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Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Events for August
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Stochastic Multiscale Methods: Mathematical Analysis and Algorithms
Mon, Aug 10, 2009 @ 07:00 AM - 05:00 PM
Sonny Astani Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
August 10-11 2009.Workshop Objectives:Exchanging information across scales is one of the most significant challenges in multiscale modeling and simulation. By necessity, and naturally within a multiscale context, information is truncated as it is presented to a coarser scale, and is enriched as it traverses the opposite path. Information is lost and corrupted as it is, respectively, upscaled and downscaled. Mitigating these errors can be set on rigorous ground through a probabilistic description of information, whence finite-dimensional approximations of measures provides an analytical path for describing the coarsening and refining of information. Stochastic analysis, therefore, provides a rational context for the analysis of multiscale methods. This workshop on Stochastic Multiscale Methods: Mathematical Analysis and Algorithms will serve to define challenges and opportunities in the development of stochastic multiscale methods for various problems in science and engineering. Issues of uncertainty quantification, model validation, and optimization under uncertainty have taken center stage in many areas of science and engineering. Likewise, multiscale modeling and computing capabilities are becoming the standard against which model-based predictions are gauged. It thus behooves the scientific community, at this juncture, to elucidate the mathematical foundation of stochastic multiscale concepts so as to ensure a steady evolution of scientific capabilities as engines of economical growth societal well-being. This workshop will initiate a dialog between mathematicians, mechanicians, and computational scientists that will lay the foundation for an accelerated growth in stochastic multiscale methods. Rapid growth in computational resources has heightened the expectation that scientific knowledge can indeed be a driver for societal well-being and betterment. At the same time, our ability to measure the natural and social world around has significantly increased, aided by technological development in sensors, the internet, and other modalities of communication. Science is thus faced, simultaneously, with a complex description of reality at an unprecendented resolution, and the possibility to describe this reality with mathematical models of increasing complexity. Multiscale descriptions of physical problems can be viewed as attempts to take advantage of these new oppotunities, while tackling the conceptual challenges they inevitably present. The communities of stochastic analysis and computational science have evolved essentially along separate paths. The path forward, however, in the direction of disruptive scientific impact, requires significant exchange and collaboration. It is the intent of this Workshop Stochastic Multiscale Methods: Mathematical Analysis and Algorithms to bring together leading researchers in these two fields with view to delineate new horizons and forge new synergies that will accelerate the evolution of multiscale capabilities to become an enabler of scientific and economic progress.The Workshop will be chaired by Roger Ghanem (USC), George Papanicolaou (Stanford), and Boris Rozovsky (Brown).
Location: Waite Phillips Hall B27, B28
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Evangeline Reyes
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Stochastic Multiscale Methods: Mathematical Analysis and Algorithms
Tue, Aug 11, 2009 @ 07:00 AM - 05:00 PM
Sonny Astani Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
August 10-11 2009.Workshop Objectives:Exchanging information across scales is one of the most significant challenges in multiscale modeling and simulation. By necessity, and naturally within a multiscale context, information is truncated as it is presented to a coarser scale, and is enriched as it traverses the opposite path. Information is lost and corrupted as it is, respectively, upscaled and downscaled. Mitigating these errors can be set on rigorous ground through a probabilistic description of information, whence finite-dimensional approximations of measures provides an analytical path for describing the coarsening and refining of information. Stochastic analysis, therefore, provides a rational context for the analysis of multiscale methods. This workshop on Stochastic Multiscale Methods: Mathematical Analysis and Algorithms will serve to define challenges and opportunities in the development of stochastic multiscale methods for various problems in science and engineering. Issues of uncertainty quantification, model validation, and optimization under uncertainty have taken center stage in many areas of science and engineering. Likewise, multiscale modeling and computing capabilities are becoming the standard against which model-based predictions are gauged. It thus behooves the scientific community, at this juncture, to elucidate the mathematical foundation of stochastic multiscale concepts so as to ensure a steady evolution of scientific capabilities as engines of economical growth societal well-being. This workshop will initiate a dialog between mathematicians, mechanicians, and computational scientists that will lay the foundation for an accelerated growth in stochastic multiscale methods. Rapid growth in computational resources has heightened the expectation that scientific knowledge can indeed be a driver for societal well-being and betterment. At the same time, our ability to measure the natural and social world around has significantly increased, aided by technological development in sensors, the internet, and other modalities of communication. Science is thus faced, simultaneously, with a complex description of reality at an unprecendented resolution, and the possibility to describe this reality with mathematical models of increasing complexity. Multiscale descriptions of physical problems can be viewed as attempts to take advantage of these new oppotunities, while tackling the conceptual challenges they inevitably present. The communities of stochastic analysis and computational science have evolved essentially along separate paths. The path forward, however, in the direction of disruptive scientific impact, requires significant exchange and collaboration. It is the intent of this Workshop Stochastic Multiscale Methods: Mathematical Analysis and Algorithms to bring together leading researchers in these two fields with view to delineate new horizons and forge new synergies that will accelerate the evolution of multiscale capabilities to become an enabler of scientific and economic progress.The Workshop will be chaired by Roger Ghanem (USC), George Papanicolaou (Stanford), and Boris Rozovsky (Brown).
