• Poster Symposium: Wednesday, April 2, 2025, from 10:00 AM to 4:00 PM
• Project Showcase Event: Wednesday, April 2, 2025, from 5:00 PM to 8:00 PM
• Location: ISyE Main Atrium

• Dr. Mary Lynn Realff: Effective Team Dynamic Initiative
• Dr. Brandy Blake: Professional and Technical Communication
• Laura Garcia: UG Career Education
• Dr. Sarah Brackmann: Community-Based Learning

Read the full story here: https://www.isye.gatech.edu/news/turn-learning-action-industrial-engineering-community-research-projects

• One of Facebook’s first employees
• Created Facebook Photos and its tagging feature
• Oversaw development for Facebook Groups, Events, and Inbox
• Cofounder of GoodRx, the largest website dedicated to helping people save money on prescription drugs (the company has saved consumers $75 billion)

Space is limited! Please RSVP.

She serves as the Design Thrust lead for the newly funded NSF Engineering Research Center (ERC) on Hybrid Autonomous Manufacturing, Moving from Evolution to Revolution (HAMMER), where she works on digital twin systems for concurrent materials and manufacturing process design. Dr. Chen is an elected member of the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) and currently serves as the President of the International Society of Structural and Multidisciplinary Design (ISSMO). She served as Editor-in-chief of the ASME Journal of Mechanical Design and the Chair of the ASME Design Engineering Division (DED).

Dr. Chen is the recipient of the 2022 Engineering Science Medal from the Society of Engineering Science (SES), ASME Pi Tau Sigma Charles Russ Richards Memorial Award (2021), ASME Design Automation Award (2015), Intelligent Optimal Design Prize (2005), ASME Pi Tau Sigma Gold Medal achievement award (1998), and the NSF Faculty Career Award (1996). She received her Ph.D. from the Georgia Institute of Technology in 1995.

The Spring 2024 event features:

• Jean-Lou Chameau, president emeritus of the California Institute of Technology (2006-13); former Georgia Tech provost (2001-06) and dean of its College of Engineering (1997-2001)
• G. Wayne Clough, former secretary of the Smithsonian Institution (2008-14); president emeritus of Georgia Tech (1994-2008)

This event is made possible by the generous support of Kenneth Hyatt, CE 62, MS IM 66.

A two-time ISyE graduate, Dunkin oversees DoE’s cybersecurity and information technology. She'll share insights from her work and take questions during this fireside chat with Engineering Dean and Southern Company Chair Raheem Beyah.

Dunkin will talk about DoE’s technology innovation and digital transformation efforts, plus her experiences as:

• CIO of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency during the Obama Administration
• Chief Strategy and Innovation Officer at Dell Technologies
• Leadership roles at Hewlett Packard focused on engineering and IT

Space is limited! Please RSVP.

Panelists will select a first, second, and third place winner for monetary awards. 

Panelists include a cross section from campus and the local community:

• Daniel Baerlechen, Associate Professor, School of Architecture
• Lauren Stewart, Williams Family Associate Professor; Interim Associate Chair for Graduate Programs and Research Innovation; and Director of the Structural Engineering and Materials Laboratory
• Tony Zivalich, Associate Vice President for Real Estate Development
• Gilbert Delgado, Assistant Vice President for Planning, Design, and Construction; Infrastructure and Sustainability
• Dan Nemec, Associate Director for Strategic Planning; Infrastructure and Sustainability
• Jason Gregory, Assistant Director of Environmental Planning; Infrastructure and Sustainability
• Jim Case, Senior Principal with Uzun+Case and Georgia Tech Adjunct Professor
• Katherine Lynch, Senior Vice President, Trammell Crow Company

Join Mike Madsen, Cherissa Tamayori, Lt. Col. Andrea Castillon, and Patrick Reynolds, for this special event, moderated by ATDC's Nakia Melecio, to learn more about the key technology areas that DIU is focused on, our acquisition processes, and ways to engage with us as the “Front Door to DoD Innovation.” DIU representatives will share their insights and answer audience questions.

All innovators, technologists, and those interested in understanding and possibly contributing to our national security are encouraged to attend.

This is a hybrid event — registrants may attend in person or via Zoom. To sign up, please register here: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/diu-atlanta-roadshow-program-overview-tickets-396315990797

Kimbrough is returning to his alma mater for the first time since living on the International Space Station (ISS) for six months in 2021. In three trips to space, he has spent 388 days away from Earth, the fourth highest total among U.S. astronauts.

Additional details can be found on the College of Engineering dean search site, including each respective candidate’s bio and curriculum vitae, as well as links to the seminars and surveys. 

Join the event.

Additional details can be found on the College of Engineering dean search site, including each respective candidate’s bio and curriculum vitae, as well as links to the seminars and surveys. 

Join the event.

Larry Jacobs, professor and associate dean for academic affairs in the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering, was named interim dean of the College and will continue to serve until the post is filled. 

Michael Toney, director of Academic Administration, will serve as search director. 

A town hall for faculty, staff, and students to learn about the search process and timeline, and to provide feedback on the characteristics of ideal candidates has been scheduled as follows:

Tuesday, Oct. 20 at 11 a.m.

Join the town hall.

An application link will be available soon. Nominations can be sent to provostsoffice@gatech.edu.

Mon. Sept. 28, 2020

3 p.m. to 4 p.m.

Join the live event: http://c.gatech.edu/celebrate-RLB 

Micro-Aggressions & How to Promote Anti-Racism in the Aerospace Industry

at 5 p.m. on Saturday, July 11
featuring

• Charles Bolden, Jr., former Administrator for NASA
• Tiffany Davis, BSAE '16, current GT graduate student
• Naia Butler-Craig, current AE doctoral student
• Kaylin Borders
• A'liyah Fleeks

We want you all to be there, so RSVP now  to get the link to this live panel discussion.  And send your questions for panelists to address.

Sponsored by the Women of Aeronautics and Astronautics

The town hall will also feature participation from the deans of the Colleges, the Library, and Georgia Tech Professional Education.

Thursday, April 30, 2020

12 p.m. to 1 p.m.

Join the town hall.

Questions can be submitted in advance to provostsoffice@gatech.edu. 

To join, please click on this link: https://primetime.bluejeans.com/a2m/live-event/uyeacvkb. 

Faculty, researchers, and staff from Resident Instruction (RI) and Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI) are encouraged to join. 

Students, faculty, and staff are invited to two town halls to learn more about the search and provide feedback on their idea of an ideal candidate.

• Mon. March 9 at 4:00 p.m. in Clough Undergraduate Learning Commons, Room 144

A second date has been set for: Tues. March 10 at 4:00 p.m. in Global Learning Center, Room 236

Georgia Tech will be assisted by Jackie Zavitz, Ellen Landers and Kaley Palanjian of Heidrick & Struggles, Inc. Nominations and applications should be directed to GTProvost@heidrick.com.

Once finalized, an application link will be provided, as well as a search timeline and ongoing updates, via a forthcoming search site.

Students, faculty, and staff are invited to two town halls to learn more about the search and provide feedback on their idea of an ideal candidate.

• Tues. March 10 at 4:00 p.m. in Global Learning Center, Room 236

A second date has been set for: Mon. March 9 at 4:00 p.m. in Clough Undergraduate Learning Commons, Room 144.

Georgia Tech will be assisted by Jackie Zavitz, Ellen Landers and Kaley Palanjian of Heidrick & Struggles, Inc. Nominations and applications should be directed to GTProvost@heidrick.com.

Once finalized, an application link will be provided, as well as a search timeline and ongoing updates, via a forthcoming search site.

Distinguished Lecture

featuring

Gen. John William "Jay" Raymond
Chief of Operations for the United States Space Force

Sponsored by Georgia Tech's

• Center for Space Technology And Research (CSTAR),

• Daniel Guggenheim School of Aerospace Engineering,

• Sam Nunn School of International Affairs

2020 Vertical Flight Foundation (VFF) Scholarship?

The Atlanta Chapter of the Vertical Flight Society (formerly the American Helicopter Society) is hosting an information session to explain the process and give tips to prospective applicants. Students from the AE School have done very well in this annual opportunity, probably because the local chapter does so much to help out applicants.

This is open to all students, regardless of academic major.

"Construction of Non-Equilibrium Hydrodynamic Models for Atmospheric Entry Plasmas"

by

Dr. Marco Panesi

Associate Professor | University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign

Tuesday, January 28
11 am - 12 pm
MK 317

About the Talk: 
The simulation of the aerothermal environment surrounding vehicles moving at hypersonic speed is a complex problem due to its multi-physics and multi-scale nature. Progress in the ability to ac-curately model these systems has been hindered by the lack of reliable physical and chemical models for collisional and radiative processes. Furthermore, the predictive capabilities of these models are often established by a simple comparison of the model predictions against results from legacy exper-imental measurements, the accuracy of which is often not well characterized. Substantial progress in the area of computational chemistry, along with increased computational resources, have allowed for the construction of realistic models based on molecular-scale dynamics. I propose to use state-specific collisional radiative models as a powerful tool to derive macroscopic conservation equations, energy exchange terms and chemical production rates for atmospheric entry plasmas. I will cover the key aspects involved in model development, namely: (1) using ab-initio quantum calculations as a powerful tool to construct high-fidelity physics-based models; (2) defining reduced-order mod-els for the simulation of 2D and 3D flows (e.g., coarse-grain modeling); (3) validating physical models and determining the uncertainty in their predictive capabilities, based on the most recent developments in Uncertainty Quantification (UQ) algorithms.

