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Events for the 4th week of October
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ECE Seminar: High-Assurance Design Methods for Trustworthy Autonomous Cyber-Physical Systems
Tue, Oct 18, 2022 @ 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Professor Pierluigi Nuzzo, Ming Hsieh Dept of ECE, USC Viterbi School of Engineering
Talk Title: High-Assurance Design Methods for Trustworthy Autonomous Cyber-Physical Systems
Abstract: Correctness and safety assurance is of utmost importance in mission-critical systems for various applications, for example, in avionics, automobiles, robotics, and manufacturing. In these systems, increasingly more sophisticated tasks that were previously allocated to humans are expected to be performed by software, including modern artificial intelligence (AI) methods. One of the biggest challenges to full autonomy is arguably in showing that these AI and autonomous software functions will still satisfy the stringent safety and correctness requirements of mission-critical systems in uncertain or unpredictable environments. In this talk, I will introduce our approach toward enhancing design-time assurance for trustworthy autonomous cyber-physical systems. I will present synthesis methods for correct-by-construction design of optimal control and reinforcement learning policies in uncertain and unknown environments with provable guarantees on the satisfaction of complex missions, expressed by temporal logic specifications. I will then introduce the rich specification formalism of stochastic assume-guarantee contracts for compositional, quantitative requirement analysis and system verification under uncertainty. Finally, I will discuss how stochastic contracts can provide the semantic foundation for the automated construction of assurance cases, structured arguments about system dependability, which can accelerate system certification and help transition from a process-driven to a property-driven certification approach.
Biography: Pierluigi Nuzzo is an Assistant Professor and the Kenneth C. Dahlberg Early Career Chair in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at USC, where he is also the Associate Director of the Center for Autonomy and Artificial Intelligence. He received the PhD in Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences from UC Berkeley, and BS and MS degrees in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Pisa and the Sant'Anna School of Advanced Studies in Pisa, Italy. Before joining UC Berkeley, he held research positions at the University of Pisa and IMEC, Leuven, Belgium, working on analog and mixed-signal circuit design. His interests focus on methodologies and tools for high-assurance design of cyber-physical systems and systems-on-chip, including the application of formal methods and optimization theory to problems in embedded and cyber-physical systems, electronic design automation, requirement engineering, security, and artificial intelligence. He received the 2022 Early-Career Award from the IEEE Technical Committee on Cyber-Physical Systems, the DARPA Young Faculty Award in 2020, the NSF CAREER Award in 2019, and best paper and design competition awards from the International Conference on Formal Methods and Models for System Design (MEMOCODE), the International Conference on Cyber-Physical Systems (ICCPS), the Design Automation Conference (DAC) and the International Solid-State Circuit Conference (ISSCC). His awards also include the IBM PhD Fellowship, the UC Berkeley Outstanding Instructor Award, and the UC Berkeley EECS David J. Sakrison Memorial Prize for his doctoral research.
Host: Professor Richard M. Leahy (leahy@sipi.usc.edu)
Webcast: https://usc.zoom.us/j/91207739138?pwd=aDVQOXRwNUZyMm5DYXhvTTM5K0Z1dz09Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 248
WebCast Link: https://usc.zoom.us/j/91207739138?pwd=aDVQOXRwNUZyMm5DYXhvTTM5K0Z1dz09
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Mayumi Thrasher
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Center of Autonomy and AI, Center for Cyber-Physical Systems and the Internet of Things, and Ming Hsieh Institute Seminar Series
Wed, Oct 19, 2022 @ 02:00 PM - 03:00 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Abhishek Cauligi, Jet Propulsion Laboratory
Talk Title: Enabling Long Range Autonomy for the Next Generation of Spacecraft Robotic Missions
Series: Center for Cyber-Physical Systems and Internet of Things
Abstract: Surface rovers have a rich history of use for planetary body exploration, but current rover missions are limited to low operational speeds and require significant ground-in-the-loop management and teleoperation to compute safe paths for the rovers to follow. However, the next generation of proposed planetary surface rover missions require significantly faster operating speeds in order to accomplish the mission tasks and objectives, thereby making autonomy a key enabling technology for such missions. This talk will discuss the challenges ahead in developing, validating, and safely deploying autonomy algorithms for the next generation of spacecraft robotic missions. The first half of this talk will focus on the autonomy architecture for NASA's Cooperative Autonomous Distributed Robotic Explorers (CADRE) mission, a technology demonstration mission that will deliver a team of autonomous rovers to the Moon's Reiner Gamma region in 2024. The latter half of the talk will focus on how recent advances in bridging data-driven approaches with nonlinear optimization can allow for embedding sophisticated planning and decision making capabilities on resource-constrained autonomous systems.