Location: Waite Phillips Hall B27, B28
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Evangeline Reyes
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Safety Management For Aviation Maintenance - Aug.17-21, 2009
Mon, Aug 17, 2009
Aviation Safety and Security Program
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
MAINT 10-1
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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Successes and Challenges of the American Electric Utility System
Tue, Aug 18, 2009 @ 10:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Viterbi School of Engineering Student Affairs
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
This talk, which also serves as an introductory lecture for EE 444, will provide a broad perspective on the history and possible future of the American electric utility system. Dr. Richard Hirsch is a professor of History of Technology and Science & Technology Studies at Virginia Tech.
Location: Olin Hall of Engineering (OHE) - 100C
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Tracy Charles
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CS Colloq: Prof. Simon Lucey
Tue, Aug 18, 2009 @ 11:00 AM - 12:30 PM
Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Time: 11 AM - 12:30 PMLocation: PHE 333Talk title: Leveraging Convex Quadratics for Alignment and Classification in Vision
Speaker: Prof. Simon Lucey (Robotics Institute, CMU)
Host: Prof. Louis-Philippe MorencyAbstract:
Convex quadratic objective functions are an attractive means of expressing some goal/task in vision like alignment or classification as: (i) local minima = global minimum, (ii) the sum of N convex quadratics is itself a convex quadratic, and (iii) they offer computationally efficient solutions. Famous algorithms in vision such as the Lucas-Kanade (LK) algorithm (alignment), and the Support Vector Machines (SVM) can both be viewed as minimizing a convex quadratic objective function.In the first part of this talk, I will be exploring problems/applications in vision where the original objective function can be suitably relaxed to take advantage of the convex quadratic form.
We will introduce two examples of such successful relaxations: (i) Convex Quadratic Fitting (CQF) for non-rigid face alignment with local-experts, and (ii) Least-Squares Congealing (LSC) for the task of unsupervised image ensemble alignment. Both examples, at the time of writing, exhibit superior performance to current state of the art performance.In the second part of this talk, I will explore the concept that if our learning goal can be expressed as a convex quadratic, and our feature extraction step linear, then the sequential feature extraction and optimization steps can be re-interpreted within a single learning goal. This alternate view of linear feature extraction with respect to a convex quadratic learning goal has a number of advantages. First, for the case of classification within the well known linear support vector machine (SVM) framework the memory and computational overheads, typically occurring due to the high dimensionality of the feature extraction process now disappear. From a theoretical perspective the feature extraction step can now be viewed alternately as manipulating the margin of the SVM. This insight is synergetic with recent work in learning that has demonstrated that the choice of margin employed while learning a SVM is critical for high classification performance in many circumstances. Second, for the case of alignment we demonstrate that a similar approach can be applied when employing linear feature extraction in conjunction with the LK algorithm for alignment. By framing the LK algorithm within the Fourier-domain, an algorithm we refer to as Fourier-LK (FLK), we demonstrate superior alignment performance with nearly no additional computational overhead.Bio:
Simon Lucey is an Assistant Research Professor in the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University, and has been a faculty member there since October 2005. Before that he was a Post-Doc in the Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) department at Carnegie Mellon University. Dr. Lucey's research interests are in computer vision, pattern recognition and machine learning with specific interests in their application to space-time face and body analysis. He received his Ph.D. in 2003 on the topic of audio-visual speaker and speech recognition from the Queensland University of Technology (QUT), Australia. To his credit he has over 30 publications in international conferences, journals and book chapters. He has been a reviewer for a number of international journals and conferences in vision, learning, pattern recognition and multimedia. He has organized and co-chaired a number of conferences, workshops and special sessions, including last year's International Conference on Auditory and Visual Speech Processing(AVSP'08) and the successful "Beyond Patches" workshop series at CVPR'06 and CVPR'07. His work on face tracking and recognition was recently showcased on a Discovery Channel series "Weird Connections". Simon has served on the programme committee for a number of top international computer vision and pattern recognition conferences including CVPR, ICCV, ECCV and BMVC and also served as an Associate Editor for the IEEE Transactions of Multimedia.
