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Events for the 1st week of May
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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, May 01, 2017 @ 02:00 PM - 03:00 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Xiaoqing Jin , Senior Engineer, Toyota Motors North America R&D
Talk Title: Logic Driven Data Science
Abstract: Data science together with machine learning is prevalent in almost every sector of industry. Many popular techniques, such as deep learning with artificial neural networks, have shown their capabilities in achieving incredible performance and accuracy in helping make Cyber Physical Systems (CPS) smarter. However, data scientists or engineers usually find it challenging to interpret the artifacts learned using such procedures. Also, due to the proliferation of sensors, control engineers have to combat the data deluge problem. They need to process, analyze, and identify structure or logical relations from intractably large amounts of time series data within limited amount of time. Typical machine learning techniques rely on similarity measures defined on complex feature spaces of signals and may overlook the embedded logical structure. In this talk, we explore data analysis from the logical perspective and introduce supervised and unsupervised learning procedures that utilize Parametric Signal Temporal Logic (PSTL) templates to discover temporal and spatial relations in signal space. The resulting methods not only perform data analysis but also generate formal artifacts to give engineers abstract understanding of the results. We will demonstrate our techniques in many domains, such as automotive testing, medical devices, and online education systems.
Biography: Xiaoqing Jin is a Senior Engineer at Toyota Motors North America R&D. She received her Ph.D. from the University of California at Riverside on topics including symbolic model checking, stochastic model checking, and formal verification and validation for hybrid systems. She began her career in doing advanced research at Toyota where she was responsible for researching and developing techniques and tools to help design and analysis of industrial cyber-physical systems, such as control systems for internal combustion engine vehicles and fuel cell electric vehicles. Her research interests are in the broad area of hybrid systems, temporal logics, machine learning, data analysis, control theory, dynamical systems, and automotive control systems.
Host: Paul Bogdan
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 248
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Estela Lopez
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First Mini-Workshop on Cyber-Physical Security and Privacy
Tue, May 02, 2017 @ 09:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Workshops & Infosessions
First Mini-Workshop on Cyber-Physical Security and Privacy
USC Viterbi Center of Cyber-Physical Systems and the Internet of Things (CCI)
Tuesday, May 2, 2017, 9am - 12pm, EEB 132
Welcome to a mini-workshop consisting of exciting research talks by the following set of Viterbi faculty and researchers working on Cyber-Physical Security and Privacy from many perspectives, including cryptography, algorithms and protocols, data management, systems engineering, and CPS design.
* Cliff Neuman, Director, Center for Computer Systems Security, USC/ISI
* Alefiya Hussain, Computer Scientist, USC/ISI
* Muhammad Naveed, Assistant Professor, Computer Science
* Aleksandra Korolova, Assistant Professor, Computer Science
* Shahram Ghandeharizadeh, Professor, Computer Science
* Neno Medvidovic, Professor, Computer Science
* Neil Siegel, Professor, Industrial Systems Engineering
* Pierluigi Nuzzo, Assistant Professor, Electrical Engineering
It is a great opportunity to hear from a stellar collection of our own
faculty about their research in this area of growing importance.
Don't miss it!Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 132
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Brienne Moore
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Using Theory to Reveal Function in Large Brain Circuits
Wed, May 03, 2017 @ 10:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Friedrich Sommer, UC Berkeley
Talk Title: Using Theory to Reveal Function in Large Brain Circuits
Abstract: Current technology provides a virtual deluge of information about brain structure and physiology. Our laboratory focuses on developing new theoretical frameworks and analytical methods that take advantage of this accelerated rate of data influx to address central problems in neuroscience. I will discuss three different projects.
High-density multi-electrode recordings monitor the spike trains of individual neurons with unparalleled temporal accuracy and also provide spatially distributed information about local field potentials (LFPs), slow signals generated by groups of neurons. In hippocampus, the relative timing between the spikes of a certain class of neurons (place cells) and a 10 Hz signal present in the LFP (the theta wave) carries information about the animal's position in the environment. Using data obtained in the Buzsaki laboratory, we developed a novel approach to decode the animal's position precisely from the LFP alone. Further, we were able to extract LFP place components, like place cells, neatly tile the spatial environment. The LFP is far simpler to record than spike trains, and is feasible to obtain from human patients. Thus, our results can be leveraged to build robust brain computer interfaces.
Integration of information across regions and modalities is a fundamental working principle of the brain. We developed a novel method to estimate integrated information. The method can be applied to recordings with large numbers (thousands) of channels. We recently provided the first estimate of integrated information in a whole animal, the behaving nematode (C-elegans). Further, we found that the mesoscopic mouse connectome integrates significantly more information than other network architectures, suggesting that integrated information is a plausible force for driving evolution.
