Faculty News
Research:
Prof. Michael Keidar (MAE), in collaboration with colleagues at Georgia Tech, has been awarded a three-year Air Force Office of Scientific Research grant for the project “High fidelity coupling of predictive plasma-wall models.” The total amount of the grant is $1.05 million. Georgia Tech is the prime contractor; the GW portion of the grant is $341,657. This project focuses on basic research on plasma-wall interaction, both experimentally and computationally. To this end, a novel kinetic model of plasma-wall interaction will be developed.
Media Mentions:
Prof. David Broniatowski’s (EMSE) work, “Decoupling of the Minority Ph.D. Talent Pool & Assistant Professor Hiring in Medical School Basic Science Departments” (also noted below in the Publications section), was featured in the November 22 article, “’There Aren’t Qualified Minority Candidates’ is a Myth,” published in the Scientific American blog “Voices.”
In its November 26 article “‘It’s Standing Rock North’: Trans Mountain pipeline in Canada stirs strong opposition,” The Seattle Times mentioned a GW vessel-traffic risk assessment, which Prof. Rene van Dorp (EMSE) and his colleague Dr. Jason Merrick (VCU) conducted.
Wired quoted Prof. Poorvi Vora (CS) in the November 23 article “Hacked or Not, Audit This Election (And All Future Ones).’’ Prof. Vora was interviewed separately for the November 28 segment “The Wisconsin Recount: What You Need to Know” on WNYC radio’s “The Takeaway.”
Publications:
“Decoupling of the Minority Ph.D. Talent Pool & Assistant Professor Hiring in Medical School Basic Science Departments,” a paper co-authored by Prof. David Broniatowski (EMSE) has been published as a feature article in eLife. The first author of the study, Dr. Kenneth Gibbs, began this paper as a final project in Prof. Broniatowski’s course, Systems Thinking and Policy Modeling, in fall 2014. The full citation of the paper is: K. D. Gibbs, J. Basson, I. Xierali, and D. A. Broniatowski (2016). “Decoupling of the minority PhD talent pool and assistant professor hiring in medical school basic science departments in the US,” eLife, 5.
Prof. Leila Farhadi (CEE) and her former master’s student Mohammad Amin Nabian have published the following paper in ASCE’s Journal of Hydraulic Engineering: M. Nabian and L. Farhadi. “Multiphase Mesh-Free Particle Method for Simulating Granular Flows and Sediment Transport,” Journal of Hydraulic Engineering, 10.1061/(ASCE)HY.1943-7900. 0001275, 04016102.
Prof. Michael Keidar (MAE) and his graduate student Dayun Yan have published the following article: D. Yan, J. H. Sherman, and M. Keidar. “Cold atmospheric plasma, a novel promising anti-cancer treatment modality,” Oncotarget. DOI: 10.18632/oncotarget.13304
Prof. Ahmed Louri (ECE) and his graduate student Pavan Poluri (University of Arizona) have published the following paper: P. Poluri and A. Louri. “Shield: A Reliable Network-on-Chip Router Architecture for Chip Multiprocessors,” IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems, vol.27, issue 10, pp.3058-3070, October 2016. Their work is sponsored by a grant from the National Science Foundation and presents novel and efficient techniques for making future multicore chips more reliable. This work will open the path for scaling future fault-tolerant multicore chips and parallel computing systems.
Conferences & Presentations:
On November 18, Prof. Valerie Reyna (Cornell University) presented joint work with Prof. David Broniatowski (EMSE) at the Psychonomic Society conference in Boston, MA. The name of her talk was “Qualitative Decision Making Under Uncertainty: A Formal Model of Fuzzy-Trace Theory.”
On November 3, Prof. Edward Della Torre (ECE) and his Ph.D. student Ali Jamali presented the paper “Vector magnetization of a distribution of cubic particles” at the 61st Annual Conference on Magnetism and Magnetic Materials. The conference was held in New Orleans, LA.
Prof. Emilia Entcheva (BME) presented an invited talk at the Arrhythmia Summit during the premier annual meeting of the American Heart Association, held November 12-16 in New Orleans, LA. The title of her talk was “Cardiac Applications of Optogenetics.” At the same meeting, Dr. Christina Ambrosi, a research scientist in Prof. Entcheva’s lab, presented a poster titled “Adeno-associated virus mediated gene delivery: implications for scalable in vivo cardiac model of optogenetics.”
