Faculty News
Awards & Honors:
The Board of Directors of the American College of Emergency Physicians (ACEP) has awarded Dr. Joseph Barbera (EMSE) the Disaster Medical Sciences Award. ACEP, the largest association of emergency physicians in the US, established this honor to recognize individuals who have made outstanding contributions of national/international significance or impact to the field of disaster medicine. The ACEP Board decides on the annual recipient based upon the recommendations of the ACEP Disaster Preparedness & Response Committee. Selection criteria include research and publications, service to organizations that support disaster medicine, humanitarian activities (including providing medical care in disasters), leadership activities, and teaching. The award was presented during the Disaster Medicine Section meeting at the 2021 ACEP Scientific Assembly, held October 26 in Boston, MA.
Publications:
Dr. Ekundayo Shittu (EMSE), his PhD student Dor Hirsh Bar Gai (EMSE), and SEAS/GW collaborators—including Dr. Saniya LeBlanc (MAE), Dr. Payman Dehghanian (ECE), and Scott Sklar (director of sustainable energy, SEAS Environmental and Energy Management Institute)—have published the following paper: D.H.B. Gai, E. Shittu, D. Attanasio, C. Weigelt, S. LeBlanc, P. Dehghanian, and S. Sklar, “Examining community solar programs to understand accessibility and investment: Evidence from the U.S,” Energy Policy, 159, p.112600.
Conferences & Presentations:
On October 26, Dr. David Broniatowski (EMSE) served as a panelist on the “Ethics & COVID-19” webinar on vaccine misinformation that was hosted by the Office of Research Excellence and the Bioethics Interest Group at the GW Milken Institute School of Public Health.
The US Department of State invited Dr. Ekundayo Shittu (EMSE) to give a talk on October 25 to a group of ten international visitors who are energy infrastructure interlocutors and experts. This was part of the State Department’s International Visitors Leadership Program. Dr. Shittu’s talk was titled “The US Energy Ecosystem: Best Practices in Energy Infrastructure, Planning, and Execution,” and it highlighted US best practices in long-term energy infrastructure planning and execution, as well as the success of US public-private partnerships in both the electricity system and oil and gas infrastructure.
On October 26, Dr. Suresh Subramaniam (ECE) was a keynote speaker at the 19th International Microwave and Optoelectronics Conference. The title of his talk was “The evolution of data center network architectures.”
Dr. Guru Venkataramani (ECE) served as a program committee chair for the 39th IEEE International Conference on Computer Design, held virtually, October 24-27. The conference had five tracks and more than 240 paper submissions and 60 accepted papers in the conference proceedings. The program committee consisted of more than 90 members from 16 countries. The highlights of the conference program include keynote talks by luminaries in the computer architecture and logic design communities, as well as a special panel on computing security challenges.
On October 19, Dr. Arkady Yerukhimovich (CS) presented his paper “The More the Merrier: Reducing the Cost of Large Scale MPC” at the 40th Annual International Conference on the Theory and Applications of Cryptographic Techniques (Eurocrypt 2021). This is joint work with Dr. S. Dov Gordon (George Mason University) and Daniel Starin (Peraton Labs).
Other News:
A version 0.4.0 of logitr, a statistical package authored and maintained by Dr. John Helveston (EMSE), was published on CRAN (Comprehensive R Archive Network) on October 25. The package supports the fast estimation of multinomial and mixed logit models in R with “Preference” space or “Willingness-to-pay” space utility parameterizations. More information about it is available on the package documentation site.
Student News
On October 13, BME doctoral students Shuyue (Frank) Guan and Destie Provenzano presented papers online at the 50th Anniversary IEEE Applied Imagery Pattern Recognition Workshop. Shuyue presented “A sneak attack on segmentation of medical images using deep neural network classifiers,” and Destie presented “Radiologist vs. machine learning: a comparison of performance in cancer imaging.” Both students are advised by Dr. Murray Loew (BME).
PhD student Shulu Chen, co-advised by Dr. Peng Wei (MAE) and Dr. Tian Lan (ECE), attended the INFORMS Annual Meeting 2021, held in Anaheim, CA. There, he presented the research work “Competitive Pricing in Airline Revenue Management with Multi-agent Reinforcement Learning.” This continues the line of work from Dr. Wei's group in AI-based airline revenue management.
A number of SEAS students attended the 2021 Society of Women Engineers (SWE) national conference, held October 21-23 in Indianapolis, IN. At the conference they participated in a variety of workshops and information sessions intended to help empower women engineers in their careers and in the classroom, and listened to keynote addresses by Stephanie Hill, executive vice president of rotary and mission systems at Lockheed Martin, and Barbara Humpton, president and CEO of Siemens US. Many also met with recruiters and participated in on-site interviews, with some receiving job offers. Students Jinbi Tian and Dami Oke presented their research at the conference, and Jinbi placed third in the competition. SEAS students who attended the conference include: Abigail Lukas, Giavanna Corazza, Brittany Underwood, Kathryn Burkey, Anasia Summersett, Cinthya Hernandez, Elena De Lucia, Pranali Shirolkar, Mariam Boguifo, Nashwa Khan, Sydney Kleingartner, and Uma Sharma.
