Faculty News
Media Mentions:
Newsweek mentioned research conducted by Dr. David Broniatowski (EMSE) in the November 28 article “Anti-Vaxxer parents don’t want their kids to be bitten by vampires, Russian ad campaign suggests.”
WUSA-CBS9 spoke to Dr. Lance Hoffman (distinguished research professor, CS) and CS graduate student Jacob Biesiada in the November 29 segment “VERIFY: No, you can't totally delete yourself from the internet.”
Conferences & Presentations:
Dr. Lorena Barba (MAE) participated in the invitation-only “Rich-Context Workshop,” focused on building a scientific basis for the empirical foundations of data science in government. Among other distinguished participants, Dr. Nancy Potok, US Chief Statistician, presented aspects of the Federal Data Strategy. The event was held November 15-16 at The National Press Club in Washington, DC. Dr. Barba also attended the International Conference for High-Performance Computing, Network, Storage, and Analysis (SC19), held November 17-22 in Denver, CO. She served during the past year as SC19 Reproducibility Chair, a top role within the technical program in charge of the Reproducibility Initiative.
Dr. Miloš Doroslovački (ECE) and his Ph.D. students, Paul Rademacher and Li Li, attended the 53rd Annual Asilomar Conference on Signals, Systems, and Computers, held November 3-6, in Pacific Grove, CA. At the conference, Paul presented the paper: P. Rademacher and M. Doroslovački, “Predictive Distribution Estimation for Bayesian Machine Learning Using a Dirichlet Process Prior.” Li presented the paper: L. Li, M. Doroslovački, and M. Loew, “Loss Functions Forcing Cluster Separations for Multi-Class Classification using Deep Neural Networks.”
On November 22, Dr. Shelly Heller (CS) presented the paper “Reach to Teach: Using Videos to Prepare Cybersecurity Adjunct Faculty” at the CAE in Cybersecurity Symposium in Phoenix, AZ. The paper is based on a Department of Defense grant. GW is a National Security Agency-designated Center of Academic Excellence-Research (CAE-R) in cybersecurity.
Dr. Can Korman (ECE) gave a presentation titled “On Hysterisis Based Random Number Generation” at the 64th Annual Conference on Magnetism and Magnetic Materials, held November 4-8 in Las Vegas, NV.
Dr. Suresh Subramaniam (ECE) completed an IEEE Distinguished Lecture Tour of Japan and Korea during the week of November 18. The lecture was titled “The Evolution of Datacenter Network Architectures,” and it discussed the latest advances in leveraging optical switching within datacenters to enable high throughputs, low latencies, and low power consumption. The tour included lectures at Sapporo (November 19), Yokohama (November 20), Osaka (November 21), and Seoul (November 22).
Other News:
On November 26, the U.S. Patent Office issued Patent #10486834: “Self-Consuming Satellite” to Dr. Michael Keidar (MAE) and Dr. Joel Slotten (instructor, MAE). GW’s Technology Commercialization Office worked with Dr. Keidar and Dr. Slotten to obtain the patent.
Left to right: Pennsylvania audit participant, Seamus Malley,
and Grant McClearn
Dr. Poorvi Vora (CS)—along with collaborators Filip Zagorski (Wroclaw University of Technology, Poland) and Neal McBurnett, students Grant McClearn and Sarah Morin, and recent graduate Seamus Malley—piloted a new approach to statistical election audits in Mercer County, PA on November 18. The State of Pennsylvania plans to deploy statistical election audits with rigorous error guarantees, known as risk-limiting audits (RLAs), all over the state in 2020. The proposed approach, named Aurror, is expected to decrease by factors as large as 67 percent the number of ballots that need to be examined to achieve the error bounds, and will significantly decrease the effort expended by election officials.
Student News
Paul Rademacher, a doctoral student of Dr. Miloš Doroslovački (ECE), attended the 7th IEEE Global Conference on Signal and Information Processing, held November 11-14, in Ottawa, Canada. He presented the paper: P. Rademacher and M. Doroslovački, “Bayesian Learning for Classification using a Uniform Dirichlet Prior.”
