Faculty News
Research:
The Office of Vice President for Research has awarded the $80,000 Centers and Institutes Facilitating Fund to the Institute for Computer Graphics . The interdisciplinary research in motion capture will be conducted by Prof. James Hahn (CS), Brian Richmond (Anthropology) and John Philbeck (Psychology).
Publications:
Prof. Michael Keidar (MAE) has published a new textbook: M. Keidar and I.I. Beilis. Plasma Engineering: application in aerospace, nanotechnology and bionanotechnology, Elsevier, 2013. This book can be used as a text for courses on plasma engineering or plasma physics in aerospace engineering, electrical engineering, and physics departments. It also can be useful as a reference for early career researchers and practicing engineers.
Prof. Michael Keidar (MAE) has published an invited paper: M. Keidar, A. Shashurin, O. Volotskova, M.A. Stepp, P. Srinivasan, A. Sandler and B. Trink. “Cold Atmospheric Plasma in Cancer Therapy,” Physics of Plasmas, vol. 20, 057101, 2013. DOI: 10.1063/1.4801516
Prof. Ergun Simsek (ECE) has published the following paper: Ergun Simsek, "Improving Tuning Range and Sensitivity of Localized SPR Sensors with Graphene," IEEE Photonics Technology Letters, vol 25, no. 9, pp. 867-870, May 2013. DOI: 10.1109/LPT.2013.2253316
Prof. Volker Sorger (ECE), doctoral student Zhuoran Li, and master’s student Chen Huang have published their first paper: V. J. Sorger, D. Kimura, R.-M. Ma, Chen Huang, Zhuoran Li and X. Zhang. “λ-size Silicon-based Modulator,” Proceedings of SPIE Vol. 8629, Silicon Photonics VIII, doi:10.1117/12.2001338 (2013).
Conferences & Presentations:
Prof. Tarek El-Ghazawi (ECE) delivered a keynote address at the 44th Symposium on the Interface of Computing Science and Statistics, held April 4-6 in Orange, CA. The conference theme was focused on “Big Data” and analytics, and the title of Prof. El-Ghazawi's keynote address was "Processing Big Data and Crunching Numbers for Big Simulations-The Advances in High-Performance Computing."
Other News
On April 11, Prof. Pinhas Ben-Tzvi (MAE) hosted a robotics workshop for 28 Loudon County high school students as part of GW's Science, Technology and Engineering Day at the Virginia Science and Technology Campus. The session focused on how the design of robotic systems is dependent on the integration of its mechanical, electrical, control, and computer subsystems. The students were given the chance to create and test robots to follow a path and avoid obstacles in a maze. The workshop was designed by Prof. Ben-Tzvi and his doctoral student William Rone , and was run by Zhou Ma with assistance from Jeffrey Philips, Sina Aghli and Wael Saab , all doctoral students of Prof. Ben-Tzvi. Prof. Ben-Tzvi would also like to thank Prof. Shahrokh Ahmadi (ECE) for the use of the ECE 1001 HandyBoard microcontrollers to control the students’ robots. GW Today has published an article on the session and the event.
Prof. Suresh Subramaniam (ECE) served as the technical program co-chair for IEEE INFOCOM, the premier conference for computer and communication networks, held in Turin, Italy, April 14-19. The conference received 1,613 paper submissions, and after a thorough review process, 279 papers were published in the conference proceedings.
Congratulations to the following faculty and graduate students, who will be recognized this Wednesday at the GW Faculty Honors ceremony :
Michael Plesniak (MAE): AIAA Fellow
Timothy Wood (CS): NSF CAREER Award
Shelly Heller (CS): Fulbright Scholars and Specialists Programs
Mona Zaghloul (ECE): IEEE Life Fellow
Sameh Badie (CEE): PCI Young Educator Achievement Award
Qianyi Zhao (ECE): Philip Amsterdam Graduate Teaching Assistant Award
Hyeong-Ah Choi (CS): Silver Anniversary Faculty
Howard Eisner (EMSE): New Emeriti Faculty
Lile Murphree (EMSE): New Emeriti Faculty
Martha Pardavi-Horvath (ECE): New Emeriti Faculty
Student News
On April 9, CEE senior Andrew Vasko received the 2013 Award of Excellence sponsored by The National Capital Chapter of the American Concrete Institute (ACI). The award is granted to senior students who show outstanding achievements in the study of concrete materials and design of concrete structures. Andrew was nominated by Prof. Sameh Badie.
