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SUNMONTUEWEDTHUFRISAT
Events for March 05, 2008
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Meet USC
Wed, Mar 05, 2008
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/events/meet_usc/ 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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Pasadena City College Transfer Fair
Wed, Mar 05, 2008 @ 10:00 AM - 01:00 PM
Viterbi School of Engineering Undergraduate Admission
Workshops & Infosessions
Students interested in transferring to USC's Viterbi School of Engineering can explore Viterbi's programs and majors, learn about the application process, and speak directly with a Viterbi transfer advisor.
Location: Paint Shop (PAS) - adena City College
Audiences: Prospective Transfer Students
Contact: Viterbi Admission
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Juniors and Seniors: What Next
Wed, Mar 05, 2008 @ 12:00 PM - 01:00 PM
Viterbi School of Engineering Career Connections
Workshops & Infosessions
Are you a 3rd or 4th year undergraduate student and want to ensure you are preparing for your career path? Check out this workshop for a timeline that will surely keep you on the professional path for your career.
Location: Ronald Tutor Hall of Engineering (RTH) - 109
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: RTH 218 Viterbi Career Services
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Professor Florian Mansfeld 70th Birthday Symposium
Wed, Mar 05, 2008 @ 01:15 PM
Mork Family Department of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
The list of speakers and times are:1:15 - 1:35 pm Martin Kendig1:35 - 1:55 pm Jesse Lumsden1:55 - 2:20 pm Coffee Break2:20 - 2:40 pm Hong Shih2:40 - 3:00 pm Raymond Tsai3:00 - 3:20 pm Esra Kus
Location: Seeley G. Mudd Building (SGM) - 123
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Petra Pearce Sapir
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“High Dimension Statistical Problems: Practice and Theoryâ€
Wed, Mar 05, 2008 @ 02:00 PM - 03:00 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
SPEAKER: Narayana P Santhanam, Postdoctoral Researcher, UC BerkeleyABSTRACT: For advances in biology, computation and storage, we have invited the "curse of dimensionality" upon many problems that concern the modern engineer. The colorful phrase in quotes coined by Bellman refers to the inability of classical methods to handle problems in which the parameters associated with each data sample is comparable to the number of samples at hand.In particular, high dimension statistical problems are ubiquitous in biology, data analysis and business. In this talk we will introduce approaches for tackling some such problems.We begin with a demonstration of our approaches on text data in the context of classification problems. We will show very fast algorithms that stand up to (and in many cases, beat) sophisticated statistical learning techniques in performance and speed. We then develop the theory behind these approaches using ideas from information theory, number theory, combinatorics, analysis as well as tools in statistical learning.The big picture is to see this work as source coding driven by data analysis and biology, complementing the traditional communication/storage driven models. We conclude with a brief preview of some of the directions in which we are developing this work.BIO: Narayana Santhanam is a postdoctoral researcher hosted by Prof. Martin Wainwright in UC Berkeley. He obtained the B.Tech degree from IIT Madras, and MS and PhD with Prof. Alon Orlitsky from UC San Diego. He is interested in theory and applications related to high dimensional problems, statistical learning, information theory and combinatorial/probabilistic problems in general.He is the recipient of the 2006 Information theory society award and the 2003 Capocelli Prize.HOST: Prof. Giuseppe Caire, caire@usc.edu
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 248
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Mayumi Thrasher
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A non-parametric approach to evaluating catastrophe risk and decisions: ..
Wed, Mar 05, 2008 @ 02:00 PM - 03:00 PM
Sonny Astani Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
...Financial and Infrastructure SystemsSPEAKER: Dr. Craig Taylor,Research Professor, USC, Sonny Astani Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering and Sr. V.P., Baseline Management Company, Inc. (with help from many)Abstract:
Catastrophes raise many issues for financial and infrastructure systems. These pertain to the use of insurance, bonds, swaps, design, retrofit, upgrades and many other activities that require complex evaluations. A great deal of past and current work has emphasized the use of parametric formulations of catastrophe loss distributions as means to help on major catastrophe risk decisions. This presentation goes in an opposite direction—even opposite to my own research until very recently.
