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Industry Career Panels: Infrastructure Engineering
Date: 12:15–1:30pm, Tuesday 13 March 2012
Venue: Elisabeth Murdoch Lecture Theatre
Industry Career Panels provide students with the opportunity to learn about careers, recruitment and internships from a diverse range of industry representatives — from HR, to recent graduate engineers and IT professionals, to executives.
View full program details and instructions for student bookings
MERIT 2012 Visiting Scholars Lecture Series: Remediation of Chromite Ore Processing Residues — Waste to a Construction Material
Speaker: Professor Jay Meegoda, Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering, New Jersey Institute of Technology
Date: 4.30pm, Tuesday 13 March 2012
Venue: Old Geology Building Theatre 1 [Access via eastern side lane of Old Geology South Building 156]
Abstract
In Hudson County, New Jersey, there are more than two million tons of leftover chromite ore processing residues (COPR). Part of COPR was used as construction fills spreading the problem to a larger area. High solubility of some chromate compounds along with their toxicity is threatening the environment as well as the human health.
The primary objective of this presentation is to demonstrate an efficient and optimum way to recover chromium and iron from COPR in the production of chrome steel or stainless steel. In this research, COPR was thermally treated to recover iron together with chromium. The research applied techniques used in steel manufacturing to extract metallic iron and chromium from COPR.
Further Information
Dr Sam Yuen
E:
Research Seminar: The Role of ICT in a Competitive and Healthy Victoria
Speakers: Prof Chris Leckie, Prof Terry Caelli, Prof Stan Skafidas
Date: Drinks: 4.30–5.30pm, Seminar: 5.30–7pm Wednesday 14 March 2012
Venue: Percy Baxter Lecture Theatre, Level 2 Deakin Waterfront Campus, 1 Gheringhap Street, Geelong
NICTA (National ICT Australia Ltd) is Australia’s Information and Communications Technology Research Centre of Excellence and is Victoria’s largest ICT research laboratory. Our primary goal is to build and deliver excellence in ICT research and commercial outcomes for Australia. NICTA VRL has been active in developing synergies and partnerships that have enabled exciting multidisciplinary projects such as retinal research, water resource management and transport infrastructure planning.
Hear from the senior researchers at NICTA about the research areas of national interest where ICT is a vital part of the solution.
Further Information
Katya Baxter
E: katya.baxter@nicta.com.au
Joint MERIT and MMI Visiting Scholar Seminar: Materials Research at IBM Almaden Research Center: Past Present and Future
Speaker: Dr Robert Miller, IBM Almaden California
Date: 10am Friday 16 March 2012
Venue: Brown Theatre, Electrical and Electronic Engineering Building 193
This seminar will be followed by discussion and morning tea at 11:00am.
Abstract
The US National Academy of Engineering has defined 14 grand challenges for the 21st century. These include topics in information analytics, environmental issues, terrorism, cyberspace, water purification, energy, healthcare and others. While some involve information gathering and management, simulation of complex systems, smart planet initiatives, healthcare informatics and analytics, etc others will require new materials and exploiting the intersection between new materials and computation and simulation. As a result, IBM Research is involved in many areas beyond the more traditional microelectronics, software, data analytics and storage businesses. Dr Miller will discuss using a number of examples the evolution of traditional topics and forays into new materials-related areas that are relevant for the future. This will be a broad-based overview of a number of topics rather than a deep dive into any specific area. Topics that will be touched will be low-k dielectrics for on-chip applications, the fate of classical lithography in the future, directed self assembly of block copolymers for sublithographic patterning, green chemistry and PET recycling, water purification and membranes, lithium-air batteries for energy storage and polymeric materials for healthcare and nanomedicine.