Prof. Howie Huang (ECE) and his Ph.D. student Pradeep Kumar presented their paper, “G-Store: High-Performance Graph Store for Trillion-Edge Processing,” at the IEEE/ACM International Conference for High Performance Computing Networking, Storage, and Analysis (Supercomputing SC'16), held November 13-18 in Salt Lake City, UT. G-Store achieves significant savings in storage and greatly outperforms the state-of-the-art. It is able to run different algorithms on trillion-edge graphs within tens of minutes, setting a new milestone in semi-external graph processing. Prof. Huang was also invited by NVIDIA to give a talk on high-performance graph analytics on GPUs at its technology theater at SC 16, where invited researchers present the latest scientific results on high-performance computing and scientific discovery. SC is the top conference in the field of high-performance computing; this year the conference accepted only 81 of 442 papers.
The paper “Dynamic Error Mitigation in NoCs using Intelligent Prediction Techniques,” published by Prof. Ahmed Louri (ECE) and his research team, was presented at the 49th IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Microarchitecture(IEEE/ACM Micro). This seminal paper on the use of machine learning in the design of next generation computer chips was sponsored by the National Science Foundation and tackles one of the most critical issues in the future of computing chips: chip reliability and error mitigations. The authors propose the utilization of machine-learning algorithms to predict faults efficiently in the system before they occur. Their work provides a solid and effective path for scaling future chips and mitigating the reliability challenge. IEEE/ACM Micro was held October 15-19 in Taipei, Taiwan and is the premier and flagship conference for presenting, discussing, and debating innovative microarchitecture ideas and techniques for advanced computing and communication systems.
Other News:
Prof. Ahmed Louri (ECE) will teach a new course, ECE 6045: Design of Interconnection Networks for Parallel Computer Architectures, in spring 2017. ECE 6045 is a standard three-credit ECE course. It will explore the architecture and design of interconnection networks for multiple domains (multicores, multiprocessors, multicomputers, and datacenters), including architecture topology, routing protocols, flow control, router design, reliability, energy efficiency, scalability, security, modeling and simulation tools, emerging technologies for interconnects (optical, wireless, RF, etc.) and emerging applications (neuromorphic, quantum, approximate computing, etc.).
Student News
EMSE graduate student Connor Roberts won second place in the graduate track in the 2016 GW Pitch George competition. Connor’s pitch was for a medical equipment management device that would allow healthcare facilities to track equipment and perform predictive maintenance on it, saving time for healthcare staff and money for the facility, and most importantly, eliminating patient deaths due to failing medical equipment. In this year’s competition, 19 teams competed in the graduate track. Connor is advised by Prof. Ekundayo Shittu (EMSE).
Prof. Murray Snyder’s (MAE) undergraduate student Ben Muthig and recently-graduated MS student Matthew Bornemeier presented the following peer-reviewed papers at the American Society of Naval Engineers Launch and Recovery Symposium, held November 16-17 in Linthicum Heights, MD: 1) C. Friedman, B. Muthig, C. Mallon, and M. Snyder. “Analysis of In Situ Ship Air Wake Dynamic Interface Phenomena Using a Small Scale Helicopter,” and 2) M. Bornemeier, M. Snyder, and G. Karpouzian. “Periodic Helicopter Response in a Turbulent Ship Air Wake.” Other GW authors of the papers include MAE undergraduate Chris Mallon and former post-doc Chen Friedman.
Computer science Ph.D. student Samuel Zapolsky, advised by Evan Drumwright (now at Toyota Research Institute), published the following peer-reviewed paper in the IEEE/RAS International Conference on Humanoid Robotics, held November 15-17 in Cancun, Mexico: S. Zapolsky and E.
Drumwright. “Particle Traces for Detecting Divergent Robot Behavior.” This research showed how to perturb dynamical robotic models to identify brittle plans and control policies for legged and manipulator robots.
Other News
SEAS Student R&D Showcase—deadline extended: The deadline to apply for the 2017 SEAS Student R&D Showcase has been extended to Monday, December 5. Visit the R&D Showcase Student Participant Information web page to get more information about the competition and application process.
MATLAB workshops and tutoring: SEAS Computing Facility is holding a series of workshops covering MATLAB programming in Tompkins 405 from November 12 through December 10. Remaining events include:
- December 3: Figures & 3D Plotting
- December 10: Linear Equation & ODE Solving
Interested students can register for the workshops at. Matlab tutoring also will be offered from 1:00 to 5:00 pm on Tuesdays and Thursdays in Tompkins 401. To schedule an appointment for MATLAB tutoring, please email [email protected]. The MATLAB workshops and tutoring will be hosted by SEAS graduate student Makan Payandehazad.
