Faculty News
Awards & Honors:
At a ceremony held in the Science and Engineering Hall on November 30, Dr. Michael Keidar (MAE) officially was installed as the A. James Clark Professor of Engineering. A description of the ceremony and recent highlights of Dr. Keidar’s career is available in this GW Today article.
Publications:
Dr. Amir Aslani (ECE) and Dr. Mohammadreza Ghahremani (ECE) at GW’s Institute for Magnetics Research have published the following paper: A. Aslani, M. Ghahremani, M. Zhang, L. H. Bennett, and E. Della Torre. “Enhanced Magnetic Properties of Ni51Mn33.4In15.6 Heusler Alloy Nanoparticles,” IEEE Transactions on Magnetics, Vol. 53, No. 12, December 2017. DOI: 10.1109/TMAG.2017.2734880.
Dr. Igor Efimov (BME) and members of his lab have published the following paper: C. Kang, A. Badiceanu, J. A. Brennan, C. Gloschat, Y. Qiao, N. Trayanova, and I.R. Efimov. “β-Adrenergic stimulation augments transmural dispersion of repolarization via modulation of delayed rectifier currents IKs and IKr in the human ventricle,” Scientific Reports. November 21, 2017; 7(1): 15922. PMID: 29162896.
Dr. Michael Keidar (MAE) and his colleagues have published the following article: I. Levchenko, K. Bazaka, M. Keidar, S. Xu, and J. Fang. “Hierarchical Multicomponent Inorganic Metamaterials: Intrinsically Driven Self-Assembly at the Nanoscale,” Advanced Materials. DOI: 10.1002/adma.201702226.
Dr. Zoe Szajnfarber (EMSE) and Dr. Erica Gralla (EMSE) have published the following article: Z. Szajnfarber and E. Gralla. “Qualitative methods for engineering systems: Why we need them and how to use them,” Systems Engineering. DOI 10.1002/sys.21412.
Conferences & Presentations:
Dr. Ken Chong (MAE) was in Hong Kong December 5-9 as an invited member of a panel conducted by the Hong Kong Research Grants Council to interview the finalists of the Collaborative Research Fund (CRF) Scheme. The CRF Scheme is similar to the National Science Foundation group and equipment proposals, and many collaborators from the U.S. served as co-investigators for it. On December 7, Dr. Chong attended the CRF Symposium, which highlighted the progress and findings of the current CRF projects and was held at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology.
Dr. Igor Efimov (BME) has delivered the following invited presentations recently: 1) “Mechanisms and Treatments of AV Nodal Reentry,” delivered November 13 at the Arrhythmia Research Summit, American Heart Association 2017 sessions (Los Angeles, CA); 2) “Human Cardiac Tissue Slices: A Novel Platform to Test Cardiotoxicity of Cancer Drugs,” delivered December 2 at the First International Scientific Research Summit GW – Spanish Consortium (Hospital Universitario de Hierro, Madrid, Spain); and 3) “Mechanisms of Ventricular Fibrillation in the Human Heart,” delivered December 5 at the 9th Theo-Rossi-di-Montelera Foundation Forum on Computer Simulation of Cardiac Function (Lugano, Switzerland).
On December 8, Dr. Claire Monteleoni (CS) gave the invited talk “Algorithms for Climate Informatics: Learning from spatiotemporal data with both spatial and temporal non-stationarity,” at the NIPS 2017 Time Series Workshop, at the Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems 2017. Dr. Monteleoni served as a senior area chair for NIPS 2017 and also served as session chair for “Algorithms, Optimization” at the conference. NIPS is one of the top two international conferences in the field of machine learning. Because of the rapid growth of artificial intelligence and machine learning technology, the NIPS conference has entered a phase of exponential growth, doubling in size for three years in a row. NIPS 2017 was held in Long Beach, CA.
Dr. Michael Plesniak (MAE) attended the 70th annual meeting of the American Physical Society (APS) Division of Fluid Dynamics, held November 19-21 in Denver, CO. He co-authored five presentations with his students and collaborators. These include MAE faculty Dr. Elias Balaras, Dr. Kartik Bulusu, and Dr. Megan Leftwich; MAE Researcher Nikolaos Beratlis; MAE doctoral students Ian Carr, Reza Najjari, and Christopher Cox; MAE master’s student David Palumbio; and colleagues from GW’s biology department. The following presentations were made: 1) Secondary flow structures in a 180° elastic curved vessel with torsion under steady and pulsatile inflow conditions;” 2) “Correlation between vortices and wall shear stress in a curved artery model under pulsatile flow conditions;” 3) “Spiral blood flows in an idealized 180-degree curved artery model;” 4) “Extremely pulsatile flow around a surface-mounted hemisphere: synergistic experiments and simulations;” and 5) “Filter feeding mechanics of \textit{Hypophthalmichthys molitrix} regarding porous gill rakers.” Dr. Plesniak also chaired the session “Cardiovascular VI” and attended the Division of Fluid Dynamics Executive Committee, which held its annual business meeting during the conference. There, he secured approval for GW to host the conference in Washington, D.C. in 2023.
