Ignacio Grossmann, 
Rudolph R. and Florence Dean University Professor of 
Chemical Engineering, 
Carnegie Mellon University

Abstract

This seminar deals with the theory of reformulations and numerical solution of generalized disjunctive programming (GDP) problems, which are expressed in terms of Boolean and continuous variables, and involve algebraic constraints, disjunctions and propositional logic statements. We propose a framework to generate alternative MINLP formulations for convex nonlinear GDPs that lead to stronger relaxations by generalizing the seminal work by Egon Balas (1988) for linear disjunctive programs. We define for the case of convex nonlinear GDPs an operation equivalent to a basic step for linear disjunctive programs that takes a disjunctive set to another one with fewer conjuncts. We show that the strength of relaxations increases as the number of conjuncts decreases, leading to a hierarchy of relaxations. We prove that the tightest of these relaxations, allows in theory the solution of the convex GDP problem as an NLP problem. We present a guide for the generation of strong relaxations without incurring in an exponential increase of the size of the reformulated MINLP. We apply the proposed theory for generating strong relaxations to a dozen convex GDPs which are solved with a NLP-based branch and bound method. Compared to the reformulation based on the hull relaxation, the computational results show that with the proposed reformulations significant improvements can be obtained in the predicted lower bounds, which in turn translates into a smaller number of nodes for the branch and bound enumeration.

We next address the extension of the above ideas to the solution of nonconvex GDPs that involve bilinear and concave terms. In order to solve these nonconvex problems with a spatial branch and bound method, a convex GDP relaxation is obtained by using suitable under- and over-estimating functions of the nonconvex constraints such as the convex envelopes proposed by McCormick (1976). In order to predict tighter lower bounds to the global optimum we exploiting the hierarchy of relaxations for linear GDP problems. A family of tighter reformulations is obtained by performing a sequence of basic steps on the original disjunctive set. Since each intersection usually creates new variables and constraints some general rules are described to limit the size of the problem. We illustrate the application of these ideas with linear relaxations of several bilinear and concave GDPs related to the optimization of process systems to demonstrate the computational savings that can be achieved with the tighter lower bounds. Finally, extensions for nonconvex problems involving nonlinear convex under- and over-estimating functions.

Bio

Prof. Ignacio E. Grossmann is the Rudolph R. and Florence Dean University Professor of Chemical Engineering, and former Department Head at Carnegie Mellon University . He obtained his B.S. degree in Chemical Engineering at the Universidad Iberoamericana , Mexico City, in 1974, and his M.S. and Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering at Imperial College in 1975 and 1977, respectively. After working as an R&D engineer at the Instituto Mexicano del Petróleo in 1978, he joined Carnegie Mellon in 1979. He was Director of the Synthesis Laboratory from the Engineering Design Research Center in 1988-93. He is director of the "Center for Advanced Process Decision-making" which comprises a total of 20 petroleum, chemical and engineering companies. Ignacio Grossmann is a member of the National Academy of Engineering , Mexican Academy of Engineering, and associate editor of AIChE Journal and member of editorial board of Computers and Chemical Enginering, Journal of Global Optimization, Optimization and Engineering, Latin American Applied Research, and Process Systems Engineering Series. He was Chair of the Computers and Systems Technology Division of AIChE , and co-chair of the 1989 Foundations of Computer-Aided Process Design Conference and 2003 Foundations of Computer-Aided Process Operations Conference. He is a member of the American Institute of Chemical Engineers, Sigma Xi, Institute for Operations Research and Management Science, and American Chemical Society.

Laurence Wolsey, Universite catholique de Louvain, CORE and IMMAQ

Abstract

After a brief introduction on single item lot-sizing, we present tight or tighter formulations for a couple of single and multi-item constant capacity lot-sizing variants. We then examine how reformulation results for basic (typically) single-item problems can be used or extended to tackle realistic multi-item, multi-site problems. As a first application we consider a two-level supply chain, namely a multi-item n-period model with production sites and sales areas with production at the sites and transportation to the areas. We demonstrate the effectiveness of a multi-commodity reformulation combined with the use of inequalities for family set-ups when there are capacities at the transportation level. The second application is a multi-item parallel machine model with start-up and/or sequence dependent changeover costs. Here we show how to extend existing valid inequalities and formulations to deal with identical parallel machines. Some limited computational results are presented.

Bio

Laurence Wolsey works at CORE (Center for Operations Research and Econometrics) and is professor of applied mathematics and operations research in the department of Engineering Mathematics of l'Universite catholique de Louvain in Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium. His main field of research is mixed integer programming, including theory, the development of branch-and-cut systems, and applications in production planning and scheduling and in network design. 
He is author of a textbook "Integer Programming" Wiley 1998, as well as joint author with George Nemhauser of "Integer Programming and Combinatorial Optimization",Wiley 1988, and "Production Planning by Mixed Integer Programming" with Y. Pochet, Springer 2006. 
Recently he has been particularly interested in the polyhedral structure of simple mixed integer programming sets, in particular mixing sets and their generalizations that have important applications in lot-sizing, and sets arising from two or more rows of a simplex tableau, an area that has been receiving much attention recently. 

He has worked closely with groups at BASF (production planning), France Telecom (multiplexer assignment) and DASH (commercial mixed integer programming systems) among others. 
He has received    the Orchard-Hays prize in 1988 from the Mathematical Programming Society (with T.J. Van Roy), the Lanchester Prize in 1989 from the Operations Research Society of America (with G.L. Nemhauser), and the EURO Gold Medal in 1994. He was editor-in-chief of the Mathematical Programming journal from 1999-2003.

William A. Massey
Department of Operations Research and Financial Engineering
Princeton University

Abstract

Consider a real time service where arriving customers make their decision to join the system based on both the availability of resources and the current service price. Given a fixed number resources, the manager can use price as a mechanism to control the utilization of the system. A manager's goal is to find a pricing policy that maximizes total revenue while meeting the quality of service targets (i.e. the probability of congestion) desired by the customers.

Using variational calculus techniques, we solve the dynamic optimal control problem that results by approximating a dynamic rate, multi-server loss model as one with a constrained offered load. We do this by using customer demand forecasts to anticipate future service blocking and then implement a congestion pricing algorithm. 

This is joint work with Robert C. Hampshire of Carnegie Mellon University and Qiong Wang of Bell Labs.

Speaker: David Sherrill (School of Chemistry and Biochemistry) (View his website)

Title: Building next-generation software for computational chemistry using rank-reduction, multicore, and GPU computing techniques

Abstract: This talk will describe the development of the PSI4 computational chemistry program, aimed at the efficient evaluation of accurate quantum models of molecules. This open-source software is targeted for initial release in early 2012 and is the result of a multi-site collaboration involving several universities and government labs. Various rank-reduction techniques have been extremely helpful in improving computational efficiency by replacing large 4-index tensors with much more compact 3-index tensors. Although this trades reduced memory requirements for increased flops in some cases, it can also lead to significant reduction in flops in many terms. Speedups due to rank reduction in intermolecular analysis will be analyzed in detail. Preliminary results of efforts in shared-memory parallelization and GPU computing will also be presented.

Bio: C. David Sherrill received his B.S. in Chemistry from MIT in 1992 and his Ph.D. in computational quantum chemistry in 1996, working as an NSF graduate fellow at the University of Georgia. He was an NSF postdoctoral fellow at the University of California, Berkeley. Since 1999, Sherrill has been on the faculty of the School of Chemistry and Biochemistry at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Since 2006, he has held a joint appointment with the School of Computational Science and Engineering. He serves as co-director of the Center for Computational Molecular Science and Technology. He has published over 110 peer-reviewed articles on the development of new quantum chemistry models and their application to challenging chemical problems. He is an elected Fellow of the American Physical Society and the American Chemical Society. Dr. Sherrill is one of the primary developers of the PSI open-source electronic structure theory program package, and he is also one of the authors of the Q-Chem program. He has been an Associate Editor of the Journal of Chemical Physics since 2009.

Pam Buckmaster earned an MPH, MS in Urban Studies, and Graduate Certificates in Gerontology (1982) and Disaster Policy (2011) from Georgia State University. After working in the Atlanta nonprofit social services sector for over 20 years, Pam decided to return to school in 2008 to pursue a career in public health. Pam works as a consultant with the CDC Healthy Aging Research Network on the Environmental and Policy Change Initiative. She served as a member of the development team for an online resource compendium on mobility and older adults. Pam also served as the lead author for an Action Brief, "Building Mobility into Planning and Policy: Complex Challenges Call for New Thinking." Currently working on a temporary basis with the Georgia Department of Behavioral Health and Developmental Disabilities in the Provider Network Management Unit, Pam looks forward to new opportunities in her career as a public health professional.

Topic:
Pam's presentation will bring us a public health perspective to the challenge of creating environments and communities that enable older adults to age-in-place and in the community, maintaining their independence and mobility. She will discuss the importance of forming partnerships across disciplines and sectors and share examples of policies, practices, and resources that promote healthy aging and the development of age-friendly communities.

Carolyn's topic will be the Atlanta Regional Commission's senior mobility transportation initiatives and Lifelong Communities work for Lifelong DeKalb and Lifelong Mableton. Her presentation will begin with an overview of demographic trends for the Atlanta region. She will discuss transportation for older adults as an issue of personal and community health, as it relates to transportation mode options, connectivity, impact on physical activity, and access to medical care. Carolyn will also address siting of personal care homes, senior housing, medical facilities and senior centers.

Date:
Tuesday, March 15, 2011 | 7:30 - 9:00 AM
Program starts promptly at 7:30.
Serving breakfast treats from Flying Biscuit Café, juice, and coffee.

Location:
Rollins School of Public Health, Emory University
Room 2001, Claudia Nance Rollins Building
1518 Clifton Road | Atlanta, GA 30322
Serviced by Cliff shuttles and MARTA Route 6. Bicycle parking is south of the building, car parking is at Michael Street Parking Deck.

Presenters:

Georgia Institute of Technology: Gretchen Tanner Goldman, Chair of the Bicycle Infrastructure Improvement Committee at Georgia Tech.

Emory University: Jamie Smith, organizer of Bike Emory. Emory University was recently designated a "Bicycle Friendly University".

Georgia State University: presenter to be determined.

Topic:
Georgia Tech, Emory, and GSU are each pursuing their own strategies to promote bicycling on campus, from sharing or selling bike to adding bicycle parking, lanes, and sharrows. These initiatives have the potential to increase physical activity, improve safety, and reduce air pollution and stress. The presenters will discuss the potential health effects of their work and share strategies, outcomes, and lessons learned.

Date:
Tuesday, April 12, 2011 | 7:30 - 9:00 AM
Program starts promptly at 7:30.
Serving breakfast treats from Highland Bakery, juice, and coffee.

Location:
Center for Quality Growth and Regional Development
Georgia Institute of Technology
760 Spring Street, Suite 213 | Atlanta, GA 30308

Laetitia Dablanc is a senior researcher at the French institute of science and technology for transport, development and networks (IFSTTAR, ex INRETS). Her areas of research are freight transport, freight and environment, sustainable transport, urban logistics, rail freight, freight transport policies. She is a visiting scholar at the Georgia Institute of Technology during academic year 2010-2011, working at the Center for Quality Growth and Regional Development with Dr. Catherine Ross, researching 'logistics sprawl' issues and freight transport planning in megaregions.