About the Speaker: 
Dr. Marco Panesi is currently Associate Professor in the Aerospace Engineering Department and director of the Center for Hypersonics and Entry System Studies (CHESS) at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign. His research interests include hypersonics aerothermodynamics, plasma dynamics and uncertainty quantification. In 2009, he received the Ph.D. degree from the von K´arm´an Institute for Fluid Dynamics in Belgium for his work on “Physical models for non-equilibrium plasma flow simulations at high speed re-entry conditions”. He completed a post-doc with the PECOS center, one of the five DOE funded PSAAP centers, at the Institute for Computa-tional Engineering and Sciences at UT Austin. Prof. Panesi joined the faculty in the Department of Aerospace Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign as an assistant professor in August 2012.

Prof. Panesi has won a number of awards, including the Young Investigator Program award from AFOSR and the Early Career Faculty award from NASA. He has won Best Paper/Presentation Awards at AIAA conferences a number of times. In 2015, he received the Award on Physical Modelling at the Symposium on Aerothermodynamics for Space Vehicles (ESA) for his contribution to the fundamentals of Aerothermodynamics.

"Characterization of Microstructure and Damage Evolution in Advanced Aerospace Composites Using X-ray Computed Tomography"

by

Prof. Michael Czabaj

Assistant Professor | Mechanical Engineering
University of Utah 

Friday, November 22
2 - 3 PM
MK 317
 

About the Talk:
In recent years, high-resolution X-ray micro-computed tomography (mCT) has emerged as a preferred method for imaging microstructure and damage in a variety of natural and engineered materials. For advanced aerospace composites, X-ray mCT has been successfully used to study 3D formation and evolution of delamination and transverse fracture, fiber tensile and compressive failure, fatigue-induced damage, and damage resulting from extreme thermomechanical environments. In addition, X-ray mCT has been used for imaging the internal microstructure of composites, including location, shape, and size of reinforcing fibers, voids, and manufacturing-induced flaws. As such, the 3D image data derived from X-ray mCT has challenged the way in which we perceive the interplay between the underlying microstructure of composites and their long term damage resistance and tolerance.

In this talk, I will begin by giving a short overview of X-ray mCT, including a brief discussion on the advantages and disadvantages of existing lab- and synchrotron-based X-ray mCT systems. I will then discuss two examples of using X-ray mCT to study composite systems that are of interest to the aerospace community. In the first example, I will discuss our attempt to image the entire life cycle of SiC/SiC ceramic-matrix composites, focusing primarily on the evolution of porosity and shrinkage cracks during multi-step polymer infiltration and pyrolysis. Next, I will describe a new in situ imaging experiment, conducted at the Advanced Light Source beamline 8.3.2, to image initiation and evolution of transverse cracks in polymer matrix composites subjected to flexure. I will conclude my talk by describing my group’s efforts to develop a new synchrotron-based nano-tomography beamline at the Advanced Light Source and the associated challenges with collecting, processing, and analyzing large quantities (i.e. TBs) of X-ray mCT image data.​

About the Speaker: 
Dr. Michael Czabaj is an assistant professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Utah and is a director of the Utah Composites Laboratory. Dr. Czabaj’s research interests are in the broad area of experimental and computational mechanics of composites, with specific focus on fracture mechanics, micromechanics, and nondestructive imaging using X-ray computed tomography. Prior to his position at the University of Utah, Dr. Czabaj was a Materials Engineer at NASA Langley Research Center. Dr. Czabaj received his doctorate in Theoretical and Applied Mechanics from Cornell University and bachelor’s degree in Aerospace Engineering from Syracuse University. 

"Structural Design in Motion: Computational Synthesis of Kinetic Structures Using Topology Optimization"

by

Prof. Kai James

Assistant Professor
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Thursday, November 14
3 - 4 PM
Guggenheim 442
 

About the Talk: 
Topology optimization is a powerful and well-established tool for generating optimal structural designs.  Unlike the sizing and shape optimization approaches that preceded it, this method simultaneously optimizes both the shape and topology of the structure, thus creating the potential to algorithmically generate novel design concepts and configurations with minimal input from human designers.  This capability makes topology optimization a potential key ingredient in the quest to achieve automated design of complex mechanical systems.

This talk will discuss our ongoing efforts to expand the capability of the topology optimization method to enable computational synthesis of kinetic structures.  This unique class of structures is designed to exhibit precisely tailored motion, while maintaining structural integrity.  The talk will present our general methodology and results from several example problems including optimal design of a bi-stable airfoil, multimaterial design of self-actuating mechanisms containing shape memory polymers, and topology optimization of multi-body mechanisms.  The talk will conclude with a discussion of ongoing and future research projects in which we explore the use of topology optimization for the design of soft robots and compound machines.​

About the Speaker: 
Kai James is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Aerospace Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and the Principal Investigator of the Computational Design Innovation Lab at UIUC.  From 2012 to 2015, he was a postdoc in the Computational Mechanics Group at Columbia University, and he earned his PhD in aerospace engineering from the University of Toronto in 2012.  His research focuses on computational solid mechanics and computational design optimization with an emphasis on problems involving various sources of nonlinearity, such as viscoelastic creep, superelasticity, and large deformations. 

He is especially interested in developing novel algorithms that leverage high-fidelity computational models and topology optimization methods for conceptual design and synthesis of complex engineering structures.  Some of his major research projects include aerostructural optimization of transonic aircraft wings, structural design optimization of a cardiovascular stent, optimal design of a bi-stable airfoil, and computational synthesis of multi-body systems.  Dr. James is the recipient of the NSF CAREER award (2018), and has also received several teaching honors including being named “Teacher of the Year” by the UIUC chapter of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics in 2017.

The Perplexing Role of
Microstructure in Impact Failure

by

Prof. Justin Wilkerson

Assistant Professor | Mechanical Engineering
Texas A&M University

Thursday, November 7
3 - 4 PM
Guggenheim 442

About the Talk: 
Over the past five decades there has been an intense effort to understand and control the thermomechanical response of materials in extreme environments. A number of technologies critical to our safety and well-being stand to benefit from such understanding including armor and defense systems, next-generation fission and fusion reactors, spacecraft shielding, vehicular crashworthiness, and advanced manufacturing. Materials in such extreme environments often exhibit complex, somewhat non-intuitive mechanical behavior that is difficult to predict with empirical or phenomenological models. Here we discuss our development of a number of multiscale, mechanism-based models that help unravel this inherent complexity.

This seminar will focus primarily on the development of an atomistically-informed crystal plasticity framework for deformation and failure of shock compressed single crystals and polycrystals. We further utilize this multiscale modeling framework to provide key insights into the development of reduced-order models, which are helpful in guiding the microstructural design of advanced light-weight armor and shielding materials.

About the Speaker:
Professor Wilkerson’s research and teaching interests lie at the interface of solid mechanics, material science, and physics. He is particularly interested in the mechanical behavior of materials under the extreme conditions generated in armor and defense applications, nuclear reactors, hypersonic aircraft, rocket motors, as well as the cores and surfaces of planets and asteroids.

Wilkerson is an assistant professor and James J. Cain ’51 Faculty Fellow in the J. Mike Walker ’66 Department of Mechanical Engineering at Texas A&M University. Wilkerson spent one year as a visiting Donald D. Harrington Faculty Fellow with the Department of Aerospace Engineering and Engineering Mechanics at the University of Texas at Austin. Prior to that, he was an assistant professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Texas at San Antonio. Wilkerson obtained his B.S. in Aerospace Engineering from Texas A&M, followed by an M.S.E and Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from Johns Hopkins University.

Wilkerson’s academic achievements have been recognized and supported by a number of honors and awards, including the AFOSR Young Investigator (YIP) Award, the Ralph E. Powe Junior Faculty Award, a Haythornwaite Foundation Research Initiation Award, a Top 10 Most Cited Article Award, the National Science Foundation (NSF) Graduate Research Fellowship, the National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate (NDSEG) Fellowship, and the 2009 Ammon S. Andes Award presented annually to recognize the nation’s top aerospace engineering graduate.

