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Events for the 4th week of October
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Center for Systems and Control (CSC@USC) and Ming Hsieh Institute for Electrical Engineering
Mon, Oct 23, 2017 @ 02:00 PM - 03:00 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Fabio Pasqualetti, University of California, Riverside
Talk Title: Synchronization Patterns in Networks of Kuramoto Oscillators: A Network-Theoretic Approach for Analysis and Control
Series: Fall 2017 Joint CSC@USC/CommNetS-MHI Seminar Series
Abstract: Synchronized behaviors among the nodes of a network are ubiquitous in nature and in several man-made systems. While some systems require complete synchronization among all the parts to function properly, others rely on cluster or partial synchronization, where subsets of nodes exhibit coherent behaviors that remain independent from the evolution of other nodes in the network. For example, while patterns of partial synchronization have been observed in healthy individuals, complete synchronization in neural systems is often associated with degenerative diseases including Parkinson's and Huntington's diseases, and epilepsy.
In this talk, I will present novel network-theoretic methods to predict and control the formation of synchronization patterns within a network of Kuramoto oscillators. I will show that exact patterns of synchronized oscillators are possible if and only if the interconnection structure and the oscillators satisfy certain stringent conditions. On the other hand, approximately synchronized patterns, which often appears in experimental time series, can emerge more easily depending on a graded combination of the interconnection structure and the intrinsic properties of the oscillators. Further, I will present structural control schemes to enforce the emergence of a desired synchronization landscape and, lastly, I will show how the proposed techniques find applicability in a broad class of network analysis and control problems.
Biography: Fabio Pasqualetti is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering, University of California, Riverside. He completed a Doctor of Philosophy degree in Mechanical Engineering at the University of California, Santa Barbara, in 2012, a Laurea Magistrale degree (M.Sc. equivalent) in Automation Engineering at the University of Pisa, Italy, in 2007, and a Laurea degree (B.Sc. equivalent) in Computer Engineering at the University of Pisa, Italy, in 2004. He received a Young Investigator Program Award from ARO in 2017, and the TCNS Outstanding Paper Award from IEEE CSS in 2016. His main research interest is in secure control systems, with application to multi-agent networks, distributed computing, and power networks. Other interests include computational neuroscience, vehicle routing, and combinatorial optimization, with application to distributed area patrolling and persistent surveillance.
Host: Ashutosh Nayyar, ashutosh.nayyar@usc.edu
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 132
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Gerrielyn Ramos
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Upper Airway Dynamic Imaging During Awake and Asleep Tidal Breathing
Wed, Oct 25, 2017 @ 01:30 AM - 02:30 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Chantal Darquenne, PhD, Professor, Dept. of Medicine University of California, San Diego
Talk Title: Upper Airway Dynamic Imaging During Awake and Asleep Tidal Breathing
Series: Medical Imaging Seminar Series
Abstract: Obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) is characterized by recurrent partial or complete airway closure during sleep, and has important clinical implications ranging from disruption of sleep with daytime sequelae of excessive sleepiness and poor quality of life to adverse cardiovascular or metabolic outcomes. While polysomnography and studies based on measurements of airway pressures and resistance have provided a wealth of information on upper airway physiology, they are unable to assess the three- dimensional anatomy of the upper airway and its conformational changes during breathing. Knowledge of the morphology and mechanical behavior of this structure is essential for a more complete understanding of the occurrence of upper airway obstruction. Such information can be obtained with imaging technology and will be the focus of this seminar.Data will be presented from a group of OSA subjects and a group of age- and BMI-matched healthy controls that underwent MR imaging to assess upper airway morphometry and changes in airway size during tidal breathing. Data were collected both during wakefulness and natural sleep with simultaneous measurement of nasal-oral flow partition and sleep state and stages. Results show significant differences in the magnitude of the changes in upper airway size over a tidal breath between OSA subjects and controls both during wakefulness and natural sleep suggesting that, for tidal breathing conditions, dynamic OSA imaging during wakefulness is representative of behavior during sleep.