Ms. Dablanc will present research on the environmental and health issues related to freight transportation in urban areas. Cities need freight but they tend to ignore this specific category of urban transport. Freight transportation, despite providing jobs and services to the urban economy, has been neglected by mobility surveys, transport models, transport strategies and regional master planning. In the meanwhile, freight operators have carried on their businesses, which is to provide the goods required by shops, companies and households at the right place and time. In most cases, they succeed, but not in the best environmental or social manner. In cities, one fourth of CO2, one third of NOx and half of particulates that come from transport are generated by trucks and vans. Many non-attainment situations for air quality, in Europe and in the U.S., are related to diesel trucks, because of the old age of commercial vehicles in cities, and the growing importance of commercial fleets in urban areas. Data and examples will be presented, mostly from European cities, and policy issues will be discussed.

Michael Kray, an analyst at the Atlanta Regional Commission, will present an analysis of the truck route network in terms of negative impact on environmental justice populations. He will highlight the planning difficulties that arise when trying to mitigate the health impact of the transportation network, especially in the Atlanta area.

About the Speaker:
Joseph Torres advocates in Washington to ensure that our nations media and telecommunications policies serve the public interest. He also works to build new coalitions to broaden the base of the media reform movement. His book News for All the People: The Epic Story of Race and the American Media, examines the history of people of color in the mass media.

Joseph also serves on the board of directors of the Center for Media Justice and the National Association of Latino Independent Producers. Before joining Free Press, Joseph worked as deputy director of communications and media policy at the National Association of Hispanic Journalists and was a journalist for several years.

SPEAKER: Louis-Martin Rousseau (Associate Professor, Department of Mathematical and Industrial Engineering, Ecole Polytechnique Montreal)

ABSTRACT:

This talk will cover the use of data mining techniques as well as Mixed Integer Programming and Constraint Programming Approaches to schedule workforce in retail stores. The objective is to determine the optimal number of employees that should be present at a given time period in order to maximize revenues. The revenue curve can then be used to construct operational schedules that maximized the expected profit, instead of focusing on lowering paid hours. This formulation yields a non linear integer problem, which we tackle with different approaches such constraint programming and MIP (after linearization).

Join us to find out what it takes to win a bid in the highly competitive construction industry. Teams will have developed a company structure and identity with an accepted legal structures; performed a detailed estimate of the project assigned and prepared relevant forms for bidding work based on the estimate; developed a site-specific safety plan appropriate to the scope of work their company would undertake; and created a set of comprehensive contract documents.

SPEAKER; Dr. Hui Yang

ABSTRACT:

 Medical devices in the 21st century are capable of monitoring the cardiac electrical activities in real time and lead to the proliferation of patient monitoring signals. With massive healthcare recordings readily available, there is dire need for the extraction of knowledge pertinent to the cardiac disease process, thereby leading to the early identification and control of cardiac disorders. We intertwined the approaches of physics-based modeling and sensor-based data fusion to promote the study of cardiac system informatics and control. The computational cardiac models not only overcome the practical and ethical limitations in physical experiments but also provide predictive insights on the underlying pathological mechanisms. Here, we modeled the variations of cardiac electrical signaling due to changes in glycosylation of a voltage-gated K+ channel, hERG, responsible for late phase 2 and phase 3 of the human ventricular action potential (AP). The multi-scale cardiac model is developed to integrate the measured changes in hERG channels under different glycosylation treatments, and further predicts the electrical behaviors of cardiac cells and tissues (cable/ring). The experimental results show that reduced glycosylation acts to shorten the repolarization period of cardiac APs, and distort the AP propagation in cardiac tissues. On the other hand, we developed an approach of multiscale recurrence analysis to study the cardiac pathological behaviors in the space-time domain, as opposed to the conventional time delay reconstructed phase space from a single ECG trace. Few, if any, previous approaches studied the relationships between cardiac disorders and multiscale recurrence patterns underlying the cardiac vectorcardiogram (VCG) signals. The integration of wavelets and nonlinear dynamics was experimentally shown to facilitate the prominence of hidden pathological properties that are usually buried in a single scale view. Finally, future research directions in the area will be discussed.

SPEAKER:  Jean-Philippe Richard

ABSTRACT:

In this talk, we discuss strong convex relaxations of mathematicalprograms with complementarity constraints (MPCCs). MPCCs have numerouspractical applications in business, engineering, and economics becausecomplementarity conditions arise in the mathematical modeling of games andequilibria. and because nonlinear programs in which constraint functionsare differentiable can be reformulated in a higher dimensional space usingoptimality conditions.

We first describe a convexification technique for linear programs withlinear complementarity constraints that generalizes thereformulation-linearization technique of Sherali and Adams and has similarconvergence properties. We then consider certain complementarity problemsappearing in KKT systems. For such problems, we show that all nontrivialfacet-defining inequalities can be obtained through a simple procedurethat aggregates constraints and use McCormick relaxations of bilinearterms. Finally, we discuss the problem of generating strong cuttingplanes, in the space of the original variables, from the optimal simplextableaux of the LP relaxation of the problem. We discuss the geometry ofthe corresponding sets and compare the strength of the cuts thus obtainedwith respect to RLT, disjunctive, and other approaches in the literature.

This talk is based on joint work with Trang Nguyen (UF) and MohitTawarmalani (Purdue).

Bio:Jean-Philippe Richard is an associate professor in the Department ofIndustrial and Systems Engineering at the University of Florida . Afterreceving a bachelor in Applied Mathematics Engineering at UniversiteCatholique de Louvain in Louvain-La-Neuve, Belgium, he came to study atthe Georgia Institute of Technology where he received a Phd in Algorithms,Combinatorics and Optimization. His current research interests include theuse of polyhedral and convex analysis techniques for the derivation ofstrong convex relaxations of mixed integer linear and nonlinear programs.He is also currently working with CSX on large-scale optimization problemsarising in railroads and with SAS-OR on computational issues associatedwith the solution of integer programs.

SPEAKER:  Michael Stein

ABSTRACT:

Statistical analysis of spatio-temporal data provides challenges instatistical modeling, diagnostics and computation. This talk gives anoverview of these challenges, with a focus on the computational. Inparticular, strategies for carrying out likelihood calculations for a largenumber of irregularly sited observations from a Gaussian process model will beconsidered.

The resilience of networks to various types of failures is an undercurrent in many parts of graph theory and network algorithms. In this paper we study the resilience of networks in the presence of cascading failures — failures that spread from one node to another across the network structure. One finds such cascading processes at work in the kind of contagious failures that spread among financial institutions during a financial crisis, through nodes of a power grid or communication network during a widespread outage, or through a human population during the outbreak of an epidemic disease.

A widely studied model of cascades in networks assumes that each node of the network has an independent random threshold specifying the number of its neighbors that must fail in order for it to fail.  It turns out that when selecting among a set of graphs to minimize the failure probability of the most vulnerable node, the optimum graph structure depends quite intricately on the distribution of thresholds.  We develop several techniques for minimizing the maximum failure probability among d-regular graphs.  For d=2 we are able to solve the problem completely: the optimal graph is always a clique (i.e. triangle) or tree (i.e. infinite path), although which graph is better exhibits a surprising non-monotonicity as the threshold parameters vary.  When d is greater than 2 we present a technique based on power-series expansions of the failure probability that allows us to compare graphs in certain parts of the parameter space, deriving conclusions including the fact that as the threshold distribution varies, at least three different graphs are optimal among d-regular graphs. In particular, the set of optimal graphs here includes one which is neither a clique nor a tree.

 This is joint work with Larry Blume, David Easley, Jon Kleinberg, and Eva Tardos.

Progress on Flapping-wing Robotic Insects

Robert J. Wood, Associate Professor

School of Engineering and Applied Sciences

Harvard University, Cambridge, MA

Thursday, November 17, 2011 (3:30pm) Guggenheim 442

Abstract:
As the characteristic size of a flying robot decreases, the challenges for successful flight revert to basic questions of fabrication, actuation, fluid mechanics, stabilization, and power - whereas such questions have in general, been answered for larger aircraft. When developing a flying robot on the scale of a common housefly, all hardware must be developed from scratch, as there is nothing "off-the-shelf" which can be used for mechanisms, sensors, or computation that would satisfy the extreme mass and power limitations. This technology void also applies to techniques available for fabrication and assembly of the aeromechanical components: the scale and complexity of the mechanical features requires new ways to design and prototype at scales between macro and MEMS, but with rich topologies and material choices, one would expect in designing human-scale vehicles. With these challenges in mind, this talk will present progress in the essential technologies for insect-scale robots. For more information, visit: http://ae.gateche.edu/node/919. 

BIO:
Robert Wood is an Associate Professor in Harvard's School of Engineering and Applied Sciences and a core faculty member of the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering. Prof. Wood completed his M.S. (2001) and Ph.D. (2004) degrees working with Professor Ron Fearing in the Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences at the U. C. Berkeley. He is founder of the Harvard Microrobotics Lab, which contains facilities for rapid development, and evaluation of robots with feature sizes on the micron to centimeter scale. His current research interests involve the creation of biologically inspired aerial and ambulatory microrobots, fluid mechanics of low Reynolds number flapping wings, minimal control of under-actuated computation-limited systems, new micro- and meso-scale manufacturing techniques, and morphable soft-bodied robots. He is the winner of a 2007 DARPA Young Faculty Award, a 2008 NSF Career Award, a 2008 ONR Young Investigator Award, a 2009 Air Force Young Investigator Award, multiple best paper and best video awards, is a member of the 2008 class of Technology Review’s top 35 innovators under the age of 35, and in 2010 received the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers from President Obama. Wood has served as PI or co-PI on twenty sponsored research projects over the past four years including the $10M NSF-sponsored Expeditions in Computing "RoboBees" project that he is leading.

We show that one can approximate the least fixed point solution for a multivariate system of monotone probabilistic polynomial equations in time polynomial in both the encoding size of the system of equations and in log(1/epsilon), where epsilon > 0 is the desired additive error bound of the solution.  (The model of computation is the standard Turing machine model.)

We use this result to resolve several open problems regarding the computational complexity of computing key quantities associated with some classic and heavily studied stochastic processes, including multi-type branching processes and stochastic context-free grammars.

(Joint work with Kousha Etessami and Alistair Stewart.)

Bio:

Mihalis Yannakakis is the Percy K. and Vida L. W. Hudson Professor of Computer Science
at Columbia University. Prior to joining Columbia, he was Director of the Computing Principles Research Department at Bell Labs and at Avaya Labs, and Professor of Computer Science at Stanford University.

Dr. Yannakakis received his PhD from Princeton University. His research interests include algorithms, complexity, optimization, game theory, databases, testing and verification. He has served on the editorial boards of several journals, including as the past editor-in-chief of the SIAM Journal on Computing, and has chaired various conferences, including the IEEE Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science, the ACM Symposium on Theory of Computing and the ACM Symposium on Principles of Database Systems.
Dr. Yannakakis is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, a recipient of the Knuth Prize, a Fellow of the ACM, and a Bell Labs Fellow.

In this artist's talk, Allan Sekula will provide a close look at a few of the works he made between 1974 and 2010. He will discuss the ways in which they both explore the unstable position of photography within the art system and acknowledge, if not assert, the "worldliness" of the image.

