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Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Events for October
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CS Colloquium (Venue changed)
Wed, Oct 01, 2008 @ 01:30 PM - 02:50 PM
Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Relational Agents: Social and Communicative Competencies for Maintaining Engagement with Users Over Multiple InteractionsSpeaker: Prof. Timothy Bickmore, Northeastern UniversityHost: Prof. Maja MataricAbstract:Many applications in healthcare, education, sales and games require maintenance of user adherence to a desired interaction usage pattern. In this talk I will present principles and techniques from a number of disciplines for building and maintaining social bonds between users and computer agents. I will discuss applications of these principles to two very different application areas: health communication by a virtual nurse agent for low health literacy patients, and direction giving by an animated robotic tour guide agent in a science museum.Ninety million Americans have low health literacy, resulting in difficulty reading and following written medical instructions. Evidence suggests that face-to-face encounters with a health provider —in conjunction with written instructions—remains one of the best methods for communicating health information to these individuals. I will describe recent work my lab has done in studying human experts explaining written health instructions to individuals with varying degrees of health literacy, and models of the observed verbal and nonverbal behavior that we have incorporated into computer animated agents that can explain health documents to users. I will present results from a series of lab studies on the efficacy of these agents, in addition to two rounds of user testing of a virtual nurse that performs bedside patient education prior to hospital discharge at Boston Medical Center.I will also discuss the development and evaluation of an animated tour guide agent that has been running in the Boston Museum of Science since April that has interacted with over 20,000 visitors. The main challenges we confronted in developing this agent were sensing visitor conversational cues in a very noisy public environment, and re-identifying repeat visitors (using biometrics) so that prior discourse and relational models could be continued.Biography:Timothy Bickmore is an Assistant Professor in the College of Computer and Information Science at Northeastern University. Dr. Bickmore's research focus is on the development of Relational Agents--computational artifacts designed to build long-term social-emotional relationships with their users. These agents have been deployed within the context of behavior change interventions in which they are designed to establish working alliance relationships with patients in order to maximize intervention outcomes. Prior to joining Northeastern, Dr. Bickmore was an Assistant Professor of Medicine at the Boston University School of Medicine. Dr. Bickmore received his PhD from the MIT Media Lab, studying under Profs. Rosalind Picard (Affective Computing) and Justine Cassell (Gesture and Narrative Language).
Location: Von Kleinsmid Center For International & Public Affairs (VKC) - 150
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: CS Colloquia
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Walking Your Dog in the Woods in Polynomial Time
Thu, Oct 02, 2008 @ 04:00 PM
Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Shripad Thite, CalTech
Host: Prof. David KempeAbstract:
The Frechet distance between two curves in the plane is the minimum length of a leash that allows a dog and its owner to walk along their respective curves, from one end to the other, without backtracking. We propose a natural extension of Frechet distance to more general metric spaces, which requires the leash itself to move continuously over time. For example, for curves in the punctured plane, the leash cannot pass through or jump over obstacles (``trees''). Thus, we introduce the homotopic Frechet distance between two curves embedded in a general metric space. We describe a polynomial-time algorithm to compute the homotopic Frechet distance between two given polygonal curves in the plane minus a given set of polygonal obstacles. Our algorithm produces a walk that minimizes the maximum leash length.This is joint work with Erin Wolf Chambers, Eric Colin de Verdiere, Jeff Erickson, Sylvain Lazard, and Francis Lazarus, which appeared at SoCG'08 in June and was invited to a CGTA special issue.Biography:
Shripad is a postdoctoral fellow in the Center for the Mathematics of Information (CMI) at Caltech. His research is in algorithms, specifically in computational geometry and topology. He designs algorithms for fundamental problems in computational geometry as well as algorithms for geometric problems in applied areas, including scientific computing, graphics and visualization, wireless networking, robotics, and even computational economics. Shripad earned his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign with Jeff Erickson, and then spent two years at the Technische Universiteit Eindhoven in the Netherlands working with Mark de Berg, before joining Caltech last year.Location: Seaver Science Library (SSL) - 150
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: CS Colloquia
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Spatial Power Combining Techniques for Microwave and mm-Wave PAs - Integrated Systems Seminar
Fri, Oct 03, 2008 @ 02:00 PM - 03:00 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Seminar by Dr. Michael DeLisio, CTO, Wavestream CorporationApplications of solid-state power amplifiers (SSPAs) have been limited by the amount of power an individual MMIC amplifier can provide. One way to overcome this limitation is to combine the outputs of several solid-state amplifier chips together. Traditional solid-state amplifier approaches use binary combining of many solid-state MMICs, often resulting in heavy, inefficient, and expensive equipment whenever single-chip capabilities are greatly exceeded. Another approach is to spatially combine the outputs of several chips within a single-mode waveguide. Spatial power combining has very low combining losses, reducing the size, weight, DC power draw, and cost of reaching the target output power. This talk will discuss the two approaches to spatial power combining have recently been used to develop waveguide-based solid-state power amplifiers. The Grid Amplifier, which operates at mm-wave frequencies, uses a single output stage chip patterned with an array or grid of transistor pairs. The Deck Amplifier, which operates at microwave frequencies, stacks up cards containing traditional MMIC amplifier chips for spatial combining. Both achieve high power density and high efficiency without compromising ease of manufacture.