Location: Charles Lee Powell Hall (PHE) - 333
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: CS Front Desk
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Opportunistic Routing in Wireless Networks: A Stochastic/Adaptive Control Approach
Wed, Aug 19, 2009 @ 11:00 AM - 12:30 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Tara Javidi,
University of California, San DiegoAbstract: Opportunistic routing for multi-hop wireless networks has seen recent research interest to overcome deficiencies of traditional routing. First, we, briefly, cast opportunistic routing as a Markov decision problem (MDP) and introduce a stochastic variant of distributed bellman-ford which provides a unifying framework for various versions of opportunistic routing such as SDF, GeRaF, and EXOR.In the second part of the talk, we touch upon the issue of congestion and throughput optimality by contrasting the opportunistic MDP-based schemes with some back-pressure opportunistic schemes. We propose a modification of the MDP framework to arrive at a throughput-optimal policy, aka ORCD, that exhibits significant delay improvements over existing candidates in the literature. In the process of proving throughput optimality for ORCD, we introduce a new Lyapunov function construction which characterizes an important and large class of throughput optimal policies. The proposed class includes backpressure and ORCD as simple special cases.To formulate and identify the optimal routing strategy, MDP formulations rely on the availability of probabilistic (Markov) models. Lastly (and time-permitting), we build on our earlier work on sensitivity analysis for opportunistic schemes and use a reinforcement learning framework to propose an adaptive opportunistic routing algorithm. The proposed scheme minimizes the expected average cost per packet independently of the initial knowledge about the channel quality and statistics across the network.Biography: Tara Javidi studied electrical engineering at Sharif University of Technology, Tehran, Iran from 1992 to 1996. She received the MS degrees in electrical engineering (systems), and in applied mathematics (stochastics) from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, in 1998 and 1999, respectively. She received her Ph.D. in electrical engineering and computer science from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, in 2002.From 2002 to 2004, she was an assistant professor at the Electrical Engineering Department, University of Washington, Seattle. She joined University of California, San Diego, in 2005, where she is currently an assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering. She was a Barbour Scholar during 1999-2000 academic year and received an NSF CAREER Award in 2004. Her research interests are in communication networks, stochastic resource allocation, stochastic control theory, and wireless communications.Hosts: Rahul Jain, rahul.jain@usc.edu, EEB 328, x02246
Michael Neely, neely@usc.edu, EEB 520, x03505
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 248
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Gerrielyn Ramos
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Legal Aspects of Aviation Safety - Aug.24-25, 2009
Mon, Aug 24, 2009
Aviation Safety and Security Program
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
LEGAL 10-1
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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BME 533 (Seminar in Biomedical Engineering)
Mon, Aug 24, 2009 @ 12:30 PM - 01:30 PM
Alfred E. Mann Department of Biomedical Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Michael Khoo, PhD, Professor & Chair of Biomedical Engineering, USC: "Overview of Biomedical Engineering at USC"
Bartlett Mel, PhD, Associate Professor of Biomedical Engineering, USC: "PhD Laboratory Rotations"Location: Olin Hall of Engineering (OHE) - 132
Audiences: Graduate Students/Faculty
Contact: Mischalgrace Diasanta
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CS Colloq: Dr. Janusz Marecki
Mon, Aug 24, 2009 @ 03:00 PM - 04:30 PM
Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Time: 3 PM - 4:30 PMLocation: VKC 150Talk title: "A Quest for Intelligence: From Stochastic Optimization to Cortex Simulations"
Speaker: Dr. Janusz Marecki (IBM T.J. Watson Research Center)
Host: Prof. Milind TambeAbstract:
With the computational capacity of the world's supercomputers approaching the computational capacity of the human brain, we may be only at the beginning of an era of intelligent algorithms. In this talk I will summarize my quest for intelligent algorithms, focused on
(i) developing techniques for risk-sensitive, autonomous decision making in stochastic environments and (ii) deciphering the cortical algorithm and running it on massively-parallel architectures, to simulate the perception/cognition functions of the brain. I will conclude by proposing a set of measures, to make the deployed intelligent algorithms safer.Bio:
Janusz Marecki is currently a Research Staff Member in the Mathematical Sciences Department at IBM T.J. Watson Research Center and a visiting professor at the Academy of Computer Science in Poland.
