Department Events
Events
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Apr27
EVENT DETAILS
lessMaintenance free Sensor Networks for Building, Habitat, and Infrastructure Monitoring
Abstract: Wireless sensor networks are groups of small computers dispersed in an area that continuously monitor and record the physical conditions of an environment and wirelessly report that data. These networks, often called “the Internet-of-Things,” underly every facet of our lives; ranging from building monitoring systems that sense occupancy and temperature and control HVAC, to habitat and wildlife monitoring systems that observe behaviors of animals and long term changes in the environment. For decades these sensing systems have relied primarily on batteries–much like the one in our phones–to power all activities. However, batteries are not a viable energy storage solution for the tiny devices at the edge of a ecologically sustainable Internet of Things. Batteries are expensive, bulky, hazardous, and wear out after a few years (even rechargeables). Replacing and disposing of billions or trillions of dead batteries per year would be expensive and irresponsible. By leaving the batteries behind and surviving off energy harvested from the environment, tiny intermittently powered sensors can monitor objects in hard to reach places maintenance free for decades. Batteryless sensing will revolutionize computing and open up new application domains from infrastructure monitoring and wildlife tracking to wearables, healthcare, and space exploration.
In this talk I will give a brief survey of wireless sensor networks and the Internet-of-Things, highlighting those applications especially relevant to Environmental and Civil Engineering. Then I will discuss my own work moving the sensor networks paradigm towards a sustainable future; including a high level overview of the computational problems that must be overcome, and the platforms I have developed. Finally, I will close with a open-ended discussion of the applications related to health, habitat, and environmental monitoring that this new class of tiny, battery-free computers could enable.Biography: Josiah Hester is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at Northwestern University Josiah joined Northwestern in Fall 2017 after completing his PhD in Computer Science at Clemson University. Josiah’s research enables sophisticated, sustainable sensing on the tiny devices at the edge of the Internet of Things. These devices enable new application domains from infrastructure monitoring and wildlife tracking to wearables, healthcare, and space exploration. Josiah explores and develops new hardware designs, software techniques, tools, and programming abstractions so that developers can easily design, debug, and deploy intricate batteryless sensor network applications that work in spite of frequent power failures. His work has received a Best Paper Award and Best Paper Nomination from ACM SenSys, and two Best Poster Awards. He was also named the Outstanding PhD Student in Computer Science for 2016 by the School of Computing at Clemson University.
TIME Friday, April 27, 2018 at 2:00 PM - 3:00 PM
LOCATION A230, Technological Institute map it
CONTACT Tierney Acott tierney-acott@northwestern.edu EMAIL
CALENDAR McCormick - Civil and Environmental Engineering
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Apr27
EVENT DETAILSmore info
lessCopenhagen is set during World War II, when the friendship of two Nobel Prize-winning physicists is tested by the prospect of providing Nazi Germany with the atomic bomb. A mysterious visit by Werner Heisenberg to Niels Bohr's home in Copenhagen in 1941 brings these renowned physicists and dear friends together under trying circumstances and leads to an argument whose consequences may determine the fate of nations. Uncertainty, the quantum mechanical principle discovered by Heisenberg, lies at every turn as he, Bohr, and Bohr's wife, Margrethe, attempt to reconstruct this fateful conversation and unravel their misunderstanding once and for all. This Tony Award-winning play (2000, Best Play) is based on historical characters and events.
Reserve your seat now. Admission is free, but tickets are required to guarantee seating.
TIME Friday, April 27, 2018 at 7:30 PM - 9:30 PM
LOCATION The STAGE Lab, Reynolds Club, 1131 E. 57th St.
CONTACT Tech-IC group tech-ic@northwestern.edu EMAIL
CALENDAR McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science
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Apr28
EVENT DETAILSmore info
lessCopenhagen is set during World War II, when the friendship of two Nobel Prize-winning physicists is tested by the prospect of providing Nazi Germany with the atomic bomb. A mysterious visit by Werner Heisenberg to Niels Bohr's home in Copenhagen in 1941 brings these renowned physicists and dear friends together under trying circumstances and leads to an argument whose consequences may determine the fate of nations. Uncertainty, the quantum mechanical principle discovered by Heisenberg, lies at every turn as he, Bohr, and Bohr's wife, Margrethe, attempt to reconstruct this fateful conversation and unravel their misunderstanding once and for all. This Tony Award-winning play (2000, Best Play) is based on historical characters and events.
Reserve your seat now. Admission is free, but tickets are required to guarantee seating.
