Seminars, Talks & Colloquia at SEAS
Fall 2009

ECE Colloquium Series: Claude Shannon Meets Quantum Mechanics: An Introduction to Quantum Shannon Theory

Shannon's breakthrough theorems have forever changed the way that we model the transmission and storage of information. Many cite his breakthrough to be one of the great scientific achievements of the past century—it sparked the eld of information theory. In recent years, computer scientists, engineers, physicists, and mathematicians have realized that Shannon's "classical" model of the world does not incorporate the other great scientic revolution of the past century: quantum mechanics. A new theory of information, dubbed “quantum Shannon theory,” has emerged that exploits the essential insights of Shannon to encode information in the quantum states of physical two-level systems such as electrons or photons. This theory determines the ultimate rates at which we can compress and transmit information encoded into quantum systems. In this seminar, I will discuss the classical coding theorems of Shannon and their generalization to the quantum setting. I will further discuss the various notions of capacity that have emerged in the quantum domain and mention problems that remain open in quantum Shannon theory.

Biography
Mark M. Wilde holds the Ph.D. degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Southern California with a special focus in quantum computing and communication. He also holds the M.S. degree in Electrical Engineering from Tulane University and the B.S. degree in Computer Engineering from Texas A&M University. He has published over 20 articles on the theory of quantum computing and communication and has presented talks at several quantum information conferences including the recent Theory of Quantum Computation, Communication, and Cryptography Workshop held in May 2009 in Waterloo, Canada. He will be teaching an introductory graduate course on the theory of quantum communication (quantum Shannon theory) at George Washington University in the Fall of 2009.

A pizza lunch will be served.

Meeting of the National Capital Section, American Society for Engineering Management

The speaker at the September 17th meeting will be Howard Eisner, D.Sc. He is the lead professor for the systems engineering field of study in GW's Department of Engineering Management and Systems Engineering. He will speak on “Some Interesting Topics in Systems Engineering.” His title at GW is distinguished research professor and professor of engineering management.

The meeting is free and will be in the EMSE Conference Room, 4:30 PM to 5:45 PM., on Thursday, September 17th. The conference room is located in the basement of 1776 G Street, NW. Enter from the 18th Street side of the building.

Parking is available under the Elliott School, 1957 E Street, enter from 19th Street side. Parking is free by obtaining a parking sticker at the meeting.

Biography
Howard Eisner joined GW in 1989 after many years as an executive and research engineer with ORI, Inc. and the Atlantic Research Corporation (ARC), holding a variety of executive positions including president of the C3I Division of the ARC Professional Services Group, president of the Intercon Systems Corporation and president of the Atlantic Research Services Corporation (ARSCO). Additionally, he holds the degrees: B.E.E., City College of New York; M.S., Columbia University, and D.Sc., George Washington University.

Also, he is the author of two books and many conference papers and articles. The books are: Computer-Aided Systems Engineering, Prentice-Hall, New Jersey, 1988; and Essentials of Project and Systems Engineering Management, John Wiley & Sons, New York, 1997.

Department of Computer Science Colloquium: Automated Digital Forensics

Despite what you may have seen in the movies, today the primary use of digital forensics is to demonstrate the presence of child pornography on the computer systems of suspected criminal perpetrators. Although digital forensics has a great potential for providing criminal leads and assisting in criminal investigations, there is a nationwide shortage of forensic investigators and today's tools are incredibly difficult to use. This talk presents research aimed at realizing the dream of Automated Digital Forensics---research that brings the tools of data mining and artificial intelligence to the problems of digital forensics. The ultimate goal of this research is to create automated tools that will be able to ingest a hard drive or flash storage device and produce a high-level reports that be productively used by relatively untrained individuals. Starting with a quick introduction to the field of digital forensics, this talk will then present three research initiatives: 1. Multi-User Carved Data Ascription, a new technique that allows data carved from the hard drive of a multi-user computer system to be attributed with a high degree of accuracy to one of the computer's former users. 2. Instant Drive Analysis, our work which allows the contents of a 1TB hard drive to be inventoried in less than 45 seconds using statistical sampling. 3. Our efforts to build Standardized Forensic Corpora of files and disk images, so that work different practitioners can be scientifically compared. Many of the tools and much of the data that we will discuss can be downloaded from the author's websites at http://afflib.org/ and http://digitalcorpora.org/.