Theoretical principles, such as Hebbian plasticity, error-based, and reward-based learning give insight into how the brain form sensory codes, object categories, and develop strategies to obtain rewards. However, we lack principles to understand how the brain guides the body to explore the environment efficiently such that it is possible to form models of the world from small numbers of observations. We proposed a novel principle that selects actions leading to the sensory observations that best improve the current model of the environment. This principle can be cast in a formal framework based on defining the information gain of the model. The resulting algorithm generates models of novel environments with greater speed than previously achieved. On one hand, the new principle generates testable predictions about how brains control action/perception loops, on the other it has technical applications in robotics and artificial intelligence.
Biography: Friedrich T. Sommer holds a Ph.D. in Physics from the University of Dusseldorf and a habilitation in Computer Science from the University of Ulm. After completing postocdoctoral work at MIT and the University of Tuebingen, he joined the department of Computer Science at the University of Ulm in 1998 as an Assistant Professor. He became a Principal Investigator at the Redwood Neuroscience Institute in Menlo Park in 2003 before joining the University of California, Berkeley in 2005, where he is an Adjunct Professor at the Redwood Center for Theoretical Neuroscience and the Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute.
Host: Shrikanth Narayanan & Richard Leady
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 132
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Tanya Acevedo-Lam/EE-Systems
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Speech Technology Research and Applications at LPTV
Wed, May 03, 2017 @ 02:00 PM - 04:00 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Nestor Becerra Yoma, Universidad de Chile in Santiago
Talk Title: Speech Technology Research and Applications at LPTV
Abstract: In this talk I will describe the research I have carried out in the Speech Processing and Transmission Laboratory (LPTV, Laboratorio de Procesamiento y TransmisioÌn de Voz) in the last 17 years. LPTV is located at Universidad de Chile and was founded by me in 2000. I will discuss the seminar work on uncertainty and how the first results were achieved. As far as we know, those are the first uncertainty modelling in HMM. I will talk about our experience with speech technology for telephone applications and second language learning. Some relevant papers on stochastic Weighted Viterbi, multi-classifier fusion, CAPT and VoIP will be discussed. I will describe our state-of-the-art robotic platform that we have implemented to pursue our research on voice-based human-robot interaction. In this context, the locally normalized features will be presented to address the time varying channel problem. I will show demos and discuss ideas on voice-based HRI. Finally, I will summarize our results on multidisciplinary research on signal processing.
Biography: NeÌstor Becerra Yoma received the PhD degree from University of Edinburgh, UK, and the M.Sc. and B.Sc. degrees from UNICAMP (Campinas State University), Sao Paulo, Brazil, all of them in Electrical Engineering, in 1998, 1993 and 1986, respectively. From 2000, he has been a Professor at the Department of Electrical Engineering, Universidad de Chile, in Santiago, where he is currently lecturing on telecommunications and speech processing. In 2011 he was promoted to the Full Professor position. From 2016 to 2017 he was a visiting professor at CMU, USA. At Universidad de Chile he started the Speech Processing and Transmission Laboratory to carry out research on speech technology applications on human-robot interaction, language learning, Internet and telephone line. His research interest also includes multidisciplinary research on signal processing in fields such as astronomy, mining and volcanology. He is the author of about 40 journal articles, 40 conference papers and three patents. Professor Becerra Yoma was an associate editor of the IEEE Transactions on Speech and Audio Processing from for four years.
Host: Shrikanth Narayanan
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 132
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Tanya Acevedo-Lam/EE-Systems
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Speech Technology Research and Applications at LPTV
Wed, May 03, 2017 @ 02:00 PM - 04:00 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Nestor Becerra Yoma, Universidad de Chile in Santiago
Talk Title: Speech Technology Research and Applications at LPTV
Abstract: In this talk I will describe the research I have carried out in the Speech Processing and Transmission Laboratory (LPTV, Laboratorio de Procesamiento y TransmisioÌn de Voz) in the last 17 years. LPTV is located at Universidad de Chile and was founded by me in 2000. I will discuss the seminar work on uncertainty and how the first results were achieved. As far as we know, those are the first uncertainty modelling in HMM. I will talk about our experience with speech technology for telephone applications and second language learning. Some relevant papers on stochastic Weighted Viterbi, multi-classifier fusion, CAPT and VoIP will be discussed. I will describe our state-of-the-art robotic platform that we have implemented to pursue our research on voice-based human-robot interaction. In this context, the locally normalized features will be presented to address the time varying channel problem. I will show demos and discuss ideas on voice-based HRI. Finally, I will summarize our results on multidisciplinary research on signal processing.
