November 26 - December 2, 2012

Newsletter

November 26, 2012

Faculty News

Awards and Honors:

Prof. Howie Huang's (ECE) research, "Pay as You Go in the Cloud: One Watt at a Time," won the ACM Undergraduate Student Research Competition at the Supercomputing Conference (SC'12) during the week of November 12. In this work, they propose a per-watt-hour pricing model for cloud computing. Compared to current per-machine-hour pricing, this energy usage based model can become a more accurate cost estimate of the service received by the users, and the cloud computing providers' profit can also become more stable.

Prof. Martha Pardavi-Horvath (ECE) recently received the BRAZIL-U.S. Distinguished Lectureship/Professorship Award, jointly sponsored by the Sociedade Brasileira de Física and the American Physical Society. In late October, she visited the Brazilian Center for Physics Research in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and the Universidade Federal de Pernambuco, Department of Physics in Recife, Brazil, where she presented a special colloquium on nanotechnology, a short course on nanomagnetism, and the following lectures: 1) "Propagation of Electromagnetic Waves in 3-D Magnetophotonic Crystals at Microwave Frequencies;" 2) "Shape and size effects is small magnetic particles;" and 3) "Interaction effects in magnetic nanowires and two dimensional arrays of nanoparticles."

Publications:

Prof. Michael Keidar (MAE) has published the following paper: L. Pekker and M. Keidar. “Analysis of Air Breathing Hall-Effect Thrusters,” Journal of Propulsion and Power, Vol. 28, No. 6, pp. 1399-1405, 2012.

Prof. Kausik Sarkar (MAE) has published the following article with his Ph.D. student Amit Katiyar: Katiyar A, Sarkar K 2012. “Effects of encapsulation damping on excitation threshold for subharmonic generation from contrast microbubbles,” Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 132, 3576-3585.

Prof. Adam Wickenheiser (MAE) recently published a chapter, titled "Analysis of Energy Harvesting Using Frequency Up-Conversion by Analytic Approximations," in the book Small-Scale Energy Harvesting, edited by Mickael Lallart and published by InTech.

Prof. Lijie Grace Zhang (MAE) and her students Benjamin Holmes and Nathan Castro have published the following paper in Tissue Engineering journal: B. Holmes, N. Castro, L.G. Zhang, and E. Zussman. “Electrospun Fibrous Scaffolds for Cartilage and Bone Regeneration: Recent Progress and Future Developments,” Tissue Engineering Part B, 18(6):478-486 (2012).

Conferences and Presentations:

Prof. Ben-Tzvi (MAE) and his doctoral student William Rone presented the following peer-reviewed conference paper at the 2012 ASME International Mechanical Engineering Congress and Exposition (IMECE 2012), held in Houston, TX, November 9-15: Rone, W., Ben-Tzvi, P., “Continuum Manipulator Statics Based on the Principle of Virtual Work.”

Prof. Ken Chong (MAE) attended the ASME Congress, held November 9-15 in Houston, TX. At the congress, he co-organized a session and presented a lead paper titled "Research and challenges in converging technologies and multi-scale mechanics." The paper was co-authored by Dr. X-Q Wang, a former MAE assistant research professor. Prof. Chong also spent a day at the University of Houston visiting professors, mentoring young faculty members, and delivering a distinguished lecture titled "Nano technology in civil infrastructure and materials."

Prof. Charles Garris (MAE) presented a paper co-authored by Muhammad Umar and himself at the ASME 2012 International Mechanical Engineering Congress, November 9-15, in Houston, TX. The paper is titled “Effect of Fluid Dynamic Parameters on the Performance of a Radial Flow Pressure Exchange Ejector.”

Prof. Kausik Sarkar (MAE) gave an invited talk, titled “Encapsulated Microbubbles: From echocardiohgraphy to noninvasive blood pressure monitoring and targeted drug delivery,” on November 9 at Boston University’s Mechanical Engineering Department.