Dr. Kausik Sarkar (MAE) attended the 70th annual meeting of the American Physical Society’s Division of Fluid Dynamics, held November 19-21 in Denver, CO. At the meeting, he chaired the session “Bubbles: Cavitation, Acoustics and Biomedical" and co-authored three oral presentations with his doctoral students Abhilash Reddy Malipeddi and Nima Mobadersany: 1) “Acoustic microstreaming due to an ultrasound contrast microbubble near a wall;” 2) “Jetting of an ultrasound contrast microbubble near a rigid wall;” and 3) “Computation of shear-induced collective-diffusivity in emulsions.” Nima Mobadersany secured a travel grant from the APS DFD to attend the conference.
Dr. Kausik Sarkar (MAE) also attended the 174th meeting of the Acoustical Society of America, held December 4-8 in New Orleans, LA. At the meeting, he chaired the session “Biomedical Acoustics: Imaging I” and co-authored four oral presentations with Dr. Grace Zhang (MAE) and his doctoral students, Mitra Aliabouzar, Krishna Nandan Kumar, and Jenna Osborne: 1) “Acoustic and atomic force microscopy characterization of microbubbles with varying shell chemistry;” 2) “Acoustic characterization of 3D printed micro-structured scaffolds for tissue engineering;” 3) “Ultrasound and lipid-coated microbubbles for osteogenic differentiation of mesenchymal stem cells in 3D printed tissue scaffolds;” and 4) “Mechanism of echogenicity of echogenic liposomes.”
Dr. Suresh Subramaniam (ECE) attended IEEE Globecom in Singapore December 4-8 and presented the paper “Joint Banding-node Placement and Resource Allocation for Multi-granular Elastic Optical Networks,” which he co-authored with his students Jingxin Wu and Maotong Xu. Dr. Subrmaniam was also an invited speaker at the Fog Computing+ Workshop, held December 8 at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore.
On December 6, Dr. Tim Wood (CS) gave an invited talk titled “From Pipes to Processors: Building High Performance Network Middleware with OpenNetVM” at Hewlett Packard Labs in Palo Alto, CA. Dr. Wood and his students have been collaborating with researchers at HPE, IBM, and AT&T on software-based networking infrastructures.
Other News:
Dr. Kelly Scanlon (senior research scientist, Environmental and Energy Management Institute) has received a one-year extension to her assignment with the Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Energy, Installations, and Environment arranged under the provisions of the Intergovernmental Personnel Act.
Student News
On December 7, CS doctoral student Cheng Tang presented a poster at the Workshop for Women in Machine Learning, at the Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems 2017. The poster presentation covered the paper “Convergence rate of stochastic k-means,” authored by Cheng and her advisor, Dr. Claire Monteleoni (CS). The workshop was held in Long Beach, CA.
Other News
Deadlines extended: The deadlines to apply for the SEAS Student R&D Showcase and the SEAS Innovation Challenge have been extended. The new deadlines are:
- SEAS Student R&D Showcase: Monday, December 18
- SEAS Innovation Challenge: Monday, January 8
The third round of competition for the Duke Energy Renewables Innovation Fund is now open. Proposals are being accepted for research related to energy—either directly or indirectly—through issues such as water, climate, food, cities, or policies. Faculty are encouraged to think broadly. The maximum award amount is $85,000, and the deadline is January 19, 2018. See the 2017 RFP.
This semester GW’s Environmental and Energy Management Institute (EEMI) will offer several on-campus, two-day professional short courses in renewable energy and sustainability. EEMI runs the courses in partnership with the European Energy Center. The courses qualify participants to take the exam for the internationally recognized Galileo Master Certificate (GMC). The remaining courses are:
Renewable Energy Market Trends and Finance
December 11-12
More information
Distributed Generation and Energy Storage
December 13-14
More information
SEAS Computing Facility
MATLAB and Solidworks Tutoring: SEAS Computing Facility (SEAS CF) will continue to offer MATLAB and Solidworks tutoring throughout the fall semester in Tompkins 401. To schedule a tutoring appointment, please email [email protected]. The MATLAB and Solidworks workshops and tutoring will be hosted by SEAS graduate student Makan Payandehazad. Tutoring dates:
- Wednesdays: 12:00 – 5:00 pm
- Thursdays: 12:00 – 3:30 pm
- Fridays: 4:00 – 6:00 pm
SEAS CF has hosted a series of workshops covering a range of topics throughout the fall semester. The remaining workshops/seminars include:
High Performance Computing Workshops:
The final workshop will be held December 15 in Tompkins 405 from 2:30 to 4:30 pm and will be hosted by the Colonial One HPC support team: SEAS CF (Marco Suarez, Jason Hurlburt, Zhen Ni); CCAS OTS (Glen MacLachlan); and DIT (Adam Wong). The workshop topics include: MPI; OpenMP; and Python package management. These workshops are offered in collaboration with the Colonial One HPC support team and will leverage Colonial One, GW's Central HPC cluster. Workshop pre-requisites: you must have a Colonial One account, familiarity with programing languages, and Linux fundamentals knowledge. If you are unfamiliar with Linux, please attend the Introduction to Linux workshops (listed above). Please email [email protected] with any questions or comments.