Biography: NeÌstor Becerra Yoma received the PhD degree from University of Edinburgh, UK, and the M.Sc. and B.Sc. degrees from UNICAMP (Campinas State University), Sao Paulo, Brazil, all of them in Electrical Engineering, in 1998, 1993 and 1986, respectively. From 2000, he has been a Professor at the Department of Electrical Engineering, Universidad de Chile, in Santiago, where he is currently lecturing on telecommunications and speech processing. In 2011 he was promoted to the Full Professor position. From 2016 to 2017 he was a visiting professor at CMU, USA. At Universidad de Chile he started the Speech Processing and Transmission Laboratory to carry out research on speech technology applications on human-robot interaction, language learning, Internet and telephone line. His research interest also includes multidisciplinary research on signal processing in fields such as astronomy, mining and volcanology. He is the author of about 40 journal articles, 40 conference papers and three patents. Professor Becerra Yoma was an associate editor of the IEEE Transactions on Speech and Audio Processing from for four years.
Host: Shrikanth Narayanan
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 132
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Tanya Acevedo-Lam/EE-Systems
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Speech Technology Research and Applications at LPTV
Wed, May 03, 2017 @ 02:00 PM - 04:00 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Nestor Becerra Yoma, Universidad de Chile in Santiago
Talk Title: Speech Technology Research and Applications at LPTV
Abstract: In this talk I will describe the research I have carried out in the Speech Processing and Transmission Laboratory (LPTV: Laboratorio de Procesamiento y TransmisioÌn de Voz) in the last 17 years. LPTV is located at Universidad de Chile and was founded by me in 2000. I will discuss the seminar work on uncertainty and how the first results were achieved. As far as we know, those are the first uncertainty modelling in HMM. I will talk about our experience with speech technology for telephone applications and second language learning. Some relevant papers on stochastic Weighted Viterbi, multi-classifier fusion, CAPT and VoIP will be discussed. I will describe our state-of-the-art robotic platform that we have implemented to pursue our research on voice-based human-robot interaction. In this context, the locally normalized features will be presented to address the time varying channel problem. I will show demos and discuss ideas on voice-based HRI. Finally, I will summarize our results on multidisciplinary research on signal processing.
Biography: NeÌstor Becerra Yoma received the PhD degree from University of Edinburgh, UK, and the M.Sc. and B.Sc. degrees from UNICAMP (Campinas State University), Sao Paulo, Brazil, all of them in Electrical Engineering, in 1998, 1993 and 1986, respectively. From 2000, he has been a Professor at the Department of Electrical Engineering, Universidad de Chile, in Santiago, where he is currently lecturing on telecommunications and speech processing. In 2011 he was promoted to the Full Professor position. From 2016 to 2017 he was a visiting professor at CMU, USA. At Universidad de Chile he started the Speech Processing and Transmission Laboratory to carry out research on speech technology applications on human-robot interaction, language learning, Internet and telephone line. His research interest also includes multidisciplinary research on signal processing in fields such as astronomy, mining and volcanology. He is the author of about 40 journal articles, 40 conference papers and three patents. Professor Becerra Yoma was an associate editor of the IEEE Transactions on Speech and Audio Processing from for four years.
Host: Shrikanth Narayanan
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 132
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Tanya Acevedo-Lam/EE-Systems
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Speech Technology Research and Applications at LPTV
Wed, May 03, 2017 @ 02:00 PM - 04:00 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Nestor Becerra Yoma, Universidad de Chile in Santiago
Talk Title: Speech Technology Research and Applications at LPTV
Abstract: In this talk I will describe the research I have carried out in the Speech Processing and Transmission Laboratory (LPTV) in the last 17 years. LPTV is located at Universidad de Chile and was founded by me in 2000. I will discuss the seminar work on uncertainty and how the first results were achieved. As far as we know, those are the first uncertainty modelling in HMM. I will talk about our experience with speech technology for telephone applications and second language learning. Some relevant papers on stochastic Weighted Viterbi, multi-classifier fusion, CAPT and VoIP will be discussed. I will describe our state-of-the-art robotic platform that we have implemented to pursue our research on voice-based human-robot interaction. In this context, the locally normalized features will be presented to address the time varying channel problem. I will show demos and discuss ideas on voice-based HRI. Finally, I will summarize our results on multidisciplinary research on signal processing.
