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SUNMONTUEWEDTHUFRISAT
Events for February 18, 2009
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Meet USC
Wed, Feb 18, 2009
Viterbi School of Engineering Undergraduate Admission
Workshops & Infosessions
This half day program is designed for prospective freshmen and family members. Meet USC includes an information session on the University and the Admission process; a student led walking tour of campus and a meeting with us in the Viterbi School. Meet USC is designed to answer all of your questions about USC, the application process and financial aid.Reservations are required for Meet USC. This program occurs twice, once at 9:00 a.m. and again at 1:00 p.m. Please visit http://www.usc.edu/admission/undergraduate/visit/meet_usc.html to check availability and make an appointment. Be sure to list an Engineering major as your "intended major" on the webform!
Location: USC Admission Center
Audiences: Prospective Freshmen and Family Members - RESERVATIONS REQUIRED
Contact: Viterbi Admission
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Meet USC
Wed, Feb 18, 2009
Viterbi School of Engineering Undergraduate Admission
Workshops & Infosessions
This half day program is designed for prospective freshmen and family members. Meet USC includes an information session on the University and the Admission process; a student led walking tour of campus and a meeting with us in the Viterbi School. Meet USC is designed to answer all of your questions about USC, the application process and financial aid.Reservations are required for Meet USC. This program occurs twice, once at 9:00 a.m. and again at 1:00 p.m. Please visit http://www.usc.edu/admission/undergraduate/visit/meet_usc.html to check availability and make an appointment. Be sure to list an Engineering major as your "intended major" on the webform!
Location: USC Admission Center
Audiences: Prospective Freshmen and Family Members - RESERVATIONS REQUIRED
Contact: Viterbi Admission
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Tools for Travel Corridor Management
Wed, Feb 18, 2009 @ 12:00 PM - 01:30 PM
Daniel J. Epstein Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering
University Calendar
SPEAKER: Alex Kurzhanskiy, Postdoctoral Researcher, EECS Department, University of California, BerkeleyDATE: Wednesday, February 18, 2009TIME: 12:00-1:30LOCATION: Lewis Hall (RGL) 103RSVP: Adam Gardner, amgardne@usc.edu**Lunch Will Be Served**ABSTRACT: The operational strategies designed to improve traffic conditions on congested travel corridors (freeways and surrounding arterials) are:• Demand management, which focuses on reducing excessive demand;• Incident management, which targets resources to alleviate accident hot spots;• Traveler information, which potentially reduces traveler buffer time;• Traffic control, which implements aggressive ramp metering at locations where significant reductions in congestion are likely to occur.Aurora Road Network Modeler is a tool set that provides quick quantitative assessment of operational strategies. It is based on the Aurora object-oriented framework, designed to model flows in networks. Its basic objects, nodes and links, allow the user to construct heterogeneous road networks. Various event classes make it possible to generate simulation scenarios. The monitor objects can keep track of the state at selected nodes and links, coordinate control actions at nodes, or generate events at nodes or links when the monitored states reach certain thresholds. Aurora RNM uses macroscopic Cell Transmission Model that represents traffic as a compressible fluid in terms of flow, density and speed. The talk will present Aurora RNM and show how it can be used in corridor management.Aurora RNM website: http://code.google.com/p/aurorarnmBIO: Alex Kurzhanskiy received his M.A. in Applied Mathematics from Lomonosov Moscow State University, Russia, in 1998. From 1998 to 2003 he worked as an engineer and consultant for several Silicon Valley companies. He received a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from UC Berkeley in 2007. Currently he is postdoctoral researcher at the EECS Department of UC Berkeley. His research interests include dynamical systems estimation, reachability analysis and control, robust convex optimization, and their application to transportation systems.