Biography: Chantal Darquenne is a Professor of Medicine at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) and the President-elect of the International Society for Aerosols in Medicine. She earned her Ph.D. degree in Applied Sciences from the Université Libre de Bruxelles (Belgium) in 1995. She completed a postdoctoral fellowship in the Division of Physiology at UCSD where she still holds her current position. Her laboratory uses an interdisciplinary approach combining engineering principles and lung physiology concepts to address her primary research interests that focus on aerosol transport and deposition in the lung, on lung ventilation inhomogeneities in health and disease, and more recently on upper airway dynamics in obstructive sleep apnea.
Host: Professor Krishna Nayak
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 132
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Talyia White
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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
Wed, Oct 25, 2017 @ 02:00 PM - 03:00 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Thomas Wahl, Northeastern University
Talk Title: Stabilizing Numeric Programs against Platform Uncertainties
Abstract: Floating-point arithmetic (FPA) is a loosely standardized approximation of real arithmetic available on many computers today, and widely employed in cyber-physical systems. The use of approximation incurs commonly underestimated risks for the reliability of numeric software, including reproducibility issues caused by the relatively large degree of freedom for FPA implementers offered by the IEEE 754 floating-point standard. If left untreated, such problems can seriously interfere with program portability and simply our trust in numeric results.
In this talk I discuss numeric programs' lack of robustness against platform variations, including irreproducible control flow and invariants that hold on some platforms but not others. I also demonstrate how such reproducibility violations can be repaired with low impact on performance, which results in a more stable program execution. I illustrate the use of our techniques both on decision-making and on purely numeric programs, and present an outlook to its applicability to addressing reproducibility issues among CPU and GPU versions of kernel support vector machines. Much of this is joint work with Miriam Leeser at Northeastern University, as well as our respective students.
Biography: Thomas Wahl joined the faculty of Northeastern University in 2011. He moved to Boston from Oxford/United Kingdom, where he was a Research Officer in the Computing Laboratory (now Department of Computer Science). Prior to the Oxford experience, Wahl held a postdoctoral position at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zurich. He obtained a PhD degree in Computer Science from the University of Texas at Austin in 2007.
Wahl's research concerns the reliability of complex computing systems. Two domains notorious for their fragility are concurrency and numerical computing. With colleagues, Wahl has developed leading algorithms and techniques for the automated analysis of concurrent software, such as multi-threaded or data-parallel programs, using rigorous formal techniques, which are able to track down deep and unintuitive program bugs. He has also investigated how floating-point arithmetic can "hijack" a program's computation when run on non-standard architectures, such as heterogeneous and custom-made embedded platforms.
Host: Paul Bogdan
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 248
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Estela Lopez
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Causal Inference in Complex Networks
Thu, Oct 26, 2017 @ 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Negar Kiyavash, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Talk Title: Causal Inference in Complex Networks
Abstract: One of the paramount challenges of this century is that of understanding complex, dynamic, large-scale networks. Such high-dimensional networks, including social, financial, and biological networks, cover the planet and dominate modern life. In this talk, we propose novel approaches to inference in such networks, for both active (interventional) and passive (observational) learning scenarios. We highlight how timing could be utilized as a degree of freedom that provides rich information about the dynamics. This information allows resolving direction of causation even when only a subset of the nodes is observed (latent setting). In the presence of large data, we propose algorithms that identify optimal or near-optimal approximations to the topology of the network.
Biography: Negar Kiyavash is Willett Faculty Scholar at the University of Illinois and a joint Associate Professor of Industrial and Enterprise Engineering (IE) and Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE). She is the director of Advance Data Analytics Program in IE and is further affiliated with the Coordinated Science Laboratory (CSL) and the Information Trust Institute. She received her Ph.D. degree in ECE from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2006. Her research interests are in design and analysis of algorithms for network inference and security. She is a recipient of NSF CAREER and AFOSR YIP awards and the Illinois College of Engineering Dean's Award for Excellence in Research.
