Faculty News
Papers:
Prof. Peter Bock (CS) and his doctoral student, Erhan Guven, have had two different but related papers accepted at two upcoming conferences: 1) "Feature Selection for the Classification of Emotions from Human Speech" at the AIPR Conference in Washington, DC, later this month; and 2) "The Effect of Backward Context on the Performance of a Support Vector Machine Applied to the Classification of Emotions from Human Speech" at the ANNIE 2010 Conference in St. Louis, MO, in early November. ANNIE is recognized as one of the largest and most rigorously refereed annual conferences in the field of complex adaptive systems.
Prof. Xiuzhen Cheng (CS) and her collaborators (Wei Li, Yong Cui, and Shengling Wang at Tsinghua University, Beijing, China) published a paper entitled "Approximate Optimization for Proportional Fair AP Association in Multi-rate WLANs" at the Fifth International Conference on Wireless Algorithms, Systems and Applications (WASA'10). This paper received the sole best paper award at WASA 2010.
Prof. Michael Keidar (MAE), along with his post-doc Alexey Shashurin and doctoral student Olga Volotskova, have published the following paper: O. Volotskova, J. Fagan, F. R. Phelan, A. Shashurin, M. Keidar, "Tailored Distribution of Single-Wall Carbon Nanotubes from Arc Plasma Synthesis Using Magnetic Fields," ACS Nano, Vol. 4, No. 9, 2010.
Prof. Rene van Dorp (EMSE) published the following paper with his collaborators from The University of Granada, Spain: J.M. HerrerÃas-Velasco, R. Herrerias-Pleguezuelo and J. R.van Dorp (2010). "Revisiting the PERT mean and variance", European Journal of Operational Research, Available online before print, ISSN 0377-2217, DOI: 10.1016/j.ejor.2010.08.014. The European Journal of Operational Research has an impact factor of 2.093 and ranks 10th out of 73 Operations Research and Management Science (ORMS) journals.
Conferences & Presentations:
Prof. Ken Chong (MAE) just completed a lecture tour on topics of sustainability and mechanics research. He presented seminars at UCLA (on September 29) and the University of Connecticut (on October 7). He also visited key laboratories, faculty members and students. He reports that, overall, it was an enlightening and productive trip.
Prof. Jonathan Deason (EMSE) chaired a session entitled "Federal Greenhouse Gas Reporting and Metrics" at the GreenGov conference, which was sponsored by the U.S. Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ) and held at GW. Deason's session, which was held on October 5, featured senior officials from EPA, CEQ, and the World Resources Institute and was attended by more than 150 people.
Prof. Tianshu Li (CEE) attended the 47th Annual Technical Meeting of the Society of Engineering Science (SES) at Iowa State University October 3-6. Prof. Li gave a presentation entitled "Molecular simulation of nucleation in tetrahedral solids" at the symposium of Phase Transformation and Mechanochemistry.
Prof. David Nagel (ECE) presented a talk entitled "Scientific Challenge: Distributed Nuclear Energy" to the Society of the Emeriti of GW on September 24.
Prof. Adam Wickenheiser (MAE) recently attended the ASME 2010 Conference on Smart Materials, Adaptive Structures and Intelligent Systems (SMASIS) in Philadelphia, PA, where he presented the paper "Broadband and Low Frequency Vibration-Based Energy Harvesting Improvement Through Magnetically Induced Frequency Up-Conversion" and chaired a session on energy harvesting. Prof. Wickenheiser also attended the 21st International Conference on Adaptive Structures and Technologies (ICAST) at Penn State University in State College, PA. At the conference, his doctoral student, Chris Blower, presented the paper "Biomimetic Feather Structures for Localized Flow Control and Gust Alleviation on Aircraft Wings", and Prof. Wickenheiser chaired a session on sensors and actuators. Prof. Wickenheiser was also elected to the International Organizing Committee for this conference.
Other News
Prof. Xiuzhen Cheng (CS) was appointed an associate editor of the IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems (TPDS) effective October 1, 2010.
Student News
On September 28, EMSE doctoral student Ariel Castillo presented an invited talk at the University of Notre Dame's Energy Center as part of its Energy Week. The talk is entitled "Determination of Solar Energy Transition Potential of Department of Defense Facilities and Non-Tactical Vehicles." Ariel was accompanied by EMSE Profs. Joost Santos and Royce Francis as part of a collaborative outreach visit organized by Patrick Murphy, a GW doctoral student who is the managing director of the Notre Dame Energy Center.
Stephen Fields, a doctoral student of Prof. Jonathan Deason (EMSE), gave an oral presentation entitled "An Analysis of South Carolina's Use of Emerging Technologies for the Remediation of Leaking Underground Storage Tanks" at the 2010 Southeastern INFORMS Conference, in Myrtle Beach, SC, October 7-8.
