SEAS Newsletter

Week of November 23-29 2009

Faculty News:

Conferences & Presentations:
Prof. Pinhas Ben-Tzvi (MAE) presented two papers at the 2009 ASME International Mechanical Engineering Congress and Exposition (IMECE 2009), held in Lake Buena Vista, FL, November 13th – 19th. The papers are: Zhou, Q., Ben-Tzvi, P., Iqbal, A., Fan, D., "Design, Analysis and Optimization of Magnetic Microactuators," and Bai, S., Ben-Tzvi, P., Zhou, Q., Huang, X., "Fuzzy Sliding Mode Control of Flexible Spacecraft with Input Saturation.” Prof. Ben-Tzvi also chaired the technical session "Vibration and Control of Mechanical Systems" at the same conference.

Prof. Tarek El-Ghazawi (ECE) served as the general co-chair for the Third International Workshop on High-Performance Reconfigurable Computing Technology and Applications (HPRCTA'09), held as a part of the IEEE/ACM Supercomputing Conference in Portland, OR, November 14th – 20th. Joined by two scientists from IBM Research and Cray, Prof. El-Ghazawi taught a one-day tutorial on modern programming for supercomputers, entitled “Programming Using the Partitioned Global Address Space (PGAS) Model,” at the conference. He also chaired a Bird-of-a-Feather session and led a week-long research exhibit on the topic with participation from other members of the PGAS consortium, including UCB, UF, IBM, Cray, HP, LBNL, and other academic, industrial, and government partners. The NSF Industry/University Center for High-Performance Reconfigurable Computing (CHREC), with sites at the University of Florida, GW, Virginia Tech, and Brigham Young University, also held a research exhibit at the IEEE/ACM Supercomputing Conference in Portland.

Guest Vignette

At 8:00 am on a brisk Monday morning, the 10 civil engineering students of Professor Pedro Silva’s materials engineering class made their way to the parking lot behind Tompkins. There, they boarded a shuttle and set off for Virginia Concrete. Upon arrival, the students met their host, Tony Thompson, the company’s technical service manager, who showed them around the on-site test lab. After describing the process of calculating ratios of ingredients and testing concrete samples, Tony directed while the students got dirty measuring out the ingredients for their own concrete samples. Two hours of shoveling, mixing and casting samples yielded 16 small cylinders and three beams to bring back to GW and test in the lab.

Once the dirty work was done, Tony brought the students to the mountains of aggregate that everyone had noticed upon arrival at the plant. He explained the use of each one and how they are transported to the plant. Tony then led the students into the plant itself, where, over the noisy rumble of mixing machines and trucks, he explained how large quantities of the concrete are mixed, poured into trucks, and shipped to job sites. At the conclusion of the tour the students climbed back onto the shuttle for the return journey with a greater understanding of the production of concrete, from small sample testing to mass manufacturing for construction. (Provided courtesy of Abraham Todd, an undergraduate in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering)

Upcoming Events

MAE Seminar: Application of Artificial Intelligence (AI) Tools to Failure Event Data Management and Probability Risk Analysis for Failure Prevention
November 23rd
2:00 pm
736 Phillips Hall
More info . . .

IMPACT HPC Seminar: Reinventing Computing
November 24th
2:00 pm
ECE Conference Room, 6th Floor Phillips Hall
More info . . .

CS Colloquium: Pain and Some Other Dangers AI Poses to Itself and to Society
November 30th
4:00 pm
736 Phillips Hall
More info . . .

ECE Colloquium: The Role of Fault-Tolerance in Quantum Computing
December 1st
12:00 - 1:00 pm
640 Phillips Hall
More info . . .

SEAS 125th Anniversary Events

SEAS Seminar Series: Engineering Challenges in the 21st Century: Monday, November 30th
“Smaller and Faster: Nanomaterials,” Presented by Prof. Martha Pardavi-Horvath (ECE)
6:30 pm
101 Marvin Center
More info . . .

Frank Howard Lecture Series–Dr. Barbara Liskov, Speaker: Wednesday, December 2nd
6:00 - 9:00 pm at 1957 E Street N.W., City View Room
Registration required for this event
More info . . .

Dissertation Defenses:

Name of Student Defending: Francesco deLeo
Title of Dissertation: "Implications of National Culture on Knowledge Management”
Monday, November 23rd at 11:00 am
1776 G Street, NW, Conference Room 120

Name of Student Defending: Richard B. Wallace
Title of Dissertation: "The Relationship of Learning, Knowledge and Sustaining Innovation - A Grounded Theory Approach”
Monday, November 23rd at 2:00 p.m.
1776 G Street, N.W., Conference Room 120

Name of Student Defending: Farid Ahmed
Title of Dissertation: "Bench Scale Evaluation of two Enhanced Digestion Processes: Enhanced Enzymic Hydrolysis and Acid-Gas Phased Digestion”
Monday, November 24th at 9:00 am
736 Phillips Hall

Name of Student Defending: Kai Xing
Title of Dissertation: "Coding-based Channel Assignment in Multi-channel Wireless Networks”
Thursday, December 3rd at 10:00 am
736 Phillips Hall

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