford from an outside management firm, from 1954-67, totaled about $4,500. Niels proposed a pilot year-long licensing office with a marketing focus, which pilot year (1968-69) achieved $55,000 in licensing income. A permanent office then was approved, with a staff of Niels and a secretary/office manager. As the work load grew from increasing numbers of technology disclosures from faculty and students, staff were added. Cumulative licensing income from 1968 is expected to top $2 billion in fiscal year 2019.
  
  Host: Ming Hsieh Institute
  
  

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

  Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

  Contact: Marilyn Poplawski

  

• Oct

  08

  Fall 2018 Joint CSC@USC/CommNetS-MHI Seminar Series

  Mon, Oct 08, 2018 @ 02:00 PM - 03:00 PM

  Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

  Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars

  
  

  Speaker: Murat Arcak, University of California Berkeley
  
  Talk Title: Scalable Symbolic Control
  
  Abstract: Finite abstractions of continuous dynamical systems play a central role in synthesizing controllers that enforce complex specifications, such as those expressed in temporal logic, and enable the designer to leverage tools from model checking and reactive synthesis. The resulting controller is symbolic, meaning that it only requires knowledge of quantized states that represent the currently occupied partition of the state space. Existing computational tools for this approach have been limited to small systems because both the abstraction and synthesis steps suffer from severe time and space bottlenecks as the system dimension grows. This talk will present recent results that overcome these bottlenecks by exploiting structural system properties. These results include: (1) taking advantage of monotonicity properties of the dynamical model for efficient reachability computations, (2) using sparsity structures in the dependency graph of state variables for parsimonious abstraction algorithms that dramatically reduce runtime, and (3) dividing the control synthesis task into sub-problems of manageable size with compositional procedures. The results will be illustrated with several practically motivated examples.
  
  Biography: Murat Arcak is a professor at UC Berkeley with appointments in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences and Department of Mechanical Engineering. He received the B.S. degree in Electrical Engineering from the Bogazici University, Istanbul (1996) and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of California, Santa Barbara (1997 and 2000). His research is in dynamical systems and control theory with applications to synthetic biology, multi-agent systems, and transportation. He received a CAREER Award from the National Science Foundation in 2003, the Donald P. Eckman Award from the American Automatic Control Council in 2006, the Control and Systems Theory Prize from the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM) in 2007, and the Antonio Ruberti Young Researcher Prize from the IEEE Control Systems Society in 2014. He is a member of SIAM and a fellow of IEEE.
  
  Host: Ketan Savla, ksavla@usc.edu
  
  More Info: http://csc.usc.edu/seminars/2018Fall/arcak.html
  
  

  More Information: 18.10.08_Murat Arcak CSCUSC Seminar.pdf

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

  Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

  Contact: Brienne Moore

  Event Link: http://csc.usc.edu/seminars/2018Fall/arcak.html

  

• Oct

  11

  Multimodal Emotion Recognition: Quantifying Dynamics and Structure in Audio-Visual Expressive Speech

  Thu, Oct 11, 2018 @ 02:00 PM - 04:00 PM

  Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

  Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars

  
  

  Speaker: Yelin (Lynn) Kim, Ph.D., Assistant Professor, University at Albany, SUNY
  
  Talk Title: Multimodal Emotion Recognition: Quantifying Dynamics and Structure in Audio-Visual Expressive Speech
  
  Abstract: The rise of AI assistant systems, including Google Home, Apple Siri, and Amazon Echo, brings the urgent need for increased and deeper understanding of users. In this talk, I will present algorithmic and statistical methods for analyzing audio-visual human behavior, particularly focusing on emotional and social signals inferred from speech and facial expressions. These methods can provide emotional intelligence to AI systems. However, developing automatic emotion recognition systems is challenging since emotional expressions are complex, dynamic, inherently multimodal, and are entangled with other factors of modulation (e.g. speech generation and emphasis). I will present several algorithms to address these fundamental challenges in emotion recognition: (i) cross-modal modeling methods that capture and control for interactions between individual facial regions and speech using the Minimum Description Length (MDL) principle-based segmentation; (ii) localization and prediction of events with salient emotional behaviors using a max-margin optimization and dynamic programming; and (iii) temporal modeling methods to learn co-occurrence patterns between emotional behaviors and emotion label noise. These algorithms have enabled advancements in the modeling of audio-visual emotion recognition systems and increased the understanding of the underlying dynamic and multimodal structure of affective communication (e.g., cross-modal interaction, temporal structure, and inherent perceptual ambiguity).
  
