August 5-18, 2019

Dr. Volker Sorger (ECE) is the principal investigator of a $3.1 million Office of Naval Research grant for “Photonic Convolutional Processor for Network Edge Computing.” It is a collaboration among GW, UCLA, University of Texas at Austin, and Omega Optics Inc. Dr. Tarek El-Ghazawi (ECE) is a co-PI on the grant. The project develops an accelerator for feature extraction known as a “convolutional neural network.” Unlike other approaches, this project uniquely combines two million optical parallel channels in free-space with tens of GHz-fast signal processing delivered by silicon photonic chip technology. This one-of-a-kind system enables processing of Peta-bytes of data (even Exa-bytes, when scaled-up) every second, with a small footprint equivalent to a desk rather than a football field. It can do this at the speed-of-light, enabling near real-time information processing, which is not possible in electronics due to parasitic effects of electrons in wires. The military seeks such real-time processors for timely decision making, but civilian applications such as autonomous and self-driving or flying vehicles could also benefit from it.

Dr. Tarek El-Ghazawi (ECE) is the principal investigator (PI) of a three-year, $675,000 award from the Airforce Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR) for the project “RANC: A Residue Arithmetic Nanophotonic Computer.” Dr. Volker Sorger (ECE) the co-PI of the project. Its goal is to develop an integrated photonics computing system (from device to architecture) based on the residue number system to achieve orders of magnitude improvements in computational speed per watt over the current state-of-the-art, while again computing at the speed of the light. This grant falls along the same trajectory of the PI's vision to explore new post-Moore's Law processor paradigms that can bypass the technological obstacles presented by the end of the Moore's Law and Dennard's scaling by engendering new classes of efficient nanophotonic processors. Since they started this pioneering direction four years ago, Drs. El-Ghazawi and Sorger have jointly secured multiple grants from the National Science Foundation, Office of Naval Research, AFOSR, and SRC, Inc. totaling approximately $6.7 million for this groundbreaking line of research that explores: photonic neuromorphic processors, reconfigurable processors and PDE solvers, residue number system processors, convolutional neural networks edge processors, and adaptive hybrid nanophotonic/plasmonic/electric networks-on-chip to support many core processors.

Dr. James Hahn (CS) is the principal investigator of a one-year, $37,436 GW Cross Disciplinary Research Fund award with co-investigators Michele Mietus-Snyder (Pediatrics), John Philbeck (Psychology), Christine Pintz (Nursing), Jennifer M. Sacheck (Exercise and Nutrition Science), and Xiaoke Zhang (Statistics). The project, “Predicting 3D Body Composition Using Optical Surface Scans,” will provide preliminary data for a new National Institutes of Health R01 proposal.

Dr. David Broniatowski (EMSE) has a new publication: M. Broniatowski, S. Grundfest-Broniatowski, M. Schiefer, D. H. Ludlow, D. A. Broniatowski, and H. M. Tucker. “Selective stimulation of human intrinsic laryngeal muscles: Analysis in a mathematical three-dimensional space,” The Laryngoscope. July 23, 2019.

Dr. Emilia Entcheva (BME) co-authored the following paper with collaborators, including a lead at Imperial College London: F. Schultz, P. Swiatlowska, A. Alvarez-Laviada, J. L. Sanchez-Alonso, Q. Song, A. A. F. de Vries, D. A. Pijnappels, E. Ongstad, V. Braga, E. Entcheva, R. G. Gourdie, M. Miragoli, and J. Gorelik. “Cardiomyocyte-myofibroblast contact dynamism is modulated by conexin-43,” FASEB Journal, DOI: 10.1096/fj.201802740RR, 2019.