Register
Google Cloud Computing Seminars
Friday, December 15
SEH, B1220
Register
9:30 – 10:30 am: Google Cloud Platform Overview
Discover what is different with the Google Cloud Platform and how it is being used in higher education and research institutions.
10:30 – 11:30 am: Google Cloud Storage, Compute Engine, and Container Engine
Discover how to store, secure, and manage any kind of data at scale on Google Cloud Platform (GCP). Learn how GCP can help you build vast dynamic clusters on the cloud and dynamic burst capability with your on-prem HPC. Identify workloads that run more effectively on GCP. Includes an HPC demonstration.
11:30 am – 12:30 pm: Big Data and Machine Learning on Google Cloud Platform; NIH/NSF Funding for Cloud-based Research
Gain insights from data using the same analytics and machine learning services that Google uses. Learn how to effectively store, process, analyze, and share petabytes of data. Learn how Google can help your group access new NIH/NSF funding dedicated to cloud-based research. Includes some machine learning demonstrations.
1:00 – 3:00 pm: Research-specific Q&A with Google
Google will be available for 20-minute Q&A sessions with research groups. These sessions are available by appointment only via the registration form. Due to the limited window, some meeting requests may not be fulfilled on site. This session will be held in SEH, 2990.
SEAS Events
BME Seminar: “Ultrasound Elasticity Imaging and Therapeutics”
Speaker: Dr. Elisa Konofagou, Columbia University
Wednesday, December 13
11:00 am – 12:00 pm
SEH, B1270
Environmental and Energy Management Institute Webinar: Overview of the SEAS Certificate in Greenhouse Gas Management
Thursday, December 14
1:30 pm
Register for the webinar
This free, 30-minute webinar will be led by Dr. Rachael Jonassen (EMSE director, Greenhouse Gas Management). Faculty will describe the courses being offered this spring toward the certificate.
MAE Seminar: “A Computational Bifluid–Solid Mechanics Framework Dealing with Capillarity and Wetting Issues: Towards Void Formation and Permeability Predictions in LCM Processes”
Speaker: Dr. Yujie Liu, Sun Yat-Sen University (China)
Thursday, December 14
2:00 pm
SEH, B1220
Entrepreneurship News & Events
The Office of Innovation & Entrepreneurship seeks a student to serve as data czar. This is a one-year position at 10-20 hours per week. The ideal candidate will be a GW student who has a high level of proficiency in spreadsheet software (including Microsoft Excel and Google Sheets) and Microsoft Office (Word, PPT, Access, etc.) and who has exceptional data entry, mining, manipulation, and analysis skills. Interested candidates should a resume and a cover letter to Stephanie Asher or contact her for more information about the position.
GW & External Events
STGlobal Conference: Call for Papers
The 18th annual STGlobal Conference will be held on March 23-24 at the National Academy of Science and American Association for the Advancement of Science buildings. STGlobal challenges graduate and undergraduate students to engage with and contribute to science and technology studies and policy scholarship. We welcome submissions under two categories: individual paper abstracts and poster abstracts. We strongly encourage work that highlights interdisciplinary efforts in these fields and engages in creative uses of theory or methodology in areas such as health, energy, sustainability, social justice, education, innovation and emerging technologies policy, research policy, and history of science and technology. The deadline to submit abstracts is December 15. For more information, please contact Zlata Gogoleva.
Dissertation Defenses
Student Name: Jennifer Hill
Dissertation Title: “Algorithmic Generation and Mobile Distribution of Phonetic, Orthographic, and Interference-Based Literacy Exercises for Adult Learners”
Advisor: Dr. Rahul Simha (CS)
Wednesday, December 13
1:00 – 2:30 pm
SEH, B1220
Student Name: Ayah Zirikly
Dissertation Title: "From Preprocessing to Named Entity Recognition, Linking and Clustering in Multilingual, Cross-Lingual, High-low Resources Settings”
Advisor: Dr. Mona Diab (CS)
Thursday, December 14
1:30 – 3:00 pm
SEH, 2990