Title:

 

WVU Libraries Resources for CSEE Graduate Students

Speaker:                Marian Armour-Gemmen

Date:                      Monday, August. 27th, 2018

Time:                      5:00 PM - 6:00 PM             

Place:                     G102 Engineering Sciences Building (ESB)

                                West Virginia University, Morgantown, WV

 

Abstract:  She will introduce the services and resources available through the WVU Libraries.  These library resources may be critical to your graduate research.

 

Speaker Bio:  Marian Armour-Gemmen is the Engineering Research librarian at WVU.  She also has been the Patent & Trademark librarian since 2003. In this capacity she assists inventors throughout the state of West Virginia. Previously she worked as the head of the Physical Sciences Library and as an associate in the Government Documents department.  She holds an MLIS from the University of South Caroline, an MA from the University of Michigan and a BA from Calvin College.

 

Technologies and applications to enable elder patients maintain independence and age in place.

 

Speaker:               Ravi Raman

Date:                      Wednesday, August 29, 2018

Time:                     11:00 AM – 12:00 PM      

Place:                    AER135 Advanced Engineering Research Building (AERB)

                                West Virginia University, Morgantown, WV

 

Abstract:  People are living longer due to advances in many fronts but the cost of healthcare especially for older patients has increased dramatically. The elderly require more tests, medicines, and medical procedures and longer periods to recover in hospitals and nursing homes. Healthcare costs could be reduced if the elderly were to stay as long as possible in their own homes.  However, as people age, there are increased likelihood of:  unmonitored falls and accidents; difficulty in moving about or lifting, reaching household items;  difficulty in feeding themselves due to hand tremors; becoming disoriented or lost. This talk will describe a number of approaches that show promise in helping elderly stay independent. Potential projects will be briefly discussed that may subsequently be pursued by Seniors and graduate students.

 

Bio: Ravi Raman is a researcher investigating technologies and applications to improve patient care. At WVU, Ravi received graduate degrees in Electrical Engineering, Computer Science and Business Administration. He was a graduate research assistant in WVU’s AI Laboratory and was a research staff member for many years at the DARPA –funded Concurrent Engineering Research Center. At CERC, Ravi helped in the development of telemedicine applications funded by NIH. Ravi taught Circuits Labs, CS classes in Artificial Intelligence and later helped a number of graduate students with their research projects. Since leaving Morgantown, Ravi has continued to work in federal and corporate research organizations.  His research interests are in technologies to improve healthcare delivery.



The value of thinking about context and human factors that shape the data we science

 

Speaker:               Dan Cosley

Date:                      Friday, August 31, 2018

Time:                     11:00 AM – 12:00 PM      

Place:                    AER120 Advanced Engineering Research Building 

 

Abstract: This talk is going to argue that we spend too much time applying data analytic methods and not enough time thinking about them. In particular, I think we too often take data as a given without considering the circumstances that generated it, a claim I will try to back up using three cases: an analysis of posting behavior in Reddit that shows dramatic changes over time (including a fun instance of Simpson's Paradox) as the community evolved; a study of personal characteristics that predict effective contribution behavior in civic participation forums (hint: it's not personality); and a model of the influence (or the lack thereof) of seeing other people's activity feeds in last.fm and several other social information sharing systems on people's behavior. My goal is to use these cases to encourage us to think more about how the system designs and the social and behavioral contexts people act in shape the data we see, and things that implies for how we go about doing data science.