Born in Erie, Pennsylvania in 1951 and based in Los Angeles, Allan Sekula is a photographer, writer-critic, and filmmaker

Since the early 1970s, his works with photographic sequences, written texts, slide shows, and sound recordings have traveled a path close to cinema. At times, they refer to specific films. In other instances, such as his 1973 work Aerospace Folktales, they operate like a “disassembled movie” while resisting the “dictatorship of the projector.” Yet, with the exception of a few video works from the early 70s and early 80s, he has stayed away from the moving image. This changed in 2001, with Tsukiji, titled after the Tokyo fish market: this is in fact the first work that Sekula was willing to call a film. His subsequent films include Short Film for Laos, 2006, and Lottery of the Sea, 2006. His most recent film, The Forgotten Space, has been screened in over 30 festivals worldwide since its premiere at the Venice Film Festival in 2010, where it won a special jury prize.

Sekula’s books include Photography against the Grain, 1984; Fish Story, 1995; Geography Lesson: Canadian Notes, 1996; Dismal Science, 1999; Performance under Working Conditions, 2003; TITANIC’s wake, 2003; and Polonia and Other Fables, 2009. These works range thematically from critical investigations of the history of photography to studies of family life in the grip of the military-industrial complex, branching out into explorations of myths of national identity. 

In addition, his longstanding interest in questions of sovereignty led to a number of widely exhibited works on the global maritime economy, including The Forgotten Space. His extended photographic works on this subject were included in Documenta 11, 2002, and Documenta 12, 2007, in Kassel, Germany.

Allan Sekula has taught in the Cinema Studies Program at New York University, in the now-defunct Department of Photography and Cinema at the Ohio State University, and since 1985, in the Program in Photography and Media at the California Institute of the Arts. 

Allan Sekula's lecture Critical Realism in a Time of Lies is co-sponsored by Georgia Tech, College of Architecture and Visual Arts, American Studies, the Graduate Institute of Liberal Arts and the Visual Scholarship Initiative at Emory University and the Hightower Fund. 

SPEAKER: Lauren Hannah

ABSTRACT:

We propose two new, nonparametric method for multivariate regression subject to convexity or concavity constraints on the response function.  Convexity constraints are common in economics, statistics, operations research, financial engineering and optimization, but there is currently no multivariate method that is computationally feasible for more than a few hundred observations.  We introduce Convex Adaptive Partitioning (CAP) and Multivariate Bayesian Convex Regression (MBCR), which create a globally convex regression model from locally linear estimates fit on adaptively selected covariate partitions. CAP is computationally efficient, with O(n log(n) log(log(n))) computational complexity, as well as statistically consistent. Although inference for MBCR is more difficult than that of CAP, we show that MBCR is not only consistent but has minimax-optimal adaptive convergence rates. These methods are tested on value function approximation settings in exotic options pricing and response surface methods for simulation optimization.

Turbulentfluid motion is characterized by a large range of physical and temporal scales,so that the smallest eddies are typically many orders of magnitude smaller thanthe largest eddies, and the time scales encompass many orders of magnitude. Thiscomplexity makes turbulent flows extremely difficult to predict and soexperiments become crucial in any effort to model the flow behavior.  It is the same complexity, however, thatmakes turbulence measurements very difficult, and current methods often sufferfrom inadequate spatial and temporal resolution to capture the full range ofscales present in the flow.  We describea new nano-scale anemometry probe that dramatically extends the range ofpossible turbulence measurements, and we demonstrate its impact by presentingturbulence measurements in a pipe flow over an unprecedented range ofconditions.  The results reveal apreviously unknown universal distribution for the streamwise turbulenceintensity.

BIO

Dr. Smits is the Eugene Higgins Professor of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineeringat Princeton and Chair of his department. His research interests are centeredon fundamental, experimental research in turbulence and fluid mechanics. In 2004, Dr. Smits received theFluid Dynamics Award of the AIAA.  In2007, Dr. Smits received the Fluids Engineering Award from the American Societyof Mechanical Engineers (ASME), the Pendray Aerospace Literature Award from theAmerican Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA), and the President'sAward for Distinguished Teaching from Princeton University. He is a Fellow ofthe American Physical Society, a Fellow of the American Institute ofAeronautics and Astronautics, a Fellow of the American Society of MechanicalEngineers, and a Member of the National Academy of Engineering.

Abstract:
In organic electronics doping can be a sin or a virtue. Two kinds of doping, primary and secondary, will be shown and the implications on function and operation of solid state devices containing organic semiconductors will be discussed. 

Due to current budget restraints, lunch is provided only to those who have preregistered.

About the Speaker:
Professor Jiri Janata is Georgia Research Alliance Eminent Scholar in the School of Chemistry and Biochemistry at Georgia Tech. His current interests include interfacial chemistry, chemical sensors and electroanalytical chemistry with particular emphasis on development of chemical sensors for environmental and security applications.

Please RSVP online so the club an accurately estimate food and beverage demands.

Speakers will include:

• Dr. Mickey Wade, Head of Experimental Sciences for the DIII-D Tokamok Fusion Reactor at General Atomics
• Dr. Weston Stacy, Fuller E. Calaway Professor of Nuclear Engineering at Georgia Tech

We look forward to seeing you there!

To learn more about the ECGT, visit energyclub.gatech.edu or the club's Facebook or Twitter pages.

If you would like to become a member of the Energy Club at Georgia Tech, you may bring $20 cash or check to any ECGT event.

Lecture with Jean D. Reed, "Challenges of Emerging Technologies for Defense".

**Please RSVP for this event.

Colonel Jean D. Reed, US Army (retired), came to the National Defense University's Center for Technology and National Security Policy in October 2010, following a distinguished career of almost fifty years combined military and civilian government service, including serving as Deputy Assistant to the Secretary of Defense for Chemical Biological Defense and Chemical Demilitarization (DATSD(CBD/CD)). Prior to his appointment as DATSD (CBD/CD) in 2005, Reed served for 15 years as a professional staff member of the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on the Armed Services (HASC), where he had principal responsibility for staff oversight of Navy research and development, Defense-wide science and technology, chemical-biological defense, and chemical weapons demilitarization programs. Reed's military career included 30 years progressive experience in a succession of line and staff positions of increasing responsibility, including field artillery battery command, Army Materiel Command, two combat tours in Vietnam as an advisor and brigade operations and intelligence officer, US Field Artillery School combat developments, nuclear-capable field artillery battalion command, deputy commander of a nuclear-capable corps artillery in Germany, major research and development laboratory command, and two tours on the Department of the Army General Staff.

This event is being funded through the GT FIRE program on "Educating a Biotechnology Policy & Security Workforce" for the development of new educational approaches at the intersection of biotechnology, policy, and security. Program co-led by Assistant Professor Margaret E. Kosal (INTA) and Prof Rob Butera (EE).

SPEAKER: Jose Guajardo

ABSTRACT:

We formulate and estimate an empirical model to study the role of services as part of firm competitive strategies in the U.S. automobile industry. We analyze the impact of service attributes (warranty length, service quality) on demand, and the contingency of these effects upon product quality. Our results rule out complementarities between service attributes and product quality, and suggest that service attributes rather play a compensatory role with respect to product quality: the impact of warranty length and service quality on demand increases when product quality decreases. On the contrary, our results indicate that both service metrics are complementary with respect to demand: the better the service quality of a brand, the higher the marginal effect of offering longer warranties on demand. Collectively, these results suggest that competing on services is more effective (in terms of its effect on demand) for firms that have lower product quality, and imply that firms would thus benefit by managing their product and service strategies jointly. The model formulation accounts for the endogeneity of prices and warranties, and allows for customer heterogeneity. Our results illustrate the importance of accounting for both effects in the estimation.

Abstract
Travel time reliability is a relatively new concept for the transportation profession. In this presentation, Dr. Margiotta will discuss:

• how travel time reliability came into the transportation lexicon;
• the various ways researchers have chosen to define and measure it;
• data and modeling requirements; and
• valuation of travel time reliability.

The presentation draws heavily on Margiotta’s own research as well as recent results from the SHRP 2 program.

Bio
Richard Margiotta, is a principal with Cambridge Systematics. He has 29 years of experience in transportation planning and engineering, and has held positions at the Transportation Research Board, University of Tennessee, SAIC and the Knoxville Metropolitan Planning Organization. He received PhD and master's degrees in civil engineering from the University of Tennessee and a bachelor's degree in biol­ogy from the State University of New York at Albany. His recent work has focused on congestion monitoring, performance management and travel time reliability.

For almost 30 years, no new commercial nuclear plants have been developed in the US. In recent years, interest has been rekindled in this generation source because of the age of existing nuclear power plants and projected demand for power. However, the March 2011 earthquake that hit Japan and damaged several reactors has caused a careful examination of nuclear power plant design and deployment.

On November 16, plan to join a panel of experts to discuss the role of nuclear power, post-Fukushima, in meeting future energy demand in the Southeast.

• Glenn Sjoden, Professor, School of Mechanical Engineering, Georgia Tech
  Glenn is an expert in integrated nuclear system design, simulation, optimization, and methods development for both nuclear power systems and radiation detection applications.Glenn has more than 26 years of experience in a broad range of science and engineering applications as a technical director, nuclear research officer, professor, lead design engineer, and as a licensed engineering consultant. His experience includes treaty monitoring with the Air Force Technical Applications Center (AFTAC), and work in nuclear, biological, and chemical (NBC) arms control, and on advanced technology defense programs for the U.S. Government. He has also served as a technical expert and research lead for critical reviews supporting the Limited Test Ban Treaty (LTBT), the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty, and numerous classified defense projects.
• Howard Axelrod, Economist, Energy Strategies
  Howard has more than 40 years of experience in the electric and gas utilities industry. He has testified before numerous state regulatory agencies and the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) on topics that include resource planning, power contract management and utility operations and management. He has worked for the GE, several State of New York agencies including the NYS Public Service Commission, Planmetrics and Resource Management (now Navigant).Howard has a PhD in Managerial Economics from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, a MBA in Marketing from the State University of New York and BSEE & MSEE degrees in Power Systems from Northeastern University. He is a Professional Engineer and Senior Member of IEEE. 
• Brian Debs, Industry Advisory Board, Laser Inertial Fusion Energy Initiative, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
  Brian has pursued a 38-year career within the nuclear power industry. After serving in the U.S. Navy as a commissioned officer, he joined the Westinghouse Electric Company as an operations manager in support of the U.S. Naval Nuclear Propulsion Program, and later as a member of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s management team. Subsequent to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Brian held executive positions with Gilbert Commonwealth Corporation, an architectural and engineering firm and Ontario Power Generation Company in the management of their twenty nuclear reactors and heavy water production and tritium recovery facilities.
  

Operating approximately 21,000 route miles in 22 states and the District of Columbia, Norfolk Southern serves all major eastern container ports and connects with rail partners in the West, linking customers to markets around the world.



But Norfolk Southern is more than just tracks and trains. It’s a team – more than 30,000 members strong working together to maintain our position as one of the premier transportation companies in the world.


As a Fortune 300 company, Norfolk Southern offers a wide variety of challenging employment opportunities. Over the past few years, Norfolk Southern has experienced unprecedented periods of growth, increasing the need for talented and dedicated individuals.

Professor Gernot Riether is an assistant professor in the School of Architecture. His research focuses on using digital technologies to improve architecture’s relationship to a natural, built and social environment. He holds a Master of Science in Advanced Architectural Design from Columbia University and a Diplom Ingenieur in Architecture from the University of Innsbruck.

The College of Architecture in partnership with the Georgia Tech Library and Archives hosts a monthly research series entitled the COA Research Forum. Held on the last Thursday of each month in which school is in session, a COA faculty member, research scientist, or student talks about his/her research.

The purpose of the series is to provide an informal forum for members of the Georgia Tech community to present their work, explore ideas, and identify opportunities for collaboration. The talks are free and open to the public. The talks are held in the Architecture Library from 11:00 am to 12:00 pm.  