Location: Ralph And Goldy Lewis Hall (RGL) - 103
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Georgia Lum
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Airborne Particles and Health: What do we know and not know in 2009
Wed, Feb 18, 2009 @ 02:00 PM - 03:00 PM
Sonny Astani Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker:Jonathan M. Samet, MD, MS,
Professor and Flora L. Thornton Chair, Department of Preventive Medicine;
Keck School of Medicine, Director, Institute for Global Health,
University of Southern CaliforniaAbstract: Particles of varied size, composition, and structure are ubiquitous in indoor and outdoor air. The sources of the particles are myriad and include both natural phenomena and man's activities. In regard to outdoor air, particle concentrations and sources are regulated in the United States by complex legislation that addresses sources and concentrations. The principal evidence-based regulation under the Clean Air Act requires the promulgation of a National Ambient Air Quality Standard (NAAQS) that sets a concentration for particulate matter (PM) in outdoor air that protects public health with a margin of safety. This presentation reviews the scientific evidence on PM and risk to health, moving from the historical evidence that high levels of PM led to disastrous numbers of excess deaths to the current context in the US and other developed countries, where PM levels are now far lower. Worldwide, PM remains a public health threat in developing countries, where people experience extremely high levels in urban areas, particularly the increasing numbers of mega-cities, and indoors from unvented or poorly vented smoke from biomass fuel combustion.Research is now focused on quantifying risks at lower levels, characterizing mechanisms of toxicity, identifying characteristics of particles that determine risk, and targeting the most critical sources from the public health perspective. The research evidence is broad, coming from the fields of engineering, atmospheric sciences, toxicology, and exposure assessment and epidemiology. An expanded evidence base is needed for protecting public health as cities continue to grow, motor vehicle usage increases, and energy production from coal combustion increases.Location: Kaprielian Hall (KAP) - 209
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Evangeline Reyes
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Pulsed Jetting in the Mechanical and Biological Worlds
Wed, Feb 18, 2009 @ 03:30 PM - 04:30 PM
Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Paul S. Krueger Associate ProfessorDepartment of Mechanical EngineeringSouthern Methodist UniversityDallas, TX 75275 Nature boasts a wide array of organisms utilizing jet propulsion, or more properly, pulsed-jet propulsion. Squid and jellyfish are some of the more well-known members of this group. It is often assumed that this form of locomotion requires high velocity, inefficient jets to be effective. Studies of mechanically generated fully-pulsed jets (pulsed jets with a period of no flow between pulses), on the other hand, have revealed a spectrum of possible flows ranging from vortex rings for short jet pulses to vortex rings followed by trailing jets for longer pulses. Jet pulses producing isolated vortex rings obtained a thrust benefit from over-pressure at the nozzle exit plane during vortex ring formation, a result with potential benefits for biological and/or mechanical pulsed-jet propulsion. In this talk the propulsive efficiency of brief squid (juveniles and adults), longfinned squid (hatchlings), and a self-propelled, mechanical pulsed-jet vehicle ("Robosquid") will be assessed using direct measurement of the jet hydrodynamics with digital particle image velocimetry (DPIV). The results for the juvenile and adult squid show that they utilize the spectrum of jet flows available with the propulsive efficiency of isolated vortex rings being significantly greater than the longer jet pulses. The performance of Robosquid mirrors these results with propulsive efficiency increasing as pulse duration decreases for pulse durations that produce isolated vortex rings. Surprisingly, squid hatchlings outperformed their larger counterparts, a result which is attributed to a range of factors including the hatchlings' preference for shorter pulses and their proportionately larger funnel diameters. A simple model for propulsive efficiency of pulsed jets incorporating nozzle exit over-pressure associated with the unsteady flow physics will be presented. The model explains the key experimental results in terms of over-pressure effects associated with vortex ring formation and predicts efficiencies that increasingly outperform steady jets as scale (i.e., Reynolds number) is reduced for pulsed jets with short, high-frequency pulses. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------Paul Krueger received his B.S. in Mechanical Engineering in 1997 from the University of California at Berkeley. He received his M.S. in Aeronautics in 1998 and his Ph.D. in Aeronautics in 2001, both from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech). In 2002 he joined the Mechanical Engineering Department at Southern Methodist University where he is currently an Associate Professor. He is a recipient of the Rolf D. Buhler Memorial Award in Aeronautics and the Richard Bruce Chapman Memorial Award for distinguished research in Hydrodynamics. In 2004 he received the Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Award from the National Science Foundation and he was elected the ASME North Texas Section Young Engineer of the Year in 2009. His research interests include unsteady hydrodynamics and aerodynamics, vortex dynamics, vortex-boundary interactions, bio-fluid mechanics, and pulsed-jet propulsion.