He holds a PhD in Artificial Intelligence from University of Southern California and a DrSc in Mathematical Modeling from Institute of Information Infrastructure in Lviv. Janusz's research interests include decision/game theory, multiagent systems, neural networks and high-performance computing. He is an author of over 60 refereed publications and 2 patents.
(More information at http://teamcore.usc.edu/marecki)
Location: Von Kleinsmid Center For International & Public Affairs (VKC) - 150
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: CS Front Desk
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Role Of The Technical Witness In Litigation - Aug.26-27, 2009
Wed, Aug 26, 2009
Aviation Safety and Security Program
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
TWW 10-1
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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Ph.D. Dissertation Defense
Wed, Aug 26, 2009 @ 10:00 AM - 11:00 AM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Bumpless Transfer and Fading Memory for Adaptive Switching ControlShin-Young Cheong
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical Engineering
University of Southern CaliforniaAbstract:
Cheong's Ph.D. dissertation mainly focuses on implementation techniques for adaptive switching control. Adaptive switching control has a possibility to generate bad transients in controller output which can be reduced using various bumpless transfer techniques. A new bumpless transfer method is developed based on slow-fast controller decomposition. The method is especially well-suited to situations in which the plant model is poor or yet to be identified, as may be the case in adaptive switching control.
A new cost function with fading memory and a finite-duration time-window is introduced in order to reduce the effect of old data in unfalsified adaptive control applications where the plant varies slowly or infrequently with time. The effectiveness of the approach is demonstrated via a simple simulation. The result demonstrates that time-windowed/fading-memory cost function for unfalsified control is useful for adaptive control system with
time-varying plants, even when the plant fails to satisfy the usual 'feasibility' requirement of unfalsified control that it must be stabilizable by one of the candidate controllers to satisfy the usual 'feasibility' requirement of unfalsified control that it must be stabilizable by one of the candidate controllers.Biography: Shin-Young Cheong received B.S. degree in Electrical Engineering from Hanyang University,Seoul, Korea, in 2003. He received M.S. degree in 2005 and continued to study for Ph.D. degree in EE at USC.
He is currently studying adaptive switching control and his research interests are control theories including adaptive control, robust control, and optimization in feedback control system.
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 203
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Shane Goodoff
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Multiple Description Coding: Shannon Meets Wiener and von Neumann
Wed, Aug 26, 2009 @ 02:30 PM - 03:30 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Jun Chen,
McMaster UniversityAbstract: Multiple description coding is a quantization technique for multimedia transmission through unreliable links. A general achievable 2-description rate region was found by El Gamal and Cover, and was shown to be tight for the quadratic Gaussian case by Ozarow. In this talk, I will present a constructive quantization scheme that can achieve the whole Gaussian 2-description rate region. The key idea is that a high dimensional nonlinear quantization system can be converted into a linear system with small nonlinear components. More fundamentally, our scheme reveals an intimate connection between Shannon's theory for digital systems and Wiener's theory for analog systems.Our scheme also suggests a natural inner bound of the rate region for the general $L$-description case. It turns out that the inner bound is tight for quadratic Gaussian multiple description coding with individual and central distortion constraints, which solves a longstanding open problem. Our proof is based on von Neumann°Øs game theory. Specifically, it is shown that the inner bound can be interpreted as a min-max game and the corresponding max-min game yields an outer bound; these two bounds coincide due to the existence of a saddle point.I will also discuss some intriguing connections between multiple description coding and other major problems in network information theory.Biography: Jun Chen received the B.E. degree with honors in Communication Engineering from Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai, China, in 2001, and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Cornell University, Ithaca, NY in 2003 and 2006, respectively. He was a Postdoctoral Research Associate in the Coordinated Science Laboratory at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, IL from 2005 to 2006, and a Josef Raviv Memorial Postdoctoral Fellow at the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center, Yorktown Heights, NY from 2006 to 2007. He is currently an Assistant Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at McMaster University, Hamilton, ON, Canada. He holds the Barber-Gennum Chair in Information Technology.Host: Zhen Zhang, zhzhang@usc.edu, EEB 508
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 539
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Gerrielyn Ramos
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Introduction to the US legal system
Thu, Aug 27, 2009 @ 05:00 PM - 06:00 PM
USC Viterbi School of Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Join us for a conversation with attorney and USC Senior Lecturer Dana Sherman about the US legal system. This seminar is an opportunity for international students to learn essential information about the US legal system.
