Follow the path of two USC computer engineering students as they move from undergraduates to founding a company through USC's technology incubator. After mixed success with various products and services, the company creates a software product called SpeedTree, which is used by hundreds of game developers including EA, Ubisoft, Activision, Bungie, Microsoft, and Sony. SpeedTree then migrates to the visual effects industry and is used in more than 50 feature films and 30 television productions, earning its developers a technical Academy Award. Engineering and career lessons learned over their 15-year entrepreneurial journey will be shared from the perspective of someone who was right where you are just 20 short years ago. Chris King helped found Interactive Data Visualization Inc. and developed SpeedTree, software that helps create the rich environments in movies and video games. Speedtree's original success in video games was with the company's work on The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, and later it debuted in the film industry with Avatar. King and his colleagues have gone on to receive a Technical Achievement Award at the February 2015 Academy Awards, and continue to develop, support, and promote their software throughout the industry. Talk sponsored by

• ACM Students
• Women in Computing

Prof. Michael N. Huhns Abstract: The Center for Computational Robotics is the outgrowth of two previous research Centers, all with the goal of advancing the capabilities of physical and information systems. The activites of the previous centers can provide a context and perspectives that set the directions for the new Center. This seminar will describe these directions and outline the disciplines needed: from mechanics to ethics. Drs. Jason O’Kane, Yiannis Rekleitis, and Jenay Beer are excited to announce the forming of the Center for Computational Robotics (CCR). We are kicking off a monthly CCR seminar brownbag series this Friday 9/25 from 11:30am-12:30pm. Speaker Prof. Mike Huhns will discuss the history of the Center (formally Center for Information Technology), and we will hold a discussion about the directions for the new research focus. Please join us in Swearingen 3A75

More Information

ACM and WiC are hosting a Resume Workshop next Wednesday, September 16th, at 6:45pm in 2A31 of Swearingen. In order to have enough pizza for everyone, we are asking for people to RSVP on Facebook at: https://www.facebook.com/events/1480529815581991/ Below is some information provided by our guest speaker, David Grim: Last year everyone had fun and learned lots. Based on last year’s experience, below is an overview of what your members can expect: Ca$h prize$ - Some prizes will be awarded for:

• Signing in (Name, CELL #, GMAIL ADDRESS)
• Resume - Bring or email résumé (David@AllenAssociates.net)
• Answering questions. (Hint – for repeat attendees we will ask some of the same questions))
• Looking into the salary crystal ball. What can you expect to earn 5 & 10 years from graduation.

Like last year we will offer résumé ideas on what has worked in the past including:

• Tips that will get the attention of the BEST companies.
• Information Technology résumé formatting (It is different than a standard résumé. What works for a French major is different than for I.T., oui vs wii)
• Information Technology résumé content (We have proven methods that will improve responses from hiring companies.)
• Cover Letters (Our approach will save I.T. folks time.)
• Thank you letters (Our approach will save I.T. folks time.)
• Planning for success in the interview process.
• What is a GUARANTEED interview question?

Did you have a really cool internship this summer? Maybe you did cutting-edge research, or went to a tech conference? We want to hear about your summer! Women in Computing is hosting Summer Rehash, where you can give a flash talk about your summer experience and hear about what your classmates accomplished. As always, pizza is provided! All are welcome. For those students who have never interned before, this will be a great chance to learn about various opportunities! When: Thursday, September 10th at 7:00 pm Where: Location TBD RSVP: https://www.facebook.com/events/1491987947783407/ Sign up to talk: http://goo.gl/forms/lh9xKWLzuQ Check out the Speaker Guidelines: http://bit.ly/1XroX5g

