Author: baranwa2@illinois.edu

Welcome back!! We hope you all had a refreshing break and are rejuvenated to witness yet another riveting series of informal talks at the CSL Social Hour. We would like you to meet the CSL administrative leadership at the inaugural social hour of the semester on Friday, September 1 in 301 CSL. We will have the director of CSL, Dr. Klara Nahrstedt, and other CSL administrative leadership members will discuss CSL organization, planned CSL events, exciting activities for the upcoming academic year, and preview the upcoming CSL academic year. Attendees will learn who is doing what on the administrative side of CSL, what is the administrative support structure in CSL, where and how one can find people, services and resources to help CSL members to be highly successful in research and education.

Bio: Klara Nahrstedt is the Ralph and Catherine Fisher Full Professor at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Computer Science Department, and the Director of Coordinated Science Laboratory at University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Klara Nahrstedt received her BA in mathematics from Humboldt University, Berlin, in 1984, and M.Sc. degree in numerical analysis from the same university in 1985. She was a research scientist in the Institute for Informatik in Berlin until 1990. In 1995 she received her PhD from the University of Pennsylvania in the Department of Computer and Information Science. She is the ACM Fellow, IEEE Fellow, and the Member of Leopoldina German National Academy of Sciences.

Join the Social Hour to learn about the people of the administrative infrastructure with whom CSL students, postdocs and faculty interact with and get emails from, and about the CSL place CSL members will spend many hours during the upcoming academic year. And most importantly come, and enjoy food and company of CSL peers, staff and faculty.

Are you tired of exam preparations or project deadlines and need a refreshing study break? Guess what we have in store for you – another CSL Musical Social Hour!! We are excited to have Alfonso Valdes, Managing Director, Smart Grid Technologies at the Information Trust Institute to perform at this week’s special CSL Social Hour on Friday, April 28 at 3pm in 369 CSL.

Bio: For his day job, Alfonso Valdes manages a portfolio of projects in energy system cyber security for the Information Trust Institute. But his passion is playing a number of string instruments: ukulele, Spanish guitar, Hawaiian guitar, acoustic rock guitar, Baroque mandolin, and bluegrass mandolin. You never know what instrument he will bring, or what he will play. And usually, neither does he. It can be a problem when he brings the bluegrass mandolin to a flamenco gig.

Fun fact: Alfonso has literally been a professional musician and has played live on WILL radio. He sometimes writes his own compositions, too.

Important: The April Video-Of-The-Month submissions are due by noon, Thursday, April 27. The link to upload your videos is:  go.illinois.edu/bestvideo.

We are very pleased to have a couple of guest speakers, Mr. Tanweer Alam and Mr. Ahmed Sadeque, from the Cricket Club of Illinois (CCI) to talk about the game of Cricket – a tale of 22 yards. This special session will be held in CSL 369 at 3pm on Friday, April 21.

Bio: Tanweer Alam is the Lead Business Intelligence Analyst at the University of Illinois Foundation (UIF). He obtained his Bachelor’s degree from the University of Oklahoma and Master’s from the University of Illinois in Management Information Systems. Prior to working at UIF he has been involved in various research opportunities at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) and the Institute of Government and Public Affairs (IGPA).   He has been part of Cricket Club of Illinois (CCI) for several years and has been involved in promoting the game of Cricket in Urbana-Champaign; on campus as well as local schools and Park Districts. Tanweer continues to work on providing opportunities to those who are interested in learning about cricket and playing opportunities in the local community and regional clubs.

 

Bio: Ahmed Sadeque is a PhD student in Crop Sciences. His research focuses on unearthing the evolution of mechanism adopted by Palmer amaranth and waterhemp (weeds) for sex-determination. He joined UIUC in August 2010 and holds double MS in Bioinformatics and Molecular Biology.   Ahmed joined Cricket Club of Illinois (CCI) for in 2012 and since then he has actively contributed towards promoting the game of Cricket in the Urbana-Champaign community. He has been part of cricket coaching sessions both on and off campus. Alongside making new friendships, CCI has allowed him to immensely improve his cricketing skills. Over the years, CCI has hosted several competitive tournaments on campus and represented the University in different Midwest Cricket tournaments as well.