Location: Seaver Science Library, Rm 150
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: April Mundy
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New Temporal-Difference Methods Based on Gradient Descent
Wed, Feb 18, 2009 @ 04:00 PM
Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Prof. Richard Sutton, University of Alberta
Host: Prof. Stefan Schaal Abstract:
Temporal-difference methods based on gradient descent and parameterized function approximators form a core part of the modern field of reinforcement learning and are essential to many of its large-scale applications. However, the most popular methods, including TD(lambda), Q-learning, and Sarsa, are not true gradient-descent methods and, as a result, the conditions under which they converge are narrower and less robust than can usually be guaranteed for gradient-descent methods. In this paper we introduce a new family of temporal-difference algorithms whose expected updates are in the direction of the gradient of a natural performance measure that we call the "mean squared projected Bellman error". Because these are true gradient-descent methods, we are able to apply standard techniques to prove them convergent and stable under general conditions including, for the first time, off-policy training. The new methods are of the same order of complexity as TD(lambda) and, when TD(lambda) converges, they converge at a similar rate to the same fixpoints. The new methods are similar to GTD(0) (Sutton, Szepesvari & Maei, 2009), but based on a different objective function and much more efficient, as we demonstrate in a series of computational experiments. (this is joint work with Hamid Maei, Doina Precup, Csaba Szepesvari, Shalabh Bhatnagar, David Silver, and Eric Wiewiora) Biography:
Richard S. Sutton is a professor and iCORE chair in the department of computing science at the University of Alberta. He is a fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence and co-author of the textbook Reinforcement Learning: An Introduction from MIT Press. Before joining the University of Alberta in 2003, he worked in industry at AT&T and GTE Labs, and in academia at the University of Massachusetts. He received a PhD in computer science from the University of Massachusetts in 1984 and a BA in psychology from Stanford University in 1978. Rich's research interests center on the learning problems facing a decision-maker interacting with its environment, which he sees as central to artificial intelligence. He is also interested in animal learning psychology, in connectionist networks, and generally in systems that continually improve their representations and models of the world.Location: Ronald Tutor Hall of Engineering (RTH) - 406
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: CS Colloquia
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Deloitte Consulting - Case Workshop
Wed, Feb 18, 2009 @ 06:00 PM - 07:30 PM
Daniel J. Epstein Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering
University Calendar
USC Information Systems AssociationWHAT: Deloitte Consulting - Case WorkshopWHEN: Wednesday, February 18, 2009, 6:00 PMWHERE: HOH 422 "Deloitte" is the brand under which 165,000 dedicated professionals in independent firms throughout the world collaborate to provide audit, consulting, financial advisory, risk management, and tax services to selected clients. These firms are members of Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu ("DTT"), a Swiss Verein. In the United States, Deloitte LLP is the member firm of DTT. Client services are primarily provided by the subsidiaries of Deloitte LLP, including:· Deloitte & Touche LLP · Deloitte Consulting LLP · Deloitte Financial Advisory Services LLP · Deloitte Tax LLPwww.deloitte.com/USC ISA is an organization that helps students learn more details about career opportunities in the Information Systems, Information Technology, or Consulting industries. The group invites large firms every week to our information sessions, which give students an opportunity to learn more about the firm and network with professionals. If you have are curious about these industries and companies, please feel free to drop by any weekly meeting. All our events are free and have free food. Minimum dress is business casual for events. All students of any major are welcome. Invite as many friends as you would like!
Location: H. Leslie Hoffman Hall Of Business Administration (HOH) - 422
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Georgia Lum
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Evening with Industry
Wed, Feb 18, 2009 @ 06:00 PM - 08:00 PM
Daniel J. Epstein Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering
University Calendar
Society of Women Engineers Presents "Evening with Industry"Date: Wednesday, February 18, 2008 Time: 6:00pm - 8:00pm Place: Radisson Hotel Registration deadline: February 13, 2008 SWE is now gearing up for its 3rd annual Evening with Industry, held at the Radisson Ballroom on February 18, 2009 from 6pm to 8pm. This year, we have a wide range of company representatives attending that want to talk to you! This is a unique opportunity to network with representatives and learn about companies the evening before the career fair--all over a three-course dinner. Companies attending: Aera Energy, AMO, Amgen, ATK, BAE Systems, Cisco, Intel, Lockheed, Microsoft, Northrop, Qualcomm, Raytheon, Xerox, Sun Microsystems, and JPL. This event is free for SWE members, and $15 for non-SWE members, so join now! Seating is limited and on a first-come/first-serve basis, so please register as soon as possible. Find out more about this event at http://www-scf.usc.edu/~sweusc/ewi/students.html
Location: Radisson Hotel
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Georgia Lum
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Evening with Industry
Wed, Feb 18, 2009 @ 06:00 PM - 08:00 PM
Viterbi School of Engineering Student Organizations
Student Activity
This is a unique opportunity to network with representatives and learn about companies before the career fair the following day. Companies attending include Cisco, Lockheed, Microsoft, AMO, and more. Seating is limited and on a first-come/first-serve basis, so please register as soon as possible.Priority registration begins for all SWE members on January 22nd and is free for members; however, a $15 refundable deposit (checks only, please) will be required to hold your seat. Registration will be opened to Non-SWE members on February 2nd until February 13th and will require a $15 non-refundable deposit to complete a reservation (for non-members only). Turn all checks (payable to USC SWE) into RTH 210 as soon as possible.Table seating will be determine by your company preferences and when we receive your refundable deposit & registration. The sooner you register & deposit, the more likely you will be sitting with the company of your choice so REGISTER & DEPOSIT NOW!
Location: Radisson Hotel
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Society of Women Engineers
