Events for the 4th week of April
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Center for Systems and Control (CSC@USC) and Ming Hsieh Institute for Electrical Engineering
Mon, Apr 23, 2018 @ 02:00 PM - 03:00 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Steven Brunton, University of Washington
Talk Title: Data-Driven Discovery and Control of Nonlinear Systems
Series: Joint CSC@USC/CommNetS-MHI Seminar Series
Abstract: The ability to discover physical laws and governing equations from data is one of humankind's greatest intellectual achievements. A quantitative understanding of dynamic constraints and balances in nature has facilitated rapid development of knowledge and enabled advanced technology, including aircraft, combustion engines, satellites, and electrical power. There are many more critical data-driven problems, such as understanding cognition from neural recordings, inferring patterns in climate, determining stability of financial markets, predicting and suppressing the spread of disease, and controlling turbulence for greener transportation and energy. With abundant data and elusive laws, data-driven discovery of dynamics will continue to play an increasingly important role in these efforts.
This work develops a general framework to discover the governing equations underlying a dynamical system simply from data measurements, leveraging advances in sparsity-promoting techniques and machine learning. The resulting models are parsimonious, balancing model complexity with descriptive ability while avoiding overfitting. The only assumption about the structure of the model is that there are only a few important terms that govern the dynamics, so that the equations are sparse in the space of possible functions. This perspective, combining dynamical systems with machine learning and sparse sensing, is explored with the overarching goal of real-time closed-loop feedback control of complex systems. Connections to modern Koopman operator theory are also discussed.
Biography: Steven L. Brunton is an Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering and a Data Science Fellow at the eScience Institute at the University of Washington in Seattle. He received a B.S. in Mathematics with a minor in Control and Dynamical Systems from Caltech in 2006, and received a Ph.D. in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering from Princeton in 2012. His research interests include data-driven modeling and control, dynamical systems, sparse sensing and machine learning applied to complex systems in fluid dynamics, optics, neuroscience, bio-locomotion, and renewable energy.
Host: Eva Kanso, kanso@usc.edu
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 132
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Gerrielyn Ramos
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Deterministic Random Matrices
Wed, Apr 25, 2018 @ 02:00 PM - 03:00 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Ilya Soloveychik, School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, Harvard University
Talk Title: Deterministic Random Matrices
Series: Center for Cyber-Physical Systems and Internet of Things
Abstract: Random matrices have become a very active area of research in the recent years and have found enormous applications in modern mathematics, physics, engineering, biological modeling, and other fields. In this work, we focus on symmetric sign (+/-1) matrices (SSMs) that were originally utilized by Wigner to model the nuclei of heavy atoms in mid-50s. Assuming the entries of the upper triangular part to be independent +/-1 with equal probabilities, Wigner showed in his pioneering works that when the sizes of matrices grow, their empirical spectra converge to a non-random measure having a semicircular shape. Later, this fundamental result was improved and substantially extended to more general families of matrices and finer spectral properties. In many physical phenomena, however, the entries of matrices exhibit significant correlations. At the same time, almost all available analytical tools heavily rely on the independence condition making the study of matrices with structure (dependencies) very challenging. The few existing works in this direction consider very specific setups and are limited by particular techniques, lacking a unified framework and tight information-theoretic bounds that would quantify the exact amount of structure that matrices may possess without affecting the limiting semicircular form of their spectra.
From a different perspective, in many applications one needs to simulate random objects. Generation of large random matrices requires very powerful sources of randomness due to the independence condition, the experiments are impossible to reproduce, and atypical or non-random looking outcomes may appear with positive probability. Reliable deterministic construction of SSMs with random-looking spectra and low algorithmic and computational complexity is of particular interest due to the natural correspondence of SSMs and undirected graphs, since the latter are extensively used in combinatorial and CS applications e.g. for the purposes of derandomization. Unfortunately, most of the existing constructions of pseudo-random graphs focus on the extreme eigenvalues and do not provide guaranties on the whole spectrum. In this work, using binary Golomb sequences, we propose a simple completely deterministic construction of circulant SSMs with spectra converging to the semicircular law with the same rate as in the original Wigner ensemble. We show that this construction has close to lowest possible algorithmic complexity and is very explicit. Essentially, the algorithm requires at most 2log(n) bits implying that the real amount of randomness conveyed by the semicircular property is quite small.
Biography: Ilya Soloveychik received his BSc degree in Applied Mathematics and Physics from the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology, Moscow, Russia in 2007, the MSc degree in Mathematics and the PhD degree in Electrical Engineering from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel in 2013 and 2016, respectively. He is currently a Fulbright postdoctoral fellow with the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. His research interests include random matrix theory, high-dimensional statistics and signal processing, and graphical models. He received the Potanin Scholarship for excellence in studies in 2005, the Klein Prize and the Kaete Klausner Scholarship in 2011. In 2015 he was awarded the Feder Family Prize for outstanding research in the field of Communications Technology and in 2016 - the Wolf Foundation Prize for excellence in studies.