The SEAS Environmental and Energy Management Institute and the European Energy Center will offer three remaining professional short courses:
Distributed Generation and Storage
Thursday and Friday, December 8-9
Taught by: Scott Sklar
Circular Economy
Thursday and Friday, March 16-17, 2017
Taught by: Roger Feldman and Ed Pinero
Multi-Aspect Introduction to Solar Photovoltaics
Dates TBA
Taught by: Scott Sklar
SEAS Events
ECE Seminar: “From Cloaking to One-Way Propagation: The Fascinating Physics and Engineering of Metamaterials”
Speaker: Dr. Andrea Alù, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, The University of Texas at Austin
Monday, November 28
1:00 – 2:00 pm
SEH, B1220
BME Seminar: “Haptics: The Technology of Touch”
Speaker: Dr. Katherine Kuchenbecker, University of Pennsylvania
Monday, November 28
4:00 – 5:00 pm
SEH, B1220
Workshop: Parallel Programming for the Intel Xeon Manycores
Tuesday, November 29
8:30 am – 6:00 pm
SEH, B1220
Register
GW’s Institute of Massively Parallel Applications and Computing Technologies (IMPACT) and the GW Intel Parallel Computing Center (GW IPCC) are pleased to invite researchers to a one-day, hands-on workshop. Instructions will be provided by Colfax International in Cooperation with GW IPCC.
CSPRI Lecture: “Cybersecurity in the Next Congress: How Much Will the Recent Election Change Current Policies and Actions?”
Speaker: Congressman Jim Langevin (D-RI)
Thursday, December 1
7:30 pm
SEH, B1220
SEAS Workshop: Women in Engineering
Friday, December 2
2:00 – 4:00 pm
SEH, B1220
Register
Dean David Dolling invites you to help make SEAS the #1 school in the country for graduating women with bachelor degrees in engineering and computer science. Join SEAS faculty, staff, students, alumni, and supporters as we address recruitment and retention issues that impact our women students. Refreshments will be available following the workshop.
ECE Seminar: “Matrix Factorization on GPU: A Tale of Two Algorithms”
Speaker: Dr. Wei Tan, Research Staff Member, IBM T. J. Watson Research Center
Tuesday, December 6
2:00 – 3:00 pm
SEH, B1220
ECE Seminar: “Light Modulators – Figures of Merit”
Speaker: Dr. Jacob Khurgin, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Johns Hopkins University
Tuesday, December 6
11:00 am – 12:00 pm
SEH, 2000
Entrepreurship Events
Video Storytelling Workshop with Planet Forward
Thursday, December 1
5:30 – 7:00 pm
Media & Public Affairs Building, Room 525
Register
Join GW Office of Innovation & Entrepreneurship and Planet Forward and its experienced media team to learn more about incorporating storytelling into your video pitch!
Student Incubator Meeting
Friday, December 2
2:00 – 3:00 pm
Tompkins M06 (Basement Level)
GW is getting its first-ever student incubator/maker space! Students are invited to meet with the GWIE team to discuss plans for the upcoming incubator space in Tompkins Hall. If you are interested in attending, please email Jasmine Bautista.
Webinar: Orientation to the New Venture Competition
Tuesday, December 6
12:00 – 1:00 pm
GW runs the 5th largest student entrepreneurship competition in the country with annual prizes valued at over $250,000. Lex McCusker, director of Student Entrepreneurship Programs, will give an overview of the New Venture Competition, including timelines, submission requirements, and scoring criteria. He will also describe the broad array of services that are available to members of the GW community who are interested in innovation and entrepreneurship, both on campus and online. First round entries for this year's competition are due on January 25, 2017.
External Events
Pre-Award Grant Development Boot Camp
Wednesday, December 7
1:00 – 4:30 pm
Marvin Center, Room 310
RSVP
Learn how to plan, prepare, and submit a competitive research proposal. More information
Dissertation Defenses
Student Name: Liping Ai
Title: “A Novel Study of the SNIR Distributions of Ka-Band HTS Systems”
Advisor: Dr. Hermann Helgert (ECE)
Thursday, December 8
1:00 – 3:00 pm
SEH, 2990