The Architecture Library is located off the first floor atrium of the West Architecture Building, 247 Fourth Street, Georgia Tech campus

Upcoming COA Research Forums:

• January 26, 2012: Benjamin Flowers, “Stadia” (GTF Recipient)
• February 23, 2012: Dowell Myers, “Immigration and our Future”
• March 29, 2012: Robert Todd, “BreakThru: Virtual Worlds and Social Media for Mentoring STEM”
• April 26, 2012: Brian Bowen, Construction History Research

"Power Up or Melt Down: The Future of Nuclear Energy" ~ Panel Discussion with Georgia Tech Experts including a CISTP Sam Nunn Security Fellow Cal Abel.

The nuclear energy debate has always been a heated one. Join our panel of Georgia Tech experts as they discuss the future of nuclear energy in a post-Fukushima world from both the technical and policy aspects. What are the positive and negative environmental effects of nuclear energy when compared to other energy sources? How safe is it? The disastrous events in the Fukushima nuclear plant in Japan following an earthquake and tsunami have heightened concern over the safety of nuclear energy.

SPEAKER: Kyoung-Kuk (Ken) Kim

ABSTRACT:

SPEAKER: Sabina Alistar, Stanford Univ.

ABSTRACT:

Operations research and mathematical modeling can play a keyrole in informing high-cost, high-impact health policy decisions. This talkdescribes my research on resource allocation for infectious disease control. Resourceallocation is especially difficult in this context because epidemics arenonlinear (preventing one infection now may prevent scores of futureinfections); interventions usually do not have additive effects, and therelationship between investment and outcomes is generally nonlinear; inaddition, epidemics vary across settings in terms of transmission modes and keyrisk groups.

Intheoretical work, I address the gap between epidemiological measures and theresource allocation decision. I present a new theoretical framework thatquantifies the effects of investment in treatment and prevention interventionson a key epidemiological parameter, the reproductive rate of infection, whichmeasures an outbreak’s potential for becoming an epidemic. The approachaccounts for nonlinearities of intervention scale-up effects. I developanalytical results characterizing the optimal solution and present illustrativeexamples with data for Ugandaand Russia. I further extendthe framework to consider the optimal control in time of variousepidemiological parameters.

Inpractical work, in collaboration with the United Nations AIDS Programme(UNAIDS) I have createda spreadsheet-based planning toolfor use by planners around the world in evaluating investment portfolios forHIV control. The tool is designed to be easy to use, includesoptimization capability, and accounts for non-additive and nonlinear effects ofinterventions.  I describe my ongoingwork with UNAIDS decision makers to test and implement the model for regionaland country-level HIV resource allocation.

SPEAKER: Dr. Bert Zwart

ABSTRACT:

We consider a generalized linear model where data may be collected in anadapted fashion. Even in the linear case, consistency of MLE/regressionestimators is a nontrivial problem, and sufficient conditions aretypicallygiven in terms of eigenvalues of the design matrix.This setting has been studied extensively by economists,statisticians and control theorists, but has gained renewedinterest given the recent activities on dynamic pricing underdemand uncertainty.In terms of dynamic pricing, it can be shown that the so-called'certainty equivalent pricing' policy does not lead to consistentresults, and price dispersion is necessary.We establish general L2 convergence rates for MLE estimators interms of eigenvalues of the design matrix and apply these ondynamic pricing problems. We develop algorithms that arecomputationally tractable and give guaranteed bounds on the regret(the loss in profit related to parameter uncertainty).

Joint work with Arnoud den Boer (CWI)

SPEAKER: Kamran Paynabar

ABSTRACT:

The rapid development ofdistributed sensing and computer technology has facilitated wide collection ofvarious waveform signals during system operations. This has resulted in temporallyand spatially data-rich environment that provides unprecedented opportunitiesfor improving complex system operations in various applications includingmanufacturing, healthcare, emerging energy systems, etc. Meanwhile, it also raisesnew research challenges on data analysis and decision makingdue to the complex data structures of waveform signals, such as heterogeneousdata dependency, high-dimensional and non-stationary characteristics. In thistalk, two topics will be discussed in detail to present the essential need ofmultidisciplinary efforts in the development of new engineering-driven dataanalysis methods for effectively analyzing waveform signals. In the first topic,a new method of “hierarchical non-negative Garrote for group variable selection”will be presented, which is developed for informative sensor and feature selectionamong massive multistream sensing signals. The second topic is to discuss a newmethod for “characterization of nonlinear profiles variations using mixed-effectmodels and wavelets”, which is developed to effectively model both within-profilevariations and between-profile variations for enhancing variation root cause diagnosis.Afterwards, a brief overview of my other research topics will also be presented.

"Feel the Power of the Dork Side" is a funny and educational presentation on basic statistics following a 20-30 minute period of collecting real-time data from the audience for use in the statistical calculations. Ludovice guarantees the show will make 63.1 ± 3.4% of you laugh until you cry and teach you to never trust a number without an error bar on it. "Feel the Power of the Dork Side" starts at 3 p.m. Friday, Nov. 11 in the Library East Commons.

The audience can get involved by taking a survey on their smartphones before the show. Ludovice will take his one-man show on the road for the New Orleans Fringe Festival November 16-19.

Dr. Ludovice lectures internationally on the use of humor in technical communication and education. He conducts research with the Improvisation for Design of Engineering Alternatives, a group of Tech researchers who apply the techniques of improvisational humor to technical innovation.

Join Dr. Ludovice at 3 p.m. Friday, Nov. 11 in the Georgia Tech Library’s East Commons for “Feel the Power of the Dork Side.” For more information, visit http://www.drpetecomedy.com/dorkside.

About the speaker:
Dr. Benjamin K. Sovacool is a Visiting Associate Professor at Vermont Law School, where he manages the Energy Security and Justice Program at their Institute for Energy & the Environment. His research interests include the barriers to alternative sources of energy supply such as renewable electricity generators and distributed generation, the politics of large-scale energy infrastructure, designing public policy to improve energy security and access to electricity, and building adaptive capacity and resilience to climate change in least developed Asian countries.

November 14, 2011
10:00am - 11:00am
D.M. Smith Building, Room 303

Any questions? Contact Dr. Marilyn Brown at marilyn.brown@pubpolicy.gatech.edu 

Abstract for "Restoring John Marshall's Missing Monument"
John Marshall, the fourth Chief Justice of the United States, is revered as the “Great Chief Justice.” During his thirty-four years as Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court (1801-1835), he was instrumental in assuring America’s recognition of the judiciary as a third and coequal branch of government.

In 1882, Congress authorized a monument to John Marshall, consisting of two elements: (1) a statue; and (2) an outdoor public location in Washington, D.C. in which to place the statue. This national monument to John Marshall was completed in 1884 when a statue of John Marshall was formally erected outside of the West Front of the United States Capitol Grounds. Marshall’s Monument remained in existence until 1981 when Marshall’s statue was relocated to the basement of the U.S. Supreme Court building to make way for President Reagan’s inauguration ceremonies.

This paper argues that Congress should restore the national monument to John Marshall by rededicating the existing John Marshall Park, a derelict park located between the Canadian Embassy and the United State Court of Appeals for the Washington D.C. Circuit that contains a replica of the original John Marshall statue, as the John Marshall Memorial Park.

Explore the conceptual plan from 2007 and the conceptual plan from 2009.

About Ryan Rowberry
Ryan Rowberry is an Assistant Professor at the Georgia State University College of Law.  As a member of the Center for the Comparative Study of Metropolitan Growth, he teaches Property Law, Environmental Law, and Legal History.  Professor Rowberry's research concentrates on the historical development of property and natural resources law.  He also examines legal issues facing Coptic Christians in Egypt.  His most recent article, A Brief History of Coptic Personal Status Law, was published by the Berkeley Journal of Middle Eastern and Islamic Law in 2010.  

Professor Rowberry graduated from Harvard Law School, where he was an Islamic Legal Studies Fellow, a Cravath International Fellow, and received the Irving Oberman Award in Legal History.  Following graduation, he practiced environmental and natural resources law at Hogan Lovells in Washington, DC.  Immediately prior to joining the College of Law, Professor Rowberry was a Supreme Court Fellow, during which he collaborated with foreign judges and academics on judicial independence and rule-of-law matters.

Before attending law school, Professor Rowberry worked as a historian and an educator.  He transcribed and collated all extant medieval manuscripts for three of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales.  He also taught 7th grade at a charter school and lectured in English and History at Peking University in Beijing, China.  He holds a B.A. in English from Brigham Young University and was selected as a Rhodes Scholar.  At Oxford University he earned a M.Sc. in Comparative Education Policy and a M.St. in Medieval British History. 

SPEAKER: Yasuo Amemiya

ABSTRACT:

This talk starts with providing an introductory overview of IBM Research, and then presents some of current statistical research projects at IBM. Smarter Planet and Business Analytics have been two of the strategically focused areas for IBM in recent years. Smarter Planet projects are mainly for better and proactive management of a large physical system by analyzing various measurements taken over space and time. For business analytics, IBM has been developing software and consulting offerings that include advanced analytical methodology. Statistical research conducted in our department is aligned closely with these strategic areas for IBM. In this talk, a few specific research projects are described. In particular, the development of new spatial-temporal analytical algorithms relevant for both areas is discussed.

By Professor Ying Chan, Director of the Journalism and Media Studies Centre, University of Hong Kong. A visiting scholar from China speaking on Telecoms Policy and Social Networks.

Sponsored by the Internet and Public Policy Project (IP3) and the Center for Advanced Communications Policy (CACP).

*Seating is limited so we are grateful for advance notice of attendance.

Contact: Hans Klein,  hans@gatech.edu

1. "Current Trends in Social Networks in China"

    Professor King-Wa Fu, Research Assistant Professor, Journalism and Media Studies Center,   University of Hong Kong.

2. "Applying Chomsky's Propaganda Model to Social Networks"

    Hans Klein, Associate Professor of Public Policy, Georgia Tech

*Sponsored by the Internet and Public Policy Project (IP3) and by the Center For Advanced Communications Policy (CACP).

Please join us for this event in the LeCraw Auditorium, College ofManagement, or watch the live webcast provided by our partners at Learn itLive.

More about the speaker:

Carl Nordgren is a creative populist.

Throughout his career, he has been an entrepreneur, helping foundtwo pioneering cellular telephone companies, two innovative marketing services firms,a semiconductor company, a software venture, a sport magazine publisher, and anew business incubator.

He recently launched two new ventures—Minogi serves creativelyentrepreneurial college students, and CreativthePopulist promotes the importanceof each of us and all of us being creatively entrepreneurial. Carlhas also recently started a new consulting practice, YourVeryBestStory.com, whichclaims the transformative power of Story as a CEO leadership tool.

In addition to launching his own entrepreneurial ventures, he hashelped many young start-up companies and entrepreneurs through mentoring andacting as interim CEO.

During his career, he has worked in four of the CreativeIndustries, and for ten years has been teaching courses in Creative Entrepreneurshipat Duke University. His first job was as a fishing guide in Ontario, he has writtena series of novels about his experience there.

Aboutthe Impact Speaker Series

Since 2002, the IMPACT Speaker Series has brought highly successful businessleaders from a variety of industries to campus to share their experiences andgive advice to students and other entrepreneurs on topics ranging from"building a venture around intellectual capital" to "successfulentrepreneurship in large organizations" and "socially responsibleleadership".