Further Information
Prof Greg Qiao
T: 8344 8665
E:
Research Seminar: Scalable and Elastic Data Management in the Cloud
Speaker: Prof Amr El Abbadi, University of California, Santa Barbara
Date: 11am–12pm Friday 16 March 2012
Venue: Theater 1 ICT Building, 111 Barry St, Carlton
Abstract
Over the past two decades, database and systems researchers have made significant advances in the development of algorithms and techniques to provide data management solutions that carefully balance the three major requirements when dealing with critical data: high availability, reliability, and data consistency. However, over the past few years the data requirements, in terms of data availability and system scalability, from Internet scale enterprises that provide services and cater to millions of users has been unprecedented. Cloud computing has emerged as an extremely successful paradigm for deploying Internet and Web-based applications. Scalability, elasticity, pay-per-use pricing, and autonomic control of large-scale operations are the major reasons for the successful widespread adoption of cloud infrastructures. In this talk, we analyze the design choices that allowed modern scalable data management systems to achieve orders of magnitude higher levels of scalability compared to traditional databases. With this understanding, we highlight some design principles for data management systems that can be used to augment existing databases with new cloud features such as scalability, elasticity, and autonomy. We then analyze several state of the art systems and discuss our proposed system, G-Store, which provides transactional guarantees on data granules formed on-demand while being efficient and scalable. Finally, we will present Zephyr, a technique for on-demand live database migration, which is critical to provide lightweight elasticity as a first class notion in the next generation of database systems. Zephyr efficiently migrates live databases in a shared nothing transactional database architecture.
Further Information
Egemen Tanin, Department of Computing & Information Systems
T: 8344 1350
E:
Research Seminar: Operationalising Resilience in City Design
Speaker: Dr Alan March
Date: 12–1pm Friday 16 March 2012
Venue: E-zone Lecture Theatre, Level 1, Architecture Building 133, University of Melbourne
Abstract
Considerable consensus exists in Australia and internationally that building and sustaining resilience to disasters is critical, given the ongoing threat of bushfires, flood and other large scale natural disasters. This has been the theme for a raft of recent government policies, such as the February 2011 Council of Australian Governments Meeting (COAG) communique formally adopted the 2009 National Strategy for Disaster Resilience. Despite this general acceptance of resilience, a long standing problem is that translating it to outcomes is difficult to achieve. This presentation sets out a view of operationalizing resilience using selected examples. Dr Alan March is the lead researcher of the project Indices for Human Settlement Fire Vulnerability which includes researchers from RMIT and the CSIRO. He researches urban design and planning for disaster risk reduction and teaches regularly at the Australian Institute for Emergency management. Alan's teaching includes urban design, planning law and planning theory subjects. He is an executive member of Melbourne Sustainable Society Institute, leading the theme “Cities”. Alan has practised since 1991 in a broad range of statutory and strategic planning, advocacy, and urban design. His book The Democratic Plan will be released in June 2012.
Further Information
Natural Disaster Management Research Initiative
Lecture: Personalization in Web Search and Data Management
Speaker: Professor Timos Sellis, National Technical University of Athens
Date: 12–1.30pm Tuesday 20 March 2012
Venue: Theatre 3, ICT Building, 111 Barry Street, Carlton [Map]
We address issues on web search personalization by exploiting users’ search histories to train and combine multiple ranking models for result reranking. These methods aim at grouping users’ clickthrough data (queries, results lists, clicked results), based either on content or on specific features that characterize the matching between queries and results and that capture implicit user search behaviors. After obtaining clusters of similar clickthrough data, we train multiple ranking functions (using Ranking SVM model), one for each cluster. Finally, when a new query is posed, we combine ranking functions that correspond to clusters similar to the query, in order to rerank/personalize its results. We also present how to support personalization in data management systems by providing users with mechanisms for spacifying their preferences. In the past, a number of methods have been proposed for ranking tuples according to user-specified preferences. These methods include for example top-k, skyline, top-k dominating queries etc. However, neither of these methods has attempted to push preference evaluation inside the core of a database management system (DBMS). Instead, all ranking algorithms or special indexes are offered on top of a DBMS, hence they are not able to exploit any optimization provided by the query optimizer. In this talk we present a framework for supporting user preference as a first-class construct inside a DBMS, by extending relational algebra with preference operators and by appropriately modifying query plans based on these preferences.
