[BNC-all] Monday Memo for April 9, 2007

Mon Apr 9 09:58:00 EDT 2007

MONDAY MEMO, APRIL 9, 2007

CONTENTS

1. Announcements

1.1:  Blood Borne Pathogen Training: Friday, April 13th from 3-4 PM in
BRK 1099. 

1.2:  REMINDER: Cleanroom Preventive Maintenance, May 1-2, 2007

1.3 :  Spring Fling: May 16; plan now to join the volleyball tournament

2. Faculty/Staff/Student Awards and Honors

2.1

3. Seminar Announcements

3.1:  Tuesday, April 10, 1:00 pm, Lawson 3102AB: "ChemXSeer: A Digitial
Library for Chemical Kinetics Data and Scientific Literature," by
Prasenjit Mitra, Assistant Professor, College of Information Sciences
and Technology, Pennsylvania State University

3.2:  Wednesday, April 11, 2:00 pm, EE 317: "Sugar: The Spice for MEMS,"
by Jason Clark, Assistant Professor, Schools of Electrical and Computer
Engineering and Mechanical Engineering, Network for Computational
Nanotechnology, Purdue University

3.3:  Thursday, April 12,10:30 am, BRK 1001: "Selecting Your Career,"
presented by NSAC

4. Workshops/Conferences

4.1

5. Job/Fellowship opportunities

5.1

6. Life on the Outside

6.1:  Baertsch Kovalchick family expands by one J

6.2:  March of Dimes bake sale: Wednesday, April 11

****************

1. Announcements

****************

1.1:  Blood Borne Pathogen Training: Friday, April 13th from 3-4 PM in
BRK 1099.  This session is limited to 10 participants; alternate
training can be coordinated with Paula Vitello at REM.

1.2:  REMINDER: Cleanroom Preventive Maintenance, May 1-2, 2007

Per Mark Voorhis, a shut down of cleanroom operations has been scheduled
for 48 hours to complete a six-month preventive maintenance procedure.
A shutdown of cleanroom operations will begin on Tuesday (1-May-07) at
7:00 AM and will be completed by Wednesday (2-May-07) at 5:00 PM.
Maintenance is required for our cleanroom makeup air handlers, chemical
exhaust, and ultra pure water systems.  Please note that the ultra pure
water will be shut down for the entire building.  We will also complete
cleanroom troubleshooting to improve temperature repeatability during
this time. 

Since the chemical exhaust system will be shut down please remove
chemicals from all hoods in the cleanroom prior to the shutdown.  If not
removed, the lab staff will dispose of them for you.

Thank you for your understanding and patience during this necessary

procedure. 

If you have any questions or concerns please Mark Voorhis
(mvoorhis at purdue.edu)

1.3:  Spring Fling: May 16; plan now to join the volleyball tournament.

Spring Fling is on May 16th this year.  We will be putting together a
team again to play in the volleyball tournament.  Please respond and let
me know if you would be interested in playing on the team.  This year
graduate students are able to play.  So if we have enough interest we
can put a couple of teams together.  We will possibly have a few
practices after work at Riehle Bros!!  Volleyball and beer!!  How can
you say no????  CONTACT Janessa Drake for additional information
(drake1 at purdue.edu).

****************

2. Awards/Honors

****************

************************

3. Seminar Announcements

************************

3.1:  Tuesday, April 10, 1:00 pm, Lawson 3102AB: "ChemXSeer: A Digitial
Library for Chemical Kinetics Data and Scientific Literature," by
Prasenjit Mitra, Assistant Professor, College of Information Sciences
and Technology, Pennsylvania State University

ABSTRACT:  Scientists have digital documents and experimental data that
they want to publish, link, and share.  ChemXSeer is an ongoing project
that aims to establish a digital library for documents and data related
to chemical kinetics.  This talk will introduce the architecture and
algorithms deployed for the following components:  (a) Chemical Entity
Search:  The tool identifies chemical formulae and chemical names,
disambiguates the terms from other general terms using hierarchical
Conditional Random Fields, and tags them. Novel similarity scores,
ranking functions and search methods are introduced to enable searching
for chemical entities;  (b) TableSeer: This tool automatically
identifies tables in digital documents and extracts the contents in the
cells of the tables.  The contents are stored in a queryable table in a
database. TableSeer extracts table metadata, and uses a novel ranking
function to search for tables relevant to user queries;  (c) Databases:
Our data repository contains experimental data obtained from various
sources. Our tools can process, store and link data in multiple formats,
e.g., Excel, XML, Gaussian, and Charmm.  A metadata ad-on can help
annotate the data and link multiple datasets.  The metadata is then used
to link the data to published articles allow the end-user to search for
relevant data.  The talk will briefly cover our efforts on novel focused
crawling algorithms and query expansion to enhance search and rewriting
techniques to utilize the limited resources available at hand and to
enhance the quality of the search respectively.  

