Events for the 3rd week of February
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Center for Cyber-Physical Systems and Internet of Things and Ming Hsieh Institute for Electrical Engineering Joint Seminar Series on Cyber-Physical Systems
Mon, Feb 13, 2017 @ 02:00 PM - 03:00 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Michael Shlesinger, Office of Naval Research
Talk Title: Pitfalls and Paradoxes in the History of Probability Theory
Abstract: This lecture traces 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 Conjecturing" and Abraham DeMoivre'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 connected to fractals. Through conditional probabilities, Bayes introduced what later has become hypothesis testing. Arriving at two different answers, 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, this lecture discusses vignettes that have brought us to today's widespread use of probability and statistics.
Biography: Dr. Michael Shlesinger manages the nonlinear physics program at the Office of Naval Research. He has published over 200 scientific papers on topics in stochastic processes, glassy materials, proteins, neurons, and nonlinear dynamics. He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society and was a Divisional Associate Editor of the Physical Review Letters. In 2006 he received ONR's Saalfeld Award for Outstanding Lifetime Achievement in Science, and earlier the federal government's Presidential Rank Award for Meritorious Senior Professionals, and the Navy Superior Civilian Service Award. He held the Kinnear Chair in Physics at the USNA, was the Michelson Lecturer at the USNA, the Regents' Lecturer at UCSD and received the U. Maryland's Distinguished Postdoc Alum award. His Ph. D., in Physics, is from the U. of Rochester in 1975, and his 1970 B.S. in Mathematics and Physics is from SUNY Stony Brook.
Host: Paul Bogdan
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - EEB 132
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Estela Lopez
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MHI CommNetS seminar
Wed, Feb 15, 2017 @ 02:00 PM - 03:00 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Dr. Marcella M. Gomez, UC Berkeley
Talk Title: Delays in biological networks and feedback design
Series: CommNetS
Abstract: Gene regulatory networks lie at the crux of life and, despite rapidly evolving tools in synthetic biology, our ability to replicate the robustness of these systems remains a challenge. We have not been able to fully understand and, hence, design effective feedback mechanisms. I present work towards said challenge through extensions in control and dynamical systems lending to an effective network design in the presence of delays, an adversarial facet of biology.
In this talk I focus on the role of delays in biological networks. I show how understanding the effects of delays and stochastic processes on gene expression dynamics can be used to design effective controllers for stability. First, I present a stability condition for stochastic linear systems with identically, independently, distributed stochastic delays. In an application to a single gene oscillator, I demonstrate the stabilizing effects of increasing the relative variance of the delay uncertainty. Using the insight gained from this analysis along with inspiration from nature, I present a stabilizing controller for the single gene oscillator based on adding a larger delay in parallel. A generalized delay-based feedback design approach shows this architecture to be near optimal. In summary, through a deeper understanding of the effects of delays on dynamics, I arrive at an effective stabilizing controller in a system with large delays, where traditional methods in controls cannot be used for feedback design.
Biography: Marcella M. Gomez is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the University of California, Berkeley in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. She received her bachelors from UC Berkeley in 2008 and her PhD from the California Institute of Technology in 2015, both in Mechanical Engineering. Her research interests lie in developing synergistic methods combining control and dynamical systems with synthetic biology for the advancement in understanding and designing of complex genetic networks.
Host: Prof. Paul Bogdan
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 248
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Annie Yu
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Munushian Keynote Lecture - William E. Moerner, Friday, February 17th at 2:00pm in GER124
Fri, Feb 17, 2017 @ 02:00 PM - 03:30 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Dr. William E. Moerner - Nobel Prize in Chemistry, Nobel Foundation (2014), Stanford University
Talk Title: The Story of Photonics and Single Molecules, from Early Spectroscopy in Solids, to Super-Resolution Nanoscopy in Cells and Beyond
Abstract: More than 25 years ago, low temperature experiments aimed at establishing the ultimate limits to optical storage in solids led to the first optical detection and spectroscopy of a single molecule in the condensed phase. At this unexplored ultimate limit, many surprises occurred where single molecules showed both spontaneous changes (blinking) and light-driven control of emission, properties that were also observed in 1997 at room temperature with single green fluorescent protein variants. In 2006, PALM and subsequent approaches showed that the optical diffraction limit of ~200 nm can be circumvented to achieve super-resolution fluorescence microscopy, or nanoscopy, with relatively nonperturbative visible light. Essential to this is the combination of single-molecule fluorescence imaging with active control of the emitting concentration and sequential localization of single fluorophores decorating a structure. Super-resolution microscopy has opened up a new frontier in which biological structures and behavior can be observed in live cells with resolutions down to 20-40 nm and below. Examples range from protein superstructures in bacteria to bands in actin filaments to details of the shapes of amyloid fibrils and much more. Current methods development research addresses ways to extract more information from each single molecule such as 3D position and orientation, and to assure not only precision, but also accuracy. Still, it is worth noting that in spite of all the interest in super-resolution, even in the "conventional" single-molecule tracking regime where the motions of individual biomolecules are recorded in solution or in cells rather than the shapes of extended structures, much can still be learned about biological processes when ensemble averaging is removed.
Biography: William Moerner is an American physical chemist and chemical physicist with current work in the biophysics and imaging of single molecules. He is credited with achieving the first optical detection and spectroscopy of a single molecule in condensed phases, along with his postdoc, Lothar Kador. Optical study of single molecules has subsequently become a widely used single-molecule experiment in chemistry, physics and biology. In 2014 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
He attended Washington University in St. Louis for undergraduate studies as an Alexander S. Langsdorf Engineering Fellow, and obtained three degrees: a B.S. in physics with Final Honors, a B.S. in electrical engineering with Final Honors, and an A.B. in mathematics summa cum laude in 1975. This was followed by graduate study, partially supported by a National Science Foundation Graduate Fellowship, at Cornell University in the group of Albert J. Sievers III. Here he received an M.S. degree and a Ph.D. degree in physics in 1978 and 1982, respectively.
Host: EE-Electrophysics
More Info: minghsiehee.usc.edu/about/lectures/munushian-lecture
Location: Ethel Percy Andrus Gerontology Center (GER) - 124
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Marilyn Poplawski
Event Link: minghsiehee.usc.edu/about/lectures/munushian-lecture