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The following announcement is from [Women in Science & Engineering – WiSE]. Please contact them directly if you have any questions.
Dear USC Community,
Join us for our next STEM Bytes seminar led by Lydia Ignatova, PhD Student in Computer Science and Miryam Huang, PhD Student in Computer Science!
To register your attendance, visit https://usc.zoom.us/meeting/register/irJqcx-PROGY8A8-lTCrPg#/registration
Event Details (see flyer attached):
Date: Tuesday, February 24
Time: 11 am – 12 pm PT
Location: Zoom
Speaker: Lydia Ignatova
Talk: Socially Assistive Robotics: Enhancing Mental Health Support through Tabletop CBT Interaction
This presentation provides an introduction to the fields of Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) and Socially Assistive Robotics (SAR), exploring how technology can be designed to support human wellness. I will then share my lab’s current active research project: the development and deployment of a small tabletop robot designed to guide users through Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) exercises such as box breathing. We will discuss the potential for these interactive machines to increase accessibility to mental health tools and the unique challenges of building robots that foster emotional well-being.
Speaker: Miryam Huang
Talk: Quantum Obfuscation
Program obfuscation aims to conceal a program’s internal structure while preserving its functionality. In this paper, we construct the first quantum ideal obfuscation scheme for arbitrary quantum circuits that support quantum inputs and outputs in the classical oracle model assuming post-quantum one-way functions, thereby resolving an open problem posed in Bartusek et al. (STOC 2023), Bartusek, Brakerski, and Vaikuntanathan (STOC 2024), and Huang and Tang (FOCS 2025).
We look forward to seeing you there!
