Faculty News
Awards & Honors:
On June 5, Prof. Chunlei Liang (MAE) received the 2014 AIAA National Capital Section Hal Andrews Young Engineer Scientist of the Year Award for his contributions to computational fluid dynamics. The Hal Andrews award is the premier award of the AIAA National Capital Section recognizing aerospace professionals in the early stages of their career. Prof. Liang was nominated for the award by Prof. Charles Garris (MAE).
Visiting Scholar Joe Cascio (EMSE) was named the 2014 recipient of the Honorary Lifetime Membership Award from the Society for Standards Professionals. Prof. Cascio’s notification indicated that “This award is given to only the most highly deserving individuals who have contributed significantly to the field of standardization (including conformity assessment).” Prof. Cascio’s award will be presented during the Society’s annual conference in August. On June 5, Prof. Chunlei Liang (MAE) received the 2014 AIAA National Capital Section Hal Andrews Young Engineer Scientist of the Year Award for his contributions to computational fluid dynamics. The Hal Andrews award is the premier award of the AIAA National Capital Section recognizing aerospace professionals in the early stages of their career. Prof. Liang was nominated for the award by Prof. Charles Garris (MAE).
Research:
Prof. Tian Lan (ECE) has received a $90,000 grant from DARPA (subcontract through ACS) to develop a cross-stratum scheduling protocol for optimizing deadline-aware traffic in Tb/s clouds via a game theoretical approach.
Prof. Julie Ryan (EMSE) received an award from Emergent Network Defense Inc. for $86,536 to assist in the development of cybersecurity technologies and to advance the research associated with an innovative biomimetic approach to network defense. The foundations for the technology development are the subject of a patent filing resulting from dissertation research performed in the EMSE department by Dr. Earl Crane with Prof. Ryan.
Prof. Joost Santos (EMSE) has received a $20,000 sub-contract from the University of Waterloo to study the feasibility of developing a water biofiltration system using Moringa Oleifera. This project is funded by Grand Challenges Canada, a highly competitive funding source that supports “bold ideas with big impact.”
Prof. Rahul Simha (CS) , together with colleagues in the Departments of Mathematics and Statistics, has been awarded a $600,000 grant from the National Science Foundation titled “GW Mathematics and Statistics Training, Education and Research.” The four-year project is intended to introduce “Big Data” elements, coursework, and undergraduate research into mathematics and statistics education at GW. The team is led by Professor Yongwu Rong (PI, Mathematics), with co-PIs, Profs. Murli Gupta and Maria Gualdani (Mathematics), Rahul Simha, and Yinglei Lai (Statistics).
Prof. Poorvi Vora (CS) has been awarded a subcontract on a National Security Agency grant to the University of Maryland. The $300,000 subcontract is titled “Reasoning About Protocols With Human Participants.” It is part of a National Security Agency Science of Security lablet at the University of Maryland, College Park (there are only four such lablets; others are at Carnegie Mellon University, North Carolina State University and University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign).
Media Mentions:
Allan Friedman (research scientist, Cyber Security Policy Research Institute) was quoted in the June 12 Washington Times article “ Consumer deals come at price of personal data ,’’ and the June 4 Gov info Security article “ Authorizing Federal Systems Continuously.” He also was interviewed for the June 6 WNPR article “Listen: How the Internet Works,” and he appeared in the June 4 CCTV-America interview “FTC lifts veil on data collection .”
Prof. Charles Garris (MAE) was the subject of the May 19 GW Hatchet article, “ With a history of bridging opposing sides, top faculty leader assumes post .”
Publications:
Profs. Edward Della Torre and Lawrence Bennett (ECE) have published the following paper: L. H. Bennett and E. Della Torre. “Bose-Einstein Condensation of Confined Magnons in Nanostructures,” Journal of Modern Physics, 5(8), 693, 2014.
