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Events for April 03, 2008
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Making Fuel and Drug-Producing Microbes through Analysis, Modeling and Design
Thu, Apr 03, 2008 @ 10:30 AM - 11:30 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Desmond Lun, Ph.D.Abstract:Engineering microorganisms that efficiently produce drugs and fuels is an exciting and challenging problem
with large potential impact on energy supply, the environment, and global health. Such engineering is greatly
aided by systematic design and, in this talk, we discuss how systematic design can be achieved through the
analysis and modeling of microbial metabolic networks. We discuss approaches that we are developing for
modeling metabolism and gene regulation and for using these models to guide design. In particular, we
describe a network optimization problem that arises in the context of optimal design and discuss algorithmic
approaches for its solution. We describe our progress in engineering E. coli for petroleum production from
simple sugars and in other engineering directions.Biography:Desmond Lun is a Computational Biologist at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard and a Research Fellow in
Genetics at Harvard Medical School. Prior to his present position, he was a Postdoctoral Research Associate in
the Coordinated Science Laboratory at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He received bachelor's
degrees in mathematics and computer engineering from the University of Melbourne, Australia in 2001, and
S.M. and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering and computer science from MIT in 2002 and 2006,
respectively. Dr. Lun's research interests are in synthetic biology, systems biology, and networking. He is coauthor,
with Tracey Ho, of "Network Coding: An Introduction," forthcoming from Cambridge University Press.Host: Professor C.-C. Jay KuoLocation: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 248
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Talyia Veal
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Interference Channels with Generalized Feedback
Thu, Apr 03, 2008 @ 02:00 PM - 03:00 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
SPEAKER: Professor Daniela Tuninetti, ECE Department, University of Illinois-ChicagoABSTRACT: In the past years, there has been a renewed interest to characterize the ultimate performance of InterFerence Channels (IFC). Classical IFCs model competition among uncoordinated source-destination pairs. IFCs with generalized feedback model scenarios where the sources can sense the current channel activity, like in wireless channels, and use this information to communicate cooperatively. Although cooperative communications is not equivalent to virtual MIMO communications, it has been shown that it benefits the performance of all the involved source-destination pairs without increasing neither the transmit powers nor the channel bandwidth. In this talk, we will review recent progresses for IFCs with and without generalized feedback. We will describe the currently best achievable and outer-bound regions. We will conclude by comparing those regions for Gaussian IFCs under different feedback configurations, and pointing out open problems.HOST: Prof. Giuseppe Caire, caire@usc.edu
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 248
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Mayumi Thrasher
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Peptide Materials Engineering
Thu, Apr 03, 2008 @ 03:30 PM
Mork Family Department of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Announcing The USC Inaugural Pings LectureshipwithProfessor Matthew TirrellDepartments of Chemical Engineering and Materials
Materials Research Laboratory
Institute for Collaborative Biotechnologies
California NanoSystems Institute
University of California, Santa Barbara
Santa Barbara, CA 93106-5130
Tel:(805) 893-3141, Fax:(805) 893-8124
E-mail: tirrell@engineering.ucsb.eduAbstractPeptides are functional modules of protein macromolecules that can be
displayed apart from the whole protein to create biofunctional surfaces
and interfaces, or can be re-assembled in new ways to create synthetic mimics of protein structures. Each of these routes are being employed to gain new insight into protein folding and to develop new, functional, biomolecular materials. Examples of work from our laboratory in this area using peptide-lipid conjugate molecules (peptide amphiphiles) will be discussed relating to multi-functional surfaces, liposomal drug delivery, protein analogous micelles, DNA-binding peptide modules and anti-microbial peptides.Professor Matthew Tirrell is Dean of Engineering at UC, Santa Barbara. He received a B.S. in Chemical Engineering at Northwestern University and a Ph.D. in 1977 in Polymer Science from the University of Massachusetts. From 1977 to 1999 he was on the faculty of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science at the University of Minnesota, where he served as head of department from 1995 to 1999. His research has been in polymer surface properties, adsorption, adhesion, surface treatment, friction, lubrication and biocompatibility. He has co-authored about 270 papers and one book and has supervised about 70 Ph.D. students. Professor Tirrell has been a Sloan and a Guggenheim Fellow, a recipient of the Camille and Henry Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar Award and has received the Allan P. Colburn, Charles Stine, William H. Walker and the Professional Progress Awards from AIChE, and was the Institute Lecturer in 2001. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, and a Fellow of: the American Institute of Medical and Biological Engineers, the AAAS, and the APS. In 2003, he concluded two years of service as co-chair of the steering committee for the National Research Council: "Beyond the Molecular Frontier: Challenges for Chemistry and Chemical Engineering".