Biography
Simson L. Garfinkel is an associate professor at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California. His current research interests include computer forensics, the emerging field of usability and security, the impact of federal human subject laws and regulations on computer science research, information policy and terrorism. Garfinkel is the author or co-author of fourteen books on computing. He is perhaps best known for his book Database Nation: The Death of Privacy in the 21st Century. Garfinkel's most successful book, Practical UNIX and Internet Security (co-authored with Gene Spafford), has sold more than 250,000 copies and been translated into more than a dozen languages since the first edition was published in 1991. Simson Garfinkel received three bachelor of science degrees from MIT in 1987, a master's of science in journalism from Columbia University in 1988, and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from MIT in 2005.

Institute for Crisis, Disaster and Risk Management's Homeland Security and Emergency Management Forum

On September 23rd, the EMSE Institute for Crisis, Disaster and Risk Management will host the first monthly Homeland Security and Emergency Management forum of the academic year in room 308 of the Marvin Center from 4:00 - 6:00PM. The speaker will be Ms. Kay Gauss, former associate director in charge of FEMA's National Preparedness, Training, and Exercises and current director of emergency management at SRA. She will share her thoughts and predictions on emergency management and homeland security, looking back 30 years and forward to the next 30 years. The forum is free of charge and open to all members of the GW community and to all homeland security and emergency management practitioners. Please contact Greg Shaw at 202-994-6736 with any questions.

GW Institute for Biomedical Engineering Colloquium: In Vivo Model Systems to Evaluate Multifunctional Nanoparticles and New Agents for Pancreatic and Brain Tumors

A key limitation of many front-line cancer chemotherapy drugs is dose-limiting host tissue toxicity. Nanoparticles may be able to effectively bypass this limitation by preferentially concentrating a drug payload at tumors. Despite impressive advances in nanoparticle fabrication, several critical factors concerning nanoparticle behavior and efficacy in vivo must be addressed; (1) the contribution of passive leakage versus targeting has to be characterized, (2) the relative importance of targeting tumor vessels versus tumor cells, (3) the dynamics of particle - drug penetration into the tumor, and the significance of local blood flow, and (4) so-called ‘Theranostic Nanoparticles’ are needed, i.e., particles that can be tracked to the tumor by conventional imaging modalities and yet retain high drug loading efficiencies. These studies need to be conducted in vivo using appropriate model systems, and this talk will present our efforts to target, treat and image pancreatic and brain tumors in specialized models that we have developed. An overview of our translational research in pancreatic and brain cancer, and the biological underpinnings of our approaches will be described.

Biography
Dr. Makale earned his Ph.D. in Radiation Physiology at The University of Alberta, and then a MS in Medical Imaging in Biomedical Engineering at GWU. He was a U.S. National Research Council Fellow in Radiation Studies, and he then joined the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, MD conducting brain imaging studies. Dr. Makale is presently a staff scientist at the University of California San Diego Moores Cancer Center where he focuses on intravital imaging, brain and pancreatic tumor models, and tumor drug development. Dr. Makale is a member of the Whittaker Institute for Bioengineering, and a consultant for the U.S. NHSTA CIREN vehicle crash program.

Pizza and refreshments will be served.

For more information, please visit: www.ibe.gwu.edu

Biologically Inspired Impulsive Starting and Maneuvering for Solitary and Aggregate Systems

Fast starting and maneuvering in the aquatic realm typically involve the formation of distinct vortex rings that deliver an impulsive change in the animals momentum. This enables these aquatic animals to maneuver in smaller spaces than that required by conventional underwater vehicles. Unsteady flapping by both plates and foils can also generate similar impulsive forces through short burst cycles, such as a single flap cycle with a fixed amplitude (figure 1a). Fast starting, jumping and maneuvering fish also generate vortex rings (figure 1b). Through the coordinated generation of impulsive forces through vortex ring formation, both solitary and aggregate systems can improve maneuvering performance. Understanding how fish and aquatic animals maneuver can help engineers improve the maneuvering performance of underwater vehicles which often operate in chaotic environments such as the surf zone.

Modeling the wake of a maneuvering fish as a simple vortex ring, with considerations taken for added mass effects, allows for straightforward analysis. Thus, by inspecting the wake generated by a rapidly maneuvering fish one can calculate the impulse imparted on the body during the maneuver. The swimming and maneuvering of aggregate swimmers, e.g. those chained together in series or parallel, can be modeled using a series of distinct vortex rings generated by each individual in the chain, with some phase shift between each individual. Particle imaging velocimetry can be used to gain insight into the mechanisms for vortex ring formation as used in fast-starting escape responses and classical maneuvers in biological animals. Both laboratory and in situ studies using both PIV and dye visualization clearly reveal the vortex ring formation and overall impulse strength over the time of the maneuver.