Host: Professor Paul Bogdan
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 132
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Talyia White
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EE Seminar: Cryptographic Primitives for Hardware Security
Thu, Apr 26, 2018 @ 10:30 AM - 11:30 AM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Ling Ren, MIT CSAIL
Talk Title: Cryptographic Primitives for Hardware Security
Abstract: Hardware plays a critical role in today's security landscape. Every protocol with security or privacy guarantees inevitably includes some hardware in its trusted computing base. The increasing number of vulnerability disclosures calls for a more rigorous approach to secure hardware designs. In this talk, I will present several cryptographic primitives to enhance the security of hardware.
I will first discuss the use of Physically Obfuscated Keys (POK) to strengthen the security of private keys. In particular, I will present a computational fuzzy extractor based on the Learning Parity with Noise (LPN) problem. Our construction uses stability information as a trapdoor to correct a constant fraction of POK errors efficiently. Next, I will describe our work on Oblivious RAM (ORAM), a cryptographic primitive to prevent access pattern leakage. I will present both architectural and algorithmic improvements to ORAM.
While hardware is often trusted as a line of defense, it can also be utilized by attackers. The advent of ASIC hash units calls into question the security of hash functions and proof-of-work protocols. I will describe bandwidth-hard functions to achieve ASIC resistance and briefly touch on my other projects in blockchains and consensus.
Biography: Ling Ren is a final year graduate student at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He received his Master's degree from Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Bachelor's degree from Tsinghua University. His research interests span computer security, cryptography, computer architecture and distributed computing. He received the best student paper award at CCS 2013.
Host: Bhaskar Krishnamachari, bkrishna@usc.edu
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 248
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Mayumi Thrasher
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EE-EP Seminar - Maysam Ghovanloo, Friday, April 27th at 2pm in EEB 132
Fri, Apr 27, 2018 @ 02:00 PM - 03:30 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Maysam Ghovanloo, Georgia Institute of Technology
Talk Title: Cutting Edge Examples of Medical Device-on-a-Chip
Abstract: For medical devices that need to be implanted or positioned inside the human body to deliver a therapy, size and functionality are among the most important parameters, affecting key aspects of the device, such as feasibility, level of invasiveness, side effects, and safety, ability to reach the desired anatomical target, and efficacy in carrying out intended functions, such as imaging, recording biological parameters, delivering drugs, or applying stimuli, or a combination of these as part of a medical intervention. on the On the other hand, microelectronic devices, integrated circuit design, and system-level architectures have advanced to the point that combining multiple functions in a variety of domains from low noise analog readout, to on-chip digital processing, RF connectivity, power management, and precise control of physical outputs on a monolithic piece of silicon has become quite routine, in an approach referred to as the system-on-a-chip (SoC). In this talk, I will present a few examples of applying the well-established SoC technology towards design and development of cutting edge medical devices that are fit to be implanted or delivered inside the body, while being supported by system blocks outside of the body, to either create de novo medical interventions or significantly improve the existing therapies. I refer to these as the medical device-on-a-chip (MDoC) approach, and also propose the pathway towards design concept, preliminary steps, and evaluation plans for new MDoC technologies that would enable new therapies and interventions that are not feasible today.
Biography: Maysam Ghovanloo received the B.S. degree in electrical engineering from the University of Tehran in 1994, and the M.S. degree in biomedical engineering from the Amirkabir University of Technology, Tehran, Iran in 1997. He also received the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, in 2003 and 2004, respectively.
Dr. Ghovanloo developed the first modular Patient Care Monitoring System in Iran and started a company to manufacture research instruments for electrophysiology and pharmacology labs. From 2004 to 2007 he was an assistant professor in the Department of ECE at the North Carolina State University, Raleigh, NC. Since 2007 he has been with the Georgia Tech's School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, where he is a professor and the founding director of the GT-Bionics Lab. In 2012 he started Bionic Sciences Inc., a technology transfer company, where he serves as the CTO. He has authored or coauthored more than 200 peer-reviewed conference and journal publications on implantable microelectronic devices, integrated circuits and microsystems for medical applications, and modern assistive/rehabilitation technologies. He also holds 8 issued patents.
Prof. Ghovanloo was a recipient of the National Science Foundation CAREER Award, the Tommy Nobis Barrier Breaker Award for Innovation, and Distinguished Young Scholar Award from the Association of Professors and Scholars of Iranian Heritage. He is an Associate Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Engineering and IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Circuits and Systems. He serves on the Senior Editorial Board of the IEEE Journal on Emerging and Selected Topics in Circuits and Systems (JETCAS). He served as an Associate Editor of IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems, Part II, as well as a Guest Editor for the IEEE Journal of Solid-State Circuits and IEEE Transactions on Neural Systems and Rehabilitation Engineering. He chaired the IEEE Biomedical Circuits and Systems (BioCAS 2015) in Atlanta, GA, and currently co-chairs the technical program committee for BioCAS 2018 in Cleveland, OH. He is also serving on the Analog subcommittee of the Custom Integrated Circuits Conf. (CICC).
Host: EE-Electrophysics
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 132
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Marilyn Poplawski