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Events for the 3rd week of February
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Center for Systems and Control (CSC@USC) and Ming Hsieh Institute for Electrical Engineering
Mon, Feb 12, 2018 @ 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Richard Murray, California Institute of Technology
Talk Title: Safety-Critical Autonomous Systems: What is Possible? What is Required?
Abstract: The last 20 years have seen enormous progress in autonomous vehicles, from planetary rovers, to unmanned aerial vehicles, to the self-driving cars that we are starting to see on the roads around us. An open question is whether we can we make self-driving cars that are safer than human-driven cars, how much safer they need to be, and what advances will be required to bring them to fruition. In this talk, I will discuss some of the approaches used in the aerospace industry, where flight critical subsystems must achieve probability of failure rates of less than 1 failure in 10^9 flight hours (i.e. less than 1 failure per 100,000 years of operation). Systems that achieve this level of reliability are hard to design, hard to verify, and hard to validate, especially if software is involved. I will describe some of the challenges that the aerospace community faces in designing systems with this level of reliability, how they are designed and implemented done today, and what is being done for the next generation of (much more complex, software-driven) aerospace systems. I will also speculate about whether similar approaches are needed in self-driving cars, and whether these levels of safety are achievable.
Biography: Richard M. Murray received the B.S. degree in Electrical Engineering from California Institute of Technology in 1985 and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1988 and 1991, respectively. He is currently the Thomas E. and Doris Everhart Professor of Control & Dynamical Systems and Bioengineering at Caltech. Murray's research is in the application of feedback and control to networked systems, with applications in biology and autonomy. Current projects include specification, design and synthesis of control protocols for networked control systems and analysis and design of biomolecular feedback systems for synthetic biology.
Host: Mihailo Jovanovic, mihailo@usc.edu
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 132
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Gerrielyn Ramos
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Dynamical Systems on Weighted Lattices: Nonlinear Processing and Optimization
Wed, Feb 14, 2018 @ 02:00 PM - 03:00 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Petros Maragos, School of E.C.E., National Technical University of Athens
Talk Title: Dynamical Systems on Weighted Lattices: Nonlinear Processing and Optimization
Series: Center for Cyber-Physical Systems and Internet of Things
Abstract: In this talk we will present a unifying theoretical framework of nonlinear processing operators and dynamical systems that obey a superposition of a weighted max-* or min-* type and evolve on nonlinear spaces which we call complete weighted lattices. Their algebraic structure has a polygonal geometry. Some of the special cases unified include max-plus, max-product, and probabilistic dynamical systems. Such systems have found applications in diverse fields including nonlinear image analysis and vision scale-spaces, control of discrete-event dynamical systems, dynamic programming (e.g. shortest paths, Viterbi algorithm), inference on graphical models, tracking salient events in multimodal information streams using generalized Markov chains, and sparse modeling. Our theoretical approach establishes their representation in state and input-output spaces using monotone lattice operators, finds analytically their state and output responses using nonlinear convolutions of a weighted max-min type, studies their stability and reachability, and provides optimal solutions to solving max-* matrix equations. The talk will summarize the main concepts and our theoretical results in this broad field using weighted lattice algebra and will sample some application areas.