With ongoing research, I currently maintain that enormous advances in computer technology (speed and storage) illuminate how these parametric fits tend to produce dramatic sub-optimization in catastrophe decision-making. Moreover, these advances further help to show that efficiency gained through these fits is minor.
Other themes proposed in this presentation are that:
• Parametric modeling can be very helpful on less major projects and especially on the sub-models developed in these complex evaluations
• Averages are very important, but so are extremes (potentially impacted by tipping points, yield points, deductibles, attachment points, limits of liability)
• Focus on efficiency should be on rendering systems evaluations (e.g., transportation systems given multiple bridge collapses) accurate yet faster
• Of necessity probabilistic, criteria for finance should incorporate gains as well as losses
• Use of equi-probable estimates such as for ROI (return on investment) in finance or for total costs in engineering greatly facilitates estimation and understanding of financial criteria
• For the extreme distributions involved with catastrophes, variance reduction techniques have so far proven to be far less important than assumed; advances in computer technology (speed, storage, pre-processing) have had vastly greater impacts.
• Complex catastrophe (or shock-based) evaluations should take advantage of these developments so that engineers, economists and others can focus on sub-models and assumptions.Location: Kaprielian Hall (KAP) - 209
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Evangeline Reyes
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Inside Polymer Nanocomposites - Interphases and Percolation
Wed, Mar 05, 2008 @ 03:30 PM - 04:30 PM
Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
L. Cate BrinsonMechanical Engineering and Materials Science and
EngineeringNorthwestern UniversityAbstract:Polymeric nanocomposites made by incorporating small amount of nanoscale inclusions into polymer matrices exhibit dramatic changes in thermomechanical properties over the pure polymers. The properties of the nanoscale fillers can be extraordinary, yet the significant changes observed cannot be due to the nanofillers alone. Enhancing their effect is the extremely significant role that the interphase plays in these systems. Given the enormous surface to volume ratio for nanoparticles, the interphase volume fraction can dwarf that of the inclusions themselves and percolate through the composite. In this talk, experimental evidence of the existence of this interphase region is presented for several nanofiller types via local and global glass transition changes and microscopy. We show that by properly controlled functionalization of the nanoscale inclusions, we can impact the properties of the interphase region and consequently control the properties of the nanocomposites. In conjunction with the experimental results, the viscoelastic behavior of multi-phase polymeric nanocomposites is modeled using a novel hybrid numerical-analytical approach that can effectively take into account the existence of the interphase region and be used to elucidate experimental results and aid in materials design. To investigate the concept of percolated interphase, a finite element approach is developed to study the impact of interphase zones on the overall properties of composite. The results have impact on potential commercial applications for nanocomposites including transparent conducting films, wear resistant coatings and hybrid systems for multifunctional performance including sensing and damage toleranceLocation: Seaver Science Library, Rm 150
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: April Mundy
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CS Colloq: Information Retrieval for Virtual Worlds
Wed, Mar 05, 2008 @ 03:30 PM - 05:00 PM
Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Title: Information Retrieval for Virtual WorldsSpeaker: Dr. Anton Leuski (ICT)ABSTRACT:
Computer simulated virtual worlds have become increasingly important
in recent years. These worlds range from off-line setups where a
single person interacts with a single computer generated character to
massive on-line worlds where tens of thousands of people come
together interacting with each other and numerous virtual characters.
