Faculty News
Research:
Prof. Amir Etemadi (ECE) has received a grant for High-impact Teaching and Learning Practices from the Office of the Vice Provost for Teaching and Learning. The purpose of the grant is to improve teaching and learning activities at the undergraduate and graduate levels. The total funding for the grant is $10,000, with 50% coming from the Office of the Vice Provost for Teaching and Learning, 25% from SEAS, and 25% from the ECE department.
Publishing:
The research that Prof. David Broniatowski (EMSE) conducts with Prof. Joel Moses of MIT was featured in the article “Future proof: designing systems that will last,” published recently in International Innovation. International Innovation is published by Research Media, and although it is not peer-reviewed, it is the leading global dissemination resource for the wider scientific, technology, and research communities.
Profs. Thomas Mazzuchi and Shahram Sarkani (EMSE) and their doctoral students have published the following papers: 1) McConkie, E., Sarkani, S., Mazzuchi, T., and Marchette, D., “Mathematical properties of system readiness levels,” Systems Engineering Vol. 16, Issue 4, 2013, pp. 391-400; 2) Sanders, G., Sarkani, S., and Mazzuchi, T., “High consequence systems phenomenological characterization: a tutorial,” Systems Engineering Vol. 16, Issue. 4, 2013, pp. 464-472; and 3) Franz, A., Sarkani, S., and Mazzuchi, T., “Whole system design and evolutionary 21st century American buildings + infrastructure,” International Journal of Architectonic, Spatial, and Environmental Design, Vol. 7, Issue 1, 2013, pp. 19-48.
Conferences & Presentations:
Prof. Abdelghani Bellaachia (CS) and his Ph.D graduate and Fulbright Scholar Anasse Bari won the Best Poster Award (2nd place) for their work, “Biologically Inspired Data Mining Framework for Biomedical Data Analytics,” at the 2nd Annual Biomedical Informatics Symposium, held October 11 at Georgetown University. The award was given by Dr. Robert Clarke, dean of research at Georgetown University and an internationally recognized leader in breast cancer research; Prof. Subha Madhavan, the director of Georgetown’s Innovation Center for Biomedical informatics (ICBI); and Adil Alaoui, director of health information technology and operations at ICBI. The symposium was organized by ICBI and sponsored by Georgetown Lombardi Comprehensive Cancer Center, Amazon web services, and Deloitte. There was an array of expert leaders from the bio-medical bioinformatics and data analytics field who shared their work, ideas, and visions under the theme of “Big Data in Precision Medicine.”
Prof. Pinhas Ben-Tzvi (MAE) and his doctoral students Zhou Ma, William Rone, Anil Kumar, and Wael Saab published and presented three peer-reviewed conference papers (full articles with full review) at the proceedings of the 2013 IEEE International Symposium on Robotic and Sensors Environments (ROSE 2013), held October 21-23 in Washington, DC. One of the papers was co-authored with Prof. Murray Snyder (MAE) as part of their research collaboration on his Ship Air Wake research program. The papers are: 1) Rone, W. and Ben-Tzvi, P., “Multi-Segment Continuum Robot Shape Estimation Using Passive Cable Displacements;” 2) Ma, Z. and Ben-Tzvi, P., “Tendon Transmission Efficiency of A Two-finger Haptic Glove;” and 3) Kumar, A., Ben-Tzvi, P., and Snyder, M.R., “Instrumentation System for Ship Airwake Measurement.” Prof. Ben-Tzvi was the Conference General Chair and also chaired the technical session “Collaborative Robotics & Distributed Sensing.”
Prof. Rachael Jonassen (EMSE part time faculty) presented two papers recently. On October 22, she delivered an invited talk titled “Managing Supply in an Uncertain Climate” at the Carbon Management Technology Conference in Alexandria, VA. On October 24, she and Marina Timofeyeva, a collaborator from NOAA Climate Services Division, spoke on “A different kind of guidance for climate adaptation planning” at the 38th Climate Diagnostics and Prediction Workshop in Greenbelt, MD.