Further Information
Dr Rui Zhang, Department of Computing and Information Systems
E:
Industry Career Panels: Computing and Information Systems
Date: 12:15–1:30pm, Tuesday 20 March 2012
Venue: Elisabeth Murdoch Lecture Theatre
Industry Career Panels provide students with the opportunity to learn about careers, recruitment and internships from a diverse range of industry representatives — from HR, to recent graduate engineers and IT professionals, to executives.
View full program details and instructions for student bookings
Engineering Education: Issues, Challenges and Opportunities
Speaker: Tony Marjoram
Date: 1–2pm Tuesday 20 March 2012
Venue: Theatre C1, Level 4, Building 174, University of Melbourne
Engineering faces various issues and challenges today, such as the decline of young people going into engineering in many countries and the impact this will have, especially in developing countries. Other issues include the need for better understanding of the role of engineering in development, poverty reduction, sustainable development, climate change response and mitigation. Fortunately, when young people realise that engineering can be interesting and part of the solution to such issues, they are attracted to the field. This presentation will discuss the ongoing need for engineering and engineering education to keep up with these challenges and changes in information and learning. These topics are the main focus of the UNESCO Engineering Report.
Technical Seminar: 3D Printing — Rapid Prototyping
Speaker: Travis Hardy, Asia-Pacific Sales Manager, 3D Systems
Date: 2–3pm Tuesday 20 March 2012
Venue: Geoff Opat Room, Level 3, David Caro Building, University of Melbourne
This month’s MMI Technical Seminar Series presentation will highlight the current and future trends of 3D Printing and how this technology is changing the engineering prototyping and manufacturing processes, significantly by significantly shortening development time.
The purpose of this seminar series is to allow research and technical staff across the university to keep up with the latest developments in equipment technology.
Details & bookings (essential)
Further Information
Irving Liaw
T: 8344 0176 or
E:
Research Seminar: Elements of a Nonstochastic Theory of Information
Speaker: Assoc Prof Girish Nair, Electrical and Electronic Engineering Department
Date: 2pm Wednesday 21 March 2012
Venue: Brown Theatre, Level 1, EEE Building 193
Abstract
In communications, unknown quantities are usually modelled as random variables. In contrast, control theory often treats uncertainties as bounded unknowns having no statistical structure. The area of networked control combines both fields and raises the question of whether it is possible to construct meaningful analogues of stochastic concepts such as independence, Markovianness and information, without assuming a probability space.
This talk introduces a framework for doing so, leading in particular to the construction of a “maximin” information functional for non-stochastic variables. It is shown that, in this framework, the largest maximin information rate through a memoryless, error-prone channel coincides exactly with its block-coding zero-error capacity without feedback. This leads to a tight condition for the achievability of exponential uniform convergence when estimating the state of an unperturbed linear system over such a channel.
Time permitting, recent results relating the concept of “directed” maximin information to the zero-error feedback capacity and feedback control will also be discussed.
Industry Night 2012
Date: 5:30–8:30pm Thursday 22 March 2012
Venue: Palladium, Crown Entertainment Complex
The Industry Expo gives companies the chance to present prominent displays that provide a detailed profile of who they are, what they do and what they are looking for in university graduates. The Industry Expo showcases the diverse range of companies available to engineering students. It is a great way for companies to advertise their programs, whilst networking with some of University of Melbourne’s brightest engineering students.
Research Seminar: Toward a Long-term Post Disaster Intervention and Recovery Framework
Speaker: Peter Lawther
Date: 12–1pm Friday 23 March 2012
Venue: E-zone Lecture Theatre, Level 1, Architecture Building 133, University of Melbourne
Peter Lawther is a practising Quantity Surveyor / Construction Project Management Consultant, and Senior Lecturer in the Faculty of Architecture, Building and Planning at the University of Melbourne. He consults and researches predominantly in the arena of international development and natural disasters, with specific reference to the provision of built environment infrastructure.