  Biography: Yelin Kim [http://yelinkim.com] is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University at Albany, State University of New York (SUNY). She received her M.S. and Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor in 2013 and 2016, respectively, and her B.S. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Seoul National University, South Korea in 2011. Her main research interests are in human-centered and affective computing, multimodal (audio-visual) modeling, and computational behavior analysis. Her work was recognized by several awards, including a Google Faculty Research Award (2018), a SUNY-A Faculty Research Award (2017), and the Best Student Paper Award at ACM Multimedia (2014).
  
  Host: Dr. Shrikanth Narayanan
  
  

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

  Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

  Contact: Tanya Acevedo-Lam/EE-Systems

  

• Oct

  11

  Auto-Tuned Threading for OLDI Microservices

  Thu, Oct 11, 2018 @ 02:00 PM - 03:00 PM

  Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

  Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars

  
  

  Speaker: Akshitha Sriraman, University of Michigan
  
  Talk Title: Auto-Tuned Threading for OLDI Microservices
  
  Abstract: Modern On-Line Data Intensive (OLDI) applications have evolved from monolithic systems to instead comprise numerous, distributed microservices interacting via Remote Procedure Calls (RPCs). Microservices face sub-ms RPC latency goals, much tighter than their monolithic ancestors that must meet >=100ms latency targets. Sub-ms-scale threading and on currency design effects as well as OS and network overheads that were once insignificant for such monoliths, can now come to dominate in the sub-ms-scale microservice regime. It is therefore vital to characterize the influence of threading design, OS, and network effects on microservices. Unfortunately, widely used academic data center benchmark suites are unsuitable to aid this characterization as they use monolithic rather than microservice architectures.
  
  We first investigate how OS/network overheads impact microservice tail latency by developing a complete suite of microservices called mSuite that we use to facilitate our study. Our characterization reveals that the relationship between optimal OS/network parameters and service load is complex. Our primary finding is that non-optimal OS scheduler decisions can degrade microservice tail latency by up to ~87%.
  
  Secondly, we investigate how threading design critically impacts microservice tail latency by developing a taxonomy of threading models -“ a structured understanding of the implications of how microservices manage concurrency and interact with RPC interfaces under wide-ranging loads. We develop mTune, a system that has two features: (1) a novel framework that abstracts threading model implementation from application code, and (2) a novel automatic load adaptation system that curtails microservice tail latency by exploiting inherent latency trade-offs revealed in our taxonomy to transition among threading models. We study mTune in the context of mSuite to demonstrate up to 1.9x tail latency improvements over static threading choices and state-of-the-art adaptation techniques.
  
  Biography: Akshitha is a fourth year Ph.D. student at the University of Michigan, where she is advised by Dr. Thomas F. Wenisch. Her primary research interests are in software systems and computer architecture. Her research focuses on developing software and hardware optimizations to improve the performance of large-scale distributed data center system.
  
  Host: Xuehai Qian, xuehai.qian@usc.edu
  
  

  More Information: 18.10.11 Akshitha Sriraman_CENG.pdf

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

  Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

  Contact: Brienne Moore

  

• Oct

  12

  Munushian Seminar - Demetrios Christodoulides, Friday, October 12th at 2PM in EEB 132

  Fri, Oct 12, 2018 @ 02:00 PM - 03:30 PM

  Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

  Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars

  
  

  Speaker: Demetrios Christodoulides, CREOL The College of Optics and Photonics
  
  Talk Title: Optical Thermodynamics of Nonlinear Highly Multimode Systems
  
  Abstract: The past few years have witnessed a resurgence of interest in multimode waveguide structures, predominantly driven by the ever-increasing demand for higher information capacities. This renaissance, in turn, incited a flurry of activities in the general area of nonlinear multimode fiber optics. The sheer complexity associated with the presence of hundreds or thousands of nonlinearly interacting modes that collectively act as a many-body system, has led to new opportunities in observing a multitude of novel optical effects that would have been otherwise impossible in single-mode settings. In this talk, a thermodynamic theory capable of describing complex, highly multimoded, nonlinear optical systems is presented. It is shown that the mode occupancies in such nonlinear multimode arrangements follow a universal behavior that always tends to maximize the system's entropy at steady-state. This thermodynamic response takes place irrespective of the type of nonlinearities involved and can be utilized to either heat or cool an optical multimode system. Aspects associated with adiabatic compressions and expansions will be discussed along with the possibility for all-optical Carnot cycles.
  