For more information, visit http://pwp.gatech.edu/crlt/

Part I
"Moving the Needle: Shifting the Conversation around
Sexual Harassment"
Wednesday, November 6
Two performances: 10 a.m. – noon and 2 – 4 p.m.
Marcus Nanotechnology Building, Rooms 1116-1118

Part research presentation, part embodied case study, and part community conversation, "Moving the Needle: Shifting the Conversation" challenges participants to expand their understanding of what sexual harassment is, how it impacts individuals and communities, and what makes an environment ripe for its presence. **The embodied case studies in this session contain strong language and detailed descriptions of sexual harassment.
 

Part II
"Moving the Needle: Enacting Your Personal Responsibility"
(plan to have attended Part I – November 6 session)
Friday, November 8
Two performances: 10 a.m. – noon and 2 – 4 p.m.
Wardlaw, Gordy Room

Building on introductory conversations about the prevalence and consequences of sexual harassment in higher education, "Moving the Needle: Enacting Your Personal Responsibility" focuses on an individual’s role in contributing to a climate that resists sexual harassment. **The embodied case studies in this session contain depictions of sexual harassment.

invites you to hear

"Factor Graphs for Flexible Inference
in Robot Perception and Control" 

by

 Frank Dellaert

Professor | School of Interactive Computing
Georgia Tech

Thursday, October 31
3 - 4 p.m.
Guggenheim 442

About the Talk: 
In robotics and computer vision, simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) and structure from motion (SFM) are important and closely related problems. I will review how SLAM, SFM, and other problems in robotics and vision can be posed in terms of factor graphs, which provide a graphical language in which to develop and collaborate on such problems. Many of these ideas are embodied in the Skydio drones, two commercially available, fully autonomous drones I helped develop at a Bay Area startup. I'll present some of our successes as well as more recent work on robotics-centered applications, including motion planning and kino-dynamic planning.

About the Speaker: 
Dr. Dellaert does research in the areas of robotics and computer vision, which present some of the most exciting challenges to anyone interested in artificial intelligence. He is especially keen on Bayesian inference approaches to the difficult inverse problems that keep popping up in these areas. In many cases, exact solutions to these problems are intractable, and as such he is interested in examining whether Monte Carlo (sampling-based) approximations are applicable in those cases. Since coming to Georgia Tech Dr. Dellaert has explored the theme of probabilistic, model-based reasoning paired with randomized approximation methods in three main research areas: Advanced sequential Monte Carlo methods, Spatio-Temporal Reconstruction from Images, Simultaneous Localization and Mapping

Vertical Flight Society

invites you to hear

The Emergence of Urban Air Mobility

a talk by

Prof. Brian German

Director of the Georgia Tech Center for Urban and Regional Air Mobility (CURAM)

Pizza Provided

Over the past two years, the term "urban air mobility (UAM)" has entered the vernacular of the aerospace industry. Silicon Valley unicorns, individual billionaires, startup companies, automotive firms, and traditional aerospace manufacturers worldwide are investing in the development of over 200 electric vertical takeoff and landing (eVTOL) aircraft to serve the UAM market. Often called "flying cars" or "air taxis," these aircraft designs are novel, incorporating many new technologies. We are entering only the early days of UAM, an era of great uncertainty. No one understands whether and how the market will emerge. No one understands how eVTOL aircraft will be certified. No one understands how to manage the airspace in cities when filled with air taxis. No one understands how cities will regulate "vertiports" where aircraft will land to embark and disembark passengers. No one understands which aircraft designs will "win" and how the best design varies city to city. In this era of uncertainty, there is great opportunity, and there is great risk. This talk will provide an introduction to the current landscape of urban air mobility

Vertical Flight Society

invites you to hear

“Winning Strategies for the
2020 Lichten Award Submissions"

a talk by

Ben Leon

2019 Lichten Award Recipient

The Lichten Award is an award given each year by the Vertical Flight Society to encourage students who have not previously presented the results of their rotorcraft-related research at a regional, national, or international event. This session will help new scholars to begin presenting their work at local and regional VFS meetings.. Award winner will be given up to $1500 for travel to the VFS Annual Forum and a $500 stipend. The Georgia Tech VFS chapter has helped many students win this prestigious award in the past.

THIS IS OPEN TO ALL STUDENTS

You do not need to be a VFS member to attend.

The 2019 Lichten Award winner, AE doctoral student Ben Leon, will speak about his experience with the 2019 application process and give an overview of his winning paper entitled:

“Ground and Flight Tests of a Cable-Driven Four-Bar Linkage Robotic Landing Gear for Rotorcraft.“

Guggenheim 244
Thursday, Oct 22 @ 11:00 am

Nonlinear Dynamics of Things: From Understanding Nature to Designing New Mechanical Systems
 

by

Prof. Eleonora Tubaldi

Assistant Professor
University of Arizona 
 

Thursday, October 24
3 - 4 PM
Guggenheim 442

About the Talk: 
At a first glance pipes conveying fluid, soft tissue, and buckled steel beams seem to have nothing to share. However, all these systems show interesting behaviors when we approach them from a nonlinear dynamics perspective. These dynamic behaviors are rich, diverse and sometimes unexpected so that they can be harnessed to achieve pioneering designs intended to have impact on different facets of our everyday life.

The talk will be divided in two main sections: during the first one, we will highlight how the nonlinear dynamics of soft cardiovascular vessels and prostheses is crucial in understanding their functioning and behavior. In this regard, the design of the next generation aortic prosthesis might be based on its ability to mimic the nonlinear dynamics of the native aorta conveying pulsatile blood flow. Even pathologies such as aortic dissection and rupture which currently present no biomechanical explanation, could be potentially caused by a nonlinear dynamic and fluid-structure interaction phenomenon.

In the second part of the talk, we will discuss how the nonlinear dynamics of buckled elastic beams can be exploited for engineering nonlinear mechanical metamaterials. By carefully assembling shallow arches in 2D arrangements, we can engineer fully snapping unit cells, which snap between two equally stable energy configurations. These unit cells can tile a 2D space which will have both bistability and snapping-through behavior. This would open new promising paths because controlling waves capability can be exploited in mechanical signal transmissions, mechanical diodes, targeted energy transmission and locally energy storage, switcher designs and logic gates.

About the Speaker: 
Dr. Tubaldi joined the University of Arizona in January 2018 as Assistant Professor in the Department of Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering and obtained, in the same university, a second appointment in the Department of Applied Mathematics GIDP in May 2018. She received her Ph.D. degree in July 2017 in Mechanical Engineering at McGill University, her M.S. Double Degree Diploma at Politecnico di Milano and École Polytechnique de Montréal in Aeronautical and Aerospace Engineering (2013), and her B.S. at Politecnico di Milano in Aerospace Engineering (2010).

Her research interests sit at the interface of nonlinear dynamics, soft materials science and fluid-structure interactions for applications in biomechanics, prosthetic design, and nonlinear mechanical metamaterial.

She is author of several peer-reviewed international journal papers. She serves as Associated Editor for  Mechanics Based Design of Structures and Machines: An International Journal. She is reviewer of J. of Fluids and Structures, Int. J. of Nonlinear Mechanics, AIAA Journal, and Computers in Biology and Medicine. She is member of the ASME (American Society of Mechanical Engineers) Dynamics & Control System & Structures (DCSS) Technical Committee. She has been awarded national scholarship Doctoral Research Quebec Merit Scholarship for Foreign Students (PBEEE) and Mechanical Engineering Doctoral Award (MEDA) at McGill University.

"Predicting Microstructure-Sensitive Mechanical Behavior of Materials by Integrating Physics-Based Modeling with Machine Learning"
 

by
 

Prof. Ashley Spear

Assistant Professor | Mechanical Engineering
The University of Utah

Thursday, October 17
3 - 4 p.m.
Guggenheim 442

About the Talk: 
The emergence of a data-driven science paradigm in the mechanics of materials community has been simultaneously motivated and enabled by recent, unprecedented access to multidimensional and multimodal data derived from sophisticated experiments, computational simulations, and combinations thereof. This talk will focus on specific examples in which we have exploited data derived from high-fidelity, physics-based models and/or from 3D experimental characterization to train machine-learning algorithms to predict complex material phenomena. In one example, we hypothesize that micromechanical fields in a cyclically loaded, uncracked polycrystal encode the eventual 3D path of a crack, which we test by training machine-learning models using data derived from crystal-plasticity simulations combined with experimental observations collected at the Advanced Photon Source. In a second example, we test the performance of different types of machine-learning models (Ridge regression, random forests, and convolutional neural networks) in terms of their ability to predict microstructure-sensitive mechanical properties throughout additively manufactured (AM) metal build domains. The models are trained using data generated from high-fidelity, multi-physics numerical simulations of the AM process, resulting microstructure, and effective mechanical properties. In each example, the primary aim of using machine learning is to massively expedite predictions of complex physical phenomena. In this context, machine learning can open up new opportunities to search high-dimensional materials-design spaces, make rapid predictions of microstructure-sensitive failure, and even discover fundamental relationships between raw image data and mechanical behavior for cases in which the governing equations are unknown or intractable to solve.