Guest Vignette
CMOS (complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor) technology is the prevalent process technology for building most, if not all, of today's computing systems. As CMOS technology continues to advance, an ever-increasing number of devices can be integrated on-chip to improve the computation capability of modern microprocessors. Unfortunately, this evolution also increases the power dissipation of the traditionally single-core chips and forces chipmakers to switch to multi-core designs. While these trends result in computers that can achieve very high throughput, two design challenges must be overcome to exploit their full potential.
Finding performance in multi-core: In multi-core designs, software must be parallelized (divided into smaller tasks that can be run simultaneously on multiple processing cores) in order to achieve higher performance. To this end, Prof. Alex Li and his students are investigating how modern parallel software interacts in current multi-core systems. In particular, they are focusing on the inefficiency of the memory system in order to derive architecture-level and/or software-level enhancements that can improve both the performance and power of the system.
Ensuring resiliency in multi-core: One interpretation of the Law of Large Numbers and Murphy's Law is that future billion-transistor microprocessors will experience failures. However, traditional fault-tolerant solutions are simply too expensive for many market segments. To address this challenge, Prof. Alex Li and his students look into characterizing faulty behaviors when parallel software is run on faulty hardware. This analysis is used to implement a highly efficient fault-tolerant scheme for protecting multi-threaded software and multi-core hardware. (Provided courtesy of Prof. Alex Li of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering)
Upcoming
Cybersecurity Seminar: Healthcare Reform and Trust on the Internet
Patricia MacTaggart, GW School of Public Health and Health Services
Wednesday, October 13
12:00 pm
302 Marvin Center
SEAS Graduate Student Open House and Seminar
Topic: Cloud Computing, presented by Prof. Howie Huang (ECE)
Wednesday, October 13
4:00 pm
310 Marvin Center
Looking Forward
GW Institute for Biomedical Engineering Seminar: Endothelialization of Drug Eluting Stents: Will new designs overcome limitations?
Tuesday, October 19
1:00 - 2:00 pm
736 Phillips Hall
CEE Colloquium: Material Characterization for Numerical Simulations and their Validation with Component Tests
Prof. Eberhard Roos, University of Stuttgart (Germany)
Thursday, October 21
11:00 am - 12:00 pm
640 Phillips Hall
SEAS Entrepreneurship Seminar: "Student Startups: From the Dorm Room to the Board Room"
Tuesday, October 26
6:00: Reception; 7:00: Panel Discussion
103 Funger Hall
Please join us for the first panel discussion in the 2010-2011 SEAS Entrepreneurship Seminar Series. Registration is required
Institute for Knowledge and Innovation Seminar: Adapting for Success in a Knowledge-based Economy"
Tuesday, October 26
10:00 am - 3:30 pm
Virginia Science and Technology Campus, Research 1, Rooms 410-413
ECE Colloquium: Electrical Power System Reliability and Economics: Applications and Challenges in the Emerging Energy Sector
Needal Deeb, Renergix, Fairfax, VA
Thursday, October 28
1:30 - 2:30 pm
640 Phillips
ECE Colloquium: An Investigation of Magnetic Reversal at Almost the Nanoscale (IEEE Magnetics Society Distinguished Lecture Series 2010)
Prof. E. Dan Dahlberg, University of Minnesota
Wednesday, November 3
4:00 pm
640 Phillips
MAE Colloquium: How Aeros, Ag/Bio Engineers, Chemists, Food Scientists & MEs Work Together To Develop Advanced Rocket Motors
Paul Sojka, Purdue University
Monday, November 8
1:00 - 2:00 pm
736 Phillips
ECE Colloquium: A New Paradigm for Exchange Bias in Polycrystalline Films (IEEE Magnetics Society Distinguished Lecture Series 2010)
Prof. Kevin O'Grady, University of York (U.K.)
Wednesday, November 10
3:00 pm
640 Phillips
GW Institute for Biomedical Engineering Colloquium: Dual-Mode Imaging of Cardiac Ischemia and Reperfusion in Contracting Hearts Using Contrast Echocardiography and Fluorescence Imaging
Profs. Vesna Zderic and Matthew Kay, ECE
Tuesday, November 16
2:30 - 3:30 pm
736 Phillips
"A Day in the Life of an Engineer"
Tuesday, November 16
6:00 - 8:00 pm
Location: TBD
Dissertation Defenses
Name of Student Defending: Bassam Ar Noaman
Title of Dissertation: "Computation of Semiconductor Device Noise for Semi-Classical Transport"
Monday, October 18 at 11:30 am
640 Phillips Hall
Name of Student Defending: Majid Mubarak Al-Naimi
Title of Dissertation: "Waveband Optimization in ROADM-based Optical Networks"
Thursday, October 21 at 1:00 am
640 Phillips Hall