Biography
Professor Alexandra (Alex) Techet is currently an Associate Professor of Mechanical and Ocean Engineering at MIT. She received her B.S.E. in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering in 1995 from Princeton University and PhD from the MIT/WHOI Joint Program in Oceanographic Engineering in 2001. In 2002, after a post-doc at Princeton University in the Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Department, Prof. Techet returned to MIT as an Assistant Professor in the Dept. of Ocean Engineering. Professor Techet’s research focuses on experimental unsteady marine hydrodynamics in several key areas, including: water entry of spheres and projectiles, flow structure interactions, unsteady bio-inspired propulsion and maneuvering, and sensing at the air/sea interface. Professor Techet was a recipient of the 2004 ONR Young Investigator Award. Her imaging work has been recognized several times by the APS Gallery of Fluid Motion and has been featured on the cover of the Journal of Fluid Mechanics.

ECE Colloquium Series: New Functional Applications of Ultrasound Imaging

Over the past two decades, there has been remarkable progress in the field of diagnostic ultrasound imaging. Functional imaging capability is increasingly augmenting the safety, portability and real-time nature of ultrasound, making this an attractive complement to other imaging modalities both for clinical applications as well as for basic science research. In this talk, Dr. Sikdar will describe some new musculoskeletal and cardiovascular applications of ultrasound imaging. These applications are motivated not only by the need for improved diagnostic techniques for leading causes of death, such as cardiovascular disease and stroke, but also by the need for objective imaging methods to better understand complex disorders, such as soft tissue pain syndromes.

Biography
Siddhartha Sikdar joined the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at George Mason University as an Assistant Professor in Spring 2008. Dr. Sikdar is also a guest researcher with the Rehabilitation Medicine Department at the NIH Clinical Center. His research interests are in translational research involving novel applications of ultrasound imaging. He has worked on new ultrasound signal and image processing methods and imaging systems for studying cardiovascular and musculoskeletal physiology and disease. He received his PhD in Electrical Engineering from the University of Washington, Seattle, in 2005. From 2005-2007, he was a Senior Fellow in Bioengineering at the University of Washington and was the recipient of a postdoctoral fellowship award from the American Heart Association.

Pizza and refreshments will be served.

MAE Seminar Series: Five Centuries of Turbulence: from da Vinci, to Kolmogorov, to the Universal Log Law

Romanticized since Leonardo da Vinci compared the motion of a water jet rapidly falling into a pool to the curls and waves of long, gorgeous hair, turbulence is a field of endeavor blessed with stunning images, elegant mathematics, intellectually fascinating physics, and vitally important applications. Its significance at the human, geologic and cosmologic scales can only be understated. Turbulent transport in plasma sustains the nuclear fusion process that in turn keeps the stars alive; the vigorous turbulent mixing in the atmosphere keeps megacities from suffocating under their own human-produced carbon dioxide; and a turbulent boundary layer allows an airfoil to generate more lift at larger angles of attack than a corresponding laminar flow. The darker facet of turbulence is its extreme complexity, sending chills down the spines of students and professionals alike. Turbulence is also mostly responsible for the high fuel consumption of all air, land and sea transportation systems. Ouch, at today’s cost of energy!

In this talk, I shall take a quick passage through five centuries of turbulence research, highlighting the major milestones.The more recent cornerstones include the Kolmogorov’s equilibrium theory of turbulence spectrum, the universal logarithmic law of wall-bounded flows, and the proliferation of direct numerical simulations. I shall discuss evidence of recent fault lines in all three major achievements, but also point to novel remedies as well as to a few contemporary accomplishments.

Biography
Mohamed Gad-el-Hak received his B.Sc. (summa cum laude) in mechanical engineering from Ain Shams University in 1966 and his Ph.D. in fluid mechanics from the Johns Hopkins University in 1973. Gad-el-Hak has since taught and conducted research at the University of Southern California, University of Virginia, University of Notre Dame, Institut National Polytechnique de Grenoble, Université de Poitiers, Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg, Technische Universität München and Technische Universität Berlin, and has lectured extensively at seminars in the United States and overseas. Dr. Gad-el-Hak is currently the Inez Caudill Eminent Professor of biomedical engineering and professor of mechanical engineering at Virginia Commonwealth University. From 2002 to 2009, Gad-el-Hak was the chair of mechanical engineering at VCU.

