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Events for the 2nd week of October
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Niels Reimers - Keynote Seminar on Entrepreneurship & Innovation, Laboratory to Market: University Technology Licensing, Monday, October 8th at 10:30am in EEB 132
Mon, Oct 08, 2018 @ 10:30 AM - 12:00 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Niels Reimers, Niels Reimers
Talk Title: Laboratory to Market: University Technology Licensing
Abstract: Abstract: A discussion of today's knowledge society, role of universities, specifics of Stanford's experience, cultural and other impediments to innovation, university policies, and elements of a university technology licensing office.
Biography: Biography: Niels Founded and directed Stanford Office of Technology Licensing, 1968-91. During the 22 years he managed the program at Stanford, he was loaned to Massachusetts Institute of Technology to reform its program, and to the University of California, Berkeley to found its program.
Cumulative licensing income to Stanford from an outside management firm, from 1954-67, totaled about $4,500. Niels proposed a pilot year-long licensing office with a marketing focus, which pilot year (1968-69) achieved $55,000 in licensing income. A permanent office then was approved, with a staff of Niels and a secretary/office manager. As the work load grew from increasing numbers of technology disclosures from faculty and students, staff were added. Cumulative licensing income from 1968 is expected to top $2 billion in fiscal year 2019.
Host: Ming Hsieh Institute
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 132
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Marilyn Poplawski
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Fall 2018 Joint CSC@USC/CommNetS-MHI Seminar Series
Mon, Oct 08, 2018 @ 02:00 PM - 03:00 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Murat Arcak, University of California Berkeley
Talk Title: Scalable Symbolic Control
Abstract: Finite abstractions of continuous dynamical systems play a central role in synthesizing controllers that enforce complex specifications, such as those expressed in temporal logic, and enable the designer to leverage tools from model checking and reactive synthesis. The resulting controller is symbolic, meaning that it only requires knowledge of quantized states that represent the currently occupied partition of the state space. Existing computational tools for this approach have been limited to small systems because both the abstraction and synthesis steps suffer from severe time and space bottlenecks as the system dimension grows. This talk will present recent results that overcome these bottlenecks by exploiting structural system properties. These results include: (1) taking advantage of monotonicity properties of the dynamical model for efficient reachability computations, (2) using sparsity structures in the dependency graph of state variables for parsimonious abstraction algorithms that dramatically reduce runtime, and (3) dividing the control synthesis task into sub-problems of manageable size with compositional procedures. The results will be illustrated with several practically motivated examples.
Biography: Murat Arcak is a professor at UC Berkeley with appointments in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences and Department of Mechanical Engineering. He received the B.S. degree in Electrical Engineering from the Bogazici University, Istanbul (1996) and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of California, Santa Barbara (1997 and 2000). His research is in dynamical systems and control theory with applications to synthetic biology, multi-agent systems, and transportation. He received a CAREER Award from the National Science Foundation in 2003, the Donald P. Eckman Award from the American Automatic Control Council in 2006, the Control and Systems Theory Prize from the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM) in 2007, and the Antonio Ruberti Young Researcher Prize from the IEEE Control Systems Society in 2014. He is a member of SIAM and a fellow of IEEE.