  Biography: Biography: Demetrios Christodoulides is the Cobb Family Endowed Chair and Pegasus Professor of Optics at CREOL-the College of Optics and Photonics of the University of Central Florida. He received his Ph.D. degree from Johns Hopkins University in 1986 and he subsequently joined Bellcore as a post-doctoral fellow. Between 1988 and 2002 he was with the faculty of the Department of Electrical Engineering at Lehigh University. His research interests include linear and nonlinear optical beam interactions, synthetic optical materials, optical solitons, and quantum electronics. He has authored and co-authored more than 350 papers. He is a Fellow of the Optical Society of America and the American Physical Society. He is the recipient of the 2011 Wood Prize and 2018 Max Born Award of OSA.
  
  Host: EE-Electrophysics
  
  More Info: https://minghsiehee.usc.edu/about/lectures/munushian/
  
  

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

  Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

  Contact: Marilyn Poplawski

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

  

• Oct

  12

  Quantum Supremacy and its Applications

  Fri, Oct 12, 2018 @ 02:30 PM - 03:30 PM

  Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

  Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars

  
  

  Speaker: Scott Aaronson, University of Texas at Austin
  
  Talk Title: Quantum Supremacy and its Applications
  
  Abstract: In the near future, there will likely be special-purpose quantum computers with 50-70 high-quality qubits and controllable nearest-neighbor couplings. In this talk, I'll discuss general theoretical foundations for how to use such devices to demonstrate quantum supremacy: that is, a clear quantum speedup for some task, motivated by the goal of overturning the Extended Church-Turing Thesis (which says that all physical systems can be efficiently simulated by classical computers) as confidently
  as possible. This part of the talk is based on joint work with Lijie
  Chen. Then, in a second part, I'll discuss new, not-yet-published work on how these experiments could be used to generate cryptographically certified random bits, for use in cryptocurrencies and other applications.
  
  
  Biography: Scott Aaronson is David J. Bruton Centennial Professor of Computer Science at the University of Texas at Austin. He received his bachelor's from Cornell University and his PhD from UC Berkeley, and did postdoctoral fellowships at the Institute for Advanced Study as well as the University of Waterloo. Before coming to UT Austin, he spent nine years as a professor in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT. Aaronson's research in theoretical computer science has focused mainly on the capabilities and limits of quantum computers. His first book, Quantum Computing Since Democritus, was published in 2013 by Cambridge University Press. He received the National Science Foundation Alan T. Waterman Award, the United States PECASE Award, the Vannevar Bush Fellowship, the Tomassoni-Chisesi Prize in Physics, and MIT's Junior Bose Award for Excellence in Teaching.
  
  Host: Xuehai Qian, xuehai.qian@usc.edu
  
  

  More Information: 18.10.12 Scott Aaronson Seminar .pdf

  Location: Ronald Tutor Hall of Engineering (RTH) - 109

  Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

  Contact: Brienne Moore

  

• Oct

  15

  Fall 2018 Joint CSC@USC/CommNetS-MHI Seminar Series

  Mon, Oct 15, 2018 @ 02:00 PM - 03:00 PM

  Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

  Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars

  
  

  Speaker: Stanley Chan, Purdue University
  
  Talk Title: Understanding Plug-and-Play ADMM: Convergence, Objective Function, and Generalization
  
  Abstract: The Plug-and-Play (PnP) ADMM algorithm is a recently developed image restoration method that allows advanced image denoisers to be integrated into physical forward models to yield a provable convergent algorithm. Since its introduction in 2013, PnP ADMM has enabled numerous record-breaking image recovery results in deblurring, inpainting, super-resolution, Poisson denoising, and compressed sensing, etc. However, despite the successful applications and promising results, very little is known about why PnP ADMM performs so well. Fundamentally, the challenge lies in the fact that many of the latest denoisers are not easily expressible as proximal maps, e.g., deep neural networks.
  In this talk, I will highlight a few recent progresses made by my group and collaborators. I will discuss three questions. (1) Convergence: Under what conditions of the denoisers will PnP ADMM converge? Answering this question will allow us to comment on what kind of denoisers we can use and what kind of convergence we should expect. (2) Objective Function: By plugging in an off-the-shelf denoiser, what does PnP ADMM actually solve? That is, what is the corresponding objective function? This problem will tell us why and when PnP ADMM will perform well, and when PnP ADMM will fail. (3) Generalization: Are we able to generalize PnP ADMM to accommodate multiple agents beyond a single forward model and a single denoiser? This leads to a new concept called consensus equilibrium, which allows us to integrate multiple weak experts to produce an overall strong recovery method. I will illustrate the ideas through examples in image denoising, graph signal processing, turbulence removal and automatic foreground extraction.
  