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 248
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Hossein Hashemi
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Mathematics for System Safety Analysis - Oct. 6-8, 2008
Mon, Oct 06, 2008
Aviation Safety and Security Program
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
MATH 09-1
For more information and to register for Aviation Safety and Security Program courses, please visit http://viterbi.usc.edu/aviation.Audiences: Registered Attendees Only
Contact: Viterbi Professional Programs
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Multi-Armed Bandits in Metric Spaces
Mon, Oct 06, 2008 @ 11:00 AM
Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Alex Slivkins, Microsoft Research - SVC
Host: Prof. David KempeAbstract:
In a multi-armed bandit problem, an online algorithm chooses from a set of strategies in a sequence of trials so as to maximize the total payoff of the chosen strategies. While the performance of bandit algorithms with a small finite strategy set is quite well understood, bandit problems with large strategy sets are still a topic of very active investigation, motivated by practical applications such as online auctions and web advertisement. The goal of such research is to identify broad and natural classes of strategy sets and payoff functions which enable the design of efficient solutions.In this work we study a very general setting for the multi-armed bandit problem in which the strategies form a metric space, and the payoff function satisfies a Lipschitz condition with respect to the metric. We refer to this problem as the "Lipschitz MAB problem". We present a complete solution for the multi-armed problem in this setting. That is, for every metric space (L,X) we define an isometry invariant which bounds from below the performance of Lipschitz MAB algorithms for X, and we present an algorithm which comes arbitrarily close to meeting this bound. Furthermore, our technique gives even better results for benign payoff functions. (STOC'08: joint work with Bobby Kleinberg and Eli Upfal)Biography:
Alex Slivkins is a researcher at Microsoft Research, Silicon Valley Center. Before that he has been an undergrad at Caltech, a grad student at Cornell CS dept, and a postdoc at Brown. He is interested in the design and analysis of algorithms, the theory of large distributed networks, and machine learning. Specific topics of interest include metric embeddings, locality-aware overlay networks, and multi-armed bandits.Location: James H. Zumberge Hall Of Science (ZHS) - 163
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: CS Colloquia
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BME 533 Seminar Series: Stephan Erberich, Ph.D.
Mon, Oct 06, 2008 @ 12:30 PM - 01:50 PM
Alfred E. Mann Department of Biomedical Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Stephan Erberich, PhD,
“Multi-Center Biomedical Image Exchange in Clinic and Research using HealthGrid Technologies"
Location: Olin Hall of Engineering (OHE) - 132
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Mischalgrace Diasanta
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Hazard Effects and Control Strategies - Oct. 9-10, 2008
Thu, Oct 09, 2008
Aviation Safety and Security Program
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
HAZ 09-1
For more information and to register for Aviation Safety and Security Program courses, please visit http://viterbi.usc.edu/aviation.Audiences: Registered Attendees Only
Contact: Viterbi Professional Programs
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New Vistas in Dispersion Science and Engineering
Thu, Oct 09, 2008 @ 12:45 PM
Mork Family Department of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Lyman Handy Colloquium SeriesPresentsDarsh WasanProfessor, Dept. of Chemical Engineering Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago, Illinois 60616Abstract:
Colloidal suspensions are used in a variety of technological contexts. For example, their spreading and adhesion behavior on solid surfaces can yield materials with desirable structural and optical properties. The structure and stability of colloidal dispersions depend highly on the interaction forces between colloidal particles and the confining geometries. This is especially the case in a concentrated colloidal dispersion when particles are more likely to come in close contact with one another and become more ordered in the confines of their restricted environment. In recent years, due to the advent of new instrumentation for measuring interaction forces in colloidal suspensions, novel forces, such as the structural force arising from the energy barrier caused by particle microstructuring and the attractive depletion force caused by the excluded volume effect, have been characterized. This lecture will highlight the role of structural forces in stabilizing dispersions and especially point out their importance in a variety of technological contexts, such as particle sedimentation, wetting, spreading and adhesion of such systems on solid surfaces and nanostructured material synthetics.Darsh T. Wasan is the Motorola Chair Professor of Chemical Engineering and Vice President for International Affairs at Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT).Location: Olin Hall of Engineering (OHE) - 122
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Petra Pearce Sapir
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Working in Big Companies, Small Companies, and Academia
Fri, Oct 10, 2008 @ 11:30 AM - 01:00 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
SPEAKERS: Profs. Michelle Povinelli and Robert ScholtzWebsite: http://ee.usc.edu/news/practical-guide/* Pizza will be provided by the EE Department.*Abstract: This free-form discussion with a new junior faculty member and
an (old) senior faculty member will give you ample time to ask those
questions that have been nagging you about career choices, doing
research, and anything else that comes to mind! And find out about the
engineer who became a President and what he thought of his profession.Location: Seaver Science Library (SSL) - 150
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Gerrielyn Ramos