Other News:
On October 11, Prof. Pinhas Ben-Tzvi (MAE) and his doctoral student William Rone hosted a group of middle school students from Friendship Public Charter School for a visit to the GW Robotics and Mechatronics Lab. These students are participating in the FIRST Lego League Challenge, an international competition that introduces robotics to elementary and middle school students. Students learned about the fundamentals of robotic systems and were shown a variety of robots and research that students in Dr. Ben-Tzvi's lab are working on.
Student News
Allan Richmond Morales, a junior in the ECE department and a Clark Scholar, has received a GW Sigelman Undergraduate Research Enhancement (SURE) Award.
Guest Vignette
Cloud computing has radically changed how businesses run their applications by allowing a huge number of computers to be economically shared by many different users. The applications running inside these cloud data centers are growing in size and complexity. Even a relatively straightforward web application is likely to be composed of multiple interacting service components such as a web server, a database, and a data cache. The result is a complicated distributed application that may exhibit performance bottlenecks or consistency requirements between components. Unfortunately, existing resource management and reliability tools consider these components individually, and they are often unaware of the important relations between them.
The work being done as part of Prof. Tim Wood's NSF Career Award is predicated on the belief that future data centers must be application-agnostic, yet distributed-computing-aware. The goal of our research is to enable cloud platforms to balance this trade-off, improving performance, reliability, and efficiency. This includes the development of both tools for cloud providers to better understand the applications running on their infrastructure, and new resource management and reliability algorithms that offer customers stronger guarantees. (Provided courtesy of Prof. Tim Woods of the Department of Computer Science)
SEAS Events
MAE Seminar: "Structural Condition Assessment and Performance Prognosis: Naval Applications and Beyond"
Speaker: Prof. Chris Earls, Cornell University
Monday, October 28
4:00 pm
201 Tompkins Hall
EMSE Movie Night: Travelling Salesman
Tuesday, October 29
Doors open at 6:30 pm, movie at 7:00 pm
103 Funger Hall
For more information, contact Prof. Hernan Abeledo
ECE Colloquium: "Power System Economics: Optimizing the Electric Delivery Infrastructure"
Speaker: Rounak Muthiyan, Berkeley Research Group LLC; Kalpa Energy LLC
Wednesday, October 30
3:30 - 5:30 pm
222 Funger Hall
MAE Seminar: "A Vision of Structural Health Monitoring for Intelligent Structures"
Speaker: Dr. Fu-Kuo Chang, Stanford University
Friday, November 1
11:00 am
771 Rome Hall
MAE Seminar: “Mechanical Forces Drive (and Regulate?) Organogenesis”
Speaker: Larry A. Taber, Washington University
Thursday, November 7
11:00 am
736 Phillips Hall
MAE Seminar: "The Very High Temperature Reactor (VHTR)"
Speaker: Dr. Hans Gougar, Idaho National Laboratory
Monday, November 11
11:30 am
736 Phillips Hall
ECE Colloquium: “Development of Micro-Devices for Intra-Cellular Recordings in Awake Active Brains”
Speaker: Dr. Mladen Barbic, Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Janelia Farm Research Campus
Monday, November 11
4:00 – 5:00 pm
640 Phillips Hall
MAE Seminar: "Engineering Pressure-sensitive Particles for Biomedical Ultrasound Applications"
Speaker: Prof. Tyrone Porter, Center for Nanoscience & Nanobiotechnology, Boston University
Wednesday, November 20
2:00 pm
302 Marvin Center
MAE Seminar: “Modeling Inelastic Behavior of Metals at Multiple Scales for Multiple Purposes”
Speaker, David L. McDowell, Georgia Institute of Technology
Monday, November 25
736 Phillips Hall
Dissertation Defenses
Name of Student Defending: Jinho Hwang
Title of Dissertation: “Improving and Repurposing Data Center Resource Usage with Virtualization”
Advisor: Prof. Tim Wood (CS)
Tuesday, November 12
10:00 am – 12:00 pm
736 Phillips Hall