June 28 - July 4, 2010

Newsletter

June 28, 2010

Faculty News

Research & Grants:

Prof. Larry Bennett (ECE) is the principal investigator on the GW portion ($400,000) of a $1.47 million U.S. Department of Energy grant awarded recently to GE Global Research to improve the energy efficiency of refrigerators.  Prof. Bennett will work along with co-PI, Prof. Ed Della Torre (ECE), graduate students Yi Jin and Shuo Gu, and GE to develop the new technology.  The new materials are expected to increase the efficiency of residential refrigerators by 30 percent. 

Media Mentions:

On June 10, Prof. Azim Eskandarian (CEE) and the Center for Intelligent Systems Research hosted the Society of Automotive Engineers’ monthly meeting, which included demonstrations of the dangers of texting and driving at the same time. The event and the simulations received coverage in both the Loudon Times and on the local CSB affiliate WUSA9.

Conferences, Workshops, & Presentations:

Earlier this month, Prof. Julie Ryan (EMSE) attended the Cooperative Cyber Defence Centre of Excellence (CCD COE) Conference on Cyber Conflicts.  The CCD COE is a NATO-sponsored organization located in Tallinn, Estonia.  The 2010 Conference on Cyber Conflicts was the first conference to combine three tracks: concepts and strategy, technical challenges and solutions, and law and policy.  Prof. Ryan was on the program committee for the law and policy track and served as official observer of the track discussions.  She also served as paper reviewer for the conference.  Prof. Ryan co-authored a paper presented at the conference, the citation for which is:  Ryan, Julie J.C.H., Daniel J. Ryan, and Eneken Tikk, (June 2010) "Cybersecurity Regulation: Using Analogies to Develop Frameworks for Regulation" Proceedings of the 2010 Conference on Cyber Conflict, Cooperative Cyber Defence Centre of Excellence, Tallinn, Estonia.  She also moderated a panel consisting of technical, strategic, and legal experts that discussed the material within the context of the conference. 

Other:

On June 23, Prof. Dhafer Marzougui (CEE) and colleagues conducted a full-scale crash test for the Federal Highway Administration’s Federal Outdoor Impact Laboratory (FOIL) at the Turner-Fairbank Highway Research Center in McLean, Virginia.  In the test, a single-unit truck weighing 15,000 lbs, traveling at 30 mph, impacted head-on into a fixed bollard system.  The bollards in this system are 8" in diameter and spaced 4' apart.  The concrete foundation supporting the bollards is 30" in width, 30" in depth, and 30' in length.  The test was conducted as part of a study of different designs for anti-ram perimeter security devices.  High speed cameras, accelerometers, and speed measuring devices were used to capture the data in the crash event.  This data will be used for further analyses and evaluations of the bollard system performance.  

Other News

On June 10, GW’s associate vice provost approved the Energy Engineering Certificate Program, a new SEAS graduate certificate program.  The certificate program will be sponsored jointly by MAE and EMSE.  It will provide training in energy engineering in terms of  basic skills in fluid mechanics, heat transfer, and mathematics, and it will cover the current energy technologies in renewable energy, how to manage energy, and design for energy efficient tools and buildings. 

Ketan Patel, a SEAS alumnus and former executive aide in the SEAS Office of Undergraduate Admissions and Student Services, was recently interviewed by the Times of India for work he is doing with Global Aid, LLC, a non-governmental organization that he founded to help provide healthcare in developing countries.

Announcements

Looking for a place to publish or present interesting work in information security or information warfare?  Consider submitting your work to the 6th International Conference on Information Warfare and Security.  It will be held at GW in March 2011, which makes it a pretty convenient venue!  You can find out much more information about the conference at: http://www.academic-conferences.org/iciw/iciw2011/iciw11-home.htm