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Honors Colloquium: Measuring Echoes of the Big Bang From Antarctica
Fri, Oct 10, 2008 @ 01:00 PM - 01:50 PM
Viterbi School of Engineering Student Affairs
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Lecture offered by Dr. Jamie Bock, Senior Research Scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and Senior Faculty Associate at Caltech
Location: Olin Hall of Engineering (OHE) - 122
Audiences: Honors Program Students and All USC Faculty and Staff are Invited to Attend
Contact: Viterbi Admission & Student Affairs
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W.V.T. Rusch Engineering Honors Colloquium: Measuring Echoes of the BIg Bang From Antarctica
Fri, Oct 10, 2008 @ 01:00 PM - 01:50 PM
Viterbi School of Engineering Student Affairs
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Lecture offered by Dr. Jamie Bock, Senior Research Scientist at JPL
Senior Faculty Associate at CalTechLocation: Olin Hall of Engineering (OHE) - 122
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Viterbi Admission & Student Affairs
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BME 533 Seminar Series:
Sat, Oct 11, 2008 @ 12:30 PM - 01:50 PM
Alfred E. Mann Department of Biomedical Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Location: Olin Hall of Engineering (OHE) - 132
Audiences: Graduate/Department/Sponsors only
Contact: Mischalgrace Diasanta
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Accident/Incident Response Preparedness - Oct. 13-15, 2008
Mon, Oct 13, 2008
Aviation Safety and Security Program
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Course Number: AIP 09-1
For more information and to register for Aviation Safety and Security Program courses, please visit http://viterbi.usc.edu/aviation.Audiences: Registered Attendees Only
Contact: Viterbi Professional Programs
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Human Error Analysis for System Safety - Oct. 13-14, 2008
Mon, Oct 13, 2008
Aviation Safety and Security Program
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
HEASS 09-1
For more information and to register for Aviation Safety and Security Program courses, please visit http://viterbi.usc.edu/aviation.Audiences: Registered Attendees Only
Contact: Viterbi Professional Programs
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Damage Assessment for System Safety - Oct. 15-17, 2008
Wed, Oct 15, 2008
Aviation Safety and Security Program
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
DASS 09-1
For more information and to register for Aviation Safety and Security Program courses, please visit http://viterbi.usc.edu/aviation.Audiences: Registered Attendees Only
Contact: Viterbi Professional Programs
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Particle Transport in Unsteady, Separated Flow
Wed, Oct 15, 2008 @ 03:30 PM - 04:30 PM
Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Particle Transport in Unsteady, Separated FlowGustaaf JacobsProfessor
Department of Aerospace Engineering & Engineering Mechanics
San Diego State University
San Diego, CA 92182Particle-laden and droplet-laden flows occur in many important natural and technological situations, e.g. aerosol transport and deposition, spray combustion in gas turbine engines, fluidized bed combustion, plasma spray coating and synthesis of nanoparticles. Particles frequently interact with a flow that separates from a wall. Liquid droplets are for example injected into the flow that separates at a sudden expanding geometry in dump combustors. Sand particles well up in the separated flow behind hills or plankton is dispersed in the detached flow behind uneven ocean floor obstacles. Mixing levels and drag overhead crucial to the combustor performance, pollution levels or plankton concentration are strongly affected by the flow separation and particle dynamics. In this talk I will discuss the physics of particles in a separated flow in the Lagrangian frame (i.e. the frame moving with the particle) and the computation of these flows with high-fidelity computational methods. After a brief discussion of the characteristics and advantages of high-order discontinuous spectral element methods for simulation of unsteady particle-laden separated flow, I present recent criteria that identify the separation location and angle of fluid particles from walls in unsteady and three dimensional setting. The Lagrangian dynamics of finite sized particles is discussed and compared to the Lagrangian fluid particle motion and Lagrangian coherent structures.
Location: Stauffer Science Lecture Hall, Room 102 (SLH 102)
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: April Mundy
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Photography for Aircraft Accident Investigation - Oct. 16-17, 2008
Thu, Oct 16, 2008
Aviation Safety and Security Program
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
PHOTO 09-1
For more information and to register for Aviation Safety and Security Program courses, please visit http://viterbi.usc.edu/aviation.Audiences: Registered Attendees Only
Contact: Viterbi Professional Programs
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DATA AND DISCOVERY ON LIQUEFACTION-INDUCED LATERAL GROUND DEFORMATIONS
Thu, Oct 16, 2008 @ 10:30 AM - 12:30 PM
Sonny Astani Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
by Fang Liu, PhD candidateSonny Astani
Dept. of Civil and Environmental EngineeringABSTRACT:Liquefaction-induced lateral ground deformations posed considerable threatens to lifeline systems in urban areas in the past. In the practice of liquefaction evaluation in geotechnical earthquake engineering, empirical relations and procedures received special appreciation. They benefited from vast amount of case histories collected and documented after major earthquakes. Advances of technologies transformed the way collecting, documenting, distributing, and utilizing this perishable information. The research effort was concentrated on exploring the feasibility of new information technologies for managing and distributing data pertinent to liquefaction damages, and on deriving and assessing data-driven models pertinent to liquefaction-induced lateral ground deformation.
