Author: baranwa2@illinois.edu

We are glad to have Ashley Moy, CEO, Cast21, as our guest speaker for this week’s social hour on Friday, October 7 at 3:00PM in 369 CSL. This session is titled as “Cast21: What Who How?”.

Bio: Ashley S. Moy has won numerous international awards for design and research. Prior to cofounding 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.

 

See you all on Friday!!

Important: The Video-of-the-Month is due by noon, Thursday, October 6.  The link to upload your videos is:  go.illinois.edu/bestvideo.

The CSL Social Hour Organizing Committee is very excited to announce this week’s special social hour by CSL professors – Prof. Maxim Raginsky and Prof. Alex Schwing. They will provide an overview of SINE (Signals, Inference, and Networks) group activities. The event will be held on Friday, September 23 at 3:00PM in CSL 369.

Bio: Maxim Raginsky received the B.S. and M.S. degrees in 2000 and the Ph.D. degree in 2002 from Northwestern University, all in Electrical Engineering. He has held research positions with Northwestern, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (where he was a Beckman Foundation Fellow from 2004 to 2007), and Duke University. In 2012, he has returned to the UIUC, where he is currently an Assistant Professor with the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and the Coordinated Science Laboratory.

Prof. Raginsky is interested in understanding, modeling and analyzing complex systems that have capabilities for sensing, communication, adaptation, and decision-making and can operate effectively in uncertain and dynamic environments. In his research he examines new angles and perspectives at the interface between information theory, learning, optimization, and control.

 

Bio: Alex Schwing is an assistant professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and affiliated with the Coordinated Science Lab. Prior to that he was a postdoctoral fellow in the Machine Learning Group at the University of Toronto. He completed his PhD in computer science in the Computer Vision and Geometry Group at ETH Zurich. He graduated from Technical University of Munich (TUM) with a diploma in Electrical Engineering and Information Technology.

Prof. Schwing’s research is centered around machine learning and computer vision. He is particularly interested in algorithms for prediction with and learning of non-linear, multivariate and structured distributions, and their application in numerous tasks, e.g., for 3D scene understanding from a single image.

We are glad to have Bihan Wen as our speaker for this week’s social hour on Friday, September 16 at 3:00PM in 369 CSL. This session is titled as “Sparsifying Transform Learning for Signal Processing Applications”.

Bio: Bihan Wen received the B.Eng. degree in electrical and electronic engineering from Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, in 2012 and the M.S. degree in electrical and computer engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, in 2015. He is currently working with Prof. Yoram Bresler, and pursuing the Ph.D. degree at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He was in the list of UIUC teachers ranked as excellent in 2013. He worked with Advanced Digital Sciences Center (ADSC) and Dolby Laboratories as Research Intern in 2015 and 2016. He has received Yee Fellowship Award for 2016-2017. His current research interests include machine learning, signal and image processing, low-rank / sparse representation, computer vision, and big data applications.

The CSL Social Hour Organizing Committee is very excited to announce this week’s social hour titled as “The Rheology Zoo: Fluids, Solids and Things-In-Between”. The event will be held on Friday, September 9 at 3:00PM in CSL 369. We will be joined by our guest speakers Arif Nelson and Rebecca Corman.

Bio: Arif Nelson is a fourth year graduate student in Mechanical Engineering. He is working with Professor Randy Ewoldt on a variety of projects involving rheologically-complex materials including thermoreversible gelation, design of shear-thinning materials, and rheology of performance magic. Additionally, he leads the Ewoldt Research Group’s outreach exhibit, The Rheology Zoo, which is intended to introduce people to concepts from rheology in a hands-on, intuitive way, and show how these concepts are used in modern research.

 

Bio: Rebecca Corman is a fourth year graduate student in Mechanical Engineering in the Ewoldt Research Group. Her research focuses on design with rheologically-complex materials with an emphasis on viscoelastic material systems.

