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Events for March 27, 2008
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CS Colloq: Coordinating Multiple Moving Objects: From Robots to Microdroplets
Thu, Mar 27, 2008 @ 11:00 AM - 12:30 PM
Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Title: Coordinating Multiple Moving Objects: From Robots to MicrodropletsSpeaker: Prof. Srinivas AkellaABSTRACT:
Coordinating the collision-free motions of multiple moving objects is
a challenging problem, with applications ranging from automotive
workcells to lab-on-a-chip devices. I will first describe our work on
the coordination of multiple robots with dynamics constraints, with
applications in manufacturing cells and UAV coordination. I will then
describe the coordination of microdroplets in digital microfluidic
"lab-on-a-chip" systems. A digital microfluidic system controls
individual droplets of chemicals on an array of electrodes; the
chemical analysis is performed by moving, mixing, and splitting
droplets. This promising new technology can impact applications in
biological research, point-of-care clinical testing, and biochemical
sensing by offering tremendous flexibility and parallelism through
software control. Since the simultaneous coordination of even tens of
droplets on the array is extremely difficult to program manually, we
are developing modular array layouts and network-style droplet routing
algorithms to automatically enable the flexible coordination of
hundreds of droplets. I will discuss our ongoing work in applying
these algorithms to enable versatile digital microfluidic biochips for
problems in biology.BIO:
Srinivas Akella is with the Computer Science department and Center for
Automation Technologies and Systems at Rensselaer Polytechnic
Institute, Troy, New York. He was a Beckman Fellow at the Beckman
Institute for Advanced Science and Technology, University of Illinois
at Urbana-Champaign, before joining RPI. He received his Ph.D. in
Robotics from the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon
University and his B.Tech. from the Indian Institute of Technology,
Madras. He has received the CAREER award from the National Science
Foundation, and was selected as a Rensselaer Faculty Early Research
Career Honoree. His research interests are in developing optimization
and geometric algorithms for applications in robotics, automation,
microsystems, and biotechnology.Location: Ronald Tutor Hall of Engineering (RTH) - 406
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: CS Colloquia
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Translocon-Assisted Folding of Membrane Proteins: New insights into Lipid-Protein Interactions
Thu, Mar 27, 2008 @ 12:45 PM
Mork Family Department of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Mork Family Department of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science Distinguished Lecture SeriespresentsProfessor Stephen H. White,
Dept. of Physiology and Biophysics,
University of California at Irvine, Irvine, CA 92697AbstractRecent studies of the translocon-assisted folding of membrane proteins have revealed two unexpected findings about the insertion of transmembrane helices across the endoplasmic reticulum membrane. First, the so-called S4 voltage-sensor helix of potassium channels, comprised of hydrophobic residues and four arginine residues, can be inserted. Second, polyleucine helices as short as 10 residues are readily inserted. Exploration of these observations using physical studies of synthetic peptides in model membranes and molecular dynamics simulations provide new insights into lipid-protein interactions. They reveal that the lipid bilayer is far more complex—and interesting—than its usual lollypop cartoon suggests. The biological, physical, and molecular dynamics data to be presented demonstrate the extreme adaptability of phospholipids that arises from the privileged relationship between their phosphate groups and lysine and arginine residues. This adaptability makes possible the transmembrane insertion of very short helices and the independent stability of potassium channel voltage-sensor domains in membranes. [Research supported by the National Institute of General Medical Sciences and the National Center for Research Resources.]
Location: Olin Hall of Engineering (OHE) - 122
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Petra Pearce Sapir
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CS Colloq: Stabilizing Internet Routing: or, A Story of Heterogeneity
Thu, Mar 27, 2008 @ 03:30 PM - 05:00 PM
Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Title: Stabilizing Internet Routing: or, A Story of HeterogeneitySpeaker: Brighten Godfrey (UC Berkeley) Abstract:
A significant cause of the unreliability of end-to-end communications on the Internet is route instability: dynamic changes in routers' selected paths. Instability is becoming even more problematic due to the increasing prevalence of real-time applications and concerns about the scalability of the Internet routing architecture. Yet Route Flap Damping, the main mechanism for combating instability, has introduced unexpected pathologies and reduced availability. This talk describes a more principled approach to stabilizing Internet routing. First, we characterize the design space by identifying general approaches to achieve stability, and giving theoretical bounds on optimal strategies within each approach. Second, I will describe Stable Route Selection (StaRS), a new mechanism which uses flexibility in route selection to improve stability without sacrificing availability. Simulation and experimental results show that StaRS improves stability and end-to- end reliability while deviating only slightly from preferred routes, and closely approaching our theoretical lower bound. These results indicate that StaRS is a promising, easily deployable way to safely stabilize Internet routing. StaRS's stability improvements are enabled by dramatic heterogeneity in route failure patterns. I will present the case that StaRS is an instance of a much more general principle: that heterogeneity --- variation in reliability, processing speed, bandwidth, or other metrics --- should quite often be viewed as an advantage. This thesis is supported by practical and theoretical results in a variety of settings including distributed hash tables, overlay multicast, and job scheduling.Biography:
Brighten Godfrey's research concerns distributed and networked systems, including Internet routing architecture, distributed algorithms, analysis of networks, peer-to-peer systems and overlay networks. He is presently a Ph.D. candidate advised by Ion Stoica at UC Berkeley.
Location: Seaver Science Library (SSL) - 150
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: CS Colloquia
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Raytheon Information Session
Thu, Mar 27, 2008 @ 05:30 PM - 07:30 PM
Viterbi School of Engineering Career Connections
Workshops & Infosessions
Join representatives of this company as they share general company information and available opportunities.
Location: Grace Ford Salvatori (GFS) 106
Audiences: All Viterbi Students
Contact: RTH 218 Viterbi Career Services
