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Events for February 29, 2016

  • Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering Candidate Series

    Mon, Feb 29, 2016 @ 10:00 AM - 11:00 AM

    Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Jenni Sidey, Research Assistant, Department of Engineering at the University of Cambridge

    Talk Title: Experimental and numerical investigations of flames with gas turbine applications at the University of Cambridge

    Abstract: With growing concern over anthropogenic climate change and increasingly stringent emission standards, the development of low-emission combustion technologies is a necessity. This seminar is concerned with the motivation, development, and implementation challenges associated with gas turbine and reciprocating engine pollutant reduction and the tools the combustion community is using to meet them. Of particular interest is the investigation of processes in which hot combustion products are used as a diluent for fresh reactants. The underlying physics of these processes will be discussed with results from laminar flame calculations, droplet autoignition simulations, and fundamental turbulent flame investigations with high speed laser diagnostics, while their application potential will be assessed through the investigation of a novel gas turbine combustor concept.

    Biography: Jenni Sidey is a research associate at the University of Cambridge. Her postdoctoral position, funded by the European Commission Joint Clean Sky Initiative, focuses on the investigation of non-premixed, premixed, and spray flame extinction and thermoacoustic oscillations in gas turbine combustors. She completed her PhD in the summer of 2015, investigating heavily preheated and diluted flames. While studying Mechanical Engineering at McGill University, she took part in alternative fuel production and microgravity flame propagation experiments.

    Location: Ronald Tutor Hall of Engineering (RTH) - 211

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Valerie Childress

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  • CS Colloquium: Sameer Singh (University of Washington) - Interactive Machine Learning for Information Extraction

    Mon, Feb 29, 2016 @ 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM

    Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Sameer Singh, University of Washington

    Talk Title: Interactive Machine Learning for Information Extraction

    Series: CS Colloquium

    Abstract: This lecture satisfies requirements for CSCI 591: Computer Science Research Colloquium

    Most of the world's knowledge, be it factual news, scholarly research, social communication, subjective opinions, or even fictional content, is now easily accessible as digitized text. Unfortunately, due to the unstructured nature of text, much of the useful content in these documents is hidden. The goal of "information extraction" is to address this problem: extracting meaningful, structured knowledge (such as graphs and databases) from text collections. The biggest challenges when using machine learning for information extraction include the high cost of obtaining annotated data and lack of guidance on how to fix mistakes.

    In this talk, I propose interpretable representations that allow users and machine learning models to interact with each other: enabling users to inject domain knowledge into machine learning, and providing explanations for why a machine learning model is making a specific prediction. I study these techniques using relation extraction as the application, an important subtask of information extraction where the goal is to identify the types of relations between entities that are expressed in text. I first describe how symbolic domain knowledge, if provided by the user as first-order logic statements, can be injected into relational embeddings to improve the predictions. In the second part of the talk, I present an approach to "explain" any machine learning prediction using a symbolic representation, which the user may annotate directly for more effective supervision. I present experiments that demonstrate that an interactive interface between a user and machine learning is effective in reducing annotation effort and in quickly training accurate extraction systems.

    Biography: Sameer Singh is a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the University of Washington, working on large-scale and interactive machine learning applied to information extraction and natural language processing. He received his PhD from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, during which he also interned at Microsoft Research, Google Research, and Yahoo! Labs on massive-scale machine learning. He was recently selected as a DARPA Riser, won the grand prize in the Yelp dataset challenge, has been awarded the Yahoo! Key Scientific Challenges and the UMass Graduate School fellowships, and was a finalist for the Facebook PhD fellowship.

    Host: CS Department

    Location: Olin Hall of Engineering (OHE) - 136

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Assistant to CS chair

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  • Spatial Light Interference Microscopy (SLIM) for Quantitative Biomedicine

    Mon, Feb 29, 2016 @ 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM

    Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Prof. Gabriel Popescu, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

    Talk Title: Spatial Light Interference Microscopy (SLIM) for Quantitative Biomedicine

    Series: Medical Imaging Seminar Series

    Abstract: Most living cells do not absorb or scatter light significantly, i.e. they are essentially transparent, or phase objects. Phase contrast microscopy proposed by Zernike in the 1930s represents a major advance in intrinsic contrast imaging, as it reveals inner details of transparent structures without staining or tagging. While phase contrast is sensitive to minute optical path-length changes in the cell, down to the nanoscale, the information retrieved is only qualitative. Quantifying cell-induced shifts in the optical path-lengths permits nanometer scale measurements of structures and motions in a non-contact, non-invasive manner. Thus, quantitative phase imaging (QPI) has recently become an active field of study and various experimental approaches have been proposed.

    Recently, we have developed Spatial Light Interference microscopy (SLIM) as a highly sensitive QPI method. Due to its nanometer pathlength sensitivity, SLIM enables interesting structure and dynamics studies over broad spatial (nanometers-centimeters) and temporal (milliseconds-weeks) scales. I will review our recent results on applying SLIM to basic cell studies, such as intracellular transport, cell growth, and single cell tomography. Recently, we have demonstrated that SLIM is a valuable tool for cancer diagnosis and prognosis in unlabeled biopsies. This capability is particularly valuable in prostate pathology.



