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Events for March 30, 2009
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Aircraft Accident Investigation - Mar.30-Apr.10, 2009
Mon, Mar 30, 2009
Aviation Safety and Security Program
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
AAI 09-4
For more information and to register for Aviation Safety and Security Program courses, please visit http://viterbi.usc.edu/aviation.Audiences: Registered Audiences Only
Contact: Viterbi Professional Programs
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Meet USC
Mon, Mar 30, 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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Protein Misfolding Diseases ¨C Chemical, Mechanical, Structural and Biomimetics Perspective
Mon, Mar 30, 2009 @ 12:15 PM
Mork Family Department of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Distinguished Lecture SeriesPresentsProfessor Ratnesh Lal,University of Chicago AbstractNative protein structures are determined by their primary sequences. Protein misfolding can lead normally folded soluble oligomers to form insoluble amyloid fibrils. In vivo, insoluble amyloid fibrils are linked to protein misfolding diseases, including Alzheimer¡¯s Disease (AD), Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), prion-diseases, type-II diabetes and systemic amyloidosis. The mechanism of amyloid toxicity is poorly understood. Amyloid ¦Â peptide associated with Alzheimer¡¯s Disease forms a U-shaped ¡®¦Â-strand-turn-¦Â-strand¡¯ structure. Computational modeling based on protein folding energetics and mechanical mobility predicts these amyloids to form ion channels. Mutlimodal and mutlidimentional atomic force microscopy (AFM) study provides a new paradigm for amyloid diseases ¨C they belong to channelopathies and provide new avenues for designing therapeutics. This presentation will illustrate new advances in our understanding of amyloid diseases and will provide glimpse of biomimetics, bioMEMS, and other possible engineering approaches for effective diagnostics and therapy. Multiscale biomechanics covering nanoscale dissection, mechanics, rheology, cell micromechanics will also be discussed, in particular, using atomic force microscopy to study biological systems from single macromolecules to cell membrane to cells and tissue. We have obtained information about both their structures and their physiochemical properties with direct relevance to cell and tissue physiology, tissue mechanics, tissue remodeling, and biomimetics.
Location: SLH 100
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Petra Pearce Sapir
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BME 533 Seminar Series
Mon, Mar 30, 2009 @ 12:30 PM - 01:50 PM
Alfred E. Mann Department of Biomedical Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Richard Casaburi, PhD, MD, Professor of Medicine & Associate Chief of Research, Division of Respiratory and
Critical Care Physiology & Medicine, Harbor-UCLA Medical Center, Torrance, CA:
"The Era of Large Clinical Trials in COPD"Location: Olin Hall of Engineering (OHE) - 132
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Mischalgrace Diasanta
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Modeling and Tracking Activities with Event-Coupled HMMs
Mon, Mar 30, 2009 @ 04:00 PM
Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Dr. Aram Galstyan, ISI, USC
Host: Prof. Jonathan GratchAbstract:
Plan, activity, and intent recognition (PAIR) is concerned with inferring hidden states of agents based on an observable sequence of their actions. Although PAIR has been an active area of research for more than a decade, most studies so far has been limited to systems with a single agent, or a handful of them. I will present our work on activity recognition on a larger scale, where thousands of agents interact with each other by engaging in abstract "attribute trades". Those interactions induce an evolving network, where the nodes and the edges represent the agents and their transactions, respectively. The collective dynamics of this network can be naturally modeled through a novel type of interacting hidden Markov models (HMM), which we call Event-Coupled HMMs. I will discuss our approach to scalable inference-making with EC-HMM, which involves pruning the network through semi-supervised learning, and utilizing an approximate and scalable representation of the hidden process on the reduced network. I will conclude by discussing the notion of "trackability", which can be intuitively defined as one's ability to accurately infer stochastic processes, and present some recent results in the context of binary HMMs.Biography:
Dr. Aram Galstyan received his Ph.D. in theoretical condensed matter physics from University of Utah, in 2000. He then joined USC Information Sciences Institute where he currently works as a computer scientist at the Intelligent Systems Division. Dr. Galstyan's current research focuses on learning and discovering patterns in large-scale sequential data, statistical network analysis, and semi-supervised learning with graphs. His other research interests include mathematical modeling of complex adaptive systems, emergent coordination in robotic swarms, and learning in multi-agent systems.
Location: Von Kleinsmid Center For International & Public Affairs (VKC) - 210
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: CS Colloquia