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Events for March 03, 2006
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Viterbi Student Council Funding Board Meeting
Fri, Mar 03, 2006
Viterbi School of Engineering Student Organizations
Student Activity
Viterbi Student Council's Funding Board weekly meeting to discuss applications for funding.
Audiences: Funding Board only
Contact: Viterbi Student Council Funding Board
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Delay, feedback, and the price of ignorance
Fri, Mar 03, 2006 @ 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
SPEAKER: Dr. Anant Sahai, UC BerkeleyABSTRACT: In 1959, Shannon made a profound comment:"[The duality between source and channel coding] can be pursued further and is related to a duality between past and future and the notions of control and knowledge. Thus we may have knowledge of the past and cannot control it; we may control the future but have no knowledge of it."This comment cannot be understood in the traditional block-code setting and as a result, has remained entirely mysterious. To understand it, we must step back and consider end-to-end delay, since delay is what fundamentally allows the exploitation of the laws of large numbers to give reliability.In channel coding, we show that while feedback often does not improve fixed block-length reliability functions, it can significantly improve the reliability with respect to fixed delay! (Contrary to a "theorem" by Pinsker claiming otherwise.) A new bound, that we call the "focusing bound," allows us to calculate the limit of what is possible when the encoder is not ignorant of the channel's past behavior. In source coding, the price of ignorance is demonstrated by considering what happens when receiver side-information is withheld from the transmitter. Block-codes perform equally poorly, but nonblock codes can use side-information to dramatically improve the fixed-delay error exponent. Furthermore, a closer look at the dominant error events for these cases gives Shannon's otherwise cryptic comment a precise interpretation.These results suggest that the traditional information theoretic recommendation of using messages as big as possible is flawed as far as architectural guidance is concerned. When encoders are not ignorant, messages should be as *small* as possible while avoid integer effects, and queueing ideas should be employed to do appropriate flow control, even when facing hard end-to-end latency constraints.BIO: Anant Sahai received the B.S. degree in EECS in 1994 from U.C. Berkeley, and both his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in EECS from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in 1996 and 2001, respectively. In 2001, he developed adaptive signal processing algorithms for software radio GPS at the startup Enuvis in South San Francisco. He joined the EECS department at Berkeley as an Assistant Professor in 2002. His current research interests are in information theory and wireless communication, particularly the area of opportunistic spectrum reuse by cognitive radios.Host: Professor Urbashi Mitra, ubli@usc.edu
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - -248
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Mayumi Thrasher
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Effective Remediation Methods for clean up of MGP Sites
Fri, Mar 03, 2006 @ 01:00 PM - 02:00 PM
Sonny Astani Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker:
Dr. Shala Craig, PEParsons
Pasadena, CAAbstract:Manufactured Gas Plants (MGP) were an important fuel source for most domestic and light industrial applications in 19th Century. These plants extracted the lighter components of coal/heavy oil, and after removal of impurities from the fluidized stream, transported the manufactured gas to households and the industry vial local pipe lines. Wastes generated as a result of operating these sites were usually retained on-site, buried, or applied to the land due to lack of regulatory barriers. Major residual contamination form these operations include arsenic, cyanide, and polynuclear aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs). Many components of the PAHs are known carcinogens, for which the State of California (as well as FED EPA) have strict limits. Operation of MGP plants, which continued through out the 1800s, was stopped in the beginning of 20th Century, after discovery and the commercial use of natural gas. However, due to the persistent nature of the residual contaminants from the MGP sites, almost all contamination buried within these sites are still remaining and in need of remedial work. Utilities in Southern California are currently in the process of remedial work at these sites. The presentation will discuss technical and regulatory challenges in the process of identifying the contaminants extent and remedial work within these sites. Special technology and tools used for investigation and remediation of the sites will be presented.Location: Kaprielian Hall (KAP) - rielian Hall, Room 156
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Evangeline Reyes
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Diagnosis and Exploration of Massively Univariate Neuroimaging Data
Fri, Mar 03, 2006 @ 02:00 PM - 03:30 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Thomas E Nichols, PhDDept. Biostatistics,
University of Michigan, Ann ArborHost: Prof. Richard LeahyAbstract:For either fMRI or EEG/MEG, the massively univariate approach a linear model at each of, say, 100,000 spatial elements in the brain. The p-values computed at each voxel depend on assumptions on the data, and inferences can not be trusted unless these assumptions are checked. However, distributional assumptions are rarely checked in neuroimaging due to the sheer scale of the data. In lieu of examining 100,000 diagnostic plots, we propose a combination of statistical and graphical techniques to efficiently diagnose model fit. We create images of diagnostic statistics sensitive to typical model-violations, and time series of summaries that detect problem scans. Together with an interactive spatiotemporal viewer, we demonstrate how summaries can be used to swiftly find rare anomalies in millions of data elements We demonstrate the method on single-subject fMRI data as well as group-level fMRI data. One specific finding is that, while the popular SPM software assumes the temporal autocorrelation tis spatially homogeneous, we find dramatic variation of the autocorrelation strength over the brain, suggesting that fMRI data requires spatially-varying autocorrelation modeling.Biography:Thomas Nichols is an Assistant Professor of Biostatistics at the University of Michigan. He received his Ph.D. in statistics from Carnegie Mellon University in 2001 where he also trained in cognitive neuroscience at the Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition. He has been active in the field of functional neuroimaging since 1992 when he joined the University of Pittsburgh's Positron Emission Tomography (PET) Center as a programmer and statistician. Dr. Nichols' research focuses on modeling and inference of functional neuroimaging data, including PET and Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI). He has developed methods and software for: Nonparametric analysis of PET fMRI data, inference methods which account for the multiplicity of searching the brain for changes in activity (SnPM); diagnosis and exploration of massively univariate models fit on imaging data (SPMd); and high temporal resolution reconstruction methods for PET.