About the Speaker: 
Dr. Ashley Spear directs the Multiscale Mechanics & Materials Laboratory at the University of Utah, where her group specializes in integrating experiments, physics-based modeling, and data-driven science to examine three-dimensional deformation, fatigue, and fracture in structural materials. Spear received her B.S. in Architectural Engineering from the University of Wyoming and her Ph.D. in Civil Engineering from Cornell University. She has received numerous teaching awards, the Young Investigator Award from the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, the TMS Early Career Faculty Fellow Award, and the CAREER Award from the National Science Foundation.

invites you to hear

"Aerothermodynamics Research for
NextGeneration Hypersonic Platforms"

by

Prof. Venkat Narayanswamy

Professor | North Carolina State University 

Tuesday, October 29
3 - 4 p.m.
MK 317
 

About the Talk: 
My research group focuses on niche aerodynamics and propulsion related problems that make critical contributions to future hypersonic platforms. We have ongoing projects that contribute towards widening the operating margin of dual mode ramjet inlets, unraveling the scramjet inlet/combustor coupling at various operation modes, investigating the hypersonic fluid structure interactions over flexible panels, and developing aerodynamic solutions to achieve tactical boost glide capabilities in hypersonic missile systems. This talk will provide a broad overview of the different research directions in our lab and focus on the first item, wherein we develop a new understanding of the shock boundary layer interaction phenomena that occur in axisymmetric internal flows to unravel the inlet unstart physics.

Inlet unstart is an enduring problem that inhibit the scramjet from widening its operation to lower Mach numbers and poses a critical bottleneck during turbo/ram/scram mode transitions. The unstart issue is particularly harsh in axisymmetric inlets where even incidence angle causes the inlet to unstart in prior studies at NASA. We made detailed investigations of model axisymmetric inlet/isolators to unravel the fundamental aerothermodynamic physics that causes the observed inlet unstart propensity. We further extended the investigations to rectangular inlets, where the flow is substantially more three dimensional than axisymmetric. The findings of these investigations provided new insights into the physical processes that determine the separation scales in internal flows and approaches to counter the flow separation. Apart from unstart issue, the findings on the flow development within the inlets are very critical as they determine the inflow distortions and unsteadiness that feed into the combustor.

About the Speaker: 
Dr. Venkat Narayanaswamy is an Associate Professor at Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Department of NCSU, where he has served the department since 2012. He directs a lab comprising eight graduate students and four undergraduate students focusing on high-speed aerodynamics/propulsion and energy related topics. Dr. Venkat Narayanaswamy received his doctoral degree from The University of Texas at Austin specializing in shock boundary interaction physics and plasma-based control. Subsequently, he pursued a postdoctoral fellowship at The University of Texas at Austin and RWTH Aachen, Germany, before joining NCSU. Dr. Narayanaswamy has authored over 25 journal publications and over 25 articles in peer-reviewed conferences. He has been recognized with numerous research awards and honors including the AFOSR DURIP Award (2018), AFOSR Young Investigator Program Award (2016), Air Force Summer Faculty Fellowship (2016), and North Carolina Space Grant New Investigator Award (2014).

"Machine Learning for Robotics: Achieving Safety, Performance and Reliability by Combining Models and Data in a Closed-Loop System Architecture"

by

Angela Schoellig

Assistant Professor
University of Toronto 
 

Friday, October 11
1:30 - 3:30 PM
Guggenheim 442

About the Talk: 
The ultimate promise of robotics is to design devices that can physically interact with the world. To date, robots have been primarily deployed in highly structured and predictable environments. However, we envision the next generation of robots (ranging from self-driving and -flying vehicles to robot assistants) to operate in unpredictable and generally unknown environments alongside humans. This challenges current robot algorithms, which have been largely based on a-priori knowledge about the system and its environment. While research has shown that robots are able to learn new skills from experience and adapt to unknown situations, these results have been limited to learning single tasks, and demonstrated in simulation or lab settings. The next challenge is to enable robot learning in real-world application scenarios.

This will require versatile, data-efficient and online learning algorithms that guarantee safety when placed in a closed-loop system architecture. It will also require to answer the fundamental question of how to design learning architectures for dynamic and interactive agents. This talk will highlight our recent progress in combining learning methods with formal results from control theory. By combining models with data, our algorithms achieve adaptation to changing conditions during long-term operation, data-efficient multi-robot, multi-task transfer learning, and safe reinforcement learning. We demonstrate our algorithms in vision-based off-road driving and drone flight experiments, as well as on mobile manipulators.

About the Speaker: 
Angela Schoellig is an Assistant Professor at the University of Toronto Institute for Aerospace Studies and an Associate Director of the Centre for Aerial Robotics Research and Education. She holds a Canada Research Chair in Machine Learning for Robotics and Control, is a principal investigator of the NSERC Canadian Robotics Network, and a Faculty Member of the Vector Institute for Artificial Intelligence. She conducts research at the intersection of robotics, controls, and machine learning. Her goal is to enhance the performance, safety, and autonomy of robots by enabling them to learn from past experiments and from each other. She is a recipient of the Robotics: Science and Systems Early Career Spotlight Award (2019), a Sloan Research Fellowship (2017), and an Ontario Early Researcher Award (2017).

She is one of MIT Technology Review’s Innovators Under 35 (2017), a Canada Science Leadership Program Fellow (2014), and one of Robohub’s “25 women in robotics you need to know about (2013)”. Her team won the 2018 and 2019 North-American SAE AutoDrive Challenge sponsored by General Motors. Her PhD at ETH Zurich (2013) was awarded the ETH Medal and the Dimitris N. Chorafas Foundation Award. She holds both an M.Sc. in Engineering Cybernetics from the University of Stuttgart (2008) and an M.Sc. in Engineering Science and Mechanics from the Georgia Institute of Technology (2007). More information can be found at: www.schoellig.name.

There will be food, building tours, educational activities, and fun for all!

Tour times are as follows. Each tour takes approximately 45 minutes to complete.

• 11:00 a.m. with Todd Mowinski, Partner, Newcomb & Boyd
• 11:00 a.m. with Joshua Gassman, Sustainable Design Director, Lord Aeck Sargent
• 11:30 a.m. with John DuCongé, Senior Project Manager, Facilities Management, Georgia Tech
• 11:30 a.m. with Jimmy Mitchell, Director of Project Solutions, Skanska USA
• Noon with Alissa Kingsley, Associate, Lord Aeck Sargent
• 12:30 p.m. with Mariá Ceballos, Architect, Facilities Management, Georgia Tech
• 1:00 p.m. with Marlon Ellis, Area Maintenance Manager, Facilities Management, Georgia Tech

Attendees are encouraged to take public transit to this event. Hourly visitor parking is available at Visitor Parking Areas 4 and 5.

Click here to RSVP to the open house.

For more information on the Living Building, please visit
livingbuilding.gatech.edu or livingbuilding.kendedafund.org.

“Learning from the Field: Physically-based Deep Learning to Advance Robot Vision in Natural Environments"
 

by
 

Dr. Katie Skinner

Aerospace Engineering | Postdoctoral Fellow
Georgia Institute of Technology

Thursday, October 3
3 - 4 PM
Guggenheim 442

About the Talk: 

Field robotics refers to the deployment of robots and autonomous systems in unstructured or dynamic environments across air, land, sea, and space. Robust sensing and perception can enable these systems to perform tasks such as long-term environmental monitoring, mapping of unexplored terrain, and safe operation in remote or hazardous environments. In recent years, deep learning has led to impressive advances in robotic perception. However, state-of-the-art methods still rely on gathering large datasets with hand-annotated labels for network training. For many applications across field robotics, dynamic environmental conditions or operational challenges hinder efforts to collect and manually label large training sets that are representative of all possible environmental conditions a robot might encounter. This limits the performance and generalizability of existing learning-based approaches for robot vision in field applications.

In this talk, I will discuss my work to develop approaches for unsupervised learning to advance perceptual capabilities of robots in underwater environments. The underwater domain presents unique environmental conditions to robotic systems that exacerbate the challenges in perception for field robotics. To address these challenges, I leverage physics-based models and cross-disciplinary knowledge about the physical environment and the data collection process to provide constraints that relax the need for ground truth labels. This leads to a hybrid model-based, data-driven solution. I will also present work that relates this framework to challenges for autonomous vehicles in other domains.

About the Speaker: 
Katherine Skinner is a Postdoctoral Fellow in Aerospace Engineering at Georgia Tech. She received a Ph.D. from the Robotics Institute at the University of Michigan in 2019. She also holds a B.S.E. in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering with a Certificate in Applications of Computing from Princeton University and an M.S. in Robotics from the University of Michigan.

American Institute for Aeronautics & Astronautics (AIAA)

is proud to sponsor a

Career Info Session with Relativity

Come chat with several Ralativity engineers about internships and career opportunities..

