SEAS Newsletter
Week of December 1 - 7, 2008
FACULTY NEWS
Awards & Honors:
Prof. Howie Huang (ECE) learned on November 22nd that he has been selected as the recipient of a 2008 IBM Real Time Innovation Award for his proposal “Hippo: HIgh-Performance POwer-aware System - Building Green Computers with IBM Real-time Java Technology.” Prof. Huang explains, “As new generations of computers become ever more powerful, they consume an increasing amount of energy. There is a growing need for a real-time power management system on a per-machine basis. To this end, we plan to design and develop a HIgh-Performance POwer-aware system, called Hippo, which has the capability of monitoring and dynamically adjusting the system's power consumption in the run-time, in accordance with the user-specific policy.” While the final number of 2008 IBM Real Time Innovation Awards is not yet known, approximately 10 IBM Real Time Innovation Awards were given worldwide in 2007.
Invited Talks:
Prof. James Lee (MAE) attended the ASME International Mechanical Engineering Congress and Exposition (ASME IMECE2008), held October 31st - November 6th in Boston, and presented the paper "Multiscale Concurrent Atomic/Continuum Theory and Its Numerical Implementation,” which was co-authored with his doctoral student, Mr. Xianqiao Wang, and Prof. Youping Chen of University of Florida. This paper is about their multiscale theory that bridges the gap between molecular dynamics and continuum physics. Prof. Lee is a newly elected ASME Fellow and was invited to attend the Fellows Recognition Reception at ASME IMECE2008.
Prof. Majid Manzari (CEE) presented an invited lecture, entitled "Numerical Modeling in Geotechnical Earthquake Engineering: Predictive Capabilities," at Columbia University on November 18th. The lecture was part of a seminar series at the Department of Civil Engineering and Engineering Mechanics.
Prof. Martha Pardavi-Horvath (ECE), associate dean of academic affairs, made three presentations at the 53rd Annual Conference on Magnetism and Magnetic Materials held from November 10th-14th in Austin, Texas. They include: M. Pardavi-Horvath , G. S. Makeeva, O. A. Golovanov: “Microwave Nanocomposite Magnets Designed by Solving Maxwell’s Equations with the Landau-Lifshitz Equation;” M. Pardavi-Horvath, C.A. Ross, F. J. Castano: “Thickness dependence of volume and edge modes in permalloy nanoarrays;” and E. V. Tartakovskaya, M. Pardavi-Horvath, M. Vázquez Villalabeitia: "Spin Reorientation Phase Transition in Self-Ordered Arrays of Magnetic Nanowires."
Prof. Michael Plesniak (MAE chair) attended the 61st Annual Meeting of the American Physical Society (APS) Division of Fluid Dynamics in San Antonio, Texas, on November 23rd -25th. Along with his students and collaborators, he made the following three presentations: "Quantifying the Influence of Flow Asymmetries on Glottal Sound Sources in Speech," "Secondary Flow Structure Induced by a Multiple-Harmonic Pulsatile Waveform at Low Womersley Number in a Curved Tube," and "Experimental Model of Contaminant Transport by a Moving Wake Inside an Aircraft Cabin."
Media Mentions:
On November 25th, PhysOrg.com published an article on research in the bio-engineering application of plasma jet being done by Prof. Michael Keidar (MAE), GW Prof. Mary Ann Stepp of the Department of Anatomy and Regenerative Biology and of Ophthalmology, and other members of their research team.
STAFF NEWS
James Howard joins us today as a new assistant vice president for development for SEAS, replacing Doug Honker. To learn more about James, please see the recent GW press release announcing his selection. James’ office is in 210 Tompkins. Feel free to stop by and welcome him.
STUDENT NEWS
ECE doctoral student Lok Acharya presented a poster, “Thickness Dependence of the Ferromagnetic Resonance of Permalloy Nanoarrays," at the 2nd Annual Howard University Nanotechology Symposium, November 20th-21st in Washington, D.C.
GUEST VIGNETTE
If you have wandered into the fourth floor labs in Tompkins on Tuesdays this term you may have noticed a large number of students assiduously feeding and caring for their three-dimensional pets: penguins, rabbits, pterodactyls, various princes and princesses, etc.; and their homes: igloos, space stations, prairies, the wild West, fantastical cityscapes, etc. Why, you may wonder, are they not working assiduously on their computer science homework instead of fantasizing and story-telling and game-designing?
The truth is, that's exactly what they are doing. For a goodly portion of this fall semester, students in the Csci 53 class taught by Prof. Rhys Price Jones, Aleksander Stefanovski, Aya Kurdi Zirikly, and Ali Seyed Ahmadi have been programming in Alice, a language based on three-dimensional characters whose movements and actions are controlled by the programmer. Problem solving and story telling become synonymous. Object oriented design is seen to be the same process as storyboard planning for a Hollywood animated movie. You can see examples of student work at http://www.seas.gwu.edu/~rhyspj/vignette.html.
Alice is presented to the world, and particularly to the computer science education community, as a gift from Carnegie Mellon University, where it was developed by a team led by Randy Pausch. If you have not seen it yet, you should watch the video "The Last Lecture" either on You Tube or on CMU's site (http://www.cmu.edu/homepage/multimedia/randy-pausch-lecture.shtml). Randy, who died in July, left Alice as part of his significant legacy to computer science. The next version of Alice will feature characters from "The Sims," a strategic life-simulation game published by Electronic Arts. In the meantime, as you can see from the students' work, they still have a lot of fun with the somewhat less-sophisticated characters currently provided.
You can see the class assignments at http://www.seas.gwu.edu/~rhyspj/cs53/cs53.html and you can download your own copy of Alice—complete with tutorials to help you learn the system—from http://www.alice.org. Have fun! (Provided courtesy of Prof. Rhys Price Jones of the Department of Computer Science)
UPCOMING
CS Seminar: Dijkstra’s Pebbles Game: An ACL2 Proof Movie: December 1st
More info . . .
The Seven Secrets of Highly Successful Ph.D. Students: December 2nd
3:00 – 5:00 pm, Marvin Center 307
INFORMS-IIE Seminar: Screening Cargo Containers for Nuclear Material: December 4th
More info . . .
LOOKING AHEAD
ECE Colloquium: Visible and Infrared Imaging Spectroscopy of Paintings: December 10th
More info . . .
American Society for Engineering Management-National Capital Section Luncheon: December 12th
More info . . .
DISSERTATION DEFENSES
Student Defending: Nuzhat Haneef
Title of Dissertation: “A Synthesized Conceptual Framework for the Design of User Interfaces of Interactive Information Products”
Monday, December 1st at 1:00 pm
Electrical and Computer Engineering Department Conference Room
Student Defending: Dan Holtshouse
Title of Dissertation: “Knowledge Management and the Future of the Knowledge Worker”
Tuesday, December 2nd at 2:00 pm
1776 G Street, NW, Conference Room 120
Student Defending: Jae Woo Kim
Title of Dissertation: “Perceptually Motivated Automatic Dance Motion Generation for Music
Tuesday, December 2nd at 3:30 pm
Computer Science Department Conference Room, Phillips Hall, Room 736
Student Defending: Stefan Popoveniuc
Title of Dissertation: “A Framework for Secure Electronic Voting” (tentative title)
Wednesday, December 10th at 4:30 pm
Computer Science Department Conference Room, Phillips Hall, Room 736
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