Title: “How nanotechnology can save us and environment: Making it happen in a safe way”
Nanotechnology is offering wonderful opportunities to make most of materials around us much better. Nanoparticles can help us to produce energy in a more efficient and less harmful way. They can also transform the environment around us and help us to clean it. Nanotechnology is opening new and exciting world for our civilization and we are still only at the beginning of this fantastic journey. However, there are questions about how safe those small particles are, and whether there are ways to make them safer. This lecture will discuss examples of emerging frontiers in this area while attempting to outline challenges in nanotechnology field.
Biosketch:
Dr. Alexander Orlov is an Associate Professor of Materials Science and Chemical Engineering at Stony Brook University. He is also a faculty member of the Consortium for Interdisciplinary Environmental Research, an affiliate faculty of Chemistry Department and the Institute for Advanced Computational Science. Dr. Orlov was awarded the US National Science Foundation CAREER Award and was made Kavli Fellow in 2014 by the Kavli Foundation and the US National Academy of Sciences. In 2016 Dr. Orlov has been named Sigma Xi Distinguished Lecturer and was recognized by the State University of New York with Chancellor's Award of Excellence in Scholarship and Creative Activities.
Guest Speaker: Dr. Alexander Orlov, Department of Materials Science and Chemical Engineering
Title: "How nanotechnology can save us and environment: Making it happen in a safe way"
Date: Tuesday, February 13, 2018
Time: 1pm-2pm
Location: Special Collections Seminar Room, E-2340, second floor of the Melville Library
Please register here.
Title: "Optically chopped PIR sensor for occupancy detection"
Passive infrared (PIR) sensors are the current choice for occupancy presence detection in buildings. The sensors are popularly used for controlling lighting, heating and cooling based on occupancy. A major problem is that these PIR sensors only detect individuals who are moving, which may provide false negative detections and inaccurate occupancy estimation, resulting in uncomfortable lighting/temperature swings, short lifetime of the equipment, and waste of energy. To address this issue, this talk presents a new type optically chopped PIR sensor, equipped with an electronic shutter and machine learning technologies that enable fast and accurate occupancy detection including individuals who are stationary.
Currently, the heating and cooling of buildings generates about 13% of the U.S. domestic greenhouse gas emissions and consumes about 40% of the energy used in a typical U.S. residence, making it the largest energy expense for most homes. When fully implemented, this technology can potentially reduce these emissions by two percentage points. Moreover, this technology can help U.S. businesses and residences eventually reduce reliance on tightly controlled building environments, thus enabling radical and sustainable architecture in next generation energy efficient building designs.
Biosketch:
Dr. Ya Wang is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Mechanical Engineering, at the State University of New York, Stony Brook (2013 - date). Before then, she was a Postdoc research fellow at the Department of Aerospace Engineering, the University of Michigan. She received her Ph.D. (2007 – 2012) in Mechanical Engineering from Virginia Tech. Dr. Wang is active in research involving dynamic properties of smart materials, applied to energy harvesting, sensing and control. Her work has been sponsored by NSF, DOE ARPA-E, DOD ONR, DOT UTRC, and local industrials. Dr. Wang was awarded 2015 Special Congressional Recognition, and 2015 DOE Wave Energy Prize. She is also advisor to Six Semi-finalists of Intel/Regeneron Science Talent Search. She has authored 1 book chapter, 27 journal papers and 30 conference proceeding papers and filed 1 U.S. utility patent, and 5 provisional patents. She is an editorial board member for the International Journal of Mechanical Systems Engineering. She is a member of ASME, SPIE, AIAA and IEEE, the conference symposium chair of 2018 ASME SAMSIS, and the technical committee member of ASME SMASIS, and SPIE NDE/smart structures.
Guest Speaker: Dr. Ya Wang
Title: "Optically chopped PIR sensor for occupancy detection"
Date: Friday, March 30, 2018
Time: 1pm-2pm
Location: Special Collections Seminar Room, E-2340, second floor of the Melville Library
Please register here.
Title: “Extinction, extinction: How it was and how to stop it from the Miocene to today”
The central question of our time is whether we can manage global ecosystems to support us today and into the future, or we continue on current trends of ever-increasing extinction rates and ecosystem loss. But while many current challenges, such as massive carbon dioxide or nitrogen output, are unprecedented, others have in fact been unfolding for thousands of years. Here I show the results of studies combining the fossil record with DNA techniques to discover the footprint of human activities deep into the past. Using the islands of the Caribbean as a microcosm offers crucial lessons for the future: it would take nature millions of years to restore what was lost over only a few hundred years.
Biosketch:
Liliana M. Dávalos is an Associate Professor of Conservation Biology at Stony Brook University, Stony Brook, New York. She is interested in the forces shaping biodiversity in time and space, including effects from human activities. Her research focuses on the evolution of species and trait diversity, and on how to conserve ecosystems today and into the future. Professor Dávalos is a 2013 Kavli Frontiers of Science Fellow for outstanding early career, a 2012 National Academies of Sciences Education Fellow in the Life Sciences, and has advised the United Nations Office of Drug and Crime on deforestation since 2007. She is a coauthor of the 2016 World Drug Report.
Guest Speaker: Dr. Liliana M. Dávalos, Department of Ecology and Evolution
Title: "Extinction, extinction: How it was and how to stop it from the Miocene to today"
Date: Tuesday, April 3, 2018
Time: 1pm-2pm
Location: Special Collections Seminar Room, E-2340, second floor of the Melville Library
Please register here.
Title: “Computational Interaction in Post-PC Computing”
In the current Post-PC computing era, new computing technologies such as mobile computing, wearable computing, augmented and virtual reality have emerged, which bring wicked challenges to interaction between humans and information technology. To address these challenges, designers must consider a multiplicity of problems from low-level hardware, through software, all the way to human factors. In this talk I will introduce a new perspective, which was introduced in our recently published book Computational Interaction, on how to design software user interfaces and interaction technology. It is an approach that focuses on the use of algorithms and mathematical models to explain and enhance interaction between humans and information technology. I will particularly introduce how to apply this approach to enhance text-based communication on mobile and wearable devices, and solve touchscreen interface design problems.
Biosketch:
Dr. Xiaojun Bi joined the Department of Computer Science at Stony Brook University as an Assistant Professor in January 2017. Previously, he was a Research Scientist at Google. His research interests center on Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), with the major focus on computational interaction in Post-PC computing. He earned his Ph.D. from the Department of Computer Science at the University of Toronto, and master’s and bachelor’s degrees from Tsinghua University, China. Xiaojun Bi has over 30 publications in top tier HCI conferences and journals including ACM CHI, UIST and Human Computer Interaction, and is an inventor of over 20 US patents. He is also a 2-time Google Faculty Research Award winner (2017, 2018), and a co-author and co-editor of the book Computational Interaction. More information can be found on his homepage: http://www.xiaojunbi.com/.
Guest Speaker: Dr. Xiaojun Bi, Department of Computer Science
Title: “Computational Interaction in Post-PC Computing”
Date: Tuesday, May 1, 2018
Time: 1pm-2pm
Location: Special Collections Seminar Room, E-2340, second floor of the Melville Library
Please register here.
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