Further Information
Natural Disaster Management Research Initiative
Research Seminar: Exploring the Human Default Mode Network with Intracranial Electrophysiology
Speaker: Dr Brett Foster, Laboratory of Behavioral and Cognitive Neurology, Stanford University
Date: 11am, Tuesday 27 March 2012
Venue: Center for Neural Engineering (Building 261), Main Conference Room (Ground Floor), 203 Bouverie Street, Carlton (Please use intercom by main door)
Abstract
Since its discovery over a decade ago, the human “Default-Mode Network” (DMN) has received an incredible amount of research interest and skepticism in the field of neuroimaging. With many early criticisms being addressed, the scientific debate now focuses on adjudicating the specific functional role(s) of this network and its unique contribution to cognition. While neuroimaging studies have made progress in this respect, more refined methods are required for anatomically and temporally resolving the functional dynamics of DMN activity. Indeed the electrophysiological correlates of DMN function remain relatively unknown. Our group has tackled this specific question using human intracranial recordings from the posteromedial cortex (PMC), a core node of the DMN. This talk will summaries our progress so far in studying the cognitive electrophysiology of the PMC and the novel insights obtained by using intracranial recordings.
Industry Career Panels: Mechanical Engineering
Date: 12:15–1:30pm, Tuesday 27 March 2012
Venue: Elisabeth Murdoch Lecture Theatre
Industry Career Panels provide students with the opportunity to learn about careers, recruitment and internships from a diverse range of industry representatives — from HR, to recent graduate engineers and IT professionals, to executives.
View full program details and instructions for student bookings
Research Seminar: Australia’s Future in Science & Technology
Speaker: Professor Ian Chubb AC
Date: Drinks: 5–6pm, Seminar: 6–7pm Wednesday 28 March 2012
Venue: The Spot Basement Theatre, Building 110, Business & Economics, 198 Berkeley Street (corner Pelhem Street), Carlton
Abstract
Mathematics, Engineering and Science provide the enabling skills and knowledge that underpin every aspect of modern life. They help us understand the natural world and enable us to respond as humans to this world with a constructed view aimed at improving the lot of human kind. In Australia, as in many economies, we have observed a decline in the number of people choosing a career in these disciplines. Among his many roles as Australia’s Chief Scientist, Professor Ian Chubb has been charged with examining this decline and offering strategies to address it.
Register and Further Information
Katya Baxter
E: katya.baxter@nicta.com.au
NICTA Big Picture Seminar Series
Research Seminar: Integrated Disaster Management Command and Control Platform for First Responders
Speaker: Dr Tuan Ngo
Date: 12–1pm Friday 30 March 2012
Venue: E-zone Lecture Theatre, Level 1, Architecture Building 133, University of Melbourne
Dr. Tuan Ngo is the Research Director of the Advanced Protective Technologies for Engineering Structure (APTES) Group in the Department of Infrastructure Engineering. He has worked as the Research Manager of the ARC Research Network for a Secure Australia (RNSA) since 2006. Dr Ngo is a member of the expert panels on Critical Infrastructure Modelling and Analysis for the Attorney-General's Department and Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet. His research interests include: protection of critical infrastructure against extreme events; and sustainable design of buildings and infrastructure.
Further Information
Industry Career Panels: Electrical and Electronic Engineering
Date: 12:15–1:30pm, Tuesday 3 April 2012
Venue: Elisabeth Murdoch Lecture Theatre
Industry Career Panels provide students with the opportunity to learn about careers, recruitment and internships from a diverse range of industry representatives — from HR, to recent graduate engineers and IT professionals, to executives.
View full program details and instructions for student bookings
Industry Career Panels: Alternative Employment Sectors for Engineering and IT graduates
Date: 12:15–1:30pm, Tuesday 17 April 2012
Venue: Elisabeth Murdoch Lecture Theatre
Industry Career Panels provide students with the opportunity to learn about careers, recruitment and internships from a diverse range of industry representatives — from HR, to recent graduate engineers and IT professionals, to executives.