Find out more about reume submission at: Tinyurl.com/AIAA-Relativity

invites you to hear

"Space Situational Awareness: 
New Challenges & Advances in Estimation, Data Sharing, and Privacy"

by

 Prof. Raktim Bhattacharya

Assistant Professor
Texas A&M University
 

Thursday, September 26
3 - 4 p.m.
Guggenheim 442

About the Talk: 
Currently there are about 500K space objects of which only 30K are actively tracked. These include operational satellites and space debris. As the space is getting crowded with new launches, keeping track of all these space objects is becoming critical to prevent possible collisions. In this effort, there are initiatives to share data, which promise to improve our knowledge of the near-space environment, also known as space-situational awareness. While there are benefits to sharing data from a situational awareness perspective, there are critical privacy and national security issues associated with it. This requires understanding of the privacy-utility tradeoff to develop appropriate data-sharing policy. Thus, there are challenges in estimating states with acceptable accuracy for utility, but not too accurately to preserve privacy. In this talk, these challenges will be discussed in a nonlinear filtering framework, including uncertainty propagation in nonlinear manifolds, sensing with non-Gaussian uncertainty, new sampling algorithms in these manifolds, optimal sensing precision, and privacy aware filtering.

About the Speaker: 
Dr. Raktim Bhattacharya received his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in aerospace engineering from the University of Minnesota in 2000 and 2003, respectively. He was a post-doctoral scholar at Caltech from 2003-2004 in the department of Control and Dynamical Systems. After that he was employed by United Technologies Research Center as a research scientist from 2004-2005. He joined the aerospace engineering department of Texas A&M University in 2005 and currently is an associate professor. His research interests include robust control and estimation, nonlinear dynamics, uncertainty quantification and convex optimization. His research is supported by NSF, AFOSR and NASA.

"Smart Mechanics for Intelligent Machines"

by

Prof. Anirban Mazumdar

Assistant Professor
Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering
Georgia Institute of Technology

Thursday, September 19
3 - 4 PM
Guggenheim 442

About the Talk: 
Mobile robots have the potential to revolutionize a range of important aerial, terrestrial, and aquatic missions.  While great advances have been made in autonomy and intelligent algorithms, the connection between physical form and intelligent behavior remains relatively unexplored.  The design of intelligent systems has often considered the “brains” and “muscles” as separate components that are developed independently of each other.  This can result in unreliable performance or conservative behaviors that fall far short of natural organisms.

Our team at Georgia Tech seeks to create autonomous systems with physical properties that are tailored to maximize the performance of intelligent algorithms.  Specifically, we are exploring how optimized geometry, adaptable shape, controllable impedance, and reflexive behaviors can inform new control and autonomy methods.  We call our approach “smart mechanics.”  These principles can be incorporated into existing physical systems as peripheral modifications or used to generate “clean-sheet” designs.  As a result, new levels of maneuverability, energy efficiency, and performance can be achieved. In this talk, I will discuss some of our recent work on underwater maneuverability, legged and multimodal locomotion, and aerial manipulation.

About the Speaker: 
Anirban Mazumdar is an Assistant Professor at the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology.  His research examines the connection between intelligent algorithms and physical behaviors.  He received his B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. degrees in Mechanical Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2007, 2009, and 2013 respectively.  Prior to joining Georgia Tech, he was a Postdoctoral Appointee in the High Consequence Automation and Robotics group at Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque, NM.

Dr. Mazumdar’s research examines principles for enhanced agility, versatility, and energy efficiency of mobile systems.  In particular, Dr. Mazumdar is interested in how electromechanical design, advanced feedback control, and intelligent behavior can be explored together in order to achieve superior performance.  An overarching theme of Dr. Mazumdar’s work is the idea of dynamic configurability: the capability of a mobile system to change its hardware configurations or software algorithms.  This ability can enable mobile systems to maximize their performance even in heterogeneous or dynamic environments. 

"High-Speed Imaging of Unsteady Shock Interactions"

a talk by 
 

Prof. John Schmisseur

Professor of Aerospace Engineering
University of Tennessee @Knoxville
 

Thursday, September 12
3 - 4 PM
Guggenheim 442

About the Talk: 

Shock-wave/boundary-layer interactions are ubiquitous on high-speed vehicles and have thus been a focus of active research for many years. Even the most basic configurations generate such interactions which, uncontrolled, can lead to high thermal and acoustic loads, and potentially vehicle failure.  Interactions in laminar and turbulent boundary layers have been studied extensively over the past several decades, with many review articles published, however, investigations of interactions in transitional boundary layers have been sparse in the existing literature.  Understanding the dynamic behavior of such interactions is critically important for the development of high-speed weapons and projectiles since for such smaller bodies it is anticipated that a much higher percentage of the vehicle boundary layer will be in a transitional state.

Recent research at the University of Tennessee Space Institute has focused on the use of high frame rate optical diagnostic techniques for the characterization of the evolving interaction structure and dynamics as the incoming boundary layer varies from laminar to transitional and turbulent states.  During this seminar, Dr. John Schmisseur will discuss the development of experimental facilities and high-speed imaging systems used in the study of shock/boundary layer interactions occurring in transitional boundary layers and provide an overview of the current understanding of transitional interactions.

About the Speaker: 

Dr. John D. Schmisseur joined the faculty of the University of Tennessee Knoxville Department of Mechanical, Aerospace, and Biomedical Engineering on August 1, 2014.  He teaches and leads research at the University of Tennessee Space Institute.

Prior to joining the faculty, John was the Chief of the Energy, Power & Propulsion Sciences Division and Program Manager for Aerothermodynamics within the Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR).  During his tenure at AFOSR, John initiated and led a national strategic research plan which has guided the research efforts of multiple federal agencies and championed the transition of basic research capabilities that have advanced flagship national hypersonics technology programs and transformed test and evaluation capabilities.   He envisioned the HIFiRE program which unified the efforts of AFRL, NASA and the Australian DSTO to advance fundamental hypersonic science and technology via flight research.  He is active within the professional community including having served as Chair of the AIAA Fluid Dynamics Technical Committee and a NATO Science and Technology Organisation working group.   Dr. Schmisseur earned his B.S. (90) and M.S. (92) in Aerospace Engineering from the University of Texas at Austin and his Ph.D. (97) in Aeronautics and Astronautics from Purdue University.  He is a Fellow of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (2012) and the Air Force Research Laboratory (2013) and is the 2008 recipient of the Air Force Science and Engineering Award in Research Management. 

"High-speed Imaging of Unsteady Shock Interactions"

a talk by

Prof. John Schmisseur

University of Tennessee @ Knoxville

About the Talk: 
Shock-wave/boundary-layer interactions are ubiquitous on high-speed vehicles and have thus been a focus of active research for many years. Even the most basic configurations generate such interactions which, uncontrolled, can lead to high thermal and acoustic loads, and potentially vehicle failure.  Interactions in laminar and turbulent boundary layers have been studied extensively over the past several decades, with many review articles published, however, investigations of interactions in transitional boundary layers have been sparse in the existing literature.  Understanding the dynamic behavior of such interactions is critically important for the development of high-speed weapons and projectiles since for such smaller bodies it is anticipated that a much higher percentage of the vehicle boundary layer will be in a transitional state.

Recent research at the University of Tennessee Space Institute has focused on the use of high frame rate optical diagnostic techniques for the characterization of the evolving interaction structure and dynamics as the incoming boundary layer varies from laminar to transitional and turbulent states.  During this seminar, Dr. John Schmisseur will discuss the development of experimental facilities and high-speed imaging systems used in the study of shock/boundary layer interactions occurring in transitional boundary layers and provide an overview of the current understanding of transitional interactions.

About the Speaker: 
Dr. John D. Schmisseur joined the faculty of the University of Tennessee Knoxville Department of Mechanical, Aerospace, and Biomedical Engineering on August 1, 2014.  He teaches and leads research at the University of Tennessee Space Institute.

Prior to joining the faculty, John was the Chief of the Energy, Power & Propulsion Sciences Division and Program Manager for Aerothermodynamics within the Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR).  During his tenure at AFOSR, John initiated and led a national strategic research plan which has guided the research efforts of multiple federal agencies and championed the transition of basic research capabilities that have advanced flagship national hypersonics technology programs and transformed test and evaluation capabilities.   He envisioned the HIFiRE program which unified the efforts of AFRL, NASA and the Australian DSTO to advance fundamental hypersonic science and technology via flight research.  He is active within the professional community including having served as Chair of the AIAA Fluid Dynamics Technical Committee and a NATO Science and Technology Organisation working group.   Dr. Schmisseur earned his B.S. (90) and M.S. (92) in Aerospace Engineering from the University of Texas at Austin and his Ph.D. (97) in Aeronautics and Astronautics from Purdue University.  He is a Fellow of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (2012) and the Air Force Research Laboratory (2013) and is the 2008 recipient of the Air Force Science and Engineering Award in Research Management. 