Dr. Ahmed Louri (ECE) has published two recent conference papers. With his Ph.D. student Ke Wang, he published: K. Wang, A. Louri, A. Karanth, and R. Bunescu. “IntelliNoC: a holistic design framework for energy-efficient and reliable on-chip communication for manycores.” The paper was published at the 46th ACM/IEEE Annual International Symposium on Computer Architecture, held June 22-26 in Phoenix, AZ. ISCA is recognized as the premier forum for new ideas and experimental results in computer architecture. The conference specifically seeks particularly forward-looking and novel submissions. The paper, which Ke presented at the conference, introduces a machine learning-enabled design methodology for scalable manycore network-on-chip (NoC) with the goal of balancing power consumption, reliability, and performance. He also published the paper “An Online Quality Management Framework for Approximate Communication in Network-on-Chips” with his Ph.D. student Yuechen Chen. This paper introduces a hardware-based quality management framework for the approximation system in network-on-chip to further enhance network performance while ensuring the quality of communication. The paper was published at the 33rd ACM International Conference on Supercomputing, held June 26-28 in Phoenix, AZ.

Dr. Kausik Sarkar (MAE) has published this paper with Ph.D. student Nima Mobadersany: N. Mobadersany and K. Sarkar. “Acoustic microstreaming near a plane wall due to a pulsating free or coated bubble: velocity, vorticity and closed streamlines,” Journal of Fluid Mechanics, 875 781-806.

Dr. Ekundayo Shittu (EMSE) has published a co-edited volume titled Renewable Energy: International Perspectives on Sustainability with Dmitry Kurochkin and Elena Shabliy, colleagues from Harvard and Columbia Universities, respectively. The publisher is Palgrave Macmillan.

Dr. Dianne Martin (professor emeritus, CS) was quoted in the July 19 Boston Globe article “50 years later, memories of the moon landing reflect a historic achievement during a turbulent time.”

On July 8, Dr. Lorena Barba (MAE) and her Ph.D. student Tingyu Wang gave a tutorial titled “Land on Vector Spaces: Practical Linear Algebra with Python” at the SciPy Conference in Austin, TX. The tutorial video and a GitHub repository with the materials are available online. On July 14, Dr. Barba separately gave a keynote at the PyData London conference. The presentation was titled “One step forward, two steps back: the frustration of diversity efforts in STEM.” The presentation slides and video are also available online.

Dr. David Broniatowski (EMSE) was the local area chair for the 2019 SBP-BRIMS conference, held July 9-12 in the Lehman Auditorium. He co-authored the following paper with his student Pedram Hosseini, who is co-advised with Dr. Mona Diab (CS): P. Hosseini, M. Diab, and D. A. Broniatowski. “Does Causal Coherence Predict Online Spread of Social Media?” In International Conference on Social Computing, Behavioral-Cultural Modeling and Prediction and Behavior Representation in Modeling and Simulation (pp. 184-193). Springer, Cham. At the conference, Dr. Broniatowski also presented a poster and gave a talk titled “Identifying Burns in Medical Device Reports,” which was co-authored with his student Lydia Gleaves.

On July 2, Dr. Emilia Entcheva (BME) was an invited speaker at the Symposium “50 Years Excitable Media,” organized by the Max-Planck Institute for Dynamic Systems and Self-Organization in Goettingen, Germany. Dr. Entcheva presented a talk on all-optical cardiac electrophysiology.

Dr. Charles Garris (MAE) was invited by ARPA-E to participate in the workshop “Flexible Carbon Capture Technologies for a Renewable-Heavy Grid,” which was held July 30-31 in Washington, DC.

Dr. Jimmy Jia (visting scholar, EMSE), who works with the SEAS Environmental and Energy Management Institute, was a facilitator of the Western States Innovation Workshop, held June 25 in Seattle, WA. Sponsored by the Western Interstate Energy Board and the CleanTech Alliance, it included attendees from energy offices of the Western states, Canadian provincial policymakers, representatives of national labs, and other commercialization organizations throughout the West. The workshop provided an opportunity to strengthen and broaden collaborations among Northwest energy innovators, build on top of 2016 regional energy innovation workshops sponsored by the U.S. Department of Energy, and improve commercialization pathways for technologies emerging from R&D institutions.

In this month's HR Corner, SEAS HR Manager Marion Flythe-Inman shares new information on:

• the Proud to be GW Festival, and
• Kronos time off training opportunities and virtual office hours.

The HR Corner is a new web page for SEAS staff that contains HR-related news, information, and events. Marion encourages staff to visit the page to find information on GW's new time off and leave guide, events and trainings, SEAS employment opportunities, and much more.