Dr. Gad-el-Hak has published close to 500 articles, authored/edited 18 books and conference proceedings, and presented 280 invited lectures. He is the author of the book “Flow Control: Passive, Active, and Reactive Flow Management,” and editor of the books “Frontiers in Experimental Fluid Mechanics,” “Advances in Fluid Mechanics Measurements,” “Flow Control: Fundamentals and Practices,” “The MEMS Handbook” (first and second editions), “Transition and Turbulence Control,” and “Large-Scale Disasters: Prediction, Control and Mitigation.”

Professor Gad-el-Hak is a fellow of the American Physical Society, the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, and the American Academy of Mechanics. In 1998, Professor Gad-el-Hak was named the Fourteenth ASME Freeman Scholar. In 1999, Gad-el-Hak was awarded the prestigious Alexander von Humboldt Prize, Germany’s highest research award for senior U.S. scientists and scholars in all disciplines. In 2002, Gad-el-Hak was named ASME Distinguished Lecturer, as well as inducted into the Johns Hopkins University Society of Scholars.

Department of Computer Science Colloquium: Smart Homes: Making Sense

Smart Home design is an attractive environment for learning new technologies and new applications. Active learning comes from experiencing phenomena; computing and computer technology requires a place for these experiences to occur. A Smart Home is the type of intelligent environment that can provide such a place for this experimental learning. Smart Homes continue to entice us with their promise of anticipating and meeting our needs as they unobtrusively adapt to our changing preferences and goals. The delivery of this promise, however, has met with limited success ion terms of functionality and user acceptance. Many commercial and academic efforts are in progress to create true smart home systems. Taking these premises into consideration, we present their current situation from the following perspectives:
As a Research Topic
As a Technology
As a Commercial Application
As an Environment for Learning

The design and development of the Smart Homes has attracted researchers of diverse disciplines from engineering to social sciences and architecture; in the talk we address key points and concerns of the various disciples. Form the computer science perspective, Smart Home environments have been studied in pervasive and mobile computing' artificial intelligence, robotics, middleware, sensor networks and multimedia computing. Specifically, in this talk we review the artificial intelligence approaches to their design and implementation. For our pedagogical interests, we feel that by taking an eclectic approach we can combine research prototypes with available market products to create an environment to allure students to study computer and information sciences. We fell this is an appealing application of omnipresent computer technology that will bring back students to our field of study.

Biography
Antonio Sanchez-Aguilar is Associate Professor of Computer Science at Texas Christian University in Fort Worth, Texas. He is a founding member of LANIA (National Laboratory for Advanced Information Science) in Xalapa, Mexico. His current areas of research are the use of Java in teaching AL, Collective Learning Systems and Image Recognition.

From 1979 to 2004 he was associated with Universidad de las Americas in Cholula Puebla, Mexico. He was professor at the Department of Computer Science and the Department of Business Administration. From 1988 to 2001 he was Vice President for Academic Support at the same institution. His responsibilities included the general management of all computing, telephony, telecommunications, and networking services, as well as library, video, and radio operations, plus other areas of academics support. The Computing academic infrastructure project of the university received a Laurate Nomination from the Computerworld Honors Program in 2001. He has taught both at the bachelors and the masters level in the Department of Computer Science and the Department of Business Administration. During his academic tenure at Universidad de las Americas, Chairman of the CS Department, Dean of the School of Academic Support. He consistently maintained his involvement with teaching and research while holding his administrative positions. Previously, he served as project chief and consultant in ITSA in Mexico City.

Dr. Sanchez Holds a Doctor of Science and a Masters Degree in Computer Science from The George Washington University in Washington, DC, as well as a bachelors Degree in Engineering from the Universidad Iberoamericana in Mexico City. He has more than 50 publications in the areas of Client/server Administration, Artificial Intelligence, and Data Bases. He served as President of the Board of LANIA from 2002 - 2008. He served as Present of SMIA ( Mexican Society of Artificial Intelligence) from 2001 to 2003. He is honorary member of the Phi Beta Delta and Upsilon Pi Epsilon societies.

GW Institute for Crisis, Disaster and Risk Management (ICDRM) Homeland Security, Emergency and Risk Management Forum: Risk and Crisis Communication: From Research Findings to Practical Application

ECE Colloquium Series: Optical Backbone Networks

Dr. Schupke’s research interests are in the area of transport networks. This includes network architectures and protocols (optical networks, IP/MPLS networks, Ethernet networks, multilayer networks), routing and wavelength assignment, recovery methods, availability analysis, critical infrastructures, network optimization, and network planning.