Biography: Petros Maragos received the Diploma in E.E. from the National Technical University of Athens (NTUA) in 1980 and the M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees from Georgia Tech, Atlanta, in 1982 and 1985. In 1985, he joined the faculty of the Division of Applied Sciences at Harvard University, where he worked for eight years as professor of electrical engineering affiliated with the Harvard Robotics Lab. In 1993, he joined the faculty of the School of ECE at Georgia Tech, affiliated with its Center for Signal and Image Processing. During periods of 1996-98 he had a joint appointment as director of research at the Institute of Language and Speech Processing in Athens. Since 1999, he has been working as professor at the NTUA School of ECE, where he is currently the director of the Intelligent Robotics and Automation Lab. He is also the coordinator of a robotics perception & interaction research unit at the Athena Research and Innovation Center. He has held visiting positions at MIT in 2012 and at UPenn in 2016. His research and teaching interests include signal processing, systems theory, machine learning, image processing and computer vision, audio-speech & language processing, and robotics. He has served as: member of IEEE SPS technical committees; associate editor for the IEEE Trans. on ASSP and IEEE Trans. on PAMI, editorial board member and guest editor for several journals on signal processing, image analysis and vision; co-organizer of several conferences and workshops on image processing, computer vision, multimedia and robotics (including recently EUSIPCO 2017 as general chair).He has also served on the Greek National Council for Research and Technology. His is the recipient or co-recipient of several awards for his academic work, including a 1987-1992 National Science Foundation Presidential Young Investigator Award, a 1988 IEEE SPS Young Author Best Paper Award, a 1994 IEEE SPS Senior Best Paper Award, the 1995 IEEE W.R.G. Baker Prize Award for the most outstanding original paper, the 1996 Pattern Recognition Society's Honorable Mention Award, the EURASIP 2007 Technical Achievement Award for contributions to nonlinear signal, image and speech processing, and the Best Paper Award of the IEEE CVPR-2011 Gesture Recognition Workshop. He was elected a Fellow of IEEE in 1995 and a Fellow of EURASIP in 2010 for his research contributions. He has been elected IEEE SPS Distinguished Lecturer for 2017-2018.
Host: Professor Paul Bogdan
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 132
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Talyia White
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Manuel Monge, Neuralink Corp. - Friday, February 16 at 2:00pm in EEB 132
Fri, Feb 16, 2018 @ 02:00 PM - 03:30 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Manuel Monge, Neuralink Corp.
Talk Title: High-Precision Electronic Medicine: Localization, Stimulation, and Beyond
Abstract: Over the past decades, remarkable advances toward miniaturized biomedical devices have been made and have enabled the development of new approaches to the diagnosis and treatment of human diseases. For instance, smart pills are being used to image the gastrointestinal tract, distributed sensors are being developed to map the function of the brain, and neural prostheses are being designed to help the visual, hearing, and motor impaired. However, most of today's implantable devices present critical limitations regarding size, power consumption, and functionality. Furthermore, several medical conditions could be dramatically improved if even smaller bioelectronic devices were to exist.
In this talk, I will provide an overview of implantable medical devices and present our efforts for engineering microscale devices to enable high-precision electronic medicine. In the first part of the talk, I will describe a novel approach for locating microscale devices inside the body using concepts from magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). We have demonstrated a new microchip that mimics the behavior of nuclear spins and can be located in space by the application of magnetic field gradients. Using this technique, we can locate a device smaller than 1 mm3 with sub-millimeter resolution in vivo. Such miniature devices could reach currently inaccessible locations inside the body with high precision to perform diagnosis and treatment of localized disease. In the second part, I will focus on neural stimulation techniques for retinal prostheses, which are devices aiming to restore vision in patients suffering from advanced stages of retinal degeneration (e.g., retinitis pigmentosa). I will present a fully intraocular epiretinal implant that reduces area and power consumption, and increases the functionality and resolution of traditional implementations. Finally, I will discuss some exciting research directions and potential applications of the developed techniques.
Biography: Manuel Monge received the BS degree in Electrical Engineering from the Pontifical Catholic University of Peru in 2008 with honors, and the MS and PhD degrees in Electrical Engineering from the California Institute of Technology in 2010 and 2017, respectively. His research interests focus on the miniaturization of medical electronics by combining and integrating physical and biological principles into the design of microscale integrated circuits. He is currently working at Neuralink Corp., developing ultra-high-bandwidth brain-machine interfaces.
He is the recipient of the 2017 Charles Wilts Prize from the Department of Electrical Engineering at Caltech for outstanding independent research in electrical engineering leading to a PhD, and the 2017 Demetriades-Tsafka-Kokkalis Prize in Biotechnology from the Division of Engineering and Applied Science at Caltech for the best thesis in the field of biotechnology. He was also the co-recipient of the 2015 IEEE CICC Best Student Paper Award, 2nd Place, and the recipient of the Caltech Rosen Scholarship in 2014.
Host: EE-Electrophysics
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 132
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Marilyn Poplawski