More and more people are using these computer-simulated environments
for education, training, communication, and entertainment. These
worlds are becoming a source for acquiring and polishing real-world
skills. They are also getting used for modeling and analysis of real-world human behavior patterns. Creating effective tools both for
analysis and construction of virtual words is highly important.In this talk I will show how statistical natural language processing
(NLP) techniques can be applied to address this problem. In the first
part of the talk I will discuss how to use NLP approaches such as
language modeling and conditional random fields to build virtual
characters capable of natural language understanding (NLU). I will
describe three different methods for creating NLU subsystems for
virtual characters of different complexities. I will focus my
presentation on a novel text classification algorithm that supports
creation of simple and effective virtual characters. This algorithm
builds on ideas from cross-lingual information retrieval. I will
describe experiments that show that the algorithm outperforms
traditional classification techniques and remains very robust in the
presence of partially correct language input. In the second part of
the talk, I will show how statistical language modelling, text
classification and clustering can be applied to analyze players'
conversations in an online virtual world and how this analysis can be
used to detect interesting player activities, players participating
in those activities, and interaction patterns.BIO:
Dr. Anton Leuski is a Research Scientist at the Institute for Creative
Technologies with the University of Southern California. He holds a Ph.D. in
Computer Science from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. His
research interests center around interactive information access,
human-computer interaction, and machine learning. Dr. Leuski's recent work has
focused on natural language problems that facilitate dialog between humans and
virtual characters, specifically language understanding and classification,
natural language generation, and activity detection and tracking in massive
collaborative environments.Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 248
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: CS Colloquia
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Meet Your New FYE Advisor
Wed, Mar 05, 2008 @ 05:00 PM
Viterbi School of Engineering Student Affairs
University Calendar
If you are a freshmen majoring in Aerospace Engineering, Astronautical Engineering, Chemical Engineering, or Electrical Engineering we would like to invite you to enjoy some refreshments and meet your new FYE advisor, Melissa Sudduth.To RSVP to the event, or for additional information, please email viterbi.studentservices@usc.edu .
Location: Ronald Tutor Hall of Engineering (RTH) - 206 (Student Lounge)
Audiences: Freshmen majoring in AE, ASTE, CHE, or EE
Contact: Viterbi Admission & Student Affairs
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General Body Meeting
Wed, Mar 05, 2008 @ 05:30 PM - 06:30 PM
Viterbi School of Engineering Student Organizations
Student Activity
Clark Construction will be at NSBE's general body meeting this upcoming week. They will be hosting a resume and interview workshop. Resumes will be critiqued onsite and offers for internship are available. And the head HR manager will be present. So bring your resume and see what's in store.
Location: Grace Ford Salvatori Hall Of Letters, Arts & Sciences (GFS) - 116
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: National Society of Black Engineers (NSBE)
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ISA - Protiviti Informational Meeting
Wed, Mar 05, 2008 @ 06:00 PM - 07:30 PM
Daniel J. Epstein Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering
University Calendar
The USC Information Systems Association will be hosting Protiviti at its next meeting.Protiviti (www.protiviti.com/) is an international provider of independent internal audit and business and technology risk consulting services. Protiviti is recognized as an internal audit and risk management consulting company and a thought leader in areas that include the complexities and challenges of complying with corporate governance regulations such as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act. Protiviti offers three distinct lines of service: Technology Risk, Business Risk and Internal Audit. The company was established in 2002 when Robert Half International, Inc. "hired more than 700 professionals who had been affiliated with the internal audit and business and technology risk consulting practice of Arthur Andersen LLP, including more than 50 individuals who had been partners of Andersen. These professionals formed the base of the Company's new Protiviti Inc. subsidiary." WHAT: Protiviti Informational MeetingWHEN: Wednesday, March 5, 2008TIME: 6:00 PMWHERE: HOH 422 You do not need to be a member to attend. This meeting is FREE and open to all majors. It's not too late to become a member. Come to this week's meeting for more information or visit the ISA website at www.uscisa.net.If you have any questions please feel free to contact Alex Kim at alexjkim@usc.edu.
Location: H. Leslie Hoffman Hall Of Business Administration (HOH) - 422
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Georgia Lum
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SWE Teen Shelter Volunteering
Wed, Mar 05, 2008 @ 07:30 PM - 09:30 PM
Viterbi School of Engineering Student Organizations
Student Activity
Want to make a difference in the life of a teen? Join SWE on this night of having fun with teenagers! All the proceeds from the SWE Date Auction are going to this teen shelter. Email uscswe.outreach@gmail.com to get involved.
Location: Cardinal Gardens (CAR) - pooling from RTH
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Society of Women Engineers (SWE)