New information technologies were demonstrated for generating and distributing post-earthquake reconnaissance reports. The newly emerging technique, known as embedded metadata in pictures, allowed portable pictures that possessed embedded information. The metadata-based approach enhanced the automation level in generating PER reports, and enabled a complex of possible applications. A lightweight Information system was developed for distributing collected case histories of liquefaction together with relevant geotechnical information over the Word Wide Web. Supported by a customized database and external data from remote servers, the proposed system enabled dynamic and rapidly responsive Web applications to share information through the Internet.
The performance of gently sloping grounds was investigated using sliding block theory under statically unstable conditions due to temporary loss in shear strength. The major efforts were concentrated on quantifying in probabilistic terms the contribution of earthquake motions to the amplitude of lateral deformations once the instability had triggered. The Monte Carlo simulation was performed for a set of actual strong motion records and an idealized infinite gentling sloping ground in order to derive the empirical relations.
Finally, a case study was presented as an example to demonstrate the value of case histories collected over years, and to evaluate the performance of three existing empirical models for liquefaction-induced lateral ground deformations. Empirical relations were integrated in a GIS system, leading to maps of liquefaction severity and liquefaction-induced lateral deformations.
Location: Kaprielian Hall (KAP) - 209
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Evangeline Reyes
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The Natural Mathematics that Arises in Investment and Information Theory
Thu, Oct 16, 2008 @ 02:15 PM - 03:20 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Distinguished Lecturer SeriesDistinguished Lecture by: Dr. Thomas Cover - Stanford UniversityABSTRACT:
Optimizing the growth rate of investment is considered a controversial investment goal, perhaps because it is an asymptotic criterion or perhaps because its implementation requires maximizing the expected logarithm of wealth and its implicit suggestion of log utility. Whatever the reason, we shall reverse the argument by focusing on the natural mathematics of the solution rather than the appropriateness of the question. Maybe graceful mathematics is an indication of the right approach.We find that growth optimality is characterized by expected ratio optimality, by competitive one-shot optimality, by Martingale processes and an associated asymptotic equipartition theorem. It also yields Black Scholes option pricing as a special case and leads naturally to so called universal portfolios that perform as well to first order in the exponent as the best constant rebalanced portfolio in hindsight. Finally we will relate the quantities arising in investment to their counterpart quantities in information theory.BIO:
Thomas Cover, the K.T. Li Professor of Engineering at Stanford, does research in information theory, communication theory and statistics, and is the coauthor of the textbook, Elements of Information Theory. He was Lab Director of the Information Systems Laboratory in Electrical Engineering from 1989 to 1996. He has been the contract statistician for the California State Lottery and a consultant to AT&T Laboratories and IBM. He received the 1990 Claude E. Shannon Award in information theory and has also received the IEEE Neural Network Council's Pioneer Award in 1993 for his work on the capacity of neural nets. He received the 1997 IEEE Richard M. Hamming medal for contributions to information, communication theory and statistics and is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is currently working on network information theory and the interplay between information theory and investment.Lecture:
SAL 101, 2:15PMReception:
SAL Lobby, 3:30PMLocation: Henry Salvatori Computer Science Center (SAL) - 101
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Estela Lopez
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W.V.T.Rusch Engineering Honors Colloquium: Influence of Advanced Tech. on Engineering Solutions
Fri, Oct 17, 2008 @ 01:00 PM - 01:50 PM
Viterbi School of Engineering Student Affairs
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Lecture offered by Mr. Norm Turoff, President and Founder of Veridiam Advanced EDM
Location: Olin Hall of Engineering (OHE) - 122
Audiences: Honors Program Students and All USC Faculty and Staff are Invited to Attend
Contact: Viterbi Admission & Student Affairs
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Integrated Systems Seminar Series - Dr. Ronald Pogorzelski, JPL
Fri, Oct 17, 2008 @ 02:00 PM - 03:00 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Coupled Oscillator Based Transmitters and Receivers: Theory and Experiment at JPLFor roughly ten years the Spacecraft Antenna Research Group at JPL has been developing and studying phased array antennas based on a concept of phase control introduced by Professor Robert A. York and his students at the University of California, Santa Barbara. In York's concept, a set of voltage controlled oscillators are coupled with their nearest neighbors in an array and are thus induced to mutually injection lock and oscillate as an ensemble. What York, et al. noted is that in such an ensemble, if one detunes the perimeter oscillators away from the ensemble frequency, one can induce linear phase progressions in the oscillator output signals. Thus, if these signals are used to excite the elements of a phased array antenna, beam agility is achieved. Since in these antennas, the signal sources for the transmit function and the local oscillators and mixers for the receive function are distributed over, and integrated with, the antenna aperture, we have termed these devices "agile beam transmitters and receivers." The JPL work has been both theoretical and experimental. The theoretical work began with a collaboration with the York group in developing a "continuum model" of such oscillator arrays. This model revealed that the dynamic behavior of the phase distribution behaves as a diffusion process. The theory was applied to linear and planar array geometries and to Cartesian, triangular, and hexagonal coupling topologies. The linear and Cartesian arrays were also studied experimentally. Most recently, coupling delay was built into the theoretical treatment resulting in some fascinating Laplace transformations leading to a simple prediction of the impact of such delays on the array dynamics. This presentation will review the development work over the past ten years both theoretical and experimental ending with the most recent work on coupling delays.
