Events Archive

Apr
18
2012
C21U Town Hall: Udacity's Sebastian Thrun to speak on Reinventing the Universities
Sebastian Thrun recently left Stanford University and started Udacity. Udacity is an online university that seeks to reach the 99% of the world population that are presently excluded from high-quality higher education. The first class on Artificial Intelligence, jointly offered with Stanford, attracted 160,000 students, of which 23,000 graduated with Stanford-level qualifications. The speaker will discuss his experience with traditional forms of education, and brainstorm how higher education may look like in the digital age. Thrun is co-founder of Udacity, a Google VP, and a Stanford Research Professor. At Google, he runs Google X, home to the Google self-driving car...
Apr
17
2012
Entropic elasticity and structural change in biofilament networks
In this talk we will focus on the elasticity of soft filamentous networks. We will begin with the mechanical behavior of fibrin networks whichhave been shown to be highly extensible in recent experiments. We believe that the high extensibility of the networks has its origins in the force inducedstructural change in the proteins making up the fibrin fibers. We will present a model and experimental evidence in support of our hypothesis. In theremainder of the talk we will describe how the quasi-harmonic approximation of statistical mechanics can be combined with the finite element method (usedin structural analysis of buildings,...
Apr
16
2012
Cellular Mechanics: The active polymer networks underlying force transmission in living cells
Apr
11
2012
The role of the interfaces in heterostructures of complex oxides
Understanding the new states at the interfaces and the resulting whole behavior of the heterostructures and multilayers is a hot topic at the forefront of the fundamental research, as demonstrated by the huge number of theoretical and experimental studies published in the topmost level scientific journals. In this context, s...
Apr
09
2012
Ford Commemorative Lecture: "God does play dice: Why quantum mechanics is craps, How chaos crafted the Kuiper belt, and other curmudgeonly concepts"
Joseph Ford saw beauty in "Chaos" and the potential for ``villainous chaos" to be used in a constructive manner. His ideas have proved prescient. The talk will focus mainly on how chaotic dynamics may have played a key constructive -- rather than destructive -- role in shaping certain features of the Kuiper belt: in particular, the formation and properties of binary objects in the transneptunian part of the Solar System. Kuiper belt binaries stand out from other known binary objects in having a...
Apr
05
2012
Surface States in Topological Insulators and Superconductors: Discovery and Recent Results
Bulk Topological Insulators are a new phase of electronic matter which realizes a non-quantum-Hall-like topological state in the bulk matter and unlike the quantum Hall liquids can be turned into superconductors. In this Lecture, I will first review the basic theory of topological matter and...
Apr
03
2012
Einstein Toolkit Workshop - April 3rd - April 6th
The workshop will provide a general introduction into numerical relativity and in code development within large collaborations.  The number of addendees are limited, and while registration is free, it is required. In order to register, write an email to workshop@einsteintoolkit.org.  
Apr
03
2012
Geodesic Theory of Transport Barriers
I describe a unified approach to locating key material transport barriers in unsteady flows induced by two-dimensional, non-autonomous dynamical systems. Seeking transport barriers as minimally stretching material lines, one obtains that such barriers must be shadowed by minimal geodesics under the metric induced by the Cauchy-Green strain tensor field associated with the flow map. As a result, snapshots of transport barriers can be explicitly computed as trajectories of ordinary differential equations. Using this approach, hyperbolic barriers (generalized stable and unstable manifolds), elliptic barriers (generalized KAM curves) and parabolic barriers (...
Apr
02
2012
Building the Brookhaven (Homestake Gold Mine) Solar Neutrino Detector
A neutrino detector, capable of detecting the neutrinos from the Sun’s fusion cycle, was strongly requested by the Theorists working on the Solar Model in the early 1960’s.  The Cl37 → Ar37 detector scheme used by Davis and Harmer at the Savannah River Experiment in the 1950’s was suggested as the basis for a scaled up Solar Neutrino Detector. The details of the design and engineering of this scale up from “Laboratory” to “Production” one mile underground at the Homestake Gold Mine in...
Apr
02
2012
A Computational Approach to Understanding Cardiac Arrhythmias

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