SUSAN DUMAIS, Microsoft Traditionally web search engines returned the same results to everyone who asks the same question.  However, using a single ranking for everyone in every context at every point in time limits how well a search engine can do in providing relevant information.  In this talk I present a framework to quantify the “potential for personalization” which is used to characterize the extent to which different people have different intents for the same query.  I describe several examples of…

YOSSI LUZON, University of Toronto Appointment Booking (AB) processes are commonly employed for managing service systems such as law court rooms and hospital surgical units that have limited resources and high rates of demand. Since various service types are typically involved, as well as demand and service duration variability, these processes are highly complex to efficiently control. In practice, the platform through which the AB process is applied is the system ’appointment book’. Relying on modern data technologies, which offer a vast amount of data of past demand and system performance statistics, the objective of this research is to establish an effective Preplanned-Appointment-Book (PAB) design via mathematical programming methods. The PAB design must adhere to some…

RICHARD REINER Richard will talk about the experience of building a high-growth startup in Canada, drawing on the stories of half a dozen high-tech startups he has led, including companies now owned by Intel, Dell, and Trend.  Richard will talk about the (many) mistakes he made along the way, surviving the resulting near-death experiences, navigating through exits and life post-acquisition, and a few lessons learned. Dr. Richard Reiner is a serial entrepreneur and company builder, active as an executive, investor,…

Join us this month as Prof. Piero Triverio discusses about his mathematical models to understand and design complex electrical systems. The methods developed by his group have been applied to integrated circuits, meta surface antennas and power cables. In the final part of the talk, Prof. Triverio and his collaborator, Dr. Laura Jimenez Juan, will speak about their joint effort to develop mathematical models for blood flow in the human body, which can help physicians understand the root causes of cardiovascular diseases. Prof.…

JEAN GOTMAN, McGill University The EEG is commonly used to help diagnose epilepsy and to localize the region of the brain from which seizures are likely to originate. The spatial resolution of EEG is however not very high and the EEG cannot see deep in the brain because of the attenuation of the electrical field with distance. If the EEG is recorded during functional MRI scanning (fMRI), it is possible to study the metabolic changes caused by these epileptic discharges (increases…

WARREN POWELL, Princeton University The problem of making sequential decisions under uncertainty spans a wide range of applications that arise in science, engineering, business, transportation, energy, health and finance.  In contrast with deterministic optimization that enjoys a widely used canonical framework, the academic study of decisions under uncertainty is a fragmented field.  Communities working on these problems (broadly known as stochastic optimization) include operations research (stochastic programming, Markov decision processes, simulation optimization, decision analysis, bandit problems), computer science (reinforcement learning, bandit…

VIVIENNE SZE, Massachusetts Institute of Technology Edge computing near the sensor is preferred over the cloud due to privacy and/or latency concerns for a wide range of applications including robotics/drones, self-driving cars, smart Internet of Things, and portable/wearable electronics.  However, at the sensor there are often stringent constraints on energy consumption and cost in addition to throughput and accuracy requirements. In this talk, we will describe how joint algorithm and hardware design can be used to reduce energy consumption while…

METIN SITTI, Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems Soft functional active materials could enable physical intelligence for small-scale (from a few millimeters down to a few micrometers overall size) devices and robots by providing them unique capabilities, such as shape changing and programming, physical adaptation, safe interaction with their environment, and multi-functional and drastically diverse dynamics. In this talk, our recent activities on design, manufacturing, and control of new shape-programmable active soft matter and untethered soft robots at the milli/microscale are…

JEFF SHAMMA, King Abdullah University of Science & Technology (KAUST) In cooperative multi-robot systems, there is a group of robots that seek to achieve a collective task as a team. Each individual robot makes decisions based on available local information as well as limited communications with neighboring robots. The challenge is to design local protocols that result in desired global outcomes. In contrast to a traditional centralized control paradigm, both measurements and decisions are distributed among multiple actors. This talk…

DUNCAN CALLAWAY, University of California, Berkeley As prices for solar photovoltaics and battery energy storage plummet, grids around the globe are undergoing tremendous changes.  How should we design and operate grids in the future in the presence of these technologies? This talk will cover some of my group’s recent efforts to answer this question.  First, I will focus on a new approach to decentralized network optimization – a variant of the primal-dual subgradient method – that can be used to…

EDWARD GUO, Columbia University Bone Bioengineering Laboratory is developing innovative technology in microstructural assessments, biomechanical modeling, multiscale and mechanobiological approaches in skeletal research.  Bone Bioengineering has both basic science and clinical significances in many medical fields, such as osteoporosis, osteoarthritis, or intervertebral disc degenerations.  I will highlight our development of a three-dimensional imaging analysis and modeling technique for trabecular bone microstructure, its applications in basic science research of bone mechanics, and clinical applications in osteoporosis and osteoarthritis.  In parallel to…

ADA S. Y. POON, Stanford University Miniaturized electronics, when placed inside the body, can wirelessly monitor and modulate internal activity and thus hold promise as a new class of treatments for disorders. The development of such bioelectronic medicines requires wireless interfaces that are tiny and operate deep in a complex electromagnetic environment. In this talk, I will describe a new method for electromagnetic energy transfer that exploits near-field interactions with biological tissue to wirelessly power tiny devices anywhere in the…

CARY YANG, Santa Clara University Continuous downward scaling in silicon integrated circuit technology into the sub-20 nm regime has created critical challenges in chip manufacturing, among them, reliability and performance of on-chip interconnects. Current interconnect materials, Cu and W, face increased reliability challenges in the nanoscale as a result of electromigration failures at high current densities. Materials such as nanocarbons, metal silicides, cobalt, ruthenium, and metallic nanowires are being considered as potential replacements for Cu and W. In particular, due…