View full program details and instructions for student bookings
Seminar: The Neural Tissue Simulator: An Ultrascalable Solution to Large-Scale Simulations of Neuronal Circuit Function
Date: 11am, Wednesday 18 April 2012
Venue: Main Conference Room (Ground floor), Center for Neural Engineering (Building 261), 203 Bouverie St. Carlton
Speaker: Dr James Kozloski, Thomas J Watson Research Center, Yorktown Heights, USA
In 2011, we developed a novel tissue volume decomposition and a hybrid branched cable equation solver for performing large-scale simulations of neural tissue. The decomposition divides the simulation into regular tissue blocks and distributes them on a parallel multithreaded machine. The solver computes neurons that have been divided arbitrarily across blocks and can be considered a tunable hybrid of Hines’ fully implicit method (1984), and the explicit predictor-corrector method of Rempe and Chopp (2006). We demonstrate thread, strong, and weak scaling of our approach on a machine of 4,096 nodes with 4 threads per node. Scaling synapses to physiological numbers had little effect on performance, since our decomposition approach generates synapses that are almost always computed locally. The largest simulation included in our scaling results comprised 1 million neurons, 1 billion compartments, and 10 billion conductance based synapses and gap junctions. Based on results from the ultra-scalable Neural Tissue Simulator, we estimate requirements for a simulation at the scale of a human brain and derive an approach to scaling computational neuroscience together with expected supercomputational resources over the next decade.
Control and Signal Processing Seminar: Sliding Mode Control—Developments and Implementation
Date: 2pm, Wednesday 18 April 2012
Venue: Brown Theatre, Level 1, Electrical and Electronic Engineering Building (193)
Speaker: Dr Bin Wang, Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering
Sliding mode control (SMC) is preferred in control engineering due to its simple dynamics, good performance and most importantly, its robustness to nonvanishing perturbations. Traditionally the solution of sliding mode control systems is understood in the Filippov sense and the “equivalent control” concept. This solution interpretation dismisses the implementation perspective in control engineering. As the ideal sliding mode requires infinite switching frequency, the undesirable phenomenon — “chattering”, will occur in the implementation where only finite switching frequency can be achieved. Therefore, implementation constraints must be addressed for control engineers.
In this presentation, the latest developments in the last decade of sliding mode control will be covered, followed by the introduction of a new framework to understand the solution of sliding mode control systems. Under this framework, some key issues in SMC systems will be addressed. The aim of the associated research is to produce a guide for SMC implementation along with a new understanding of SMC systems.
IBES Digitally Connected Research Morning Tea
Date: 10–11am, Friday 20 April 2012
Venue: Richard Newton Rooms, Level 5, Electrical and Electronic Engineering Building (193)
Join IBES as we host an informal morning tea for researchers to discuss projects, build collaborations and develop interdisciplinary connections to explore the impact of a broadband-enabled society.
Assoc Prof Frank Vetere from the Department of Computing & Information Systems will give a short overview of research into how broadband-enabled technologies are connecting diverse groups of people, from sick children to the elderly, enriching their lives.
RSVP: by Tuesday, 17 April
MMI Technical Seminar 4
Date: 3–4pm, Friday 20 April 2012
Venue: Room 103, Architecture Building (133)
The Melbourne Materials Institute would like to invite everyone to this month’s seminar presented by the Melbourne Centre for Nanofabrication (MCN).
The MCN is a purpose built, state of the art facility which comprises a unique array of fabrication and characterisation equipment, supported by expertise drawn from partner nodes, such as The University of Melbourne. Its strengths are in the areas of advanced materials, biotechnology and characterisation techniques.
Director of the MCN Dwayne Kirk will present an overview of the facilities and access modes, while a number of the MCN’s instrument managers will provide an overview of industry and the academic based work carried out there. Associate Professor Ray Dagastine will also present his experiences of using the centre, as a resident of the MCN Technology Fellow Program.
As a contributing partner of the centre, the University of Melbourne through the Research Infrastructure Strategy Office and the MMI will use this seminar to launch a number of new initiatives to encourage and facilitate access for University of Melbourne researchers.
