Sponsored in part by the UB2020 Strategic Strengths and organized by the Information and Computing Technology (ICT) initiative, the purpose of the 2008 Fall Workshop was to promote and facilitate faculty-led, multi-disciplinary research projects related to information science, human-computer interaction, or computational science. An anticipated outcome of this workshop is to increase research, scholarship, and funding to these ICT-related areas.
The workshop was well attended, representing many UB departments such as Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, Computer Science and Engineering, Electrical Engineering, the Center for Computational Research (CCR), Management Science and Systems, Mathematics, Industrial and Systems Engineering, Chemical and Biological Engineering, Communication, and the Office of the Provost. ICT faculty members were fortunate in that a number of key individuals from the university attended the workshop, including: Rajan Batta, Associate Dean of Graduate Education; Alex Cartwright, Vice Provost for Strategic Initiatives; Bharat Jayaraman, Chair of Computer Science and Engineering; David Kofke, Chair of the Chemical and Biological Engineering, and Satish Tripathi, Provost.
The event was hosted and moderated by Venu Govindaraju, Professor of Computer Science and Engineering and Director of the ICT initiative. In the morning, new faculty members hired under the auspices of ICT each provided a brief description of their academic and professional backgrounds and current research interests while displaying their individual ICT website faculty profile. This was followed by brief presentations by ICT faculty members, a discussion on the ICT website progress, and proposal coordination process.
Workshop Minutes (pdf)
Additional photos:
Posted January 23, 2009 in ICT
Jason Corso, Assistant Professor of Computer Science & Engineering, was recently awarded a grant from the DARPA Computer Science Study Group Program. This program aims to fund work in computer science that will revolutionize operations at the DoD rather than make incremental advances. The first phase of this award will provide $99,600 in funding to Corso’s work, which in this proposal focuses on innovative uses of automatic computer learning from video.
Short synopsis of the proposal:
“The main objective of this proposal is to understand how probabilistic ontologies of visual phenomena can be induced directly from video thereby revolutionizing our ability to rapidly learn a probabilistic low-to-high level domain model directly from data and use it to automatically infer a comprehensive yet parsimonious semantic description with quantitative underpinnings of video.”
Posted January 21, 2009 in ICT
In December 2008, at the invitation of the Russian government and Rusnano, the Russian Corporation of Nanotechnologies, two UB professors participated in Rusnanotech ‘08, a major, international conference about the future of nanotechnology. SUNY Distinguished Professor of Chemistry, Paras N. Prasad, Ph.D., gave the invited plenary talk, addressing approximately two thousand scientists and officials from around the globe on “Nanotechnology and Engineering Challenges of the 21st Century.” He described the groundbreaking work that he and his colleagues are doing at the UB Institute for Lasers, Photonics and Biophotonics. Assistant Professor of Electrical Engineering Natalia M. Litchinitser, Ph.D., who conducts research on nanophotonics and nonlinear optics, also attended. She presented an invited talk about her research on metamaterials entitled “Metamaterials–Unparalleled Opportunities for Light Manipulation.” Both professors work closely with the UB 2020 Strategic Strength in Integrated Nanostructured Systems.
This conference is part of a recently announced $5 billion effort by the Russian government to support nanotechnology. Talks regarding possible research collaborations between UB and Russian scientists are being pursued. Professor Prasad mentioned that UB may host some of these Russian scientists in the spring or summer of 2009.
Other WNY attendees of the conference included Keith Blakely, Chief Executive Officer of NanoDynamics, Michael Fonstein, CEO of Cleveland Biolabs, and Ravi Pandey and Andre Gudkov of the Roswell Park Cancer Institute.
To view selected footage of the proceedings, please click here.
Posted January 6, 2009 in INS
