Aug. 25, 2016                                                                                              Vol. 19, No. 17

In This Issue


Engineering News

  

Technology Review and Pacific Standard Magazine recently covered a paper by Ashton Anderson, Jon Kleinberg, and Sendhil Mullainathan that used a dataset of 200 million chess games as a model system for analyzing human decisions and errors.
 
The New York Times quotes Dan Huttenlocher, founding dean and vice provost at Cornell Tech. "Being in bigger interactive spaces encourages expansive thinking, while being in a box of a room encourages box thinking."



The Journal of Chemical Physics highlights Fernando A. Escobedo's work on whether

two complementary-shaped polyhedral nanoparticles can be used as compounds to form crystals that fill up space? Can fast self-assembly be achieved by entropic forces (that favor space filling) alone, or are enthalpic bonds also needed? These questions are explored using molecular simulation for a mixture of octahedra and cuboctahedra.




Ober named Lester B. Knight Director of CNF
The Cornell NanoScale Science & Technology Facility (CNF) is pleased to welcome their new Lester B. Knight Director - Professor Christopher Ober (MSE). But first, they want to thank Professor Dan Ralph for steering the CNF on its course for the last five years, leading them in a successful bid to join the membership of the National Science Foundation's new National Nanotechnology Coordinated Infrastructure (NNCI).



Professor Ober states, "As the new CNF Director, I am excited about the new job and about the new opportunities afforded by the creation of the NNCI, a network focused on nanoscience and nanotechnology. As the users of CNF know, we have first-rate facilities and outstanding staff who are dedicated to helping our users achieve success in all their efforts. As a long time user of CNF myself, I am always very impressed with the enthusiasm of the staff for teaching new users and working with them to solve interesting and often difficult problems. We welcome inquiries from all researchers about CNF's capabilities and the new network."
Awards and honors 

 
Ph.D. student Liye Fu (CS), IS professor Cristian Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil, and CS professor Lillian Lee received the Best Paper Award at the 2016 IJCAI "Natural language processing meets journalism" workshop for the paper "Tie-breaker: Using language models to quantify gender bias in sports journalism".



The Steen and Daniel groups were awarded a grant from NSF and NASA to conduct experiments on the International Space Station!
This joint collaboration will examine contact line dynamics and shape stability of liquid drops in contact with surfaces. They will examine drop coalescence and contact line mobility in specially designed experiments for outer space.


Results of this work will impact many applications on Earth where liquids move along solid surfaces, advancing or receding against a gas, such as forming (casting, extrusion, drawing) and coating (spin-, die-, or slot-coating) operations, microfluidic drop manipulation in lab-on-chip platforms, and immersion lithography in semiconductor manufacturing, to name a few. Studies in Space facilitate fundamental understanding by removing the effects of gravity on the drop response.



Professor John Hopcroft (CS) will be given the Friendship Award at the People's Great Hall on September 29.  It is China's highest 
recognition for foreign experts. 


Professor Jon Kleinberg (CS), together with Christos Faloutsos and former Cornell postdoc Jure Leskovec won the 2016 SIGKDD Test of Time Award for their 2005 KDD paper, "Graphs over Time: Densification Laws, Shrinking Diameters and Possible Explanations".  This is the third year of the SIGKDD Test of Time Award, and Cornell faculty have been among the recipients in each of the years it was conferred: Jon Kleinberg and Eva Tardos in 2014 (with Cornell PhD alum David Kempe); Thorsten Joachims in 2015; and Jon Kleinberg in 2016.



Professor Andrew Myers (CS) has been selected as the new Editor-in-Chief for the top journal in the programming languages research area, ACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems (TOPLAS).



Minglin Ma, assistant professor (BEE), received a 2016 CMBE Young Innovator's Award, which includes publication in a special edition of Cellular and Molecular Bioengineering.
 
Shell Scholarship Winners, three Cornell students have received scholarships for the 2016-17 academic year: Laura Vasquez-Bolanos (MAE), Zhi Lin (MAE) and Kayla Niccum (CBE).
Each will receive a yearly $5,000 scholarship from Shell in recognition of thier pursuing an undergraduate degree in a specific technical major.   
Hurley Joins AAD Team 
June Losurdo and Alumni Affairs and Development are pleased to announce that Debra Hurley will be joining the AAD team in Engineering on September 1, as an Associate Director for A
lumni Affairs and Development in Engineering. Debra comes to us from Central AAD, where she worked closely with former VP Susan Murphy and did fundraising for Cornell's Student and Academic Services, including the Gannett Health Center project.
 
