SEAS Newsletter

Week of October 5 – October 11, 2009

Faculty News

RESEARCH:
Prof. James Hahn (CS) spent a part of his sabbatical last year at the Children's National Medical Center. While there, he was involved in a proposal to establish the Institute for Pediatric Surgical Innovation. On September 16th, it was announced that the government of Abu Dhabi will be making a gift of $150 million to establish the Institute and to fund it for the next five years. The mission of the Institute is to conduct research to dramatically advance the state of pediatric surgery. Prof. Hahn is charged with establishing a laboratory for image-guided surgery, surgical simulations, and medical visualization. This effort is one of six major research thrusts of the Institute.

CONFERENCES & PRESENTATIONS:
Prof. Andrew Cutler (MAE) presented a talk entitled "Simultaneous CARS and Interferometric Rayleigh Scattering" at the NASA/AFOSR Hypersonics Review on October 8th, while Gaetano Magnotti, a doctoral student studying with him, presented another talk, "CARS - Interferometric Rayleigh Scattering Measurements in Supersonic Combusting Flows," on October 6th.

Prof. Mona Zaghloul (ECE) will attend the IEEE SENSORS09 conference in New Zealand October 26th – 28th. Prof. Zaghloul is the president of the IEEE Sensors Council and will attend the conference as the Sensors Council president. She and one of her students will present "Modeling and Simulation of a ZnO nanowire bridge and development of an electrical equivalent Circuit in Liquid," a paper by R. Bajpai, and M. Zaghloul.

Student News

Dushyanth Giridhar, an ECE graduate student mentored by Prof. Vesna Zderic, presented a poster at the 9th International Symposium on Therapeutic Ultrasound in Aix En Provence, France, in September 2009. The FDA supported Dushyanth's travel. The poster information is: Giridhar, D. (GW); Robinson, R. (FDA CDRH); Zderic, V. (GW), Sliwa, J. (St. Jude Medical); and Myers, M. (FDA CDRH), "Characterization of medical ultrasound transducers using infrared imaging and a mathematical inverse method." This research represents Dushyanth's master thesis work.

Ahsen Uppal, an ECE master's student working with Prof. Howie Huang, was recently selected as a student volunteer for Super Computing (SC) 09. SC is the premier international conference for high performance computing, networking, storage and analysis. The committee selected 150 volunteers out of 260 applicants.

Other News

On Saturday, November 7th, GW will host the local regional programming contest for ACM (The Association for Computing Machinery), the professional society for computer scientists. The contest is sponsored by IBM. We expect to be invaded by 25 teams from various universities and colleges, including three teams from GW. The contest proper runs for five hours, starting at noon, with the teams attempting to solve as many as they can out of a total of eight programming problems of varying difficulty. It will take place in Tompkins Hall, which will be busy from about 8:30 am until 6:00 pm that day.

Prof. Rhys Price Jones (CS) is the contest director; Prof. Gabriel Parmer (CS) is the local judge, and Eric Noriega (SEAS Computing Facility director) is the system manager. Alex Florescu is coordinating and coaching our local teams and will help arrange volunteers from the ACM student chapter to manage the event.

SEAS and Prof. Price Jones would appreciate any help from student, faculty, or staff volunteers. All volunteers and team members will be entitled to one-year free memberships in ACM, as well as freely participating in the food and drink provided on the day of the contest. If you are interested in volunteering, please contact Prof. Price Jones at rhyspj@gwu.edu.

The 30% solution is a proven and realistic way to bring more women into leadership, alter cultural stereotypes, and influence agendas, resources and outcomes (Linda Tarr-Whelan, "Women Lead the Way," 2009, page 15). SEAS and CS are fortunate to have reached the 30% solution and we are ready to more forward. Toward that end, Profs. Rachelle Heller and Poorvi Vora (CS) have recently revived the Women in Computer Science group. The group held a meeting on September 30th and plans to meet on a monthly basis thereafter. It invites others interested in learning about their activities to attend the next meeting. All meetings are open to both men and women. If you are interested, you can join the group at linkedin.com, and search under groups for WiCS at GW.

Guest Vignette

The nature of scientific computing is changing - it is becoming increasingly data-centric. Prof. Howie Huang is investigating several different architectural approaches, including some next-generation, low-power processors and storage devices, e.g., Solid-State Drives (SSDs), and considering how these architectures might offer substantial benefits over the existing ones in terms of both performance and energy efficiency. The premise is that in the near future the only feasible, scalable data-intensive environment will consist of a massively scaled-down and -out system, where data partitioning, fault tolerance, and massive parallelism will play a much larger role than today. While SSDs can provide excellent performance for both sequential and random I/Os, one will still need traditional hard disks for the bulk volume. How this additional tier in the storage system can be used in the most effective way is at the heart of this project. The research efforts here will not only create an immediate impact on many scientific applications, but also significantly advance the state of the art in data-intensive supercomputing. This research, recently funded by NSF, is in collaboration with Prof. Alex Szalay at Johns Hopkins University. The project has been selected as a finalist in the Storage Challenge of SuperComputing 2009. (Provided courtesy of Prof. Howie Huang of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering)

Looking Ahead

CS Colloquium: Smart Homes: Making Sense
October 26th
4:00 pm
736 Phillips Hall
More info...

CS Colloquium: Combinatorial Architecture: A Multi-core Processor Running on Regular Sequential Code
November 12th
4:00 pm
736 Phillips Hall
More info...

SEAS 125th Anniversary Events

Frank Howard Lecture Series–Dr. Mihail Roco, Speaker: Monday, October 12th
6:00 - 9:00 pm at 1957 E Street N.W., Room 213
Registration required for this event
More info . . .

Frank Howard Lecture Series–Dr. Mihail Roco, Speaker: Monday, October 12th
6:00 - 9:00 pm at 1957 E Street N.W., Room 213
Registration required for this event
More info . . .

Frank Howard Lecture Series–Dr. Frieder Seible, Speaker: Thursday, November 12th
6:00 - 9:00 pm at 1957 E Street N.W., Room 213
Registration required for this event
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:  Wilson Rosa
Title of Dissertation: "Impact of Object-Oriented Methods on Software Productivity Gain”
Thursday, October 15th
1776 G Street, NW, Conference Room 120

Name of Student Defending:  Kai Xing
Title of Dissertation: "Coding-based Channel Assignment in Multi-channel Wireless Networks”
Thursday, December 4th at 10:00 am
736 Phillips Hall

SEAS Career Services Events

Resume Critique Night: Thursday, October 22nd
6:00 – 8:00 pm at the GW Alumni House
To RSVP or reserve space at the event, email seasalum@gwu.edu

Southeast Biomedical Engineering Career Conference: October 30th
Washington D.C. Convention Center
For more information: http://www.Sebecconference.org

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