Author: baranwa2@illinois.edu

This week, Thinh T. Doan is going to give a brief presentation on “Controllability of Complex networks“. The event will be held in CSL 369 from 3:00pm to 4:00pm.

Bio: Thinh T. Doan is a third year Ph.D. student in ECE working with Prof. Alex Olshevsky. He was born in Vietnam, where he did his undergraduate in ECE at Hanoi University of Science and Technology. Before joining UIUC, he received a master degree in ECE at the University of Oklahoma, US, in 2013. His research interests span on the intersection of control theory, convex optimization, and combinatorial optimization. Recently, he has been focusing on studying controllability of complex networks and large-scale optimization problems.

Welcome back! We are glad to have Dr. Sharon Xue Yang as our guest speaker for this week’s social hour on Friday, October 30 at 3:00PM in 369 CSL. This special session is titled as “Have you failed?”

Bio:  Sharon Xue Yang is a Principal Engineer at New Devices Group at Intel, where Sharon has been leading indoor localization technology developments as well as driving neuron network technologies into wearable SoCs. Before joining New Devices Group, Sharon was with Intel Labs, where her primary research fields were indoor localization and heterogeneous networks/multi-radio coexistence. Sharon served as the Location Architect across Intel platform groups. Sharon also founded and co-chair Bluetooth SIG coexistence working group. Sharon holds 131 (38 granted, 93 pending) patents, and is the author of 30+ referred papers published in IEEE/ACM journals/conferences. Sharon holds a Ph.D. in Computer Engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign.

This week, Chuchu Fan is going to give a brief presentation on “Safety Verification of Hybrid Systems“. The event will be held in CSL 369 from 3:00pm to 4:00pm.

Chuchu is a third year Ph.D. student in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, working as a research assistant with Professor Sayan Mitra. She received her Bachelor’s degree from the Department of Automation in Tsinghua University in 2013. Her research mainly focuses on the verification of nonlinear hybrid systems. In her spare time, she would love to do some cooking and shopping, to verify the instability of chemistry and a woman’s mind.

 

This week, James Schmidt is going to give a brief presentation on “Topological Entropy“. The event will be held in CSL 369 from 3:00pm to 4:00pm.

James is a second year master’s student in ECE working with Daniel Liberzon and Ali Belabbas.  He received his B.A. in Math and Philosophy and B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Notre Dame in 2014.  His research interests include joint problems in controls and communications, and applications of algebra and geometry in control.  He plays guitar avidly, and a fan of all things Russian –  enjoys the music of Tchaikovsky and literature of Tolstoy.

Welcome back! We are glad to have Mr. John Day as our guest speaker for this week’s social hour on Friday, October 9 at 3:00PM in 301 CSL. This special session is titled as “Are You Guys in a Band?” – “No we are crypto-facsist lackeys of military-industrial complex“.

Fun fact: John’s office was fire bombed when he was a student here at Illinois. According to John – “It didn’t go off but they would have gotten our beer refrigerator!”

Join us at the event to know more about this incident. 🙂

John Day has been involved in research and development of computer networks since 1970, when their group at the UIUC was the 12th node on ARPANET and has developed and designed protocols for everything from the data link layer to the application layer. Also making fundamental contributions to research on distributed databases. He managed the development of the OSI reference model, naming and addressing, and a major contributor to the upper-layer architecture and the development of network management architecture, working in the area since 1984 and building and deploying a network management system, a decade ahead of comparable systems. Mr. Day has published Patterns in Network Architecture: A Return to Fundamentals (Prentice Hall, 2008), which has been characterized (embarrassingly) as “the most important book on network protocols in general and the Internet in particular ever written.”  The book analyzes the fundamental flaws in the Internet and proposes what appears to be the only path forward. Today Mr. Day splits his time between making this new path a reality and teaching at Boston University. Mr. Day is also a recognized scholar in the history of cartography (emphasis on 17thC China), and is currently President of the Boston Map Society.

This week, Sadegh Bolouki, is going to give a brief presentation on “The Range Controllability in Network Systems“. The event will be held in CSL 369 from 3:00pm to 4:00pm.

Sadegh Bolouki received the B.S. and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering from Sharif University of Technology, Tehran, Iran, and Ecole Polytechnique de Montreal in 2008 and 2014 respectively. From January 2014 to July 2015, he was a research scholar at the Mechanical Engineering and Mechanics Department at Lehigh University. Since August 2015, he has been a postdoctoral research scholar at the Coordinated Science Laboratory at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His research interest include decentralized and distributed control, opinion dynamics, consensus, and game theory.

Important Announcement: The Video of the Month is due by 5:00pm, Thursday, September 24^th.  The link to upload your videos is:  go.illinois.edu/bestvideo.

This week, Chandrasekaran Jayaraman, is going to give a brief presentation on “Cubitus journey into entrepreneurship“. The event will be held in CSL 369 from 3:00pm to 4:00pm.

Chandrasekaran Jayaraman is a PhD student in Industrial and Enterprise Systems Engineering (and also a CSLer). He is working with Prof. Carolyn Beck (ISE) and Prof. Jacob Sosnoff (Department of Kinesiology and Community Health). While he was doing research on wheelchair user mobility and patient therapy, he saw a real need to prevent shoulder pain/injury among his research subjects, and thus, founded Cubitus.

The Cubitus team members also include Adam Burns, an MS student in civil and environmental engineering; and Mudassir Khan, a junior in bioengineering with a minor in entrepreneurship.

Cubitus’s goal is to provide a low-cost option where users will access their daily wheelchair propulsion metrics and training on their mobile device.  None of these propulsion measures are currently available to the user except in a specialized rehab clinic. The Cubitus technology will increase their awareness of shoulder health by being able to monitor and correct their pushing form regularly.

As a part of Cubitus, Jayamaran has also been awarded a 2015 Entrepreneurship at Illinois Summer Fellowship through the Technology Entrepreneurship Center (TEC).

This week we are going to have our first speaker from TEC (Technology Entrepreneur Center). The event will be held in CSL 369 from 3:00pm to 4:00pm.

This week, Thomas Reese, is going to talk about his invention FlipWord. His talk is entitled as “FlipWord and Passive Language Learning“.

Thomas Reese received his Master’s in Computer Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2015. He has previously spent time working at Sandia National Laboratories and Amazon. He wandered around Asia with only a backpack for nearly a year in total, simultaneously gaining fluency in Mandarin Chinese. To improve language learning outcomes for others, he founded FlipWord.

Welcome back! We are glad to have Professor R. Srikant as the inaugural speaker for this semester’s social hour on Friday, September 4 at 3:00PM in 369 CSL. This is a special session, where Prof. Srikant will talk about his research and his experiences at CSL.

Prof. Srikant received his B.Tech. from the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras in 1985, his M.S. and Ph.D. from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1988 and 1991, respectively, all in Electrical Engineering.  He was a Member of Technical Staff at AT&T Bell Laboratories from 1991 to 1995. He is currently with the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he is the Fredric G. and Elizabeth H. Nearing Endowed Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering and a Professor in the Coordinated Science Lab.