The weekly series provides Georgia Tech students, alumni and the Atlantabusiness community an opportunity to network and learn from successfulentrepreneurs, venture capitalists, and notable business and non-profitleaders. Events for the series take place in the LeCraw Auditorium in theCollege of Management building at 4:30 pm on Wednesdays unless otherwise noted.

The series is free and open to the public, and reservations are notrequired.

For more information, visit http://libguides.gatech.edu/NuclearPanel

Due to current budget restraints, lunch is provided only to those who have preregistered.

Abstract:
Development of sensitive and on-the-spot detection probes of pollutants and toxins is an ongoing area of current research. This research is focused on development of gold nanoparticle (AuNP) based probe to detect such molecules quickly and accurately with excellent discrimination of other molecules. Colorimetric technique and Raman spectroscopy have been utilized to detect such pollutants and toxins without any dye tagging in ppm and/or ppb level. Other techniques including UV-vis, DLS and 1H-1H DOSY are also utilized to characterize the gold nanoparticle based probes.

ABSTRACT:
As the characteristic size of a flying robot decreases, the challenges for successful flight revert to basic questions of fabrication, actuation, fluid mechanics, stabilization, and power - whereas such questions have in general been answered for larger aircraft. When developing a flying robot on the scale of a common housefly, all hardware must be developed from scratch, as there is nothing "off-the-shelf" which can be used for mechanisms, sensors, or computation that would satisfy the extreme mass and power limitations. This technology void also applies to techniques available for fabrication and assembly of the aeromechanical components: the scale and complexity of the mechanical features requires new ways to design and prototype at scales between macro and MEMS, but with rich topologies and material choices, one would expect in designing human-scale vehicles. With these challenges in mind, this talk will present progress in the essential technologies for insect-scale robots.

BIO:
Robert Wood is an associate professor in Harvard's School of Engineering and Applied Sciences and a core faculty member of the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering. Wood completed his master's (2001) and PhD (2004) degrees working with Professor Ron Fearing in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences at U. C. Berkeley. He is founder of the Harvard Microrobotics Lab, which contains facilities for rapid development and evaluation of robots with feature sizes on the micron to centimeter scale. His current research interests involve the creation of biologically inspired aerial and ambulatory microrobots, fluid mechanics of low Reynolds number flapping wings, minimal control of under-actuated computation-limited systems, new micro- and meso-scale manufacturing techniques, and morphable soft-bodied robots. He is the winner of a 2007 DARPA Young Faculty Award, a 2008 NSF Career Award, a 2008 ONR Young Investigator Award, a 2009 Air Force Young Investigator Award, multiple best paper and best video awards, is a member of the 2008 class of Technology Review’s top 35 innovators under the age of 35, and in 2010 received the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers from President Obama. Wood has served as PI or co-PI on twenty sponsored research projects over the past four years including the $10M NSF-sponsored Expeditions in Computing "RoboBees" project that he is leading.

Panelists: 

• Peggy Barlett, Professor of Anthropology, Emory University 
  Barlett’s current interests focus on sustainability in higher education as a tangible arena in which to understand and enact sustainable development more generally.Recently, her scholarly work has turned to the role of campus sustainable food projects in rebuilding a healthier global agro-food system. 
• Nell Fry, Students Organizing for Sustainability, Georgia Tech
  Fry, the 2010 Hobart Center for Food Service Sustainability grant writer and a 2011 HCFS Fellow, is leading a comprehensive energy reduction program, working toward zero waste across campus, and reducing water usage. She also works to educate the campus about sustainable food through farmers’ markets, educational events, and working with students. 
• Rashid Nuri, Founder, Truly Living Well Urban Farms
  Nuri is a graduate of Harvard College, where he studied political science and holds a M.S. in Plant and Soil Science from the University of Massachusetts and currently serves on the boards of Georgia Organics and the Atlanta Local Food Initiative. Rashid possess over 40 years of experience in both industrial and organic agriculture, where he has managed public, private and community-based food and agriculture businesses in over 30 countries. 
• William Winders, Professor of Sociology, Georgia Tech
  Winders is a sociologist who specializes in the areas of social inequality (class, race, and gender), social movements, political sociology, and the world economy. His current research examines how political coalitions and the southern political-economy shaped twentieth century U.S. agricultural policy.

About the event:
This symposium honors the memory of Liam Rattray (1989-2011), a student in the Georgia Tech Honors Program whose commitment to sustainability and social justice provides a compelling model for intellectual and civic engagement for us all, no matter what our age.

The symposium’s immediate emphasis on food speaks to an important area of Liam’s passion and opens up a much broader range of issues that extend far beyond the production and consumption of food. We invite you to join our speakers in a spirited conversation about the implications of what we eat, where it comes from, who grows it, and how it’s grown.

SPEAKER: Dr. Andy Sun

ABSTRACT:

The electricity industry has been experiencing fundamental changes over the pastdecade. Two of the arguably most significant driving forces are the integrationof renewable energy resources into the electric power system and the creationof deregulated electricity markets. Many new challenges arise. In thistalk, we present some new results on two important issues: How to reliablyoperate a power system under high penetration of uncertain supply and demand;and how to design an electricity market that balances efficiency and fairness.

In the first part of the talk, we address the first issue in the context of theso-called unit commitment (UC) problem, one of the most critical operations ofan electric power system facing with new challenges of increasing uncertaintyfrom both generation and load. We propose a fully adaptive robust model for thesecurity constrained UC problem in the presence of nodal net loaduncertainty. We develop a practical solution methodology and present anextensive numerical study on the real-world large scale power system operatedby the ISO New England (ISO-NE). Computational results demonstrate theadvantages of the robust model over the traditional reserve adjustment approachin terms of economic efficiency, operational reliability, and robustness touncertain distributions.

As motivated by the above application, we study a more general notion of finiteadaptability in a rather general setting of multistage stochastic and adaptiveoptimization. We show that geometric properties of uncertainty sets, such assymmetry, play a significant role in determining the power of robust andfinitely adaptable solutions, and these solutions are good approximation formultistage stochastic as well as adaptive optimization problems. To the best ofour knowledge, these are the first approximation results for the multistageproblem in such generality. Moreover, the results and proof techniques arequite general and extend to include important constraints such as integralityand linear conic constraints.

In the final part of the talk, we present a new perspective on electricitymarket design. We propose and investigate the notion of $\beta$-fairness thataddresses the tradeoff between social welfare and fairness. The case $\beta=0$corresponds to current practice, whereas $\beta=1$ corresponds to a solutionthat maximizes the minimum utility among market participants, the so-calledmax-min fairness. Such a max-min fair solution eliminates side payments, thusprovides a solution to a long standing problem in the current practice. Weinvestigate the tradeoff curve, and show that the current practice $(\beta=0)$is not Pareto efficient. Our scheme also gives a solution to another well-knownproblem, namely achieving fairness and integrity of the auction in choosing frommultiple (near) optimal solutions.

SPEAKER: Chuck Zhang

ABSTRACT:

Lightweight,high-strength composites manufacturing is a fast-growing industry of enormousimportance. Research and advancements have resulted in innovativeuses of composites in aerospace, auto, marine, space and sporting goodsindustries. Recent discovery and insertion of nanomaterials (e.g. carbonnanotubes) further expand capabilities/potential of composites formultifunctional applications. However, these materials are relatively new andtheir manufacturing often involvesmultiple complex processingsteps. Such issues have created difficulty incomprehensive understanding of the nanomanufacturing processes and theresulting materials, and in turn, have limited their application bases. Thispresentation will discuss amethodology and on-going research projects in design and manufacturing of a unique nanomaterial,carbon nanotube buckypaper, in the Industrial and ManufacturingEngineering Department and the High-PerformanceMaterials Institute (HPMI) at the Florida State University. Special focus of the presentation will be given onthe development and application of physics-based process models and experimental data for design of the buckypapermaterials with desired properties and the corresponding manufacturing processes. 

Bio: 

Dr.Chuck Zhang is Professor and Chairman of the Department of Industrial andManufacturing Engineering at the Florida A&M University-Florida State University College of Engineering. He is also the Deputy Director of the High-PerformanceMaterials Institute (HPMI) at FSU. He received his Ph.D.degree in Industrial Engineering from the University of Iowa and has been withFSU since 1993. Dr. Zhang’s primary research interests include modeling/simulation/intelligentdesign of composite and nanocomposite materials and their manufacturingprocesses, scalable nanomanufacturing, multifunctional material development,and geometric tolerancing and metrology. His research projects have beensponsored by a number of organizations including National Science Foundation(NSF), National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), Air Force Officeof Scientific Research (AFOSR), Army Research Laboratory (ARL), Office of NavalResearch (ONR) and Society of Manufacturing Engineers (SME), as well asindustrial companies such as ATK, Cummins, General Dynamics, GKN AerospaceServices, Lockheed Martin and Siemens Power Generation. Dr. Zhang has publishedover 120 refereed journalarticles and 170 conference papers.

MODEL ORDER REDUCTION FOR TIME-CRITICAL APPLICATIONS IN AERONAUTICAL ENGINEERING

Charbel Farhat

Department of Aeronautics & Astronautics

Stanford University, Stanford, CA USA

Thursday, October 27, 2011 @ 4:00pm

Montgomery Knight (G442)

Abstract:
In many applications, high-fidelity time-dependent numerical simulations remain so computationally intensive that they cannot be used as often as needed, or are more often used in special circumstances than routinely. This is the case, for example, for turbulent CFD computations at high Reynolds numbers. Consequently, in many engineering fields including aeronautics, the impact of computational sciences on time-critical operations such as design, design optimization, control, and flight test has not yet fully materialized. For these operations, reduced order models that can faithfully reproduce the essential features of the larger computational models at a fraction of their computational cost offer a promising alternative. This presentation will cover recent advances in this field. It will also demonstrate real-time performance on mobile devices of a CFD-based computational methodology for assisting flutter flight-testing and the aerodynamic design of a Formula 1 car.

BIO:
Charbel Farhat is the Vivian Church Hoff Professor of Aircraft Structures, Chairman of the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics, and Director of the Army High Performance Computing Research Center at Stanford University. He is designated as an ISI Highly Cited Author in Engineering by the Institute for Science Information (ISI) Web of Knowledge, Thomson Scientific Company. He was knighted by the French Government in the Order of Academic Palms and awarded the Medal of Chevalier dans l’Ordre des Palmes Academiques. He is also the recipient of several other academic distinctions including the Lifetime Achievement Award from ASME, the Structures, Structural Dynamics and Materials Award from AIAA, the John von Neumann Medal, Computational and Applied Sciences Award, and R. H. Gallagher Special Achievement Award from USACM, the Gordon Bell Prize and Sidney Fernbach Award from IEEE, the Computational Mechanics Award from IACM, and the Modeling and Simulation Award from the Department of Defense. Professor Farhat is a Fellow of AIAA, ASME, USACM, IACM, SIAM, and WIF. His research interests include nonlinear aeroelastic phenomena for modern fighter jets, micro aerial vehicles, aeroacoustics, fluid-structure interaction, underwater acoustic scattering, underwater implosion, shape optimization, multi-scale modeling, model order reduction, and real-time computing.