Other News
During the last class of CE 1010, Introduction to Civil and Environmental Engineering, students participate in a bridge contest. Several weeks earlier, the students were arranged in small teams and received a set of instructions for the competition. Teams received a toolkit and requisitioned a supply of balsa wood. The specialized wood supplied is density-graded to ensure fairly uniform structural performance. The bridge contest is a one-tenth scale version of the American Institute of Steel Construction (AISC) 2020 Steel Bridge Contest. The students bring completed bridges to the last class. The bridges are weighed and tested, with computer data acquisition used to plot each bridge’s load-displacement curve. Bridges are scored for weight and cost, as well as load and deflection at the linear peak.
SEAS alumna Dr. Christine Mann Darden and three other African American women known as the “Hidden Figures” will be awarded the Congressional Gold Medal, the highest civilian honor in the US. President Trump signed into law the Hidden Figures Congressional Gold Medal Act on November 8. The women, who worked at NASA's Langley Research Center during the Space Race, did some of the complex calculations that helped make space travel possible.
Upcoming SEAS Events
SEH WOW (What’s Our Work) Talk
Speakers:
- Dr. Sandy Kawano (Biology): “Integrating Ecology, Evolution, and Biomechanics to Investigate How Animals Evolve”
- Dr. Nirbhay Kumar (Global Health): “A Vaccine to Eliminate Malaria that Causes One Death per Minute”
- Dr. Murray Loew (BME): “Seeing the Invisible: Recent Work in Medical Imaging and Image Analysis”
Wednesday, December 4
4:00 pm
SEH, B1220
RSVP
The WOW Talk series brings together colleagues and students from disciplines associated with GW's Science and Engineering Hall—and related fields—to present new research and share ideas. These short talks (15 minutes each) are designed to introduce members of the GW community to current and exciting research projects being undertaken; to initiate discussion, collaborate, and share expertise; and to promote research performed in the SEH and at GW.
ECE Talk: “Optimization and Codesign of Power Electronics Converters”
Speaker: Kristen Booth, Post-doctoral Researcher, The Ohio State University
Tuesday, December 10
2:00 pm
SEH, B1220
Entrepreneurship News & Events
IMPEL+ Workshop
Friday, December 6
National Renewable Energy Laboratory Offices (901 D Street SW, Suite 930)
Apply
Expert coaches will provide hands-on training to help participants develop more effective communication of the value proposition of their early-stage building technologies R&D for non-technical audiences. The goal of the workshops will be for participants to develop well-formulated, confident pitches to use toward next steps for their idea and/or technology or even to pursue public or private sector funds, depending on interest. IMPEL+ (Incubating Market-Propelled Entrepreneurial-Mindset at the Labs and Beyond) is a program funded by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Building Technologies Office and implemented by the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. SEAS faculty, post-docs, and graduate students are welcome to apply.
Make-A-Thing Open Studio @ GW Innovation Center
Fridays throughout the semester
1:00 – 6:00 pm
Tompkins Hall, M06
The studio is open to the GW community. For more information, please email the GW Innovation Center.
Dissertation Defenses
Student Name: Avinash Sharma
Dissertation Title: “Modeling Coherent Scattering Effects from a Corn Canopy at L-Band”
Advisor: Dr. Roger Lang (ECE)
Monday, December 9
1:00 – 3:00 pm
SEH, 2000
Student Name: Zachary Pirtle
Dissertation Title: “Generative Independence: A Programmatic Analysis Framework for Complex Systems Engineering”
Advisor: Dr. Zoe Szajnfarber (EMSE)
Monday, December 9
2:00 pm
SEH, 2990
Human Resources News
In this month's HR Corner, SEAS HR Manager Marion Flythe-Inman shares new information on:
- How to share your GW employment stories with HR
- GW's Career Milestones Celebrations in December
The HR Corner is a 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.