Guest Vignette
It was indeed surprising how close they flew before we even heard a sound when standing at approximately 50 feet from a large group of flamingos in flight. The reason is that birds’ wing beats are silent. The secret lying in the unsteady fluid dynamics of flapping wings can be exploited to provide more agility, higher energy efficiency, and a reduced acoustic footprint for future unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), although most UAVs currently use fixed-wing aircraft, rotorcraft designs.
Prof. Chunlei Liang’s research group is studying the unsteady aerodynamics of flapping wing flight through their massively parallel computational fluid dynamics (CFD) codes. Prof. Liang recently completed a new development of a high-order accurate, robust, and efficient method for solving compressible Navier-Stokes equations on moving and deformable domains. He also constructed a computer cluster with 252 cores in his lab. A high-fidelity simulation of transitional flow around a flapping wing behind an oscillating bluff body now takes him only six days to compute. He has named this new code GW Efficient Computational Aerodynamics Solver.
The development of efficient high-order methods is also beneficial for studying the atmospheric weather in the sun. Prof. Liang collaborates with astrophysicists at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR). Recently, they successfully developed a novel, fully-compressible model and a massively parallel simulation tool to study the differential rotation and turbulent convection of the sun. His doctoral student, Mr. Junfeng Wang, is supported by a prestigious Newkirk graduate fellowship from NCAR.
Prof. Liang is active in the national community of high-order CFD methods. Currently, he is co-organizing a symposium of high-order methods for CFD to be held in Rayleigh, North Carolina. The presentations of this symposium will be included as a special issue of Computers & Fluids, an Elsevier journal. (Provided courtesy of Prof. Chunlei Liang of the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering)
SEAS Events
MAE Seminar: "Fracture Mechanics at the Nanoscale: An Atomistic J-Integral Based on Estimates of Continuum Fields"
Speaker: Jonathan A. Zimmerman, Mechanics of Materials Department, Sandia National Laboratories
Monday, April 22
1:00 pm
736 Phillips Hall
CS Colloquium: “Beyond Jeopardy! Adapting Watson to New Domains Using Distributional Semantics”
Speaker: Dr. Alfio Gliozzo, IBM and Columbia University
Tuesday, April 23
6:10 pm
736 Phillips Hall
CEE Colloquium: “Multiple Length/Time Scale Modelling of Multi-Physics”
Speaker: Prof. James Lee, MAE
Friday, April 26
10:00 – 11:30 am
Dean’s Conference Room, Tompkins Hall
MAE Seminar: “Mechanobiology of Atherosclerosis and Arterial Hypertension”
Speaker: Dr. Heather N. Hayenga, University of Maryland and Texas A&M University
Tuesday, April 30
3:00 pm
736 Phillips Hall
CS Colloquium: “From Sorcery to Science: How Hollywood Physics Advances Computational Engineering”
Speaker: Dr. Eitan Grinspun, Columbia University
Wednesday, May 1
2:00 pm
736 Phillips Hal
Symposium on Biomedical Engineering and Computing
Thursday, May 2
Marvin Center, Continental Ballroom
The Symposium on Biomedical Engineering and Computing will showcase the best in interdisciplinary research going on at GW in engineering, science, and medicine focused on biomedical engineering and biomedical computing.
Entrepreneurship Events
2013 GW Business Plan Competition Finals
Friday, April 19
9:00 am – 6:30 pm
Duques Hall, 6th Floor
Business Gives Back Gala
Saturday, April 20
National Press Club
8:30 - 11:30 pm
NY Tech Day
Thursday, April 25
All day
Pier 92, New York City
Graduation Events
Thursday, May 16
Doctoral Hooding Ceremony
5:00 pm
Charles E. Smith Center
Friday, May 17
School of Engineering and Applied Science Reception
4:30 pm
Marvin Center Ballrooms
School of Engineering and Applied Science Celebration
7:30 pm
Charles E. Smith Center
Sunday, May 19
Processions step off at the National Mall
9:30 am
National Mall
University Commencement
10:00 am
National Mall, between 8th and 14th Streets