TIME Saturday, April 28, 2018 at 7:30 PM - 9:30 PM
LOCATION The STAGE Lab, Reynolds Club, 1131 E. 57th St.
CONTACT Tech-IC group tech-ic@northwestern.edu EMAIL
CALENDAR McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science
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Apr29
EVENT DETAILSmore info
lessCopenhagen is set during World War II, when the friendship of two Nobel Prize-winning physicists is tested by the prospect of providing Nazi Germany with the atomic bomb. A mysterious visit by Werner Heisenberg to Niels Bohr's home in Copenhagen in 1941 brings these renowned physicists and dear friends together under trying circumstances and leads to an argument whose consequences may determine the fate of nations. Uncertainty, the quantum mechanical principle discovered by Heisenberg, lies at every turn as he, Bohr, and Bohr's wife, Margrethe, attempt to reconstruct this fateful conversation and unravel their misunderstanding once and for all. This Tony Award-winning play (2000, Best Play) is based on historical characters and events.
Reserve your seat now. Admission is free, but tickets are required to guarantee seating.
TIME Sunday, April 29, 2018 at 2:00 PM - 4:00 PM
LOCATION The STAGE Lab, Reynolds Club, 1131 E. 57th St.
CONTACT Tech-IC group tech-ic@northwestern.edu EMAIL
CALENDAR McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science
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May4
EVENT DETAILS
lessMicrobiome Stability: What Can We Learn From Extreme Environments?
My research team and I investigate the causes and consequences of microbiome stability, with an emphasis on understanding the key feature of resilience. Resilience is the ability of a community to recover in structure or function after a disturbance. We are especially interested in quantifying the contributions of microbial diversity reservoirs, like rare and dormant members, to resilience. As a model for our research, we work in the Centralia, Pennsylvania soil ecosystem. Centralia is the site of a slow-burning coal seam fire that presents a severe disturbance to the surface soil communities. The fire ignited in 1962 and advances along the coal seams at a rate of 3-7 m/yr. The heat from the fire vents through overlying soils, causing surface soil temperatures to reach as high as > 400°C, but more recently in the range of 40 - 75°C. The fire-impact gradient at Centralia provides a unique opportunity to investigate eco-evolutionary microbiome dynamics in response to a severe press disturbance. I will discuss our recent results about the response and recovery of soil microbial communities to the Centralia fire, including overarching community responses and traits of members that flourish in the extreme environment. We anticipate that the results of our research will provide insights into microbiome stability, and will broadly inform management or manipulation of microbiomes towards desired functions.
Biography
Dr. Ashley Shade received her Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin Microbiology Doctoral Training Program in 2010, and afterwards was a Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation postdoctoral fellow of the Life Sciences Research Foundation at Yale University. In 2014, she started her position in the Department of Microbiology and Molecular Genetics at Michigan State University. Her research interests concern the microbial ecology of environmental systems, including plants, soils, and their feedbacks. She applies an ecological approach to understand how microbial communities respond to stressors, and what determines their resilience as a system. Her lab employs ‘omics tools (metagenomics, metatranscriptomics, exometabolomics) with both field and laboratory studies. ShadeLab phytobiome research is focused on common dry bean, a legume important for human and livestock nutrition, and switchgrass, a biofuel feedstock. Shade is an advocate of reproducible research and open science, and her lab’s analysis workflows are on GitHub (https://github.com/ShadeLab). In addition, Shade has developed a popular workshop on microbial metagenome analysis (edamamecourse.org). She is member of the Earth Microbiome Project (http://www.earthmicrobiome.org/) and the International Society for Microbial Ecology, and serves as an editor at the American Society for Microbiology journal mSystems and the Society for Applied Microbiology journal Environmental Microbiology.TIME Friday, May 4, 2018 at 2:00 PM - 3:00 PM
LOCATION A230, Technological Institute map it
CONTACT Tierney Acott tierney-acott@northwestern.edu EMAIL
CALENDAR McCormick - Civil and Environmental Engineering
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May8
EVENT DETAILS
lessAre robots finally replacing humans? Join Northwestern Engineering faculty fellow Mark Mills as he discusses emerging artificial intelligence and automation technologies, whether they’ll lead to “peak jobs,” and the possibility of a Universal Basic Income for citizens that are unemployable in the new “knowledge” workforce.
Mills is founder and CEO of Digital Capital Power, a tech-centric capital advisory group. He also co-founded the Digital Power Group, Digital Power Capital, and ICx Technologies. A trained physicist and development engineer, Mills served as a staff consultant to the White House Science Office under President Ronald Reagan, a number of federal research laboratories, and the US Department of Energy.
