December 3-9, 2018

The US Department of Justice has awarded Dr. Robert Pless (CS) a three-year, $1 million grant for the project “An Object-Centric Approach for Image Analysis to Combat Human Trafficking.” Images are often part of a criminal investigation, but for questions such as “Where was this image taken?” investigators are often limited to using generic tools designed for different purposes, like Google reverse image search. a prototype search tool with a focus on fighting human trafficking.

On November 20, Dr. Ken Chong (MAE) gave a seminar at Stanford University titled “An Outlook of Basic and Translational Research.” The seminar was well attended, and afterward Dr. Chong interacted with engineering students and faculty at a working luncheon.

Dr. Erica Gralla (EMSE) gave three presentations on students’ work at the INFORMS 2018 Annual Meeting, held November 4-7 in Phoenix, AZ. The presentations included two senior design projects and one research project: 1) K. Ajrawat, A. Fintzy, J. Miles, C. Shaffer, J. Barbera, and E. Gralla. “Decision Support Model and Analysis for the Strategic National Stockpile;” 2) K. Friesecke, S. Grumer, J. D'Arrigo, H. Abeledo, J. Barbera, and E. Gralla. “Scheduling Staff for the FEMA National Response Coordination Center;” and 3) J. Miles and E. Gralla. “Using System Dynamics to Understand Financial Inclusion in Ugandan Agriculture.” All of the authors are from the EMSE department; they include Dr. Joseph Barbera (EMSE) and Dr. Hernan Abeledo (EMSE), and EMSE undergraduates who graduated last year.

Dr. Howie Huang (ECE) and his Ph.D. students Yuede Ji and Yang Hu presented two papers—“iSpan: Parallel Identification of Strongly Connected Components with Spanning Trees” and “TriCore: Parallel Triangle Counting on GPUs”—at the IEEE/ACM International Conference for High Performance Computing Networking, Storage, and Analysis (Supercomputing/SC'18). SC is the top conference in the area of high performance computing. This year it accepted only 70 papers out of 288 submissions. The conference was held November 11-16 in Dallas, TX, and it attracted more than 12,000 attendees. At the conference, Dr. Huang was also an invited speaker on the panel for the workshop “Irregular Applications: Architectures and Algorithms.” During the panel, four invited speakers discussed the current state and future trends of high-performance computing architectures for data analytics workloads.

Dr. Kausik Sarkar (MAE) attended the 71st Annual Meeting of the Division of Fluid Dynamics of the American Physical Society, held November 18-20 in Atlanta, GA. At the meeting, he chaired the session "M09: Bubbles: Cavitation and Biomedical Acoustics" and presented the following talks with his Ph.D. students Nima Mobadersany and Abhilash Reddy Malipeddy: “M09.00006 : Acoustic microstreaming due to a pulsating free or coated bubble near a wall: velocity, vorticity shear stress and closed streamlines,” and “L36.00002 : Combined quadrupolar–swapping trajectory model for microstructural evolution of drops in a strongly confined shear flow.”

Dr. Suresh Subramaniam (ECE) served as an area TPC chair for IEEE INFOCOM 2019, a premier conference in computer networking, and attended the TPC meeting in Tempe, AZ, on November 17. This is the ninth year Dr. Subramaniam has served in this capacity. He served as conference TPC chair in 2013.

On November 19, Dr. Johan Rene van Dorp (EMSE) gave a seminar titled “What Do Coin Tosses, Decision Making under Uncertainty, The Vessel Traffic Risk Assessment 2010, and Average Return Time Uncertainty Have in Common?” to the Statistics Department at the University of Rome “La Sapienza.” On November 20, he taught a four-hour short course, “Beyond Beta, on some other distributions with bounded support and applications,” to the department’s Ph.D. students.

The Computational Structures Group in CSAILab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology invited Dr. Guru Venkataramani (ECE) to give a research talk at MIT’s CSAIL seminar series on the topic of hardware security. Dr. Venkataramani presented his lecture, “Unmasking and Defending against Cache Timing Channels,” on November 19. It was attended by leading MIT experts on computer security, as well as technology leaders from companies in the Greater Boston area. The talk was planned as part of an MIT lecture series on how to architect future generations of computing platforms that are secure from side and covert channels that were behind the now infamous Meltdown and Spectre attacks widely reported in the news earlier this year.

SEAS held the 6^th Annual George Washington University/Korea University Exchange Reunion Dinner on November 13, bringing together students currently in the GW/KU Exchange Program, alumni of the program, and faculty involved in it. In attendance were Simon Lee and his wife, Anna, and 60 students, alumni, and faculty. Simon Lee is an alumnus of both KU and SEAS (MS ’05), and he and Anna endowed the exchange program in 2010, providing financial assistance to SEAS students to study abroad at KU. A highlight of the annual reunion dinner is the “pass the mic” session during which alumni share stories of their time in Korea and how their study abroad experience has made an impact on their lives. This year, Simon initiated the session with the question “How have you changed in the last year?"