We are very pleased to have Professor Tamer Başar as our guest speaker for this week’s special social hour on Friday, April 14 at 3:00PM in 369 CSL. Prof. Başar will talk about his prime years at CSL – evolution of the CSL over several decades and how his research portfolio has evolved in parallel.

Bio: Professor Tamer Başar received B.S.E.E. degree from Robert College, Istanbul, in 1969, and M.S., M.Phil, and Ph.D. degrees in engineering and applied science from Yale University, in 1970, 1971 and 1972, respectively. After stints at Harvard University, Marmara Research Institute (Gebze, Turkey), and Boğaziçi University (Istanbul), he joined the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) in 1981, where he is with the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, is the Director of the Center for Advanced Study, and carries the academic titles of Swanlund Endowed Chair, Center for Advanced Study Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Professor at the Coordinated Science Laboratory, Professor with the Information Trust Institute, and Affiliate Professor at the Department of Mechanical Science and Engineering.

Dr. Başar is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and of the European Academy of Sciences, and is also Fellow of IEEE, IFAC, and SIAM. He has an extensive list of publications in systems, control, communications, and dynamic games, including books on non-cooperative dynamic game theory, robust control, network security, wireless and communication networks, and stochastic networked control. His current research interests include stochastic teams, games, and networks; security; and cyber-physical systems. Among some of the honors and awards he has received are: IEEE Control Systems (Technical Field) Award (2014), Isaacs Award of ISDG (2010), Richard E. Bellman Control Heritage Award of the American Automatic Control Council (2006), Giorgio Quazza Medal of IFAC (2005), Outstanding Service Award of IFAC (2005), Hendrik W. Bode Lecture Prize of the IEEE Control Systems Society (2004), IEEE Millennium Medal (2000, Axelby Outstanding Paper Award (1995), Medal of Science of Turkey (1993), and several honorary doctorates and professorships.

Ever wonder how the grid of the future looks like? Well, Alireza Askarian is going to briefly talk about the future grid during this week’s social hour talk on Friday, April 7 at 3pm in 369 CSL.

Bio: Alireza Askarian is a Master’s student in the Department of Mechanical Science and Engineering at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. He obtained his B.Sc. degree in Mechanical Engineering from Sharif University of Technology in Tehran, Iran. He is working under the supervision of Prof. Srinivasa M. Salapaka on developing novel microgrid control architecture to meet the challenges to grid system reliability, efficiency, and resiliency presented by widespread distributed and stochastic renewable power generation. His long-term goal lies in adoption of key technologies developed by this research for grid system of future.

Welcome back!! We are very pleased to have Professor Ravishankar Iyer as our guest speaker for this week’s special social hour on Friday, March 31 at 3:00PM in 369 CSL. This special session is titled as “Sequences to Systems: Creating the CompGen Engine at Illinois”.

Bio: Professor Ravishankar Iyer is the George and Ann Fisher Distinguished Professor of Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He holds joint appointments in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, the Coordinated Science Laboratory (CSL), and the Department of Computer Science. He is an affiliate faculty of the Insititue for Genomic Biology (IGB) and National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA). Iyer has led several large successful projects funded by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), National Science Foundation (NSF), and industry. He currently co-leads the CompGen Initiative at Illinois. Funded by NSF and partnering with industry leaders, hospitals, and research laboratories, CompGen aims to build a new computational platform to address both accuracy and performance issues for a range of genomics applications. Professor Iyer is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), and the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). He has received several awards, including the IEEE Emanuel R. Piore Award, and the 2011 Outstanding Contributions award by the Association of Computing Machinery. Professor Iyer is also the recipient of the degree of Doctor Honaris Causa from Toulouse Sabatier University in France.

Important: The Video-of-the-Month is due by 5 pm, Thursday, March 30.  The link to upload your videos is:  go.illinois.edu/bestvideo.