 

Bio: Dr. Dan Cosley is an associate professor in information science at Cornell University who does research around human-computer interaction and social media, now moonlighting as a rotating Program Director at the National Science Foundation (NSF). His high-level research goal is to leverage people's behavior in digital media to improve both individual well-being and community outcomes. This leads to many lines of inquiry, including work aimed at better predicting and understanding of human behavior in digital media, making recommendations based on those models and the needs of people and systems, and developing interfaces that help not just companies and researchers but also people themselves get value out of their data. He, with a number of collaborators, has done work on tools for modeling and supporting contributions to online communities (including the SuggestBot tool in Wikipedia and the RegulationRoom deliberation environment), on understanding how behavior and preferences evolve over time in a number of social media (including Wikipedia, Reddit, Twitter, and last.fm), and on supporting reflection, self-understanding, and interpersonal interaction (including the Pensieve tool for reminiscing and tools for agent-supported creativity and cross-lingual interaction). The work has been sponsored by a number of NSF awards, including CHS large, medium, small, and CAREER awards, and is rooted in the computer science training he received from 2000-2006 under the guidance of advisors John Riedl and Loren Terveen from the University of Minnesota.


 

Pervasive wearable physiological/behavioral monitoring and biofeedback


Speaker:
                Omid Dehzangi

Date:                      Monday, September 10, 2018

Time:                     5:00 PM – 6:00 PM            

Place:                    G102 Engineering Sciences Building (ESB)

                                West Virginia University, Morgantown, WV

 

Abstract:  Healthcare costs in the United States are projected to increase 5.3 percent in 2018 (closer to 20%) of GDP, which is a cause of major concerns. The largest contributor to this cost is the hospital cost accounting for ~30% to the healthcare expenditure. On the other hand, IOT and wearable health technologies are drawing significant attention transforming the way people interact with each other and their environment. The pervasive nature of such systems provides ubiquitous access to the continuous personalized information extracted from these systems. Despite the ground-breaking potentials, there are a number of interesting challenges in order to design and develop wearable medical embedded systems. Due to limited available resources in wearable processing architectures, power-efficiency is demanded to allow unobtrusive and long-term operation of the hardware. Also, the data-intensive nature of continuous health monitoring requires efficient signal processing and data analytic algorithms for near real-time, scalable, reliable, accurate, and secure extraction of relevant information from an overwhelmingly large amount of data. Dr. Omid Dehzangi’s objective is to contribute in reducing the costs and improve the effectiveness of healthcare in order to shift the conventional paradigms from hospital-centric healthcare with episodic and reactive focus on diseases to patient-centric and home-based healthcare via proactive early monitoring, diagnosis, and treatment.

Dr. Dehzangi is interested in developing technologies that systematically transform the design and architecture of embedded computing systems as novel delivery mechanisms to reduce costs for healthcare and wellness via incorporating signal processing and artificial intelligence algorithms. He aims to investigate empirical and theoretic grounds of determining human mind-body state collectively (e.g. multi-modality and multi-sensor fusion, joint human/environment modeling) and longitudinally (e.g. temporal decomposition, learning, and pattern recognition) in a seamless and ubiquitous fashion. He is currently investigating multi-modal human state analysis and fusion algorithm design. His vision is to connect an individual with his/her environments and to connect the present of an individual with his/her past and future in order to bridge the gap toward fully automated Human-in-the-Loop Cyber-Physical Systems (HiLCPS). The resulting knowledge extracted from these systems will enable emerging applications in healthcare, wellness, emergency response, fitness monitoring, elderly care support, long-term preventive chronic care, assistive care, smart environments and transportation, sports, virtual and augmented reality, assistive robotic devices, and entertainment that create many new research opportunities and transform various disciplines.

 

 
Speaker Bio: Omid Dehzangi received his Ph.D. degree from the School of Computer Engineering at Nanyang Technological University. He received B.Sc. and M.Sc. degrees from the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Shiraz University. In 2013 and 2014, he completed postdoctoral fellowships at the Center for Brain Health and the Department of Electrical Engineering at the University of Texas at Dallas, respectively. He has been an Assistant Professor at the department of Computer and Information Science, University of Michigan from 2014 to 2018. He is currently an Assistant Professor & Data analytic lead at the Rockefeller Neuroscience Institute, West Virginia University. His research has been funded by the NSF, NIH, SRC, MICHR, Texas Instruments, Toyota, and Ford.


