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SUNMONTUEWEDTHUFRISAT
Events for November 21, 2006
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On Campus Freshmen Admission Interviews continue...
Tue, Nov 21, 2006
Viterbi School of Engineering Undergraduate Admission
Receptions & Special Events
Admission Interviews are available to freshman applicants throughout the Fall until December 15, 2006. Freshman applicant interviews are not required as part of the admission process, however we would like to meet as many of our applicants as possible. All interview appointments are scheduled online.http://viterbi.usc.edu/admission/freshman/interviews/
Audiences: Freshmen Applicants for Fall 2007
Contact: Viterbi Admission
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CED Canned Food Drive
Tue, Nov 21, 2006
Viterbi School of Engineering Student Organizations
Student Activity
CED is sponsoring a canned food drive starting Monday, Nov. 13, and continuing until Wednesday, Nov. 29. For every can that is brought in, a student will be receive a ticket to be entered into a drawing for prizes, including a $100 gift certificate to Best Buy.
Location: Ronald Tutor Hall of Engineering (RTH) - 210
Audiences: Undergraduates
Contact: CED
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Error-Control and Constrained Coding Solutions for DNA Microarrays and Aptamer Array Designs
Tue, Nov 21, 2006 @ 11:00 AM - 01:00 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
SPEAKER: Professor Olgica Milenkovic, University of Colorado, BoulderABSTRACT: DNA microarrays and aptamer arrays are two classes of systems used for analyzing the dynamical activity of cells in terms of their RNA and protein fingerprints. These macromolecule arrays provide valuable information for disease diagnostics and monitoring, as well as for the development and testing of genetic drugs and therapeutic RNA antibodies. In the past, substantial efforts were made to increase the quality of the manufacturing process and to improve the reliability of microarrays and aptamer arrays. Nevertheless, there still exist many issues that have to be resolved in order to ensure proper functionality of these arrays in the presence of failures and dropout events occurring during and after the production process.In the first part of the talk, we focus on several problems related to DNA microarrays. We briefly introduce gene regulatory networks and the process of reverse engineering regulatory networks in terms of DNA microarray data. We then proceed to describe how classical error-control coding techniques can be used to increase the accuracy of data generated by DNA arrays subjected to spot failures. We propose an integrated framework for analyzing quality control and error-correction in DNA microarrays generated by photolitographic VLSIPS (Very Large Scale Immobilized Polymer Synthesis) methods. In this context, the issues of base scheduling, mask design and border-length minimization, construction of quality control arrays and good probe multiplexing strategies are addressed. The presented analysis is based on combining and extending results regarding balanced error-correcting codes and superimposed codes.In the second part of the talk, we briefly describe aptamers and the SELEX (Systematic Evolution of Ligands by Exponential Enrichment) process used for identifying and isolating RNA aptamers. We then proceed to describe a generalization of the paradigm of constrained coding and its application to structured selection and generation of RNA aptamers. The proposed approach is based on viewing (folded) RNA aptamers as words of regular and context-free grammars which include bio-chemical constraints in their production rules. The grammar based approach to constrained coding allows for counting the number of aptamer structures and for generating such structures in terms of well known combinatorial techniques.The material to be presented in the talk is self-contained and it is assumed that the audience does not have a background in molecular biology.BIO: Olgica Milenkovic received her MS degree in mathematics and PhD in electrical engineering from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, in 2001 and 2002, respectively. In August 2002, she joined the University of Colorado, Boulder, where she is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. In the summer of 2005, she was a Discrete Mathematics and Theoretical Computer Science (DIMACS) Visitor at Bell Labs, Lucent Technologies. She is currently a Visiting Professor at the Center for Information Theory and Applications at the University of California, San Diego. Her research interests include error-control and constrained coding, analysis of algorithms, combinatorics, probability theory, and bioinformatics.Host: Prof. Keith Chugg, chugg@usc.edu
Location: James H. Zumberge Hall Of Science (ZHS) - 163
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Mayumi Thrasher
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Epstein ISE EGSA Ice Cream Social
Tue, Nov 21, 2006 @ 02:00 PM - 04:00 PM
Daniel J. Epstein Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering
University Calendar
UPCOMING EPSTEIN ISE EVENTSOne more month left for the semester to end, and most of you are probably exhausted with course work and job interviews. The Engineering Graduate Students Association (EGSA) is about to wrap up events for this semester and to end it, we decided to have an ice-cream social and give you an opportunity to attend other major events.EPSTEIN ISE EGSA ICE-CREAM SOCIALDate: Tuesday, 21st November 2006Time: 2:00 - 4:00pmLocation: Courtyard of Andrus Gerontology BuildingDrop by between 2 to 4pm at the Courtyard of GER building for free Ice Cream. Open for all Epstein ISE graduate students and faculty.