More information

is proud to present

“Why Do We Look Up at the Heavens?”

a talk by

Br. Guy Consolmagno

Director of the Vatican Observatory, Rome

About this talk
Why did we go to the Moon? Why does the Vatican support an astronomical observatory? These questions mask a deeper question: why do individuals choose to spend their lives in pursuit of pure knowledge? The motivation behind our choices, both as individuals and as a society, controls the sorts of science that gets done. It determines the kinds of answers that are found to be satisfying. And ultimately, it affects the way in which we think of ourselves.

About the speaker
Guy Consolmagno, SJ is a brother in the Roman Catholic Society of Jesus (the Jesuits), working since 1993 as an astronomer and meteorite specialist at the Specola Vaticana (Vatican Observatory), located in the Papal summer gardens outside Rome. Since 2014 he has been president of the Vatican Observatory Foundation, which supports the work of the Observatory and especially its 1.8 meter Vatican Advanced Technology Telescope (VATT) in Arizona. In September of 2015 he was named Director of the Vatican Observatory by Pope Francis.

Consolmagno's research explores connections between meteorites, asteroids, and the evolution of small solar system bodies. Along with more than 200 scientific publications, he is the author of a number of popular books, including: Turn Left at Orion (with Dan Davis), and most recently, Would You Baptize an Extraterrestrial? (with Fr. Paul Mueller, S.J.). He also has hosted science programs for BBC Radio 4, has been interviewed in numerous documentary films, and writes a monthly science column for the British Catholic magazine, The Tablet.

A native of Detroit, MI, Consolmagno earned two degrees from MIT and a doctorate in planetary sciences from the University of Arizona, was a postdoctoral research fellow at Harvard and MIT, served in the US Peace Corps (Kenya), and taught university physics at Lafayette College before entering the Jesuits in 1989. He has served as chair of the American Astronomical Society’s Division for Planetary Sciences (AAS/DPS) and on the planetary surfaces nomenclature committee of the International Astronomical Union (IAU). Asteroid “4597 Consolmagno” was named in recognition of his work. In 2014 he won the Carl Sagan Med al for public outreach by the AAS/DPS.

More than 500 students have participated in SURE since its inception and:

• 75% of them ultimately attended graduate school, either for a master’s degree or a PhD.
• Half of those who attended graduate school did so at Georgia Tech.

The poster session is from 12:30pm-2pm. Refreshments will be served all day. Come by and see what our scholars have been up to all summer!

To limit processing time, new hires should complete compliance paperwork online prior to the session. For more information, visit http://www.ohr.gatech.edu/graduateprocessing. 

Machines in engineering use mostly hard materials, whereas machines in nature are often soft.  This difference has been an inspiration for the nascent field of soft machines.  What does softness impart to the life of animals and plants?   Softness enables deformation, and deformation provides functions.  Familiar examples include the beating of the heart, the sound shaped by the vocal folds, and the flapping of the wing.  In soft machines, the large deformation enable soft materials to behave as transducers, connecting multiple stimuli to multiple functions.  How do molecular processes enable new classes of actuators and sensors?  How efficiently can materials convert information from one form to another?  These questions are stimulating new and exciting developments at the interface between science and engineering.  This talk highlights the behavior of soft materials that enables the creation of soft machines.  Examples include highly stretchable and transparent devices that mimic the functions of muscles, skins and axons.

PhD and MS students from multiple engineering majors are invited to this open house, where they will learn about Northrop Grumman's 3-year Future Technical Leaders professional development program. Bring your resumes and be prepared to ask questions. Select attendees will be invited back for private interviews the next day.

Wednesday, September 7 at 4 p.m.
Weber Building, 2nd Floor
CoVE Auditorium

Pizza Provided

Murali Gopal Muraleedharan

Advisor: Prof. Vigor Yang

MULTI-SCALE MODELING OF HEAT TRANSPORT IN COMBUSTION OF ENERGETIC NANOMATERIALS

10 am Wednesday November 16

Montgomery-Knight Building Room 317

ABSTRACT

Energetic nanomaterials are attractive to combustion and propulsion, and energy generation applications. They have high volumetric energy density, and offer precision control of thermal transport properties and chemical reactivity via tailorable nanoscale properties. Examples include metal-based nanoparticles, nanoporous sheets, nano-suspensions, etc. One common approach is to disperse energetic fuel nanoparticles in oxidizer base-fluids to form energetic nano-suspensions. Combustion of nano-suspensions may be diffusion or kinetics limited, depending on their characteristic timescales. Enhanced heat conduction rate has significant impacts on the combustion behaviors of these materials.  A detailed understanding of the heat transport mechanisms, therefore, demands special attention.

Heat conduction in nano-suspensions is a widely debated topic. Anomalous thermal conductivity enhancements observed in experiments are often credited to interfacial heat transport and dynamic phenomena. Solid-liquid interfacial heat conduction may be enhanced or repressed by tuning interfacial (Kapitza) conductance. Hydrophilic interfaces offer a strong bonding between particle and base-fluid. Strong bonding between solid and liquid atoms at the interface results in the surface adsorption of fluid molecules, and reduced Kapitza resistance. Interfacial layer (nanolayer) is also significant in enhancing heat conduction. Nanolayer acts as a high density, high phonon mean free path conduit for efficient heat conduction between particle and fluid. Contributions from Brownian motion is also debated. Although it was believed that the random walk of nanoparticles can enhance overall thermal conductivity, Brownian motion effects are usually neglected owing to the high timescales associated with it. Formation of long-chain structures by nanoparticle aggregation can cause heat percolation effects. Several experimental evidences support the role of nanoparticle aggregation towards thermal conductivity enhancement.

In this work, a bottom-up approach is followed to obtain a multiscale model of conductive heat transport in energetic nano-suspension. Molecular dynamics simulations are performed to understand heat transport at the nanoscale. Aluminum, aluminum oxide, and water are the materials used in simulations. In the first stage, equilibrium molecular dynamics (EMD) simulations are performed to investigate the effect of particle volume fraction, particle size, interfacial bonding strength, temperature, and pressure on the thermal conductivity of single and multi-particle nano-suspensions. In the next stage, non-equilibrium molecular dynamics (NEMD) simulations are employed to study interfaces: behavior of interfacial conductance, and the effect of various parameters on it. On the basis of the explored nanoscale physics, a theoretical model for the effective thermal conductivity of energetic nanomaterials is developed. In the final stage, this model is used in a flame propagation problem. Thereafter, the effect of tunable nanoscale properties on the thermal conductivity and macroscale combustion properties is also investigated.

Committee:

Dr. Vigor Yang,AE

Dr. G. P. Peterson, ME

Dr. Jerry Seitzman, AE

Dr. Asegun Henry, ME

Dr. Julian Rimoli, AE

AE Brown Bag Lunch

featuring talks by

Steven Haviland & Michelle Ku

Highlights from the Recent Robotics Grand Challenge

(Steven Haviland)

Electric Propulsion Reliability:
Statistical Analysis of On-orbit Anomalies and Failure Rates

(Michelle Ku)

"Landing SpaceX's Reusable Rockets"

a talk by

Lars Blackmore

Friday, September 2 at 11 a.m.

SpaceX's reusable rocket program aims to reduce the cost of space travel by making rockets that can land, refuel and refly, instead of being thrown away after every flight. Precise landing of a rocket is a unique problem, which has been likened to balancing a rubber broomstick on your hand in a windstorm. Rockets do not have wings (unlike airplanes) and they cannot rely on a high ballistic coefficient to fly in a straight line (unlike missiles). In the past year, SpaceX has successfully landed five rockets, two of which were on dry land at Cape Canaveral, and three of which were on a floating platform in the Atlantic. This talk will discuss the challenges involved, how these challenges were overcome, and next steps towards rapid reusability.

by

Aharon Z. Karon

Advisor: Prof. Krishan K. Ahuja

Potential Factors Responsible for Discrepancies in Jet Noise Measurements of Different Studies

10:30 a.m., Tuesday, August 16 
Montgomery Knight Building -- Room 317

ABSTRACT:
Jet noise measurements have been acquired at many anechoic jet-facilities around the world. These measurements have been used to form the basis for prediction schemes and to understand the generation and radiation of jet noise. Often, when jet noise measurements from different jet-facilities that are thought to be acquired at or corrected to similar conditions are compared, differences are observed in the spectra. These comparisons are typically performed on the basis of the same nozzle-exit diameter, jet velocity, microphone distance from the jet flow, and ambient conditions. This phenomenon has spurred much discussion in the aeroacoustics community, with some even claiming that some of the measurements are contaminated with rig-noise. This study investigates following four factors that can be responsible for the differences in jet noise measurements: (1) rig noise contamination, (2) the jet’s Reynolds number, (3) the nozzle-exit boundary layer of the jet, and (4) reflections and shielding from surfaces inside the anechoic jet-facility.