  
  Biography: Stanley H. Chan is currently an Assistant Professor in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering and the Department of Statistics at Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN. He received the B.Eng. degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Hong Kong in 2007, the M.A. degree in Mathematics from UC San Diego in 2009, and the Ph.D. degree in Electrical Engineering from UC San Diego in 2011. In 2012-2014, he was a postdoctoral research fellow at Harvard. His PhD study and postdoctoral training were supported by the Croucher Foundation PhD Scholarship and postdoctoral Fellowship, two of the most prestigious scholarships in Hong Kong.
  Dr. Chan is a recipient of the Best Paper Award of IEEE International Conference on Image Processing 2016 for his work on single photon image sensors. He is also a recipient of multiple education awards including the IEEE Signal Processing Cup Second Prize, Purdue College of Engineering Outstanding Graduate Mentor Award, Eta Kappa Nu Teaching Award, Eta Kappa Nu Outstanding Professor Award, and Purdue Teaching for Tomorrow Fellowship.
  Dr. Chan is an Associate Editor of IEEE Transactions on Computational Imaging since 2018, an Associate Editor of OSA Optics Express in 2016 - 2018, an Elected Member and the subcommittee Chair of the IEEE Signal Processing Society Special Interest Group in Computational Imaging since 2015. He was the co-chair and co-organizer of the computational imaging special session in ICIP 2016, and had served on multiple technical program committees including ICIP, ICASSP, OSA Imaging and Applied Optics Congress, and Midwest Machine Learning Symposium.
  
  
  Host: Antonio Ortega, antonio.ortega@sipi.usc.edu
  
  More Info: http://csc.usc.edu/seminars/2018Fall/chan.html
  
  

  More Information: 18.10.15 Stanley Chan_CSC@USC Seminar.pdf

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

  Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

  Contact: Brienne Moore

  Event Link: http://csc.usc.edu/seminars/2018Fall/chan.html

  

• Oct

  16

  Finding Structure in Data: Clustering and Representation Learning

  

  Tue, Oct 16, 2018 @ 10:00 AM - 11:00 PM

  Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

  Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars

  
  

  Speaker: Arya Mazumdar, College of Information & Computer Sciences, University of Massachusetts Amherst
  
  Talk Title: Finding Structure in Data: Clustering and Representation Learning
  
  Abstract: This talk is loosely divided into two parts, both about uncovering hidden structures in data by unsupervised or semisupervised methods. In the first, we discuss new tools to learn parameters of mixtures of distributions, statistical block models, and interactive algorithms for such problems. In the second, we describe new algorithms to learn nonlinear models of data, primarily focusing on networks of rectified linear units. We will emphasize on the information theoretic tools that have been used in both of the parts. We provide rigorous theoretical guarantees and our algorithms perform very well in experiments conducted with real data.
  
  
  Biography: Arya Mazumdar is an assistant professor in the College of Information and Computer Sciences at the University of Massachusetts Amherst since Fall 2015. Prior to this, Arya was an assistant professor at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities, and a postdoctoral scholar at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Arya received his Ph.D. from the University of Maryland, College Park, in 2011, where his thesis won the Distinguished Dissertation Fellowship Award. Arya is a recipient of the 2015 NSF CAREER award and the 2010 IEEE ISIT Jack K. Wolf Student Paper Award. He spent the summers of 2008 and 2010 at the Hewlett-Packard Laboratories, Palo Alto, CA, and IBM Almaden Research Center, San Jose, CA, respectively. Arya's research interests include information theory and machine learning.
  