Prof. Murray Snyder (MAE) presented the paper “Validation of Ship Air Wake Simulations and Investigation of Ship Air Wake Impact on Rotary Wing Aircraft” at the American Society of Naval Engineers Launch and Recovery Symposium 2012, held November 14-15, in Linthicum, MD. His co-authors were Hyung Suk Kang (Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory) and Cody Brownell and John Burks (United States Naval Academy). Prof. Snyder was also the moderator of the Air Technical Session at this conference.

Prof. Suresh Subramaniam (ECE) attended the NSF-sponsored Japan-US Workshop on Advanced Networking Research in Tokyo on November 13-14. The workshop brought together 15 invited researchers from the US and 15 from Japan to discuss research issues in next-generation networks and possible collaboration between Japanese and US researchers.

Student News:

Andrew DeJong, a doctoral student advised by Prof. Chunlei Liang (MAE), presented and published the paper "Massively parallel Spectral Difference solver for simulating vortex-induced vibrations of circular cylinders" on November 15 at the American Society of Mechanical Engineers 2012 International Mechanical Engineering Conference and Expo in Houston, TX. Andrew also served as chair of the session "Wind, Water, Solar and Other Alternative Energy Systems: Wind Power Design."

EMSE graduate student Charisma Williams has published her third article in Emergency Management Magazine. The article is titled "4 Tips for Creating an Emergency Management Career."

Other News:

Prof. Charles Garris’ (MAE) Energy Systems and Analysis class (MAE 6262) had a mano-a-mano debate on the pros and cons of the Obama and Romney energy policies on the eve of the November 6 election. According to Prof. Garris, the two teams probed deeply beyond the political rhetoric and explored the technical, economic, and political issues underlying U. S. energy policy. Highlights of the debate included impassioned support for the role of government in supporting the development of new environmentally friendly technologies by Eydhah Almatrafi and Will Alexander of the Obama team, while Peter Benoliel of the Romney team articulately defended the role of the free-market system in determining which technologies should be adopted. The debate was moderated by Mrs. Jean Hand from ICF Consulting who kept the debaters on topic and on schedule, and injected wisdom from the outside world into the debate.

Guest Vignette:

Over the past decade, multicore processors have become dominant players in advancing computing to new directions. They have been instrumental in enabling higher performance within reasonable power envelopes. Despite advances in computer architecture and technology domains, not all software developers are ready to take full advantage of massive parallelism offered by these multicore architectures. A key enabler to harnessing the promise of multicores is to incorporate some programmer-friendly features into these architectures and enable feedback about the application performance. Prof. Venkataramani's research group has been working on some of these important multicore issues for the past three years. His research has been funded by National Science Foundation CAREER award and another NSF grant from the CISE division. His group's recent work on incorporating emerging memory technologies into multicore machines received best poster award at IEEE PACT 2011 conference. (Provided courtesy of Prof. Guru Venkataramani of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering)

SEAS Events:

ECE Colloquium: “Chemical, Structural, and Electronic Hybridization of Graphene Films”
Dr. Jeremy Robinson, Materials Research Scientist, Naval Research Laboratory
Thursday, November 29
3:30 - 4:30 pm
309 Tompkins Hall
 

Institute for Nanotechonology and Institute for Biomedical Engineering Seminar: "Biocompatible Nanoparticle Materials In For Cancer Imaging and Therapy"
Dr. Xiaoyuan (Shawn) Chen, Chief and Senior Investigator, National Institutes of Health
Friday, November 30
10:30 am
771 Rome Hall
 

GW Institute for Biomedical Engineering Colloquium: “Ultrasound Enhanced Triggered Release of Liposomal Contents”
Dr. Sanku Mallik, North Dakota State University
Thursday, December 6
1:00 - 2:00 pm
204 Tompkins Hall
 

Entrepreneurship Events:

Entrepreneurial Session 6: How to Become a Clean Tech Entrepreneur
Thursday, November 29
5:00 pm
258 Duques Hall
Food and refreshments will be available.
 

$60,000 GW Business Plan Competition:
$10,000 - Best Undergrad Business Plan
$5,000 - Older Adult-Focused Innovation category, thanks to AARP Foundation
$4,000 - Best Sustainable Technology Award
$1,000 - Audience Choice Award
Application deadline: January 28, 2013.