Hear from:

• Joon An — "Putting Science into Orbit: Skylab and the Beginning of Lab-Science in Space"
• Paulina Faraj — "Radio Controlled Citizens: An Examination of a Decree by the Ministerial Council for the Defense of the Reichon 'Extraordinary Measures'"
• Gloria Ross — "Technological Frames and the Sustainable Urban Agriculture Movement in Atlanta, Georgia" 

Climate Change & Global Energy Security

Technology and Policy Options

By Marilyn Brown and Benjamin Sovacool

Also featuring: Judith Curry, Earth & Atmospheric Sciences; Bob McGrath, GTRI;  Bryan Norton, School of Public Policy; and Thomas Orlando, Energy Research

Tackling climate change and improving energy security are two ofthe twenty-first century's greatest challenges. In this book, Marilyn Brown andBenjamin Sovacool offer detailed assessments of the most advanced commerciallyavailable technologies for strengthening global energy security, mitigating theeffects of climate change, and enhancing resilience through adaptation andgeo-engineering. They also evaluate the barriers to the deployment of thesetechnologies and critically review public policy options crucial to theiradoption.

Arguing that society has most of the technologies necessary forthe task, Brown and Sovacool discuss an array of options available today. Theyoffer 8 case studies from around the world that document successful approachesto reducing emissions of greenhouse gases and improving energy security. Brownand Sovacool argue that meeting the twin challenges of climate change andenergy security will allow us to provide energy, maintain economic growth, andpreserve the natural environment–without forcing tradeoffs among them.

*Reception to follow

Presentation with Dr. Christopher Ford and Mr. William Tobey, "Present Day Nuclear Weapons Challenges".

**Please RSVP for this event.

Presenters:
o Dr. Christopher Ford (Hudson Institute; former US Special Representative for Nuclear Nonproliferation)
o Mr. William Tobey (Harvard's Belfer Center; former Deputy Administrator at the National Nuclear Security Administration)

Hosted by CISTP and the Stanley Foundation.

Because of this background, his work is based in concept with biological traces. He investigates a wide range of media, from large-scale micrographic and photographic prints to explorations in microscopy, multi-media installations and performances. His subject matter is also varied, as animals, biological materials, immigrant workers, hydroponics, radio signal technology, effects processors, and video are examples from his palette.

Presentation with Dr. Christopher Ford and Mr. William Tobey, "21st Century Nuclear Challenges: Policies, Priorities, and the Public Role".

**Please RSVP for this event.

During the Cold War, discussion of nuclear weapons was everywhere. Nuclear issues were front and center in the headlines, underpinned our nation’s defense posture, defined super power politics, and were the reason why all school children knew where the local bomb shelter was located. Despite the perhaps even greater dangers nuclear weapons and material pose today—the nuclear programs of rogue states Iran and North Korea, the threat of nuclear terrorism, increasing numbers of nuclear weapons in volatile or fragile parts of the world like Pakistan, the nuclear disaster in Japan— the nuclear security agenda has enexplicably dropped out of the national debate. Global stockpiles of nuclear weapons, vulnerable nuclear material worldwide, and the byproducts of nuclear energy production will remain among the central challenges to US national security and global stability throughout the 21st century.

Please join an expert panel for a discussion of these important issues. What role should nuclear weapons play in our national defense? Are nuclear weapons the most useful tool to combat today’s adversaries? In light of today's budgetary constraints, how should the US spend its more limited resources on defense? What strategies can be employed to control rogue states with nuclear programs like Iran and North Korea? Do we have adequate security in place to prevent terrorists from acquiring nuclear weapons-usable material or technology? These are just some of the questions the featured speakers will address as they examine how to best shape the US nuclear posture and policies in the 21st century.

Featured speakers:
• Dr. Christopher Ford, Director of the Center for Technology and Global Security and Senior Fellow at the Hudson Institute and former US Special Representative for Nuclear Nonproliferation. Dr. Christopher Ford served until September 2008 as United States Special Representative for Nuclear Nonproliferation, and prior to that as Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary of State responsible for arms control, nonproliferation, and disarmament verification and compliance policy. Prior to joining the Bush Administration, Dr. Ford served as Minority Counsel and then General Counsel to the US Senate Select Committee on Intelligence in the wake of the September 2001 terrorist attacks. He is also an intelligence officer in the U.S. Navy Reserve, holding the rank of Lieutenant Commander.

• William Tobey, Senior Fellow at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard University and former Deputy Administrator for Defense Nuclear Nonproliferation at the National Nuclear Security Administration. William Tobey was most recently Deputy Administrator for Defense Nuclear Nonproliferation at the National Nuclear Security Administration. There, he managed the U.S. government's largest program to prevent nuclear proliferation and terrorism by detecting, securing, and disposing of dangerous nuclear material. Mr. Tobey also served on the National Security Council Staff in three administrations, in defense policy, arms control, and counter-proliferation positions. He has participated in international negotiations ranging from the START talks with the Soviet Union, to the Six Party Talks with North Korea.

This event is sponsored by the Hudson Institute, Partnership for a Secure America, the Stanley Foundation, Kennesaw State University and Georgia Tech's Sam Nunn School of International Affairs Center for Strategy, Technology, and Policy (CISTP).

These communities are faculty-led and each focus on a topic ranging from humor and innovation to sustainability. Each community has between 20 to 40 students.

Faculty leaders define their own topic based on interest and receive a stipend for their work, depending on the number of students participating in their program.

SPEAKER: Han Liu, Johns Hopkins University

ABSTRACT:

Graphical models have proven to be an extremely useful abstraction in statistical machine learning. The starting point is the graph of a distribution. While usually the graph is assumed given, we are interested in estimating the graph from data. In this talk we present
several new nonparametric and semiparametric methods for graph estimation. One approach is named "the nonparanormal," which uses copula methods to transform the variables by monotonic functions, relaxing the fully parametric assumptions made by the Gaussian
graphical model. Another approach is to restrict the family of allowed graphs to forest graphs, enabling the use of fully nonparametric density estimation. Finally, we introduce a new framework named "graph-valued regression" where the graph is estimated conditioned on
a recursive partition of a set of covariates. The resulting methods are easy to understand and compute, theoretically well supported, and effective for modeling and exploring high dimensional data. Joint work with Fang Han, John Lafferty, Larry Wasserman, and Tuo Zhao.

Bio: Han Liu graduated from the joint Ph.D. program in Machine Learning and Statistics at Carnegie Mellon University in 2011.  Since then he became an assistant professor of Biostatistics and Computer Science at Johns Hopkins University. His research lies at the intersection of Modern Statistics and Computer Science. Especially, he is interested in large-scale nonparametric methods, which directly conduct inference in infinite-dimensional
spaces and are more flexible to capture the subtleties in modern applications. He is the PI of a NSF grant and has won several academic awards, including the J. Tinsley Oden faculty fellowship from UT Austin, the best overall paper runner up award at the 26th
international conference of Machine Learning and a PHD fellowship from Google.

The 2011 Fall Briefing will feature guest speaker and Chairman of the Board of Regents Ben Tarbutton, III (MGT '94). 

Please RSVP to k.wright@gatech.edu to attend. 

Spintronics exploits the influence of the electron spin orientation on electronic transport. It is mainly known for the “giant magnetoresistance” (GMR) and the large increase of the hard disc capacity obtained with read heads based on the GMR, but it has also revealed many other interesting effects. 

Today spintronics is developing along many novel directions with promising prospects as well for short term applications as for the “beyond CMOS” perspective.

After an introduction on the fundamentals of spintronics, Fert will review some of the most interesting emerging directions of today: spin transfer and its applications to STT-RAMs or to microwave generation, spintronics with semiconductors, graphene and carbon nanotubes, Spin Hall Effects, neuromorphic devices etc.

Abstract:
The Director of NASA's Aviation Safety Program acts not just as the program's executive, but also serves several policy functions.  One is co-chairing the 'Aviation Safety' Interagency Working Group of the Aeronautics Science and Technology Subcommittee within the Committee of Technology convened by the National Science and Technology Council, and thus authoring the chapter on Aviation Safety within the Office of Science and Technology Policy's National Aeronautics R & D Plan.  Another is serving on the executive committee or advisory board of several public-private partnerships, including the Commercial Aviation Safety Team (CAST) and the Aviation Safety Information Analysis and Sharing (ASIAS) initiative.  In this talk, Amy Pritchett will discuss her experiences in these capacities while on an IPA to NASA.  Of note, several interesting intersections of technology and policy will be explored, including the role of aviation safety research as an enabler of the aviation industry, and trade-offs between various public and private mechanisms for analyzing proprietary flight data for emerging safety concerns. 

About Policy@Tech:
Policy@Tech (www.policy.gatech.edu) is a consortium of Georgia Tech's five policy research centers, working together to increase Georgia Tech's impact in public policy.

Policy@Tech speaker series with Amy Pritchett, "The Intersection of Technology and Policy in Aviation Safety".

Amy Pritchett is a David S. Lewis Associate Professor of Cognitive Engineering, Aerospace Engineering Joint Associate Professor Industrial and Systems Engineering, and Former Director of NASA's Aviation Safety Program.

Abstract: The Director of NASA's Aviation Safety Program acts not just as the program's executive, but also serves several policy functions. One is co-chairing the 'Aviation Safety' Interagency Working Group of the Aeronautics Science and Technology Subcommittee within the Committee of Technology convened by the National Science and Technology Council, and thus authoring the chapter on Aviation Safety within the Office of Science and Technology Policy's National Aeronautics R & D Plan. Another is serving on the executive committee or advisory board of several public-private partnerships, including the Commercial Aviation Safety Team (CAST) and the Aviation Safety Information Analysis and Sharing (ASIAS) initiative. In this talk, Amy Pritchett will discuss her experiences in these capacities while on an IPA to NASA. Of note, several interesting intersections of technology and policy will be explored, including the role of aviation safety research as an enabler of the aviation industry, and trade-offs between various public and private mechanisms for analyzing proprietary flight data for emerging safety concerns.

Future speakers in the series
o January, 2012, Rob Butera (ECE) and Maggie Kosal (INTA) on biosecurity policy
o February, 2012, Christine Ries, (ECON) on setting state tax policy
o March, 2012, Mark Myer (CEE) on transportation policy

Policy@Tech is a consortium of Georgia Tech's five policy research centers, working together to increase Georgia Tech's impact in public policy.

"Careers for the Global Good" and "Let U.S. Lead: The UN and the US at a Crossroads" - both events at the Harland Cinema, Dobbs University Center. Sponsored by Emory Political Science Department, Emory Model U.N., The United Nations Association, Georgia Tech Sam Nunn School, and Georgia State Andrew Young School.

4PM | "Careers for the Global Good"
Panelists include:
o Gillian Sorensen ~ Senior Advisor and National Advocate, United Nations Foundation
o Terrence K. Williamson ~ Diplomat in Residence at Morehouse University
o Jennifer McCoy ~ Director of the Americas Program at The Carter Center and Professor at Georgia State University
o Elizabeth Blake ~ Senior VP of Government Affairs, Advocacy and General Counsel at Habitat for Humanity International

7PM | "Let U.S. Lead: The UN and the US at a Crossroads"
In celebration of the 66th anniversary of the United Nations.
Keynote address by:
o Gillian Sorensen ~ Senior Advisor and National Advocate, United Nations Foundation

His research focuses on land use and transportation interactions, and on the development of integrated planning approaches and modeling tools to support urban sustainability. He has designed and led the development of the UrbanSim land use model system, now in widespread use by metropolitan planning organizations in the United States. It is used to assess the effects of transportation projects on urban development outcomes and long-term induced demand. He has numerous active research projects, funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF), the Federal Highway Administration, the European Commission and the Metropolitan Transportation Commission in the Bay Area.

A light lunch box will be provided.