Further details and online registration
Fluid and Thermal Sciences Seminar: Closed-loop Turbulence Control—Progresses and Challenges
Date: 3pm, Friday 20 April 2012
Venue: Mechanical Engineering Lecture Theatre, Level 3, Building 170
Speaker: Professor Bernd Noack, Research Director CNRS and ANR Chair of Excellence at Institut PPRIME, University of Poitiers, France
Closed-loop turbulence control is a rapidly evolving, interdisciplinary field of research. The range of current and future engineering applications has truly epic proportions, including cars, trains, airplanes, jet noise, air conditioning, medical applications, wind turbines, combustors, and energy systems.
We review successful control studies of flows around airfoils and bluff bodies at high Reynolds numbers in experiments and simulations. These studies achieve beneficial changes of the mean flow (0 Hz) for lift enhancement or drag reduction via suppression of an instability at a natural frequency by exciting instabilities at lower or higher frequencies. This strongly nonlinear interplay between vanishing, natural and actuation frequencies is incorporated in a generalised mean-field model and exploited for control design. It cannot be described in any linear model.
Building on these results, we pursue a model-based strategy for closed-loop manipulation of broad-band turbulence dynamics, i.e. the control of a rich kaleidoscope of such nonlinear interactions. This strategy starts with robust control-oriented low-order Galerkin models. Using these models, the first and second moments are predicted with statistical closures employing finite-time thermodynamics and maximum entropy concepts. These closures incorporate natural and controlled dynamics, i.e. enable fully-nonlinear infinite horizon control. The ultimate goal is a general mathematical theory for turbulence control in experiments.
Industry Career Panels: Biomedical Engineering
Date: 12:15–1:30pm, Tuesday 24 April 2012
Venue: Elisabeth Murdoch Lecture Theatre
Industry Career Panels provide students with the opportunity to learn about careers, recruitment and internships from a diverse range of industry representatives — from HR, to recent graduate engineers and IT professionals, to executives.
View full program details and instructions for student bookings
Engineers Australia Presentation
Date: 12:30–1:30pm, Tuesday 8 May 2012
Venue: Theatre A, Elisabeth Murdoch Centre
Students can learn about:
- Career Advice & Employment Resources (Vacation & Graduate Employment)
- Networking Opportunities
- Professional Development opportunities
- Chartered Status
- Professional Recognition
- International Recognition
- Access to Industry Information
- Exclusive members only offers
Bookings: www.careersonline.unimelb.edu.au
Low Carbon Living CRC Seminar: Engaging Communities in Urban Transformation.
Date: 1pm Tuesday 15 May 2012
Speakers: Prof Kim Dovey, Architecture and Urban Design, and Dr Michael Trudgeon, VEIL
Location: Sisalkraft Theatre, Ground Gloor, ArchitectureBuilding
The second seminar in the Low Carbon Living CRC series will look at engaging communities in urban transformation. Prof Kim Dovey, Architecture and Urban Design, and Dr Michael Trudgeon, VEIL, will talk about research and projects related to the topic as a chance to explore further opportunities for collaborative inter-faculty research projects within the CRC.
At this seminar Prof Chris Ryan will also report on two recent meetings regarding the CRC and its progress.
Further Information
Prof Priyan Mendis
E:
NeuroEngineering Seminar: High-Capacity Cortical Embedding of Synfire Chains
Date: 3:30pm Tuesday 15 May 2012
Speaker: Dr Chris Trengove, RIKEN Brain Science Institute
Venue: Center for Neural Engineering (Building 261), Main Conference Room (ground floor), 203 Bouverie Street, Carlton. For those without swipe access, please use intercom by main door.
Synfire chains, sequences of pools linked by feedforward connections, support the propagation of precisely timed spike sequences, or synfire waves. We present a model of synfire chain embedding in a cortical scale recurrent network using conductance-based synapses, balanced chains, and variable transmission delays. The network attains substantially higher embedding capacities than previous spiking neuron models and allows all its connections to be used for embedding. The number of waves is regulated by recurrent background noise. We computationally explored the capacity limit, and use a mean field analysis to describe the equilibrium state. Simulations confirm the mean field analysis over broad ranges of pool size and connectivity per neuron; the number of pools embedded in the system trades off against the firing rate and the number of waves. An optimal inhibition level balances the conflicting requirements of stable synfire propagation and limited response to background noise. A simplified analysis shows that the present conductance-based synapses achieve higher contrast between the responses to synfire input and background noise compared to current-based synapses, and also reveals the role of transmission delays, both within and between links. Regulation of wave numbers depends on the use of variable intra-link transmission delays.
