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Events for February 19, 2009
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Spring 2009 Engineering Career Fair
Thu, Feb 19, 2009 @ 10:00 AM - 03:00 PM
Viterbi School of Engineering Career Connections
Receptions & Special Events
The Engineering Career Fair is free and open to all students in the USC Viterbi School of Engineering.Students do not need to register for this event, just show up!This casual, yet professional, environment allows students the opportunity to have brief conversations with recruiters about full-time employment, internships, and co-ops. Don't forget your resume!
Location: Engineering Quad
Audiences: All Viterbi Students
Contact: RTH 218 Viterbi Career Services
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Characterizing Atmospheric Boundary Layer Turbulence
Thu, Feb 19, 2009 @ 02:00 PM - 03:00 PM
Sonny Astani Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Dr. Sukanta Basu, Atmospheric Science Group, Department of Geosciences, Texas Tech University, TexasAbstract:Atmospheric boundary layer (ABL) spans the lowest few hundred meters of the earth's atmosphere and intensively exchanges mass (e.g., water vapor, pollutants), momentum, and heat with the underlying earth's surface. ABL has immense practical importance as wide ranges of industrial (e.g., stack gas dispersion, wind energy generation), biological (e.g., pollen transport and deposition), natural (e.g., dust devil formation), and meteorological (e.g., cloud formation) activities take place in this turbulent layer. At the same time, owing to its high Reynolds number, ABL plays a critical role in advancing fundamental turbulence research. For decades, it has been a favorite playground for the theoretical physics community for testing a variety of universal scaling and similarity hypotheses.
My research group at Texas Tech University tries to gain a better understanding of ABL turbulence by synergistically combining new-generation modeling approaches (e.g., large-eddy simulation), observational techniques (e.g., small-aperture scintillometry), and by borrowing a suite of tools from the emergent field of complex systems. In this talk, I present a mélange of ongoing research projects ranging from large-eddy simulation of nighttime boundary layers to flux measurements involving scintillometry, from multi-scale numerical weather prediction to synthetic inflow generation for wind turbine design, and from characterization of low-level jets to portable high-performance computing using MatlabMPI.Location: Kaprielian Hall (KAP) - 209
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Evangeline Reyes
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A Modeling Framework for Detecting HEU in Seaborne Containers
Thu, Feb 19, 2009 @ 03:30 PM - 04:50 PM
Daniel J. Epstein Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering
University Calendar
ISE 650 SEMINARTitle: "A Modeling Framework for Detecting HEU in Seaborne Containers"Speaker: Yu Ding, Associate Professor, Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering, Texas A&M UniversityABSTRACT: Our research is part of a 5-year, multi-disciplinary research grant that encompasses Nuclear Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science, Social Sciences, and Systems Engineering. The overall goal of this effort is to develop new sensor systems and decision tools to detect illicit nuclear materials before they can be smuggled into the United States. The systems engineering focus is on (1) the design of a robust, re-configurable network of nuclear materials detectors across the US and allied countries, (2) dynamic screening of shipping containers based on chain-of-custody and geopolitical information, and (3) developing strategies for sequential screening of containers at the same or different interdiction points. This talk focuses on the inspection systems/policies at a single sea port. I will first examine the current practice of inspecting container traffic. Then, I will present a layered inspection system that utilizes the radiography information of containers and a new inspection measure called "hardness". Our research determines the inspection policies and decides the level of scrutiny to cargo containers by considering the tradeoff between detection probability and system throughput.THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 19, 2009, GERONTOLOGY BUILDING (GER) ROOM 309, 3:30 – 4:50 PMBiosketch: Dr. Yu Ding received a B.S. degree from the University of Science & Technology of China in 1993, an M.S. degree from Tsinghua University in 1996 and an M.S. degree from the Penn State University in 1998, and his Ph.D. degree from the University of Michigan in 2001. Dr. Ding is currently an Associate Professor in the Department of Industrial & Systems Engineering at Texas A&M University. His research interests are in the general area of system informatics and quality/ reliability engineering. Dr. Ding currently serves as a department editor for IIE Transactions on Quality and Reliability Engineering and as an associate editor for IEEE Transactions on Automation Science & Engineering. Dr. Ding is a member of IIE, INFORMS, IEEE, and ASME.