Location: Olin Hall of Engineering (OHE) - -132
Audiences: International Students
Contact: MAPP Office
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W.V.T. Rusch Engineering Honors Colloquium Intellectual Property Law for the Engineer
Fri, Aug 28, 2009 @ 01:00 PM - 01:50 PM
Viterbi School of Engineering Student Affairs
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Marc E. Brown, Esq. of McDermott Will & Emery LLP will present "Intellectual Property Law for the Engineer" as part of the W.V.T. Rusch Engineering Honors Colloquium.
Location: Seeley G. Mudd Building (SGM) - 101
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Viterbi Admissions & Student Affairs
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Testing 802.11p WAVE on the Road: An Error-Prone Traffic Telematics Standard
Mon, Aug 31, 2009 @ 10:30 AM - 11:30 AM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Dr. Nicolai Czink,
Stanford UniversityAbstract: Vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) systems can make the road safer and its use more efficient, given that the data transmission from and to the road users over the wireless link is timely, accurate, and well presented. Under these conditions, a reduction in the number and severity of accidents can be expected. Furthermore, traffic can be more efficiently managed and congestions can be avoided. The IEEE 802.11p standard for Wireless Access on Vehicular Environments (WAVE) was derived from the 802.11a WiFi standard to support high-speed communications on the road for both road-to-car and car-to-car environments. Already in simulation tests, the standard turned out to fail in common scenarios like driving with high speeds, shadowing by other cars, or simply access by too many vehicles in dense traffic situations.Using the proprietary CVIS testbed, developed in a European research project, we tested the performance limits of 802.11p. This presentation will show that the standard (in its current version) fails to ensure reliable data transmission in almost all environments. The results also provide some guidance for installing WAVE equipment and suggest countermeasures to increase the reliability of the WAVE standard.Biography: Nicolai Czink received his MSc and PhD degrees from Vienna University of Technology in 2004 and 2008, respectively, both with distinction. Since 2005, he is with the ftw. Telecommunications Research Center Vienna, where he is Senior Researcher in the area of wireless communications at present. From April 2008 to April 2009, he was visiting scholar at the Smart Antennas Research Group at Stanford University working on MIMO interference measurements an modeling. His current interests are intelligent transportation systems an cooperative communications.Host: Andreas Molisch, 04670, EEB 530, molisch@usc.edu
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 539
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Gerrielyn Ramos
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BME 533 (Seminar in Biomedical Engineering)
Mon, Aug 31, 2009 @ 12:30 PM - 01:30 PM
Alfred E. Mann Department of Biomedical Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
BME Faculty Research Overview Presentations:1) Theodore Berger, PhD:Neurophysiology of memory and learning, nonlinear systems analysis of hippocampal network properties, neurobiology2) Noah Malmstadt, PhD:Nanoscale structure formation in model lipid membranes; microfluidic reaction control by phase-selective extraction 3) Manbir Singh, PhD: Biomedical imaging including magnetic resonance, PET, SPECT, and biomagnetic imaging
Location: Olin Hall of Engineering (OHE) - 132
Audiences: Graduate Students/Faculty
Contact: Mischalgrace Diasanta
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BME Graduate Students Ice Cream Social
Mon, Aug 31, 2009 @ 01:45 PM - 03:00 PM
Alfred E. Mann Department of Biomedical Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Make some new friends and meet up with some old ones! Come and join us.
Location: garden area next to DRB 140
Audiences: Graduate Students/Faculty/BME Staff
Contact: Mischalgrace Diasanta