Prof. Samer Hamdar (CEE) and his doctoral student Justin Schorr have published an article in Accident Analysis and Prevention, considered to be one of the top journals in transportation safety. The article citation is: J. P. Schorr and S. H. Hamdar. (2014) “Safety Propensity Index for Signalized and Unsignalized Intersections: Exploration and Assessment,” Accident Analysis and Prevention, pp. 93-105, DOI information: 10.1016/j.aap.2014.05.008.
Prof. Michael Keidar (MAE) has published the following paper with his graduate and undergraduate students Xiaoqian “Jenny” Cheng and Will Murphy: X. Cheng, J. Sherman, W. Murphy, E. Ratovitski, J. Canady, and M. Keidar. “ The Effect of Tuning Cold Plasma Composition on Glioblastoma Cell Viability ,” PLOS ONE, May 30, 2014.
Prof. Tianshu Li (CEE) and his graduate student Yuanfei Bi have published the following paper: Y. Bi and T. Li. “Probing Methane Hydrate Nucleation through the Forward Flux Sampling Method,” Journal of Physical Chemistry B, 2014, DOI: 10.1021/jp503000u.
Prof. Joost Santos (EMSE) is a co-author of the recently published article: R. R. Tan, K.B. Aviso, M. A. B. Promentilla, F. D. Solis, K. D. Yu, and J. R. Santos. “ A shock absorption index for inoperability input–output models ,” Economic Systems Research, June 2014.
Prof. Kausik Sarkar (MAE) and his graduate student Shirshendu Paul have published the following collaborative article: R. Nahire, R. Hossain, R. Patel, S. Paul, A. H. Ambre, V. Meghnani, B. Layek, K. S. Katti, K. N. Gange, E. Leclarc, D. K. Srivastava, K. Sarkar, and S. Mallik. (2014) “Multifunctional polymersomes for cytosolic delivery of gemcitabine and doxorubicin to cancer cells,” Biomaterials, 35, 6482-6497.
Conferences & Presentations:
Prof. Samer Hamdar (CEE) participated in the 2014 National Science Foundation Cyber-Bridges Workshop for CAREER awardees, held June 2-3, in Arlington, VA. At the workshop, he presented work titled “Vehicle to Vehicle and Vehicle to Infrastructure Communication Logics Using an Episode Based Modeling Framework” and interacted with researchers from the advanced cyber-infrastructure community.
Prof. Zhenyu Li (ECE) gave an invited talk, titled “Co-Fabrication of Liquid-core Micro/Nano Structures in Soft Materials for Stretchable Electronics, Photonics and Microfluidics,” at the EIPBN Conference, held May 27-30, here in Washington, DC. EIPBN, or the “3-Beams” conference, is the premier conference on the science and technology of nanopatterning, and is the place to hear the newest techniques and the latest advances in patterning and device fabrication technology.
On June 17, Prof. Claire Monteleoni (CS) will give an invited talk at NIST in the ACMD Seminar Series, Applied and Computational Mathematics Division. Her talk is titled “Clustering Algorithms for Streaming and Online Settings.”
Prof. Kausik Sarkar (MAE) gave an invited talk at the 2nd Northeast Complex Fluids and Soft Matter Workshop, held June 6, at City College of New York. The title of his talk was “Dynamics of Encapsulated Microbubbles for Cotrast Ultrasound Imaging and Drug Delivery.”
Visiting Scholar Wei Zhang and CS doctoral student Sundaresan Rajasekaran, both advised by Prof. Timothy Wood (CS), presented their paper, titled “MIMP: Deadline and Interference Aware Scheduling of Hadoop Virtual Machines,” at the IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Cluster, Cloud and Grid Computing, held May 26-29, in Chicago, IL.
EMSE was well represented at the 4th International Engineering Systems Symposium (CESUN 2014), held June 8-12, in Hoboken, NJ. Profs. David Broniatowski, Royce Francis, Erica Gralla, Tom Mazzuchi, Zoe Szajnfarber and EMSE doctoral students Azrah Azhar, Alex Burg, Isabel Bignon, Amy Cox, Samantha Marquart, Ifechukwu Nduka, Zach Pirtle, and Ademir Vrolijk represented EMSE. Profs. Francis and Szajnfarber served on the program committee for the conference.