Xiaoyan (Iris) Lin, Assistant Professor in Statistics will give a talk tomorrow in our CSCE 791 – Seminar on Advances in Computing from 2:20PM – 3:10PM in SWGN 2A18. Below please find the details of her talk. The seminar talks are open to all interested graduate students and faculty. Abstract: Interval-censored data occur naturally in many fields and the main feature is that the failure time of interest is not observed exactly, but is known to fall within some interval. In this paper, we propose a semiparametric probit model for analyzing case 2 interval-censored data as an alternative to existing semiparametric models in the literature. Specifically, we propose to approximate the unknown nonparametric nondecreasing function in the probit model with a linear combination of monotone splines, leading to only a finite number of parameters to estimate. Both maximum likelihood and Bayesian estimation methods are proposed. For each method, regression parameters and the baseline survival function are estimated jointly. The proposed methods make no assumptions about the observation process and can be applicable to any interval-censored data with easy implementation. The methods are evaluated by simulation studies and are illustrated by two real-life interval-censored data applications. There are a number of other external speakers that have confirmed that they will give a talk in our seminar. I am currently working to obtain titles, abstracts and bios as early as possible and make them available to Song. Anyways the seminar schedule for this Fall is complete. Please see upcoming talks at: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1nPjHe2JQWbQaSl2pdHRe4qVQFHqTsTVk414….

Come join Women in Computing for our first meeting of the year! Pizza will be provided and all are welcome! We will be discussing plans for the year, and celebrating the start of a new semester. Hope to see you there. Please check out our Facebook page and rsvp to the meeting Where: Swearingen 3A75 When: August 31st at 6:00 pm RSVP at: https://www.facebook.com/events/1524020381222847/

Here is link to a video on how to set up your laptop and or desktop in your dorm for CSCE 145. We will also be having as session with live help in Swearingen 1D11 and 1D15 tomorrow from 10:00-noon. We will help you:

1. Install Java
2. Install eclipse
3. Access the wireless

Below is the link to the video version and you can try it for yourself. Install Java and Computer Basics https://breeze.sc.edu/p3hu5ipju2o/

DISSERTATION DEFENSE Candidate: Youjie Zhou Advisor: Dr. Song Wang Co-Advisor: Dr. Lili Ju Date: Friday, June 19, 2015 Time: 2:00 pm Place: Swearingen (3A75 Conference Room) Abstract Propagated image segmentation is the problem of utilizing the existing segmentation of an image for obtaining a new segmentation of, either a neighboring image in a sequence, or the same image but in different scales. We name these two cases as the inter-image propagation and the intra-image propagation respectively. The inter-image propagation is particularly important to material science, where efficient and accurate segmentation of a sequence of 2D serial-sectioned images of 3D material samples is an essential step to understand the underlying micro-structure and related physical properties. For natural images with objects in different scales, the intra-image propagation, where segmentations are propagated from the finest scale to coarser scales, is able to better capture object boundaries than single-shot segmentations on a fixed image scale. In this work, we first propose an inter-image propagation method named Edge-Weighted Centroid Voronoi Tessellation with Propagation of Consistency Constraint (CCEWCVT) to effectively segment material images. CCEWCVT segments an image sequence by repeatedly propagating a 2D segmentation from one slice to another, and in each step of this propagation, we apply the proposed consistency constraint in the pixel clustering process such that stable structures identified from the previous slice can be well-preserved. We justify the effectiveness of the proposed CCEWCVT method on a 3D material image sequence, and we compare its performance against several state-of-the-art 2D, 3D, propagated segmentation methods. Then for the intra-image propagation, we propose a superpixel construction method named Hierarchical Edge-Weighted Centroidal Voronoi Tessellation (HEWCVT) to accurately capture object boundaries in natural images. We model the problem as a multilevel clustering process: superpixels in one level are clustered to obtain larger size superpixels in the next level. The clustering energy involves both color similarities and the proposed boundary smoothness of superpixels. We further extend HEWCVT to obtain supervoxels on 3D images or videos. Both quantitative and qualitative evaluation results on several standard datasets show that the proposed HEWCVT method achieves superior or comparable performances to other state-of-the-art methods.