SPOTLIGHT ON RESEARCH AT USC VITERBI

These Spotlight on Research at USC Viterbi, is a virtual series of technical talks, or lectures given by our faculty. The topic presented by the faculty lasts for 60 minutes where attendees are free to take notes and ask the faculty related questions.

This is an open and free event - anyone can attend with prior registration.

Research Topics:

• Engineering the Internet of Things: An introduction to nearly two decades of research into the Internet of Things (IoT) at the University of Southern California will describe our work on designing protocols and systems for energy-efficient and reliable wireless embedded networks including robotic networks, as well as distributed edge-cloud computing and blockchain technologies for IoT. The discussion will involve design of algorithms and systems for a range of applications indoor localization, smart cities, personalized learning, and most pertinent to our current times, tracking epidemics.
  
• Human-centered Multimodal Machine Intelligence: Multimodal machine intelligence offers enormous possibilities for helping understand the human condition and in creating technologies to support and enhance human experiences [1, 2]. What makes such approaches and systems exciting is the promise they hold for adaptation and personalization in the presence of the rich and vast inherent heterogeneity, variety and diversity within and across people. Multimodal engineering approaches can help analyze human trait (e.g., age), state (e.g., emotion), and behavior dynamics (e.g., interaction synchrony) objectively, and at scale. Machine intelligence could also help detect and analyze deviation in patterns from what is deemed typical. These techniques in turn can assist, facilitate or enhance decision making by humans, and by autonomous systems. Realizing such a promise requires addressing two major lines of, oft intertwined, challenges: creating inclusive technologies that work for everyone while enabling tools that can illuminate the source of variability or difference of interest.
• Smart Collaborative Robots: Many emerging robotics applications require the use of multiple collaborating robots to operate under human supervision. To be useful in such applications, collaborative robots will need to (1) program themselves, (2) efficiently learn from the observed performance, (3) safely operate in the presence of uncertainty, (4) appropriately call for help during the execution of challenging tasks, and (5) effectively communicate with humans. This presentation will provide an overview of the advances in physics-aware artificial intelligence that are being used to enable robots to automatically make decisions to meet aforementioned requirements.