Location: Ethel Percy Andrus Gerontology Center (GER) - Building Courtyard
Audiences: Graduate/Faculty/Department Only/
Contact: Georgia Lum
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USC CS Colloquium Series
Tue, Nov 21, 2006 @ 03:30 PM - 04:50 PM
Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Dr. David ChiangComputer ScientistUSC Information Sciences InstituteTitle: Finding Structure in Statistical Machine TranslationAbstract:The introduction of data-driven methods into machine translation (MT) in the 1990s created a whole new way of doing MT, and the recent move from the word-based models developed at IBM to the phrase-based models developed by Och and others has led to a breakthrough in MT performance.
The next breakthrough, the move to syntax-based models that deal with the hierarchical, meaning-bearing, structures of sentences, is waiting in the wings. It is only recently that such models, based on synchronous context-free grammars and related formalisms, have become top contenders in large-scale evaluations such as those conducted by NIST, especially for Chinese-to-English translation. And this framework offers many avenues for potential advances.I will present Hiero, the first grammar-based MT system, to our knowledge, to outperform a phrase-based baseline when measured using the widely-used BLEU metric, and describe several related approaches. Two current challenges for this approach are: (1) how can the training and translation process be made efficient for extremely large amounts of data? (2) how can we obtain synchronous grammars that better model the structure of a parallel corpus? I will present some recent progress and future work at ISI that addresses these two questions.Biography:Dr. David Chiang has been a computer scientist at the Information Sciences Institute since January 2006. He completed his PhD at the University of Pennsylvania under the supervision of Dr. Aravind Joshi, working on formal language theory, statistical natural language processing, and computational biological sequence analysis. His current research is on using grammars and parsing for statistical machine translation.
Location: Seaver Science Library (SSL) - 150
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Nancy Levien
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Freshmen Academy Large Lecture Series
Tue, Nov 21, 2006 @ 05:30 PM
Viterbi School of Engineering Student Affairs
University Calendar
The 3rd Freshmen Academy Large Lecture Series will welcome Ken Klein, President, Chairman of the Board and CEO of Wind River, a global leader in device software optimization. Ken Klein is a Viterbi alumnus whose generous gift established the Klein Institute for Undergraduate Engineering Life (KIUEL). A full biography is posted on http://viterbi.usc.edu/academies/.We will have a "Thanksgiving Dinner" before the program beginning at 5pm on the SGM patio!
Location: Seeley G. Mudd Building (SGM) - 123
Audiences: Freshmen
Contact: Freshmen Academies
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Mandelstams Witness
Tue, Nov 21, 2006 @ 07:00 PM
USC Viterbi School of Engineering
Receptions & Special Events
Please join us for a staged reading of V.M. Rakoff's "Mandelstam's Witness", an adaptation of the first volume of Nadezhda Mandelstam's memoir, Hope Against Hope. It tells the harrowing tale of the arrest and imprisonment of Nadezhda's husband, Osip, for writing a poem about Joseph Stalin. Osip Mandelstam was Russia's greatest poet of the last century. After his death in a Stalin prison in 1938, Nadezhda memorized and/or hid all of his poems to ensure that they would not be blotted out by Soviet authorities. Staying one step ahead of arrest and after an endless series of hardships, she smuggled the poems to the West in the 1950s. Mandelstam's Witness reveals a woman of great intelligence, limitless courage, no illusions and a wild sense of the absurdity of life.RSVP is required. Please visit: http://www.usc.edu/webapps/events_calendar/custom/113/index.php?category=Item&item=0.861399&active_category=Upcoming
Location: School Of Cinematic Arts-building E (SCE) - ne Dock Theatre
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Daria Yudacufski
