He Wang, University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign Friday, January 15, 2:50-4:05 PM, 2A26 Swearingen Engineering Center Abstract: Indoor localization has been a tantalizing problem in mobile computing, and despite significant research, there is no solution yet in the mainstream. In this talk, I will discuss the landscape of indoor localization. I will also talk about my own research, UnLoc, which breaks away from pure RF based localization (e.g., cellular, Wi-Fi) and shows the benefits of leveraging smartphone sensors (accelerometers, gyroscopes, magnetometers, etc.) into the solution framework. I will describe additional solutions, VideoLoc, where feeds from surveillance cameras can be leveraged for highly precise localization and customer interaction, without compromising privacy of individual users. I will end with how some of our core techniques are not specific to localization and can be extended to other applications such as augmented reality. Bio: He Wang is a PhD candidate in the department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign. His research focuses on designing mobile sensing systems, with an emphasis on indoor localization. His work has been featured in the media such as Scientific American, MIT Technology Review, LA Times, Yahoo News and Daily Mail. He received his master’s degree from Duke University in 2013 and bachelor’s degree from Tsinghua University in 2011. This seminar is open to anyone who is interested, not just students enrolled in the CSCE 791 class. Please consider attending.

ACM is hosting a Career Fair Prep presentation by the Technical Youth program at Brooksource. They are going to give tips on preparing for a career fair and interviews as well as share IT market trends and LinkedIn tips and tricks. Pizza will be provided so please RSVP on the Facebook event on the ACM group if you are able. Below is the link to the event and attached is the flyer. https://www.facebook.com/events/457789534405726/

Dr. Tom Bradicich GM & VP Hewlett Packard Enterprises Where and When: Tuesday, Nov. 24 Amoco Hall, Swearingen 2:50 PM- 4:00 PM  What: An engineer who is a well-known worldwide leader in IT shares his wisdom for leading and succeeding. Why Come? Dr. Bradicich led the design team for IBM’s first prototype notebook (laptop) computer. Currently he is a general manager and vice president of Hewett Packard Enterprises and leads three global HP Discovery Labs in the US, France, and Singapore. He holds several patents. Dr. Bradicich has advised foreign governments, major universities, and global industry leaders. He serves as a technical advisor to HP legal on business and IP contracts with third parties. He is leading the global business unit Hyperscale Servers and Systems (IoT=Internet of Things). His systems received an InfoWorld 2015 Technology of the Year Award. He has earned the BSEE, MSEE, and PhD Engineering degrees, serves on the Dean’s Advisory Board of the College of Engineering at the University of Florida, and has guest lectured and served as adjunct faculty at several universities, teaching courses in the Departments of Electrical and Computer Engineering. Dr. Bradicich is sought after by the media. He is coming to USC as a favor and in a most unusual and generous offer has decided not to charge for his services. Students should take advantage of hearing wisdom from such a world leader. You can see his accomplishments by checking these things out: 1. LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tombradicichphd 2. Google Tom Bradicich: See the quotes by him 3. His Blog: http://tombradicichphd.tumblr.com/

This semester's Code-a-thon is scheduled for November 20th! Be ready for an exciting night of coding and more coding! We will have pizza, prizes, and problems, you don't need more than that. There are problems for all levels of programmers, split into 145, 146, and 240+ divisions, so don't be afraid to come out! We have 1D11 and 1D15 reserved for the event! Hope to see you there! Please RSVP on facebook: https://www.facebook.com/events/1656867807935539/

More information at http://web.sa.sc.edu/cgc/events/game-design-workshop/

ACM Talk Speaker: Alex Wong - Validation Engineer at Intel, an alumnus of the University of South Carolina Time: November 17th at 6:00pm. Place: Room 2A14/16 of Swearingen There will be pizza! Please RSVP on facebook: https://www.facebook.com/events/1514532028863460/