  Host: Professor Salman Avestimehr
  
  

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

  Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

  Contact: Talyia White

  

• Oct

  17

  Machine-Integrated Intelligence, Controlled Sensing, and Active Learning

  

  Wed, Oct 17, 2018 @ 12:00 AM - 01:00 PM

  Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

  Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars

  
  

  Speaker: Tara Javidi, Electrical and Computer Engineering, UC San Diego
  
  Talk Title: Machine-Integrated Intelligence, Controlled Sensing, and Active Learning
  
  Series: Center for Cyber-Physical Systems and Internet of Things
  
  Abstract: The computing landscape has been drastically changing. The new computing realm, which is sometimes dubbed as internet of everything, includes networked devices ranging from tiny wearable sensors, smart home appliances, and personal autonomous robots, to connected self-driving cars, and to smart city infrastructures. In this new computing eco-system, comprising of resource-constrained, unreliable, and vulnerable components and networks, the non-recurring cost of hardware acceleration, engineering implementation, and system building has continued to grow significantly. This is in addition to the growing cost associated with the collection, curation, and labeling of data during both the training and the execution of various popular machine learning models. These design bottle-necks not only result in a significant increase in the non-recurring cost of engineering for companies but also provide a severe hurdle in technology development associated with hardware upgrade and/or system redesign.
  
  In the first part of the talk, I will discuss an overview of my research on information acquisition and active learning in the context of the mission of our newly formed UCSD Center for Machine-Integrated Computing and Security (MICS). I will report ongoing research in the center where this system integrated view has enabled best-in-class results by bringing Machine into Machine Learning. In the second part of the talk, I will delve deeper into the problems of information acquisition, controlled sensing, and active learning and show our solutions to significantly reduce the cost of data collection and/or data labeling while ensuring reliability and fidelity during the training or run-time. In particular, we illustrate our findings and algorithms in the context of DetecDrone: an ML-enabled drone intelligence platform developed in my lab to provide search, mapping, and monitoring off-the-shelf low cost drones.
  
  
  Biography: Tara Javidi studied electrical engineering at Sharif University of Technology, Tehran, Iran from 1992 to 1996. She received her MS degrees in electrical engineering (systems) and in applied mathematics (stochastic analysis) from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, in 1998 and 1999, respectively. She received her Ph.D. in electrical engineering and computer science from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, in 2002. From 2002 to 2004, Tara Javidi was an assistant professor at the Electrical Engineering Department, University of Washington, Seattle. In 2005, she joined the University of California, San Diego, where she is currently a professor of electrical and computer engineering and a founding co-director of the Center for Machine-aware Computing and Security (MICS). She is also a member of Board of Governors of the IEEE Information Theory Society (2017/18/19).
  
  Tara Javidi's research interests are in theory of active learning, information theory with feedback, stochastic control theory, and stochastic resource allocation in wireless communications and communication networks. Tara Javidi was a recipient of a 2018 Qualcomm Faculty Award, National Science Foundation early career award (CAREER) in 2004, Barbour Graduate Scholarship, University of Michigan, in 1999, and the Presidential and Ministerial Recognitions for Excellence in the National Entrance Exam, Iran, in 1992. Tara Javidi is a Distinguished Lecturer of the IEEE Information Theory Society (2017/18).
  
  Host: Professor Paul Bogdan
  
  

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

  Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

  Contact: Talyia Whtie

  

• Oct

  18

  Stochastic Control of Finite and Infinite Dimensional Systems Under Uncertainty: Theory, Algorithms and Applications

  

  Thu, Oct 18, 2018 @ 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM

  Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

  Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars

  
  

  Speaker: Evangelos A. Theodorou , Guggenheim School of Aerospace Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology
  
  Talk Title: Stochastic Control of Finite and Infinite Dimensional Systems Under Uncertainty: Theory, Algorithms and Applications
  
  Series: Center for Cyber-Physical Systems and Internet of Things
  
  Abstract: In this talk, I will present an overview of projects related to stochastic control and machine learning methods and their applications to dynamical systems represented by stochastic differential and stochastic partial differential equations. These are typically systems that exists in autonomy and robotics as well as in areas of applied physics such as fluid mechanics, plasma physics and turbulence. I will discuss different forms of uncertainty representation that span Gaussian Processes, Polynomial Chaos, Deep Probabilistic Neural Networks and Q-Wiener processes. Finally, I will show applications to robotic terrestrial agility, perceptual control, social networks, large-scale swarms, and control of stochastic fields, and conclude with future directions.
  