Host: Urbashi Mitra, ubli@usc.edu, EEB 536, x04667
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 248
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Gerrielyn Ramos
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Towards Fully Flexible Energy Autonomous Industrial Wireless Sensor Networks
Fri, Oct 27, 2017 @ 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Hans-Peter Bernhard, Johannes Kepler University Linz, Austria Institute for Communications Engineering and RF-Systems
Talk Title: Towards Fully Flexible Energy Autonomous Industrial Wireless Sensor Networks
Abstract: Wireless communication links in industrial environments are gradually replacing wired solutions. This transition offers more flexibility and enables new technologies and applications to arise. However for industrial monitoring tasks, currently available wireless standards do not meet all requirements, and depending on the application, different standards have to be used. In this overview, results from the European research project Dependable Embedded Wireless Infrastructure (DEWI) are presented, which led to the development of a new highly flexible wireless protocol. The degree of flexibility of the protocol not only allows to meet various requirements in industrial monitoring, but also to cover communication needs of the entire operation cycle of sensor nodes. Additionally, to enable a maximum degree of freedom, it is designed to operate energy autonomously with a strictly limited power budget imposed by energy harvesting. Aside of all theses requirements, synchronized sampling is a very important topic in industrial measurement environments using hundreds of sensors. We show the use of a \alpha\epsilon-modulator to synchronize the nodes within a wireless sensor network. This is a new method to achieve long term synchronization, also during long offline periods, with least possible short term sampling jitter. Closely related to synchronization is clock frequency estimation. Without a highly accurate estimated clock, network synchronization won't work. But, in wireless systems or harsh environments, it is likely that clock events can be missed and, therefore, the observed process has to be treated as a sparse periodic process. To parameterize the clock, current research is applying periodogram estimators at a complexity of at least O(N log N). Here a highly accurate iterative frequency estimator for pulse signals with low computational complexity is shown. It is an unbiased estimator with a complexity of O(N). Furthermore, the mean square error (MSE) of this new efficient approach is proportional to O(N_3) and thus as accurate as periodogram or frequency domain based methods. The talk concludes with a short review and an outline of ongoing and future research in highly flexible wireless sensor networks.
Biography: He received the Dipl.-Ing. (M.Sc.) degree in communication engineering and the Dr. techn. (Ph.D.) degree with distinction from Vienna Technical University in 1991 and 1997, respectively.
From 1985 to 1992 he worked for different companies in the area of database and organizational programming. From 1992 to 1998 he was with the Institute for Communications and Radio Frequency Engineering at the Technical University Vienna as a research assistant and became in 1994 assistant professor at this institute. From 1997 on he started teaching at HTBLA-Steyr. In 1999 he joined the Institute for Communications Engineering and RF-Systems, Johannes Kepler University Linz, as a lecturer and he currently holds a senior researcher position at this institute. He was guest researcher with the Institute for Information Theory and Automation, Academy of Sciences Prague and with the University of Cambridge UK, Engineering Department, Inst. f. Vision Speech and Robotics. Starting in 2004 he served as consultant for several companies as there are Infineon, DICE (Danube Integrated Circuit Engineering GmbH & Co KG), and others. In 2007 he founded a scientific consulting company with focus on assisting handicapped persons and nonprofit health care organizations. He is holding patents in the field of computer science and computer assisting systems for handicapped persons. He has contributed to the following research projects "Nonlinear Methods in Speech processing", "Assisting Handicapped Persons in Computer Handling" and he supervised the research project "Information Theoretic Methods for Load Curve Prediction" in collaboration with SIEMENS power grid department. From 2014 to 2017 he worked also with the European ARTEMIS project DEWI (Dependable Embedded Wireless Infrastructure) focussed on energy efficient sensing, signal processing and communication. Currently he is involved in the joint undertaking of Electronic Components and Systems for European Leadership (ECSEL) on Secure Connected Trustable Things (SCOTT) as a senior scientist. His research interests include algorithm design for wireless communications with a special focus on synchronization, security and energy efficient protocols.
Hans-Peter Bernhard received the GIT-Award in 1991, in the year 2000 he was awarded with the innovation award of Upper Austrian government and he was Austrian representative at the Novartis International Science Week Switzerland with the best Austrian education project in health care. Hans-Peter Bernhard is an IEEE senior member and member of the signal processing society.
Host: Urbashi Mitra, ubli@usc.edu, EEB 536, x04667
Location: 248
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Gerrielyn Ramos