 

Welcome back!! Hope you had an enjoyable summer. We are glad to have Amber Srivastava as our speaker for this week’s social hour on Friday, September 2 at 3:00PM in 369 CSL. This session is titled as “Combined Resource Allocation and Route Optimization Problems”.

Bio: Amber Srivastava is a second year master’s student in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at UIUC. He is working with Professor Srinivasa Salapaka on developing algorithms for simultaneous resource allocation and multi-hop routing in multi-agent networks. These algorithms can be utilized in effective resource and energy management in the areas of vehicle routing, building management systems and industrial process monitoring etc.

Welcome to the last social hour of the semester. We are glad to have Dr. Normand Paquin, CSL Associate Director for Research, as our guest speaker for this week’s social hour on Friday, May 6, 2016. The session is titled as “Infusing Engineering in Medicine – the new Carle Illinois College of Medicine” . The event will be held in CSL 369.

Bio: Normand is the Associate Director for Research at the Coordinated Science Laboratory. He holds a bachelor’s degree in Engineering-Physics from Queen’s University in Canada, a PhD in Physics from the University of Cambridge in Great Britain and an MBA from the University of Illinois. From 2003 to 2010, he assisted faculty with major center proposals and administration under several titles — including Director and Assistant Dean — in Illinois’ College of Engineering. Prior to that, he held senior administrative positions in Illinois’ College of Business and at several companies in the United States and Canada. He has also worked as a research scientist. Most recently, he has served as a consultant for research endeavors and played a key role in promoting faculty engagement in the new Illinois Applied Research Institute. Additionally, he served as president of start-up 4D Teleport Technologies from 2010 to the present.

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

This week, we are organizing a special panel discussion in NCSA Auditorium. The session is titled as “Do Engineers Make The World A Better Place?“. The event will be held at 3:00-4:15PM.

Please join us for a candid discussion on the broader effects, unforeseen consequences, and unintended misuses of new technologies.

We are glad to have Mayank Kale as our speaker for this week’s social hour on Friday, April 22 at 3:00PM in 369 CSL. This session is titled as “Democratized Healthcare”.

Bio: Mayank Kale is a Junior studying Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is the co-founder of a healthcare startup called Invoq Health that wants to transform the way community health is delivered in developing countries. He loves working on problems that lie at the intersection of engineering, design and humanity.

The CSL Social Hour Organizing Committee is very excited to announce this week’s special social hour sponsored by Granular. The session will focus on best practices for stress management and focus and info on Granular’s technology. We will be joined by our guest speakers Jake Kreider and Sophie Roney. The event will be held in CSL 301 at 3pm.

Important: There will be internship/full-time opportunities for CSL students.

Bio: Jake Kreider is the Engineering Director for Granular’s Champaign office. He has been developing software professionally for the last 13 years, and unprofessionally for longer than that. He has worked in a variety of enterprise platforms and languages, and in a variety of contexts including front-end web applications, back-end data processing, and intersystem middleware. He enjoys learning new programming languages, following advancements in software development, and looking for hilariously-captioned pictures of cats on the Internet. He holds a Bachelor of Science degree from Illinois State University and a Master of Science degree from Northwestern University.

 

Bio: Sophie Roney is the Site Director for Granular Champaign in Research Park.  As Site Director (aka Happiness Manager), she creates an uplifting environment by providing the tools and conditions for the office to thrive.   Sophie is also a Yogi who teaches Hatha and Kundalini yoga and meditation tools to the C-U community.  Sophie earned her B.S from the University of Illinois-College of Business.

We are glad to have Yuting Ng as our speaker for this week’s social hour on Friday, April 8 at 3:00PM in 369 CSL. This session is titled as “Direct Measurements of a GPS Receiver”.

Bio: Yuting is a second year graduate student in the Department of Aerospace Engineering working with Prof. Grace Xingxin Gao. She received her B.Sc. with university honors in Electrical Engineering in 2014. Her research interests are in advanced GPS signal tracking, navigation, remote sensing, control systems, RADAR and UAVs.