  
  
  Biography: Evangelos A. Theodorou is an assistant professor with the Guggenheim School of aerospace engineering at Georgia Institute of Technology. He is also affiliated with the Institute of Robotics and Intelligent Machines. Evangelos Theodorou earned his Diploma in Electronic and Computer Engineering from the Technical University of Crete (TUC), Greece in 2001. He has also received a MSc in Production Engineering from TUC in 2003, a MSc in Computer Science and Engineering from University of Minnesota in spring of 2007 and a MSc in Electrical Engineering on dynamics and controls from the University of Southern California(USC) in Spring 2010. In May of 2011 he graduated with his PhD, in Computer Science at USC. After his PhD, he was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow with the department of computer science and engineering, University of Washington, Seattle. Evangelos Theodorou is the recipient of the King-Sun Fu best paper award of the IEEE Transactions on Robotics for the year 2012 and recipient of the best paper award in cognitive robotics in International Conference of Robotics and Automation 2011. He was also the finalist for the best paper award in International Conference of Humanoid Robotics 2010, International Conference of Robotics and Automation 2017 and Robotics Science and Systems 2018. His theoretical research spans the areas of stochastic optimal control theory, machine learning, information theory and statistical physics. Applications involve learning, planning and control in autonomous, robotics and aerospace systems.
  
  Host: Prof. Paul Bogdan
  
  

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

  Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

  Contact: Talyia White

  

• Oct

  24

  Integrating Security in Cyber-physical Systems

  

  Wed, Oct 24, 2018 @ 12:00 PM - 01:00 PM

  Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

  Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars

  
  

  Speaker: Miroslav Pajic, Duke University
  
  Talk Title: : Integrating Security in Cyber-physical Systems
  
  Series: Center for Cyber-Physical Systems and Internet of Things
  
  Abstract: Modern embedded control architectures have moved from isolated systems to open architectures, such as new automotive systems with services that include remote diagnostics, code updates, and vehicle-to-vehicle communication. However, this increasing set of functionalities, network interoperability, and system design complexity have also introduced security vulnerabilities that are easily exploitable, since current embedded and cyber-physical systems have not been built with security in mind. Furthermore, the tight interaction between information technology and physical world makes these systems vulnerable to malicious attacks beyond the standard cyber-attacks, while relying exclusively on conventional security techniques may be unfeasible due to resource-constraints and long system lifetime.
  
  Consequently, there is a need to change the way we reason about security in cyber-physical systems, and start designing platform-aware attack-resilient components and architectures capable of dealing with various attacks on the systems and its environment. In this talk, I will present our recent efforts in this domain, starting from cyber-physical security techniques that (a) capture effects of attacks on system performance, (b) introduce attack resilience into control algorithms and facilitate attack detection, and (c) enable mapping of the desired Quality-of-Control (QoC) under attack guarantees into real-time performance requirements on the underlying OS and networks. In addition, I will introduce a physics-aware design framework for securing resource-constrained CPS, that supports design-time tradeoffs between QoC in the presence of attacks and system resources used by the deployed security mechanisms, such as message authentication. This design framework has been used to add strong security guarantees in several existing automotive system. Finally, for systems with varying levels of autonomy and human interaction, I will show how we can exploit human power of inductive reasoning and the ability to provide context, to improve the overall security guarantees
  
  
  Biography: Miroslav Pajic is the Nortel Networks Assistant Professor in Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Duke University, with a secondary appointment in the Computer Science Department. He received the Dipl. Ing. and M.S. degrees from the University of Belgrade, Serbia, in 2003 and 2007, as well as the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, in 2010 and 2012, respectively. His research interests focus on design and analysis of cyber-physical systems (CPS) and in particular on model-based design of CPS, real-time and embedded systems, high-assurance distributed and networked control systems, and high-confidence medical devices and systems.
  
  Miroslav received various awards including the NSF CAREER Award, ONR Young Investigator Program Award, ACM SIGBED Frank Anger Memorial Award, the Joseph and Rosaline Wolf Dissertation Award from Penn Engineering, as well as six Best Paper and Runner-up Awards at the main CPS venues, including the Best Paper Awards at the 2017 ACM SIGBED International Conference on Embedded Software (EMSOFT) and 2014 ACM/IEEE International Conference on Cyber-Physical Systems (ICCPS), and the Best Student Paper award at the 2012 IEEE Real-Time and Embedded Technology and Applications Symposium (RTAS).
  
