Eric Sembrat's Test Bonanza

Nature-inspired solutions have spawned such products as potential cancer cures from animal and plants, novel antibiotics, and gecko-inspired adhesives. This “bio-inspired” approach applies integrative methods from anatomy, animal function, evolution, and biomechanics to inspire novel synthetic materials.  Further, new methods for visualizing animals have opened new doors into understanding the diversity of life.  

This lecture will discuss how studies of gecko form and functions have contributed to a broader understanding of bio-inspiration. It will also focus on recent research using 3-D imaging techniques to digitally reconstruct living animals in full 3-D color and high resolution, and explore biological diversity in a whole new way.

Tom Abel will take the audience on a journey through the early stages of the universe, using the latest computer animations of how the first stars formed and died and how stars built up the first galaxies.

His work has shown that the first luminous objects in the universe were massive stars, shining one million times as brightly as our Sun. They died quickly and seeded the cosmos with the chemical elements necessary for life. Galaxies started to assemble just one hundred million years after the Big Bang, and they are still growing now. Computer simulations of these events provide remarkable insights into the early history of the cosmos.

Abel is computational cosmologist who explores cosmic history using supercomputer calculations. His long-term goal is "to build a galaxy, one star at a time," via computer modeling. Among his research interests are the processes and events of "the dark ages," the first few hundred million years after the Big Bang.

Abel's visualizations and simulations of dark-age events have been featured on PBS, the Discovery Channel, and on the cover of National Geographic.

Motile cilia are cell organelles able to exert a net force onto a liquid; they are highly conserved across eukaryotes, and enable a variety of functions from the motility of single cell organisms to flow that carries nutrients to our brains.  A fascinating process takes place in mammalian airways: a carpet of motile cilia maintains the cell surface free of pathogens and particles by continuously refreshing and clearing a barrier of mucus. In order for this `muco-ciliary clearance' to be effective, cilia motion needs to be phase-locked across significant distances, in the form of a travelling wave, and it is not known how this is achieved. 

Our lab is currently approaching this question from two directions:  recently we have begun imaging ciliated cell carpets, quantifying the spatial and temporal coherence in the dynamics, and perturbing the system; we aim to match the understanding gained at that level with our previous work on model systems, which informed us of the importance of hydrodynamic coupling between driven oscillators, as a mechanism sufficient to establish collective large-scale dynamical patterns. 

In this talk, I will discuss recent advances in probing stellar binaries at a variety of scales.

The first detection of gravitational waves from binary black hole mergers have opened up new opportunities and challenges in astrophysics. I will describe my group's efforts to extract the astrophysical evolution of massive stellar binaries from observations of gravitational waves emitted during mergers of stellar remnants.

I will also discuss the promise of double tidal disruptions of stellar binaries by massive black holes to explain some very intriguing observational signatures from galactic nuclei.

We report our direct study of the compressibility on ultrahigh mobility two-dimensional electron system (μ ~ 1×10⁷ cm²/Vs) in GaAs/AlGaAs quantum wells under microwave (MW) irradiation. The field penetration current results show that the quantum capacitance oscillates with microwave induced resistance oscillations (MIRO), however, the trend is opposite with respect to the compressibility for usual equilibrium states in previous theoretical explanations.

The anomalous phenomena provide a platform for study on the non-equilibrium system under microwave, and point to the current domains and inhomogeneity induced by radiation. Moreover, the quantum capacitance indication for multi-photon process around j = 1/2 is detected under intensive microwave below 30 GHz.

To move over, around, or through obstacles in the world, robots and animals need to employ a repertoire of dynamic and dexterous behaviors.  Since the world is ever-changing, these behaviors must be synthesized on-the-fly and adapted to diverse environmental conditions.  At present, animals deftly outperform autonomous robots in this regard.  We seek tools that will enable the performance of dynamic legged robots to surpass that of their animal counterparts.

In this talk, we discuss advances in modeling and control of dynamic legged locomotion.  Unlike some areas of robotics and biomechanics, models for most dynamic legged behaviors have poor predictive power.  In particular, rigid-body models of legged locomotion yield predictions that vary discontinuously when multiple limbs contact terrain.  By introducing compliance in hips and feet, we show that model predictions vary smoothly with respect to initial conditions (including states, parameters, and inputs). 

Smooth model predictions are amenable to scalable algorithms for estimation, optimization, and learning; we briefly discuss our current efforts and future plans in these directions.  We conclude that compliance in hips and feet perform morphological computations that can simplify modeling and control of dynamic legged locomotion.

BIOGRAPHY

Sam Burden earned his BS with Honors in Electrical Engineering from the University of Washington in Seattle in 2008.  He earned his PhD in Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences from the University of California in Berkeley in 2014, where he subsequently spent one year as a Postdoctoral Scholar.  In 2015, he returned to UW EE as an Assistant Professor; in 2016, he received a Young Investigator award from the Army Research Office (ARO-YIP).  Sam is broadly interested in discovering and formalizing principles of sensorimotor control.  Specifically, he focuses on applications in dynamic and dexterous robotics, neuromechanical motor control, and human-cyber-physical systems.  In his spare time, he teaches robotics to students of all ages in classrooms and campus events.

Hitherto, the laser has been very successful to study atomic physics. The possibility to amplify lasers to extreme peak power offers a new paradigm unifying the atomic and subatomic worlds, to include Nuclear physics, High Energy Physics, Astrophysics and Cosmology. This application needs extreme intensities. At the moment we are experiencing a rush toward the 10 PW led by the 3-pillar ELI infrastructure along with Apollon in France and similar infrastructures in Russia, USA, China  and Korea.

The applications include x-ray and TeV /cm with the goal to go beyond the High Energy Standard Model and contribute to apprehending Cosmic Acceleration and revealing Dark Matter.  The societal applications are also numerous with proton therapy, short-lived isotope production, nuclear waste transmutation and the like.