Abstract

Transportation models have used zonal geography and coarse representations of the transport network to represent the spatial environment for trip origins, destinations and routes. But the coarseness of the zonal geography and transport networks is inconsistent with the level of detail needed to represent walking and bicycling adequately. This also has implications for the representation of transit, which is so dependent on walk access at origin and destination of transit trips. 

This talk addresses recent work under way as part of projects funded by the NSF and the Metropolitan Transportation Commission in the San Francisco Bay Area to develop an analytic and visualization capability at a level of detail of parcels and local streets. Preliminary development of an integrated database, model system and visualization platform yields early insight into strategies to more fully represent pedestrians and bicyclists within land use and transportation models and planning.

Due to current budget restraints, lunch is provided only to those who have preregistered.

Abstract:
Since the realization of the electrical conductivity in conjugated polymers during the late seventies, this class of organic materials has received growing attention due to their technological applications. In addition to their attractive processing properties associated with conventional polymers, conjugated polymers have both electrical and optical properties similar to those of metals and inorganic semiconductors. Similar to traditional non-conjugated polymers, conjugated polymers possess a very low intrinsic thermal conductivity (~ 0.2 W m-1 K-1). Defects in bulk polymers such as chain entanglements, voids, and impurities lead to a significant number of phonon scattering sites that impede heat transfer. The utility of these polymers as thermal interface materials depends largely on (i) the directional carrier mobility through the polymer chain (ii) the contact area and resistance between polymer and surfaces. Further, the alignment of polymer chains with enhanced molecular and superamolecular order at the nanoscale can reduce defects and improve the mechanical strength and thermal/electrical conductivity in the direction of alignment significantly. This presentation will cover the template assisted fabrication of conjugated polymer (polythiophene) nanostructures towards enhanced molecular ordering within nanostructures. The polythiophene (Pth) nanostructures of diameters ~ 200 nm and length up to tens of micron were grown potentiostatically using a three electrode electrochemical cell and a hard nanoporous template. The important fabrication parameters to control the morphology of nanostructures will also be discussed. A photoacoustic (PA) technique was used to measure the thermal resistances of Pth nanotube arrays dry-adhered to a substrate to form the interface. The total thermal resistance of a Pth nanotube interface was measured to be as low as ~ 1 mm2K/W, which is significantly less than the measured resistances for state of art thermal adhesives.

About the Speaker:
Dr. Virendra Singh is Post-doctoral Research Associate in the Nano Engineered System and Transport (NEST) laboratory in the School of Mechanical Engineering. He received his MS and M. Phil degrees, both in Analytical Chemistry, from the Indian Institute of Technology, Roorkee, India; and PhD in Physical Chemistry from Panjab University, Chandigarh, India. In 2007, after completion of his PhD, he moved to Georgia Tech. He was a postdoc in Chemical Engineering with Prof. Behrens from 2007 to 2009, before joining the NEST lab. He has taught several courses as a visiting lecturer and has over 16 publications in refereed journals and proceedings. His current research interests include fabrication and characterization of conjugated polymer and conjugated polymer-CNT hybrid nanostructures, electrochemical polymerization/deposition, and CNT dispersion in non-aqueous solvents.

Biography:
Sam Ock Park is currently Professor Emeritus of Economic Geography, Department of Geography, SNU; and Distinguished Professor, Department of Public Administration, Gachon University. He served as Dean of College of Social Sciences, SNU (2004-2006) and as the President of University Senate of Seoul National University (2007~August 31, 2011). He served as the President of Korean Regional Science Association (1997-2001), the President of Pacific Regional Science Conference Organization (PRSCO) (2000-2001), the President of Korean Geographical Society (2003-2004), and the Chair of the International Geographical Union Commission on the Dynamics of Economic Spaces (2000-2004). Councilor-at-Large of Regional Science Association-International (RSAI) (2009~). He also served as the Pacific Editor of Papers in Regional Science (1995-1997) and is currently an editorial board member of Regional Studies, Journal of Economic Geography, and Papers in Regional Science and Co-editor-in-Chief of The Korea Spatial Planning Review. He has published more than 160 articles in English and Korean including papers in international journals such as, Papers in Regional Science, Progress in Human Geography, Economic Geography, Environment and Planning A, Geoforum, Journal of Economic And Social Geography (TESG), and so on, and published 19 books on the locational dynamics of economic activities, regional development, high tech industries, industrial clusters and regional innovation systems. His recent research topics are regional innovation systems, industrial clusters, and dynamics of economic spaces. He received several awards such as the Best Paper of the Year by the Korea Federation of Science and Technology Societies (1997), the First Academic Award of Korean Geographical Society (2006), a Medal for Distinguished Activities of Research, SNU (2007), A National Distinguished Scholar in the field of Humanity and Social Sciences (2008). Dr. Park holds a BA and a MA in Geography, Seoul National University (SNU), and Ph. D. in Economic Geography in The University of Georgia.

Please join us for this event at 4:30pm in LeCraw Auditorium, College ofManagement, or register for the free live webcast provided by our partners at Learn itLive.

More about the speaker:

BillRogers is president and CEO of SunTrust Banks, Inc. As such, he is responsiblefor all aspects of the financial performance, corporate strategy and businessoperations of the company, as well as regulatory compliance, client servicedelivery and all staff support functions.

Heassumed his current role in June 2011, having served as Chief Operating Officersince November 2010 and President since December 2008. Previously, he served asCorporate Executive Vice President with executive oversight responsibilitiesfor Commercial Real Estate Banking, Corporate & Investment Banking,Mortgage, Treasury & Payments Solutions and Wealth and InvestmentManagement.

Mr.Rogers began his career in 1980 in the commercial bank training program ofTrust Company of Georgia, a SunTrust predecessor company. Throughout his careerwith SunTrust, he has held increasingly senior positions across the enterprise,including corporate and commercial banking, corporate finance, retail bankingand mortgage banking.

Aboutthe Impact Speaker Series

Since 2002, the IMPACT Speaker Series has brought highly successful businessleaders from a variety of industries to campus to share their experiences andgive advice to students and other entrepreneurs on topics ranging from"building a venture around intellectual capital" to "successfulentrepreneurship in large organizations" and "socially responsibleleadership".

The weekly series provides Georgia Tech students, alumni and the Atlantabusiness community an opportunity to network and learn from successfulentrepreneurs, venture capitalists, and notable business and non-profitleaders. Events for the series take place in the LeCraw Auditorium in theCollege of Management building at 4:30 pm on Wednesdays unless otherwise noted.

The series is free and open to the public, and reservations are notrequired.

(Please Note - This talk will be delivered via Skype)

Over the past two decades, there has been increasing use of linguistically annotated sentence collections, such as the Penn Treebank (PTB), for constructing statisticallybased parsers across a variety of languages. Such Treebank-based parsers are trained on and exploit syntactic regularities in (manually-annotated) phrase structures - statistically interpolating where data is missing - in order to synthesize a most-likely parse when presented with novel (and pre-existing) sentences. Within this framework, one must rely on the promissory note that all necessary grammatical knowledge is encapsulated and statistically extractable from the Treebank corpus. In this talk we discuss the practical limits of this approach, cognitive implications for the problem of language acquisition, and finally, on-going Treebank work for a bilingual English/Arabic roboceptionist (Hala), a joint project with Carnegie Mellon University
(Qatar and Pittsburgh).

Co-sponsored by the School of Modern Languages, Ivan Allen College Dean's Office and the School of Interactive Computing.

Biography of Dr. Fong:  Sandiway Fong received his B.Sc. in Computing Science, at Imperial College of Science and Technology, University of London. He received an S.M. in 1986 at MIT, where he worked in the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.  After working at IBM's Watson Research Center, he returned to MIT  for his Ph.D. which was awarded in 1991.  Upon graduation Dr. Fong joined the NEC Research Institute to work on natural language processing, and machine translation.  In 2003, he moved to the University of Arizona, where he is now an Associate Professor.  His research interests are at the intersection of computer science and formal linguistics, with a focus on multilingual parsing, ontolinguistics, computational lexical semantics and computational morphology.

SPEAKER:  Dennis K.J. Lin

University Distinguished Professor

Department of Statistics

The Pennsylvania State University

ABSTRACT:

In the past decades, we have witnessed the revolution of informationtechnology.Its impact to statistical research is enormous.This talk attempts to address recent developments and somepotential research issues inBusiness, Industry and Government (BIG) Statistics,with special focus on computer experiment and information systems.An overall introduction and review will be given,followed by specific research potentials.For each subject, the problem will be introduced,some initial results will be presented,and future research problems will be suggested.If time permits, I will also discuss some recent advancesin Search Engine and RFID study.Slides of this talk can be downloaded at the websitehttp://www.personal.psu.edu/users/j/x/jxz203/lin/Lin_pub/

Brief Bio

Dr. Dennis Lin is a University Distinguished Professor ofStatistics and Supply Chain Management at Penn State University,as well as an honorary chair professor at Fudan University.His research interests are quality engineering, industrial statistics,data mining and response surface.He has published over 150 papers in a wide variety of journals.Dr. Lin is an elected fellow of ASA and ASQ,an elected member of ISI, a lifetime member of ICSA,and a fellow of RSS.He is an honorary chair professor for various universities, includinga Chang-Jiang Scholar of China at Renmin University, Fudan University,National Chengchi University (Taiwan),and XiAn Statistical Institute (China).Dr. Lin presents several distinguished lectures, includingthe 2010 Youden Address (FTC) and the 2011 Loutit Address (SSC).He is also the recipient of the 2004 Faculty Scholar Medal Award at Penn State University.

This discussion will involve subject matter experts, considering hydraulic fracturing, commonly known as "fracking" or "hydrofracking."

• Carlos Santamarina (Professor and Goizuetta Foundation Chair, School of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Georgia Tech) Carlos leads a research team that explores the scientific foundations of soil behavior and subsurface processes using innovative testing methods combined with high resolution process monitoring systems. Research outcomes are addressing issues in geotechnical engineering in the area of energy geotechnology with contributions to: efficiency and conservation, resource recovery (petroleum, methane hydrates), energy storage, and waste utilization (carbon geological storage, fly ash and nuclear waste).
• Sayta Gupta (Senior Research Director of Fracturing Technology, Baker Hughes) Sayta’s career has been in the oil and gas industry. After working on the research staffs of Gulf and Pennzoil, he joined the Western Company, which was acquired by BJ Services. Baker Hughes purchased BJ Services in 2010. At Western, Sayta was chief chemical engineer. Sayta is the inventor or co-inventor on 110 U.S. and international patents related to numerous fracturing fluids and additives. He continues to have a leadership role in BJ Services SmartCare systems, launched in 2010, which enables operators to frack oil and gas wells in a responsible and safe manner while maximizing production.

For the TSP on graphic metrics (graph-TSP), the approach yields a 1.461-approximation algorithm with respect to the Held-Karp lower bound. For graph-TSP restricted to a class of graphs that contains degree three bounded and claw-free graphs, we show that the integrality gap of the Held-Karp relaxation matches the conjectured ratio 4/3. The framework allows for generalizations in a natural way and also leads to a 1.586-approximation algorithm for the traveling salesman path problem on graphic metrics where the start and end vertices are prespecified.

This is joint work with Tobias Momke.

This is a talk in two parts, linked by probabilistic methods and linear algebra. In the first half, we look at the problem of finding all 2-edge cuts in a graph. For this we give a simple algorithm based on uniformly sampling the graph's cycle space (all Eulerian subgraphs). Its distributed implementation is time-optimal on every graph. In the second half, we talk about partitioning set systems into set covers. Mainly, as a function of the minimum degree and maximum set size, how many disjoint covers can be obtained? The tools used to answer this include discrepancy theory and iterated linear programming.