In this new role in engineering, Hurley will work with colleagues in AAD and the Cornell  Engineering to cover all aspects of the college's capital project fundraising.  She will also work with many of our alumni on their individual philanthropic giving to Cornell Engineering. Debra's office will be in 256 Carpenter Hall. 
  Ezra's Round Table Systems Seminar Series 
 
Resilience of transportation networks:

estimation and control
 


Featuring:   Alexandre Bayen, 
Electrical Engineering & Computer Sciences
Civil & Environmental Engineering
University of California, Berkeley
 
Friday, August 26, 2016
 
12:00 p.m. - Lunch Buffet - 267 Rhodes Hall
12:15 p.m. - Presentation - 253 Rhodes Hall



Organized by: Oliver Gao
314 Hollister Hall
607-254-8334
 
News from the Engineering Library
Over 18,000 Wiley Online Books

 
 
 
The Engineering Library has also recently expanded

ebook collections from:




SAE   
DataVis, a new data visualization tool for teaching materials properties, was added to Access Engineering.
 
Email any questions to [email protected]
Jill Powell and Jeremy Cusker, Engineering Librarians
Workshops from the Cornell Statistical Consulting Unit (CSCU)

CSCU has released their Fall 2016 workshop schedule. Workshops will be given from September to November on a variety of topics including:   
  • Basic Data Analysis and Research Skills
  • Introductory Statistical Analysis Using R
  • Intermediate Statistical Analysis Using R
  • Introductory Statistical Analysis Using a user-friendly software
  • Interpreting Linear Models: Regression and ANOVA
  • Introduction to Logistic Regression
  • Getting Started with Data Analysis
  • Visualizing Data using ggplot2 in R
  • Nonparametric Statistical Methods
  • Introduction to Modeling Count Data
  • Model Selection and Multi-Model Inference
  • Missing Data
For more information, visit https://cscu.cornell.edu/workshops/schedule.php.  
Nominations are open for the President's Award for Innovation in Diversity and Inclusion for Individuals and Managers
Cornell is proud to recognize the achievements of staff who excel in their roles, as supervisors, and in supporting diversity and inclusion. Do you know of a staff member who goes above and beyond expectations in the areas of diversity and inclusion? Nominate them for an award through September 9, 2016. Recipients will receive a monetary award, and all nominees will be invited to a luncheon with President Rawlings and Vice President Mary Opperman in November.
 
The successful awardee will be a staff member or manager/supervisor who has demonstrated the University's commitment to diversity and inclusion as reflected in the Toward New Destinations diversity framework and the values of inclusion outlined in Cornell's Skills for Success.  
 
Recognize the accomplishments of a staff member or manager/supervisor who has advanced diversity or done exemplary work. Nominations open through September 9. Nomination details
2016-17 Kavli Institute at Cornell (KIC) Postdoctoral Fellowship Program: Now accepting applications
KIC Postdoctoral Fellows are high-profile, two-year postdoctoral positions with significant independence and resources. The KIC Fellows program is designed to attract the best and brightest young researchers in nanoscale science to Cornell.  For more information, including complete application guidelines, please visit our website: www.kicnano.cornell.edu/funding
 
All application material should be submitted to [email protected] by November 7, 2016.
Upson Hall renovation update

The Upson Hall construction project is nearing completion of Phase 1. The contractor is putting the finishing touches on flooring, paint, freight elevator and other finishes. The furniture has started to arrive and is being put together in the rooms where it belongs. The construction team has obtained a temporary certificate of occupancy for floors 3-5 and have begun moving people and equipment in. 


   
Regarding construction, general activities and impacts projected for the next several weeks: 
  • The passenger elevator will be out of service until the end of September 2016. Freight elevator on the Rhodes side of the building will be operational during move in. Elevators in Rhodes Hall or Duffield Hall may also be used to reach Upson Hall Levels 1 and 2. If you need assistance with elevator access, please contact the facility manager. 
  • Installation of major building utility infrastructure in the basement will continue.
REMINDER - Pike's regular work hours are 5 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. They will try to restrict the "most disruptive" noise to the hours of 5 a.m. to 8 a.m., but that is subjective. There will be construction noise at any/all times during their working hours.  


Check out the status of the renovation on the Engineering website


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