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 248
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Regina Morton
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Viterbi Early Career Chair Lecture Series
Fri, Mar 03, 2006 @ 02:30 PM - 03:30 PM
Integrated Media Systems Center
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
CURTIS ROADS: Synthesis, Analysis, and Visualization of Sound based on Gabor's Atomic Model Professor of Media Arts and Technology / Music, UCSBEvent poster: http://www-rcf.usc.edu/~mucoaco/events/20060303-roads.pdfABSTRACT: This laboratory report covers a range of projects developed over the past five years. Thanks to the collaboration of other researchers, this work is able to proceed in several directions simultaneously, unified by a common thread. Some of this research is purely scientific; some is purely artistic; most of it combines scientific and aesthetic concerns. All the research is based on a granular or atomic model of sound proposed by Dennis Gabor in the 1940s. Granular analysis and synthesis of sound has evolved over more than five decades from theories and primitive experiments into a broad range of applied techniques. Specific to the granular model is its focus on the micro time scale (typically 1 to 100 ms). Granular techniques treat sound as a stream of acoustic atoms in both the time domain of waveforms and the time-frequency domain of analyzed sounds. First I will briefly trace the history of the idea of sound particles. Next I present PulsarGenerator, an application that realizes a specific type of particle synthesis with links to past analog techniques. I will also present the SweepingQGranulator, a software tool that I wrote for the microfiltration of granulated sound. The latest threads in this line of research go in two directions. The first is a time-frequency analysis method known as matching pursuit wavelet analysis. The second is a new prototype for generalized synthesis and control of particle synthesis called Emission Control. Finally, I present some of the sounds and visualizations that we have been developing in conjunction with this research, some of which are motivated by scientific aims, others of which are artistically motivated, and some that attempt to satisfy both aims.BIOSKETCH: Curtis Roads (b. 1951) holds a joint appointment as Professor in Media Arts and Technology and in Music at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB). He is also Vice Chair of MAT and Associate Director of the Center for Research in Electronic Art Technology (CREATE) at UCSB. He studied music composition and computer programming at California Institute of the Arts, the University of California, San Diego (B. A. Summa Cum Laude), and the University of Paris VIII (PhD). From 1980 to 1986 he was a researcher in computer music at the MIT Experimental Music Studio and the MIT Media Laboratory. He then taught at the University of Naples "Federico II," Harvard University, Oberlin Conservatory, CCMIX (Paris), and the University of Paris VIII. He has led masterclasses at the Australian National Conservatory (Melbourne) and the Prometeo Laboratorio (Parma), among others. He is co-organizer of international workshops on musical signal processing in Sorrento, Capri, and Santa Barbara (1988, 1991, 1997, 2000). He has served on the composition juries of the Ars Electronica (Linz) and the International Electroacoustic Music Competition (Bourges, France). Certain of his compositions feature granular and pulsar synthesis, methods he developed for generating sound from acoustical particles. At UCSB he developed the Creatophone, a system for spatial projection of sound in concert, and the Creatovox, an expressive instrument for virtuoso performance developed in collaboration with Alberto de Campo. de Campo and Roads and developed PulsarGenerator, a program for sound particle synthesis. Together with programmer David Thall, he recently developed EmissionControl, a new program for generalized particle synthesis.Host: Elaine Chew, Viterbi Early Career, Assistant Professor of Industrial and Systems EngineeringSupported in part by the Viterbi Early Career Chair Funds, the Integrated Media Systems Center, and the Epstein Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering.For other lectures in the series, please see http://www-rcf.usc.edu/~mucoaco/events/vecc0506.html
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 248
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Elaine Chew