Biography: Abhishek Cauligi is a Robotics Technologist with the Surface Mobility Group within the Robotics section of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. He received his B.S. in Aerospace Engineering from the University of Michigan - Ann Arbor in 2016 and his PhD. in Aeronautics and Astronautics from Stanford University under the supervision of Prof. Marco Pavone in 2021, where he was a recipient of the NASA Space Technology Research Fellowship (NSTRF/NSTRGO). His research interests lie in leveraging recent advances in nonlinear optimization, machine learning, and control theory towards planning and control for complex spacecraft robotic systems.
Host: Somil Bansal, somilban@usc.edu
Webcast: https://usc.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_ySGInGwKRKKHX7NHJwTk3QLocation: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 132
WebCast Link: https://usc.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_ySGInGwKRKKHX7NHJwTk3Q
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Talyia White
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MHI ISSS Seminar - Dr. Kamran Entesari, Friday, Oct. 21st at 2pm in EEB 132 and via Zoom
Fri, Oct 21, 2022 @ 02:00 PM - 03:30 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Kamran Entesari, Texas A&M University
Talk Title: Recent Advances in Millimeter-wave Silicon Photonics Circuits for Wireless Communications
Series: Integrated Systems
Abstract: Nowadays, continuously growing wireless traffic shapes the progress in the wireless communication systems. Therefore, next generation of wireless communication systems are actively
investigated to accommodate expanding data traffic of the future. As one of the promising candidates, silicon photonics devices and circuits are able to improve the performance of the future wireless system.
In this seminar, potential hybrid-integrated mm-wave silicon photonics receivers for future wireless communication systems are explored. The proposed mm-wave silicon photonics reconfigurable receiver front-end can be programmed as either a mm-wave band-pass filter (BPF) for channel selection or a mmwave notch filter for jammer rejection in adjacent and alternate channels within 20-43.5 GHz frequency range. This photonically-assisted mm-wave receiver is optimized for minimum noise figure (NF), maximum linearity or third-order input intercept point (IIP3) and maximum signal to noise ratio (SNR) by optical modulator bias control and optical amplification. Meanwhile, silicon photonics devices are
vulnerable to process and temperature variations. As a result, they require manual calibration, which is expensive, time consuming, and prone to human errors. Therefore, precise automatic calibration solutions with modified monitor-based silicon photonic filter structures are demonstrated and employed in the mmwave silicon photonics receiver. Also, thermal crosstalk effect in the photonic devices is investigated, and substrate thinning is proposed to suppress this effect and reduce calibration time to less than half. The proposed monitor-based tuning method compensates fabrication variations and thermal crosstalk by controlling micro-heaters as tuning elements individually using electrical monitors. This approach
successfully demonstrates calibration and dynamic tuning of silicon photonics filters in the mm-wave receiver from severely degraded initial magnitude response to a well-defined magnitude response.
Biography: Kamran Entesari received his Ph.D. degree from University of Michigan Ann Arbor, in computer Engineering at
Texas A&M University, College Station, where he is currently a Professor. His research interests include the design of RF/mm-wave integrated circuits and systems, and integrated RF/mm-wave photonics for wireless communications and sensing.
Prof. Entesari was a recipient of the 2017 and 2018 Qualcomm Faculty Award, and the 2011 National Science Foundation CAREER Award. He was the corecipient of the 2009 Semiconductor Research Corporation Design Contest Second Place Award, the Best
Student Paper Award of the IEEE RFIC Symposium in 2014 (second place), the IEEE Microwave Theory and Techniques Society award in 2011 (third place), and the IEEE Antennas and Propagation Society award in 2013 (Honorable Mention). He is currently a Technical Program Committee Member of the IEEE RFIC Symposiums and was an Associate Editor of the IEEE Microwave and Wireless Components Letters and a Member of Editorial Board for IEEE Solid-State Circuits Letters. He has published more than 150 peerreviewed
IEEE journal and conference papers.
Host: MHI - ISSS, Hashemi, Chen and Sideris
More Info: Meeting ID: 928 5171 5526, Passcode: 638839
More Information: Abstract and Bio-Oct 21-Entesari.pdf
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 132
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Marilyn Poplawski
Event Link: Meeting ID: 928 5171 5526, Passcode: 638839