    Biography: Gabriel Popescu is an Associate Professor in Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He received the B.S. and M.S. in Physics from University of Bucharest, in 1995 and 1996, respectively, obtained his M.S. in Optics in 1999 and the Ph.D. in Optics in 2002 from the School of Optics/ CREOL (now the College of Optics and Photonics), University of Central Florida. Dr. Popescu continued his training with the G. R. Harrison Spectroscopy Laboratory at M.I.T., working as a postdoctoral associate. He joined Illinois in August 2007 where he directs the Quantitative Light Imaging Laboratory (QLI Lab) at the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology. Dr. Popescu is an Associate Editor of Optics Express and Biomedical Optics Express, and Editorial Board Member for Journal of Biomedical Optics and Scientific Reports. He authored a book, edited another book, authored 118 journal publications, 175 conference presentations, 32 patents, gave 150 invited talks. Dr. Popescu founded Phi Optics, Inc., a start-up company that commercializes quantitative phase imaging technology. He is OSA Fellow and SPIE Fellow.

    Host: Professor Justin Haldar

    Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 132

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Talyia Veal

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  • Seminars in Biomedical Engineering

    Mon, Feb 29, 2016 @ 12:30 PM - 01:49 PM

    Alfred E. Mann Department of Biomedical Engineering

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Dr. Stuart Ibsen, Postdoctoral fellow, Salk Institute

    Talk Title: TBA

    Biography: Stuart Ibsen received his undergraduate degree in Biomedical Engineering at Johns Hopkins University. He went on to earn a Ph.D. in Zoology from the University of Hawaii and a Ph.D. in Biomedical Engineering from the University of California, San Diego. Stuart has 10 years of experience designing and building scientific instrumentation to use ultrasound to understand bioacoustic echolocation sonar sensory systems in dolphins and to explore biological phenomena in C. elegans and in cancer cell research. Stuart is also designing new drug delivery vehicles for chemotherapy applications

    Host: K. Kirk Shung, PhD

    Location: Olin Hall of Engineering (OHE) - 122

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Mischalgrace Diasanta

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  • EE-EP Seminar - Hui Fang, Monday, February 29th at 2:00pm in EEB 132

    Mon, Feb 29, 2016 @ 02:00 PM - 03:30 PM

    Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Hui Fang, University of Illinois

    Talk Title: Advanced Electronic Materials for Next-Generation Biomedical Implants and Bio tools

    Abstract: Innovating electronic materials and related process technologies are critical in building next generation large scale, bio-electronic interface for biomedical implants and bio-tools.

    In this talk, the influence of materials and process innovation will be discussed in the context of achieving two essential properties at the bio-electronic interface, bio conformality and bio stability. First, to reconcile the mechanic properties mismatch between soft, curvilinear organ surface and conventional rigid, planar electronics, Si nanomembrane enables bio conformal electronics from top down approach and advanced micro/nano fabrication on flexible substrates. In the second part of the talk, I will discuss how to achieve long term bio-stability at the bio-electronic interface through an ultrathin hermetic thermal silicon dioxide layer from a special device fabrication process. A capacitively coupled, bio-conformal sensing electronics with over 1,000 channels demonstrate the robustness of this encapsulation strategy. Together, these results form a realistic pathway towards bio compatible, bio conformal and bio stable electronic implants, with potential for broad utility, such as brain/heart activity mapping, brain-machine interface, and pharmaceutical screening. At the end of my talk, I will show how we can leverage recent advancements in nano electronics into building next generation bio electronics and solve big problems in biology, especially in brain activity mapping.

    Biography: Dr. Hui Fang received his B.S. degree (2009) from Tsinghua University, and Ph.D. degree (2014) from the University of California, Berkeley, both in Materials Science and Engineering. At Berkeley he worked under the supervision of Prof. Ali Javey. Currently Dr. Fang is a postdoctoral research associate in Professor John A. Rogers' group at the University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign. Dr. Fang's research interests include developing novel materials, devices and related process technologies for bio-integrated electronics and nano electronics, as well as exploring new materials/device physics at the nanoscale. Dr. Fang is a recipient of the 2013 Chinese Government Award for Outstanding Self-financed Students Abroad. His publication record can be found online at http://publish.illinois.edu/huifangnano/.

    Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 132

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Marilyn Poplawski

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  • Schlumberger Information Session

    Mon, Feb 29, 2016 @ 06:00 PM - 08:00 PM

    Viterbi School of Engineering Career Connections

    Workshops & Infosessions


    We invite you to meet with us for an inside look at our Field Engineer positions. You will have an opportunity to talk one on one with Schlumberger representatives and learn more about who we are and what we do as an Oilfield Services Company. Food and Beverages will be provided!

    Location: Seeley G. Mudd Building (SGM) - 101

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: RTH 218 Viterbi Career Connections

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