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Events for February 21, 2025
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EiS Communications Hub - Tutoring for Engineering Ph.D. StudentsFri, Feb 21, 2025 @ 10:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Viterbi School of Engineering Student Affairs
Workshops & Infosessions
Viterbi Ph.D. students are invited to drop by the Hub for instruction on their writing and speaking tasks! All tutoring is one-on-one and conducted by Viterbi faculty.
Location: Ronald Tutor Hall of Engineering (RTH) - 222A
Audiences: Viterbi Ph.D. Students
Contact: Helen Choi
Event Link: https://sites.google.com/usc.edu/eishub/home
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. -
AI Seminar- Evaluating Sparse Autoencoders with Board Game Models
Fri, Feb 21, 2025 @ 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Information Sciences Institute
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Adam Karvonen, Machine Learning Researcher with the ML Alignment & Theory Scholars
Talk Title: Evaluating Sparse Autoencoders with Board Game Models
Abstract: Join Zoom Meeting: https://usc.zoom.us/j/94409584905?pwd=Sm5LVkd0bndUdEluM3piK0NWTUQrUT09 Meeting ID: 944 0958 4905Passcode: 822247 Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) have recently become one of the most popular approaches in interpretability. As a result, there has been a flurry of new proposed SAE approaches. However, we struggle to evaluate these new approaches because there isn’t an underlying ground truth in natural language that we can use to create objective metrics for interpretability. We examine the setting of board games, using OthelloGPT and ChessGPT, and create two supervised metrics: “coverage” to assess individual feature quality and “board reconstruction” to measure overall state capture. Additionally, we propose a new SAE training approach called “p-annealing”. Our metrics reveal improvements that were hidden by existing proxy metrics, and the p-annealing approach performs the best on our metrics. While SAEs achieve high performance on board reconstruction (F1 scores of 0.85 and 0.95 on Chess and Othello), they don’t match the performance of linear probes, suggesting current techniques may not capture all of a model’s board state information. Papers: Intro to Sparse Autoencoders: What are SAEs? How do they work? What are the next steps for the field to take? Similar to this blog post: https://adamkarvonen.github.io/machine_learning/2024/06/11/sae-intuitions.html Board Game Models: Covers this paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.00113 and this blog post: https://adamkarvonen.github.io/machine_learning/2024/06/12/sae-board-game-eval.html
Biography: I am mostly interested in machine learning and software engineering. Lately, a lot of my focus has been on Large Language Models - both in using them as a tool when combined with formal methods, and in understanding and interpreting them. Outside of work, I race dirt bikes. I race A class in hard enduro, and B class in regular enduro and hare scrambles.
Host: Abel Salinas and Justina Gilleland
More Info: https://www.isi.edu/events/5368/evaluating-sparse-autoencoders-with-board-game-models/
Webcast: https://usc.zoom.us/j/94409584905?pwd=Sm5LVkd0bndUdEluM3piK0NWTUQrUT09Location: Virtual Only
WebCast Link: https://usc.zoom.us/j/94409584905?pwd=Sm5LVkd0bndUdEluM3piK0NWTUQrUT09
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Pete Zamar
Event Link: https://www.isi.edu/events/5368/evaluating-sparse-autoencoders-with-board-game-models/
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. -
Alfred E.Mann Department of Biomedical Engineering - Seminar series
Fri, Feb 21, 2025 @ 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Alfred E. Mann Department of Biomedical Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Corina Amor Vegas, Assistant Professor, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center
Talk Title: "Deconstructing aging with senolytic CAR T cells"
Abstract: Senescent cells accumulate in organisms over their lifespan and play a key role in age-related tissue decline and the development of chronic aging pathologies. Thus, effective strategies to eliminate senescent cells (senolytics) could have broad therapeutic implications. In a departure from conventional chemical approaches we developed the first cell-based senolytic therapy based on chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T cells targeting uPAR, a cell-surface protein upregulated on senescent cells. Our initial proof of concept showed their efficiency in young animal models of liver fibrosis and cancer. We now show that uPAR-positive senescent cells accumulate during physiological aging and characterize their cell types and expression profiles. Importantly, we find that they can be safely targeted with senolytic CAR T cells in aged animals where they result in significant improvements in both tissue regeneration and metabolic function. Of note, we find that the beneficial effects of senolytic CAR T cells are long lasting; single administration of a low dose is sufficient to safely achieve long-term therapeutic and preventive effects in healthspan.
Biography: Corina received an M.D. from Universidad Complutense de Madrid in Spain and a PhD from the Gerstner Sloan Kettering Graduate School at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in NY. Following graduation she established her own research group at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory as an Independent Fellow in January 2022 and was rapidly promoted to assistant professor in January 2024. She is also the Co-chair of the department of cellular communication at the CSHL Cancer Center. The Amor laboratory studies aging biology with a focus on cellular senescence. The long-term goal of their research is to elucidate the contribution of senescent cells to the aging process and to develop novel cell-based therapeutic strategies to treat age-related pathologies. This work has lead to several awards including the the Chairman’s Prize award from MSKCC, listing as Forbes 30 under 30 and the the NIH Director’s Early Independence Award (DP5).