Location: Kaprielian Hall (KAP) - 156
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Hossein Hashemi
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System Safety - Oct. 20-31, 2008
Mon, Oct 20, 2008
Aviation Safety and Security Program
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
SSC 09-1
For more information and to register for Aviation Safety and Security Program courses, please visit http://viterbi.usc.edu/aviation.Audiences: Registered Attendees Only
Contact: Viterbi Professional Programs
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BME 533 Seminar Series: Philip Requejo, Ph.D.
Mon, Oct 20, 2008 @ 12:30 PM - 01:50 PM
Alfred E. Mann Department of Biomedical Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Philip Requejo, Ph.D., Director, Rancho Los Amigos Rehabilitation Center
"Optimizing Mobility in the Home and Community for Manual Wheelchair Users"Location: Olin Hall of Engineering (OHE) - 132
Audiences: Graduate/Department/Sponsors only
Contact: Mischalgrace Diasanta
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Aviation Security Program Management - Oct. 21-24, 2008
Tue, Oct 21, 2008
Aviation Safety and Security Program
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
AVSEC 09-1
For more information and to register for Aviation Safety and Security Program courses, please visit http://viterbi.usc.edu/aviation.Audiences: Registered Attendees Only
Contact: Viterbi Professional Programs
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COMPUTER MODELING FOR WAVE OSCILLATION PROBLEMS IN HARBORS AND COASTAL REGIONS
Tue, Oct 21, 2008 @ 10:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Sonny Astani Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Oral Defense byXiuying Xing, PhD CandidateSonny Astani
Department of Civil and Environmental EngineeringABSTRACT:Harbors are built to provide a sheltered environment for the mooring of ships and vessels. For some wave periods the semi-enclosed harbor basin acts as a resonator to amplify the wave motions in the harbor due to the combined effects of wave diffractions, refractions and multiple reflections from the boundaries. This undesirable wave motion could induce significant ship motions, damage ships and dock facilities, and delay loading and unloading activities if the resonant wave periods are close to that of the ship mooring system. Harbor planners and engineers need to study the wave induced oscillations as new harbor layouts are contemplated.
This dissertation study presents a finite element model which could be used for predicting the response characteristics of harbors and bays of arbitrary shape and variable depth. The model incorporates the effects of wave reflection, refraction, diffraction and dissipation losses due to boundary absorption, bottom friction and energy losses due to the flow separation at the entrances. The model has been applied to three harbors (Crescent City Harbor in northern California, Pohang Harbor in Korea, and Hualien Harbor in Taiwan) and two bays (San Pedro Bay in southern California and Bay of Fundy in the east coast of Canada and US). The results from the finite element model have been shown to agree surprisingly well with the field data obtained from events such as earthquake generated tsunamis and hurricane induced wave oscillations, as well as normal day observations. The results reveal the fact that the wave oscillation condition inside a harbor or bay is determined by the local layout and bathymetry. The harbor or bay responds to the incident wave in a predictable manner irrespective to the sources of driving forces such as typhoon, tsunami, winter storms, etc. The study also explains the tremendous tide phenomena at Bay of Fundy.
Modification strategy studies for reducing the seiche problems in Pohang Harbor and Hualien Harbor have also been presented. The model is shown to be an effective engineering tool for harbor planning and design to derive ways of eliminating or altering the harbor response so that the harbor may indeed provide a sheltered environment for moored ships and vessels.Location: Kaprielian Hall (KAP) - 209
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Evangeline Reyes
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GAMEDESK PROGRAM: A New Approach to Learning
Tue, Oct 21, 2008 @ 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Integrated Media Systems Center
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Annenberg Research Park Colloquium Series: Victor Lacour - GAMEDESK PROGRAM: A New Approach to Learning According to the state of California, 1 out of every 4 students drop out of high school. Often, the main issue is lack of engagement, ownership, and relevance of the material. The GameDesk program (A new outreach developed by the University of Southern California) addresses these issues by providing engagement through the development of educational video games. Instead of passive learning through books and traditional lecture, students actively learn by building games around core educational standards. Working together in teams, the students learn the importance of specialization, leadership, and collaboration-skills which translate directly into successful career paths. Teams build games along side subject teachers to translate a particular area of study into a game format and, as a result, they learn by doing. Ultimately, GameDesk's overall goal is to improve student retention, engagement, and attendance, and increase standards based scores, creating more viable pathways into successful careers. Currently, a pilot of the GameDesk program is implemented at Jordon High School, for fall 08. The talk will be followed by a discussion between 12:30-1:30 over lunch.
Location: Kerckhoff Hall (KER) - ckhoff Hall
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Greg Constante
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GAMEDESK PROGRAM: A New Approach to Learning
Tue, Oct 21, 2008 @ 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Integrated Media Systems Center
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Annenberg Research Park Colloquium Series: Victor Lacour - GAMEDESK PROGRAM: A New Approach to Learning The GameDesk program (A new outreach developed by the University of Southern California) addresses these issues by providing engagement through the development of educational video games. Instead of passive learning through books and traditional lecture, students actively learn by building games around core educational standards. GameDesk's overall goal is to improve student retention, engagement, and attendance, and increase standards based scores, creating more viable pathways into successful careers. Currently, a pilot of the GameDesk program is implemented at Jordon High School, for fall 08. The talk will be followed by a discussion between 12:30-1:30 over lunch.