Dissertation Defense Candidate: Yang Song Advisor: Dr. Jason O’Kane Date: Friday, November 13, 2015 Time: 1:00pm Location: Swearingen, 3A00 (Dean’s Conference Room) Abstract This dissertation first presents our geometric-­based planning algorithm for robots to describe and reason about uncertainty, termed the `"constrained geometric approximation approach" Previous work delivered computationally expensive methods to represent a robot's knowledge of its states and uncertainty explicitly, using an information state in the information space. In contrast, our approach is computationally inexpensive. Specifically, this approximation method uses simple geometric data structures which are suitable for the robots with extreme limitations in both sensing and computation. We provided simulations of sensor ­based navigation tasks, along with experimental results. We conclude that the robot can achieve similar success rate at a small fraction of the computational cost, by maintaining simple representations of the incomplete information. The dissertation also contributes two decentralized algorithms for the multi-­robot lattice pattern formation problem. Prior work solved such problems by constituting only particular lattice patterns. Our approaches enable robots to form arbitrary lattice patterns without global knowledge of the system. Both of the formation algorithms feature in representing the lattice as a directed graph, in which edges show the desired rigid body transformations between the robot and its neighbors. Another common feature of the two algorithms is that robots organize themselves using tree structures. The first formation algorithm enables each robot to perform distributed task assignment using only local information. The experimental results demonstrate that the algorithm executes efficiently and scales reasonably well as the number of robots increases. Moreover, the algorithm is stateless and is robust to system failures. We analyze the pitfalls of the proposed task-assignment-­based formation algorithm. According to the analysis, we have designed another formation algorithm that has new features including: The bounded execution time, a novel motion strategy that guarantees the network connectivity, and the improved final lattice formation quality. Furthermore, we have proved the correctness of the new algorithm and conducted groups of experiments to compare the timing performance and the formation qualities of both formation algorithms.

THESIS DEFENSE Candidate: Melissa Henderson Advisor: Dr. Jenay Beer Date: Friday, November 6, 2015 Time: 2:15pm Place: Swearingen, 3A75 Conference Room Abstract Industrial applications have not been extensively researched regarding human-robot interaction. This project investigated industrial robot acceptance in the context of one manufacturing site. Acceptance was examined in relation to the workforce and conditions of acceptance were identified using mixed methodology. Quantitative (surveys) and qualitative (interviews) data was used to measure and analyze the existing state of technology acceptance and site culture. Based on this exploratory study, it was found the manufacturing facility has a weak culture but would be generally accepting of industrial robots if the technology were easy to use and useful. The identified boundary conditions to acceptance included training, job satisfaction and the opportunity to work in teams. It is hypothesized there was hesitation towards acceptance for age groups > 42 years and with less technology experience or exposure.

Candidate: Arjang Fahim Advisor: Dr. Homayoun Valafar Date: Monday, November 9, 2015 Time: 10:00am Place: Swearingen, 3A75 Conference Room Abstract Proteins are often referred as working molecule of a cell, performing many structural, functional and regulatory processes. Revealing the function of proteins still remains a challenging problem. Advancement in genomics sequence projects produces large protein sequence repository, but due to technical difficulty and cost related to structure determination, the number of identified protein structure is far behind. Novel structures identification are particularly important for a number of reasons: they generate models of similar proteins for comparison; identify evolutionary relationships; further contribute to our understanding of protein function and mechanism; and allow for the fold of other family members to be inferred. Considering the evolutionary mechanisms responsible for the generation of new structures in proteins, it has been speculated that there may be a limited number of unique protein folds as few as ten thousand families. Currently, the Protein Data Bank consists of nearly 113,000 protein structures, but less than 1,500 families are represented, and almost no new fold families have been reported since 2008. Ideally, solved protein structures for new protein families would be used as templates for in silico structure prediction methods, and the results of both solved and predicted structures would in turn be used to infer function. However, such an approach requires new, efficient and cost-effective computational methods for target selection and structure determination. Traditional characterization of a protein structure by NMR spectroscopy is expensive and time consuming regardless of the structural novelty of the target protein. In an effort to expand the applicability of NMR spectroscopy, the community is continually focused on the development of new and economical approaches that enable the study of more challenging, or structurally novel proteins. While many advances have been made in this regard, very little attention has been made on reducing the cost of structural characterization of routine proteins. Probability Density Profile Analysis (PDPA) has been previously introduced to directly address the economies of structure determination of routine proteins and subsequently, identification of novel structures from minimal sets of NMR data. The latest version of PDPA (2D-PDPA) has been successful in identifying the structural homologue of an unknown protein within a library of 1000 decoy structures. In order to further expand the selectivity and sensitivity of PDPA, incorporation of additional data is necessary. However, current PDPA approach is limited by its computational requirements, and its expansion to include additional data will render it computationally infeasible. Here we propose a new method and developments that eliminate PDPA's computational limitations and allow inclusion of Residual Dipolar Coupling (RDC) data from multiple vector types in multiple alignment media. Additionally nD-PDPA will be used to refine an unknown protein to obtain closer structure to the native in terms of bb-rmsd.

Please join us, as women in Computing at USC welcomes guest speaker Jill Solovey! Jill is the Director of Enterprise Solution Development at Premier, Inc., a healthcare IT company focused on transforming healthcare with collaboration and technology. Jill will speak about her experiences in computing and software engineering. As always, pizza will be provided. Date: Monday Nov. 2nd Time: 6:30pm Where: Swearingen 3A75 Please RSVP via Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/events/860256300755808/