Author: baranwa2@illinois.edu

Please join us at the Social Hour to welcome today’s guest speaker Elizabeth Dennison, Associate Director of the CSL. The event will be held in CSL 369 at 3pm.

Bio: Elizabeth Dennison joined the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1987, working for the Department of Urbana and Regional Planning before coming to CSL. She has been at CSL since 1996, where she currently holds the position of the Associate Director. During her 20 years of exemplary service at CSL, Beth has always been a significant resource for the CSL community.

P.S. Please stop by to treat yourself with some home-made cupcakes and cookies.

We are glad to have Shubhanshu Mishra as our speaker for this week’s social hour on Friday, March 18 at 3:00PM in 369 CSL. This session is titled as “Insights on Temporal Evolution of Science using Scholarly Data”.

Bio: Shubhanshu Mishra is a 3^rd year Ph.D. student at the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at UIUC. He works as a research assistant with Prof. Jana Diesner and Prof. Vetle Torvik.. His research involves using large scale data mining and machine learning solutions, to study the temporal evolution of science. His ongoing research work is focused on studying topical novelty of scientific articles, measuring relative topical expertise of authors on an article, and studying factors which affect the self-citation practices by authors. He finished his Integrated Bachelor’s and Master’s degree in Mathematics and Computing from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur in 2012. He was a fellow of Kishor Vaigyanik Protsahan Yojana (KVPY), a scholarship program funded by the Department of Science and Technology of the Government of India, from 2007 to 2012.

We are glad to have Shane Ghiotto as our guest speaker for this week’s social hour on Friday, March 4 at 3:00PM in 369 CSL. This special session is titled as “Growing with a Startup”.

Bio: Shane Ghiotto leads a team of engineers in developing Rithmio’s algorithms. He began working with company founders Prashant Mehta and Adam Tilton on the technology behind Rithmio’s gesture recognition platform in 2011 and became Rithmio’s first full-time employee in 2014. He has a Master’s and a Bachelor’s degree in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

This week, Syed Bilal Mehdi is going to give a brief talk on “Collision Avoidance using Bézier Curves“. The event will be held in CSL 369 from 3:00pm to 4:00pm.

Bio: Syed Bilal Mehdi received his MS degree in 2012 from the Mechanical Science and Engineering department at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). He is currently a PhD candidate in the same department. In 2013, he was named a CSE fellow by the Computational Science and Engineering department (CSE) and was later awarded as a teaching fellow at the Mechanical Science and Engineering department at UIUC. His research interests include cooperative multi-vehicle missions with a focus on collision avoidance and nonlinear robust adaptive control.

Important Announcement: The Video-of-the-Month is due by noon, Thursday, February 25.  The link to upload your videos is:  go.illinois.edu/bestvideo.

 

This week, Chi Zhang is going to give a brief talk on “Feedback particle filter with application to attitude estimation“. The event will be held in CSL 369 from 3:00pm to 4:00pm.

Bio: Chi Zhang is a fifth-year Ph.D. student working with Professor Prashant Mehta of the Department of Mechanical Science and Engineering, UIUC. In 2011, he received his B.S. degree in Automotive Engineering from Tsinghua University, Beijing, China; In 2014, he received M.S. degree in Mathematics from UIUC. His research focuses on developing particle-based algorithms for nonlinear filtering and global optimization. Particularly, he is interested in problems possessing geometric structures (e.g. Riemannian manifolds). One application of his recent projects is the nonlinear attitude estimation found in robot localization.

See you all on Friday at the Social Hour!!

This week, Ali Yekkehkhany is going to give a brief talk on “Scheduling for Data Centers with Multi-level of Data Locality‘. The event will be held in CSL 369 from 3:00pm to 4:00pm. The talk is based on his recent work that has been accepted for presentation at the IEEE INFOCOM, 2016.

Bio: Ali Yekkehkhany is a a second year graduate student working with Professor Yi Lu in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. Ali graduated with a bachelors degree from Sharif University of Technology in 2014. Ali works in the area of Communication and Networks – Queueing theory, scheduling for cloud systems, Stochastic machine learning, and Data mining.

See you all at the social hour. There will be food for thought, as well as for the stomach.

Welcome back!! This week, Akshay Shetty is going to give a brief presentation on “Vision-Aided Measurement Level Integration of Multiple GPS Receivers for UAVs“. The event will be held in CSL 369 from 3:00pm to 4:00pm.

Bio: Akshay is a second year graduate student in the Department of Aerospace Engineering working with Prof. Grace Xingxin Gao. He received his B.Tech. with Honors in Aerospace Engineering from Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay in 2014. On graduation, he was awarded the Institute Silver Medal. His research interests include control theory and sensor-fusion for outdoor navigation of UAVs.

 

 

 

Important Announcement: The Video-of-the-Month is due by noon, Thursday, January 28.  The link to upload your videos is:  go.illinois.edu/bestvideo.

Welcome to the last social hour of the semester! We are glad to have Daniel J. Block as our guest speaker for this week’s social hour on Friday, December 4 at 3:00PM in 369 CSL. This special session is titled as “Inexpensive Control System Lab Experiments”.

Bio: Dan received his B.S. in General Engineering with secondary field in Robotics and Control from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in 1991.  Then from 1991 to 1993 worked at IBM in Poughkeepsie, NY as a test engineer implementing/programming both their old line and new line of robotic test equipment.  In 1993 returned to the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign for a M.S. in General Engineering working under Mark Spong in the area of Robotics and Control.  From 1994 to present he has the position of Lab Manager of the College of Engineering Control Systems Laboratory at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.  With this position he spends his time building new experiments for control theory and robotic theory lab courses and instructing hands on laboratory courses, GE 489 Lab Robotic Control, GE 420 Lab Digital Control of Dynamic Systems, GE 423 Mechatronics and ME461 Computer Control of Mechanical Systems.

Important Announcement: The final Video of the Month is due by noon, Thursday, December 3^rd.  The link to upload your videos is:  go.illinois.edu/bestvideo.

This week, Aadeel Akhtar is going to give a brief presentation on “The Future of Prosthetics – Neural Control, Sensory Feedback, and 3D–Printing“. The event will be held in CSL 369 from 3:00pm to 4:00pm.

Bio: Aadeel received his B.S. in Biology, double-minoring in Neuroscience and Computer Science from Loyola University Chicago in 2007. He went on to receive an M.S. in Computer Science at Loyola in 2008. Aadeel is currently an M.D./Ph.D. student in the Neuroscience program at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, as well as the NSF IGERT in Neuroengineering. He is a member of the Bretl Research Group and currently holds an NIH National Research Service Award MD/PhD Fellowship. His research interests include motor control and sensory feedback for upper limb prosthetic devices, and he has established collaborations with the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago, the John Rogers Research Group at Illinois, and the Range of Motion Project in Guatemala and Ecuador.

Welcome back! We are glad to have Adam Tilton as our guest speaker for this week’s social hour on Friday, November 13 at 3:15PM in 369 CSL. This special session is titled as “Starting a venture backed business”.

Bio: Adam Tilton is the Co-founder and CEO of Rithmio. While pursuing his PhD in the Department of Mechanical Science and Engineering at the University of Illinois in the Coordinated Science Laboratory, Tilton and his co-founder Prashant Mehta created technology for pattern recognition and classification. When they discovered their technology enables gesture recognition for motion-sensing devices they started Rithmio. In 2014, Tilton won the Cozad New Venture Competition and was nominated for the Illinois Innovation Prize. In 2015, Tilton closed a $3mm round of funding from Intel Capital and KGC Capital.