BIO:  Prasenjit Mitra is an assistant professor at the College of
Information Sciences and Technology at the Pennsylvania State
University.  He received his PhD in Electrical Engineering from the
database group at Stanford University in 2004.  Prior to that, he had
received a Master of Science degree in Computer Science at The
University of Texas at Austin in December 1994.  His Bachelor of
Technology (with Honors) degree in Computer Science and Engineering was
received from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur in May,
1993.  From 1995, he was a senior member of the technical staff at the
Server Technologies division at Oracle Corporation in Redwood Shores, CA
for five years developing database management systems software.  He also
held a position as a senior engineer at Narus, Inc. and DBWizards
working on database applications. 

Dr. Mitra's research interests are in database systems, digital
libraries, information retrieval, and web information systems. He is
especially interested in scalable information integration from large
data sources in distributed settings and making data and information on
the world-wide-web easily processable by machines. 

3.2:  Wednesday, April 11, 2:00 pm, EE 317: "Sugar: The Spice for MEMS,"
by Jason Clark, Assistant Professor, Schools of Electrical and Computer
Engineering and Mechanical Engineering, Network for Computational
Nanotechnology, Purdue University

ABSTRACT: In this seminar, I present some design, modeling, and
simulation features of a computer aided engineering tool for
microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) called SUGAR.  For experimental
verification, I use a microdevice that is difficult to simulate with
conventional MEMS software.  I show that the relative errors of the
lumped models are less than 3% of finite element analysis; that the
computational costs are much less than 1% of finite element analysis;
and that simulation fairly agrees with experiment. Features of SUGAR
include: a flexible SPICE-like netlist language for MEMS design; a
simple modeling framework for computationally efficient lumped models;
an extensible architecture to which users can add features; and the
ability to display 3D circuits together with deflected electromechanical
structures. Since SUGAR is programmed in MATLAB, a multitude of commonly
used functions and 3rd-party toolboxes may be used with SUGAR at once.
Such attributes facilitate the exploration of design spaces and feature
modifications.

BIO:  Jason Clark is an Assistant Professor of Electrical and Computer
Engineering, and of Mechanical Engineering, at Purdue University. He is
a faculty member of the Birck Nanotechnology Center, and of the Network
for Computational Nanotechnology. Dr. Clark received his Ph.D. in
Applied Science from the University of California at Berkeley, fall
2005. His CAD/E efforts lead to one of the first nodal analysis software
packages for MEMS, called SUGAR. And his micro-metrology efforts lead to
the first comprehensive on-chip methods for measuring micro-scale
geometry and material properties, called electro micro-metrology (EMM).
Prior to professorship, he held positions at Lawrence Livermore National
Lab, Berkeley National Lab, Berkeley Biomedical Microdevices Center,
Berkeley.

3.3:  Thursday, April 12,10:30 am, BRK 1001: "Selecting Your Career,"
presented by NSAC

Come consider whether you'd like to work in industry, a government lab,
or academia.  Each graduate student will need to decide what type of
career is most appealing as full-time employment is pursued upon
graduation.  A panel discussion with faculty whom have experience in
industry and government labs in addition to academia will be available
to answer questions on this very valuable topic.  

Included will be an introduction to the panel members; faculty from
several different disciplines; a brief overview of the career fields to
be discussed (industry, government labs, and academia); plenty of open
question time to address important issues. 

If you would like a specific topic/question included in the dialogue,
you may bring it with you to the seminar, or send it to Brian Iverson (
biverson at purdue.edu <mailto:biverson at purdue.edu> ).

************************

4. Workshops/Conferences

************************

4.1

********************************

5.  Fellowship/Job Opportunities

********************************

5.1 

********************************

6.  Life on the Outside

********************************

6.1:  Baertsch Kovalchick family expands by one J

Our Chelsey Baertsch announces the birth of her daughter, Scarlet Dru
Baertsch Kovalchick on March 22.

6.2:  March of Dimes bake sale: Wednesday, April 11.  The business
office will have a bake sale to raise funds for the March of Dimes.  Buy
and eat goodies and support a worthy cause at the same time.

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