This is joint work with R. Thurimella; and with B. Bollobas, T. Rothvoss, & A. Scott.

Please join us for this event at 4:30pm in the LeCraw Auditorium, College ofManagement, or watch the live webcast provided by our partners at Learn itLive.

More about the speaker:

DennisLockhart is the president and CEO of the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta.  In this role, he serves on the FederalReserve’s chief monetary policy body, the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC).

Beforejoining the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta, Mr. Lockhart was a faculty memberat Georgetown University, teaching in the master’s program in the Walsh Schoolof Foreign Service. He also has extensive experience in the world of privateequity and finance.  From 2001 to 2003 hewas a managing partner at the private equity firm Zephyr Management, L.P., a firmbased in New York with activity in Africa and Latin America.  Prior to joining Zephyr, he worked for 13years at Heller Financial, where he served as executive VP and director of theparent company and as president of Heller International Group.  Earlier in his career, Mr. Lockhart heldvarious positions, both domestic and international, with Citicorp/Citibank (nowCitigroup) between 1971 and 1988.

Mr. Lockhart earned a B.A. inpolitical science and economics from Stanford University in 1968 and an M.A. ininternational economics and American foreign policy from the Johns HopkinsUniversity School of Advanced International Studies in 1971.                                                               

About the ImpactSpeaker Series

Since 2002, the IMPACT Speaker Series has brought highly successful businessleaders from a variety of industries to campus to share their experiences andgive advice to students and other entrepreneurs on topics ranging from"building a venture around intellectual capital" to "successfulentrepreneurship in large organizations" and "socially responsibleleadership".

The weekly series provides Georgia Tech students, alumni and the Atlantabusiness community an opportunity to network and learn from successfulentrepreneurs, venture capitalists, and notable business and non-profitleaders. Events for the series take place in the LeCraw Auditorium in theCollege of Management building at 4:30 pm on Wednesdays unless otherwise noted.

The series is free and open to the public, and reservations are notrequired.

This week's seminar will be presented by Harini Kumar, Graduate Student in Computer Science.  The presentation will be followed by discussion regarding her work "Using GPS and GIS enabled devices to improve pavement evaluation, management and data collection".

CISTP Lecture with Matti Tarvainen, "IAEA Outreach Programme to Collect Safeguards Relevant Trade Data".

**Please RSVP for this event.

Matti Tarvainen is the Team Leader of the Trade and Technology Analysis Team (TTA) of the IAEA Department of Safeguards. He has 29 years of experience in safeguards both on the national (SSAC) and the international level. Before joining the IAEA in 2002 he held a position of Principal Advisor at the Radiation and Nuclear Safety Authority (STUK) in Finland and his main responsibilities included safeguards R&D and IAEA Safeguards Support Programme coordination. In the Agency, his main responsibilities included safeguards State evaluation before establishment of the TTA – Trade and Technology Analysis Unit in 2004. He has an advanced degree, Licentiate of Philosophy, in applied nuclear physics and radiochemistry from the University of Jyväskylä, Finland.

"Manufacturing in China and Vietnam" ~ Doing Business in China and Southeast Asia - Real World Perspective by Scott Ellyson, CEO, East West Manufacturing. Co-sponsored by GT Ciber, The Sam Nunn School of International Affairs, China Research Center, and Georgia China Alliance.

Ten years ago, Scott Ellyson and Jeff Sweeney co-founded East West Manufacturing in Atlanta to bring U.S.-based companies both the cost-savings and speed to market offered by Asian manufacturing. They began by forging partnerships with a number of manufacturing facilities in China, Thailand, Vietnam, Taiwan and India, and later purchased factories for their team to operate in Changzhou, China and Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. Learn how they have accomplished this success and what this means for U.S. competitiveness.

About Dr. Lee's Research:
My research program is very much interdisciplinary across physical chemistry, physics, biochemistry, molecular/structural/cellular biology, and nanoscale science/engineering. The goal is to provide 1) novel insights into the link between the mechanisms of complex cellular machineries and the fundamental laws of dynamics, and 2) efficient single molecule methods to study and control complex enzymatic reactions. 

The first one is a ground-based sensing system, whichgenerates trajectories of moving objects passing the scene using a laserscanner networks. My research based on this system includes: 

1. a trajectory processing method that selects andcorrects mistakes in moving object tracking results automatically; 

2. a trajectory analysis method that model the sceneusing tracking results and detect abnormal trajectories in the scene.

 The second one is a vehicle-based sensing system, whichuses laser scanners, cameras and GPS/IMU to generate a detailed copy of adynamic scene at the moment. My research based on the system includes:

 1. an object extraction method that extracts definedtypes of objects from laser sensing data with an attention mechanism;

2. an attempt on fusing laser data and ladybug video,where spatial and color information are merged to provide a richerrepresentation of scenes.

Yipu Zhao

Please join us for this event at 4:30pm in the LeCraw Auditorium, College ofManagement, or register for the free live webcast provided by our partners at Learn itLive.

More about the speaker:

J. PaulRaines is the chief executive officer of GameStop. Prior to being named CEO,Raines served as chief operating officer from September 2008 to June 2010. Rainesand his team have ledthe transformation of GameStop into the leading multichannel player in videogaming - building online platforms, download and streaming technologies, and maintainingworld class retail store operations. Gamestop is a global retailer with operationsin 17 countries across Europe, Canada, Australia and the United States.

Priorto joining GameStop, Raines spent eight years with The Home Depot in variousmanagement positions in retail operations, including serving as executive vicepresident for U.S. Stores and president of the Southern Division for theAtlanta-based company. He also has extensive international expertise coveringLatin America, Asia and Europe.

Beforejoining The Home Depot, Raines spent four years in global sourcing for L.L.Bean and 10 years with Kurt Salmon Associates in their consumer products group.

Rainessits on the President’s Advisory Board for Georgia Tech.

Aboutthe Impact Speaker Series

Since 2002, the IMPACT Speaker Series has brought highly successful businessleaders from a variety of industries to campus to share their experiences andgive advice to students and other entrepreneurs on topics ranging from"building a venture around intellectual capital" to "successfulentrepreneurship in large organizations" and "socially responsibleleadership".

The weekly series provides Georgia Tech students, alumni and the Atlantabusiness community an opportunity to network and learn from successfulentrepreneurs, venture capitalists, and notable business and non-profitleaders. Events for the series take place in the LeCraw Auditorium in theCollege of Management building at 4:30 pm on Wednesdays unless otherwise noted.

The series is free and open to the public, and reservations are notrequired.

CISTP's Innovation, Globalization & Development Lecture Series presents, "The Surveillance Economy: Why Information Does not always do what Economic Theory Predicts". Co-sponsored by The Sam Nunn School of International Affairs, and the College of Management.

**Please RSVP for this event.

Professor Lipartito's areas of specialization are economic and business history and the history of technology. Most of his research has been on the United States over the past century, although he also engages in comparative work on Europe and maintains a strong interest in the Atlantic world. By combining an understanding of the material dimensions of history - markets, businesses, technological systems - with an appreciation of their cultural and political ramifications, he challenges students to develop their own understanding of the evolution of modern society. He brings this multifaceted approach to his publications as well as to the classroom, where he regularly covers business history, the history of the global economy, political economy, the history of technology, as well as Atlantic civilization and twentieth century America.

We describe an emerging paradigm, which we refer to as the Laplacian Paradigm, for the design of efficient algorithms for massive graphs. This paradigm is built on a recent collection of nearly-linear-time primitives in Spectral Graph Theory developed by Spielman and Teng. Their key primitive is a solver for a linear system, Ax = b, where A is the Laplacian matrix of a weighted, undirected n-vertex graph and b is an n-dimensional vector. Other primitives include nearly-linear-time algorithms for local clustering, spectral sparsification, and low stretch spanning trees. When applying the Laplacian Paradigm, we reduce the input problem to one or multiple problems that can be efficiently solved by these spectral primitives.

The Laplacian Paradigm has been used in a recent algorithm for computing an approximately maximum s-t flow in an undirected graph. This flow is computed by solving a sequence of electrical flow problems. Each electrical flow is given by the solution of a system of linear equations in a Laplacian matrix, and thus may be approximately computed in nearly-linear time. Using this approach, we develop the fastest known algorithm for computing approximately maximum s-t flows as well as the fastest known algorithm for approximating minimum s-t cut in a graph. The Laplacian paradigm has also been applied to obtain nearly-linear-time algorithms for applications in semi-supervised learning, image process, web-spam detection, eigenvalue approximation, and for solving elliptic finite element systems.

Recently, almost all original primitives in this collection including the Laplacian solver itself have been significantly improved. Practical implementation might become available in the near future. The goal of this presentation is to encourage more researchers to consider the use of the Laplacian Paradigm to develop faster algorithms for solving fundamental problems in combinatorial optimization, scientific computing, machine learning, network analysis, and other applications that involve massive graphs.

Joint work with Daniel Spielman (Yale) and Paul Christiano (MIT), Jonathan Kelner (MIT), and Aleksander Madry (MIT).

Nuclear Energy: Security and Waste Management ~ Hosted by France-Atlanta 2011.

This highly efficient energy source has brought some concerns lately with the Fukushima nuclear situation. Come listen to a dialogue between France and American experts in nuclear energy with a focus on security and waste management issues.

Tentative agenda :
7:30 am - Registration and networking breakfast
8:00 to 8:20 am - Opening remarks by keynote speaker Mr. Tim Echols
8:20 to 8:30 am - Panelists introduction
8:30 to 10:00 am - Panel 1 : Nuclear Waste Management
10:00 to 10:15 am - Q&A by moderator Mr. Tim Echols
10:15 to 10:30 am - Coffee break and networking
10:30 to 10:50 am - Keynote speaker Mr. David Blee, US Nuclear Infrastructure Council (NIC)
10:50 to 11:00 am - Panelists introduction
11:00 am to 12:20 pm - Nuclear Security Management.
12:20 to 12:35 pm - Q&A by moderator Mr. John McIntyre, Executive Director, CIBER, Georgia Tech
12:35 to 1:35 pm - Lunch and networking
1:35 pm - End of meeting

The College of Architecture, the Center for European and Transatlantic Studies within The Sam Nunn School of International Affairs, and the Office of International Education at Georgia Tech, will host a conference on the banlieues of France and the inner suburbs of Atlanta, two suburban conditions that have much to teach us through a comparison of how they are conceived, perceived, and lived.

Preceding the conference, a film series will be presented that highlights the subjects to be discussed during the conference.

Featured Speakers :
o Frédéric Druot, architect
o Jean-Louis Pan Ké Shon, demographer
o Yamina Benguigui, filmmaker

Abstract:
We all know that modern science is undergoing a profound transformation as it aims to tackle the complex problems of the 21st Century. It isbecoming highly collaborative; problems as diverse as climate change, renewable energy, or the origin of gamma-ray bursts require understandingprocesses that no single group or community alone has the skills to address. At the same time, after centuries of little change, compute, data, and network environments have grown by 9-12 orders of magnitude in the last few decades. Moreover, science is not only compute-intensive but is dominated now by data-intensive methods. This dramatic change in the culture and methodology of science will require a much more integrated and comprehensive approach to development and deployment of hardware, software, and algorithmic tools and environments supporting research, education, and increasingly collaboration across disciplines.