TIME Tuesday, May 8, 2018 at 4:00 PM - 5:00 PM
LOCATION ITW classroom, 1-350, Ford Motor Company Engineering Design Center map it
CONTACT Northwestern Engineering Events northwestern-engineering-events@northwestern.edu EMAIL
CALENDAR McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science
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May11
EVENT DETAILS
lessStability Criteria for Complex Microbial Communities, or the Decline and Fall of Lotka-Volterra.
Abstract:
Pairwise models for species interactions have provided a foundation for understanding the dynamics and equilibria of ecological communities for over 90 years, with a classic example being the generalized Lotka-Volterra equations. These approaches parametrize the direct effect of one population on another, and have been enormously influential. For example, for a large community, theory tells us that if the number of interactions is too large, or their strengths are too high, then we know it won't be possible for all species to stably coexist. If true, this strongly constraints the types and combiantions of interactions we can expect to see in nature. But notably absent from equations like Lotka-Volterra is what mediates these interactions—for example, if two species compete, what are the resources they compete for. This is particularly crucial in microbial communities, where many interactions, both competitive and mutualistic, are mediated by the consumption and production of abiotic resources. Here I describe recent work from our lab demonstrating just how rare it is for direct species interactions to recapitulate the full dynamics of a community of consumers, producers and resources. I also show that those classic results relating to stable coexistence are altered by considering the dynamics of resources, and we find qualitatively new conditions for community stability. Finally, I’ll talk about the prospects for inferring predictive models based on consumers, producers and resources, and the possibility of extensions to more general complex systems.Short Bio:
PhD Theoretical Physics (University of Cambridge)
Postdoctoral Researcher (University of Oregon)
Omidyar Fellow (Santa Fe Institute)
Assistant Professor, Plant Biology (University of Illinois)TIME Friday, May 11, 2018 at 2:00 PM - 3:00 PM
LOCATION A230, Technological Institute map it
CONTACT Tierney Acott tierney-acott@northwestern.edu EMAIL
CALENDAR McCormick - Civil and Environmental Engineering
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May14
EVENT DETAILS
lessConservation science has progressed rapidly over the past few decades. The primary purpose of conservation research is to gather credible knowledge to assist with management and policy. Unfortunately, decision science, which is the science of how to make decisions in all fields, is rarely used with conservation science. Join The Nature Conservancy’s Hugh Possingham for a discussion on the applications of simple mathematical tools that have transformed nature conservation in The Nature Conservancy and around the world, as well as the value of data and research in conservation.
TIME Monday, May 14, 2018 at 10:30 AM - 11:30 AM
LOCATION ITW classroom, 1-350, Ford Motor Company Engineering Design Center map it
CONTACT Northwestern Engineering Events northwestern-engineering-events@northwestern.edu EMAIL
CALENDAR McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science
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May16
EVENT DETAILS
lessUncovering and Optimizing the Chemical Mechanisms in Alkali-activated Materials and Related Engineering Systems
Abstract
With the world facing a climate crisis due to increasing CO2 emissions, there is pressing need to develop and implement sustainable construction/engineering materials across the globe. Alkali-activated materials (AAMs) are one such sustainable alternative to conventional ordinary Portland cement (OPC) concrete; however, questions remain regarding the long-term performance of AAMs which is hampering implementation of this sustainable solution in the construction industry. Furthermore, for OPC-based concrete, the use of extensive clinker substitution to reduce CO2 emissions has led to changes to the underlying chemistry of the main binder gel, where it is uncertain how these novel supplementary cementitious materials augment the long-term properties (e.g., gel stability and pore structure) of the cement paste.Here, I will outline how fundamental materials research is addressing the long-term performance unknowns of AAMs and certain OPC-based systems, where we are linking key experimental techniques with atomistic and larger length scale simulations. To assess gel/binder stability in Ca-rich AAMs, we have used density functional theory (DFT) and synchrotron-based X-ray pair distribution function (PDF) analysis to investigate the influence of alkali substitution on the structure and thermodynamics of calcium-alumino-silicate-hydrate (C-A-S-H) gel. The results provide important new information on the impact of alkali substitution in this gel system and insight on the structural arrangements present in sodium-substituted C-A-S-H gels (C-(N)-A-S-H). Moreover, we have (i) uncovered a mechanism that mitigates microcracking in alkali-activated slags (i.e., a C-(N)-A-S-H gel system) using nanoparticles and (ii) determined how ZnO slows down the hydration reaction in AAMs and OPC-based systems.