Location: Henry Salvatori Computer Science Center (SAL) - 101
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Petra Pearce Sapir
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CS Colloq: Places Everyone: Creating an Animated Tapestry of Human Activity for Virtual Worlds
Thu, Apr 03, 2008 @ 03:30 PM - 05:00 PM
Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Title: Places Everyone: Creating an Animated Tapestry of Human Activity for Virtual WorldsSpeaker: Jan Allbeck(UPENN)Abstract:
As we journey through our day, our lives intersect with other people. We see people leaving for work, waiting for trains, meeting with friends, hard at work, and thousands of other activities that we may not even be conscious of. People create a rich tapestry of activity throughout our day, a human texture. We may not always be aware of this texture, but we would definitely notice if it were missing, and it is missing from many simulations. Creating virtual scenarios that simulate a substantial human population with typical and varied behaviors can be an overwhelming task. In addition to modeling the environment and characters, tagging the environment with semantic data, and creating motions for the characters, the simulation engineer also needs to create character profiles for a heterogeneous population and link these character traits to appropriate behaviors to be performed at appropriate times and in appropriate places during the simulation. Due to the large number of individuals, the variety of behaviors they may engage in, and the potential complexity of environments, this is currently beyond the scope of military, crowd research, or entertainment simulations. At present, simulations either have a very limited number of character profiles or are meticulously hand scripted. I will describe a framework, called CAROSA (Crowds with Aleatoric, Reactive, Opportunistic, and Scheduled Actions), that will facilitate the creation of heterogeneous populations for large scale simulations by using a commercial off-the-shelf software package (Microsoft Outlook®), a Parameterized Action Representation (PAR), and multiple human agent simulation software (HiDAC). CAROSA incorporates four different broad action types: scheduled, reactive, opportunistic, and aleatoric. Scheduled activities arise from specified roles for individuals or groups; reactive actions are triggered by contextual events or environmental constraints; opportunistic actions arise from explicit goals and priorities; aleatoric actions are random but structured by choices, distributions, or parametric variations. The CAROSA architecture enables the specification and control of actions for more realistic large scale human textures in virtual worlds such as buildings and cities, links human characteristics and high level behaviors to animated graphical depictions, and relieves some of the burden in creating and animating heterogeneous 3D animated human populations.Biography:
I am a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Computer and Information Science, which is a part of the School of Engineering and Applied Science at the University of Pennsylvania. My advisor is Dr. Norman I. Badler. I am also Associate Director of the Center for Human Modeling and Simulation (HMS), where I coordinate and participate in the research projects affiliated with HMS as well as coordinating the operational aspects of the lab facility. I have Bachelors degrees in Mathematics and Computer Science from Bloomsburg University and a Masters degree in Computer and Information Science from Penn. I have had the great opportunity to explore many aspects of computer graphics, but am most drawn to research at the crossroads of animation, artificial intelligence, and psychology in the simulation of virtual humans. My current research focuses on the creation and simulation of heterogeneous, functional crowds.Location: Seaver Science Library (SSL) - 150
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: CS Colloquia
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Control Point Corporation Information Session
Thu, Apr 03, 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