Announcements
The GW Office of the Vice Provost for Research (OVPR) announces its latest round of pilot funding for new and cross-disciplinary projects:
University Facilitating Fund (UFF) fosters the creation of new research projects and scholarly activities that encourage application to externally funded opportunities, bring external recognition to the principal investigator (PI) and university, and/or demonstrate significant impact in the field to which it belongs. Applicants must be regular full-time faculty who are continuing in service at the university the following academic year. UFF awards range from $5,000-$20,000 but are typically less than $15,000. Full proposals are due by 5:00 pm on November 18. Proposals must be submitted via OVPR's InfoReady portal. More details about the funds are available on the OVPR website and in InfoReady.
Cross-Disciplinary Research Fund (CDRF) supports the establishment of research partnerships within chartered centers and institutes or between two or more diverse disciplines that encourage strong applications to externally funded opportunities. CDRF awards provide up to $50,000 per year with the opportunity for a second year of competitive renewal funding. Full proposals are due by 5:00 pm on December 9. Full proposals must be submitted via OVPR's InfoReady portal. More details about the CDRF are available on the OVPR website and in InfoReady.
Upcoming SEAS Events
TODAY: BME Day
Keynote Speaker: Dr. Pamela Norris, GW Vice Provost for Research
Monday, November 1
10:00 am – 5:30 pm (Reception to follow)
SEH, Lehman Auditorium (and via WebEx)
All SEAS faculty and students are invited to join the BME Department for its annual BME Day. The day’s events include a keynote from GW Vice Provost for Research Dr. Pamela Norris; guest speaker Dr. Cindy Liu, associate professor and chief medical officer, Antibiotic Resistance Action Center (Department of Environmental and Occupational Health); undergraduate and graduate student presentations; a career panel discussion; and more. Registration is required.
ECE Seminar: “The Challenges of End-to-End Network Resilience”
Speaker: Dr. Massimo Tornatore, Politecnico di Milano
Thursday, November 9
10:00 – 11:00 am
MAE Distinguished Seminar: “Breakthroughs in the Modeling of Shell Structures: From IGA to Peridynamics”
Speaker: Dr. Yuri Bazilevs, Brown University
Thursday, November 18
2:00 – 3:00 pm
CS Lecture: “Opportunities in the Metaverse”
Speaker: Joel Scharlat, director of operations for Cyber Bytes Foundation, founder & CEO of IVEA Consulting and Metaverse Technologies, Inc.
Thursday, November 18
3:30 – 5:30 pm
This is a special topic lecture for the course CSCI 3907/6907 Augmented and Virtual Reality. This talk will focus on the Metaverse, and what it means for the future of augmented reality and virtual reality. We’ll also discuss some solutions to potential pitfalls and how to make the Metaverse a safe environment for all. Finally, some projects of interest will be discussed. To attend and to receive the meeting link, please RSVP to Dr. Hurriyet Ok by November 17.
Women in Engineering Webinar: Creativity and Engineering
Friday, November 19
12:00 pm
Join Dr. Lorrie Faith Cranor, master quilter, photographer, computer scientist, entrepreneur, director of CyLab Usable Privacy and Security Laboratory, distinguished Carnegie Mellon University professor, and more, as she shares her holistic approach to life, academia, industry, and social activism.
BME Speaker Series: “Image-Based” Systems Biology - A New Paradigm in Cancer Research”
Speaker: Dr. Arvind Pathak, Johns Hopkins University
Wednesday, December 1
11:00 am – 12:00 pm
Lehman Auditorium (SEH, B1270)
Entrepreneurship News & Events
Hackathon: “Innovate the Future of Travel Tech - From House to Gate”
Session One (virtual): Friday, November 12 | 1:00 – 4:00 pm
Session Two (in-person): Friday, November 19 | 9:30 am – 5:45 pm (A non-mandatory reception follows, 5:45 – 7:00 pm)
Register and find more information
This two-session hackathon/design sprint is looking for solutions to improve air travelers’ assurance that they will have enough time to make their flights when starting from home, office, or anywhere. People must consider lots of travel time factors when traveling to the airport, including walking, ground transportation (bus, Metro, parking garage and walking), check-in (baggage), security clearance, and transit time to the gate. These unknowns create anxiety for passengers. This event is hosted by the GW Office of Innovation & Entrepreneurship in partnership with CirrusLabs, George Hacks, and the GW Innovation Center.
External Events
RCR and Beyond
Classes meet throughout the Fall semester
Thursdays, 12:00 – 1:30 pm
Responsible Conduct of Research (RCR) @ GW and Beyond is a semester-long weekly seminar course designed to develop and strengthen ethical problem-solving skills along with cultivating sensitivity to ethical issues commonly found while conducting research. The course is open to the entire campus community, including undergraduates, graduate students, postdocs, researchers, staff and research administrators. Registration is capped at 20 participants, first come, first served. Classes are held on Thursdays, 12:00 p.m. - 1:30 p.m. throughout the semester, unless otherwise noted.
Dissertation Defenses
Student Name: Ke Wang
Title: “Machine Learning Enabled Design Framework for High-performance, Energy-efficient, Fault-tolerant, and Secure On-chip Communication”
Advisor: Dr. Ahmed Louri (ECE)
Monday, November 1
2:00 pm
Student Name: Benjamin Bowman
Title: “Graph Techniques for Next Generation Cybersecurity”
Advisor: Dr. Howie Huang (ECE)
Wednesday, November 3
12:00 pm
Student Name: Rose Tingwei Yin
Title: “Bioresorbable Conformal Bioelectronic Interfaces for Treatment of Arrhythmias”
Advisor: Dr. Igor Efimov (BME)
Friday, November 5
9:30 – 11:30 am
SEH, B1220 and virtual (Zoom link)