Speaker:               Jesse Sommerville

Date:                      Wednesday, September 19, 2018

Time:                     6:00 PM – 7:00 PM            

Place:                   107 Mineral Resources Building (ESB)

                               West Virginia University, Morgantown, WV

 Practical Cryptography:  Block Cipher Cut-and-Paste Oracle Attacks

 


Demystify Block Chain

Speaker:               David Krovich

Date:                      Monday, September 24, 2018

Time:                     5:00 PM – 6:00 PM            

Place:                    G102 Engineering Sciences Building (ESB)

                                West Virginia University, Morgantown, WV

Abstract: With the rise of bitcoin to as high as $20,000 per coin in 2017 people are starting to take notice of cryptocurrencies.  The driving technology behind bitcoin is what is referred to as the blockchain. This talk will attempt to demystify the blockchain and attempt to explain some of the inner workings.  During the talk a blockchain implemented in python will be shown from genesis.

Biography: David Krovich is a Research Associate Faculty in the Lane Department of Computer Science at West Virginia University.  David has earned his a BS in Computer Science and MS in Software Engineering from West Virginia University.  His current research areas are cybersecurity and open source software. 

Working at the Intersection of Law & Technology

Speaker:               Ola Adekunle, J.D.

Date:                     Friday, October 19, 2018

Time:                     11:00 AM – 12:00 PM            

Place:                    AERB135 Advanced Engineering Research Building 

                                West Virginia University, Morgantown, WV

Abstract: This presentation provides a brief overview of the different forms of Intellectual Property (IP) protection with a focus on patents. The presentation explains patent law basics and why patents are a critical business tool. Finally the presentation explores career opportunities and paths for engineers and engineering students interested in patent law

Biography: Ola Adekunle is a Patent Counsel on Google's Global Patents Team based in Mountain View, CA. In his role, Ola works on shaping Google's patent portfolio based on analysis of Google and third party patents, business strategies, and products. At Google, Ola also co-leads and helped institutionalize the Google Street Law program and is a member of the steering committee for a number of Google legal diversity, inclusion and equity initiatives such as the Google Legal Summer Institute. Prior to joining Google in 2017, Ola was Senior Patent Counsel & IP Strategist at Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) and Hewlett Packard Company (HP) from 2012 to 2017, where he supported several business units including Servers and Labs business units. Before HP/HPE, Ola was an Associate at a couple of law firms in VA and TX. Ola earned his J.D., M.B.A., and B.S. in Computer Engineering from West Virginia University. In his spare time, Ola loves spending time with his lovely wife and two sets of twins (twin boys and twin girls).


Resilient Distribution Systems

Speaker:             Chen-Ching Liu

Date:                   Tuesday, October 23, 2018

Time:                   5:00 PM – 6:00 PM            

Place:                   MRB113 Mineral Resources Building 

                              West Virginia University, Morgantown, WV

Abstract: Recent development of the smart grid significantly enhanced the level of automation in the distribution grids. With high level deployment of remote-controlled switches, distribution feeders can be restored efficiently after power outages. In this presentation, computational algorithms for utilization of smart meters, remote control capabilities, and feeder restoration will be discussed together with their practical implementations. The role of microgrids in distribution system restoration will be evaluated. Traditional techniques, however, are not designed for extreme events in the distribution systems. The same is true for widely adopted reliability indices. New thinking of system design, operation, and metrics will be important for resiliency of future distribution grids. 

Biography:Chen-Ching Liu is American Electric Power Professor and Director, Power and Energy Center at ECE, Virginia Tech. He was Boeing Distinguished Professor at Washington State University, Pullman, WA. During 1983-2005, he was a Professor of EE at University of Washington, Seattle. Dr. Liu was Palmer Chair Professor at Iowa State University from 2006 to 2008. From 2008-2011, he served as Acting/Deputy Principal of the College of Engineering, Mathematical and Physical Sciences at University College Dublin, Ireland. Professor Liu received an IEEE Third Millennium Medal in 2000 and the Power and Energy Society Outstanding Power Engineering Educator Award in 2004. In 2013, Dr. Liu received a Doctor Honoris Causa from Polytechnic University of Bucharest, Romania. Chen-Ching chaired the IEEE Power and Energy Society Fellow Committee, Technical Committee on Power System Analysis, Computing and Economics, and Outstanding Power Engineering Educator Award Committee. He served on the U.S. National Academies Board on Global Science and Technology. Professor Liu is a Fellow of the IEEE and Member of the Washington State Academy of Sciences.

