December 8-14, 2014

Newsletter

December 15, 2014

Faculty News

Honors & Awards:

Photo of Professor Sarkar receiving an award

 

 

 

 

 

 

Prof. Kausik Sarkar (MAE) has been elected a Fellow of The American Physical Society for “Fundamental contributions and creative analysis of flows with droplets—effects of viscoelasticity, emulsion rheology, normal stress differences, wall-induced migration, and modeling of encapsulated contrast microbubbles for ultrasound imaging.” He was awarded the fellowship certificate during the plenary session of the 67th annual meeting of the American Physical Society (APS) Division of Fluid Dynamics, held November 23-25 in San Francisco CA. The criterion for election as a fellow of APS is “exceptional contributions to the physics enterprise; e.g., outstanding physics research, important applications of physics, leadership in or service to physics, or significant contributions to physics education. Fellowship is a distinct honor signifying recognition by one's professional peers.” Each year, no more than one-half of one percent of the then-current membership of the Society is recognized by their peers for election to the status of Fellow in The American Physical Society.

Media Mentions:

The Washington Post quoted Allan Friedman (research scientist, Cyber Security Policy Research Institute) in the December 5 article “Why it’s so hard to calculate the cost of Sony Pictures Hack.”

Prof. Lance Hoffman (Cyber Security Policy Research Institute) was interviewed by the Voice of America TV on the occasion of the visit of Minister Lu Wei, Head of the Cyberspace Administration of the People's Republic of China on December 2.

The IEEE Women in Engineering magazine has published an article on Prof. Mona Zaghloul (ECE) in its December 2014 issue.

Publications:

Prof. Rachael Jonassen (part-time faculty, EMSE) published a paper “Energy Investment Risk and Future Climate” in the European Energy Centre journal Energy Learning. This is the first of a three-part series she is preparing on the topic, which will be published in cooperation with the United Nations Environment Programme and Centro Studi Galileo as an EEC eBook upon completion. The eBook will form the basis of a new training course on the topic.

Prof. Michael Keidar (MAE), Taisen Zhuang, Alexey Shashurin, George Teel, Dereck Chiu, Joseph Lukas, Samudra Haque, and Lubos Brieda have published the following article: M. Keidar, T. Zhuang, A. Shashurin, G. Teel, D. Chiu, J. Lukas, S. Haque, and L. Brieda. “Electric propulsion for small satellites,” Plasma Physics and Controlled Fusion, 57 (2015) 014005.

Prof. Michael Keidar (MAE); his students, Dayun Yan and Xiaoqian Cheng; and his colleagues have published the following paper: D. Yan, J. H. Sherman, X. Cheng, E. Ratovitski, J. Canady, and M. Keidar. “Controlling plasma stimulated media in cancer treatment application,” Applied Physics Letters, Vol. 105, Issue 22.

Prof. Saniya LeBlanc (MAE) has published the invited article “Thermoelectric generators: Linking material properties and systems engineering for waste heat recovery applications," Sustainable Materials and Technologies, 2014.

Conferences & Presentations:

Prof. Azim Eskandarian (CEE) and his doctoral student Tejas Ruparel (CEE) and post-doctoral research scientist Dr. Karma Yonten (CEE) presented and published the following paper at the Proceedings of the ASME 2014 International Mechanical Engineering Congress & Exposition (IMECE), held November 14-20 in Montreal, Canada: T. Ruparel, K. Yonten, and A. Eskandarian. “Analyzing Roadside Safety Implications of Future Vehicle Designs.”

On December 1, Prof. Lance Hoffman (Cyber Security Policy & Research Institute) spoke about cryptographic policy to the Internet Society-DC. 

Prof. Michael Keidar (MAE) presented an invited talk titled “Cold Plasma Cancer Therapy” at the 2014 MRS Fall Meeting Symposium G, “Plasma Processing and Diagnostics for Life Sciences,” held November 30 – December 5 in Boston, MA. He also chaired a session at the meeting.

Prof. Megan Leftwich (MAE) and her research group attended the 67th annual meeting of the American Physical Society (APS) Division of Fluid Dynamics, held November 23-25 in San Francisco CA. At the meeting, they gave the following presentations:

  1. M. C. Leftwich and C. Friedman. “The hydrodynamics and kinematics of sea lion swimming”
  2. A. Baumer, A. Lehn, J. Grotberg, and M. C. Leftwich. “An experimental and theoretical approach to a simplified model of human birth”
  3. A. Lehn, P. J. M. Thornycroft, G. V. Lauder, and M. C. Leftwich. “The effect of input perturbations on swimming performance”
  4. C. Parker and M. C. Leftwich. “Wake visualization behind multiple VAWTs in a wind tunnel using sPIV”
     

On December 8, Prof. Claire Monteleoni (CS) is giving an invited tutorial at the top conference in her field, Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS). Her tutorial is titled “ Climate Change: Challenges for Machine Learning,” and her co-presenter is Arindam Banerjee, University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. The conference attendance is in the range of 1000-2000, so the tutorial attendance is typically in the hundreds.

