College of Science Seminar

Upcoming Seminar

Please join us on Friday, March 8, for our next College of Science seminar. 

In-Person Location: ISB 130 (Seminar room on the ground floor of the ISB)
Virtually: Join us via Zoom: link (Password: 610657).

Friday, March 8 from 3PM - 4PM
Dr. Saptarshi Sengupta
Assistant Professor of Computer Science

Title: Predicting Hard Drive Failures with Multi-Aspect Transformers

Abstract: The global data storage market is projected to grow from $247.32 billion in 2023 to $777.98 billion by 2030. Hard Disk Drive (HDD) failures in datacenters are costly - from catastrophic data loss to a question of goodwill, stakeholders want to avoid it like the plague. An important tool in proactively monitoring against HDD failure is timely estimation of the Remaining Useful Life (RUL). To this end, the Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology (S.M.A.R.T.) employed within HDDs provide critical data for long-term maintenance upholding the security and dependability of these essential data storage devices. Data-driven predictive models in the past have used these S.M.A.R.T. logs and CNN/RNN based architectures heavily to estimate failure. However, they have suffered significantly in providing a confidence interval around the predicted RUL values as well as in processing very long sequences of logs. In addition, some of these approaches, such as those based on LSTMs, are inherently slow to train and have tedious feature engineering overheads. To overcome these challenges, the community has moved towards attention-based learning. In this talk, I will introduce a custom, multi-aspect Transformer architecture - a Temporal-Fusion Bi-encoder Self-attention Transformer (TFBeST) for predicting failures in hard-drives. It is an encoder-decoder based deep learning technique that enhances the context gained from understanding health statistics sequences and predicts a sequence of the number of days remaining before a disk potentially fails. I will also highlight a confidence margin statistic that can help manufacturers replace a hard drive within a time frame. Extensive experiments on HDD data from major manufacturers show the excellent performance of this custom architecture against the competitor SoTA RUL prediction methods during inference over 10-year device logs. Although validated on HDD fault estimation, the TFBeST architecture is well-suited for other prognostics applications with some adaptation.

Calendar

Please feel free to add and share the College of Science seminars calendar to stay up to date on both college and department seminars. The shareable link is here.

Past Seminars

February 16, 2024, Dr. Kim Blisniuk, Associate Professor of Geology, titled: "What is earthquake geology? A journey through earthquake hazard and faults of the Bay Area through the eyes of an earthquake geologist"

February 9, 2024, Dr. Katherine Wilkinson, Professor of Biology, titled: "The Muscle Spindle: The Most Important Sensory Organ You’ve Never Heard Of"

November 3, 2023, Dr. Leila Khatib, Assistant Professor of Biology, titled: "Viral Surrogates and One Water California"

October 13, 2023, Dr. Siri Veland, Assistant Professor of Geology, titled: "Phasing out coal in carbon and coal intensive regions in Europe – where are the tipping points?"

September 29, 2023, Dr. Fred Larabee, Assistant Professor of Biology, titled: "Collections-based research on insect form and function at the J. Gordon Edwards Insect Museum"

September 15, 2023, Dr. Nick Esker, Assistant Professor of Chemistry, titled: "利记 Targetry: Thin film chemistry to investigate nuclear reactions far from stability"

September 8, 2023, Dr. Fabio Di Troia, Assistant Professor of Computer Science, titled: "Generating Synthetic Malware Data for Zero-Day Detection"

August 25, 2023, Dr. Yan X Zhang, Associate Professor of Mathematics and Statistics, titled: "利记 Student Success in Blockchain Research"

May 5, 2023, Dr. Ardem Patapoutian, Department of Neuroscience and an Investigator Howard Hughes Medical Institute, titled: "Grilione Seminar: How Do You Feel? The Molecules That Sense Touch"

April 14, 2023, Dr. Faranak Abri, Assistant Professor of Computer Science, titled: "Deception Detection and Social Engineering Attacks"

April 7, 2023, Dr. Carlie Pietsch, Assistant Professor of Geology, titled: "30 years of darkness and the long dawn of marine life’s recovery after the end-Cretaceous mass extinction"

March 10, 2023, Dr. Jon Jenkins, NASA Ames Research Center, titled: "Chasing Shadows in the Night: How NASA’s Kepler and TESS Missions Are Revolutionizing Exoplanet Science"

March 3, 2023, Dr. Brianne Gutmann, Assistant Professor of Physics and Astronomy, titled: "Reframing physics student preparation: supporting conversation about ethics, science, and society in the classroom"

February 24, 2023, Dr. Susan Lambrecht, Professor of Biological Sciences, titled: "Rapid evolution in California native plants during a historic drought"

February 17, 2023, Dr. Minghui Diao, Associate Professor of Meteorology and Climate Science, titled: "Clouds and Aerosols – the Wildcards of Climate Change"

February 3, 2023, Dr. David Ensminger, Assistant Professor of Biological Sciences, titled: "Transgenerational impacts of stress in a wild caught lizard"

Fall 2022 Seminars

December 2, 2022, Dr. Michael Graham, Professor and Department Chair at 利记 Moss Landing Marine Laboratories, titled: "Food, clean oceans, and jobs: Is aquaculture our key to a sustainable future?"

November 18, 2022, Dr. Ellen Metzger, Professor in the Department of Geology and Science Education, titled: "The Geology of Henry Coe State Park: Combining Scientific Research with Public Outreach"

November 4, 2022, Dr. Chandralekha Singh, Distinguished Professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Pittsburgh, titled: "Promoting equity and inclusion in STEM teaching and learning". Please contact Jon (jonathan.espinoza@donhuey.net) for a link to the recording and additional resources of the seminar.

October 21, 2022, Dr. Maya deVries, Assistant Professor in the Department of Biological Sciences, titled: "Trophic relationships in the benthos: feeding morphology and ecology of macroinvertebrates"

October 14, 2022, Dr. Hilary Hurst, Assistant Professor in the Department of Physics & Astronomy, titled: "The Second Quantum Revolution - Building A Robust Quantum Ecosystem in the Lab and in the Classroom"

September 30, 2022, Dr. Nate Bogie, Assistant Professor in the Department of Geology, titled:  “Plant Feedbacks on Soil Hydrology in Agroecosystems from the Sacramento Valley to the Sahel”

September 23, 2022, Dr. Gianmarc Grazioli, Assistant Professor in the Department of Chemistry, titled:  “Exploring mechanisms of molecular assembly and disassembly using computer simulations and machine learning”

September 9, 2022, Dr. Katerina Potika, Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science, titled: "Easy breezy network analysis: community detection".

September 2, 2022, Dr. Ben Carter, Associate Professor in the Department of Biological Sciences, title: "Modern day solutions to age-old questions in the study of plant distributions".

August 26, 2022, Dr. Julio Soto, Professor in the Department of Biological Sciences, title: "Strategies that improve undergraduate students' success".