Phased Array Feed for Reflector Antenna
Speaker:
               Anish Roshi

Date:                      Monday, November 5, 2018

Time:                     5:00 PM – 6:00 PM            

Place:                    G102 Engineering Sciences Building (ESB)

                                West Virginia University, Morgantown, WV

 
Abstract: A large class of radio astronomy observations require extended and large scale surveys. However, large reflector antennas used by radio astronomers have restricted field of view (FoV) which limits the survey speed. Conventionally, multiple optimized feeds have been used to increase the FoV, however, they do not produce overlapping beams and the off-axis feeds suffer efficiency degradation, resulting in reduced mapping efficiency. The Phased Array Feed (PAF) is another technology that can be used to increase the FoV. PAF consists of densely packed, electrically small feed arrays, each of which over illuminates the reflector. Signals from the array elements are combined to form multiple, overlapping beams with low spillover noise. A low-noise, multi-beam PAF system increases the survey speed of the telescope, enabling radio astronomers to make sensitive, large scale surveys. Developing a low-noise PAF, however, is difficult due to mutual coupling between array elements. Mutual coupling modifies the element radiation patterns. It also couples amplifier noise between signal paths. Therefore, detailed electromagnetic, noise and network modeling are needed to design a PAF for radio astronomy applications.

In this talk, I describe the development of a cryogenic PAF. This project was called the Focal L-band Array for the Green Bank Telescope (FLAG) {a collaboration between NRAO, Green Bank Observatory, Brigham Young University and West Virginia University. A 1.4 GHz 19-element, dual- polarization, cryogenic PAF was developed for the Green Bank Telescope (GBT). I will describe the PAF instrumentation and the signal processing involved in forming beams with the system. Commissioning observations of calibrator radio sources show that this receiver has the lowest reported beam-formed system temperature (Tsys) normalized by aperture efficiency of any phased array receiver to date. The survey speed of the PAF with seven formed beams at the Nyquist separation is larger by a factor 7 compared to the single beam system on the GBT. I will then describe a model for the PAF system developed at NRAO and compare its predictions with measurement results. Finally, I will present some observational results toward the pulsar B0329+54 and an extendedHII region, the Rosette Nebula. The PAF system along with a real-time beam-former is currently being used for HI 21 cm observations of galaxies, study of Pulsar emission and to search for Fast Radio Bursts.

  

Biography: D. Anish Roshi graduated with an engineering degree in electronics and communications from the University of Kerala. In 1989, he joined the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR), National Center for Radio Astrophysics, Pune as a Research Associate/Scientific Officer. At TIFR, he completed his Ph.D (Physics) specializing in Radio Astronomy (1999) and was appointed as a member of the faculty. He was a Jansky postdoctoral fellow at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO), USA between 2000 and 2002. On completion of the post-doctoral fellowship, Dr Roshi joined the Raman Research Institute (RRI), Bangalore. While at RRI, he was involved with several Astrophysics research and instrumentation projects. He led a team of engineers to build a digital receiver for the Murchison Widefield Array, located at Western Australia. In 2010, Dr. Roshi moved to the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO), USA and is currently a Scientist/Astronomer. At NRAO, he was the System Architect and Project Scientist for the Versatile Astronomical Spectrometer that was built for the Green Bank Telescope (GBT). He was also the System Architect for the Phased Array Feed project. He is currently on-leave from NRAO for a year and is working with faculty members of Electrical engineering and Astronomy departments at West Virginia University. His research interests include Galactic interstellar medium, massive star formation and radio astronomy instrumentation.