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SUNMONTUEWEDTHUFRISAT
Events for November 11, 2009
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Meet USC: Admission Presentation, Campus Tour, & Engineering Talk
Wed, Nov 11, 2009
Viterbi School of Engineering Undergraduate Admission
Workshops & Infosessions
This half day program is designed for prospective freshmen and family members. Meet USC includes an information session on the University and the Admission process; a student led walking tour of campus and a meeting with us in the Viterbi School. Meet USC is designed to answer all of your questions about USC, the application process and financial aid.Reservations are required for Meet USC. This program occurs twice, once at 9:00 a.m. and again at 1:00 p.m. Please visit http://www.usc.edu/admission/undergraduate/visit/meet_usc.html to check availability and make an appointment. Be sure to list an Engineering major as your "intended major" on the webform!
Location: USC Admission Center
Audiences: Prospective Freshmen and Family Members - RESERVATIONS REQUIRED
Contact: Viterbi Admission
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Two Applications of Computational Electromagnetics: ...
Wed, Nov 11, 2009 @ 02:00 PM - 03:00 PM
Sonny Astani Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
...Moving Objects with the Force of Light and Improving Solar Cell Performance. Speaker: Dr. Michelle L. Povinelli, Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical Engineering, University of Southern California Abstract: In the first part of the talk, I will discuss how light can be used to move and reposition microscale objects. Our work has demonstrated novel applications of optical forces within integrated microphotonic devices-a type of "optical circuits" that use light rather than electrons to carry information. I will present designs for devices that rotate the polarization of light by taking advantage of light forces. In the second part of the talk, I will discuss how computational electromagnetic modeling can be used to design higher-efficiency solar cells. We calculate the optical absorption of vertically aligned silicon nanowire arrays. We optimize the ultimate efficiency of the solar cell with respect to filling ratio and lattice constant. We identify two enhancement mechanisms, an increase in field concentration within the nanowire and the excitation of guided resonance modes. Our results show that an optimized silicon nanowire array can have higher efficiency that a solid thin film. Michelle Povinelli is an Assistant Professor of Electrical Engineering and holder of the WiSE Jr. Gabilan Chair at the University of Southern California. She is a recipient of a NSF CAREER Award and an Army Young Investigator Award. She received a BA from the University of Chicago, an MPhil from the University of Cambridge, where she studied as a Churchill Scholar, and a PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, all in Physics. She completed postdoctoral research in the Electrical Engineering Department at Stanford University and was selected as one of five national recipients of a L'Oreal For Women in Science Postdoctoral Fellowship. She has co-authored over twenty-five refereed journal articles and holds two US Patents.
Location: Kaprielian Hall (KAP) - 209
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Evangeline Reyes
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Gravity Currents Propagating Over an Array of Bottom Obstacles
Wed, Nov 11, 2009 @ 03:30 PM - 04:30 PM
Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
George Contantinescu Associate Professor Department of Civil and Environmental EngineeringIIHR-Hydroscience and EngineeringUniversity of IowaIowa City, IA 52242 Highly resolved 3-D Large Eddy Simulation (LES) is used to study the interaction between a lock-exchange gravity current with a large volume of release and an array of bottom-mounted large-scale obstacles in the form of 2-D dunes or square ribs. The study of the interaction between a gravity current and an array of obstacles is important for many practical applications. For example, arrays of obstacles are often used as protective measures on the hilly terrains and on the skirts of the mountains to stop or slow down gravity currents in the form of powder-snow avalanches. Even if they do not arrest the flow, the retarding obstacles reduce the impact of the avalanche with the buildings situated downstream of the obstacles. The temporal variation of the impact forces on the obstacles is analyzed. This information is needed for the design of the retarding obstacles. Additionally, simulation results are used to understanding how this variation is related to the passage of the backward propagating hydraulic jumps and the different flow structures that develop within the flow. The loose bed surface over which the gravity current propagates in the environment is often not flat. Bed forms, typically in the form of ripples, dunes or anti-dunes are present at the seafloor or river bed. The presence of large-scale bedforms provides an additional mechanism for energy dissipation and can substantially modify the capacity of a compositional gravity current to entrain sediment with respect to the case of a flat bed. LES is used to understand how the shape and the relative size of the large-scale obstacles (roughness elements) affect the front velocity, the structure of the current, the energy balance, the bed shear distributions and sediment entrainment capacity of the current as it propagates over a loose bed. Finally, scale effects are investigated between Reynolds numbers at which most of the laboratory studies are conducted (Re~104)
Location: Stauffer Science Lecture Hall, Rm 100
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: April Mundy
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A Novel Approach to C-to-HDL Compilation for FPGA Accelerators
Wed, Nov 11, 2009 @ 03:30 PM - 04:50 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
ABSTRACT:
While FPGA-based hardware accelerators have repeatedly been demonstrated as a viable option for faster computing with very large speed-ups, their programmability remains a major barrier to their wider acceptance by application code developers. These platforms are typically programmed in a low level hardware description language, a skill not common among application developers and a process that is often tedious and error-prone. Programming FPGAs from high-level languages would provide easier integration with software systems as well as open up hardware accelerators to a wider spectrum of application developers. SHORT BIO:
Walid A. Najjar is a Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of California Riverside. His research interests are in the fields of computer architecture and compiler optimizations, embedded systems and sensor networks. Lately, he has been very active in the area of compilation for FPGA-based code acceleration and reconfigurable computing. NSF, DARPA and various industry sponsors have supported his research. He received a B.E. in Electrical Engineering from the American University of Beirut in 1979 and the M.S. and Ph.D. in Computer Engineering from the University of Southern California in 1985 and 1988 respectively. He was on the faculty of the Department of Computer Science at Colorado State University (from 1989 to 2000), before that he was with the USC- Information Sciences Institute. He currently serves as Associate Editor for IEEE Transactions on Computers and IEEE Computer Architecture Letters. He has served on the program committees for a number of leading conferences including FPL, FPT, CASES, ISSS-CODES, DATE, Computing Frontiers, ICCD, HPCA, and MICRO. He is a Fellow of the IEEE. Hosted by Prof. Viktor K. PrasannaLocation: Olin Hall of Engineering (OHE) - -122
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Janice Thompson