Host: Ketan Savla, ksavla@usc.edu
More Info: http://csc.usc.edu/seminars/2018Fall/arcak.html
More Information: 18.10.08_Murat Arcak CSCUSC Seminar.pdf
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 132
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Brienne Moore
Event Link: http://csc.usc.edu/seminars/2018Fall/arcak.html
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Multimodal Emotion Recognition: Quantifying Dynamics and Structure in Audio-Visual Expressive Speech
Thu, Oct 11, 2018 @ 02:00 PM - 04:00 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Yelin (Lynn) Kim, Ph.D., Assistant Professor, University at Albany, SUNY
Talk Title: Multimodal Emotion Recognition: Quantifying Dynamics and Structure in Audio-Visual Expressive Speech
Abstract: The rise of AI assistant systems, including Google Home, Apple Siri, and Amazon Echo, brings the urgent need for increased and deeper understanding of users. In this talk, I will present algorithmic and statistical methods for analyzing audio-visual human behavior, particularly focusing on emotional and social signals inferred from speech and facial expressions. These methods can provide emotional intelligence to AI systems. However, developing automatic emotion recognition systems is challenging since emotional expressions are complex, dynamic, inherently multimodal, and are entangled with other factors of modulation (e.g. speech generation and emphasis). I will present several algorithms to address these fundamental challenges in emotion recognition: (i) cross-modal modeling methods that capture and control for interactions between individual facial regions and speech using the Minimum Description Length (MDL) principle-based segmentation; (ii) localization and prediction of events with salient emotional behaviors using a max-margin optimization and dynamic programming; and (iii) temporal modeling methods to learn co-occurrence patterns between emotional behaviors and emotion label noise. These algorithms have enabled advancements in the modeling of audio-visual emotion recognition systems and increased the understanding of the underlying dynamic and multimodal structure of affective communication (e.g., cross-modal interaction, temporal structure, and inherent perceptual ambiguity).
Biography: Yelin Kim [http://yelinkim.com] is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University at Albany, State University of New York (SUNY). She received her M.S. and Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor in 2013 and 2016, respectively, and her B.S. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Seoul National University, South Korea in 2011. Her main research interests are in human-centered and affective computing, multimodal (audio-visual) modeling, and computational behavior analysis. Her work was recognized by several awards, including a Google Faculty Research Award (2018), a SUNY-A Faculty Research Award (2017), and the Best Student Paper Award at ACM Multimedia (2014).
Host: Dr. Shrikanth Narayanan
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 132
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Tanya Acevedo-Lam/EE-Systems
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Auto-Tuned Threading for OLDI Microservices
Thu, Oct 11, 2018 @ 02:00 PM - 03:00 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Akshitha Sriraman, University of Michigan
Talk Title: Auto-Tuned Threading for OLDI Microservices
Abstract: Modern On-Line Data Intensive (OLDI) applications have evolved from monolithic systems to instead comprise numerous, distributed microservices interacting via Remote Procedure Calls (RPCs). Microservices face sub-ms RPC latency goals, much tighter than their monolithic ancestors that must meet >=100ms latency targets. Sub-ms-scale threading and on currency design effects as well as OS and network overheads that were once insignificant for such monoliths, can now come to dominate in the sub-ms-scale microservice regime. It is therefore vital to characterize the influence of threading design, OS, and network effects on microservices. Unfortunately, widely used academic data center benchmark suites are unsuitable to aid this characterization as they use monolithic rather than microservice architectures.
We first investigate how OS/network overheads impact microservice tail latency by developing a complete suite of microservices called mSuite that we use to facilitate our study. Our characterization reveals that the relationship between optimal OS/network parameters and service load is complex. Our primary finding is that non-optimal OS scheduler decisions can degrade microservice tail latency by up to ~87%.
Secondly, we investigate how threading design critically impacts microservice tail latency by developing a taxonomy of threading models -“ a structured understanding of the implications of how microservices manage concurrency and interact with RPC interfaces under wide-ranging loads. We develop mTune, a system that has two features: (1) a novel framework that abstracts threading model implementation from application code, and (2) a novel automatic load adaptation system that curtails microservice tail latency by exploiting inherent latency trade-offs revealed in our taxonomy to transition among threading models. We study mTune in the context of mSuite to demonstrate up to 1.9x tail latency improvements over static threading choices and state-of-the-art adaptation techniques.
Biography: Akshitha is a fourth year Ph.D. student at the University of Michigan, where she is advised by Dr. Thomas F. Wenisch. Her primary research interests are in software systems and computer architecture. Her research focuses on developing software and hardware optimizations to improve the performance of large-scale distributed data center system.