Research Seminar: The Accelerating Universe and The Hunt for Dark Energy
Speaker: Prof Brian Schmidt,Australian National University
Date: Refreshments: 5–6pm, Seminar: 6–7pm Tuesday 15 May 2012
Venue: Basement Theatre, The Spot Building (110), 198 Berkeley Street, Carlton
In 1998, two international teams raced to determine the fate of the Universe. Was it expanding or contracting? They found that it wasn’t just expanding but that the expansion was accelerating. It was a startling discovery suggesting that an unknown force is countering the effect of gravity and pushing the Universe apart. Today cosmologists believe that this mysterious dark energy comprises 70 per cent of the Universe. Brian Schmidt, leader of one of the two teams, will describe their discovery and its implications. He will explain how astronomers have traced our Universe’s history back more than 13 billion years, leading them to ponder the ultimate fate of the cosmos.
Further Information
Katya Baxter
E: katya.baxter@nicta.com.au
NeuroEngineering Seminar: Smartphone – The Centerpiece of mHealth Reality
Date: 11am Wednesday 16 May 2012
Speaker: Dr Sasan Abidi
Venue: Center for Neural Engineering (Building 261), Main Conference Room (ground floor), 203 Bouverie Street, Carlton. For those without swipe access, please use intercom by main door.
The number of operational mobile subscribers is expected to pass the 6 billion mark by mid 2012 and the number of wearable wireless sensors is expected to grow to 400 million by the year 2014. Such a tremendous growth in the mobile space will result in an increasing number of mobile-based applications deployments, such as: Machine-to-Machine (M2M) communications, Electronic-Health (eHealth), and Mobile-Health (mHealth). These emerging mobile applications will require 3G and 4G mobile networks for biomedical data transport, including establishing, maintaining, and transmitting health-related information, research, education, and training.
The capabilities of Smartphone platforms will play major roles in driving the practicality of mHealth applications, which are expected to impact prevention and treatment methods in diverse medical fields. This talk opens the concept of Mobile Health (mHealth) from the biomedical applications, Quality of Service (QoS), security, and cloud computing perspectives.
MERIT Visiting Scholars Lecture: Professor Ulrich Wiesner, Cornell University
Date: 1.00 – 2.00pm Wednesday 16 May 2012
Venue: Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering Theatre, Building 165
Solutions to global problems including energy conversion and storage, clean water and human health require increasingly complex, multicomponent hybrid materials with unprecedented levels of control over composition, structure and order at the nanoscale to determine function. One of the characteristics of the associated research is the integration over multiple, often educationally orthogonal fields ranging from basic science to engineering to medicine.
This talk will give examples of efforts by the Wiesner group at Cornell University, USA, to overcome perceived barriers between disciplines and to tackle important, interdisciplinary problems through the assembly of teams of researchers. Strategies to obtain functional hybrid nanomaterials will include equilibrium as well as non-equilibrium structure formation processes and will be applied to amorphous, polycrystalline as well as single crystal-type materials. The aim of the described work is to understand the underlying fundamental chemical, thermodynamic and kinetic formation principles enabling generalisation of results over a wide class of materials systems. To this end experimental work will be supported by theoretical work to quantitatively understand complex parameter spaces and materials properties. After introducing synthesis concepts and materials characterisation property assessments will be described in the context of specific applications.
Professor Ulrich Wiesner studied Chemistry at the University of Mainz, Germany, and UC Irvine, CA, gaining his PhD in 1991 with work under Professor HW Spiess at the Max Planck Institute for Polymer Research, Mainz. In 1993, after a two year postdoc at the Ecole Superieure de Physique et de Chimie Industrielle de la ville de Paris, France, with Professor L Monnerie, he returned to the group of Professor Spiess were he finished his Habilitation in 1998. He joined the Cornell University, NY, Materials Science and Engineering faculty in 1999 as a tenured Associate Professor, becoming a full Professor in 2005, and since 2008 has held the position of Spencer T. Olin Professor of Engineering.
