UB2020 Strategic Strengths Announcements

Professor Esther Sans Takeuchi to Receive Highest Honor

lpettit — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 20:45:14 +0000

Esther Sans Takeuchi, Greatbatch Professor of Advanced Power Sources and Integrated Nanostructured Systems (INS) faculty member, has recently been named by President Obama as a recipient of the prestigious National Metal of Technology and Innovation. Prof. Takeuchi will receive the honor at a White House ceremony which recognizes top scientists through the National Metal of Technology and Innovation and the National Metal of Science awards for outstanding efforts in the promotion of technology for economic, environmental, or social improvement in the United States. SUNY Distinguished Professor Eli Ruckenstein, also affiliated with INS, was awarded the National Metal of Science in 1998 by President Clinton.

For the full story: http://www.buffalo.edu/ubreporter/2009_09_16/takeuchi_medal

Professor Govindaraju Receives Two Hewlett-Packard Grant Awards

lpettit — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 12:38:00 +0000

Venu Govindaraju, UB Distinguished Professor of Computer Science and Engineering and ICT Chair, has recently been selected for two renewal awards under Hewlett-Packard’s Innovation Research Program. The projects, “Multimodal Command-and-Control By Integrating Two-Handed Gestures and Speech” (Co-PI Jason Corso), and “Intelligent Processing of Hand-Annotated Documents” (Co-PI Srirangaraj Setlur), both involve breakthrough research in the area of immersive interaction. The grants, totaling approximately $250K, fund investigator and graduate student collaborative research with Hewlett-Packard.

Professor Jason Corso to Receive CAREER Award

lpettit — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 17:05:28 +0000

Assistant Professor of CSE and ICT faculty member, Jason Corso, will receive the NSF CAREER award for computer vision research entitled “CAREER: Generalized Image Understanding with Probabilistic Ontologies and Dynamic Adaptive Graph Hierarchies.” Please join us in congratulating Professor Corso in this major accomplishment.

ICT Day: May 1, 2009

admin — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 17:59:32 +0000

The Information and Computing Technology Strategic Initiative sponsored “ICT Day,” an event dedicated to academic pursuits related to this Strategic Strength. ICT Day featured lectures throughout the day by both UB faculty and several distinguished external speakers in the areas of Enabling Discovery and Smart Environments. A poster session open to student and faculty participants was also held.

SCHEDULE OF EVENTS

9:00 - 9:45 am: Breakfast in the Flag Room

9:45 - 10:00 am: Opening Remarks, Venu Govindaraju, Chair of the ICT Faculty Advisory Committee and Alex Cartwright, Vice Provost for Strategic Initiatives

Session I
Chair: Bharat Jayaraman, Professor and Chair, Computer Science and Engineering

10:00 - 11:00 am: From the Wild West to the Edge of Science: Progress in Face Recognition and Visual Biometrics (PDF) — Jonathon Phillips, NIST Program Director
11:00 - 11:30 am: Vipin Chaudhary, UB Associate Professor, Computer Science and Engineering
11:30 - 12:00 pm: T. Kesh Kesavadas, UB Professor, Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering

12:00 - 2:00 pm: Lunch (meet and greet with the Provost) and Poster Session in the Flag Room

Session II
Chair: E. Bruce Pitman, UB Associate Dean for Research, College of Arts and Sciences, and Professor of Mathematics

2:00 - 3:00 pm: 10 Years of GPGPU and Many-Core Computing: What have we learned! (PDF) — Dinesh Manocha, Phi Delta Theta/Matthew Mason Distinguished Professor, Computer Science, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
3:00 - 3:30 pm: Modeling, Simulation and Computing for Abnormal Thermal-Mechanical Environments (PDF) — Paul DesJardin, UB Associate Professor, Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering
3:30 - 4:00 pm: High Resolution vs. High Order Approximations (PDF) — Jae-Hun Jung, UB Assistant Professor, Mathematics

4:00 - 5:00 pm: Reception in the Flag Room

Professor Cemal Basaran Widely Published for Work on Single-Walled Carbon Nanotubes

admin — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 15:13:32 +0000

Cemal Basaran, a Professor in the Department of Civil, Structural, and Environmental Engineering, and an adjunct Professor in the Departments of Electrical Engineering and Mechanical Engineering, recently had his work on single-walled carbon nanotubes (SWCNTs) featured by several dozens of international newspapers, magazines, and trade publications, such as The Times of India, Semiconductor International, Science Daily and Daily News. After a press release from UB regarding his findings that SWCNTs produce only 1% of the resistive heating of metals typically used in microelectronic interconnects, Semiconductor International contacted Professor Basaran for an exclusive interview about this important discovery. Please join us in congratulating Professor Basaran on these recent publications.

To read the full text of the published articles, please follow the links below:

Semiconductor International

Science Daily

Assistant Professor Natalia Litchinitser Published in February Issue of Nature Photonics

admin — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 18:58:28 +0000

Natalia Litchinitser, Assistant Professor of Electrical Engineering at UB, and Vladimir Shalaev, Robert and Anne Burnett Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Purdue University, published their commentary on developing low-loss metamaterials in the February issue of Nature Photonics. In the article, they discuss recent work proposed by Alexander Popov and Sergey Myslivets that utilizes the traditionally problematic losses of metamaterials as a pathway to transparent or amplified negative-index media. This technique of backward optical parametric amplification (OPA) which they describe could lead to exciting developments in metamaterials in areas such as invisibility and cloaking. Professor Litchinitser also recently presented her research on photonic metamaterials to other UB faculty members at one of the INS lunchtime informal seminars.

To read the full commentary in Nature Photonics, please click here: Natalia Litchinitser & Vladimir Shalaev, “Loss as a Route to Transparency” (PDF)

ICT Hosts Inaugural Workshop, Fall 2008

admin — Fri, 23 Jan 2009 20:23:16 +0000

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:

Grant Awarded to Assistant Professor Jason Corso for Work on Automatic Computer Learning from Video

admin — Wed, 21 Jan 2009 16:10:56 +0000

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.”

UB Professors Attend Conference in Russia on the Future of Nanotechnology

admin — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 21:44:29 +0000

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.

Spring 2009 Courses

admin — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 14:09:21 +0000

Several of the course offerings for the Spring 2009 semester may be of interest to graduate students working in areas related to Integrated Nanostructured Systems. Please refer to the following links or contact the appropriate professor(s) for further information:

MAE 589: Diffraction, Microscopy and Spectroscopy Techniques (PDF)

CHE 510: Materials Chemistry (PDF)

CHE 514: Polymer Chemistry (PDF)