Biography
Dominic A. Schupke received his Dipl.-Ing. degree from RWTH Aachen in 1998 and his Dr.-Ing. degree from Munich University of Technology (TUM) in 2004. He is with Nokia Siemens Networks (NSN) in Munich, Germany and manages the Multi-Layer Networks and Resilience Group in the Research, Technology and Platforms Unit. Prior to NSN he was with Siemens and the Institute of Communication Networks at TUM. Dominic has been technical program committee member for IEEE conferences Globecom, ICC, and INFOCOM, as well as for OFC, DRCN, and ONDM. Since March 2007 he has served as Associate Editor of the OSA Journal of Optical Networking, which became now IEEE/OSA Journal of Optical Communications and Networking (JOCN). He is also author or co-author of 15 journal contributions and over 50 conference papers.

Please contact Dr. Zderic at zderic@gwu.edu" with any questions about this presentation.

Department of Computer Science Colloquium: Negotiations between Intelligent Agents: An exploration into the benefits of cooperation and the costs of competition

The study of competitive and cooperative behaviors by humans, animals, and even intelligent automata has been pursued within a number of intellectual fields for many decades, but a number of recent developments have given new impetus to such studies of interactions within both natural and artificial societies. These new approaches have attempted to integrate the results from fields as disparate as political science, social psychology, microeconomics, and artificial intelligence to better understand why some collections of intelligent agents succeed at their assigned task while others fail. This colloquium presentation will focus on negotiation as a model of social interaction between decision agents, a model in which cooperation and competition can be seen as existing at opposite ends of a behavioral continuum. Important results from machine learning, game theory, behavioral economics, and social neuroscience will be reviewed, and a current research effort to develop a general computational model of negotiating behavior will be described. The talk will conclude with speculations on potential applications of this work.

Biography
Dr. Mark D. Happel is a Senior Scientist in the Milton S. Eisenhower Research Center (MERC) of the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (JHU/APL), where he conducts research into the neural bases of human social interactions. He has played a key role in the establishment of a psychophysiology laboratory as a part of MERC’s Human Dynamics Center, and performs research using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) under a collaborative agreement with the Georgetown University Medical Center. He also holds an appointment as an Associate Professorial Lecturer in Comp

uter Science at the George Washington University. Prior to joining APL, he performed or led research and development projects at the RAND Corporation, the MITRE Corporation, GE Aircraft Engines, and Northern Telecom. A graduate of the US Naval Academy, he served in the Navy as a nuclear-trained submarine officer. His research interests include social neuroscience, neuroeconomics, machine learning, and statistical pattern recognition.

Traffic and Networks Research Laboratory - Driver Behavior: Modeling particles or Modeling Behavior?

The two-fluid model that was derived from physics of particle at low temperature is utilized to characterize the quality of urban traffic. Early experiments have also indicated that driving behavior has significant effects on the parameters of the two-fluid model. Therefore, these parameters can also be used to characterize driving behavior (aggressive/conservative). This presentation describes two studies undertaken by the author and results indicating aggressive behavior during the mornings and on arterial roads having high crash rates. Motivated by these studies, the two-fluid model is derived from expected utility. To validate the relationships that were observed in the derivation, data of two-fluid model from the various cities in 1990-91 in America was used. Interesting conclusions can be drawn regarding the regimes under which the two-fluid model is valid and the average perception of drivers. The parameters of the utility model can be utilized to evaluate training and educational programs for new drivers, to ensure that crashes do not occur due to skewed perception, and help improve safety. The utility model has the potential of being used to engineer human driving behavior.

Biography:

Dr. Vinayak Dixit is the Associate Director of Research of the United States Department of Transportation sponsored Gulf Coast Research Center for Evacuation and Transportation Resiliency, at Louisiana State University. His interest lies in utilizing traffic engineering and tools from economics to develop and maintain sustainable infrastructure systems. His research has covered areas in Evacuation and Emergency Management, Minimization of Road Renewal Impacts, Traffic Flow Theory, Transportation Financing and Experimental Economics. His research is being funded by the National Science Foundation, Exploratory Advanced Research Program in Federal highway Administrations, and the Strategic Highway Research Program.

Department of Computer Science Colloquium: Combinatorial Architecture: A Multi-core Processor Running on Regular Sequential Code

This talk presents an innovative computer architecture based on combinatorial interconnections of processor and memory resources. These interconnections are arranged in accordance with the so-called Balanced Incomplete Block Designs (BIBD). The exchange of information is performed by means of direct interaction of replicated objects rather than by traditional shipping of data from a source to a destination. The system automatically partitions sequential programs into concurrent streams and effectively brings in processing and routing capabilities. Hardware is built of well-developed types of components without complicated functional interactions, like synchronization, branch scheduling, and pipeline hazards. Software is the same as for conventional serial computers. With this architecture it is possible to enjoy a universal speedup by factor of 3 and more without any particular efforts just by virtue of the unusual interconnections of the operative components. The redundancy due to replication of functional elements may be exploited for the purpose of fault-tolerance. The system is flexible in trading the speedup for energy saving.