Plenary panel:
Prof. Szajnfarber organized and moderated the plenary panel “An Interdisciplinary Discussion of Modularity, Evolution and Innovation: Organization, Organisms, Physical and Infrastructure Systems.”
Peer-reviewed papers:
1) D. A. Broniatowski. “Requirements Upflow: Using Requirements Documents to Uncover the Latent Architecture of Engineered Systems.”
2) D. A. Broniatowski and J. Moses. “Flexibility, Complexity, and Controllability in Complex Systems.”
3) M. Dwyer and Z. Szajnfarber. “A Framework to Assess the Impacts of Jointness.”
4) R. A. Francis. "A vision for probabilistic analysis of re-configurable resilient engineered and infrastructure systems.”
5) E. L. Gralla and Z. Szajnfarber. “Parts and Path: Interactions between decomposition and decision sequence in design and operations.”
6) Z. Szajnfarber, A. Vrolijk, and J. Crusan. “Exploring the Interaction Between Open Innovation Methods and System Complexity.”
Poster presentations:
1) A. Azhar and E. Gralla. “Disaster Response Logistics: Towards a Realistic Representation of Disaster Contexts.”
2) A. Burg and Z. Szajnfarber. “Conceptually Modeling the Organizational and Technological Interactions between NASA’s R&D and Mission Concept Ecosystems.”
3) I. Bignon and Z. Szajnfarber. “Organizational implications of individual-level exploration and exploitation in the R&D context.”
4) A. Cox and Z. Szajnfarber. “A Case Study of Evolution Enabling System Characteristics.”
5) Z. Pirtle, A. Vrolijk, and Z. Szajnfarber. “Path dependence, social construction and hierarchy in systems engineering: Insights from comparing satellite instrument developments in the United States and European Union.”
6) I. Nduka and J. R. van Dorp. “Modeling Uncertainty due to a Programmatic Risk Factor using a Bayesian Network approach.”
Session chairmanships:
1) Prof. Broniatowski chaired the technical session “Foundations of Complex Engineering Systems.”
2) Prof. Francis chaired the technical session “Resilience in Engineering Systems.”
3) Prof. Gralla chaired the technical session “Fundamentals: Autonomy and System Boundary.”
4) Prof. Szajnfarber chaired the technical session “Dynamics of Innovation in Engineering Systems.”
Other News:
On May 27, the international steering committee of the 2014 Conference on Electromagnetic Field Calculations presented Prof. Edward Della Torre (ECE) with a plaque and certificate of appreciation for his help with, and promotion of, the conference. The conference was held in Annecy, France.
Student News
MAE doctoral student Farhad Goodarzi and master’s student John Dougherty attended the American Control Conference, held June 3-4, in Portland, OR, and presented the following three papers: 1) “Laser-based guidance of a quadrotor UAV for precise landing on an inclined surface;” 2) “Geometric stabilization of a quadrotor UAV with a payload connected by flexible cable;” and 3) “Lagrangian mechanics and Lie group variational integrators for spacecraft with imbalanced reaction wheels.” Farhad and John are advised by Prof. Taeyoung Lee (MAE).
Other News
The National Security Agency and the Department of Homeland Security have re-designated GW as a Center of Excellence in Information Assurance and Cyber Defense with a research designation. This designation will hold until 2019.
Jonah Han, Taehee Lee , and Javed Shaik, three students from Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, will join GW's Institute for Magnetics Research (IMR) as summer interns. They will be involved in original research in preparation for careers in engineering or physics, and will be mentored by Profs. Edward Della Torre and Lawrence Bennett (ECE) and supervised by IMR's doctoral students.
SEAS Events
ECE Colloquium:
“Sparse Representation of Multispectral Images and Application to Remote Sensing”
Speaker: Dr. Peng Liu, Chinese Academy of Sciences
Thursday, June 19
2:00 – 3:00 pm
640 Phillips Hall