Host: Xuehai Qian, xuehai.qian@usc.edu
More Information: 18.10.11 Akshitha Sriraman_CENG.pdf
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 248
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Brienne Moore
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Munushian Seminar - Demetrios Christodoulides, Friday, October 12th at 2PM in EEB 132
Fri, Oct 12, 2018 @ 02:00 PM - 03:30 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Demetrios Christodoulides, CREOL The College of Optics and Photonics
Talk Title: Optical Thermodynamics of Nonlinear Highly Multimode Systems
Abstract: The past few years have witnessed a resurgence of interest in multimode waveguide structures, predominantly driven by the ever-increasing demand for higher information capacities. This renaissance, in turn, incited a flurry of activities in the general area of nonlinear multimode fiber optics. The sheer complexity associated with the presence of hundreds or thousands of nonlinearly interacting modes that collectively act as a many-body system, has led to new opportunities in observing a multitude of novel optical effects that would have been otherwise impossible in single-mode settings. In this talk, a thermodynamic theory capable of describing complex, highly multimoded, nonlinear optical systems is presented. It is shown that the mode occupancies in such nonlinear multimode arrangements follow a universal behavior that always tends to maximize the system's entropy at steady-state. This thermodynamic response takes place irrespective of the type of nonlinearities involved and can be utilized to either heat or cool an optical multimode system. Aspects associated with adiabatic compressions and expansions will be discussed along with the possibility for all-optical Carnot cycles.
Biography: Biography: Demetrios Christodoulides is the Cobb Family Endowed Chair and Pegasus Professor of Optics at CREOL-the College of Optics and Photonics of the University of Central Florida. He received his Ph.D. degree from Johns Hopkins University in 1986 and he subsequently joined Bellcore as a post-doctoral fellow. Between 1988 and 2002 he was with the faculty of the Department of Electrical Engineering at Lehigh University. His research interests include linear and nonlinear optical beam interactions, synthetic optical materials, optical solitons, and quantum electronics. He has authored and co-authored more than 350 papers. He is a Fellow of the Optical Society of America and the American Physical Society. He is the recipient of the 2011 Wood Prize and 2018 Max Born Award of OSA.
Host: EE-Electrophysics
More Info: https://minghsiehee.usc.edu/about/lectures/munushian/
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 132
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Marilyn Poplawski
Event Link: https://minghsiehee.usc.edu/about/lectures/munushian/
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Quantum Supremacy and its Applications
Fri, Oct 12, 2018 @ 02:30 PM - 03:30 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Scott Aaronson, University of Texas at Austin
Talk Title: Quantum Supremacy and its Applications
Abstract: In the near future, there will likely be special-purpose quantum computers with 50-70 high-quality qubits and controllable nearest-neighbor couplings. In this talk, I'll discuss general theoretical foundations for how to use such devices to demonstrate quantum supremacy: that is, a clear quantum speedup for some task, motivated by the goal of overturning the Extended Church-Turing Thesis (which says that all physical systems can be efficiently simulated by classical computers) as confidently
as possible. This part of the talk is based on joint work with Lijie
Chen. Then, in a second part, I'll discuss new, not-yet-published work on how these experiments could be used to generate cryptographically certified random bits, for use in cryptocurrencies and other applications.
Biography: Scott Aaronson is David J. Bruton Centennial Professor of Computer Science at the University of Texas at Austin. He received his bachelor's from Cornell University and his PhD from UC Berkeley, and did postdoctoral fellowships at the Institute for Advanced Study as well as the University of Waterloo. Before coming to UT Austin, he spent nine years as a professor in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT. Aaronson's research in theoretical computer science has focused mainly on the capabilities and limits of quantum computers. His first book, Quantum Computing Since Democritus, was published in 2013 by Cambridge University Press. He received the National Science Foundation Alan T. Waterman Award, the United States PECASE Award, the Vannevar Bush Fellowship, the Tomassoni-Chisesi Prize in Physics, and MIT's Junior Bose Award for Excellence in Teaching.
Host: Xuehai Qian, xuehai.qian@usc.edu
More Information: 18.10.12 Scott Aaronson Seminar .pdf
Location: Ronald Tutor Hall of Engineering (RTH) - 109
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Brienne Moore