Location: Kerckhoff Hall (KER) - ckhoff Hall
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Greg Constante
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Pitfalls and Paradoxes in the History of Probability Theory
Tue, Oct 21, 2008 @ 04:00 PM
Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Dr. Mike Shlesinger, Office of Naval Research
Host: Prof. Ram NevatiaAbstract:
We trace the history of probability theory from the throwing of bones, sticks, and dice to modern times. Early 18th century books, Jacob Bernouill's "The Art of Conjecture" and Abraham DeMoive's "The Doctrine of Chances" were rich with new mathematics, insight and gambling odds. Progress was often made by confronting paradoxes. The first of these confused probabilities with expectations and was explained in the Pascal-Fermat letters of 1654. The St. Petersburg Paradox involved a distribution with an infinite first moment, and Levy discovered a whole class of probabilities with infinite moments that have found a surprising utility in physics. The Bertrand paradox involved measure theory for continuous probabilities, Poisson discovered that adding random variables need not always produce the Gaussian, and Daniel Bernoulli and D'Alembert argued over the probabilities for the safety of smallpox vaccinations. Using these and other anecdotes, we discuss vignettes that have brought us to our modern understanding of probability theory.Biography:
Dr. Shlesinger holds the Kinnear Chair in Science at the US Naval Academy. At the Office of Naval Research, Dr. Shlesinger is the Research Division Director in the Expeditionary Maneuver Warfare and Combating Terrorism Department. He is also the Program Manager for the Counter-IED basic research program and ONR's Chief Scientist for Nonlinear Science. Dr. Shlesinger joined ONR in 1983 and became a member of the Senior Executive Service in 1987. He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society and has published about 200 scientific papers on topics in stochastic processes, glassy materials, proteins, neurons, and nonlinear dynamics. He is a Divisional Associate Editor of the Physical Review Letters. Dr. Shlesinger received ONR's 2006 Saalfeld Award for Outstanding Lifetime Achievement in Science, the federal government's Presidential Rank Award for Meritorious Senior Professionals in 2004, U. Maryland's Distinguished Postdoc Alum award in 2004, the Navy Superior Civilian Service Award in 1991 and was the Regents' Lecturer at UCSD in 1994, and the Michelson Lecturer at the USNA in 1992. His Ph. D., in Physics, is from the U. of Rochester in 1975, and he holds a B.S. in Mathematics and Physics from SUNY Stony Brook in 1970.Location: Seaver Science Library (SSL) - 150
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: CS Colloquia
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Identifying and Quantifying the Impact of Air Pollution Source Areas by...
Wed, Oct 22, 2008 @ 10:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Sonny Astani Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Nonparametric Trajectory AnalysisOral Defense by:Chien-Cheng Pan, PhD candidateSonny Astani
Dept. of Civil and Environmental EngineeringABSTRACT:In order to improve air quality, it is necessary to identify and quantify the sources of airborne pollution. Local emissions are more easily to control compared to regional emissions since multiple agencies and states are not involved in the regulatory process. Generally two types of air quality models, source – oriented models and receptor – oriented models, are used to evaluate the impact of emission on air quality on a local, regional, and global scale. Source – oriented models require detailed information on emission composition, rates and local meteorological data. Therefore, they are not suitable for sources of fugitive emissions and intermittent or temporary emissions, which cannot easily be quantified. On the other hand, receptor models need chemical composition data to identify and quantify sources affecting the monitoring sites. However, pollutants without distinguishable "fingerprints", such as SO2, O3 cannot be apportioned by this method. A new hybrid source – receptor model was previous develop and is called Nonparametric Trajectory Analysis (NTA). It is based on nonparametric kernel smoothing and backtrajectory analysis. NTA was developed to identify and quantify local sources of species measured on a very short time scale, i.e, minute, and it has gotten some encouraging results. However, NTA sometimes produces artifacts areas that appear to be sources but not, this is especially true for sources very close to the receptor. A major objective of this study is to address this difficulty.The NTA gives a map of the average concentration at the receptor when the air passes over each point on the map. This NTA map is obviously related to the local sources affecting the receptor, but it is not a map of the sources. One way to extend the NTA method is the Point Source Response (PSR) method. The NTA map can be considered a linear combination of responses to number of point sources. The NTA map for a point source at each point on a grid is calculated. Next, the weighted sum of the PRS maps that best fits the NTA map for the real data is estimated by principal components regression. In this way, the size and location of source affecting the receptor are estimated.This method is illustrated by application to 1- minute SO2 data from Long Beach, and 1-minute PM10 data for Rubidoux along with meteorological data from nearby monitoring stations in South Coast Air Basin of Southern California. The result identified offshore ships in the Long Beach harbor and transportation hubs close to the intersection of freeway 710 and freeway 405 as major SO2 sources. For the Rubidoux area, aggregate, and asphalt factories, and construction sites are identified as source of PM10.Location: Kaprielian Hall (KAP) - 209
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Evangeline Reyes
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Department of Biomedical Engineering Keynote Lecture
Wed, Oct 22, 2008 @ 04:00 PM - 06:30 PM
Viterbi School of Engineering Student Affairs
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
The Department of Biomedical Engineering presents: The Fred S. Grodins Keynote Lecture 2008 Speaker:
Matthew O'Donnell, Ph.D.