Prof. Michael Plesniak (MAE) attended the 67th annual meeting of the American Physical Society (APS) Division of Fluid Dynamics, held November 23-25 in San Francisco CA. He chaired the D5 Biofluids: Red Blood Cells session and co-authored five presentations with his students and collaborators: Prof. Adrienne Hancock (Dept. of Speech and Hearing Sciences), Prof. Chunlei Liang (MAE), Research Prof. Kartik Bulusu (MAE), post-doctoral scholar Adam Apostoli, doctoral students Ian Carr and Christopher Cox, master’s student Elizabeth Hubler, undergraduate student Lucas Pollok, summer intern Daniel Plesniak (Haverford College), and colleagues from Stanford University. The presentations were as follows: 1) “Wavelet analysis of hemispheroid flow separation toward understanding human vocal fold pathologies,” 2) “Self-oscillating Vocal Fold Model Mechanics: Healthy, Diseased, and Aging,” 3) “Towards A Fast High-Order Method for Unsteady Incompressible Navier-Stokes Equations using FR/CPR,” 4) “Velocimetry modalities for secondary flows in a curved artery test section,” and 5) “3D separation over a wall-mounted hemisphere in steady and pulsatile flow.” As chair of the Fluid Dynamics Prize Committee, Prof. Plesniak also attended the Division of Fluid Dynamics Executive Committee, which held its annual business meeting during the conference.

On November 23, Prof. Kausik Sarkar (MAE) presented a talk at the 67th annual meeting of the American Physical Society (APS) Division of Fluid Dynamics. The title of the talk was “Lateral migration and diffusion of a mechanical engineer through emulsion of drops induced by Andy's influence.”

Other News:

Prof. Azim Eskandarian (CEE) recently was featured in an IEEE ITS (Intelligent Transportation Systems) podcast on active safety. Prof. Eskandarian’s interview begins at the 4:24 mark.

Photo of group of students

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Prof. Rumana Riffat (CEE) took her undergraduate students on a field trip to the Alexandria wastewater treatment and resource recovery plant, Alexandria Renew Enterprises. Prof. Lisa Benton-Short, academic program director of sustainability, also participated in the trip. The students received a tour of the plant and learned about the various advanced treatment processes that were used. The production of Class A biosolids fertilizer, biogas and electricity from sludge was an important learning aspect of the tour.

Prof. Volker Sorger (ECE) recently was featured in a video by the International Photonics and Optics Society (SPIE) titled “Plasmonic chips enable new switching efficiency.” In the video, Prof. Sorger shows how new developments in integrated nanophotonics and plasmonics may address the dramatic growth in the amount of energy needed for data processing.

Student News

Emily Porter, Undergraduate BME students Caitlin Caroll and William Murphy represented SEAS and GW in the December 4 WJLA-ABC 7 news piece “Obama promotes college affordability at summit.”

Cheng Tang, a doctoral student studying under Prof. Claire Monteleoni (CS), is presenting a poster on their paper “Scaling up Lloyd’s algorithm: stochastic and parallel block-wise optimization perspectives” at the Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS) Workshop on Optimization for Machine Learning. NIPS is being held December 8-13 in Montreal, Canada.

Other News

The CUA-GW-AU Solar Decathlon entry, Harvest Home, recently won a Presidential Citation in Sustainable Design from the DC Chapter of the American Institute of Architects.

Guest Vignette

Embedded systems dominate the computational domain. They account for 97% of all processors in the world, and are taking an increasingly conspicuous role in the management of our lives. Computation is truly embedded everywhere, and as the Internet of Things increases in prominence, this trend will only accelerate. Unfortunately, the software infrastructures that have traditionally accommodated such systems are inadequate to address the non-functional requirements of current and future systems. These requirements include enhanced reliability, security, and the effective use of the massive parallelism provided by current processors.

The Composite component-based operating system is research conducted by Prof. Parmer and numerous Ph.D. and undergraduate students at GW that fundamentally redefines the software structure of future embedded systems to address the shortcomings of existing systems. Recently, Ph.D. student Qi Wang and Prof. Parmer published work on a system called FJOS that effectively harnesses massively multi-core processors in real-time systems for more feature-rich control of the physical world.

FJOS provides an OpenMP runtime that coordinates parallelism with five times less overhead than existing systems at 40 cores, despite decades of optimization on those systems. This work recently received the best student paper award at the IEEE Real-Time and Embedded Technology and Applications Symposium (RTAS), the top conference in systems aspects of real-time. Current work takes this further and provides the first system that, for fundamental operating system functionalities, can use each of a massive numbers of cores as effectively as a single core—a significant challenge that is the final goal of all parallel systems. This work empowers software to make the necessary leap in intelligence required for the next generation of embedded systems ranging from the invisible computation that is pervasive in our infrastructure, all the way to robotic cars. Composite is funded by NSF (including the Career Award) and the Office of Naval Research. (Provided courtesy of Prof. Gabe Parmer, Department of Computer Science)

External Events

ModevCon2014
Thursday and Friday, December 11-12
Washington, DC
Special GW students, faculty, and staff code with 50% discount. To register use you GW email address and the following code: GWU50. At the conference please make sure you bring your GW ID to the event for access. Any questions about the conference should be directed to Sarah Donovan: [email protected].

Dissertation Defenses

Student's Name: Zhou Ma
Dissertation Title: “Sensing and Force-Feedback Exoskeleton (SAFE) Robotic Glove Mechanism and Its Applications”
Advisor: Prof. Pinhas Ben-Tzvi (MAE)
Monday, December 15
1:00 – 3:00 pm
771 Rome Hall