Location: Ethel Percy Andrus Gerontology Center (GER) - 309
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Georgia Lum
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Spitzer lecture presents Professor George M. Whitesides
Thu, Feb 19, 2009 @ 03:30 PM
Mork Family Department of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Professor George M. Whitesides
Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology
Harvard University Cambridge, MA PresentsSimple Bioanalytical SystemsSimplicity and economy are often the keys to successful technologies. ¡°Simple solutions¡± is the phrase we apply to the idea of using science to provide easily used solution to a variety of problems in bioanalysis, with a particular focus on problems in developing economies. The requirements for low cost, ruggedness, and independence of infrastructure characteristic of problems in developing economies pose remarkably challenging problems for advanced science and technology¡ªand the area is one that will benefit enormously from new ideas. Successful solutions will also be useful both in developing economies and in the developed world: low cost and simplicity are advantages almost everywhere. The flow of problems, ideas, and solutions stimulated by considering these problems is thus a most interesting two-way street. This talk will discuss this class of problems within the specific context of medical diagnostics (how close can one come to ¡°Zero-cost Diagnostics¡±?), and with a focus on three technologies: microfluidic systems based on patterned paper, microanalytical systems using magnetic levitation, and simple microfluidics devices for use with simple organisms.
Location: Henry Salvatori Computer Science Center (SAL) - 101
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Petra Pearce Sapir
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Learning Similarities and Dimensionality Reduction
Thu, Feb 19, 2009 @ 04:00 PM
Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Dr. Kilian Weinberger, Yahoo! Research
Host: Prof. Fei ShaAbstract:
One of the most fundamental challenges of machine learning and artificial intelligence is the learning of suitable representations of data. Many machine learning algorithms assume that the data is presented in low dimensional vectorial form, where Euclidean distances reflect dissimilarities. Often this raw data format is far from optimal. Ideally one should be able to learn a "hand-tailored" representation of each particular data set for any given task. In this talk, I present three algorithms for learning compact representations that give rise to semantically meaningful similarity metrics. Each of the algorithms involves, at its core, a convex optimization problem that learns the new representation under meaningful constraints. This framework provides perfect reproducibility and theoretical guarantees. The three methods are most suitable for different data settings: Maximum Variance Unfolding reduces the dimensionality of data sets with underlying manifold structure. Taxonomy Embedding is a powerful tool for hierarchical document categorization. Large Margin Nearest Neighbor learns a robust metric for k-nearest neighbor classification. I present state-of-the-art classification results on several real world applications, including handwritten digit recognition on the MNIST corpus and document categorization on the OHSUMED medical journal data base. Biography:
Kilian Weinberger is a Research Scientist at Yahoo Research in Santa Clara, California. He works on next-generation spam filtering algorithms, multimedia search and machine learning with convex optimization. In 2007 he received a Ph.D. in Computer Science at the University of Pennsylvania under the supervision of Prof. Lawrence Saul. His work on supervised and unsupervised metric learning won several outstanding paper awards at CVPR, AISTATS and ICML. Prior to his doctoral studies he earned a first class honor BA in Mathematics and Computer Science from the University of Oxford.Location: Seaver Science Library (SSL) - 150
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: CS Colloquia
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Engineering Date Auction
Thu, Feb 19, 2009 @ 05:00 PM - 08:00 PM
Viterbi School of Engineering Student Organizations
Student Activity
Location: E-Quad
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Society of Women Engineers
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Central Intelligence Agency Information Session
Thu, Feb 19, 2009 @ 06:00 PM - 08:00 PM
Viterbi School of Engineering Career Connections
Workshops & Infosessions
The Central Intelligence Agency is searching for intelligent and dedicated men and women from a variety of diverse academic backgrounds to contribute to our National Security mission. The West Regional Recruiter and a National Clandestine Services Recruiter will be conducting an Information Session to discuss the CIA mission, employment & internship opportunities and the employment/security clearance process.
Location: Trojan Residence Hall (TRO) - jan Presentation Room, Student Union B3
Audiences: Current Engineering Undergraduate/Graduate Students
Contact: RTH 218 Viterbi Career Services