  
  Host: Professor Paul Bogdan
  
  

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

  Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

  Contact: Talyia White

  

• Oct

  24

  The IEEE GRSS Chapter and University of Southern California Special Lecture Event, Wednesday, Oct. 24th at 6pm in EEB 132

  Wed, Oct 24, 2018 @ 06:00 PM - 07:30 PM

  Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

  Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars

  
  

  Speaker: Dr. Jeff Puschell,, Principal Engineering Fellow and Chief Scientist Space Systems at Raytheon Space and Airborne Systems in El Segundo
  
  Talk Title: ATLIS: Advanced Technology Land Imaging Spectroradiometer: a Next Generation Sustainable Land Imager
  
  Abstract: The Advanced Technology Land Imaging Spectroradiometer (ATLIS) is a small (0.04 m3), multispectral pushbroom imager to provide visible through shortwave (VSWIR) calibrated imagery for the Sustainable Land Imaging-Technology (SLI-T) reference mission architecture (RMA).
  ATLIS is designed to provide imaging spectroradiometry that meets SLI-T RMA key parameters with an instrument that is much smaller and much less massive than previous land imaging systems.
  This presentation describes a NASA ESTO funded project to design, build and test a six spectral band prototype ATLIS called ATLIS-P that will establish whether this compact, low mass design approach with wide field of view (WFOV), free form reflective telescope, large format, small detector digital FPA and on-chip processing meets SLI-T RMA VSWIR requirements. ATLIS is supported by NASA ESTO through grant NNX16AP64G.
  
  Biography: Dr. Jeff Puschell is Principal Engineering Fellow and Chief Scientist, Space Systems at Raytheon Space and Airborne Systems in El Segundo, California. He is an internationally recognized expert in the system engineering of space-based imaging and remote sensing systems. His 30+ years of experience is broadly based and includes leading and making major contributions to development of visible-infrared instruments for space-based research and operational environmental imaging and remote sensing, development and field testing of laser-based communication and remote sensing systems and building and using millimeter, infrared, visible and ultraviolet wavelength instrumentation for ground-based astronomy. Dr. Puschell has been Principal Investigator, Technical Director, Chief Engineer, Chief Scientist or Project Manager on more than 15 projects in space-based remote sensing and laser communication. He has authored or co- authored 130+ papers on a variety of topics in space-based imaging and remote sensing, optical communication and astrophysics. Dr. Puschell is co-editor and co-author for the leading reference book Space Mission Engineering: The New SMAD. He is a Fellow of the AIAA and SPIE.
  
  Host: USC Viterbi School
  
  More Info: http://sites.ieee.org/metrola-grss/
  
  

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

  Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

  Contact: Marilyn Poplawski

  Event Link: http://sites.ieee.org/metrola-grss/

  

• Oct

  25

  Sender Decomposition of Cache-Aided Communications and Distributed Computing

  

  Thu, Oct 25, 2018 @ 01:00 PM - 02:00 PM

  Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

  Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars

  
  

  Speaker: Petros Elia, Communication Systems Department, EURECOM, Sophia Antipolis, France
  
  Talk Title: Sender Decomposition of Cache-Aided Communications and Distributed Computing
  
  Series: Center for Cyber-Physical Systems and Internet of Things
  
  Abstract: Recent results have shown that the data-redundancy that can exist in cache-aided communication networks as well as in (coded) distributed computing, can allow for substantial reductions in communication delays. These approaches though face various fundamental challenges that severely reduce the theoretically unbounded gains to much smaller gains. The work here shows a simple way without any additional data exchange between the communicating/computing nodes to decompose the problems of coded caching and coded distributed computing, into problems of smaller dimensionality with much better overall performance. Different manifestations of this "decomposition" phenomenon are explored, each revealing interesting boosts in performance and a direct amelioration of different bottlenecks like the "uneven category bottleneck", the "straggler bottleneck" and the "finite data-set bottleneck".
  
  
  Biography: Petros Elia received the B.Sc. degree from the Illinois Institute of Technology, and the M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering from the University of Southern California in 2001 and 2006 respectively. He is a professor with the Department of Communication Systems at EURECOM, in Sophia Antipolis, France. His latest research deals with information-theoretic aspects of caching, as well with different problems in the area of complexity-constrained communications, coding theory, and surveillance networks. He is a Fulbright scholar, the co-recipient of the NEWCOM++ distinguished achievement award 2008-2011 for a sequence of publications on the topic of complexity in wireless communications, and the recipient of the ERC Consolidator Grant 2017-2022 on cache-aided wireless communications.
  