Biography
Professor Simon Berkovich received an M.S. in Applied Physics from Moscow Physico-Technological Institute and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the Institute of Precision Mechanics and Computer Technology of the USSR Academy of Sciences. He played a leading role in a number of research and development projects on the design of advanced hardware and software systems. Dr. Berkovich has several hundred professional publications in various areas of physics, electronics, computer science, and biological cybernetics. He is an author of five books and holds 30 patents. Among his inventions is a method for dynamic file construction that later become known as B-tree and extendible hashing. In 2002, Dr. Berkovich was elected a member of the European Academy of Sciences "for an outstanding contribution to computer science and the development of fundamental computational algorithms."

National Crash Analysis Center Seminar on Automotive Safety

"Fundamentals of Fabrication, Characterization, and Material modeling of Composites for Crashworthiness Application” is the topic of the 2nd Annual Seminar on Automotive Safety. This teaching seminars on Automotive Safety are sponsored by the National Crash Analysis Center (NCAC) under the GW Transportation Safety and Security Signature Program in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering. The goals are to: 1) provide a forum to expand the education of our researchers and graduate students, and help focus their research on relevant and timely topics; and 2) provide a technical forum for discourse in the safety community on pertinent research needs, activities, and findings related to such topics.

Please RSVP to Randa Radwan Samaha at rrsamaha@ncac.gwu.edu by Friday November 6.#

GW Institute for Biomedical Engineering Colloquium: Accelerating Medical Device Innovation: The Role of Innovation

In science, the most exciting problems arise at the intersections of disciplines. For bioengineers, it’s biology, chemistry and engineering. Biomedical engineers are motivated to use their deep understanding of applied science to create devices, processes, and systems with the patient squarely in mind. Innovation is defined inventiveness put to use. The US is the world leader in medical device innovation. Many unmet clinical needs still exist in the healthcare space. This talk will put the medical device industry into context, discuss how medical devices are developed and brought to the clinic, and offer a plan for students who want to prepare themselves to be innovators.

Biography
In September 2007, John Linehan was appointed Professor of Bioengineering in the McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science and Professor of Medicine in the Feinberg School of Medicine at Northwestern University. He is also the Director of the Center for Translational Innovation within the FSM Clinical and Translational Sciences Institute. Since 2005, he has been a Consulting Professor of Bioengineering in Stanford University’s Department of Bioengineering and the Biodesign Program. Dr. Linehan is also the Executive Editor of Bmesource.org, an open-source web portal in biomedical engineering. Dr. Linehan was Vice President of the Whitaker Foundation from 1998 - 2005. He was responsible for implementing and managing major biomedical engineering educational grant programs and for creating and organizing a number of unique programs including the international Biomedical Engineering Educational Summit meetings (2000 & 2005) and the national Academic Leadership Program for developing young faculty as leaders. The Whitaker Foundation, having invested more than $800 million primarily in biomedical engineering education and research in the past 30 years, closed its doors in June 2006. Dr. Linehan was elected to the National Academy of Engineering for his research on pulmonary mechanics and the metabolism of critical bioactive agents and for innovations in bioengineering education and professional development. He is a member of the U. S. Food and Drug Administration Science Board. He is a fellow and past president of the Biomedical Engineering Society, a founding fellow and past president of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering, a fellow of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers and a fellow of the International Academy for Medical and Biological Engineering. He received a distinguished achievement award from the College of Engineering at the University of Wisconsin. Dr. Linehan received his bachelor's degree from Marquette University, his master's degree from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and his doctorate from the University of Wisconsin, all in mechanical engineering.

For more information, please visit: www.ibe.gwu.edu

Pizza and refreshments will be served.

Department of Computer Science Colloquium: Top-k Algorithms and Applications

In recent years, there has been a great deal of interest in developing effective techniques for ad-hoc search and retrieval in relational databases, document and multimedia databases, scientific information systems, and so on. A popular paradigm for tackling this problem is top-k querying, i.e., the ranking of the results and returning the k results with the highest scores. Numerous variants of the top-k retrieval problem and several algorithms have been introduced in recent years. In this talk we shall discuss the top-k problem in detail, especially the fundamental algorithms such as FA and TA, important variants such as algorithms operating under restricted sorted/random access, deterministic and probabilistic approximations, as well as distributed and streaming top-k computations. A significant portion of the talk will be focused on applications of these top-k algorithms, especially in the context of the Web services and online databases, multimedia, documents and relational databases.

