Past Events

Community detection in networks is a key exploratory tool with applications ranging from identifying protein complexes in protein-protein interaction networks to scaling network computation by divide and conquer-type algorithms. Many clustering algorithms make heuristic choices which work well in practice, but their theoretical underpinnings are not well understood. For example, it is commonly believed that normalizing the network adjacency matrix improves the performance of Spectral Clustering.

In this discussion we consider load balancing on a large graph. Each edge has a unit of load that it wishes to distribute between its nodes in the most balanced way. For infinite graphs the corresponding load balancing problem exhibits nonuniqueness, related with role of boundary conditions in statistical mechanical models.  

Join Professor Christopher Jermaine from Rice University for a talk that describes the SimSQL System, a platform for writing and executing machine-learning codes. Since SimSQL is at its heart a relational database system, it is designed to support data independence. That is, the same declarative statistical inference codes can be used regardless of data set size, computer hardware, and physical data storage and distribution across machines.One concern is that a platform supporting data independence in this way will not perform well.

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Join WNCG Faculty Todd Humphreys, White Rose of Drachs' Captain Andrew Schofield and a panel of experts as they share the firsthand account of controlling a yacht with a custom-made GPS device. Must have SXSW Interactive Badge for entry.   For more information, visit the SXSW 2014 schedule. 

Modern sociotechnical systems are exemplified by individuals, teams and organizations working in concert with advanced and autonomous technologies to accomplish complex tasks. The challenge is to design these systems to capitalize on both human and machine capabilities by letting humans do what they do best and letting machines do what they do best to increase effectiveness and efficiency.

Rapid increase in the use of wireless services over the last two decades has lead the problem of the radio-frequency (RF) spectrum exhaustion. More specifically, due to this RF spectrum scarcity, additional RF bandwidth allocation, as utilized in the recent past, is not anymore a viable solution to fulfill the demand for more wireless applications and higher data rates.

Digital infinite impulse response (IIR) filters are popular in audio signal processing applications because they typically have a much lower computational cost than finite impulse response (FIR) filters designed to the same specifications. However, IIR filter design is difficult, particularly for arbitrary frequency responses that span multiple octaves, as is common in audio. A recent technique known as frequency warping offers a new way to design arbitrary IIR filters with much greater accuracy than before.Dr.

Information acquisition problems form a class of stochastic decision problems in which a decision maker, by carefully controlling a sequence of actions with uncertain outcomes, dynamically refines the belief about (Markovian) parameters of interest. Examples arise in patient care, computer vision, spectrum utilization, and joint source--channel coding.In this talk, as a special case of information acquisition, we consider the problem of (two-dimensional) search in an active hypothesis testing framework.

Professor Alan Bovik of the WNCG gives the Keynote Address at the SPIE Conference on Image Quality and System Performance. The address, entitled "Perceptual tools for quality-aware video networks," was held in San Francisco, CA in February 2014.