First, the Doubling-Diameter Method, a scheme used to detect rig-noise contamination in jet-noise measurements, is verified and used on jet noise measurements acquired in the Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI) Anechoic Jet-Facility to verify the cleanliness of the jet noise measurements. Second, the effect of Reynolds number of the jet is investigated qualitatively and quantitatively for its effect on jet noise measurements. Third, the effect of the nozzle-exit boundary layer on jet noise measurements is categorized qualitatively and quantitatively. In addition, a potential correction is developed that can be used to account for the differences in jet noise measurements from jets with different nozzle-exit boundary layer states. Finally, surfaces inside the anechoic chamber itself, such as, the plenum chamber, and a secondary nozzle are investigated as potential reflectors and shields that can cause waviness and modifications in the jet noise spectra, respectively.

Committee:

• Prof. Krishan K. Ahuja, School of Aerospace Engineering
• Prof. Jechiel Jagoda, School of Aerospace Engineering
• Prof. Lakshmi Sankar, School of Aerospace Engineering
• Dr. Donald K. Nance, NASA Marshall Space Flight Center
• Dr. Joseph Gavin, Gulfstream

Registration limited to PRC Consortia members. For more information, please contact Patricia Allen, PRC Events Coordinator at patricia.allen@prc.gatech.edu.

Georgia Tech automotive industry partners include BMW, GM and Ford, to date. Additional R&D collaborations are underway with Mercedes Benz, Ferrari, Honda, and Toyota in many areas that include hybrid vehicle R&D, internal component design, communication-vehicle interactions, automated driving, driver-assist, human-robot interactions and in environmental impacts.

Current automotive-related faculty expertise at Georgia Tech include:

• Advanced MEMS and Sensors for Automotive Systems – Prof. Oliver Brand and Prof. Klaus Wolter
• Sensor Arrays for Media Sensing – Prof. Peter Hesketh
• Meta Materials for Advanced Vibration Sensing – Prof. Michael Leamy
• Reliability, Prognostic and Condition Monitoring – Prof. Suresh Sitaraman and Prof. Maryam Saeedifard
• WBG Power Devices and Modules – Prof. Depak Divan and Prof. Russ Dupuis
• High-temperature Drivers – Prof. John Cressler
• Electrical Design –Prof. Madhavan Swaminathan
• Thermal Management – Prof. Yogendra Joshi and Prof. Samuel Graham
• High-temperature Molding Materials – Prof. CP Wong
• High-bandwidth Photonics – Prof. GK Chang
• Glass-based Digital Packages – Dr. Venky Sundaram
• RF and Power components and modules – Dr. Raj Pulugurtha
• Cu Interconnections Without Solders – Dr. Vanessa Smet
• Integrated Systems – Prof. Rao Tummala

The intent of the workshop is to share proposed R&D projects and get feedback from companies interested in joining the consortium.

First Lady Val Peterson and the Georgia Tech Faculty Women’s Club invite female members of the faculty and faculty wives to its annual open house. Preview the year’s new programs, interest groups, and service projects while enjoying lunch.

For information about GTFWC, visit www.gtfwc.gatech.edu or www.facebook.com/gtfwc.

Have you just landed an interview for a job that you're very excited about? Do you know how to prepare for the interview? Are you unsure of what to expect during the interview process? Come to this coffee talk to get tips on how to ace a job interview! Ms. Miller will offer tips and strategies on effective interviewing from preparation to follow-up. Be sure to bring your questions about interviewing! There will be plenty of time for Q&A as well.

Women in Engineering (WIE) and the Women's Resource Center (WRC) are excited to host this Coffee Talk Series for undergraduate and graduate women majoring in STEM areas (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math).  The series will be held in the Clough Commons Lounge, located in Room 205 next to the Starbucks.

If you haven’t yet been to the Clough Lounge, it’s the perfect space for coffee talk – a room lined with interesting books and filled with tables and comfy chairs!  We’ve designed this series to give STEM women a chance to gather in an informal setting to get to know one another and to discuss topics – technical and personal – that are important to them. 

These coffee talks will feature many interesting guest speakers – both female faculty members and professional women in STEM – who will be joining us to share their professional stories and their personal advice!

Each week, coffee, tea and dessert will be provided so please plan to stop by for a few moments or the entire hour.  We hope to see you for coffee talk!

• For more information about Ms. Ayanna Miller, please click here.

• To learn more about the Coffee Talk Series, please click here.

Each week, coffee, tea and dessert will be provided so please plan to stop by for a few moments or the entire hour.  We hope to see you for coffee talk!

To learn more about the Coffee Talk Series, please click here.

This week's guest speakers is Caressa Foreman, Senior Project Manager at Target Corporation. For more information on Ms. Foreman, please click here.

This week's topic is "Transitioning - Choosing the career you'll love and weaving your way in to the company culture"

Each week, coffee, tea and dessert will be provided so please plan to stop by for a few moments or the entire hour.  We hope to see you for coffee talk!

• To learn more about the Coffee Talk Series, please click here.

This luncheon is open to all female engineering graduate students, whether or not they form a mentoring pair.  During this luncheon, we will discuss specific topics of interest to grad students, such as, “Top 5 mistakes for grad students,” “How to deal with your advisor,” etc.

To learn more about our Graduate Mentoring Program, please click here.

To RSVP for this luncheon, visit http://coe.gatech.edu/events/graduate-mentoring-luncheon

This week's guest speaker is Ms. Lauren Bacci.  For more information on Ms. Lauren Bacci, please click here.

This week's topic is "Networking – Learn to evaluate and expand your current network by understanding key tools for networking"

Each week, coffee, tea and dessert will be provided so please plan to stop by for a few moments or the entire hour.  We hope to see you for coffee talk!

• To learn more about the Coffee Talk Series, please click here.

This Week's Topic:  Communication Skills & Providing Feedback
About out Speaker:  Basma Osman graduated from Georgia Tech in May 2010 with a Biomedical Engineering Bachelor. Basma co-oped with Kimberly-Clark Corporation for four semesters and was hired on full-time with the company as a product developer in their professional R&E department upon graduation. She is active in Atlanta’s section of Society of Women Engineers and in recruiting for K-C at Georgia Tech.

Each week, coffee, tea and dessert will be provided so please plan to stop by for a few moments or the entire hour.  We hope to see you for coffee talk!

• To learn more about the Coffee Talk Series, please click here.

This week's coffee talk will feature a graduate student panel.  The panelists will be:

* Emma Bones, Masters CE

* Alexandra Coso, PhD AE

* Temi Olubanjo, PhD ECE

* Lauren Priddy, PhD BME

All undergrad students who are considering attending graduate school (soon or at any point in the future) are invited to attend!  This is a great opportunity to get your questions about graduate school answered.

Each week, coffee, tea and dessert will be provided so please plan to stop by for a few moments or the entire hour.  We hope to see you for coffee talk!

• To learn more about the Coffee Talk Series, please click here.

Each week, coffee, tea and dessert will be provided so please plan to stop by for a few moments or the entire hour.  We hope to see you for coffee talk!

• To learn more about the Coffee Talk Series, please click here.
• To learn more about Dr. Jennifer Leavey, please click here.

Each week, coffee, tea and dessert will be provided so please plan to stop by for a few moments or the entire hour.  We hope to see you for coffee talk!

• To learn more about the Coffee Talk Series, please click here.

Join us at this Thursday’s Coffee Talk for the GAMES workshop (it's fun and fosters good conversation while raising self-awareness about how you currently study – and how you can study more effectively!), which will be led by Beth Spencer from the Center for Academic Success.  This coffee talk will provide you with tips and strategies for academic success as you begin to prepare for finals!

• To learn more about the Coffee Talk Series, please click here.

We’ll have free organic coffee, tea and delicious cookies. Please feel free to stop by for a few moments or the entire hour.  So bring a friend, and we hope to see all of you on Thursday!

• To learn more about the Coffee Talk Series, which is hosted by Women in Engineering (WIE) and the Women's Resource Center (WRC), please click here.

Les will visit the Georgia Tech bookstore to discuss and sign copies of his novel. Free to the public.

Synopsis:
Decades after the last footprints were left on the Moon, the U.S. was preparing to return to the Lunar surface, when the mission suddenly became much more urgent. It would have to be a rescue mission.

Unbeknownst to the rest of the world, China had sent its own Lunar expedition. A manned expedition. Until a distress call was received, no human outside of China even knew that the mission was manned -- or that their ship had crash-landed and couldn’t take off again.

Time was running out, and if the four Chinese astronauts were to be rescued, the American lunar mission would have to launch immediately, with a only a skeleton crew. Once the U.S. astronauts were underway the army of engineers and scientists back home had the daunting task of deciding what equipment could be left on the Moon to permit the lunar landar to lift safely from the Moon with the two U.S. astronauts and the four stranded Chinese taikonauts! Could the U.S. mount such a mission successfully -- and would thousands of years of instilled honor “allow” the Chinese astronauts to accept a rescue?

• There are Science, Engineering, Math, and Architecture awards in the Netherlands, Australia, Italy, and Chile. 
• There are Business and Finance awards in Mexico, the Netherlands, Spain, and Australia. 
• There are Public Policy and International Relations awards for Mexico, Malaysia, and Austria.