Biography: NeÌstor Becerra Yoma received the PhD degree from University of Edinburgh, UK, and the M.Sc. and B.Sc. degrees from UNICAMP (Campinas State University), Sao Paulo, Brazil, all of them in Electrical Engineering, in 1998, 1993 and 1986, respectively. From 2000, he has been a Professor at the Department of Electrical Engineering, Universidad de Chile, in Santiago, where he is currently lecturing on telecommunications and speech processing. In 2011 he was promoted to the Full Professor position. From 2016 to 2017 he was a visiting professor at CMU, USA. At Universidad de Chile he started the Speech Processing and Transmission Laboratory to carry out research on speech technology applications on human-robot interaction, language learning, Internet and telephone line. His research interest also includes multidisciplinary research on signal processing in fields such as astronomy, mining and volcanology. He is the author of about 40 journal articles, 40 conference papers and three patents. Professor Becerra Yoma was an associate editor of the IEEE Transactions on Speech and Audio Processing from for four years.
Host: Shrikanth Narayanan
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 132
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Tanya Acevedo-Lam/EE-Systems
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Speech Technology Research and Applications at LPTV
Wed, May 03, 2017 @ 02:00 PM - 04:00 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Nestor Becerra Yoma, Universidad de Chile in Santiago
Talk Title: Speech Technology Research and Applications at LPTV
Abstract: In this talk I will describe the research I have carried out in the Speech Processing and Transmission Laboratory (LPTV, Laboratorio de Procesamiento y Transmision de Voz) in the last 17 years. LPTV is located at Universidad de Chile and was founded by me in 2000. I will discuss the seminar work on uncertainty and how the first results were achieved. As far as we know, those are the first uncertainty modelling in HMM. I will talk about our experience with speech technology for telephone applications and second language learning. Some relevant papers on stochastic Weighted Viterbi, multi-classifier fusion, CAPT and VoIP will be discussed. I will describe our state-of-the-art robotic platform that we have implemented to pursue our research on voice-based human-robot interaction. In this context, the locally normalized features will be presented to address the time varying channel problem. I will show demos and discuss ideas on voice-based HRI. Finally, I will summarize our results on multidisciplinary research on signal processing.
Biography: Nestor Becerra Yoma received his PhD degree from University of Edinburgh, UK, and the M.Sc. and B.Sc. degrees from UNICAMP (Campinas State University), Sao Paulo, Brazil, all of them in Electrical Engineering, in 1998, 1993 and 1986, respectively. From 2000, he has been a Professor at the Department of Electrical Engineering, Universidad de Chile, in Santiago, where he is currently lecturing on telecommunications and speech processing. In 2011 he was promoted to the Full Professor position. From 2016 to 2017 he was a visiting professor at CMU, USA. At Universidad de Chile he started the Speech Processing and Transmission Laboratory to carry out research on speech technology applications on human-robot interaction, language learning, Internet and telephone line. His research interest also includes multidisciplinary research on signal processing in fields such as astronomy, mining and volcanology. He is the author of about 40 journal articles, 40 conference papers and three patents. Professor Becerra Yoma was an associate editor of the IEEE Transactions on Speech and Audio Processing from for four years.
Host: Shrikanth Narayanan
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 132
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Tanya Acevedo-Lam/EE-Systems
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The FuzzyLog Approach to Building Distributed Services
Thu, May 04, 2017 @ 04:00 PM - 05:00 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Mahesh Balakrishnan, Yale University
Talk Title: The FuzzyLog Approach to Building Distributed Services
Abstract: Control plane applications such as coordination services, SDN controllers, filesystem namespaces, and big data schedulers have strong requirements for consistency as well as performance. Building such applications is currently a black art, requiring a slew of complex distributed protocols that are inefficient when layered and difficult to combine. The shared log approach (seen in the Corfu, Tango, and CorfuDB systems) achieves simplicity for distributed applications by replacing complex protocols with a single shared log; however, it does so by introducing a global ordering over all updates in the system, which can be expensive, unnecessary, and sometimes impossible. We propose the FuzzyLog abstraction, which provides applications the simplicity of a shared log without its drawbacks. The FuzzyLog allows applications to construct and access a durable, iterable partial order of updates in the system. FuzzyLog applications retain the simplicity of their shared log counterparts while extracting parallelism, providing a range of consistency guarantees and tolerating network partitions.
Biography: Mahesh Balakrishnan is an Associate Professor (pre-tenure) at Yale University since Fall 2015. He received a PhD in Computer Science from Cornell University in 2009. He worked at Microsoft Research Silicon Valley from 2008 to 2014, where he co-led the CORFU and Tango projects on shared log systems, and briefly at VMware Research in 2015. His research interests span distributed systems, storage and networking. Currently, his research centers on new abstractions that simplify the construction of fast, reliable and consistent systems, while hiding the complexity of concurrency, failures and hardware details from programmers. He has published 35+ peer-reviewed papers in systems conferences such as SOSP, NSDI and FAST and journals such as TOCS. His current research is funded by NSF, Facebook Awards, and a VMware Early Career faculty grant.
Host: Xuehai Qian, x04459, xuehai.qian@usc.edu
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Gerrielyn Ramos