The pore structure of concrete strongly impacts long-term durability, where the pore network and permeability of the gel phase(s) are known to control the rate of degradation. However, the mechanisms controlling the development of the gel/capillary pore network during formation of the binder gel, especially in AAMs, are largely unknown. Here, I will outline our recent progress in the development and implementation of a mesoscale modeling methodology to simulate the formation of the binder gels and pore network in AAMs, along with key experimental data (e.g., small-angle neutron scattering and quasi-elastic neutron scattering) capable of tracking the evolution of the pore network and associated water dynamics immediately after mixing. Given that AAMs can be synthesized using various precursors and activator chemistries, this research, based on a novel computational approach, will enable the prediction of long-term degradation of new cement chemistries in the future.
Bio
Claire White is an Assistant Professor at Princeton University in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering and the Andlinger Center for Energy and the Environment with associated faculty status in the Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering, the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, the Princeton Institute for the Science and Technology of Materials, and the Princeton Institute for Computational Science and Engineering. Professor White completed her graduate studies in 2010 at the University of Melbourne supported by an Australian Postgraduate Award from the Australian government. After receiving her PhD, she worked as a postdoc at Los Alamos National Laboratory and was awarded a Director’s Postdoctoral Fellowship to research the atomic structure of low-CO2 alkali-activated materials. Her research focuses on understanding and optimizing engineering and environmental materials, with an emphasis on controlling the chemical mechanisms responsible for formation and long-term degradation of low-CO2 cements. This research spans multiple length and time scales, utilizing advanced synchrotron and neutron-based experimental techniques, and simulation methodologies. Professor White is the recipient of a number of awards including an NSF CAREER Award and the Howard B. Wentz Jr. Junior Faculty Award (Princeton University), and has been listed several times on the Princeton Engineering Commendation List for Outstanding Teaching.TIME Wednesday, May 16, 2018 at 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM
LOCATION A230, Technological Institute map it
CONTACT Tierney Acott tierney-acott@northwestern.edu EMAIL
CALENDAR McCormick - Civil and Environmental Engineering
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May18
EVENT DETAILS
lessM&M&Ms: Microbial Ecology, MECs and Metagenomics
Abstract: Modern wastewater treatment systems are vital for protecting human and environmental health, however current treatment processes are energy intensive. Adoption of new technologies is slow in part due to a lack of understanding of how to engineer and control open microbial communities and a “once-through” treatment paradigm. I will discuss two projects focused on developing an “integrated microbial resource management” (IMRM) approach, i.e. the design and maintenance of microbial communities to enable comprehensive resource recovery.
Environmental bioprocesses depend on a complex microbial community whose dynamics are driven by a combination of environmental selection, immigration, historical and stochastic mechanisms. We used amplicon sequencing data collected from six full-scale activated sludge systems to demonstrate that community dynamics were highly reproducible and regionally synchronized, similar to previously studied natural lake ecosystems. Community dissimilarity varied more strongly with time rather than immigration source or operational characteristics, suggesting a significant influence of deterministic assembly mechanisms guided by seasonal temperature fluctuations. Moreover, rare and abundant taxa displayed varying sensitivity to deterministic and stochastic processes.
In addition to field-scale microbial ecology studies, I will discus the design and optimization of a lab-scale hybrid system for resource recovery from wastewater via bioelectrochemical hydrogen peroxide production and subsequent inorganic catalysis. In this work, we demonstrated tunable production of H2O2 in a microbial electrochemical cell (MEC) and optimized cathode buffer and hydraulic residence time for solubility and pH compatibility with the downstream catalytic system. We envision biologically derived H2O2 as part of an “urban biorefinery” system for upgrading waste feedstocks to valuable commodities. Ongoing metagenomic sequencing work is evaluating the impact of carbon source on the community structure, carbon utilization efficiency and resilience of the anode respiring community.Biography:
Jim Griffin is a PhD candidate in the department of Chemical and Biological Engineering at Northwestern University. His research uses high throughput sequencing to investigate complex microbial communities in engineered and natural environments, with a particular interest in bioelectrochemical processes for resource recovery. He holds a B.S. in Chemical Engineering from MIT. In his spare time he is an amateur circus artist.TIME Friday, May 18, 2018 at 2:00 PM - 3:00 PM
LOCATION A230, Technological Institute map it
CONTACT Tierney Acott tierney-acott@northwestern.edu EMAIL
CALENDAR McCormick - Civil and Environmental Engineering