Host: Peter Wang
Location: Ronald Tutor Hall of Engineering (RTH) - 109
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Carla Stanard
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. -
CA DREAMS - Technical Seminar Series
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Fri, Feb 21, 2025 @ 12:00 PM - 01:00 PM
Information Sciences Institute
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Dr. Jeong-sun Moon, HRL Laboratories
Talk Title: HRL's Millimeter-wave GaN Technologies
Abstract: This talk will present HRL’s millimeter-wave GaN technologies developed under the DARPA DREAM program to advance millimeter-wave GaN transistor technologies with higher linearity, efficiency, and power density, leveraging HRL’s long history of GaN technology development.
Biography: Dr. Jeong-sun Moon is a Principal Scientist at HRL Laboratories, Malibu, CA and a Fellow of IEEE. He has been with HRL since 2000 and working on developing next-generation advanced RF/EO/IR technologies and has been a PI for numerous contracts from DARPA, ONR, and USG. Before joining the HRL, he worked at the Sandia National Laboratories. He has over 200 technical publications and holds 30 patents.
Host: Dr. Steve Crago
More Info: https://www.isi.edu/events/5342/hrls-millimeter-wave-gan-technologies/
Webcast: https://usc.zoom.us/j/97017422125?pwd=Dbrt8MNMrmBV3xalKQJcAiNsggFJjJ.1&from=addonWebCast Link: https://usc.zoom.us/j/97017422125?pwd=Dbrt8MNMrmBV3xalKQJcAiNsggFJjJ.1&from=addon
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Amy Kasmir
Event Link: https://www.isi.edu/events/5342/hrls-millimeter-wave-gan-technologies/
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. -
CS DISTINGUISHED LECTURE feat. Noah A. Smith, PhD
Fri, Feb 21, 2025 @ 02:00 PM - 04:15 PM
Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Noah A. Smith, PhD, Amazon Professor of Machine Learning - Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering, University of Washington
Talk Title: OLMo, Tulu, and Friends: Accelerating the Science of Language Modeling
Abstract: Neural language models with billions of parameters and trained on trillions of words are powering the fastest-growing computing applications in history and generating discussion and debate around the world. Yet most scientists cannot study or improve those state-of-the-art models because the organizations deploying them keep their data and machine learning processes secret. I believe that the path to models that are usable by all, at low cost, customizable for areas of critical need like the sciences, and whose capabilities and limitations are made transparent and understandable, is radically open development, with academic and not-for-profit researchers empowered to do reproducible science. In this talk, I’ll share the story of the work our team is doing to radically open up the science of language modeling. We've released multiple iterations of OLMo, a strong language model with fully open pretraining data, including a strong mixture-of-experts model, OLMoE. From these we also built Molmo, an open language-vision model. We’ve also built and released Tülu, a series of models that systematically explore the post-training landscape. All of these come with open-source code and extensive documentation, including new tools for evaluation. Together these artifacts make it possible to explore new scientific questions and democratize control of the future of this fascinating and important technology.
The work I’ll present was led by a large team at the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence in Seattle, with collaboration from the Paul G. Allen School at the University of Washington and various kinds of support and coordination from many organizations, including the Kempner Institute for the Study of Natural and Artificial Intelligence at Harvard University, AMD, CSC - IT Center for Science (Finland), Databricks, Together.ai, and the National AI Research Resource Pilot.
This lecture satisfies requirements for CSCI 591: Research Colloquium.
RSVP Deadline: Tuesday, February 18, 2025
ZOOM: https://usc.zoom.us/j/94658825749?pwd=PSuL9G8Aw9BaR7haIuAfPwIyQ7d7Hq.1
Meeting ID: 946 5882 5749
Passcode: 02212025
Biography: Noah Smith is a computer scientist working in several fields of artificial intelligence research. He recently wrote Language Models: A Guide for the Perplexed, a general-audience tutorial, and he co-directs the OLMo open language modeling effort with Hanna Hajishirzi.
Broadly, his research targets algorithms that process data encoding language, music, and more, to augment human capabilities. He also works on core problems of research methodology like evaluation. You can watch videos of some of his talks, read his papers, and learn about his research groups, Noah’s ARK and AllenNLP. Smith is most proud of his mentoring accomplishments: as of 2024, he has graduated 29 Ph.D. students and mentored 15 postdocs, with 27 alumni now in faculty positions around the world. 20 of his undergraduate/masters mentees have gone on to Ph.D. programs. His group’s alumni have started companies and are technological leaders both inside and outside the tech industry.
Host: Prof. Jieyu Zhao
More Info: https://forms.gle/FDsJM8mjfCw8M6Rk9
Webcast: https://usc.zoom.us/j/94658825749?pwd=PSuL9G8Aw9BaR7haIuAfPwIyQ7d7Hq.1Location: Ginsburg Hall (GCS) - Auditorium (LL1)
WebCast Link: https://usc.zoom.us/j/94658825749?pwd=PSuL9G8Aw9BaR7haIuAfPwIyQ7d7Hq.1
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science
Event Link: https://forms.gle/FDsJM8mjfCw8M6Rk9
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.
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