Frank & Julie Jungers Dean of Engineering & Professor of Bioengineering, College of Engineering, University of Washington, SeattleTopic:
Can Ultrasound Become the Dominant Molecular Imaging Modality?Date:
Wednesday, October 22, 2008
4:00 - 5:00 PM Lecture
5:00 - 6:30 PM RefreshmentsTo RSVP: http://viterbi.usc.edu/admission/professionalprograms/rsvp/index.php.Location: Davidson Continuing Education Conference Center
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Viterbi Professional Programs
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Efficient Ensemble-Based Closed-Loop Production Optimization
Thu, Oct 23, 2008 @ 12:45 PM
Mork Family Department of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Mork Family Department of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science Distinguished Lecture SeriesPresentsProfessor Dean OliverMewbourne School of Petroleum and Geological Engineering,
University of Oklahoma, Norman, OK 73019Abstract:
With the advances in smart well technology, substantially higher oil recovery can be achieved by intelligently designing the operation scheme in a closed-loop optimization framework. The closed-loop optimization consists of two parts: geological model updating and production optimization. Both of these parts require gradient information to minimize or maximize an objective function: squared data mismatch or the net present value (or other quantities depending on different financial goals), respectively. Alternatively, an ensemble-based method can acquire the gradient information through the correlations provided by the ensemble. Computation in this way is nearly independent of the number of control variables, reservoir simulator and simulation solver. We propose a new method for closed-loop optimization, which combines an ensemble based optimization scheme (EnOpt) with the ensemble Kalman filter (EnKF). The EnKF adjusts the reservoir models to honor observations and propagates the uncertainty in time. EnOpt optimizes the expectation of the net present value based on the updated reservoir models. The combined method is robust, completely adjoint-free and can be readily used with any reservoir simulator. The proposed scheme is illustrated with the Brugge Field test example developed for the SPE-ATW on Closed-Loop Optimization. This test problem has 10 injectors, 20 producers and 3 completion intervals per well that can be controlled independently.Location: Olin Hall of Engineering (OHE) - 122
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Petra Pearce Sapir
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Tidal Saltwater Wetlands and Coastal Water Quality
Thu, Oct 23, 2008 @ 02:00 PM - 03:00 PM
Sonny Astani Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Abstract:Stanley GrantProfessor of Environmental EngineeringChair, Department of Chemical Engineering and Materials ScienceUniversity of California, IrvineAbstract:Tidal saltwater wetlands are the ocean's last line of defense against polluted surface water runoff from urban watersheds. After entering tidal wetlands, runoff-associated pollutants undergo dilution and transport by what Zimmerman called the "tidal whirlpool", and transformation by myriad physicochemical and biologically mediated processes. Here I present field measurements and modeling studies of fecal indicator (FIB) and nutrients in Newport Bay, Orange County, California. Results from this field and modeling effort shed light on: (1) the maximum volume of runoff a tidal saltwater wetland can receive, above which its pollutant treatment capacity is compromised; (2) design principles for optimizing pollutant treatment in restored tidal saltwater wetlands; and (3) the level of model complexity needed to accurately describe pollutant fate and transport in these complex systems.
Location: Kaprielian Hall (KAP) - 209
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Evangeline Reyes
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W.V.T. Rusch Engineering Honors Colloquium: Without Measurement You Are Just Guessing
Fri, Oct 24, 2008 @ 01:00 PM - 01:50 PM
Viterbi School of Engineering Student Affairs
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Lecture offered by Dr. William Taber
Technical Group Supervisor for Mission Design and Navigation Software
JPLLocation: Olin Hall of Engineering (OHE) - 122
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Viterbi Admission & Student Affairs
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W.V.T. Rusch Engineering Honors Colloquium: Without Measurement You Are Just Guessing
Fri, Oct 24, 2008 @ 01:00 PM - 01:50 PM
Viterbi School of Engineering Student Affairs
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Lecture offered by Dr. William Taber
Technical Group Supervisor for Mission Design and Navigation Software, JPLLocation: Olin Hall of Engineering (OHE) - 122
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Viterbi Admission & Student Affairs
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BME 533 Seminar Series: Istvan Seri, MD (CHLA & USC Keck School of Medicine)
Mon, Oct 27, 2008 @ 12:30 PM - 01:50 PM
Alfred E. Mann Department of Biomedical Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Istvan Seri, MD, Section Head, Division of Neonatalogy, Childrens Hospital of Los Angeles, and Professor of Pediatrics and Physiology & Biophysics, Keck School of Medicine: "Transitional hemodynamics in very preterm neonates"
Location: Olin Hall of Engineering (OHE) - 132
Audiences: Graduate/Department Only
Contact: Mischalgrace Diasanta
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VIBRATION OF NEARBY STRUCTURES INDUCED BY HIGH-SPEED RAIL TRANSIT
Mon, Oct 27, 2008 @ 02:00 PM - 04:00 PM
Sonny Astani Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Oral Defense by Pei-wen ChenSonny Astani
Department of Civil and Environmental EngineeringAbstract:This dissertation is centered around the need for analyses concerning ground borne vibration caused by high speed rail transit. As the speed and weight of the trains increase, the vibrations caused by the transportation system can affect the local environment and economy. Selected for a case study is the Taiwan High Speed Rail (THSR); it's readily available geotechnical and structural data and make it an ideal case for a detailed analysis. TheTHSR route traverses through densely populated areas of Western Taiwan where modern computer technological institutes are located. The ground borne vibration has affected that industry and caused costly relocation of the factories. The work herein focuses on the vibration generated by deeply embedded piles of the elevated track while most previous analyses were based on ground surface induced vibrations. It is shown that the soil-structure interaction effect of a resonant bridge can contribute to amplify the vibration at higher speeds.
