July 28 - August 10, 2014

Newsletter

July 28, 2014

Faculty News

Research:

Profs. Danmeng Shuai and Tianshu Li (CEE) and collaborators from the University of Iowa and University of California-Riverside have received a $543,303 grant from NSF to develop and apply piezoelectric nanoheterostructures for reducing the chemical and energy demand in water treatment. GW is the lead institution and Prof. Danmeng Shuai is the PI.

Publications:

Prof. Michael Keidar (MAE) has published the following paper: X. Cheng, W. Murphy, N. Recek, D. Yan, U. Cvelbar, A. Vesel, M. Mozetič, J. Canady, M. Keidar, and J. H. Sherman. "Synergistic effect of gold nanoparticles and cold plasma on glioblastoma cancer therapy," Journal of Physics D: Applied Physics. 47 (2014) 335402.

Prof. Ergun Simsek (ECE) has published the following manuscript: R. Sahin, S. Akturk, and E. Simsek. "Quantifying the quality of femtosecond laser ablation of graphene," Applied Physics A, vol. 116, no. 2, pp. 555-560, 2014.

Prof. Suresh Subramaniam (ECE) has published the following two papers: 1) J. Zhao, S. Subramaniam, and M. Brandt-Pearce. "Intra- and inter-domain QoT-aware routing and wavelength assignment (RWA) for translucent optical networks," IEEE/OSA Journal of Optical Communications and Networks, vol. 6, no. 6, pp. 536–548, June 2014; and 2) X. Wang, M. Brandt-Pearce, and S. Subramaniam. "Distributed grooming, routing, and wavelength assignment for dynamic optical networks using ant colony optimization," IEEE/OSA Journal of Optical Communications and Networks , vol. 6, no. 6, pp. 578–589, June 2014.

Conferences & Presentations:

On July 24, Prof. David Broniatowski (EMSE) presented a paper titled "A Mathematical Formalization of Fuzzy Trace Theory" at the 36th annual conference of the Cognitive Science Society in Quebec City, Canada. At the same conference, he also chaired a session on decision making.

CSPRI director, Prof. Lance Hoffman (CS) , presented a keynote address on the Internet of Things at the IoT Privacy Summit in Silicon Valley, CA during the week of July 7.

On July 21, Research Professor David Nagel (ECE) presented an invited talk titled "How Does the Internet Work?" to the National Student Leadership Conference.

Prof. Julie Ryan (EMSE) and Prof. Weedn (CCAS Forensics Sciences) attended a workshop on forensic linguistics July 10-14. This by-invitation only workshop, sponsored by The Association for Linguistic Evidence (TALE), brought together researchers in specialties ranging from pathology to cybersecurity to discuss the educational and research challenges associated with the emerging field of forensic computational linguistics.

Prof. Abdou Youssef (CS) and his doctoral student Qun Zhang published a paper, " Semantics-Sensitive Math-Similarity Search," at the Conferences on Intelligent Computer Mathematics (CICM 2014), held July 7-11, in Coimbra, Portugal.

Other News:

Prof. Julie Ryan (EMSE) recently served as outside reader for Lachlan Brumley's dissertation research conducted at Monash University, Australia. The research, directed by Prof. Carlo Kopp and entitled "Misperception and its evolutionary value," focused on game theory and information warfare.

Student News

On July 22, Isabel Bignon (EMSE doctoral student)gave a seminar at the Goddard Space Flight Center. The title of the talk was "Technical workforce in the R&D context: aligning management levers with work identities." Isabel is advised by Prof. Zoe Szajnfarber.

Evan Kaufman (MAE doctoral student) recently presented his research as an Air Force Research Lab Space Scholar. The presented work was focused on measuring satellites and data association. The two main contributions were in techniques to decrease uncertainty and to remove coalescence from the of satellite estimates. Evan is advised by Prof. Taeyoung Lee.

Christopher O'Brien (MAE doctoral student) gave the following presentation at the 7th World Congress of Biomechanics, held July 6-11 in Boston, MA: C. O'Brien, N. Castro, J. O'Brien and L.G. Zhang. "Integrating Nanomaterials and 3D Printing for Complex Tissue Regeneration." Christopher is advised by Prof. Lijie Grace Zhang.