Biography
Gautam Das is an Associate Professor and Head of the Database Exploration Laboratory (DBXLAB) at the CSE department of the University of Texas at Arlington. Prior to joining UTA in Fall 2004, Dr. Das has held positions at Microsoft Research, Compaq Corporation and the University of Memphis. He graduated with a B.Tech in computer science from IIT Kanpur, India, and with a PhD in computer science from the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Dr. Das's research interests span data mining, information retrieval, databases, algorithms and computational geometry. He is currently interested in ranking, top-k query processing, and sampling problems in databases, as well as data management problems in P2P and sensor networks, social networks, blogs and web communities. His research has resulted in over 85 papers, many of which have appeared in premier database, data mining and algorithms conferences and journals. Dr. Das has served as Program Co-Chair of COMAD 2008, CIT 2004 and SIGMOD-DMKD 2004, Best Paper Awards Chair of KDD 2006, as well as in program committees of numerous conferences. He has served as a Guest Editor for the ACM TKDD special issue devoted to the best papers of KDD 2006. Dr. Das's research has been supported by grants from National Science Foundation, Office of Naval Research, Microsoft Research, Nokia Research, Cadence Design Systems and Apollo Data Technologies.

GW Institute for Biomedical Engineering Colloquium: Acoustic Radiation Force Impulse (ARFI) Ultrasound for Diagnostic Imaging of Atherosclerosis, Subcutaneous Bleeding, and Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy

Elastographic imaging methods have gained recognition in recent years as means for differentiating tissue structures via interrogation of tissue mechanical properties. Mechanical properties may be assessed in response to intrinsic excitations, such as cardiac pulsation or respiration, or extrinsic excitations, such as applied vibrations or impulsive forces. Impulsive acoustic radiation force is exploited in a novel ultrasound-based elastographic imaging technology termed Acoustic Radiation Force Impulse (ARFI) imaging. In ARFI imaging, a short duration (70 µs), relatively high intensity sound pulse generates a body force in a focal region of excitation. Tissue displacements in response to the force are monitored using one-dimensional axial ultrasonic motion tracking methods and are indicative of tissue mechanical properties. Noninvasive tissue mechanical property assessment is relevant to many clinical applications. In this overview of recent ARFI imaging research progress in Dr. Gallippi’s laboratory, ARFI’s relevance to 1) detecting and materially characterizing atherosclerotic plaques, in vivo; 2) monitoring subcutaneous hemostasis, in vivo; and 3) delineating muscular changes in Duchenne muscular dystrophy, in vivo will be demonstrated. Image and signal processing challenges and opportunities unique to ARFI ultrasound will be highlighted.

Biography
Caterina M. Gallippi, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor in the Joint Department of Biomedical Engineering at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, North Carolina State University. Dr. Gallippi’s research focuses on acoustic radiation force-based elastographic imaging methods, multi-dimensional motion tracking, and adaptive image and signal processing. Dr. Gallippi earned a Ph.D. in biomedical engineering from Duke University in 2003 and a BSE in electrical engineering from Princeton University in 1998.

For more information, please visit: www.ibe.gwu.edu

Pizza and refreshments will be served.

MAE Seminar Series: Measurement Science for Intelligent Manufacturing Robotics and Automation Program

The next generation of industrial robots will work side-by-side and interact intelligently with their human counterparts as they move the factory floor, increasing efficiency and safety. The NIST Measurement Science Program is working with industry and academia to create the necessary standards, performance metrics, and infrastructure technology to support and innovate the development of perception systems, sensors and technology and use of these robots. The program testbed, including a mobile robot arm, autonomous vehicles, and sensors, allows NIST to collaborate with developers and users of autonomous robotic technology and academia, enabling wider adoption of advanced perception, autonomous navigation, and manipulation and handling techniques in the automotive, aerospace, and other industries.