Location: Kaprielian Hall (KAP) - 209
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Evangeline Reyes
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Incident Investigation/Analysis - Oct. 28-31, 2008
Tue, Oct 28, 2008
Aviation Safety and Security Program
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
IIA 09-1
For more information and to register for Aviation Safety and Security Program courses, please visit http://viterbi.usc.edu/aviation.Audiences: Registered Attendees Only
Contact: Viterbi Professional Programs
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Parsing Images (Distinguished Lecture)
Thu, Oct 30, 2008 @ 04:00 PM
Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Prof. Jitendra Malik, UC Berkeley
Host: Prof. Ram NevatiaAbstract:
When humans look at an image or a video clip, they start from the raw input, a collection of pixels, and infer considerable structure and semantics about the world that is projected into the image. They construct a hierarchical partition of the image into sets of pixels that correspond to "objects" or "parts" of objects, and attach concepts - "dog", "forest" etc to various levels in this hierarchy. We have considerable evidence from perception that this process is based on bottom up cues such as similarity of pixel brightness, color, texture and motion as well as top down input derived from familiar visual categories such as faces or street scenes. Constructing a computational model for this is perhaps the central problem in both human and machine vision. Various subproblems of this grand challenge include image segmentation, perceptual grouping and visual recognition.My research group and I have been studying different aspects of this problem for more than a decade, and at this stage, we feel we have the outlines of a framework for solving it. We start with a local process of marking contours in images based on local differences in brightness, color, texture etc, move on to a more global framework for extracting coherent regions, which in turn help drive a process of visual recognition, which then feedback to refine the grouping itself. We can quantify the performance of the framework on various standard datasets for the subproblems. Of course, much more work needs to be done to attain human level performance, but I feel optimistic that computer vision is on track towards closing the much-cited ``semantic gap'' between pixels and perception.Biography:
Jitendra Malik was born in Mathura, India in 1960. He received the B.Tech degree in Electrical Engineering from Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur in 1980 and the PhD degree in Computer Science from Stanford University in 1985. In January 1986, he joined the university of California at Berkeley, where he is currently the Arthur J. Chick Professor in the Computer Science Division, Department of Electrical Engg and Computer Sciences. He is also on the faculty of the Cognitive Science and Vision Science groups. During 2002-2004 he served as the Chair of the Computer Science Division and during 2004-2006 as the Department Chair of EECS. He serves on the advisory board of Microsoft Research India, and on the Governing Body of IIIT Bangalore.His current research interests are in computer vision, computational modeling of human vision and analysis of biological images. His work has spanned a range of topics in vision including image segmentation, perceptual grouping, texture, stereopsis and object recognition with applications to image based modeling and rendering in computer graphics, intelligent vehicle highway systems, and biological image analysis. He has authored or co-authored more than a hundred and fifty research papers on these topics, and graduated twenty-five PhD students who occupy prominent places in academia and industry.He received the gold medal for the best graduating student in Electrical Engineering from IIT Kanpur in 1980, a Presidential Young Investigator Award in 1989, and the Rosenbaum fellowship for the Computer Vision Programme at the Newton Institute of Mathematical Sciences, University of Cambridge in 1993. At UC Berkeley, he was selected for the Diane S. McEntyre Award for Excellence in Teaching in 2000, a Miller Research Professorship in 2001, and appointed to be the Arthur J. Chick Professor in 2002. He received the Distinguished Alumnus Award from IIT Kanpur in 2008. He was awarded the Longuet-Higgins Prize for a contribution that has stood the test of time twice, in 2007 and in 2008. He is a fellow of the IEEE.Location: Seaver Science Library (SSL) - 150
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: CS Colloquia
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Integrated Systems Seminar Series - Dr. Sudhakar Pamarti, UCLA
Fri, Oct 31, 2008 @ 02:00 PM - 03:00 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
"Signal Processing Techniques for the Analog Circuit Designer" - a talk by Dr. Sudhakar Pamarti, Assistant Professor, UCLA
Location: Kaprielian Hall (KAP) - 156
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Hossein Hashemi