Tired of exams, deadlines, and CSL heating system!! Come and join us for the special CSL Social Hour on Friday March 17, at 3 pm in 369 CSL. Warning: There will be no slides, no equations, no deep learning. Instead there will be us getting together, celebrating the beginning of Spring and live music. We are pleased to have Ardavan Ardeshirilajimi and Parisa Karimi  as our Social hour guests this week. They are going to play classical Persian music pieces with Tar and Kamancheh.

Bio: Ardavan is a PhD candidate in the Civil and Environmental Engineering Department at UIUC. He received his M.Sc. degree in Mechanical Engineering from University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth, and his B.Sc. degree in Mechanical Engineering from Sharif University of Technology in Tehran, Iran. Ardavan is very passionate about Iranian classical music. He has been playing plays Tar and Tonbak, since he was young. Other than music, he is interested in cooking, playing soccer, calligraphy, and ice skating.

 

Bio: Parisa is a PhD student in the ECE department, at UIUC. She obtained her Bachelor’s degree from Iran University of Science and Technology, Tehran, and her master’s degree from Sharif University of technology Tehran, all in Electrical Engineering. Parisa is an experienced Kamancheh player. She is the winner of the best Kamancheh soloist in the youth music festival Tehran, 2015. She is also interested in playing piano, but her true passion lies in music composition.

We are glad to have Dr. Svetlana Sowers, Senior Technology Manager at the Office of Technology Management (OTM), as our guest speaker for this week’s social hour on Friday, March 10 at 3pm in 301 CSL. She will talk about various aspects of managing University IP, including protecting, promoting and licensing IP.

Bio: Dr. Svetlana Sowers is a Senior Technology Manager at the Office of Technology Management at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign. She is responsible for technology transfer of software and other copyrightable inventions from across campus. She had helped launch the Ready-to-Sign and Mobile programs at the University of Illinois. Prior to joining the tech transfer community over 5 years ago, Svetlana has worked at Yahoo!, Motorola, and at a local startup. She received her MBA degree from the University of Illinois, and Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Maryland in College Park.

See you all on Friday!!

 

We are glad to have Daniel George, as our speaker for this week’s social hour on Friday, March 3 at 3:00PM in 369 CSL. This session is titled as “Deep learning for extracting signals weaker than noise: Detecting gravitational waves”.

Bio: Daniel George is a PhD student in Astronomy, pursuing the Computational Science and Engineering concentration, at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He obtained his Bachelor’s degree in Engineering Physics from IIT Bombay. He is currently a Research Assistant in the Gravity Group at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) and a member of the LIGO collaboration working at the interface of deep learning, high-performance computing, and gravitational wave astrophysics. His long-term interests lie in applying cutting-edge computer science and technology, especially artificial intelligence, to accelerate discoveries in the fundamental sciences.

Abstract: Daniel will  describe a new technique which can rapidly extract weak signals with signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) as low as 0.25. This outperforms matched-filtering and other machine learning methods. It also extends the range of gravitational waves that can be detected by LIGO, thus enabling immediate follow-up campaigns. Furthermore, the same technique can detect and classify transients from raw telescope data. This initiates a new paradigm for research which uses massively-parallel simulations to train artificial intelligence algorithms that exploit emerging hardware architectures.

Remember Ashley Moy from the Cast 21!! Well, the social hour team is excited to have her back as a guest speaker for this week’s special social hour on February 24 at 3pm in 369 CSL. This special session is titled as “Cast21 – a work in progress”.

Bio: Ashley S. Moy has won numerous international awards for design and research. Prior to co-founding Cast21, the accomplished engineer and researcher has worked in clinics in the United States and abroad to develop medical devices and pharmaceuticals. In 2013, Ashley led a team to develop a probiotic drug to help reduce the incidence of diet-induced heart disease and went on to win the iGEM World Championship. Prior to cofounding Cast21, Moy also did business development for Fibroblast, a healthcare Saas startup. When she is not working, she loves playing and listening to live music with her friends and aerial spinning.

Important: The Video-of-the-Month is due by noon, Thursday, February 23.  The link to upload your videos is:  go.illinois.edu/bestvideo.