Biography
Tsai Hong received her PhD from the University of Maryland at College Park in 1982. Dr. Hong plays a major leadership role in research activities of perception systems and perception performance evaluation for manufacturing and autonomous vehicle safety applications. She is responsible for algorithm design and software development of several major modules for the Collaborative Technology Alliances (CTA) perception project in U.S. Army Research Laboratory (ARL), perception for advanced intelligent manufacturing, dynamic 6DOF pose measurement methods for manufacturing application, the DARPA LAGR program, the Indoor Autonomous Vehicle (IAV) project, the Autonomous road Navigation (AutoNav) project, and the Next Generation Inspection System (NGIS) project. Dr. Hong currently is the project leader of the metrology and standard for advanced perception project. She is responsible for the development and technical supervision of research projects in developing advanced measurements for real-time perception manufacturing applicaitions. In addition, her research activities including perfromance evaluation of perception systems and real-time vision, world modeling, multi-sensor fusion, temporal fusion for unmanned vehicles and mobile robots and multi-sensor integration and control for industrial inspection. The agencies that have sponsored her research include the U.S. Navy, U.S. Army, DARPA, and NIST internal research funds. She has served as a doctoral thesis co-advisor and committee member for various students and has published over 100 articles on the above research areas.

Department of Computer Science Colloquium: Pain and Some Other Dangers AI Poses to Itself and to Society

I will begin by recounting the evolution of my own ethical reflection on the construction of a Personal Artificial Intelligence (PAI), i.e. an entity that could pass the Turing Test, albeit with important caveats and clarifications. In this Colloquy, special attention will be paid to the pain, suffering and moral capacities of this “trans-species” Person and to some other possibly deleterious effects of this accomplishment on human society, e.g. problems of human responsibility and autonomy.

In my earliest work, I applied standard norms of Western medical codes (e.g. “Above all, do no harm”) to the PAI as subject of a non-therapeutic and potentially harmful/lethal experiment. I intimated that a deliberate, teleological PAI project was unjustifiable by all but the most extreme utilitarian ethical theories, largely because it would be perceived as unnecessary to human welfare.

In later writings, I began to see that the myriad applications of AI would begin to blur the distinction between luxury and necessity and postulated that within the moral framework of a liberal, utilitarian cost/benefits analysis the PAI would emerge not as an intentional design, but as a syncretism of advances in service robotics and in medical prosthetics, particularly from those technologies involved in the repair of human brains.

As the intelligence and decision-making capabilities of this entity evolve into its “adult phase” it would be granted the same moral autonomy as competent adult human persons only if it had the capacity of empathy, i.e. it would be required to vividly experience and resonate with the pain and suffering of other persons, even those of different “species” – in short, it would have to possess a superego replete with guilt (a form of suffering) as a constraint upon its (possibly metahuman) actions and thoughts. And as it evolves to a more “God-like” phase, its sufferings and moral burdens would become almost unimaginably immense.

I will conclude with some imaginative ethical and theological reflection on God and evolution consequent to the achievement of this PAI before turning to Peter Bock for a response leading to audience participation.

Biography
Dr. LaChat is Professor Emeritus of Christian Ethics at The Methodist Theological School in Ohio, where he taught from 1982 to 2008. He was also Adjunct Professor of Religion at Ohio Wesleyan University. Prior to that, he taught in the Philosophy Department at St. John’s University in Minnesota, UMass Boston and in four departments as Teaching Fellow at Harvard. Dr. LaChat received his BA from Nebraska Wesleyan University (1970), his MDiv from Harvard Divinity School (1973) and his PhD from Harvard University (1980). The author of numerous scholarly works, his most recent interests and publications have centered on the ethical issues salient in artificial intelligence and animal rights, particularly as these issues involve the problems of pain and sentience. Dr. LaChat presently resides in Port Clinton, Ohio with his wife, Reverend Marlene LaChat, an Ordained Elder of the United Methodist Church. They are both engaged in fishing and thinking.

ECE Colloquium Series: The Role of Fault-Tolerance in Quantum Computing

The strong Church-Turing thesis states that any function that can be computed efficiently in the physical world can be computed efficiently by a modern digital computer (Turing machine). Surprisingly, quantum computers challenge this thesis because they can solve some problems exponentially faster than the best known algorithm running on a classical computer. However, quantum computers are difficult to physically implement, despite rapid experimental progress, because decoherence and systematic errors limit the quality of quantum gates and memories. The theory of quantum error-correction and fault-tolerant quantum computation provides a remarkable solution to the problem of noise: if the error rate is less than a constant accuracy threshold, then arbitrarily reliable, efficient quantum computation is possible. Dr. Cross will give an overview of the role of fault-tolerance in quantum computation and illustrate some of the main ideas by way of examples.

Biography
Andrew Cross obtained his PhD and SM degrees in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from MIT in 2008 and 2005, respectively, and his BS degree in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from Case Western University in 2002. Dr. Cross has published over 20 papers, and is serving as a reviewer for Quantum Information and Computation, Physical Review A, ACM Journal of Emerging Technologies in Computing Systems, and Journal of Physics B.

Please contact Dr. Zderic at zderic@gwu.edu" with any questions about this presentation.