  Host: Paul Bogdan
  
  

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

  Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

  Contact: Talyia White

  

• Oct

  29

  Fall 2018 Joint CSC@USC/CommNetS-MHI Seminar Series

  Mon, Oct 29, 2018 @ 02:00 PM - 03:00 PM

  Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

  Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars

  
  

  Speaker: Amir Rahmani, NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory
  
  Talk Title: Swarm Autonomy and a New Era of Space Exploration
  
  Abstract:
  Teams and swarms of autonomous robots and spacecraft hold the promise to change the way some missions are designed and provide new mission opportunities. Monolithic systems can be traded for a swarm of interconnected and coordinating assets. Swarm robotics has reached a level of maturity that can be reliably fielded. NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory has long enjoyed leadership in spacecraft formation flying and swarm robotics. This talk will present an overview of JPL's multi-agent autonomy tasks and technologies, including our multi-mission multi-agent autonomy architecture, as well as a number of multi-robot motion-planning tools developed at JPL.
  
  
  Biography: Dr. Amir Rahmani has a Ph.D. from University of Washington in aeronautics and astronautics and was an assistant professor of aerospace engineering at the University of Miami prior to joining JPL. He has over a decade research experience in distributed space systems, formation flying, as well as swarm robotics. He is the NASA Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) subtopic manager for coordination and control of swarm of space vehicles.
  
  Host: Mihailo Jovanovic, mihailo@usc.edu
  
  More Info: http://csc.usc.edu/seminars/2018Fall/rahmani.html
  
  

  More Information: 18.10.29_Amir_Rahmani_NASA_Seminar.pdf

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

  Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

  Contact: Brienne Moore

  Event Link: http://csc.usc.edu/seminars/2018Fall/rahmani.html

  

• Oct

  31

  Resilient Distributed Inference in Cyber-Physical Systems

  

  Wed, Oct 31, 2018 @ 12:00 PM - 01:00 PM

  Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

  Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars

  
  

  Speaker: Soummya Kar, Carnegie Mellon University
  
  Talk Title: Resilient Distributed Inference in Cyber-Physical Systems
  
  Series: Center for Cyber-Physical Systems and Internet of Things
  
  Abstract: In applications such as large-scale cyber-physical systems (CPS) and Internet-of-Things (IoT), as the number of devices or agents continues to grow, the integrity and trustworthiness of data generated by these devices becomes a pressing issue of paramount importance. An adversary may hijack individual devices or the communication channel between devices to maliciously alter data streams. In numerous IoT applications, we deploy physical devices throughout an environment, and we are interested in using the stream of sensor measurements to make inferences about the environmental state. Due to the large-scale and distributed nature of devices and data it might be infeasible to carry out computation and decision-making in a classical centralized fashion as well as to prevent attacks and intrusions on all data sources. As a result, reactive countermeasures, such as intrusion detection schemes and resilient inference algorithms become a vital component of security in distributed IoT-type setups.
  
  As an alternative to traditional fusion-center based cloud setups, in this talk we focus on fog-type architectures in which devices themselves perform the necessary computations using local data and peer-to-peer information exchange with neighboring devices to make inferences about an environment. In the first part of the talk, we review distributed inference approaches and algorithms based on the consensus+innovations paradigm. We discuss performance metrics such as rates of convergence, communication complexity, and optimality. The second part of the talk focuses on recent work on secure and resilient variants of these algorithms in adversarial environments. Specifically, focusing on the case of data integrity attacks on the device network, we characterize fundamental trade-offs between resilience, quantified in terms of achievable inference performance and ability to detect intrusions and threats, and model properties such as observability and connectivity of the inter-device communication network.
  
  
  Biography: Soummya Kar received a B.Tech. in electronics and electrical communication engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, India, in May 2005 and a Ph.D. in electrical and computer engineering from Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, in 2010. From June 2010 to May 2011, he was with the Electrical Engineering Department, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, USA, as a Postdoctoral Research Associate. He is currently an Associate Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, USA. His research interests include decision-making in large-scale networked systems, stochastic systems, multi-agent systems and data science, with applications to cyber-physical systems and smart energy systems. Recent recognition of his work includes the 2016 O. Hugo Schuck Best Paper Award from the American Automatic Control Council and a 2016 Dean's Early Career Fellowship from CIT, Carnegie Mellon.
  
  Host: Professor Paul Bogdan
  
  

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

  Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

  Contact: Talyia White