IBES Digitally Connected Research Morning Tea: Digital Networks and Participatory Public Space
Date: 10:00–11:00am Friday 25 May 2012
Speaker: A/Prof Scott McQuire, Culture and Communication
Venue: Richard Newton Rooms, Level 5, Electrical and Electronic Engineering Building (193)
A number of projects exploring the potential for digital networks to deepen citizen engagement in the organisation and utilisation of public space. Extending our research into large urban screens such as Federation Square’s ‘Big Screen’, our new project focuses on the implications of the NBN for public space. As cities become increasingly media-dense environments, how can we translate the new technological capacity of highspeed broadband into an enabler of ‘participatory public space’?
RSVP: by Tuesday 22 May
CIS Seminar: Mobile Cloud and Green Computing
Date: 11am-12pm, Mon May 28, 2012
Speaker: Prof Ivan Stojmenovic, University of Ottawa, Canada
Venue: 803 Board Room, Level 8, Doug McDonell Building, Department of Computing
Mobile devices (smart phones, tablets, laptops, embedded boards, robots) can serve as ‘dumb’ terminals for cloud computing services over intelligent networks. Mobile cloud has emerged as a new cloud computing platform that puts the cloud into a ‘pocket’. Important issues include optimising the scheduling and transport schemes, access management, and application optimisation, for mobile devices to achieve energy savings.
This talk will first introduce the development of mobile cloud computing and describe some applications involving multimedia, vision/recognition, graphics, gaming, text processing. Next, it will present the transmission, computation, and sensing challenges of green computing in the mobile cloud. It will also discuss the possible solutions from various perspectives. Energy savings for task outsourcing and location based services will be discussed in detail. ‘Crowd computing" combines mobile devices and social interactions to achieve large-scale distributed computation. Examples include rsquo farming, participatory and opportunistic crowd-sourced sensing. One particular emerging concept is the vehicular cloud. For example, traffic lights in a congested area could be rescheduled by running rescheduling code (controlled by the municipality) on collective computational platforms provided by cars.
Ivan Stojmenovic is Professor at the University of Ottawa, Canada and currently serves as editor-in-chief of the IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems. He has had over 300 different papers published and edited seven books on wireless, ad hoc, sensor and actuator networks and applied algorithms. Professor Stojmenovic is one of about 250 computer science researchers with an h-index of at least 50 and has the top h-index in Canada for mathematics, with 11000 citations. He has received four best paper awards and the Fast Breaking Paper for October 2003, by Thomson ISI ESI. He is a recipient of the Royal Society Research Merit Award, UK. He is a Tsinghua 1000 Plan Distinguished Professor (2012-5). He is a Fellow of the IEEE (Communications Society, class of 2008), and a member of the Canadian Academy of Engineering (since 2012). He was an IEEE CS Distinguished Visitor in 2010-11. He received an Excellence in Research Award at the University of Ottawa in 2009. He has held regular and visiting positions in Serbia, Japan, USA, Canada, France, Mexico, Spain, UK (as Chair in Applied Computing at the University of Birmingham), Hong Kong, Brazil, Taiwan and China.
Further Information
Raj Buyya
E:
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Industry Career Panels: International Students
Date: 12:15–1:30pm, Tuesday 7 August 2012
Venue: Elisabeth Murdoch Lecture Theatre
Industry Career Panels provide students with the opportunity to learn about careers, recruitment and internships from a diverse range of industry representatives — from HR, to recent graduate engineers and IT professionals, to executives.
View full program details and instructions for student bookings
Industry Career Panels: Women in Engineering and IT
Date: 12:15–1:30pm, Tuesday 21 August 2012
Venue: Elisabeth Murdoch Lecture Theatre
Industry Career Panels provide students with the opportunity to learn about careers, recruitment and internships from a diverse range of industry representatives — from HR, to recent graduate engineers and IT professionals, to executives.
View full program details and instructions for student bookings