Students who write successful nationally competitive scholarship applications usually begin making plans months (and sometimes years) in advance of the deadline. Students need to plan effective research experiences, summer internships, and participation in meaningful campus and community activities.

The Georgia Tech Fellowship Communication Program assists student applicants for prestigious scholarships and fellowships such as Rhodes, Marshall, Gates Cambridge, Churchill, Fulbright, Mitchell, Udall, Goldwater, and others.

We encourage students to:

• make an appointment early in their college career to discuss specific and general application interests with fellowship advisors, 
• attend scholarship information sessions, 
• visit the official web sites of scholarships that fit with their career objectives and experiences, and 
• check the Georgia Tech T-Square Fellowship Communication Program web site (sign-in required) for information such as deadlines and tips about writing applications.

Earlier this spring, the NSF has awarded 38 Georgia Tech students with Graduate Research Fellowships (GRF), more than any other college or university in the state. Seniors, first-year graduate students, and first semester second-year graduate students can apply this fall. 

GUEST LECTURER
Joseph T. Wu, Ph.D.

AFFILIATION
ISyE - Georgia Tech

ABSTRACT
The outbreak of highly pathogenic H5N1 influenza in domestic poultry and wild birds has caused global concern over the possible evolution of a novel human strain. If such a strain emerges, and is not controlled at source, a pandemic is likely to result. Health policy in most countries will then be focused on reducing morbidity and mortality. We estimate the expected reduction in primary attack rates for different household-based interventions using a mathematical model of influenza transmission within and between households. We show that, for lower transmissibility strains, the combination of household-based quarantine, isolation of cases outside the household, and targeted prophylactic use of anti-virals will be highly effective and likely feasible across a range of plausible transmission scenarios. For example, for a basic reproductive number (the average number of people infected by a typically infectious individual in an otherwise susceptible population) of 1.8, assuming only 50% compliance, this combination could reduce the infection (symptomatic) attack rate from 74% (49%) to 40% (27%), requiring peak quarantine and isolation levels of 6.2%and 0.8% of the population, respectively, and an overall anti-viral stockpile of 3.9 doses per member of the population. Although contact tracing may be additionally effective, the resources required make it impractical in most scenarios. National influenza pandemic preparedness plans currently focus on reducing the impact associated with a constant attack rate, rather than on reducing transmission. Our findings suggest that the additional benefits and resource requirements of household-based interventions in reducing average levels of transmission should also be considered, even when expected levels of compliance are only moderate.

Panelists/Speakers:

Paul Raines, The Home Depot; Executive Vice President of U.S. Stores

Steve Hollingworth, CARE; Chief Operating Officer

Dr. Julie Swann, H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering at Georgia Tech; Assistant Professor and Co-Director of the Center for Humanitarian Logistics

Moderator:

Dr. Chelsea C. White, III, H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering at Georgia Tech; School Chair and Professor

Schedule:

6:00

Organizing Committee:
Xiaoming Huo, Vladimir Koltchinskii, Justin Romberg, Ming Yuan

Sponsored by:
National Science Foundation
School of ECE
School of Math
School of ISyE, Georgia Tech

Joint work with J. Foreman (MIT), J. Alspaugh (Dell), R. Bhatnagar (NTU), C.
Teo (NTU), C. Dubois (ENSMP)

Abstract: Dell's supply chain for desktops involves Asian vendors shipping components by sea to several U.S. plants. While suppliers are responsible for shipping enough inventory, Dell can reroute and expedite their shipments while in transit to balance inventory across sites and dynamically track geographic demand patterns. We present the optimization models developed in collaboration with Dell to address this routing challenge, insights gained since their implementation last year including the results of an impact assessment study, and ongoing extensions.

Bio: J

"Generalized Fast Multipole Method"

Abstract:
I will present a novel FMM technique applicable to both oscillatory and non-oscillatory
kernels. The method is very flexible and accurate. It is more general than existing FMMs and can often compete with nearly optimal schemes for specific kernels like 1/r. I will present the progress of the research with some preliminary numerical results.

Bio:

 Visit Dr. Darve's website.

You are cordially invited to attend a reception preceding the seminar to chat informally with faculty and students. Reception will take place outside Klaus 1324 between 1:30 - 2:00.

To receive future announcements, please sign up to the cse-seminar email list: https://mailman.cc.gatech.edu/mailman/listinfo/cse-seminar

Professor, Mathematics and Computer Science Department, Emory University 

"Efficient Iterative Methods for Large Scale Inverse Problems"

Abstract:

Ill-posed problems arise in many image processing applications, including microscopy, medicine and astronomy.  Iterative methods are typically recommended for these large scale problems, but they can be difficult to use in practice.  In this talk we describe a hybrid approach that combines the Golub-Kahan bidiagonalization algorithm with Tikhonov regularization and a weighted generalized cross validation scheme.  We also show how this method can be used as an effective scheme for choosing regularization parameters for certain nonlinear inverse problem.  Applications from image processing illustrate the effectiveness of the resulting numerical schemes.

This is joint work with Julianne Chung, University of Maryland.

Bio:

James Nagy is a Professor of Mathematics and Computer Science at Emory University.  He received his Ph.D. in Applied Mathematics from North Carolina State University in 1991.  Before joining Emory University in 1999 he had postdoctoral research fellowships with the IMA at the University of Minnesota, with the NSF at the University of Maryland, and was on the faculty at Southern Methodist University.  He is on the editorial boards of SIAM Journal on Scientific Computing (SISC), SIAM Journal on Matrix Analysis and Applications (SIMAX), and the SIAM Book Series "Fundamentals of Algorithms".  His research interests include numerical linear algebra, structured matrix computations, and numerical solution of inverse problems in image processing. Among his many publications includes the recent SIAM book, "Image Deblurring: Matrices, Spectra and Filtering", which is co-authored with Per Christian Hansen and Dianne O'Leary. Visit Dr. Nagy's website.

Please join us for a reception preceding the seminar outside Klaus 1324, beginning at 1:30pm.

To receive future announcements, please sign up to the cse-seminar email list: https://mailman.cc.gatech.edu/mailman/listinfo/cse-seminar

"Model-Based Data Mining for Functional Data Under Spatial Interdependence" 

Abstract:

In this seminar, I will present data mining methods for discovering and summarizing patterns in functional data observed under spatial interdependence. The field of functional data analysis has already provided a series of competitive data mining approaches, but they are generally limited to the assumption of independence between the random functions. This assumption is rather restrictive in many research applications.

In the first part of this seminar, I will introduce a model-based method for clustering random functions which are spatially interdependent. The time functions are decomposed into spatial global and time-dependent cluster effects using a semi-parametric model. We assume that the clustering membership is a realization from a Markov random field. In the case study presented in this paper, we focus on obtaining temporal cluster trends for racial-ethnic diversity for five southeast states in the US.

In the second part of this seminar, I will introduce a computational efficient and theoretically-founded cross-correlation analysis. Under the proposed semi-parametric model, we show that the cross-correlation estimators are asymptotically unbiased under the conditions that the sample size is large and the intrinsic dimensionality of the functional processes is much smaller than the sample size. We illustrate this correlation analysis within a demographic study, in which we analyze the association between per capita income and racial-ethnic diversity.

This is joint work with Huijing Jiang, PhD student in ISyE, Georgia Institute of Technology

Bio:

Nicoleta Serban is an assistant professor in ISyE. She received her B.S. in Mathematics and an M.S. in Theoretical Statistics and Stochastic Processes from the University of Bucharest. She went on to earn her Ph.D. in Statistics at Carnegie Mellon University. Before joining Georgia Tech, Dr. Serban's research focused on nonparametric statistical methods motivated by recent applications from proteomics and genomics. Dr Serban's current research focusses on multiple functional estimation and clustering with applications to industrial performance, service site location, socio-economics and NMR biomolecular studies. Visit Dr. Serban's website.

Please join us for a reception preceding the seminar outside Klaus 1324, beginning at 1:30pm.

To receive future announcements, please sign up to the cse-seminar email list: https://mailman.cc.gatech.edu/mailman/listinfo/cse-seminar

"Landing SpaceX's Reusable Rockets"

a talk by

Lars Blackmore

Friday, September 2 at 11 a.m.

SpaceX's reusable rocket program aims to reduce the cost of space travel by making rockets that can land, refuel and refly, instead of being thrown away after every flight. Precise landing of a rocket is a unique problem, which has been likened to balancing a rubber broomstick on your hand in a windstorm. Rockets do not have wings (unlike airplanes) and they cannot rely on a high ballistic coefficient to fly in a straight line (unlike missiles). In the past year, SpaceX has successfully landed five rockets, two of which were on dry land at Cape Canaveral, and three of which were on a floating platform in the Atlantic. This talk will discuss the challenges involved, how these challenges were overcome, and next steps towards rapid reusability.