Other News

This summer researchers at GW's Institute for Magnetics Research (IMR) are working with a new cryogen-free, vector vibrating sample magnetometer (vVSM), which they have been using to study the magnetic behavior of magnetic materials and Heusler alloys. Different magnetic materials have been measured at different temperatures and applied fields using VSM. Different measuring methods such as isofield and isothermal measurements also were tested by VSM. In isothermal measurements, by keeping the magnetic field constant and varying the temperature, magnetization was measured at each temperature; and in isothermal measurements, by keeping the temperature constant and varying the magnetic field, magnetization was measured at each field. The researchers for this project include three interns from Thomas Jefferson High School; Dr.Virgil Provenazano, a visiting senior researcher from NIST; Dr. Mladen Barbic, a visiting senior researcher from the Janelia Farm Research Campus in Ashburn, VA; Dr. Mohammadreza Ghahremani, a postdoctoral fellow; and ECE graduate student Maryam Ovichi. IMR focuses its work on modeling, experimental measurements, and the use of magnetic materials in magnetic refrigeration systems.

SEAS Computing Facility News:

Software updates:
New Software:
Adobe Creative Cloud: In collaboration with a few other schools and the Division of IT, SEASCF now offers the entire Adobe Creative Cloud suite to SEAS faculty and staff. The available products include Dreamweaver, Illustrator, Indesign, and Photoshop.

Intel Visual Fortran Studio XE: SEASCF now offers 10 floating Windows licenses of Intel Visual Fortran for SEAS Faculty.

 

Software changes:

Matlab: SEAS, CCAS, and the Business School consolidated Matlab licenses over the summer resulting in an increased number of licenses and additional toolkits available for the schools to share. 

Autodesk: Effective May 7, 2014, Autodesk has changed its education business model, providing free access to Autodesk's professional desktop and suites for educational institutions in North America. SEAS was granted three years of free educational licenses through the Autodesk Academic Resource Center resulting in access to the complete Education Master Suite and the Entertainment Creation Suite.

 

Research computing updates

Colonial One High Performance Computing: GW recently acquired and deployed a new shared high-performance computing cluster called Colonial One. This cluster is managed by professional staff in the Division of IT, with university-sponsored computational staff in the Computational Biology Institute and the Columbian College of Arts and Sciences.

This implementation represents a partnership between the Division of IT and the university's academic and research organizations in response to current and developing faculty research needs. SEAS joined CCAS, SMHS, SPHHS, CBI and DIT on the Colonial One HPC initiative, significantly expanding computing resources for the Engineering School's researchers.

This investment will give SEAS researchers priority access on:
- 32 K20 GPUs
- 512 CPU cores
- 20 TB of storage for SEAS HPC users
- Access to a shared 250TB lustre file system

Support will be provided by the SEAS Computing Facility in collaboration with the HPC administration team in the Division of IT and the HPC community at GW. To request access for your research group, please email [email protected] with the following information:
- PI name and UserID
- Department
- Research group name
- Research group members and UserIDs

 

Instructional Labs upgrades

Tompkins 201: Studio Lab

  • All three projectors including the dull smartboard projector are being life-cycled and replaced with clearer and more powerful ones
  • All walls were repainted with fresh dry erase paint

Tompkins 405: Linux/Mac Lab

  • Dry erase film is being installed on the glass, significantly increasing the writing surface
  • Ceiling speakers are being installed
  • Seating is being rearranged to use the space more efficiently
  • Flat screen TVs are being installed to improve student viewing angles

Tompkins 410 and 411

  • The whiteboards have been removed and replaced with dry erase walls
  • Ceiling speakers are being installed
  • Seating is being rearranged to use the space more efficiently
  • Flat screen TVs are being installed to improve student viewing angles

New Services
3D Printers: SEASCF recently acquired four 3D printers and one Digitizer Scanner for SEAS students and faculty. To book a scanner for a class or schedule time for a printout, please email [email protected]

Dissertation Defenses

Name of Student Defending: Matthieu Andre
Title of Dissertation: "Measurement of Interface Dynamics and Transfer Applied to a Free Surface Shear Instability"
Advisor: Prof. Philippe Bardet
Thursday, July 31
2:00 pm
736 Phillips Hall